CHAPTER VII

Hollister stowed his pack in the smoking room and stood outside by the rail, watching the Toba Valley fall astern, a green fissure in the white rampart of the Coast Range.  Chance, the inscrutable arbiter of human destinies, had directed him that morning to a man cutting wood on the bank of the river close by that cluster of houses where other men stirred about various tasks, where there must have been wives and mothers, for he saw a dozen children at play by a snow fort.

“Steamer?” the man answered Hollister’s inquiry.  “Say, if you want to catch her, you just about got time.  Two fellows from here left awhile ago.  If you hurry, maybe you can catch ’em.  If you catch ’em before they get out over the bar, they’ll give you a lift to the float.  If you don’t, you’re stuck for a week.  There’s only one rowboat down there.”

Hollister had caught them.

He took a last, thoughtful look.  Over the vessel’s bubbling wake he could see the whole head of the Inlet deep in winter snows,—­a white world, coldly aloof in its grandeur.  It was beautiful, full of the majesty of serene distances, of great heights.  It stood forth clothed with the dignity of massiveness, of permanence.  It was as it had been for centuries, calm and untroubled, unmoved by floods and slides, by fires and slow glacial changes.  Yes, it was beautiful and Hollister looked a long time, for he was not sure he would see it again.  He had a canoe and a tent cached in that silent valley, but for these alone he would not return.  Neither the ownership of that timber which he now esteemed of doubtful value nor the event of its sale would require his presence there.

He continued to stare with an absent look in his eyes until a crook in the Inlet hid those white escarpments and outstanding peaks, and the Inlet walls—­themselves lifting to dizzy heights that were shrouded in rolling mist—­marked the limit of his visual range.  The ship’s bell tinkled the noon hour.  A white-jacketed steward walked the decks, proclaiming to all and sundry that luncheon was being served.  Hollister made his way to the dining saloon.

The steamer was past Salmon Bay when he returned above decks to lean on the rail, watching the shores flit by, marking with a little wonder the rapid change in temperature, the growing mildness in the air as the steamer drew farther away from the gorge-like head of Toba with its aerial ice fields and snowy slopes.  Twenty miles below Salmon Bay the island-dotted area of the Gulf of Georgia began.  There a snowfall seldom endured long, and the teeth of the frost were blunted by eternal rains.  There the logging camps worked full blast the year around, in sunshine and drizzle and fog.  All that region bordering on the open sea bore a more genial aspect and supported more people and industries in scattered groups than could be found in any of those lonely inlets.