When he passed the power-house with its nailed windows and doors he turned his head the other way. It was like walking by a graveyard where some one was sleeping that he loved. Bruce always had been peculiarly depressed by abandoned homesteads, deserted cabins, machinery left to rust, because they represented wasted efforts, failure, but when these monuments to dead hopes were his own! His quickened footsteps sometimes became very nearly like a run. It was from such a trip that Bruce came back to his cabin after two days' absence more than ordinarily heavy-hearted, if that were possible, though his luck had been unusually good. He had a cougar, one lynx, and six dark marten. Counting the State bounty on the cougar, the green skins be brought back represented close to a hundred dollars. At that rate he soon could go "outside." But to-night the thought did not elate him. What was there for him outside? What was there for him anywhere? As he had trudged along the trail through the broken snow, the gloom of the canyon had weighed upon him heavily, but it was the chill silence in the bare cabin when he opened the door that put the finishing touches upon his misery. The emptiness of it echoed in his heart. The blankets were in a mound in the bunk; he had been too disheartened before he left even to sweep the floor; the ashes over-flowed the stove hearth and there was no wood split. The soiled dishes, caked with hardened grease, made him sick. The chimney of the lamp he lighted was black with smoke. It was the last word in cheerlessness, and there was no reason to think, Bruce told himself, that it would not be in such surroundings that he would end his days. He was tired, hungry; his vitality and spirits were at low ebb. He warmed over a pan of biscuits and cold bacon and threw a handful of coffee in the dismal looking coffee pot. When it was ready he placed it on the clammy oilcloth and sat down. He eyed the food for a moment--the ever-present bacon, the sticky can of condensed milk, the black coffee in the tin cup, the biscuits covered with protuberances that made them look like a panful of horned toads. He realized suddenly that, hungry as he had thought himself, he could not eat. With a sweeping, vehement gesture he pushed it all from him. The tin cup upset and a small waterfall of coffee splashed upon the floor, the can of condensed milk rolled across the table and fell off but he did not pick it up. Instead, he folded his arms upon the oilcloth in the space he had made and dropping his forehead upon his ragged shirt-sleeve, he cried. Bruce had hit bottom. Older, wiser, braver men than Bruce have cried in some crisis of their lives. Tears are no sign of weakness. And they did not come now because he was quitting--because he did not mean to struggle on somehow or because there was anything or anybody of whom he was afraid. It was only that he was lonely, heartsick, humiliated, weary of thinking, bruised with defeat.