The five days that followed on the S. S. Princess Alice were long, bright, glorious, tiresome ones and the boys would have enjoyed every minute of the time if that disconcerting, maddening, magic word gold had not kept burning in their brains. They saw yellow and the nearer they came to that wonderful land in the far north, which the discoveries of gold had made as famous as diamonds have made the Kimberly mines or watered stock has made Wall Street, their very beings seemed to be transmuted into the precious metal.

Hence, neither the great Coast Range Mountains nor the wonderful glaciers appealed overmuch to these youngsters who had set their hearts on getting gold out of the Yukon-Arctic district just as firmly as had ever the most seasoned prospector.

But Juneau did make an impression on Bill for he heard tales of gold up there the like of which he had never heard before. Only once did he think to belittle the town by making odious comparisons of it with his “Noo York” but with Jack’s help he smothered the attempt for he was in the gold country now and was carried away by that malignant disease known as the gold fever.

CHAPTER III
ON THE EDGE OF THINGS

The Princess Alice made a stop for a few hours at Juneau, a town standing on a promontory between Lynn Canal and the Taku River, and the boys, with many other passengers, disembarked to see what they could see. Here for the first time they felt they were getting pretty close to the field of their future activities for they were in Alaska, the land of the midnight sun and the aurora borealis, the moose and the caribou, the prehistoric glaciers and—hidden gold.

Across the water a great mill was in full blast and as they stood looking at it a big, grisly sort of a man, who appeared to be between fifty and sixty, and whose clothes showed that he was an old time prospector, moved over toward them. Evidently he had in mind the idea of holding some small conversation with them, for up on top of the world the inhabitants do not consider formal introductions as being at all necessary when they feel like talking to any one.

“Goin’ to buy it boys?” he asked, grinning good-naturedly to show that his intentions were of the best.

“Afore we do, we’d kinda like to know what it is, for we’d hate to buy a pig-in-a-poke,” replied Bill smiling just as cheerfully, only, as I have previously mentioned, whenever Bill smiled the scar across his cheek made him look as if he was getting ready to exterminate a greaser.

“Oh, I see, you youngsters are new up here—tourists maybe,” came from the big throated man.

“We’re new up here all right,” admitted Jack, “but we’re not up here to see the sights, or for our health either, but to do a bit of prospecting.”

“Shake pards,” and he held out a calloused hand, as big as a ham and as horny as a toad’s back, to each of them in turn. “I’m Hank Dease, but in these parts I’m known as Grizzly Hank. And who might you fellows be?”

“I’m Jack Heaton of New Jersey, and this is my side-kick, Bill Adams of New York City, New York County and New York State, and there with the goods as needed.”

“I blazes! I’m right glad to know you boys,” drawled Grizzly Hank, “for you look to me as if you’re made o’ the right kind o’ timber. Since you’re strangers here I’ll tell you about Juneau, which I allow is the finest city in the world.”

Now Juneau has a population of about two thousand people, so, naturally, Bill was going to jump right in and monopolize things by asking Grizzly Hank if he’d ever been in Noo York, but Jack gave him the high-sign not to break in and so for once his pal held his peace.

“I’ll tell you about the wonderful things we have here first and then if there’s any little thing you want to know about prospectin’ up here or in the Yukon Territory I’ll tell you as good as I know. I’ve been in this country for nigh onto thirty years and you see how well I’ve panned out, but you fellows may do better—a few do, but, I blazes, most of ’em don’t.”

Grizzly Hank had found a couple of good listeners and as he liked to talk he was making the most of them while they lasted.

“That’s the Treadwell mill you are lookin’ at over yonder on Douglas Island. It has an output of gold that runs upwards of eighty thousand dollars a month. The first gold ever found in Alaska was down at Sitka in 1873, but it was old Joe Juneau, a French-Canadian prospector, who showed that gold could be mined here in payin’ quantities.

“At that time another prospector named Treadwell who was in this district had loaned a little money on some claims over there and finally had to take them for the debt. Later on he bought French Pete’s claim which lay next to it for the magnificent sum of five hundred dollars; and these claims which he bought for a mere song are the great Treadwell mines of to-day. I blazes! There are some other mines in this district and since Treadwell took over the original claims the output of gold has been to the tune of a hundred million dollars and the end is nowhere yet in sight. I blazes!”

“Do you mean to say, Mister Dease, that gold is mined over there like coal?” asked Bill, thereby exposing his ignorance.

