Hollister and his men went, after the rain, up across that ravaged place, and when they came to the hollow where the great cedars and lesser fir had stood solemn and orderly in brown-trunked ranks, the rudest of the loggers grew silent, a little awed by the melancholy of the place, the bleakness, the utter ruin.  Where the good green forest had been, there was nothing but ashes and blackened stubs, stretches of bare rock and gravelly soil, an odor of charred wood.  There was no green blade, no living thing, in all that wide space, nothing but a few gaunt trunks stark in the open; blasted, sterile trunks standing like stripped masts on a derelict.

There was nothing left of the buildings except a pile of stone which had been the fireplace in the log house, and a little to one side the rusty, red skeleton of the mess-house stove.  They looked about curiously for a few minutes and went back to the valley.

At the house Hollister paid them off.  They went their way down to the steamer landing, eager for town after a long stretch in the woods.  The fire was only an exciting incident to them.  There were other camps, other jobs.

It was not even an exciting incident to Hollister.  Except for a little sadness at sight of that desolation where there had been so much beauty, he had neither been uplifted nor cast down.  He had been unmoved by the spectacular phases of the fire and he was still indifferent, even to the material loss it had inflicted on him.  He was not ruined.  He had the means to acquire more timber if it should be necessary.  But even if he had been ruined, it is doubtful if that fact would have weighed heavily upon him.  He was too keenly aware of a matter more vital to him than timber or money,—­a matter in which neither his money nor his timber counted one way or the other, and in which the human equation was everything.

The steamer that took out his men brought in a letter from his wife, which Lawanne sent up by his Chinese boy.  He had written to her the day before the fire broke out.  He could not recall precisely what he wrote, but he had tried to make clear to her what troubled him and why.  And her reply was brief, uncommonly brief for Doris, who had the faculty of expressing herself fully and freely.

Hollister laid the letter on the table.  The last line of that short missive kept repeating itself over and over, as if his brain were a phonograph which he had no power to stop playing: 

“I shall be home next week on the Wednesday boat.”

He got up and walked across the room, crossed and recrossed it half a dozen times.  And with each step those words thrust at him with deadly import.  He had deluded himself for a while.  He had thought he could beat the game in spite of his handicap.  He had presumed for a year to snap his fingers and laugh in the face of Fate, and Fate was to have the last laugh.

He seemed to have a fatalistic sureness about this.  He made a deliberate effort to reason about it, and though his reason assumed that when a woman like Doris Cleveland loved a man she did not love him for the unblemished contours of his face, there was still that deep-rooted, unreasoning feeling that however she might love him as the unseen, the ideal lover, she must inevitably shrink from the reality.