pportunity was characteristically
American, and I would have gladly taken part in the play, but alas! my
Grant history was still unfinished, and I had already overstayed my
vacation limit. I should have returned at once, but my friend Babcock
was expecting me to visit him, and this I did.

Anacortes (once a port of vast pretentions), was, at this time, a
boom-town in decay, and Burton whom I had not seen for ten years,
seemed equally forlorn. After trying his hand at several professions, he
had finally drifted to this place, and was living alone in a rude cabin,
camping like a woodsman. Being without special training in any trade, he
had fallen into competition with the lowest kind of unskilled labor.

Like my Uncle David, another unsuccessful explorer, he had grown old
before his time, and for a few minutes I could detect in him nothing of
the lithe youth I had known at school on the Iowa prairie twenty years
before. Shaggy of beard, wrinkled and bent he seemed already an old man.

By severest toil in the mills and in the forest he had become the owner
of two small houses on a ragged street--these and a timber claim on the
Skagit River formed his entire fortune.

Though careless of dress and hard of hand, his speech remained that of
the thinker, and much of his reading was still along high, philosophical
lines. He had been a singular youth, and he had developed into a still
more singular man. With an instinctive love of the forest, he had become
a daring and experienced mountaineer. As he described to me his solitary
trips over the high Cascades I was reminded of John Muir, for he, too,
often spent weeks in the high peaks above his claim with only such
outfit as he could carry on his back.

"What do you do it for?" I asked. "Are you gold-hunting?"

With a soft chuckle he answered, "Oh, no; I do it just for the fun of
it. I love to move around up there, alone, above timber line. It's
beautiful up there."

Naturally, I recalled the scenes of our boyhood. I spoke of the Burr Oak
Lyceums, of our life at the Osage Seminary, and of the boys and girls we
had loved, but he was not disposed, at the moment, to dwell on them or
on the past. His heart (I soon discovered) was aflame with desire to
join the rush of gold-seekers. "I wish you would grubstake me," he
timidly suggested. "I'd like to try my hand at digging gold in the
Klondike."

"It's too late in the season," I replied. "Wait till spring. Wait till I
finish my