September’s end brought no great change in fortune, but a change withal of deep significance.  The ice had begun to run in the Yukon.  No man needed telling it would “be a tuhble wintah, and dey’d better move down Souf.”  All the late boats by both routes had been packed.  Those men who had failed, and yet, most tenacious, were hanging on for some last lucky turn of the wheel, knew the risk they ran.  And now to-day the final boat of the year was going down the long way to the Behring Sea, and by the Canadian route, open a little longer, the Big Chimney men, by grace of that one left behind, would be on the last ship to shoot the rapids in ’98.

Not only to the thousands who were going, to those who stayed behind there was something in the leaving of the last boat—­something that knocked upon the heart.  They, too, could still go home.  They gathered at the docks and told one another they wouldn’t leave Dawson for fifty thousand dollars, then looked at the “failures” with home-sick eyes, remembering those months before the luckiest Klondyker could hear from the world outside.  Between now and then, what would have come to pass up here, and what down there below!

The Boy had got a place for Muckluck in the A. C. Store.  She was handy at repairing and working in fur, and said she was “all right” on this bright autumn morning when the Boy went in to say good-bye.  With a white woman and an Indian boy, in a little room overlooking the water-front, Muckluck was working in the intervals of watching the crowds on the wharf.  Eyes more experienced than hers might well stare.  Probably in no other place upon the globe was gathered as motley a crew:  English, Indian, Scandinavian, French, German, Negroes, Chinese, Poles, Japs, Finns.  All the fine gentlemen had escaped by earlier boats.  All the smart young women with their gold-nugget buttons as big as your thumb, lucky miners from the creeks with heavy consignments of dust to take home, had been too wary to run any risk of the Never-Know-What closing inopportunely.  The great majority here, on the wharf, dazed or excited, lugging miscellaneous possessions—­things they had clung to in straits so desperate they knew no more how to relax their hold than dead fingers do—­these were men whose last chance had been the Klondyke, and who here, as elsewhere, had failed.  Many who came in young were going out old; but the odd thing was that those worst off went out game—­no whining, none of the ostentatious pathos of those broken on the wheel of a great city.

A man under Muckluck’s window, dressed in a moose-skin shirt, straw hat, broadcloth trousers, and carpet slippers, in one hand a tin pail, in the other something tied in a handkerchief, called out lustily to a ragged individual, cleaving a way through the throng, “Got your stuff aboard?”

“Yes, goin’ to get it off.  I ain’t goin’ home till next year.”

And the face above the moose-skin shirt was stricken with a sudden envy.  Without any telling, he knew just how his pardner’s heart had failed him, when it came to turning his tattered back on the possibilities of the Klondyke.