ment, and the miner went over it carefully.

"What ye got here?" he asked, kicking the heavy case before referred to,
which the boys had brought along on their own initiative. "Pianny? Don't
believe we need any pianny, up Yukon way. There's plenty piannys in
Alaska, now, but I remember the first one that was brought in. It's up in
Dawson yet. It was brought in on the first rush in '98. Cost four hundred
dollars in the States and two thousand dollars to haul up from Skagway.
The last time I heard it, it was being mauled by a feenominon, who had a
patent pianny-playin' wooden arm on one side, and it sounded like a day's
work in a boiler factory at one end and a bad smash in a glass pantry at
the other. I heard some o' them educated Cheechakos talkin' about art, but
I didn't care for it much."

"It isn't a piano," said Gerald as the laugh subsided. "It's a little
enterprise of our own, and is to be put in storage in Skagway until we're
through with our work."

"Wa'al," replied the guide, as he tested its weight, "we don't have to
handle it then, and that's something of a load off my mind."

The next day when the boy Scouts awoke they found the vessel anchored in
the picturesque harbor of Skagway, the end of the "Inside Passage."

CHAPTER V.

A NEW MODE OF TRAVEL.

Their stay in Skagway was brief. It was the point of parting between
Colonel Snow and his young charges, as it was necessary for him to hasten
a way westward to another part of Alaska on his mission, which would
occupy some weeks. The boys parted with him reluctantly and with some
little feeling of homesickness, but he promised to join them as early as
possible and assured them that he had placed them in safe hands, with
ample means for their return to Skagway should sickness or accident befall
them.

Except for the brief glimpses of native and local Alaskan life which they
had obtained during the stoppages of the steamer at Metlakatla, in the
Annette Islands, a reservation set apart by Congress for the now civilized
Tsimpsean Indians, a tribe which, with their devoted missionary head,
William Duncan, immigrated from British Columbia to secure, it is said,
greater religious liberty, and at Ketchikan, a thriving town, the boys
here gained their first real impressions of Alaskan conditions. They found
Skagway a town of about fifteen hundred people, set in a great natural
amphitheatre surrounded by mountains capped with perpetual snow. It is
connect