d Bug Bend. There I stayed and drifted with the streak for
three months, and thawed out at least sixty thousand dollars' worth of
muck. I had time to think things over. I came to the conclusion that I
could not record my claim, since that might bring the miners up who
would notice that my partner was missing; neither could I take down my
dust to Dawson to express it to the outside, since that also would
lead to questions being asked as to where I'd got it, seeing that it
was so great in amount. So I determined to lie quiet until the summer
time, and then to wash out only so much gold as I could carry about
myself.

"There was little chance of my being discovered on the Squaw River,
for it is seldom travelled, and I calculated that in four months' time
when the spring had come, the river would float the body far away to
where it never would be found, or if found, then at a time when it
would be unrecognisable. But in my first calculation I had not
reckoned with my loneliness, and the horror which comes of knowledge
of hidden crime. By the end of March I could stand it no longer and
set out for Dawson, where there were men in whose company I could
forget.

"Soon after I got there the winter broke up and, by the first of May,
though the Klondike itself was still frozen solid to its river-bed,
the snow and ice from the country and rivers to the south, which had
been exposed to the rays of the sun, had thawed and, draining into it,
had created a shallow torrent which, running between the banks above
the ground-ice, gave an appearance of the Klondike in full flood. Very
soon the water over-flowed, so that houses were deluged and men had to
take to boats and the roofs of their cabins for safety; it looked as
though Dawson would be washed away. The drifting ice commenced to pack
and pile against the bridge above the town; unless the jam could be
broken before the ground-ice loosened, the bridge must collapse. Some
men volunteered to blow it up with dynamite. In so doing they caused
the ground-ice to tear itself free from the bottom so that, the water
getting underneath, it floated up and pressed the pack against the
floor of the bridge, forming, for a half-minute, an impassable barrier
against the torrent rushing down. The flood rose behind it like a
tidal wave, tossing on its crest a gigantic floe, standing waist-deep
in which I saw, for the second during which it flashed in the sun, a
frozen man, whom I recognised, who gaze