Ransom's weather-tanned face had taken on a deeper flush, and there was a questioning look in Roscoe's eyes, as though he were striving to look through a veil of clouds to a picture just beyond his vision. "If most of us believed as you believe," he said at last, "civilization would end. We would progress no farther." "And this civilization," said Ransom, "can there not be too much of it? Was it any worse for God's first men to set forth and slay twenty thousand other men, than it is for civilization's sweat-shops to slay twenty thousand men, women, and children each year in the making of your cigars and the things you wear? Civilization means the uplifting of man, doesn't it, and when it ceases to uplift when it kills, robs, and disrupts in the name of progress; when the dollar-fight for commercial and industrial supremacy kills more people in a day than God's first people killed in a year; when not only people, but nations, are sparring for throat-grips, can we call it civilization any longer? This talk may all be bally rot, Roscoe. Ninety-nine out of every hundred people will think that it is. There are very few these days who stoop to the thought that the human soul is the greatest of all creations, and that it is the development of the soul, and not of engines and flying machines and warships, that measures progress as God meant progress to be. I am saying this because I want you to be honest when you go up among the savages, as you call them. You may find up there the last chapter in life, as it was largely intended that life should be in the beginning of things. And I want you to understand it, because in your books you possess a power which should be well directed. When I received your last letter I hunted up the best man I knew as guide and companion for you--old Rameses, down at the Mission. He is called Rameses because he looks like the old boy himself. You said you wanted to learn Cree, and he'll teach it to you. He will teach you a lot of other things, and when you look at him, especially at night beside the campfire, you will find something in his face which will recall what I have said, and make you think of the first people." Roscoe, at thirty-two, had not lost his boy's enthusiasm in life, in spite of the fact that he had studied too deeply, and had seen too much, and had begun fighting for existence while still in bare feet. From the beginning it seemed as though some grim monster of fate had hovered about him, making his path as rough as it could, and striking him down whenever the opportunity came. His own tremendous energy and ambition had carried him to the top.