alth, one can be boss of old Dame
Circumstance, if one has the price in cold cash. It's a melancholy
fact that the good things of the world can only be had for a
consideration."

"If you made a lot of money mining, we could travel--one could do lots
of things," she reflected. "I don't think I'd want to live in a city
again. But it would be nice to go there sometimes."

"Yes, dear girl, it would," Bill agreed. "With a chum to help you
enjoy things. I never got much fun out of the bright lights by
myself--it was too lonesome. I used to prowl around by myself with an
analytical eye upon humanity, and I was always bumping into a lot of
sordidness and suffering that I couldn't in the least remedy, and it
often gave me a bad taste in my mouth. Then I'd beat it for the
woods--and they always looked good to me. The trouble was that I had
too much time to think, and nothing to do when I hit a live town. It
would be different now. We can do things together that I couldn't do
alone, and you couldn't do alone. Remains only to get the wherewithal.
And since I know how to manage that with a minimum amount of effort,
I'd like to be about it before somebody else gets ahead of me. Though
there's small chance of that."

"We'll be partners," said she. "How will we divide the profits,
Billum?"

"We'll split even," he declared. "That is, I'll make the money, and
you'll spend it."

They chuckled over this conceit, and as the dusk closed in slowly they
fell to planning the details. Hazel lit the lamp, and in its yellow
glow pored over maps while Bill idly sketched their route on a sheet of
paper. His objective lay east of the head of the Naas proper, where
amid a wild tangle of mountains and mountain torrents three turbulent
rivers, the Stikine, the Skeena, and the Naas, took their rise. A
God-forsaken region, he told her, where few white men had penetrated.
The peaks flirted with the clouds, and their sides were scarred with
glaciers. A lonesome, brooding land, the home of a vast and
seldom-broken silence.

"But there's all kinds of game and fur in there," Bill remarked
thoughtfully. "And gold. Still, it's a fierce country for a man to
take his best girl into. I don't know whether I ought to tackle it."

"We couldn't be more isolated than we are here," Hazel argued, "if we
were in the arctic. Look at that poor woman at Pelt House. Three
babies born since she saw a doctor or another woman of her own color!
Wha