The grisly prospector looked amused but he recalled the time when his own ideas of mining gold had been just about as vague.

“You see, boys, gold is found in several ways up here. Sometimes it is ’bedded in quartz when the ore, as it is called, has to be mined and then crushed in a stamp mill to get the gold out; more often it is found as free gold, dust and grains and bits of pure gold mixed with the dirt when it must be panned, that is, put in a pan and the dirt washed away and then the gold, which is the heaviest, falls to the bottom of the pan, and again,” he lowered his voice to make what he was about to tell them more impressive, “nuggets of gold are picked up from bits the size of a pea to chunks as large as my fist! I blazes! It all depends on the locality.”

“These diggin’s here are quartz mines and the ore is of mighty low grade—only a couple of dollars in gold to the ton of quartz. To get this gold out the quartz, or ore, is crushed in a mill called a stamp, and the Treadwell has the largest number of stamps of any mill in the world—upwards of two thousand, I blazes!”

Grizzly Hank paused for a moment to get a fresh start.

“Go on Mister Hank, we’re listenin’ with both ears,” urged Bill.

“As you were saying—” Jack paced him.

“As I was about to say,” continued the prospector, who was every whit as appreciative of his audience as it was of him, “when Treadwell began to take out gold, old timers all along the coast clear down as far as ’Frisco heard of it, came up and pushed further north believing that they would find other lodes of gold bearing ore and they believed right, I blazes!

“That other mine over there on Douglas Island that you see to the right is the Mexican Mine but it’s small fry as against the Treadwell for it only has a hundred and twenty stamps working.”

“We’re not pertiklarly keen on Mexican mines, oil wells or anything else that goes by the name of Mex—we had all the Mexican stuff we wanted when we was down there six months ago,” broke in Bill to whom the word brought no very pleasant recollections.

“To this side of the Mexican mine,” went on the prospector, “is the Ready Bullion mine and it has a two hundred stamp mill.”

“Ready Bullion listens good to me,” admitted Jack, once more breaking into his discourse.

“Shortly after the Treadwell mine began to show itself a bonanza, a story went the rounds that it was an accidental lode, or a blowout as we call it; that is, it was a lode of gold deposited there by some gigantic upheaval of the earth when Alaska was in the makin’ and that it was the only place north of fifty-six where gold could be mined at a profit.

“I always believed that yarn was set agoin’ to keep other prospectors out of the country; but when it kept on producin’, men with picks and shovels came here just the same, and what happened was that other deposits were found and these are the mines that are bein’ worked now in southern Alaska.

“Still other prospectors pushed on further north with their packs on their backs, on sleds which they pulled themselves or which were hauled by dog teams, on horses and mules, and they toiled up the Trail of Heartache, as the nearly straight-up White Pass trail was called in those days. I blazes, and, I was one of ’em.

“Once on the other side of yonder range we prospected for gold bearin’ quartz, and panned the river beds until we reached the Klondike River. There is where Carmack, with two Indian pards, Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie, had already staked rich claims. One day Carmack went down to the stream to wash a piece of moose he had killed and it was then that he saw gold in the water and when he panned it he got more nuggets than his eyes could believe. News of gold travels faster than greased lightnin’ and it was not long before the biggest gold stampede was on that ever took place in the golden history of gold! I blazes!

“Over night the Klondike became famous and wherever human bein’s lived that spoke a language it was a word that they knew and it meant but one thing to them—and that was gold. And, I blazes, the world knew that gold was bein’ panned out in the Klondike by hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars and the world went crazy over it.

“When I got there one mornin’ I was dead-broke but by night I was a rich man. It was nothin’ to wash a hundred, five hundred, I blazes, a thousand dollars from a few pans of gravel. And still further north, somewhere along the Porcupine River, Thornton and a couple of his pards discovered a blow-out where nuggets of gold were so thick they could pick ’em up like stones; they packed them in moosehide sacks and corded them up like stovewood until they had all the gold they thought they could carry out of the country.”

Grizzly Hank had the boys going for fair. They stood as though they were magnetized to the spot. Both were itching for more detailed information but neither spoke his mind for they had agreed before they left New York that while they would have to admit they were prospectors bent on finding gold, like countless thousands before them, they would give no hint, under any circumstance, of their real mission to any one.

“Go on—” said Bill impatiently.

