Explore "The Inverted Pyramid" by Bertrand W. Sinclair on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Sometimes Rod's heart troubled him so that he would turn in his ascent of a hill to some part of the works and go down again, stamp, stamp, joggling it from that enfeebled flutter back to its normal beat. And afterward he would sit on a log for awhile, struggling against a wave of depression. So much depended on him alone. He was the mainspring. If he broke or ran down, the job must go unfinished; people, his own people and many others, must suffer. And yet, when he faced the prospect of going on and on like that, flogging a weak heart to its work, keeping his brain alert to direct a big undertaking and the mass of detail involved, making money and more money and pouring it like water into an endless pipe, he felt a profound weariness, an unutterable distaste for this game of profit-creating which other men played with such gusto.
The sum that passed through his hands in any calendar month of 1919 would have been sufficient to give him everything he wanted for years to come. He lived no better than his loggers. He was separated from Mary most of the time. He became a peripatetic. Something always required his presence in a camp, and immediately thereafter in town, -- some new phase of the timber market or the Norquay Trust affairs.