he asked, speaking as one who had come to the end of his tether, which, indeed, perhaps really was the case. We pocketed our bullets anyhow, and told him gravely: "Yes, it's a deal." We shook hands on it.
It was all in the proper spirit of gold-seeking adventure, begad! and the comic-opera touch, so far as I was concerned, had not yet quite fully appeared. I had cut loose from everything. I felt as though I were jumping off the rim of the planet into unknown space. It was a delightful, reckless, half naughty, half childish, feeling. "To hell with civilization!" was its note. At the back of the mind lay a series of highly-coloured pictures: Men made fortunes in a night, human life was cheap, six-shooters lay beside tin mugs at camp-fire breakfasts, and bags of "dust" were tossed across faro-tables from one desperado in a broad-brimmed hat to another who was either an Oxford don incognito, or an unfrocked clergyman, or a younger son concealing tragic beauty in an over-cultured heart, with perhaps an unclaimed title on his strawberry-marked skin. R.M., too, was forever talking about staking claims: "We'll get grub-staked by some fellow.... If we only pan a few ounces per day it'll mean success ..." to all of which Paxton emitted his "Ouch! Ouch!" as a strong man who said little because he preferred action to words.
I, meanwhile, had no accurate information to supply, though I was the promoter of the expedition. I paraded the newspaper accounts. They were of little use. Nothing, in fact, was of any use. We were in different worlds. They were in an Emigrant Sleeper skirting the shores of Lake Superior. I was on the look-out for the Witch of Atlas, wandering through the pine forest of the Cascine near Pisa, dreaming in the Indian Caucasus, or watching Serchio's stream. Even "Ouch! Ouch!" could not keep me in Ontario for long.
It all lies down the wrong end of that ever-lengthening telescope now, our trip to the Rainy River Gold Fields. Happy, careless, foolish days of sunlight, liberty, wood-*smoke and virgin wilderness. Useless days, of course,
