The draw of the woods, the call of the open air, moreover,
always potent, had become insistent. Spring
added its aching nostalgia that burned like a fever in my
veins.
Thus various influences, some positive, some negative, combined to make me feel that anything was better than the drudgery of my wretched New York life, and the goldfields merely offered a plausible excuse. If I made blinkers with my own hands, I made them effectively at least. Deep out of sight in the personality there hides, perhaps, some overseer who, watching wisely the turns of fate, makes such blinkers, ensuring their perfect fit as well....
There was a nice feeling, of course, that if one went to a goldfield, one picked up gold. Shaking sand in a shining pan beside a rushing river was a picture in the mind. There were wild men, friends and enemies; there were Indians too; but also there were sunsets, tempests, dawns and stars. It would be liberty and happiness. I should see the moon rise in clear, sweet air above the rim of primæval woods. I should cook bacon over an open fire of wood. There would be no grinning Chinaman to pay for laundry....
The men with whom I was going were not entirely satisfactory. I knew them slightly, for one thing; for another, the chief drawback, they were going in a very different mood from mine. Their one object was to make their fortunes. It was real gold, and not the glamour of the wilderness, that called them; and in the Emigrant Sleeper, as we journeyed towards Duluth, they sketched their plans with intense enthusiasm: Paxton, the engineer, explained puzzlingly, with the aid of matches, a trolley he would construct for bringing the ore from pit to crusher, while R.M., with reckless immorality, enlarged upon the profits he would derive from running a "joint" of desperate sort--"for no one need know that my father's a clergyman, and my uncle in the House of Lords."
Both men were shadows; they were not real; there was
no companionship in them for me, at any rate. That
