minutes after we got the news, and we
drove the four miles in seventeen minutes. I've known men with
sweethearts outside, but I never knew one to act gladder than Monty did
at the thought of hearing from his mother.

"You must come and see us when you make your pile," he told me,
"or--what's better--we'll go East together next spring and surprise her.
Won't that be great? We'll walk in on her in the summer twilight while
she is working in her flower-garden. Can't you just see the green trees
and smell the good old smells of home? The catbirds will be calling and
the grass will be clean and sweet. Why, I'm so tired of the cold and the
snow and the white, white mountains that I can hardly stand it."

He ran on in that vein all the way to town, glad and hopeful and
boyish--and I wondered why, with his earnestness and loyalty and broad
shoulders, he had never loved any woman but his mother. When I was
twenty-three my whole romantic system had been mangled and shredded from
heart to gizzard. Still, some men get their age all in a lump; they're
boys up till the last minute, then they get the Rip Van Winkle while you
wait.

This morning was bitter, but the "sour doughs" were lined up outside the
store, waiting their turns like a crowd of Parsifal first-nighters, so
we fell in with the rest, whipping our arms and stamping our moccasins
till the chill ate into our very bones. It took hours to sort the
letters, but not a man whimpered. When you wait for vital news a tension
comes that chokes complaint. There was no joking here, nor that
elephantine persiflage which marks rough men when they forgather in the
wilderness. They were the fellows who blazed the trail, bearded, shaggy,
and not pretty to look at, for they all knew hardship and went out
strong-hearted into this silent land, jesting with danger and singing in
the solitudes. Here in the presence of the Mail they laid aside their
cloaks of carelessness and saw one another bared to the quick, timid
with hunger for the wives and little ones behind.

There were a few like Prosser, in whom there was still the glamour of
the Northland and the mystery of the unknown, but they were scattered,
and in their eyes the anxious light was growing also.

Five months is a wearying time, and silent suspense will sap the
courage. If only one could banish worry; but the long, unbearable nights
when the mind leaps and scurries out into the voids of conjecture like
sparks from a chimney--w