-don't start running yourself down. Boost,--boost
yourself for all you're worth."

"Oh, yes! I know," I said. "But this is different. I have become
acquainted with you. I cannot sail under false colours. I have no
experience. I am a simple baby when it comes to business."

He banged his desk again.

"George,--I'm the boss of this affair. You must just sit back quiet
and listen, while I tell you about it; then you can talk as much as you
want.

"There's a thousand acres of property that I, or I should say, my
daughter Eileen owns some hundred miles up the coast from here. The
place is called Golden Crescent Bay. My wife took a fancy to it in the
early days, when she came with me on a trip one time I was looking over
a timber proposition. I bought it for her for an old song and she grew
so fond of the place that she spent three months of every year, as long
as she lived, right on that very land. She left it all to Eileen when
she died.

"As a business man, I should sell it, for its value has gone away up;
but, as a husband, as a father and as a sentimentalist, I just can't do
it. It would be like desecration.

"There's two miles of water frontage to it; there's the house we put
up, also a little cabin where the present caretaker lives. The only
other place within a couple of miles by water and four miles round by
land through the bush, is a cottage that stands on the property
abutting Eileen's, and close to her bungalow. It has been boarded up
and unoccupied for quite a while. Of course, up behind, over the
hills, there are ranches here and there, while, across the bay and all
up the coast, there are squatters, settlers, fishermen and ranchers for
a fare-you-well."

"You say there is a caretaker there already?" I put in.

"Yes!--I was just getting to that. He's an old Klondike miner; came
out with a fortune. Spent the most of it before he got sober. Came
to, just in time. Now he hoards what's left like an old skinflint.
Won't spend a nickel, unless it's on booze. Drinks like a drowning man
and it never fizzes on him. A good enough man for what he's been
doing, but no good for what I want now."

"You don't want me to do him out of his place, Mr. Horsfal?" I asked.

"I was coming to that, too,--only you're so darned speedy.

"He's all right as a caretaker with little or nothing to do, and he
will prove useful to you for odd jobs,--but, I have a salmon cannery
some miles north of this plac