wo weeks later the docks of the principal cities on the sunset coast
presented a changed appearance. All was hurry and flurry. Ships being
loaded to the deck rails were moored by their great hawsers alongside
docks groaning under immense freight deposited upon them. The rush and
clatter of drays and wagons united in one deep, deafening roar. These
huge masses of freight and baggage presented the same general
appearance. Everything with which to begin mining life in a new and
barren country was there. Dog sleds and fur robes, heavy army sacks
crammed to their drawstrings with Mackinaw and rubber clothing, boots
and shoes, boats, tents, dogs and horses, piles of lumber for boat
building, coils of rope, dog harness and bales of hay, while fat yellow
coated hams bulged in heaps both gay and greasy in the summer sun as
though further frying were unnecessary.

There were mining tools heaped in corners or against the walls of
warehouses, being stacked too high to safely keep their places if
jostled ever so lightly. New and clean gold pans, one inside another,
towered roofward among outfits of aspiring tradespeople of the
prospective camps in the Klondyke; these same rich men in embryo being
also the proprietors of the closely piled sacks of flour, meal and
beans, along with hundreds of cases of butter, eggs and cream, _ad
infinitum_.

Among the hurrying, excited men preparing for departure an undesirably
large number were those anxiously caring for bottle-filled cases and
black barrels, cumbrous and heavy enough to have been already crammed
with Klondyke gold; but in reality being full to the brim of that which
(their owners prognosticated) would relieve them of using pick and
shovel, and bring them without effort after their arrival in the new
diggings all the shining gold they could want to handle. It concerned
them little that they would give in exchange for all this wealth only
that which would deplete the pockets, befuddle the brains and steal the
wits of the deluded purchasers, making them in every case less able to
cope with adverse conditions so desperate in this new, untried, and
remote region.

These men walked, well dressed and pompous, among their goods and
chattels on the great and busy wharves in the hot sunshine, mopping
their perspiring brows and fat cheeks, which latter, like those of well
kept porkers, adorned their rubicund faces. Across their broad
waistcoats dangled glittering ropes and "charms" of tawd