rable, a revelation will dawn upon him.

In the Yukon country, when this comes to pass, the man usually
provisions a poling boat, if it is summer, and if winter, harnesses his
dogs, and heads for the Southland. A few months later, supposing him to
be possessed of a faith in the country, he returns with a wife to share
with him in that faith, and incidentally in his hardships. This but
serves to show the innate selfishness of man. It also brings us to the
trouble of 'Scruff' Mackenzie, which occurred in the old days, before
the country was stampeded and staked by a tidal-wave of the
che-cha-quas, and when the Klondike's only claim to notice was its
salmon fisheries.

'Scruff' Mackenzie bore the earmarks of a frontier birth and a frontier
life.

His face was stamped with twenty-five years of incessant struggle with
Nature in her wildest moods,--the last two, the wildest and hardest of
all, having been spent in groping for the gold which lies in the shadow
of the Arctic Circle. When the yearning sickness came upon him, he was
not surprised, for he was a practical man and had seen other men thus
stricken. But he showed no sign of his malady, save that he worked
harder. All summer he fought mosquitoes and washed the sure-thing bars
of the Stuart River for a double grubstake. Then he floated a raft of
houselogs down the Yukon to Forty Mile, and put together as comfortable
a cabin as any the camp could boast of. In fact, it showed such cozy
promise that many men elected to be his partner and to come and live
with him. But he crushed their aspirations with rough speech, peculiar
for its strength and brevity, and bought a double supply of grub from
the trading-post.

As has been noted, 'Scruff' Mackenzie was a practical man. If he wanted
a thing he usually got it, but in doing so, went no farther out of his
way than was necessary. Though a son of toil and hardship, he was
averse to a journey of six hundred miles on the ice, a second of two
thousand miles on the ocean, and still a third thousand miles or so to
his last stamping-grounds,--all in the mere quest of a wife. Life was
too short. So he rounded up his dogs, lashed a curious freight to his
sled, and faced across the divide whose westward slopes were drained by
the head-reaches of the Tanana.

He was a sturdy traveler, and his wolf-dogs could work harder and
travel farther on less grub than any other team in the Yukon. Three
weeks later he strode into a hunting-camp