ad
begun with Rand's rescue of the old Klondiker, ripened before many days of
the voyage had elapsed into something like warm friendship and the miner
became a wellspring of joy to the young men in the wealth of adventure
narrative that fell from his lips and the quiet humor of his views of
life. His removal by Captain Huxley, to the saloon deck on which they were
berthed, gave them constant opportunity for meeting him, and as the
novelty of the scenery and surroundings gradually wore off, they turned
more and more to his companionship and plied him incessantly with
cross-examination as to the peculiarities of the new land which they were
about to enter.

At one time in command of a whaler in Bering Sea waters, his ship had been
one of six crushed in the ice of the Arctic sea, the crews of which had
been forced to winter at Point Barrow, the most northerly point of the
United States, where the government had established a whaling relief
station.

The enormous burden thrown upon this relief station by the influx of so
great a number of dependents coming from the whalers, who had no means of
getting away, threatened starvation for all and only by the greatest good
fortune did word reach the government at Washington, which at once took
steps for their relief. Lieut. Jarvis of the Revenue Marine Service, who
was in the east at the time on furlough, from his ship, a revenue cutter
engaged in patroling Bering Sea to protect the seal fisheries, volunteered
to make the effort to relieve the starving men, although he was leaving
the bedside of a sick wife whom he might never see again. Bering Sea and
the Arctic are frozen over six months at a time, and the relief expedition
must be made over the frozen tundra and uninhabited snow waste, eighteen
hundred miles in extent, from the Seward Peninsula to the "top of the
continent," as Swiftwater Jim termed it.

The problem as to how to transport the food for these men over this great
expanse of country, barren of trails and almost impassible in places, was
solved by Lieutenant Jarvis and his aides. By assembling from the various
reindeer stations which the government had established in the Far North, a
large herd of reindeer which they drove the entire distance to Point
Barrow, they arrived just in time to relieve the hundreds of men who were
on the verge of starvation.

"I tell ye," said Swiftwater Jim, in telling the story to the boys, "I
have never seen anything on earth since