too exhausted to cook the dwindling bacon, make the fire, put up the tent. What did it matter? Nothing mattered. Each mile was a mile of delight farther from New York. The trip might last months for all I cared.
We cursed Gallup behind his back and to his face. He never even answered. His sulky silence broke only round the evening fire, when he would tell us appalling tales of murder, violence and sudden death about the goldfields whither we were bound. It was another form of revenge. The desperadoes, cutthroats, and wild hairy men generally who awaited us, us especially since we were English, hardly belonged to our happy planet. Yet he knew them at first hand, knew them even by name. They would all be on the look-out for us. Against several, for he had his friendly impulses, he warned us in particular. Were we good shots and quick on the trigger? The man who pulled first, he reminded us, had the drop on the other fellow. There was a "stiff" named Morris who was peculiarly deadly, Morris, a Canadian, who had killed his man in a saloon brawl across the river and had skipped over the border into Minnesota. Morris would be interested in "guys" like us. He described him in detail. We looked forward to Morris.
They were cheery camp-fire stories Gallup told us nightly. We crawled into our chilly tent, wondering a little, each in his own thin blanket, what these hairy men were going to do to "guys like us." We did not wonder long. Sleep came like a clap. At dawn, the wind just rising, and the chipmunks dropping fir-cones on to our tent with miniature reports, the hairy men were all forgotten. It was impossible to hold an ugly thought of any kind. The river sang at our feet, the sky was pearl and rose, the air was sharply perfumed with smells of forest and wood-smoke, and glimpses of sunrise shone everywhere between the trees; trees that stretched without a break five hundred miles to the shores of James Bay in the arctic seas.
We gulped our tea and bacon, packed tent and blankets,
split open the cracks in our swollen hands, and launched
