spitable. But the queer
thought that came over me was that it was more than inhospitable: it was
forbidding. High over my head poured the bitter wind in a river of sound
through the bare tree tops; close at hand it rustled with a flurry of
dead leaves that was uncannily like the bustle of inimical businesses
pursued insolently in the dark, at my very elbow; and suddenly, through
and over all other sounds, there rose in the harsh gloom the long,
ravening cry of a wolf.

Heaven knows I was used to the bush, and no howling was much to me; but
you know how things come over you sometimes. It came over me then that I
was sick of my life at La Chance; sick of working with Wilbraham and
sicker still of washing myself in brooks and sleeping on the
ground,--for I had not been in a house since August. Before I knew it I
was speaking out loud as men do in books, only it was something I had
thought before, which in books it generally isn't: "Scott, I'm a fool to
stay here. I'd sooner go and work on day's wages somewhere and have a
place _to go home to!_" And then I felt my face get red in the dark, for
I knew what I meant, if you do not.

There was nothing to go home to at Wilbraham's, except a roof over my
head, till circumstances sent me out into the bush again. In the daytime
there were the mine and the mill. At night there was the bare living
room of Wilbraham's shack, without a book, or a paper, or a decent
chair; Wilbraham himself, fat, pig-headed, truculent, stumping the
devil's sentry-go up and down the bare floor, talking eternally about
himself and the mine, till a saint must have loathed the two of them;
Thompson, the mine superintendent, silent, slow and stupid, playing
ghastly solitaire games in a corner with a pack of dirty cards; and me,
Nick Stretton, hunching myself irritably on a hard chair till I could
decently go to bed. Even the bush was better than night after night of
that,--and suddenly I felt my thoughts bursting out, even if I had sense
enough to keep my mouth shut.

I was as sick of the bush as I was of the shack. I wanted a place of my
own and a life of my own: and I was going to have it. There was nothing
but old friendship to tie me to Wilbraham's; I could do as well anywhere
else, and I was going there--to-morrow; going somewhere, anyhow, so that
when my day's work was over I could go home to a blazing fire on a wide
hearth, instead of Wilbraham's smelly stove where no one ever cleaned
the creosote