Hollister shrugged his shoulders.  He had no feeling in the matter.  She could not possibly know him; she would not wish to know him if she could.  His problems were nowise related to her.  But he knew too much to be completely indifferent.  His mind kept turning upon what her life had been, and what it must be now.  He was curious.  What had become of the money?  Why did she and her English husband bury themselves in a rude shack by a river that whispered down a lonely valley?

Hollister’s mind thrust these people aside, put them out of consideration, when he reached the flat and found his canoe where he left it, his tiny silk tent suspended intact from the limb.  He ranged about the flat for an hour or so.  He had an impression of it in his mind from his winter camp there; also he had a description of it from Doris, and her picture was clearer and more exact in detail than his.  He found the little falls that trickled down to a small creek that split the flat.  He chose tentatively a site for their house, close by a huge maple which had three sets of initials cut deeply in the bark where Doris told him to look.

Then he dragged the canoe down to the river, and slid it afloat and let the current bear him down.  The air was full of pleasant odors from the enfolding forest.  He let his eyes rest thankfully upon those calm, majestic peaks that walled in the valley.  It was even more beautiful now than he had imagined it could be when the snow blanketed hill and valley, and the teeth of the frost gnawed everywhere.  It was less aloof; it was as if the wilderness wore a smile and beckoned with friendly hands.

The current and his paddle swept him down past the settlement, past a busy, grunting sawmill, past the booming ground where brown logs floated like droves of sheep in a yard, and he came at last to where his woodsmen waited with the piled goods on a bank above tidewater.

All the rest of that day, and for many days thereafter, Hollister was a busy man.  There was a pile of goods to be transported up-stream, a house to be fashioned out of raw material from the forest, the shingle-bolt chute to be inspected and repaired, the work of cutting cedar to be got under way, all in due order.  He became a voluntary slave to work, clanking his chains of toil with that peculiar pleasure which comes to men who strain and sweat toward a desired end.  As literally as his hired woodsmen, he earned his bread in the sweat of his brow, spurred on by a vision of what he sought to create,—­a home and so much comfort as he could grasp for himself and a woman.

The house arose as if by magic,—­the simple magic of stout arms and skilled hands working with axe and saw and iron wedges.  One of Hollister’s men was a lean, saturnine logger, past fifty, whose life had been spent in the woods of the Pacific Coast.  There was no trick of the axe Hayes had not mastered, and he could perform miracles of shaping raw wood with neat joints and smooth surfaces.