The prospects of the company holding together were perhaps brighter than many of their friends imagined. The bonds that bound them each to the others were other than financial. The head of the firm was Dan Tussock, the organiser and driver of work. With thirty years’ experience in dealing with men, material and machines in all kinds of constructive work, he had mastered the secret of how to apply power to raw material for the service of mankind, which is the secret of industry, as had few in that bustling, rushing, up-building province of British Columbia. Associated with him was the young lawyer, Dalton, a master of all technicalities of his profession, a shrewd negotiator, an alert watch dog against all such predatory creatures as had made prey of Dan Tussock during his checkered and eventful life. With them, the youth Paul Gaspard, inexperienced in the ways of men, ignorant of affairs, but furnished in rich measure with the priceless endowments of a clear, high mind, with instincts for things right and fine, and a heart vastly capable of unlimited loyalty to a friend, even to the obliteration of self. Already they had cleaned up and disposed of their first acre of land at good profit, and were now embarked in a still more extensive enterprise, the clearing and marketing of a new subdivision of the city. Besides this, in Tussock’s mind new enterprises were taking shape, timber limits and lumber mills were visualising themselves; for Dan Tussock had once been known as one of the lumber kings of the Pacific coast.