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The Hidden Places

by Bertrand W. Sinclair · English · Gutenberg #18150 · 444,662 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Hidden Places

Author: Bertrand W. Sinclair


        
Release date: April 11, 2006 [eBook #18150]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18150

Credits: Produced by Suzanne Shell and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HIDDEN PLACES ***




Produced by Suzanne Shell and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net





THE HIDDEN PLACES

[Illustration: He did not shrink while those soft fingers went
exploring the devastation wrought by the exploding shell.
FRONTISPIECE. _See page 128._]

THE HIDDEN PLACES


By BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR


Author of

_"Big Timber," "Poor Man's Rock," etc._


    A.L. BURT COMPANY
    Publishers New York

    Published by arrangement with Little, Brown and Company
    Printed in U.S.A.


    _Copyright, 1922,_
    BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.

    _All rights reserved_
    Published January, 1922.

    PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




THE HIDDEN PLACES




CHAPTER I


Hollister stood in the middle of his room, staring at the door without
seeing the door, without seeing the bulky shadow his body cast on the
wall in the pale glow of a single droplight. He was seeing everything
and seeing nothing; acutely, quiveringly conscious and yet oblivious
to his surroundings by reason of the poignancy of his thought.

A feeling not far short of terror had folded itself about him like a
shrouding fog.

It had not seized him unaware. For weeks he had seen it looming over
him, and he had schooled himself to disregard a great deal which his
perception was too acute to misunderstand. He had struggled
desperately against the unescapable, recognizing certain significant
facts and in the same breath denying their accumulated force in sheer
self-defense.

A small dressing-table topped by an oval mirror stood against the wall
beside his bed. Hollister took his unseeing gaze off the door with a
start, like a man withdrawing his mind from wandering in far places.
He sat down before the dressing-table and forced himself to look
steadfastly, appraisingly, at the reflection of his face in the
mirror--that which had once been a presentable man's countenance.

He shuddered and dropped his eyes. This was a trial he seldom ventured
upon. He could not bear that vision long. No one could. That was the
fearful implication which made him shrink. He, Robert Hollister, in
the flush of manhood, with a body whose symmetry and vigor other men
had envied, a mind that functioned alertly, a spirit as nearly
indomitable as the spirit of man may be, was like a leper among his
own kind; he had become a something that filled other men with pitying
dismay when they looked at him, that made women avert their gaze and
withdraw from him in spite of pity.

Hollister snapped out the light and threw himself on his bed. He had
known physical suffering, the slow, aching hours of tortured flesh,
bodily pain that racked him until he had wished for death as a welcome
relief. But that had been when the flame of vitality burned low, when
the will-to-live had been sapped by bodily stress.

Now the mere animal instinct to live was a compelling force within
him. He was young and strong, aching with his desire for life in its
fullest sense. And he did not know how he was going to live and endure
the manner of life he had to face, a life that held nothing but
frustration and denial of all that was necessary to him, which was
making him suffer as acutely as he had ever suffered in the field,
under the knives of callous surgeons, in the shambles of the front
line or the ether-scented dressing stations. There is morphine for a
tortured body, but there is no opiate for agony of the spirit, the
sharp-toothed pain that stabs at a lonely heart with its invisible
lancet.

In the darkness of his room, with all the noisy traffic of a seaport
city rumbling under his windows, Hollister lay on his bed and
struggled against that terrifying depression which had seized him,
that spiritual panic. It was real. It was based upon undeniable
reality. He was no more captain of his soul than any man born of woman
has ever been when he descends into the dark places. But he knew that
he must shake off that feeling, or go mad, or kill himself. One of the
three. He had known men to kill themselves for less. He had seen
wounded men beg for a weapon to end their pain. He had known men who,
after months of convalescence, quitted by their own hand a life that
no longer held anything for them.

And it was not because life held out any promise to Hollister that he
lived, nor was it a physical, fear of death, nor any moral scruple
against self-destruction. He clung to life because instinct was
stronger than reason, stronger than any of the appalling facts he
encountered and knew he must go on encountering. He had to live, with
a past that was no comfort, going on down the pathway of a future
which he attempted not to see clearly, because when he did envisage it
he was stricken with just such a panic as now overwhelmed him.

To live on and on, a pariah among his fellows because of his
disfigurement. A man with a twisted face, a gargoyle of a countenance.
To have people always shrink from him. To be denied companionship,
friendship, love, to know that so many things which made life
beautiful were always just beyond his reach. To be merely endured. To
have women pity him--and shun him.

The sweat broke out on Hollister's face when he thought of all that.
He knew that it was true. This knowledge had been growing on him for
weeks. To-night the full realization of what it meant engulfed him
with terror. That was all. He did not cry out against injustice. He
did not whine a protest. He blamed no one. He understood, when he
looked at himself in the glass.

After a time he shook off the first paralyzing grip of this unnameable
terror which had seized him with clammy hands, fought it down by sheer
resolution. He was able to lie staring into the dusky spaces of his
room and review the stirring panorama of his existence for the past
four years. There was nothing that did not fill him with infinite
regret--and there was nothing which by any conceivable effort he could
have changed. He could not have escaped one of those calamities which
had befallen him. He could not have left undone a single act that he
had performed. There was an inexorable continuity in it all. There
had been a great game. He had been one of the pawns.

Hollister shut his eyes. Immediately, like motion pictures projected
upon a screen, his mind began to project visions. He saw himself
kissing his wife good-by. He saw the tears shining in her eyes. He
felt again the clinging pressure of her arms, her cry that she would
be so lonely. He saw himself in billets, poring over her letters. He
saw himself swinging up the line with his company, crawling back with
shattered ranks after a hammering, repeating this over and over again
till it seemed like a nightmare in which all existence was comprised
in blood and wounds and death and sorrow, enacted at stated intervals
to the rumble of guns.

He saw himself on his first leave in London, when he found that Myra
was growing less restive under his absence, when he felt proud to
think that she was learning the lesson of sacrifice and how to bear up
under it. He saw his second Channel crossing with a flesh wound in his
thigh, when there seemed to his hyper-sensitive mind a faint
perfunctoriness in her greeting. It was on this leave that he first
realized how the grim business he was engaged upon was somehow rearing
an impalpable wall between himself and this woman whom he still loved
with a lover's passion after four years of marriage.

And he could see, in this mental cinema, whole searing sentences of
the letter he received from her just before a big push on the Somme
in the fall of '17--that letter in which she told him with child-like
directness that he had grown dim and distant and that she loved
another man. She was sure he would not care greatly. She was sorry if
he did. But she could not help it. She had been so lonely. People were
bound to change. It couldn't be helped. She was sorry--but--

And Hollister saw himself later lying just outside the lip of a
shell-crater, blind, helpless, his face a shredded smear when he felt
it with groping fingers. He remembered that he lay there wondering,
because of the darkness and the strange silence and the pain, if he
were dead and burning in hell for his sins.

After that there were visions of himself in a German hospital, in a
prison camp, and at last the armistice, and the Channel crossing once
more. He was dead, they told him, when he tried in the chaos of
demobilization to get in touch with his regiment, to establish his
identity, to find his wife. He was officially dead. He had been so
reported, so accepted eighteen months earlier. His wife had married
again. She and her husband had vanished from England. And with his
wife had vanished his assets, his estate, by virtue of a pre-war
arrangement which he had never revoked.

He beheld himself upon the streets of London, one of innumerable stray
dogs, ruined, deserted, disfigured, a bit of war's wreckage. He did
not particularly consider himself a victim of injustice. He did not
blame Myra. He was simply numbed and bewildered.

But that was before he grew conscious of what it meant to a sensitive
man, a man in whom all warm human impulses flowed so strongly, to be
penniless, to have all the dependable foundations of his life torn
from under his feet, to be so disfigured that people shunned him.

He had to gather up the broken pieces of his life, fit them together,
go on as best he could. It did not occur to him at first to do
otherwise, or that the doing would be hard. He had not foreseen all
the strange shifts he would be put to, the humiliations he would
suffer, the crushing weight of hopelessness which gathered upon him by
the time he arrived on the Pacific Coast, where he had once lived, to
which he now turned to do as men all over the war-racked earth were
doing in the winter of 1919,--cast about in an effort to adjust
himself, to make a place for himself in civil life.

All the way across the continent of North America Hollister grew more
and more restive under the accumulating knowledge that the horrible
devastation of his features made a No Man's Land about him which few
had the courage to cross. It was a fact. Here, upon the evening of the
third day in Vancouver, a blind and indescribable fear seized upon
him, a sickening conviction that although living, he was dead,--dead
in so far as the common, casual intimacies of daily intercourse with
his fellows went. It was as if men and women were universally
repulsed by that grotesquely distorted mask which served him for a
face, as if at sight of it by common impulse they made off, withdrew
to a safe distance, as they would withdraw from any loathsome thing.

Lying on his bed, Hollister flexed his arms. He arched his chest and
fingered the muscular breadth of it in the darkness. Bodily, he was a
perfect man. Strength flowed through him in continuous waves. He could
feel within himself the surge of vast stores of energy. His brain
functioned with a bright, bitter clearness. He could feel,--ah, that
was the hell of it. That quivering response to the subtle nuances of
thought! A profound change had come upon him, yet essentially he, the
man, was unchanged. Except for those scars, the convoluted ridges of
tissue, the livid patches and the ghastly hollows where once his
cheeks and lips and forehead had been smooth and regular, he was as he
had always been.

For a moment there came over him the wild impulse to rush out into the
street, crying:

"You fools! Because my face is torn and twisted makes me no different
from you. I still feel and think. I am as able to love and hate as
you. Was all your talk about honorable scars just prattle to mislead
the men who risked the scars? Is all your much advertised kindliness
and sympathy for war-broken men a bluff?"

He smiled sadly. They would say he was mad. They would classify him as
suffering from shell shock. A frock-coated committee would gravely
recommend him for treatment in the mental hospital at Essondale. They
would not understand.

Hollister covered his face with a swift, tight clasping of his hands.
Something rose chokingly in his throat. Into his eyes a slow, scalding
wetness crept like a film. He set his teeth in one corner of his
pillow.




CHAPTER II


When Hollister was eighteen years old he had been briefly troubled by
an affliction of his eyes brought on from overstudy. His father, at
the time, was interested in certain timber operations on the coast of
British Columbia. In these rude camps, therefore, young Hollister
spent a year. During that twelve months books were prohibited. He
lived in the woods, restored the strength of his eyes amid that
restful greenness, hardened a naturally vigorous body by healthy,
outdoor labor with the logging crews. He returned home to go on with
his University work in eastern Canada with unforgettable impressions
of the Pacific coast, a boyish longing to go back to that region where
the mountains receded from the sea in wave after wave of enormous
height, where the sea lapped with green lips at the foot of the ranges
and thrust winding arms back into the very heart of the land, and
where the land itself, delta and slope and slide-engraved declivities,
was clothed with great, silent forests, upon which man, with his axes
and saws, his machinery, his destructiveness in the name of industry,
had as yet made little more impression than the nibbling of a single
mouse on the rim of a large cheese.

When he graduated he did return on a thirty-days' vacation, which the
lure of the semi-wild country prolonged for six months,--a whole
summer in which he resisted the importunities of his father to take
his part in the business upon which rested the family fortune.
Hollister never forgot that summer. He was young. He had no cares. He
was free. All life spread before him in a vast illusion of
unquestionable joyousness. There was a rose-pink tinge over these
months in which he fished salmon and trout, climbed the frowning
escarpments of the Coast Range, gave himself up to the spell of a
region which is still potent with the charm of the wilderness untamed.
There had always lingered in his receptive mind a memory of profound
beauty, a stark beauty of color and outline, an unhampered freedom,
opportunity as vast as the mountains that looked from their cool
heights down on the changeful sea and the hushed forests, brooding in
the sun and rain.

So he had come back again, after seven years, scarcely knowing why he
came, except that the coast beckoned with a remote gesture, and that
he desired to get as far as possible from the charnel house of Europe,
and that he shrank from presenting himself among the acquaintances of
his boyhood and the few distant relatives left him upon the Atlantic
seaboard.

His father died shortly after Hollister married. He had left his son
property aggregating several thousand dollars and a complicated
timber business disorganized by his sudden death. Hollister was
young, sanguine, clever in the accepted sense of cleverness. He had
married for love,--urged thereto by a headlong, unquestioning,
uncritical passion. But there were no obstacles. His passion was
returned. There was nothing to make him ponder upon what a
devastating, tyrannical force this emotion which he knew as love might
become, this blind fever of the blood under cover of which nature
works her ends, blandly indifferent to the consequences.

Hollister was happy. He was ambitious. He threw himself with energy
into a revival of his father's business when it came into his hands.
His needs expanded with his matrimonial obligations. Considered
casually--which was chiefly the manner of his consideration--his
future was the future of a great many young men who begin life under
reasonably auspicious circumstances. That is to say, he would be a
success financially and socially to as great an extent as he cared to
aspire. He would acquire wealth and an expanding influence in his
community. He would lead a tolerably pleasant domestic existence. He
would be proud of his wife's beauty, her charm; he would derive a
soothing contentment from her affection. He would take pleasure in
friendships. In the end, of course, at some far-off, misty mile-post,
he would begin to grow old. Then he would die in a dignified manner,
full of years and honors, and his children would carry on after him.

Hollister failed to reckon with the suavities of international
diplomacy, with the forces of commercialism in relation to the markets
of the world.

The war burst upon and shattered the placidity of his existence very
much as the bombs from the first Zeppelins shattered the peace and
security of London and Paris.

He reacted to the impetus of the German assault as young men of his
class uniformly reacted. There was in Hollister's mind no doubt or
equivocation about what he must do. But he did not embark upon this
adventure joyously. He could not help weighing the chances. He
understood that in this day and age he was a fortunate man. He had a
great deal to lose. But he felt that he must go. He was not, however,
filled with the witless idea that service with the Expeditionary Force
was to be an adventure of some few months, a brief period involving
some hardships and sharp fighting, but with an Allied Army hammering
at the gates of Berlin as a grand finale. The slaughter of the first
encounters filled him with the conviction that he should put his house
in order before he entered that bloody arena out of which he might not
emerge.

So that when he crossed the Channel the first time he had disentangled
himself from his business at a great loss, in order to have all his
funds available for his wife in case of the ultimate disaster.

Myra accompanied him to England, deferred their separation to the last
hour. They could well afford that concession to their affection, they
told each other. It was so hard to part.

It scarcely seemed possible that four years had gone winging by since
then, yet in certain moods it seemed to Hollister as if an eternity
had passed. Things had been thus and so; they had become different by
agonizing processes.

He did not know where Myra was. He, himself, was here in Vancouver,
alone, a stranger, a single speck of human wreckage cast on a far
beach by the receding tides of war. He had no funds worth considering,
but money was not as yet an item of consideration. He was not
disabled. Physically he was more fit than he had ever been. The
delicate mechanism of his brain was unimpaired. He had no
bitterness--no illusions. His intellect was acute enough to suggest
that in the complete shucking off of illusions lay his greatest peril.
Life, as it faced him, the individual, appeared to be almost too grim
a business to be endured without hopes and dreams. He had neither. He
had nothing but moods.

He walked slowly down Granville Street in the blackest mood which had
yet come upon him. It differed from that strange feeling of terror
which had taken him unaware the night before. He had fallen easy prey
then to the black shadows of forlornness. He was still as acutely
aware of the barrier which his disfigurement raised between him and
other men. But with that morbid awareness there rose also now, for the
first time, resentment against the smug folk who glanced at him and
hurriedly averted their eyes. Slowly, by imperceptible degrees, as the
tide rises on a sloping shore, his anger rose.

The day was cold and sunny, a January morning with a touch of frost in
the air. Men passed him, walking rapidly, clad in greatcoats. Women
tripped by, wrapped in furs, eyes bright, cheeks glowing. And as they
passed, singly, in chattering pairs, in smiling groups, Hollister
observed them with a growing fury. They were so thoroughly insulated
against everything disagreeable. All of them. A great war had just
come to a dramatic close, a war in which staggering numbers of men had
been sacrificed, body and soul, to enable these people to walk the
streets in comfortable security. They seemed so completely unaware of
the significance of his disfigured face. It was simply a disagreeable
spectacle from which they turned with brief annoyance.

Most of these men and women honored the flag. In a theater, at any
public gathering, a display of the national colors caused the men to
bare reverently their heads, the women to clap their hands with
decorous enthusiasm. Without doubt they were all agreed that it was a
sacred duty to fight for one's country. How peculiar and illogical
then, he reflected, to be horrified at the visible results of fighting
for one's country, of saving the world for democracy. The thing had
had to be done. A great many men had been killed. A great number had
lost their legs, their arms, their sight. They had suffered
indescribable mutilations and disabilities in the national defense.
These people were the nation. Those who passed him with a shocked
glance at his face must be aware that fighting involves suffering and
scars. It appeared as if they wished to ignore that. The inevitable
consequences of war annoyed them, disturbed them, when they came face
to face with those consequences.

Hollister imagined them privately thinking he should wear a mask.

After all, he was a stranger to these folk, although he was their
countryman and a person of consequence until the war and Myra and
circumstances conspired against him.

He stifled the resentment which arose from a realization that he must
expect nothing else, that it was not injustice so much as stupidity.
He reflected that this was natural. A cynical conclusion arose in his
mind. There was no substance, after all, in this loose talk about
sympathy and gratitude and the obligation of a proud country to those
who had served overseas. Why should there be? He was an individual
among other individuals who were unconsciously actuated by rampant
individualism except in moments of peril, when stark necessity
compelled them to social action. Otherwise it was every man for
himself. Yes, it was natural enough. He _was_ a stranger to these
people. Except for the color of his skin, he was no more to them than
a Hindoo or a Japanese. And doubtless the grotesque disarrangement of
his features appalled them. How could they discern behind that
caricature of a face the human desire for friendliness, the ache of a
bruised spirit?

He deliberately clamped down the lid upon such reflections and
bethought himself of the business which brought him along the street.
Turning off the main thoroughfare, he passed half a block along a
cross street and entered an office building. Ascending to the fourth
floor, he entered an elaborate suite of offices which bore upon the
ground glass of the entrance door this legend:

    LEWIS AND COMPANY

    SPECIALISTS IN B.C. TIMBER. INVESTMENTS

He inquired for Mr. Lewis, gave his card to a young woman who glanced
at him once and thereafter looked anywhere but at him while he spoke.
After a minute of waiting he was ushered into a private office. As he
neared this door, Hollister happened to catch a panoramic glimpse in a
wall mirror. The eyes of half a dozen clerks and other persons in that
room, both male and female, were fixed on him with the shocked and
eager curiosity he had once observed upon the faces of a crowd
gathered about the mangled victim of a street accident.

Mr. Lewis was a robust man, a few years older than Hollister. The
cares of a rapidly developing business and certain domestic ties had
prevented Mr. Lewis from offering himself upon the altar of his
country. The responsibility of eight per cent. investments entrusted
to his care was not easily shaken off. Business, of course, was a
national necessity. However, since the armistice, Mr. Lewis had ceased
to be either explanatory or inferentially apologetic--even in his own
thought--for his inability to free himself from the demands of
commerce during a critical period.

In any case he was there, sound in wind and limb, a tall,
square-shouldered, ruddy man of thirty-five, seated behind an oak
desk, turning Hollister's card over in his fingers with an
anticipatory smile. Blankness replaced the smile. A sort of horrified
wonder gleamed in his eyes. Hollister perceived that his face shocked
the specialist in B.C. timber, filled Mr. Lewis with very mixed
sensations indeed.

"You have my card. It is several years since we met. I dare say you
find me unrecognizable," Hollister said bluntly. "Nevertheless I can
identify myself to your satisfaction."

A peculiarity of Hollister's disfigurement was the immobility of his
face. The shell which had mutilated him, the scalpels of the German
field surgeons who had perfunctorily repaired the lacerations, had
left the reddened, scar-distorted flesh in a rigid mold. He could
neither recognizably smile nor frown. His face, such as it was, was
set in unchangeable lines. Out of this rigid, expressionless mask his
eyes glowed, blue and bright, having escaped injury. They were the
only key to the mutations of his mind. If Hollister's eyes were the
windows of his soul, he did not keep the blinds drawn, knowing that
few had the hardihood to peer into those windows now.

