 9 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 gently 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 re-established in the coldly impersonal, maddening, 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. No much for that. Hollister, recalling his experience in London, smiled sardonically as 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. Did 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. Cleveland 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. Contrary wise 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. In 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 obliguity 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. Surely 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. Legal 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 wastebasket. 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. Nothing 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 too 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 Tobah 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-seeder 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 unsaleable at any price, it would be a question of a job for him before so very long. 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 a while 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 a way 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 in 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 guilt-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 as 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 Delton Timber rose before his eyes. He entered the office. Mr. McFarland, or Mr. Lee, he said to the deskman. A short, stowed 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. McFarland. I want legal advice on a matter of considerable importance. Hollister came straight to the point. Do you recommend an able lawyer, one with considerable experience in timber litigation preferred? I can. Malcolm McFarland, second floor Sibley block. If it's legal business relating to timber, he's your man. Not because he happens to be my brother, McFarland 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 McFarland, 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. McFarland listened, asked questions, nodded, understanding. You could recover on the ground of misrepresentation, he said at last. The case, as you stated, 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 principle with interest and costs. These provided the vendor is financially responsible. I presume they are, Lewis and Company sold me this timber, here of the papers. Will you undertake this matter for me?" McFarland jerked his thumb towards the ceiling. "'This, Lewis, above me?' "'Yes.'" Hollister laid the documents before McFarland. He ran through them, laid them down, and looked reflectively at Hollister. "'I am 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,' McFarland stated. "'I happen to be sure of that, because I am 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 monies 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,' McFarland continued. "'You could get a judgment against them, but it would be worthless. "'I would be 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. McFarland.' 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 penitentiaries 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 shoreline were 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. 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 Highwater Mark. Now and then a motor-word by, but for the most part the drive lay silent, a winding ribbon of asphalt between the sea and the wooded heights of Point Gray. English Bay sparkled between them and the city. And the purple smoke-haze, driven inland by the west wind, rose the white crests of the capillanos, an alpine background to the seaboard town. Hollister could hear the whine of saw-mills, the rumble of trolley-cars, the clang of steel in a great shipyard, and the tide whispering in the wet sands at his feet the birds twittering among the budding alders. And as 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 are 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 rumbling of his hair. I cannot find so very much a miss, 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 maid 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'll 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 salinity. Your blood be upon your own head. They both laughed. End of chapter nine, recording by Roger Maline. Chapter 10 of The Hidden Places. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Roger Maline. The Hidden Places by Bertrand W. Sinclair. Chapter 10. 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 brother's 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 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, colourless routine of existence. Something he could not voluntarily give up but which gave nothing, promised nothing, saved 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 looked at 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 McFarland and Lee have had some correspondence with their headman 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 Valdes Island at the Euclitaus, 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 in the riverbank, 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, just tasteful 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 rest 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 MacFarlane's office, a lean, weather-beaten man of sixty, named Carr. He was frank and friendly, wholly unlike the timber brokers and Millman 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 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 riverbank, at market prices, less cost of towage to Vancouver. You could 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, but it was not. It was past, the