ck to a too willing or imaginative affiant. Shortly
afterward, I heard the two men coming, cleared the deck for action, and
braced myself for a delectable situation. It was a story of a "snow"
location of mining property. The law requires that a certain fixed
amount of work or expenditure shall be done or made annually upon every
mining location for purposes of benefiting and developing the claim, and
further provides that upon failure to do such "assessment work" the
ground shall become open and relocatable on the 1st of January
following. Hence many individuals single out what they believe to be
valuable property, and acutely investigate the validity of its holder's
title, nosing about the ground or searching through the records to
ascertain, first, whether the work has been done; second, whether an
affidavit of labor has been recorded; and, third, if the facts render
such an affidavit of no effect (save only as _prima facie_ evidence) and
subject the affiant to a charge of perjury.

The legal requirements had not been fulfilled regarding the property in
question; and on December 31, 1899, Ripley and Welch (before mentioned)
set out from Council, over the snow, for Crooked Creek, fifteen miles
away. Before starting, they took the precaution to set their watches by
the recorder's chronometer, for timepieces are very contradictory in
Alaska, and it frequently happens that a number of relocators assemble
at the same spot, watches in hand, near midnight of a December 31,
prepared to drive down their stakes at the first moment of the new year,
and of course it becomes a nice question of evidence as to who has the
right time. The case in point certainly had not been lacking in dramatic
incident. Welch and Ripley found others on the ground for whom no love
was lost. It was not a trysting-place. Some underhand work was done, and
Ripley, so he said, restrained old Tom from putting a bullet into a
certain miscreant. But it was hard work to confine the enthusiastic
Ripley to the material matters, and I had frequently to nail him down
and shut him up until I wrote out a portion of the statement desired. He
was acting it through, walking up and down, gesticulating, and,
occasionally, falling into the native dialect. His favorite mode of
brushing aside a suggestion--treating it as immaterial--was to exclaim:
"That's all right, but it don't buy whisky"; and now and then he would
suddenly turn upon the third man with the question, "Ai