e first raft."

"I do not see it," said Dallas; "we made both."

"Yes; but the first was when we were 'prentices, the second was when we
had served our time."

The speaker laughed as he said this; and as it happened, it was on the
second day after that he pointed with something like triumph to some
newly cut and trimmed young pieces of pine-trunk notched in a peculiar
way, cast up among some rocks on the shores of the little lake they were
crossing.

"That's the end of 'em, my sons," he said.

"Oh, no; any one may have cut down those trees."

"For sartain, my son; but I nailed 'em together, for there's one of my
spikes still sticking in. Good nail, too; see how it's twisted and
bent."

This seemed unanswerable, but neither Abel nor Dallas was convinced.

"They may have swum ashore," Abel said to his cousin, as they lay down
to sleep that night.

"Yes," said Dallas, "and I shall hold to Bob's proverb about those born
to be hanged."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

A PLUNGE INTO HOT QUARTERS.

"So this is the golden city," said Dallas, as he and Abel sat, worn out
and disconsolate, gazing at a confusion of tents, sheds, and shanties,
for it could be called nothing else, on the hither side of a tumbled
together waste of snow and ice spreading to right and left. "Is it all
a swindle or a dream?"

"I hope it's a dream," replied his cousin, limping a step or two, and
then seating himself on the sledge which, footsore and weary, he had
been dragging for the last few days after they had finally abandoned
their raft. "I hope it's a dream, and that we shall soon wake."

The big Cornishman took his short pipe out of his mouth, blew a big
cloud, looked at his companions, who were asleep rolled up in their
blankets, and then at the cousins.

"Oh, we're wide awake enough, my sons," he said, "and we've got here at
last."

"Yes," said Dallas bitterly; "we've got here, and what next?"

"Make our piles, as the Yankees call it, my lads."

"Where?" cried Abel. "Why, we had better have stayed and washed
gold-dust out of the sand up one of those streams."

"Oh, you mustn't judge of a place first sight; but I must say it aren't
pretty. People seems to chuck everything they don't want out o' doors,
like the fisher folk down at home in Cornwall. But it's worse here, for
they've got no sea to come up and wash the rubbish away."

"Nor yet a river," said Dallas. "I expected the Yukon to be a grand
flowing stream."

"Well,