From day to day and from week to week, apprehending mistily that he was caught in and carried along by a current—­a slow but irresistible movement of events—­Hollister pursued the round of his daily life as if nothing but a clear and shining road lay before him; as if he had done for ever with illusions and uncertainties and wild stirrings of the spirit; as if life spread before him like a sea of which he had a chart whereon every reef was marked, every shoal buoyed, and in his hands and brain the instruments and knowledge wherewith to run a true course.  He made himself believe that he was reasonably safe from the perils of those uneasy waters.  Sometimes he was a little in doubt, not so sure of untroubled passage.  But mostly he did not think of these potential dangers.

He was vitally concerned, as most men are, with making a living.  The idea of poverty chafed him.  He had once been a considerable toad in a sizable puddle.  He had inherited a competence and lost it, and power to reclaim it was beyond him.  He wasted no regrets upon the loss of that material security, although he sometimes wondered how Myra had contrived to let such a sum slip through her fingers in a little over two years.  He assumed that she had done so.  Otherwise she would not be sitting on the bank of the Toba, waiting more or less passively for her husband to step into a dead man’s shoes.

That was, in effect, Bland’s situation.  He was an Englishman of good family, accustomed to a definite social standing, accustomed to money derived from a source into which he never troubled to inquire.  He had never worked.  He never would work, not in the sense of performing any labor as a means of livelihood.  He had a small income,—­fifty or sixty dollars a month.  When he was thirty he would come into certain property and an income of so many thousand pounds a year.  He and his wife could not subsist in any town on the quarterly dole he received.  That was why they had come to live in that cabin on the Toba River.  Bland hunted.  He fished.  To him the Toba valley served well enough as a place to rusticate.  Any place where game animals and sporting fish abounded satisfied him temperamentally.

He had done his “bit” in the war.  When he came into his money, they would go “home.”  He was placidly sure of himself, of his place in the general scheme of things.  He was suffering from temporary embarrassment, that was all.  It was a bit rough on Myra, but it would be all right by and by.

So much filtered into Hollister’s ears and understanding before long.  Archie Lawanne came back downstream with two grizzly pelts, and Hollister met Bland for the first time.  He appraised Bland with some care,—­this tall, ruddy Englishman who had supplanted him in a woman’s affections, and who, unless Hollister’s observation had tricked him, was in a fair way to be himself supplanted.

For Hollister was the unwilling spectator of a drama to which he could not shut his eyes.  Nor could he sit back in the role of cynical audience, awaiting in cushioned ease the climax of the play and the final exit of the actors.