"_He placed this stone,_" Rod translated. "Come on. I'll show you where the old chap's buried and tell you something about him." Big Dent passes on map and chart for an island, by a geographical laxity. But it is an island only for brief moments at an extremely high tide. Otherwise it is a peninsular out-thrust, that helps to choke the Euclataw Passage. Big Dent was a mile wide and twice as long. From side to side and from end to end it stood clothed in its ancient garment, the forest. Everywhere lifted enormous firs in whose plumy crests had sighed the winds that blew the first Norquay's trading vessel down Cardero Channel, cedars that were lusty when Columbus crossed the Western Ocean. For profit there had never been ax laid to tree on that twelve hundred acres. On its northern extremity Big Dent remained the natural forest of the region, a hushed jungle of devil's club, salal brush, ferns that grew man-high, salmonberry, branchy dogwood, vine maple. Out of this lesser growth the great trees rose in their majesty, silent, immobile, brooding. The sun blazed on their lofty heads. About their boles were silence and shade, a coolness at midday heat, the commingled smells of moist, fecund earth and rotting wood. But all across the southern portion, the greater half of Big Dent, the thickets had been cut away, the patriarchal trees freed of the litter about their solidly planted feet, the sun let in, grass sowed, so that the eye could reach far down wooded corridors and get glimpses of sparkling sea; so that a Norquay or his guests could walk abroad in those friendly places and observe--if they were minded to observe--how man had imposed order and beauty upon the wasteful processes of nature by sweeping away all the detritus of the arboreal struggle to survive. Leaving the house Rod and Laska walked a little way up the slope. They came to a small square enclosed by a low wall of masonry, the half-acre of the Norquay dead. A gate of grilled iron let them in. A red cedar rose in the middle of the plot like an enormous brown mast which had sprouted flat, feathery boughs that drooped as if tired with the weight of long-borne years, and cast a deep shadow over part of this burial ground. In this shaded portion uprose a number of gray granite slabs, the native rock every Norquay had used for such of his works as he wished to endure. Apart from these simple slabs stood a row of uniform design: a headstone four feet high, three feet wide; another, the width of the headstone and the length of a tall man, laid flat on the earth. Ornamentation there was none. Plain gray stone, worked to a smooth polish, briefly lettered,--that was all. A few flower beds were let into the turf between. A simple, unpretentious place in which plain men could take their long sleep. Rod stopped by the first of the larger headstones. "This was the first of our family here," he said. The girl looked down at the inscription. RODERICK SYLVESTER NORQUAY