JACK HEATON, GOLD SEEKER | Project Gutenberg (2024)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JACK HEATON GOLD SEEKER ***

CHAPTER I
HOW THE TROUBLE STARTED

“Well glory be! an’ if it ain’t Jack Heaton hisself. An’ right glad am Ito see yuh, Jack. Bill will be mighty glad, too, for he’s that bugs ongoin’ to South America for them di-am-onds. Sure he’s been talkin’ o’nothin’ else these last two weeks gone Saturday. An’ how are yuh anyhow,Jack?”

It was Mrs. Adams, Bill’s warm-hearted and courageous mother, who hadanswered the bell and was greeting Jack in this whole-souled fashion.

Since the boys had returned from Mexico and had come into possession ofall that money for the services they had rendered the AmericanConsolidated Oil Company, Inc., the Adamses, mother and son, had risenin the world not only figuratively but very literally, for instead ofliving in a shanty hard by the gas-house under the viaduct which spansManhattan Street, they had moved into a five room apartment on ClaremontAvenue—and a front apartment overlooking the Hudson River at that. Nowonder, then, that Mrs. Adams was emitting her good nature in alldirections like rays of radium and that of all persons Jack was anespecial target for them.

“Bill’s in the parlor, Jack; go right in,” she said with emphasis on theparlor, for it was the only one she had ever been the mistress of inall her hardworking life.

“Well, Bill, what do you think you’re doing, getting ready to go after ayegg or rehearsing for a movie?” asked Jack as he reached the frontroom, which by the grace of landlords and popular usage is known as theparlor, where he found his pal engaged in the gentle pastime ofsnapping a six-gun.

Bill cut short his exercises with the weapon that had seen such hardservice in Mexico so recently and he laughed lightly, though no oneexcept his closest friends would have been aware of it.

“Nary one, Jack, but I’ve had one o’ them hunch things that you used toget and it’s the one best bet as how me and you are goin’ to the wildso’ the Amazon and capture some o’ them chunks o’ mud similar like andappertainin’ to the one you wears on your mitt. So I was just limberin’up my trigger finger a bit with a little action.”

“Oh, you were, were you,” remarked Jack with a mild touch of sarcasm inhis voice.

“Yes, an’ I was just thinkin’ about ’phonin’ you to find out how soon wecould get under way. You see, I haven’t done a tap to make a dollarsince our landfall and owin’ to the high cost o’ livin’—we’re over twohundred feet above Manhattan Street now—my pile’s nosin’ down like asubmarine and it’ll soon be restin’ on the bottom and we’ll be backwhere we come from. So I’m askin’ you, not only as man to man but as mypal, when do we start?”

“We don’t head that way this time,” replied Jack, “we head north, witha capital N.”

“Whad’a mean we head north?” asked Bill in utter amazement.

“That’s exactly what I came over to see you about, Bill. I’ve hadhalf-a-dozen jobs offered me since we came back but routine work isentirely out of my line so what’s the use in wasting someone else’s goodmoney and my own good time. No, I’ve tried it and I can’t be a good manFriday for any business concern—not even for my dad’s.

“So you see you and I are in the same class—everything going out andnothing coming in and I’ve been wondering a lot lately what we couldscare up that would make a noise like a million dollars. Say Bill, didyou ever read Jack London’s ‘Call of the Wild’?” Jack put the questionwithout notice.

“‘Call o’ the Wild’?” mused Bill, turning the phrase over in his dome ofthought; “I’ve heard all kinds o’ calls o’ wild men an’ wild women butnever do I remember any wild call by this blokie Jack London. Who isthis guy anyway?”

“There’s no use talking to a fellow like that,” thought Jack, but then,as in dozens of other instances in the past, he patiently explained whoJack London was and repeated the tale as told by that past master offiction, for the benefit of his less well-read pal.

“Now the point I’m driving at is this,” he went on. “Jack London tellsus that white men who were prospecting in the land of the Yeehats, atribe of Indians in the gold country of Alaska, found diggings wherethere was gold, gold, nothing but gold, I tell you, and they packed itin moosehide sacks so that they could get it back to civilization. Thenthe Yeehats came upon and killed them and the shining yellow metal fellinto their hands. The gold must still be up there, and you can’t disputeit either.”

At this recital Bill’s big blue eyes bulged out like those of a spiderwatching a fly. He had caught the drift of what Jack was saying and ifthere is any one thing that will set an inert imagination to functioningquicker or fix the attention of the human mind faster than another it isthe mordant of seeking out this precious metal that we call gold. Thenhe blinked his eyes and shook his head.

“It sounds to me,” he said finally, which in the lingo of the cowboy,means that he had his doubts. “If this is a yarn this London fellerwrote how do we know that he didn’t make up the Yeehats and the goldjust like he made up the rest of it,” Bill wanted to know, and notwithout reason.

“I’ll tell you how. That book was given to me for a birthday presentwhen I was about ten years old and whenever I wanted to read a goodstory I took it up just as everybody, from the rag-picker to thepresident, re-reads ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and ‘Treasure Island.’ So one fineday, not long after we got back from the oil-fields I spied the book andread it again; then all of a sudden this ending about the Yeehats andthe gold in sacks struck me that there might be some truth lurkingbehind the fiction like a greaser behind a giant cactus or a Siwashbehind a totem pole.”

“But how can we find out for sure?”

“I have found out already. I wrote to the Secretary of the Bureau ofEthnology at Washington and to the Minister of the Interior ofCanada, and they sent me handbooks that tell all about the Indians ofAlaska and the Yukon Territory and I’ve got the real dope on them.”

Bill had a high regard for Jack’s way of boring into things and thisscheme of going to the governments for information about the Indians upthere in the far Northland seemed to his untrained mind to approach veryclosely to a high order of genius. Still he was not entirely convinced.

“That shows that the climax of London’s book relating to the Yeehats isstraight from the shoulder, doesn’t it?” Jack wound up.

“That part about the Yeehats is all right but how about the gold?Because a tribe of Indians called the Yeehats lived up there doesn’t saythat pioneer prospectors actually found the nuggets, got it, piled it upin sacks ready to bring back where they could spend it and then werekilled off by the Indians. Mind you, Jack, I’m not sayin’ as how itcouldn’t have happened but I’m only sayin’ as how I’d like to know forsure afore we goes, see?”

“Well first of all there’s the Yeehats—” Jack began to explain all overagain.

“That part about the Yeehats is all O.K.; there’s no blinkin’ at facts.No one I’ll say, no not even a bookmaker could think up such anoutlandish name as Yeehat even to splice it to a redskin for a name,but any one who couldn’t think about gold in chunks would be lonesome ifhe had a brain,” argued Bill.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” called out Jack. “First of all nevercall a man who writes books a bookmaker. A man who puts his pen to paperand writes down various things for other folks to read is a maker ofbooks while a man that takes bets at a race track is a bookmaker. Nowdon’t get these two professions mixed up again.”

“The trouble with you, Jack, is that you can’t see the woods because o’the trees, as you used to tell me down in Mexico when I picked you up onsome point that didn’t have anything to do with the case. What’s thediff I’d like to know, whether he was a maker o’ books as you callshim or a bookmaker as I calls him. Well go on with your ratkillin’.”

“What I was going to say when you sidetracked me was that when a writerwrites a book every idea that goes into it really comes from someoutside source and consequently all this stuff that we call inspirationand imagination is more or less bunk. This being true, I hold that whatLondon wrote about the prospectors, the gold they found, the moosehidesacks of it they piled up and the Yeehats, were not just mere fleetingfancies which were conjured up in his brain to serve his purpose for thestory but hard and fast facts that he had heard about when he was upabove there in Alaska.”

“I knows what you say and I guess I knows what you’re talking about, butas against the book that tells about the Yeehats and the sacks o’ goldin the land where the rainbow ends give me the straight tip on thedi-am-onds that Jack Heaton got from the cannibal princess where therainbow begins,” plugged in Bill, still bent on the diamond project.

“Don’t you see, Bill, it will take a mint of money to outfit thatdiamond hunting expedition—why, we’d have to take a small army with usto cope with those Amazonian savages while as I told you before they’reall Christianized, peace-loving folks in the far north—too cold to beanything else. Why, we couldn’t begin to finance this diamondproposition between us even if we put every dollar we have to our namesin it,” Jack drove his argument home and he could see that the force ofhis logic and oratory was beginning to have the desired effect on hishard-headed pal.

“Couldn’t you get the directors of the American Consolidated OilCompany to take a flyer and back us in the di-am-ond venture,”further persisted Bill.

“I might be able to get them to see it but those old four-per-centersare long on sure things and very short on anything that looks like agamble. I’d hate to have any of them go into anything with us that wasnot as sure of succeeding as to-morrow’s sun is sure of rising, for ifwe ever went down there and failed to bring back a boat load of diamondsas large as the Koohinoor, or Mountain of Light as it is called,they’d think they’d been stung by a nest of hornets and if we didn’tbring back any at all they’d want to throw us into the Atlantic Ocean.”

“They’re sure enough dead-game sports,” Bill commented sadly, “butthere’s one thing certain and that is if I don’t make a ten-strike soonI’ll have to get a job as a longshoreman and me mudder and me ’ull bemovin’ down to the shanty. Get me?”

“As a longshoreman only gets ten dollars a day for six or eight hours’work I guess the job at that might net you enough to keep the coyotefrom sleeping in the vestibule of your apartment. If I wasn’t too heavyfor light work and too light for heavy work I’d get a job on the docksmyself. As things now stand I’m going to Alaska and I’ll bring back somuch gold that if I threw it on the market there’d be a slump in theprice of it,” orated Jack boastfully, as he rubbed his hands together inpleasurable anticipation like a miserable young Shylock. But the magicof gold is apt to make misers of even the most generous folks.

“Yuh lads come now and have a bite to eat,” sang out Mrs. Adams cheerilyand the two youngsters went through an arched hole in the wall thatconnected, yet separated the parlor from the dining room, though thismay sound a bit paradoxical. The latter room was decorated with a platerail around the wall and a great vari-colored dome lamp hanging from theceiling.

Under the lamp was a table laid with a cloth as white, silver as brightand china as fine as would be found, Jack opined, up or down the Avenueor even over on Riverside Drive. Bill’s mother was almost as proud ofher new home and its fixtures as she was of her boy and that is sayingall of it. As for Jack, why she thought he was the smartest boy in theworld; yes, she truly did, and whatever he said went with her.

Their apartment was tastily furnished and comfortable, and he was gladto know that he had been, in a measure, indirectly responsible for it.It has often been said that travel is the great educator but thepossession of money goes a mighty long ways toward making gentlemen outof coal heavers and ladies out of scrub women. True there was still someroom for improvement in the way Bill and his mother handled “English asshe is spoke” but no improvement was needed in their hearts.

“So yuh lads are goin’ to South America for di-am-onds, are yuh,” saidMrs. Adams when they were seated. “Well, it ’ud be a fine andge-glorious thing if you’d fetch home a couple of scuttles of thembaubles and throw them to those as can afford ’em at so much per throw,”and her eyes reflected the happy thought which she had voiced, as aKimberly blue-white stone reflects the light of the sun. “But do yuhknow Jack,” she added pensively, “I’d a deal ruther have me boy Billlivin’ with me in the shanty than to have him riskin’ his young lifedown there on the equator with those man-eaters.”

“You can rest easy in your mind on that score, Mrs. Adams,” Jack assuredher, “for I’ve nearly persuaded Bill to give up this South Americanventure and join me in an expedition to the Alaskan gold fields, tosearch for a few sacks of nuggets.”

“Ilasker, Ilasker? No, I never heard of the place before. It must nothave been on the map when I went to school,” thought Mrs. Adams outloud.

“You’ve heard of the Yukon?” suggested Jack.

“Yukon, Yukon? I can’t say that I have, but,” and her eyes brightened asthough she had solved a jigsaw puzzle, “I have heard of the Klondike.”

“That accounts for it then,” said Jack, “for the Klondike is a golddistrict and it is named from the Klondike River which it is on. TheKlondike River is in the Yukon Territory, which belongs to Canada, andthis is directly east of Alaska. The Klondike River is really only astream, perhaps not over a hundred feet wide, but so rich were the earlygold fields there that practically all of the Yukon Territory and a partof Alaska to boot has been called the Klondike country. Such is the fameand power of gold.”

“We own Ilasker, don’t we Jack?” Bill wanted to know.

“Yes, though she used to belong to Russia but the U. S. bought her aboutfifty years ago for seven million, two hundred thousand dollars. Sincethen she has produced three hundred million dollars worth of gold. Somebargain, what say, Bill?”

“I’ll say it was,” replied his pal.

“It came about this way,” continued Jack, “when she was owned by Russiashe was a losing deal for that country because in the first place shewas too far away from the seat of government and there was no wire orwireless communication at that time between them; and in the secondplace Russia hadn’t any more of a notion as to how to govern her thanshe has of governing herself now.

“When the Civil War was on Russia was a good friend of the Union andhelped us in every way she could, even to loaning us her warships. AsRussia wanted to dispose of Alaska and Uncle Sam wanted to pay somethingfor the services she had rendered, Mr. Seward, who was Secretary ofState in President Lincoln’s Cabinet, bought the territory, which wasthen considered entirely worthless, from her.

“The International boundary line that divides Alaska from Canada was indispute between the United States and Great Britain almost from the timewe got her from Russia but neither country did any worrying over it forAlaska was not supposed to be worth arguing about. But when gold wasdiscovered on the Yukon River in 1896 and at Cape Nome in 1898 there wasa great stampede, just as there was to California in ’49. Then it wasthat both the United States and Great Britain got busy and a commissionmet in London, England, in 1903 to settle the matter, which was done tothe satisfaction of both countries.”

“How far away are these gold fields that you and Bill are goin’ to?”Mrs. Adams asked; “are they as far away as the di-am-ond fields ofSouth America?”

“I should say about the same distance, Mrs. Adams, and that is in theneighborhood of some five thousand miles.”

“It’s sure some little ways off,” chipped in Bill, “but distance doesn’tcount; what we wants is the yellow butter, hey Buddie?”

“That’s what we’re after; other folks have found it and we stand as gooda chance as they did. Are you with me, Bill?”

“It sounds to me, Jack, but I’ll go with youse to Ilasker on your huncheven if we have to walk back.”

“Good!” ejacul*ted Jack; “I guessed you would from the start. And so yousee all of this six-gun practice is tommyrot, for the men of the frozennorth are different from those of the burnt-up south, for whether theyare Americans, French-Canadians, Indians or half-breeds, they are allwhite men—white at heart—and you’ll never have any use for a side armup there.”

“It must be a orful nice country, but if you don’t mind I’m going totote mine along just the same.”

“Then it’s all settled, is it, Bill?”

“I’m right there, pal o’ mine, every time.”

The boys struck hands and their new adventure was on.

CHAPTER II
HO! FOR THE GOLD COUNTRY!

“Now that I’ve declared myself in on this game I wants to know somethingabout how it is supposed to be played,” said Bill, who, having oncethrown his pet scheme overboard went into the new one heart and soul.“How big a country is this here Ilasker and to what part do we hike?”

Now Bill was like lots of other born and bred “Noo” Yorkers in thatwherever there was an a the end of a word he invariably substituteder for it. As Bill’s mother had excused herself and made her exit,Jack took it upon himself to set his pal to rights.

“Not Ile-ask’-her, Bill, but A-las’-ka; get that? A-las’-ka!”

“All right, A-las’-ker then; have it any way,” groused Bill who,though he always wanted to know the right of every thing and hadinsisted time and time again that Jack correct him whenever he said ordid anything that was not “accordin’ to Hoyle,” as he put it, still hewas a little peeved when his pal did so, and in this respect he was notunlike the common run of folks whether of low or high degree.

“It’s a larger country than you’d think. Here are two maps of her thatI’ve brought along,” said Jack as he produced, unfolded and spread thelarge sheets on the floor. This done, both he and Bill dropped to thecorrect prone position for shooting—that is lying flat on theirstomachs with their faces downward—a position of great value inskirmishes on the border, but one seldom needed in civilized New York,unless it be to size up a map to the best advantage.

“This smaller one will give you an idea of how big she really is,”continued Jack; “it shows Alaska laid on top of the United States, thatis compared with her. You see the main part of her is nearly square andshe is hemmed in by the Pacific and Arctic Oceans all round except onher eastern boundary which is the Yukon Territory of Canada.

“If you lay the square part of Alaska over the middle part of the UnitedStates as this map shows, it will cover about all of Illinois,Wisconsin, Montana, Iowa, Missouri, North and South Dakota, Nebraska,Kansas and Oklahoma; then that handle of coast land, which is less thana hundred miles wide and some five hundred miles long, extends southeastalong the western edge of Canada and this strip would reach clear acrossKentucky, Tennessee and Georgia to the Atlantic Ocean, while pushing outto the southwest is the Alaska Peninsula and beyond it the AleutianIslands.

“The peninsula is nearly five hundred miles long and the islands arestrung out for another five hundred miles or more, so that the tail endof them would touch the Pacific Ocean in California. You see for size,Texas, which we think is a pretty big state, isn’t in it with Alaska.”

“It’s almost big enough to get lost in,” reflected Bill dryly.

“Now this large one is a government map of Alaska and I’ll show youexactly where we are headed for. See that red cross I’ve marked therejust below the Arctic Circle on the Big Black River? Well, that’s ourdestination and when we reach it we’ll be in the land of the Yeehats. Atany rate that is where they once lived, for from what I have gatheredthey were wiped out of existence some years ago. Once we get into theircountry it’s up to us to find out where the gold is cached.”1

“But suppose the Yeehats, or some other tribe of Indians, are stillthere and that they’ve got the gold corralled, what then?” Bill wantedto know.

“Oh well, we’ll have to treat with them according to the exigencies ofthe case. The first thing we must do though is to get there, the next isto locate the gold and when this preliminary but important work is doneI think we can safely say that it is ours.”

“Ours not because we found it first but because we found it last,” Billadded to clinch the ownership.

“Exactly, or words to that effect.”

“Must be awful cold up there,” suggested Bill as his eyes wanderedaround the sub-Arctic region on the map.

“In summer it’s a mighty pleasant place but in winter it does get alittle chilly, for sometimes the bottom nearly drops out of thethermometer and the quicksilver falls to fifty, sixty and even seventydegrees below zero; but you don’t mind a little thing like cold weatherdo you?”

“No,” replied Bill thoughtfully, “but I kicked all last winter to thesuperintendent of this here apartment buildin’ because the heat was onlysixty-eight degrees while I likes it about seventy-two degrees. If I’da-known we was goin’ on this here trip to the frigid zone I’d a-told himto bank the fires, or let ’em go out entirely, so I’d get used to it.Lettin’ that be as it may, what kind of an outfit do we want and do weget it here or when we gets up into that blarsted country?”

“We’ll take our rifles and I suppose we ought to have a shot-gun forsmall game, and while, as I have said before, the inhabitants, whatevermay be their color or country, are all peace abiding folks still weought to take our six-guns along so that we can protect our gold when weget back to civilized lands again.”

“An’ we’d better take our thermos bottles, solid alcohol cookin’ outfit,flash lamps, compasses and a pair of pliers with us, not forgettin’ memouth-organ,” put in Bill.

“By all means,” allowed Jack; “as for the rest of it we can find outexactly what we need in the way of rations and equipment when we reachDawson or Circle City. We don’t want to overload ourselves but theremust be a-plenty of the necessaries, for, the way I figure it, we’llprobably have to stay the best part of a year in those parts.”

“When do we leave for this promised land o’ gold and sixty degrees belowzero?” inquired impatient red-headed Bill.

“It’s about the right time of the year for us to be pilgriming now,”returned his partner; “that’s why I’m here.”

“How long will it take us to get up there?”

“Oh, about three weeks or so if we make connections and don’t lose toomuch time on the way.”

“Then I takes it the weather’ll still be warm when we arrives. We’ll geta canoe, or maybe a couple o’ them, and paddle up this Big Black Riveruntil we comes to the land of the Yeehats,” suggested Bill.

“No, that’s not my idea of it at all. You see, Bill, so much of thecountry where we are going is low that it is more or less wet all thetime and it would make traveling overland in summer with our outfit ahard game. The way I’ve figured it out is that we ought to start fromCircle City when winter sets in and travel by dogsled; then we can go upor down rivers, over them, cut cross country, yes, to the North Pole ifwe want to, and without any hard work on our part.

“Winter sets in early up there and by the time we reach Circle, get ouroutfit, learn the lay of the land, hear what all the old timers have tosay and the first snow begins to fly, we’ll be just about ready tostrike out.”

Bill shoved his hands in his pockets, went to the window and focused hiseyes on a great warship that lay at anchor in the Hudson. He waswondering, not about the craft for he knew all about her and every otherkind afloat; he likewise knew about some of those craft that navigatedthe land as for instance hawses, but this traveling in winter insearch of gold with dog-sleds was a deep mystery to him.

“In winter the gold’ll be snowed under and we’d never find it I’ma-thinkin’,” he said thoughtfully.

“Take it from me, Bill, wherever the gold has been cached there willbe signs that will point out the place as plain as the nose on yourface. All we’ve got to do is to find the signs—uncovering the gold willbe easy,” argued Jack.

“It sounds to me, Buddy, but if we’re goin’, the sooner the quicker saysI.”

“The Twentieth Century Limited leaves the Grand Central Station at2:45 in the afternoon and pulls into the LaSalle Street Station atChicago the next morning in time so that we can make connection with theNorth Coast Limited of the Burlington Route which carries aNorthern Pacific sleeper through to Seattle. How about leavingto-morrow afternoon?”

“All to the good; that’ll give me time to see me goil and tell her I’mgoin’ to Ilasker,” for Bill, be it known had become very much smittenwith Vera Clair, the little blond telephone girl down in the office ofthe American Consolidated Oil Company. And Vera, who could roll thenumber three under, over, through and above her tongue with the bestof operators, and who also lived in Harlem, thought quite well of Bill,too.

“If you say that,” warned Jack, “Miss Clair will think you are going toask her a very important question and you might find yourself in asomewhat embarrassing position.”

“What d’you mean ‘ ’barrassin’ position,’” questioned Bill sharply,blinking the while at Jack.

“Why she might think you meant you were going to pop the question⸺”

“Put the pedal on that soft stuff right where you are, or I’ll makeyouse put up your dooks, see, Buddy.”

“Then say A-las-ka, as I told you before, and you’ll be on the safeside,” again explained Jack.

“All right, A-las-ker then,” Bill attempted once more and Jack gave uptrying to teach him how to pronounce it as a bad job.

The next afternoon the boys met at the Grand Central Station with theirbig suit cases and each carried in his money-belt two hundred dollars incash and a draft on the National Bank at Skagway for a thousand dollars.It was not long before they were on board the Twentieth CenturyLimited and were being whirled through the tunnel under New York and upto Mott Haven; there the powerful electric locomotive gave way to agigantic steam locomotive and they were soon running along the edge ofthe historic Hudson River headed toward the field of their newendeavors.

At the sight of the Palisades Bill could no longer restrain hisaesthetic feelings—oh yes, Bill had them too, and he knew the beautifulwhen he saw it.

“I tell youse the Hudson has got them all faded, Jack. I’ve seen ’emall includin’ the Schuylkill at Philadelphia and they might as well getoffen the map.”

“There are three rivers you haven’t seen yet, Bill, and these are theMississippi, the Yukon and the Amazon. When you have seen these greatstreams you’ll be in a better position to judge the merits of theHudson.”

“This position right here in seat 2, car 30 is good enough for me tosize up the Hudson. Just as Noo York is the onliest town in the world sothe Hudson is the onliest river on the map. Somebody oughter give Mr. H.Hudson a medal for havin’ discovered it; an’ when we come back, richer’nRockerfeller, I’ll donate one to him that is twenty-four carats fine.”

Jack had the porter fix a table between the seats and laid out histime-tables of the three railroads that were to carry them across thecontinent. Then for Bill’s enlightenment and his own pleasure he tracedthe route they were to make to Seattle and thence on up to Circle City,Alaska.

“Let’s see, we reach Chicago to-morrow morning and change cars there.Then we’re in for a long ride, for it will take us about three days andnights to make the trip. We’ll get into Seattle next Saturday morningsome time. Our boat leaves Seattle the following Monday morning and thiswill give us all the time we want to see Seattle.”

“Now look up this boat trip from Seattle to Skagway,” said Bill.

“We take the S.S. Princess Alice and sail up through Puget Sound untilwe reach the northern end of Vancouver Island, when we come to the opensea; then we run through Hecate Strait, between the Queen CharlotteIslands and the Province of Columbia, when we pass through DixonEntrance into Clarence Strait and are in Alaskan waters. Farther on whenwe get to Juneau we’ll begin to see something that looks like realscenery for that’s the beginning of the great glaciers.”

“I’m not so keen on seein’ scenery as I am on seein’ gold,” vouchsafedBill, whose resultant financial success in the Mexican expedition seemedto have completely turned his young head from contentment and the loveof adventure into discontent and a violent itching for riches.

“You’ll see both a-plenty before we’re through with it, take it fromme.”

“What’s all them pink spots on the map, islands?” inquired Bill scanningthem closely.

“Yes, and the blue part outside is the Pacific Ocean while that on theinside represents various inlets, straits, sounds, canals, etc. So yousee we take what is called the inside route and it will be as smoothsailing as if we were going to Albany on the day boat.”

“An’ what happens when we land at Skagway?”

“There we change to the railroad, which has been built in recent yearsover the White Pass across the Coast Range, and we are then in the YukonTerritory which, as I told you and your mother, is a part of Canada. Therailroad ends at White Horse, a town about a hundred miles farthernorth. We’ll still have about seven hundred miles to travel before weget to Circle City, but we do this leg by a steamer on the Yukon River,and from there to the land of the Yeehats on the Big Black River we’llhave to cover with dog-sleds,” concluded Jack.

Their journey across the continent was about as exciting as a trip fromManhattan Street to Bowling Green on the Subway. While the boys werevery much awake when in their waking state, when it came to sleepingthey could beat the seven sleepers by a stretch, and as forappetites—well, they just naturally had an exaggerated idea of whattheir stomachs were for—and ate like young pug-uglies. In truth theywere on the job every time the dining car waiter announced the last callfor breakfast and the first call for lunch and dinner.

