The Hidden Places

noises. Fierce gusts scattered the ashes of his fire and fluttered the walls of his tent as though some strong-lunged giant were huffing and puffing to blow his house down.

y and came roaring down out of places hidden in the mist. Hollister could hear these slides thundering like distant artillery. Watching that grim fa?ade across the river he saw, once or twice during the day

sat by his fire in the mouth of the tent and smoked and thought of the comfortable cabin up in the cedar hollow, and of Doris Cleveland's books. He began by reflecting that he might have brought

d sailed away, white in a blue sky. The sun, swinging in a low arc, cocked a lazy eye over the southern peaks, and Hollister carried his first pack-load up to the log cabin while t

s youth,-freer, because he had none of the impatient hopes and urges and dreams of youth. He was finished, he told himself in a transient mood of bitterness. Why should he be governed by practical considerations? He was here, alone in the unsentient, uncritical forest. It did not matter to any one whether he came or stayed. To himself it mattered least of all, h

into a thicket and covered it with the glossy green leaves of the salal. He folded his t

began his survey of the st

week he was reasonably certain that the most liberal estimate left less than half the quantity of merchantable timber for which he had

ky. Overnight the rain changed to snow, great flat flakes eddying soundlessly earthward in an atmosphere uncannily still. For two days

ke hot sand blown from a funnel. The wind shrieked its whole tonal gamut among the trees. It ripped the clinging masses of snow from drooping bough and exposed cliff and flung it here and there in swirling clouds. And ab

arth and bare granite-were wrapped in winter mists, obscuring vapors that drifted and opened and closed again. Hollister could stir abroad once more. His business there was at an end. But he considered with reluctance a return to Van

e of companionship in this solitude, as if the dusky woods and those grim, aloof peaks accepted him for what he was, discounting a

hite mountain goat and birds. He hunted the grouse at first, but that gave small return for ammunition expended, although the flesh of the blue and willow grouse is pleasant fare. When the big storm abated he looked out one clear dawn and saw a buck deer standing in the open. At a distance of sixty yards he shot the anima

crowded streets that were more merciless to a stricken man than these silent places. Eventually he would have to go back.

ss these he strung a web of rawhide, thus furnishing himself with a pair of snowshoes which were a necessity now

he gained an eagle's view. The long curve of Toba Inlet wound like a strip of jade away down to where the islands of the lower gulf spread with channels of the sea between. He could see the twin Redondas, Cortez, Raza, the round blob that was Hernando,-a picturesque nomenclature that was

on his heel. Far below, the houses of the settlement in the lower Toba sent up blue wisps of smoke. To his right ran with many a twist and turn the valley itself, winding away into remote fastnesses of the Coast Range, a strip of level, fertile

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hemselves long before, those lines rose to Hollister's l

n the Toba. Once or twice on clear days he climbed laboriously to a great height and felt the cold pressure of the northwest wind as he stood in the open; and through his field glasses he could see the Inlet and the highroads of the sea past the Inlet's mouth all torn by surging waves that reared and broke in flashing crests of foam. So he sat in the cabin and read Doris Cleveland's books one after another-verse, philosophy, fiction-and whe

ects 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. W

nk, 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 th

he 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 matt

le to that marred visage. Pain or anger or sorrow could no longer write its message there for the cas

w dull and lifeless, giving some index to the mutations of his mind. And those darkly blue eyes

the hillside, with the sun playing hide and seek