sided there lay in the cedar alone.

By the time he had established this, the clear, cold, sunny days came
to an end. Rain began to drizzle half-heartedly out of a murky sky.
Overnight the rain changed to snow, great flat flakes eddying
soundlessly earthward in an atmosphere uncannily still. For two days
and a night this ballet of the snowflakes continued, until valley and
slope and the high ridges were two feet deep in the downy white.

Then the storm which had been holding its breath broke with singular
fury. The frost bared its teeth. The clouds still volleyed, but their
discharge now filled the air with harsh, minute particles that stung
bare skin like hot sand blown from a funnel. The wind shrieked its
whole tonal gamut among the trees. It ripped the clinging masses of
snow from drooping bough and exposed cliff and flung it here and there
in swirling clouds. And above the treble voices of the storm
Hollister, from the warm security of the cabin, could hear the
intermittent rumbling of terrific slides. He could feel faint tremors
in the earth from the shock of the arrested avalanche.

This elemental fury wore itself out at last. The wind shrank to chill
whisperings. But the sky remained gray and lowering, and the great
mountain ranges--white again from foot to crest, save where the slides
had left gashes of brown earth and bare granite--were wrapped in
winter mists, obscuring vapors that drifted and opened and closed
again. Hollister could stir abroad once more. His business there was
at an end. But he considered with reluctance a return to Vancouver.
He was not happy. He was merely passive. It did not matter to anyone
where he went. It did not matter much to himself. He was as well here
as elsewhere until some substantial reason or some inner spur rowelled
him into action.

Here there was no one to look askance at his disfigurement. He was
less alone than he would be in town, for he found a subtle sense of
companionship in this solitude, as if the dusky woods and those grim,
aloof peaks accepted him for what he was, discounting all that
misfortune which had visited him in the train of war. He knew that was
sheer fantasy, but a fantasy that lent him comfort.

So he stayed. He had plenty of material resources, a tight warm house,
food. He had reckoned on staying perhaps a month. He found now that
his estimate of a month's staples was away over the mark. He could
subsist two months. With care he could stretch it