As they were nearing Savanna up in the northwest corner of Illinois,Jack told his pal that they would soon strike the Mississippi River andthat from there on to St. Paul the railroad parallels the ‘father ofwaters.’

“The Mississippi is a thousand five hundred miles long, has its headwaters at Lake Itaska in Northern Minnesota and empties into the Gulf ofMexico about a hundred miles south of New Orleans,” explained Jack. “Youwill see from this, Bill, that there are other rivers in our UnitedStates besides the noble Hudson.”

Presently the train ran right along side of the great river. Bill tookone look at the installment of scenery which lay spread out before themas flat as a board and then he burst out into a long and loud cackle,making, according to Jack’s way of thinking, a holy show of them both.

“Why the big noise?” questioned Jack in a sour voice, for he wasexasperated beyond all measure at this unseemly conduct of his pal.

“It’s enough to make a bucking broncho laugh. The Mississippi eh? andyou’d put it in the same class with the Hudson? Why it’s nothin’ but astream o’ mud,” Bill made answer.

“You must remember that we’re a thousand miles from its delta,”expostulated Jack.

“That’s nothin’; the Hudson’s so wide at Noo York the politicians can’tget enough money together at one time to build a bridge acrost it, seeBuddy?”

And let it be said in Bill’s behalf that that part of the Mississippiwhich is visible to the eye where the Burlington railway parallels itdoes make a mighty poor showing.

The boys were conspicuous for their silence all the rest of the way toSt. Paul for Bill had made up his mind that he wouldn’t let even his palrun down his Hudson River, and Jack had taken a mental vow that, pal orno pal, he would never again point out any wonder, ancient or modern,whether produced by nature or fashioned by the hand of man again toBill, because the latter always pooh-poohed everything unless it was inor intimately associated with the city of Bagdad-on-the-Hudson.

As the train was nearing Livingstone, Montana, late in the afternoon ofthe following day the boys had entirely forgotten that the muddy watersof the Mississippi had been the innocent cause of making them a littlesore at each other and all was to the merry with them again.

Livingstone is the junction where the change is made for Gardiner, the“gateway of the Yellowstone,” and everybody in the car was talking aboutthe hot-springs, the geysers, the ‘Devil’s Paint Pot,’ ‘Hell’sHalf-Acre’ and other wonders to be seen there. Moreover quite a numberof passengers were tourists who had made this long western trip for theexpress purpose of seeing the Park.

“We should by all means have seen the Park since we are so near it. Itwas a great mistake of mine to have bought our tickets through toSeattle without a stop-over here,” said Jack who was genuinely regretfulthat he had not thought of it at the time, but it was too late now.

“Never youse mind,” bolstered up Bill cheerily, “we’ll stop off when wecomes back and we’ll have all the time we needs and plenty o’ coin to doit on.”

“That listens all right too but I have observed it is very seldomindeed that a fellow ever returns over the same trail that he sets outon, and that the time to see a thing is when he passes by the firsttime. Well, we’ll get the gold we’re after and then I’m going to make atour of the world strictly for pleasure.”

“I’m with youse Jack,” responded Bill heartily.

Jack made no reply for he could see himself carrying Bill along as apiece of excess baggage and having him size up everything they saw usinghis Noo York, as he calls it, as a yard-stick to measure it by. Billwas all right for a trip of any kind where a sure-shot and brute-forcewere needed but on a pleasure trip around the world—well, he preferredto go it alone.

Came the time when the shine porter indicated his desire to brush offthe boys and they knew that they were getting close to the end of thefirst leg of their journey—Seattle. They were right glad to get off thetrain, though withal they had had a pleasant journey and had met anumber of interesting people. Among them was a Mr. Rayleigh who wasaccompanied by his very charming daughter Miss Vivian.

Jack had told the Rayleighs a little of his varied experiences in theWorld War, of his expedition to the Arctics, of his more recent journeyto Mexico (giving Bill all the credit of their adventures there) and oftheir proposed trip to Alaska to find gold. The net result of it all wasthat the chance acquaintance ripened into a warm friendship before theyleft the train at Seattle and his new found friends gave Jack a verycordial invitation to visit them in Chicago when he returned from hisquest in the Northland, but they left poor Bill out in the cold.

Jack didn’t blame Mr. Rayleigh much for he didn’t know Bill’s heart andhe judged him by exterior appearances only. Poor Bill! the only way hecould ever get a look-in anywhere was when some one saw him in action,and if Mr. Rayleigh could have seen him swatting German U-boats, or onthe ’dobe in that fight with Lopez’s gang he would have welcomed himwith open arms.

As it was, Jack accepted the invitation so cordially given, withavidity, for he liked Miss Vivian—she was so different from those NewYork girls (but hush! it would never do to voice this thought in Bill’shearing or there would be a pitched battle on the spot) and she seemedto him more like a beautiful dream picture than a real being who livedin a world of three dimensions.

“Yes,” he said to himself, “I’ve simply got to get that gold now,there’s no two ways about it.”

Seattle, so named after old Chief Seattle, an Indian who was friendly tothe whites, is built on a site where a handful of Indians once had theirvillage, but it was an important place even then in virtue of its beinga convenient point where every once in a while thousands of Indianswould meet and hold their pow-wows.

It was settled by the pale faces about seventy years ago and when thegold stampede for the Klondike was on, it was the great center foroutfitting the prospectors. Later on Skagway became the chief outfittingstation but as the latter town is in Alaska a duty must also be paid bythose who cross over the boundary line into the Yukon Territory since itis a part of Canada. To get around this the boys concluded that theywould wait until they got to Circle City and outfit up there if this waspossible.

Jack was rather surprised to find that Seattle was a fine, up-to-datecity in every sense of the word but of course Bill couldn’t see it thatway at all, so listen to him yawp:

“Youse could sot the whole blinkin’ town down on the East Side of NooYork and then where’d it be? Youse couldn’t find it, see!”

By the following Monday the boys had seen everything that Seattle andthe surrounding country had to offer but the only things that interestedBill were the Siwash Indians and Mount Ranier.

“I suppose you’ll say that the New Yorkers are dirtier than theseSiwashes and that Mount Ranier can’t hold a candle to the Palisades,”Jack bantered him.

“Somebody must have taken the wash out of them Siwashes from the waythey smell, and as for Mount Ranier, I’ll say it’s a real mountain.Let’s climb it, what say, Jack?”

“After we get the gold,” was his pal’s comeback.

The five days that followed on the S. S. Princess Alice were long,bright, glorious, tiresome ones and the boys would have enjoyed everyminute of the time if that disconcerting, maddening, magic word goldhad not kept burning in their brains. They saw yellow and the nearerthey came to that wonderful land in the far north, which the discoveriesof gold had made as famous as diamonds have made the Kimberly mines orwatered stock has made Wall Street, their very beings seemed to betransmuted into the precious metal.

Hence, neither the great Coast Range Mountains nor the wonderfulglaciers appealed overmuch to these youngsters who had set their heartson getting gold out of the Yukon-Arctic district just as firmly as hadever the most seasoned prospector.

But Juneau did make an impression on Bill for he heard tales of gold upthere the like of which he had never heard before. Only once did hethink to belittle the town by making odious comparisons of it with his“Noo York” but with Jack’s help he smothered the attempt for he was inthe gold country now and was carried away by that malignant diseaseknown as the gold fever.

CHAPTER III
ON THE EDGE OF THINGS

The Princess Alice made a stop for a few hours at Juneau, a townstanding on a promontory between Lynn Canal and the Taku River, and theboys, with many other passengers, disembarked to see what they couldsee. Here for the first time they felt they were getting pretty close tothe field of their future activities for they were in Alaska, the landof the midnight sun and the aurora borealis, the moose and the caribou,the prehistoric glaciers and—hidden gold.

Across the water a great mill was in full blast and as they stoodlooking at it a big, grisly sort of a man, who appeared to be betweenfifty and sixty, and whose clothes showed that he was an old timeprospector, moved over toward them. Evidently he had in mind the idea ofholding some small conversation with them, for up on top of the worldthe inhabitants do not consider formal introductions as being at allnecessary when they feel like talking to any one.

“Goin’ to buy it boys?” he asked, grinning good-naturedly to show thathis intentions were of the best.

“Afore we do, we’d kinda like to know what it is, for we’d hate to buy apig-in-a-poke,” replied Bill smiling just as cheerfully, only, as I havepreviously mentioned, whenever Bill smiled the scar across his cheekmade him look as if he was getting ready to exterminate a greaser.

“Oh, I see, you youngsters are new up here—tourists maybe,” came fromthe big throated man.

“We’re new up here all right,” admitted Jack, “but we’re not up here tosee the sights, or for our health either, but to do a bit ofprospecting.”

“Shake pards,” and he held out a calloused hand, as big as a ham and ashorny as a toad’s back, to each of them in turn. “I’m Hank Dease, but inthese parts I’m known as Grizzly Hank. And who might you fellows be?”

“I’m Jack Heaton of New Jersey, and this is my side-kick, Bill Adams ofNew York City, New York County and New York State, and there with thegoods as needed.”

“I blazes! I’m right glad to know you boys,” drawled Grizzly Hank, “foryou look to me as if you’re made o’ the right kind o’ timber. Sinceyou’re strangers here I’ll tell you about Juneau, which I allow is thefinest city in the world.”

Now Juneau has a population of about two thousand people, so, naturally,Bill was going to jump right in and monopolize things by asking GrizzlyHank if he’d ever been in Noo York, but Jack gave him the high-sign notto break in and so for once his pal held his peace.

“I’ll tell you about the wonderful things we have here first and then ifthere’s any little thing you want to know about prospectin’ up here orin the Yukon Territory I’ll tell you as good as I know. I’ve been inthis country for nigh onto thirty years and you see how well I’ve pannedout, but you fellows may do better—a few do, but, I blazes, most of ’emdon’t.”

Grizzly Hank had found a couple of good listeners and as he liked totalk he was making the most of them while they lasted.

“That’s the Treadwell mill you are lookin’ at over yonder on DouglasIsland. It has an output of gold that runs upwards of eighty thousanddollars a month. The first gold ever found in Alaska was down at Sitkain 1873, but it was old Joe Juneau, a French-Canadian prospector, whoshowed that gold could be mined here in payin’ quantities.

“At that time another prospector named Treadwell who was in thisdistrict had loaned a little money on some claims over there and finallyhad to take them for the debt. Later on he bought French Pete’s claimwhich lay next to it for the magnificent sum of five hundred dollars;and these claims which he bought for a mere song are the great Treadwellmines of to-day. I blazes! There are some other mines in this districtand since Treadwell took over the original claims the output of gold hasbeen to the tune of a hundred million dollars and the end is nowhere yetin sight. I blazes!”

“Do you mean to say, Mister Dease, that gold is mined over there likecoal?” asked Bill, thereby exposing his ignorance.

The grisly prospector looked amused but he recalled the time when hisown ideas of mining gold had been just about as vague.

“You see, boys, gold is found in several ways up here. Sometimes it is’bedded in quartz when the ore, as it is called, has to be mined andthen crushed in a stamp mill to get the gold out; more often it is foundas free gold, dust and grains and bits of pure gold mixed with the dirtwhen it must be panned, that is, put in a pan and the dirt washed awayand then the gold, which is the heaviest, falls to the bottom of thepan, and again,” he lowered his voice to make what he was about to tellthem more impressive, “nuggets of gold are picked up from bits the sizeof a pea to chunks as large as my fist! I blazes! It all depends on thelocality.”

“These diggin’s here are quartz mines and the ore is of mighty lowgrade—only a couple of dollars in gold to the ton of quartz. To getthis gold out the quartz, or ore, is crushed in a mill called a stamp,and the Treadwell has the largest number of stamps of any mill in theworld—upwards of two thousand, I blazes!”

Grizzly Hank paused for a moment to get a fresh start.

“Go on Mister Hank, we’re listenin’ with both ears,” urged Bill.

“As you were saying—” Jack paced him.

“As I was about to say,” continued the prospector, who was every whit asappreciative of his audience as it was of him, “when Treadwell began totake out gold, old timers all along the coast clear down as far as’Frisco heard of it, came up and pushed further north believing thatthey would find other lodes of gold bearing ore and they believed right,I blazes!

“That other mine over there on Douglas Island that you see to the rightis the Mexican Mine but it’s small fry as against the Treadwell for itonly has a hundred and twenty stamps working.”

“We’re not pertiklarly keen on Mexican mines, oil wells or anything elsethat goes by the name of Mex—we had all the Mexican stuff we wantedwhen we was down there six months ago,” broke in Bill to whom the wordbrought no very pleasant recollections.

“To this side of the Mexican mine,” went on the prospector, “is theReady Bullion mine and it has a two hundred stamp mill.”

“Ready Bullion listens good to me,” admitted Jack, once more breakinginto his discourse.

“Shortly after the Treadwell mine began to show itself a bonanza, astory went the rounds that it was an accidental lode, or a blowout aswe call it; that is, it was a lode of gold deposited there by somegigantic upheaval of the earth when Alaska was in the makin’ and that itwas the only place north of fifty-six where gold could be mined at aprofit.

“I always believed that yarn was set agoin’ to keep other prospectorsout of the country; but when it kept on producin’, men with picks andshovels came here just the same, and what happened was that otherdeposits were found and these are the mines that are bein’ worked now insouthern Alaska.

“Still other prospectors pushed on further north with their packs ontheir backs, on sleds which they pulled themselves or which were hauledby dog teams, on horses and mules, and they toiled up the Trail ofHeartache, as the nearly straight-up White Pass trail was called inthose days. I blazes, and, I was one of ’em.

“Once on the other side of yonder range we prospected for gold bearin’quartz, and panned the river beds until we reached the Klondike River.There is where Carmack, with two Indian pards, Skookum Jim and TagishCharlie, had already staked rich claims. One day Carmack went down tothe stream to wash a piece of moose he had killed and it was then thathe saw gold in the water and when he panned it he got more nuggets thanhis eyes could believe. News of gold travels faster than greasedlightnin’ and it was not long before the biggest gold stampede was onthat ever took place in the golden history of gold! I blazes!

“Over night the Klondike became famous and wherever human bein’s livedthat spoke a language it was a word that they knew and it meant but onething to them—and that was gold. And, I blazes, the world knew thatgold was bein’ panned out in the Klondike by hundreds and thousands andhundreds of thousands of dollars and the world went crazy over it.

“When I got there one mornin’ I was dead-broke but by night I was a richman. It was nothin’ to wash a hundred, five hundred, I blazes, athousand dollars from a few pans of gravel. And still further north,somewhere along the Porcupine River, Thornton and a couple of his pardsdiscovered a blow-out where nuggets of gold were so thick they couldpick ’em up like stones; they packed them in moosehide sacks and cordedthem up like stovewood until they had all the gold they thought theycould carry out of the country.”

Grizzly Hank had the boys going for fair. They stood as though they weremagnetized to the spot. Both were itching for more detailed informationbut neither spoke his mind for they had agreed before they left New Yorkthat while they would have to admit they were prospectors bent onfinding gold, like countless thousands before them, they would give nohint, under any circ*mstance, of their real mission to any one.

“Go on—” said Bill impatiently.

“Yes, pards,” he went on, his sharp, deep-set eyes brightening whichshowed that however it was he had failed to keep the elusive metal hehad found, his long quest left no cause for regret; “yes pards, the goldbelt runs from the Gulf of Alaska to the Arctic Ocean, and the furthernorth you go the more gold you’ll find and—the harder it will be to getit down under.2 I’m goin’ to the Porcupine River district as soon asI can get some one to grub-stake me⸺”

A mighty bellowing blast came from the triple throated whistle of thesteamer at the dock and drowned out the alluring voice of the prospectorpioneer. Then the warning sound subsided for a moment.

“There’s your boat a-whistlin’ an’ if you’re goin’ on her you’d betterscoot. I blazes! Good-by and good luck.”

They started for the boat on the run but their minds were in asemi-torpid condition, for the old miner had surely enough set them bythe ears. When they were again on the deck of the Princess Alice andhad somewhat recovered from the magic of his words they fell todiscussing gold, Grizzly Hank and a few other consequential things.

“Moosehide sacks of gold corded up like stovewood!” repeated Billblinking his blue eyes.

“The farther north you go the more gold you’ll find!” reiterated Jack,for the words sounded like ready money to him.

“Shake, old pard, we’re on the right trail,” and the boys struck handswith a vengeance. “I was thinkin’ as how we orter have taken GrizzlyHank along with us,” commented Bill; “he knows all the ropes and he’da-come in mighty handy.”

“I thought of that too when he was talking to us but then we’d have tosplit up our winnings into thirds which would mean that we’d simplyshort-change ourselves out of a couple of million dollars or so. Thenagain his ideas and ours would probably be entirely different for he’s aprospector of the old school while we are discoverers of the new school.Finally, ‘two’s company and three’s none’ is just as true, I imagine, ofthe trail as it is of a parlor date.”

“Agreed to on all points,” said Bill, “but when we comes back let’sgrub-stake him to the limit so that he can eke out a million or so onhis own account afore he kicks-in.”

Skagway was the jumping off place as far as the Princess Alice wasconcerned and the boys were right glad of it for they were anxious morethan ever to get into the heart of things. The town is on the ChilkatInlet at the head of Lynn Canal and, like many others along the coast,it has a mountain for a background.

They stopped over night at Mrs. Pullen’s hotel, which is also awonderful Alaskan museum, and as they were looking about they cameacross a rack of the inevitable picture post cards. Bill said he was ofa mind to send one down under to a certain little telephone countess,(whom he could see in his mind’s eye masticating the indestructiblelisterated nuggets and hear her say in the deep recesses of his auditoryorgan “who do you want to talk to?” with the “smile that wins.”)

On one of the post cards was a picture of a very pleasant, mild manneredlooking gentleman whose kindly eyes and benevolent mouth bore out Jack’sstatement that all men north of fifty-six are white at heart. Underthe picture on the card of the somewhat incongruous caption of SoapySmith.

“I suppose he’s the Sunday School Superintendent, owner of the FirstNational Bank and mayor of this burg,” Bill remarked to his partner.

A prosperous looking individual standing near-by overheard Bill’sfacetious comment, smiled sadly and said:

“I take it you boys haven’t heard the story of Soapy Smith and so I’llenlighten you as to the manner of man he was. Soapy came by hissaponified cognomen honestly for he began his career as a full member ofthe fraternity of gentle grafters. Soapy’s line was to wrap up a tendollar bill with a small bar of soap and sell it from the tail end of awagon for the small sum of one dollar.

“Then the lamb would take his purchase around in the back alley where noone could see him, and open it up and then he would find that he was outjust ninety-nine cents, for while he had the soap the slippery ten-spotstill remained as a part of Soapy’s financial reserve fund.

“But this graft was too legitimate for Soapy for he had to give a bar ofsoap worth at least a cent to each and every purchaser. Havingaccumulated a little coin he drifted in here with the stampeders in ’98and opened up a saloon, dance-hall and gambling house. As if this gamewas too honest he organized a gang of outlaws and they robbed men andkilled them too, right and left.

“Law abiding citizens got tired of these hold-ups, for the prospectorsand miners began to go through Dyea and use the Chilcoot Pass ratherthan take a chance of meeting Soapy and his gang in Skagway or on theWhite Pass trail. So a Vigilance Committee was organized and at one oftheir meetings one night they put Frank Reed at the gate to keep Soapyand the members of his gang out.

“As soon as Soapy heard of the meeting he took his shootin’ irons andwent over to it where Reed promptly refused to admit him. Came twosimultaneous pistol shots; Soapy fell dead and Reed lived for a coupleof weeks and then he cashed in. If you go up to the canyon you’ll seethe graves of both these men in the cemetery there. So you see you can’tmost always tell by lookin’ at a man what is under his vest.”

The next morning the boys took the train for White Horse, about ahundred and ten miles due north at which point they would makeconnections with a boat on the Yukon River. While the stampeders hadtoiled up the icy trail of White Pass, their backs breaking under theirpacks and their hearts breaking under the torture of it all, the boyswere now making the trip in a comfortable train of the White Pass andYukon Railway, the first in Alaska and the Yukon Territory.

“Isn’t just exactly like ridin’ on the Twentieth Century, is it Jack?”observed Bill as the train crept at a snail’s pace up to the summit.

Just then the train rounded a curve blasted out of solid rock and theylooked straight down a thousand feet into a canyon.

“More like a trip on the Elevated,” suggested Jack.

Once over the Pass the engineer opened the throttle a little and thetrain picked up in speed. Then by way of varying the kaleidoscopicchanges of scenery the train shot into a tunnel and out of it onto atremendously high bridge that spans the Skagway River which flowstumultuously over the rocky bottom on its way to the gulf.

A few miles beyond they crossed an old wagon road which was being builtto connect White Horse with White Pass but the railroad was completedfirst and took its place. A dozen miles or so farther on they saw somelog cabins which the conductor of the train pointed out as having beenthe center of White Pass City, one of the tented towns that had sprungup during the mad rush to the Klondike, and when it subsided the townvanished.

Then came into view Glacier Gorge and high above it the train sped alongits very edge, then wound up a long grade, when spread before them werethe Sawtooth Mountains and Dead Horse Gulch.

“Sounds like the name of a dime novel I onct read,” reflected Bill.

“Why Dead Horse Gulch?” Jack asked the conductor.

“Because when the rush was on in ’98 thousands of the pioneers broughttheir horses with them and so many of them died down there fromstarvation and overwork that their bodies choked up the gulch.

“See that sheet of water yonder?” he continued, “that’s the beginning ofLake Bennet and there the hustling, bustling, town of Bennet once was.As soon as the gold crowd from Skagway reached this lake they gave upthe trail and threw together rafts and craft of every description. Theypiled their outfits on or in them and then floated down the Yukon Riverto the Klondike, unless they were drowned first, as many were. You’ll beglad to know, boys, the train hesitates twenty minutes at Bennet forvictuals,” and the boys thought it was high time that it did so.

When this important function was over and they were again on the trainit ran along the edge of the lake until the lower end of it was reachedwhere the friendly con called “Carcross! Carcross!”

“This town,” he told them, “is built on a place where the Indians usedto watch for the caribou to cross and this is the cause why of itsname.”

After a short ride their rail trip—the last they would have for many,many moons—came to an end at White Horse, on the Thirty Mile River.They considered they were playing in great good luck, for the steamboatsleave only twice a week for Dawson and one was scheduled to sail thatnight.

This gave the boys plenty of time to look around White Horse but theysaw with eyes dimly for their vision was as blurred by their quest forgold as ever were those who had rushed madly through there in the daysof ’98.

Bill opined that he “liked White Horse fine as it has two boats a weekwe can get away on.” As a matter of fact it is a lively town for thesteamboats take on their supplies here for their down river trips.

The boys walked over to the White Horse Rapids, as the Indians called itafter a Finnlander because of his light hair and whom they thought wasas strong as a horse, after he had lost his life in its swirling waters.And hundreds of other lives and dozens of outfits were lost in the wildscramble of the early prospectors to get to the gold fields.

But neither Jack nor Bill gave more than a passing thought to thesefoolhardy and adventurous souls who had risked and lost all in theirfutile attempts to get to the Klondike; much less did they think ofthose who had made the golden goal and won out in the finality of theirefforts, for the boys’ own scheme consumed every moment of their time,and all of their energies were directed upon the consummation of itsince they were gold seekers just as truly as were any of those who hadgone before.

The steamboat Selkirk, which was to carry the boys from White Horse toCircle City, was of the old time kind that was used on the Mississippiand other rivers half a century ago; that is, it was of thewood-burning, stern paddle-wheel type.

As they stood out on deck the next morning Jack tried to lose sight ofthe big issue for the moment and he imagined himself to be the firstexplorer who had traced the Yukon River in this region. If he had nothad gold on the brain it would have been an easy thing to do for herewere the same virgin meadows, primeval forests and silent fastnessesjust as they were when the Russians laid claim to Alaska. And the gold,he reasoned, that was here then is, for the greater part, here now.

Not once since they had left Seattle had Bill compared anything with hisNoo York, at least not out loud, but when they were passing through theheadwaters of the Yukon he said as though he was talking to himself, “Ithasn’t got anything on the Spuyten Duyvil,” which, let me elucidate,is a tidal channel that connects the Harlem River with the Hudson Riverand so forms the northern boundary of Manhattan Island on which New YorkCity proper is built. But in the eight hundred and sixty odd mile tripdown the Yukon to Circle City Bill had ample opportunity to amend hissnap comparison and even then he was fifteen hundred miles from its manychanneled delta where it flows into the Bering Sea.

“Doesn’t look much like the naked north or frozen regions that the folksback home think it is,” remarked Bill, as they passed a tundra(pronounced toon´-dra) which was thick with grass and shrubs andsprinkled with various plants in flower.

“I’ll say it doesn’t,” replied Jack, “but wait, we haven’t run intowinter weather yet.”

As the boat plied its way softly and swiftly down the Yukon they sawoccasional Indian villages, the men taking life easy, the childrenplaying and the squaws busy drying the golden salmon on poles set in thesun. Then to the great delight of both boys they saw a caribou swim outfrom the shore intending, probably, to cross to the other side, butfrightened by the modernity of the throbbing, smoking monster he swamback faster than he came, and on gaining the shore he disappeared fromview.

Another time Bill went over to Jack, who was talking with somepassengers, and saluting as to an officer he said, “I have to report,sir, a bear on the starboard bow.” And sure enough there stood a hugebear high on the ledge of a rock and so motionless was he that he seemedcarved out of the rock itself; but inwardly he was fully alive to thismechanical invasion of his eminent domain.

Never was a river trip of such wild beauty, so full of interest and yetsuch soothing quiet as this one the boys were now making and it wouldhave proved doubly delightful if they had been pleasure seekers insteadof gold seekers. The only breaks in the continuity of the run were madewhen the boat nosed its way along a bank and, finding an anchorage, shewooded up, that is she took on wood to be burned under her boilers.

Now the river widened and the boat ran into the more placid waters ofLake LeBarge which Jack pointed out to Bill as having been the scene ofaction in The Cremation of Sam McGee, a poem by Robert Service. Onreaching the lower end of the lake the boat shot down the Thirty MileRiver where the swift current winds forth and back like a tangled ropeand it takes a pilot who knows his trade to hold her to the channel.

