She was making the boy letter-perfect in this. Andy Hall sat on the step below her, smoking a cigarette in contemplative silence. "They'll be through at Valdez to-morrow," he informed Rod. "So soon? I thought they had a week to go." "They made time," Andy commented tersely. "Well, better load the working gear on floats and get it up here," Rod told him. "Have 'em begin on the cedar hollow." "I put the fallers in there this afternoon." Rod smiled. It was almost unnecessary to tell Andy Hall what should be done. Sometimes it seemed as if Andy had a mysterious prescience. Then Rod would recollect that they had discussed such a move long before. Or it was the logical move which Andy merely anticipated. In either case Andy always knew what he was doing, and why; nor did he ever hesitate to take the initiative. Rod leaned back in a grass chair, clasped his hands behind his head, stared across the channel at the flash of the sun on the windows of Hawk's Nest. Behind him, in a west-facing room, he could hear the staccato of typewriter keys, tapping out the last chapter of Mary's second novel. He wondered, if things had been different, if he would have succeeded in that outlet. No, he decided. It would have been a splendid thing to try. He had been eager to embody and interpret the spirit of the pioneers. But he doubted now if he had the peculiar creative gift of making words transform his imaginings into a reality that would convey stark passion and stirring deeds. And Mary had that gift, beyond a doubt; not only the inborn faculty of perceiving, but the torturing necessity to transmit, to release through patient drudgery at her chosen medium, that sense of life as a vast conflict in which man struggles with his fellows, his gods, and his passions, sometimes to victory and often to defeat. No, he had the vision, the perceptive faculty, but not that uncanny power to capture and pass it on. Such vision as he had must find its outlet in action less subtle, more practical. He would never write the stories he had dreamed; he knew that now. But Mary would; she had her wings. He was proud of her flight. Only, sometimes, when her work took her into a brooding remoteness, a spiritual detachment that thrust not only himself but every material consideration temporarily aside, he wondered if the artist could ever function except as the supreme egotist, if the true artist must not by some obscure compulsion subordinate everything to the imperative demands of his art. Even so, he knew that he would rather have only such portion of his wife as he could share than the most complete possession--body, soul and brain--of any other woman he knew. Mary would always understand. In any crisis she would always have courage and confidence. She was his windward anchor. He loved her not for what she did and said but for what she was--herself. Young Roderick picked up a stick from one corner of the porch.