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