.

"Call the police," she wailed.

"My dear Conlan----" commenced His Lordship.

"I'm through with talking. One minute gone!"

Angela stood up.

"I'm not coming to Alaska," she said defiantly, "but I'll come with you
out of this house, to save my mother and father further annoyance and
insult."

Jim walked to the door and held it open.

"We leave for Liverpool at five o'clock to-morrow morning," he said.

She got her hat and coat and walked majestically to the cab.

CHAPTER VIII

THE WHITE TRAIL

It was a "squaw man" rejoicing in the name of "Slick George" who first
revealed the magic wealth of the Klondyke. Whilst making a fire on a small
creek now known to the world as Bonanza Creek wherewith to cook his
evening meal, he thawed out some of the frozen gravel, and, in the manner
of the born prospector, carelessly washed it, to find himself the
possessor of nearly a thousand dollars in raw gold.

Making Forty Mile with a view to dissipating his newly found wealth in a
gormandizing "jag," he sent the settlers in that ramshackle camp into wild
excitement by producing nuggets of a size hitherto unmatched.

In a few hours Forty Mile was a deserted place. Every able-bodied man, and
not a few others, responded to the lure of gold with an alacrity that was
remarkable. Anything that would float was pushed into the muddy Yukon,
and poled up the fifty-two miles river to the new Eldorado.

The news spread with the speed amazing in so sparsely populated a country.
From all the townships lying on the banks of the Yukon, from Sitka and
from the Canadian borderland, came endless processions--good men, bad men,
women and children--all with the gold-lust overleaping any other
considerations.

Dawson, the center of all this itinerant humanity, grew from a struggling
camp on a frozen muskeg to a teeming Babylon. The strike proved to be
genuine. Already tens of thousands of dollars had been unearthed along
some of the smaller creeks. The price of commodities rose as the
population increased. When the Arctic winter settled down, and the
mountain-locked country was frozen a hundred feet down from the surface,
the thousands who had made the journey in ignorance of the conditions
obtaining found the food supply inadequate to meet the needs of the
wanderers. The law of Supply and Demand operating, only the lucky stakers
were able to pay the huge prices demanded for every single commodity.

The news filtered through to