This was not the wilderness as he had expected it to be, nor as he had often read of it in books.

It was not the wilderness that Gregson and Thorne had described in their letters.

It was beautiful! It was magnificent! His heart throbbed with pleasure as he gazed down on it, the flush grew deeper in his face, and he seemed hardly to breathe in his tense interest.
One of the four on the car was an old Indian and it was he, strangely enough, who broke the silence.

He had seen the look in Howland's face, and he spoke softly, close to his ear, "Twent' t'ousand moose down there--twent' t'ousand caribou-oo! No man--no house--more twent' t'ousand miles!" Howland, even quivering in his new emotion, looked into the old warrior's eyes, filled with the curious, thrilling gleam of the spirit which was stirring within himself.

Then again he stared straight out into the unending distance as though his vision would penetrate far beyond the last of that visible desolation--on and on, even to the grim and uttermost fastnesses of Hudson Bay; and as he looked he knew that in these moments there had been born in him a new spirit, a new being; that no longer was he the old Jack Howland whose world had been confined by office walls and into whose conception of life there had seldom entered things other than those which led directly toward the achievement of his ambitions.
The short northern day was nearing an end when once more they saw the broad Saskatchewan twisting through a plain below them, and on its southern shore the few log buildings of Le Pas hemmed in on three sides by the black forests of balsam and spruce.