“Yes, pards,” he went on, his sharp, deep-set eyes brightening which showed that however it was he had failed to keep the elusive metal he had found, his long quest left no cause for regret; “yes pards, the gold belt runs from the Gulf of Alaska to the Arctic Ocean, and the further north you go the more gold you’ll find and—the harder it will be to get it down under.2 I’m goin’ to the Porcupine River district as soon as I can get some one to grub-stake me—”

2	In Alaska and the far north the United States is called down under.

A mighty bellowing blast came from the triple throated whistle of the steamer at the dock and drowned out the alluring voice of the prospector pioneer. Then the warning sound subsided for a moment.

“There’s your boat a-whistlin’ an’ if you’re goin’ on her you’d better scoot. I blazes! Good-by and good luck.”

They started for the boat on the run but their minds were in a semi-torpid condition, for the old miner had surely enough set them by the ears. When they were again on the deck of the Princess Alice and had somewhat recovered from the magic of his words they fell to discussing gold, Grizzly Hank and a few other consequential things.

“Moosehide sacks of gold corded up like stovewood!” repeated Bill blinking his blue eyes.

“The farther north you go the more gold you’ll find!” reiterated Jack, for the words sounded like ready money to him.

“Shake, old pard, we’re on the right trail,” and the boys struck hands with a vengeance. “I was thinkin’ as how we orter have taken Grizzly Hank along with us,” commented Bill; “he knows all the ropes and he’d a-come in mighty handy.”

“I thought of that too when he was talking to us but then we’d have to split up our winnings into thirds which would mean that we’d simply short-change ourselves out of a couple of million dollars or so. Then again his ideas and ours would probably be entirely different for he’s a prospector of the old school while we are discoverers of the new school. Finally, ‘two’s company and three’s none’ is just as true, I imagine, of the trail as it is of a parlor date.”

“Agreed to on all points,” said Bill, “but when we comes back let’s grub-stake him to the limit so that he can eke out a million or so on his own account afore he kicks-in.”

Skagway was the jumping off place as far as the Princess Alice was concerned and the boys were right glad of it for they were anxious more than ever to get into the heart of things. The town is on the Chilkat Inlet at the head of Lynn Canal and, like many others along the coast, it has a mountain for a background.

They stopped over night at Mrs. Pullen’s hotel, which is also a wonderful Alaskan museum, and as they were looking about they came across a rack of the inevitable picture post cards. Bill said he was of a mind to send one down under to a certain little telephone countess, (whom he could see in his mind’s eye masticating the indestructible listerated nuggets and hear her say in the deep recesses of his auditory organ “who do you want to talk to?” with the “smile that wins.”)

On one of the post cards was a picture of a very pleasant, mild mannered looking gentleman whose kindly eyes and benevolent mouth bore out Jack’s statement that all men north of fifty-six are white at heart. Under the picture on the card of the somewhat incongruous caption of Soapy Smith.

“I suppose he’s the Sunday School Superintendent, owner of the First National Bank and mayor of this burg,” Bill remarked to his partner.

A prosperous looking individual standing near-by overheard Bill’s facetious comment, smiled sadly and said:

“I take it you boys haven’t heard the story of Soapy Smith and so I’ll enlighten you as to the manner of man he was. Soapy came by his saponified cognomen honestly for he began his career as a full member of the fraternity of gentle grafters. Soapy’s line was to wrap up a ten dollar bill with a small bar of soap and sell it from the tail end of a wagon for the small sum of one dollar.

“Then the lamb would take his purchase around in the back alley where no one could see him, and open it up and then he would find that he was out just ninety-nine cents, for while he had the soap the slippery ten-spot still remained as a part of Soapy’s financial reserve fund.

“But this graft was too legitimate for Soapy for he had to give a bar of soap worth at least a cent to each and every purchaser. Having accumulated a little coin he drifted in here with the stampeders in ’98 and opened up a saloon, dance-hall and gambling house. As if this game was too honest he organized a gang of outlaws and they robbed men and killed them too, right and left.

“Law abiding citizens got tired of these hold-ups, for the prospectors and miners began to go through Dyea and use the Chilcoot Pass rather than take a chance of meeting Soapy and his gang in Skagway or on the White Pass trail. So a Vigilance Committee was organized and at one of their meetings one night they put Frank Reed at the gate to keep Soapy and the members of his gang out.

“As soon as Soapy heard of the meeting he took his shootin’ irons and went over to it where Reed promptly refused to admit him. Came two simultaneous pistol shots; Soapy fell dead and Reed lived for a couple of weeks and then he cashed in. If you go up to the canyon you’ll see the graves of both these men in the cemetery there. So you see you can’t most always tell by lookin’ at a man what is under his vest.”

