somewhere beyond the Toba. "I
have obligations to fulfill. I've been playing truant, after a
fashion. I've stolen a year to do something I wanted to do. Now it's
done and I'm not even sure it's well done--but whether it's well done
or not, it's finished, and I have to go back and get into the collar
and make money to supply other people's needs. Unless," he shrugged
his shoulders, "I break loose properly. This country has that sort of
effect on a man. It makes him want to break loose from everything that
seems to hamper and restrain him. It doesn't take a man long to shed
his skin in surroundings like these. Oh, well, whether I come back or
not, I'll be all the same a hundred years from now."

A rifle shot cut sharp into the silence that followed Lawanne's last
words. That was nothing uncommon in the valley, where the crack of a
gun meant only that some one was hunting. But upon this report there
followed, clear and shrill, a scream, the high-pitched cry that only a
frightened woman can utter. This was broken into and cut short by a
second whip-like report. And both shots and scream came from the
direction of Bland's house.

Hollister rose. He looked at Lawanne and Lawanne looked at him. Across
Hollister's brain flashed a thought that would scarcely have been born
if he had not seen Bland spying from the willows, if he had not seen
Charlie Mills approaching that house, if he had not been aware of all
the wheels within wheels, the complicated coil of longings and desires
and smoldering passions in which these people were involved. He looked
at Lawanne, and he could not read what passed in his mind. But when he
turned and set out on a run for that shake cabin four hundred yards
downstream, Lawanne followed at his heels.

They were winded, and their pace had slowed to a hurried walk by the
time they reached the cabin. The door stood open. There was no sound.
The house was as still as the surrounding woods when Hollister stepped
across the threshold.

Bland stood just within the doorway, erect, his feet a little apart,
like a man bracing himself against some shock. He seemed frozen in
this tense attitude, so that he did not alter the rigid line of his
body or shift a single immobile muscle when Hollister and Lawanne
stepped in. His eyes turned sidewise in their sockets to rest briefly
and blankly upon the intruders. Then his gaze, a fixed gaze that
suggested incredulous disbelief, went back to the body of his wife.