future there is 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 fro 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 a stern, feeling the steady throb of her engines, hearing the swish and pearl 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-shoot 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 steamers 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's 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 McFarlane's office. But there were half a dozen lagers meeting the weekly steamer. They were locationless 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 lager 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 the 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 no wise 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 at a float and let the current bear him down. The air was full of pleasant odours 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 nod 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, passed a busy grunting sawmill, passed the booming ground where brown logs floated like droves of sheep in a yard, and he came at last to where his woodsman waited with the piled goods on a bank above tide water. 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 upstream, a house to be fashioned out of raw material from the forest, the shingle-boat 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 woodsman 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 ax and saw and iron wedges. One of Hollister's men was a lean, saturnine lager, past fifty, whose life had been spent in the woods of the Pacific Coast. There was no trick of the ax 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 ax blade into the brown trunk of a five-foot cedar and said leconically, "'She'll do!' That ancient tree had been transformed into timbers, into bores 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 rust at brown when October came again. All up and down the river the still wood 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. End of CHAPTER X CHAPTER XI THE HIDDEN PLACES BY BIRTRAND W. CINCLAIR A week of hot sunshine had filled the Toba River bank full of royally water when Hollister breasted its current again. In mid-stream it ran full and strong. Watery whisperings arose where swirls boiled over sunken snags. But in the low eddies and shoal water under each bank the gray canoe moved upstream 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 boughs, the vastness of those forests of somber fur 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 unto them the shrill imperative blast of a donkey-engine. Where are we now, Bob? About a half-mile below the upper curve of the Big Bend, Hollister replied. Doris sat silent for a while. 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's skin was like a child's, smooth and soft and tinted like a rose-pedal. 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 to 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 a while, 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 brainstorm 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 a way 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 unfamiliar 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 in the river's shining face. Doris sniffed. I smell wood smoke, she said. Is there a fire on the flat? Yes, in a cooked stove, Hollister replied. There is a shack here. She questioned him and he told her of the Bland's. 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 bare-headed 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. Where here, he said, home, such as it is, it's home. He helped her out, guided her steps up to the level of the bottom land. 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 snow-fields, 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 fur. 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 furs on each bank 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 unheating 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 labour with the paddle. He could see beauty where Doris sought. 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 a while 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 never have 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 seized 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 in 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. End of Chapter 11 Recording by Roger Maline Chapter 12 of The Hidden Places This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Roger Maline The Hidden Places by Bertrand W. Sinclair Chapter 12 Hollister likened himself and Doris, more than once in the next few weeks, 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 Tobah. He could shut his eyes and see the whole plan work out in ordered sequence, the bolt chute repaired, the ancient cedars felled, sawed into four-foot lengths, split to a size, piled by the chute and all its lateral branches. Then, when a certain quantity was ready, they would be cast, one after another, into that trough of smooth poles which pitched sharply down from the heart of his timber to the river. One after another they would gather way, slipping down, faster and faster, to dive at last with a great splash into the stream, to accumulate behind the confining boomsticks until they were rafted to the mill, where they would be sawn into thin sheets to make tight roofs on houses in distant towns. And for the sweat that labour with ax and saw rung from his body, and for the directing power of his brain, he would be rewarded with money which would enable him to satisfy his needs. For the first time in his life Hollister perceived both the complexity and the simplicity of that vast machine into which modern industry has grown. In distant towns other men made machinery, textiles, boots, furniture. On inland plains where no trees grew, men sowed and reaped the wheat which passed through the