Because he loved
her he wished her to see, to experience the joy of dawn following that
long night in which she groped her way. But he dreaded lest that light
gladdening her eyes should mean darkness for him, a darkness in which
everything he valued would be lost.
Then some voice within him whispered suggestively that in this
darkness Myra would be waiting with outstretched hands,--and Hollister
frowned and tried not to think of that.
CHAPTER XIX
At noon next day Hollister left the mess-house table and went out to
sit in the sun and smoke a pipe beyond the Rabelaisian gabble of his
crew. While he sat looking at the peaks north of the valley, from
which the June sun was fast stripping even the higher snows, he saw a
man bent under a shoulder pack coming up the slope that dropped away
westward toward the Toba's mouth. He came walking by stumps and
through thickets until he was near the camp. Then Hollister recognized
him as Charlie Mills. He saw Hollister, came over to where he sat, and
throwing off his pack made a seat of it, wiping away the sweat that
stood in shining drops on his face.
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