Mr. Lewis looked at him, looked away, and then his gaze came slowly
back as if drawn by some fascination against which he struggled in
vain. He did not wish to look at Hollister. Yet he was compelled to
look. He seemed to find difficulty in speech, this suave man of
affairs.

"I'm afraid I shouldn't have recognized you, as you say," he uttered,
at last. "Have you--ah----"

"I've been overseas," Hollister answered the unspoken question. That
strange curiosity, tinctured with repulsion! "The result is obvious."

"Most unfortunate," Mr. Lewis murmured. "But your scars are honorable.
A brother of mine lost an arm at Loos."

"The brothers of a good many people lost more than their arms at
Loos," Hollister returned dryly. "But that is not why I called. You
recollect, I suppose, that when I was out here last I bought a timber
limit in the Toba from your firm. When I went overseas I instructed
you to sell. What was done in that matter?"

Mr. Lewis' countenance cleared at once. He was on his own ground
again, dealing with matters in which he was competent, in consultation
with a client whom he recalled as a person of consequence, the son of
a man who had likewise been of considerable consequence. Personal
undesirability was always discounted in the investment field, the
region of percentum returns. Money talked, in arrogant tones that
commanded respect.

He pressed a button.

"Bring me," he ordered the clerk who appeared, "all correspondence
relating to this matter," and he penciled a few sentences on a slip of
paper.

He delved into the papers that were presently set before him.

"Ah, yes," he said. "Lot 2027 situated on the south slope of the Toba
Valley. Purchased for your account July, 1912. Sale ordered October,
1914. We had some correspondence about that early in 1915, while you
were in London. Do you recall it, Mr. Hollister?"

"Yes. You wrote that the timber market was dead, that any sale
possible must be at a considerable sacrifice. Afterward, when I got to
the front, I had no time to think about things like that. But I
remember writing you to sell, even at a sacrifice."

"Yes, yes. Quite so," Mr. Lewis agreed. "I recall the whole matter
very clearly. Conditions at that time were very bad, you know. It was
impossible to find a purchaser on short notice. Early in 1917 there
was a chance to sell, at a considerably reduced figure. But I couldn't
get in touch with you. You didn't answer our cable. I couldn't take
the responsibility of a sacrifice sale."

Hollister nodded. In 1917 he was a nameless convalescent in a German
hospital; officially he was dead. Months before that such things as
distant property rights had ceased to be of any moment. He had
forgotten this holding of timber in British Columbia. He was too full
of bitter personal misery to trouble about money.

"Failing to reach you we waited until we should hear from you--or from
your estate." Mr. Lewis cleared his throat as if it embarrassed him to
mention that contingency. "In war--there was that possibility, you
understand. We did not feel justified; so much time had elapsed. There
was risk to us in acting without verifying our instructions."

"So this property is still to be marketed. The carrying charges, as I
remember, were small. I presume you carried them."

"Oh, assuredly," Mr. Lewis asserted. "We protected your interests to
the very best of our ability."

"Well, find me a buyer for that limit as soon as you can," Hollister
said abruptly. "I want to turn it into cash."

"We shall set about this at once," Mr. Lewis said. "It may take a
little time--conditions, as a result of the armistice, are again
somewhat unsettled in the logging industry. Airplane spruce production
is dead--dead as a salt mackerel--and fir and cedar slumped with it.
However we shall do our best. Have you a price in mind, Mr.
Hollister, for a quick sale?"

"I paid ten thousand for it. On the strength of your advice as a
specialist in timber investments," he added with a touch of malice. He
had taken a dislike to Mr. Lewis. He had not been so critical of
either men or motives in the old days. He had remembered Lewis as a
good sort. Now he disliked the man, distrusted him. He was too smooth,
too sleek. "I'll discount that twenty percent, for a cash sale."

Mr. Lewis made a memorandum.

"Very good," said he, raising his head with an inquiring air, as if to
say "If that is all----"

"If you will kindly identify me at a bank,"--Hollister rose from his
chair, "I shall cease to trouble you. I have a draft on the Bank of
B.N.A. I do not know any one in Vancouver."

"No trouble, I assure you," Lewis hastened to assent, but his tone
lacked heartiness, sincerity.

It was only a little distance to the bank, but Lewis insisted on
making the journey in a motorcar which stood at the curb. It was plain
to Hollister that Mr. Lewis disliked the necessity of appearing in
public with him, that he took this means of avoiding the crowded
sidewalks, of meeting people. He introduced Hollister, excused himself
on the plea of business pressure, and left Hollister standing before
the teller's wicket.

This was not a new attitude to Hollister. People did that,--as if he
were a plague. There came into his mind--as he stood counting the
sheaf of notes slide through a grill by a teller who looked at him
once and thereafter kept his eyes averted--a paraphrase of a hoary
quotation, "I am a monster of such frightful mien, as to be hated
needs but to be seen." The rest of it, Hollister thought grimly, could
never apply to him.

He put the money in his pocket and walked out on the street. It was a
busy corner on a humming thoroughfare. Electric cars rumbled and
creaked one behind another on the double tracks. Waves of vehicular
traffic rolled by the curb. A current of humanity flowed past him on
the sidewalk.

Standing there for a minute, Hollister felt again the slow rising of
his resentment against these careless, fortunate ones. He could not
say what caused that feeling. A look, a glance,--the inevitable
shrinking. He was morbidly sensitive. He knew that, knew it was a
state of mind that was growing upon him. But from whatever cause, that
feeling of intolerable isolation gave way to an inner fury.

As he stood there, he felt a wild desire to shout at these people, to
curse them, to seize one of these dainty women by the arms, thrust his
disfigured face close to hers and cry: "Look at me as if I were a man,
not a monstrosity. I'm what I am so that you could be what you are.
Look at me, damn you!"

He pulled himself together and walked on. Certainly he would soon run
amuck if he did not get over feeling like that, if he did not master
these impulses which bordered on insanity. He wondered if that inner
ferment would drive him insane.

He went back to the second-rate hotel where he had taken refuge,
depressed beyond words, afraid of himself, afraid of the life which
lay in fragments behind him and spread away before him in terrifying
drabness. Yet he must go on living. To live was the dominant instinct.
A man did not put on or off the desire to live as he put on or off his
coat. But life promised nothing. It was going to be a sorry affair. It
struck Hollister with disheartening force that an individual is
nothing--absolutely nothing--apart from some form of social grouping.
And society, which had exacted so much from him, seemed peculiarly
indifferent to the consequences of those imperative exactions, seemed
wholly indifferent to his vital need.

And it was not reward or recognition of service performed that
Hollister craved. He did not want to be pensioned or subsidized or to
have medals pinned on him. What he wanted was chiefly to forget the
war and what the war had visited upon him and others like him.
Hollister suffered solely from that sense of being held outside the
warm circle of human activities, fellowships, friendliness. If he
could not overcome that barrier which people threw up around
themselves at contact with him, if he could not occasionally know the
sound of a friendly voice, he felt that he would very soon go mad. A
man cannot go on forever enduring the pressure of the intolerable.
Hollister felt that he must soon arrive at a crisis. What form it
would take he did not know, and in certain moods he did not care.

On the landing at the end of the narrow corridor off which his room
opened he met a man in uniform whom he recognized,--a young man who
had served under him in the Forty-fourth, who had won a commission on
the field. He wore a captain's insignia now. Hollister greeted him by
name.

"Hello, Tommy."

The captain looked at him. His face expressed nothing whatever.
Hollister waited for that familiar shadow of distaste to appear. Then
he remembered that, like himself, Rutherford must have seen thousands
upon thousands of horribly mutilated men.

"Your voice," Rutherford remarked at length, "has a certain familiar
sound. Still, I can't say I know you. What's the name?"

"Bob Hollister. Do you remember the bottle of Scotch we pinched from
the Black Major behind the brick wall on the Albert Road? Naturally
you wouldn't know me--with this face."

"Well," Rutherford said, as he held out his hand, "a fellow shouldn't
be surprised at anything any more. I understood you'd gone west. Your
face _is_ mussed up a bit. Rotten luck, eh?"

Hollister felt a lump in his throat. It was the first time for months
that any human being had met him on common ground. He experienced a
warm feeling for Rutherford. And the curious thing about that was that
out of the realm of the subconscious rose instantly the remembrance
that he had never particularly liked Tommy Rutherford. He was one of
the wild men of the battalion. When they went up the line Rutherford
was damnably cool and efficient, a fatalist who went about his grim
business unmoved. Back in rest billets he was always pursuing some
woman, unearthing surplus stores of whisky or wine, intent upon
dubious pleasures,--a handsome, self-centered debonair animal.

"My room's down here," Hollister said. "Come in and gas a bit--if you
aren't bound somewhere."

"Oh, all right. I came up here to see a chap, but he's out. I have
half an hour or so to spare."

Rutherford stretched himself on Hollister's bed. They lit cigarettes
and talked. And as they talked, Rutherford kept looking at Hollister's
face, until Hollister at last said to him:

"Doesn't it give you the willies to look at me?"

Rutherford shook his head.

"Oh, no. I've got used to seeing fellows all twisted out of shape. You
seem to be fit enough otherwise."

"I am," Hollister said moodily. "But it's a devil of a handicap to
have a mug like this."

"Makes people shy off, eh? Women particularly. I can imagine,"
Rutherford drawled. "Tough luck, all right. People don't take very
much stock in fellows that got smashed. Not much of a premium on
disfigured heroes these days."

Hollister laughed harshly.

"No. We're at a discount. We're duds."

For half an hour they chatted more or less one-sidedly. Rutherford had
a grievance which he took pains to air. He was on duty at Hastings
Park, having been sent there a year earlier to instruct recruits,
after recovering from a wound. He was the military man par excellence.
War was his game. He had been anxious to go to Siberia with the
Canadian contingent which had just departed. And the High Command had
retained him here to assist in the inglorious routine of
demobilization. Rutherford was disgruntled. Siberia had promised new
adventure, change, excitement.

The man, Hollister soon perceived, was actually sorry the war was
over, sorry that his occupation was gone. He talked of resigning and
going to Mexico, to offer his sword to whichever proved the stronger
faction. It would be a picnic after the Western Front. A man could
whip a brigade of those greasers into shape and become a power. There
ought to be good chances for loot.

Yet Hollister enjoyed his company. Rutherford was genial. He was the
first man for long to accept Hollister as a human being. He promised
to look Hollister up again before he went away.

The world actually seemed cheerful to Hollister, after Rutherford had
gone,--until in moving about the room he caught sight of his face in
the mirror.




CHAPTER III


About ten days later Tommy Rutherford walked into Hollister's room at
eight in the evening. He laid his cap and gloves on the bed, seated
himself, swung his feet to and fro for a second, and reached for one
of Hollister's cigarettes.

"It's a hard world, old thing," he complained. "Here was I all set for
an enjoyable winter. Nice people in Vancouver. All sorts of fetching
affairs on the tapis. And I'm to be demobilized myself next week.
Chucked out into the blooming street with a gratuity and a couple of
medals. Damn the luck."

He remained absorbed in his own reflections for a minute, blowing
smoke rings with meticulous care.

"I wonder if a fellow _could_ make it go in Mexico?" he drawled.

Hollister made no comment.

"Oh, well, hang it, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof," he
remarked, with an abrupt change of tone. "I'm going to a hop at the
Granada presently. Banish dull care and all that, for the time being,
anyway."

His gaze came to an inquiring rest on Hollister.

"What's up, old thing?" he asked lightly. "Why so mum?"

"Oh, nothing much," Hollister answered.

"Bad thing to get in the dumps," Rutherford observed sagely. "You
ought to keep a bottle of Scotch handy for that."

"Drink myself into a state of mind where the world glitters and
becomes joyful, eh? No, I don't fancy your prescription. I'd be more
apt to run amuck."

"Oh, come now," Rutherford remonstrated. "It isn't so bad as that.
Cheer up, old man. Things might be worse, you know.

"Oh, hell!" Hollister exploded.

After which he relapsed into sullen silence, to which Rutherford,
frankly mystified and somewhat inclined to resent this self-contained
mood, presently left him.

Hollister was glad when the man went away. He had a feeling of relief
when the door closed and retreating footsteps echoed down the hall. He
had grasped at a renewal of Rutherford's acquaintance as a man
drowning in a sea of loneliness would grasp at any friendly straw. And
Rutherford, Hollister quickly realized, was the most fragile sort of
straw. The man was a profound, non-thinking egotist, the adventurer
pure and simple, whose mentality never rose above grossness of one
sort and another, in spite of a certain outward polish. He could
tolerate Hollister's mutilated countenance because he had grown
accustomed to horrible sights,--not because he had any particular
sympathy for a crippled, mutilated man's misfortune, or any
understanding of such a man's state of feeling. To Rutherford that was
the fortune of war. So many were killed. So many crippled. So many
disfigured. It was luck. He believed in his own luck. The evil that
befell other men left him rather indifferent. That was all. When
Hollister once grasped Rutherford's attitude, he almost hated the man.

He sat now staring out the window. A storm had broken over Vancouver
that day. To-night it was still gathering force. The sky was a
lowering, slate-colored mass of clouds, spitting squally bursts of
rain that drove in wet lines against his window and made the street
below a glistening area shot with tiny streams and shallow puddles
that were splashed over the curb by rolling motor wheels. The wind
droned its ancient, melancholy chant among the telephone wires, shook
with its unseen, powerful hands a row of bare maples across the way,
rattled the windows in their frames. Now and then, in a momentary lull
of the wind, a brief cessation of the city noises, Hollister could
hear far off the beat of the Gulf seas bursting on the beach at
English Bay, snoring in the mouth of False Creek. A dreary,
threatening night that fitted his mood.

He sat pondering over the many-horned dilemma upon which he hung
impaled. He had done all that a man could do. He had given the best
that was in him, played the game faithfully, according to the rules.
And the net result had been for him the most complete disaster. So far
as Myra went, he recognized that domestic tragedy as a natural
consequence. He did not know, he was unable to say if his wife had
simply been a weak and shallow woman, left too long alone, thrown too
largely on her own resources in an environment so strongly tinctured
by the high-pitched and reckless spirit generated by the war. He had
always known that his wife--women generally were the same, he
supposed--was dominated by emotional urges, rather than cold reason.
But that had never struck him as of great significance. Women were
like that. A peculiar obtuseness concealed from him, until now, that
men also were much the same. He was, himself. When his feelings and
his reason came into conflict, it was touch and go which should
triumph. The fact remained that for a long time the war had separated
them as effectually as a divorce court. Hollister had always had a
hazy impression that Myra was the sort of woman to whom love was
necessary, but he had presumed that it was the love of a particular
man, and that man himself. This, it seemed, was a mistake, and he had
paid a penalty for making that mistake.

So he accepted this phase of his unhappiness without too much rancor.
Myra had played fair, he perceived. She had told him what to expect.
And the accident of a misleading report had permitted her to follow
her bent with a moral sanction. That she had bestowed herself and
some forty thousand dollars of his money on another man was not the
thing Hollister resented. He resented only the fact that her glow of
love for him had not endured, that it had gone out like an untended
fire. But for some inscrutable reason that had happened. He had built
a dream-house on an unstable foundation. It had tumbled down. Very
well. He accepted that.

But he did not accept this unuttered social dictum that he should be
kept at arm's length because he had suffered a ghastly disarrangement
of his features while acting as a shield behind which the rest of
society rested secure. No, he would never accept that as a natural
fact. He could not.

No one said that he was a terrible object which should remain in the
background along with family skeletons and unmentionable diseases. He
was like poverty and injustice,--present but ignored. And this being
shunned and avoided, as if he were something which should go about in
furtive obscurity, was rapidly driving Hollister to a state
approaching desperation.

For he could not rid himself of the social impulse any more than a
healthy man can rid himself of the necessity for food and drink at
certain intervals. If Hollister had been so crushed in body and mind
that his spirit was utterly quenched, if his vitality had been so
drained that he could sit passive and let the world go by unheeded,
then he would have been at peace.

He had seen men like that--many of them--content to sit in the sun,
to be fed and let alone. Their hearts were broken as well as their
bodies.

But except for the distortion of his face, he returned as he had gone
away, a man in full possession of his faculties, his passions, his
strength. He could not be passive either physically or mentally. His
mind was too alert, his spirit too sensitive, his body too crammed
with vitality to see life go swinging by and have no hand in its
manifestations and adventures.

Yet he was growing discouraged. People shunned him, shrank from
contact. His scarred face seemed to dry up in others the fountain of
friendly intercourse. If he were a leper or a man convicted of some
hideous crime, his isolation could not be more complete. It was as if
the sight of him affected men and women with a sense of something
unnatural, monstrous. He sweated under this. But he was alive, and
life was a reality to him, the will to live a dominant force. Unless
he succumbed in a moment of madness, he knew that he would continue to
struggle for life and happiness because that was instinctive, and
fundamental instincts are stronger than logic, reason, circumstance.

How he was going to make his life even tolerably worth living was a
question that harassed him with disheartening insistence as he watched
through his window the slanting lines of rain and listened to the
mournful cadences of the wind.

"I must get to work at something," he said to himself. "If I sit still
and think much more----"

He did not carry that last sentence to its logical conclusion.
Deliberately he strove to turn his thought out of the depressing
channels in which it flowed and tried to picture what he should set
about doing.

Not office work; he could not hope for any inside position such as his
experience easily enabled him to fill. He knew timber, the making and
marketing of it, from top to bottom. But he could not see himself
behind a desk, directing or selling. His face would frighten clients.
He smiled; that rare grimace he permitted himself when alone. Very
likely he would have to accept the commonest sort of labor, in a mill
yard, or on a booming ground, among workers not too sensitive to a
man's appearance.

Staring through the streaming window, Hollister looked down on the
traffic flow in the street, the hurrying figures that braved the storm
in pursuit of pleasure or of necessity, and while that desperate
loneliness gnawed at him, he felt once more a sense of utter defeat,
of hopeless isolation--and for the first time he wished to hide, to
get away out of sight and hearing of men.

It was a fugitive impulse, but it set his mind harking back to the
summer he had spent holidaying along the British Columbia coast long
ago. The tall office buildings, with yellow window squares dotting the
black walls, became the sun-bathed hills looking loftily down on
rivers and bays and inlets that he knew. The wet floor of the street
itself became a rippled arm of the sea, stretching far and silent
between wooded slopes where deer and bear and all the furtive wild
things of the forest went their accustomed way.

Hollister had wandered alone in those hushed places, sleeping with his
face to the stars, and he had not been lonely. He wondered if he could
do that again.

He sat nursing those visions, his imagination pleasantly quickened by
them, as a man sometimes finds ease from care in dreaming of old days
that were full of gladness. He was still deep in the past when he went
to bed. And when he arose in the morning, the far places of the B.C.
coast beckoned with a more imperious gesture, as if in those solitudes
lay a sure refuge for such as he.

And why not, he asked himself? Here in this pushing seaport town,
among the hundred and fifty thousand souls eagerly intent upon their
business of gaining a livelihood, of making money, there was not one
who cared whether he came or went, whether he was glad or sad, whether
he had a song on his lips or the blackest gloom in his heart. He had
done his bit as a man should. In the doing he had been broken in a
cruel variety of ways. The war machine had chewed him up and spat him
out on the scrap heap. None of these hale, unmanned citizens cared to
be annoyed by the sight of him, of what had happened to him.

And he could not much longer endure this unapproachableness, this
palpable shrinking. He could not much longer bear to be in the midst
of light and laughter, of friendly talk and smiling faces, and be
utterly shut off from any part in it all. He was in as evil case as a
man chained to a rock and dying of thirst, while a clear, cold stream
flowed at his feet. Whether he walked the streets or sat brooding in
his room, he could not escape the embittered consciousness that all
about him there was a great plenty of kindly fellowship which he
craved and which he could not share because war had stamped its iron
heel upon his face.

Yes, the more he thought about it, the more he craved the refuge of
silence and solitude. If he could not escape from himself, at least he
could withdraw from this feast at which he was a death's-head. And so
he began to cast about him for a place to go, for an objective, for
something that should save him from being purely aimless. In the end
it came into his mind that he might go back and look over this timber
in the valley of the Toba River, this last vestige of his fortune
which remained to him by pure chance. He had bought it as an
investment for surplus funds. He had never even seen it. He would have
smiled, if his face had been capable of smiling, at the irony of his
owning ten million feet of Douglas fir and red cedar--material to
build a thousand cottages--he who no longer owned a roof to shelter
his head, whose cash resources were only a few hundred dollars.

