red and put to the plow, it would
produce abundantly. A vast, fecund area out of which man, withdrawing
from the hectic pressure of industrial civilization, could derive
sustenance,--if he possessed sufficient hardihood to survive such
hardships and struggle as his forefathers had for their common lot.

Hollister ranged the lower part of the hillside until hunger drove him
back to camp. And, as it sometimes happens that what a man fails to
come upon when he seeks with method and intent he stumbles upon by
accident, so now Hollister, coming heedlessly downhill, found the
corner stake he was seeking. With his belt-axe he blazed a trail from
this point to the flat below, so that he could find it again.

He made no further explorations that afternoon. He spent a little time
in making his camp comfortable in ways known to any outdoor man. But
when day broke clear the following morning he was on the hill, compass
in hand, bearing due west from the original stake. He found the second
without much trouble. He ran a line south and east and north again and
so returned to his starting point by noon with two salient facts
outstanding in his mind.

The first was that he suspected himself of having bought a poke which
contained a pig of doubtful value. This, if true, made plain the
difficulty of re-sale, and made him think decidedly unpleasant things
of "Lewis and Company, Specialists in B.C. Timber." The second was
that someone, within recent years, had cut timber on his limit. And it
was his timber. The possessive sense was fairly strong in Hollister,
as it usually is in men who have ever possessed any considerable
property. He did not like the idea of being cheated or robbed. In this
case there was superficial evidence that both these things had
happened to him.

So when he had cooked himself a meal and smoked a pipe, he took to the
high ground again to verify or disprove these unwelcome conclusions.
In that huge and largely inaccessible region which is embraced within
the boundaries of British Columbia, in a land where the industrial
life-blood flows chiefly along two railways and three navigable
streams, there are many great areas where the facilities of
transportation are much as they were when British Columbia was a field
exploited only by trappers and traders. Settlement is still but a
fringe upon the borders of the wilderness. Individuals and
corporations own land and timber which they have never seen, sources
of materi