sis was the evil from which he had
suffered and which he should avoid. But he said to himself that if he
could get pleasure out of so simple a thing as a canoe trip in a
lonely region, there was hope for him yet. And in the same breath he
wondered how long he could be sustained by that illusion.

He had a blue-print of the area covering the Big Bend. That timber
limit which he had lightly purchased long ago, and which
unaccountably went begging a purchaser, lay south and a bit west from
where he set up his camp. He satisfied himself of that by the
blue-print and the staking description. The northeast corner stake
should stand not a great way back from the river bank.

He had to find a certain particularly described cedar tree, thence
make his way south to a low cliff, at one extreme of which he should
find a rock cairn with a squared post in its center. From that he
could run his boundary lines with a pocket compass, until he located
the three remaining corners.

Hollister found cedars enough, but none that pointed the way to a low
cliff and a rock cairn. He ranged here and there, and at last went up
the hillside which rose here so steeply as to be stiff climbing. It
bore here and there a massive tree, rough-barked pillars rising to a
branchy head two hundred feet in the air. But for the most part the
slope was clothed with scrubby hemlock and thickets of young fir and
patches of hazel, out of which he stirred a great many grouse and once
a deer.

But if he found no stakes to show him the boundaries of his property,
he gained the upper rim of the high cliff which walled the southern
side of the Big Bend, and all the valley opened before him. Smoke
lifted in a pale spiral from the house below his camp. Abreast of the
log boom he had passed in the river, he marked the roofs of several
buildings, and back of the clearings in the logged-over land opened
white squares against the dusky green of the surrounding timber. He
perceived that a considerable settlement had arisen in the lower
valley, that the forest was being logged off, that land was being
cleared and cultivated. There was nothing strange in that. All over
the earth the growing pressure of population forced men continually to
invade the strongholds of the wilderness. Here lay fertile acres,
water, forests to supply timber, the highway of the sea to markets.
Only labor,--patient, unremitting labor--was needed to shape all that
great valley for cultivation. Clea