David Rasmunsen
too well to say anything.

"Doubling the time because of chance delays, I should make the trip in
two months. Think of it, Alma! Four thousand in two months! Beats the
paltry hundred a month I'm getting now. Why, we'll build further out
where we'll have more space, gas in every room, and a view, and the rent
of the cottage'll pay taxes, insurance, and water, and leave something
over. And then there's always the chance of my striking it and coming
out a millionaire. Now tell me, Alma, don't you think I'm very
moderate?"

And Alma could hardly think otherwise. Besides, had not her own
cousin,--though a remote and distant one to be sure, the black sheep, the
harum-scarum, the ne'er-do-well,--had not he come down out of that weird
North country with a hundred thousand in yellow dust, to say nothing of a
half-ownership in the hole from which it came?

David Rasmunsen's grocer was surprised when he found him weighing eggs in
the scales at the end of the counter, and Rasmunsen himself was more
surprised when he found that a dozen eggs weighed a pound and a
half--fifteen hundred pounds for his thousand dozen! There would be no
weight left for his clothes, blankets, and cooking utensils, to say
nothing of the grub he must necessarily consume by the way. His
calculations were all thrown out, and he was just proceeding to recast
them when he hit upon the idea of weighing small eggs. "For whether they
be large or small, a dozen eggs is a dozen eggs," he observed sagely to
himself; and a dozen small ones he found to weigh but a pound and a
quarter. Thereat the city of San Francisco was overrun by anxious-eyed
emissaries, and commission houses and dairy associations were startled by
a sudden demand for eggs running not more than twenty ounces to the
dozen.

Rasmunsen mortgaged the little cottage for a thousand dollars, arranged
for his wife to make a prolonged stay among her own people, threw up his
job, and started North. To keep within his schedule he compromised on a
second-class passage, which, because of the rush, was worse than
steerage; and in the late summer, a pale and wabbly man, he disembarked
with his eggs on the Dyea beach. But it did not take him long to recover
his land legs and appetite. His first interview with the Chilkoot
packers straightened him up and stiffened his backbone. Forty cents a
pound they demanded for the twenty-eight-mile portage, and while he
caught his breath and