was like
that--nothing else mattered. And now that I am nearing the end of my
life I can see that nothing else has ever mattered. Everything that
happened appealed to me in its relation to her. It seemed to me as if I
saw all the world through the medium of my love for her, and that all
beauty, all truth, all good was but a setting for this girl of mine.

"Come on," said Jim; "let's go for a walk in the town."

The "Modern Gomorrah" he called it, and he was never tired of
expatiating on its iniquity.

"See that man there?" he said, pointing to a grey-haired pedestrian, who
was talking to an emphatic blonde. "That man's a lawyer. He's got a
lovely home in Los Angeles, an' three of the sweetest girls you ever
saw. A young fellow needed to have his credentials O. K.'d by the Purity
Committee before he came butting round that man's home. Now he's off to
buy wine for Daisy of the Deadline."

The grey-haired man had turned into a saloon with his companion.

"Yes, that's Dawson for you. We're so far from home. The good old
moralities don't apply here. The hoary old Yukon won't tell on us. We've
been a Sunday School Superintendent for ten years. For fifty more we've
passed up the forbidden fruit. Every one else is helping themselves.
Wonder what it tastes like? Wine is flowing like water. Money's the
cheapest thing in sight. Cut loose, drink up. The orchestra's a-goin'.
Get your partners for a nice juicy two-step. Come on, boys!"

He was particularly bitter, and it really seemed in that general lesion
of the moral fibre that civilisation was only a makeshift, a veneer of
hypocrisy.

"Why should we marvel," I said, "at man's brutality, when but an aeon ago
we all were apes?"

Just then we met the Jam-wagon. He had mushed in from the creeks that
very day. Physically he looked supreme. He was berry-brown, lean,
muscular and as full of suppressed energy as an unsprung bear-trap.
Financially he was well ballasted. Mentally and morally he was in the
state of a volcano before an eruption.

You could see in the quick breathing, in the restlessness of this man,
a pent-up energy that clamoured to exhaust itself in violence and
debauch. His fierce blue eyes were wild and roving, his lips twitched
nervously. He was an atavism; of the race of those white-bodied,
ferocious sea-kings that drank deep and died in the din of battle. He
must live in the white light of excitement, or sink in the gloom of
despair. I could see his fine n