rrange, so also could others; that his wife
was capable of action independent of him or his plans.

He glanced down the river and saw a long Siwash dugout sweep around
the curve of the Big Bend. It straightened away and bore up the long
stretch of swift water that ran by his house. Hollister could
distinguish three or four figures in it. He could see the dripping
paddles rise and fall in measured beat, the wet blades flashing in the
sun.

He gained the porch and turned his glasses on the canoe. He recognized
it as Chief Aleck's dugout from a rancherie near the mouth of the
river, a cedar craft with carved and brilliantly painted high-curving
ends. Four Siwash paddlers manned it. Amidships two women sat. One was
the elderly housekeeper who had been with them since their boy's
birth. The other was Doris, with the baby in her lap.

A strange panic seized Hollister, the alarm of the unexpected, a
reluctance to face the crisis which he had not expected to face for
another twenty-four hours. He stepped down off the porch, walked
rapidly away toward the chute mouth, crossed that and climbed to a
dead fir standing on the point of rocks beyond. From there he watched
until the canoe thrust its gaudy prow against the bank before his
house, until he saw the women ashore and their baggage stacked on the
bank, until the canoe backed into the current and shot away
downstream, until Doris with the baby in her arms--after a lingering
look about, a slow turning of her head--followed the other woman up
the porch steps and disappeared within. Then Hollister moved back over
the little ridge into the shadow of a clump of young firs and sat down
on a flat rock with his head in his hands, to fight it out with
himself.

To stake everything on a single throw of the dice,--and the dice
loaded against him! If peace had its victories no less than war, it
had also crushing defeats. Hollister felt that for him the final, most
complete _debacle_ was at hand.

He lifted his head at a distant call, a high, clear, sweet
"Oh-_hoo-oo-oo_" repeated twice. That was Doris calling him as she
always called him, if she wanted him and thought he was within range
of her voice. Well, he would go down presently.

He looked up the hill. He could see through a fringe of green timber
to a place where the leaves and foliage were all rusty-red from the
scorching of the fire. Past that opened the burned ground,--charred,
black, desolate. Presently life would be li