had arisen in the lower valley, that the forest was being logged off, that land was being cleared and cultivated.  There was nothing strange in that.  All over the earth the growing pressure of population forced men continually to invade the strongholds of the wilderness.  Here lay fertile acres, water, forests to supply timber, the highway of the sea to markets.  Only labor,—­patient, unremitting labor—­was needed to shape all that great valley for cultivation.  Cleared and put to the plow, it would produce abundantly.  A vast, fecund area out of which man, withdrawing from the hectic pressure of industrial civilization, could derive sustenance,—­if he possessed sufficient hardihood to survive such hardships and struggle as his forefathers had for their common lot.

Hollister ranged the lower part of the hillside until hunger drove him back to camp.  And, as it sometimes happens that what a man fails to come upon when he seeks with method and intent he stumbles upon by accident, so now Hollister, coming heedlessly downhill, found the corner stake he was seeking.  With his belt-axe he blazed a trail from this point to the flat below, so that he could find it again.

He made no further explorations that afternoon.  He spent a little time in making his camp comfortable in ways known to any outdoor man.  But when day broke clear the following morning he was on the hill, compass in hand, bearing due west from the original stake.  He found the second without much trouble.  He ran a line south and east and north again and so returned to his starting point by noon with two salient facts outstanding in his mind.

The first was that he suspected himself of having bought a poke which contained a pig of doubtful value.  This, if true, made plain the difficulty of re-sale, and made him think decidedly unpleasant things of “Lewis and Company, Specialists in B.C.  Timber.”  The second was that someone, within recent years, had cut timber on his limit.  And it was his timber.  The possessive sense was fairly strong in Hollister, as it usually is in men who have ever possessed any considerable property.  He did not like the idea of being cheated or robbed.  In this case there was superficial evidence that both these things had happened to him.

So when he had cooked himself a meal and smoked a pipe, he took to the high ground again to verify or disprove these unwelcome conclusions.  In that huge and largely inaccessible region which is embraced within the boundaries of British Columbia, in a land where the industrial life-blood flows chiefly along two railways and three navigable streams, there are many great areas where the facilities of transportation are much as they were when British Columbia was a field exploited only by trappers and traders.  Settlement is still but a fringe upon the borders of the wilderness.  Individuals and corporations own land and timber which they have never seen, sources of material wealth acquired cheaply, with an eye to the future.  Beyond the railway belts, the navigable streams, the coastwise passages where steamers come and go, there lies a vast hinterland where canoe and pack-sack are still the mainstay of the traveler.