yly out at him from behind stumps. He
could see rows of split salmon hung by the tail to the beams of an
open-fronted smokehouse. Around another bend he came on a buck deer
standing knee-deep in the water, and at the sight of him the animal
snorted, leaped up the bank and vanished as silently as a shadow.

Hollister marked all these things without ceasing to ply his paddle.
His objective lay some six miles up-stream. But when he came at last
to the upper limit of the tidal reach he found in this deep, slack
water new-driven piling and freshly strung boom-sticks and acres of
logs confined therein; also a squat motor tugboat and certain lesser
craft moored to these timbers. A little back from the bank he could
see the roofs of buildings.

He stayed his paddle a second to look with a mild curiosity. Then he
went on. That human craving for companionship which had gained no
response in the cities of two continents had left him for the time
being. For that hour he was himself, sufficient unto himself. Here
probably a score of men lived and worked. But they were not men he
knew. They were not men who would care to know him,--not after a
clear sight of his face.

Hollister did not say that to himself in so many words. He was only
subconsciously aware of this conclusion. Nevertheless it guided his
actions. Through long, bitter months he had rebelled against spiritual
isolation. The silent woods, the gray river, the cloud-wrapped hills
seemed friendly by comparison with mankind,--mankind which had marred
him and now shrank from its handiwork.

So he passed by this community in the wilderness, not because he
wished to but because he must.

Within half a mile he struck fast water, long straight reaches up
which he gained ground against the current by steady strokes of the
paddle, shallows where he must wade and lead his craft by hand. So he
came at last to the Big Bend of the Toba River, a great S curve where
the stream doubled upon itself in a mile-wide flat that had been
stripped of its timber and lay now an unlovely vista of stumps, each
with a white cap of snow.

On the edge of this, where the river swung to the southern limit of
the valley and ran under a cliff that lifted a thousand foot sheer, he
passed a small house. Smoke drifted blue from the stovepipe. A pile of
freshly chopped firewood lay by the door. The dressed carcass of a
deer hung under one projecting eave. Between two stumps a string of
laundered clothes