But look off in the other direction. Lord, you can see two hundred
miles! If it weren't for the Babine Range sticking up you could look
clear to where my cabin stands. What an outlook! Tens of thousands of
square miles of timber and lakes and rivers! Sunny little valleys;
fish and game everywhere; soil that will grow anything. And scarcely a
soul in it all, barring here and there a fur post or a stray
prospector. Yet human beings by the million herd in filthy tenements,
and never see a blade of green grass the year around.
"I told you, I think, about prospecting on the head of the Naas last
spring. I fell in with another fellow up there, and we worked
together, and early in the season made a nice little clean-up on a
gravel bar. I have another place spotted, by the way, that would work
out a fortune if a fellow wanted to spend a couple of thousand putting
in some simple machinery. However, when the June rise drove us off our
bar, I pulled clear out of the country. Just took a notion to see the
bright lights again. And I didn't stop short of New York. Do you
know, I lasted there just one week by the calendar. It seems funny,
when you think of it, that a man with three thousand dollars to spend
should get lonesome in a place like New York.
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