mind was made up. It was spring, the primitive instinct to strike camp and move on was in the blood, a nostalgia for the woods was in it too, and the prospect of another torrid, moist summer in the city at $15 a week was more than I could face. That scrap of news, at any rate, decided me. And, truth to tell, it was not so much the lure of gold that called me, as the lure of the wilderness. I longed to see the big trees again, to smell the old naked earth, to hear water falling and feel the great winds blow.... It was an irresistible call.
My one terror, as when I decided to buy the dairy two years before, was that someone would tell me there was no gold, that it was not worth going, or would prevent me in some other way. I deliberately hid from myself all unfavourable information, while I collected all possible items that might justify my intention. That same night I showed the paragraph to Kay. "I'll go," he said at once, "but let's get a third, a fourth too, if we can." He mentioned Paxton, an engineer, aged 35, who had just lost all his worldly possessions in speculation. Paxton said he would come with us. The fourth was R.M., son of the clergyman in Hamilton. R.M., whose father was brother to a belted earl, was an insurance agent, and making a good living at his job. He was my own age, also my own height. He was, besides, a heavy-weight amateur boxer of considerable prowess, and his favourite time for holding bouts in the ring was Sunday evenings, to which fact a rival clergyman had recently taken occasion to refer slightingly in his own pulpit. R.M., resenting the slur both upon himself and his father, had waited outside the church door one Sunday after the evening service, and when the clergyman emerged had asked for an apology--a public one in the pulpit. On being met with an indignant refusal, R.M. invited the other to "put 'em up." The thrashing that followed produced a great scandal in the little town, and R.M. found the place too hot to hold him. He therefore jumped at the idea of the goldfields.
The arrangements were made, of course, by letter,
