The history of Rod's family was part of the history of his native land, in so far as Anglo-Saxon occupancy had made history. The Norquay foothold had been the first individual one established by a white man on the Pacific between Spain to the south and Russia to the north. That century and more of far-seeing purposeful struggle had culminated in the possession of every material benefit men live and work and sometimes vainly die to grasp. Blood had been spilled, storms braved, great risks faced to win that security. To Rod, ever since he could remember, these things had been real, vividly colored episodes enacted under the auspices of the high gods of adventure. He was imaginative, creatively imaginative. Old Roderick Sylvester, the barque _Hermes_, the sea-otter trading, the bride who fled her English home to fare into strange seas for love, the Chilcotins on their bloody forays, the wooden blockhouse, the first course of masonry, the vast influx of gold-seekers in the Cariboo rush of '58, the completion of Hawk's Nest in all its comfortable permanence,--these were not simply things he knew as part of his antecedents. They were realities, as if they had happened but yesterday under his own eyes. They moved him strangely, deeply. He could reconstruct in his mind all that crowded century. In his mind's eye all the men and women whose bones lay underground about the great red cedar lived and moved and had being once more. He could see them as clearly as he saw Phil and his father and Laska or Mary Thorn. He had been trying to capture those visions, those personalities, those old stirring times so crowded with pregnant action. He had been trying more or less earnestly for a year and a half. And he had failed. He was aware of his failure. The human equation somehow evaded him when he put pen to paper. He couldn't put his finger with surety on the well-spring of human motive. He hadn't the key to character. Rod had more than a casual acquaintance with literature in two languages. He knew Balzac and O. Henry alike, Homer and George Ade, De Maupassant and the Brontes, Flaubert and Anatole France, Ibsen and Tolstoi and Gorky, Kipling and Hardy and Dickens and Poe. He read these writers, and he saw that they created men and women, creatures of pain and passion, even as God created them. He perceived that they did it, that with deft strokes they clothed their skeletons with flesh and blood and breathed the breath of life into them, so that they strutted and sighed and fought with an emotion-compelling intensity. But he could not do it himself. And he passionately desired to catch and transfix those gorgeous pictures his brain evoked from that pioneering past.