THE SOUNDING OF THE CALL
When Buck earned sixteen hundred dollars in five minutes for John Thornton, he made it possible for his master to pay off certais and to journey with his partners into the East after a fabled lost mihe history of which was as old as the history of the try. Many men had sought it; few had found it; and more than a few there were who had never returned from the quest. This lost mine was steeped in tragedy and shrouded in mystery. No one knew of the first man. The oldest tradition stopped before it got ba. From the beginning there had been an a and ramshackle . Dying men had sworn to it, and to the mihe site of which it marked, g their testimony with hat were unlike any known grade of gold in the Northland.
But no living man had looted this treasure house, and the dead were dead; wherefore John Thornton ae and Hans, with Bud half a dozen s, faced into the East on an unknown trail to achieve where men and dogs as good as themselves had failed. They sledded seventy miles up the Yukon, swung to the left into the Stewart River, passed the Mayo and the McQuestion, and held on until the Stewart itself became a streamlet, threading the upstanding peaks which marked the bae of the ti.
John Thornton asked little of man or nature. He was unafraid of the wild. With a handful of salt and a rifle he could pluo the wilderness and fare wherever he pleased and as long as he pleased. Being in no haste, Indian fashion, he hunted his dinner in the course of the days traveling; and if he failed to find it, like the Indian, he kept on traveling, secure in the knowledge that sooner or later he would e to it. So, on this great journey into the East, straight meat was the bill of fare, ammunition and tools principally made up the load on the sled, and the timecard was drawn upon the limitless future.
To Buck it was boundless delight, this hunting, fishing, and indefinite wandering through strange places. For weeks at a time they would hold on steadily, day after day; and for weeks upohey would camp, here and there, the dogs loafing and the men burning holes through frozen mud gravel and washing tless pans of dirt by the heat of the fire. Sometimes they went hungry, sometimes they feasted riotously, all acc to the abundance of game and the fortune of hunting. Summer arrived, and dogs and men, packs on their backs, rafted across blue mountain lakes, and desded or asded unknown rivers in slender boats whipsawed from the standing forest.
The months came a, and bad forth they twisted through the uncharted vastness, where no men were a where men had been if the Lost were true. They went across divides in summer blizzards, shivered uhe midnight sun on naked mountaiweeimber line and the eternal snows, dropped into summer valleys amid swarming gnats and flies, and in the shadows of glaciers picked strawberries and flowers as ripe and fair as any the Southland could boast. In the fall of the year they peed a weird lake try, sad and silent, where wild fowl had been, but where then there was no life nn of life--only the blowing of chill winds, the f of i sheltered places, and the melancholy rippling of waves on lonely beaches.
And through another wihey wandered on the obliterated trails of men who had gone before. Ohey came upon a path blazed throughout the forest, an a path, and the Lost seemed very near. But the path began nowhere and ended nowhere, and remained a mystery, as the man who made it and the rea