s pit, with Fate
or Destiny or blind Chance, whatever witless force was at work,
approaching inexorably to push him over the brink.

CHAPTER XXII

To the world outside the immediate environs of the Toba, beyond those
who knew the people concerned, that double murder was merely another
violent affair which provided material for newspapers, a remote event
allied to fires, divorces, embezzlements, politics, and scandals in
high finance,--another item to be glanced quickly over and as quickly
forgotten.

But one man at least could not quickly forget or pass it over lightly.
Once the authorities--coming from a great distance, penetrating the
solitude of the valley with a casual, business-like air--arrived,
asked questions, issued orders, sent two men abroad in search of the
slayer, and removed the bodies to another jurisdiction, Hollister had
nothing more to do with that until he should be called again to give
formal testimony.

He was left with nothing to do but brood, to sit asking unanswerable
questions of a world and a life that for him was slowly and
bewilderingly verging upon the chaotic, in which there was no order,
no security, no assurance of anything but devastating changes that had
neither rhyme nor reason in their sequence. There might be logical
causes, buried obscurely under remote events, for everything that had
transpired. He conceded that point. But he could not establish any
association; he could not trace out the chain; and he revolted against
the common assumption that all things, no matter how mysterious, work
out ultimately for some common good.

Where was the good forthcoming out of so much that was evil, he asked?
Looking back over the years, he saw much evil for himself, for
everything and every one he cared about, and mingled with it there was
little good, and that good purely accidental, the result of fortuitous
circumstances. He knew that until the war broke out he had lived in a
backwater of life, himself and Myra, contented, happy, untried by
adversity. Once swung out of that backwater they had been swept away,
powerless to know where they went, to guess what was their
destination.

Nothing that he could have done would have altered one iota the march
of events. Nothing that he could do now would have more than the
slightest bearing on what was still to come. He was like a man beaten
to a dazed state in which he expects anything, in which his feeble
resistance will not ward off