"I didn't expect you could," King responded.
"Can you?"
King had asked himself the same question scores of times and had made his own reply. He expressed it now as he had expressed it to himself every time the question had arisen in his own mind.
"Bill McCartney and King Howden can't live in the same place this winter," he said, looking straight into Hurley's eyes. "And I ain't going away."
When they had finished talking the three men shook hands quietly. They had entered into a covenant on behalf of a few hundred serious men and women who had set their faces months before towards the setting sun and had followed the trail over the hills and into the little valley, where lay the only hopes that life had still to offer them—the hidden valley at the rainbow's end.
And two of those three men slept as men sleep who are without care and are content with the day that is done. But Keith McBain could not sleep for the thought of the price he had already paid and the price that he was even yet to pay for his own folly.
The week that followed was one of unceasing labor and careful vigilance on the part of Hugh Hurley and Keith McBain. King went forward with the work he had been given to do by Keith McBain, and paid not the slightest heed to petty obstructions that were being thrown in his way every day by men who, though pretending to serve their old boss, were really actuated by the designs of which McCartney was the maker and the inspirer.
No one was unaware of McCartney's intriguing. Signs of it were in evidence everywhere. In spite of King's endeavors to hold his men together and secure concerted effort, there were little breaks and hindrances that temporarily offset his best attempts to direct the work along effective lines. Especially active among those who sided with McCartney was Tom Rickard, who had joined the gang of men under King's direction with no other object whatever than the frustration of all efforts to produce harmony among the men.
Towards the end of the week, however, the division between the two sides, represented by McCartney's supporters on the one hand, and on the other by the men who were still faithful to Keith McBain and took kindly to King's methods, was so marked than an open break seemed imminent. The threatening attitude of the opposition to King was so apparent that many of his men grew impatient with his quiet forbearance.
To make matters worse, the weather, that had been so unfavorable for almost a month, had turned from bad to worse. The river had risen so that the men were no longer able to get logs for building purposes from the opposite side of the stream, and were forced to make long hauls through wet brush and over rain-soaked ground, until their spirits were tested almost to the limit of endurance.