d simple life. Breakfast over, and they were at work
by the first gray light; and when night descended, they did their
cooking and camp-chores, smoked and yarned for a while, then rolled up
in their sleeping-robes, and slept while the aurora borealis flamed
overhead and the stars leaped and danced in the great cold. Their fare
was monotonous: sour-dough bread, bacon, beans, and an occasional dish
of rice cooked along with a handful of prunes. Fresh meat they failed
to obtain. There was an unwonted absence of animal life. At rare
intervals they chanced upon the trail of a snowshoe rabbit or an
ermine; but in the main it seemed that all life had fled the land. It
was a condition not unknown to them, for in all their experience, at
one time or another, they had travelled one year through a region
teeming with game, where, a year or two or three years later, no game
at all would be found.

Gold they found on the bars, but not in paying quantities. Elijah,
while on a hunt for moose fifty miles away, had panned the surface
gravel of a large creek and found good colors. They harnessed their
dogs, and with light outfits sledded to the place. Here, and possibly
for the first time in the history of the Yukon, wood-burning, in
sinking a shaft, was tried. It was Daylight's initiative. After
clearing away the moss and grass, a fire of dry spruce was built. Six
hours of burning thawed eight inches of muck. Their picks drove full
depth into it, and, when they had shoveled out, another fire was
started. They worked early and late, excited over the success of the
experiment. Six feet of frozen muck brought them to gravel, likewise
frozen. Here progress was slower. But they learned to handle their
fires better, and were soon able to thaw five and six inches at a
burning. Flour gold was in this gravel, and after two feet it gave
away again to muck. At seventeen feet they struck a thin streak of
gravel, and in it coarse gold, testpans running as high as six and
eight dollars. Unfortunately, this streak of gravel was not more than
an inch thick. Beneath it was more muck, tangled with the trunks of
ancient trees and containing fossil bones of forgotten monsters. But
gold they had found--coarse gold; and what more likely than that the
big deposit would be found on bed-rock? Down to bed-rock they would
go, if it were forty feet away. They divided into two shifts, working
day and night, on two shafts, and the smoke of thei