drew near. "I thought you were a
goner," he said, huskily. "That horse of yours is a wonder."

As I thought of the look in that gray pony's brown eyes whilst I lay,
helpless beneath him, my heart warmed with gratitude and affection. "Old
boy," I said, as I patted his neck, "I will never leave _you_ to starve
and freeze in the far north. If you carry me through to Telegraph Creek,
I will see that you are comfortable for the remaining years of your
life."

I mention this incident for the reason that it had far-reaching
consequences--as the reader will discover.

In _The Trail of the Goldseekers_, I have told in detail my story of our
expedition. Suffice it to say, at this point, that we were seventy-nine
days in the wilderness, that we were eaten by flies and mosquitoes, that
we traveled in the rain, camped in the rain, packed our saddles in the
rain. We toiled through marshes, slopped across miles of tundra, swam
our horses through roaring glacial streams and dug them out of
bog-holes. For more than two hundred miles we walked in order to lighten
the loads of our weakened animals, and when we reached Glenora we were
both past-masters of the art of camping through a wilderness. No one
could tell us anything about packing, bushing in a slough or managing a
pack-train. We were master-trailers!

Burton, though a year or two older than I, proved an invincible
explorer, tireless, uncomplaining and imperturbable. In all our harsh
experiences, throughout all our eighty days of struggle with mud, rocks,
insects, rain, hunger and cold, he never for one moment lost his
courage. Kind to our beasts, defiant of the weather, undismayed by any
hardship, he kept the trail. He never once lifted his voice in anger.
His endurance of my moods was heroic.

Assuming more than half of the physical labor he loyally said, "You are
the boss, the historian of this expedition. You are the proprietor. I am
only the hired-man."

Such service could not be bought. It sprang from a friendship which had
begun twenty-eight years before, an attachment deep as our lives which
could not be broken.

On the seventy-ninth day, ragged, swarthy, bearded like Forty-niners,
with only a handful of flour and a lump of bacon left in our kit we came
down to the Third Fork of the Stickeen River, without a flake of gold to
show for our "panning" the sands along our way. My diaries state that
for more than thirty days of this journey it rained, and as I look back