The next morning the boys took the train for White Horse, about a hundred and ten miles due north at which point they would make connections with a boat on the Yukon River. While the stampeders had toiled up the icy trail of White Pass, their backs breaking under their packs and their hearts breaking under the torture of it all, the boys were now making the trip in a comfortable train of the White Pass and Yukon Railway, the first in Alaska and the Yukon Territory.

“Isn’t just exactly like ridin’ on the Twentieth Century, is it Jack?” observed Bill as the train crept at a snail’s pace up to the summit.

Just then the train rounded a curve blasted out of solid rock and they looked straight down a thousand feet into a canyon.

“More like a trip on the Elevated,” suggested Jack.

Once over the Pass the engineer opened the throttle a little and the train picked up in speed. Then by way of varying the kaleidoscopic changes of scenery the train shot into a tunnel and out of it onto a tremendously high bridge that spans the Skagway River which flows tumultuously over the rocky bottom on its way to the gulf.

A few miles beyond they crossed an old wagon road which was being built to connect White Horse with White Pass but the railroad was completed first and took its place. A dozen miles or so farther on they saw some log cabins which the conductor of the train pointed out as having been the center of White Pass City, one of the tented towns that had sprung up during the mad rush to the Klondike, and when it subsided the town vanished.

Then came into view Glacier Gorge and high above it the train sped along its very edge, then wound up a long grade, when spread before them were the Sawtooth Mountains and Dead Horse Gulch.

“Sounds like the name of a dime novel I onct read,” reflected Bill.

“Why Dead Horse Gulch?” Jack asked the conductor.

“Because when the rush was on in ’98 thousands of the pioneers brought their horses with them and so many of them died down there from starvation and overwork that their bodies choked up the gulch.

“See that sheet of water yonder?” he continued, “that’s the beginning of Lake Bennet and there the hustling, bustling, town of Bennet once was. As soon as the gold crowd from Skagway reached this lake they gave up the trail and threw together rafts and craft of every description. They piled their outfits on or in them and then floated down the Yukon River to the Klondike, unless they were drowned first, as many were. You’ll be glad to know, boys, the train hesitates twenty minutes at Bennet for victuals,” and the boys thought it was high time that it did so.

When this important function was over and they were again on the train it ran along the edge of the lake until the lower end of it was reached where the friendly con called “Carcross! Carcross!”

“This town,” he told them, “is built on a place where the Indians used to watch for the caribou to cross and this is the cause why of its name.”

After a short ride their rail trip—the last they would have for many, many moons—came to an end at White Horse, on the Thirty Mile River. They considered they were playing in great good luck, for the steamboats leave only twice a week for Dawson and one was scheduled to sail that night.

This gave the boys plenty of time to look around White Horse but they saw with eyes dimly for their vision was as blurred by their quest for gold as ever were those who had rushed madly through there in the days of ’98.

Bill opined that he “liked White Horse fine as it has two boats a week we can get away on.” As a matter of fact it is a lively town for the steamboats take on their supplies here for their down river trips.

The boys walked over to the White Horse Rapids, as the Indians called it after a Finnlander because of his light hair and whom they thought was as strong as a horse, after he had lost his life in its swirling waters. And hundreds of other lives and dozens of outfits were lost in the wild scramble of the early prospectors to get to the gold fields.

But neither Jack nor Bill gave more than a passing thought to these foolhardy and adventurous souls who had risked and lost all in their futile attempts to get to the Klondike; much less did they think of those who had made the golden goal and won out in the finality of their efforts, for the boys’ own scheme consumed every moment of their time, and all of their energies were directed upon the consummation of it since they were gold seekers just as truly as were any of those who had gone before.

The steamboat Selkirk, which was to carry the boys from White Horse to Circle City, was of the old time kind that was used on the Mississippi and other rivers half a century ago; that is, it was of the wood-burning, stern paddle-wheel type.

As they stood out on deck the next morning Jack tried to lose sight of the big issue for the moment and he imagined himself to be the first explorer who had traced the Yukon River in this region. If he had not had gold on the brain it would have been an easy thing to do for here were the same virgin meadows, primeval forests and silent fastnesses just as they were when the Russians laid claim to Alaska. And the gold, he reasoned, that was here then is, for the greater part, here now.

