The steamer backed away from a float of which Hollister was the sole occupant.  She swung in a wide semicircle, pointed her bluff bow down the Inlet, and presently all that he could see of her was the tip of her masts over a jutting point and the top of her red funnel trailing a pennant of smoke, black against a gray sky.

Hollister stood looking about him.  He was clad like a logger, in thick mackinaws and heavy boots, and the texture of his garments was appropriate to the temperature, the weather.  He seemed to have stepped into another latitude,—­which in truth he had, for the head of Toba Inlet lies a hundred and fifty miles northwest of Vancouver, and the thrust of that narrow arm of the sea carries it thirty miles into the glacial fastnesses of the Coast Range.  The rain that drenched Vancouver became snow here.  The lower slopes were green with timber which concealed the drifts that covered the rocky soil.  A little higher certain clear spaces bared the whiteness, and all the tree tops, the drooping boughs, carried a burden of clinging snow.  Higher still lifted grim peaks capped with massive snow banks that even midsummer heat could never quite dispel.  But these upper heights were now hidden in clouds and wraiths of frost fog, their faces shrouded in this winter veil which—­except for rare bursts of sunshine or sweeping northwest wind—­would not be lifted till the vernal equinox.

It was very cold and very still, as if winter had laid a compelling silence on everything in the land.  Except the faint slapping of little waves against the ice-encrusted, rocky shore, and the distant, harsh voices of some wheeling gulls, there was no sound or echo of a sound, as he stood listening.

Yet Hollister was not oppressed by this chill solitude.  In that setting, silence was appropriate.  It was merely unexpected.  For so long Hollister had lived amid blaring noises, the mechanical thunder and lightning of the war, the rumble of industry, the shuffle and clatter of crowds, he had forgotten what it was like to be alone,—­and in the most crowded places he had suffered the most grievous loneliness.  For the time being he was unconscious of his mutilation, since there was no one by to remind him by look or act.  He was only aware of a curious interest in what he saw, a subdued wonder at the majestic beauty and the profound hush, as if he had been suddenly transferred from a place where life was maddeningly, distractingly clamorous to a spot where life was mute.

The head of Toba is neither a harbor nor a bay.  One turns out of the island-studded Gulf of Georgia into an arm of the sea a mile in breadth.  The cliffs and mountains grow higher, more precipitous mile by mile, until the Inlet becomes a chasm with the salt water for its floor.  On past frowning points, around slow curves, boring farther and farther into the mainland through a passage like a huge tunnel, the roof of which has been blown away.  Then suddenly there is an end to the sea.  Abruptly, a bend is turned, and great mountains bar the way, peaks that lift from tidewater to treeless heights, formidable ranges bearing upon their rocky shoulders the lingering remains of a glacial age.  The Inlet ends there, the seaway barred by these frowning declivities.