It was all a muddle.  He was very tired, too tired to bear thinking, almost too tired to feel.  He was conscious of himself as a creature of weariness sitting against a tree, his scarred face blackened like the tired faces of these other men, wondering dully what was the sum of all this sweat and strain, the shattered plans, the unrewarded effort, the pain and stress that men endure.  A man made plans, and they failed.  He bred hope in his soul and saw it die.  He longed for and sought his desires always, to see them vanish like a mirage just as they seemed within his grasp.

Lawanne and Bland had gone home, dragging themselves on tired limbs.  Carr’s men rested where they chose.  They must watch lest the fire back down into the valley again and destroy their timber, as it had destroyed Hollister’s.  They had blankets and food.  Hollister gave his own men the freedom of the house.  Their quarters on the hill stood in the doomed timber.  The old log house would be ashes now.

He wondered what Doris was doing, if she steadily gained her sight.  But concrete, coherent thought seemed difficult.  He thought in pictures, which he saw with a strange detachment as if he were a ghost haunting places once familiar.

He found his chin sinking on his breast.  He roused himself and walked over to the house.  His men were sprawled on the rugs, sleeping in grotesque postures.  Hollister picked his way among them.  Almost by the door of his bedroom Charlie Mills sprawled on his back, his head resting on a sofa cushion.  He opened his eyes as Hollister passed.

“That was a tough game,” Hollister said.

“It’s all a tough game,” Mills answered wearily and closed his eyes again.

Hollister went on into the room.  He threw himself across the bed.  In ten seconds he was fast asleep.

CHAPTER XX

For another day, a day of brilliant sunshine and roaring west wind, the fire marched up over the southern slope.  Its flaming head, with a towering crest of smoke, went over a high ridge, and its lower flank smoldered threateningly a little above the valley.  The second night the wind fell to a whisper, shifting freakishly into the northeast, and day dawned with a mass formation of clouds spitting rain, which by noon grew to a downpour.  The fire sizzled and sputtered and died.  Twenty hours of rain cleared the sky of clouds, the woods of smoke.  The sun lifted his beaming face over the eastern sky line.  The birds that had been silent began their twittering again, the squirrels took up their exploration among the tree tops, scolding and chattering as they went.  Gentle airs shook the last rain drops from leaf and bough.  The old peace settled on the valley.  There was little to mark the ten days of effort and noise and destruction except a charred patch on the valley floor and a mile-wide streak that ran like a bar sinister across the green shield of the slope south of the Big Bend.  Even that desolate path seemed an insignificant strip in the vast stretch of the forest.