This other matter of timber cutting was one he could settle in short order.  It roused his curiosity.  It gave him a touch of the resentment which stirs a man when he suspects himself of being the victim of pillaging vandals.  No matter that despair had recently colored his mental vision; the sense of property right still functioned unimpaired.  To be marred and impoverished and shunned as if he were a monstrosity were accomplished facts which had weighed upon him, an intolerable burden.  He forgot that now.  There was nothing much here to remind him.  He was free to react to this new sense of outrage, this new evidence of mankind’s essential unfairness.

In the toll taken of his timber by these unwarranted operations there was little to grieve over, he discovered before long.  He had that morning found and crossed, after a long, curious inspection, a chute which debouched from the middle of his limit and dipped towards the river bottom apparently somewhere above his camp.  He knew that this shallow trough built of slender poles was a means of conveying shingle-bolts from the site of cutting to the water that should float them to market.  Earlier he had seen signs of felling among the cedars, but only from a distance.  He was not sure he had seen right until he discovered the chute.

So now he went back to the chute and followed its winding length until it led into the very heart of the cedars in the hollow.  Two or three years had elapsed since the last tree was felled.  Nor had there ever been much inroad on the standing timber.  Some one had begun operations there and abandoned the work before enough timber had been cut to half repay the labor of building that long chute.

Nor was that all.  In the edge of the workings the branches and litter of harvesting those hoary old cedars had been neatly cleared from a small level space.  And on this space, bold against the white carpet of snow, stood a small log house.

Hollister pushed open the latched door and stepped into the musty desolation of long abandoned rooms.  It was neatly made, floored with split cedar, covered by a tight roof of cedar shakes.  Its tiny-paned windows were still intact.  Within, it was divided into two rooms.  There was no stove and there had never been a stove.  A rough fireplace of stone served for cooking.  An iron bar crossed the fireplace and on this bar still hung the fire-blackened pothooks.  On nails and shelves against the wall pans still hung and dishes stood thick with dust.  On a homemade bunk in one corner lay a mattress which the rats had converted to their own uses, just as they had played havoc with papers scattered about the floor and the oilcloth on the table.

Hollister passed into the other room.  This had been a bedroom, a woman’s bedroom.  He guessed that by the remnants of fabric hanging over the windows, as well as by a skirt and sunbonnet which still hung from a nail.  Here, too, was a bedstead with a rat-ruined mattress.  And upon a shelf over the bed was ranged a row of books, perhaps two dozen volumes, which the rats had somehow respected,—­except for sundry gnawing at the bindings.