damn the doctors anyway!"

He lifted the long glass to his lips and sipped it slowly to soothe away
his irritation.

"But I was young... once. I was young twelve years ago, and I had
hair on top of my head, and my stomach was lean as a runner's, and the
longest day was none too long for me. I was a husky back there in '98.
You remember me, Milner. You knew me then. Wasn't I a pretty good bit of
all right?"

Milner nodded and agreed. Like Trefethan, he was another mining engineer
who had cleaned up a fortune in the Klondike.

"You certainly were, old man," Milner said. "I'll never forget when
you cleaned out those lumberjacks in the M. & M. that night that
little newspaper man started the row. Slavin was in the country at
the time,"--this to us--"and his manager wanted to get up a match with
Trefethan."

"Well, look at me now," Trefethan commanded angrily. "That's what the
Goldstead did to me--God knows how many millions, but nothing left in my
soul..... nor in my veins. The good red blood is gone. I am a jellyfish,
a huge, gross mass of oscillating protoplasm, a--a..."

But language failed him, and he drew solace from the long glass.

"Women looked at me then; and turned their heads to look a second time.
Strange that I never married. But the girl. That's what I started to
tell you about. I met her a thousand miles from anywhere, and then some.
And she quoted to me those very words of Thoreau that Bardwell quoted a
moment ago--the ones about the day-born gods and the night-born."

"It was after I had made my locations on Goldstead--and didn't know what
a treasure-pot that that trip creek was going to prove--that I made that
trip east over the Rockies, angling across to the Great Up North there
the Rockies are something more than a back-bone. They are a boundary,
a dividing line, a wall impregnable and unscalable. There is no
intercourse across them, though, on occasion, from the early days,
wandering trappers have crossed them, though more were lost by the way
than ever came through. And that was precisely why I tackled the job. It
was a traverse any man would be proud to make. I am prouder of it right
now than anything else I have ever done.

"It is an unknown land. Great stretches of it have never been explored.
There are big valleys there where the white man has never set foot, and
Indian tribes as primitive as ten thousand years... almost, for they
have had some contact with the whites. Parties of them com