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Updated: May 11, 2025
"You know what I mean," she said. "You are afraid of Doris seeing you. That's plain enough. Is it so terrible a thing, after all? If she can't stand the sight of your face, you're better off without her." "It's easy to be philosophic about some one else's troubles," Hollister muttered. "You can be off with one love and be reasonably sure of another before long. I can't.
So Hollister put forth the plausible fact that he must see about his affairs and took the next steamer for the Toba. Lawanne, expecting letters, was at the float to meet the steamer. Hollister went up-stream with him. They talked very little until they reached Lawanne's cabin. There was a four-mile current to buck, and they saved their breath for the paddles.
Staring through the streaming window, Hollister looked down on the traffic flow in the street, the hurrying figures that braved the storm in pursuit of pleasure or of necessity, and while that desperate loneliness gnawed at him, he felt once more a sense of utter defeat, of hopeless isolation and for the first time he wished to hide, to get away out of sight and hearing of men.
Bob took a step or two toward the wounded man. "Don't you know me, Houck? We've come to look after you. This is Dud Hollister. You know him." "What if I did gun him?" the high-pitched voice maundered on. "Tried to steal my bronc, he did, an' I wouldn't stand for it a minute.... All right. Light yore fires. Burn me up, you hounds of Hades. I'm not askin' no favors. Not none a-tall."
Sometimes, latterly, he saw a hint of that same dubious expression about Archie Lawanne. But there was a different temper in Lawanne, a flash of the sardonic at times. In July, however, Lawanne went away. "I'm coming back, though," he told Hollister before he left. "I think I shall put up a cabin and winter here."
Hollister who, at the time the Emerys began to pierce the upper crust, was the leader of Endbury society, had discarded chromos as much as five years before. Mrs. Emery and Marietta, newly admitted to the honor of her acquaintance, wondered to themselves at the cold monotony of her black and white engravings.
Hollister was not thinking particularly of these things. He had eaten his meal at a table with half a dozen other men. In the saloon probably two score others applied themselves, with more diligence than refinement, to their food. There was a leavening of women in this male mass of loggers, fishermen, and what-not. A buzz of conversation filled the place. But Hollister was not a participant.
Here, in a rude cabin on the brink of a frozen river, chance had set her neighbor to him. To what end Hollister neither knew nor wished to inquire. He said to himself that it did not matter. He repeated this aloud. He believed it to be true. How could it matter now? But he found that it did matter in a way that he had not reckoned upon. For he found that he could not ignore her presence there.
Hollister soaped and scrubbed to clean his hands and face of the sweat and dirt of his day's labor. Above the wash bench Myra's face, delicately pink and white and framed by her hair that was the color of strained honey, looked down at him through an open window.
He would sit on Hollister's porch with a pipe sagging one corner of his mouth and gaze placidly at the river, the hills, the far stretch of the forest, and Hollister knew that to Bland it was so much water, so much up-piled rock and earth, so much growing wood.
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