n--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.

Well, what of it, Hollister asked himself? It was nothing to him. He
was a disinterested bystander now. But looking down on Bland's cabin,
he reflected that his irritation was rooted in the fact that he did
not want to be a bystander. He desired to eliminate Myra Bland and all
that pertained to her from even casual contact with him. It seemed
absurd that he should feel himself to be in danger. But he had a dim
sense of danger. And instead of the aloofness which he desired, he
seemed to see vague threads drawing himself and Doris and Myra Bland
and this man Mills closer and closer together, to what end or purpose
he could not tell.

For a minute Hollister was tempted to turn the man away when he went
back up there in the morning. But that, he concluded with a shrug of
his shoulders, was carrying a mere fancy too far.

It did not therefore turn his thoughts into a more placid channel to
find, when he reached the house, Myra sitting in the kitchen talking
to Doris. Yet it was no great surprise. He had expected this, looked
forward to it with an uneasy sense of its inevitability.

Nothing could have been more commonplace, more uneventful than that
meeting. Doris introduced her husband. They were all at their ease.
Myra glanced once at his face and thereafter looked away. But her flow
of small talk, the conversational stop-gap of the woman accustomed to
social amenities, went on placidly. They were strangers, meeting for
the first time in a strange land.

Bland had gone up-river with Lawanne.

"Jim lives to hunt," Myra said with a short laugh. It was the first
and nearly the last mention of her husband she made that evening.

Hollister went out to wash himself in a basin that stood on a bench by
the back door. He felt a relief. He had come through the first test
casually enough. A slightly sardonic grimace wrinkled his tight-lipped
mouth. There was a grim sort of humor in the situation. Those three,
whose lives had got involved in such a tangle, forgathered under the
same roof in that lonely valley, each more or less a victim of
uncomprehended forces both within and exterior to themselves. Yet it