But the most exciting piece of navigation is at Five Finger Rapids, forhere the river narrows down into a neck and almost closing the latterare five ugly finger-like rocks projecting above the surface with thewater swirling swiftly round them in mighty eddies. It looked to Jackand Bill as if there was not enough room for the boat to pass betweenany two of them but this didn’t seem to worry the pilot any who held hernose hard toward the middle finger.

The boys thought that he must be tired of life. But hold there matey,just as they had timed her to strike the rock he bore down hard on hiswheel to port and the boat missed the rock by the skin of its teeth,Their hearts dropped back from their throats to their thoraxes again andthey believed they still stood a fair chance of finding the gold theywere after.

And now comes Dawson into view—Dawson in the heart of the Klondike—theDawson of tradition, adventure, romance and—of gold! This is theidentical town where that great army of pioneer gold seekers, who bravedthe rigors of the winters, the dangers of the rapids, the stresses ofstarvation and the robbers of Soapy Smith’s gang, found themselves ifthey were unfortunate enough to be so fortunate.

As the steamboat ties up here for half a day to load and unload itscargo the boys went on a hike over to an Indian village calledMoosehide, a little way down the trail from Dawson. On returning totown they got the borry, as Bill called it, of a couple of horses androde out eight or ten miles where some great dredges were at workbringing up the sand and gravel from the streams and hydraulickingequipments were washing the gold out of it.

“This kind of mining,” Jack said to his partner, “is simply panning outgold on a big scale by machinery, and gold fields that are not richenough to be worked profitably by a prospector will yield gold on apaying basis where hydraulicking can be taken advantage of.”

“It’s too slow a game for me,” was Bill’s idea of the scheme, “I wantsto pick it up in chunks.”

“That’s what we’re here for,” Jack made answer.

They left Dawson that evening and the next morning still found them inthe Yukon Territory, but shortly after breakfast the boat crossed theInternational boundary line and they were on good old U. S. soil again.The boat soon made a landing at Eagle City where Fort Egbert is locatedand the first thing Jack spied was a big wireless station which he knewbelonged to the U. S. Army.

From Eagle to Circle City, or just Circle as it is called for short,is a sail of a hundred and ninety miles. Both Jack and Bill were deadtired of traveling and they hailed Circle as heartily as they would havehailed their own home town. But they didn’t know what they were hailing.The only outstanding fact with them was that they had arrived, or atany rate they had gone as far as trains and boats could carry themtoward the goal of their desires. The bridge was swung ashore and theygot off without delay. The whistle blew a couple of sonorous blasts, andthe boat backed off and went on her way down stream.

In the days of the gold rush Circle had been the great outfitting townin these parts. It was built up entirely of log cabins and it had morelog cabins than any town had ever gathered together before or since. WhyCircle City? Whence the name? Because when the town was started it wasbelieved to be located right on the Arctic Circle but later it waslearned that it was a good eighty miles below the Circle.

As the boys stepped ashore they were greeted by a few white men, someIndians and the ear-splitting howls of the huskies.

“I tell you Bill, we’re on the very edge of things.”

“You said a mouthful, pard,” was that worthy’s sober reply.

CHAPTER IV
WHEN BILL AND BLACK PETE MET

The boys wore sorely disappointed in Circle for while it had been, asthey had heard, “the largest log house town in the world,” and as far aslog houses go it was yet, for that matter, still that essential movingprinciple that makes up a town, namely the inhabitants, was lacking.

But times have changed since the early ’90’s and now all that remain ofits population are a few men who look after the stores and a handful ofprospectors, miners, hunters and trappers who come into town to buytheir supplies, and these hearten it up a bit. As for the empty loghouses they serve only as so many monuments to commemorate the time whenthe town was alive and full of action.

You ask why the town died out? I’ll tell you. Gold was discovered therein 1894 and for the next four years its growth was phenomenal—thewonder of all Alaska; but when the Klondike was opened up theinhabitants left everything behind them and made a mad rush for the newgold fields, and so at the present time there is little left to tell ofthe glory that was Circle’s.

The way Jack had figured it out coming up on the boat was that theywould get their clothes, grub, sleds and dogs at Circle, whichprospectors and others he had talked with said they could do, and thenwhen they were all fixed and winter had set in they would push on overto the land of the Yeehats and there establish a base from which theycould work.

This base of supplies was to be like the hub of a great wheel thecircumference of which would include all of the territory to beprospected and their local expeditions would be like the spokes, that isthey would strike out with their dog teams, traveling light, taking anew line of direction each trip they made. In this way they could, hesaid, make a thorough search for the hidden gold that those before themhad struck so rich but which for divers reasons best known to those whohad sought it had never been gotten out of the country.

His best thought, as he had previously explained in answer to anobjection of Bill’s, was to make this search during the winter monthsinstead of doing it in summer-time in virtue of the fact that they couldthen use dog sleds and this would enable them to cover the groundwithout working themselves to death and do it at a goodly clip besides.

Now, when Bill had set his eyes on the deserted City of Circle heinstantly took a violent dislike to it. Having become fairly well postedon the geography of Ilasker, as he still persisted in calling it, heconcocted the notion that what they should have done was to come up inthe early spring and go on by boat to Fort Yukon, which is abouteighty-five miles farther on down the river.

From there, he contended, they could have gotten a couple of canoes andpaddled up the Porcupine and Big Black Rivers until they were close towhere the International boundary line crosses the Arctic Circle. Thisdone, (according to Jack’s own reasoning he said), they would be aboutas near the place where they wanted to make their winter quarters asthey could get. But there was no getting away from it, they were now inCircle with winter fast coming on and it was too late to change the worksheet as previously laid out.

By the time this argument was over, the boys had reached the GrandPalace Hotel, an enormous log building of two stories of the regulationkind to be found in all frontier and mining towns.

Running nearly the length of one side of the hall as they entered it,was a bar with a hotel register on the end nearest the door. At theextreme farther end of the hall a platform had been built up about ashigh as a man’s head, while any number of small round tables coveredwith worn-out and faded green cloth were strewn about the room.

The owner of the Grand Palace in the days antedating the Klondike rushwas Sam Hastings, or Silent Sam as he was called, because he neverspoke unless he was spoken to and his replies were always pithy and tothe point. His face was smooth shaven; he wore a low crowned, narrowbrimmed Stetson hat, a rolling collar with a flowing tie, silk shirtwith diamond set gold buttons in the cuffs, a Prince Albert coat with asix gun conveniently within reach under it, doeskin3 breeches and kidbutton shoes. Unlike Soapy Smith he was honest, as men of his type wentin those days, but like Soapy he died with his button shoes on.

Now let this close-up of Silent Sam fade away and take a look at asnap-shot of Doc Marling, the present owner of the Grand Palace and youwill observe a further change that time and circ*mstances have wroughtin Circle.

Doc is a big-headed man and bearded like a couple of pards. He wears awoolen shirt, under which beats a fair to middling heart; his breechesare also woolen tied around his ankles and he has on a pair of deerskinmoccasins.

He is no shooter—you could see that the moment you look at him—but itis history up yonder that he once choked a bear to death with his handsalone.

He was the only animated object in the great bare room when the boyswalked in and they felt like a couple of mavericks that had been cut outfrom the herd. No more lonesome place had either of them ever been inthis side of Nyack-on-the-Hudson.

But Doc Marling didn’t seem to feel that way, since after being therefor twenty odd years perhaps he’d gotten used to it. He invited them toinscribe their names on the hotel register, after which he led the marchdown the hall—it seemed to the boys as if it was a block long—thenceup the stair-way whose well-worn steps showed clearly that Circle hadbeen very much alive in the days of her youth, and then to their roomwhich was altogether too big.

“One thing sure, we’ll get in practice here for the long winter that isahead of us,” reflected Jack philosophically.

“It wouldn’t be half-bad if we had a ’phone connection with theAmerican Consolidated Oil Company back in Noo York, but where are we?Five thousand miles away and not even a wireless station nearer thanEagle. ‘I blazes!’ as Grizzly Hank down at Juneau says,” groused Bill.His indisposition was curious in that no matter how strenuous the tideof battle might be he had never a word to say, but inaction alwaysbehaved as an irritant to his nervous system.

Came soon the loud jangling of a bell and they knew it for a call tosupper. They followed where it led and sat down to their first meal inCircle, and it was good. There were ten or a dozen men at the table withthem and up here at the very outpost of civilization, where men are whatthey are, they all fell into loud and easy conversation.

“We’re in the hands of white men, as I said we’d be, back there in NewYork,” Jack told his partner when they were again in their room.

Just as they were about to turn in they thought they heard a phonographgoing, and as “music hath charms to soothe the savage breast” they wentdown into the big hall to be soothed.

While in pre-Klondike days it was of nightly occurrence to find four orfive hundred people gathered in the hall, there were now congregatedperhaps some twenty-five or thirty men, and these were made up ofAmericans, French-Canadians, Indians, half-breeds, and a Chinaman ortwo, to say nothing of the bear.

A few of those who composed this agglomeration of humanity, were thescum of the earth but most of them were men of strong character andsterling worth. Considering that they were on the very edge of thingsthey were bound to be a rough and ready lot but taken all in all theywere well behaved and peaceably inclined—all except one and he wasBlack Pete.

While the crowd by no means filled the void of the big hall, still itbreathed enough of life into the stagnated atmosphere to take off thesharp edges of their lonesomeness.

Now instead of a phonograph they discovered that the source of the musicoriginated in a tall, rangy miner with a big bushy mustache, who wassitting on the platform and sawing away on a fiddle as if his whole soulwas in it. Near the platform some kind of a disturbance was going onaround which the onlookers had formed themselves into a ring. Whateverit was they were greatly interested and from the roars of laughter theywere evidently enjoying it hugely.

Jack and Bill elbowed their way deep enough into the ring to see whatthe frolic was and what they saw they concluded was about as good as anact in a side-show. In a word it was a team of dancers executing withgreat precision and solemnity the “bear-trot”, or “bear-hug”, or“bear-something-or-other”, for a young French-Canadian and a big brownbear, who stood erect on his hind legs, when he was as tall as hiskeeper, were executing a most ludicrous, albeit, a lumbering sort ofdance.

After a spell Rip Stoneback, the fiddler, ceased scraping the catgutstrings with his horse-hair bow and the trainer and his bear wound uptheir exhibition with a wrestling bout that tickled the everlastingdaylights out of these simple northmen, from which it could be fairlydeduced that, after all, they were really only boys “growed” up.

The boys mingled freely with the knots of men taking in what they had tosay about everything in general and little things in particular, for itwas all brand-new and novel to them. Jack struck up a conversation witha young fellow named Jim Wendle from ’Frisco who had staked a claim overon Preacher Creek.

“The boys here are all right,” he was saying to Jack, “there’s only onefellow who is really hard boiled and that’s Black Pete over there. He’slaid out every man he’s ever tackled, either with his fists, or hisknife and I’ve heard that he shot a man once. He’s meaner than all getout when he’s had a few drinks so don’t get into any argument with him.Agree to anything he says if he talks to you.”

Black Pete did not look the part of a “bad man” though his face was hardand his complexion was swarthy. He was not very tall, had tremendousshoulders and having lived in the open Northland all his life he knewthe run of men who gathered here. He was thoroughly disliked in Circlebecause of this disposition on his part to always want to pick a fightand there were men thereabouts who were actually afraid of him.

At about the same time that Jack was getting his information concerningBlack Pete another prospector was tipping off his history to Bill and itwas lucky for both of the boys that they were “let in” on his pastperformances when they were.

Black Pete and a boon companion were leaning against the bar when thelatter made some passing remark about that young stripling and hispartner who had just landed in Circle.

“Sleem keed heem all right,” returned Pete, “but I no got use for heempardner—zat fellow weez da cut cross hees cheek. I give heem beegleeking sometime. Maybe theese night. Watch a meenute. I have som’ funwith sleem keed.” Black Pete called to Jack and motioned him to comeover, but as the latter had not been introduced he paid no attention andthis aroused Black Pete’s ire. Then he and his companion started overtoward Jack and Jim Wendle.

“Be careful now,” his friend cautioned him.

Black Pete laid his hand on Jack’s shoulder in a perfectly friendly likemanner and said:

“You and Jeem com’ heeva dreenk weeth me?”

At that Jack got up from the table and looked Black Pete square in theeye.

“I don’t drink,” he said shortly.

Black Pete was mad clear through, that much was plain.

Bill who had been taking a hand in a world-old game called poker,happened to see Jack and Black Pete facing each other and he divinedtrouble. He laid down his cards and went over where his pardner and thebad un were, to listen in on the conversation.

“Heeve a seegar, then,” the Canuk insisted catching hold of Jack’s armand pulling him toward the bar.

Taking a firm hold on Black Pete’s wrist Jack removed his hand from hisarm and said, without the slightest inflexion in his voice, “I don’tsmoke.”

Then the unexpected happened—that which had not happened in Circle inperhaps a dozen or twenty years before.

“You don’t eh?” growled Black Pete, infuriated at Jack’s cold refusal tojoin him in either one or the other, “then deem you, heeve a bullet!”

At the same time he whipped out his six-shooter and pulled the trigger,but his marksmanship was bad, for Bill had caught him by his throat fromthe side and pulled his body over so that the bullet crashed through theroof, instead of boring a hole through Jack’s body.

Expecting that the remaining chambers would be emptied in the strugglewhich took place between Bill and Black Pete the crowd dropped to thefloor, jumped behind the bar, crawled under tables—all except René andhe kept his trained bear between himself and the business end of the gunthe bad man of Circle and the Harlem boy were struggling for.

These latter two were well matched though there was no doubt but thatBlack Pete who was the larger was also the stronger, but sheer brutestrength could not gain the mastery where the tricks of the wrestler’sart are brought to bear and Bill had a little the best of it.

As the crowd rightly guessed when the first shot was fired, Black Petedid pull the trigger every chance he got until all of his cartridgeswere shot off but each time the bullet that was intended for Bill wentwild and neither he nor the others were scratched. One bullet, though,shivered the big plate glass mirror over the bar into a thousand piecesand Doc Marling, the proprietor, knew that he was having bad luck justthen to the jig-time of three hundred dollars, even if it didn’t keep onfor the next seven years.

All the time the struggle was under way Jack stood by as though he waswatching a friendly bout in Prof. William Adam’s Academy on ManhattanStreet in the good old days. More than one of the onlookers wondered whyhe didn’t crack a bottle on Black Pete’s head and so help out hispartner, but this was not the way the boys did team work. In a set-to ofany kind whether it was with bare knuckles, with knives or with pistolsneither one would take a hand in the affair the other was engaged inunless, as Jack had once explained to me, it was “absolutelyimperative.”

And this status of the fray was far from having come to pass, at leastthat was the way Jack sized it up. The crowd must have kept count of theshots fired for when the last one took place they quickly pickedthemselves up from the floor, or crawled out from their safety-firsthiding places, and gathered around Bill and Black Pete who were still atit.

Whether it was due to the final breaking down of his courage, failingstrength, too much hootch or the superior tactics of the trainedathlete, was not apparent, but slowly Bill overpowered his opponent,threw him over his shoulder, when he struck the floor on his back, andpinned him down so that he could not move. After all had seen that BlackPete was helpless Bill let him up.

There was wild cheering for the victor and some one brought Bill a bigglass of forty-rod.

“You have well earned it boy and you need it,” he said as he offered theglass to him.

“I never drink,” said Bill and it was given instead to Black Pete torevive him again.

When the latter had regained his feet, and recovered from the shock alittle, he offered no explanation for his defeat, but in his deephumiliation he moved over toward the door to make as dignified an exitas he could in the quickest possible time.

“Hey, where are youse goin’,” Bill called out after him. “Come back hereand sit down at this table and let’s be friends, for I never holds agrudge after I have downed me man. Sit down here, I wants to tell yousesomething.”

Black Pete reluctantly did as Bill requested and the crowd surged roundthem to hear what it was this boy from down under had to say to him.

“I takes it you’re a bit loaded with licker to-night and perhaps I hadthe ’vantage of youse for I never lets any of that hootch stuffinterfere with me phys-e-que, see? Now you think you’re some scrapperdon’t you? Well maybe you are, and I’ll give you a fair chanst. Tomorreryouse keep away from the bug-juice, see? and come ’round in de evenin’and I’ll spar’ a few rounds with youse—tree rounds ull be aboutenough—just a friendly bout for the sport it will give these gentshere. Marquis Queensbury rules or sluggers rules, I don’t care which.Youse can go now,” and Black Pete promptly sneaked off wishing that anearthquake would open a gulch through Circle and swallow up him, Bill,Jack and everybody else, but it didn’t.

All the next day Black Pete wondered how he could get out of the‘friendly bout’ that Bill was so willing to pull off for the mere funof the thing. He didn’t know what the Marquis of Queensbury rules werebut he finally came to the conclusion that he was a better man than hisopponent and that the only way he could retrieve his standing in Circlewas to give the Keed the beating of his life.

Curiously enough he did ‘cut out the booze’ just as though he had paidBill for the advice and then he proceeded to get into his best fightingtrim.

“I knock heem face een eef I ever heet heem,” he said talking tohimself, and then to prove to his own satisfaction that he could do ithe made four well defined dents in the pine board wall with a smashingblow of his fist.

“An’ you said these folks up here was all of the peace-lovin’ gardenvariety, and never use a gun,” Bill said soberly when they were in theirroom after the fracas.

“I thought they were,” replied Jack.

“You thought they were?” and Bill lookedat him as though he had caught him breakingthe n^th commandment. “Well don’t youse thinkagain, Buddy, or youse might hurt yourself,see?”

CHAPTER V
OUTFITTING AT CIRCLE

In the great hall everything was as quiet as the faces on the totempoles that reared their ugliness into the air on either side of theGrand Palace Hotel. While the night before had been the most exciting ofany that the oldest pioneers of Circle could remember since the days of’94, in the broad light of the morning after, it seemed as though “themakin’s of it had just melted away,” as Bill expressed it.

The boys found Doc Marling in the ‘office’ of his hotel which meant thathe was standing back of the register and ink-bottle. He greeted hispaying guests mournfully and when Jack inquired what he had on his youngmind that grieved him he pointed to the frame-work which had held thelargest mirror north of Dawson so short a time before as yesterday. Itonly went to prove how fragile are mirrors and the mutability of thingsin general.

“My lookin’-glass is busted,” he said funeral-like, “and I’m out justthree hundred cold dollars in gold.”

“I don’t see how you could blame us because a patron of yours thoughthe’d let daylight through me. Black Pete started it and it’s up to youto make him settle for it,” suggested Jack.

“He hasn’t got anything to settle with; that’s the worst part of it,” hereplied, fishing.

“Then you orter take it gentle-like outen his hide.” This from Bill.

“Well, I kinda allowed that you about did that thing last night,” saidDoc, “and bein’ somewhat of a philosopher I allowed too that while theglass was worth three hundred dollars it was worth well nigh that amountin gold dust to see him take his medicine.”

“That’s a pleasant way to look at it, Mr. Marling, and now,” said Jack,“we want you to tell us which of these stores here is the best place tobuy our outfit.”

“They’re all all right. But you ought to go and make the acquaintance ofJack McQuesten over there at the N. C. (Northern CommercialCompany’s) store. He is the daddy of Circle for he set up a tradin’post here as soon as the pioneer prospectors begin to come in. Jack’s aman that seventeen dog-sleds loaded with moosehide sacks of goldcouldn’t budge from the straight and unerrin’ path of rectitude, isJack, and he’ll fix you lads up bully and O. K.,” he told them.

So the boys went over to the N. C., and while Jack McQuesten’s famehad reached them down as far as Skagway, Bill Adams’ fame had precededthem that morning from the hotel. The old trader was sitting on a boxwhen they came in and they saw right away that he was a pioneer of theold school. A low, broad brimmed hat, without a dent or crease in it,set squarely on his head, and a pair of keen gray eyes, about halfclosed as if he didn’t want to see too much at a time, was boring holesthrough them.

He was full-faced, his nose was broad and his mustache gray; it wasplain to be seen why he had been entrusted with hundreds of thousands ofdollars by the various companies whose trading posts were famous allover Alaska. He was, as Doc Marling had said, as straight as a die andhe knew character, even as characters knew him. He was dressed like aminer and the only outstanding feature of his rig that the boys caughtsight of was a magnificent gold watch chain and charm—and he had awatch to match them in his pocket—which had been presented to him bythe Order of Pioneers, for of the first of the hardy pioneers ofAlaska, he was the very first.

“Mr. McQuesten,” began Jack, “we came over to get a winter’s supply ofgrub and an outfit fit for an arctic expedition.”

Jack McQuesten took a good look at Bill and said with a twinkle in hiseye, “so you are the young chap that whipped Black Pete—well I’ll bedog-goned. But let me give you a pointer, be careful how you handle himfor his ways are not our ways—and we can’t be responsible for them.It’s the first time in the history of Circle he has not done up his manand he isn’t any too particular how he does it, so watch out he doesn’tknife you.”

“We’ll be careful all right, from now on, Mr. McQuesten, believe me,”returned Bill.

“He’s out of his latitude,” put in Jack—that is Jack Heaton; “he oughtto be ashamed of himself living up here on the Arctic Circle with whitepeople instead of being down there on the Tropic of Cancer with the restof the greasers.”

“If he pulls any of that Chilili Mex stuff on me to-night I’ll sendhim so far he’ll need a weegie board to get back to earth on, but I’mthankin’ you Mister McQuesten for tellin’ me as how I should be careful,sir,” Bill said in an apologetic voice, perhaps because he had let BlackPete off so easily the night before.

“Now to get down to business, Mr. McQuesten,” began Jack who was anxiousto get things a-moving. “What we want is an outfit of clothes, mess-gearand grub that will carry us through the winter. We’re not going so faraway but what we expect to get back before the last ice and firstwater but we might want to keep on going and we must have an outfit sothat we can pull through if needs be.”

“What you want is an outfit for about eight months but you couldn’tbegin to pack it on your backs or haul it on sleds,” the old outfitterexplained; “such an outfit would weigh in the neighborhood of eighthundred or a thousand pounds, and a man can’t carry more than fiftypounds or haul more than one hundred pounds on a stretch. What you oughtto have is a couple of dog-sleds.”

“Perzactly!” agreed Bill, “and the question now is can we get the dogs.”

“There are some very likely dogs in and around Circle that I might beable to pick up for you and I’ll see the men who own them over at thePalace to-night. I’ll go ahead and outfit you on the strength of yourbeing able to get the dogs.”

“Good!” ejacul*ted Jack.

“First of all the things you’ll wear,” the old trader struck outgenially and his eyes twinkled more merrily than ever for here was bigbusiness staring him in the face—a volume of it such as he had nottransacted since the palmy days of Circle these many years agone.

The boys were all attention.

“You’ll want a couple of suits of waterproof underwear, a Mackinaw coatand breeches for early winter and spring; a caribou skin coat with thefur on which has a hood fixed to it; a pair of moosehide or bearskinbreeches, a couple of pairs of moccasins and muk-luks apiece and abouta dozen pairs of German sox.”

“Whoa, Buddy,” sang out Bill, “I wouldn’t wear a pair o’ them Bochesocks if I had to go barefoot, see?”

“That’s only the name of them, boy; why they make them down there inDawson,” explained Mr. Jack, the storekeeper.

“Well, I might wear ’em in a pinch then,” said Bill.

“Then you must have fur mittens that are lined with wool; several pairsof woolen mittens to wear when you are building your log cabin, heavyfur caps and fur lined sleeping bags. Of course there will be towels andhandkerchiefs and all of that sort of small stuff.”

As the storekeeper enumerated the various items of clothing, he broughtthem forth and laid out two piles, one for each of the boys.

“Now let me tell you something about taking care of these fur clothes;if you expect them to last you for more than a month take my advice andkeep them dry, or if they do get wet, don’t wait but stop where you are,build a fire and dry them then and there. I don’t care how low thequick falls you can’t get cold in one of these suits.

“Oh, yes; I almost forgot your eye shades but they are absolutelynecessary in traveling over the snow on bright days,” and he produced aqueer looking pair of goggles without any glasses in them. “These areEsquimo shades and I wouldn’t give a cent for any other kind,” he saidas he handed the boys a pair.

They examined them closely and found that they were made of wood andwhere the lenses were supposed to be in a pair of goggles there werethin pieces of wood instead with a couple of slits in them to let thelight through. Jack and Bill put them on and made puns and had fun overand out of them. Jack pretended he was a college prof and then gave animitation of Teddy Roosevelt. Not to be outdone, Bill gave an imitationof Jack giving an imitation of him, and then he wound up by pretendinghe was Judge Gilhooley of the Harlem Police Court and promptly sentencedhimself to pay a fine of seven dollars and twenty-three cents forfalsely (or badly) impersonating Hizzoner.

Jack McQuesten laughed at their antics until his sides ached and theboys laughed too, and altogether Circle wasn’t such a bad town as theyhad painted it.

“You’ll take these eye shades more seriously when you have to use themand you’ll thank your Uncle Jack for giving them to you, for they leaveno bad after effects as glass goggles do when you take them off.

“Next comes the hardware,” he went on explaining as he had to athousand, yes ten thousand, tenderfeet, in the past, and he thoroughlyenjoyed living over again those golden days. “I call everything hardwarethat you can’t eat, wear, use for medicine, hunt or fish with, exceptthe dogs.

“You’ll need quite a lot of hardware including snowshoes and sleds, awall tent, tarpaulins and compasses, for traveling. For building yourcabin you will want a five-foot crosscut saw, a rip and a hand saw, anax, hammer and some other carpenter tools, besides nails, hinges, rivetsand such like traps.

“For cooking a folding sheet-iron stove, pans, coffee pot, tin plates,cups, knives, forks and spoons. You say you’ve got a good singlebarrelled repeating shotgun and a hunting knife apiece? You must takealong plenty of loaded shells and I will fix up all of the fishingtackle you want. For your prospecting outfit you must take aprospector’s pick and a miner’s pick with a steel point, a shovel with around point such as we use up here, a magnet, a few pounds ofquicksilver, a gold pan, a small gold scale to weigh your winnings onand a magnifying glass.

