“Ah,” he said.  “Is Charlie Mills devoid of understanding, or Lawanne?”

She looked at him fixedly for a second.

“You are very acute,” she observed.  “Some time I may tell you about Charlie Mills.  Certainly I’d never reveal my soul to Archie Lawanne.  He’d dissect it and gloat over it and analyze it in his next book.  And neither of them will ever be quite able to abandon the idea that a creature like me is something to be pursued and captured.”

She turned away.  Hollister saw her go into the house.  He could picture the two of them there together.  Doris and Myra bending over young Robert, who was now beginning to lie with wide-open blue eyes, in which the light of innocent wonder, of curiosity, began to show, to wave his arms and grope with tiny, uncertain hands.  Those two women together hovering over his child,—­one who was still legally his wife, the other his wife in reality.

How the world would prick up its donkey ears—­even the little cosmos of the Toba valley—­if it knew.  But of course no one would ever know.  Hollister was far beyond any contrition for his acts.  The end justified the means,—­doubly justified it in his case, for he had had no choice.  Harsh material factors had rendered the decision for him.  Hollister was willing now to abide by that decision.  To him it seemed good, the only good thing he had laid hold of since the war had turned his world upside down and inside out.

He went about his work mechanically, deep in thought.  His mind persisted in measuring, weighing, turning over all that Myra had said, while his arms pushed and heaved and twisted the pike pole, thrusting the blocks of cedar into an orderly arrangement within the boom-sticks.

CHAPTER XVI

Hollister had gone down to Lawanne’s with a haunch of venison.  This neighborly custom of sharing meat, when it is to be had for the killing, prevails in the northern woods.  Officially there were game seasons to be observed.  But the close season for deer sat lightly on men in a region three days’ journey from a butcher shop.  They shot deer when they needed meat.  The law of necessity overrode the legal pronouncement in this matter of food, as it often did in other ways.

While Hollister, having duly pleased Lawanne’s China-boy by this quarter of venison, sat talking to Lawanne, Charlie Mills came in to return a book.

“Did you get anything out of that?” Lawanne asked.

“I got a bad taste in my mouth,” Mills replied.  “It reads like things that happen.  It’s too blamed true to be pleasant.  A man shouldn’t be like that, he shouldn’t think too much—­especially about other people.  He ought to be like a bull—­go around snorting and pawing up the earth till he gets his belly full, and then lie down and chew his cud.”

Lawanne smiled.