Thrice Armed by Harold Bindloss — Read

The city was almost insufferably hot, and Jimmy, who had time on his hands that afternoon, found it pleasant to saunter through the dim green shadow among the Stanley pines which crowd close up to its western boundary. They rose about him, old and great of girth, a tremendous colonnade of towering trunks, two hundred feet above the narrow riband of driving road which was further walled in by tall green fern. There was drowsy silence in those dim recesses, and a solemnity which the occasional faint hoot of a whistle or tolling of a locomotive bell did not seem to dissipate, for the civic authorities had, up to that time, at least, with somewhat unusual wisdom made no attempt to improve on what nature had done for them. Here they cut a little foot-path, there a wavy driving road, but except for that they left the Stanley Park a beautiful strip of primeval wilderness.

Jimmy had arrived in Vancouver a few hours earlier with the _Shasta_ loaded deep, but, although affairs had been going tolerably well with the Company, this fact afforded him no very great satisfaction. He liked the sea, and had succeeded in making firm friends of most of the ranchers and salmon-packers whose produce he carried; but there was ambition in him, and of late he had been growing vaguely restless. After all, the command of a boat like the _Shasta_, with some two hundred and fifty odd tons of carrying capacity, could not be expected to prove a very lucrative occupation, and Jimmy now and then remembered regretfully that he might have had a commission in the Navy. He had also an incentive for desiring advancement, upon which, however, he seldom permitted himself to dwell, since on two occasions he and Anthea Merril had read in each other's eyes a fact that had a vital significance to both of them.