"Up there is a lake of water, Mr. Ide, that God designed to flow down this valley, and it's going to find its own channel again--somehow! I hope that doesn't sound like cheap boasting. It's only my idea of the right." He led the way back around the granite dome above the spruce benches, and the old man followed in silence. Two hours later Rodburd Ide was off and away for Castonia, his jumper-bell jangling its echoes among the trees. He had hope in his heart and a letter in his pocket. The hope was his own. The letter was addressed to John Barrett's daughter, and the superscription had brought a little scowl to the brows of the magnate of Castonia. Somehow it seemed like communication with the enemy. But Dwight Wade, writing it in the stillness of the night, while the little man snored in his bunk, had seemed in his own imaginings to be putting into that letter, as one lays away for safe keeping in a casket, all that heart and soul held of love and candor and tenderness. It was as though he intrusted those into her hands to preserve for him against the day when he might take them back into life and living once more. Just now they did not seem to belong to this life on Enchanted; they did not harmonize with the bitter conditions. He pressed down the envelope's seal with the fantastic reflection that he was sending out of the conflict witnesses in whose presence he might stand ashamed. Therefore, it was not treason that Rodburd Ide bore in the pocket of his big fur coat. Dwight Wade had sent tenderer emotions to the rear. He stood at the front, ready to meet iron with iron and fire with fire. CHAPTER XXVI THE DEVIL OF THE HEMPEN STRANDS "When the snub-line parts and the great load starts There's nothing that men may do, Except to cower with quivering hearts While the wreck goes thundering through." --The Ballad of Tumbledick. Days of winter snow and blow; days of sunshine, hard and cold as the radiance from a diamond's facets; days of calm and days of tempest; days when the snowflakes dropped as straight as plummets, and days when the whirlwinds danced in crazy rigadoons down the valleys or spun like dervishes on the mountain-tops! And all were days of honest, faithful toil in the black growth of Enchanted, and the days brought the dreamless sleep o' nights that labor won. In those long evenings hope lighted a taper that shone brightly beside the lantern of the office camp in whose dull beams Dwight Wade wrote long and earnest letters. But these were not to John Barrett's daughter; the conditions of their waiting love had tacitly closed the mail between them. Again Dwight Wade, in the honesty of his soul, had seen a light of hope that contrasted cheerily with the red glare of might against might which made his decency quail. He saw a chance to win as a man, not as a thug.