bitant
prices with Ans Handerson's dust and crossed over the divide in the
direction of the creeks that lie between Klondike and Indian River.

Three months later they came back over the divide in the midst of a snow-
storm and dropped down the trail to 24 ELDORADO. It merely chanced that
the trail led them that way. They were not looking for the claim. Nor
could they see much through the driving white till they set foot upon the
claim itself. And then the air lightened, and they beheld a dump, capped
by a windlass that a man was turning. They saw him draw a bucket of
gravel from the hole and tilt it on the edge of the dump. Likewise they
saw another, man, strangely familiar, filling a pan with the fresh
gravel. His hands were large; his hair wets pale yellow. But before
they reached him, he turned with the pan and fled toward a cabin. He
wore no hat, and the snow falling down his neck accounted for his haste.
Bill and Kink ran after him, and came upon him in the cabin, kneeling by
the stove and washing the pan of gravel in a tub of water.

He was too deeply engaged to notice more than that somebody had entered
the cabin. They stood at his shoulder and looked on. He imparted to the
pan a deft circular motion, pausing once or twice to rake out the larger
particles of gravel with his fingers. The water was muddy, and, with the
pan buried in it, they could see nothing of its contents. Suddenly he
lifted the pan clear and sent the water out of it with a flirt. A mass
of yellow, like butter in a churn, showed across the bottom.

Hootchinoo Bill swallowed. Never in his life had he dreamed of so rich a
test-pan.

"Kind of thick, my friend," he said huskily. "How much might you reckon
that-all to be?"

Ans Handerson did not look up as he replied, "Ay tank fafty ounces."

"You must be scrumptious rich, then, eh?"

Still Ans Handerson kept his head down, absorbed in putting in the fine
touches which wash out the last particles of dross, though he answered,
"Ay tank Ay ban wort' five hundred t'ousand dollar."

"Gosh!" said Hootchinoo Bill, and he said it reverently.

"Yes, Bill, gosh!" said Kink Mitchell; and they went out softly and
closed the door.

THE ONE THOUSAND DOZEN

David Rasmunsen was a hustler, and, like many a greater man, a man of the
one idea. Wherefore, when the clarion call of the North rang on his ear,
he conceived an adventure in eggs and bent all his energy to its
achievemen