“There is some one at Bland’s now,” Hollister said.

“That’s their window light, eh?” Lawanne commented.  “I may go down and see him in the morning.  I am not very keen on two or three weeks alone in these tremendous silences.  This valley at night now—­it’s awesome.  And those Siwashes are like dumb men. You wouldn’t go bear-hunting, I suppose?”

There was a peculiar gratification to Hollister in being asked.  But he had too much work on hand.  Neither did he wish to leave Doris.  Not because it might be difficult for her to manage alone.  It was simply an inner reluctance to be separated from her.  She was becoming a vital part of him.  To go away from her for days or weeks except under the spur of some compelling necessity was a prospect that did not please him.  That which had first drawn them together grew stronger.  Love, the mysterious fascination of sex, the perfect accord of the well-mated—­whatever it was it grew stronger.  The world outside of them held less and less significance.  Sometimes they talked of that, wondered about it, wondered if it were natural for a man and a woman to become so completely absorbed in each other, to attain that singular oneness.  They wondered if it would last.  But whether it should prove lasting or not, they had it now and it was sufficient.

Lawanne went down to Bland’s in the morning.  He was still there when Hollister climbed the hill to his work.

Before evening he had something else to think about besides Lawanne.  A trifle, but one of those trifles that recurs with irritating persistence no matter how often the mind gives it dismissal.

About ten o’clock that morning a logger came up to the works on the hill.

“Can you use another man?” he asked bluntly.  “I want to work.”

Hollister engaged him.  By his dress, by his manner, Hollister knew that he was at home in the woods.  He was young, sturdily built, handsome in a swarthy way.  There was about him a slightly familiar air.  Hollister thought he might have seen him at the steamer landing, or at Carr’s.  He mentioned that.

“I have been working there,” the man replied.  “Working on the boom.”

He was frank enough about it.  He wanted money,—­a stake.  He believed he could make more cutting shingle bolts by the cord.  This was true.  Hollister’s men were making top wages.  The cedar stood on good ground.  It was big, clean timber, easy to work.

“I’ll be on the job to-morrow,” he said, after they had talked it over.  “Take me this afternoon to get my outfit packed up here.”

Hollister was haunted by the man’s face at odd times during the day.  Not until he was half-way home, until he came out on that ledge from whence he could look—­and always did look with a slight sense of irritation—­down on Bland’s cabin as well as his own, did he recall clearly where and when he had seen Charlie Mills.

Mills was the man who sat looking at Myra across the table that winter morning when Hollister was suffering from the brief madness which brought him to Bland’s cabin with a desperate project in his disordered mind.