Whether Lewis sold the timber or not, he would go and see it. For a
few weeks he would be alone in the woods, where men would not eye him
askance, nor dainty, fresh-faced women shrink from him as they
passed.




CHAPTER IV


The steamer backed away from a float of which Hollister was the sole
occupant. She swung in a wide semicircle, pointed her bluff bow down
the Inlet, and presently all that he could see of her was the tip of
her masts over a jutting point and the top of her red funnel trailing
a pennant of smoke, black against a gray sky.

Hollister stood looking about him. He was clad like a logger, in thick
mackinaws and heavy boots, and the texture of his garments was
appropriate to the temperature, the weather. He seemed to have stepped
into another latitude,--which in truth he had, for the head of Toba
Inlet lies a hundred and fifty miles northwest of Vancouver, and the
thrust of that narrow arm of the sea carries it thirty miles into the
glacial fastnesses of the Coast Range. The rain that drenched
Vancouver became snow here. The lower slopes were green with timber
which concealed the drifts that covered the rocky soil. A little
higher certain clear spaces bared the whiteness, and all the tree
tops, the drooping boughs, carried a burden of clinging snow. Higher
still lifted grim peaks capped with massive snow banks that even
midsummer heat could never quite dispel. But these upper heights were
now hidden in clouds and wraiths of frost fog, their faces shrouded in
this winter veil which--except for rare bursts of sunshine or sweeping
northwest wind--would not be lifted till the vernal equinox.

It was very cold and very still, as if winter had laid a compelling
silence on everything in the land. Except the faint slapping of little
waves against the ice-encrusted, rocky shore, and the distant, harsh
voices of some wheeling gulls, there was no sound or echo of a sound,
as he stood listening.

Yet Hollister was not oppressed by this chill solitude. In that
setting, silence was appropriate. It was merely unexpected. For so
long Hollister had lived amid blaring noises, the mechanical thunder
and lightning of the war, the rumble of industry, the shuffle and
clatter of crowds, he had forgotten what it was like to be alone,--and
in the most crowded places he had suffered the most grievous
loneliness. For the time being he was unconscious of his mutilation,
since there was no one by to remind him by look or act. He was only
aware of a curious interest in what he saw, a subdued wonder at the
majestic beauty and the profound hush, as if he had been suddenly
transferred from a place where life was maddeningly, distractingly
clamorous to a spot where life was mute.

The head of Toba is neither a harbor nor a bay. One turns out of the
island-studded Gulf of Georgia into an arm of the sea a mile in
breadth. The cliffs and mountains grow higher, more precipitous mile
by mile, until the Inlet becomes a chasm with the salt water for its
floor. On past frowning points, around slow curves, boring farther and
farther into the mainland through a passage like a huge tunnel, the
roof of which has been blown away. Then suddenly there is an end to
the sea. Abruptly, a bend is turned, and great mountains bar the way,
peaks that lift from tidewater to treeless heights, formidable ranges
bearing upon their rocky shoulders the lingering remains of a glacial
age. The Inlet ends there, the seaway barred by these frowning
declivities.

Hollister remembered the head of Toba after a fashion. He had the lay
of the land in his mind. He had never seen it in midwinter, but the
snow, the misty vapors drifting along the mountain sides, did not
confuse him.

From the float he now perceived two openings in the mountain chain.
The lesser, coming in from the northwest, was little more than a deep
and narrow gash in the white-clad hills. On his right opened the
broader valley of the Toba River, up which he must go.

For a space of perhaps five minutes Hollister stood gazing about him.
Then he was reminded of his immediate necessities by the chill that
crept over his feet,--for several inches of snow overlaid the planked
surface of the landing float.

Knowing what he was about when he left Vancouver, Hollister had
brought with him a twenty-foot Hudson's Bay freight canoe, a capacious
shoal-water craft with high topsides. He slid this off the float,
loaded into it sundry boxes and packages, and taking his seat astern,
paddled inshore to where the rising tide was ruffled by the outsetting
current of a river.

Here, under the steep shoulder of a mountain, rows of piles stood
gaunt above the tide flats. When Hollister had last seen the mouth of
the Toba, those same piles had been the support of long boom-sticks,
within which floated hundreds of logs. On the flat beside the river
there had stood the rough shacks of a logging camp. Donkey engines
were puffing and grunting in the woods. Now the booming ground was
empty, save for those decaying, teredo-eaten sticks, and the camp was
a tumbledown ruin when he passed. He wondered if the valley of the
Toba were wholly deserted, if the forests of virgin timber covering
the delta of that watercourse had been left to their ancient solitude.
But he did not stop to puzzle over this. In ten minutes he was over
the sandy bar at the river's mouth. The sea was hidden behind him. He
passed up a sluggish waterway lined by alder and maple, covered with
dense thickets, a jungle in which flourished the stalwart salmonberry
and the thorny sticks of the devil's club. Out of this maze of
undergrowth rose the tall brown columns of Douglas fir, of red cedar,
of spruce and hemlock with their drooping boughs.

Sloughs branched off in narrow laterals, sheeted with thin ice, except
where the current kept it open, and out of these open patches flocks
of wild duck scattered with a whir of wings. A mile up-stream he
turned a bend and passed a Siwash rancheria. The bright eyes of little
brown-faced children peered shyly out at him from behind stumps. He
could see rows of split salmon hung by the tail to the beams of an
open-fronted smokehouse. Around another bend he came on a buck deer
standing knee-deep in the water, and at the sight of him the animal
snorted, leaped up the bank and vanished as silently as a shadow.

Hollister marked all these things without ceasing to ply his paddle.
His objective lay some six miles up-stream. But when he came at last
to the upper limit of the tidal reach he found in this deep, slack
water new-driven piling and freshly strung boom-sticks and acres of
logs confined therein; also a squat motor tugboat and certain lesser
craft moored to these timbers. A little back from the bank he could
see the roofs of buildings.

He stayed his paddle a second to look with a mild curiosity. Then he
went on. That human craving for companionship which had gained no
response in the cities of two continents had left him for the time
being. For that hour he was himself, sufficient unto himself. Here
probably a score of men lived and worked. But they were not men he
knew. They were not men who would care to know him,--not after a
clear sight of his face.

Hollister did not say that to himself in so many words. He was only
subconsciously aware of this conclusion. Nevertheless it guided his
actions. Through long, bitter months he had rebelled against spiritual
isolation. The silent woods, the gray river, the cloud-wrapped hills
seemed friendly by comparison with mankind,--mankind which had marred
him and now shrank from its handiwork.

So he passed by this community in the wilderness, not because he
wished to but because he must.

Within half a mile he struck fast water, long straight reaches up
which he gained ground against the current by steady strokes of the
paddle, shallows where he must wade and lead his craft by hand. So he
came at last to the Big Bend of the Toba River, a great S curve where
the stream doubled upon itself in a mile-wide flat that had been
stripped of its timber and lay now an unlovely vista of stumps, each
with a white cap of snow.

On the edge of this, where the river swung to the southern limit of
the valley and ran under a cliff that lifted a thousand foot sheer, he
passed a small house. Smoke drifted blue from the stovepipe. A pile of
freshly chopped firewood lay by the door. The dressed carcass of a
deer hung under one projecting eave. Between two stumps a string of
laundered clothes waved in the down-river breeze. By the garments
Hollister knew a woman must be there. But none appeared to watch him
pass. He did not halt, although the short afternoon was merging into
dusk and he knew the hospitality of those who go into lonely places to
wrest a living from an untamed land. But he could not bear the thought
of being endured rather than welcomed. He had suffered enough of that.
He was in full retreat from just that attitude. He was growing afraid
of contact with people, and he knew why he was afraid.

When the long twilight was nearly spent, he gained the upper part of
the Big Bend and hauled his canoe out on the bank. A small flat ran
back to the mouth of a canyon, and through the flat trickled a stream
of clear water.

Hollister built a fire on a patch of dry ground at the base of a
six-foot fir. He set up his tent, made his bed, cooked his supper, sat
with his feet to the fire, smoking a pipe.

After four years of clamor and crowds, he marveled at the astonishing
contentment which could settle on him here in this hushed valley,
where silence rested like a fog. His fire was a red spot with a yellow
nimbus. Beyond that ruddy circle, valley and cliff and clouded sky
merged into an impenetrable blackness. Hollister had been cold and wet
and hungry. Now he was warm and dry and fed. He lay with his feet
stretched to the fire. For the time he almost ceased to think,
relaxed as he was into a pleasant, animal well-being. And so presently
he fell asleep.

In winter, north of the forty-ninth parallel, and especially in those
deep clefts like the Toba, dusk falls at four in the afternoon, and
day has not grown to its full strength at nine in the morning.
Hollister had finished his breakfast before the first gleam of light
touched the east. When day let him see the Alpine crevasses that
notched the northern wall of the valley, he buckled on a belt that
carried a sheath-ax, took up his rifle and began first of all a
cursory exploration of the flat on which he camped.

It seemed to him that in some mysterious way he was beginning his life
all over again,--that life which his reason, with cold, inexorable
logic, had classified as a hopeless ruin. He could not see wherein the
ruin was lessened by embarking upon this lone adventure into the
outlying places. Nevertheless, something about it had given a fillip
to his spirits. He felt that he would better not inquire too closely
into this; that too keen self-analysis was the evil from which he had
suffered and which he should avoid. But he said to himself that if he
could get pleasure out of so simple a thing as a canoe trip in a
lonely region, there was hope for him yet. And in the same breath he
wondered how long he could be sustained by that illusion.

He had a blue-print of the area covering the Big Bend. That timber
limit which he had lightly purchased long ago, and which
unaccountably went begging a purchaser, lay south and a bit west from
where he set up his camp. He satisfied himself of that by the
blue-print and the staking description. The northeast corner stake
should stand not a great way back from the river bank.

He had to find a certain particularly described cedar tree, thence
make his way south to a low cliff, at one extreme of which he should
find a rock cairn with a squared post in its center. From that he
could run his boundary lines with a pocket compass, until he located
the three remaining corners.

Hollister found cedars enough, but none that pointed the way to a low
cliff and a rock cairn. He ranged here and there, and at last went up
the hillside which rose here so steeply as to be stiff climbing. It
bore here and there a massive tree, rough-barked pillars rising to a
branchy head two hundred feet in the air. But for the most part the
slope was clothed with scrubby hemlock and thickets of young fir and
patches of hazel, out of which he stirred a great many grouse and once
a deer.

But if he found no stakes to show him the boundaries of his property,
he gained the upper rim of the high cliff which walled the southern
side of the Big Bend, and all the valley opened before him. Smoke
lifted in a pale spiral from the house below his camp. Abreast of the
log boom he had passed in the river, he marked the roofs of several
buildings, and back of the clearings in the logged-over land opened
white squares against the dusky green of the surrounding timber. He
perceived that a considerable settlement had arisen in the lower
valley, that the forest was being logged off, that land was being
cleared and cultivated. There was nothing strange in that. All over
the earth the growing pressure of population forced men continually to
invade the strongholds of the wilderness. Here lay fertile acres,
water, forests to supply timber, the highway of the sea to markets.
Only labor,--patient, unremitting labor--was needed to shape all that
great valley for cultivation. Cleared and put to the plow, it would
produce abundantly. A vast, fecund area out of which man, withdrawing
from the hectic pressure of industrial civilization, could derive
sustenance,--if he possessed sufficient hardihood to survive such
hardships and struggle as his forefathers had for their common lot.

Hollister ranged the lower part of the hillside until hunger drove him
back to camp. And, as it sometimes happens that what a man fails to
come upon when he seeks with method and intent he stumbles upon by
accident, so now Hollister, coming heedlessly downhill, found the
corner stake he was seeking. With his belt-axe he blazed a trail from
this point to the flat below, so that he could find it again.

He made no further explorations that afternoon. He spent a little time
in making his camp comfortable in ways known to any outdoor man. But
when day broke clear the following morning he was on the hill, compass
in hand, bearing due west from the original stake. He found the second
without much trouble. He ran a line south and east and north again and
so returned to his starting point by noon with two salient facts
outstanding in his mind.

The first was that he suspected himself of having bought a poke which
contained a pig of doubtful value. This, if true, made plain the
difficulty of re-sale, and made him think decidedly unpleasant things
of "Lewis and Company, Specialists in B.C. Timber." The second was
that someone, within recent years, had cut timber on his limit. And it
was his timber. The possessive sense was fairly strong in Hollister,
as it usually is in men who have ever possessed any considerable
property. He did not like the idea of being cheated or robbed. In this
case there was superficial evidence that both these things had
happened to him.

So when he had cooked himself a meal and smoked a pipe, he took to the
high ground again to verify or disprove these unwelcome conclusions.
In that huge and largely inaccessible region which is embraced within
the boundaries of British Columbia, in a land where the industrial
life-blood flows chiefly along two railways and three navigable
streams, there are many great areas where the facilities of
transportation are much as they were when British Columbia was a field
exploited only by trappers and traders. Settlement is still but a
fringe upon the borders of the wilderness. Individuals and
corporations own land and timber which they have never seen, sources
of material wealth acquired cheaply, with an eye to the future. Beyond
the railway belts, the navigable streams, the coastwise passages where
steamers come and go, there lies a vast hinterland where canoe and
pack-sack are still the mainstay of the traveler.

In this almost primeval region the large-handed fashion of primitive
transactions is still in vogue. Men traffic in timber and mineral
stakings on the word of other men. The coastal slopes and valleys are
dotted with timber claims which have been purchased by men and
corporations in Vancouver and New York and London and Paris and
Berlin, bought and traded "sight unseen" as small boys swap
jackknives. There flourishes in connection with this, on the Pacific
coast, the business of cruising timber, a vocation followed by hardy
men prepared to go anywhere, any time, in fair weather or foul.
Commission such a man to fare into such a place, cruise such and such
areas of timber land, described by metes and bounds. This resourceful
surveyor-explorer will disappear. In the fullness of weeks he will
return, bearded and travel-worn. He will place in your hands a report
containing an estimate of so many million feet of standing fir, cedar,
spruce, hemlock, with a description of the topography, an opinion on
the difficulty or ease of the logging chance.

On the British Columbia coast a timber cruiser's report comes in the
same category as a bank statement or a chartered accountant's audit of
books; that is to say, it is unquestionable, an authentic statement of
fact.

Within the boundaries defined by the four stakes of the limit
Hollister owned there stood, according to the original cruising
estimate, eight million feet of merchantable timber, half fir, half
red cedar. The Douglas fir covered the rocky slopes and the cedar
lined the gut of a deep hollow which split the limit midway. It was
classed as a fair logging chance, since from that corner which dipped
into the flats of the Toba a donkey engine with its mile-long arm of
steel cable could snatch the logs down to the river, whence they would
be floated to the sea and towed to the Vancouver sawmills.

Hollister had been guided by the custom of the country. He had put a
surplus fund of cash into this property in the persuasion that it
would resell at a profit, or that it could ultimately be logged at a
still greater profit. And this persuasion rested upon the cruising
estimate and the uprightness of "Lewis and Company, Specialists in
B.C. Timber, Investments, Etc."

But Hollister had a practical knowledge of timber himself, acquired at
first hand. He had skirted his boundaries and traversed the fringes
of his property, and he saw scrubby, undersized trees where the
four-foot trunks of Douglas fir should have lifted in brown ranks. He
had looked into the bisecting hollow from different angles and marked
magnificent cedars,--but too few of them. Taken with the fact that
Lewis had failed to resell even at a reduced price, when standing
timber had doubled in value since the beginning of the war, Hollister
had grave doubts, which, however, he could not establish until he went
over the ground and made a rough estimate for himself.

This other matter of timber cutting was one he could settle in short
order. It roused his curiosity. It gave him a touch of the resentment
which stirs a man when he suspects himself of being the victim of
pillaging vandals. No matter that despair had recently colored his
mental vision; the sense of property right still functioned
unimpaired. To be marred and impoverished and shunned as if he were a
monstrosity were accomplished facts which had weighed upon him, an
intolerable burden. He forgot that now. There was nothing much here to
remind him. He was free to react to this new sense of outrage, this
new evidence of mankind's essential unfairness.

In the toll taken of his timber by these unwarranted operations there
was little to grieve over, he discovered before long. He had that
morning found and crossed, after a long, curious inspection, a chute
which debouched from the middle of his limit and dipped towards the
river bottom apparently somewhere above his camp. He knew that this
shallow trough built of slender poles was a means of conveying
shingle-bolts from the site of cutting to the water that should float
them to market. Earlier he had seen signs of felling among the cedars,
but only from a distance. He was not sure he had seen right until he
discovered the chute.

So now he went back to the chute and followed its winding length until
it led into the very heart of the cedars in the hollow. Two or three
years had elapsed since the last tree was felled. Nor had there ever
been much inroad on the standing timber. Some one had begun operations
there and abandoned the work before enough timber had been cut to half
repay the labor of building that long chute.

Nor was that all. In the edge of the workings the branches and litter
of harvesting those hoary old cedars had been neatly cleared from a
small level space. And on this space, bold against the white carpet of
snow, stood a small log house.

Hollister pushed open the latched door and stepped into the musty
desolation of long abandoned rooms. It was neatly made, floored with
split cedar, covered by a tight roof of cedar shakes. Its tiny-paned
windows were still intact. Within, it was divided into two rooms.
There was no stove and there had never been a stove. A rough fireplace
of stone served for cooking. An iron bar crossed the fireplace and on
this bar still hung the fire-blackened pothooks. On nails and shelves
against the wall pans still hung and dishes stood thick with dust. On
a homemade bunk in one corner lay a mattress which the rats had
converted to their own uses, just as they had played havoc with papers
scattered about the floor and the oilcloth on the table.

Hollister passed into the other room. This had been a bedroom, a
woman's bedroom. He guessed that by the remnants of fabric hanging
over the windows, as well as by a skirt and sunbonnet which still hung
from a nail. Here, too, was a bedstead with a rat-ruined mattress. And
upon a shelf over the bed was ranged a row of books, perhaps two dozen
volumes, which the rats had somehow respected,--except for sundry
gnawing at the bindings.

Hollister took one down. He smiled; that is to say, his eyes smiled
and his features moved a little out of their rigid cast. Fancy finding
the _contes_ of August Strindberg, the dramatist, that genius of
subtle perception and abysmal gloom, here in this forsaken place.
Hollister fluttered the pages. Writing on the flyleaf caught his eye.
There was a date and below that:

    DORIS CLEVELAND--HER BOOK

He took down the others, one by one,--an Iliad, a Hardy novel, "The
Way of All Flesh" between "Kim" and "The Pilgrim Fathers", a volume of
Swinburne rubbing shoulders with a California poet who sang of gibbous
moons, "The Ancient Lowly" cheek by jowl with "Two Years Before the
Mast." A catholic collection, with strong meat sandwiched between some
of the rat-gnawed covers. And each bore on the flyleaf the inscription
of the first, written in a clear firm hand: Doris Cleveland--Her Book.

Hollister put the last volume back in place and stood staring at the
row. Who was Doris Cleveland and why had she left her books to the
rats?

He gave over his wonder at the patently unanswerable, went out into
the living room, glanced casually over that once more, and so to the
outside where the snow crisped under his feet now that the sun had
withdrawn behind the hills. About the slashed area where the cedars
had fallen, over stumps and broken branches and the low roof of the
cabin, the virgin snow laid its softening whiteness, and the tall
trees enclosed the spot with living green. A hidden squirrel broke out
with brisk scolding, a small chirruping voice in a great silence. Here
men had lived and worked and gone their way again. The forest remained
as it was before. The thickets would soon arise to conceal man's
handiwork.

Hollister shook off this fleeting impression of man's impermanence,
and turned downhill lest dark catch him in the heavy timber and make
him lose his way.




CHAPTER V


A wind began to sigh among the trees as Hollister made his way
downhill. Over his evening fire he heard it grow to a lusty gale that
filled the valley all night with moaning noises. Fierce gusts
scattered the ashes of his fire and fluttered the walls of his tent as
though some strong-lunged giant were huffing and puffing to blow his
house down. At daylight the wind died. A sky banked solid with clouds
began to empty upon the land a steady downpour of rain. All through
the woods the sodden foliage dripped heavily. The snow melted, pouring
muddy cataracts out of each gully, making tiny cascades over the edge
of every cliff. Snowbanks slipped their hold on steep hillsides high
on the north valley wall. They gathered way and came roaring down out
of places hidden in the mist. Hollister could hear these slides
thundering like distant artillery. Watching that grim façade across
the river he saw, once or twice during the day, those masses plunge
and leap, ten thousand tons of ice and snow and rock and crushed
timber shooting over ledge and precipice to end with fearful crashing
and rumbling in the depth of a steep-walled gorge.

