All that winter Rod heard hints, snatches of conversation; he watched, listened, made mental notes. He heard the complaining of the pinched industrial barons. They blamed the war now. C'est la guerre!
But it was not the war. They were reaping, all civilization was reaping, only seed that had been sown long before the war. The worthy bourgeois learned nothing; but he did forget many things. Chiefly he forgot, or perhaps had never learned, that the war did not create greed, ineptitude, blundering, injustice; the war didn't endow man with a tendency to snatch at chestnuts in the fire and complain loudly when he burned his fingers. It seemed to Rod utterly childish to blame the war for individual or even national folly. The war had its own burden of iniquity to bear. The war created nothing and destroyed nothing that had its root in the human heart. At the worst it had only deflected certain things, released pent forces and passions.
He considered. Grove would have made as great a mess of his ambitious schemes if no cannon had waked echoes in Flanders. He had been a victim of his own weakness. A weak, vain man with great power in his hands, and a group of strong, predatory men filching it from him on the old principle that "he shall take who has the power and he shall keep who can."
This was the law that seemed to rule modern industrial society. Right has always rested on power; it cannot be otherwise. Very well then. Let them live by the law. Rod could not help a sneer when he saw these aspiring minor plutocrats wince as the shoe pinched them; the shoe which they would have fitted on other feet without a qualm, if they could.
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.