GULF AND GLACIER

OR

THE PERCIVALS IN ALASKA

BY
WILLIS BOYD ALLEN

Author of the “Lion City of Africa,” “Pine Cones,” “Silver Rags,” “The
Northern Cross,” “Kelp,” “Cloud and Cliff,” “John
Brownlow’s Folks,” etc., etc.

BOSTON
D. LOTHROP COMPANY
WASHINGTON STREET OPPOSITE BROMFIELD

Copyright, 1892,
by
D. Lothrop Company.

TO

The Little Captain

CONTENTS.

GULF AND GLACIER.

CHAPTER I.

NORTHERN BOUND.

“All aboard!”

It was a bright July morning, and its gladness was reflected in the faces of the throng that hurried to and fro, like an army of particularly busy ants, in the Boston and Lowell Depot.

Way trains puffed in and out, discharging their loads of out-of-town people, who poured through the doorway in an almost continuous stream, carrying baskets of lunch, bunches of pond lilies and the small parcels that tell of every-day trips to the city.

On the opposite side of the station stood a Canadian Pacific train. The massive trucks and heavy English build of the tawny cars distinguished them from the stock required for local traffic. This was the train which was to take a hundred or more passengers, without change, across the broad American Continent. From the windows of those very cars, the travelers were to look out upon the rolling Western prairies, the ravines and snowy summits of the Rocky Mountains, and at last, the blue waters of the Pacific. No wonder the people on this side of the station, those departing, as well as those to be left behind, wore a more serious and anxious look upon their faces than the light-hearted suburbans who chatted gaily on their brief daily trip of a dozen miles.

How curiously the hundred tourists looked into one another’s eyes? “Will he prove a delightful companion, I wonder?” they said to themselves. “Is she to be a life-long friend, dating from this moment when our paths meet for the first time?”

“All aboard!” shouts the conductor again.

It has been well said that a railway station is a fit emblem of human life, with its brief merriment and grief, its greetings and good-bys, its clamor of coming and going.

Be this as it may, it is probable that of the half a thousand people in the Lowell Depot that morning, but few abandoned themselves to moral reflections. Certainly Tom Percival was not occupied with