re clamoring so
insistently. Before the store, by the scales, was another crowd. An
Indian threw his pack upon the scales, the white owner jotted down the
weight in a note-book, and another pack was thrown on. Each pack was
in the straps, ready for the packer's back and the precarious journey
over the Chilcoot. Frona edged in closer. She was interested in
freights. She remembered in her day when the solitary prospector or
trader had his outfit packed over for six cents,--one hundred and
twenty dollars a ton.

The tenderfoot who was weighing up consulted his guide-book. "Eight
cents," he said to the Indian. Whereupon the Indians laughed
scornfully and chorused, "Forty cents!" A pained expression came into
his face, and he looked about him anxiously. The sympathetic light in
Frona's eyes caught him, and he regarded her with intent blankness. In
reality he was busy reducing a three-ton outfit to terms of cash at
forty dollars per hundred-weight. "Twenty-four hundred dollars for
thirty miles!" he cried. "What can I do?"

Frona shrugged her shoulders. "You'd better pay them the forty cents,"
she advised, "else they will take off their straps."

The man thanked her, but instead of taking heed went on with his
haggling. One of the Indians stepped up and proceeded to unfasten his
pack-straps. The tenderfoot wavered, but just as he was about to give
in, the packers jumped the price on him to forty-five cents. He smiled
after a sickly fashion, and nodded his head in token of surrender. But
another Indian joined the group and began whispering excitedly. A
cheer went up, and before the man could realize it they had jerked off
their straps and departed, spreading the news as they went that freight
to Lake Linderman was fifty cents.

Of a sudden, the crowd before the store was perceptibly agitated. Its
members whispered excitedly one to another, and all their eyes were
focussed upon three men approaching from up the trail. The trio were
ordinary-looking creatures, ill-clad and even ragged. In a more stable
community their apprehension by the village constable and arrest for
vagrancy would have been immediate. "French Louis," the tenderfeet
whispered and passed the word along. "Owns three Eldorado claims in a
block," the man next to Frona confided to her. "Worth ten millions at
the very least." French Louis, striding a little in advance of his
companions, did not look it. He had parted company with his h