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aph to the coast at Eagle, and I simply desire to get there early enough to get off some dispatches to Washington before the post telegraph office closes." "W-w-hat's 'Forty-mile?' I've heard of 'Forty-rod,' but never of 'Forty-mile,'" remarked Pepper flippantly. "Wa-al," drawled the miner, "they was pretty near synon'mous, as you say, when I first knew the place. Forty-mile is the only civilized place of habitation between Dawson and Eagle. It's on the Yukon side of the river, and is a trading station for the Forty-mile mining district, the first real gold mining region opened up in this region. It was the scene of my early triumphs as a 'sourdough' after I left the whaling business, and I 'mushed' into it in the winter along with Dowling, the great mail carrier of this region, who carried the mail up the Yukon on the ice, with a dog team, nine hundred miles between Dawson and Fort Gibbon once a month. "I got a good paying claim on Forty-mile Creek and took out so much rich gravel that winter that after I cleaned up in the spring I got an idea that I didn't need any more, and sold out and hiked for the States. It didn't last long, and I had to come back, but not up here. I thought I'd like to stop for an hour or so and see if any of my old partners were here." There was little of interest at Forty-mile, except the big warehouses of the trading companies, but they had dinner ashore, and Swiftwater managed to find among the scanty population one or two of his old comrades, who had given up the search for gold and were content to work for the trading companies. A rapid but uneventful run during the afternoon brought them to Eagle, where they were greeted with delight by the three hundred or more citizens, and the few army officers, who, after welcoming the party, carried the Colonel off to the barracks, the boys being quartered in the only hotel of the place, run by the postmistress of the town, who had formerly been a school teacher in the States, and who made the boys' stay delightfully homelike. Desiring to make Circle the next day, a distance of nearly two hundred miles by the river, they left Eagle at an early hour after taking on board a supply of fuel of a rather questionable character, for which they had to pay a heavy price. The trading companies said that this was the second launch that had visited Eagle and the demand for high-grade fuel was not great. "Say, boys, what is 'mush'?" asked Jack, sudden
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