Bull Evans leanin' over me.

"'What's the worst, Bull?' I asks, as soon as I realizes.

"'Red Bill's gone,' he says, 'an' so's most o' the grub. The dunnage
is scattered anywheres along a mile or two. We hoofs it from here. No
more rafts in mine!'

"An' a good thing we did hoof it, too. If we'd got through the Grand
Canyon Rapids an' struck, unknowin', the White Horse Rapids--what they
afterwards called the 'Miners' Grave'--nary a one o' the three of us
would ha' come out alive.

"As it was, bein' afoot, we broke away from what afterwards was the
Klondyke Trail, an', instead of striking across Lake Labarge, kep'
between it an' Lake Kluane, strikin' some creeks leadin' into the
White River. There, at last, after three months on the trail, we
panned an' found color. We trailed on, pannin' as we went, cleanin' up
pretty fair, an' final, struck some placers on the Stewart River. The
Injuns was peaceful an' we could get grub from a half-breed tradin'
store near old Fort Selkirk. We wintered there."

"That was in '85?" Owens queried.

"Winter o' '85 an' spring o' '86."

"Then you must have been right on hand for the great strike on
Forty-Mile?"

"We sure was."

"But, man, you should have made a fortune, there!"

"I did!" came Jim's laconic answer.

"Well?"

"I made a hundred thousand dollars in three months."

"What happened to it, then?"

"That," said the old prospector, leaning back, and looking at his two
hearers, "is a wild an' woolly yarn! Do you want to hear it, or do I
go on to the findin' o' that ore you've got in your hand?"

"Oh, tell the yarn, Jim!" pleaded Clem, who was less interested in
Jim's strike than was the mine-owner. Owens nodded assent.

"Pannin' gold," Jim began, "is pretty much the same all over. One
minin' camp is a good deal like another, though Forty-Mile was the
cleanest an' straightest camp I ever struck. I could spin a good many
yarns o' Forty-Mile an' near-by camps, but I'll leave 'em to another
time an' tell you how it was I got poor, again, all in a hurry.

"With a bunch o' buckskin bags holdin' a hundred thousand dollars in
the coarse nuggety gold o' Forty-Mile, I was good an' ready to take
the back trail. I thought maybe I'd get back again next spring, for
I'd become a sure-enough 'sour-dough' (old-timer of the northern
gold-fields, so-called from camp bread). But I wanted to eat heavy
an' lie soft for a while. I'd spend one winter in 'Frisco, any way,
an' have a run f