But it failed to go through.  Hollister met his man in MacFarlan’s office,—­a lean, weather-beaten man of sixty, named Carr.  He was frank and friendly, wholly unlike the timber brokers and millmen Hollister had lately encountered.

“The fact is,” Carr said after some discussion, “we aren’t in the market for timber in the ordinary, speculative sense.  I happen to know that particular stand of cedar, or I wouldn’t be interested.  We’re a body of returned men engaged in making homes and laying the foundation for a competence by our joint efforts.  You would really lose by selling out to us.  We would only buy on stumpage.  If you were a broker I would offer you so much, and you could take it or leave it.  It would be all one to us.  We have a lot of standing timber ourselves.  But we’re putting in a shingle mill now.  The market looks good, and what we need is labor and shingle bolts, not standing timber.  I would suggest you go in there with two or three men and get the stuff out yourself.  We’ll take all the cedar on your limit, in bolts on the river bank at market prices, less cost of towage to Vancouver.  You can make money on that, especially if shingles go up.”

There seemed a force at work compelling Hollister to this move.  He reflected upon it as he walked home.  Doris wanted to go; this man Carr encouraged him to go.  He would be a fool not to go when opportunity beckoned, yet he hesitated; there was a reluctance in his mind.  He was not afraid, and yet he was.  Some vague peril seemed to lurk like a misty shadow at his elbow.  Nothing that he had done, nothing that he foresaw himself doing, accounted for that, and he ended by calling himself a fool.  Of course, he would go.  If Myra lived there,—­well, no matter.  It was nothing to him, nothing to Doris.  The past was past; the future theirs for the making.  So he went once more up to Toba Inlet, when late April brought spring showers and blossoming shrubs and soft sunny days to all the coast region.  He carried with him certain tools for a purpose, axes, cross-cut saws, iron wedges, a froe to flake off uniform slabs of cedar.  He sat on the steamer’s deck and thought to himself that he was in vastly different case to the last time he had watched those same shores slide by in the same direction.  Then he had been in full retreat, withdrawing from a world which for him held nothing of any value.  Now it held for him a variety of desirable things, which to have and to hold he need only make effort; and that effort he was eager to put forth, was now indeed putting forth if he did no more than sit on the steamer’s deck, watching green shore and landlocked bays fall astern, feeling the steady throb of her engines, hearing the swish and purl of a cleft sea parting at the bow in white foam, rippling away in a churned wake at her stern.

He felt a mild regret that he went alone, and the edge of that was dulled by the sure knowledge that he would not long be alone, only until such time as he could build a cabin and transport supplies up to the flat above the Big Bend, to that level spot where his tent and canoe were still hidden, where he had made his first camp, and near where the bolt chute was designed to spit its freight into the river.