He was tied to his camp. He could not stir abroad without more
discomfort than he cared to undergo. Every bush, every bough, would
precipitate upon him showers of drops at the slightest touch. He sat
by his fire in the mouth of the tent and smoked and thought of the
comfortable cabin up in the cedar hollow, and of Doris Cleveland's
books. He began by reflecting that he might have brought one down to
read. He ended before nightfall of a dull, rain-sodden day with a
resolution to move up there when the weather cleared. A tent was well
enough, but a house with a fireplace was better.

The rain held forty-eight hours without intermission. Then, as if the
clouds had discharged their aqueous cargo and rode light as
unballasted ships, they lifted in aerial fleets and sailed away, white
in a blue sky. The sun, swinging in a low arc, cocked a lazy eye over
the southern peaks, and Hollister carried his first pack-load up to
the log cabin while the moss underfoot, the tree trunks, the green
blades of the salal, and the myriad stalks of the low thickets were
still gleaming with the white frost that came with a clearing sky.

He began with the idea of carrying up his blankets and three or four
days' food. He ended by transporting up that steep slope everything
but his canoe and the small tent. It might be, he said to himself as
he lugged load after load, just a whim, a fancy, but he was free to
act on a whim or a fancy, as free as if he were in the first blush of
careless, adventurous youth,--freer, because he had none of the
impatient hopes and urges and dreams of youth. He was finished, he
told himself in a transient mood of bitterness. Why should he be
governed by practical considerations? He was here, alone in the
unsentient, uncritical forest. It did not matter to any one whether he
came or stayed. To himself it mattered least of all, he thought. There
was neither plan nor purpose nor joy in his existence, save as he
conceived the first casually, or snatched momentarily at the other in
such simple ways as were available to him here,--here where at least
there was no one and nothing to harass him, where he was surrounded by
a wild beauty that comforted him in some fashion beyond his
understanding.

When he had brought the last of his food supply up to the cabin, he
hauled the canoe back into a thicket and covered it with the glossy
green leaves of the salal. He folded his tent in a tight bundle and
strung it to a bough with a wire, out of reach of the wood rats.

These tasks completed, he began his survey of the standing timber on
his limit.

At best he could make only a rough estimate, less accurate than a
professional cruiser's would be, but sufficient to satisfy him. In a
week he was reasonably certain that the most liberal estimate left
less than half the quantity of merchantable timber for which he had
paid good money. The fir, as a British Columbia logging chance, was
all but negligible. What value resided there lay in the cedar alone.

By the time he had established this, the clear, cold, sunny days came
to an end. Rain began to drizzle half-heartedly out of a murky sky.
Overnight the rain changed to snow, great flat flakes eddying
soundlessly earthward in an atmosphere uncannily still. For two days
and a night this ballet of the snowflakes continued, until valley and
slope and the high ridges were two feet deep in the downy white.

Then the storm which had been holding its breath broke with singular
fury. The frost bared its teeth. The clouds still volleyed, but their
discharge now filled the air with harsh, minute particles that stung
bare skin like hot sand blown from a funnel. The wind shrieked its
whole tonal gamut among the trees. It ripped the clinging masses of
snow from drooping bough and exposed cliff and flung it here and there
in swirling clouds. And above the treble voices of the storm
Hollister, from the warm security of the cabin, could hear the
intermittent rumbling of terrific slides. He could feel faint tremors
in the earth from the shock of the arrested avalanche.

This elemental fury wore itself out at last. The wind shrank to chill
whisperings. But the sky remained gray and lowering, and the great
mountain ranges--white again from foot to crest, save where the slides
had left gashes of brown earth and bare granite--were wrapped in
winter mists, obscuring vapors that drifted and opened and closed
again. Hollister could stir abroad once more. His business there was
at an end. But he considered with reluctance a return to Vancouver.
He was not happy. He was merely passive. It did not matter to anyone
where he went. It did not matter much to himself. He was as well here
as elsewhere until some substantial reason or some inner spur rowelled
him into action.

Here there was no one to look askance at his disfigurement. He was
less alone than he would be in town, for he found a subtle sense of
companionship in this solitude, as if the dusky woods and those grim,
aloof peaks accepted him for what he was, discounting all that
misfortune which had visited him in the train of war. He knew that was
sheer fantasy, but a fantasy that lent him comfort.

So he stayed. He had plenty of material resources, a tight warm house,
food. He had reckoned on staying perhaps a month. He found now that
his estimate of a month's staples was away over the mark. He could
subsist two months. With care he could stretch it to three, for there
was game on that southern slope,--deer and the white mountain goat and
birds. He hunted the grouse at first, but that gave small return for
ammunition expended, although the flesh of the blue and willow grouse
is pleasant fare. When the big storm abated he looked out one clear
dawn and saw a buck deer standing in the open. At a distance of sixty
yards he shot the animal, not because he hankered to kill, but because
he needed meat. So under the cabin eaves he had quarters of venison,
and he knew that he could go abroad on that snowy slope and stalk a
deer with ease. There was a soothing pleasantness about a great blaze
crackling in the stone fireplace. And he had Doris Cleveland's books.

Yes, Hollister reiterated to himself, it was better than a bedroom off
the blank corridor of a second-rate hotel and the crowded streets that
were more merciless to a stricken man than these silent places.
Eventually he would have to go back. But for the present,--well, he
occupied himself wholly with the present, and he did not permit
himself to look far beyond.

From the deerskin he cut a quantity of fine strips and bent into oval
shape two tough sticks of vine maple. Across these he strung a web of
rawhide, thus furnishing himself with a pair of snowshoes which were a
necessity now that the snow lay everywhere knee-deep and in many
places engulfed him to the waist when he went into the woods.

It pleased him to go on long snowshoe hikes. He reached far up the
ridges that lifted one after another behind his timber. Once he gained
a pinnacle, a solitary outstanding hummock of snow-bound granite
rising above all the rest, rising above all the surrounding forest.
From this summit he gained an eagle's view. The long curve of Toba
Inlet wound like a strip of jade away down to where the islands of the
lower gulf spread with channels of the sea between. He could see the
twin Redondas, Cortez, Raza, the round blob that was Hernando,--a
picturesque nomenclature that was the inheritance of Spanish
exploration before the time of Drake. Beyond the flat reaches of
Valdez, Vancouver Island, an empire in itself, lifted its rocky
backbone, a misty purple against the western sky. He watched a
steamer, trailing a black banner of smoke, slide through Baker Pass.

Out there men toiled at fishing; the woods echoed with the ring of
their axes and the thin twanging of their saws; there would be the
clank of machinery and the hiss of steam. But it was all hidden and
muffled in those vast distances. He swung on his heel. Far below, the
houses of the settlement in the lower Toba sent up blue wisps of
smoke. To his right ran with many a twist and turn the valley itself,
winding away into remote fastnesses of the Coast Range, a strip of
level, fertile, timbered land, abutted upon by mountains that shamed
the Alps for ruggedness,--mountains gashed by slides, split by gloomy
crevasses, burdened with glaciers which in the heat of summer spewed
foaming cataracts over cliffs a thousand foot sheer.

    "Where the hill-heads split the tide
      Of green and living air,
    I would press Adventure hard
      To her deepest lair.

    I would let the world's rebuke
      Like a wind go by,
    With my naked soul laid bare
      To the naked sky."

Out of some recess in his memory, where they had fixed themselves long
before, those lines rose to Hollister's lips. And he looked a long
time before he turned downhill.

A week passed. Once more the blustery god of storms asserted his
dominion, leaving the land, when he passed, a foot deeper in snow. If
he had elected to stay there from choice, Hollister now kept close to
his cabin from necessity, for passage with his goods to the steamer
landing would have been a journey of more hardships than he cared to
undertake. The river was a sheet of ice except over the shallow
rapids. Cold winds whistled up and down the Toba. Once or twice on
clear days he climbed laboriously to a great height and felt the cold
pressure of the northwest wind as he stood in the open; and through
his field glasses he could see the Inlet and the highroads of the sea
past the Inlet's mouth all torn by surging waves that reared and broke
in flashing crests of foam. So he sat in the cabin and read Doris
Cleveland's books one after another--verse, philosophy, fiction--and
when physical inaction troubled him he cut and split and piled
firewood far beyond his immediate need. He could not sit passive too
long. Enforced leisure made too wide a breach in his defenses, and
through that breach the demons of brooding and despondency were quick
to enter. When neither books nor self-imposed tasks about the cabin
served, he would take his rifle in hand, hook on the snowshoes, and
trudge far afield in the surrounding forest.

On one of these journeys he came out upon the rim of the great cliff
which rose like a wall of masonry along the southern edge of the flats
in the Big Bend. It was a clear day. Hollister had a pair of very
powerful binoculars. He gazed from this height down on the settlement,
on the reeking chimneys of those distant houses, on the tiny black
objects that were men moving against a field of white. He could hear a
faint whirring which he took to be the machinery of a sawmill. He
could see on the river bank and at another point in the nearby woods
the feathery puff of steam. He often wondered about these people,
buried, like himself, in this snow-blanketed and mountain-ringed
remoteness. Who were they? What manner of folk were they? He trifled
with this curiosity. But it did not seriously occur to him that by two
or three hours' tramping he could answer these idle speculations at
first hand. Or if it did occur to him he shrank from the undertaking
as one shrinks from a dubious experiment which has proved a failure in
former trials.

But this day, under a frosty sky in which a February sun hung
listless, Hollister turned his glasses on the cabin of the settler
near his camp. He was on the edge of the cliff, so close that when he
dislodged a fragment of rock it rolled over the brink, bounded once
from the cliff's face, and after a lapse that grew to seconds struck
with a distant thud among the timber at the foot of the precipice.
Looking down through the binoculars it was as if he sat on the topmost
bough of a tall tree in the immediate neighborhood of the cabin,
although he was fully half a mile distant. He could see each garment
of a row on a line. He could distinguish colors--a blue skirt, the
deep green of salal and second-growth cedar, the weathered hue of the
walls.

And while he stared a woman stepped out of the doorway and stood
looking, turning her head slowly until at last she gazed steadily up
over the cliff-brow as if she might be looking at Hollister himself.
He sat on his haunches in the snow, his elbows braced on his knees,
and trained the powerful lenses upon her. In a matter of half a minute
her gaze shifted, turned back to the river. She shrugged her
shoulders, or perhaps it was a shiver born of the cold, and then went
back inside.

Hollister rested the binoculars upon his knee. His face did not alter.
Facile expression was impossible to that marred visage. Pain or anger
or sorrow could no longer write its message there for the casual
beholder to read. The thin, twisted remnants of his lips could tighten
a little, and that was all.

But his eyes, which had miraculously escaped injury, could still glow
with the old fire, or grow dull and lifeless, giving some index to the
mutations of his mind. And those darkly blue eyes, undimmed beacons
amid the wreckage of his features, burned and gleamed now with a
strange fire.

The woman who had been standing there staring up the hillside, with
the sun playing hide and seek in her yellow hair, was Myra Hollister,
his wife.




CHAPTER VI


Hollister sat in the snow, his gaze fixed upon this house on the river
bank, wrestling with all the implications of this incredible
discovery. He could neither believe what he had seen nor deny the
evidence of his vision. He kept watch, with the glasses ready to fix
upon the woman if she emerged again. But she did not reappear. The
cold began to chill his body, to stiffen his limbs. He rose at last
and made his way along the cliff, keeping always a close watch on the
house below until he came abreast of his own quarters and turned
reluctantly into the hollow where the cedars masked the log cabin.

He cooked a meal and ate his food in a mechanical sort of abstraction,
troubled beyond measure, rousing himself out of periods of
concentration in which there seemed, curiously, to be two of him
present,--one questioning and wondering, the other putting forward
critical and sneering answers, pointing out the folly of his wonder.

In the end he began to entertain a real doubt not only of the
correctness of his sight, but also of his sanity. For it was clearly
impossible, his reason insisted, that Myra would be pioneering in
those snowy solitudes, that she should live in a rude shack among
stumps on the fringe of a wilderness. She had been a creature of
luxury. Hollister could not conceive a necessity for her doing this.
He had so arranged his affairs when he went to France that she had
access to and complete control of his fortune. When she disclosed to
him by letter the curious transformation of her affections, he had not
revoked that arrangement. In the bewildering shock of that disclosure
his first thought had not been a concern for his property. And the
official report of him as killed in action which followed so soon
after had allowed her to reap the full benefit of this situation. When
she left London, if indeed she had left London, with her new associate
in the field of emotion she had at least forty-five thousand dollars
in negotiable securities.

And if so--then why?

Hollister's reason projected him swiftly and surely out of pained and
useless speculation into forthright doing. From surety of what he had
seen he passed to doubt, to uneasiness about himself: for if he could
not look at a fair-haired woman without seeing Myra's face, then he
must be going mad. He must know, beyond any equivocation.

There was a simple way to know, and that way Hollister took while the
embers of his noonday fire still glowed red on the hearth. He took his
glasses and went down to the valley floor.

It would have been a simple matter and the essence of directness to
walk boldly up and rap at the door. Certainly he would not be
recognized. He could account for himself as a traveler in need of
matches, some trifling thing to be borrowed. The wilderness is a
destroyer of conventions. The passer-by needs to observe no ceremony.
He comes from nowhere and passes into the unknown, unquestioned as to
his name, his purpose, or his destination. That is the way of all
frontiers.

But Hollister wished to see without being seen. He did not know why.
He did not attempt to fathom his reluctance for open approach. In the
social isolation which his disfigurement had inflicted upon him,
Hollister had become as much guided by instinct in his actions and
impulses as by any coldly reasoned process. He was moved to his
stealthy approach now by an instinct which he obeyed as blindly as the
crawling worm.

He drew up within fifty yards of the house, moving furtively through
thickets that screened him, and took up his post beside a stump. He
peered through the drooping boughs of a clump of young cedar. There,
in perfect concealment, hidden as the deer hides to let a roving
hunter pass, Hollister watched with a patience which was proof against
cold, against the discomfort of snow that rose to his thighs.

For an hour he waited. Except for the wavering smoke from the
stovepipe, the place might have been deserted. The house was one with
the pervading hush of the valley. Hollister grew numb. But he held his
post. And at last the door opened and the woman stood framed in the
opening.

She poised for an instant on the threshold, looking across the river.
Her gaze pivoted slowly until it encompassed the arc of a half-circle,
so that she faced Hollister squarely. He had the binoculars focused on
her face. It seemed near enough to touch. Then she took a step or two
gingerly in the snow, and stooping, picked up a few sticks from a pile
of split wood. The door closed upon her once more.

Hollister turned upon the instant, retraced his steps across the flat,
gained the foot of the steep hill and climbed step by step with
prodigious effort in the deep snow until he reached the cabin.

He had reaffirmed the evidence of his eyes, and was no longer troubled
by the vague fear that a disordered imagination had played him a
disturbing trick. He had looked on his wife's face beyond a question.
He accepted this astounding fact as a man must accept the indubitable.
She was here in the flesh,--this fair-haired, delicate-skinned woman
whose arms and lips had once been his sure refuge. Here, in a rude
cabin on the brink of a frozen river, chance had set her neighbor to
him. To what end Hollister neither knew nor wished to inquire. He said
to himself that it did not matter. He repeated this aloud. He believed
it to be true. How _could_ it matter now?

But he found that it did matter in a way that he had not reckoned
upon. For he found that he could not ignore her presence there. He
could not thrust her into the outer darkness beyond the luminous
circle of his thoughts. She haunted him with a troublesome insistence.
He had loved her. She had loved him. If that love had gone glimmering
there still remained memory from which he could not escape, memories
of caresses and embraces, of mutual passion, of all they had been to
each other through a time when they desired only to be all things to
each other. These things arose like ghosts out of forgotten chambers
in his mind. He could not kill memory, and since he was a man, a
physically perfect man, virile and unspent, memory tortured him.

He could not escape the consequences of being, the dominant impulses
of life. No normal man can. He may think he can. He may rest secure
for a time in that belief,--but it will fail him. And of this
Hollister now became aware.

He made every effort to shake off this new besetment, this fresh
assault upon the tranquility he had attained. But he could not abolish
recollection. He could not prevent his mind from dwelling upon this
woman who had once meant so much to him, nor his flesh from responding
to the stimulus of her nearness. When a man is thirsty he must drink.
When he is hungry food alone can satisfy that hunger. And there arose
in Hollister that ancient sex-hunger from which no man may escape.

It had been dormant in him for a time; dormant but not dead. In all
his life Hollister had never gone about consciously looking upon women
with a lustful eye. But he understood life, its curious
manifestations, its sensory demands, its needs. For a long time pain,
grief, suffering of body and anguish of mind had suppressed in him
every fluttering of desire. He had accepted that apparent snuffing out
of passion thankfully. Where, he had said to himself when he thought
of this, where would he find such a woman as he could love who would
find pleasure in the embrace of a marred thing like himself? Ah, no.
He had seen them shrink too often from mere sight of his twisted face.
The fruits of love were not for the plucking of such as he. Therefore
he was glad that the urge of sex no longer troubled him.

Yet here in a brief span, amid these silent hills and dusky forests
where he had begun to perceive that life might still have
compensations for him, this passivity had been overthrown, swept away,
destroyed. He could not look out over the brow of that cliff without
thinking of the woman in the valley below. He could not think of her
without the floodgates of his recollection loosing their torrents. He
had slept with her head pillowed in the crook of his arm. He had been
wakened by the warm pressure of her lips on his. All the tender
intimacies of their life together had lurked in his subconsciousness,
to rise and torture him now.

And it was torture. He would tramp far along those slopes and when he
looked too long at some distant peak he would think of Myra. He would
sit beside his fireplace with one of Doris Cleveland's books in his
hand and the print would grow blurred and meaningless. In the glow of
the coals Myra's face would take form and mock him with a seductive
smile. Out of the gallery of his mind pictures would come trooping,
and in each the chief figure was that fair-haired woman who had been
his wife. At night while he slept, he was hounded by dreams in which
the conscious repression of his waking hours went by the board and he
was delivered over to the fantastic deviltries of the subconscious.

Hollister had never been a sentimental fool, nor a sensualist whose
unrestrained passions muddied the streams of his thought. But he was a
man, aware of both mind and body. Neither functioned mechanically.
Both were complex. By no effort of his will could he command the blood
in his veins to course less hotly. By no exercise of any power he
possessed could he force his mind always to do his bidding. He did not
love this woman whose nearness so profoundly disturbed him. Sometimes
he hated her consciously, with a volcanic intensity that made his
fingers itch for a strangling grip upon her white throat. She had
ripped up by the roots his faith in life and love at a time when he
sorely needed that faith, when the sustaining power of some such faith
was his only shield against the daily impact of bloodshed and
suffering and death, of all the nerve-shattering accompaniments of
war.

Yet he suffered from the spur of her nearness, those haunting pictures
of her which he could not bar out of his mind, those revived memories
of alluring tenderness, of her clinging to him with soft arms and
laughter on her lips.

He would stand on the rim of the cliff, looking down at the house by
the river, thinking the unthinkable, attracted and repulsed, a victim
to his imagination and the fever of his flesh, until it seemed to him
sometimes that in the loaded chamber of his rifle lay the only sure
avenue of escape from these vain longings, from unattainable desire.

Slowly a desperate resolution formed within his seething brain,
shadowy at first, recurring again and again with insistent persuasion,
until it no longer frightened him as it did at first, no longer made
him shrink and feel a loathing of himself.

She was his wife. She had ceased to care for him. She had given
herself to another man. No matter, she was still his. Legally, beyond
any shadow of a doubt. The law and the Church had joined them
together. Neither man nor God had put them asunder, and the law had
not released them from their bonds. Then, if he wanted her, why should
he not take her?

Watching the house day after day, hours at a stretch, Hollister
brooded over this new madness. But it no longer seemed to him madness.
It came to seem fit and proper, a matter well within his rights. He
postulated a hypothetical situation; if he, officially dead,
resurrected himself and claimed her, who was there to say him nay if
he demanded and exacted a literal fulfilment of her solemn covenant to
"love, honor, and obey?" She herself? Hollister snapped his fingers.
The man she lived with? Hollister dismissed him with an impatient
gesture.

