Hollister looked at her.  He knew by the glow on her face that she spoke as she felt, that she was happy, that he had made her so.  And he was proud of himself for a minute, as a man becomes when he is conscious of having achieved greatness, however briefly.

Only he was aware of a shadow.  Doris leaned against him talking of things they would do, of days to come.  He looked over her shoulder through the west window and his eye rested on Bland’s cabin, where another woman lived who had once nestled in his arms and talked of happiness.  Yes, he was conscious of the shadow, of regrets, of something else that was nameless and indefinable,—­a shadow.  Something that was not and yet still might be troubled him vaguely.

He could not tell why.  Presently he dismissed it from his mind.

CHAPTER XII

Hollister likened himself and Doris, more than once in the next few days, to two children in a nursery full of new toys.  He watched the pride and delight which Doris bestowed upon her house and all that it contained, the satisfaction with which she would dwell upon the comforts and luxuries that should be added to it when the cedars on the hill began to produce revenue for them.

For his own part he found himself eager for work, taking a pleasure far beyond his expectation in what he had set himself to do, here in the valley of the Toba.  He could shut his eyes and see the whole plan work out in ordered sequence,—­the bolt chute repaired, the ancient cedars felled, sawed into four-foot lengths, split to a size, piled by the chute and all its lateral branches.  Then, when a certain quantity was ready, they would be cast one after another into that trough of smooth poles which pitched sharply down from the heart of his timber to the river.  One after another they would gather way, slipping down, faster and faster, to dive at last with a great splash into the stream, to accumulate behind the confining boom-sticks until they were rafted to the mill, where they would be sawn into thin sheets to make tight roofs on houses in distant towns.  And for the sweat that labor with axe and saw wrung from his body, and for the directing power of his brain, he would be rewarded with money which would enable him to satisfy his needs.  For the first time in his life Hollister perceived both the complexity and the simplicity of that vast machine into which modern industry has grown.  In distant towns other men made machinery, textiles, boots, furniture.  On inland plains where no trees grew, men sowed and reaped the wheat which passed through the hands of the miller and the baker and became a nation’s daily bread.  The axe in his hand was fashioned from metallic ore dug by other men out of the bowels of the earth.  He was fed and clothed by unseen hands.  And in return he, as they did, levied upon nature’s store of raw material and paid for what he got with timber, rough shaped to its ultimate uses by the labor of his hands.