“And now for the grub. This will include flour, corn-meal, yeast incakes and baking powder; evaporated fruits, potatoes, onions andvegetables; sugar and saccharin tablets; ham, bacon and salt pork; abouta hundred pounds of Alaska strawberries and hardtack for emergencyrations, also a lot of pemmican for the same purpose; some tea, coffeeand condensed milk, soap and oleomargarine; salt and pepper, and a fewother little things I shall not forget to put in. You have a medicinecase? What have you got in it?” he asked, for Jack McQuesten had taken agreat interest in these two ‘down east’ boys and he intended to see thatthey had enough of everything and the right kind of things—that is ifthey ever started.

Jack told him it had bottles containing quinine, pepsin, catharticpills, calomel and migrain.

“No drug kit is complete up here unless you have arnica for stiff jointsand strained muscles and boracic acid for blistered and aching feet.”

The old trader was in no hurry to get the outfit together that day forhe knew there was going to be a fight to the finish in the evening andknowing Black Pete better than he cared to and not knowing Bill Adams atall, he allowed that, like as not, the boys wouldn’t need anythingfurther unless it was one or two spruce boxes.

“Looks to me as if Mr. Jack is tryin’ to sell us his store and is goin’off to new diggin’s,” yawped Bill when he looked over the list Jack hadmade as the storekeeper called off the items. “An’ what’s thequicksilver for anyway—to fill up the thermometer tube when the bottomdrops out o’ it?”

Jack laughed at his pal’s little joke. “No, to dissolve out the goldwhen we find it in quartz.”

“I suppose we’ll have to take it and pay for it and all them otherprospectin’ tools just to make things look regular, but we’ll throw themaway as soon as we gets outer sight. We’re after gold in sacks, not inhandfuls,” said Bill. “Why man alive it ’ud take a freight car totransport all the stuff he’s goin’ to sell us; and besides, think o’ theskads o’ spondulicks we’re goin’ to have to cough up fer it all, too.”

“You must remember that we’ve got to live all winter, Bill, andMcQuesten knows just what he’s about.”

“An’ what’s them Alaska strawberries?—a hundred pounds o’ them!—hemust think we’re goin’ to a Fourth Ward Picnic or a strawberry festible.Do you know, Jack, I’m goin’ to have some o’ them night-bloomin’strawberries for supper if I has to tip that slant-eyed, Hong-Kong cookat the hotel a four bit piece.

“I suppose you’ve eaten pemmican, haven’t you Bill?”

“I’ve eaten most everything from chicken-à-la-King with youse at theRitz-Carlton to a pair o’ old rubber boots when I was shipwrecked atsea. It seems to me I’ve heard that word pemmican somewhere afore inmy bright log-book o’ youth, but I can’t say as how I ever sat down to atable-de-hoty dinner where it was served and that I knew I waspartakin’ of it at the same time. Explain it to me and maybe I’llremember it by the way it smells.”

“Pemmican,” began Jack, “is like Irish stew, Hungarian goulash,chop-suey or chili-con-carne in that there is a general recipe formaking it. But cooks take even more liberties than poets; consequentlyno two brands of pemmican are made the same, and, hence, cannot taste,or smell, alike, but the two things that all of them have in common arefilling and staying qualities for either man or dog.

“Pemmican is usually made of meat ground up and grease added to it whenit is cooked, and some makers put pea-flour and other vegetableingredients into it to make it cheap. A pound of it will not fill a cupand you can eat it every meal without getting tired of it. We used greatlots of it—in fact almost lived on it—when I went on that Arcticexpedition, and we fed it to the dogs too.

“Rear Admiral Peary had his pemmican made to order to get the full foodvalue out of it; his recipe called for lean beef ground fine, two thirdspart, and this was mixed with beef fat, one third part, to which wasadded a little sugar and some raisins. The pemmican for the dogs is madeof cats, dogs, horses or any other kind of meat that is cheap. What thispemmican is like that we are going to get here I haven’t the faintestidea, but it doesn’t matter much for we’re not going to use it as asteady diet.”

“One thing is sure, other prospectors have et it and what they can eatwe can eat if we have to,” was Bill’s idea of it.

On returning to the hotel Bill took Sing Nook, the Chinese cook to oneside, pressed a fifty cent piece into his hand and told him it was hisearnest desire to have some Alaska strawberries for his supper by way ofa little delicacy.

“Velly welly,” returned the celestial dignitary who presided over thejoss-house of pots and pans; “I glivee you pleanty Alaska stlawbelliesflor slupper.” And so that was easily fixed.

When Bill sat down to partake of the rations that evening he waitedpatiently for the Alaska strawberries to come under his observation; butnone materialized as far as his acute judgment of the luscious fruit wasconcerned. As soon as the meal was over and the diners had dispersedBill got Sing into a corner and sang him a song without music, but thewords of which ran something like this:

“I gave you four bits this afternoon to get me a helpin’ o’ Alaskastrawberries. You took my good money but you failed to deliver thegoods. Now what have you got to say for yourself, you Shanghai coloredson of a Pekin pigtail.”

“Allee samee I dlid glivee you Alaska stlawbellies flor slupper. You nocatchee ’em?” Sing asked very much surprised.

“No, I didn’t catchee ’em and if you don’t catchee ’em for me right nowyouse ’ell catchee a couple of ’em in the eye, I’m a thinkin’.”

Sing had seen what Bill had done to Black Pete and he had a verywholesome respect for this boy with the “velly badee facee,” so hehustled out into the kitchen and was soon back with an enormous bowl ofbeans, which he set on the table.

“What’s this?” questioned Bill sharply.

“Alaska stlawbellies, allee samee you havee tonlight for slupper.”

“Holy cat!” cried Bill in an awful voice. “I’ve been stung!”

Sing in the meantime had become very much alarmed over themisunderstanding but when he heard Bill guffawing in appreciation of thejoke, he joined in heartily. Bill had learned two things; namely, whatAlaskan strawberries are, and that a Chinaman has a sense of humor.

There was a larger gathering of the Northmen in the Grand Palace Hotelthat night than there had been since the last election. They came inlike spooks at a séance, apparently materialized out of thin air, butunlike the latter, you would have to admit that they looked mighty likehard and fast, flesh and blood human beings; and further they refuse todematerialize until they had seen what they came forth to see.

As was his wont, Rip Stoneback, who had been prospecting for gold inthese parts for the last quarter of a century but whose innumerabledisappointments had not affected his musical talent, was on theplatform, but he was not fiddling. René and his big brown bear werethere too but they were not executing any fancy steps or doing any funnystunts, for the gathering that night were neither interested in thegoddess of music, nor of the dance, nor, again, of comedy.

What they were there to see was a man’s game that had originated in theprimeval world, had been handed down while man was in the process ofdevelopment, and has since bided in communities that are far morecultured than Circle. It was the old spirit of the fight that calledthem and they were there to a man.

The tables, which were always scattered round the hall, where divers andsundry games with the pasteboards were played of an evening, had allbeen set back against the walls and the chairs piled up around them.Just why Doc Marling had seen fit to move them off the floor was notapparent unless he thought it was going to be a sprinting match insteadof a pugilistic contest. There was enough room in the hall for a dozensquared rings.

He had also removed all of the breakable assets to better protectedplaces, his bump of precaution having been enlarged by the unfortunatebreaking of his three hundred dollar “lookin’-glass” that was the prideof Circle and the envy of towns up and down the Yukon River for ahundred miles in either direction.

Conversation was being carried on but it was of a tense kind and low,and not at all like the big voiced, open hearted talk that is the way ofthese free men of the Northland. And all because a seasoned man, but abully, was going to do battle with a stripling who hailed from a placethey had heard spoken of as New York.

Bill had seen fights, yes, he had had fights ever since he couldremember and in later years, as a member of the Harlem Athletic Club,he had watched some friendly bouts of give and take and had himselfparticipated in so many battles that the fact he was going to fightBlack Pete had no more effect on him than if he had been going to sparwith Jack.

Black Pete was in a different mood. He too had had his fights but theywere far between and rough and tumble ones at that with men who, likehimself, knew nothing about the science of the game, and usually he cameout on top. Failing in this he had used his knife on men who downed him,and once he shot a man. A bully sooner or later, though, will meet hismatch and when Black Pete met Bill he was scheduled for a K. O.(knockout).

At nine o’clock, or thereabouts, the proprietor walked over to the placewhere the bout was to be pulled off and made this announcement:

“We have with us to-night Black Pete, champeen all round pugilist ofAlaska and Bill Adams, the New York Kid, in a friendly bout and may thebest man win.”

Black Pete came on to the center of the floor full of dash and dog. ThenBill came on and held out his hand but Black Pete refused to shake, soBill shook hands with himself, just like that. Evidently Pete was notgoing to fight according to approved ring rules. Instead he swung avicious right hander at Bill’s head. Bill ducked it and laughed and heknew his man was slow.

Then by sparring and feinting he drew from Pete rights and lefts withthe force of a sledge-hammer back of them but which Bill side-stepped orducked. It was not long before Pete showed signs of getting tired ofhitting the air. As Pete had told himself, if he could ever hit Bill hewould smash in his face; the power was back of his blows all right butthe trouble was that Bill wouldn’t stand still long enough to let him doit.

Bill, who was as lithe and nimble on his feet as a cat, was everywherearound his opponent at once and kept him on the go following histactics. Then Bill must have gotten careless for Black Pete gave him awallop on the jaw that sent him whirling a dozen feet. Now for the firsttime Pete’s friends egged him on and yelled “give it to him again.”

Then Pete, encouraged by his luck, rushed Bill, but he was not to becaught napping again. He warmed up to his work and tapped Pete on thenose, making it bleed, on the jaw, making it hurt, in the mouth, makingit swell and in the eye making it black; in fact he hit him any andeverywhere he wanted to and so fast did he hammer him that Pete gotbewildered and began to strike out in every direction in the hope thatsome of his blows would land on his enemy’s anatomy, and so another did.It was a glancing blow and scraped Bill’s cheek so hard it nearly rippedthe knife scar open.

“Wind him up Bill,” called out Jack.

“All right,” his partner answered, and with that he gave Pete one of hisfamous ’ospital punches and he went to the floor in a heap.

Jack went over to Pete and slowly counted ten and as he still failed toshow any signs of intelligence he counted him out. Pete’s friendscarried him over to a corner where he came to a half hour later and thenthey put him to bed. He had had “a yard and a half over plenty,” as Billwould say.

Rip sawed away again on his fiddle, Doc put the tables back on thefloor, René danced and wrestled with his good-natured bear and the menplayed cards again, but no one asked Bill or Jack to have a drink, acigar or a bullet as long as they were in Circle. I dare say that theveriest tenderfoot can now go into the Grand Palace Hotel and he will betreated as considerately as he would in the Waldorf-Astoria, in NewYork, the Blackstone in Chicago or the Palace in San Francisco.

The next morning after the bout Black Pete lit out for other diggingsand he has never been seen in Circle since. In this primitive way thenare bad breeds often made into better men.

CHAPTER VI
MUSH, YOU HUSKIES, MUSH

When pioneer Jack McQuesten saw Bill deliver the final blow that knockedBlack Pete out he knew he was safe in going ahead with the boys’ outfit.He also made it known that very night that they were in the market tobuy some dogs, that nothing but the best would be good enough for themand that he himself would pick them out. The result was that within thenext two or three days there was quite a bunch of dogs in Circle, enoughI should say to make up half-a-dozen dog-teams.

“How many dogs do you reckon we’ll need to haul our outfit?” Bill wantedto know.

“What do you say, Mr. McQuesten?” Jack put it up to the storekeeper.

“You could get along with five or six dogs to the team, but seven willgive you much better service and besides, if any thing should happen toany of them, you would be in no danger of getting stuck.”

“It’s better to have too many than too few,” said Jack Heaton.

Then they went out and took a look at the dogs and they were of all thekinds used in Alaska. Among the lot that were offered the boys were somegenuine Eskimo dogs or malamutes as they are called, a number ofhuskies, which are a mixture of various breeds of dogs that have beenbrought into Alaska, with the native Indian dogs; a few Siwash, orcommon Indian dogs and the rest were outside dogs of various breeds.

“It’s like buyin’ a necktie in a department store—any of ’em would dobut when you see ’em all together you don’t know which one you like thebest,” confided Bill. “Now if they was hawses⸺”

“Leave it to me Bill,” broke in Jack; “it’s been a month of Sundayssince I’ve had anything to do with dogs and dog teams but I’ll pick outthe best of the bunch with Mr. McQuesten’s help. The malamute was theonly kind of dog we used in the Arctic and we’ll buy all of them thereare here—what, only four?—not enough for even one team. Can’t you getus three more of these malamutes, Mr. McQuesten, so that we’ll have atleast one team of them?” asked Jack.

“These are all that I know about. It’s a great day when you see any onewith a matched team of any kind of dogs. The husky is just as good adog, or better for these parts, and there are five of them. You’ll haveto make out with outside dogs for the others.” Then he whispered inJack’s ear, “I wouldn’t take any of those Indian dogs if I was you, forthey are the worst kind of thieves and will keep your teams in bad bloodall of the time. But I will say they are good work dogs.”

“You’re in the know, Mr. McQuesten, and I’ll take your tip,” repliedJack.

This buying of dogs was an entirely new phase of business to Bill and hetook in every word that the pair of Jacks, by which I mean Messrs.McQuesten and Heaton, were saying and to the remarks, arguments andlaudations that the owners of the various dogs made and were having byand between themselves. It must be admitted that Bill stood at the footof the pass when it came to knowing anything about these work dogs.

“Tell me this, Jack,” Bill whispered so that no one might learn of hisprofound ignorance, “what’s the diff’ ’tween a malamute and a husky?”

“More than there is between a broncho and a mustang, though the dogs ofa dog team are always called huskies, regardless of the kinds of dogsit is made up of. See those handsome, alert-looking fellows over therewith their ears sticking straight up?” Jack nodded toward them; “well,they are the malamutes.

“Their pointed ears are in that position for keeps, their noses areblack and as sharp as a collie’s, while they have slitted eyes fromwhich I shouldn’t wonder if the Eskimo got his idea for making his eyeshades. Their pointed ears, keen eyes and sharp noses make them look asif they were ready to jump out of their hides. They’re the Ford motorsof the Arctic region all right. Their close hair is about the color of asilver fox, and look at their tails! two of them stand up like wirelessmasts and those of the other two look as if they had been put over theirbacks with a curling iron.

“A husky looks a good deal like a malamute, for his ears are pointedtoo, but instead of being fixed in an upright position he can move them,so every once in a while you’ll notice he will let them drop. He doesn’tstand one, two, three though with the malamute for beauty.”

“McGargle over there says that dog drivers up here will take a huskyanytime before they’d take a malamute. How do you make that out?”

“I make it out because McGargle has a couple of huskies he wants tosell. We’ll ask McQuesten anyway,” said Jack.

“I’ve just had a argument with my pard,” Bill said to the storekeeper asbig as though he had all the inside information that is known aboutdogs, “and he says that the malamutes are the best and I says that thehuskies are the best. Now what do you say?”

“Yes, huskies are supposed to be a little better workers for the kind ofsledding we do in this part of the country, but speaking for myself Iprefer the malamute because the snow doesn’t stick between his toes aseasily and his feet are harder. After all it’s only a matter of choiceand usually what you can get. Both kinds of dogs were made by AlmightyGod for the work they have to do and they do it well.

“This is true too of the outside dogs; some of them are just as goodworkers and just as good in every respect as either the malamutes or thehuskies. It isn’t a question of which dogs are the best any more nowthan in the days back there when a good dog brought two hundred andfifty, five hundred, yes, even a thousand dollars.” McQuesten shook hishead sadly. “But those good old days will never come back again.”

Nearly all the time the boys were looking over the dogs and barteringwith their owners for them they made a bedlam of the peace and quiet ofCircle with their ear-splitting barking and howling, and Jack asked Billto observe that it was the malamutes and huskies that did the howling,while the Siwashes and outside dogs did the barking.

“Whenever you find a dog barking, though he may look like a malamute ora husky you will know to a certainty that he is not full blooded but hassome other strain in him,” explained Jack.

An Indian had half-a-dozen Siwashes for sale and Bill made it hisbusiness to get a line on them. Not knowing, or let us say, forgetting,that the Indian dog has the meanest disposition in the world, Bill heldout his hand and snapped his fingers at one of them. As a reward for hiskindy notice the dog returned the compliment by snapping savagely at hishand and had he not been tied to a stake and Bill somewhat of anacrobat, the brute would have made a partial meal from the extremity.

“No Siwashes for mine,” Bill bellowed; “I wouldn’t have a team o’ themIndian savages on a bet.”

Having selected the dogs they wanted the dickering began in earnestbetween the boys and the various owners, with McQuesten as referee. Theydrove some pretty good bargains too, though it just so happened theywere favored by a slump in the dog market at that particular time sothat dogs that used to fetch a hundred dollars or more they bought fortwenty-five dollars or less.

The upshot of it all was that the malamutes and the huskies cost theboys in the neighborhood of twenty-five dollars apiece and the outsidedogs from ten to fifteen dollars apiece. The outside dogs included acouple of cross-bred mastiffs, a couple of St. Bernards and aNewfoundland.

The boys paid over the money and got the names of the various dogs,which Jack wrote down, so that they would neither forget them nor getthem twisted, for a dog will not respond to any save his own name anyquicker than a man will, though he’s not so sensitive about it. Theowners who had not been fortunate enough to have made sales took theirdogs with them and went their way, but not happily for they knew notwhen Circle would see prospectors like these boys again.

“Now, men, bring the dogs over to the store and we’ll hitch them up forthe boys,” said McQuesten.

“What in thunder to?” Bill wondered, but never a question did he ask.

The men and the boys took a couple of dogs apiece and when they broughtup at the store McQuesten went in and in a few minutes returned with twosets of harness. These were made of strips of deerskin a couple ofinches wide, fixed to rawhide traces. The strips were made into a loopthat went round each dog’s neck to form a collar, and three strips, towhich the traces were fastened, crossed his back, the first one justback of his forelegs, and the other two, which were fixed to the tracesome fourteen inches apart, met on top of his back just in front of hishind legs.

In front of the store were two small two-wheeled carts which are used inthe various towns to transport goods on during the summer months bymeans of dog teams. Then came the question of which should be thelead-dogs and which should be the wheel-dogs, as the dogs are calledthat are hitched in front and next to the sled, or in this case to thecarts.

Next, old Jack and young Jack separated the dogs into two teams, withthe plentiful advice of their former owners and others who were lookingon, and then with the aid of more than willing hands of the old timersthe dogs were hitched up with all the malamutes in one team and all ofthe huskies in the other.

“Now let’s get the names of these dogs straight, so that they’ll knowwhen we’re talking to them,” said Jack to Bill.

“First off, which team do you want, Jack?” asked Bill, though he knewhis partner, like himself, was strong for the malamutes.

“You take whichever one you want, Bill.”

“Well, I’ll take the huskies if you don’t mind,” he replied as if hemeant it.

“That wouldn’t be regular, Bill; we’ll draw straws and whoever gets thelong one takes the malamutes.”

“No, I must have them huskies. They’re the best dogs, that’s what allthe drivers say, an’ as I don’t know much about drivin’ dog-teams Iorter have the best one, what say, Mr. Jack?”

Jack McQuesten saw through Bill’s little game and his eyes twinkled forhe had bored into Bill’s nature when he first saw him and he knew he hada heart as big as all Alaska.

“Give him the team of huskies, Jack,” was McQuesten’s decision; “Billdeserves them.”

In Jack’s team of malamutes ’Frisco was the lead-dog, with Wolf, Jennie,Tofty, Jim and Prince after him while Skookum was wheel-dog. The team ofhuskies that Bill fell heir to was made up of Sate, the leader, andafter him came Caro, Lukeen, Danny, Lon, Moosehide and Jinx for wheeler.

How these dogs came by their names is, as Kipling used to say, anotherstory, or, rather, more in the nature of a riddle, but we can make aguess at a few of them. For instance ’Frisco, who was a pure malamute,couldn’t have come from San Francisco, hence it is likely that his firstowner had. Wolf, also a pure malamute, probably came by his name fromhaving been a wolf killer, Tofty, from a town over near Fish Creek wherehe might have been born, while Skookum means strong in the Chinookjargon. So much for Jack’s team.

As to Bill’s team, Sate, it seems clear, is a contraction of Satan, andwas so called because he was an imp of knowledge, as wise and wily ashuskies are made. Caro is a town over by Chandlar Lake, about a hundredmiles northwest of Fort Yukon; Lukeen got his name from old Fort Lukeen,on the Kushokwin River, but on whose site the town of Kolmakoffsky nowstands. He was a long, long way from the place where his slit-eyes firstsaw the light of day. Moosehide may have derived his cognomen by havingeaten this delicacy when he was once starving to death, while Jinx is aname that is always associated with bad luck and he finally lived up toit.

The storekeeper handed Jack and Bill a rawhide whip apiece, about twelveor fourteen feet long, and told two of the drivers to give the boys ahand, which was his easy way of saying to show them how to manage theteams, for it takes much time and a deal of practice before a tenderfootcan drive these dogs by word of mouth and the crack of the whip.

It was plain to be seen that the dogs were glad to be in the tracesagain and they all stood alert and ready for the word to mush, whichmeans the same thing as the farmer’s gid-ap. While Jack had had someexperience with driving a dog team in the Arctic he was by no means anadept at it and poor Bill was as helpless as a pedestrian crossing FifthAvenue at Forty-Second Street. But the men knew and the dogs know whatto do.

There was a crack of a whip that sounded like a pistol shot, with a yellof “mush, you huskies,” and Bill’s team was at it and away. Anothercrack of a whip and another “mush on” from Jack, when his team followeda close second in the wake of the other. It was great sport for the oldtimers watching the breaking in of the new teams and their new drivers.For the boys it was real hard work and they felt as though they weresweating blood in their efforts to keep the dogs under control.

Every day from that time on Jack and Bill hitched up their dog teams andcarted goods to and from the boat landing and the store for JackMcQuesten and when there was nothing else to do they would get on theircarts and ride all round the town to the end that they might learn howto drive the dogs right and so that the dogs would get used to them.

As both Jack and Bill were past masters in the game of handling horsesthey used the same tactics with the dogs—that is to say, they treatedthem decently and punished them only when they really needed it. Atfirst the dogs didn’t know what the boys were up to, being so kind tothem; they seemed to think it was a trick and some of them resented it.Now it has been said that malamutes and huskies have no affection foranyone, not even the man that feeds them, but Jack and Bill believedthat dogs are alike the world over and they proceeded to prove it bymaking friends with these work-dogs of the north. This in the face ofthe fact that the old timers told them that petting the dogs would spoilthem, but the boys thought differently.

Came then the first fall of snow and winter had set in. For the nextweek or so the boys drove their dog teams around hitched to the sledsand both did much walking on their snow-shoes. Like driving a dog teamwalking on snow-shoes requires practice, only not nearly as much, andwhile Jack had learned both of these things in the Arctic they were anentirely new means of transportation to Bill, but he took to them withavidity for they were in the nature of sport.

As I had occasion to remark in an earlier account of Bill, he couldlearn anything that had to do with the concrete, as for instance ridingor shooting or athletics, but when it came to the abstract, such asextracting cube root, how wireless works or the way chemical elementscombine, he was as compact as the antlers of a bull moose. But he waslike the rest of the human herd in that he would have given hisgold-tooth to be able to do what someone else could do, only it musthave to do with the working of the mind. What Bill did have, though, wasa good memory, but he lacked the fundamentals of education and this waswhere he fell down. But this has nothing to do with snowshoes and how helearned to use them.

His first efforts at snowshoeing were like everyone’s else, laughable inthe extreme, and the natives who congregated to watch him roared as hespilled himself this way or that way and then must needs have assistanceto get up again. Before he had done with it, though, he could walk onthem very swiftly notwithstanding his rather short bowed legs and it wassurprising how quickly he learned the swinging outward motion that mustbe acquired in order to become an expert.

To cap the climax he laughed best at them by laughing last when heturned a complete back somersault with a pair of five-foot snowshoes onand that, as you will allow, is some very considerable trick.

“He’ll do!” as Jack McQuesten put it.

A good deal of snow had fallen, the streams and rivers had frozen overso that the sledding was good and it was getting around the zero mark.The long awaited day had arrived and Jack McQuesten had packed theiroutfit on the sleds, at the same time showing the boys how to do it.There is a wonderful knack in knowing how to pack, and the “freight-car”that Bill had declared they would need to carry their outfit, which theold trader had made up for them, his experienced hands compressed intotwo comfortable loads. It was next to impossible, as Jack said, tobelieve that such an enormous amount of stores could be contained in sosmall a space.

The dogs were harnessed and they knew that now they were in for somereal work but they were none the less anxious for the start. Then thereemerged from McQuesten’s store two strange figures dressed in furs fromhead to foot. They were neither Eskimos nor Indians but a look at themfull in the face revealed that they were no other than a couple ofyouthful gold seekers who had come out of the far east and answered tothe names of Jack and Bill. Truly they looked of the North, Northern.

Finally just as the first dull streaks of daylight sifted through thethick air the cracks of their rawhide whips broke the monotony of weeksof waiting and the orders to “mush on, you huskies” from both Jack andBill who were at the handle bars of their sleds started the teams downthe main street of Circle at a brisk pace.

They crossed the Yukon River and took the No Name River that flows intoit a little to the north of Circle and whose headwaters lay some fortymiles to the east of it. By noon they calculated they had covered aboutfifteen miles and here they made their first stop, had a drink of hottea from their thermos bottles and did justice to some other ediblesthat Sing Nook had knocked together for them, and they were not Alaskastrawberries either.

After they and the dogs had rested half-an-hour, they broke out theirsleds, which means loosening the runners, which freeze and stick fast,by moving the sled sidewise with the gee pole, and started up the riveragain. They didn’t make such good time now for the work was new and wastelling on them even more than it was on the dogs. So by sundown theyhad made only ten miles more, but Bill said he thought that was doingmighty well under the circ*mstances and Jack thought so too. They hadhoped, though, to make the head of the stream that night.

“Four days o’ this kind o’ goin’ will put us in the land o’ theYeehats,” said Bill.

They pitched their tent on the bank of the river and built a rousingfire just outside of it. Then they fed the dogs a generous piece of fisheach, which is the principal diet of the dogs in Alaska; this done theygot their own suppers and, just to see how it would go, they warmed upsome pemmican, got out the hardtack and made a big pot of coffee.

