The Hidden Places | Page 9

on duty at Hastings Park,
having been sent there a year earlier to instruct recruits, after
recovering from a wound. He was the military man par excellence. War

was his game. He had been anxious to go to Siberia with the Canadian
contingent which had just departed. And the High Command had
retained him here to assist in the inglorious routine of demobilization.
Rutherford was disgruntled. Siberia had promised new adventure,
change, excitement.
The man, Hollister soon perceived, was actually sorry the war was over,
sorry that his occupation was gone. He talked of resigning and going to
Mexico, to offer his sword to whichever proved the stronger faction. It
would be a picnic after the Western Front. A man could whip a brigade
of those greasers into shape and become a power. There ought to be
good chances for loot.
Yet Hollister enjoyed his company. Rutherford was genial. He was the
first man for long to accept Hollister as a human being. He promised to
look Hollister up again before he went away.
The world actually seemed cheerful to Hollister, after Rutherford had
gone,--until in moving about the room he caught sight of his face in the
mirror.
CHAPTER III
About ten days later Tommy Rutherford walked into Hollister's room at
eight in the evening. He laid his cap and gloves on the bed, seated
himself, swung his feet to and fro for a second, and reached for one of
Hollister's cigarettes.
"It's a hard world, old thing," he complained. "Here was I all set for an
enjoyable winter. Nice people in Vancouver. All sorts of fetching
affairs on the tapis. And I'm to be demobilized myself next week.
Chucked out into the blooming street with a gratuity and a couple of
medals. Damn the luck."
He remained absorbed in his own reflections for a minute, blowing
smoke rings with meticulous care.
"I wonder if a fellow could make it go in Mexico?" he drawled.

Hollister made no comment.
"Oh, well, hang it, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof," he
remarked, with an abrupt change of tone. "I'm going to a hop at the
Granada presently. Banish dull care and all that, for the time being,
anyway."
His gaze came to an inquiring rest on Hollister.
"What's up, old thing?" he asked lightly. "Why so mum?"
"Oh, nothing much," Hollister answered.
"Bad thing to get in the dumps," Rutherford observed sagely. "You
ought to keep a bottle of Scotch handy for that."
"Drink myself into a state of mind where the world glitters and
becomes joyful, eh? No, I don't fancy your prescription. I'd be more apt
to run amuck."
"Oh, come now," Rutherford remonstrated. "It isn't so bad as that.
Cheer up, old man. Things might be worse, you know.
"Oh, hell!" Hollister exploded.
After which he relapsed into sullen silence, to which Rutherford,
frankly mystified and somewhat inclined to resent this self-contained
mood, presently left him.
Hollister was glad when the man went away. He had a feeling of relief
when the door closed and retreating footsteps echoed down the hall. He
had grasped at a renewal of Rutherford's acquaintance as a man
drowning in a sea of loneliness would grasp at any friendly straw. And
Rutherford, Hollister quickly realized, was the most fragile sort of
straw. The man was a profound, non-thinking egotist, the adventurer
pure and simple, whose mentality never rose above grossness of one
sort and another, in spite of a certain outward polish. He could tolerate
Hollister's mutilated countenance because he had grown accustomed to

horrible sights,--not because he had any particular sympathy for a
crippled, mutilated man's misfortune, or any understanding of such a
man's state of feeling. To Rutherford that was the fortune of war. So
many were killed. So many crippled. So many disfigured. It was luck.
He believed in his own luck. The evil that befell other men left him
rather indifferent. That was all. When Hollister once grasped
Rutherford's attitude, he almost hated the man.
He sat now staring out the window. A storm had broken over
Vancouver that day. To-night it was still gathering force. The sky was a
lowering, slate-colored mass of clouds, spitting squally bursts of rain
that drove in wet lines against his window and made the street below a
glistening area shot with tiny streams and shallow puddles that were
splashed over the curb by rolling motor wheels. The wind droned its
ancient, melancholy chant among the telephone wires, shook with its
unseen, powerful hands a row of bare maples across the way, rattled the
windows in their frames. Now and then, in a momentary lull of the
wind, a brief cessation of the city noises, Hollister could hear far off the
beat of the Gulf seas bursting on the beach at English Bay,