e 11th of May or later than the 28th. And yet men had begun to
keep a hopeful eye on the river from the 10th of April, when a white
ptarmigan was reported wearing a collar of dark-brown feathers, and his
wings tipped brown. That was a month ago, and the great moment could
not possibly be far now.

The first thing everybody did on getting up, and the last thing
everybody did on going to bed, was to look at the river. It was not
easy to go to bed; and even if you got so far it was not easy to sleep.
The sun poured into the cabins by night as well as by day, and there
was nothing to divide one part of the twenty-four hours from another.
You slept when you were too tired to watch the river. You breakfasted,
like as not, at six in the evening; you dined at midnight. Through all
your waking hours you kept an eye on the window overlooking the river.
In your bed you listened for that ancient Yukon cry, "The ice is going
out!"

For ages it had meant to the timid: Beware the fury of the shattered
ice-fields; beware the caprice of the flood. Watch! lest many lives go
out with the ice as aforetime. And for ages to the stout-hearted it had
meant: Make ready the kyaks and the birch canoes; see that tackle and
traps are strong--for plenty or famine wait upon the hour. As the white
men waited for boats to-day, the men of the older time had waited for
the salmon--for those first impatient adventurers that would force
their way under the very ice-jam, tenderest and best of the season's
catch, as eager to prosecute that journey from the ocean to the
Klondyke as if they had been men marching after the gold boom.

No one could settle to anything. It was by fits and starts that the
steadier hands indulged even in target practice, with a feverish
subconsciousness that events were on the way that might make it
inconvenient to have lost the art of sending a bullet straight. After a
diminutive tin can, hung on a tree, had been made to jump at a hundred
paces, the marksman would glance at the river and forget to fire. It
was by fits and starts that they even drank deeper or played for higher
stakes.

The Wheel of Fortune, in the Gold Nugget, was in special demand. It was
a means of trying your luck with satisfactory despatch "between drinks"
or between long bouts of staring at the river. Men stood in
shirt-sleeves at their cabin doors in the unwinking sunshine, looking
up the valley or down, betting that the "first boat in" would be one of
t