Thompson looked at him a second.

“Do you mean it?” he asked.  “I’m not what you’d call a good hand on the trail.  You might find me a handicap.”

Tommy grinned.

“I’ve got the impression you’re a chap that can hold his end up,” he drawled.  “I’ve an idea we’d make a go of it, all right.”

“I believe we would,” Thompson asserted impulsively.  “Hanged if I haven’t a mind to take you at your word.”

“Do,” Tommy urged earnestly.  “The Pacific coast has this part of the interior frazzled when it comes to opportunities.  That’s what we’re both after, isn’t it?  An opportunity to get on—­in plain English, to make some money?  It’s really simple to get up the Peace and through the mountains and on down to southeastern Alaska or somewhere in northern B.C.  It merely means some hard mushing.  And neither of us is very soft.  You’ve begun to cut your eyeteeth on the wilderness.  I can see that.”

“Yes, I believe I have,” Thompson assented, “I’m learning to take as a matter of course a good many things that I used to rather dread.  I find I have a hankering to be on the move.  Maybe I’ll end up as a tramp.  If you want a partner for that journey I’m your man.”

“Shake,” Tommy thrust out his hand with a boyish sort of enthusiasm.  “We’ll have no end of a time.”

They sat up till a most unseemly hour talking over the details of that long trek.  Tommy Ashe was warmed with the prospect, and some of his enthusiasm fired Thompson, proved strangely infectious.  The wanderlust, which Wesley Thompson was only beginning to feel in vague stirrings, had long since become the chief motif in Tommy’s life.  He did not unburden himself at length.  It was simply through stray references, offhand bits of talk, as they checked up resources and distances, that Thompson pieced out the four years of Ashe’s wanderings across Canada—­four years of careless, happy-go-lucky drifting along streams and through virgin forest, sometimes alone, sometimes with a partner; four years of hunting, fishing, and camping all the way from Labrador to Lone Moose.  Tommy had worked hard at this fascinating game.  He confessed that with revenue enough to keep him going, to vary the wilderness with an occasional month in some city, he could go on doing that sort of thing with an infinite amount of pleasure.

But something had gone wrong with the source of the funds that came quarterly.  Tommy did not appear to regret that.  But he realized its significance.  He would have to work.  Having to work he meant to work as he had played, with all his heart and to some purpose.  He had an ambitious idea of pressing Fortune to her lair.  He was young and very sanguine.  His cheerful optimism was the best possible antidote for the state of mind in which he found Thompson.

They went to bed at last.  With breakfast behind them they went up to Ashe’s cabin and brought down to Thompson’s a miscellaneous collection of articles that Tommy had left behind when he went trapping.  Tommy had four good dogs in addition to the brown retriever.  By adding Thompson’s pair and putting all their goods on one capacious toboggan they achieved a first-class outfit.