The Hidden Places | Page 6

which brought him along the street.
Turning off the main thoroughfare, he passed half a block along a cross
street and entered an office building. Ascending to the fourth floor, he
entered an elaborate suite of offices which bore upon the ground glass
of the entrance door this legend:
LEWIS AND COMPANY
SPECIALISTS IN B.C. TIMBER. INVESTMENTS
He inquired for Mr. Lewis, gave his card to a young woman who
glanced at him once and thereafter looked anywhere but at him while
he spoke. After a minute of waiting he was ushered into a private office.
As he neared this door, Hollister happened to catch a panoramic
glimpse in a wall mirror. The eyes of half a dozen clerks and other
persons in that room, both male and female, were fixed on him with the

shocked and eager curiosity he had once observed upon the faces of a
crowd gathered about the mangled victim of a street accident.
Mr. Lewis was a robust man, a few years older than Hollister. The
cares of a rapidly developing business and certain domestic ties had
prevented Mr. Lewis from offering himself upon the altar of his
country. The responsibility of eight per cent. investments entrusted to
his care was not easily shaken off. Business, of course, was a national
necessity. However, since the armistice, Mr. Lewis had ceased to be
either explanatory or inferentially apologetic--even in his own
thought--for his inability to free himself from the demands of
commerce during a critical period.
In any case he was there, sound in wind and limb, a tall,
square-shouldered, ruddy man of thirty-five, seated behind an oak desk,
turning Hollister's card over in his fingers with an anticipatory smile.
Blankness replaced the smile. A sort of horrified wonder gleamed in his
eyes. Hollister perceived that his face shocked the specialist in B.C.
timber, filled Mr. Lewis with very mixed sensations indeed.
"You have my card. It is several years since we met. I dare say you find
me unrecognizable," Hollister said bluntly. "Nevertheless I can identify
myself to your satisfaction."
A peculiarity of Hollister's disfigurement was the immobility of his
face. The shell which had mutilated him, the scalpels of the German
field surgeons who had perfunctorily repaired the lacerations, had left
the reddened, scar-distorted flesh in a rigid mold. He could neither
recognizably smile nor frown. His face, such as it was, was set in
unchangeable lines. Out of this rigid, expressionless mask his eyes
glowed, blue and bright, having escaped injury. They were the only key
to the mutations of his mind. If Hollister's eyes were the windows of his
soul, he did not keep the blinds drawn, knowing that few had the
hardihood to peer into those windows now.
Mr. Lewis looked at him, looked away, and then his gaze came slowly
back as if drawn by some fascination against which he struggled in vain.
He did not wish to look at Hollister. Yet he was compelled to look. He

seemed to find difficulty in speech, this suave man of affairs.
"I'm afraid I shouldn't have recognized you, as you say," he uttered, at
last. "Have you--ah----"
"I've been overseas," Hollister answered the unspoken question. That
strange curiosity, tinctured with repulsion! "The result is obvious."
"Most unfortunate," Mr. Lewis murmured. "But your scars are
honorable. A brother of mine lost an arm at Loos."
"The brothers of a good many people lost more than their arms at
Loos," Hollister returned dryly. "But that is not why I called. You
recollect, I suppose, that when I was out here last I bought a timber
limit in the Toba from your firm. When I went overseas I instructed
you to sell. What was done in that matter?"
Mr. Lewis' countenance cleared at once. He was on his own ground
again, dealing with matters in which he was competent, in consultation
with a client whom he recalled as a person of consequence, the son of a
man who had likewise been of considerable consequence. Personal
undesirability was always discounted in the investment field, the region
of percentum returns. Money talked, in arrogant tones that commanded
respect.
He pressed a button.
"Bring me," he ordered the clerk who appeared, "all correspondence
relating to this matter," and he penciled a few sentences on a slip of
paper.
He delved into the papers that were presently set before him.
"Ah, yes," he said. "Lot 2027 situated on the south slope of the Toba
Valley. Purchased for your account July, 1912. Sale ordered October,
1914. We had some correspondence about that early in 1915, while you
were in London. Do you recall it, Mr. Hollister?"

"Yes. You wrote that the timber market was dead, that any sale possible
must be at a considerable sacrifice. Afterward, when I got to the front, I