with an infinite amount of pleasure.

But something had gone wrong with the source of the funds that came
quarterly. Tommy did not appear to regret that. But he realized its
significance. He would have to work. Having to work he meant to work as
he had played, with all his heart and to some purpose. He had an
ambitious idea of pressing Fortune to her lair. He was young and very
sanguine. His cheerful optimism was the best possible antidote for the
state of mind in which he found Thompson.

They went to bed at last. With breakfast behind them they went up to
Ashe's cabin and brought down to Thompson's a miscellaneous collection
of articles that Tommy had left behind when he went trapping. Tommy had
four good dogs in addition to the brown retriever. By adding Thompson's
pair and putting all their goods on one capacious toboggan they achieved
a first-class outfit.

In the North when a man sets out on a winter journey, or any sort of
journey, in fact, his preparations are speedily made. He loads his sled,
hitches his dogs, takes his rifle in hand, hooks his toes in his
snowshoes and goes his way.

This is precisely the course Tommy Ashe and Thompson followed. Having
decided to go, they went, and neither of them took it as a serious
matter that they were on the first leg of a twelve-hundred-mile jaunt in
the deep of winter across a primitive land.

To be exact in dates it was February the first when they touched at
Pachugan, where Tommy traded in his furs, and where they took on a
capacity load of grub. West of the lake head they bore across a low,
wooded delta and debouched upon Peace River's frozen surface.

After that it was plod-plod-plod, one day very much like another, cold
with coldness of the sub-Arctic, the river a white band through heavy
woods, nights that were crisp and still as death, the sky a vast dome
sprinkled with flickering stars, brilliant at times with the Northern
Lights, that strange glow that flashes and shimmers above the Pole, now
a banner of flame, again only a misty sheen. Sometimes it seemed an
unreality, that silence, that immensity of hushed forest, those vast
areas in which life was not a factor. When a blizzard whooped out of the
northern quarter, holding them close to the little tent and the tiny
sheet-iron stove, when they sat for hours with their hands clasped over
their knees, listening to the voice of the wilderness whispering
sibilantly in the swaying boughs, it seemed utterly i