t struck the trail.

"Huh! couldn't see us for smoke," Hootchinoo Bill chuckled, flirting the
stinging sweat from his brow and glancing swiftly back along the way they
had come.

Three men emerged from where the trail broke through the trees. Two
followed close at their heels, and then a man and a woman shot into view.

"Come on, you Kink! Hit her up! Hit her up!"

Bill quickened his pace. Mitchell glanced back in more leisurely
fashion.

"I declare if they ain't lopin'!"

"And here's one that's loped himself out," said Bill, pointing to the
side of the trail.

A man was lying on his back panting in the culminating stages of violent
exhaustion. His face was ghastly, his eyes bloodshot and glazed, for all
the world like a dying man.

"_Chechaquo_!" Kink Mitchell grunted, and it was the grunt of the old
"sour dough" for the green-horn, for the man who outfitted with "self-
risin'" flour and used baking-powder in his biscuits.

The partners, true to the old-timer custom, had intended to stake down-
stream from the strike, but when they saw claim 81 BELOW blazed on a
tree,--which meant fully eight miles below Discovery,--they changed their
minds. The eight miles were covered in less than two hours. It was a
killing pace, over so rough trail, and they passed scores of exhausted
men that had fallen by the wayside.

At Discovery little was to be learned of the upper creek. Cormack's
Indian brother-in-law, Skookum Jim, had a hazy notion that the creek was
staked as high as the 30's; but when Kink and Bill looked at the corner-
stakes of 79 ABOVE, they threw their stampeding packs off their backs and
sat down to smoke. All their efforts had been vain. Bonanza was staked
from mouth to source,--"out of sight and across the next divide." Bill
complained that night as they fried their bacon and boiled their coffee
over Cormack's fire at Discovery.

"Try that pup," Carmack suggested next morning.

"That pup" was a broad creek that flowed into Bonanza at 7 ABOVE. The
partners received his advice with the magnificent contempt of the sour
dough for a squaw-man, and, instead, spent the day on Adam's Creek,
another and more likely-looking tributary of Bonanza. But it was the old
story over again--staked to the sky-line.

For threes days Carmack repeated his advice, and for three days they
received it contemptuously. But on the fourth day, there being nowhere
else to go, they went up "that pup." They knew tha