ision. His scope had been rigidly limited, yet whatever
he saw, he saw big. His mind was orderly, his imagination practical,
and he never dreamed idly. When he superimposed a feverish metropolis
on a waste of timbered, snow-covered flat, he predicated first the
gold-strike that made the city possible, and next he had an eye for
steamboat landings, sawmill and warehouse locations, and all the needs
of a far-northern mining city. But this, in turn, was the mere setting
for something bigger, namely, the play of temperament. Opportunities
swarmed in the streets and buildings and human and economic relations
of the city of his dream. It was a larger table for gambling. The
limit was the sky, with the Southland on one side and the aurora
borealis on the other. The play would be big, bigger than any Yukoner
had ever imagined, and he, Burning Daylight, would see that he got in
on that play.

In the meantime there was naught to show for it but the hunch. But it
was coming. As he would stake his last ounce on a good poker hand, so
he staked his life and effort on the hunch that the future held in
store a big strike on the Upper River. So he and his three companions,
with dogs, and sleds, and snowshoes, toiled up the frozen breast of the
Stewart, toiled on and on through the white wilderness where the
unending stillness was never broken by the voices of men, the stroke of
an ax, or the distant crack of a rifle. They alone moved through the
vast and frozen quiet, little mites of earth-men, crawling their score
of miles a day, melting the ice that they might have water to drink,
camping in the snow at night, their wolf-dogs curled in frost-rimed,
hairy bunches, their eight snowshoes stuck on end in the snow beside
the sleds.

No signs of other men did they see, though once they passed a rude
poling-boat, cached on a platform by the river bank. Whoever had cached
it had never come back for it; and they wondered and mushed on.
Another time they chanced upon the site of an Indian village, but the
Indians had disappeared; undoubtedly they were on the higher reaches of
the Stewart in pursuit of the moose-herds. Two hundred miles up from
the Yukon, they came upon what Elijah decided were the bars mentioned
by Al Mayo. A permanent camp was made, their outfit of food cached on
a high platform to keep it from the dogs, and they started work on the
bars, cutting their way down to gravel through the rim of ice.

It was a hard an