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I nodded my head again, accepting the rôle.

"All right," said Slim, nodding his.

"Well, Slim, my son," said Hank then, "you said you would like us to be going. Shall we go?"

This he spoke very genially, ultra-genially, with a smile that made his partner look cynically at him a moment before rising and picking up his blanket-roll. At once Hank and I were up shouldering ours, and we climbed to the bench, back into the full blaze of sunlight and thence, at a tangent, across to the track, and once again were jig-jogging in the silly short steps the ties decree, upon our way.

As we walked, Hank talked the history of the region, of the Bonaparte Mine, somewhere away over there to north beyond the heat-quake over the sand and the river; talked of the Cariboo road, winding north under the blue glitter of the Dry Belt sky. He knew a lot about it (how men going into the Cariboo country in the gold rush, penniless, signed promises to work on it a stated period before leaving Victoria and New Westminster, and did so; how a detachment of Royal Engineers from England came out to work upon it in response to a request of the governor of those days to the Home Office), either from listening to old-timers or from reading; I fancy from reading, for he spent much time in the winter, as I discovered later, sitting in public libraries, and he was no great fiction fan. Books of sociology, books of criminology, books of travel: that was the order of his library leanings. These men who had invited me to hike with them to the United States were not just railway workers. I very soon tapped that. All that they were I came to know by degrees.