a patch of earth
cleared of fallen logs and thicket. Its front windows gave on the Toba
River, slipping down to the sea. A maple spread friendly arms at one
corner, a lordly tree that would blaze crimson and russet-brown when
October came again. All up and down the river the still woods spread a
deep-green carpet on a floor between the sheer declivity of the north
wall and the gentler, more heavily timbered slope of the south.
Hollister looked at his house when it was done and saw that it was
good. He looked at the rich brown of the new-cleared soil about it,
and saw in his mind flowers growing there, and a garden.

And when he had quartered his men in the cabin up the hill and put
them to work on the cedar, he went back to Vancouver for his wife.

CHAPTER XI

A week of hot sunshine had filled the Toba River bank full of roily
water when Hollister breasted its current again. In midstream it ran
full and strong. Watery whisperings arose where swirls boiled over
sunken snags. But in the slow eddies and shoal water under each bank
the gray canoe moved up-stream under the steady drive of Hollister's
paddle.

Doris sat in the bow. Her eyes roved from the sun-glittering stream to
the hills that rose above the tree-fringed valley floor, as if sight
had been restored to her so that her eyes could dwell upon the
green-leaved alder and maple, the drooping spruce bows, the vastness
of those forests of somber fir where the deer lurked in the shadows
and where the birds sang vespers and matins when dusk fell and dawn
came again. There were meadow larks warbling now on stumps that dotted
the floor of the Big Bend, and above the voices of those
yellow-breasted singers and the watery murmuring of the river there
arose now and then the shrill, imperative blast of a donkey engine.

"Where are we now, Bob?"

"About half a mile below the upper curve of the Big Bend," Hollister
replied.

Doris sat silent for awhile. Hollister, looking at her, was stricken
anew with wonder at her loveliness, with wonder at the contrast
between them. Beauty and the beast, he said to himself. He knew
without seeing. He did not wish to see. He strove to shut away thought
of the devastation of what had once been a man's goodly face. Doris'
skin was like a child's, smooth and soft and tinted like a rose petal.
Love, he said to himself, had made her bloom. It made him quake to
think that she might suddenly see out of those dear, blind eyes. Would