The Hidden Places

by Bertrand W. Sinclair

  CHAPTER X

  "Why not go in there and take that cedar out yourself?" Dorissuggested.

  They had been talking about that timber limit in the Toba, thepossibility of getting a few thousand dollars out of it, and how theycould make the money serve them best.

  "We could live there. I'd love to live there. I loved that valley. Ican see it now, every turn of the river, every canyon, and all thepeaks above. It would be like getting back home."

  "It is a beautiful place," Hollister agreed. He had a momentary visionof the Toba as he saw it last: a white-floored lane between two greatmountain ranges; green, timbered slopes that ran up to immensedeclivities; glaciers; cold, majestic peaks scarred by winteravalanches. He had come a little under the spell of those ruggedsolitudes then. He could imagine it transformed by the magic ofsummer. He could imagine himself living there with this beloved woman,exacting a livelihood from those hushed forests and finding it good.

  "I've been wondering about that myself," he said. "There is a lot ofgood cedar there. That bolt chute your brothers built could berepaired. If they expected to get that stuff out profitably, whyshouldn't I? I'll have to look into that."

  They were living in a furnished flat. If they had married in whatpeople accustomed to a certain formality of living might call hastethey had no thought of repenting at leisure, or otherwise. They were,in fact, quite happy and contented. Marriage had shattered noillusions. If, indeed, they cherished any illusory conceptions of eachother, the intimacy of mating had merely served to confirm thoseillusions, to shape them into realities. They were young enough to beardent lovers, old enough to know that love was not the culmination,but only an ecstatic phase in the working out of an inexorable naturallaw.

  If Doris was happy, full of high spirits, joyfully abandoned to thefulfilment of her destiny as a woman, Hollister too was happier thanhe had considered it possible for him ever to be again. But, inaddition, he was supremely grateful. Life for him as an individual hadseemed to be pretty much a blank wall, a drab, colorless routine ofexistence; something he could not voluntarily give up, but which gavenothing, promised nothing, save monotony and isolation and, in theend, complete despair. So that his love for this girl, who had givenherself to him with the strangely combined passion of a mature womanand the trusting confidence of a child, was touched with gratitude.She had put out her hand and lifted him from the pit. She would alwaysbe near him, a prop and a stay. Sometimes it seemed to Hollister amiracle. He would look at his face in the mirror and thank God thatshe was blind. Doris said that made no difference, but he knew better.It made a difference to eyes that could see, however tolerantly.

  In Hollister, also, there revived the natural ambition to get on, tograsp a measure of material security, to make money. There were somany ways in which money was essential, so many desirable things theycould secure and enjoy together with money. Making a living camefirst, but beyond a mere living he began to desire comfort, evenluxuries, for himself and his wife. He had made tentative plans. Theyhad discussed ways and means; and the most practical suggestion of allcame now from his wife's lips.

  Hollister went about town the next few days, diligently seekinginformation about prices, wages, costs and methods. He had a practicalknowledge of finance, and a fair acquaintance with timber operationsgenerally, so that he did not waste his own or other men's time. Hemet a rebuff or two, but he learned a great deal which he needed toknow, and he said to Doris finally:

  "I'm going to play your hunch and get that timber out myself. It willpay. In fact, it is the only way I'll ever get back the money I putinto 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 tosell it, but there is some sort of returned soldiers' cooperativeconcern working in the Big Bend, and MacFarlan and Lee have had somecorrespondence with their head man about this limit of mine. He isgoing 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 theEuclataws, where I can clear up some land and grow things, and fishsalmon when they run, as we talked about."

  "That would be nice, and I dare say we would get on very well," Dorissaid. "But I'd rather go to the Toba."

  Hollister did not want to go to the Toba. He would go if it werenecessary, but when he remembered that fair-haired woman living in thecabin on the river bank, he felt that there was something to beshunned. Myra was like a bad dream too vividly remembered. There wasstealing over Hollister a curious sense of something unreal in hisfirst marriage, in the war, even in the strange madness which hadbriefly afflicted him when he discovered that Myra was there. He couldsmile at the impossibility of that recurring, but he could not smileat the necessity of living within gunshot of her again. He was notafraid. There was no reason to be afraid. He was officially dead. Nosense of sin troubled him. He had put all that behind him. It wassimply a distaste for living near a woman he had once loved, withanother whom he loved with all the passion he had once lavished onMyra, and something that was truer and tenderer. He wanted to shut thedoors on the past forever. That was why he did not wish to go back tothe Toba. He only succeeded in clearly defining that feeling when itseemed that he must go--unless this prospective sale wentthrough--because he had to use whatever lever stood nearest his hand.He had a direct responsibility, now, for material success. As thelaborer goes to his work, distasteful though it may be, that he maylive, that his family may be fed and clothed, so Hollister knew thathe would go to Toba Valley and wrest a compensation from that timberwith his own hands unless a sale were made.

