his own!

Hollister threw back his head and burst into sardonic laughter. It
pleased him, this devastating jest which he was about to perpetrate
upon his wife and her lover.

From the seclusion of the timber behind this point of rocks he set
himself to watch through his glasses the house down the river. The
second day of keeping this vigil he saw the man leave the place, gun
in hand, cross on the river ice and vanish in the heavy timber of that
wide bottom land. Hollister did not know what business took him on
these recurrent absences; hunting, he guessed, but he had noted that
the man seldom returned before late in the afternoon, and sometimes
not till dusk.

He waited impatiently for an hour. Then he went down to the frozen
river. Twenty minutes' rapid striding brought him to the door of the
house.

The place was roughly built of split cedar. A door and a window faced
the river. The window was uncurtained, a bald square of glass. The sun
had grown to some little strength. The air that morning had softened
to a balminess like spring. Hollister had approached unseen over snow
softened by this warmth until it lost its frosty crispness underfoot.
Now, through the uncurtained window, his gaze marked a section of the
interior, and what he saw stayed the hand he lifted to rap on the
door.

A man young, smooth-faced, dark almost to swarthiness, sat on a bench
beside a table on which stood the uncleared litter of breakfast. And
Myra sat also at the table with one corner of it between them. She
leaned an elbow on the board and nursed her round chin in the palm of
that hand, while the other was imprisoned between the two clasped
hands of the man. He was bending over this caught hand, leaning
eagerly toward her, speaking rapidly.

Myra sat listening. Her lips were slightly parted. Her eyelids
drooped. Her breast rose and fell in a slow, rhythmic heave. Otherwise
she was motionless and faintly smiling, as if she were given up to
some blissful languor. And the man spoke on, caressing her imprisoned
hand, stroking it, looking at her with the glow of conquest in his hot
eyes.

Hollister leaned on the muzzle of his grounded rifle, staring through
the window. He could see their lips move. He could hear faintly the
tense murmur of the man's voice. He saw the man bend his head and
press a kiss on the imprisoned hand.

He turned softly and went down the bank to the river and walked away
over the ice. When he had put five hundr