Nevertheless the muttered growling of various influential persons echoed in his ears now and then. He heard it directly. He noted the effect of it in different aspects of his more or less complicated affairs. There were influential cliques in Vancouver who took it as a personal grievance that the Norquay estate--which was Rod himself--would neither heed their Jeremiads concerning labor, nor deviate from a settled policy. It takes so little to arouse the ugly devils that lurk in men. They tried to make a feud of what was only a feeling of irritation. They attacked him. When they went that length, Rod struck back with whatever weapon lay to hand, and he had not a few in his arsenal. They couldn't hurt him; they could at most annoy. And so presently, Rod, finding no cracks in his material armor through which a spear could be thrust, ceased to be troubled by their futile activities. He despised their stratagems, and mocked at them, and confounded them with a waspish sarcasm whenever he encountered them in person. Undoubtedly in that year he earned something close to hatred from a certain group of men who five years earlier would have been aghast at such a state of affairs. About certain phases of this Isabel Wall kept him duly informed. But in the spring of that year she married Andy Hall,--and was herself immediately cast out from among the chosen people. Which circumstance only moved Isabel to amused laughter. But it stirred Rod and Mary to admiration. In this final step Isabel seemed ta have burned all her bridges with a high heart. They were quietly married and came to live with Rod and Mary for company's sake,--since the two husbands were necessarily absent a great deal of the time. Not long after that the last stick of the last Norquay timber on Valdez, that noble stretch of fir and cedar Oliver Thorn had husbanded so long, found its way to the boomsticks. When the first crew was ready to shift its donkey engines and coils of cable, Rod said to Andy Hall: "Have that outfit loaded on floats. Take it over to Mermaid Bay and make a high-lead setting a little back from shore to the right of the landing. Better start getting these camp buildings over there too." Andy stared at him. "You're not going to cut that timber?" He waved a hand across the channel, where the dusky forest massed behind the red roof of Hawk's Nest. "Why not?" Rod asked. He wondered if Andy shared a feeling that stirred, he believed, in no breast save his own and Mary's. "It's a damned shame," Andy muttered. "No choice."