al 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.

In this almost primeval region the large-handed fashion of primitive
transactions is still in vogue. Men traffic in timber and mineral
stakings on the word of other men. The coastal slopes and valleys are
dotted with timber claims which have been purchased by men and
corporations in Vancouver and New York and London and Paris and
Berlin, bought and traded "sight unseen" as small boys swap
jackknives. There flourishes in connection with this, on the Pacific
coast, the business of cruising timber, a vocation followed by hardy
men prepared to go anywhere, any time, in fair weather or foul.
Commission such a man to fare into such a place, cruise such and such
areas of timber land, described by metes and bounds. This resourceful
surveyor-explorer will disappear. In the fullness of weeks he will
return, bearded and travel-worn. He will place in your hands a report
containing an estimate of so many million feet of standing fir, cedar,
spruce, hemlock, with a description of the topography, an opinion on
the difficulty or ease of the logging chance.

On the British Columbia coast a timber cruiser's report comes in the
same category as a bank statement or a chartered accountant's audit of
books; that is to say, it is unquestionable, an authentic statement of
fact.

Within the boundaries defined by the four stakes of the limit
Hollister owned there stood, according to the original cruising
estimate, eight million feet of merchantable timber, half fir, half
red cedar. The Douglas fir covered the rocky slopes and the cedar
lined the gut of a deep hollow which split the limit midway. It was
classed as a fair logging chance, since from that corner which dipped
into the flats of the Toba a donkey engine with its mile-long arm of
steel cable could snatch the logs down to the river, whence they would
be floated to the sea and towed to the Vancouver sawmills.

Hollister had been guided by the custom of the country. He had put a
surplus fund of cash into this property in the persuasion that it
would resell at a profit, or that it could ultimately be logged at a
still greater profit. And this persuasion rested upon the cruising
estimate and the uprightness of "Lewis and Company, Specialists