litude of the forest, or in waiting on a crowd of unthinking lumber
jacks, but I could do little to aid him. I had sent him books and loaned
him money whenever he would accept it (which was seldom), and I had
offered each year to bring him back to the Middle West and put him on a
farm; but to all these suggestions he continued to repeat, "I can't
bring myself to it. I can't return, a defeated explorer."

Like my uncle David, he preferred to walk the path he had chosen, no
matter to what depth it might descend.

Not long after this meeting with Ben and while I was still absorbed in
youthful memories, dreaming of my prairie comrades, a letter came to me
from Blanche Babcock, telling me that her brother Burton, my boyhood
chum, my companion on The Long Trail to the Yukon, had crossed the Wide
Dark River, and with this news, a sense of heavy loss darkened my day.
It was as if a part, and no small part, of my life had slipped away from
me, irrecoverably, into a soundless abyss.

For more than forty years this singular soul had been a subject of my
care (at times he had been closer to me than my own brother), and now he
had vanished from the tangible realities of his mountain home into the
unmapped region whose blind trails we had so often manfully discussed.

By all the laws which his family recognized, his life was a failure. To
Ben Roberts he was a derelict--and yet to me a kind of elemental dignity
lay in the attitude he had maintained when surrounded by coarse and
ignorant workmen. He remained unmoved, uncontaminated. His mind
inhabited a calm inner region beyond the reach of any coarse word or
mocking phrase. Growing ever more mystical as he grew older he had gone
his lonely way bent and gray and silent, a student of the forest and the
stream. So far as I know he never uttered a bitter or despairing word,
and when the final great boundary river confronted him he entered it
with the same courage with which he ferried the Yukon or crossed the ice
fields of Iskoot.

It happened that on the day this news came to me one of my Chicago
friends sent their beautiful motor car to fetch Zulime and me to the
opera, and as the children saw us in our evening dress, they cried out,
"Oh papa, mama is a queen and you look like a king!" Thus it happened
that I rode away in a luxury which I had not earned at the very moment
when my faithful trail-mate, after toiling all his life, was passing to
his grave wifeless, childless and unknow