Grenfell with a smile, the latter waved his hand.

"Oh," he said, "we're a most worshipful company of broken deadbeats,
fed on credit, and out on a forlorn hope; but it seems to me that the
storekeeper who supplied us with provisions is the craziest of all the
crowd."

"It was the broken men who made this country," said Devine.

There was a certain truth in this observation, as the rest of them
knew, for, after all, it was the outcast and the desperate who first
pushed grimly on into the wilderness, up tremendous defiles and over
passes choked with snow, and afterward played a leading part in the
Titanic struggle with nature in the strongholds where she had ruled
supreme. The wilderness is merciless; the beaten men died, but the
rest held on, indomitable; and now those who from the security of a
railroad observation-car gaze upon orchard and oat-field, awful gorge
and roaring torrent, can dimly realize what the making of that
province cost the pioneers who marched into it with famine-worn faces
and bleeding feet. That the valor of that army has not yet abated all
are sure who know what the vanguard of the last host had to face on
the trail to Klondyke a few years ago.

It is unpleasant to sleep in half-thawed slush around a sulky fire, or
to grip canoe pole or paddle until one's swollen fingers will not
straighten and the palms are raw. There is an exhilaration in plunging
down a roaring rapid through a haze of spray, but it loses something
of its charm when each movement required to keep the canoe straight
causes the man who holds the paddle agony from the wounds the floor of
the craft has rubbed on his knees; and a portage through tangled
brushwood and over slippery rock around a fall forms a tolerably
arduous task when he is stiff from constant immersion in very cold
water and has had little to eat for a week or so. It is a little
difficult to convey a clear impression of the sensation experienced
during the execution of these and similar tasks, though they are
undertaken somewhat frequently in that country, and, as it happens,
the men most qualified to speak are not as a rule gifted with
descriptive powers.

In any case, nobody answered Devine, and instead of moralizing they
presently went to sleep. They were up at sunrise the next day, and
started soon afterward on a march that led them through tangled pine
bush, the tall grass of natural swamp prairies, rotting muskegs, and
over stony hill-slopes. It was rep