That a man of Paxton’s age and experience should have made this long expedition without first satisfying himself that it was likely to be worth while, has always puzzled me. He was an easy-going, good-natured man, whose full figure proclaimed that he liked the good things of life. But he was in grave difficulties, graver perhaps than I ever knew, and I think he was not sorry to contemplate a trip across the border. His attitude, at any rate, was that he “didn’t care a rap so long as I get out of here.” That Kay and myself and R.M. should take the adventure was natural enough, for none of us had anything to lose, and, whatever happened, we should “get along somehow,” and even out of the frying-pan into the fire was better than the summer furnace of the city. R.M. wrote that he had a hundred dollars, Paxton produced fifty, I supplied the railway passes and added my last salary, together with some eight dollars that Ikey No. 2 was persuaded to hand over. “Send some stuff along,” fired McCloy, opening his eyes a little wider than usual when I told him. “Any hot stuff you get I’ll use.” It has already been told how Kay missed the train by a few minutes, and how Whitey, waving his parting present of a bottle of Bourbon whisky, was the final picture Paxton and I had of New York City as the evening train pulled out. CHAPTER XXVII Some people, examining the alternate ups and downs of life, have thought to detect a rhythm in it: like every other expression of energy, from heat to history, from sound to civilization, it moves, they think, with a definite wave-length. The down and up, the hollow of the wave and its crest, follow one another in rhythmical sequence. It is an imaginary notion doubtless, though it applied to my life aptly enough at this time apparently: the Toronto misery, the Island happiness; the New York hell, the Backwoods heaven.