Here it was that Bill was introduced to that celebrated food which wasthe chief factor in the discovery of the North Pole, though of coursePeary and his malamutes and the Eskimos had something to do with it too.

“Pemmican,” allowed Bill, making a face that would put shame to anancestor on a totem-pole, “seems to be a concoction on the order o’ abrownstone house built up o’ schnitzel and artificial rubber. I supposeit is all right though when everything else is all wrong but when we getthere,” and he pointed somewhere in a direction that might lead to theNorth Star, the one hundred and thirty-fourth parallel and New York, butmeaning their winter quarters to be, “it will be venison steak forours.”

The dogs, tired after their first day’s work, since they had been idleall summer, had disappeared, having dug out holes in the snow and goneto bed. The boys, though they were dead tired too, were in no mood forsleep, but in their fur clothes they were as warm as though ensconced intheir own steam-heated homes, while the mellow glow of the candle lightinside their tent gave it as cheery an aspect as a cluster of electriclights in a parlor.

So they sat around for an hour or so after supper discussing theirsuccessful start, their outfit, the dogs and—not to be forgotten for asingle moment—the gold they were after. It was good to know that here,far from the civilized haunts of men, there were fourteen huskies,strong of leg and tough of feet, sleeping out there under the snow whocould carry them to the farthermost ends of the frozen North if needsbe. It gave them a great feeling of security.

“Imagine us, Jack, a-drivin’ down Broadway or Fifth Avenoo! What’d thepeople think anyway?” Bill dreamed in an audible voice.

“I opine we wouldn’t get very far,” replied Jack, laughing at thisridiculous idea of his pal’s.

“I’d like to know why not?” queried Bill.

“Because the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals wouldn’tstand for it for a moment. They would send the dogs to the Bide-a-Weehome and us to Randall’s Island.4 And then the tables would be turnedfor we’d get the dried fish and water and they’d get the pemmican, pinktea and ice cream.”

“I’m on, Buddy; what’s all right in one part o’ the United States is acrime in some other part o’ it. I guess we’ll stay right here with ourhuskies, eh, Jack?”

“I’ll say we will for about six months—or until we find that gold.”

“These Indian guys ain’t such slouches, are they?” went on Bill, whohaving filled up on pemmican was in a talkative mood. “Imagine themhavin’ sense enough to hitch up a lot o’ dogs and puttin’ them to workpullin’ loads. Some invention I calls it.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Jack. “While the Indians used dog teams beforethe white men came here, the Indians didn’t know anything about using asmart dog for a leader and driving them by word of mouth.”

“How’d they do it, then!”

“By having an Indian boy run ahead of the dogs and of course the dogsran after him. It was the white man that put an intelligent dog ahead ofthe team to lead them. You must have noticed to-day that our lead dogs,’Frisco and Sate, did mighty little real pulling but they kept the otherdogs spread out and pulling their level best. And it’s the leaders whoho and mush and gee and haw when we yell at them and impart ourorders to the other dogs of the teams. It’s always the white man whoputs the finishing touches on things he finds.”

“We’ll put the finishin’ touches on them sacks o’ gold, I’m sayin’,”Bill rejoined and then calming down a bit he added, “when we finds ’em.”

The fire had burned low and the boys got into their sleeping bags, whenthey followed their dogs into the shadowy land of dreams. But while thedogs dreamed of getting their fill of fish just once, their youngmasters dreamed of enough yellow gold to last them for all time.

CHAPTER VII
IN WINTER QUARTERS

The barking and howling of the dogs woke the boys from a sound sleep.They quickly got out of their sleeping bags to see what it was all aboutand when they looked out of the tent they saw a pack of fourteen huskieswith their mouths wide open and looking for all the world as though theywere laughing, except when they were in the act of straining their vocalcords to make a noise.

If they could have talked the boys would have heard them say, “here, yousleepy fellows, get a move on yourselves, for we’ve got to do twentymiles to-day.” The handsome brutes were as playful and joyous as any oftheir tribe this side of the happy hunting grounds where all goodcanines go to when they die and where the “toil of the trace and trail”are not known.

On second thought, though, it may just be that they were not soparticularly anxious to get into the harness again as it was that theyhad fond recollections of the dried fish they had eaten the nightbefore, and that they were more than ready now for another helping ofthe same hyperbolical breakfast food.

While Jack fed them more generous portions of fish than they had everknown before, Bill proceeded to get their own breakfasts, of crispbacon, real bread made by that heathen Chinese, Sing Nook, back there atCircle, and coffee with condensed milk and sugar in it. What more couldthey—could anyone—want? The boys couldn’t imagine.

Now as long as they had followed the river their course had been dueeast and they didn’t have to worry about going in the right directionbut when they reached the end of it their course lay northeast, whichis, naturally, forty-five degrees between the points of the compassknown as due north and due east. To follow this course they producedtheir compasses and while both Jack and Bill were perfectly familiarwith the use of the instruments something seemed to be wrong with them,for instead of the needles pointing to the north as do all goodcompasses, they pointed almost due east, or to be exact they pointed toeast by north, which is eleven and one-fourth degrees north of dueeast.

“It’s twelve o’clock by both your watch and mine and there’s the sunoverhead on the meridian, so north must be up there and here’s thesebloomin’ compasses a-pointin’ to the east,” complained Bill. “Here weare a thousand miles from nowhere and we don’t even know the blinkin’north when we sees it.”

“Now don’t get excited, Bill, but let’s investigate this thing andreason out the whyness of the wherefore,” said Jack sanely, though hecouldn’t understand it any more than did his “pard” Bill.

They were so close to the north-pole the needles vibrated with dynamicenergy and yet they fixedly held their positions north by east.

“Maybe it’s the hardware in our outfit that’s affectin’ them, or thepemmican we had for lunch yesterday, or else the dogs have et akeg-o’-nails afore we left Circle,” suggested Bill, who had a betteridea of funning than he had of science.

“There isn’t enough iron in our outfit to affect them as you can tell ifyou will walk around the sleds with your compass. It may be thepemmican, though, for I sort of feel as if there’s a loadstone in mystomach. Leaving all joking aside, Bill, there is something here—somephenomenon we don’t understand,” returned Jack, thinking as he had neverthought before.

“It may just be,” he went on, “that there is a vein of iron ore runningalong in this direction which would of course account for the erraticbehavior of the needles. If so we’ll soon get out of the range of itsinfluence. What we’ll do is to call the point marked east on ourcompass cards north and then if we travel north by east we’ll reallybe going in the right direction, see?” explained Jack.

“It’s as clear as mud,” responded Bill, “we’ll have a nice timecorrectin’ the errors of these compasses when they are ninety degreesouten the way. You can use your compass if you want to but I’m goin’ bythe blinkin’ Sun and the bloomin’ North Star, I am.”

All that day as they were mushing on Jack kept tab on his compass andBill kept his eye on the sun and while they both firmly believed theywere headed right, the compass, by which the mariner pushes boldlyforward, steering always as it directs, knowing it will not send himastray, had the boys worked up into something that very nearlyapproached a nervous state of mind.

All the time they were on the march that afternoon the going was verymuch heavier than it had been on the No Name River, for they had tobreak the trail as they went along. Jack kept wondering what had comeover the compasses that so persistently made them point east instead ofnorth.

When they had established camp that night they were still discussing thefrivolous peculiarities of compasses which enabled them to point eastwhen they were on top-o’-the-world with the same degree of freedom thatthey pointed north when they were used on the rim-o’-the-world.

The weather was crisp and cold and the air as thin and clear as crystal.Bill, who had lost faith in the instrument that is the symbol ofunerring accuracy, stood forth in the night, looking more like somebarbarian of the glacial age than a pampered boy of the gas-housedistrict and viewed the twinkling lights in the bowl of the heavens. Hecalled Jack and indicating the North Star with his finger said:

“Either that star is wrong and our compasses are right or the other wayabout, but ’tween you and me, Bud, I’ll bank on the North Star everytime and dish the compasses.”

“I know exactly where the trouble comes in, Bill; funny I couldn’t havethought of it before,” said Jack, brightening up as though hisbrain-cells had decohered. “The North Star and the compasses are bothright. You know that the magnetic north pole and the true, orgeographic, north pole are not in the same place.

“In fact the magnetic pole is way south of the true pole—let me see, ifI remember rightly it is pretty close to the meridian which is onehundred degrees west of Greenwich and on the sixty-eighth parallel, andis, consequently, nearly twenty degrees south of the geographic pole.This is the reason, then, our compasses point to the east instead of tothe north; the only thing we don’t want to forget to do is to allow forthis difference.”

“Right you are, Jack,” Bill made answer, for of all times that hisadmiration for his partner welled in his breast it was when the latterexplained what he called “this high-brow stuff.” “Say if I had a brainlike yourn I wouldn’t be up here seekin’ moosehide sacks o’ gold, I’d beback there in little ole Noo York on Wall Street shovelin’ it intovaults; that’s what I’d be doin’.”

Having disposed of the vexatious problem of the North Pole Bill againtook an interest in his compass and began figuring out how many pointsthis way or that way they would have to go to get so many points theother side of somewhere else. Bill didn’t know it but up there in thecold, cold North he was developing his gray matter, for he wasthinking and this is the only process by which it can be done.

And so for the next three days they kept steadily onward over tundras,on streams, through wooded lands, up hills and down dales and alwaysnorth by east. Nor did the boys feel a bit lonesome here in these vaststretches of the sub-Arctic ice and snow and the great, grim solitude ofnature but this may be accounted for in virtue of there being hardlyever a minute but that they were kept on the jump doing something foreither themselves or the dogs.

Neither were they without companions for the dogs were the mostwonderful company ever. They showed the most amazing intelligence,particularly ’Frisco and Sate, and Bill was not far from the truth whenhe said “they’re human and that’s all there is to it.” And in very truthso it seemed, for whatever they wanted to do or say, they knew preciselyhow to go about it, or to make themselves understood.

“We still have another day’s journey before us,” Jack announced as theymade their last temporary camp, and they were, indeed, getting prettyclose to the end of the rainbow, for they were even then in the land ofthe Yeehats, which was the land of their golden hopes.

But to Bill, instead of there being more gold the farther north theywent, the snowscape grew more desolate and forbidding, for he was betteracquainted with a semi-torrid climate than he was with a wholly frigidone, and to him the outlook was far from alluring. Jack who had spentnine months in the Arctic didn’t mind it a little bit. He had themakings in him of a polar explorer.

Harking back to that July morning when Jack had unfolded the fascinatingstory of gold in moosehide sacks to him in his apartment, and nowlooking out upon the snow-veiled land as far as his eye could reach Billagain began to wonder if, after all, it wasn’t a fairy tale told by awriter of fiction, or, more likely, a hoax perpetrated by the earlyminers on the tenderfeet who pestered them with questions.

“What I’d like to know is if this metal is really up here,” he finallysaid to Jack, “why haven’t men like Jack McQuesten, Doc Marling, SamStoneback and all the other old timers who have lived in Ilasker eversince gold was discovered, searched for and found this treasure.”

Jack smiled cynically—that is, as cynically as a boy can smile.

“You might just as reasonably ask me why the head door-keeper of theStock Exchange has not made a fortune on the floor—he’s on the groundtoo you know. Or why is it a boot-black sometimes becomes a millionaire,or a girl from Tin Can Alley rises out of the depths and is crowned aqueen?” Jack argued.

“Or Bill Adams, of Claremont Avenoo, seekin’ the yellow metal in theshadow o’ the North Pole,” Bill commented and then he added, “I’mgettin’ to be some poet like Mr. Service, what say, Jack?”

“Yes, this beautiful Northland will make a poet of anybody. But were thebootblack and the alley wench destined to do and become what they did doand did become?” Jack went on.

“Is it because they thought their way up, or is the element of chanceresponsible for it all? Perhaps it is like pemmican, due to a little ofeverything mixed together. These are things for you to think about,Bill.”

Bill was thinking but he couldn’t think fast enough to keep up withJack’s line of talk, though he had the satisfaction of knowing what hispartner was driving at and this was more than he was sometimes able todo.

“It sounds to me, Jack,” he finally said, “but I’m hopin’ as how you’reright. I wouldn’t take any stock in it comin’ from any one else ’ceptin’yourself. Your hunches from the time I first knowed you has got theweegie board locked in a vault. An’ consekently I’m sayin’ as how I takeit your hunch inkubator is in just as good workin’ order and reliablehere in Ilasker, as it was down in Mexico.”

“Now you’re talking sense,” said Jack, throwing out his chest, only itcouldn’t be noticed from the exterior because his caribou coat was sobig it covered up his abnormal expansion. “And see here, Bill, you wantto cut out this ‘it sounds to me’ stuff. I’m not exactly what you calla Christian Scientist but we’ll never find the pot of gold if you’regoing to keep doubting it all the time.”

This little talk gave Bill some food for thought too, and he resolvedthat let come what may he would never show any signs of its “sounding tohim” again.

Along in the late afternoon of the next day they came to a river andJack proclaimed that they had at last reached the end of their longtrip.

“This is the Big Black River all right and if I haven’t missed my guesswe are about ten miles below the Arctic Circle and fifteen or twentymiles west of the International boundary line. Put her there, old pard,we’re in the land of the Yeehats at last!”

“With nary a Yeehat in sight,” said Bill as they grasped hands, “but I’mgoin’ to keep my rifle handy if it’s all the same to you.”

Then came the work of building their winter quarters which was to be alog cabin of one room about twelve feet wide and fourteen feet long.There were plenty of trees about, the chief kind being Alaska spruce,and owing to its abundance in the more northern parts of Alaska it isused for work of every description, such as cabins, mining timber,firewood, sleds, etc.

The first thing to be done was to fell the trees and they began bysawing them down with their crosscut saw. Bill said he would rather chopthem down and that he could do it easier and quicker than both of themcould do it together with the saw. While this work was in progress thedogs grew restless on account of their inactivity and enlivened thingsup every now and then with a fight; then Jack would go among them, likeDaniel in the lion’s den, and use the butt-end of his whip handle onthem until they broke apart.

“I’ll give you muts something to do that will take the fight out ofyou,” he told them, and he did, for as Bill felled each tree hispardner, as he had now begun to call him, lashed a rope round an endand hitching the dogs to it put them to doing work the like of whichnone of them had ever done before.

And pull? Why, boy, they pulled so hard that their muscles looked as ifthey would break through their hides. After he had broken out a log andwas ready to start Jack would give his long whip a tremendous crack andyell mush! when every dog did his duty and they liked it too.

It was a never ending source of wonder to the boys that these animalsliked to work. And yet under the influence of kind treatment they werevery affectionate, especially the malamutes, though none of them showedit in a way at all like dogs that live in the lap of luxury. Neitherwould it do to pet one of them to the exclusion of the others else therewould be a terrific fight going on in an instant for they were fearfullyjealous, and would not tolerate the slightest show of partiality.

“I’ve got one o’ them high-brow ideas, Jack; I’ve been thinkin’ andthinkin’ as I’ve watched these huskies, and after what you told me aboutthe way the dogs acted on the front over there in France, I’veconclooded they’ve got human brains just the same as you and me. Theycould talk if they wants to but they just pretend they can’t so theywon’t have to argy with a feller. They’re just like them furriners inNoo York, they can savvy anything they wanter and anything they don’twanter savvy—why they don’t.”

“Then you believe in reincarnation,” said Jack.

“Reindarnation!” was Bill’s near echo. “I might believe in it if I knewwhat it is, but not knowin’ I cannot say.”

Then Jack explained how some folks, including about four hundred millionin India, believed that the souls of animals, when they died, passed oninto the bodies of people. This was all easy enough for Jack to tellabout but when Bill wanted to know what Jack meant by soul his partnerhad no small time telling him about it in a way that he couldunderstand.

“It sounds reasonable,” declared Bill, “and I would believe in thisreindarnation thing only these dogs are so much decenter than mostpeople.”

And so they worked and talked and talked and worked and another monthslipped by before they got their log cabin done. The way Bill couldswing an ax made Jack envious and while building the cabin was thehardest of hard work, both of these youngsters got a lot of pleasureseeing it go up log by log. And when it was all done they were as proudof it as any millionaire who ever built a mansion on Fifth Avenue.

And furniture! They made mission furniture, table, chairs and all theaccessories of home, the like of which no missionary in the heart oflightest Africa ever set eyes upon. And comfortable! With a rousingfire, ham and Alaska strawberries, coffee and biscuits that Jack made sowell (I didn’t say so light) they were as comfortable as a husky after adouble ration of dried fish, fast asleep under the snow.

“I’m thinkin’ we’ve got to get out and kill some fresh meat,” suggestedBill after a meal in which the spirit of Sing Nook was present, i.e.,when the strawberries came on as usual.

“I thought you declared that Alaska strawberries were every whit as goodas the spaghetti we used to get at The Black Cat back in New York,when we thought we were a couple of highflyers,” Jack laughed.

“Oh, for a dish of spaghetti,” sighed Bill, and then he came back withthis statement: “Ilasker strawberries are all right but after you’ve etthem for thirty or forty meals you get a lee-tle tired of them and pinefor a young oyster, in a bowl of cracker soup, or a couple of friedeggs—one fried on one side and one on the other—or even a steak from ahoof of a panhandle longhorn.”

“I move that to-morrow we begin ‘prospecting’,” Jack said, paying noattention to Bill’s likes and dislikes. “We’ve been away now for overthree months and all we’ve got to show for it is an outlay of more thana thousand dollars, these two mighty good dog teams, our cabin and thefun we’re having.”

“Then let’s go to it,” Bill said.

“We’ll strike out across the river and go due north; then every trip wemake we’ll veer round five points until we’ve boxed the compass.”

CHAPTER VIII
ON THE ARCTIC CIRCLE

While the boys did not expect to be gone longer than a week, or ten daysat the most, on any one spoke of their prospecting wheel, and carriedgood grub to last them for this length of time, they nevertheless tookthe precaution to stock up with enough alcohol, compressed tea, hardtack and pemmican for themselves, and dried fish for the dogs, to staveoff starvation for a month in the event of meeting with an accident,getting stormbound, or wanting to make a longer stay.

With a team apiece of seven dogs and a load of only a hundred and fiftypounds it was possible for them to ride on their sleds a good deal ofthe time. But this does not mean that they could very often actually siton them but the way they did it was to stand on the rear ends of therunners and hold on to the handle bars.

The night before they made their first trip out they packed theirtraveling mess-gear, which consisted of a collapsible stove and alcoholfor fuel, grub and the few other necessary things of their outfit, onthe sleds, so that they could make a start the next morning atday-break.

They crossed the Big Black River and drove due north over the tundra (aRussian word, pronounced toon-dra,) which is a rolling prairie,without any trees on it; the soil is black and soft, or muck as it iscalled, and on it both mosses and lichens grow. They drove due north andin the course of time Bill announced that according to the sun, hiswatch and his stomach there should be a period of rest and of eating.According to Jack’s calculations they had made about twelve miles andwere moreover right then on the Arctic Circle.

“After we gets through with the eats, Jack, I wants you to edicate me onthis Arctic Circle thing,” said Bill as he threw the dogs their fish.

Jack was busy opening the thermos bottles of hot tea and getting out thesandwiches.

“What do you want to know about it?” he asked absent-mindedly, for hewas not a little bit interested in this at the particular moment.

“I wants to know why is the Arctic Circle, and everything else aboutthe bloomin’ thing. The way I’ve doped it out it is like a meridian orthe equator, that is, it’s a line that you can’t see and yet it’s thereor here just the same. I’m settin’ on it and I know it but I can’t proveit, As man to man, now, I’m askin’ you what is it?” asked Bill withgreat earnestness.

Jack looked at him and laughed.

“You asked a question and then answered it yourself in the next breath.You’ve said all there is to say about it except that it’s a circlerunning round the North Pole like an ostrich feather on a lady’s hat,only, different from the latter, it extends on all sides of the pole tolatitude sixty-six degrees and thirty-two minutes north.”

“But why is it?” persisted Bill.

Jack thought a moment.

“The chief reason the Arctic Circle is so called is because it is thecircle below which the sun does not drop in mid-summer. If we were hereon the Arctic Circle in summer we’d see the sun at midnight just abovethe horizon, and the farther north a person goes in summer the higher hewill see the sun above the horizon at midnight. Lots of tourists come uphere every summer just to take a look at the midnight sun, and thenatives call them sunners.”

“An’ we won’t get to see it then?” kicked Bill; “it’s just my luck. Ifit ’ud be rainin’ soup I’d be standin’ out in it with a fork.”

“We’re not up here to see the sun at midnight,” Jack came back at him,“we’re lucky if we get a glimpse of it at noon. What we’re up here foris to get the yellow stuff.”

“Oh yes, I kinda lost sight o’ the bloomin’ gold for a minute,” wasBill’s reply.

It was great sport, now that their loads were light, for the youngdrivers to flourish their whips and crack them in the dry air, while thedogs, fed-up, fresh and eager, raced along, with tinkling bells wherethe going was good, as though they were making a dash for the pole. Theboys and their outfit would have made a capital movie, but there wasn’ta cinematograph camera nearer than Skagway on the south or St. Michaelson the west.

At this time of the year, the period of daylight on the Arctic Circle isvery short and as darkness came on they pulled up on the banks of astream to make camp.

“This must be the Rat River,” said Bill.

“It is, but it certainly isn’t much at this point. We’re close to itshead waters though and that accounts for it. It empties into thePorcupine River about sixty or seventy miles west of here. It might beworth our while to make a survey up and down the river for a few miles,so to-morrow let’s go down stream.”

They had not gone more than five miles the next morning when theirattention was attracted by a huge fire a couple of hundred feet back ofthe north bank and they drove up to see what was going on.

“Bet it’s the Yeehats barbecuin’ a caribou,” suggested Bill who wasdying by inches for the want of a caribou steak.

“Look again,” said Jack, and then Bill saw the winter diggings of someminers, three all told, one white man and two Indians, busy with picksand shovels.

“Lookin’ for our gold,” was Bill’s idea of it.

“More likely they are mining for some on their own account. A great dealof placer mining is done up here in the winter—has to be done in winteras a matter of fact—because the ground is so low and wet that theycan’t do any digging in the summer time, for the hole fills up withwater as fast as the dirt is thrown out.

“The way they work it according to what Rip Stoneback told me, is likethis. The miner cuts all the fire-wood he can in the summer, which isn’ta great deal as it is so scarce in these parts, and builds hissluice-box; then when winter sets in and it begins to freeze, heclears the moss off of a small patch. On this clearing he builds a fireand keeps it going until the ground is thawed down a foot or so when hedigs it out; then he builds another fire, digs out the thawed ground andrepeats the operation until he has sunk a shaft through the muck andgravel to bed-rock.

“Now between the gravel and bed-rock is a layer of gold-bearing dirtcalled pay-streak and this is hoisted to the surface by means of awindlass on the ends of whose rope are spliced a couple of buckets; andthis windlass, of course, sets over the shaft. Usually two men go downin the shaft and pick the frozen pay streak from the ground. The shaftsvary in depth from fifteen to forty feet depending on what part of thecountry the mine is located.

“The third man stays on top to draw up the buckets and with awheel-barrow wheels the gold-bearing dirt back and dumps it in a pilewhere it will be in no danger of getting washed away by the meltingsnows when spring comes. In the spring when water is plentiful the funbegins for then the clean-up takes place and the men who were as pooras Indian dogs all winter wax rich and take their winnings back tocivilization where they can be separated from it.

“The clean-up means that the color-bearing dirt is shoveled into thesluice-box, that is, a trough without ends, into which the miner hascontrived to keep a steady stream of water running. The water washesaway the dirt and leaves the free gold just as it does in the moreprimitive method of panning.”

The miners were as glad to see the boys as the latter were to see them,yes even more so. They immediately knocked off all work and there was aregular “chin-fest,” as Bill called it, from that time on. They made theboys stay to supper and improvised bunks in their cabin for them tosleep on. After Art Jennings, who, as you will gather from his name, wasthe lone white man, had heard the news of the outside world they talkedabout three other things only, the first of which was gold, the secondgold and the third gold.

“This placer minin’ is altogether too slow a game for me,” remarked Billwhen they were on their way again. “What I wants is to see moosehidesacks of it piled up like cordwood, I do.”

“Well there are moosehide sacks of it cached right here in Yeehatvilleon the Circle. From the Pacific Ocean on up to the Arctic Ocean there’sgold. In every stream and river, as well as the land between them, thisprecious metal is found in either particles or in nuggets. Take theKlondike! it’s not much larger than the Rat River here and yet so muchgold was found there its name became known all over the world. Everyriver in Alaska and the Yukon, I suppose, is just as rich but you don’thear much about them because the Klondike was the first and so outshoneall the rest. We’ll get ours yet, don’t worry,” said Jack hopefully.

Each trip the boys made from their base of supplies took them from oneto two weeks. Their marches in and out were usually made in a couple ofdays and when they had worked away from their permanent base as far asthey wanted to go they would set up a temporary camp.

If the weather was not too severe, that is to say below zero, theypitched their tent, but when it got to twenty, forty or sixty below, ora blizzard struck them as it frequently did in mid-winter, they made abetter camp by cutting out blocks of snow and piling them up into adome-shaped shelter like the igloo of the Eskimo, but which Bill, whoalways persisted in nick-naming everything that was new to him, called abutter-dish.

Building a snow igloo was a simple matter after they had put up acouple, and the boys got it down to such a fine point that they could dothe complete job in two or three hours. Of course this was largely theresult of Jack’s experience in the Arctic which enabled him to go aboutit in the right way. He had brought his saw-knife with him for thisexpress purpose. This useful tool is about eighteen inches long and oneand three-fourths inches wide and while one of the edges of it is sharplike a knife the other edge has teeth cut in it like a saw.

With this saw-knife Jack or Bill would saw out the hard frozen snow intoblocks which for the lower layers of the igloo measured about two feetin length and eighteen inches wide and high; as the upper layers werereached they used smaller and smaller blocks. Finally when all of thesnow-blocks but one were laid up and the igloo was as hemispherical asthe half of a ball, the last block, which they beveled on four sides,was set in the center and this held all of the other blocks out like thekeystone of a bridge.

They made these snow igloos about six feet in diameter on the inside ofthe base so that they could lie down comfortably. To get into the igloothey left one of the snow blocks of the first layer out and through thishole they also took in the grub they needed, the alcohol stoves and thesleeping bags. To close the hole it was only necessary to push in thesnow block when they were pretty well housed in.

