ve obscurity, was rapidly driving Hollister to a state
approaching desperation.

For he could not rid himself of the social impulse any more than a
healthy man can rid himself of the necessity for food and drink at
certain intervals. If Hollister had been so crushed in body and mind
that his spirit was utterly quenched, if his vitality had been so
drained that he could sit passive and let the world go by unheeded,
then he would have been at peace.

He had seen men like that--many of them--content to sit in the sun,
to be fed and let alone. Their hearts were broken as well as their
bodies.

But except for the distortion of his face, he returned as he had gone
away, a man in full possession of his faculties, his passions, his
strength. He could not be passive either physically or mentally. His
mind was too alert, his spirit too sensitive, his body too crammed
with vitality to see life go swinging by and have no hand in its
manifestations and adventures.

Yet he was growing discouraged. People shunned him, shrank from
contact. His scarred face seemed to dry up in others the fountain of
friendly intercourse. If he were a leper or a man convicted of some
hideous crime, his isolation could not be more complete. It was as if
the sight of him affected men and women with a sense of something
unnatural, monstrous. He sweated under this. But he was alive, and
life was a reality to him, the will to live a dominant force. Unless
he succumbed in a moment of madness, he knew that he would continue to
struggle for life and happiness because that was instinctive, and
fundamental instincts are stronger than logic, reason, circumstance.

How he was going to make his life even tolerably worth living was a
question that harassed him with disheartening insistence as he watched
through his window the slanting lines of rain and listened to the
mournful cadences of the wind.

"I must get to work at something," he said to himself. "If I sit still
and think much more----"

He did not carry that last sentence to its logical conclusion.
Deliberately he strove to turn his thought out of the depressing
channels in which it flowed and tried to picture what he should set
about doing.

Not office work; he could not hope for any inside position such as his
experience easily enabled him to fill. He knew timber, the making and
marketing of it, from top to bottom. But he could not see himself
behind a desk, directing or selling. His face would fr