If upon Hollister had been bestowed the power to grant her sight or to withhold it, he would have shrunk from a decision. Because he loved her he wished her to see, to experience the joy of dawn following that long night in which she groped her way. But he dreaded lest that light gladdening her eyes should mean darkness for him, a darkness in which everything he valued would be lost.
Then some voice within him whispered suggestively that in this darkness Myra would be waiting with outstretched hands,—and Hollister frowned and tried not to think of that.
CHAPTER XIX
At noon next day Hollister left the mess-house table and went out to sit in the sun and smoke a pipe beyond the Rabelaisian gabble of his crew. While he sat looking at the peaks north of the valley, from which the June sun was fast stripping even the higher snows, he saw a man bent under a shoulder pack coming up the slope that dropped away westward toward the Toba's mouth. He came walking by stumps and through thickets until he was near the camp. Then Hollister recognized him as Charlie Mills. He saw Hollister, came over to where he sat, and throwing off his pack made a seat of it, wiping away the sweat that stood in shining drops on his face.
"Well, I'm back, like the cat that couldn't stay away," Mills said.
The same queer undercurrent of melancholy, of sadness, the same hint of pain colored his words,—a subtle matter of inflection, of tone. The shadowy expression of some inner conflict hovered in his dark eyes. Again Hollister felt that indefinable urge of sympathy for this man who seemed to suffer with teeth grimly clenched, so that no complaint ever escaped him. A strange man, tenacious of his black moods.
"How's everything?" Mills asked. "You've made quite a hole here since I left. Can I go to work again?"