of the flats
in the Big Bend. It was a clear day. Hollister had a pair of very
powerful binoculars. He gazed from this height down on the settlement,
on the reeking chimneys of those distant houses, on the tiny black
objects that were men moving against a field of white. He could hear a
faint whirring which he took to be the machinery of a sawmill. He
could see on the river bank and at another point in the nearby woods
the feathery puff of steam. He often wondered about these people,
buried, like himself, in this snow-blanketed and mountain-ringed
remoteness. Who were they? What manner of folk were they? He trifled
with this curiosity. But it did not seriously occur to him that by two
or three hours' tramping he could answer these idle speculations at
first hand. Or if it did occur to him he shrank from the undertaking
as one shrinks from a dubious experiment which has proved a failure in
former trials.

But this day, under a frosty sky in which a February sun hung
listless, Hollister turned his glasses on the cabin of the settler
near his camp. He was on the edge of the cliff, so close that when he
dislodged a fragment of rock it rolled over the brink, bounded once
from the cliff's face, and after a lapse that grew to seconds struck
with a distant thud among the timber at the foot of the precipice.
Looking down through the binoculars it was as if he sat on the topmost
bough of a tall tree in the immediate neighborhood of the cabin,
although he was fully half a mile distant. He could see each garment
of a row on a line. He could distinguish colors--a blue skirt, the
deep green of salal and second-growth cedar, the weathered hue of the
walls.

And while he stared a woman stepped out of the doorway and stood
looking, turning her head slowly until at last she gazed steadily up
over the cliff-brow as if she might be looking at Hollister himself.
He sat on his haunches in the snow, his elbows braced on his knees,
and trained the powerful lenses upon her. In a matter of half a minute
her gaze shifted, turned back to the river. She shrugged her
shoulders, or perhaps it was a shiver born of the cold, and then went
back inside.

Hollister rested the binoculars upon his knee. His face did not alter.
Facile expression was impossible to that marred visage. Pain or anger
or sorrow could no longer write its message there for the casual
beholder to read. The thin, twisted remnants of his lips could tighten
a little, and that was