re when the weather cleared. A tent was well
enough, but a house with a fireplace was better.

The rain held forty-eight hours without intermission. Then, as if the
clouds had discharged their aqueous cargo and rode light as
unballasted ships, they lifted in aerial fleets and sailed away, white
in a blue sky. The sun, swinging in a low arc, cocked a lazy eye over
the southern peaks, and Hollister carried his first pack-load up to
the log cabin while the moss underfoot, the tree trunks, the green
blades of the salal, and the myriad stalks of the low thickets were
still gleaming with the white frost that came with a clearing sky.

He began with the idea of carrying up his blankets and three or four
days' food. He ended by transporting up that steep slope everything
but his canoe and the small tent. It might be, he said to himself as
he lugged load after load, just a whim, a fancy, but he was free to
act on a whim or a fancy, as free as if he were in the first blush of
careless, adventurous youth,--freer, because he had none of the
impatient hopes and urges and dreams of youth. He was finished, he
told himself in a transient mood of bitterness. Why should he be
governed by practical considerations? He was here, alone in the
unsentient, uncritical forest. It did not matter to any one whether he
came or stayed. To himself it mattered least of all, he thought. There
was neither plan nor purpose nor joy in his existence, save as he
conceived the first casually, or snatched momentarily at the other in
such simple ways as were available to him here,--here where at least
there was no one and nothing to harass him, where he was surrounded by
a wild beauty that comforted him in some fashion beyond his
understanding.

When he had brought the last of his food supply up to the cabin, he
hauled the canoe back into a thicket and covered it with the glossy
green leaves of the salal. He folded his tent in a tight bundle and
strung it to a bough with a wire, out of reach of the wood rats.

These tasks completed, he began his survey of the standing timber on
his limit.

At best he could make only a rough estimate, less accurate than a
professional cruiser's would be, but sufficient to satisfy him. In a
week he was reasonably certain that the most liberal estimate left
less than half the quantity of merchantable timber for which he had
paid good money. The fir, as a British Columbia logging chance, was
all but negligible. What value re