nto court, declaring that the paper was worthless,
and that he had been buncoed. As late as 1894, a man who ran a
restaurant offered 40,000 shares of Le Roi stock for four barrels of
Canadian whiskey; but the whiskey man would not trade that way.

In the meantime, however, men were working in the mine; and now they
began to ship ore. It was worth $27.00 a ton, and the stock became
valuable. Scattered over the Northwest were 500,000 shares that were
worth $500,000.00. Nearly all the men who had put money into the
enterprise were Yankees,--mining men from Spokane, just over the border.
These men began now to pick up all the stray shares that could be found;
and in a little while eight-tenths of the shares were held by men living
south of the line. At Northport, in Washington, they built one of the
finest smelters in the Northwest, hauled their ore over there, and
smelted it. The ore was rich in gold and copper. They put in a 300
horse-power hoisting-engine and a 40-drill air-compressor,--the largest
in Canada,--taking all the money for these improvements out of the mine.
The thing was a success, and news of it ran down to Chicago. A party of
men with money started for the new gold fields, but as they were buying
tickets three men rushed in and took tickets for Seattle. These were
mining men; and those who had bought only to British Columbia cashed in,
asked for transportation to the coast, and followed the crowd to the
Klondike.

In that way Le Roi for the moment was forgotten.

II

The Lieutenant-Governor of the Northwest Territories, who had been a
journalist and had a nose for news, heard of the new camp. All the while
men were rushing to the Klondike, for it is the nature of man to go from
home for a thing that he might secure under his own vine.

The Governor visited the new camp. A man named Ross Thompson had staked
out a town at the foot of Le Roi dump and called it Rossland. The
Governor put men to work quietly in the mine and then went back to his
plank palace at Regina, capital of the Northwest Territories,--to a
capital that looked for all the world like a Kansas frontier town that
had just ceased to be the county seat. Here for months he waited,
watching the "Imperial Limited" cross the prairie, receiving delegations
of half-breeds and an occasional report from one of the common miners in
Le Roi. If a capitalist came seeking a soft place to invest, the
Governor pointed to the West-bound Limited and whis