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good.”
    I folded the sheet quickly and stood up.
    â€œFine-looking map,” he continued. “You’ve put a lot of work in, stranger.”
    â€œI don’t suppose I need your comments or advice, thank you. I’m quite aware of the lay of this land.”
    â€œCould have told you what was there for the finding if you’d have asked, you know.”
    I found that comment both deflating and annoying.
    â€œYes,” I said, “if I’d managed to ask you without getting shot.”
    â€œTrue,” replied Greencoat thoughtfully. “True enough, there would be that to consider.”
    I wasn’t sure whether he meant to mock me, but I had enough of his talk.
    â€œYou’re no longer on your claim, sir, and any rash talk might lead me towards my rifle.”
    He shrugged.
    â€œNor are we on your claim,” he said with a philosophical tone. “I don’t think you’ve staked one, have you?”
    â€œWhen I do,” I growled, “I might easily drag your body to the edge of my boundary to bury you as a claim jumper.”
    He didn’t answer, but strolled away in the direction from which he had come, leaving me frustrated and angry. Granted, there was no real reason for me to have spoken in such a bellicose fashion, but Greencoat’s arrogance, combined with his confirmation that I was not about to unearth the motherlode, had sunk me to the very depths of disappointment and disillusionment. I never doubted that he was telling the truth. It was a little as if he had already used my dreams once, and now they were soiled goods.
    For two days I did nothing but hunt, stare at my map, sleep, and wander about. Sitting on the crest of the ridge above my camp with my telescope and my rifle, I would leaf through my options over and over.
    I could choose the best hundred feet of Binder Creek and carry on my work as dutifully and systematically as I was able, but that would leave me with only a few hundred dollars—perhaps a thousand, by winter. It seemed scarcely enough to justify a hellish winter camping in ten to twelve feet of snow, nor again the thousand miles of hard travel it had taken to reach it, should I decide to return south before the real cold hit.
    I could pack up, call my past weeks of prospecting a bad venture, and try a new location, but chances were that whatever new gulch or gully I moved to would be no more kind to me than this, and I would only have wasted the time I had already spent preparing my camp and building my tools.
    Neither of these choices was very desirable, and the third was not much better—namely to return to Barkerville and see what other opportunities arose. For a while, I persisted with the coarse, dull work of gold mining, but my thoughts began to return more and more to this last possibility.
    There must, I thought, be other ways to earn a good living in this country than shovelling muck. Where ten men can become wealthy digging up gold, one more must be able to draw good pay looking after their needs in some endurable way. There would not be much call for dockworkers, Pinkerton agents, or student lawyers in Barkerville, but I decided that before I committed myself to working a claim in that isolated little valley, I would see what work was available in the great gold-rush city.
    I believe it was the first day of August when I started for town.

I SUPPOSE THAT MY RETREAT to the relative civilization of Barkerville was due to boredom more than anything else. We human beings carry on a strange relationship with the unknown that allows it to control us in both positive and negative fashions. It is the unknown that fills us with the greatest fear, and again it is the unknown—the gambler’s unknown, and the explorer’s—that spurs a man on to strive for more than the bare necessities.
    Once Binder Creek had become to me a known quantity, I found it difficult to keep her as my wife and only love. I had no plan