n if you should chance to transgress one of its petty-larceny
dictums. Well, you'll soon be there. Can you see a glint of blue away
down there? No? Take the glasses."

She adjusted the binoculars and peered westward from the great height
where the camp sat. Distantly, and far below, the green of the forest
broke down to a hazy line of steel-blue that ran in turn to a huge fog
bank, snow-white in the rising sun.

"Yes, I can see it now," she said. "A lake?"

"No. Salt water--a long arm of the Pacific," he replied. "That's
where you and I part company--to your very great relief, I dare say.
But look off in the other direction. Lord, you can see two hundred
miles! If it weren't for the Babine Range sticking up you could look
clear to where my cabin stands. What an outlook! Tens of thousands of
square miles of timber and lakes and rivers! Sunny little valleys;
fish and game everywhere; soil that will grow anything. And scarcely a
soul in it all, barring here and there a fur post or a stray
prospector. Yet human beings by the million herd in filthy tenements,
and never see a blade of green grass the year around.

"I told you, I think, about prospecting on the head of the Naas last
spring. I fell in with another fellow up there, and we worked
together, and early in the season made a nice little clean-up on a
gravel bar. I have another place spotted, by the way, that would work
out a fortune if a fellow wanted to spend a couple of thousand putting
in some simple machinery. However, when the June rise drove us off our
bar, I pulled clear out of the country. Just took a notion to see the
bright lights again. And I didn't stop short of New York. Do you
know, I lasted there just one week by the calendar. It seems funny,
when you think of it, that a man with three thousand dollars to spend
should get lonesome in a place like New York. But I did. And at the
end of a week I flew. The sole memento of that trip was a couple of
Russell prints--and a very bad taste in my mouth. I had all that money
burning my pockets--and, all told, I didn't spend five hundred. Fancy
a man jumping over four thousand miles to have a good time, and then
running away from it. It was very foolish of me, I think now. If I
had stuck and got acquainted with somebody, and taken in all the good
music, the theaters, and the giddy cafes I wouldn't have got home and
blundered into Cariboo Meadows at the psychological moment to make a