he had been, and how he had hurried home. As
he came down the short stair a friend faced him and said "Good-night,"
where we say "Good-evening." "Hello, Bill," said the fat drummer. They
shook hands languidly. The fat man yawned and asked, "Anything doing?"
"Not the littlest," said Bill. "Then," said Jim (the fat man), "let us
go up to the King Edward, sit down, and have a good, quiet smoke."

THE CONQUEST OF ALASKA

Immediately under the man with the money, who lived in London, there was
the President in Chicago; then came the chief engineer in Seattle, the
locating engineer in Skagway, the contractor in the grading camp, and
Hugh Foy, the "boss" of the builders. Yet in spite of all this
overhanging stratification, Foy was a big man. To be sure, none of these
men had happened to get their positions by mere chance. They were men of
character and fortitude, capable of great sacrifice.

Mr. Close, in London, knew that his partner, Mr. Graves, in Chicago,
would be a good man at the head of so cold and hopeless an enterprise as
a Klondike Railway; and Mr. Graves knew that Erastus Corning Hawkins,
who had put through some of the biggest engineering schemes in the West,
was the man to build the road. The latter selected, as locating
engineer, John Hislop, the hero, one of the few survivors of that wild
and daring expedition that undertook, some twenty years ago, to survey a
route for a railroad whose trains were to traverse the Grand Canon of
Colorado, where, save for the song of the cataract, there is only shade
and silence and perpetual starlight. Heney, a wiry, compact, plucky
Canadian contractor, made oral agreement with the chief engineer and,
with Hugh Foy as his superintendent of construction, began to grade what
they called the White Pass and Yukon Railway. Beginning where the
bone-washing Skagway tells her troubles to the tide-waters at the elbow
of that beautiful arm of the Pacific Ocean called Lynn Canal, they
graded out through the scattered settlement where a city stands to-day,
cut through a dense forest of spruce, and began to climb the hill.

When the news of ground-breaking had gone out to Seattle and Chicago,
and thence to London, conservative capitalists, who had suspected Close
Brothers and Company and all their associates in this wild scheme of
temporary insanity, concluded that the sore affliction had come to stay.
But the dauntless builders on the busy field where the grading camp was
in act