CHAPTER VIII.
COLONEL SNOW’S RANCH.
At an early hour that morning the journey was resumed and their progress up stream continued uninterruptedly until about the middle of the forenoon, when Swiftwater stepped ashore and began to search along the right bank for landmarks. Suddenly, he stepped out of the woods, and held up his hand and the Indians in the first boat began to turn the craft’s head in toward the shore.
“Here we are,” cried the miner, pointing to a large board nailed across two small trees, under which a “cairn” or pile of boulders had been erected. “This is one of the corners of the Colonel’s property.”
The boats were quickly fastened and the boys tumbled 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.