Hollister had wandered alone in those hushed places, sleeping with his face to the stars, and he had not been lonely.  He wondered if he could do that again.

He sat nursing those visions, his imagination pleasantly quickened by them, as a man sometimes finds ease from care in dreaming of old days that were full of gladness.  He was still deep in the past when he went to bed.  And when he arose in the morning, the far places of the B.C. coast beckoned with a more imperious gesture, as if in those solitudes lay a sure refuge for such as he.

And why not, he asked himself?  Here in this pushing seaport town, among the hundred and fifty thousand souls eagerly intent upon their business of gaining a livelihood, of making money, there was not one who cared whether he came or went, whether he was glad or sad, whether he had a song on his lips or the blackest gloom in his heart.  He had done his bit as a man should.  In the doing he had been broken in a cruel variety of ways.  The war machine had chewed him up and spat him out on the scrap heap.  None of these hale, unmanned citizens cared to be annoyed by the sight of him, of what had happened to him.

And he could not much longer endure this unapproachableness, this palpable shrinking.  He could not much longer bear to be in the midst of light and laughter, of friendly talk and smiling faces, and be utterly shut off from any part in it all.  He was in as evil case as a man chained to a rock and dying of thirst, while a clear, cold stream flowed at his feet.  Whether he walked the streets or sat brooding in his room, he could not escape the embittered consciousness that all about him there was a great plenty of kindly fellowship which he craved and which he could not share because war had stamped its iron heel upon his face.

Yes, the more he thought about it, the more he craved the refuge of silence and solitude.  If he could not escape from himself, at least he could withdraw from this feast at which he was a death’s-head.  And so he began to cast about him for a place to go, for an objective, for something that should save him from being purely aimless.  In the end it came into his mind that he might go back and look over this timber in the valley of the Toba River, this last vestige of his fortune which remained to him by pure chance.  He had bought it as an investment for surplus funds.  He had never even seen it.  He would have smiled, if his face had been capable of smiling, at the irony of his owning ten million feet of Douglas fir and red cedar—­material to build a thousand cottages—­he who no longer owned a roof to shelter his head, whose cash resources were only a few hundred dollars.

Whether Lewis sold the timber or not, he would go and see it.  For a few weeks he would be alone in the woods, where men would not eye him askance, nor dainty, fresh-faced women shrink from him as they passed.

CHAPTER IV