It took a minute or so of covering the willows before he located the cause of that movement of shrubbery.  But presently he made out the head and shoulders of a man.  And the man was Bland, doing precisely what Hollister was doing, looking through a pair of field glasses.  Hollister stood well back in the room.  He was certain Bland could not see that he himself was being watched.  In any case, Bland was not looking at Hollister’s house.  It was altogether likely that he had been doing so, that he had seen Myra sitting beside Hollister with her hand on his shoulder, bending forward to peer into Hollister’s face.  And Hollister could easily imagine what Bland might feel and think.  But he was steadily watching Myra.  Once he turned the glasses for a few seconds on Hollister’s house.  Then he swung them back to Myra, followed her persistently as she walked along the bank, on past Lawanne’s, on towards their own rude shack.  And at last Bland shifted.  One step backward, and the woods swallowed him.  One moment his shoulders and his head stood plain in every detail, even to the brickish redness of his skin and the curve of his fingers about the glasses; the next he was gone.

Hollister sat thinking.  He did not like the implications of that furtive observance.  A suspicious, watchful man is a jealous man.  And a jealous man who has nothing to do but watch and suspect and nurse that mean passion was a dangerous adjunct to an unhappy woman.

Hollister resolved to warn Myra, to emphasize that warning.  No one could tell of what a dull egotist like Bland might be capable.  The very fact of that furtive spying argued an ignoble streak in any man.  Bland was stiff-necked, vain, the sort to be brutal in retaliation for any fancied invasion of his rights.  And his conception of a husband’s rights were primitive in the extreme.  A wife was property, something that was his.  Hollister could imagine him roused to blind, blundering fury by the least suspicious action on Myra’s part.  Bland was the type that, once aroused, acts like an angry bull,—­with about as much regard or understanding of consequences.  Hollister had been measuring Bland for a year, and the last two or three weeks had given him the greatest opportunity to do so.  He had appraised the man as a dullard under his stupid, inflexible crust of egotism, despite his veneer of manners.  But even a clod may be dangerous.  A bomb is a harmless thing, so much inert metal and chemicals, until it is touched off; yet it needs only a touch to let loose its insensate, rending force.

Hollister rose to start down the path after Myra with the idea that he must somehow convey to her a more explicit warning.  As he stepped out on the porch, he looked downstream at Bland’s house and saw a man approach the place from one direction as Myra reached it from the other.  He caught up his glasses and brought them to bear.  The man was Mills,—­whom he had thought once more far from the Toba with the rest of his scattered crew.  Nevertheless this was Mills drawing near Bland’s house with quick strides.