138
XV Martial's Misadventure 149
XVI Acton's Warning 162
XVII An Eventful Day 174
XVIII Tranquillity 186
XIX Nasmyth Hears the River 195
XX Nasmyth Goes Away 208
XXI The Men of the Bush 218
XXII Nasmyth Sets to Work 228
XXIII The Derrick 239
XXIV Realities 251
XXV Nasmyth Decides 260
XXVI One Night's Task 269
XXVII Timber Rights 278
XXVIII A Painful Duty 287
XXIX A Futile Scheme 297
XXX Second Thoughts 309
XXXI The Last Shot 318

THE GREATER POWER

CHAPTER I

OVERBURDENED

It was winter in the great coniferous forest which rolls about the
rocky hills and shrouds the lonely valleys of British Columbia. A
bitter frost had dried the snow to powder and bound the frothing
rivers; it had laid its icy grip upon the waters suddenly, and the
sound of their turmoil died away in the depths of the rock-walled
canyons, until the rugged land lay wrapped in silence under a sky of
intense, pitiless blueness that seemed frozen too. Man and beast
shrink from the sudden cold snaps, as they call them, in that country,
and the rancher, who has sheep to lose, sits shivering in his log
house through the long forenights with a Marlin rifle handy, while the
famished timber wolves prowl about his clearing. Still, it is the
loggers toiling in the wilderness who feel the cold snaps most, for
the man who labours under an Arctic frost must be generously fed, or
the heat and strength die out of him, and, now and then, it happens
that provisions become scanty when no canoe can be poled up the
rivers, and the trails are blocked with snow.

There were four loggers at work in a redwood forest, one January
afternoon, rolling a great log with peevies and hand