She grudged every moment of the hours which I spent in my study. There was so little for her to do! She kept her chair during her waking hours either on the porch overlooking the garden or in the kitchen supervising the women at their work. Every slightest event was pitifully important in her life. The passing of the railway trains, the milking of the cow, the watering of the horses, the gathering of the eggs—these were important events in her diary. My incessant journeyings, my distant destinations lay far beyond her utmost imagining. To her my comings and goings were as mysterious, as incalculable as the orbits of the moon, and I think she must have sometimes questioned whether Hamlin Garland, the historian, could possibly be the son for whom she had once knit mittens and repaired kites.
If I had not been under contract, if I had not gone so far in preparation and announcement that to quit would have been disgraceful, I would have given up my trip on her account. "I am ashamed to turn back. I must go on," I said. "I won't be gone long. I'll come out by way of the Stickeen."
When the time came to say good-bye, she broke down utterly and I went away with a painful constriction in my own throat, a lump which lasted for hours. Not till on the second day as I saw droves of Canadian antelope racing with the train, whilst flights of geese overhead gave certain sign of the wilderness, did I regain my desire to explore the valleys of the North. That lonely old woman on the porch of the Homestead was never absent from my mind.
Promptly on the afternoon of my arrival at Ashcroft on the Canadian Pacific Railway, Burton Babcock, wearing a sombrero and a suit of corduroy, dropped from the eastbound train, a duffel bag in his right hand, and a newly-invented camp-stove in the other. "Well, here I am," he said, with his characteristic chuckle.
Ready for the road, and with no regrets, no hesitancies, no fears, he set to work getting our outfit together leaving me to gather what information I could concerning the route which we had elected to traverse.
It was hard for me to realize that this bent, bearded, grizzled mountaineer was Burt Babcock, the slim companion of my Dry Run Prairie boyhood—it was only in peculiar ways of laughter, and in a certain familiar pucker of wrinkles about his eyes, that I traced the connecting link. I must assume that he found in me something quite as alien—perhaps more so, for my life in Boston and New York had given to me habits of speech and of thought which obscured, no doubt, most of my youthful characteristics.
As I talked with some of the more thoughtful and conscientious citizens of the town, I found them taking a very serious view of the trip we were about to undertake. "It is a mighty long, hard road," they said, "and a lot of men are going to find it a test of endurance. Nobody knows anything about the trail after you leave Quesnelle. You want to go with a good outfit, prepared for two months of hardship."
In view of this warning I was especially slow about buying ponies. "I want the best and gentlest beasts obtainable," I said to Burton. "I am especially desirous of a trustworthy riding horse."
That evening, as I was standing on the hotel porch, my attention was attracted to a man mounted on a spirited gray horse, riding up the street toward the hotel. There was something so noble in the proud arch of this horse's neck, something so powerful in the fling of his hooves that I exclaimed to the landlord, "There is the kind of saddle-horse I am looking for! I wonder if by any chance he is for sale?"
The landlord smiled. "He is. I sent word to the owner and he has come on purpose to see you. You can have the animal if you want him bad enough."
The rider drew rein and the landlord introduced me as the man who was in need of a mount. Each moment my desire to own the horse deepened, but I was afraid to show even approval. "How much do you want for him?" I asked indifferently.
"Well, stranger, I must have fifty dollars for this horse. There is a strain of Arabian in him, and he is a trained cow-pony besides."
Fifty dollars for an animal like that! It was like giving him away. I was at once suspicious. "There must be some trick about him. He is locoed or something," I remarked to my partner.
We could find nothing wrong, however, and at last I passed over a fifty dollar bill and led the horse away.
Each moment increased my joy and pride in that dapple-gray gelding. Undoubtedly there was Arabian blood in his veins. He had a thoroughbred look. He listened to every word I spoke to him. He followed me as cheerfully and as readily as a dog. He let me feel his ears (which a locoed horse will not do) and at a touch of my hand made room for me in his stall. In all ways he seemed exactly the horse I had been looking for, and I began to think of my long ride over the mountains with confidence.
To put the final touch to my security, the owner as he was leaving the hotel said to me, with a note of sadness in his voice, "I hate to see that horse take the long trail. Treat him well, partner."
Three days later, mounted on my stately gray "Ladrone," I led my little pack-train out of Ashcroft, bound for Teslin Lake, some twelve hundred miles to the Northwest. It was a lovely spring afternoon, and as I rode I made some rhymes to express my feeling of exultation.
| I mount and mount toward the sky, The eagle's heart is mine. I ride to put the clouds below Where silver lakelets shine. The roaring streams wax white with snow, The granite peaks draw near, The blue sky widens, violets grow, The air is frosty clear. And so from cliff to cliff I rise, The eagle's heart is mine; Above me, ever-broadening skies— Below, the river's shine. |
The next day as we were going down a steep slope, one of the pack horses bolted and ran round Ladrone entangling me in the lead rope. When I came to myself I was under my horse, saddle and all, and Ladrone was looking down at me in wonder. The tremendous strain on the rope had pulled me saddle and all under his belly, and had he been the ordinary cayuse he would have kicked me to shreds. To my astonishment and deep gratitude he remained perfectly quiet while I scrambled out from under his feet and put the saddle in place.
My partner, white with excitement, drew near. "I thought you were a goner," he said, huskily. "That horse of yours is a wonder."
As I thought of the look in that gray pony's brown eyes whilst I lay, helpless beneath him, my heart warmed with gratitude and affection. "Old boy," I said, as I patted his neck, "I will never leave you to starve and freeze in the far north. If you carry me through to Telegraph Creek, I will see that you are comfortable for the remaining years of your life."
I mention this incident for the reason that it had far-reaching consequences—as the reader will discover.
In The Trail of the Goldseekers, I have told in detail my story of our expedition. Suffice it to say, at this point, that we were seventy-nine days in the wilderness, that we were eaten by flies and mosquitoes, that we traveled in the rain, camped in the rain, packed our saddles in the rain. We toiled through marshes, slopped across miles of tundra, swam our horses through roaring glacial streams and dug them out of bog-holes. For more than two hundred miles we walked in order to lighten the loads of our weakened animals, and when we reached Glenora we were both past-masters of the art of camping through a wilderness. No one could tell us anything about packing, bushing in a slough or managing a pack-train. We were master-trailers!
Burton, though a year or two older than I, proved an invincible explorer, tireless, uncomplaining and imperturbable. In all our harsh experiences, throughout all our eighty days of struggle with mud, rocks, insects, rain, hunger and cold, he never for one moment lost his courage. Kind to our beasts, defiant of the weather, undismayed by any hardship, he kept the trail. He never once lifted his voice in anger. His endurance of my moods was heroic.
Assuming more than half of the physical labor he loyally said, "You are the boss, the historian of this expedition. You are the proprietor. I am only the hired-man."
Such service could not be bought. It sprang from a friendship which had begun twenty-eight years before,