and. A hand that
could crush like a vice.

"Why, you just don't need to say another word, Murray," he exclaimed.
"And, anyway, I guess you were right. I'd slacked on those pelts and
knew it, and--and that's what made me mad--you lighting on it."

The two men shook hands, and Alec, as he withdrew his, passed it across
his forehead and ran his fingers through his hair.

"But say, Murray," he went on, in a tone of friendliness that rarely
existed between them. "I'm sick. Sick to death with it all--and
that's about the whole of the trouble. It's no sort of good. I can't
even keep my mind on the work, let alone do it right. I hate the old
store. Guess I must get out. I need to feel I can breathe. I need to
live. Say, I feel like some darn cabbage setting around in the middle
of a patch. Jess doesn't understand. Mother doesn't. Sometimes I
kind of fancy Father Jose understands. But you know. You've lived in
the world. You've seen it all, and know it. Well, say, am I to be
kept around this forgotten land till my whiskers freeze into sloppy
icicles? I just can't do it. I've tried. Maybe you'll never know how
I've tried--because of mother, and Jess, and the old dad. Well, I've
quit now. I've got to get out a while, or--or things are going to
bust. Do you know how I feel? Do you get me? I'll be crazy with six
months more of this Fort, and these rotten neches. Gee! When I think
how John Kars has lived, and where he's lived, it gets me beat seeing
him hunting the long trail in these back lands."

Murray's smile had returned. But it was encouraging and friendly, and
lacked all fixity.

"Maybe the other life set him crazy, same as this is fixing you," he
said, with perfect amiability.

The boy laughed incredulously. He flung himself into his mother's
chair, and looked up at Murray's face above the stove.

"I don't believe that life could set folk crazy. There's too much to
it," he laughed. He went on a moment later with a warmth of enthusiasm
that must have been heart-breaking to those of greater experience.
"Think of a city," he cried, almost ecstatically. "A big, live city.
All lights at night, and all rushing in daylight. Men eager and
striving in competition. Meeting, and doing, and living. Women,
beautiful, and dressed like pictures, with never a thought but the joy
of life, and the luxury of it all. And these folk without a smell of
the dollars we possess. Folk without a difference