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 in B.C.  Timber, Investments, Etc.”

But Hollister had a practical knowledge of timber himself, acquired at first hand.  He had skirted his boundaries and traversed the fringes of his property, and he saw scrubby, undersized trees where the four-foot trunks of Douglas fir should have lifted in brown ranks.  He had looked into the bisecting hollow from different angles and marked magnificent cedars,—­but too few of them.  Taken with the fact that Lewis had failed to resell even at a reduced price, when standing timber had doubled in value since the beginning of the war, Hollister had grave doubts, which, however, he could not establish until he went over the ground and made a rough estimate for himself.