"I wonder what he'd have been if he'd never gone adrift and had never come to this rugged land. I wonder if his rich parents, or the luxuries and frivolities of civilization, would have spoiled him, and made him grow up into a selfish, cowardly, and perhaps dissipated, weakling? I wonder if it's the rugged country and the rugged, hard life he lives, that have given him a rugged, noble heart, or whether he'd have had it anyway?