ship to shoot
the rapids in '98.

Not only to the thousands who were going, to those who stayed behind
there was something in the leaving of the last boat--something that
knocked upon the heart. They, too, could still go home. They gathered
at the docks and told one another they wouldn't leave Dawson for fifty
thousand dollars, then looked at the "failures" with home-sick eyes,
remembering those months before the luckiest Klondyker could hear from
the world outside. Between now and then, what would have come to pass
up here, and what down there below!

The Boy had got a place for Muckluck in the A. C. Store. She was handy
at repairing and working in fur, and said she was "all right" on this
bright autumn morning when the Boy went in to say good-bye. With a
white woman and an Indian boy, in a little room overlooking the
water-front, Muckluck was working in the intervals of watching the
crowds on the wharf. Eyes more experienced than hers might well stare.
Probably in no other place upon the globe was gathered as motley a
crew: English, Indian, Scandinavian, French, German, Negroes, Chinese,
Poles, Japs, Finns. All the fine gentlemen had escaped by earlier
boats. All the smart young women with their gold-nugget buttons as big
as your thumb, lucky miners from the creeks with heavy consignments of
dust to take home, had been too wary to run any risk of the
Never-Know-What closing inopportunely. The great majority here, on the
wharf, dazed or excited, lugging miscellaneous possessions--things they
had clung to in straits so desperate they knew no more how to relax
their hold than dead fingers do--these were men whose last chance had
been the Klondyke, and who here, as elsewhere, had failed. Many who
came in young were going out old; but the odd thing was that those
worst off went out game--no whining, none of the ostentatious pathos of
those broken on the wheel of a great city.

A man under Muckluck's window, dressed in a moose-skin shirt, straw
hat, broadcloth trousers, and carpet slippers, in one hand a tin pail,
in the other something tied in a handkerchief, called out lustily to a
ragged individual, cleaving a way through the throng, "Got your stuff
aboard?"

"Yes, goin' to get it off. I ain't goin' home till next year."

And the face above the moose-skin shirt was stricken with a sudden
envy. Without any telling, he knew just how his pardner's heart had
failed him, when it came to turning his tattered back on the