The next day I returned to New York and resumed my life of reporting on the paper.... The elections had been fought, and Tammany was beaten, a wave of Republicanism sweeping both State and City. A Committee of Investigation, under Senator Lexow, was appointed to examine into the methods of Tammany Hall, and for weeks I sat in court while the testimony was taken, and the most amazing stories of crime, corruption, wickedness and horror I ever heard were told by one “protected” witness after another. It brought to light a veritable Reign of Terror. John Goff was prosecuting counsel; he became Recorder, in place of Judge Smythe, as his reward. Boss Croker, head of Tammany, was conveniently in England and could not be subpœnaed. Other leaders, similarly, were well out of reach. Tammany, it was proved up to the hilt, had extorted an annual income of fifteen million dollars in illegal contributions from vice. The court was a daily theatre in which incredible melodrama and tragedy were played. With this thrilling exception, the work I had to do remained the same as before ... a second Christmas came round ... another spring began to melt the gloomy skies. Conditions, it is true, were a little easier, for Louis had left us and Kay was earning ten or fifteen dollars a week in Exchange Place, but by March or April, the eighteen months of underfeeding and trying work had brought me, personally, to the breaking point.... It was late in April I read that gold had been found in the Rainy River district which lay in the far north-western corner of Ontario, the river of that name being the frontier between Minnesota State and Canada. The paragraph stating the fact was in a Sunday paper I read on my way to Bronx Park, and the instant I saw it my mind was made up. It was spring, the primitive instinct to strike camp and move on was in the blood, a nostalgia for the woods was in it too, and the prospect of another torrid, moist summer in the city at $15 a week was more than I could face. That scrap of news, at any rate, decided me. And, truth to tell, it was not so much the lure of gold that called me, as the lure of the wilderness. I longed to see the big trees again, to smell the old naked earth, to hear water falling and feel the great winds blow.... It was an irresistible call.