"So I've heard." said Harding. "Well, I'm going to take a smoke. Will you come along?"
They declined, and when he left them one smiled at the other.
"They're smart people across the frontier, but to send a man into the northern timber belt looking for paint trade openings or resin they can make varnish of is about the limit to commercial enterprise."
Harding was leaning back in his chair in the smoking-room with a frown on his face when Blake joined him. He had a nervous, alert look, and was dressed with fastidious neatness.
"So you have come along at last!" he remarked in an ironical tone.
"Feel like getting down to business, or shall we put it off again?"
"Sorry I couldn't come earlier," Blake replied. "Somehow or other I couldn't get away. Things kept turning up to occupy me."
"It's a way they seem to have. Your trouble is that you're too diffuse; you spread yourself out too much. You want to fix your mind on one thing; and that will have to be business as soon as we leave here."
"I dare say you're right. My interest's apt to wander; but if you take advantage of every opportunity that offers, you get most out of life. Concentration's good; but if you concentrate on a thing and then don't get it, you begin to think what a lot of other things you've missed."
"That may be all right," said Harding dubiously; "but we're going to concentrate on business right now. I have a wife, and I don't forget it. Marianna—that's Mrs. Harding—is living in a two-room tenement, making her own dresses and cooking on a gasoline stove, so's to give me my chance for finding the gum. And I'm here in an expensive hotel, where I've made about two dollars' commission in three days. We have got to pull out as soon as possible. Did you get any information from the Hudson Bay man?"
"I learned something about our route through the timber belt, and the kind of camp outfit we'll want; the temperature's often fifty below in winter. Then I was in Revillons', looking at their cheaper furs, and in a store where they supply especially light hand-sleds, snowshoes, and patent cooking cans. We must have these things good, and I estimate they'll cost about six hundred dollars."