y account I'm done for."

"Still, it's a tolerably big country, and folks forget. You might, at
least, go so far, and that would, after all, give you a good deal--a
competence, the right to marry."

Gordon laughed, but his voice was harsh.

"This is one of the days on which I must talk. I feel like that, now
and then," he said. Then he looked at Nasmyth hard. "Well, I've seen
the one woman I could marry, and it's certain that, if I dare make her
the offer, she would never marry me."

"Ah," said Nasmyth, "you seem quite sure of that?"

"Quite," declared Gordon, and there was, for a moment or two, an
almost uncomfortable silence in the shanty.

Then he made a little forceful gesture as he turned to his companion
again.

"Well," he said, "after all, what does it count for? Is it man's one
and only business to marry somebody? Of course, we have folks back
East, who seem to act on that belief, and in your country half of them
appear to spend their time and energies philandering."

"I don't think it's half," said Nasmyth dryly.

"It's not a point of any importance, and we'll let it go. Anyway, it
seems perilously easy for a man who gets the woman he sets his mind
upon to sink into a fireside hog in the civilized world. Now and then,
when things go wrong with folks of that kind, they come out here, and
nobody has any use for them. What can you do with the man who gets
sick the first time he sleeps in the rain, and can't do without his
dinner? Oh, I know all about the preservation of the species, but
west of the Great Lakes we've no room for any species that isn't tough
and fit."

He broke off for a moment. "After all, this is the single man's
country, and--we--know that it demands from him the best that he was
given, from the grimmest toil of his body to the keenest effort of his
brain. Marriage is a detail--an incident; we're here to fight, to
grapple with the wilderness, and to break it in, and that burden
wasn't laid upon us only for the good of ourselves. When we've flung
our trestles over the rivers, and blown room for the steel track out
of the canyon's side, the oat-fields and the orchards creep up the
valleys, and the men from the cities set up their mills. Prospector,
track-layer, chopper, follow in sequence here, and then we're ready to
hold out our hands to the thousands you've no use or food for back
yonder. I'm not sure it matters that the men who do the work don't
often share the results of it. We bu