on for
two hundred miles yielded Doc Lewis sufficient revenue to grub-stake a
Swede. Thus he slept warm, kept his feet dry, and was still a miner. He
did not believe in hardship, and eschewed stampedes. Yet when he had
seen the last able-bodied man vanish from camp on the Skookum run he
grew restless. He scoffed at fake excitements to Jarvis, the
faro-dealer, who also forbore the trail by virtue of his calling, but he
got no satisfaction. A fortnight later he rolled his blankets and
journeyed toilsomely up the river valley.

"Better late than never," he thought.

Arriving at the empty shack of the negroes, he camped, only to awaken
during the night to the roar of the torrent at his door. Having seen
other mountain streams in the break-up, he waited philosophically,
hunting ptarmigan among the firs back of the cabin.

He had lost track of the days when, down the gulch, in the morning
light, he descried a strange party approaching.

Two men bore between them a stretcher made from their shirts. They
crawled with dreadful slowness, resting every hundred feet. Moreover,
they stumbled and staggered aimlessly through the niggerheads. As they
drew near he sighted their faces, from which the teeth grinned in a
grimace of torture and through which the cheek-bones seemed to
penetrate.

He knew what the signs boded. For years he had ministered to these
necessities, and no man had ever approached his success.

"It is the rape of the North they are doing," he sighed. "We ravage her
stores, but she takes grim toll from all of us." He moved the hot water
forward on the stove, cleared off the rude table, and laid out his
instrument-case.

WHEN THE MAIL CAME IN

We didn't like Montague Prosser at first--he was too clean. He wore his
virtue like a bath-robe, flapping it in our faces. It was Whitewater
Kelly who undertook to mitigate him one day, but, being as the nuisance
stood an even fathom high and had a double-action football motion about
him, Whitewater's endeavors kind of broke through the ice and he
languished around in his bunk the next week while we sat up nights and
changed his bandages.

Yes, Monty was equally active at repartee or rough-house, and he knocked
Whitewater out from under his cap, slick and clean, just the way you
snap a playing-card out from under a coin, which phenomenon terminated
our tendencies to scoff and carp.

Personally, I didn't care. If a man wants to wallow about in a
disgustin