  But it failed to go through. Hollister met his man in MacFarlan'soffice,--a lean, weather-beaten man of sixty, named Carr. He was frankand friendly, wholly unlike the timber brokers and millmen Hollisterhad lately encountered.

  "The fact is," Carr said after some discussion, "we aren't in themarket for timber in the ordinary, speculative sense. I happen to knowthat particular stand of cedar, or I wouldn't be interested. We're abody of returned men engaged in making homes and laying the foundationfor a competence by our joint efforts. You would really lose byselling out to us. We would only buy on stumpage. If you were a brokerI would offer you so much, and you could take it or leave it. It wouldbe all one to us. We have a lot of standing timber ourselves. Butwe're putting in a shingle mill now. The market looks good, and whatwe need is labor and shingle bolts, not standing timber. I wouldsuggest you go in there with two or three men and get the stuff outyourself. We'll take all the cedar on your limit, in bolts on theriver bank at market prices, less cost of towage to Vancouver. You canmake money on that, especially if shingles go up."

  There seemed a force at work compelling Hollister to this move. Hereflected upon it as he walked home. Doris wanted to go; this man Carrencouraged him to go. He would be a fool not to go when opportunitybeckoned, yet he hesitated; there was a reluctance in his mind. He wasnot afraid, and yet he was. Some vague peril seemed to lurk like amisty shadow at his elbow. Nothing that he had done, nothing that heforesaw himself doing, accounted for that, and he ended by callinghimself a fool. Of course, he would go. If Myra lived there,--well, nomatter. It was nothing to him, nothing to Doris. The past was past;the future theirs for the making. So he went once more up to TobaInlet, when late April brought spring showers and blossoming shrubsand soft sunny days to all the coast region. He carried with himcertain tools for a purpose, axes, cross-cut saws, iron wedges, a froeto flake off uniform slabs of cedar. He sat on the steamer's deck andthought to himself that he was in vastly different case to the lasttime he had watched those same shores slide by in the same direction.Then he had been in full retreat, withdrawing from a world which forhim held nothing of any value. Now it held for him a variety ofdesirable things, which to have and to hold he need only make effort;and that effort he was eager to put forth, was now indeed puttingforth if he did no more than sit on the steamer's
deck, watching greenshore and landlocked bays fall astern, feeling the steady throb of herengines, hearing the swish and purl of a cleft sea parting at the bowin white foam, rippling away in a churned wake at her stern.

  He felt a mild regret that he went alone, and the edge of that wasdulled by the sure knowledge that he would not long be alone, onlyuntil such time as he could build a cabin and transport supplies up tothe flat above the Big Bend, to that level spot where his tent andcanoe were still hidden, where he had made his first camp, and nearwhere the bolt chute was designed to spit its freight into the river.

  It was curious to Hollister,--the manner in which Doris could see soclearly this valley and river and the slope where his timber stood.She could not only envision the scene of their home and his futureoperations, but she could discuss these things with practical wisdom.They had talked of living in the old cabin where he had found hershelf of books, but there was a difficulty in that,--of getting up thesteep hill, of carrying laboriously up that slope each item of theirsupplies, their personal belongings, such articles of furniture asthey needed; and Doris had suggested that they build their house inthe flat and let his men, the bolt cutters, occupy the cabin on thehill.

  He had two hired woodsmen with him, tools, food, bedding. When thesteamer set them on the float at the head of Toba Inlet, Hollisterleft the men to bring the goods ashore in a borrowed dugout andhimself struck off along a line blazed through the woods which, one ofCarr's men informed him, led out near the upper curve of the Big Bend.

