"Three stones piled one on top of another" might be used to mark many and many different sorts of places. They might be in town. They might be in the country, in pasture or meadow; beside a lake in the valley, or on the summit of the hills. Again, what reason why they might not be in the heart of a great forest? The Ship woods comprised such a forest. Its very name was derived from the fact that for long years great timbers for ship building purposes had been cut there. In one part or another of its vast expanse men were at work the whole year through, sawing, chopping, hewing. A single "stick" from the forest's depths might measure more than one hundred feet in length by three feet or more each way, in thickness. Perhaps four teams of horses would be used to haul such a piece of timber out of the woods and to the railroad siding where it was loaded for transportation to the owners' mills, many miles away. The fact that those who owned the forest did live a long distance from it, naturally left the vast tract in the hands of only such men as were employed in cutting the big "sticks." And as the latter were little interested in anything more than the trees that would do for their purposes, the woods was for the most part regarded as pretty nearly public property. That is to say, no one so much as thought of asking permission to go there, to camp, to hunt, to pick blackberries, or anything of the kind. Nor was anyone expected to do so, for that matter. The boss timber man and the crews which handled the saws, and axes, the heavy chains, the canthooks and all the paraphernalia of their hard, hard work, asked no questions of trespassers. They warned hunters against leaving campfires burning and against dropping lighted matches in the leaves. They would permit no one to chop into or otherwise injure a tree which might make "timber" then or later; but in general the occasional stranger who visited these wilds was as free to come to hunt, to fish, to build a brush shack or camp, or to gather firewood, herbs or poles or bark--to do almost as he pleased in short--and as free to go away again, as he would have been in the unclaimed forest of a new country. All this information and much more the Auto Boys had gathered. Plans for their trip had been under way all winter. In imagination they had often pictured the wild, rugged scenery of the locality. Working and talking together, they had built for themselves a kind of aircastle on the banks of the swift, cold and rock-strewn stream skirting the edge of the big woods, in which, at least figuratively, they lived. They had seen themselves in their tent, the automobile in a shelter close by, and a little fire lighted to drive mosquitoes away, many and many an evening together, while still the snow lay deep and the tinkle and gurgle of the swift-flowing stream were smothered beneath the ice.