ff ran
out to a steep, scrubbily timbered hillside, he dropped down to the
valley floor and bore toward the river through a wide flat. Here he
moved through a forest of cedar and spruce so high and dense that no
ray of sun ever penetrated through those interlocked branches to warm
the earth in which those enormous trunks were rooted. Moss hung in
streamers from the lower boughs. It was dusky there in full day. The
wild things of the region made this their sanctuary. Squirrels scolded
as he passed. The willow grouse tamely allowed him to approach within
twenty feet before they fluttered to the nearest thicket. The deep
snow was crisscrossed by the tracks of innumerable deer driven down
from the highlands by the deeper snow above.

For a time, in this shadowy temple of the pagan gods, Hollister was
forced to depend on a pocket compass to hold a course in the direction
he wished to go. But at last he came out in a slashing, a place where
loggers had been recently at work. Here a donkey engine stood black
and cold on its skids, half-buried in snow. Beyond this working a
clear field opened, and past the field he saw the outline of the
houses on the river bank and he bore straight for these to learn upon
what days the steamer touched the head of Toba and how he might best
gain that float upon which he had disembarked two months before.

CHAPTER VII

Hollister stowed his pack in the smoking room and stood outside by the
rail, watching the Toba Valley fall astern, a green fissure in the
white rampart of the Coast Range. Chance, the inscrutable arbiter of
human destinies, had directed him that morning to a man cutting wood
on the bank of the river close by that cluster of houses where other
men stirred about various tasks, where there must have been wives and
mothers, for he saw a dozen children at play by a snow fort.

"Steamer?" the man answered Hollister's inquiry. "Say, if you want to
catch her, you just about got time. Two fellows from here left awhile
ago. If you hurry, maybe you can catch 'em. If you catch 'em before
they get out over the bar, they'll give you a lift to the float. If
you don't, you're stuck for a week. There's only one rowboat down
there."

Hollister had caught them.

He took a last, thoughtful look. Over the vessel's bubbling wake he
could see the whole head of the Inlet deep in winter snows,--a white
world, coldly aloof in its grandeur. It was beautiful, full of the
majesty of serene dis