By the time he had established this, the clear, cold, sunny days came to an end.  Rain began to drizzle half-heartedly out of a murky sky.  Overnight the rain changed to snow, great flat flakes eddying soundlessly earthward in an atmosphere uncannily still.  For two days and a night this ballet of the snowflakes continued, until valley and slope and the high ridges were two feet deep in the downy white.

Then the storm which had been holding its breath broke with singular fury.  The frost bared its teeth.  The clouds still volleyed, but their discharge now filled the air with harsh, minute particles that stung bare skin like hot sand blown from a funnel.  The wind shrieked its whole tonal gamut among the trees.  It ripped the clinging masses of snow from drooping bough and exposed cliff and flung it here and there in swirling clouds.  And above the treble voices of the storm Hollister, from the warm security of the cabin, could hear the intermittent rumbling of terrific slides.  He could feel faint tremors in the earth from the shock of the arrested avalanche.

This elemental fury wore itself out at last.  The wind shrank to chill whisperings.  But the sky remained gray and lowering, and the great mountain ranges—­white again from foot to crest, save where the slides had left gashes of brown earth and bare granite—­were wrapped in winter mists, obscuring vapors that drifted and opened and closed again.  Hollister could stir abroad once more.  His business there was at an end.  But he considered with reluctance a return to Vancouver.  He was not happy.  He was merely passive.  It did not matter to anyone where he went.  It did not matter much to himself.  He was as well here as elsewhere until some substantial reason or some inner spur rowelled him into action.

Here there was no one to look askance at his disfigurement.  He was less alone than he would be in town, for he found a subtle sense of companionship in this solitude, as if the dusky woods and those grim, aloof peaks accepted him for what he was, discounting all that misfortune which had visited him in the train of war.  He knew that was sheer fantasy, but a fantasy that lent him comfort.

So he stayed.  He had plenty of material resources, a tight warm house, food.  He had reckoned on staying perhaps a month.  He found now that his estimate of a month’s staples was away over the mark.  He could subsist two months.  With care he could stretch it to three, for there was game on that southern slope,—­deer and the white mountain goat and birds.  He hunted the grouse at first, but that gave small return for ammunition expended, although the flesh of the blue and willow grouse is pleasant fare.  When the big storm abated he looked out one clear dawn and saw a buck deer standing in the open.  At a distance of sixty yards he shot the animal, not because he hankered to kill, but because he needed meat.  So under the cabin eaves he had quarters of venison, and he knew that he could go abroad on that snowy slope and stalk a deer with ease.  There was a soothing pleasantness about a great blaze crackling in the stone fireplace.  And he had Doris Cleveland’s books.