il, in 1885, he
went over the Pass for good. There was to be no return for him until he
found the gold he sought.

The years came and went, but he remained true to his resolve. For eleven
long years, with snow-shoe and canoe, pickaxe and gold-pan, he wrote out
his life on the face of the land. Upper Yukon, Middle Yukon, Lower
Yukon--he prospected faithfully and well. His bed was anywhere. Winter
or summer he carried neither tent nor stove, and his six-pound
sleeping-robe of Arctic hare was the warmest covering he was ever known
to possess. Rabbit tracks and salmon bellies were his diet with a
vengeance, for he depended largely on his rifle and fishing-tackle. His
endurance equalled his courage. On a wager he lifted thirteen
fifty-pound sacks of flour and walked off with them. Winding up a
seven-hundred-mile trip on the ice with a forty-mile run, he came into
camp at six o'clock in the evening and found a "squaw dance" under way.
He should have been exhausted. Anyway, his _muclucs_ were frozen stiff.
But he kicked them off and danced all night in stocking-feet.

At the last fortune came to him. The quest was ended, and he gathered up
his gold and pulled for the outside. And his own end was as fitting as
that of his quest. Illness came upon him down in San Francisco, and his
splendid life ebbed slowly out as he sat in his big easy-chair, in the
Commercial Hotel, the "Yukoner's home." The doctors came, discussed,
consulted, the while he matured more plans of Northland adventure; for
the North still gripped him and would not let him go. He grew weaker day
by day, but each day he said, "To-morrow I'll be all right." Other
old-timers, "out on furlough,", came to see him. They wiped their eyes
and swore under their breaths, then entered and talked largely and
jovially about going in with him over the trail when spring came. But
there in the big easy-chair it was that his Long Trail ended, and the
life passed out of him still fixed on "farther north."

From the time of the first white man, famine loomed black and gloomy over
the land. It was chronic with the Indians and Eskimos; it became chronic
with the gold hunters. It was ever present, and so it came about that
life was commonly expressed in terms of "grub"--was measured by cups of
flour. Each winter, eight months long, the heroes of the frost faced
starvation. It became the custom, as fall drew on, for partners to cut
the cards or draw straws to det