weeks.  Hollister had an unspoken hope that they would remain distant, no matter that Doris occasionally wondered about this woman who lived around the river’s curve, what she was like and when she would meet her.  Hollister knew nothing of Bland, nothing of Myra.  He did not wish to know.  It did not matter in the least, he assured himself.  He was dead and Myra was married.  All that old past was as a book long out of print.  It could not possibly matter if by chance they came in contact.  Yet he had a vague feeling that it did matter,—­a feeling for which he could not account.  He was not afraid; he had no reason to be afraid.  Nevertheless he gazed sometimes from the cliff top down on the cabin where Bland and Myra lived, and something stirred him so that he wished them gone.

He came off the hill one evening in the middle of June to find a canoe drawn up on the beach, two Siwashes puttering over a camp fire, and a tall, wirily slender, fair-haired man who might have been anywhere between twenty-seven and thirty-five sitting in the front doorway, talking to Doris.

Hollister noted the expression on the man’s face when their eyes met.  But he did not mind.  He was used to that.  He was becoming indifferent to what people thought of his face, because what they thought no longer had power to hurt him, to make him feel that sickening depression, to make him feel himself kin to those sinners who were thrust into the outer darkness.  Moreover, he knew that some people grew used to the wreckage of his features.  That had been his experience with his two woodsmen.  At first they looked at him askance.  Now they seemed as indifferent to his disfigurement as they were to the ragged knots and old fire-scars on the trees they felled.  Anyway, it did not matter to Hollister.

But this fair-haired man went on talking, looking all the while at Hollister, and his look seemed to say, “I know your face is a hell of a sight, but I am not disturbed by it, and I don’t want you to think I am disturbed.”  Behind the ragged mask of his scars Hollister smiled at this fancy.  Nevertheless he accepted his interpretation of that look as a reality and found himself moved by a curious feeling of friendliness for this stranger whom he had never seen before, whom he might never see again,—­for that was the way of casual travelers up and down the Toba.  They came out of nowhere, going up river or down, stopped perhaps to smoke a pipe, to exchange a few words, before they moved on into the hushed places that swallowed them up.

The man’s name was Lawanne.  He was bound up-stream, after grizzly bear.

“I was told of an Englishman named Bland who is quite a hunter.  I stopped in here, thinking this was his place and that I might get him to go on with me,” he said to Hollister.

“That’s Bland’s place down there,” Hollister explained.

“So Mrs. Hollister was just telling me.  There didn’t seem to be anybody about when I passed.  It doesn’t matter much, anyway,” he laughed.  “The farther I get into this country, the less keen I am to hunt.  It’s good enough just to loaf around and look at.”