Except for the question of having enough money to get out again before the iron winter set in towards October, we might have spent the whole summer there. We decided to leave while it was still possible. To paddle a hundred and fifty miles against the stream was not attractive. We would do the trip on foot. Selling tent and canoe to the clerk in the bank, we set out across the Twenty-Six Mile Portage one day towards the end of June. A party of five men, also bound for Duluth, joined us, and one of them was--Morris. Those happy, unproductive goldfields! That untenanted Rainy Lake City where no tramcars ever ran, nor faro-tables flourished! Morris, the hairy desperado! In the dismal New York days that followed they seemed to belong to some legendary Golden Age. Romance and adventure, both touched with comedy, went hand in hand, beauty and liberty heightening some imagined radiance. Wasted time, of course, but for that very reason valuable beyond computation. Stored memories are stored energy that may prove the raw material of hope in days that follow after. Even Morris, the “stiff,” and cut-throat, played his little part in the proper spirit. There was a price on his head in Canada. We watched him closely; we watched his partners too. The Twenty-Six Mile Portage cut off an immense bend of the Vermilion River, running through the depths of trackless, gloomy forest the whole way. Nothing was easier than to “mix us up with the scenery” as a phrase of those parts expressed it. Especially must we be on our guard at night. One of us must always only pretend to sleep. Our former mistake about Gallup need not make us careless. A natural instinct to dramatize the expedition might have succeeded better if Morris, the villain, had not sometimes missed his cue and failed to realize the importance of his rôle. The scenery, at any rate, was right. The weather broke the very day we started, and the region justified its translated Indian name. A drenching rain fell sousing on the world. With our heavy packs we made slow progress, crawling in single file beneath the endless dripping trees, soaked to the skin in the first ten minutes. There was no trail, but Morris had a compass. Darkness fell early on the first night when we had covered barely six miles. Morris found a deserted lumbermen’s shanty. One man chopped down a pitch-pine and cut out its dry heart of resinous wood which caught fire instantly; another soaked a shred of cedar-wood in a tin mug filled with melted bacon fat; a third cooked dinner for the whole party; and by eight o’clock we all lay grouped about the fire, dodging the streams of water that splashed through the gaping remnants of the pine-log roof.