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The Bard of Whitehorse. A month later, walking home from a party in the moonlight, a new line came to him: "There are strange things done in the midnight sun. . . . Though I did not know it [The Cremation of Sam McGee] was to be the keystone of my success." For more than a year "McGrew" and "McGee" lay with a sheaf of other manuscripts among Service's shirts. At last his "author complex" drove him to send them off to a publisher with oo to pay for 104 their private printing. The composing-room crew, who set up the ringing, romping lines in type, were so enthusiastic that the publisher returned Service's $100 and decided to take a chance on the book himself. He claims that Songs of a Sourdough sold 1,000,000 copies.
Thereafter, Bank Clerk Service answered to the epithet of "Bard" and became Whitehorse's leading celebrity. After repeating his first success with Ballads of a Cheechako and a popular novel of the Gold Rush, The Trail of '98, he was free to live and wander as he liked.
Now waiting in Hollywood to return to his French home, Autobiographer Service is in no rush to bring his reminiscences up to date. (Ploughman of the Moon is only the first half of Robert Service's autobiography. He ends it as he sets off for the Balkans as a pre-World War I correspondent for the Toronto Star.) He is "only 70." "If I am allowed," he says, "I may write the second half of my life when I am 80. Perhaps it will be the more interesting."