waved in the down-river breeze. By the garments
Hollister knew a woman must be there. But none appeared to watch him
pass. He did not halt, although the short afternoon was merging into
dusk and he knew the hospitality of those who go into lonely places to
wrest a living from an untamed land. But he could not bear the thought
of being endured rather than welcomed. He had suffered enough of that.
He was in full retreat from just that attitude. He was growing afraid
of contact with people, and he knew why he was afraid.

When the long twilight was nearly spent, he gained the upper part of
the Big Bend and hauled his canoe out on the bank. A small flat ran
back to the mouth of a canyon, and through the flat trickled a stream
of clear water.

Hollister built a fire on a patch of dry ground at the base of a
six-foot fir. He set up his tent, made his bed, cooked his supper, sat
with his feet to the fire, smoking a pipe.

After four years of clamor and crowds, he marveled at the astonishing
contentment which could settle on him here in this hushed valley,
where silence rested like a fog. His fire was a red spot with a yellow
nimbus. Beyond that ruddy circle, valley and cliff and clouded sky
merged into an impenetrable blackness. Hollister had been cold and wet
and hungry. Now he was warm and dry and fed. He lay with his feet
stretched to the fire. For the time he almost ceased to think,
relaxed as he was into a pleasant, animal well-being. And so presently
he fell asleep.

In winter, north of the forty-ninth parallel, and especially in those
deep clefts like the Toba, dusk falls at four in the afternoon, and
day has not grown to its full strength at nine in the morning.
Hollister had finished his breakfast before the first gleam of light
touched the east. When day let him see the Alpine crevasses that
notched the northern wall of the valley, he buckled on a belt that
carried a sheath-ax, took up his rifle and began first of all a
cursory exploration of the flat on which he camped.

It seemed to him that in some mysterious way he was beginning his life
all over again,--that life which his reason, with cold, inexorable
logic, had classified as a hopeless ruin. He could not see wherein the
ruin was lessened by embarking upon this lone adventure into the
outlying places. Nevertheless, something about it had given a fillip
to his spirits. He felt that he would better not inquire too closely
into this; that too keen self-analy