He gained the porch and turned his glasses on the canoe.  He recognized it as Chief Aleck’s dugout from a rancherie near the mouth of the river, a cedar craft with carved and brilliantly painted high-curving ends.  Four Siwash paddlers manned it.  Amidships two women sat.  One was the elderly housekeeper who had been with them since their boy’s birth.  The other was Doris, with the baby in her lap.

A strange panic seized Hollister, the alarm of the unexpected, a reluctance to face the crisis which he had not expected to face for another twenty-four hours.  He stepped down off the porch, walked rapidly away toward the chute mouth, crossed that and climbed to a dead fir standing on the point of rocks beyond.  From there he watched until the canoe thrust its gaudy prow against the bank before his house, until he saw the women ashore and their baggage stacked on the bank, until the canoe backed into the current and shot away downstream, until Doris with the baby in her arms—­after a lingering look about, a slow turning of her head—­followed the other woman up the porch steps and disappeared within.  Then Hollister moved back over the little ridge into the shadow of a clump of young firs and sat down on a flat rock with his head in his hands, to fight it out with himself.

To stake everything on a single throw of the dice,—­and the dice loaded against him!  If peace had its victories no less than war, it had also crushing defeats.  Hollister felt that for him the final, most complete debacle was at hand.

He lifted his head at a distant call, a high, clear, sweet “Oh-hoo-oo-oo” repeated twice.  That was Doris calling him as she always called him, if she wanted him and thought he was within range of her voice.  Well, he would go down presently.

He looked up the hill.  He could see through a fringe of green timber to a place where the leaves and foliage were all rusty-red from the scorching of the fire.  Past that opened the burned ground,—­charred, black, desolate.  Presently life would be like that to him; all the years that stretched ahead of him might be as barren as that black waste.

His mind projected itself into the future from every possible angle.  He did not belittle Doris’ love, her sympathy, her understanding.  He even conceded that no matter how his disfigurement affected her, she would try to put that behind her, she would make an effort to cling to him.  And Hollister could see the deadly impact of his grotesque features upon her delicate sensibility, day after day, month after month, until she could no longer endure it, or him.  She loved the beautiful too well, perfection of line and form and color.  Restored sight must alter her world; her conception of him must become transformed.  The magic of the unseen would lose its glamor.  All that he meant to her as a man, a lover, a husband, must be stripped bare of the kindly illusion that blindness had wrapped him in.  Even if she did not shrink in amazed reluctance at first sight, she must soon cease to have for him any keener emotion than a tolerant pity.  And Hollister did not want that.  He would not take it as a gift—­not from Doris; he could not.