Time dragged after that.

Once the bid was on its way to Chicago, there was nothing to do but wait.

It was a delay which lengthened from June until July, thence into late summer and early autumn, while the hills turned brown with the colorings of the aspens, while Mount Taluchen and its surrounding mountains once more became grim and forbidding with the early fall of snow.
The time for the opening of the bids had passed, far in the distance, but there had come no word.

Ba'tiste, long since taken into as much of a partnership agreement as was possible, went day after day to the post office, only to return empty-handed, while Houston watched with more intensity than ever the commercial columns of the lumber journals in the fear that the contract, after all, had gone somewhere else.

But no notice appeared.