id
old Neil Bonner, and forthwith crawled back among his roses. Young Neil
set his jaw, pitched his chin at the proper angle, and went to work. As
an underling he did his work well and gained the commendation of his
superiors. Not that he delighted in the work, but that it was the one
thing that prevented him from going mad.

The first year he wished he was dead. The second year he cursed God. The
third year he was divided between the two emotions, and in the confusion
quarrelled with a man in authority. He had the best of the quarrel,
though the man in authority had the last word,--a word that sent Neil
Bonner into an exile that made his old billet appear as paradise. But he
went without a whimper, for the North had succeeded in making him into a
man.

Here and there, on the white spaces on the map, little circlets like the
letter "o" are to be found, and, appended to these circlets, on one side
or the other, are names such as "Fort Hamilton," "Yanana Station,"
"Twenty Mile," thus leading one to imagine that the white spaces are
plentifully besprinkled with towns and villages. But it is a vain
imagining. Twenty Mile, which is very like the rest of the posts, is a
log building the size of a corner grocery with rooms to let up-stairs. A
long-legged cache on stilts may be found in the back yard; also a couple
of outhouses. The back yard is unfenced, and extends to the sky-line and
an unascertainable bit beyond. There are no other houses in sight,
though the Toyaats sometimes pitch a winter camp a mile or two down the
Yukon. And this is Twenty Mile, one tentacle of the many-tentacled P. C.
Company. Here the agent, with an assistant, barters with the Indians for
their furs, and does an erratic trade on a gold-dust basis with the
wandering miners. Here, also, the agent and his assistant yearn all
winter for the spring, and when the spring comes, camp blasphemously on
the roof while the Yukon washes out the establishment. And here, also,
in the fourth year of his sojourn in the land, came Neil Bonner to take
charge.

He had displaced no agent; for the man that previously ran the post had
made away with himself; "because of the rigours of the place," said the
assistant, who still remained; though the Toyaats, by their fires, had
another version. The assistant was a shrunken-shouldered, hollow-chested
man, with a cadaverous face and cavernous cheeks that his sparse black
beard could not hide. He coughed muc