The purely animal man, which is never wholly extinguished, which
merely lurks unsuspected under centuries of cultural veneer to rise
lustily when slowly acquired moralities shrivel in the crucible of
passion, now began to actuate Hollister with a strange cunning, a
ferocity of anticipation. He would repossess himself of this
fair-haired woman. And she should have no voice in the matter. Very
well. But how?

That was simplicity itself. No one knew such a man as he was in the
Toba country. All these folk in the valley below went about
unconscious of his existence in that cabin well hidden among the great
cedars. All he required was the conjunction of a certain kind of
weather and the absence of the man. Falling snow to cover the single
track that should lead to this cabin, to bury the dual footprints that
should lead away. The absence of the man was to avoid a clash: not
because Hollister feared that; simply because in his mind the man was
not a factor to be considered, except as the possibility of his
interference should be most easily avoided. Because if he did
interfere he might have to kill him, and that was a complication he
did not wish to invoke. Somehow he felt no grudge against this man,
no jealousy.

The man's absence was a common occurrence. Hollister had observed that
nearly every day he was abroad in the woods with a gun. For the
obscuring storm, the obliterating snowfall, he would have to wait.

All this, every possible contingency, took form as potential action in
his obsessed mind,--with neither perception nor consideration of
consequences. The consummation alone urged him. The most primitive
instinct swayed him. The ultimate consequences were as nothing.

This plan was scarcely formed in Hollister's brain before he modified
it. He could not wait for that happy conjunction of circumstances
which favored action. He must create his own circumstances. This he
readily perceived as the better plan. When he sought a way it was
revealed to him.

A few hundred yards above the eastern limit of the flat where his
canoe was cached, there jutted into the river a low, rocky point. From
the river back to the woods the wind had swept the bald surface of
this little ridge clear of snow. He could go down over those sloping
rocks to the glare ice of the river. He could go and come and leave no
footprints, no trace. There would be no mark to betray, unless a
searcher ranged well up the hillside and so came upon his track.

And if a man, searching for this woman, bore up the mountain side and
came at last to the log cabin--what would he find? Only another man
who had arisen after being dead and had returned to take possession of
his own!

Hollister threw back his head and burst into sardonic laughter. It
pleased him, this devastating jest which he was about to perpetrate
upon his wife and her lover.

From the seclusion of the timber behind this point of rocks he set
himself to watch through his glasses the house down the river. The
second day of keeping this vigil he saw the man leave the place, gun
in hand, cross on the river ice and vanish in the heavy timber of that
wide bottom land. Hollister did not know what business took him on
these recurrent absences; hunting, he guessed, but he had noted that
the man seldom returned before late in the afternoon, and sometimes
not till dusk.

He waited impatiently for an hour. Then he went down to the frozen
river. Twenty minutes' rapid striding brought him to the door of the
house.

The place was roughly built of split cedar. A door and a window faced
the river. The window was uncurtained, a bald square of glass. The sun
had grown to some little strength. The air that morning had softened
to a balminess like spring. Hollister had approached unseen over snow
softened by this warmth until it lost its frosty crispness underfoot.
Now, through the uncurtained window, his gaze marked a section of the
interior, and what he saw stayed the hand he lifted to rap on the
door.

A man young, smooth-faced, dark almost to swarthiness, sat on a bench
beside a table on which stood the uncleared litter of breakfast. And
Myra sat also at the table with one corner of it between them. She
leaned an elbow on the board and nursed her round chin in the palm of
that hand, while the other was imprisoned between the two clasped
hands of the man. He was bending over this caught hand, leaning
eagerly toward her, speaking rapidly.

Myra sat listening. Her lips were slightly parted. Her eyelids
drooped. Her breast rose and fell in a slow, rhythmic heave. Otherwise
she was motionless and faintly smiling, as if she were given up to
some blissful languor. And the man spoke on, caressing her imprisoned
hand, stroking it, looking at her with the glow of conquest in his hot
eyes.

Hollister leaned on the muzzle of his grounded rifle, staring through
the window. He could see their lips move. He could hear faintly the
tense murmur of the man's voice. He saw the man bend his head and
press a kiss on the imprisoned hand.

He turned softly and went down the bank to the river and walked away
over the ice. When he had put five hundred yards between himself and
that house, he turned to look back. He put his hand to his face and
wiped away drops of sweat, a clammy exudation that broke out all over
his body very much as if he had just become aware of escaping by a
hair's breadth some imminent and terrible disaster. In truth that was
precisely his feeling,--as if he had been capering madly on the brink
of some fearful abyss which he could not see until it was revealed to
him in a terrifying flash.

He shivered. His ego grovelled in the dirt. He had often smiled at
theories of dual personality. But standing there on the frozen stream
with the white hills looming high above the green-forested lowlands he
was no longer sure of anything, least of all whether in him might lurk
a duality of forces which could sway him as they would. Either that,
or he had gone mad for a while, a brief madness born of sex-hunger, of
isolation, of brooding over unassuaged bitterness.

Perhaps he might have done what he set out to do if the man had not
been there. But he did not think so now. The brake of his real manhood
had begun to set upon those wild impulses before he drew up to the
door and looked in the window. What he saw there only cleared with a
brusque hand the cobwebs from his brain.

Fundamentally, Hollister hated trickery, deceit, unfairness,
double-dealing. In his normal state he would neither lie, cheat, nor
steal. He had grown up with a natural tendency to regard his own
ethics as the common attribute of others. There had somehow been born
in him, or had developed as an intrinsic part of his character early
in life, a child-like, trustful quality of faith in human goodness.
And that faith had begun to reel under grievous blows dealt it in the
last four years.

Myra was not worth the taking, even if he had a legal and moral right
to take her (not that he attempted to justify himself now by any such
sophistry). She could not be faithful, it seemed, even to a chosen
lover. The man into whose eyes she gazed with such obvious
complaisance was not the man she lived with in that house on the river
bank. Hollister had watched him through the glasses often enough to
know. He was a tall, ruddy-faced man, a big man and handsome.
Hollister had looked at him often enough, reckoning him to be an
Englishman, the man Myra married in London, the man for whom she had
conceived such a passion that she had torn Hollister's heart by the
brutal directness of her written avowal. Hollister had watched him
swinging his ax on the woodpile, going off on those long tramps in the
bottom land. He might be within gunshot of the house at this moment.

Hollister found himself pitying this man. He found himself wondering
if it had always been that way with Myra, if she were the helpless
victim of her own senses. There were women like that. Plenty of them.
Men too. Sufferers from an overstimulated sexuality. He could not
doubt that. He suspected that he was touched with it himself.

What a muddle life was, Hollister reflected sadly, looking down from
the last opening before he plunged into the cedar grove that hid the
log cabin. Here, amid this wild beauty, this grandeur of mountain and
forest, this silent land virginal in its winter garment, human
passion, ancient as the hills themselves, functioned in the old, old
way.

But he did not expend much thought on mere generalizations. The
problem of Myra and her lovers was no longer his problem; their
passions and pains were not his. Hollister understood very clearly
that he had escaped an action that might have had far-reaching
consequences. He was concerned with his escape and also with the
possible recurrence of that strange obsession, or mood, or madness, or
whatever it was that had so warped his normal outlook that he could
harbor such thoughts and plan such deeds. He did not want to pass
through that furnace again.

He had had enough of the Toba Valley. No, he modified that. The valley
and the sentinel peaks that stood guard over it, the lowlands duskily
green and full of balsamy odors from the forest, was still a goodly
place to be. But old sins and sorrows and new, disturbing phases of
human passion were here at his elbow to dispel the restful peace he
had won for a little while. He must escape from that.

To go was not so simple as his coming. The river was frozen, that
watery highway closed. But he solved the problem by knowledge gained
in those casual wanderings along the ridge above the valley. He knew
a direct way of gaining the Inlet head on foot.

So he spent a last night before the fireplace, staring silently into
the dancing blaze, seeing strange visions in the glowing coals, lying
down to heavy, dreamless sleep at last in his bunk.

At daybreak he struck out westward along the great cliff that frowned
on the Big Bend, his blankets and a small emergency supply of food in
a bulky pack upon his shoulders. When the sheer face of the cliff ran
out to a steep, scrubbily timbered hillside, he dropped down to the
valley floor and bore toward the river through a wide flat. Here he
moved through a forest of cedar and spruce so high and dense that no
ray of sun ever penetrated through those interlocked branches to warm
the earth in which those enormous trunks were rooted. Moss hung in
streamers from the lower boughs. It was dusky there in full day. The
wild things of the region made this their sanctuary. Squirrels scolded
as he passed. The willow grouse tamely allowed him to approach within
twenty feet before they fluttered to the nearest thicket. The deep
snow was crisscrossed by the tracks of innumerable deer driven down
from the highlands by the deeper snow above.

For a time, in this shadowy temple of the pagan gods, Hollister was
forced to depend on a pocket compass to hold a course in the direction
he wished to go. But at last he came out in a slashing, a place where
loggers had been recently at work. Here a donkey engine stood black
and cold on its skids, half-buried in snow. Beyond this working a
clear field opened, and past the field he saw the outline of the
houses on the river bank and he bore straight for these to learn upon
what days the steamer touched the head of Toba and how he might best
gain that float upon which he had disembarked two months before.




CHAPTER VII


Hollister stowed his pack in the smoking room and stood outside by the
rail, watching the Toba Valley fall astern, a green fissure in the
white rampart of the Coast Range. Chance, the inscrutable arbiter of
human destinies, had directed him that morning to a man cutting wood
on the bank of the river close by that cluster of houses where other
men stirred about various tasks, where there must have been wives and
mothers, for he saw a dozen children at play by a snow fort.

"Steamer?" the man answered Hollister's inquiry. "Say, if you want to
catch her, you just about got time. Two fellows from here left awhile
ago. If you hurry, maybe you can catch 'em. If you catch 'em before
they get out over the bar, they'll give you a lift to the float. If
you don't, you're stuck for a week. There's only one rowboat down
there."

Hollister had caught them.

He took a last, thoughtful look. Over the vessel's bubbling wake he
could see the whole head of the Inlet deep in winter snows,--a white
world, coldly aloof in its grandeur. It was beautiful, full of the
majesty of serene distances, of great heights. It stood forth clothed
with the dignity of massiveness, of permanence. It was as it had been
for centuries, calm and untroubled, unmoved by floods and slides, by
fires and slow glacial changes. Yes, it was beautiful and Hollister
looked a long time, for he was not sure he would see it again. He had
a canoe and a tent cached in that silent valley, but for these alone
he would not return. Neither the ownership of that timber which he now
esteemed of doubtful value nor the event of its sale would require his
presence there.

He continued to stare with an absent look in his eyes until a crook in
the Inlet hid those white escarpments and outstanding peaks, and the
Inlet walls--themselves lifting to dizzy heights that were shrouded in
rolling mist--marked the limit of his visual range. The ship's bell
tinkled the noon hour. A white-jacketed steward walked the decks,
proclaiming to all and sundry that luncheon was being served.
Hollister made his way to the dining saloon.

The steamer was past Salmon Bay when he returned above decks to lean
on the rail, watching the shores flit by, marking with a little wonder
the rapid change in temperature, the growing mildness in the air as
the steamer drew farther away from the gorge-like head of Toba with
its aerial ice fields and snowy slopes. Twenty miles below Salmon Bay
the island-dotted area of the Gulf of Georgia began. There a snowfall
seldom endured long, and the teeth of the frost were blunted by
eternal rains. There the logging camps worked full blast the year
around, in sunshine and drizzle and fog. All that region bordering on
the open sea bore a more genial aspect and supported more people and
industries in scattered groups than could be found in any of those
lonely inlets.

Hollister was not thinking particularly of these things. He had eaten
his meal at a table with half a dozen other men. In the saloon
probably two score others applied themselves, with more diligence than
refinement, to their food. There was a leavening of women in this male
mass of loggers, fishermen, and what-not. A buzz of conversation
filled the place. But Hollister was not a participant. He observed
casual, covert glances at his disfigured face, that disarrangement of
his features and marring of his flesh which made men ill at ease in
his presence. He felt a recurrence of the old protest against this. He
experienced a return of that depression which had driven him out of
Vancouver. It was a disheartenment from which nothing in the future,
no hope, no dream, could deliver him. He was as he was. He would
always be like that. The finality of it appalled him.

After a time he became aware of a young woman leaning, like himself,
against the rail a few feet distant. He experienced a curious degree
of self-consciousness as he observed her. The thought crossed his mind
that presently she would look at him and move away. When she did not,
his eyes kept coming back to her with the involuntary curiosity of
the casual male concerning the strange female. She was of medium
height, well-formed, dressed in a well-tailored gray suit. Under the
edges of a black velvet turban her hair showed glossy brown in a
smooth roll. She had one elbow propped on the rail and her chin
nestled in the palm. Hollister could see a clean-cut profile, the
symmetrical outline of her nose, one delicately colored cheek above
the gloved hand and a neckpiece of dark fur.

He wondered what she was so intent upon for so long, leaning immobile
against that wooden guard. He continued to watch her. Would she
presently bestow a cursory glance upon him and withdraw to some other
part of the ship? Hollister waited for that with moody expectation. He
found himself wishing to hear her voice, to speak to her, to have her
talk to him. But he did not expect any such concession to a whimsical
desire.

Nevertheless the unexpected presently occurred. The girl moved
slightly. A hand-bag slipped from under her arm to the deck. She
half-turned, seemed to hesitate. Instinctively, as a matter of common
courtesy to a woman, Hollister took a step forward, picked it up.
Quite as instinctively he braced himself, so to speak, for the shocked
look that would gather like a shadow on her piquant face.

But it did not come. The girl's gaze bore imperturbably upon him as he
restored the hand-bag to her hand. The faintest sort of smile lurked
about the corners of a pretty mouth. Her eyes were a cloudy gray. They
seemed to look out at the world with a curious impassivity. That much
Hollister saw in a fleeting glance.

"Thanks, very much," she said pleasantly.

Hollister resumed his post against the rail. His movement had brought
him nearer, so that he stood now within arm's length, and his interest
in her had awakened, become suddenly intense. He felt a queer
thankfulness, a warm inward gratefulness, that she had been able to
regard his disfigurement unmoved. He wondered how she could. For
months he had encountered women's averted faces, the reluctant glances
of mingled pity and distaste which he had schooled himself to expect
and endure but which he never ceased to resent. This girl's uncommon
self-possession at close contact with him was a puzzle as well as a
pleasure. A little thing, to be sure, but it warmed Hollister. It was
like an unexpected gleam of sunshine out of a sky banked deep with
clouds.

Presently, to his surprise, the girl spoke to him.

"Are we getting near the Channel Islands?"

She was looking directly at him, and Hollister was struck afresh with
the curious quality of her gaze, the strangely unperturbed directness
of her eyes upon him. He made haste to answer her question.

"We'll pass between them in another mile. You can see the western
island a little off our starboard bow."

"I should be very glad if I could; but I shall have to take your word
for its being there."

"I'm afraid I don't quite understand."

A smile spread over her face at the puzzled tone.

"I'm blind," she explained, with what struck Hollister as infinite
patience. "If my eyes were not sightless, I shouldn't have to ask a
stranger about the Channel Islands. I used to be able to see them well
enough."

Hollister stared at her. He could not associate those wide gray eyes
with total darkness. He could scarcely make himself comprehend a world
devoid of light and color, an existence in which one felt and breathed
and had being amid eternal darkness. Yet for the moment he was selfish
enough to feel glad. And he said so, with uncharacteristic
impulsiveness.

"I'm glad you can't see," he found himself saying. "If you could----"

"What a queer thing to say," the girl interrupted. "I thought every
one always regarded a blind person as an object of pity."

There was an unmistakably sardonic inflection in the last sentence.

"But you don't find it so, eh?" Hollister questioned eagerly. He was
sure he had interpreted that inflection. "And you sometimes resent
that attitude, eh?"

"I daresay I do," the girl replied, after a moment's consideration.
"To be unable to see is a handicap. At the same time to have pity
drooled all over one is sometimes irritating. But why did you just say
you were glad I was blind?"

"I didn't mean that. I meant that I was glad you couldn't see _me_,"
he explained. "One of Fritz's shells tore my face to pieces. People
don't like to look at the result. Women particularly. You can't see my
wrecked face, so you don't shudder and pass on. I suppose that is why
I said that the way I did."

"I see. You feel a little bit glad to come across some one who doesn't
know whether your face is straight or crooked? Some one who accepts
you sight unseen, as she would any man who spoke and acted
courteously? Is that it?"

"Yes," Hollister admitted. "That's about it."

"But your friends and relatives?" she suggested softly.

"I have no relatives in this country," he said. "And I have no friends
anywhere, now."

She considered this a moment, rubbing her cheek with a gloved
forefinger. What was she thinking about, Hollister wondered?

"That must be rather terrible at times. I'm not much given to slopping
over, but I find myself feeling sorry for you--and you are only a
disembodied voice. Your fix is something like my own," she said at
last. "And I have always denied that misery loves company."

"You were right in that, too," Hollister replied. "Misery wants
pleasant company. At least, that sort of misery which comes from
isolation and unfriendliness makes me appreciate even chance
companionship."

"Is it so bad as that?" she asked quickly. The tone of her voice made
Hollister quiver, it was so unexpected, so wistful.

"Just about. I've become a stray dog in this old world. And it used to
be a pretty good sort of a world for me in the old days. I'm not
whining. But I do feel like kicking. There's a difference, you know."

He felt ashamed of this mild outburst as soon as it was uttered. But
it was true enough, and he could not help saying it. There was
something about this girl that broke down his reticence, made him want
to talk, made him feel sure he would not be misunderstood.

She nodded.

"There is a great difference. Any one with any spirit will kick if
there is anything to kick about. And it's always shameful to whine.
You don't seem like a man who _could_ whine."

"How can you tell what sort of man I am?" Hollister inquired. "You
just said that I was only a disembodied voice."

She laughed, a musical low-toned chuckle that pleased him.

"One gets impressions," she answered. "Being sightless sharpens other
faculties. You often have very definite impressions in your mind about
people you have never seen, don't you?"

"Oh, yes," he agreed. "I daresay every one gets such impressions."

"Sometimes one finds those impressions are merely verified by actual
sight. So there you are. I get a certain impression of you by the
language you use, your tone, your inflections--and by a something else
which in those who can see is called intuition, for lack of something
more definite in the way of a term."

"Aren't you ever mistaken in those impressionistic estimates of
people?"

She hesitated a little.

"Sometimes--not often. That sounds egotistic, but really it is true."

The steamer drew out of the mouth of Toba Inlet. In the widening
stretch between the mainland and the Redondas a cold wind came
whistling out of Homfray Channel. Hollister felt the chill of it
through his mackinaw coat and was moved to thought of his companion's
comfort.

"May I find you a warm place to sit?" he asked. "That's an
uncomfortable breeze. And do you mind if I talk to you? I haven't
talked to any one like you for a long time."

She smiled assent.

"Ditto to that last," she said.

"You aren't a western man, are you?" she continued, as Hollister took
her by the arm and led her toward a cabin abaft the wheelhouse on the
boat deck, a roomy lounging place unoccupied save by a fat woman
taking a midday nap in one corner, her double chin sunk on her ample
bosom.

"No," he said. "I'm from the East. But I spent some time out here
once or twice, and I remembered the coast as a place I liked. So I
came back here when the war was over and everything gone to pot--at
least where I was concerned. My name is Hollister."

"Mine," she replied, "is Cleveland."

Hollister looked at her intently.

"Doris Cleveland--her book," he said aloud. It was to all intents and
purposes a question.

"Why do you say that?" the girl asked quickly. "And how do you happen
to know my given name?"

"That was a guess," he answered. "Is it right?"

"Yes--but----"

"Let me tell you," he interrupted. "It's queer, and still it's simple
enough. Two months ago I went into Toba Inlet to look at some timber
about five miles up the river from the mouth. When I got there I
decided to stay awhile. It was less lonesome there than in the racket
and hustle of a town where I knew no one and nobody wanted to know me.
I made a camp, and in looking over a stretch of timber on a slope that
runs south from the river I found a log cabin----"

"In a hollow full of big cedars back of the cliff along the south side
of the Big Bend?" the girl cut in eagerly. "A log house with two
rooms, where some shingle-bolts had been cut--with a bolt-chute
leading downhill?"

