This instance is given to show by how slender a thread a matter of great interest sometimes hangs. Had the pigeon not been left on the section line, or had it not been discovered by the competing land hunter, the man with the hobnails in his boots would have been the victor, and his would have been the joy of having won that which he had striven hard to attain. CHAPTER IX. Tracing Gentlemen Timber Thieves--Getting Wet--Fawn. I have said that the country tributary to the waters of the Wisconsin River constituted a good field for the selection of valuable government pine-timbered lands. It is equally true that it was a country where the custom had grown among lumbermen to enter a few forties of government land, sufficient at least to make a show of owning a tract of timber on which to conduct a winter's operation of logging, and then to cut the timber from adjacent or near by forty-acre tracts of land yet belonging to the government. This method of trespassing upon the timber not owned by the operator, but being the property of the United States, was carried on to a greater extent there than in any other section of the state in which I was familiar with the methods and practices of logging pine timber. Many logging jobbers having formed this habit of helping themselves to government timber, found it difficult, after the government lands had been entered by private purchase of others than themselves, to discontinue their practice of taking timber that was not their own. Reforms of such habits do not come voluntarily nor easily, as a rule, but generally under some sort of pressure.