In a way, the part he played was creative.

He was doing something.

And at no time, striking another chord of his nature, could he take the joy in a million-dollar Eldorado dump that was at all equivalent to the joy he took in watching his two sawmills working and the big down river log-rafts swinging into the bank in the big eddy just above Moosehide Mountain.

Gold, even on the scales, was, after all, an abstraction.

It represented things and the power to do.