d. "Never say die!
This gen'l'man's been at it twelve years--tried more 'n one camp, but
now--well, he's so well fixed he don't care a cuss about the Klondyke."

Schiff lit up and pulled hard at the cutty.

O'Flynn had taken Kaviak to the fire, and was showing him how to roast
half a petaty in wood ashes; but he was listening to the story and
putting in "Be the Siven!" at appropriate moments.

Schiff poured out a cloud of rank smoke.

"Gen'lemen," he said, "the best Klondyke claims'll be potted. Minook's
the camp o' the future. You'd better come along with us."

"Got no dogs," sighed the Boy; but the two strangers looked hard at the
man who hadn't that excuse.

Benham sat and idly watched preparations for the next course.

"Say, a nabob like you might give us a tip. How did you do the trick?"

"Well, I'd been playing your game for three years, and no galley slave
ever worked half as hard--"

"That's it! work like the devil for a couple o' years and then live
like a lord for ever after."

"Yes; well, when the time came for me to go into the Lord business I
had just forty-two dollars and sixty cents to set up on."

"What had you done with the rest?"

"I'd spent the five thousand dollars my father left me, and I'd cleaned
up just forty-two dollars sixty cents in my three years' mining."

The announcement fell chill on the company.

"I was dead broke and I had no credit. I went home."

"But"--Mac roused himself--"you didn't stay--"

"No, you don't stay--as a rule;"--Mac remembered Caribou--"get used to
this kind o' thing, and miss it. Miss it so you--"

"You came back," says Salmon P., impatient of generalities.

"And won this time," whispered Schiff.

For that is how every story must end. The popular taste in fiction is
universal.

"A friend at home grub-staked me, and I came in again--came down on the
high water in June. Prospected as long as my stuff lasted, and
then--well, I didn't care about starving, I became an A. C. Trader."

A long pause. This was no climax; everybody waited.

"And now I'm on my own. I often make more money in a day trading with
the Indians in furs, fish, and cord-wood, than I made in my whole
experience as a prospector and miner."

A frost had fallen on the genial company.

"But even if _you_ hadn't any luck," the Boy suggested, "you must have
seen others--"

"Oh, I saw some washing gravel that kept body and soul together, and I
saw some ... that didn't."

In the p