, "if it's on your road."

"Thanks. Maybe we will," Bill returned.

The surveyor lifted his hat, with a swift glance of admiration at
Hazel, and they passed with a mutual "so long."

"What do you think of that, old girl?" Bill observed presently. "A
real, honest-to-God railroad going by within a hundred miles of our
shack. Three years. It'll be there before we know it. We'll have
neighbors to burn."

"A hundred miles!" Hazel laughed. "Is that your idea of a neighborly
distance?"

"What's a hundred miles?" he defended. "Two days' ride, that's all.
And the kind of people that come to settle in a country like this don't
stick in sight of the cars. They're like me--need lots of elbow room.
There'll be hardy souls looking for a location up where we are before
very long. You'll see."

They passed other crews of men, surveyors with transits, chainmen,
stake drivers, ax gangs widening the path through the timber. Most of
them looked at Hazel in frank surprise, and stared long after she
passed by. And when an open bottom beside a noisy little creek showed
the scattered tents of the survey camp, Hazel said:

"Let's not stop, Bill."

He looked back over his shoulder with a comprehending smile.

"Getting shy? Make you uncomfortable to have all these boys look at
you, little person?" he bantered. "All right, we won't stop. But all
these fellows probably haven't seen a white woman for months. You
can't blame them for admiring. You do look good to other men besides
me, you know."

So they rode through the camp with but a nod to the aproned cook, who
thrust out his head, and a gray-haired man with glasses, who humped
over a drafting board under an awning. Their noon fire they built at a
spring five miles beyond.

Thereafter they skirted three lakes in succession, Fraser, Burns, and
Decker, and climbed over a low divide to drop into the Bulkley
Valley--a pleasant, rolling country, where the timber was interspersed
with patches of open grassland and set with small lakes, wherein
schools of big trout lived their finny lives unharried by anglers--save
when some wandering Indian snared one with a primitive net.

Far down this valley they came upon the first sign of settlement.
Hardy souls, far in advance of the coming railroad, had built here and
there a log cabin and were hard at it clearing and plowing and getting
the land ready for crops. Four or five such lone ranches they passed,
tarrying overnight at