armistice a flood of immigration was let loose.  British and French and Scandinavians and swarms of people from Czecho-Slovakia and all the Balkan States, hurried from devastated lands and impending taxes to a new country glowing with the deceptive greenness of far fields.  The population had increased; the housing for it had not.  So that rents went up and up until economic factors exerted their inexorable pressure and the tap of the carpenter’s hammer and the ring of his saw began to sound in every city, in every suburb, on new farms and lonely prairies.

Cedar shingles began to make fortunes for those who dealt in them on a large scale.  By midsummer Carr’s mill on the Toba worked night and day.

“Crowd your work, Hollister,” Carr advised him.  “I’ve been studying this cedar situation from every angle.  There will be an unlimited demand and rising prices for about another year.  By that time every logging concern will be getting out cedar.  The mills will be cutting it by the million feet.  They’ll glut the market and the bottom will drop out of this cedar boom.  So get that stuff of yours out while the going is good.  We can use it all.”

But labor was scarce.  All the great industries were absorbing men, striving to be first in the field of post-war production.  Hollister found it difficult to enlarge his crew.  That was a lonely hillside where his timber stood.  Loggers preferred the big camps, the less primitive conditions under which they must live and work.  Hollister saw that he would be unable to extend his operations until deep snow shut down some of the northern camps that fall.  Even so he did well enough, much better than he had expected at the beginning.  Bill Hayes, he of the gray mustache and the ear-piercing faller’s cry, was a “long-stake” man.  That is to say, old Bill knew his weaknesses, the common weaknesses of the logger, the psychological reaction from hard work, from sordid living, from the indefinable cramping of the spirit that grows upon a man through months of monotonous labor.  Town—­a pyrotechnic display among the bright lights—­one dizzy swoop on the wings of fictitious excitement—­bought caresses—­empty pockets—­the woods again!  Yet the logger dreams always of saving his money, of becoming a timber king, of setting himself up in some business—­knowing all the while that he is like a child with pennies in his hand, unhappy until they are spent.  Bill Hayes was past fifty, and he knew all this.  He stayed in the woods as long as the weakness of the flesh permitted, naively certain that he had gone on his last “bust”, that he would bank his money and experience the glow of possessing capital.

The other man was negligible—­a bovine lump of flesh without personality—­born to hew wood and draw water for men of enterprise.

And there was always Mills, Mills who wanted to make a stake and “get to hell out of here”, and who did not go, although the sum to his credit in Hollister’s account book was creeping towards a thousand dollars, so fierce and unceasing an energy did Mills expend upon the fragrant cedar.