In Hollister, also, there revived the natural ambition to get on, to grasp a measure of material security, to make money.  There were so many ways in which money was essential, so many desirable things they could secure and enjoy together with money.  Making a living came first, but beyond a mere living he began to desire comfort, even luxuries, for himself and his wife.  He had made tentative plans.  They had discussed ways and means; and the most practical suggestion of all came now from his wife’s lips.

Hollister went about town the next few days, diligently seeking information about prices, wages, costs and methods.  He had a practical knowledge of finance, and a fair acquaintance with timber operations generally, so that he did not waste his own or other men’s time.  He met a rebuff or two, but he learned a great deal which he needed to know, and he said to Doris finally: 

“I’m going to play your hunch and get that timber out myself.  It will pay.  In fact, it is the only way I’ll ever get back the money I put into that, so I really haven’t much choice in the matter.”

“Good!” Doris said.  “Then we go to the Toba to live.  When?”

“Very soon—­if we go at all.  There doesn’t seem to be much chance to sell it, but there is some sort of returned soldiers’ cooperative concern working in the Big Bend, and MacFarlan and Lee have had some correspondence with their head man about this limit of mine.  He is going to be in town in a day or two.  They may buy.”

“And if they do?”

“Well, then, we’ll see about a place on Valdez Island at the Euclataws, where I can clear up some land and grow things, and fish salmon when they run, as we talked about.”

“That would be nice, and I dare say we would get on very well,” Doris said.  “But I’d rather go to the Toba.”

Hollister did not want to go to the Toba.  He would go if it were necessary, but when he remembered that fair-haired woman living in the cabin on the river bank, he felt that there was something to be shunned.  Myra was like a bad dream too vividly remembered.  There was stealing over Hollister a curious sense of something unreal in his first marriage, in the war, even in the strange madness which had briefly afflicted him when he discovered that Myra was there.  He could smile at the impossibility of that recurring, but he could not smile at the necessity of living within gunshot of her again.  He was not afraid.  There was no reason to be afraid.  He was officially dead.  No sense of sin troubled him.  He had put all that behind him.  It was simply a distaste for living near a woman he had once loved, with another whom he loved with all the passion he had once lavished on Myra, and something that was truer and tenderer.  He wanted to shut the doors on the past forever.  That was why he did not wish to go back to the Toba.  He only succeeded in clearly defining that feeling when it seemed that he must go—­unless this prospective sale went through—­because he had to use whatever lever stood nearest his hand.  He had a direct responsibility, now, for material success.  As the laborer goes to his work, distasteful though it may be, that he may live, that his family may be fed and clothed, so Hollister knew that he would go to Toba Valley and wrest a compensation from that timber with his own hands unless a sale were made.