for their
froth. The comic supplement might bring a pallid smile to my face, and
then I would fall asleep.

Although I did not yield to John Barleycorn while working in the laundry,
a certain definite result was produced. I had heard the call, felt the
gnaw of desire, yearned for the anodyne. I was being prepared for the
stronger desire of later years.

And the point is that this development of desire was entirely in my
brain. My body did not cry out for alcohol. As always, alcohol was
repulsive to my body. When I was bodily weary from shovelling coal the
thought of taking a drink had never flickered into my consciousness.
When I was brain-wearied after taking the entrance examinations to the
university, I promptly got drunk. At the laundry I was suffering
physical exhaustion again, and physical exhaustion that was not nearly so
profound as that of the coal-shovelling. But there was a difference.
When I went coal-shovelling my mind had not yet awakened. Between that
time and the laundry my mind had found the kingdom of the mind. While
shovelling coal my mind was somnolent. While toiling in the laundry my
mind, informed and eager to do and be, was crucified.

And whether I yielded to drink, as at Benicia, or whether I refrained, as
at the laundry, in my brain the seeds of desire for alcohol were
germinating.

CHAPTER XXV

After the laundry my sister and her husband grubstaked me into the
Klondike. It was the first gold rush into that region, the early fall
rush of 1897. I was twenty-one years old, and in splendid physical
condition. I remember, at the end of the twenty-eight-mile portage
across Chilcoot from Dyea Beach to Lake Linderman, I was packing up with
the Indians and out-packing many an Indian. The last pack into Linderman
was three miles. I back-tripped it four times a day, and on each forward
trip carried one hundred and fifty pounds. This means that over the
worst trails I daily travelled twenty-four miles, twelve of which were
under a burden of one hundred and fifty pounds.

Yes, I had let career go hang, and was on the adventure-path again in
quest of fortune. And of course, on the adventure-path, I met John
Barleycorn. Here were the chesty men again, rovers and adventurers, and
while they didn't mind a grub famine, whisky they could not do without.
Whisky went over the trail, while the flour lay cached and untouched by
the trail-side.

As good fortune would have it, the