4 THE LOO OF A TIMBER CRUISER 



from books. And we were to find that he possessed 

 a capacity for work and a guileless sincerity that 

 endeared him before long to every one. 



There was Bob Moak, a veteran timber cruiser, 

 whose twenty-eight years spent in the woods among 

 lumber camps from Maine to Oregon had made of 

 him a veritable giant of a man, long-limbed and 

 heavy-shouldered, taciturn and reserved, slow of 

 thought and speech, but mighty in action. He knew 

 the look of good timber better than his own fea- 

 tures, and though the touch of Time showed in his 

 bowed shoulders and grizzled hair, his experience 

 and woodsmanship made him still a most valuable 

 man for the party. 



There was Conway, a former college athlete, now 

 a Forest Guard, and like myself, new to reconnais- 

 sance, but with a spare and sinewy build which 

 augured agility and endurance. 



There was Bert Gilbert, the noted camp cook, 

 famous throughout New Mexico and Arizona for 

 his flapjacks and " slumgullion. ' ' He had just ar- 

 rived from Flagstaff with a gunnysack of personal 

 effects and a soul-gratifying "hangover" from a 

 recent dalliance with the Demon Rum. Bert, sad to 

 relate, was of that amiable type which finds in the 

 lure of a social glass with friends, and the diver- 

 sions of the city, temptations not to be resisted. 

 The desire to escape from the burden of this "good 

 fellowship" and so far as might be from his own 

 weakness, had first launched the cook, some years 



