It came to seem fit and proper, a matter well within his rights. He
postulated a hypothetical situation; if he, officially dead,
resurrected himself and claimed her, who was there to say him nay if
he demanded and exacted a literal fulfilment of her solemn covenant to
"love, honor, and obey?" She herself? Hollister snapped his fingers.
The man she lived with? Hollister dismissed him with an impatient
gesture.
The purely animal man, which is never wholly extinguished, which
merely lurks unsuspected under centuries of cultural veneer to rise
lustily when slowly acquired moralities shrivel in the crucible of
passion, now began to actuate Hollister with a strange cunning, a
ferocity of anticipation. He would repossess himself of this
fair-haired woman. And she should have no voice in the matter. Very
well. But how?
That was simplicity itself. No one knew such a man as he was in the
Toba country. All these folk in the valley below went about
unconscious of his existence in that cabin well hidden among the great
cedars. All he required was the conjunction of a certain kind of
weather and the absence of the man.
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