Two weeks from the day Hayes struck his axe blade into the brown trunk of a five-foot cedar and said laconically, “She’ll do”, that ancient tree had been transformed into timbers, into boards that flaked off smooth and straight under iron wedges, into neat shakes for a rain-tight roof, and was assembled into a two-roomed cabin.  This was furnished with chairs and tables and shelves, hewn out of the raw stuff of the forest.  It stood in the middle of a patch of earth cleared of fallen logs and thicket.  Its front windows gave on the Toba River, slipping down to the sea.  A maple spread friendly arms at one corner, a lordly tree that would blaze crimson and russet-brown when October came again.  All up and down the river the still woods spread a deep-green carpet on a floor between the sheer declivity of the north wall and the gentler, more heavily timbered slope of the south.  Hollister looked at his house when it was done and saw that it was good.  He looked at the rich brown of the new-cleared soil about it, and saw in his mind flowers growing there, and a garden.

And when he had quartered his men in the cabin up the hill and put them to work on the cedar, he went back to Vancouver for his wife.

CHAPTER XI

A week of hot sunshine had filled the Toba River bank full of roily water when Hollister breasted its current again.  In midstream it ran full and strong.  Watery whisperings arose where swirls boiled over sunken snags.  But in the slow eddies and shoal water under each bank the gray canoe moved up-stream under the steady drive of Hollister’s paddle.

Doris sat in the bow.  Her eyes roved from the sun-glittering stream to the hills that rose above the tree-fringed valley floor, as if sight had been restored to her so that her eyes could dwell upon the green-leaved alder and maple, the drooping spruce bows, the vastness of those forests of somber fir where the deer lurked in the shadows and where the birds sang vespers and matins when dusk fell and dawn came again.  There were meadow larks warbling now on stumps that dotted the floor of the Big Bend, and above the voices of those yellow-breasted singers and the watery murmuring of the river there arose now and then the shrill, imperative blast of a donkey engine.

“Where are we now, Bob?”

“About half a mile below the upper curve of the Big Bend,” Hollister replied.

Doris sat silent for awhile.  Hollister, looking at her, was stricken anew with wonder at her loveliness, with wonder at the contrast between them.  Beauty and the beast, he said to himself.  He knew without seeing.  He did not wish to see.  He strove to shut away thought of the devastation of what had once been a man’s goodly face.  Doris’ skin was like a child’s, smooth and soft and tinted like a rose petal.  Love, he said to himself, had made her bloom.  It made him quake to think that she might suddenly see out of those dear, blind eyes.  Would she look and shudder and turn away?  He shook off that ghastly thought.  She would never see him.  She could only touch him, feel him, hear the tenderness of his voice, know his guarding care.  And to those things which were realities she would always respond with an intensity that thrilled him and gladdened him and made him feel that life was good.