All the rest of that day, and for many days thereafter, Hollister was a busy man. There was a pile of goods to be transported up-stream, a house to be fashioned out of raw material from the forest, the shingle-bolt chute to be inspected and repaired, the work of cutting cedar to be got under way, all in due order. He became a voluntary slave to work, clanking his chains of toil with that peculiar pleasure which comes to men who strain and sweat toward a desired end. As literally as his hired woodsmen, he earned his bread in the sweat of his brow, spurred on by a vision of what he sought to create,--a home and so much comfort as he could grasp for himself and a woman.
The house arose as if by magic,--the simple magic of stout arms and skilled hands working with axe and saw and iron wedges. One of Hollister's men was a lean, saturnine logger, past fifty, whose life had been spent in the woods of the Pacific Coast. There was no trick of the axe Hayes had not mastered, and he could perform miracles of shaping raw wood with neat joints and smooth surfaces.
Two weeks from the day Hayes struck his axe blade into the brown trunk of a five-foot cedar and said laconically, "She'll do", that ancient tree had been transformed into timbers, into boards that flaked off smooth and straight under iron wedges, into neat shakes for a rain-tight roof, and was assembled into a two-roomed cabin. This was furnished with chairs and tables and shelves, hewn out of the raw stuff of the forest. It stood in the middle of a patch of earth cleared of fallen logs and thicket. Its front windows gave on the Toba River, slipping down to the sea. A maple spread friendly arms at one corner, a lordly tree that would blaze crimson and russet-brown when October came again. All up and down the river the still woods spread a deep-green carpet on a floor between the sheer declivity of the north wall and the gentler, more heavily timbered slope of the south. Hollister looked at his house when it was done and saw that it was good. He looked at the rich brown of the new-cleared soil about it, and saw in his mind flowers growing there, and a garden.
And when he had quartered his men in the cabin up the hill and put them to work on the cedar, he went back to Vancouver for his wife.