Scents blew along the trail to Dick's face; damp and clean and piney. Golden light dredged through the black needles of the jack-pines and the wide-spread spruces, and powdered the slender white of birch and cotton-wood with yellow dust. And, hour by hour, the beat of hoofs and the jarring of the rig could do more than faintly blurr the surface of the deep, warm silence that lay like Peace itself upon the earth.
The chestnut swung along with his awkward, tireless gait; obedient to the light hand of the man whom he knew for his master; and Dick sat still, with his lean face expressionless and his eyes staring out, unblinking, below the heavy brows. He was thinking of a comparison in Ruskin's "Ethics of the Dust"; a comparison of the awful, hopeless difference between the hyaline block which is pure, untouchable in its integrity; which unhesitatingly repulses everything evil, and of its brother block; weak, immoral, accepting corruption, unable to deny the insiduous power of corroding fluids. To the lay eye those two blocks looked alike, even as he and Tempest had looked alike—years ago. Life had used various acids to test the two men. But Tempest only had won out. Grange's Andree might break his heart and his work, but neither she nor anything else could make him evil. Dick of his own free will had taken tests which had left their scars and their rotten places, and which had eaten out of him the power to stand where he would have chosen to stand now.
Fully he saw this, as a man may bring himself unflinchingly to look on himself. And still he drove through the calling musical forest with that concentrated look on his face. Ahead came faintly the smell of cooking-fires; of green wood smoke and fresh-grilled bacon and coffee. Round a sharp elbow in the trail showed a clearing sunk among the dark pines and a knot of covered wagons like huge brown beetles asleep. Where the flames pulsed up women moved and children's laughter echoed, sweet and shrill. A man slouched forward big and sunburnt, leaving a trail of tobacco-smoke blue on the still air.
Dick pulled up. He knew these for settlers trekking in with their wives and children to the Peace River country;
