ssional packers, and jumped the freight
ten cents a pound in a single day. In token of their gratitude, the
packers patronized his faro and roulette layouts and were mulcted
cheerfully of their earnings. But his commercialism was of too lusty a
growth to be long endured; so they rushed him one night, burned his
shanty, divided the bank, and headed him up the trail with empty pockets.

Ill-luck was his running mate. He engaged with responsible parties to
run whisky across the line by way of precarious and unknown trails, lost
his Indian guides, and had the very first outfit confiscated by the
Mounted Police. Numerous other misfortunes tended to make him bitter of
heart and wanton of action, and he celebrated his arrival at Lake Bennett
by terrorizing the camp for twenty straight hours. Then a miners'
meeting took him in hand, and commanded him to make himself scarce. He
had a wholesome respect for such assemblages, and he obeyed in such haste
that he inadvertently removed himself at the tail-end of another man's
dog team. This was equivalent to horse-stealing in a more mellow clime,
so he hit only the high places across Bennett and down Tagish, and made
his first camp a full hundred miles to the north.

Now it happened that the break of spring was at hand, and many of the
principal citizens of Dawson were travelling south on the last ice. These
he met and talked with, noted their names and possessions, and passed on.
He had a good memory, also a fair imagination; nor was veracity one of
his virtues.

II

Dawson, always eager for news, beheld Montana Kid's sled heading down the
Yukon, and went out on the ice to meet him. No, he hadn't any
newspapers; didn't know whether Durrant was hanged yet, nor who had won
the Thanksgiving game; hadn't heard whether the United States and Spain
had gone to fighting; didn't know who Dreyfus was; but O'Brien? Hadn't
they heard? O'Brien, why, he was drowned in the White Horse; Sitka
Charley the only one of the party who escaped. Joe Ladue? Both legs
frozen and amputated at the Five Fingers. And Jack Dalton? Blown up on
the "Sea Lion" with all hands. And Bettles? Wrecked on the
"Carthagina," in Seymour Narrows,--twenty survivors out of three hundred.
And Swiftwater Bill? Gone through the rotten ice of Lake LeBarge with
six female members of the opera troupe he was convoying. Governor Walsh?
Lost with all hands and eight sleds on the Thirty Mile. Devereaux? Who