an to actuate Hollister with a strange cunning, a
ferocity of anticipation. He would repossess himself of this
fair-haired woman. And she should have no voice in the matter. Very
well. But how?

That was simplicity itself. No one knew such a man as he was in the
Toba country. All these folk in the valley below went about
unconscious of his existence in that cabin well hidden among the great
cedars. All he required was the conjunction of a certain kind of
weather and the absence of the man. Falling snow to cover the single
track that should lead to this cabin, to bury the dual footprints that
should lead away. The absence of the man was to avoid a clash: not
because Hollister feared that; simply because in his mind the man was
not a factor to be considered, except as the possibility of his
interference should be most easily avoided. Because if he did
interfere he might have to kill him, and that was a complication he
did not wish to invoke. Somehow he felt no grudge against this man,
no jealousy.

The man's absence was a common occurrence. Hollister had observed that
nearly every day he was abroad in the woods with a gun. For the
obscuring storm, the obliterating snowfall, he would have to wait.

All this, every possible contingency, took form as potential action in
his obsessed mind,--with neither perception nor consideration of
consequences. The consummation alone urged him. The most primitive
instinct swayed him. The ultimate consequences were as nothing.

This plan was scarcely formed in Hollister's brain before he modified
it. He could not wait for that happy conjunction of circumstances
which favored action. He must create his own circumstances. This he
readily perceived as the better plan. When he sought a way it was
revealed to him.

A few hundred yards above the eastern limit of the flat where his
canoe was cached, there jutted into the river a low, rocky point. From
the river back to the woods the wind had swept the bald surface of
this little ridge clear of snow. He could go down over those sloping
rocks to the glare ice of the river. He could go and come and leave no
footprints, no trace. There would be no mark to betray, unless a
searcher ranged well up the hillside and so came upon his track.

And if a man, searching for this woman, bore up the mountain side and
came at last to the log cabin--what would he find? Only another man
who had arisen after being dead and had returned to take possession of