Having never learned dissipation as a form of amusement, nor having yet been driven to it by the sheer deadliness of incessant, monotonous labor, Thompson was able to save his money.  When he went to Wrangel once a month he got a bath, a hair-cut, and some magazines to read, perhaps an article or two of necessary clothing.  That was all his financial outlay.  He came back as clear-eyed as when he left, with the bulk of his wages in his pocket, where some of his fellows returned with empty pockets and aching heads.

Wherefore, when the winter snows at last closed down the pile camp Thompson had accumulated four hundred dollars.  Also he had made an impression on the contractor by his steadiness, to such an extent that the man offered him a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month to come back and take charge of a similar camp in the spring.  But Thompson, like Tommy Ashe, had grown troubled with the wandering foot.  The money in hand gave him security against want in strange places.  He would not promise to be on hand in the spring.  Like Tommy, he had a notion to try town, to see for himself what opportunity town afforded.  And he pitched on Vancouver, not alone because Tommy Ashe was there, but because it was the biggest port on Canada’s western coast.  He had heard once from Tommy.  He was a motor-car salesman now, and he was doing well.  But Tommy’s letter was neither long nor graphic in its descriptions.  It left a good deal of Vancouver to Thompson’s imagination.  However, like the bear that went over the mountain, Thompson thought he would go and see what he could see.

Wrangel lies well within the Inside Passage, that great waterway which is formed between the mainland and a chain of islands that sweeps from Cape Flattery in the south to the landward end of the Aleutians.  All the steamers that ply between Puget Sound and Skagway take that route.  Seldom do the vessels plying between southern ports and the far beaches of Nome come inside.  They are deep-sea craft, built for offshore work.  So that one taking a steamer at Wrangel can travel in two directions only, north to Skagway, south to Puget Sound.

The booking facilities at Wrangel are primitive, to say the least.  When Thompson inquired about southbound passage, he was told to go down and board the first steamer at the pierhead, and that it would leave at eleven that night.  So he took all his meager belongings, which he could easily carry in a blanket roll and a sailor’s ditty-bag, and went down half an hour before sailing time.  There seemed no one to bar his passage, and he passed up the gangplank aboard a two-funnelled, clean-decked steamer, and made his way to a smoking room aft.

There were a few men lounging about, men of the type he was accustomed to seeing in Wrangel, miners, prospectors and the like, clad in mackinaws and heavy laced boots.  Thompson, habitually diffident, asked no questions, struck up no conversations after the free and easy manner of the North.  He laid down his bag and roll, sat awhile listening to the shift of feet and the clatter of cargo winches on deck and pierhead.  Then, growing drowsy, he stretched himself on a cushioned seat with his bag for a pillow and fell asleep.