Not once since they had left Seattle had Bill compared anything with his Noo York, at least not out loud, but when they were passing through the headwaters of the Yukon he said as though he was talking to himself, “It hasn’t got anything on the Spuyten Duyvil,” which, let me elucidate, is a tidal channel that connects the Harlem River with the Hudson River and so forms the northern boundary of Manhattan Island on which New York City proper is built. But in the eight hundred and sixty odd mile trip down the Yukon to Circle City Bill had ample opportunity to amend his snap comparison and even then he was fifteen hundred miles from its many channeled delta where it flows into the Bering Sea.

“Doesn’t look much like the naked north or frozen regions that the folks back home think it is,” remarked Bill, as they passed a tundra (pronounced toon´-dra) which was thick with grass and shrubs and sprinkled with various plants in flower.

“I’ll say it doesn’t,” replied Jack, “but wait, we haven’t run into winter weather yet.”

As the boat plied its way softly and swiftly down the Yukon they saw occasional Indian villages, the men taking life easy, the children playing and the squaws busy drying the golden salmon on poles set in the sun. Then to the great delight of both boys they saw a caribou swim out from the shore intending, probably, to cross to the other side, but frightened by the modernity of the throbbing, smoking monster he swam back faster than he came, and on gaining the shore he disappeared from view.

Another time Bill went over to Jack, who was talking with some passengers, and saluting as to an officer he said, “I have to report, sir, a bear on the starboard bow.” And sure enough there stood a huge bear high on the ledge of a rock and so motionless was he that he seemed carved out of the rock itself; but inwardly he was fully alive to this mechanical invasion of his eminent domain.

Never was a river trip of such wild beauty, so full of interest and yet such soothing quiet as this one the boys were now making and it would have proved doubly delightful if they had been pleasure seekers instead of gold seekers. The only breaks in the continuity of the run were made when the boat nosed its way along a bank and, finding an anchorage, she wooded up, that is she took on wood to be burned under her boilers.

Now the river widened and the boat ran into the more placid waters of Lake LeBarge which Jack pointed out to Bill as having been the scene of action in The Cremation of Sam McGee, a poem by Robert Service. On reaching the lower end of the lake the boat shot down the Thirty Mile River where the swift current winds forth and back like a tangled rope and it takes a pilot who knows his trade to hold her to the channel.

But the most exciting piece of navigation is at Five Finger Rapids, for here the river narrows down into a neck and almost closing the latter are five ugly finger-like rocks projecting above the surface with the water swirling swiftly round them in mighty eddies. It looked to Jack and Bill as if there was not enough room for the boat to pass between any two of them but this didn’t seem to worry the pilot any who held her nose hard toward the middle finger.

The boys thought that he must be tired of life. But hold there matey, just as they had timed her to strike the rock he bore down hard on his wheel to port and the boat missed the rock by the skin of its teeth, Their hearts dropped back from their throats to their thoraxes again and they believed they still stood a fair chance of finding the gold they were after.

And now comes Dawson into view—Dawson in the heart of the Klondike—the Dawson of tradition, adventure, romance and—of gold! This is the identical town where that great army of pioneer gold seekers, who braved the rigors of the winters, the dangers of the rapids, the stresses of starvation and the robbers of Soapy Smith’s gang, found themselves if they were unfortunate enough to be so fortunate.

As the steamboat ties up here for half a day to load and unload its cargo the boys went on a hike over to an Indian village called Moosehide, a little way down the trail from Dawson. On returning to town they got the borry, as Bill called it, of a couple of horses and rode out eight or ten miles where some great dredges were at work bringing up the sand and gravel from the streams and hydraulicking equipments were washing the gold out of it.

“This kind of mining,” Jack said to his partner, “is simply panning out gold on a big scale by machinery, and gold fields that are not rich enough to be worked profitably by a prospector will yield gold on a paying basis where hydraulicking can be taken advantage of.”

“It’s too slow a game for me,” was Bill’s idea of the scheme, “I wants to pick it up in chunks.”

“That’s what we’re here for,” Jack made answer.

They left Dawson that evening and the next morning still found them in the Yukon Territory, but shortly after breakfast the boat crossed the International boundary line and they were on good old U. S. soil again. The boat soon made a landing at Eagle City where Fort Egbert is located and the first thing Jack spied was a big wireless station which he knew belonged to the U. S. Army.

