?"

"Oh, almost everybody has to buy. There are ships and timber camps and
the hotels, and--"

"Where do they get the money?"

"Everybody seems to have money. Some take it there with them. Men
working in the timber camps get four dollars a day and their board. At
one place they paid four dollars a cord for wood to ship to San
Francisco, and a man can sell all the shingles he can make at four
dollars a thousand. I was offered five cents a foot for piles. If we had
Buck and Dandy over there we could make twenty dollars a day putting in
piles."

"Where could you get the piles?"

"Off the government land, of course. All help themselves to what they
want. Then there are the fish and the clams and oysters, and--"

"But what about the land for the claim?"

That question was a stumper. The little wife never lost sight of that
bargain made before we were married. Now I found myself praising a
country for the agricultural qualities of which I could not say much.
But if we could sell produce higher, might we not well lower our
standard of an ideal farm? The claim I had taken was described with a
touch of apology, in quality falling so far below what we had hoped to
acquire. However, we decided to move, and began to prepare for the
journey.

The wife, baby, bedding, ox yoke, and log chain were sent up the Cowlitz
in a canoe. Buck and Dandy and I took the trail. On this occasion I was
ill prepared for a cool night camp, having neither blanket nor coat. I
had expected to reach Hard Bread's Hotel, where the people in the canoe
would stop overnight. But I could not make it, so again I lay out on the
trail. "Hard Bread's," an odd name for a hotel, was so called because
the old widower that kept the place fed his patrons on hardtack three
times a day.

I found that my wife had not fared any better than I had on the trail,
and in fact not so well. The floor of the cabin--that is, the hotel--was
a great deal harder than the sand spit where I had passed the night. I
had plenty of pure, fresh air, while she, in a closed cabin and in the
same room with many others, had neither fresh air nor freedom from
creeping things that make life miserable. With her shoes for a pillow, a
shawl for covering, small wonder that she reported, "I did not sleep a
wink last night."

We soon arrived at the Cowlitz landing, the end of the canoe journey.
Striking the tent that had served us so well on the Plains and making a
cheerful camp fire, we spe