posts, rough pine trees unstripped of their bark, with
a few sagging wires. Tavernake looked at them as Robinson Crusoe might
have looked at Man Friday's footsteps. It was the first sign of human
life which they had seen for months.

"It's a real world we are in, after all!" he sighed. "Somehow or other,
I thought--I thought we'd escaped."

CHAPTER VIII. BACK TO CIVILIZATION

Pritchard, trim and neat, a New Yorker from the careful arrangement
of his tie to the tips of his patent boots, gazed with something like
amazement at the man whom he had come to meet at the Grand Central
Station. Tavernake looked, indeed, like some splendid bushman whose life
has been spent in the kingdom of the winds and the sun and the rain.
He was inches broader round the chest, and carried himself with a new
freedom. His face was bronzed right down to the neck. His beard was
fullgrown, his clothes travel-stained and worn. He seemed like a breath
of real life in the great New York depot, surrounded by streams of
black-coated, pale-cheeked men.

Pritchard laughed softly as he passed his arm through his friend's.

"Come, my Briton," he said, "my primitive man, I have rooms for you in
a hotel close here. A bath and a mint julep, then I'll take you to
a tailor's. What about the big country? It's better than your salt
marshes, eh? Better than your little fishing village? Better than
building boats?"

"You know it," Tavernake answered. "I feel as though I'd been drawing
in life for month after month. Have I got to wear boots like
yours--patent?"

"Got to be done," Pritchard declared.

"And the hat--oh, my Heavens!" Tavernake groaned. "I'll never become
civilized again."

"We'll see," Pritchard laughed. "Say, Tavernake, it was a great trip of
ours. Everything's turning out marvelously. The oil and the copper are
big, man--big, I tell you. I reckon your five thousand dollars will be
well on the way to half a million. I'm pretty near there myself."

It was not until later on, when he was alone, that Tavernake realized
with how little interest he listened to his companion's talk of their
success. It was so short a time ago since the building up of a fortune
had been the one aim upon which every nerve of his body was centered.
Curiously enough, now he seemed to take it as a matter of course.

"On second thoughts, I'll send a tailor round to the hotel," Pritchard
declared. "I've rooms myself next yours. We can go out and buy boots and