  A man sometimes learns a great deal in the brief span of a fewminutes. When Hollister disembarked he knew the name of one man onlyin Toba Valley, the directing spirit of the settlement, Sam Carr, whomhe had met in MacFarlan's office. But there were half a dozen loggersmeeting the weekly steamer. They were loquacious men, withoutformality in the way of acquaintance. Hollister had more than trailknowledge imparted to him. The name of the man who lived with his wifeat the top of the Big Bend was Mr. J. Harrington Bland; the loggersaid that with a twinkle in his eye, a chuckle as of inner amusement.Hollister understood. The man was a round peg in this region of squareholes; otherwise he would have been Jack Bland, or whatever themisplaced initial stood for. They spoke of him further as "theEnglishman." There was a lot of other local knowledge bestowed uponHollister, but "the Englishman" and his wife--who was a "pippin" forlooks--were still in the forefront of his mind when the trail led himout on the river bank a few hundred yards from their house. He passedwithin forty feet of the door. Bland was chopping wood; Myra sat on alog, her tawny hair gleaming in the sun. Bland bestowed upon Hollisteronly a casual glance, as he strode past, and went on swinging his axe;and Hollister looking impersonally at the woman, observed that shestared with frank curiosity. He remembered that trait of hers. He hadoften teased her about it in those days when it had been an impossibleconception that she could ever regard seriously any man but himself.Men had always been sure of a very complete survey when they camewithin Myra's range, and men had always fluttered about her like mothsdrawn to a candle flame. She had that mysterious quality of attractingmen, pleasing them--and of making other girls hate her in the samedegree. She used to laugh about that.

  "I can't help it if I'm popular," she used to say, with a mischievoussmile, and Hollister had fondly agreed with that. He remembered thatit flattered his vanity to have other men admire his wife. He had beenso sure of her affections, her loyalty, but that had passed likemelting snow, like dew under the morning sun. A little loneliness, afew months of separation, had done the trick.

  Hollister shrugged his shoulders. He had no feeling in the matter. Shecould not possibly know him; she would not wish to know him if shecould. His problems were nowise related to her. But he knew too muchto be completely indifferent. His mind kept turning upon what her lifehad been, and what it must be now. He was curious. What had become ofthe money? Why did she and her English husband bury themselves in arude shack by a river that whispered down a lonely valley?

  Hollister's mind thrust these people aside, put them out ofconsideration, when he reached the flat and found his canoe where heleft it, his tiny silk tent suspended intact from the limb. He rangedabout the flat for an hour or so. He had an impression of it in hismind from his winter camp there; also he had a description of it fromDoris, and her picture was clearer and more exact in detail than his.He found the little falls that trickled down to a small creek thatsplit the flat. He chose tentatively a site for their house, close bya huge maple which had three sets of initials cut deeply in the barkwhere Doris told him to look.

  Then he dragged the canoe down to the river, and slid it afloat andlet the current bear him down. The air was full of pleasant odors fromthe enfolding forest. He let his eyes rest thankfully upon those calm,majestic peaks that walled in the valley. It was even more beautifulnow than he had imagined it could be when the snow blanketed hill andvalley, and the teeth of the frost gnawed everywhere. It was lessaloof; it was as if the wilderness wore a smile and beckoned withfriendly hands.

  The current and his paddle swept him down past the settlement, past abusy, grunting sawmill, past the booming ground where brown logsfloated like droves of sheep in a yard, and he came at last to wherehis woodsmen waited with the piled goods on a bank above tidewater.

  All the rest of that day, and for many days thereafter, Hollister wasa busy man. There was a pile of goods to be transported up-stream, ahouse to be fashioned out of raw material from the forest, theshingle-bolt chute to be inspected and repaired, the work of cuttingcedar to be got under way, all in due order. He became a voluntaryslave to work, clanking his chains of toil with that peculiar pleasurewhich comes to men who strain and sweat toward a desired end. Asliterally as his hired woodsmen, he earned his bread in the sweat ofhis brow, spurred on by a vision of what he sought to create,--a homeand so much comfort as he could grasp for himself and a woman.

  The house arose as if by magic,--the simple magic of stout arms andskilled hands working with axe and saw and iron wedges. One ofHollister's men was a lean, saturnine logger, past fifty, whose lifehad been spent in the woods of the Pacific Coast. There was no trickof the axe Hayes had not mastered, and he could perform miracles ofshaping raw wood with neat joints and smooth surfaces.

  Two weeks from the day Hayes struck his axe blade into the brown trunkof a five-foot cedar and said laconically, "She'll do", that ancienttree had been transformed into timbers, into boards that flaked offsmooth and straight under iron wedges, into neat shakes for arain-tight roof, and was assembled into a two-roomed cabin. This wasfurnished with chairs and tables and shelves, hewn out of the rawstuff of the forest. It stood in the middle of a patch of earthcleared of fallen logs and thicket. Its front windows gave on the TobaRiver, slipping down to the sea. A maple spread friendly arms at onecorner, a lordly tree that would blaze crimson and russet-brown whenOctober came again. All up and down the river the still woods spread adeep-green carpet on a floor between the sheer declivity of the northwall and the gentler, more heavily timbered slope of the south.Hollister looked at his house when it was done and saw that it wasgood. 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 putthem to work on the cedar, he went back to Vancouver for his wife.