Mills remained, moody, working with that strange dynamic energy, sparing of words except that now and then he would talk to Hollister in brief jerky sentences, in a manner which implied much and revealed nothing. Mills always seemed on the point of crying out some deep woe that burned within him, of seeking relief in some outpouring of speech,—but he never did. At the most he would fling out some cryptic hint, bestow some malediction upon life in general. And he never slackened the dizzy pace of his daily labor, except upon those few occasions when from either Hollister or Lawanne he got a book that held him. Then he would stop work and sit in the bunk house and read till the last page was turned. But mostly he cut and piled cedar as if he tried to drown out in the sweat of his body whatever fever burned within.
Hollister observed that Mills no longer had much traffic with the Blands. For weeks at a time he did not leave the bolt camp except to come down to Hollister's house.
Lawanne seemed to be a favored guest now, at Bland's. Lawanne worked upon his book, but by fits and starts, working when he did work with a feverish concentration. He had a Chinese boy for house-servant. He might be found at noon or at midnight sprawled in a chair beside a pot-bellied stove, scrawling in an ungainly hand across sheets of yellow paper. He had no set hours for work. When he did work, when he had the vision and the fit was on and words came easily, chance callers met with scant courtesy. But he had great stores of time to spare, for all that. Some of it he spent at Bland's, waging an interminable contest at cribbage with Bland, coming up now and then with the Blands to spend an evening at Hollister's.
"It's about a man who wrecked his life by systematically undermining his own illusions about life," he answered one day Hollister's curious inquiry as to what the new book was about, "and of how finally a very assiduously cultivated illusion made him quite happy at last. Sound interesting?"
"How could he deliberately cultivate an illusion?" Doris asked. "If one's intelligence ever classifies a thing as an illusion, no conscious effort will ever turn it into a reality."
"Oh, I didn't say he cultivated the illusion," Lawanne laughed.
"Besides, do you really think that illusions are necessary to happiness?" Doris persisted.
"To some people," Lawanne declared. "But let's not follow up that philosophy. We're getting into deep water. Let's wade ashore. We'll say whatever is is right, and let it go at that. It will be quite all right for you to offer me a cup of tea, if your kitchen mechanic will condescend. That Chink of mine is having a holiday with my shotgun, trying to bag a brace of grouse for dinner. So I throw myself on your mercy."
"This man Bland is the dizzy limit," Lawanne observed, when the tea and some excellent sandwiches presently appeared. "He bought another rifle the other day—paid forty-five bones for it. That makes four he has now. And they have to manage like the deuce to keep themselves in grub from one remittance day to the next. He's a study. You seldom run across such a combination of physical perfection and child-like irresponsibility. He was complaining about his limited income the other day—'inkum' in his inimitable pronunciation. I suggested that right here in this valley he could earn a considerable number of shekels if he cared to work. He merely smiled amiably and said he didn't think he cared to take on a laborer's job. It left a chap no time for himself, you know. I suppose he'll vegetate here till he comes into that money he's waiting for. He refers to that as if it were something which pertained to him by divine right, something which freed him from any obligation to make any effort to overcome the sordid way in which they live at present."
"He doesn't consider it sordid," Hollister said. "Work is what he considers sordid—and there is something to be said for his viewpoint, at that. He enjoys himself tramping around with a gun, spending an afternoon to catch half a dozen six-inch trout."