hands of the miller and the baker and became a nation's daily bread. The ax in his hand was fashioned from metallic ore dug by other men out of the bowels of the earth. He was fed and clothed by unseen hands, and in return he, as they did, levied upon nature's store of raw material and paid for what he got with timber, rough-shaped to its ultimate uses by the labour of his hands. All his life Hollister had been able to command money without effort. Until he came back from the war he did not know what it meant to be poor. He had known business as a process in which a man used money to make more money. He had been accustomed to buy and sell, to deal with tokens rather than with things themselves. Now he found himself at the primitive source of things and he learned, a little to his astonishment, the pride of definitely planned creative work. He began to understand that lesson which many men never learn, the pleasure of pure achievement even in simple things. For two or three days he occupied himself at various tasks on the flat. He did this to keep watch over Doris, to see that she did not come to grief in this unfamiliar territory. But he soon put aside those first misgivings as he was learning to put aside any fear of the present or of the future which arose from her blindness. His love for her had not been born of pity. He had never thought of her as helpless. She was too vivid, too passionately alive in body and mind to inspire him with that curiously mixed feeling which the strong bestow upon the maimed and the weak. But there were certain risks of which he was conscious, no matter that Doris laughingly disclaimed them. With a stick and her ears and fingers she could go anywhere, she said, and she was not far wrong as Hollister knew. Within 48 hours she had the run of the house and the cleared portion of land surrounding. She could put her hand on every item of her kitchen equipment. She could get kindling out of the wood-box, light a fire in the stove, as well as he. All the stock of food staples lay in an orderly arrangement of her own choice on the kitchen shelves. She knew every object in the two rooms, each chair and box and stool, the step at the front door, the short path to the river bank, the trunk of the branchy maple, the rugged bark of a great spruce behind the house, as if within her brain there existed an exact diagram of the whole, and with which, as a guide, she could move within those limits as swiftly and surely as Hollister himself. He never ceased to wonder at the mysterious delicacies of touch and hearing which served her so well in place of sight. But he accepted the fact, and once she had mastered her surroundings, Hollister was free to take up his own work, no matter where it led him. Doris insisted that he should. She had a sturdy soul that seldom leaned and never thought of clinging. She could laugh, a deep-throated, chuckling laugh, and sometimes, quite unexpectedly, she could go about the house singing. And if now and then she rebelled with a sudden furious resentment against the long night that shut her in, that, as she said herself, was just like a small black cloud passing swiftly across the face of the sun, Hollister began at the bottom of the chute, as he was beginning at the bottom of his fortune, to build up again. Where it was broken, he repaired it. Where it had collapsed under the weight of snow or of fallen trees, he put in a new section. His hands grew calloused, and the muscles of his back and shoulders grew tough with swinging an axe, lugging and lifting heavy poles. The sun burned to the scar tissue of his face to a brown, like that on the faces of his two men, who were piling the cut-seeder in long ricks among the green timber, while he got the chute ready to slide the red, pungent-smelling blocks downhill. Sometimes, on a clear still day when he was at the house, he would hear old Bill Hayes' voice, far off in the woods, very faint in the distance, shrilling the fallers' warning, Timber! Close on that he would hear a thud that sent tremors running through the earth, and there would follow the echo of crashing boughs all along the slope. Once, he said lightly to Doris, every time one of those big trees goes down like that, it means a hundred dollars' worth of timber on the ground. And she laughed back, We make money when cedar goes up and we make money when cedar comes down. Very nice! May passed and June came to an end. With it Hollister also came to an end of his ready money. It had all gone into tools, food, wages, all his available capital sunk in the venture. But the chute was ready to run bolts. They poured down in a stream till the river surface within the boomsticks was a brick-colored jam that gave off a pleasant aromatic smell. Then Hollister and his two men cast off the boom, let the current sweep it down to Carr's new shingle mill below the big bend. When the bolts were tallied in, Hollister got a check. He sat with pad and pencil, figuring for half an hour after he came home, after his men had each shouldered a fifty-pound pack of supplies and gone back up the hill. He gave over figuring at last. The thing was profitable. More so than he had reckoned. He got up and went into the kitchen where Doris was rolling pie crust on a board. Where off, he said, putting an arm around her. If we can keep this up all summer, I'll build a new wing on the house and bring you in a piano to play with this winter. Hollister himself now took a hand at cutting cedar. Each morning he climbed that steep slope to the works, and each night he came trudging down, and morning and night he would pass at a point where the trail led along the rim of a sheer cliff to look down on the valley below, to look down on the roof of his own house and upon Bland's house farther on. Sometimes smoke streamed blue from Bland's stovepipe. Sometimes it stood dead, a black cylinder above the shake