with grim resolution. After breakfast we took
a small steamer which ran to Skagway, where we spent the day
arranging to take the steamer to the south. We felt quite at home in
Skagway now, and Chicago seemed not very far away. Having made
connection with my bankers I stretched out in my twenty-five cent
bunk with the assurance of a gold king.

Here the long trail took a turn. I had been among the miners and
hunters for four months. I had been one of them. I had lived the
essentials of their lives, and had been able to catch from them some
hint of their outlook on life. They were a disappointment to me in
some ways. They seemed like mechanisms. They moved as if drawn by
some great magnet whose centre was Dawson City. They appeared to
drift on and in toward that human maelstrom going irresolutely to
their ruin. They did not seem to me strong men--on the contrary, they
seemed weak men--or men strong with one insane purpose. They set
their faces toward the golden north, and went on and on through every
obstacle like men dreaming, like somnambulists--bending their backs
to the most crushing burdens, their faces distorted with effort. "On
to Dawson!" "To the Klondike!" That was all they knew.

I overtook them in the Fraser River Valley, I found them in Hazleton.
They were setting sail at Bennett, tugging oars on the Hotalinqua,
and hundreds of them were landing every day at Dawson, there to stand
with lax jaws waiting for something to turn up--lost among thousands
of their kind swarming in with the same insane purpose.

Skagway was to me a sad place. On either side rose green mountains
covered with crawling glaciers. Between these stern walls, a cold and
violent wind roared ceaselessly from the sea gates through which the
ships drive hurriedly. All these grim presences depressed me. I
longed for release from them. I waited with impatience the coming of
the steamer which was to rescue me from the merciless beach.

At last it came, and its hoarse boom thrilled the heart of many a
homesick man like myself. We had not much to put aboard, and when I
climbed the gang-plank it was with a feeling of fortunate escape.

A GIRL ON THE TRAIL

A flutter of skirts in the dapple of leaves on the trees,
The sound of a small, happy voice on the breeze,
The print of a slim little foot on the trail,
And the miners rejoice as they hammer with picks in
the vale.

For fairer than gold is the face of a maid,