What, then, with their fur clothing, a log house at their permanent baseand these snow igloos at the ends of their trips, they were able to keepquite comfortable. Nearly every one who has never put in a winter in theArctic, or sub-Arctic, regions seems to think that the extreme cold is athing to be feared, but it isn’t if one has the right kind of clothes,enough food and if, when outside of the shelter, he does not stop butkeeps right on going or working. But the long hours of darkness oftenget to be mighty monotonous.

Being boys, however, nothing could chill their ardor or cast a gloom ontheir spirits for any length of time and they were always ready for afrolic. Thus it was when they were sledding on streams where the ice wasgood they had some great races. Each contended that his team was theswiftest that ever pulled a sled and this difference of opinioninvariably led to a challenge to prove it.

The dogs entered into the spirit of the races with as much zest as theiryoung masters and when they were abreast and the signal to go wasgiven, the whips cracked and the dogs jumped to get first place. Onwardthey dashed with an ease and grace that made them seem more like rubberballs bouncing along low on the course, than four-footed animals whosebusiness it was to work.

But the spirit of sport was strangely strong in these living, vibrantcreatures and as they fairly flew along over the course they voicedtheir joy by short howls and yelps when they were in the lead or theiranguish by whines and cries when they dropped behind.

Jack was, perhaps, a better driver than Bill but in his own heart hegave the credit to his team when they won and win they nearly alwaysdid. Bill was a good “sport” though and never got “sore” when he lost arace; he always took the blame on himself for his poor driving andnothing could shake his belief that his was the fastest team, bar none,in all Alaska.

There were a few times though when Bill’s team won. One of these rareoccasions was when a snowshoe rabbit ran from a bank onto the iceintending to cross to the other side; finding himself in front of aterrible pack of running dogs or wolves, he knew not which, that werebent on catching him, instead of going on across to safety he ranstraightaway ahead of them.

Sate, Bill’s lead-dog, spotted him first and he ran as he had never runbefore; the dogs of his team felt this super-burst of speed on his partand as the rabbit paced him, so he paced them with the highly gratifyingresult, to Bill, that his team jumped ahead of Jack’s by a length. Theboys urged their teams on with their “yow-yows,” and the bells jingledjoyously while the wild race was on.

The dogs of both teams had forgotten that there were such things as atrace or trail, while the boys had lost sight of the treasure they wereseeking and let nothing impede their mad flight toward destruction. Atthe end of a quarter of a mile Bill’s team was nearly three lengthsahead of Jack’s and he felt the race well won. His dogs had lost allinterest in the race, indeed, they did not know they were racing for itwas the rabbit they were after now. Then little snowshoe fooled them,for he made a sharp turn and ran up the bank.

Sate likewise turned as sharp as the high speed he was making wouldallow; the team swerved abruptly, slipped and slid for half-a-dozenyards, the sled upset and everything was piled up in a heap. Jack’s teamshot by them like an arrow and they ran for another quarter of a milebefore he could stop them in their mad flight. When he got back he hadto admit that Bill’s team had won the race but it cost them an hour’swork to make good the damage done. There was no more racing that day.

“You see, Jack, as I always told you, my team is faster than yourn andall it needs to show speed is a rabbit for a pace maker,” was Bill’scomment as he picked himself up.

In their goings and comings they ran across all sorts of wild animallife from the little lemmings, a mouse-like animal with short ears andtail, which looks like a miniature yellow rabbit, to the giant moose. Inbetween these two extremes they saw squirrels, snowshoe rabbits, red andblack foxes, lynxes, gray wolves and caribou. They had also seen thetracks of bears, for the species of bear that live in the sub-Arcticregions does not hibernate.

They often shot squirrel, rabbit and ptarmigan (pronouncedtar’-mi-gan), a bird of the grouse order, and these served as dishesof great delicacy for the boys, as well as giving the dogs a welcomechange from dried fish. Bill declared it to be the open season forbagging some big game and Jack agreed that they must. But it is hard toseek cached treasure and be big game hunters at the same time.

Once while they were moving leisurely along after a satisfying dinnerand they were talking about hunting the caribou, moose and bear, thetables were suddenly turned on them when they became the hunted preyof wild beasts, for a pack of famished wolves had scented them out andwere headed straight for them.

Pell-mell came the lean, long-legged beasts with ears erect, ribsbulging out of their loose skins, tails drooping and starved todesperation. Instantly the boys halted their teams and had barely timeenough to cut the dogs out of their traces before the pack was uponthem. The dogs knew they were in for a fight to the death and bracedthemselves for it, while the boys drew their revolvers and stood ontheir sleds ready for the attack.

In less than a minute the wolves were upon them and the fight was on.The dogs met the onslaught with the strength and courage the wolveslacked; and in between pistol shots, each of which picked off a wolf,the dogs snapped in two the legs, and broke the necks of their savageancestors with a crunch of their powerful jaws, or opened their bellies,which let their entrails half out, or severed the jugular veins whenstreams of blood spurted forth from the rips made by merciless fangs.

But the dogs suffered too, for often three or even four wolves wouldfight a single one and in this unequal struggle he would go down unlesshis master took a hand and evened up numbers by a few well-placedbullets. Nor was it easy for the boys to shoot the wolves, for the fightwas so fast and furious it was well-nigh impossible at times to send apiece of cold lead into their miserable carcasses without the danger ofhitting their dogs.

One of the curious things was that when a wolf got hold of the harnesson a dog it mistook it for brute substance instead of inert leather andit would bite it viciously and shake it furiously without getting theliving response that it had the right to expect.

When the number of wolves had been brought down to twice that of thedogs, they knew they were beaten and the moment this happened theircourage failed them and those that were left with strength enough totake to their heels slunk quickly away.

An examination of the dogs showed that far from coming out of the fightunscathed every one of them was in a bad way and, still more sad torelate, Jennie and Prince, two of the outside dogs of Jack’s team, hadto be shot to put them out of their misery. As the dogs were so badlyoff and the harness cut up and chewed to pieces the boys had to makecamp on the spot.

They dressed the wounds of the dogs as well as they could and gave themhalf-a-can of pemmican apiece—a food that the dogs liked above allelse. While the dogs laid down and rested and nursed their hurts, theirmasters built an igloo, for they couldn’t tell when they would be ableto move on. While the igloo was going up there was nothing but kindwords and praise for the dogs and it could be seen by the looks in theireyes and the expressions on their faces that they knew every word whichwas said to and about them, and enjoyed and appreciated it all. As Billsaw them now he was more thoroughly convinced than ever that theseparticular dogs were endowed with human brains and not just common dogbrains.

“I always told you my team could outrun yourn and you’ll have to admitthey out-fought yourn too,” said Bill boastfully after the gloom hadsomewhat worn off.

“I don’t see how you make that out,” Jack flared up.

“Well, two of your dogs will never mush again pullin’ a sled afterthem here on earth—though they may haul a little red cart with angelsin it when they go tearin’ along the trails o’ heaven.”

“That’s no argument at all,” returned Jack soberly, “and you can’t getaway with it either. Why, I saw ’Frisco rip the throats open of one wolfafter another when four of them were at him at once. Prince and Jenniewent down in a fluke—in a fluke I tell you—and that is the only reasonthey lost out.’”

“This is soitenly tough luck,” said Bill as he was going over the woundsof the dogs before they turned in.

“And I’m two dogs short,” moaned Jack, “though I’m mighty glad they werenot the malamutes.”

“Never youse mind, Buddy. I’ll give youse one of mine and we’ll still beeven.”

“I don’t want any of your dogs, Bill, I’ll just drive my five dogs alonguntil we strike an Indian village or some camp and then I’ll buy acouple of Siwashes. But I’m sure sorry to lose Prince and Jennie forthey were a couple of dandy dogs to say the least.”

Just the same when Bill had fixed the harness and hitched up the dogspreparatory to making a fresh start, Jack saw with grim pleasure thatthe teams were even and that Bill’s best dog, next to Sate his leader,was in the traces of his team.

Jack didn’t say anything about it then but he made up his mind that whenhe went ’round the world on a pleasure jaunt, or anywhere else, Billcould go with him however crude his speech, and rough his manner.

They limped back to their base of supplies and stayed there for a weekuntil the dogs got into shape again.

CHAPTER IX
THE LAND OF THE YEEHATS

On the various trips they had made from their base of supplies on theBig Black River the boys had kept a sharp lookout for marks or signs orother visual evidence which might indicate in some way the location ofthe treasure they sought. Jack’s hunch was responsible for his beliefthat so great a store of gold would not, in fact could not, have beenabandoned without some clew which would serve as a key to its recovery.

They often dug off the snow from a pile of dirt which they thought mightcover the sacks of gold; as wood was frequently hard to get, theycouldn’t thaw it out and, consequently, had to work like “nigg*rs” withtheir picks and shovels to penetrate it. And to what purpose?—usuallyonly to find it was the dump of some discarded mine. But a gold seekerwots not of either hardship or work if his efforts give promise ofbringing about the desired result. And they hoped great hopes.

Again they would find a cache (pronounced cash) but it was not ofthe kind that is formed of a hole in the ground, or a cavity under apile of stones, but a box-like structure erected on poles set in theground. Some of the better ones had notched logs which served as stepsand these were set up at an angle on one side so that access to thecache could be made with greater ease and lesser agility. These cacheswere used by prospectors and miners who transported their outfits ontheir backs, or hauled them on sleds, and who had to double back on thetrail time and time again before they got to their journey’s end.

In nearly all of these caches the stores were of ancient vintage, a fewof them dating back to the pioneers of ’94 or perhaps a little later,and those who made the caches never returned to claim their contentseither because they found they could get along without them, or werekilled or died, or grew disheartened and made their way back to theriver towns of the Yukon. In only a couple of them did they find freshstores and in one of these, curiously enough, there was a poke5 ofgold nuggets. Its owner, in all probability, had laid it down when hewas stocking the cache and forgot to take it with him when he went.

Neither did the boys take it, nor disturb the stores in any of thecaches they found, for it is an unwritten law in the barren north thatno man shall touch anything cached which belongs to another.

On the fifth trip out they drove east, or more accurately east by south,crossed the International boundary line and headed straight for MountBurgess forty miles away. As Jack had said, they cared not whether theyfound the gold in Alaska, in the Yukon Territory or on top of the NorthPole, as long as they found it. After they had covered about thirtymiles they ran into a scrub forest and the first thing Jack spied was apair of moose antlers lashed to a tree.

Both he and Bill thought this a very strange circ*mstance but theypresently concluded that it had been put there by some hunter though forwhat purpose they could not guess. After going half-a-mile farther intothe woods they came to another pair of moose antlers likewise lashed toa tree; this interested them in dead earnest and they began toinvestigate accordingly. Ordinarily when a trail is blazed through thewoods a bit of the bark of the trees is chipped off at short intervalsso that those who go or come cannot go astray but must find their waythere and back, let come whatever may.

But here was a trail blazed differently from any they had ever seen orheard of, in that at considerable distances apart the antlers of a mooselashed to a tree pointed the way, but what that way led to neither Jacknor Bill had the remotest idea. Sometimes the antlers were so far apart,or led off at such angles, that they had to hunt for an hour or more forthe next one.

“What, I’m askin’ you as man to man, does it mean? Are we gettin’ nearit?” questioned Bill, blinking his blue eyes.

“I don’t know,” replied Jack soberly, though hoping against hope that itwas the sign they sought; “but it is queer, isn’t it?”

“Let’s keep right on,” was Bill’s solemn advice.

“Mush on there, you huskies!” yelled Jack; “double rations of fish foryou if we find it.”

“Ten rations of fish, three times a day fer life if we finds it, saysI,” came from Bill.

It is not known positively whether Sate could count up to ten or not buthe gave Bill an awful look which in husky language meant “cut out thatloose talk and maybe each of us will get a piece of fish for supperanyway,” and with that he and his mates mushed on as fast as theirmasters could pick out the trail.

They kept this up the best part of the day when their quest ended at alog cabin not unlike their own, and over whose door was the largest pairof bull-moose antlers the boys had ever seen. The boys, who had beenbuilding high their hopes on something far less tangible than a clew,were disappointed to the quick but they had the right kind of stuff inthem and so never batted an eye.

They were greeted by the barking and howling of many dogs and what withthe noise their own teams made it sounded as if pandemonium had brokenloose. Then Joseph Cook, hunter, trapper, Indian Agent and sometime goldseeker, otherwise familiarly known as Bull Moose Joe, for he had broughtdown more moose than any other living man, appeared at the door and gavethem a warm welcome.

“But why all the antlers lashed to the trees?” Jack queried after theyhad established comrade-like relations.

“I have blazed the trail to my cabin with antlers so that he who chancesthis way with his eyes open can find me.”

Bull Moose Joe was a man who stood six foot in his moccasins, was ofmedium build and as straight as an Indian. He looked as if he might havestepped out of the great West in the days of the fifties for he wore hishair long, had a mustache and a goatee. As usual with white men up therehe must needs have the news from down under, no matter how stale itwas, and then, also as usual, the conversation just naturally driftedover to the channel of gold. It was then that Bull Moose Joe gave theboys the greatest jolt they had had in all their varied but brief careerin the gold fields.

“I take it you boys are looking for the same thing I came up to look forten years ago,” he said in an off-hand way.

“Yes, it’s gold we’re after,” replied Jack.

“Gold in moosehide sacks piled up like cordwood!” he added, watching theeffect of his words on the boys.

And the effect was truly electrical for their faces became rigid, theireyes glassed over and they felt the very blood in their arteries congealinto water-ice.

“And—and—did you find it?” asked Jack when he had recovered his powersof speech a little.

“Yes, that’s what we want to know,” Bill gurgled as if his gullet waschoked up.

Bull Moose Joe pulled a couple of times on his pipe, watched the hotsmoke ascend and dissolve away just as had his dreams of gold. Helaughed softly. He was in no hurry to answer but to the boys the momentsseemed like an age.

“No,” he said finally, “I never found it though I searched diligentlyfor it winter and summer for the first five years I was here. I speakthe Hupa tongue which is the tongue of the Athapascans and I learnedto talk it so that I could find out what the Indians knew about it.

“There was once a tribe of Indians, who lived hereabouts and they weredifferent from any of the Indians that are living in the Yukon or Alaskato-day, for they were as fierce and bloodthirsty as the Apaches downunder. Among our natives here there is a legend about a pocket of goldthat was found by these Indians long before the gold seekers came on toit.

“Then hunters and trappers from the Hudson Bay Company pushed theirway across the desolate wastes of upper Canada and coming upon thistribe they killed them and took the gold from them. Before they couldget the metal out of the country they were attacked by the Yeehats,another band of Indians, and, in turn, lost their lives. These latterIndians cached the gold in a pile of stones but how long it remainedthere it is hard to say for the Indians now living seem not to know.

“Many years after, when men swarmed over Chilcoot Pass and White Passlike so many black flies, floated down the Yukon River and on to theKlondike, a miner named John Thornton and a couple of pards, left theothers and pushed farther north. And then, like the fools for luck theywere, they discovered the cache and in it the pile of nuggets that isworth millions.

“How to get it over to the Yukon River and down under in safety weretheir only worries but they were big ones. They were rich beyond thedreams of the wildest stampeder and so to lessen the chances of loss byany means they took their time and laid the most painstaking plans.

“First they hunted the moose and made sacks of the hides; into thesethey packed the gold nuggets fifty pounds to the sack, and there werefive hundred sacks which were worth millions. No sooner had they startedthan the Yeehats swooped down on them and although Thornton and his menput up a desperate fight they fell before the larger number of Indiansand the moosehide sacks of gold stayed right where they found them.

“In a few years the Yeehats as a tribe were practically exterminated bystarvation and disease and so the gold is still here, but exactly where,no one knows. But sometime it will be found again and if those whostrike it are luckier than the others they will get it out; but thattime has not yet come. To keep me going I began to trap and hunt and ayear or so ago the Minister of the Interior made me Indian Agent forthis part of the Yukon.”

“How did you come to take up moose-hunting?” Jack asked him.

“I calculated that when I found the gold I wouldn’t want to wait until Ikilled the moose needed to make the new sacks I should need, so I beganto hunt them long ago and there they are,” and he pointed to a pile offinished sacks over in the corner. “You see I took time by the forelock.

“There’s only one other man up here that has any kind of a reputation asa moose-hunter other than myself and that’s Moosehide Mike who livessomewhere over in the Klondike River district. I met him a few years agoat a potlatch but as soon as we found out that each was looking for thesame pot of gold we didn’t hit it up very well together.”

When the boys left Bull Moose Joe’s cabin they were on pins and needles,for their thoughts were of the most conflicting nature. Their beliefthat the gold was there was now for the first time fixed to a certainty;on the other hand what ghost of a chance had they of finding it when anold timer like Bull Moose Joe who had lived there for years and coveredthe ground in winter and summer had not unearthed it?

“We won’t be quitters anyway,” announced Jack, “we’ll keep right on asper schedule.”

“You said it,” affirmed his partner.

As they had met with quite a few Indians during their sojourn at Circleand had since run into several Indian villages, the boys had acquired afair vocabulary of the Chinook jargon; which is a simple universallanguage formed of a lot of heterogeneous words which every Indian andwhite man understands and by which they are able to hold intelligiblethough limited conversation.

For instance, in the Chinook jargon the word English is calledBoston; to go toward the shore is called Friday; a big lot ofanything is expressed by saying hi-ya; a vile native alcoholic drinkis known as hootchenoo, and from this latter word comes the wordhootch which is used by the frontiersmen everywhere. Do youunderstand, or you do understand, is kum-tux; anything to eat ismuck-a-muck; a strong person or animal is skookum; a friend,tillacum, and so on.

With a vocabulary of a couple of dozen words of Chinook the boys wereable to get along fairly well with any of the Indian tribes theyhappened to meet. In all of the Indian villages they came to everythingwas quiet and peaceful excepting the fiendish howling and barking of thehalf-starved dogs. There was nothing to indicate the cruelty andferociousness that marked the Yeehats and the Indians who lived in theseparts before them.

Jack and Bill easily made friends with the Indians they came in contactwith for they bought dried fish of them for their teams, gave them a fewprovisions where the need was great and Jack always carried his medicinecase and treated the sick for such ailments as were not beyond his poorability. These latter he had to leave for the medicine man, orShamen, as he is called, to kill or cure.

One afternoon as they neared an Indian village of considerable size nearthe head waters of the Tatonduk River they met with whole families ofIndians and on scraping up an acquaintance with some of them the boysgathered the information that they were going to a potlatch.

Now about all that the Indians of this region of Alaska do, outside oftrapping and hunting, is to eat, drink and be merry, provided of course,they have the food and hootchenoo to do it with, for lacking theseintegers the resultant product, that is, unalloyed joy, could not behad. Among the Indians who were going to the potlatch was a half-breedboy who spoke English a little having learned it from Bull Moose Joe andother white hunters and trappers, and Jack promptly annexed him with thegift of a knife.

When Jack asked the lad his name he said that the white men called himKloshsky, but that his right name was Montegnard. Now Klosh inChinook means good but where the sky came from was not so easy toguess, unless he was nicknamed by some one of Semitic persuasion.

Kloshsky told the boys that the potlatch was a hi-yu feast withhyas fun, and that it was going to be given by a big man of theYikyak tribe who wanted to be chief. The word potlatch, heexplained, really means gift and that after much feasting, drinking,dancing and wrestling the man-who-would-be-chief and whose name wasMontegnais, would give away everything he owned to his guests.

“Let’s declare ourselves in on this potlatch thing,” said Bill.

“Not a bad idea at all,” admitted Jack. And so they followed the crowd.

Friends and relatives of the man-who-would-be-chief came from miles andmiles around and the journey finally ended at an Indian village in thecenter of which was a big log house nearly as large as that of the GrandPalace Hotel back at Circle. Into it the visitors made their way andJack and Bill went with them.

Talk about the decorations for a Halloween party! why, boy, nothing awhite mind ever conceived of could begin to come up to theembellishments of this great hall. In the middle there was a wonderfulbird that reached from the floor to the ceiling, nearly, and the like ofwhich nature had never made in all her seven million years ofexperience. From the ceiling there hung curiously shapen birds, beastsand human beings that for fearsomeness outdid anything the boys had everseen. As Bill said, “it was enough to scare a fellow half-to-death.”

On poles, which were arranged in a circle around the giant bird, thefinest blankets, the costliest furs and other articles prized by theIndians were displayed and these, Kloshsky told the boys, were thepresents which the man-who-would-be-chief was to give away.

When all had assembled the potlatch came to order. The big man wasgorgeously dressed in ceremonial clothes and carried a long wand. Aroundhim gathered his lieutenants (they would be so called down under) andthey were also outfitted in ceremonial clothes.

Then came the orchestra which consisted of half-a-dozen men with theirtom-toms. Finally followed the guests who moved about talking amongthemselves like society folks at a church fair. From theman-who-would-be-chief on down to the poorest Indian, all wore therichest kind of furs, some of them made of the silver fox, and they wereornamented with various decorations and natural jewelry. Many of the menand women wore necklaces and belts formed of gold nuggets as large ashickory nuts and these at once caught the eyes of the boys. Lo! the poorIndian!

Of all those present there were only two poorly dressed ones and thesewere a couple of rank outsiders who had come from down under and now sawfor the first time what Indian high-life really meant. Jack and Billfelt like a couple of hobos who had tumbled out of a box-car and landedin the midst of a fancy dress hall in progress on Fifth Avenue.

When all were assembled the man-who-would-be-chief opened the potlatchwith a recital of the wonderful deeds his ancestors had done, that hisfamily had done, and especially those that he had done.

“It’s the same old stuff the politician who wants to be mayor, orgovernor, or president pulls in the States,” Bill pointed out.

Then the players began to beat their tom-toms and when the rhythm ofthis bombastic music had stirred the souls of the guests to their verydepths, it got them going and they danced for all they were worth. Mostof them carried huge wooden masks that were a nightmare to look at.Different from our dances their movements were not regulated by art butby the simple history of their lives and of those of their ancestors; inother words they were folk-dances.

“I could do that dance as good as any of them if I only had afalse-face,” spoke up Bill, who could see nothing whatever in theenergetic but solemn performance.

“What do you want a false-face for? What’s the matter with the one youhave on?” said Jack, laughing heartily.

“I knew it was purtty bad but I didn’t know it was as bad as all that,”retorted his partner.

The dance over, the man-who-would-be-chief began to talk to the spiritsof his ancestors. Getting no immediate response he called upon hisguests to wake them up that they might hear what he had to say to them.He started them off with a large assortment of terrifying yells and thiswas augmented by cries, shrieks and screams of the others until itsounded like a band of renegade savages rushing to the first onslaughtof battle.

Bill wasn’t the least bit afraid of anything happening, because Jack hadtold him all of the people in Alaska and the Yukon country, whatever thecolor of their exteriors might be, were white at heart. But his excessof caution just naturally led him to fold his arms so that his handwouldn’t be more than half-a-second away from his six-gun should he needit.

The yelling kept up at a pitch so that a white man could not have heardhimself think and it lasted for fifteen or twenty minutes. Neither Jacknor Bill took very much stock in what they were yelling for but (it issad to relate and hard to believe) the primitive instinct in these boysoverpowered the civilizing influences to which they had been subjectedand time and again they both let loose the awful and heartrendingyi-yi, yi-yi, of the cowboy.

“Oh, Harlem flat, where is thy sting?” said Jack when the yelling wasover.

“You’d think they was a lot o’ cliff-dwellers in Noo York tellin’ thejanitor in soothin’ tones down the dumb-waiter to put on a little morecoal,” commented Bill.

Then came the wrestling matches between those who had been enemies and,without regard to which one won, when the bout was over they were goodfriends again.

“I could throw the two o’ them with me right hand tied back o’ me, see?”Bill sneered with evident disgust. “Let’s you and me show these Injunswhat a real wrestling bout is, what say, Jack?”

“Don’t get peeved, Bill. This is their game. If you saw a bout in theNew York Athletic Club, or back of the gas-house, you wouldn’t want tojump in and show the onlookers how it ought to be done, would you? Justremember that we are only innocent bystanders.”

Next came the big feast and although there were caribou and rabbit,geese and ptarmigan, still that old standby without which no Indianfeast would be complete had the place of honor.

There was a team of ten roast dogs all hitched up and going to fill thegreat void in the principal organ of digestion which existed under thebelt of each redskin. They were hot-dogs in very truth.

“I think I’d better go an’ find out if all our dogs says ‘here’ when Icalls the roll,” said Bill, and not withstanding Jack’s assurances thatthese edible dogs were not their sled dogs, Bill went out and counted upthe members of their teams just the same.

After every one had gorged himself, or herself, theman-who-would-be-chief began to distribute the presents. One of hislieutenants would call out a name, another would hold the gift beforethe person who answered to it, Montegnais would strike the floor withhis wand indicating his pleasure and the gift would be made.

The boys came last and the man-who-would-be-chief asked them theirnames. Kloshsky interpreted his wishes to the boys and through thelinguistic ability of this half-breed lad they made known that theyanswered to the cognomens of Jack and Bill, the latter from “Noo” York.Then it was they knew the man-who-would-be-chief for a gentleman, evenif he was a red-skin, for he gave them each a most wonderful blanket.

When he had given away all of his possessions the potlatch was over;it was then very near morning but as the boys were tired they stayedover at the village until the following day.

“Old hatchet face can have my vote, anytime,” proclaimed Bill, as headmired his trophy.

“You’re a nice American, you are,” said Jack; “selling your vote for ablanket, eh!”

“There’s a big difference,” proclaimed Bill; “thisman-who-wants-to-be-chief is a heathen savage politician while down inthe States the politicians are civilized Christians. An’ besides they’vegot jails down there. Get me?”

Just as they were ready to start back Kloshsky, the half-breed boy, toldthem it is the custom to return all gifts to the man-who-would-be-chiefwithin a month and that they must bring his blankets back by the nextmoon.

Jack and Bill reluctantly handed over their presents to Kloshsky andtold him to give them back to the man-who-would-be-chief with their bestwishes and kindest personal regards and other nice felicitations thatare usually found on the ends of business letters.

