"That would be nice, and I dare say we would get on very well," Doris said. "But I'd rather go to the Toba."
Hollister did not want to go to the Toba. He would go if it were necessary, but when he remembered that fair-haired woman living in the cabin on the river bank, he felt that there was something to be shunned. Myra was like a bad dream too vividly remembered. There was stealing over Hollister a curious sense of something unreal in his first marriage, in the war, even in the strange madness which had briefly afflicted him when he discovered that Myra was there. He could smile at the impossibility of that recurring, but he could not smile at the necessity of living within gunshot of her again. He was not afraid. There was no reason to be afraid. He was officially dead. No sense of sin troubled him. He had put all that behind him. It was simply a distaste for living near a woman he had once loved, with another whom he loved with all the passion he had once lavished on Myra, and something that was truer and tenderer. He wanted to shut the doors on the past forever. That was why he did not wish to go back to the Toba. He only succeeded in clearly defining that feeling when it seemed that he must go—unless this prospective sale went through—because he had to use whatever lever stood nearest his hand. He had a direct responsibility, now, for material success. As the laborer goes to his work, distasteful though it may be, that he may live, that his family may be fed and clothed, so Hollister knew that he would go to Toba Valley and wrest a compensation from that timber with his own hands unless a sale were made.
But it failed to go through. Hollister met his man in MacFarlan's office,—a lean, weather-beaten man of sixty, named Carr. He was frank and friendly, wholly unlike the timber brokers and millmen Hollister had lately encountered.
"The fact is," Carr said after some discussion, "we aren't in the market for timber in the ordinary, speculative sense. I happen to know that particular stand of cedar, or I wouldn't be interested. We're a body of returned men engaged in making homes and laying the foundation for a competence by our joint efforts. You would really lose by selling out to us. We would only buy on stumpage. If you were a broker I would offer you so much, and you could take it or leave it. It would be all one to us. We have a lot of standing timber ourselves. But we're putting in a shingle mill now. The market looks good, and what we need is labor and shingle bolts, not standing timber. I would suggest you go in there with two or three men and get the stuff out yourself. We'll take all the cedar on your limit, in bolts on the river bank at market prices, less cost of towage to Vancouver. You can make money on that, especially if shingles go up."
There seemed a force at work compelling Hollister to this move. He reflected upon it as he walked home. Doris wanted to go; this man Carr encouraged him to go. He would be a fool not to go when opportunity beckoned, yet he hesitated; there was a reluctance in his mind. He was not afraid, and yet he was. Some vague peril seemed to lurk like a misty shadow at his elbow. Nothing that he had done, nothing that he foresaw himself doing, accounted for that, and he ended by calling himself a fool. Of course, he would go. If Myra lived there,—well, no matter. It was nothing to him, nothing to Doris. The past was past; the future theirs for the making. So he went once more up to Toba Inlet, when late April brought spring showers and blossoming shrubs and soft sunny days to all the coast region. He carried with him certain tools for a purpose, axes, cross-cut saws, iron wedges, a froe to flake off uniform slabs of cedar. He sat on the steamer's deck and thought to himself that he was in vastly different case to the last time he had watched those same shores slide by in the same direction. Then he had been in full retreat, withdrawing from a world which for him held nothing of any value. Now it held for him a variety of desirable things, which to have and to hold he need only make effort; and that effort he was eager to put forth, was now indeed putting forth if he did no more than sit on the steamer's deck, watching green shore and landlocked bays fall astern, feeling the steady throb of her engines, hearing the swish and purl of a cleft sea parting at the bow in white foam, rippling away in a churned wake at her stern.
He felt a mild regret that he went alone, and the edge of that was dulled by the sure knowledge that he would not long be alone, only until such time as he could build a cabin and transport supplies up to the flat above the Big Bend, to that level spot where his tent and canoe were still hidden, where he had made his first camp, and near where the bolt chute was designed to spit its freight into the river.
It was curious to Hollister,—the manner in which Doris could see so clearly this valley and river and the slope where his timber stood. She could not only envision the scene of their home and his future operations, but she could discuss these things with practical wisdom. They had talked of living in the old cabin where he had found her shelf of books, but there was a difficulty in that,—of getting up the steep hill, of carrying laboriously up that slope each item of their supplies, their personal belongings, such articles of furniture as they needed; and Doris had suggested that they build their house in the flat and let his men, the bolt cutters, occupy the cabin on the hill.
He had two hired woodsmen with him, tools, food, bedding. When the steamer set them on the float at the head of Toba Inlet, Hollister left the men to bring the goods ashore in a borrowed dugout and himself struck off along a line blazed through the woods which, one of Carr's men informed him, led out near the upper curve of the Big Bend.
A man sometimes learns a great deal in the brief span of a few minutes. When Hollister disembarked he knew the name of one man only in Toba Valley, the directing spirit of the settlement, Sam Carr, whom he had met in MacFarlan's office. But there were half a dozen loggers meeting the weekly steamer. They were loquacious men, without formality in the way of acquaintance. Hollister had more than trail knowledge imparted to him. The name of the man who lived with his wife at the top of the Big Bend was Mr. J. Harrington Bland; the logger said that with a twinkle in his eye, a chuckle as of inner amusement. Hollister understood. The man was a round peg in this region of square holes; otherwise he would have been Jack Bland, or whatever the misplaced initial stood for. They spoke of him further as "the Englishman." There was a lot of other local knowledge bestowed upon Hollister, but "the Englishman" and his wife—who was a "pippin" for looks—were still in the forefront of his mind when the trail led him out on the river bank a few hundred yards from their house. He passed within forty feet of the door. Bland was chopping wood; Myra sat on a log, her tawny hair gleaming in the sun. Bland bestowed upon Hollister only a casual glance, as he strode past, and went on swinging his axe; and Hollister looking impersonally at the woman, observed that she stared with frank curiosity. He remembered that trait of hers. He had often teased her about it in those days when it had been an impossible conception that she could ever regard seriously any man but himself. Men had always been sure of a very complete survey when they came within Myra's range, and men had always fluttered about her like moths drawn to a candle flame. She had that mysterious quality of attracting men, pleasing them—and of making other girls hate her in the same degree. She used to laugh about that.
"I can't help it if I'm popular," she used to say, with a mischievous smile, and Hollister had fondly agreed with that. He remembered that it flattered his vanity to have other men admire his wife. He had been so sure of her affections, her loyalty, but that had passed like melting snow, like dew under the morning sun. A little loneliness, a few months of separation, had done the trick.