"The very same," Hollister continued. "I see you know the place. And
in this cabin there was a shelf with a row of books, and each one had
written on the flyleaf, 'Doris Cleveland--Her Book.'"

"My poor books," she murmured. "I thought the rats had torn them to
bits long ago."

"No. Except for a few nibbles at the binding. Perhaps," Hollister said
whimsically, "the rats knew that some day a man would need those books
to keep him from going crazy, alone there in those quiet hills. They
were good books, and they would give his mind something to do besides
brooding over past ills and an empty future."

"They did that for you?" she asked.

"Yes. They were all the company I had for two months. I often wondered
who Doris Cleveland was and why she left her books to the rats--and
was thankful that she did. So you lived up there?"

"Yes. It was there I had my last look at the sun shining on the hills.
I daresay the most vivid pictures I have in my mind are made up of
things there. Why, I can see every peak and gorge yet, and the valley
below with the river winding through and the beaver meadows in the
flats--all those slides and glaciers and waterfalls--cascades like
ribbons of silver against green velvet. I loved it all--it was so
beautiful."

She spoke a little absently, with the faintest shadow of regret, her
voice lingering on the words. And after a momentary silence she went
on:

"We lived there nearly a year, my two brothers and I. I know every
rock and gully within two miles of that cabin. I helped to build that
little house. I used to tramp around in the woods alone. I used to sit
and read, and sometimes just dream, under those big cedars on hot
summer afternoons. The boys thought they would make a little fortune
in that timber. Then one day, when they were felling a tree, a flying
limb struck me on the head--and I was blind; in less than two hours of
being unconscious I woke up, and I couldn't see anything--like that
almost," she snapped her finger. "On top of that my brothers
discovered that they had no right to cut timber there. Things were
going badly in France, too. So they went overseas. They were both
killed in the same action, on the same day. My books were left there
because no one had the heart to carry them out. It was all such a
muddle. Everything seemed to go wrong at once. And you found them and
enjoyed having them to read. Isn't it curious how things that seem so
incoherent, so unnecessary, so disconnected, sometimes work out into
an orderly sequence, out of which evil comes to some and good to
others? If we could only forestall Chance! Blind, blundering, witless
Chance!"

Hollister nodded, forgetting that the girl could not see. For a minute
they sat silent. He was thinking how strange it was that he should
meet this girl whose books he had been poring over all these weeks.
She had a mind, he perceived. She could think and express her thoughts
in sentences as clean-cut as her face. She made him think, thrust him
face to face with an abstraction. Blind, blundering, witless Chance!
Was there nothing more than that? What else was there?

"You make me feel ashamed of myself," he said at last. "Your luck has
been worse than mine. Your handicap is greater than mine--at least you
must feel it so. But you don't complain. You even seem quite
philosophic about it. I wish I could cultivate that spirit. What's
your secret?"

"Oh, I'm not such a marvel," she said, and the slight smile came back
to lurk around the corners of her mouth. "There are times when I
rebel--oh, desperately. But I get along very nicely as a general
thing. One accepts the inevitable. I comfort myself with the selfish
reflection that if I can't see a lot that I would dearly love to see,
I am also saved the sight of things that are mean and sordid and
disturbing. If I seem cheerful I daresay it's because I'm strong and
healthy and have grown used to being blind. I'm not nearly so helpless
as I may seem. In familiar places and within certain bounds, I can get
about nearly as well as if I could see."

The steamer cleared the Redondas, stood down through Desolation Sound
and turned her blunt nose into the lower gulf just as dark came on.
Hollister and Doris Cleveland sat in the cabin talking. They went to
dinner together, and if there were curious looks bestowed upon them
Hollister was too engrossed to care and the girl, of course, could not
see those sidelong, unspoken inquiries. After dinner they found chairs
in the same deck saloon and continued their conversation until ten
o'clock, when drowsiness born of a slow, rolling motion of the vessel
drove them to their berths.

The drowsiness abandoned Hollister as soon as he turned in. He lay
wakeful, thinking about Doris Cleveland. He envied her courage and
fortitude, the calm assurance with which she seemed to face the world
which was all about her and yet hidden from her sight. She was really
an extraordinary young woman, he decided.

She was traveling alone. For several months she had been living with
old friends of the family on Stuart Island, close by the roaring
tiderace of the Euclataw Rapids. She was returning there, she told
Hollister, after three weeks or so in Vancouver. The steamer would
dock about daylight the following morning. When Hollister offered to
see her ashore and to her destination, she accepted without any
reservations. It comforted Hollister's sadly bruised ego to observe
that she even seemed a trifle pleased.

"I have once or twice got a steward to get me ashore and put me in a
taxi," she said. "But if you don't mind, Mr. Hollister."

And Hollister most decidedly did not mind. Doris Cleveland had shot
like a pleasant burst of colorful light across the grayest period of
his existence, and he was loath to let her go.

He dropped off to sleep at last, to dream, strangely enough and with
astonishing vividness, of the cabin among the great cedars with the
snow banked white outside the door. He saw himself sitting beside the
fireplace poring over one of Doris Cleveland's books. And he was no
longer lonely, because he was not alone.

He smiled at himself, remembering this fantasy of the subconscious
mind, when the steward's rap at the door wakened him half an hour
before the steamer docked.




CHAPTER VIII


Quartered once more in the city he had abandoned two months earlier,
Hollister found himself in the grip of new desires, stirred by new
plans, his mind yielding slowly to the conviction that life was less
barren than it seemed. Or was that, he asked himself doubtfully, just
another illusion which would uphold him for awhile and then perish?
Not so many weeks since, a matter of days almost, life, so far as he
was concerned, held nothing, promised nothing. All the future years
through which he must live because of the virility of his body seemed
nothing but a dismal fog in which he must wander without knowing where
he went or what lay before him.

Now it seemed that he had mysteriously acquired a starting point and a
goal. He was aware of a new impetus. And since life had swept away a
great many illusions which he had once cherished as proven reality, he
did not shrink from or misunderstand the cause underlying this potent
change in his outlook. He pondered on this. He wished to be sure. And
he did not have to strain himself intellectually to understand that
Doris Cleveland was the outstanding factor in this change.

Each time he met her, he breathed a prayer of thanks for her
blindness, which permitted her to accept him as a man instead of
shrinking from him as a monster. Just as the man secure in the
knowledge that he possesses the comfort and security of a home can
endure with fortitude the perils and hardships of a bitter trial, so
Hollister could walk the streets of Vancouver now, indifferent to the
averted eyes, the quick glance of reluctant pity. He could get through
the days without brooding. Loneliness no longer made him shudder with
its clammy touch.

For that he could thank Doris Cleveland, and her alone. He saw her
nearly every day. She was the straw to which he, drowning, clung with
all his might. The most depressing hours that overtook him were those
in which he visualized her floating away beyond his reach.

To Hollister, as he saw more of her, she seemed the most remarkable
woman he had ever known. Her loss of sight had been more than
compensated by an extraordinary acuteness of mental vision. The world
about her might now be one of darkness, but she had a precise
comprehension of its nature, its manifestations, its complexities. He
had always taken blindness as a synonym for helplessness, a matter of
uncertain groping, of timidities, of despair. He revised that
conclusion sharply in her case. He could not associate the most remote
degree of helplessness with Doris Cleveland when they walked, for
instance, through Stanley Park from English Bay to Second Beach. That
broad path, with the Gulf swell muttering along the bouldery shore on
one side and the wind whispering in the lofty branches of tall trees
on the other, was a favorite haunt of theirs on crisp March days. The
buds of the pussy willow were beginning to burst. Birds twittered in
dusky thickets. Even the gulls, wheeling and darting along the shore,
had a new note in their raucous crying. None of these first undertones
of the spring symphony went unmarked by Doris Cleveland. She could
hear and feel. She could respond to subtle, external stimuli. She
could interpret her thoughts and feelings with apt phrases, with a
whimsical humor,--sometimes with an appealing touch of wistfulness.

At the Beach Avenue entrance to the park she would release herself
from the hand by which Hollister guided her through the throngs on the
sidewalks or the traffic of the crossings, and along the open way she
would keep step with him easily and surely, her cheeks glowing with
the brisk movement; and she could tell him with uncanny exactness when
they came abreast of the old elk paddock and the bowling greens, or
the rock groynes and bathhouse at Second Beach. She knew always when
they turned the wide curve farther out, where through a fringe of
maple and black alder there opened a clear view of all the Gulf, with
steamers trailing their banners of smoke and the white pillar of
Point Atkinson lighthouse standing guard at the troubled entrance to
Howe Sound.

No, he could not easily fall into the masculine attitude of a
protector, of guiding and bending a watchful care upon a helpless bit
of desirable femininity that clung to him with confiding trust. Doris
Cleveland was too buoyantly healthy to be a clinging vine. She had too
hardy an intellectual outlook. Her mind was like her body, vigorous,
resilient, unafraid. It was hard sometimes for Hollister to realize
fully that to those gray eyes so often turned on him it was always
night,--or at best a blurred, unrelieved dusk.

In the old, comfortable days before the war, Hollister, like many
other young men, accepted things pretty much as they came without
troubling to scrutinize their import too closely. It was easy for him,
then, to overlook the faint shadows than ran before coming events. It
had been the most natural thing in the world to drift placidly until
in more or less surprise he found himself caught fairly in a sweeping
current. Some of the most important turns in his life had caught him
unprepared for their denouement, left him a trifle dizzy as he found
himself committed irrevocably to this or that.

But he had not survived four years of bodily and spiritual disaster
without an irreparable destruction of the sanguine, if more or less
nebulous assurance that God was in his heaven and all was well with
the world. He had been stricken with a wariness concerning life, a
reluctant distrust of much that in his old easy-going philosophy
seemed solid as the hills. He was disposed to a critical and sometimes
pessimistic examination of his own feelings and of other people's
actions.

So love for Doris Cleveland did not steal upon him like a thief in the
night. From the hour when he put her in the taxi at the dock and went
away with her address in his pocket, he was keenly alive to the
definite quality of attraction peculiar to her. When he was not
thinking of her, he was thinking of himself in relation to her. He
found himself involved in the most intimate sort of speculation
concerning her. From the beginning he did not close his eyes to a
possibility which might become a fact. Six months earlier he would
honestly have denied that any woman could linger so tenaciously in his
mind, a lovely vision to gladden and disturb him in love's paradoxical
way. Yet step by step he watched himself approaching that dubious
state, dreading a little the drift toward a definite emotion, yet
reluctant to draw back.

When Doris went about with him, frankly finding a pleasure in his
company, he said to himself that it was a wholly unwise proceeding to
set too great store by her. Chance, he would reflect sadly, had swung
them together, and that same blind chance would presently swing them
far apart. This daily intimacy of two beings, a little out of it among
the medley of other beings so highly engrossed in their own affairs,
would presently come to an end. Sitting beside her on a shelving rock
in the sun, Hollister would think of that and feel a pang. He would
say to himself also, a trifle cynically, that if she could see him as
he was, perhaps she would be like the rest: he would never have had
the chance to know her, to sit beside her hearing the musical ripple
of her voice when she laughed, seeing the sweetness of her face as she
turned to him, smiling. He wondered sometimes what she really thought
of him, how she pictured him in her mind. She had very clear mental
pictures of everything she touched or felt, everything that came
within the scope of her understanding,--which covered no narrow field.
But Hollister never quite had the courage to ask her to describe what
image of him she carried in her mind.

For a month he did very little but go about with Doris, or sit quietly
reading a book in his room. March drew to a close. The southern border
of Stanley Park which faced the Gulf over English Bay continued to be
their haunt on every sunny afternoon, save once or twice when they
walked along Marine Drive to where the sands of the Spanish Bank lay
bared for a mile offshore at ebb tide.

If it rained, or a damp fog blew in from the sea, Hollister would pick
out a motion-picture house that afforded a good orchestra, or get
tickets to some available concert, or they would go and have tea at
the Granada where there was always music at the tea hour in the
afternoon. Doris loved music. Moreover she knew music, which is a
thing apart from merely loving melodious sounds. Once, at the place
where she was living, the home of a married cousin, Hollister heard
her play the piano for the first time. He listened in astonishment,
forgetting that a pianist does not need to see the keyboard and that
the most intricate movements may be memorized. But he did not visit
that house often. The people there looked at him a little askance.
They were courteous, but painfully self-conscious in his
presence,--and Hollister was still acutely sensitive about his face.

By the time that April Fool's Day was a week old on the calendar,
Hollister began to be haunted by a gloomy void which would engulf him
soon, for Doris told him one evening that in another week she was
going back to the Euclataws. She had already stretched her visit to
greater length than she intended. She must go back.

They were sitting on a bench under a great fir that overlooked a
deserted playground, emerald green with new grass. They faced a
sinking sun, a ball of molten fire on the far crest of Vancouver
Island. Behind them the roar of traffic on downtown streets was like
the faint murmur of distant surf.

"In a week," Hollister said. If there was an echo of regret in his
voice he did not try to hide it. "It has been the best month I have
spent for a long, long time."

"It has been a pleasant month," Doris agreed.

They fell silent. Hollister looked away to the west where the deep
flame-red of low, straggling clouds shaded off into orange and pale
gold that merged by imperceptible tints into the translucent clearness
of the upper sky. The red ball of the sun showed only a small segment
above the mountains. In ten minutes it would be gone. From the east
dusk walked silently down to the sea.

"I shall be sorry when you are gone," he said at last.

"And I shall be sorry to go," she murmured, "but----"

She threw out her hands in a gesture of impotence, of resignation.

"One can't always be on a holiday."

"I wish we could," Hollister muttered. "You and I."

The girl made no answer. And Hollister himself grew dumb in spite of a
pressure of words within him, things that tugged at his tongue for
utterance. He could scarcely bear to think of Doris Cleveland beyond
sound of his voice or reach of his hand. He realized with an
overwhelming certainty how badly he needed her, how much he wanted
her--not only in ways that were sweet to think of, but as a friendly
beacon in the murky, purposeless vista of years that stretched before
him. Yes, and before her also. They had not spent all those hours
together without talking of themselves. No matter that she was
cheerful, that youth gave her courage and a ready smile, there was
still a finality about blindness that sometimes frightened her. She,
too, was aware--and sometimes afraid--of drab years running out into
nothingness.

Hollister sat beside her visualizing interminable to-morrows in which
there would be no Doris Cleveland; in which he would go his way vainly
seeking the smile on a friendly face, the sound of a voice that
thrilled him with its friendly tone.

He took her hand and held it, looking down at the soft white fingers.
She made no effort to withdraw it. He looked at her, peering into her
face, and there was nothing to guide him. He saw only a curious
expectancy and a faint deepening of the color in her cheeks.

"Don't go back to the Euclataws, Doris," he said at last. "I love you.
I want you. I need you. Do you feel as if you liked me--enough to take
a chance?

"For it is a chance," he finished abruptly. "Life together is always a
chance for the man and woman who undertake it. Perhaps I surprise you
by breaking out like this. But when I think of us each going separate
ways----"

He held her hand tightly imprisoned between his, bending forward to
peer closely at her face. He could see nothing of astonishment or
surprise. Her lips were parted a little. Her expression, as he looked,
grew different, inscrutable, a little absent even, as if she were lost
in thought. But there was arising a quiver in the fingers he held
which belied the emotionless fixity of her face.

"I wonder if it is such a desperate chance?" she said slowly. "If it
is, why do you want to take it?"

"Because the alternative is worse than the most desperate chance I
could imagine," he answered. "And because I have a longing to face
life with you, and a dread of it alone. You can't see my ugly face
which frightens off other people, so it doesn't mean anything to you.
But you can hear my voice. You can feel me near you. Does it mean
anything to you? Do you wish I could always be near you?"

He drew her up close to him. She permitted it, unresisting, that
strange, thoughtful look still on her face.

"Tell me, do you want me to love you--or don't you care?" he demanded.

For a moment Doris made no answer.

"You're a man," she said then, very softly, a little breathlessly.
"And I'm a woman. I'm blind--but I'm a woman. I've been wondering how
long it would take you to find that out."




CHAPTER IX


Not until Hollister had left Doris at her cousin's home and was
walking back downtown did a complete realization of what he had done
and pledged himself to do burst upon him. When it did, he pulled up
short in his stride, as if he had come physically against some
forthright obstruction. For an instant he felt dazed. Then a consuming
anger flared in him,--anger against the past by which he was still
shackled.

But he refused to be bound by those old chains whose ghostly clanking
arose to harass him in this hour when life seemed to be holding out a
new promise, when he saw happiness beckoning, when he was dreaming of
pleasant things. He leaned over the rail on the Granville Street
drawbridge watching a tug pass through, seeing the dusky shape of the
small vessel, hearing the ripple of the flood tide against the stone
piers, and scarcely conscious of the bridge or the ship or the gray
dimness of the sea, so profound was the concentration of his mind on
this problem. It did not perplex him; it maddened him. He whispered a
defiant protest to himself and walked on. He was able to think more
calmly when he reached his room. There were the facts, the simple,
undeniable facts, to be faced without shrinking,--and a decision to be
made.

For months Hollister, when he thought of the past, thought of it as a
slate which had been wiped clean. He was dead, officially dead. His
few distant relatives had accepted the official report without
question. Myra had accepted it, acted upon it. Outside the British War
Office no one knew, no one dreamed, that he was alive. He had served
in the Imperials. He recalled the difficulties and delays of getting
his identity reëstablished in the coldly impersonal, maddeningly
deliberate, official departments which dealt with his case. He had
succeeded. His back pay had been granted. A gratuity was still
forthcoming. But Hollister knew that the record of his case was
entangled with miles of red tape. He was dead--killed in action. It
would never occur to the British War Office to seek publicity for the
fact that he was not dead. There was no machinery for that purpose.
Even if there were such machinery, there was no one to pull the
levers. Nothing was ever set in motion in the War Office without
pulling a diversity of levers. So much for that. Hollister, recalling
his experience in London, smiled sardonically at thought of the
British War Office voluntarily troubling itself about dead men who
came to life. The War Office would not know him. The War Office did
not know men. It only knew identification numbers, regiments, ranks,
things properly documented, officially assigned. It was disdainful of
any casual inquiry; it would shunt such from official to official,
from department to department, until the inquirer was worn out, his
patience, his fund of postage and his time alike exhausted.

No, the British War Office would neither know nor care nor tell.

Surely the slate was sponged clean. Should he condemn himself and
Doris Cleveland to heartache and loneliness because of a technicality?
To Hollister it seemed no more than that. Myra had married again.
Would she--reckoning the chance that she learned he was alive--rise up
to denounce him? Hardly. His own people? They were few and far away.
His friends? The war had ripped everything loose, broken the old
combinations, scattered the groups. There was, for Hollister, nothing
left of the old days. And he himself was dead,--officially dead.

After all, it narrowed to himself and Doris Cleveland and an ethical
question.

He did not shut his eyes to the fact that for him this marriage would
be bigamy; that their children would be illegitimate in the eyes of
the law if legal scrutiny ever laid bare their father's history; nor
that by all the accepted dictums of current morality he would be
leading an innocent woman into sin. But current morality had ceased to
have its old significance for Hollister. He had seen too much of it
vaporized so readily in the furnace of the war. Convention had lost
any power to dismay him. His world had used him in its hour of need,
had flung him into the Pit, and when he crawled out maimed,
discouraged, stripped of everything that had made life precious, this
world of his fellows shunned him because of what he had suffered in
their behalf. So he held himself under no obligation to be guided by
their moral dictums. He was critical of accepted standards because he
had observed that an act might be within the law and still outrage
humanity; it might be legally sanctioned and socially approved and
spread intolerable misery in its wake. Contrariwise, he could conceive
a thing beyond the law being meritorious in itself. With the Persian
tent-maker, Hollister had begun to see that "A hair, perhaps, divides
the false and true."

There was no falsity in his love, in his aching desire to lay hold of
happiness out of the muddle of his life, to bestow happiness if he
could upon a woman who like himself had suffered misfortune. Within
him there was the instinct to clutch firmly this chance which lay at
hand. For Hollister the question was not, "Is this thing right or
wrong in the eyes of the world?" but "Is it right for her and for me?"
And always he got the one answer, the answer with which lovers have
justified themselves ever since love became something more than the
mere breeding instinct of animals.

