rkin' order. The stuff's on the way now. Hullo!
Come in!"

The visitors were Mervin and Hewson on their way to Dawson. These two
men had been successful beyond their dreams. It was just like finding
money the way fortune had pushed it in front of their noses. They were
offensively prosperous; they reeked of success.

In both of them a great change had taken place, a change only too
typical of the gold-camp. They seemed to have thawed out; they were
irrepressibly genial; yet instead of that restraint that had formerly
distinguished them, there was a grafted quality of weakness, of
flaccidity, of surrender to the enervating vices of the town.

Mervin was remarkably thin. Dark hollows circled his eyes, and a curious
nervousness twisted his mouth. He was "a terror for the women," they
said. He lavished his money on them faster than he made it. He was
vastly more companionable than formerly, but somehow you felt his
virility, his fighting force had gone.

In Hewson the change was even more marked. Those iron muscles had
couched themselves in easy flesh; his cheeks sagged; his eyes were
bloodshot and untidy. Nevertheless he was more of a good fellow, talked
rather vauntingly of his wealth, and affected a patronising manner. He
was worth probably two hundred thousand, and he drank a bottle of brandy
a day.

In the case of these two men, as in the case of a thousand others in the
gold-camp, it seemed as if easy, unhoped-for affluence was to prove
their undoing. On the trail they had been supreme; in fen or forest, on
peak or plain, they were men among men, fighting with nature savagely,
exultantly. But when the fight was over their arms rested, their muscles
relaxed, they yielded to sensuous pleasures. It seemed as if to them
victory really meant defeat.

As I went on with my packing I paid but little heed to their talk. What
mattered it to me now, this babble of dumps and dust, of claims and
clean-ups? I was going to thrust it all behind me, blot it clean out of
my memory, begin my life anew. It would be a larger, more luminous life.
I would live for others. Home! Mother! again how exquisitely my heart
glowed at the thought of them.

Then all at once I pricked up my ears. They were talking of the town, of
the men and women who were making it famous (or rather infamous), when
suddenly they spoke the name of Locasto.

"He's gone off," Mervin was saying; "gone off on a big stampede. He got
pretty thick with some of the