Mills was the man.  Whether he was more than a potential lover, whether Myra in her ennui, her hunger for a new sensation—­whatever unsatisfied longings led her to exercise upon men the power of her undeniable attraction—­had now given her heart into Charlie Mills’ keeping, Hollister of course neither knew nor cared.

But he did know that they met now and then, that Mills seemed to have some curious knowledge of when Bland was far afield.  Mills could be trusted to appear on the flat in the evening or on a Sunday, if Myra came to see Doris.

He speculated idly upon this sometimes.  Myra he knew well enough, or thought he did.  He began to regard Mills with a livelier interest, to talk to the man, to draw him out, to discover the essential man under the outward seeming.  He was not slow to discover that Mills was something more than so much bone and sinew which could be applied vigorously to an axe or a saw.

Hollister’s speculations took a new turn when Archie Lawanne and Bland came back from the bear hunt.  For Lawanne did not go out.  He pitched a tent on the flat below Hollister’s and kept one Siwash to cook for him.  He made that halt to rest up, to stretch and dry his bear-skins.  But long after these trophies were cured, he still remained.  He was given to roaming up and down the valley.  He extended his acquaintance to the settlement farther down, taking observation of an earnest attempt at cooeperative industry.  He made himself at home equally with the Blands and the Hollisters.

And when July was on them, with hot, hazy sunshine in which berries ripened and bird and insect life filled the Toba with a twitter and a drone, when the smoke of distant forest fires drifted like pungent fog across the hills, Hollister began to wonder if the net Myra seemed unconsciously to spread for men’s feet had snared another victim.

This troubled him a little.  He liked Lawanne.  He knew nothing about him, who he was, where he came from, what he did.  Nevertheless there had arisen between them a curious fellowship.  There seemed to reside in the man a natural quality of uprightness, a moral stoutness of soul that lifted him above petty judgments.  One did not like or dislike Lawanne for what he did or said so much as for what he suggested as being inherent within himself.

There was a little of that quality, also, about Charlie Mills.  He worked in the timber with a fierce energy.  His dark face glistened with sweat-beads from morning till night.  His black hair stood in wisps and curls, its picturesque disorder heightened by a trick he had of running his fingers through it when he paused for a minute to take breath, to look steadfastly across at the slide-scarred granite face of the north valley wall, with a wistful look in his eyes.

“Those hills,” he said once abruptly to Hollister, “they were here long before we came.  They’ll be here long after we’re gone.  What a helpless, crawling, puny insect man is, anyway.  A squirrel on his wheel in a cage.”