in
B.C. Timber, Investments, Etc."

But Hollister had a practical knowledge of timber himself, acquired at
first hand. He had skirted his boundaries and traversed the fringes
of his property, and he saw scrubby, undersized trees where the
four-foot trunks of Douglas fir should have lifted in brown ranks. He
had looked into the bisecting hollow from different angles and marked
magnificent cedars,--but too few of them. Taken with the fact that
Lewis had failed to resell even at a reduced price, when standing
timber had doubled in value since the beginning of the war, Hollister
had grave doubts, which, however, he could not establish until he went
over the ground and made a rough estimate for himself.

This other matter of timber cutting was one he could settle in short
order. It roused his curiosity. It gave him a touch of the resentment
which stirs a man when he suspects himself of being the victim of
pillaging vandals. No matter that despair had recently colored his
mental vision; the sense of property right still functioned
unimpaired. To be marred and impoverished and shunned as if he were a
monstrosity were accomplished facts which had weighed upon him, an
intolerable burden. He forgot that now. There was nothing much here to
remind him. He was free to react to this new sense of outrage, this
new evidence of mankind's essential unfairness.

In the toll taken of his timber by these unwarranted operations there
was little to grieve over, he discovered before long. He had that
morning found and crossed, after a long, curious inspection, a chute
which debouched from the middle of his limit and dipped towards the
river bottom apparently somewhere above his camp. He knew that this
shallow trough built of slender poles was a means of conveying
shingle-bolts from the site of cutting to the water that should float
them to market. Earlier he had seen signs of felling among the cedars,
but only from a distance. He was not sure he had seen right until he
discovered the chute.

So now he went back to the chute and followed its winding length until
it led into the very heart of the cedars in the hollow. Two or three
years had elapsed since the last tree was felled. Nor had there ever
been much inroad on the standing timber. Some one had begun operations
there and abandoned the work before enough timber had been cut to half
repay the labor of building that long chute.

Nor was that all. In the edge of the workings the branch