Properly speaking there are few ways into B.C. Perhaps there are none out. It is a devil of a country for getting to know every man jack in it. From the Columbia Crossing, or even from the summit of the Rockies down to the Inlet, and the City of Vancouver (in Pete's time mere forest and as thick as a wheatfield), it's the Main Street. The fact of the matter is that the whole of the Slope, the Pacific Slope, is only one Main Street. It begins to dawn on a man on the Slope, that in a very few years he might know everyone from the Rocky Mountains down to Victoria and to Seattle and Tacoma and Portland and San Francisco. Men wander to and fro like damned souls or migratory salmon or caribou. Pete, you know, knew everyone in B.C. by sight, more or less. There wasn't a shebang on the road he wasn't familiar with. He came on chaps here and there who said "Klahya" or "What ho!" or "Hell, it ain't you?" or "Thunder, it's old Pete, so it is." He felt familiar with the road, with the Cañon, with every house, every loafer, every bummer, every "goldarned drifting son of a gun" who went up and down like a log in the tide-way, or round and round like one in a whirlpool, betwixt the Victoria beginning and the Rocky Mountain End. When he had been full of Mills and Canneries he used to mosey off up-country. When he was soaked by the Wet Belt and the wet rains he pined for the Dry Belt. When the high dry plateaus of the Dry Belt dried him up, he thought of the soft days lower down, or higher up in the Upper Wet Belt of the Shushwap. One can swap climate for climate in a few hours. Now the frost of the lower country, of the lower Fraser, with its intervals of warm Chinook wind and rain, sickened Pete. He put in a lot of time at old Smith's, but by the end of February he was keen on climbing higher. Old Smith got on his nerves, good old soul though he was, and of course Pete couldn't stick to one "jhob." Old Cultus seemed so good a chap, and Pete thought it would be a fine thing to put his legs across a cayuse once more and go a-riding, whooping hell and thunder out of the steers. And he had come nigh to forgetting Jenny. When he thought of her his face looked devilish, but he thought of her seldom. "She bad klootchman, yah," said Pete. But he couldn't go yet. He waited for the harder frost to go, for the big ice, then two feet thick, to break again in the lower river. Then the Mill would start, and he would hear of the spiked logs. "That make Quin sick," said Pete. So he hung on and waited, knowing he would hear. It couldn't be long. Men from the City said that things had been tough that winter in Shack-Town. He heard at intervals about this chap or that: about Skookum, good old Skookum, and Chihuahua, who had been jailed for a jag which was of portentous dimensions, leading him to assault a policeman Up Town. The "bulls" yanked Chihuahua in and he got it hot, officially and otherwise, as a man will in the calaboose.