“Mush, you huskies!” yelled Jack and Bill simultaneously while theIndians, less cheerful than on the night of the potlatch, waved themtheir adieus.

“Indian giver,” said Jack when they were beyond earshot.

“I wouldn’t vote for that stingy guy now if he gave me all the blanketshe owns,” groused Bill.

But while they soon forgot the blankets they could not forget thenecklaces and belts of nuggets the Indians wore and they had more reasonthan ever to believe they were at the rainbow’s end where it dipped intopots of pure gold.

CHAPTER X
ON THE TRAIL OF GOLD

“Well, how is old Potlatch this nice, bright, beautiful morning,” Jackjocularly inquired of his partner after they had started and theirgrouches had somewhat subsided.

“No more o’ them things for me,” replied Bill almost amiably. “We’vewasted a whole day and we haven’t even got a blanket between us to showfor it. What I was thinkin’ about, though, was the sacks Bull Moose Joehas made pertainin’ to an’ anticipatin’ the findin’ of the gold. My onebest bet is that we gets the gold first off and the sacks arterward.”

“Now you’re talking sense, Bill. It just goes to show how all-fired overconfident a fellow can be. Confidence is a good thing but some peoplehave so much of it they fool themselves. Of course I’ll admit that itwould take a long time to kill enough moose to make twenty or thirtysacks but a few months more or less wouldn’t make much difference afterwe’ve got the metal. Of course if we accidentally stumbled onto amoose-yard that would be different.”

The boys had hunted the caribou for their fresh meat supplies, in factcaribou were so plentiful in some districts of the country through whichthey passed they seldom had to use their stock provisions, such as baconand Alaska strawberries, and as for the dogs, they waxed fat on theexcess of meat they were given and grew sluggish. There was no need forthem to die to get to the happy hunting grounds—they had attained allthat their canine souls could wish for under these youngsters of greathearts and high courage who were their masters.

It is no trick at all to shoot a caribou and it is no sport either forif it is wounded it will not put up a fight. Sport in hunting big gamecomes in only when the hunter is exposed to danger and takes a chance offighting for his life along with the beast he is trying to kill. AndBill was right when he said that any man who calls himself a sportsmanand goes after caribou for the mere sake of killing them ought to begiven a spanking and sent back home to his mother.

While Jack was something of a naturalist and knew all about caribou andtheir habits Bill was the expert when it came to dressing them. Billshot the first caribou and when he brought it into camp he examined itclosely for it was the first one he had ever seen at close range.

“It looks like a reindeer to me, pard,” he said after eyeing it closely.

“It is a reindeer, for caribou and reindeer are one and the same animal;the only difference is that reindeer are domesticated and caribou arewild. Then again there are two kinds of caribou; the one you’ve broughtin is the kind that lives north of sixty-four and this is called barrenground caribou, while the kind that lives farther south is calledwoodland caribou.

“You see the winter coat of this caribou is thick and almost white, butin summer it takes on a reddish-brown color except underneath and thatstays white. As summer comes on the caribou goes north and in winter hecomes down here to the woodlands. While he is quite shy yet hiscuriosity is so great it often gets the best of him and he will standand give a fellow the once over until it is sometimes too late for himto retreat.

“As to speed, why he can beat a dog or a horse all hollow and so when heis running nothing but a target shot will bring him down.”

“We must get some moose afore we start back for little ole Noo York. Iwant to take back the head and antlers of a big un to me goil, see,”reflected Bill, who was evidently beginning to think of home.

Jack allowed that it might not be a bad scheme to bring down a moose ortwo, not merely for trophies of their prowess as big game hunters, butfor the purpose of using their flesh for food, as well as their hides,in the possible event of their having need for them. Now, know you, thatwhile in summer the moose usually travels alone, in winter a number ofthem will band together and trample down the snow in a space with theirhoofs, and this is called a moose-yard.

Finally, one day, the boys came across tracks leading to a moose-yard,then quickly made a temporary camp, and struck out to stalk it. Theycame upon it just as the moose, of which there were about a dozen, hadreached a small lake. In the yard were two old bull moose, half-a-dozencows and the rest calves. The boys crept up on them until they werewithin bullet range. The bull moose were magnificent specimens of wildanimal life and must have weighed more than a thousand pounds apiece.

The boys chose their quarry and then two bullets speeded forth thoughthe cracks of their Winchesters sounded like a single shot. They rantoward the moose but the bullets which had crashed into their greatbodies did not kill them or even drop them to the ground. Instead, thewounded beasts bellowed with rage and as the boys came up they chargedthem with mighty fury, their great antlers cutting the air like so manysabers.

As fast as they were able to get out of the way of one of the bulls, theother was upon them and they were kept busy dodging, side-stepping andin devious other ways eluding them. In the skirmish between the boys andthe bulls, the cows and the calves stood off at some little distancelooking on but without the slightest show of any intention of joiningin, for their belief in the power of the bulls to look after themselveswas absolute.

Just as the larger of the bulls was making a final desperate charge onJack, he pulled the trigger of his rifle three times with lightning-likerapidity; the monster moose came to a dead-stop and toppled over, when afourth bullet ended him and Jack had his first and only moose to hiscredit.

In the meantime Bill was having a hard time of it, for the other bullpressed him so close he not only could not use his gun but he had todrop it to save himself. Bill had seen bullfights in Mexico, but atoreador dodging a bull of the bovine species was as mere child’s play,he opined, as he afterward said in telling me about it, when comparedwith getting away from this mighty animal of the genus Cervus.

He had also seen, yes, had even performed, that seemingly superhumanfeat known in the cattle country as bulldogging a steer, which meansthat a cowboy throws a steer to the ground by grasping its horns andtwisting its neck until the animal falls, but he knew that this trickwould not succeed with the monster he was now pitted against.

The struggle was going on away from where it started as far as powderwill send a bullet and the moment Jack had killed his moose he ran tohelp his partner. Before he got within firing range he saw a sight thathe would not be likely to forget, no, not if he lived to the centurymark. The bull moose had made a terrific lunge at Bill but instead ofpinning him on his horns, or catching and tossing him a dozen yards orso as is the way of these enraged beasts, the New York boy had graspedhis antlers as he lowered his head and with the agility of an acrobat,plus the desire to aid and abet the first law of nature, when the bull’shead went up Bill went with it with his feet straight up in the air.

In another instant he turned completely over and landed on the moose’sneck and there he gripped the coarse thatch of hair and held on with atenacity of purpose that all of the bull’s cavorting around could notshake off. Then it was that Bill drew his six-gun and emptied thecontents of it into the head of the great beast, while a bullet fromJack’s rifle brought him down. Finding their leaders were no more, thecows and calves turned and fled.

The next thing on the list was to skin the moose, and this was a veryarduous job. Both of the boys, but especially Bill, could almostout-Indian an Indian when it came to skinning a caribou but out herewhere the icy wind was cutting across the lake it was a verydisagreeable task. Before they were through with the work the day hadslipped into night and they had to make their temporary camp theirquarters. After a supper of moose-cutlet they felt much “sorensified” asBill expressed it, and he was not so badly off but that he could play afew chunes, as he called them, on his mouth organ. They piled thehides, both of which were as large as the largest buffalo hides, ontheir sleds, together with as much of the meat of the carcass of one ofthe moose as they could carry; this they took back with them to theirpermanent camp, and it solved the meat problem for a very considerabletime to come.

While Jack could clean the skins quite as well as his partner, still thejob didn’t agree with his finer sensibilities and he balked on doing itin true Indian style. Bill was not so particular and he would squatsquaw-like on the floor, lay the skin on his lap, hair-side down, gripthe edge of it with his teeth, and with his left hand under it he easilyand quickly cut and scraped away all the flesh and fat from it with hisknife in the right and never once make a miscue and cut the skin.

Not satisfied with their experience as big game hunters in bringing downthe moose, the boys pined for a bear. Now while bears are quiteplentiful in many parts of Alaska they seemed to be mighty scarce in theYeehat district, though every once in a while the boys would see thetracks of one. And so it was that Jack and Bill left their work ofseeking gold ever and anon and sought to track, instead, the bear to hislair.

But their hunt for a bear was very like their hunt for gold in that theyhunted both with vim and determination but neither the bear nor the goldwas anywhere to be found. Yet the boys knew that both were there if theycould only catchee ’em, as Sing Nook would say. When they came upon thefresh tracks of a bear, as they did once in a while in crossing lakes orgoing through the woods, they forewent their main quest in the hopes ofgetting a shot at Bruin, but instead they never even got a look at one.

But bear was not on their minds all of the time. They had been busyaround their permanent camp for several days getting the moosehides intoshape and bear was as remote from their minds as the prehistoricdinosaur.

One evening Jack was getting supper and Bill had gone over to thewood-pile, which was a stone’s throw from the cabin, for some firewood.After he had been gone for a quarter of an hour, or so, Jack began towonder what had become of him, inasmuch as he was waiting for the woodto broil a moose-steak. Another five minutes elapsed and Jack, who hadbecome impatient, went to the door to hurry Bill up.

“Going to stay at that wood-pile all day,” he yelled very loud and notvery gently.

No answer from Bill, so Jack went over to see if anything could havehappened. When he got close to the wood-pile he heard groans and when hecame upon his partner he found enough had happened, and to spare. Therewas Bill keeled over in the snow covered with frozen blood while lyingup as close to him as two mortal enemies could get was a big brown bearbreathing his last.

Jack lifted his partner to his shoulder and carried him to the cabinwhere he gave him first aid and washed him up. Bill was clawed, chewed,torn and bruised from head to foot and back again. Only for his furclothing he must certainly have been killed.

After Jack had attended his partner and made him as comfortable aspossible he went out to the wood-pile and took a look at the bear. Mr.Bruin had been slashed up quite a bit himself for Jack counted fifty-sixknife wounds in his head and body. He was assuredly a whopper for hemust have weighed in the neighborhood of six hundred pounds.

Bill lay in his bunk for two days and nights and when he got up he wasstill feeling pretty groggy. The first thing he did was to ask for his“lookin’ glass,” which was a bit of burnished steel of the kind used bydough-boys in the army. Bill screwed up his face and Jack thought he wasgoing to cry.

“’Tain’t no use, pard,” he moaned looking at himself.

“No use of what, Bill,” Jack asked sympathetically.

“No use in havin’ a goil. Look at me map now and tells me, as man toman, could any goil love a guy what’s got one like it. I says no.”

“A fellow’s face hasn’t anything to do with it. It’s the kind of afellow he is down deep in his heart, and the stuff he’s made of, thatcounts, not only with his girl, but with the world at large,” urgedJack.

“But look at it. Nobody but a mother could love a face like that,”proclaimed Bill, and Jack came very near thinking his partner had spokenrightly.

“Now tell me how it all happened.”

“Well,” began Bill, putting his hand to his forehead, “I remember I wentto the wood-pile and as I was pickin’ up an armful o’ wood I heardsomething back of me go woof! woof! I said ’woof, woof yourself’ andlookin’ ’round I saw this here ornery bear standin’ back o’ me with hisdooks up and ready for a fight. I drops the wood and lets out an orfulholler for you to bring a gun but you musta gone to sleep on the stovefor you didn’t show up.

“Then this here ornery bear makes a reach for me jaw and me and him hada sprintin’ match ’round the wood-pile. Finally he catches up with meand lands a gentle little tap on me jaw with his tremendous right handand it sent me sprawling. Afore I could get up he was on top o’ me and Ithought I was goin’ to be like the hero o’ that rime for little kidswhich runs:

“I had left me six-gun here in the cabin and I had just sense enoughleft to grabs me huntin’ knife when I stabbed him every chanst I got.

“We rolls over and over until after a while he and me couldn’t roll overany more and then you comes.”

“Yes, you drove that knife into him fifty-six times by actual count,”said Jack admiringly.

“One more stab and there’d have been enough for an advertisem*nt for apickle factory,” replied Bill.

“You certainly did put him out of commission all right. It must havebeen a great fight. I tell you I’d like to have seen it,” allowed Jackwith enthusiasm.

Bill looked up and blinked his eyes at his partner.

“Yes, it was a great fight all right. I’m sorry you missed it and I wishyou could have seen it from the place I did. I allus did prefer broilin’moose-steaks as against killin’ a b’ar, and hereafter youse gets thewood. See?”

So ended their hunt for big game.

Now if you will look at a map of Alaska you will see that the PorcupineRiver is like the letter U laid over on its side; that is to say, itshead waters are in Alaska and the stream then flows east over theInternational boundary into the Yukon Territory, thence north bynortheast across the Arctic Circle and when it reaches latitude 137degrees and longitude about 67-1/2 degrees, it makes a sharp bend andflows back west by southwest for a couple of hundred miles, when itempties into the Yukon River, between the towns of Beaver and FortYukon.

The boys had followed Jack’s scheme of going out in every direction likespokes from the hub of a wheel, in which case, as has been previouslyexplained, the hub was the base of their supplies on the Big BlackRiver. And it will also be seen by a reference to the map that thisriver is a tributary of the Porcupine River and empties into it nearFort Yukon. In fact, Alaska is a country of rivers and nearly all ofthem, except those along the coast, are feeders for the Yukon River.

By the middle of March the boys had completed about half of the spokesof the wheel and on this particular trip they had found greaterevidences of gold in larger quantities than on any one they hadpreviously made. It was their sixth trip, which took them due south oftheir base, and at the end of it they came to the head waters of thePorcupine River. Then they traveled down it, or perhaps it would bebetter to say up it, for in its inception it flows northwest. They metmore miners on, and in the vicinity of, the Porcupine River than in allof the rest of their trips put together.

Every little way they would come across a handful of miners who wereengaged in the irksome but albeit pleasant task of picking out thepay-streak in a mine, hauling it to the surface and piling it up on thedump. At these camps the boys always lost a lot of time for they wouldhave to stop and give, or get, the latest news from down under which inmost instances was from three to five months old. All of the men theymet were in the most cheerful and sanguine frame of mind, which ofitself was enough to show that the claims they had staked out were richin the yellow metal.

At every camp the boys received a most hearty welcome from these roughand hardy men who were wresting treasure from old Mother Earth here inthe high, high North. Often they felt that they must push on but theysimply could not withstand the temptation of accepting an invite to stayfor dinner, supper or breakfast, or as long as they had a mind to, forthe men were making their piles and under such auspiciouscirc*mstances they craved the company of their fellow kind.

Thus it was that when the boys went into the rough log cabins, whichwere often no better and sometimes a great deal worse than their own,they saw glittering things lying around loose the like of which theircabin could not boast, and these were nuggets of gold in abundance. Inone cabin they saw an old molasses can with the cover melted off and itwas filled to overflowing with nuggets; in another cabin there was abucket heaped high with nuggets, while in still another, nuggets werepiled up in the corner like coal.

And this treasure was only a small part, an incidental part, of thewinnings of these men, for the nuggets were picked up from thepay-streak as it was picked out and shoveled into the buckets, while thegold dust which had a far greater worth was still out in the dumpswaiting to be washed in the final clean-up which would take place in thespring.

Bill allowed that the men in Alaska must all be white except for thatrotter, Black Pete, for no one watched the gold to keep it from beingstolen, nor would there be any need to watch it until they started backon their long journey toward civilization. The boys were at last on thetrail of gold!

“Here in this district is gold a-plenty, Jack, if we want to do like therest of ’em and work for it,” said Bill as a feeler, for he had begun tothink that, after all, it might be a better paying deal to do a littledigging on their own account and get a few thousand out of a place wherethey knew it was, than to keep on looking for millions laced up inmoosehide sacks, when they hadn’t the faintest notion of where it washidden. In other words it was the outcropping of the old cabbage—adageI mean—which says that a canary in the cage is worth a couple of themflying around the room with the windows open.

But Jack vetoed the idea, for since they were on the richest claims thathad yet been staked by mortal, it stood to reason that right in thisdistrict must be the great store of gold they were after. Again, and bythe same token, when various miners offered them ten, fifteen, yes, evenas high as twenty-five dollars a day to work for them, these generouswages made not the slightest appeal to the boys. If they had to work toget the gold out of the earth, the boys allowed it would be better to doa little prospecting the coming summer, stake out their claims and thengo to it the next winter.

“It’s the same old game I’m tellin’ you, pards,” said one of the minersto his companions as the boys drove away after he had made them aparticularly alluring offer to go to work. “These young scalawags areafter them moosehide sacks o’ gold as sure as I’m born, and twentydog-teams couldn’t pull them away from the crazy idee.”

Then the three men laughed a long, loud, and hearty laugh which showedwhat they thought of the scheme.

CHAPTER XI
GOLD, GOLD, NOTHING BUT GOLD

The boys had made a much longer stay on the end of this last trip outthan they had figured on, for now that they were in the heart of thereal gold fields they were reluctant to go back until they had exploredevery part of it.

While gold dust and gold nuggets were to be found in every miner’s cabinin amounts ranging up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, still theboys were as poor as ever, for nowhere had they found the slightestsigns of gold packed in moosehide sacks and corded up like stovewood.

They had gone through valleys, up and down streams, over tundras, intoforests and across lakes and they had combed these districts prettywell, but the only visible effect of their efforts was the exeunt oftheir good grub and they were fast running short of their reserverations for both themselves and their dogs.

Both Jack and Bill were growing discouraged but the difference betweenthem was that while the latter never hesitated to voice his innermostthoughts, the former applied the brakes so that his never got to thesurface of audible speech.

“This prospectin’ business is beginnin’ to clog on me phy-si-que,”announced Bill, as he was hitching up the dogs preparatory to startingback to their base.

“Suppose you’d been prospecting here for twenty odd years like old ‘IBlazes’ we met down at Juneau, or for fifteen, ten, or five years likehundreds of others up here,” plugged in Jack.

“That’s a hawse of an entirely different breed for they haven’t anythingelse to do, while I have me business, me mother and me goil to lookafter in little ole Noo York,” Bill replied, his eyes snapping with thepure joy of the thought.

New York! how good those two words sounded to Jack, for while Montclair,New Jersey, is where he lived, everybody north of New York as far asAlbany, east as far as Coney Island, south as far as the Atlantic Oceanand west as far as Trenton always think of New York as his home townwhen he gets a respectable distance away from it.

But to get back to Earth and Alaska. The dwindling condition of theirfood supplies led the boys to go into close caucus as the best means ofsupporting their party, so they decided to go back to their base at onceand bring down a larger store of provisions.

This settled, they repacked their sleds and hitched up the dogs for thetrip northward again. They started off with whips a-cracking, bellsa-jingling and the dogs in the best of spirits even if their masterswere not in such good humor.

“My only regret in leaving Alaska will be that we can’t take all ofthese huskies along with us. I’m going to take ’Frisco and maybe Skookumtoo,” said Jack.

“An’ I’m goin’ to take old Sate home,” said Bill, and when Sate heardthis he gave two merry little howls for all the world as if he hadunderstood and, on second thought, there’s no doubt but that he did.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we could take back both dog teams an’ the sledsan’ drive them up Fifth Avenoo—wouldn’t it be great, Jack?”

His partner gave him the laugh.

“There you go dreaming that same stuff again. It would be a great showfor the New Yorkers who don’t know how to travel except on trolleys, andtrains and in motor cars and hearses. But by the time we get back itwill be well along toward the middle of summer so I guess we’ll have tocall that little day dream of yours off.”

“Can’t youse even let a fellow dream out loud onct in a while?” Billinquired petulantly. “It don’t cost nothin’.”

“Go on and rave then, I don’t care,” said Jack.

“Well then, just imagine it was winter in Noo York an’ us a-drivin’ ourdog teams up the Avenoo with moosehide sacks o’ gold piled on our sledslike cordwood.”

“Why, we wouldn’t get from Thirty-third Street to Forty-second beforethere’d be Wild West doings and a dozen gangs of gunmen, any one ofwhich would be as bad or worse than Soapy Smith’s, would be holding usup and taking our sacks of gold away from us,” Jack told him.

“An’ what would the perlice be doin’ all this time?” asked Billinnocently.

“Oh, they’d be directing the traffic and showing the hold-up men whichway to go to keep from being run over by the many motor cars,” Jackreplied with all seriousness.

Bill blinked his eyes.

“An’ I suppose we’d be standin’ by with our hands in our pockets lookin’on. Mush, you huskies, mush!” yelled Bill gruffly and with that theconversation lagged.

All that day they traveled leisurely along and when night came on theyhad only done some twenty miles. As usual the boys looked after thedogs’ feet and fed them a stinting portion of fish, when they at oncedug into the snow with the openings on the south side. Jack and Bill hadno intention of making a snow igloo for, like their dogs, they had grownfat upon the good things of the land and in consequence they were not asalert and spry as they had been.

“See them huskies Jack? See the way they’ve crawled in on the southside? That means a high wind from the north to-night and Iprognosticates a blizzard comin’. I hates to think o’ it but I guesswe’d better build a igloo,” was Bill’s advice.

“Not so bad when you can use a dog for a barometer, what say Bill?”remarked his partner.

“Sure, they’re great animules all right. You can use ’em for Christmaspresents, a pair o’ suspenders or eat ’em, accordin’ to your needs,”added Bill to his partner’s eulogy on the wide range of usefulness ofthe husky as an all round convenience.

Now the dogs of the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions are the greatestweather forecasters in the world for when they want to go to sleep theydig a hole out of the snow so that the opening will be to the leeside,that is, to the side opposite that which the wind strikes when it blowsup in the night.

The dogs forecasted the direction the wind would blow that night withtheir usual accuracy and Bill’s acumen of mind in foreseeing thenecessity of an igloo was justified, for a blizzard hurled itself downon them from the north, the thermometer dropped to seventy below, thewind raged and tore around like mad, while the sleet beat down upon andaround them with mighty fury for four whole days and nights without alet-up.

In the meantime the boys stood it, or rather laid down to it,uncomfortably in their igloo, for it was altogether too small for such aprolonged stay. At that they would have gotten along all right but fortheir short rations, which, if the blizzard had kept up much longer,would have starved them to death. During all this time the dogs hadstayed in their holes without so much as a bite of fish to eat.

When on the morning of the fifth day the boys pulled away the block ofsnow that closed the opening to their igloo they found they were snowedunder, and after a couple of hours of hard work they succeeded indigging their way out through ten feet of snow. Then they called theirdogs who were likewise sewed up in the blanket of snow. One by one theydug their way out but they were so hungry they were in a mean humor.

Since they had not had anything to eat for so long a time the boysgenerously gave them half of their fish rations for the time they wereentombed, when they became something like their old selves again. Itdidn’t take the boys long to hitch up and get started but the going waspainfully slow and tedious, though they hoped for better sledding whenthey struck the tundra that lay beyond.

“All I’m asking is that we run into an Indian village, for as ourgrub-boxes now stand, we’ll soon be without anything to eat,” said Jackhalf to himself, as they moved along.

“Funny as how this blizzard couldn’t have held off for a couple of daysand given us a chanst to get back to our base,” groused Bill just asthough the weather cared anything for them; “but what’s that I spiesdown yonder in the valley.”

The boys stopped their teams so that they could see to better advantageand took a look at the object in the distance.

“Looks like the top of some miner’s cabin,” was Jack’s opinion. “As itis about noon let’s go over, invite ourselves in, eat and be miserable.”

“Mush!” they bawled out and made for the cabin which was nearly a mileaway.

As they came up to it the only sign of life they saw was a couple ofgaunt huskies that looked more like starved timber wolves than animalsof the domesticated canine breed. They snarled and snapped at the boys,which ill manners made the team dogs furiously mad and had they not beenin the traces they would have made short work of them. Bill threw eachof the starved dogs a piece of fish and in the hopes of getting morethey curbed their tempers a bit. In the meantime Jack hallooed time andagain outside the door but there was no response from the cabin.

“Whoever lives here can’t be very far away or his dogs wouldn’t stickaround,” said Jack. Then he pounded vigorously on the door and hallooedagain.

He was about to give it up for a bad job when the door opened a little,but instead of a miner to greet him he was astonished almost out of hiswits when he saw before him the frail, wasted form of a young half-breedgirl. Then Bill stepped up and he got the shock of his life too.

The girl, who was not more than fifteen years old, said never a word butstared appealingly at them with her big, dark hollow eyes, and then fellsuddenly to the floor. The boys were inside the cabin in an instant andit was easy to guess that hers was a case of pure and simple starvation.Bill picked her up as though she were a baby and he was going to lay heron a bunk near by when he saw a white man stretched out motionless onit. Hastily laying the girl on another bunk he went to the man, listenedto his heart and found that he was still alive.

Jack had not been idle in the meantime but had made some tea andprepared some bouillon and these he gave to both the girl and the man.The tea acted as a stimulant, the bouillon as a food and together theyhad an almost immediate effect on the girl, for now she opened her wan,lusterless eyes and looked at her benefactors. Then she feebly smiledher appreciation of the kindness of these two strange white boys whomshe felt had been sent in this hour of her extreme need by the GreatSpirit.

Having got the girl well on the mend, both Jack and Bill gave theirundivided attention to the man; but he did not recover so rapidly forwith him starvation was an after effect, the primary cause having itsorigin in a cancer of the stomach which was of several years’ standing.But with all of Jack’s medical lore and Bill’s skill in making new menout of broken down ones; in spite of the strengthening food and carefulnursing, Michael Carscadden, better known as Moosehide Mike, steadilygrow worse; for he was sorely in need of an operation.

In the early morning hours he always seemed to be better and on thefifth day after the boys reached the cabin they believed he had afighting chance; it was on this basis that they held out the hope of hisrecovery to the girl Eileen. But Michael knew his condition better thandid the boys and that same evening, just as the red Arctic sun wasslipping down behind the White Mountains, this mighty hunter of mooseand of gold knew that he was slipping with it to his last rest. Deathhad staked out its claim on him. Knowing that the end was not far off hetook Eileen in his arms and called the boys to his bedside.

“This little girl is my daughter. Her mother was a full-bloodedAthapascan and as good a woman as the great God ever put a heart in. Ayear ago she died and I did not have the strength to get back tocivilization with my sacks of gold and as I would not leave without themEileen and I have lived here alone these last twelve months. My wife wasa direct descendant of Yakintat, a Yeehat chief.

“The Yeehats once lived in this district and they had in theirpossession a great store of gold which they had taken from three whitemen, of whom a prospector named John Thornton was the leader. In thefight which followed Thornton and his companions were killed. The Chiefof the Yeehats cached the gold which Thornton and his men had packedin moosehide sacks and its hiding place remained a secret with thetribe.