roof. Sometimes one figure and sometimes two moved about the place. More often no one stirred. But that was as near as the Bland's had come in eight weeks. Hollister had an unspoken hope that they would remain distant, no matter that Doris occasionally wondered about this woman who lived around the river's curve, what she was like and when she would meet her. Hollister knew nothing of Bland, nothing of Myra. He did not wish to know. It did not matter in the least, he assured himself. He was dead and Myra was married. All that old past was as a book long out of print. It could not possibly matter if by chance they came in contact. Yet he had a vague feeling that it did matter, a feeling for which he could not account. He was not afraid. He had no reason to be afraid. Nevertheless he gazed sometimes from the cliff top down on the cabin where Bland and Myra lived, and something stirred so that he wished them gone. He came off the hill one evening in the middle of June to find a canoe drawn up on the beach, two side washes puttering over a campfire, and a tall, wiry, slender, fair-haired man who might have been anywhere between twenty-seven and thirty-five sitting in the front doorway talking to Doris. Hollister noted the expression on the man's face when their eyes met, but he did not mind. He was used to that. He was becoming indifferent to what people thought of his face because what they thought no longer had power to hurt him, to make him feel that sickening depression, to make him feel himself kin to those sinners who were thrust into the outer darkness. Moreover he knew that some people grew used to the wreckage of his features. That had been his experience with his two woodsmen. At first they looked at him as scant. Now they seemed as indifferent to his disfigurement as they were to the ragged knots and old fire-scars on the trees they felled. Anyway it did not matter to Hollister. But this fair-haired man went on talking, looking all the while at Hollister, and his look seemed to say, I know your face is a hell of a sight, but I am not disturbed by it, and I don't want you to think I am disturbed. Behind the ragged mask of his scars Hollister smiled at this fancy. Nevertheless he accepted his interpretation of that look as a reality and found himself moved by a curious feeling of friendliness for this stranger whom he had never seen before, whom he might never see again, for that was the way of casual travelers up and down the toba. They came out of nowhere, going up river or down, stopped perhaps to smoke a pipe to exchange a few words before they moved on into the hushed places that swallowed them up. The man's name was Lawan. He was bound upstream after Grizzly Bear. I was told of an Englishman named Bland who is quite a hunter. I stopped in here thinking this was his place and that I might get him to go on with me, he said to Hollister. That's Bland's place down there, Hollister explained. So Mrs. Hollister was just telling me. There didn't seem to be anybody about when I passed. It doesn't matter much anyway, he laughed. The farther I get into this country, the less keen I am to hunt. It's good enough just to loaf around and look at. Lawan had supper with him. Hollister asked him not only as a matter of courtesy, but with a genuine feeling that he wanted this man to break bread with him. He could not quite understand that sudden warmth of feeling for a stranger. He had never in his life been given to impulsive friendliness. The last five years had not strengthened his belief in friendships. He had seen too many fail under stress. But he liked this man. They sat outside after supper and Doris joined them there. Lawan was not targeted. He was given to long silences in which he sat with eyes fixed on river or valley or the hills above in mute appreciation. Do you people realize what a panoramic beauty is here before your eyes all the time? He asked once. It's like a fairy land to me. I must see a lot of this country before I go away. And I came here quite by chance. Which is, after all, the way nearly everything happens, Doris said. Oh, Lawan turned to her. You think so? You don't perceive the great design, the perfect plan, and all that we do? Do you, she asked. He laughed. No. If I did, I should sit down with folded hands, knowing myself helpless in the inexorable grip of destiny. I should always be perfectly passive. If you tried to do that, you could not remain passive long. The unrecognable element of chance would still operate to make you do this or that. You couldn't escape it. Nobody can. Then you don't believe there is a destiny that shapes our ends? Rough hue them, how we will? Lawan said lightly. Doris shook her head. Destiny is only a word. It means one thing to one person, something else to another. It's too abstract to account for anything. Life's a puzzle no one ever solves, because the factors are never constant. When we try to account for this and that, we find no fixed law, nothing but what is subject to the element of chance, which can be used in the future. Most of us, at different times, hold our own fate, temporarily at least, in our own hands, without knowing it. And some insignificant happening does this or that to us. If we had done something else, it would all be different. You're wife, Lawan observed to Hollister, is quite a philosopher. Hollister nodded. He was thinking of this factor of chance. He himself had been a victim of it. He had profited by it. And he wondered what vagaries of chance were still to bestow happiness or inflict suffering upon him, in spite of his most earnest effort to achieve mastery over circumstances. He felt laterally that he had a firm grip on the immediate effect of chance. The immediate future? Yet who could tell? Dusk began to close on the valley, while the far high crests of the mountains still gleamed under a crimson sky. Deep shadows filled