The tall office buildings, with yellow window squares dotting the
black walls, became the sun-bathed hills looking loftily down on
rivers and bays and inlets that he knew. The wet floor of the street
itself became a rippled arm of the sea, stretching far and silent
between wooded slopes where deer and bear and all the furtive wild
things of the forest went their accustomed way.
Hollister had wandered alone in those hushed places, sleeping with his
face to the stars, and he had not been lonely. He wondered if he could
do that again.
He sat nursing those visions, his imagination pleasantly quickened by
them, as a man sometimes finds ease from care in dreaming of old days
that were full of gladness. He was still deep in the past when he went
to bed. And when he arose in the morning, the far places of the B.C.
coast beckoned with a more imperious gesture, as if in those solitudes
lay a sure refuge for such as he.
And why not, he asked himself? Here in this pushing seaport town,
among the hundred and fifty thousand souls eagerly intent upon their
business of gaining a livelihood, of making money, there was not one
who cared whether he came or went, whether he was glad or sad, whether
he had a song on his lips or the blackest gloom in his heart.
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