Hollister could not see himself as a man guilty of moral obliquity if
he let the graveyard of the past retain its unseemly corpse without
legal exhumation and examination, and the delivering of a formal
verdict upon what was already an accomplished fact.

Nevertheless, he forced himself to consider just what it would mean to
take that step. Briefly it would be necessary for him to go to London,
to secure documentary evidence. Then he must return to Canada, enter
suit against Myra, secure service upon her here in British Columbia.
There would be a trial and a temporary decree; after the lapse of
twelve months a divorce absolute.

He was up against a stone wall. Even if he nerved himself to public
rattling of the skeleton in his private life, he did not have the
means. That was final. He did not have money for such an undertaking,
even if he beggared himself. That was a material factor as inexorable
as death. Actual freedom he had in full measure. Legal freedom could
only be purchased at a price,--and he did not have the price.

Perhaps that decided Hollister. Perhaps he would have made that
decision in any case. He had no friends to be shocked. He had no
reputation to be smirched. He was, he had said with a bitter
wistfulness, a stray dog. And Doris Cleveland was in very much the
same position. Two unfortunates cleaving to each other, moved by a
genuine human passion. If they could be happy together, they had a
right to be together. Hollister challenged his reason to refute that
cry of his heart.

He disposed finally of the last uncertainty,--whether he should tell
Doris. And a negative to that rose instantly to his lips. The past was
a dead past. Let it remain dead--buried. Its ghost would never rise to
trouble them. Of that he was very sure.

Hollister went to bed, but not to sleep. He heard a great clock
somewhere in the town strike twelve and then one, while he still lay
staring up at the dusky ceiling. But his thoughts had taken a
pleasanter road. He had turned over the pages of his life history,
scanned them with a gloomy and critical eye, and cast them with
decisive finality into the waste basket. He was about to begin a new
book, the book of the future. It was pleasant to contemplate what he
and Doris Cleveland together would write on those blank pages. To hope
much, to be no longer downcast, to be able to look forward with
eagerness. There was a glow in that like good wine.

And upon that he slept.

Morning brought him no qualms or indecisions. But it did bring him to
a consideration of very practical matters, which yesterday's emotional
crisis had overshadowed. That is to say, Hollister began to take stock
of the means whereby they two should live. It was not an immediately
pressing matter, since he had a few hundred dollars in hand, but he
was not short-sighted and he knew it would ultimately become so.
Hence, naturally, his mind turned once more to that asset which had
been one factor in bringing him back to British Columbia, the timber
limit he owned in the Toba Valley.

He began to consider that seriously. Its value had shrunk appreciably
under his examination. He had certainly been tricked in its purchase
and he did not know if he had any recourse. He rather thought there
should be some way of getting money back from people who obtained it
under false pretenses. The limit, he was quite sure, contained less
than half the timber Lewis and Company had solemnly represented it to
carry. He grew uneasy thinking of that. All his eggs were in that
wooden basket.

He found himself anxious to know what he could expect, what he could
do. There was a considerable amount of good cedar there. It should
bring five or six thousand dollars, even if he had to accept the fraud
and make the best of it. When he reflected upon what a difference the
possession or lack of money might mean to himself and Doris, before
long, all his acquired and cultivated knowledge of business affairs
began to spur him to some action. As soon as he finished his breakfast
he set off for the office of the "Timber Specialist." He already had a
plan mapped out. It might work and it might not, but it was worth
trying.

As he walked down the street, Hollister felt keenly, for the first
time in his thirty-one years of existence, how vastly important mere
bread and butter may become. He had always been accustomed to money.
Consequently he had very few illusions either about money as such or
the various methods of acquiring money. He had undergone too rigorous
a business training for that. He knew how easy it was to make money
with money--and how difficult, how very nearly impossible it was for
the penniless man to secure more than a living by his utmost exertion.
If this timber holding should turn out to be worthless, if it _should_
prove unsalable at any price, it would be a question of a job for him,
before so very long. With the handicap of his face! With that
universal inclination of people to avoid him because they disliked to
look on the direct result of settling international difficulties with
bayonets and high explosives and poison gas, he would not fare very
well in the search for a decent job. Poverty had never seemed to
present quite such a sinister face as it did to Hollister when he
reached this point in his self-communings.

Mr. Lewis received him with a total lack of the bland dignity
Hollister remembered. The man seemed uneasy, distracted. His eyes had
a furtive look in them. Hollister, however, had not come there to make
a study of Mr. Lewis' physiognomy or manner.

"I went up to Toba Inlet awhile ago and had a look over that timber
limit of mine," he began abruptly. "I'd like to see the documents
bearing on that, if you don't mind."

Mr. Lewis looked at him uncertainly, but he called a clerk and issued
an order. While the clerk was on his mission to the files Lewis put a
few questions which Hollister answered without disclosing what he had
in mind. It struck him, though, that the tone of Mr. Lewis' inquiry
bordered upon the anxious.

Presently the clerk returned with the papers. Hollister took them up.
He selected the agreement of sale, a letter or two, the original
cruiser's estimate, a series of tax receipts, held them in his hand
and looked at Lewis.

"You haven't succeeded in finding a buyer, I suppose?"

"In the winter," Lewis replied, "there is very little stir in timber."

"There is going to be some sort of stir in this timber before long,"
Hollister said.

The worried expression deepened on Mr. Lewis' face.

"The fact is," Hollister continued evenly, "I made a rough survey of
that timber, and found it away off color. You represented it to
contain so many million feet. It doesn't. Nowhere near. I appear to
have been rather badly stung, and I really don't wonder it hasn't been
resold. What do you propose to do about this?"

Mr. Lewis made a gesture of deprecation.

"There must be some mistake, Mr. Hollister."

"No doubt of that," Hollister agreed dryly. "The point is, who shall
pay for the mistake?"

Mr. Lewis looked out of the window. He seemed suddenly to be stricken
with an attitude of remoteness. It occurred to Hollister that the man
was not thinking about the matter at all.

"Well?" he questioned sharply.

The eyes of the specialist in timber turned back to him uneasily.

"Well?" he echoed.

Hollister put the documents in his pocket. He gathered up those on the
desk and put them also in his pocket. He was angry because he was
baffled. This was a matter of vital importance to him, and this man
seemed able to insulate himself against either threat or suggestion.

"My dear sir," Lewis expostulated. Even his protest was half-hearted,
lacked honest indignation.

Hollister rose.

"I'm going to keep these," he said irritably. "You don't seem to take
much interest in the fact that you have laid yourself open to a charge
of fraud, and that I am going to do something about it if you don't."

"Oh, go ahead," Lewis broke out pettishly. "I don't care what you do."

Hollister stared at him in amazement. The man's eyes met his for a
moment, then shifted to the opposite wall, became fixed there. He sat
half turned in his chair. He seemed to grow intent on something, to
become wrapped in some fog of cogitation, through which Hollister and
his affairs appeared only as inconsequential phantoms.

In the doorway Hollister looked back over his shoulder. The man sat
mute, immobile, staring fixedly at the wall.

Down the street Hollister turned once more to look up at the
gilt-lettered windows. Something had happened to Mr. Lewis. Something
had jolted the specialist in British Columbia timber and paralyzed his
business nerve centers. Some catastrophe had overtaken him, or
impended, beside which the ugly matter Hollister laid before him was
of no consequence.

But it was of consequence to Hollister, as vital as the breaker of
water and handful of ship's biscuits is to castaways in an open boat
in mid-ocean. It angered him to feel a matter of such deep concern
brushed aside. He walked on down the street, thinking what he should
do. Midway of the next block, a firm name, another concern which dealt
in timber, rose before his eyes. He entered the office.

"Mr. MacFarlan or Mr. Lee," he said to the desk man.

A short, stout individual came forward, glanced at Hollister's scarred
face with that involuntary disapproval which Hollister was accustomed
to catch in people's expression before they suppressed it out of pity
or courtesy, or a mixture of both.

"I am Mr. MacFarlan."

"I want legal advice on a matter of considerable importance,"
Hollister came straight to the point. "Can you recommend an able
lawyer--one with considerable experience in timber litigation
preferred?"

"I can. Malcolm MacFarlan, second floor Sibley Block. If it's legal
business relating to timber, he's your man. Not because he happens to
be my brother," MacFarlan smiled broadly, "but because he knows his
business. Ask any timber concern. They'll tell you."

Hollister thanked him, and retraced his steps to the office building
he had just quitted. In an office directly under the Lewis quarters he
introduced himself to Malcolm MacFarlan, a bulkier, less elderly
duplicate of his brother the timber broker. Hollister stated his case
briefly and clearly. He put it in the form of a hypothetical case,
naming no names.

MacFarlan listened, asked questions, nodded understanding.

"You could recover on the ground of misrepresentation," he said at
last. "The case, as you state it, is clear. It could be interpreted as
fraud and hence criminal if collusion between the maker of the false
estimate and the vendor could be proven. In any case the vendor could
be held accountable for his misrepresentation of value. Your remedy
lies in a civil suit--provided an authentic cruise established your
estimate of such a small quantity of merchantable timber. I should say
you could recover the principal with interest and costs. Always
provided the vendor is financially responsible."

"I presume they are. Lewis and Company sold me this timber. Here are
the papers. Will you undertake this matter for me?"

MacFarlan jerked his thumb towards the ceiling.

"This Lewis above me?"

"Yes."

Hollister laid the documents before MacFarlan. He ran through them,
laid them down and looked reflectively at Hollister.

"I'm afraid," he said slowly, "you are making your move too late."

"Why?" Hollister demanded uneasily.

"Evidently you aren't aware what has happened to Lewis? I take it you
haven't been reading the papers?"

"I haven't," Hollister admitted. "What has happened?"

"His concern has gone smash," MacFarlan stated. "I happen to be sure
of that, because I'm acting for two creditors. A receiver has been
appointed. Lewis himself is in deep. He is at present at large on
bail, charged with unlawful conversion of moneys entrusted to his
care. You have a case, clear enough, but----" he threw out his hands
with a suggestive motion--"they're bankrupt."

"I see," Hollister muttered. "I appear to be out of luck, then."

"Unfortunately, yes," MacFarlan continued. "You could get a judgment
against them. But it would be worthless. Simply throwing good money
after bad. There will be half a dozen other judgments recorded against
them, a dozen other claims put in, before you could get action. Of
course, I could proceed on your behalf and let you in for a lot of
costs, but I would rather not earn my fees in that manner. I'm
satisfied there won't be more than a few cents on the dollar for
anybody."

"That seems final enough," Hollister said. "I am obliged to you, Mr.
MacFarlan."

He went out again into a street filled with people hurrying about
their affairs in the spring sunshine. So much for that, he reflected,
not without a touch of contemptuous anger against Lewis. He understood
now the man's troubled absorption. With the penitentiary staring him
in the face--

At any rate the property was not involved. Whatever its worth, it was
his, and the only asset at his command. He would have to make the best
of it, dispose of it for what he could get. Meantime, Doris Cleveland
began to loom bigger in his mind than this timber limit. He suffered a
vast impatience until he should see her again. He had touches, this
morning, of incredulous astonishment before the fact that he could
love and be loved. He felt once or twice that this promise of
happiness would prove an illusion, something he had dreamed, if he did
not soon verify it by sight and speech.

He was to call for her at two o'clock. They had planned to take a
Fourth Avenue car to the end of the line and walk thence past the
Jericho Club grounds and out a driveway that left the houses of the
town far behind, a road that went winding along the gentle curve of a
shore line where the Gulf swell whispered or thundered, according to
the weather.

Doris was a good walker. On the level road she kept step without
faltering or effort, holding Hollister's hand, not because she needed
it for guidance, but because it was her pleasure.

They came under a high wooded slope.

"Listen to the birds," she said, with a gentle pressure on his
fingers. "I can smell the woods and feel the air soft as a caress. I
can't see the buds bursting, or the new, pale-green leaves, but I know
what it is like. Sometimes I think that beauty is a feeling, instead
of a fact. Perhaps if I could see it as well as feel it--still, the
birds wouldn't sing more sweetly if I could see them there swaying on
the little branches, would they, Bob?"

There was a wistfulness, but only a shadow of regret in her tone. And
there were no shadows on the fresh, young face she turned to
Hollister. He bent to kiss that sweet mouth, and he was again thankful
that she had no sight to be offended by his devastated features. His
lips, unsightly as they were, had power to stir her. She blushed and
hid her face against his coat.

They found a dry log to sit upon, a great tree trunk cast by a storm
above high-water mark. Now and then a motor whirred by, but for the
most part the drive lay silent, a winding ribbon of asphalt between
the sea and the wooded heights of Point Grey. English Bay sparkled
between them and the city. Beyond the purple smoke-haze driven inland
by the west wind rose the white crests of the Capilanos, an Alpine
background to the seaboard town. Hollister could hear the whine of
sawmills, the rumble of trolley cars, the clang of steel in a great
shipyard,--and the tide whispering on wet sands at his feet, the birds
twittering among the budding alders. And far as his eyes could reach
along the coast there lifted enormous, saw-toothed mountains. They
stood out against a sapphire sky with extraordinary vividness, with
remarkable brilliancy of color, with an austere dignity.

Hollister put his arm around the girl. She nestled close to him. A
little sigh escaped her lips.

"What is it, Doris?"

"I was just remembering how I lay awake last night," she said,
"thinking, thinking until my brain seemed like some sort of machine
that would run on and on grinding out thoughts till I was worn out."

"What about?" he asked.

"About you and myself," she said simply. "About what is ahead of us. I
think I was a little bit afraid."

"Of me?"

"Oh, no," she tightened her grip on his hand. "I can't imagine myself
being afraid of _you_. I like you too much. But--but--well, I was
thinking of myself, really; of myself in relation to you. I couldn't
help seeing myself as a handicap. I could see you beginning to chafe
finally under the burden of a blind wife, growing impatient at my
helplessness--which you do not yet realize--and in the end--oh, well,
one can think all sorts of things in spite of a resolution not to
think."

It stung Hollister.

"Good God," he cried, "you don't realize it's only the fact you
_can't_ see me that makes it possible. Why, I've clutched at you the
way a drowning man clutches at anything. That I should get tired of
you, feel you as a burden--it's unthinkable. I'm thankful you're
blind. I shall always be glad you can't see. If you could--what sort
of picture of me have you in your mind?"

"Perhaps not a very clear one," the girl answered slowly. "But I hear
your voice, and it is a pleasant one. I feel your touch, and there is
something there that moves me in the oddest way. I know that you are a
big man and strong. Of course I don't know whether your eyes are blue
or brown, whether your hair is fair or dark--and I don't care. As for
your face I can't possibly imagine it as terrible, unless you were
angry. What are scars? Nothing, nothing. I can't see them. It wouldn't
make any difference if I could."

"It would," he muttered. "I'm afraid it would."

Doris shook her head. She looked up at him, with that peculiarly
direct, intent gaze which always gave him the impression that she did
see. Her eyes, the soft gray of a summer rain cloud--no one would have
guessed them sightless. They seemed to see, to be expressive, to glow
and soften.

She lifted a hand to Hollister's face. He did not shrink while those
soft fingers went exploring the devastation wrought by the exploding
shell. They touched caressingly the scarred and vivid flesh. And they
finished with a gentle pat on his cheek and a momentary, kittenish
rumpling of his hair.

"I cannot find so very much amiss," she said. "Your nose is a bit
awry, and there is a hollow in one cheek. I can feel scars. What does
it matter? A man is what he thinks and feels and does. I am the maimed
one, really. There is so much I can't do, Bob. You don't realize it
yet. And we won't always be living this way, sitting idle on the
beach, going to a show, having tea in the Granada. I used to run and
swim and climb hills. I could have gone anywhere with you--done
anything--been as good a mate as any primitive woman. But my wings are
clipped. I can only get about in familiar surroundings. And sometimes
it grows intolerable. I rebel. I rave--and wish I were dead. And if I
thought I was hampering you, and you were beginning to regret you had
married me--why, I couldn't bear it. That's what my brain was buzzing
with last night."

"Do any of those things strike you as serious obstacles now--when I
have my arms around you?" Hollister demanded.

She shook her head.

"No. Really and truly right now I'm perfectly willing to take any sort
of chance on the future--if you're in it," she said thoughtfully.
"That's the sort of effect you have on me. I suppose that's natural
enough."

"Then we feel precisely the same," Hollister declared. "And you are
not to have any more doubts about me. I tell you, Doris, that besides
wanting you, I _need_ you. I can be your eyes. And for me, you will be
like a compass to a sailor in a fog--something to steer a course by.
So let's stop talking about whether we're going to take the plunge.
Let's talk about how we're going to live, and where."

A whimsical expression tippled across the girl's face, a mixture of
tenderness and mischief.

"I've warned you," she said with mock solemnity. "Your blood be upon
your own head."

They both laughed.




CHAPTER X


"Why not go in there and take that cedar out yourself?" Doris
suggested.

They had been talking about that timber limit in the Toba, the
possibility of getting a few thousand dollars out of it, and how they
could make the money serve them best.

"We could live there. I'd love to live there. I loved that valley. I
can see it now, every turn of the river, every canyon, and all the
peaks above. It would be like getting back home."

"It is a beautiful place," Hollister agreed. He had a momentary vision
of the Toba as he saw it last: a white-floored lane between two great
mountain ranges; green, timbered slopes that ran up to immense
declivities; glaciers; cold, majestic peaks scarred by winter
avalanches. He had come a little under the spell of those rugged
solitudes then. He could imagine it transformed by the magic of
summer. He could imagine himself living there with this beloved woman,
exacting a livelihood from those hushed forests and finding it good.

"I've been wondering about that myself," he said. "There is a lot of
good cedar there. That bolt chute your brothers built could be
repaired. If they expected to get that stuff out profitably, why
shouldn't I? I'll have to look into that."

They were living in a furnished flat. If they had married in what
people accustomed to a certain formality of living might call haste
they had no thought of repenting at leisure, or otherwise. They were,
in fact, quite happy and contented. Marriage had shattered no
illusions. If, indeed, they cherished any illusory conceptions of each
other, the intimacy of mating had merely served to confirm those
illusions, to shape them into realities. They were young enough to be
ardent lovers, old enough to know that love was not the culmination,
but only an ecstatic phase in the working out of an inexorable natural
law.

If Doris was happy, full of high spirits, joyfully abandoned to the
fulfilment of her destiny as a woman, Hollister too was happier than
he had considered it possible for him ever to be again. But, in
addition, he was supremely grateful. Life for him as an individual had
seemed to be pretty much a blank wall, a drab, colorless routine of
existence; something he could not voluntarily give up, but which gave
nothing, promised nothing, save monotony and isolation and, in the
end, complete despair. So that his love for this girl, who had given
herself to him with the strangely combined passion of a mature woman
and the trusting confidence of a child, was touched with gratitude.
She had put out her hand and lifted him from the pit. She would always
be near him, a prop and a stay. Sometimes it seemed to Hollister a
miracle. He would look at his face in the mirror and thank God that
she was blind. Doris said that made no difference, but he knew better.
It made a difference to eyes that could see, however tolerantly.

In Hollister, also, there revived the natural ambition to get on, to
grasp a measure of material security, to make money. There were so
many ways in which money was essential, so many desirable things they
could secure and enjoy together with money. Making a living came
first, but beyond a mere living he began to desire comfort, even
luxuries, for himself and his wife. He had made tentative plans. They
had discussed ways and means; and the most practical suggestion of all
came now from his wife's lips.

Hollister went about town the next few days, diligently seeking
information about prices, wages, costs and methods. He had a practical
knowledge of finance, and a fair acquaintance with timber operations
generally, so that he did not waste his own or other men's time. He
met a rebuff or two, but he learned a great deal which he needed to
know, and he said to Doris finally:

"I'm going to play your hunch and get that timber out myself. It will
pay. In fact, it is the only way I'll ever get back the money I put
into that, so I really haven't much choice in the matter."

"Good!" Doris said. "Then we go to the Toba to live. When?"

"Very soon--if we go at all. There doesn't seem to be much chance to
sell it, but there is some sort of returned soldiers' cooperative
concern working in the Big Bend, and MacFarlan and Lee have had some
correspondence with their head man about this limit of mine. He is
going to be in town in a day or two. They may buy."

"And if they do?"

"Well, then, we'll see about a place on Valdez Island at the
Euclataws, where I can clear up some land and grow things, and fish
salmon when they run, as we talked about."