“A few years after, a plague broke out among the Yeehats and when thatended there was only a handful of them left and these joined other andless fierce tribes. When I reached Alaska I heard, like yourselves andall the others who came here, the story of this great treasure of goldand, like yourselves and many others, I set my heart on finding it.

“I lived with different Indian tribes and, finally, when I was prettynearly killed by a moose a young Indian woman nursed me back to life andthen I married her. She told me many legends and folk-lore tales aboutthe Indians and one of these had to do with a mighty store of gold, thelocation of which had been handed down to her. She thought of it asnothing more than a mere story but I took it seriously and me and myMarie set out to find it and find it we did.”

The dying gold seeker raised himself on his arm a little and clutched atthe collar of his shirt. His eyes brightened with a kind ofpreternatural light as he continued:

“Yes, there we found it in a cave deep in the side of a hill, bright andyellow nuggets ranging in size from bits as large as a pea to chunks aslarge as my fist. The moosehide sacks that held it had long since rottedaway and the metal had burst through them and lay in heaps on theground.

“Then it was I became a hunter of moose, not for the love of hunting,not for the meat to eat, but for their hides to make new sacks of. And Ikilled more moose than any other man hereabouts, unless it be Bull-MooseJoe who lives over there around Mount Burgess in the Yukon. Thedifference ’twixt him and me is that he hunted the moose a-fore he foundthe gold whilst I found the gold and then hunted the moose. My Marie andlittle Eileen and me made new sacks of the hides, packed them full ofgold, brought them and here they be.”

The boys looked at each other knowingly and shook their heads. Theyunderstood perfectly, or thought they did.

“He’s got a high fever and is as delirious as they make them,” saidJack.

“Bats in his belfry for fair,” added Bill.

“No, good friends. My poor daddy is not out of his head. Every word hesays is truly so,” Eileen told them.

The dying man smiled feebly.

“When I am gone I want you two boys to take my little Eileen with youdown under and see that she is brought up like a white lady and giveneverything that gold can buy. And I want you to watch over and protecther as if she was your own sister. Promise me you will do all this and Iwill give to each of you one-third of all my gold and Eileen is to havethe other third. She will tell you where it is when I am gone and thereI want you to bury me.”

He stretched out his hands unsteadily toward the boys and they graspedthem warmly.

“Do you promise?” he asked almost inaudibly.

“We most solemnly do,” answered the boys deep from their hearts.

“Then I shall die in peace.”

Her father took Eileen’s thin, pale hand in his and kissed it.

“Good-by, little daughter. I hear your mother calling and I must go. Ithought that I would live to take you down under but it is not to be.Instead your mother and me will meet you in the sweet bye and bye. Andmay the great, good God above us bless you.”

Her hand fell out of his and she threw her arms around his neck.

“Good-by, dear, dear Daddy; good-by,” she sobbed, and then fellprostrate across the inert body of her father from which his spirit hadjust taken flight.

Jack lifted her gently back to her own bunk, while Bill drew a blanketover the dead man’s face and turned away with something mighty liketears in his blue eyes.

That night was the most solemn and heart-rending one any of these youngfolks had ever experienced, for to the young, death is ever gloomy. Theboys built a good fire, lit half-a-dozen candles and did all they couldto soften the weight of the blow which had fallen on Eileen, but theirefforts were in vain.

To add to the melancholy of the occasion the dogs, instead of crawlinginto their holes after they had eaten their half-rations of fish, sat ina semi-circle outside of the cabin door and in the ghostly light of thestreaming aurora borealis, with their noses pointed skyward, they spentthe greater part of the night howling mournfully a last requiem for thedeparted soul.

The next morning the boys set to work to fashion a casket to hold theremains of Michael Carscadden, and it took them the best part of threedays to finish it. Then they put his body in his sleeping bag and laidit in the rough hewn box.

Eileen was so weak and dazed she seemed hardly to realize what it wasall about. As she lay on her bunk she only stared with wide-open,pathetic eyes at these last sad arrangements. It was merciful that shedid not understand to the full.

The boys gave her all the food they could scrape together and didwithout themselves for they had to get her strong enough to travel.Starvation was close on their heels. Bill’s solution for the shortage offood was that they kill one of the sled-dogs but Jack would not listento such a thing.

“I’m no cannibal Bill, and I’d as leave eat my grandmother as I wouldone of our dogs,” was the way he disposed of this brash idea of hispartner.

Jack figured that they could last just three days longer and by the endof that time they would have to be back at their base of supplies, orthey would never get there.

“We must leave your father now, Eileen, and will you tell us where it ishe wished to sleep his last sleep?” Jack was finally forced to ask her.

He had waited as long as he could for he greatly feared that in herweakened condition she might not survive this last sad ordeal. But inEileen’s veins flowed the blood of Irish stoics and Indian chiefs andshe accepted the inevitable with great courage and fortitude.

“Under the floor,” she replied as bravely as she could.

“He chose well,” Bill whispered, “for here the wolves can’t get him.”

“The cabin will be the tomb of a true Alaskan gold seeker here in theheart of the wild northland,” said Jack reverently.

The boys commenced to tear up the heavy timbers that formed the floor ofthe cabin and when they had a couple of them up what they saw underneathalmost caused their senses to leave them, for there in a big pit laysack upon sack made of moosehide piled up like cordwood!

Bill lowered himself into the pit and lifted out the sacks to Jack whopiled them up against the wall. The rawhide thongs had come loose fromsome of them and the shining yellow metal poured out in a golden streamabout the floor.

When hardships and starvation overtook the boys they knew them for sternrealities but having stumbled upon the great store of gold in thiswholly unexpected manner and under such surprising conditions theydidn’t know whether it was truly so or merely a wild and woolly dream.They really didn’t. To them it was all too wonderful for any humanexplanation.

While they were hard at work getting up the sacks, the gold seeker whoslept on yonder bunk and the half-breed girl who lay weak and helplesson the other bunk were well nigh forgotten for they were the masters ofgold that made them as rich as the ancient Crœsus or the modernRockefeller.

“Gold! gold!! Nothing but gold!!! I tell you Bill,” ejacul*ted Jack inthe wild frenzy of the gold seeker who has made his strike.

“Yes, old pard, and we’ve got it in our clutches where it won’t getaway,” returned Bill, just as excitedly. “Jack I’ve got to take my hatoffen to you for bein’ the only, original man with the hunch that alwaysmakes good.”

CHAPTER XII
BACK TO THE HAUNTS OF MEN

After the boys had taken the sacks of gold out of the pit they loweredthe rude box that held all that was mortal of Michael Carscadden intoit; stood with Eileen by the open grave with bowed heads and made theirsilent prayers for him. Then Bill played Nearer My God To Thee on hismouth-organ and never before had he played the toy musical instrument sosweetly and with such feeling.

This done the boys filled in the space around and above the box withsnow which they packed down tight; then they came to rigid attention,gave the military salute and Bill sounded taps on his mouth-organ whenthe simple but sincere service was over. So ended the life of adventureand romance of one of Alaska’s greatest hunters of moose and seekers ofgold—Michael Carscadden.

After the boys had put back the heavy hewn timbers, which formed thefloor, they fell to discussing the best way to get Eileen and the goldover to their permanent camp, for it was about as hard a puzzle asgetting the fox, the geese and corn across the river.

There were three ways of doing it but as two of them necessitatedleaving Eileen alone at one or the other of the cabins they did notthink well of either of these and hence eliminated them. The matterresolved itself down to the conclusion that the only feasible plan wasfor them all to go together and take along the gold at the same time.

“You can hitch up my dogs, boys,” spoke up Eileen, “then you will haveseven dogs in each team and they can haul these heavy loads.”

“But your dogs are nothing but skin and bones, Eileen,” Jack explainedto her, “and I doubt very much if they will be able to drag themselvesback to our camp, let alone do any team-work.”

“Here we are millionaires in our own right an’ only half-a-pound of tea,a dozen biscuits and two cans of pemmican left and our dogs a-starvin’to death. I’ll give a hundred dollars for a beefsteak as big as myhand,” said Bill, and he meant it, but there were no takers, for here inthe frozen wilderness gold had lost its purchasing power.

That night while Eileen slept, the boys loaded the heavy sacks on theirsleds and on one of them they made a comfortable bed for her ofbear-skins. Then Jack prepared a pot of tea, doled out a single biscuitand a spoonful of pemmican for each hand and called Eileen to“breakfast.” While she was getting ready for the long journey the boyswent out and whistled for the dogs but they were in no great hurry toleave their warm holes.

Less than half a ration of fish apiece was their share but they are longsuffering beasts and actually seemed thankful for the little that theygot. As Bill was hitching up his team, Sate, his lead dog, caught hiseye and his master’s heart went out to him.

“Sate, you poor dum animule, you’ll get your fill o’ rations, I’mthinkin’, when we hits our camp,” he told him as he gave him a couple oflove pats on the head.

“You’re all right, pard. You’re the goodest driver in all Alaska and Iknow it isn’t your fault that we’re starved out,” Sate saidgood-naturedly. At any rate he howled a couple of times cheerfully whichwas his way of saying it in short-hand dog-language.

When Jack went into the cabin Eileen had taken her last leave of hersleeping father whose burial place she might never see again.

“We’re all ready to go, Eileen,” he called cheerily.

“I am ready to go too, Jack,” she said simply; “there is nothing for meto stay for now.”

Jack picked her up and carried her out to his sled where he put her inher sleeping bag and tucked a lot of big fur robes around her.

It was an hour or more before the night would fade into day, yet sobright gleamed the aurora borealis that it was easily light enough tosee to travel. Their whips cracked, the commands to mush were given tothe teams, the bells jingled, but there was lacking the great vibrantjoy that comes of living in the open which usually marked their going.The sleds were heavy with gold, but Eileen’s daddy had been left behindand they were on the ragged edge of starvation.

Even when they reached the tundra the sleds did not pull easily for theywere overloaded and the dogs were weak from hunger so that instead ofenjoying themselves racing along in the traces, gold had made themwork-dogs with all that this hard term implies.

Nor were the boys more kind to them because of the gold and hardshipthat had been thrust upon them. Rather they gave their orders in harshertones and plied their whips harder and more often. The dogs well knewthat there had been a great and sudden change in their lives and theylaid it all to the girl who rode, when, according to their canine way ofthinking, she by rights ought to and should have walked.

And Eileen thought so too and she often asked the boys to let her walkwith them that the loads might be made the lighter but they would nothear of it. Her little added weight made no difference, according toJack, and besides, alleged Bill, the dogs could stand it for once, fornever had huskies been taken care of better, done so little real work,or had suffered less from hunger.

It took them two days and the best part of another one before theyreached their camp and it was lucky for them that the time was notprolonged for that noon they had drunk their last drop of tea, eaten thelast crumb of biscuit and particle of pemmican, and given their dogs thelast bite of fish. So hungry had Bill become that he had marked out thedog he was going to kill to provide provender for them all, but fate waskind to the dog, and to Bill, for he was not called on to do this act ofsabotage.

When they at last got to their camp Bill was as good as his word and fedthe dogs a dozen rations of fish and moosemeat and having downed this inas many gulps they began to show signs of life and decency again. Jackthrew together a real meal, the first that Eileen had eaten in weeks,nay months, and oh, how good those Alaska strawberries tasted! They wereindeed a delicious fruit.

After the boys had gorged themselves they counted up their sacks of goldto make sure that none had escaped either by way of the door or up thechimney, and in their youthful ardor they were on the very verge ofgiving vent to their repressed feelings in true western style, and whoopthings up. But somehow they simply couldn’t do it with that frail, slipof a girl, weakened by months of misery and starvation, and all of herown people gone out of her life forever, lying there on the bunkfollowing their every movement. Once she smiled, ever so faintly, andthe light of a new life was in her eyes and the peace of contentment wason her face.

After policing up the cooking utensils and setting things to rights abit they turned the cabin over to Eileen and built a snow igloo ofgoodly size just outside the door, for their own quarters. Now that theprecious metal they had sought for so long and hard was theirs they werekeen to start back to the haunts of men, but Eileen did not grow strongas rapidly as they had hoped for and there was naught else for them todo but stay.

Then the question came up as to the safest way to get their winningsfrom their cabin in the Alaskan wilds back to the Atlantic seaboard andinto the Empire Safe Deposit Company’s vault. Convoying a cargo ofgold nuggets, to say nothing of chaperoning a little Irish-Indian maid,from the almost unknown heart of this great sub-Arctic country, overrivers, sea and land and into the most thickly inhabited part of theworld was, they realized, no small undertaking.

“There are two trails we can take to get to Seattle,” began Jack.

“One is the way we came up,” interrupted Bill, “and the other—”

“Is for us to sled down the Big Black and Porcupine Rivers to FortYukon, then take a Yukon River steamer to St. Michaels, over on NortonSound, and from that place sail on a regular steamer that goes direct toSeattle.”

“But that way is longer by a thousand miles,” protested Bill.

“I know it is but if we go to Circle City and then up the Yukon River toWhite Horse we’ll have to cross over into Yukon Territory and thechances are we’ll have to hand over a ten per cent tax on ourhard-earned winnings to the Canadian Government; besides they’ll beliable to make us do a lot of explaining as to where we got it from, andI hold it’s nobody’s business. Get me?”

Bill batted his eyes.

“Afore I’d pay a nickel tax on our dust I’d drive over to the North Poleand go around by the way of Greenland,” was his emphatic rejoinder.

Now there are a lot of terse phrases such as “nothing succeeds likesuccess,” “a fool and his money are soon parted,” et cetera, andanother might be to say that nothing makes most fellows so stingy ascoming into possession of a fortune, for it was evident that theseusually over-generous boys had “tightened up” since this golden mannahad risen from the pit where it was cached in such a strange manner.They were, as Bill expressed it, “fools for luck.”

Eileen was not progressing as fast as they thought she would though sheimproved slowly and surely. Good food, the best care, cheerfulcompanionship and strong arms to look after her every want had made awondrous change in this frail little girl who had dropped to the floorfrom exhaustion only a fortnight before. One thing was sure, howevermiserly the boys had grown in their minds, they took a tremendousinterest in this silent half-breed child whose father had been the meansof making them as rich as the richest caliph and that, you will allow,is pretty rich.

Eileen in turn recognized in them messengers sent by the Great Spiritwho had saved her life, and as she watched them go about their work,heard them talk of their plans, and what they would do with and for herwhen they got home, she knew they were, like the nuggets in the sacks,twenty-four carats fine.

At first she couldn’t quite make Bill out, especially when he smiled,for the very emotion that nature intended a smile to represent, thatterrible scar across his cheek gave the opposite appearance. SometimesEileen would look at him so curiously that Jack thought perhaps, shemight be a little afraid of him, so one day while Bill was out gettingsome wood Jack told her how he came by that scar and the kind of afellow he was as a friend and a fighter.

Came that day when all agreed that Eileen could safely make the sledtrip down to Fort Yukon and, indeed, it was high time, for spring wasfast coming on and this meant that the snow would melt, the ice growthin and rotten and the bottom drop out of the trail at any moment.

So again the gold and the girl were loaded on the sleds and the longawaited start back home was made—a journey of some six thousand miles.Many things can happen in making a trip of even less length, aye, anddid happen as you shall presently see.

It was not often that the dogs got into any very serious fights butthere had been bad blood between Eileen’s Indian dogs and Jack’s andBill’s dogs from the time they first met and they would have discardedthe Indian dogs long before but as each team was short a dog and the twoscrubs, as Bill called them, could haul their full share, they keptthem.

At the first camp they made, going down the Big Black River, Link, oneof the Indian dogs and Dave, of Jack’s team, got into a fight over sosmall a thing as a piece of fish that neither of them had, and beforethe boys could separate them Link lay very close to the edge of theworld next to come. It was a calamity that this fight should havehappened a day after instead of a week before they started for it provedto be the most costly dog-fight that was ever pulled off anywhere, barnone.

Bill was for leaving the dog and going on but Jack said it was best tostay in camp for a few days and let Link’s wound’s heal, for they hadgreat need of him as both sleds were loaded to the guards and it was allthat a full team of seven dogs each could haul. Then again Jack hadconscientious scruples against shooting the dog or turning him loose inthe wilds. (Perhaps because Link belonged to Eileen). But before Linkwas whole again another seven days had slipped by and spring waspressing winter hard for first place.

The days were getting longer and so warm that their thick fur clothingwas quite uncomfortable and they must needs change into their mackinaws.The melting snow and running water everywhere made sledding overland outof the question but the trail was still holding on the river though hereand there holes appeared and cracks separated the more solid stretchesof ice. Time was up and they must push on.

Jack took the lead as he had Eileen on his sled and Bill’s outfit cameon a little ways behind. Another day’s march and they came to somerapids where the air holes were larger and the ice bent under the weightof their treasure. Jack was ahead of his team picking the way across thetreacherous trail when all of a sudden Bill let out a blood-curdlingyell of the Apache variety, and on looking back he and Eileen saw thathe and his sled and Jinx, the wheel dog had gone through the ice whileSate and the rest of the team were straining every muscle to thebreaking limit to keep from being dragged down into the icy watersbehind them. The pole that Bill had taken the precaution to carry savedhim from going under but try as he would he could not get out.

Running back at top speed Jack had the situation sized up long before hereached the scene of disaster. When he was within a dozen feet of theteam he made a mighty slide, as a man sliding for home with three onbases, and drawing his hunting knife from its sheath at the same time,the instant he came alongside the last dog he cut the traces. Relievedof the mighty weight so suddenly the team fell headlong forward andsprawled about on the ice; at the same moment the sled, with over halfof the moosehide sacks of gold on it, and Jinx, the wheel dog, droppedto the bottom of the river. Jack then helped Bill out and on gettingback to the former’s team they made an air line for the shore.

It would add nothing to the gayety of the world to relate what Jack saidto Bill and Bill said to Jack and what both of them said about the lossof their vast fortune so soon after they had found it. Eileen was thepeace maker and she told them they still had enough gold to keep themforever and ever (she had never lived in New York) and that the loss ofthe gold mattered not a whit as long as Bill had been saved. And both ofthe boys came to think that she had the right view of it at that.

The result of the dreadful mishap was a pow-wow in which it was resolvedfirst, that they couldn’t afford to take any further chances on thelast ice with either Eileen or the remainder of their treasure,second, that spring was altogether too far advanced to make any furtherattempt to get to Fort Yukon with their remaining sled, and third, thatthey must mark the spot where the gold went down so that they couldrecover it when conditions were more favorable.

“The only thing for us to do now,” declared Jack, “is to camp right hereuntil the first water and then build a boat or a raft and float ondown to Fort Yukon, which is some seventy miles from here. In themeantime we’ll build up a cairn of rocks on each side of the river andin a line with the sunken yellow stuff so that when we do come backwe’ll know right where it is.”

“An’ one good thing no one else ’ull ever guess out where it is,”philosophized Bill.

The boys made a fairly comfortable camp and set about building a raft ofspruce logs which they lashed together with rawhide thongs. When thiswas done and they could get across the river they built up a great pileof rocks on either side of it but well back from the shore. Beforeanother moon rolled round they were ready to make a fresh start down theriver.

“What about these huskies here,” asked Bill, who always kept hisweather-eye open for the welfare of their dogs even though they didn’thave any more use for them.

“We’ll turn them loose and they’ll follow us along the shore all right,”replied Jack, and so that little matter was settled.

They loaded the remaining sacks of gold, their outfit and provisions, ofwhich precious little was left, onto the raft. In the middle they hadbuilt up a platform of saplings for Eileen to sit on to the thoughtfulend that when the raft struck the rapids and took a notion to dive, likea submarine, the water would not wash over and wet her.

Then Eileen took her seat on the platform, Jack stood on the front endand Bill on the diagonal corner of the rear end and with their longpoles they pushed their treasure float off shore. As Jack had said, thehuskies followed them and they kept as close to the edge of the river asthey could, barking and howling furiously as they ran along.

It took very little effort on the part of the boys to steer the raft andnone at all to keep it moving as the current was augmented all along byrivulets and streams from the melting snows. Where the river was wideand the water shallow the raft sailed gently along but where the channelwas narrow the boys had to do some tall maneuvering to keep it fromgetting swamped.

The rapids, of which there were many, were their despair. When theungainly craft struck these eddying currents it pitched and rolled aboutlike a piece of cork and the little crew had to hang on to it for dearlife. In this exciting fashion they covered the rest of the distancedown the Big Black River. Just before they came to the mouth where itempties into the Porcupine River the bed made a sharp descent and thewater rushed down it in a mighty torrent.

There was a bend in the river ahead of them and this too theysuccessfully navigated, but a rock, that projected out of the water, andwhich was directly in their course, proved their undoing. Jack managedto get his pole on it and brought all of his strength to bear to keepthe raft clear of it, but the weight and the momentum were too great anda corner struck it with such force that Eileen and the boys were thrownbodily into the water.

It was well for them that they were good swimmers and after a strugglewith the swift current all of them landed on the shore like bags of wetrags. Then the huskies covered with mud and rending the air with theirvocal organs swarmed round them.

Never in all his life had Jack felt more like crying. He could stand anykind of bodily pain but with all of their gold gone he sufferedexquisite mental torture. Many a prospector in the early days had killedhimself for less bad luck. Bill seemed to be not all there for he actedqueerly and talked about the little “boidies” that were singing in thetrees, the “bloomin’” flowers that bloomed in the spring, and other likeidiotic fancies that hadn’t anything to do with the case, tra, la.

Eileen was the only one who had kept her wits about her. She reasonedwith the boys, or at least she tried to; she told them how very, very,lucky they were in that for the second time none of them were drowned,and as for the gold it was a blessed good thing it was all gone, shesaid, for it only brought bad luck.

Bill looked at her as she spoke these consoling words in a funny kind ofway, as though he’d just got out of a merry-go-round and didn’t quiteknow where he was.

“Eileen,” he managed to say, blinking at her; “I wouldn’t even let aperliceman talk that way to me. If you was me pard, Jack here, I’d makeyou put up your dooks, see.”

Eileen laughed as if either he, or what he had said, was a great joke,and what’s more, she laughed out loud—the first time since they hadknown her. Then Jack laughed, and Bill, not to be left out in the cold,joined them with his hearty guffaw. And there the three of them sat on afallen tree, water soaked, bedraggled, dead broke and as miserable aspossible, laughing fit to kill.

Having had experience in losing things, including a few mere sacks ofgold and a lot of provisions when his sled went down, Bill had insistedbefore they embarked on their raft that they should each carry a day’srations strapped to their backs. Building a big fire they dried theirclothes and had their drop of tea and bit of pemmican and after thatthey felt much better, and quit laughing.

The huskies fared very much a la Mother Hubbard’s dog, which is to saythat the cupboard was bare and so the poor brutes had none, no, not evena piece of fish to eat.

“Well, one good thing,” said Bill, whose pemmican had revived him again,“we won’t have to mark this blarsted spot where the last bit of our goldwas dumped for I’d know that rock if I saw it a thousand miles off FireIsland.”

Jack and Eileen took a good look at the projecting finger which wouldn’tget out of the way of their raft, and they agreed with Bill that it wasa monument of misfortune which having once been run into could never beforgotten.

As they were only twenty some odd miles from Fort Yukon these youngstersstarted out to walk there, or “hoof it” as Bill so inelegantly expressedit. They had not gone more than a couple of miles when they cameupon—no, it couldn’t be, and yet there it was—their raft beached onthe shore and on it there still remained three of the moosehide sacks ofgold.

As Jack had often told Bill conditions are largely a matter of mind andtruly it seemed so. For see you now, when they first stumbled on the pitof gold in Carscadden’s cabin they were not nearly as elated as onewould have thought they’d be. Then when they lost the sled load of gold,though they were still millionaires, they were as sore at heart and madat each other as they could be. When they lost all of their treasure andwere dead-broke they laughed, and now having recovered three sacks of itthey simply went wild with joy. Can you beat it?

It was a remarkable trio of youngsters that landed from their raft atFort Yukon on that never-to-be-forgotten day in July. At any rate sosaid the inhabitants of that burg. Hoboes couldn’t have looked moredisreputable. And the huskies were all there too, mean, lean and dogdirty.

The crowd at the landing that gathered round this motley little groupscarce knew what to make of it, they felt so sorry for these woe-be-gone“kids.” But when they saw Bill take two moosehide sacks filled withsomething that was tremendously heavy under his arms and Jack takeanother and third one on his shoulder, the half-breed girl trudgingalong between them and their teams of huskies sticking as close to themas they could get without being stepped on, their mute sorrow changed toopen expressions of surprise. Here was something to talk about to theend of time.

“Moosehide sacks filled with gold! by jimminy!” blurted out an oldtimer.

“An’ them kids found it where we couldn’t,” exclaimed another bitterly.

And so on, and so on.

They went over to the Crystal Hotel and while Bill stood guard over whatwas left of their treasure, Jack took Eileen across the street to theNew York Emporium and there they outfitted themselves and Bill for thetrip down to St. Michaels. When they next appeared in public there hadbeen a great transformation for Eileen was a brand new girl and Jack andBill were almost themselves again.

Eileen, as pretty as ever an Irish lass and an Indian maid blended intoone could be, had her hair done up, wore a blue traveling dress, asailor hat and, cross my criss cross, she had on stockings and shoes,which latter, let it be whispered, she would willingly have traded for apair of old moccasins.

The boys were clean, well groomed and had their hair cut. They wore realstore clothes—all wool suits that looked as if the price tag on themhad been marked up to $7.65 from $5.67. When they walked their shoessqueaked at every step like a duck having its neck wrung. They wererich, genial and willing to talk on any subject they didn’t knowanything about, but of the moosehide sacks filled with gold, they saidnever a word.

Yet, with all their good humor the boys were ready to pull the triggersof their six-guns on the bat of an eyelid should any one get the idea inhis head that he was going to relieve them of their treasure. And theyguarded Eileen with the same jealous care.

A week’s run on the steamboat down the Yukon landed them at St. Michael,and once there they shipped their sacks of gold by express through toNew York City when a part of their great responsibility was lifted fromtheir minds. In a month’s time Jack and Bill were back where they hadstarted from, while Eileen was being petted and pampered by the swelldomof Montclair.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JACK HEATON GOLD SEEKER ***