and took some little time; but on a given morning in early May R.M. was to join our train as it passed through Hamilton. I had been able to procure passes for the lot of us as far as Duluth, some fifteen hundred miles distant, on Lake Superior, and from there we should have to travel another hundred and fifty miles by canoe down the Vermilion River to Rainy Lake City, for the foundations of which the forest, I read, had already been partially cleared. Several further articles had appeared in the papers; it was a gorgeous country, men were flocking in, and the Bank of Montreal had established a branch in a temporary shack. Moreover, as mentioned before, it was spring.
That a man of Paxton's age and experience should have made this long expedition without first satisfying himself that it was likely to be worth while, has always puzzled me. He was an easy-going, good-natured man, whose full figure proclaimed that he liked the good things of life. But he was in grave difficulties, graver perhaps than I ever knew, and I think he was not sorry to contemplate a trip across the border. His attitude, at any rate, was that he "didn't care a rap so long as I get out of here." That Kay and myself and R.M. should take the adventure was natural enough, for none of us had anything to lose, and, whatever happened, we should "get along somehow," and even out of the frying-pan into the fire was better than the summer furnace of the city. R.M. wrote that he had a hundred dollars, Paxton produced fifty, I supplied the railway passes and added my last salary, together with some eight dollars that Ikey No. 2 was persuaded to hand over.
"Send some stuff along," fired McCloy, opening his eyes a little wider than usual when I told him. "Any hot stuff you get I'll use."
It has already been told how Kay missed the train by a few minutes, and how Whitey, waving his parting present of a bottle of Bourbon whisky, was the final picture Paxton and I had of New York City as the evening train pulled out.
