A few hundred yards above the eastern limit of the flat where his canoe was cached, there jutted into the river a low, rocky point.  From the river back to the woods the wind had swept the bald surface of this little ridge clear of snow.  He could go down over those sloping rocks to the glare ice of the river.  He could go and come and leave no footprints, no trace.  There would be no mark to betray, unless a searcher ranged well up the hillside and so came upon his track.

And if a man, searching for this woman, bore up the mountain side and came at last to the log cabin—­what would he find?  Only another man who had arisen after being dead and had returned to take possession of his own!

Hollister threw back his head and burst into sardonic laughter.  It pleased him, this devastating jest which he was about to perpetrate upon his wife and her lover.

From the seclusion of the timber behind this point of rocks he set himself to watch through his glasses the house down the river.  The second day of keeping this vigil he saw the man leave the place, gun in hand, cross on the river ice and vanish in the heavy timber of that wide bottom land.  Hollister did not know what business took him on these recurrent absences; hunting, he guessed, but he had noted that the man seldom returned before late in the afternoon, and sometimes not till dusk.

He waited impatiently for an hour.  Then he went down to the frozen river.  Twenty minutes’ rapid striding brought him to the door of the house.

The place was roughly built of split cedar.  A door and a window faced the river.  The window was uncurtained, a bald square of glass.  The sun had grown to some little strength.  The air that morning had softened to a balminess like spring.  Hollister had approached unseen over snow softened by this warmth until it lost its frosty crispness underfoot.  Now, through the uncurtained window, his gaze marked a section of the interior, and what he saw stayed the hand he lifted to rap on the door.

A man young, smooth-faced, dark almost to swarthiness, sat on a bench beside a table on which stood the uncleared litter of breakfast.  And Myra sat also at the table with one corner of it between them.  She leaned an elbow on the board and nursed her round chin in the palm of that hand, while the other was imprisoned between the two clasped hands of the man.  He was bending over this caught hand, leaning eagerly toward her, speaking rapidly.

Myra sat listening.  Her lips were slightly parted.  Her eyelids drooped.  Her breast rose and fell in a slow, rhythmic heave.  Otherwise she was motionless and faintly smiling, as if she were given up to some blissful languor.  And the man spoke on, caressing her imprisoned hand, stroking it, looking at her with the glow of conquest in his hot eyes.

Hollister leaned on the muzzle of his grounded rifle, staring through the window.  He could see their lips move.  He could hear faintly the tense murmur of the man’s voice.  He saw the man bend his head and press a kiss on the imprisoned hand.