er cabins their horns still lorded it. Their bones were bleaching in
the fire-weed.

On from claim to claim the new-comers to these rich pastures went, till
they came to the junction of the El Dorado, where huddles the haphazard
settlement of the Grand Forks, only twelve miles from Dawson. And now
they were at the heart of "the richest Placer Mining District the world
has seen." But they knew well enough that every inch was owned, and
that the best they could look for was work as unskilled labourers, day
shift or night, on the claims of luckier men.

They had brought a letter from Ryan, of the North-West Mounted Police,
to the Superintendent of No. 10, Above Discovery, a claim a little this
side of the Forks. Ryan had warned them to keep out of the way of the
part-owner, Scoville Austin, a surly person naturally, so exasperated
at the tax, and so enraged at the rumour of Government spies
masquerading as workmen, checking his reports, that he was "a
first-rate man to avoid." But Seymour, the Superintendent, was, in the
words of the soothing motto of the whole American people, "All right."

They left their packs just inside the door of the log-cabin, indicated
as "Bunk House for the men on No. 6, Above"--a fearsome place, where,
on shelf above shelf, among long unwashed bedclothes, the unwashed
workmen of a prosperous company lay in the stupor of sore fatigue and
semi-asphyxiation. Someone stirred as the door opened, and out of the
fetid dusk of the unventilated, closely-shuttered cabin came a voice:

"Night shift on?"

"No."

"Then, damn you! shut the door."

As the never-resting sun "forced" the Dawson market-garden and the
wild-roses of the trail, so here on the creek men must follow the
strenuous example. No pause in the growing or the toiling of this
Northern world. The day-gang on No. 0 was hard at it down there where
lengthwise in the channel was propped a line of sluice-boxes, steadied
by regularly spaced poles laid from box to bank on gravel ridge.
Looking down from above, the whole was like a huge fish-bone lying
along the bed of the creek. A little group of men with picks, shovels,
and wheelbarrows were reducing the "dump" of winter pay, piled beside a
windlass, conveying it to the sluices. Other men in line, four or five
feet below the level of the boxes, were "stripping," picking, and
shovelling the gravel off the bed-rock--no easy business, for even this
summer temperature thawed but a few inches a d