“Mr. Gregson is waiting for you at Le Pas,” said one of the men who had come with it.  “Thorne is at Wekusko.”

For the first time in his life Howland now plunged into the heart of the wilderness, and as mile after mile slipped behind them and he sped deeper into the peopleless desolation of ice and snow and forest his blood leaped in swift excitement, in the new joy of life which he was finding up here under the far northern skies.  Seated on the front of the car, with the four men pumping behind him, he drank in the wild beauties of the forests and swamps through which they slipped, his eyes constantly on the alert for signs of the big game which his companions told him was on all sides of them.

Everywhere about them lay white winter.  The rocks, the trees, and the great ridges, which in this north country are called mountains, were covered with four feet of snow and on it the sun shone with dazzling brilliancy.  But it was not until a long grade brought them to the top of one of these ridges and Howland looked into the north that he saw the wilderness in all of its grandeur.  As the car stopped he sprang to his feet with a joyous cry, his face aflame with what he saw ahead of him.  Stretching away under his eyes, mile after mile, was the vast white desolation that reached to Hudson Bay.  In speechless wonder he gazed down on the unblazed forests, saw plains and hills unfold themselves as his vision gained distance, followed a frozen river until it was lost in the bewildering picture, and let his eyes rest here and there on the glistening, snow-smothered bosoms of lakes, rimmed in by walls of black forest.  This was not the wilderness as he had expected it to be, nor as he had often read of it in books.  It was not the wilderness that Gregson and Thorne had described in their letters.  It was beautiful!  It was magnificent!  His heart throbbed with pleasure as he gazed down on it, the flush grew deeper in his face, and he seemed hardly to breathe in his tense interest.

One of the four on the car was an old Indian and it was he, strangely enough, who broke the silence.  He had seen the look in Howland’s face, and he spoke softly, close to his ear, “Twent’ t’ousand moose down there—­twent’ t’ousand caribou-oo!  No man—­no house—­more twent’ t’ousand miles!”

Howland, even quivering in his new emotion, looked into the old warrior’s eyes, filled with the curious, thrilling gleam of the spirit which was stirring within himself.  Then again he stared straight out into the unending distance as though his vision would penetrate far beyond the last of that visible desolation—­on and on, even to the grim and uttermost fastnesses of Hudson Bay; and as he looked he knew that in these moments there had been born in him a new spirit, a new being; that no longer was he the old Jack Howland whose world had been confined by office walls and into whose conception of life there had seldom entered things other than those which led directly toward the achievement of his ambitions.