Hollister began at the bottom of the chute, as he was beginning at the bottom of his fortune, to build up again.  Where it was broken he repaired it.  Where it had collapsed under the weight of snow or of fallen trees he put in a new section.  His hands grew calloused and the muscles of his back and shoulders grew tough with swinging an axe, lugging and lifting heavy poles.  The sun burned the scar-tissue of his face to a brown like that on the faces of his two men, who were piling the cut cedar in long ricks among the green timber while he got the chute ready to slide the red, pungent-smelling blocks downhill.

Sometimes, on a clear still day when he was at the house, he would hear old Bill Hayes’ voice far off in the woods, very faint in the distance, shrilling the fallers’ warning, “Timb-r-r-r.”  Close on that he would hear a thud that sent tremors running through the earth, and there would follow the echo of crashing boughs all along the slope.  Once he said lightly to Doris: 

“Every time one of those big trees goes down like that it means a hundred dollars’ worth of timber on the ground.”

And she laughed back: 

“We make money when cedar goes up, and we make money when cedar comes down.  Very nice.”

May passed and June came to an end; with it Hollister also came to the end of his ready money.  It had all gone into tools, food, wages, all his available capital sunk in the venture.  But the chute was ready to run bolts.  They poured down in a stream till the river surface within the boom-sticks was a brick-colored jam that gave off a pleasant aromatic smell.

Then Hollister and his two men cast off the boom, let the current sweep it down to Carr’s new shingle mill below the Big Bend.  When the bolts were tallied in, Hollister got a check.  He sat with pad and pencil figuring for half an hour after he came home, after his men had each shouldered a fifty-pound pack of supplies and gone back up the hill.  He gave over figuring at last.  The thing was profitable.  More so than he had reckoned.  He got up and went into the kitchen where Doris was rolling pie crust on a board.

“We’re off,” he said, putting an arm around her.  “If we can keep this up all summer, I’ll build a new wing on the house and bring you in a piano to play with this winter.”

Hollister himself now took a hand at cutting cedar.  Each morning he climbed that steep slope to the works, and each night he came trudging down; and morning and night he would pause at a point where the trail led along the rim of a sheer cliff, to look down on the valley below, to look down on the roof of his own house and upon Bland’s house farther on.  Sometimes smoke streamed blue from Bland’s stovepipe.  Sometimes it stood dead, a black cylinder above the shake roof.  Sometimes one figure and sometimes two moved about the place; more often no one stirred.  But that was as near as the Blands had come in eight