She was his wife.  She had ceased to care for him.  She had given herself to another man.  No matter, she was still his.  Legally, beyond any shadow of a doubt.  The law and the Church had joined them together.  Neither man nor God had put them asunder, and the law had not released them from their bonds.  Then, if he wanted her, why should he not take her?

Watching the house day after day, hours at a stretch, Hollister brooded over this new madness.  But it no longer seemed to him madness.  It came to seem fit and proper, a matter well within his rights.  He postulated a hypothetical situation; if he, officially dead, resurrected himself and claimed her, who was there to say him nay if he demanded and exacted a literal fulfilment of her solemn covenant to “love, honor, and obey?” She herself?  Hollister snapped his fingers.  The man she lived with?  Hollister dismissed him with an impatient gesture.

The purely animal man, which is never wholly extinguished, which merely lurks unsuspected under centuries of cultural veneer to rise lustily when slowly acquired moralities shrivel in the crucible of passion, now began to actuate Hollister with a strange cunning, a ferocity of anticipation.  He would repossess himself of this fair-haired woman.  And she should have no voice in the matter.  Very well.  But how?

That was simplicity itself.  No one knew such a man as he was in the Toba country.  All these folk in the valley below went about unconscious of his existence in that cabin well hidden among the great cedars.  All he required was the conjunction of a certain kind of weather and the absence of the man.  Falling snow to cover the single track that should lead to this cabin, to bury the dual footprints that should lead away.  The absence of the man was to avoid a clash:  not because Hollister feared that; simply because in his mind the man was not a factor to be considered, except as the possibility of his interference should be most easily avoided.  Because if he did interfere he might have to kill him, and that was a complication he did not wish to invoke.  Somehow he felt no grudge against this man, no jealousy.

The man’s absence was a common occurrence.  Hollister had observed that nearly every day he was abroad in the woods with a gun.  For the obscuring storm, the obliterating snowfall, he would have to wait.

All this, every possible contingency, took form as potential action in his obsessed mind,—­with neither perception nor consideration of consequences.  The consummation alone urged him.  The most primitive instinct swayed him.  The ultimate consequences were as nothing.

This plan was scarcely formed in Hollister’s brain before he modified it.  He could not wait for that happy conjunction of circumstances which favored action.  He must create his own circumstances.  This he readily perceived as the better plan.  When he sought a way it was revealed to him.