ost incredible that such wholesale robberies
should have gone on with so little danger of detection. Certainly
detection was a matter of sufficient simplicity. Someone happens along,
like Thorpe, carrying a Government map in his pocket. He runs across a
parcel of unclaimed land already cut over. It would seem easy to lodge a
complaint, institute a prosecution against the men known to have put in
the timber. BUT IT IS ALMOST NEVER DONE.

Thorpe knew that men occupied in so precarious a business would be
keenly on the watch. At the first hint of rivalry, they would buy in the
timber they had selected. But the situation had set his fighting blood
to racing. The very fact that these men were thieves on so big a
scale made him the more obstinately determined to thwart them. They
undoubtedly wanted the tract down river. Well, so did he!

He purposed to look it over carefully, to ascertain its exact boundaries
and what sections it would be necessary to buy in order to include it,
and perhaps even to estimate it in a rough way. In the accomplishment of
this he would have to spend the summer, and perhaps part of the fall,
in that district. He could hardly expect to escape notice. By the
indications on the river, he judged that a crew of men had shortly
before taken out a drive of logs. After the timber had been rafted and
towed to Marquette, they would return. He might be able to hide in
the forest, but sooner or later, he was sure, one of the company's
landlookers or hunters would stumble on his camp. Then his very
concealment would tell them what he was after. The risk was too great.
For above all things Thorpe needed time. He had, as has been said, to
ascertain what he could offer. Then he had to offer it. He would be
forced to interest capital, and that is a matter of persuasion and
leisure.

Finally his shrewd, intuitive good-sense flashed the solution on him.
He returned rapidly to his pack, assumed the straps, and arrived at the
first dam about dark of the long summer day.

There he looked carefully about him. Some fifty feet from the water's
edge a birch knoll supported, besides the birches, a single big hemlock.
With his belt ax, Thorpe cleared away the little white trees. He stuck
the sharpened end of one of them in the bark of the shaggy hemlock,
fastened the other end in a crotch eight or ten feet distant, slanted
the rest of the saplings along one side of this ridge pole, and turned
in, after a hasty supper, lea