From Eagle to Circle City, or just Circle as it is called for short, is a sail of a hundred and ninety miles. Both Jack and Bill were dead tired of traveling and they hailed Circle as heartily as they would have hailed their own home town. But they didn’t know what they were hailing. The only outstanding fact with them was that they had arrived, or at any rate they had gone as far as trains and boats could carry them toward the goal of their desires. The bridge was swung ashore and they got off without delay. The whistle blew a couple of sonorous blasts, and the boat backed off and went on her way down stream.

In the days of the gold rush Circle had been the great outfitting town in these parts. It was built up entirely of log cabins and it had more log cabins than any town had ever gathered together before or since. Why Circle City? Whence the name? Because when the town was started it was believed to be located right on the Arctic Circle but later it was learned that it was a good eighty miles below the Circle.

As the boys stepped ashore they were greeted by a few white men, some Indians and the ear-splitting howls of the huskies.

“I tell you Bill, we’re on the very edge of things.”

“You said a mouthful, pard,” was that worthy’s sober reply.

CHAPTER IV
WHEN BILL AND BLACK PETE MET

The boys wore sorely disappointed in Circle for while it had been, as they had heard, “the largest log house town in the world,” and as far as log houses go it was yet, for that matter, still that essential moving principle that makes up a town, namely the inhabitants, was lacking.

But times have changed since the early ’90’s and now all that remain of its population are a few men who look after the stores and a handful of prospectors, miners, hunters and trappers who come into town to buy their supplies, and these hearten it up a bit. As for the empty log houses they serve only as so many monuments to commemorate the time when the town was alive and full of action.

You ask why the town died out? I’ll tell you. Gold was discovered there in 1894 and for the next four years its growth was phenomenal—the wonder of all Alaska; but when the Klondike was opened up the inhabitants left everything behind them and made a mad rush for the new gold fields, and so at the present time there is little left to tell of the glory that was Circle’s.

The way Jack had figured it out coming up on the boat was that they would get their clothes, grub, sleds and dogs at Circle, which prospectors and others he had talked with said they could do, and then when they were all fixed and winter had set in they would push on over to the land of the Yeehats and there establish a base from which they could work.

This base of supplies was to be like the hub of a great wheel the circumference of which would include all of the territory to be prospected and their local expeditions would be like the spokes, that is they would strike out with their dog teams, traveling light, taking a new line of direction each trip they made. In this way they could, he said, make a thorough search for the hidden gold that those before them had struck so rich but which for divers reasons best known to those who had sought it had never been gotten out of the country.

His best thought, as he had previously explained in answer to an objection of Bill’s, was to make this search during the winter months instead of doing it in summer-time in virtue of the fact that they could then use dog sleds and this would enable them to cover the ground without working themselves to death and do it at a goodly clip besides.

Now, when Bill had set his eyes on the deserted City of Circle he instantly took a violent dislike to it. Having become fairly well posted on the geography of Ilasker, as he still persisted in calling it, he concocted the notion that what they should have done was to come up in the early spring and go on by boat to Fort Yukon, which is about eighty-five miles farther on down the river.

From there, he contended, they could have gotten a couple of canoes and paddled up the Porcupine and Big Black Rivers until they were close to where the International boundary line crosses the Arctic Circle. This done, (according to Jack’s own reasoning he said), they would be about as near the place where they wanted to make their winter quarters as they could get. But there was no getting away from it, they were now in Circle with winter fast coming on and it was too late to change the work sheet as previously laid out.

By the time this argument was over, the boys had reached the Grand Palace Hotel, an enormous log building of two stories of the regulation kind to be found in all frontier and mining towns.

Running nearly the length of one side of the hall as they entered it, was a bar with a hotel register on the end nearest the door. At the extreme farther end of the hall a platform had been built up about as high as a man’s head, while any number of small round tables covered with worn-out and faded green cloth were strewn about the room.

The owner of the Grand Palace in the days antedating the Klondike rush was Sam Hastings, or Silent Sam as he was called, because he never spoke unless he was spoken to and his replies were always pithy and to the point. His face was smooth shaven; he wore a low crowned, narrow brimmed Stetson hat, a rolling collar with a flowing tie, silk shirt with diamond set gold buttons in the cuffs, a Prince Albert coat with a six gun conveniently within reach under it, doeskin3 breeches and kid button shoes. Unlike Soapy Smith he was honest, as men of his type went in those days, but like Soapy he died with his button shoes on.

