, the lucky
laymen."

So, as the facts, grossly exaggerated, got noised abroad, they came to
call us the "Lucky Laymen."

Looking back, there will always seem to me something weird and
incomprehensible in those twilight days, an unreality, a vagueness like
some dreary, feverish dream. For three months I did not see my face in a
mirror. Not that I wanted to, but I mention this just to show how little
we thought of ourselves.

In like manner, never did I have a moment's time to regard my inner self
in the mirror of consciousness. No mental analysis now; no long hours of
retrospection, no tete-a-tete interviews with my soul. At times I felt
as if I had lost my identity. I was a slave of the genie Gold, releasing
it from its prison in the frozen bowels of the earth. I was an automaton
turning a crank in the frozen stillness of the long, long night.

It was a life despotically objective, and now, as I look back, it seems
as if I had never lived it at all. I seem to look down a long, dark
funnel and see a little machine-man bearing my semblance, patiently,
steadily, wearily turning the handle of a windlass in the clear,
lancinating cold of those sombre, silent days.

I say "bearing my outward semblance," and yet I sometimes wonder if that
rough-bearded figure in heavy woollen clothes looked the least like me.
I wore heavy sweaters, mackinaw trousers, thick German socks and
moccasins. From frequent freezing my cheeks were corroded. I was
miserably thin, and my eyes had a wild, staring expression through the
pupils dilating in the long darkness. Yes, mentally and physically I was
no more like myself than a convict enduring out his life in the soulless
routine of a prison.

The days were lengthening marvellously. We noted the fact with dull
joy. It meant more light, more time, more dirt in the dump. So it came
about that, from ten hours of toil, we went to twelve, to fourteen;
then, latterly, to sixteen, and the tension of it was wearing us down to
skin and bone.

We were all feeling wretched, overstrained, ill-nourished, and it was
only voicing the general sentiment when, one day, the Prodigal remarked:

"I guess I'll have to let up for a couple of days. My teeth are all on
the bum. I'm going to town to see a dentist."

"Let me look at them," said the Halfbreed.

He looked. The gums were sullen, unwholesome-looking.

"Why, it's a touch of scurvy, lad; a little while, and you'd be spitting
out your teeth like orang