"You know, the old man's all broke up at me playing the fool like this.
He's got a glue factory back in Massachusetts. Guess he stacks up about
a million or so. Wanted me to go into the glue factory, begin at the
bottom, stay with it. 'Stick to glue, my boy,' he says; 'become the Glue
King,' and so on. But not with little Willie. Life's too interesting a
proposition to be turned down like that. I'm not repentant. I know the
fatted calf's waiting for me, getting fatter every day. One of these
days I'll go back and sample it."

It was he I first heard talk of the Great White Land, and it stirred me
strangely.

"Every one's crazy about it. They're rushing now in thousands, to get
there before the winter begins. Next spring there will be the biggest
stampede the world has ever seen. Say, Scotty, I've the greatest notion
to try it. Let's go, you and I. I had a partner once, who'd been up
there. It's a big, dark, grim land, but there's the gold, shining,
shining, and it's calling us to go. Somehow it haunts me, that soft,
gleamy, virgin gold there in the solitary rivers with not a soul to pick
it up. I don't care one rip for the value of it. I can make all I want
out of glue. But the adventure, the excitement, it's that that makes me
fit for the foolish house."

He was silent a long time while my imagination conjured up terrible,
fascinating pictures of the vast, unawakened land, and a longing came
over me to dare its shadows.

As we said good-night, his last words were:

"Remember, Scotty, we're both going to join the Big Stampede, you and
I."

CHAPTER VI

I slept but fitfully, for the night air was nipping, and the bunkhouse
nigh as open as a cage. A bonny morning it was, and the sun warmed me
nicely, so that over breakfast I was in a cheerful humour. Afterwards I
watched the gang labouring, and showed such an injudicious interest that
that afternoon I too was put to work.

It was very simple. Running into the mountain there was a tunnel, which
they were lining with concrete, and it was the task of I and another to
push cars of the stuff from the outlet to the scene of operations. My
partner was a Swede who had toiled from boyhood, while I had never done
a day's work in my life. It was as much as I could do to lift the loaded
boxes into the car. Then we left the sunshine behind us, and for a
quarter of a mile of darkness we strained in an uphill effort.

From the roof, which we stooped to avoid, sheet