3	Doeskin is a kind of fine twilled cloth much used in those days for making breeches.

Now let this close-up of Silent Sam fade away and take a look at a snap-shot of Doc Marling, the present owner of the Grand Palace and you will observe a further change that time and circumstances have wrought in Circle.

Doc is a big-headed man and bearded like a couple of pards. He wears a woolen shirt, under which beats a fair to middling heart; his breeches are also woolen tied around his ankles and he has on a pair of deerskin moccasins.

He is no shooter—you could see that the moment you look at him—but it is history up yonder that he once choked a bear to death with his hands alone.

He was the only animated object in the great bare room when the boys walked in and they felt like a couple of mavericks that had been cut out from the herd. No more lonesome place had either of them ever been in this side of Nyack-on-the-Hudson.

But Doc Marling didn’t seem to feel that way, since after being there for twenty odd years perhaps he’d gotten used to it. He invited them to inscribe their names on the hotel register, after which he led the march down the hall—it seemed to the boys as if it was a block long—thence up the stair-way whose well-worn steps showed clearly that Circle had been very much alive in the days of her youth, and then to their room which was altogether too big.

“One thing sure, we’ll get in practice here for the long winter that is ahead of us,” reflected Jack philosophically.

“It wouldn’t be half-bad if we had a ’phone connection with the American Consolidated Oil Company back in Noo York, but where are we? Five thousand miles away and not even a wireless station nearer than Eagle. ‘I blazes!’ as Grizzly Hank down at Juneau says,” groused Bill. His indisposition was curious in that no matter how strenuous the tide of battle might be he had never a word to say, but inaction always behaved as an irritant to his nervous system.

Came soon the loud jangling of a bell and they knew it for a call to supper. They followed where it led and sat down to their first meal in Circle, and it was good. There were ten or a dozen men at the table with them and up here at the very outpost of civilization, where men are what they are, they all fell into loud and easy conversation.

“We’re in the hands of white men, as I said we’d be, back there in New York,” Jack told his partner when they were again in their room.

Just as they were about to turn in they thought they heard a phonograph going, and as “music hath charms to soothe the savage breast” they went down into the big hall to be soothed.

While in pre-Klondike days it was of nightly occurrence to find four or five hundred people gathered in the hall, there were now congregated perhaps some twenty-five or thirty men, and these were made up of Americans, French-Canadians, Indians, half-breeds, and a Chinaman or two, to say nothing of the bear.

A few of those who composed this agglomeration of humanity, were the scum of the earth but most of them were men of strong character and sterling worth. Considering that they were on the very edge of things they were bound to be a rough and ready lot but taken all in all they were well behaved and peaceably inclined—all except one and he was Black Pete.

While the crowd by no means filled the void of the big hall, still it breathed enough of life into the stagnated atmosphere to take off the sharp edges of their lonesomeness.

Now instead of a phonograph they discovered that the source of the music originated in a tall, rangy miner with a big bushy mustache, who was sitting on the platform and sawing away on a fiddle as if his whole soul was in it. Near the platform some kind of a disturbance was going on around which the onlookers had formed themselves into a ring. Whatever it was they were greatly interested and from the roars of laughter they were evidently enjoying it hugely.

Jack and Bill elbowed their way deep enough into the ring to see what the frolic was and what they saw they concluded was about as good as an act in a side-show. In a word it was a team of dancers executing with great precision and solemnity the “bear-trot”, or “bear-hug”, or “bear-something-or-other”, for a young French-Canadian and a big brown bear, who stood erect on his hind legs, when he was as tall as his keeper, were executing a most ludicrous, albeit, a lumbering sort of dance.

After a spell Rip Stoneback, the fiddler, ceased scraping the catgut strings with his horse-hair bow and the trainer and his bear wound up their exhibition with a wrestling bout that tickled the everlasting daylights out of these simple northmen, from which it could be fairly deduced that, after all, they were really only boys “growed” up.

The boys mingled freely with the knots of men taking in what they had to say about everything in general and little things in particular, for it was all brand-new and novel to them. Jack struck up a conversation with a young fellow named Jim Wendle from ’Frisco who had staked a claim over on Preacher Creek.

“The boys here are all right,” he was saying to Jack, “there’s only one fellow who is really hard boiled and that’s Black Pete over there. He’s laid out every man he’s ever tackled, either with his fists, or his knife and I’ve heard that he shot a man once. He’s meaner than all get out when he’s had a few drinks so don’t get into any argument with him. Agree to anything he says if he talks to you.”

