pay. In fact, it is the only way I'll ever get back the money I put
into that, so I really haven't much choice in the matter."

"Good!" Doris said. "Then we go to the Toba to live. When?"

"Very soon--if we go at all. There doesn't seem to be much chance to
sell it, but there is some sort of returned soldiers' cooperative
concern working in the Big Bend, and MacFarlan and Lee have had some
correspondence with their head man about this limit of mine. He is
going to be in town in a day or two. They may buy."

"And if they do?"

"Well, then, we'll see about a place on Valdez Island at the
Euclataws, where I can clear up some land and grow things, and fish
salmon when they run, as we talked about."

"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 si