Lawanne had supper with them.  Hollister asked him, not only as a matter of courtesy but with a genuine feeling that he wanted this man to break bread with them.  He could not quite understand that sudden warmth of feeling for a stranger.  He had never in his life been given to impulsive friendliness.  The last five years had not strengthened his belief in friendships.  He had seen too many fail under stress.  But he liked this man.  They sat outside after supper and Doris joined them there.  Lawanne was not talkative.  He was given to long silences in which he sat with eyes fixed on river or valley or the hills above, in mute appreciation.

“Do you people realize what a panoramic beauty is here before your eyes all the time?” he asked once.  “It’s like a fairyland to me.  I must see a lot of this country before I go away.  And I came here quite by chance.”

“Which is, after all, the way nearly everything happens,” Doris said.

“Oh,” Lawanne turned to her, “You think so?  You don’t perceive the Great Design, the Perfect Plan, in all that we do?”

“Do you?” she asked.

He laughed.

“No.  If I did I should sit down with folded hands, knowing myself helpless in the inexorable grip of destiny.  I should always be perfectly passive.”

“If you tried to do that you could not remain passive long.  The unreckonable element of chance would still operate to make you do this or that.  You couldn’t escape it; nobody can.”

“Then you don’t believe there is a Destiny that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will?” Lawanne said lightly.

Doris shook her head.

“Destiny is only a word.  It means one thing to one person, something else to another.  It’s too abstract to account for anything.  Life’s a puzzle no one ever solves, because the factors are never constant.  When we try to account for this and that we find no fixed law, nothing but what is subject to the element of chance—­which can’t be reckoned.  Most of us at different times hold our own fate, temporarily at least, in our own hands without knowing it, and some insignificant happening does this or that to us.  If we had done something else it would all be different.”

“Your wife,” Lawanne observed to Hollister, “is quite a philosopher.”

Hollister nodded.  He was thinking of this factor of chance.  He himself had been a victim of it.  He had profited by it.  And he wondered what vagaries of chance were still to bestow happiness or inflict suffering upon him in spite of his most earnest effort to achieve mastery over circumstances.  He felt latterly that he had a firm grip on the immediate future.  Yet who could tell?

Dusk began to close on the valley while the far, high crests of the mountains still gleamed under a crimson sky.  Deep shadows filled every gorge and canyon, crept up and up until only the snowy crests glimmered in the night, ghostly-silver against a sky speckled with stars.  The valley itself was shrouded under the dark blanket of the night, through which the river murmured unseen and distant waterfalls roared over rocky precipices.  The two Indians attending Lawanne squatted within the red glow of their fire on the bank.  Downstream a yellow spot broke out like a candle flame against black velvet.