The cabin could not be seen until the trail came quite near it. When I caught sight of a curl of smoke I knew I was almost there. Then I saw the cabin and a little lady in almost bloomer dress milking the cow. She never finished milking that cow, nor did she ever milk any cow when her husband was at home.
There were so many things to talk about that we could scarcely tell where to begin or when to stop. Much of the conversation naturally centered on the question of our moving to a new home.
"Why, at Olympia, eggs were a dollar a dozen. I saw them selling at that. The butter you have there would bring you a dollar a pound as fast as you could weigh it out. I saw stuff they called butter sell for that. Potatoes are selling for three dollars a bushel and onions at four. Everything the farmer raises sells high."
"Oh, almost everybody has to buy. There are ships and timber camps and the hotels, and--"
"Everybody seems to have money. Some take it there with them. Men working in the timber camps get four dollars a day and their board. At one place they paid four dollars a cord for wood to ship to San Francisco, and a man can sell all the shingles he can make at four dollars a thousand. I was offered five cents a foot for piles. If we had Buck and Dandy over there we could make twenty dollars a day putting in piles."
"Off the government land, of course. All help themselves to what they want. Then there are the fish and the clams and oysters, and--"
That question was a stumper. The little wife never lost sight of that bargain made before we were married. Now I found myself praising a country for the agricultural qualities of which I could not say much. But if we could sell produce higher, might we not well lower our standard of an ideal farm? The claim I had taken was described with a touch of apology, in quality falling so far below what we had hoped to acquire. However, we decided to move, and began to prepare for the journey.
The wife, baby, bedding, ox yoke, and log chain were sent up the Cowlitz in a canoe. Buck and Dandy and I took the trail. On this occasion I was ill prepared for a cool night camp, having neither blanket nor coat. I had expected to reach Hard Bread's Hotel, where the people in the canoe would stop overnight. But I could not make it, so again I lay out on the trail. "Hard Bread's," an odd name for a hotel, was so called because the old widower that kept the place fed his patrons on hardtack three times a day.