Both Lawanne and Hollister were familiar with death, death by the sniper’s bullet, by machine gun and shell, by bayonet and poison gas.  This was different.  It was not war.  It was something that touched them more deeply than any of the killing they had seen in war.  The low hum of foraging bees about the door, the foxglove swaying in summer airs, the hushed peace of the distant hills and nearer forest,—­this was no background for violence and death.  It shocked them, chilled and depressed them.  Hollister felt a new sort of ache creep into his heart.  His eyes stung.  And Lawanne suddenly turned away with a choking sound muffled in his throat.

They went out into the sunlight.  Away down the valley a donkey engine tooted and whirred.  High above them an eagle soared, wheeling in great circles about his aerial business.  The river whispered in its channel.  The blue jays scolded harshly among the thickets, and a meadow lark perched on a black stump near at hand, warbling his throaty song.  Life went on as before.

“What’ll we do?” Lawanne said presently.  “We’ve got to do something.”

“There’s not much we can do, now,” Hollister replied.  “You go down to Carr’s and tell them to send a man with a gas-boat out to Powell River with word to the Provincial Police of what has happened.  I’ll keep watch until you come back.”

In an hour Lawanne returned with two men from the settlement.  They laid the bodies out decently on a bed and left the two men to keep vigil until sundown, when Hollister and Lawanne would take up that melancholy watch for the night.

“I wonder,” Hollister said to Lawanne, as they walked home, “what’ll become of Bland?  Will he give himself up, or will they have to hunt him?”

“Neither, I think,” Lawanne answered slowly.  “A man like that is certainly not himself when he breaks out like that.  Bland has the cultural inheritance of his kind.  You could see that he was stupefied by what he had done.  When he rushed away into the woods I think it was just beginning to dawn on him, to fill him with horror.  He’ll never come back.  You’ll see.  He’ll either go mad, or in the reaction of feeling he’ll kill himself.”

They went into Lawanne’s cabin.  Lawanne brought out a bottle of brandy.  He looked at the shaking of his fingers as he poured for Hollister and smiled wanly.

“I don’t go much on Dutch courage, but I sure need it now,” he said.  “Isn’t it queer the way death affects you under different circumstances?  I didn’t see such an awful lot of action in France, but once a raiding party of Heinies tumbled into our trench, and there was a deuce of a ruction for a few minutes.  Between bayonets and bombs we cleaned the lot, a couple of dozen of them.  After it was all over, we stacked them up like cordwood—­with about as much compunction.  It seemed perfectly natural.  There was nothing but the excitement of winning a scrap.  The half-dozen of our own fellows that went west in the show—­they didn’t matter either.  It was part of the game.  You expected it.  It didn’t surprise you.  It didn’t shock you.  Yet death is death.  Only, there, it seemed a natural consequence.  And here it—­well, I don’t know why, but it gives me a horror.”