"That would be nice, and I dare say we would get on very well," Doris
said. "But I'd rather go to the Toba."

Hollister did not want to go to the Toba. He would go if it were
necessary, but when he remembered that fair-haired woman living in the
cabin on the river bank, he felt that there was something to be
shunned. Myra was like a bad dream too vividly remembered. There was
stealing over Hollister a curious sense of something unreal in his
first marriage, in the war, even in the strange madness which had
briefly afflicted him when he discovered that Myra was there. He could
smile at the impossibility of that recurring, but he could not smile
at the necessity of living within gunshot of her again. He was not
afraid. There was no reason to be afraid. He was officially dead. No
sense of sin troubled him. He had put all that behind him. It was
simply a distaste for living near a woman he had once loved, with
another whom he loved with all the passion he had once lavished on
Myra, and something that was truer and tenderer. He wanted to shut the
doors on the past forever. That was why he did not wish to go back to
the Toba. He only succeeded in clearly defining that feeling when it
seemed that he must go--unless this prospective sale went
through--because he had to use whatever lever stood nearest his hand.
He had a direct responsibility, now, for material success. As the
laborer goes to his work, distasteful though it may be, that he may
live, that his family may be fed and clothed, so Hollister knew that
he would go to Toba Valley and wrest a compensation from that timber
with his own hands unless a sale were made.

But it failed to go through. Hollister met his man in MacFarlan's
office,--a lean, weather-beaten man of sixty, named Carr. He was frank
and friendly, wholly unlike the timber brokers and millmen Hollister
had lately encountered.

"The fact is," Carr said after some discussion, "we aren't in the
market for timber in the ordinary, speculative sense. I happen to know
that particular stand of cedar, or I wouldn't be interested. We're a
body of returned men engaged in making homes and laying the foundation
for a competence by our joint efforts. You would really lose by
selling out to us. We would only buy on stumpage. If you were a broker
I would offer you so much, and you could take it or leave it. It would
be all one to us. We have a lot of standing timber ourselves. But
we're putting in a shingle mill now. The market looks good, and what
we need is labor and shingle bolts, not standing timber. I would
suggest you go in there with two or three men and get the stuff out
yourself. We'll take all the cedar on your limit, in bolts on the
river bank at market prices, less cost of towage to Vancouver. You can
make money on that, especially if shingles go up."

There seemed a force at work compelling Hollister to this move. He
reflected upon it as he walked home. Doris wanted to go; this man Carr
encouraged him to go. He would be a fool not to go when opportunity
beckoned, yet he hesitated; there was a reluctance in his mind. He was
not afraid, and yet he was. Some vague peril seemed to lurk like a
misty shadow at his elbow. Nothing that he had done, nothing that he
foresaw himself doing, accounted for that, and he ended by calling
himself a fool. Of course, he would go. If Myra lived there,--well, no
matter. It was nothing to him, nothing to Doris. The past was past;
the future theirs for the making. So he went once more up to Toba
Inlet, when late April brought spring showers and blossoming shrubs
and soft sunny days to all the coast region. He carried with him
certain tools for a purpose, axes, cross-cut saws, iron wedges, a froe
to flake off uniform slabs of cedar. He sat on the steamer's deck and
thought to himself that he was in vastly different case to the last
time he had watched those same shores slide by in the same direction.
Then he had been in full retreat, withdrawing from a world which for
him held nothing of any value. Now it held for him a variety of
desirable things, which to have and to hold he need only make effort;
and that effort he was eager to put forth, was now indeed putting
forth if he did no more than sit on the steamer's deck, watching green
shore and landlocked bays fall astern, feeling the steady throb of her
engines, hearing the swish and purl of a cleft sea parting at the bow
in white foam, rippling away in a churned wake at her stern.

He felt a mild regret that he went alone, and the edge of that was
dulled by the sure knowledge that he would not long be alone, only
until such time as he could build a cabin and transport supplies up to
the flat above the Big Bend, to that level spot where his tent and
canoe were still hidden, where he had made his first camp, and near
where the bolt chute was designed to spit its freight into the river.

It was curious to Hollister,--the manner in which Doris could see so
clearly this valley and river and the slope where his timber stood.
She could not only envision the scene of their home and his future
operations, but she could discuss these things with practical wisdom.
They had talked of living in the old cabin where he had found her
shelf of books, but there was a difficulty in that,--of getting up the
steep hill, of carrying laboriously up that slope each item of their
supplies, their personal belongings, such articles of furniture as
they needed; and Doris had suggested that they build their house in
the flat and let his men, the bolt cutters, occupy the cabin on the
hill.

He had two hired woodsmen with him, tools, food, bedding. When the
steamer set them on the float at the head of Toba Inlet, Hollister
left the men to bring the goods ashore in a borrowed dugout and
himself struck off along a line blazed through the woods which, one of
Carr's men informed him, led out near the upper curve of the Big Bend.

A man sometimes learns a great deal in the brief span of a few
minutes. When Hollister disembarked he knew the name of one man only
in Toba Valley, the directing spirit of the settlement, Sam Carr, whom
he had met in MacFarlan's office. But there were half a dozen loggers
meeting the weekly steamer. They were loquacious men, without
formality in the way of acquaintance. Hollister had more than trail
knowledge imparted to him. The name of the man who lived with his wife
at the top of the Big Bend was Mr. J. Harrington Bland; the logger
said that with a twinkle in his eye, a chuckle as of inner amusement.
Hollister understood. The man was a round peg in this region of square
holes; otherwise he would have been Jack Bland, or whatever the
misplaced initial stood for. They spoke of him further as "the
Englishman." There was a lot of other local knowledge bestowed upon
Hollister, but "the Englishman" and his wife--who was a "pippin" for
looks--were still in the forefront of his mind when the trail led him
out on the river bank a few hundred yards from their house. He passed
within forty feet of the door. Bland was chopping wood; Myra sat on a
log, her tawny hair gleaming in the sun. Bland bestowed upon Hollister
only a casual glance, as he strode past, and went on swinging his axe;
and Hollister looking impersonally at the woman, observed that she
stared with frank curiosity. He remembered that trait of hers. He had
often teased her about it in those days when it had been an impossible
conception that she could ever regard seriously any man but himself.
Men had always been sure of a very complete survey when they came
within Myra's range, and men had always fluttered about her like moths
drawn to a candle flame. She had that mysterious quality of attracting
men, pleasing them--and of making other girls hate her in the same
degree. She used to laugh about that.

"I can't help it if I'm popular," she used to say, with a mischievous
smile, and Hollister had fondly agreed with that. He remembered that
it flattered his vanity to have other men admire his wife. He had been
so sure of her affections, her loyalty, but that had passed like
melting snow, like dew under the morning sun. A little loneliness, a
few months of separation, had done the trick.

Hollister shrugged his shoulders. He had no feeling in the matter. She
could not possibly know him; she would not wish to know him if she
could. His problems were nowise related to her. But he knew too much
to be completely indifferent. His mind kept turning upon what her life
had been, and what it must be now. He was curious. What had become of
the money? Why did she and her English husband bury themselves in a
rude shack by a river that whispered down a lonely valley?

Hollister's mind thrust these people aside, put them out of
consideration, when he reached the flat and found his canoe where he
left it, his tiny silk tent suspended intact from the limb. He ranged
about the flat for an hour or so. He had an impression of it in his
mind from his winter camp there; also he had a description of it from
Doris, and her picture was clearer and more exact in detail than his.
He found the little falls that trickled down to a small creek that
split the flat. He chose tentatively a site for their house, close by
a huge maple which had three sets of initials cut deeply in the bark
where Doris told him to look.

Then he dragged the canoe down to the river, and slid it afloat and
let the current bear him down. The air was full of pleasant odors from
the enfolding forest. He let his eyes rest thankfully upon those calm,
majestic peaks that walled in the valley. It was even more beautiful
now than he had imagined it could be when the snow blanketed hill and
valley, and the teeth of the frost gnawed everywhere. It was less
aloof; it was as if the wilderness wore a smile and beckoned with
friendly hands.

The current and his paddle swept him down past the settlement, past a
busy, grunting sawmill, past the booming ground where brown logs
floated like droves of sheep in a yard, and he came at last to where
his woodsmen waited with the piled goods on a bank above tidewater.

All the rest of that day, and for many days thereafter, Hollister was
a busy man. There was a pile of goods to be transported up-stream, a
house to be fashioned out of raw material from the forest, the
shingle-bolt chute to be inspected and repaired, the work of cutting
cedar to be got under way, all in due order. He became a voluntary
slave to work, clanking his chains of toil with that peculiar pleasure
which comes to men who strain and sweat toward a desired end. As
literally as his hired woodsmen, he earned his bread in the sweat of
his brow, spurred on by a vision of what he sought to create,--a home
and so much comfort as he could grasp for himself and a woman.

The house arose as if by magic,--the simple magic of stout arms and
skilled hands working with axe and saw and iron wedges. One of
Hollister's men was a lean, saturnine logger, past fifty, whose life
had been spent in the woods of the Pacific Coast. There was no trick
of the axe Hayes had not mastered, and he could perform miracles of
shaping raw wood with neat joints and smooth surfaces.

Two weeks from the day Hayes struck his axe blade into the brown trunk
of a five-foot cedar and said laconically, "She'll do", that ancient
tree had been transformed into timbers, into boards that flaked off
smooth and straight under iron wedges, into neat shakes for a
rain-tight roof, and was assembled into a two-roomed cabin. This was
furnished with chairs and tables and shelves, hewn out of the raw
stuff of the forest. It stood in the middle of a patch of earth
cleared of fallen logs and thicket. Its front windows gave on the Toba
River, slipping down to the sea. A maple spread friendly arms at one
corner, a lordly tree that would blaze crimson and russet-brown when
October came again. All up and down the river the still woods spread a
deep-green carpet on a floor between the sheer declivity of the north
wall and the gentler, more heavily timbered slope of the south.
Hollister looked at his house when it was done and saw that it was
good. He looked at the rich brown of the new-cleared soil about it,
and saw in his mind flowers growing there, and a garden.

And when he had quartered his men in the cabin up the hill and put
them to work on the cedar, he went back to Vancouver for his wife.




CHAPTER XI


A week of hot sunshine had filled the Toba River bank full of roily
water when Hollister breasted its current again. In midstream it ran
full and strong. Watery whisperings arose where swirls boiled over
sunken snags. But in the slow eddies and shoal water under each bank
the gray canoe moved up-stream under the steady drive of Hollister's
paddle.

Doris sat in the bow. Her eyes roved from the sun-glittering stream to
the hills that rose above the tree-fringed valley floor, as if sight
had been restored to her so that her eyes could dwell upon the
green-leaved alder and maple, the drooping spruce bows, the vastness
of those forests of somber fir where the deer lurked in the shadows
and where the birds sang vespers and matins when dusk fell and dawn
came again. There were meadow larks warbling now on stumps that dotted
the floor of the Big Bend, and above the voices of those
yellow-breasted singers and the watery murmuring of the river there
arose now and then the shrill, imperative blast of a donkey engine.

"Where are we now, Bob?"

"About half a mile below the upper curve of the Big Bend," Hollister
replied.

Doris sat silent for awhile. Hollister, looking at her, was stricken
anew with wonder at her loveliness, with wonder at the contrast
between them. Beauty and the beast, he said to himself. He knew
without seeing. He did not wish to see. He strove to shut away thought
of the devastation of what had once been a man's goodly face. Doris'
skin was like a child's, smooth and soft and tinted like a rose petal.
Love, he said to himself, had made her bloom. It made him quake to
think that she might suddenly see out of those dear, blind eyes. Would
she look and shudder and turn away? He shook off that ghastly thought.
She would never see him. She could only touch him, feel him, hear the
tenderness of his voice, know his guarding care. And to those things
which were realities she would always respond with an intensity that
thrilled him and gladdened him and made him feel that life was good.

"Are you glad you're here?" he asked suddenly.

"I would pinch you for such a silly question if it weren't that I
would probably upset the canoe," Doris laughed. "Glad?"

"There must be quite a streak of pure barbarian in me," she said after
a while. "I love the smell of the earth and the sea and the woods.
Even when I could see, I never cared a lot for town. It would be all
right for awhile, then I would revolt against the noise, the dirt and
smoke, the miles and miles of houses rubbing shoulders against each
other, and all the thousands of people scuttling back and forth,
like--well, it seems sometimes almost as aimless as the scurrying of
ants when you step on their hill. Of course it isn't. But I used to
feel that way. When I was in my second year at Berkeley I had a brain
storm like that. I took the train north and turned up at home--we had
a camp running on Thurlow Island then. Daddy read the riot act and
sent me back on the next steamer. It was funny--just an irresistible
impulse to get back to my own country, among my own people. I often
wonder if it isn't some such instinct that keeps sailors at sea, no
matter what the sea does to them. I have sat on that ridge"--she
pointed unerringly to the first summit above Hollister's timber,
straight back and high above the rim of the great cliff south of the
Big Bend--"and felt as if I had drunk a lot of wine; just to be away
up in that clear still air, with not a living soul near and the
mountains standing all around like the pyramids."

"Do you know that you have a wonderful sense of direction, Doris?"
Hollister said. "You pointed to the highest part of that ridge as
straight as if you could see it."

"I do see it," she smiled, "I mean I know where I am, and I have in my
mind a very clear picture of my surroundings always, so long as I am
on familiar ground."

Hollister knew this to be so, in a certain measure, on a small scale.
In a room she knew Doris moved as surely and rapidly as he did
himself. He had dreaded a little lest she should find herself feeling
lost and helpless in this immensity of forest and hills which
sometimes made even him feel a peculiar sense of insignificance. It
was a relief to know that she turned to this wilderness which must be
their home with the eagerness of a child throwing itself into its
mother's arms. He perceived that she had indeed a clear image of the
Toba in her mind. She was to give further proof of this before long.

They turned the top of the Big Bend. Here the river doubled on itself
for nearly a mile and crossed from the north wall of the valley to the
south. Where the channel straightened away from this loop Hollister
had built his house on a little flat running back from the right-hand
bank. A little less than half a mile below, Bland's cabin faced the
river just where the curve of the S began. They came abreast of that
now. What air currents moved along the valley floor shifted in from
the sea. It wafted the smoke from Bland's stovepipe gently down on the
river's shining face.

Doris sniffed.

"I smell wood smoke," she said. "Is there a fire on the flat?"

"Yes, in a cook's stove," Hollister replied. "There is a shack here."

She questioned him and he told her of the Blands,--all that he had
been told, which was little enough. Doris displayed a deep interest in
the fact that a woman, a young woman, was a near neighbor, as
nearness goes on the British Columbia coast.

From somewhere about the house Myra Bland appeared now. To avoid the
heavy current, Hollister hugged the right-hand shore so that he passed
within a few feet of the bank, within speaking distance of this woman
with honey-colored hair standing bareheaded in the sunshine. She took
a step or two forward. For an instant Hollister thought she was about
to exercise the immemorial privilege of the wild places and hail a
passing stranger. But she did not call or make any sign. She stood
gazing at them, and presently her husband joined her and together they
watched. They were still looking when Hollister gave his last backward
glance, then turned his attention to the reddish-yellow gleam of
new-riven timber which marked his own dwelling. Twenty minutes later
he slid the gray canoe's forefoot up on a patch of sand before his
house.

"We're here," he said. "Home--such as it is--it's home."

He helped her out, guided her steps up to the level of the bottomland.
He was eager to show her the nest he had devised for them. But Doris
checked him with her hand.

"I hear the falls," she said. "Listen!"

Streaming down through a gorge from melting snowfields the creek a
little way beyond plunged with a roar over granite ledges. The few
warm days had swollen it from a whispering sheet of spray to a
deep-voiced cataract. A mist from it rose among the deep green of the
fir.

"Isn't it beautiful--beautiful?" Doris said. "There"--she pointed--"is
the canyon of the Little Toba coming in from the south. There is the
deep notch where the big river comes down from the Chilcotin, and a
ridge like the roof of the world rising between. Over north there are
mountains and mountains, one behind the other, till the last peaks are
white cones against the blue sky. There is a bluff straight across us
that goes up and up in five-hundred-foot ledges like masonry, with
hundred-foot firs on each bench that look like toy trees from here.

"I used to call that gorge there"--her pointing finger found the mark
again--"The Black Hole. It is always full of shadows in summer, and in
winter the slides rumble and crash into it with a noise like the end
of the world. Did you ever listen to the slides muttering and
grumbling last winter when you were here, Bob?"

"Yes, I used to hear them day and night."

They stood silent a second or two. The little falls roared above them.
The river whispered at their feet. A blue-jay perched on the roof of
their house and began his harsh complaint to an unheeding world, into
which a squirrel presently broke with vociferous reply. An up-river
breeze rustled the maple leaves, laid cooling fingers from salt water
on Hollister's face, all sweaty from his labor with the paddle.

He could see beauty where Doris saw it. It surrounded him, leaped to
his eye whenever his eye turned,--a beauty of woods and waters, of
rugged hills and sapphire skies. And he was suddenly filled with a
great gladness that he could respond to this. He was quickened to a
strange emotion by the thought that life could still hold for him so
much that seemed good. He put one arm caressingly, protectingly,
across his wife's shoulder, over the smooth, firm flesh that gleamed
through thin silk.

She turned swiftly, buried her face against his breast and burst into
tears, into a strange fit of sobbing. She clung to him like a
frightened child. Her body quivered as if some unseen force grasped
and shook her with uncontrollable power. Hollister held her fast,
dismayed, startled, wondering, at a loss to comfort her.

"But I _can't_ see it," she cried. "I'll never see it again. Oh, Bob,
Bob! Sometimes I can't stand this blackness. Never to see you--never
to see the sun or the stars--never to see the hills, the trees, the
grass. Always to grope. Always night--night--night without beginning
or end."

And Hollister still had no words to comfort her. He could only hold
her close, kiss her glossy brown hair, feeling all the while a
passionate sympathy--and yet conscious of a guilty gladness that she
could not see him--that she could not look at him and be revolted and
draw away. He knew that she clung to him now as the one clear light in
the darkness. He was not sure that she (or any other woman) would do
that if she could see him as he really was.

Her sobs died in her throat. She leaned against him passively for a
minute. Then she lifted her face and smiled.

"It's silly to let go like that," she said. "Once in awhile it comes
over me like a panic. I wonder if you will always be patient with me
when I get like that. Sometimes I fairly rave. But I won't do it
often. I don't know why I should feel that way now. I have never been
so happy. Yet that feeling came over me like a suffocating wave. I am
afraid your wife is rather a temperamental creature, Bob."

She ended with a laugh and a pout, to which Hollister made appropriate
response. Then he led her into the house and smiled--or would have
smiled had his face been capable of that expression--at the pleasure
with which her hands, which she had trained to be her organs of
vision, sought and found doors and cupboards, chairs, the varied
equipment of the kitchen. He watched her find her way about with the
uncanny certainty of the sightless, at which he never ceased to
marvel. When she came back at last to where he sat on a table,
swinging one foot while he smoked a cigarette, she put her arms around
him and said:

"It's a cute little house, Bob. The air here is like old wine. The
smell of the woods is like heaven, after soot and smoke and coal gas.
I'm the happiest woman in the whole country."

Hollister looked at her. He knew by the glow on her face that she
spoke as she felt, that she was happy, that he had made her so. And he
was proud of himself for a minute, as a man becomes when he is
conscious of having achieved greatness, however briefly.

Only he was aware of a shadow. Doris leaned against him talking of
things they would do, of days to come. He looked over her shoulder
through the west window and his eye rested on Bland's cabin, where
another woman lived who had once nestled in his arms and talked of
happiness. Yes, he was conscious of the shadow, of regrets, of
something else that was nameless and indefinable,--a shadow. Something
that was not and yet still might be troubled him vaguely.

He could not tell why. Presently he dismissed it from his mind.




CHAPTER XII


Hollister likened himself and Doris, more than once in the next few
days, to two children in a nursery full of new toys. He watched the
pride and delight which Doris bestowed upon her house and all that it
contained, the satisfaction with which she would dwell upon the
comforts and luxuries that should be added to it when the cedars on
the hill began to produce revenue for them.

For his own part he found himself eager for work, taking a pleasure
far beyond his expectation in what he had set himself to do, here in
the valley of the Toba. He could shut his eyes and see the whole plan
work out in ordered sequence,--the bolt ch

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