as soon as you leave it you'll find no
paint required. The settlers use logs or shiplap and leave them in the
raw. The trip won't pay you."

"Well, I'll see the country, and find out something about the
coniferous gums."

"They're soft and resinous. Don't you get the material you make good
varnish of from the tropics?"

Harding laughed.

"You people don't know your own resources. There's 'most everything a
white man needs right on this American continent, if he'll take the
trouble to look for it. Lumber changes some of its properties with the
location in which it grows, I guess. We have pines in Florida, but
when you get right up to their northern limit you'll find a difference."

"There's something in that," the sawmill man agreed.

"If you're going up to their northern limit, you'll see some of the
roughest and wildest country on this earth," declared the Hudson Bay
agent. "It's almost impossible to get through in summer unless you
stick to the rivers, and to cross it in winter with the dog sleds is
pretty tough work."

"So I've heard." said Harding. "Well, I'm going to take a smoke. Will
you come along?"

They declined, and when he left them one smiled at the other.

"They're smart people across the frontier, but to send a man into the
northern timber belt looking for paint trade openings or resin they can
make varnish of is about the limit to commercial enterprise."

Harding was leaning back in his chair in the smoking-room with a frown
on his face when Blake joined him. He had a nervous, alert look, and
was dressed with fastidious neatness.

"So you have come along at last!" he remarked in an ironical tone.
"Feel like getting down to business, or shall we put it off again?"

"Sorry I couldn't come earlier," Blake replied. "Somehow or other I
couldn't get away. Things kept turning up to occupy me."

"It's a way they seem to have. Your trouble is that you're too
diffuse; you spread yourself out too much. You want to fix your mind
on one thing; and that will have to be business as soon as we leave
here."

"I dare say you're right. My interest's apt to wander; but if you take
advantage of every opportunity that offers, you get most out of life.
Concentration's good; but if you concentrate on a thing and then don't
get it, you begin to think what a lot of other things you've missed."

"That may be all right," said Harding dubiously; "but we're going to
concentrate on business right now