Pork and love!  He wanted to laugh, and he wanted to cry, and between the two it was a queer, half-choked sound that came to his lips.  He ate a good breakfast, rested for a couple of hours, and went on.  At a more leisurely pace he traveled through most of the day, and at night he camped.  In the ten days following his flight from Prince Albert he kept utterly out of sight.  He avoided trappers’ shacks and trails and occasional Indians.  He rid himself of his beard and shaved himself every other day.  Mary Josephine had never cared much for the beard.  It prickled.  She had wanted him smooth-faced, and now he was that.  He looked better, too.  But the most striking resemblance to Derwent Conniston was gone.  At the end of the ten days he was at Turtle Lake, fifty miles east of Fort Pitt.  He believed that he could show himself openly now, and on the tenth day bartered with some Indians for fresh supplies.  Then he struck south of Fort Pitt, crossed the Saskatchewan, and hit between the Blackfoot Hills and the Vermillion River into the Buffalo Coulee country.  In the open country he came upon occasional ranches, and at one of these he purchased a pack-horse.  At Buffalo Lake he bought his supplies for the mountains, including fifty steel traps, crossed the upper branch of the Canadian Pacific at night, and the next day saw in the far distance the purple haze of the Rockies.

It was six weeks after the night in Kao’s place that he struck the Saskatchewan again above the Brazeau.  He did not hurry now.  Just ahead of him slumbered the mountains; very close was the place of his dreams.  But he was no longer impelled by the mighty lure of the years that were gone.  Day by day something had worn away that lure, as the ceaseless grind of water wears away rock, and for two weeks he wandered slowly and without purpose in the green valleys that lay under the snow-tipped peaks of the ranges.  He was gripped in the agony of an unutterable loneliness, which fell upon and scourged him like a disease.  It was a deeper and more bitter thing than a yearning for companionship.  He might have found that.  Twice he was near camps.  Three times he saw outfits coming out, and purposely drew away from them.  He had no desire to meet men, no desire to talk or to be troubled by talking.  Day And night his body and his soul cried out for Mary Josephine, and in his despair he cursed those who had taken her away from him.  It was a crisis which was bound to come, and in his aloneness he fought it out.  Day after day he fought it, until his face and his heart bore the scars of it.  It was as if a being on whom he had set all his worship had died, only it was worse than death.  Dead, Mary Josephine would still have been his inspiration; in a way she would have belonged to him.  But living, hating him as she must, his dreams of her were a sacrilege and his love for her like the cut of a sword.  In the end he was like a man who had triumphed over a malady that would always leave its marks upon him.  In the beginning of the third week he knew that he had conquered, just as he had triumphed in a similar way over death and despair in the north.  He would go into the mountains, as he had planned.  He would build his cabin.  And if the Law came to get him, it was possible that again he would fight.