about him there was a great plenty of kindly fellowship which he
craved and which he could not share because war had stamped its iron
heel upon his face.

Yes, the more he thought about it, the more he craved the refuge of
silence and solitude. If he could not escape from himself, at least he
could withdraw from this feast at which he was a death's-head. And so
he began to cast about him for a place to go, for an objective, for
something that should save him from being purely aimless. In the end
it came into his mind that he might go back and look over this timber
in the valley of the Toba River, this last vestige of his fortune
which remained to him by pure chance. He had bought it as an
investment for surplus funds. He had never even seen it. He would have
smiled, if his face had been capable of smiling, at the irony of his
owning ten million feet of Douglas fir and red cedar--material to
build a thousand cottages--he who no longer owned a roof to shelter
his head, whose cash resources were only a few hundred dollars.

Whether Lewis sold the timber or not, he would go and see it. For a
few weeks he would be alone in the woods, where men would not eye him
askance, nor dainty, fresh-faced women shrink from him as they
passed.




CHAPTER IV


The steamer backed away from a float of which Hollister was the sole