hoarding his strength
and even refusing a hand to his neighbour, starving the patient beasts
of burden they had brought with them, friends who were willing to share
their toil without sharing their reward, driving on the poor staggering
strengthless brutes with open knives, and clubbing them to death when
they fell beneath their loads with piteous eyes, or leaving them to
freeze slowly where they lay, pressing forward, hurrying, fighting,
slaughtering, so the men went into the gold camps all the summer, and
the passes were the silent witnesses of the horror of it all and of the
innocent blood shed. Then Nature herself intervened, and winter came
down like a black curtain on the world, and the passes closed up behind
the men and were filled with drifts of snow that covered the bones and
the blood and the deep miry slides, marked with slipping tracks where
struggling, gasping lives had gone out, and the river closed up behind
the men and the ice thickened there daily, and the men were in the camps
and there was no way out.

And now, in the darkness of the winter night, in the coldness in which
no man could live, there was peace. There was no sound, for the snow on
the tall pines never melted and never fell, the water in the creeks was
solid as the rocks and made no murmur, there was no footfall of bird nor
beast, no leaf to rustle, no twig to fall.

But beyond the silent peaks and the desolate passes, beyond the rigid
pines, low down in the darkness, there was a reddish glow in the air, a
strange, yellowish, quivering mist of light that hovered and moved
restlessly, and yet kept its place where it hung suspended between white
earth and black sky. All around was majestic peace and calm and
stillness, nature wrapped in silence, but the flickering, wavering mist
of light jumped feverishly in the darkness and spoke of man. It was the
cloud of restless light that hung over the city of Dawson.

Within the front parlour of the "Pistol Shot," the favourite and most
successful, besides being the most appropriately named saloon in Dawson,
the cold had been pretty well fought down; a huge stove stood at each
end of the room, crammed as full as it would hold with fuel, all windows
were tightly closed, and lamps flared merrily against the white-washed
walls.

At this hour the room was full, and the single door, facing the bar,
was pushed open every half minute to admit one or two or more figures to
join the steaming, drinking, no