It was the middle of an afternoon in May. An old side-wheeler was steaming south toward Puget Sound across the land-locked waters that lie between Vancouver Island and the state of Washington. A little astern on one hand Mount Baker lifted its heights of eternal snow. On the other, and a little ahead, the Olympians rose white and majestic; and between, vast, dim forests rolled down to the ruffled, blue water. It seemed to Frank Whitney, sitting on the steamer's upper deck in the lee of her smokestack, that it was a wild and wonderfully beautiful country he had reached at last; for since leaving Vancouver, British Columbia, they had steamed past endless rocks and woods, while island after island faded into the smoke trail down the seething wake and great white mountains opened out, changed their shapes, and closed in on one another as the steamer went by.