The sum that passed through his hands in any calendar month of 1919 would have been sufficient to give him everything he wanted for years to come. He lived no better than his loggers. He was separated from Mary most of the time. He became a peripatetic. Something always required his presence in a camp, and immediately thereafter in town,--some new phase of the timber market or the Norquay Trust affairs. "I'm almost a widow," Mary said to him once. "It's as bad as the war. About all we get a chance to say to each other these days is 'Hello' and 'Good-by.'" Some day there would be an end to that, of course. A clean slate and a chance to draw his breath, to sit idly, contentedly, on the beach while Rod junior hunted crabs among the rocks, to talk with Mary about things that were not measured in money values. He had never been hungry to grasp material substance out of life so much as to understand life, the absorbing spectacle of the universe, to fathom its strange manifestations of beauty and terror. All his life he had loved the sight and smell of forests, the sound of running water, the majesty of the hills. He had loved peace and beauty and harmony. He loved them more than ever, but the beloved trinity had vanished out of his days. He was become an engineer, his hand on the levers, his ears full of the roar and grind of machinery. Only for a few hours now and then in the privacy of his own home could he achieve rest and content; or when for a moment he could stand forgetful and look up at the mainland palisades, rising tier on tier to far heights behind Little Dent and the Euclataws. Yet in spite of struggling with a formidable task, irritating problems, planning, directing, moving with sure purpose to an end the value of which he sometimes doubted, he began to get little glows of satisfaction when he was not too tired, more especially as that first year closed and he knew that the heart which had been organically perfect but functionally weak was regaining strength, slowly attaining functional perfection once more. Perhaps that lessened his moodiness, made him quicker to respond to external stimulus. He had gone for a year on his nerve. He had followed a light that sometimes seemed no more than a will-o'-the-wisp. With bodily soundness he began to feel a touch of pride in the work of his hands and brain. He had made no costly mistakes, either in men or tactics. It was odd, he reflected sometimes, as he went about the workings, that other men, corporations, were carrying on various private wars with labor, and that he should be free of those clashes that arose so often and so unexpectedly in the years following the war. It was even more odd that he should be regarded with suspicion by these other men and corporation heads for maintaining production without strikes, disputes, clashes, antagonisms.