The three days' voyage by boat and rail was irksome. I bought my kit
at Sainte Croix, on the Central Pacific Railroad, and on June 1st I
began the last stage of my journey via the Sainte Isole broad-gauge,
arriving in the wilderness by daylight. A tedious forced march by
blazed trail, freshly spotted on the wrong side, of course, brought me
to the northern terminus of the rusty, narrow-gauge lumber railway
which runs from the heart of the hushed pine wilderness to the sea.

Already a long train of battered flat-cars, piled with sluice-props
and roughly hewn sleepers, was moving slowly off into the brooding
forest gloom, when I came in sight of the track; but I developed a
gratifying and unexpected burst of speed, shouting all the while. The
train stopped; I swung myself aboard the last car, where a pleasant
young fellow was sitting on the rear brake, chewing spruce and reading
a letter.

"Come aboard, sir," he said, looking up with a smile; "I guess you're
the man in a hurry."

"I'm looking for a man named Halyard," I said, dropping rifle and
knapsack on the fresh-cut, fragrant pile of pine. "Are you Halyard?"

"No, I'm Francis Lee, bossing the mica pit at Port-of-Waves," he
replied, "but this letter is from Halyard, asking me to look out for a
man in a hurry from Bronx Park, New York."