But that was not the end of the great blaze.  Blocked in the valley, the fire, as if animated by some deadly purpose, crept into the mouth of a brushy canyon and ran uphill with demoniac energy until it was burning fiercely over a benchland to the west of Hollister’s timber.

The fight began once more.  With varying phases it raged for a week.  They would check it along a given line and rest for awhile, thinking it safely under control.  Then a light shift of wind would throw it across their line of defense, and in a dozen places the forest would break into flame.  The fire worked far up the slope, but its greatest menace lay in its steady creep westward.  Slowly it ate up to the very edge of Hollister’s timber, in spite of all their checks, their strategy, the prodigious effort of every man to check its vandal course.

Then the west wind, which had held its breath so long, broke loose with unrestrained exhalation.  It fanned the fire to raging fury, sent it leaping in yellow sheets through the woods.  The blaze lashed eagerly over the tops of the trees, the dreaded crown fire of the North Woods.  Where its voice had been a whisper, it became a roar, an ominous, warning roar to which the loggers gave instant heed and got themselves and their gear off that timbered slope.

They could do no more.  They had beaten it in the valley.  Backed by the lusty pressure of the west wind, it drove them off the hill and went its wanton way unhindered.

In the flat by Hollister’s house the different crews came together.  There was not one of them but drooped with exhaustion.  They sat about on the parched ground, on moss, against tree trunks, and stared up the hill.

Already the westerly gale had cleared the smoke from the lower valley.  It brought a refreshing coolness off the salt water, and it was also baring to their sight the spectacular destruction of the forest.

All that area where Hollisters cedars had stood was a red chaos out of which great flames leaped aloft and waved snaky tongues, blood-red, molten gold, and from which great billows of smoke poured away to wrap in obscurity all the hills beyond.  There was nothing they could do now.  They watched it apathetically, too weary to care.

Hollister looked on the destruction of his timber most stolidly of all.  For days he had put forth his best effort.  His body ached.  His eyes smarted.  His hands were sore.  He had done his best without enthusiasm.  He was not oppressed so greatly as were some of these men by this vast and useless destruction.  What did it matter, after all?  A few trees more or less!  A square mile or two of timber out of that enormous stand.  It was of no more consequence in the sum total than the life of some obscure individual in the teeming millions of the earth.  It was his timber.  So was his life a possession peculiar to himself.  And neither seemed greatly to matter; neither did matter greatly to any one but himself.