acity. Lacking newspapers at which to pish! and pshaw! they
listened to Windy Jim, disbelieving the only unvarnished tale that
gentleman had ever told. For Windy, with the story-teller's instinct,
knew marvellous enough would sound the bare recital of those awful
Dawson days when the unprecedented early winter stopped the provision
boats at Circle, and starvation stared the over-populated Klondyke in
the face.

Having disposed of their letters, the miners crowded round the courier
to hear how the black business ended--matter of special interest to
Minook, for the population here was composed chiefly of men who, by the
Canadian route, had managed to get to Dawson in the autumn, in the
early days of the famine scare, and who, after someone's panic-proposal
to raid the great Stores, were given free passage down the river on the
last two steamers to run.

When the ice stopped them (one party at Circle, the other at Fort
Yukon), they had held up the supply boats and helped themselves under
the noses of Captain Ray and Lieutenant Richardson, U. S. A.

"Yes, sir," McGinty had explained, "we Minook boys was all in that
picnic. But we give our bond to pay up at mid-summer, and after the fun
was over we dropped down here."

He pushed nearer to Windy to hear how it had fared with the men who had
stayed behind in the Klondyke--how the excitement flamed and menaced;
how Agent Hansen of the Alaska Commercial Company, greatest of the
importers of provisions and Arctic equipment, rushed about, half crazy,
making speeches all along the Dawson River front, urging the men to fly
for their lives, back to the States or up to Circle, before the ice
stopped moving!

But too many of these men had put everything they had on earth into
getting here; too many had abandoned costly outfits on the awful Pass,
or in the boiling eddies of the White Horse Rapids, paying any price in
money or in pain to get to the goldfields before navigation closed. And
now! here was Hansen, with all the authority of the A. C., shouting
wildly: "Quick, quick! go up or down. It's a race for life!"

Windy went on to tell how the horror of the thing dulled the men, how
they stood about the Dawson streets helpless as cattle, paralysed by
the misery that had overtaken them. All very well for Hansen to try to
relieve the congestion at the Klondyke--the poor devils knew that to go
either way, up or down, as late as this meant death. Then it was
whispered how Captain Co