every gorge and canyon, crept up and up, until only the snowy crests glimmered in the night, ghostly silver, against a sky speckled with stars. The valley itself was shrouded under the dark blanket of the night, through which the river murmured unseen and distant waterfalls roared over rocky precipices. The two Indians attending Lawan squatted within the red glow of their fire on the bank. Downstream, a yellow spot broke out like a candle flame against black velvet. There is someone at Bland's now, Hollister said. That's their window light, eh? Lawan commented. I may go down and see him in the morning. I am not very keen on two or three weeks alone in these tremendous silences. This valley at night now, it's awesome. And those side washes are like dumb men. You wouldn't go bear hunting, I suppose. There was a peculiar gratification to Hollister in being asked, but he had too much work on hand. Neither did he wish to leave Doris. Not because it might be difficult for her to manage alone. It was simply an inner reluctance to be separated from her. She was becoming a vital part of him. To go away from her for days or weeks, except under the spur of some compelling necessity, was a prospect that did not please him. That which had first drawn them together grew stronger. Love, the mysterious fascination of sex, the perfect accord of the well-mated, whatever it was, grew stronger. The world outside of them held less and less significance. Sometimes they talked of that, wondered about it. Wondered if it were natural for a man and a woman to become so completely absorbed in each other to attain that singular oneness. They wondered if it would last. But whether it should prove lasting or not, they had it now, and it was sufficient. Lawan went down to Bland's in the morning. He was still there when Hollister climbed the hill to his work. Before evening he had something else to think about besides Lawan. A trifle, but one of those trifles that recurs with irritating persistence, no matter how often the mind gives it dismissal. About ten o'clock that morning a lager came up to the works on the hill. Can you use another man? he asked bluntly. I want to work. Hollister engaged him. By his dress, by his manner, Hollister knew that he was at home in the woods. He was young, sturdily built, handsome in a swarthy way. There was about him a slightly familiar air. Hollister thought he might have seen him at the steamer landing, or at cars. He mentioned that. I have been working there, the man replied. Working on the boom. He was frank enough about it. He wanted money, a state. He believed he could make more cutting shingle boats by the cord. This was true. Hollister's men were making top wages. The cedar stood on good ground. It was big, clean timber, easy to work. I'll be on the job to-morrow, he said, after they had talked it over. Take me this afternoon to get my outfit packed up here. Hollister was haunted by the man's face at odd times during the day. Not until he was half-way home, until he came out on that ledge from whence he could look, and always did look with a slight sense of irritation, down on Bland's cabin as well as his own, did he recall clearly where and when he had seen Charlie Mills? Mills was the man who sat looking at Myra across the table that winter morning when Hollister was suffering from the brief madness which brought him to Bland's cabin with a desperate project in his disordered mind. Well, what of it, Hollister asked himself. It was nothing to him. He was a disinterested bystander now. But looking down on Bland's cabin, he reflected that his irritation was rooted in the fact that he did not want to be a bystander. He desired to eliminate Myra Bland and all that pertained to her, from even casual contact with him. It seemed absurd that he should feel himself to be in danger. But he had a dim sense of danger, and instead of the aloofness which he desired, he seemed to see vague threads drawing himself and Doris and Myra Bland and this man Mills closer and closer together to what end or purpose he could not tell. For a minute Hollister was tempted to turn the man away when he went back up there in the morning. But that, he concluded with a shrug of his shoulders, was carrying a mere fancy too far. It did not therefore turn his thoughts into a more placid channel to find, when he reached the house, Myra sitting in the kitchen, talking to Doris. Yet it was no great surprise. He had expected this, looked forward to it with an uneasy sense of the inevitability. Nothing could have been more commonplace, more uneventful than that meeting. Doris introduced her husband. They were all at their ease. Myra glanced once at his face and thereafter looked away. But her flow of small talk, the conversational stop-gap of the woman accustomed to social amenities, went on placidly. They were strangers meeting for the first time in a strange land. Bland had gone upriver with Luan. Jim loves to hunt, Myra said with a short laugh. It was the first and nearly the last mention of her husband she made that evening. Hollister went out to wash himself in a basin that stood on a bench by the back door. He felt a relief. He had come through the first test casually enough. A slightly sardonic grimace wrinkled his tight-lipped mouth. There was a grim sort of humor in the situation. Those three, whose lives had got involved in such a tangle, foregathered under the same roof in that lonely valley, each more or less a victim of uncomprehended forces both within and exterior to themselves. Yet it was simple enough. Each, in common with all humanity, pursued the elusive shadow of happiness. The diverging paths along which they pursued it had brought them to this common point. Hollister soaped and scrubbed to clean his hands and face of the sweat and dirt of his day's labor. Above the washbench Myra's face, delicately pink and white and framed