4 THE LOG 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 
