Hollister’s uneasiness doubled.  There was a power for mischief in that situation when he thought of Jim Bland scowling from his hiding place in the willows.  He set out along the path.

But by the time he came abreast of Lawanne’s cabin he had begun to feel himself acting under a mistaken impulse, an exaggerated conclusion.  He began to doubt the validity of that intuition which pointed a warning finger at Bland and Bland’s suspicions.  In attempting to forestall what might come of Bland’s stewing in the juice of a groundless jealousy, he could easily precipitate something that would perhaps be best avoided by ignoring it.  He stood, when he thought of it, in rather a delicate position himself.

So he turned into Lawanne’s.  He found Archie sitting on the shady side of his cabin, and they fell into talk.

CHAPTER XXI

Lawanne had been thumping a typewriter for hours, he told Hollister, until his fingers ached.  He was almost through with this task, which for months had been a curious mixture of drudgery and pleasure.

“I’m through all but typing the last two chapters.  It’s been a fierce grind.”

“You’ll be on the wing soon, then”, Hollister observed.

“That depends,” Lawanne said absently.

But he did not explain upon what it depended.  He leaned back in his chair, a cigarette in his fingers, and stared for a minute up at the trees.

“I’ll get the rest of it pounded out in two or three days,” he came back to his book, “then I think I’ll go up the Little Toba, just to see what that wild-looking gorge is like twenty or thirty miles back.  Better come along with me.  Do you good.  You’re sort of at a standstill.”

“I can’t,” Hollister explained.  “Doris is coming back next week.”

Lawanne looked at him intently.

“Eyes all right?”

“I don’t know.  I suppose so,” Hollister replied.  “She didn’t say.  She merely wrote that she was coming on the Wednesday steamer.”

“Well, that’ll be all right too,” Lawanne said.  “You’ll get over being so down in the mouth then.”

“Maybe,” Hollister muttered.

“Of course.  What rot to think anything else.”

Hollister did not contradict this.  It was what he wanted to feel and think, and could not.  He understood that Lawanne, whatever his thought, was trying to hearten him.  And he appreciated that, although he knew the matter rested in his wife’s own hands and nothing any one else could do or say had the slightest bearing on it.  His meeting with Doris would be either an ordeal or a triumph.

“I might get Charlie Mills to go with me,” Lawanne pursued his own thought.

“Mills didn’t go out with the rest of the crew?” Hollister asked.  He knew, of course, that Charlie Mills was still in the Toba valley because he had seen him with his own eyes not more than half an hour earlier.  His question, however, was not altogether idle.  He wondered whether Mills had gone out and come back, or if he had not left at all.