Black Pete did not look the part of a “bad man” though his face was hard and his complexion was swarthy. He was not very tall, had tremendous shoulders and having lived in the open Northland all his life he knew the run of men who gathered here. He was thoroughly disliked in Circle because of this disposition on his part to always want to pick a fight and there were men thereabouts who were actually afraid of him.

At about the same time that Jack was getting his information concerning Black Pete another prospector was tipping off his history to Bill and it was lucky for both of the boys that they were “let in” on his past performances when they were.

Black Pete and a boon companion were leaning against the bar when the latter made some passing remark about that young stripling and his partner who had just landed in Circle.

“Sleem keed heem all right,” returned Pete, “but I no got use for heem pardner—zat fellow weez da cut cross hees cheek. I give heem beeg leeking sometime. Maybe theese night. Watch a meenute. I have som’ fun with sleem keed.” Black Pete called to Jack and motioned him to come over, but as the latter had not been introduced he paid no attention and this aroused Black Pete’s ire. Then he and his companion started over toward Jack and Jim Wendle.

“Be careful now,” his friend cautioned him.

Black Pete laid his hand on Jack’s shoulder in a perfectly friendly like manner and said:

“You and Jeem com’ heeva dreenk weeth me?”

At that Jack got up from the table and looked Black Pete square in the eye.

“I don’t drink,” he said shortly.

Black Pete was mad clear through, that much was plain.

Bill who had been taking a hand in a world-old game called poker, happened to see Jack and Black Pete facing each other and he divined trouble. He laid down his cards and went over where his pardner and the bad un were, to listen in on the conversation.

“Heeve a seegar, then,” the Canuk insisted catching hold of Jack’s arm and pulling him toward the bar.

Taking a firm hold on Black Pete’s wrist Jack removed his hand from his arm and said, without the slightest inflexion in his voice, “I don’t smoke.”

Then the unexpected happened—that which had not happened in Circle in perhaps a dozen or twenty years before.

“You don’t eh?” growled Black Pete, infuriated at Jack’s cold refusal to join him in either one or the other, “then deem you, heeve a bullet!”

At the same time he whipped out his six-shooter and pulled the trigger, but his marksmanship was bad, for Bill had caught him by his throat from the side and pulled his body over so that the bullet crashed through the roof, instead of boring a hole through Jack’s body.

Expecting that the remaining chambers would be emptied in the struggle which took place between Bill and Black Pete the crowd dropped to the floor, jumped behind the bar, crawled under tables—all except René and he kept his trained bear between himself and the business end of the gun the bad man of Circle and the Harlem boy were struggling for.

These latter two were well matched though there was no doubt but that Black Pete who was the larger was also the stronger, but sheer brute strength could not gain the mastery where the tricks of the wrestler’s art are brought to bear and Bill had a little the best of it.

As the crowd rightly guessed when the first shot was fired, Black Pete did pull the trigger every chance he got until all of his cartridges were shot off but each time the bullet that was intended for Bill went wild and neither he nor the others were scratched. One bullet, though, shivered the big plate glass mirror over the bar into a thousand pieces and Doc Marling, the proprietor, knew that he was having bad luck just then to the jig-time of three hundred dollars, even if it didn’t keep on for the next seven years.

All the time the struggle was under way Jack stood by as though he was watching a friendly bout in Prof. William Adam’s Academy on Manhattan Street in the good old days. More than one of the onlookers wondered why he didn’t crack a bottle on Black Pete’s head and so help out his partner, but this was not the way the boys did team work. In a set-to of any kind whether it was with bare knuckles, with knives or with pistols neither one would take a hand in the affair the other was engaged in unless, as Jack had once explained to me, it was “absolutely imperative.”

And this status of the fray was far from having come to pass, at least that was the way Jack sized it up. The crowd must have kept count of the shots fired for when the last one took place they quickly picked themselves up from the floor, or crawled out from their safety-first hiding places, and gathered around Bill and Black Pete who were still at it.

Whether it was due to the final breaking down of his courage, failing strength, too much hootch or the superior tactics of the trained athlete, was not apparent, but slowly Bill overpowered his opponent, threw him over his shoulder, when he struck the floor on his back, and pinned him down so that he could not move. After all had seen that Black Pete was helpless Bill let him up.

There was wild cheering for the victor and some one brought Bill a big glass of forty-rod.

“You have well earned it boy and you need it,” he said as he offered the glass to him.

“I never drink,” said Bill and it was given instead to Black Pete to revive him again.