In those days the World emptied many thousand of its workers into your big bucket, and in that bucket I was one drop. I had as partners, as tilikums, men from the Land of Everywhere: not a quarter, hardly a country, of the round world but was represented in the great Parliament of the Pick and Shovel and Axe that decreed the Road, the Great Road, the one Great Road of all! I have seen many countries, as you know, but none can ever be to me what B.C. was when I worked there. It fizzed and fumed and boiled and surged. It was in a roar: it hummed: it was like the Cañon when the grey Fraser from the North comes down to Lytton and smothers the blue Thompson in its flood. We lived in those days: we worked in those days: we didn't merely exist or think or moon or fool around. We were no 'cultus' crowd. We lit into things and dispersed the earth. Some day, it may be, I shall do another book to try and recall the odours of the majestic slain forests and the outraged hills when your live Locomotives hooted in the Passes and wailed to see the Great Pacific. In the meantime I offer you this, which deals only incidentally with your work, and takes for its subjects a Sawmill and the life we lived who worked in one on the lower Fraser, when we and the River retired from the scene that to-day ends in busy Vancouver and yet spreads across the Seas. It is possible that you will say that there is too much violence in this story, seeing that it is laid in British Columbia and not South of the Forty Ninth Parallel. Well, I do not hold you responsible for the violence. Even in law-abiding B.C. man will at times break out and paint the Town red without a metaphor. There is a great deal of human nature in man, even when suppressed by Judge Begbie: and Siwashes will be Siwashes, especially when "pahtlum," or drunk, as they say in the elegant Chinook with which I have adorned a veracious but otherwise plain story. Take it from me that there is not an incident, or man, or woman in it who is not more or less painted from real life. That amiable contractor for whom we all had quite an affection, whom I have thinly veiled under the name of Vanderdunk, is no exception. He will, I feel sure, forgive me, but some of the others might not and they are veiled rather more deeply. This I owe to myself, for I may revisit B.C. again and I cannot but remember that, for some things I said of folks out there many years ago, I was threatened with the death, so dear to the Western Romancer, which comes from being hung by the neck from a Cottonwood. If ever I do see that country again, I hope it will be with you. As my friend Chihuahua would have said, "Quien sabe?" My best regards to you, tilikum! Here's how! Your sincere friend, MORLEY ROBERTS. THE PREY OF THE STRONGEST I "Klahya, tilikum."