tial to an Indian for company;
besides the fact that I'd have to pay him wages and dollars count with
me now. A fellow likes some one he can talk to. If you've cut the cloth
and are at loose ends, why not come along?"

Thompson looked at him a second.

"Do you mean it?" he asked. "I'm not what you'd call a good hand on the
trail. You might find me a handicap."

Tommy grinned.

"I've got the impression you're a chap that can hold his end up," he
drawled. "I've an idea we'd make a go of it, all right."

"I believe we would," Thompson asserted impulsively. "Hanged if I
haven't a mind to take you at your word."

"Do," Tommy urged earnestly. "The Pacific coast has this part of the
interior frazzled when it comes to opportunities. That's what we're both
after, isn't it? An opportunity to get on--in plain English, to make
some money? It's really simple to get up the Peace and through the
mountains and on down to southeastern Alaska or somewhere in northern
B.C. It merely means some hard mushing. And neither of us is very soft.
You've begun to cut your eyeteeth on the wilderness. I can see that."

"Yes, I believe I have," Thompson assented, "I'm learning to take as a
matter of course a good many things that I used to rather dread. I find
I have a hankering to be on the move. Maybe I'll end up as a tramp. If
you want a partner for that journey I'm your man."

"Shake," Tommy thrust out his hand with a boyish sort of enthusiasm.
"We'll have no end of a time."

They sat up till a most unseemly hour talking over the details of that
long trek. Tommy Ashe was warmed with the prospect, and some of his
enthusiasm fired Thompson, proved strangely infectious. The wanderlust,
which Wesley Thompson was only beginning to feel in vague stirrings, had
long since become the chief motif in Tommy's life. He did not unburden
himself at length. It was simply through stray references, offhand bits
of talk, as they checked up resources and distances, that Thompson
pieced out the four years of Ashe's wanderings across Canada--four years
of careless, happy-go-lucky drifting along streams and through virgin
forest, sometimes alone, sometimes with a partner; four years of
hunting, fishing, and camping all the way from Labrador to Lone Moose.
Tommy had worked hard at this fascinating game. He confessed that with
revenue enough to keep him going, to vary the wilderness with an
occasional month in some city, he could go on doing that sort of thing