"I fancy that what I can't afford is to remain on board the Shasta," said Jimmy dryly.
"Sit down," said Jordan; "we'll talk out this thing. Now, why do you want to go up there?"
Jimmy did as he was bidden, though there was a significant gleam in his eyes. "Well," he said, "perhaps it's your due that I should tell you. For one thing, because I feel that I must. I'm not sure you'll understand me, but I feel it's what I was made for. There are half-frozen swamps to be crossed, leagues of forest, cañons, melting snow to be floundered through. That kind of thing gets hold of some of us. I feel I have to go. Secondly, there seems to be gold up there. I want the money."
Jordan noisily thrust back his chair, and then took up a pen and, apparently without recognizing what he was doing, snapped it across.
"Stop right there! I can't stand too much—and there's Eleanor," he said, and broke into a harsh laugh as he glanced down at the pen. "In one way, it's significant that I've broken the—thing."
He said nothing for the next moment or two, and appeared to be putting a restraint upon himself, but there was longing in his voice when he went on again. "Lord! I guess it's in us. When we'd only the wagons and axes we worried right across the continent. There was always something that drew us to the place we didn't know. The harder the way was the more the longing grew. I was up in the Selkirks on the gold-trail once, and I'm never going to work something that life left behind right out of me."
"Come!" said Jimmy simply.
The veins rose swollen on Jordan's forehead, but he struck the table with a clenched fist and gazed at his comrade with hot anger in his eyes.
"Will you stop, you—fool?" he said. "Don't you know how I want to go? Stop, or I'll throw you out right now!"
He sat still, looking at Jimmy for perhaps half a minute, and each was conscious of the same longing in his heart and the same tingling of his blood, for that is a country where men still feel the lust of the primeval conflict and the allurements of the wilderness. Then Jordan appeared to recover himself.