That uncertainty bore on him hard. He was doing his best. His men were doing their best. Logs came down to tidewater in a marvellous flow, as if the trees were handled by intelligent automatons with legs and fingers of steel. He had no labor difficulty that was not solved on such occasions as it arose by a half-hour's dispassionate talk over a table with the spokesmen of his crews. The walking delegates of the Logger's Union approached him as confidently as if he had been a member of the union. But there was always that cursed pit into which he was flinging his trees. It yawned bottomless. It loomed before him distressingly; an Augean stable that he must clean. He had his weak moments, his hours of utter discouragement. But he could neither stop nor turn aside. Sometimes in the streets of Vancouver, after a checking up with Charlie Hale in the Norquay Trust office, he would have the morbid fancy that the deep traffic roar of the city was like the roar of the rapids by Little Dent, and that he was in a frail craft shooting that fierce economic tiderace to disaster in the financial whirlpools. What a price to pay for one man's purblind ambition! He would look back at the chaste white square of the Norquay Trust Building, at the black iron skeleton of the great electric sign, and his lips would mutter a curse. CHAPTER XXVII Late summer of 1920 pricked to utter collapse the prosperity balloon which had been deflating ever since the Armistice. Europe still stewed in the choice juices of local punitive expeditions, reparation snarls, gyrating exchange, so that North American commerce lagged by the way with heavy feet. Here and there industry somehow kept going. It couldn't stop altogether, even lacking foreign markets. Crops were sowed and reaped; people were fed; life went on. But capital ventured timidly. Wages fell, even though commodities seemed reluctant to cheapen. The stress came particularly hard on the Pacific Coast. The bottom dropped out of the lumber market. A thousand loggers walked the streets of Vancouver, hungry, bewildered, as soon as their savings gave out. Only here and there a few companies and individuals, fortunately situated, well-managed, or filled with bowels of compassion for their men, were enabled to continue. They could log cheaply. They were willing to risk a little loss rather than disband crews and let machinery rust; and they hoped for the upturn, the revival of "confidence," that talisman which commends itself to Boards of Trade and Chambers of Commerce. Rod owned his timber. He neither leased, paid royalty, stumpage, nor interest on borrowed capital. It was choice timber, picked long ago when his forefathers had the cream of coastal forests to choose from. If a tree could be cut and sold at a profit by any one, he was the one. So long as he could operate without loss, he meant to keep on. He had to keep on, until the cost of production overtook the market price.