steam. But it was all hidden and
muffled in those vast distances. He swung on his heel. Far below, the
houses of the settlement in the lower Toba sent up blue wisps of
smoke. To his right ran with many a twist and turn the valley itself,
winding away into remote fastnesses of the Coast Range, a strip of
level, fertile, timbered land, abutted upon by mountains that shamed
the Alps for ruggedness,--mountains gashed by slides, split by gloomy
crevasses, burdened with glaciers which in the heat of summer spewed
foaming cataracts over cliffs a thousand foot sheer.

"Where the hill-heads split the tide
Of green and living air,
I would press Adventure hard
To her deepest lair.

I would let the world's rebuke
Like a wind go by,
With my naked soul laid bare
To the naked sky."

Out of some recess in his memory, where they had fixed themselves long
before, those lines rose to Hollister's lips. And he looked a long
time before he turned downhill.

A week passed. Once more the blustery god of storms asserted his
dominion, leaving the land, when he passed, a foot deeper in snow. If
he had elected to stay there from choice, Hollister now kept close to
his cabin from necessity, for passage with his goods to the steamer
landing would have been a journey of more hardships than he cared to
undertake. The river was a sheet of ice except over the shallow
rapids. Cold winds whistled up and down the Toba. Once or twice on
clear days he climbed laboriously to a great height and felt the cold
pressure of the northwest wind as he stood in the open; and through
his field glasses he could see the Inlet and the highroads of the sea
past the Inlet's mouth all torn by surging waves that reared and broke
in flashing crests of foam. So he sat in the cabin and read Doris
Cleveland's books one after another--verse, philosophy, fiction--and
when physical inaction troubled him he cut and split and piled
firewood far beyond his immediate need. He could not sit passive too
long. Enforced leisure made too wide a breach in his defenses, and
through that breach the demons of brooding and despondency were quick
to enter. When neither books nor self-imposed tasks about the cabin
served, he would take his rifle in hand, hook on the snowshoes, and
trudge far afield in the surrounding forest.

On one of these journeys he came out upon the rim of the great cliff
which rose like a wall of masonry along the southern edge