umbled up the bank with some
curiosity to investigate the site of what was for some weeks to be a home
to them.

"The Colonel told me," said Rand "that he had bought from the Canadian
Government about two thousand acres of the best virgin timber of the
British Columbia section, and this must be some of it."

The site of their camp certainly bore out the owner's anticipations of the
value of his purchase. For miles in every direction stretched a solid
substantial growth of timber--hemlock, spruce, fir, poplar and birch,
towering to hundreds of feet into the air, and many bolls five and six
feet through at the butt. There was very little undergrowth and heavy turf
extended in the long aisles of the forest in every direction.

Within a very short time the boats had been permanently fastened to the
banks by heavy ropes and strong stakes cut in the small timber, and all
hands began to unload the camp equipage. From the bottom of one end of the
craft where the camp stuff and supplies had been piled, rough boards which
Swiftwater referred to as "sawed stuff," and which had been carried as a
sort of false bottom to the boats, were brought out and made into a sort
of platform roughly nailed together and placed on a foundation of small
boulders gathered from the bed of the creek which raised it a few inches
from the ground. On this a heavy army tent, which had been brought from
White Horse, was erected by the Scouts themselves and stoutly pegged and
guyed in the most approved fashion. A series of flies divided the interior
into rooms, and in these the camp bedsteads were placed. This was to be
the permanent abiding place of the boys and the miner while the work of
preparing the sawmill camp for the next winter's work was going on.

The Indians were each given a dog tent and two of the tarpaulins were
turned over to them, and at some little distance away they soon rigged up
something between a hut and a burrow of stones, sods, and brush, about ten
feet square, the bottom of which they filled two feet deep with spruce and
fir boughs. Over all they drew the tarpaulins and pegged them down. The
boys watched curiously the gathering of the fir and spruce sprigs.

"Makes the finest spring bed in the world," said Jim. "I've slept on it
hundreds of nights, and there's no mattress made that equals it. We'll
make up some for ourselves within a few days."

Preparations for the night having been made, and a fireplace dug out of
the bank