by her hair that was the color of strained honey, looked down at him through an open window. Her blue eyes rested on him, searchingly, he thought, with a curious appraisal, as if he were something to be noted and weighed and measured by the yardstick of her estimation of men. If she only knew, Hollister reflected sardonically, with his face buried in the towel, what a complete and intimate knowledge she had of him. Looking up suddenly, his eyes met hers fixed unwaveringly upon him, and for an instant his heart stood still with the reasonless conviction that she did know, she must know, that she could not escape knowing. There was a quality of awareness in her steady gaze that terrified him for a moment by its implication, which made him feel as if he stood over a powder magazine and that she held the detonator in her hand. But immediately he perceived the absurdity of his momentary panic. Myra turned her head to speak to Doris. She smiled, the old dimpling smile which gave him a strange feeling to see again. Certainly his imagination was playing him tricks. How could she know? And what would she care if she did know, so long as he made no claims, so long as he let the dead past lie in its grave? For Myra was as deeply concerned to have done with their old life as he. He rested upon that assumption and went into the house and sat down to his supper. Later, toward sundown, Myra went home. Hollister watched her vanish among the thickets, thinking that she too had changed as greatly as himself. She had been timid once, reluctant to stay alone overnight in a house with telephones and servants on a street brilliantly lighted. Now she could apparently face the loneliness of those solitudes without uneasiness. But war and the aftermath of war had taught Hollister that man adapts himself to necessity when he must, and he suspected that women were not greatly different. He understood that, after all, he had never really known Myra any more than she had known him. Externally they had achieved knowledge of each other through sight, speech, physical contact, comprehension of each other's habits. But their real selves, the essence of their being, the shadowy inner self, where motives and passions took form and gathered force until they were translated for good or evil into forthright action, these they had not known at all. At any rate he perceived that Myra could calmly enough face the prospect of being alone. Hollister cast his eye up to where the cedars towered, a green mass on the slope above the cliff. He thought of Charlie Mills and wondered if, after all, she would be alone. He felt ashamed of that thought as soon as it formed in his mind, and being ashamed, he saw and understood that he still harbored a little bitterness against Myra. He did not wish to bestow bitterness or any other emotion upon her. He wanted her to remain completely outside the scope of his feelings. He would have to try, he perceived, to see if he could be perceived, to cultivate a complete indifference to her, to what she did, to where she went, to insulate himself completely against her, because he was committed to other enterprises, and chiefly because, as he said to himself, he would not exchange a single brown strand of Doris Cleveland's hair for all of Myra's body, even if he had that choice. The moon stole up from behind the coast range, after they had gone to bed. Its pale beams laid a silver square upon the dusky floor of their room. Doris reached with one arm and drew his face close up to hers. Are you happy? she demanded, with a fierce intensity. Don't you ever wish you had a wife who could see? Aren't you ever sorry? Doris, Doris! he chided gently. What in the world put such a notion as that into your head? She lay thoughtful for a minute. Sometimes I wonder, she said at last, sometimes I feel that I must reassure myself that you are contented with me. When we come in contact with a woman like Mrs. Bland, for instance, tell me, Bob, is she pretty? Yes, he said, very. Fair or dark? Fair skinned. She has blonde hair and dark blue eyes, almost purple. She is about your height, about the same figure. Why so curious? I just wondered. I like her very much, Doris said, with some slight emphasis on the last two words. She is a very interesting talker. I noticed that, Hollister observed, dryly. She spoke charmingly of the weather and the local scenery and the mosquitoes. Doris laughed. A woman always falls back on those conversational staples with a strange man. That's just the preliminary skirmishing. But she was here all afternoon, and we didn't spend five hours talking about the weather. What did you talk about then? Hollister asked, curiously. Men and women and money, mostly, Doris replied. If one may judge a woman by the impressionistic method, I should say that Mrs. Bland would be very attractive to men. It was on the tip of Hollister's tongue to say, She is. Instead, he murmured, Is that why you were doubting me? Think I'm apt to fall in love with this charming lady? No, Doris said thoughtfully. It wasn't anything concrete like that. It's a feeling, a mood, I suppose. And it's silly for me to say things like that. If you grow sorry you married me, if you fall in love with another woman, I'll know it without being told. She pinched his cheek playfully and lay silent beside him. Hollister watched the slow shift of the moon-beams across the foot of the bed, thinking, his mind darting sketchily from incident to incident of the past, peering curiously into the misty future. Until at last he grew aware by her drooped eyelashes and regular breathing that Doris was asleep. He grew drowsy himself. His eyelids grew heavy. Presently he was asleep also and dreaming of a fantastic struggle in which Myra Bland transformed into a vulture-like creature with a fierce, beaked face and enormous strength, tore him relentlessly from the arms of his wife.