“No.  He turned back at the last minute, for some reason.  He’s camping in one of the old T. & T. shacks below Carr’s.  I rather like Mills.  He’s interesting when you can get him to loosen up.  Queer, tense sort of beggar at times, though.  A good man to go into the hills with—­to go anywhere with—­although he might not show to great advantage in a drawing-room.  By Jove, you know, Hollister, it doesn’t seem like nine months since I settled down in this cabin.  Now I’m about due to go back to the treadmill.”

“Do you have to?” Hollister asked.  “If this satisfies you, why not come back again after you’ve had a fling at the outside?”

“I can’t, very well,” Lawanne for the first time touched on his personal affairs, that life which he led somewhere beyond the Toba.  “I have obligations to fulfill.  I’ve been playing truant, after a fashion.  I’ve stolen a year to do something I wanted to do.  Now it’s done and I’m not even sure it’s well done—­but whether it’s well done or not, it’s finished, and I have to go back and get into the collar and make money to supply other people’s needs.  Unless,” he shrugged his shoulders, “I break loose properly.  This country has that sort of effect on a man.  It makes him want to break loose from everything that seems to hamper and restrain him.  It doesn’t take a man long to shed his skin in surroundings like these.  Oh, well, whether I come back or not, I’ll be all the same a hundred years from now.”

A rifle shot cut sharp into the silence that followed Lawanne’s last words.  That was nothing uncommon in the valley, where the crack of a gun meant only that some one was hunting.  But upon this report there followed, clear and shrill, a scream, the high-pitched cry that only a frightened woman can utter.  This was broken into and cut short by a second whip-like report.  And both shots and scream came from the direction of Bland’s house.

Hollister rose.  He looked at Lawanne and Lawanne looked at him.  Across Hollister’s brain flashed a thought that would scarcely have been born if he had not seen Bland spying from the willows, if he had not seen Charlie Mills approaching that house, if he had not been aware of all the wheels within wheels, the complicated coil of longings and desires and smoldering passions in which these people were involved.  He looked at Lawanne, and he could not read what passed in his mind.  But when he turned and set out on a run for that shake cabin four hundred yards downstream, Lawanne followed at his heels.

They were winded, and their pace had slowed to a hurried walk by the time they reached the cabin.  The door stood open.  There was no sound.  The house was as still as the surrounding woods when Hollister stepped across the threshold.

Bland stood just within the doorway, erect, his feet a little apart, like a man bracing himself against some shock.  He seemed frozen in this tense attitude, so that he did not alter the rigid line of his body or shift a single immobile muscle when Hollister and Lawanne stepped in.  His eyes turned sidewise in their sockets to rest briefly and blankly upon the intruders.  Then his gaze, a fixed gaze that suggested incredulous disbelief, went back to the body of his wife.