d
by the Bonanzo king told that he had succeeded in filling his winter's
cache.

"Why don't you smell out the sugar, Dave?" Jacob Welse asked, pointing
to the bulletins.

Dave Harney looked his reproach. "Mebbe you think I ain't ben
smellin'. I've clean wore my dogs out chasin' round from Klondike City
to the Hospital. Can't git yer fingers on it fer love or money."

They walked down the block-long sidewalk, past the warehouse doors and
the long teams of waiting huskies curled up in wolfish comfort in the
snow. It was for this snow, the first permanent one of the fall, that
the miners up-creek had waited to begin their freighting.

"Curious, ain't it?" Dave hazarded suggestively, as they crossed the
main street to the river bank. "Mighty curious--me ownin' two
five-hundred-foot Eldorado claims an' a fraction, wuth five millions if
I'm wuth a cent, an' no sweetenin' fer my coffee or mush! Why,
gosh-dang-it! this country kin go to blazes! I'll sell out! I'll quit
it cold! I'll--I'll--go back to the States!"

"Oh, no, you won't," Jacob Welse answered. "I've heard you talk
before. You put in a year up Stuart River on straight meat, if I
haven't forgotten. And you ate salmon-belly and dogs up the Tanana, to
say nothing of going through two famines; and you haven't turned your
back on the country yet. And you never will. And you'll die here as
sure as that's the Laura's spring being hauled aboard. And I look
forward confidently to the day when I shall ship you out in a
lead-lined box and burden the San Francisco end with the trouble of
winding up your estate. You are a fixture, and you know it."

As he talked he constantly acknowledged greetings from the passers-by.
Those who knew him were mainly old-timers and he knew them all by name,
though there was scarcely a newcomer to whom his face was not familiar.

"I'll jest bet I'll be in Paris in 1900," the Eldorado king protested
feebly.

But Jacob Welse did not hear. There was a jangling of gongs as
McGregor saluted him from the pilot-house and the Laura slipped out
from the bank. The men on the shore filled the air with good-luck
farewells and last advice, but the three hundred grubless ones, turning
their backs on the golden dream, were moody and dispirited, and made
small response. The Laura backed out through a channel cut in the
shore-ice, swung about in the current, and with a final blast put on
full steam ahead.

The crowd thinned away and