He was tied to his camp.  He could not stir abroad without more discomfort than he cared to undergo.  Every bush, every bough, would precipitate upon him showers of drops at the slightest touch.  He sat by his fire in the mouth of the tent and smoked and thought of the comfortable cabin up in the cedar hollow, and of Doris Cleveland’s books.  He began by reflecting that he might have brought one down to read.  He ended before nightfall of a dull, rain-sodden day with a resolution to move up there when the weather cleared.  A tent was well enough, but a house with a fireplace was better.

The rain held forty-eight hours without intermission.  Then, as if the clouds had discharged their aqueous cargo and rode light as unballasted ships, they lifted in aerial fleets and sailed away, white in a blue sky.  The sun, swinging in a low arc, cocked a lazy eye over the southern peaks, and Hollister carried his first pack-load up to the log cabin while the moss underfoot, the tree trunks, the green blades of the salal, and the myriad stalks of the low thickets were still gleaming with the white frost that came with a clearing sky.

He began with the idea of carrying up his blankets and three or four days’ food.  He ended by transporting up that steep slope everything but his canoe and the small tent.  It might be, he said to himself as he lugged load after load, just a whim, a fancy, but he was free to act on a whim or a fancy, as free as if he were in the first blush of careless, adventurous youth,—­freer, because he had none of the impatient hopes and urges and dreams of youth.  He was finished, he told himself in a transient mood of bitterness.  Why should he be governed by practical considerations?  He was here, alone in the unsentient, uncritical forest.  It did not matter to any one whether he came or stayed.  To himself it mattered least of all, he thought.  There was neither plan nor purpose nor joy in his existence, save as he conceived the first casually, or snatched momentarily at the other in such simple ways as were available to him here,—­here where at least there was no one and nothing to harass him, where he was surrounded by a wild beauty that comforted him in some fashion beyond his understanding.

When he had brought the last of his food supply up to the cabin, he hauled the canoe back into a thicket and covered it with the glossy green leaves of the salal.  He folded his tent in a tight bundle and strung it to a bough with a wire, out of reach of the wood rats.

These tasks completed, he began his survey of the standing timber on his limit.

At best he could make only a rough estimate, less accurate than a professional cruiser’s would be, but sufficient to satisfy him.  In a week he was reasonably certain that the most liberal estimate left less than half the quantity of merchantable timber for which he had paid good money.  The fir, as a British Columbia logging chance, was all but negligible.  What value resided there lay in the cedar alone.