the worn-out man heard
neither, for he was sleeping heavily.

There are many like him who dream great dreams scattered across the new
lands by the Pacific from the snow of the Yukon to Mexico, but their
visions are sacred and not expressed in speech, while a smile which is
half ironical flickers in the steadfast eyes when they hear them
caricatured by the platform Imperialist. Their words are scanty, but
their handiwork is plain; the gap hewn in the virgin forest, bridge
flung over frothing river, and the raw rent of the giant powder amidst
the lonely hills. It is crude and unsightly often, the
creosote-reeking railroad track, and the ugly humming mills, but it
means food for the toilers, good wages and trade, and in place of a
pleasance for the rich to seek diversion in, a new and rich dominion
won, not for England, or the Republic, alone, but for humanity.

He started with the sunrise, the pack-straps galling his shoulders, his
feet bleeding in the saturated boots, clammy blankets, flour-bag, and
pork upon his aching back, kettle, frypan, and rifle rattling about
him, and for the first hour every stride that led him farther into the
wilderness was made with pain and difficulty. Still, he made it
cheerfully, for Alton had long borne the burden that was laid on Adam
uncomplainingly, while his rival, sitting beyond the reach of hardship
in his Vancouver office, plotted, and filched the fruits of others'
toil. It was also an apparently unequal conflict they had been drawn
into, subtlety pitted against sturdiness, the elusive, foining rapier
against the bushman's axe, but there are moments in all struggles when
finesse does not avail, and it is by raw, unreasoning valour a man must
stand or fall, while at times like these the ponderous blade is the
equal of the slender streak of steel.

It was two days later when Alton, who may have made ten miles in the
time, noticed something unusual on the opposite hillside. A snowslide
had come down that way, and its path was marked by willows and smaller
trees. Alton, of course, knew that the hollow they sprang from had
been scored out deep by countless tons of debris and snow, and that
prospector Jimmy would scarcely have passed the place. It also seemed
to him that there was a gap in the slighter band of forest which ran
straight towards the snowline up the face of the hill that suggested
the work of man, and his pace quickened a trifle as he pressed forward
towards the r