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.