But the mountain received only passing notice.
Daylight’s interest was centered in the big
flat itself, with deep water all along its edge for
steamboat landings.
“A sure enough likely town site,” he muttered.
“Room for a camp of forty thousand men.
All that’s needed is the gold-strike.”
He meditated for a space. “Ten dollars
to the pan’ll do it, and it’d be the all-firedest
stampede Alaska ever seen. And if it don’t
come here, it’ll come somewhere hereabouts.
It’s a sure good idea to keep an eye out for
town sites all the way up.”
He stood a while longer, gazing out over the lonely
flat and visioning with constructive imagination the
scene if the stampede did come. In fancy, he
placed the sawmills, the big trading stores, the saloons,
and dance-halls, and the long streets of miners’
cabins. And along those streets he saw thousands
of men passing up and down, while before the stores
were the heavy freighting-sleds, with long strings
of dogs attached. Also he saw the heavy freighters
pulling down the main street and heading up the frozen
Klondike toward the imagined somewhere where the diggings
must be located.
He laughed and shook the vision from his eyes, descended
to the level, and crossed the flat to camp.
Five minutes after he had rolled up in his robe, he
opened his eyes and sat up, amazed that he was not
already asleep. He glanced at the Indian sleeping
beside him, at the embers of the dying fire, at the
five dogs beyond, with their wolf’s brushes
curled over their noses, and at the four snowshoes
standing upright in the snow.
“It’s sure hell the way that hunch works
on me” he murmured. His mind reverted to
the poker game. “Four kings!” He
grinned reminiscently. “That was
a hunch!”
He lay down again, pulled the edge of the robe around
his neck and over his ear-flaps, closed his eyes,
and this time fell asleep.
At Sixty Mile they restocked provisions, added a few
pounds of letters to their load, and held steadily
on. From Forty Mile they had had unbroken trail,
and they could look forward only to unbroken trail
clear to Dyea. Daylight stood it magnificently,
but the killing pace was beginning to tell on Kama.
His pride kept his mouth shut, but the result of
the chilling of his lungs in the cold snap could not
be concealed. Microscopically small had been
the edges of the lung-tissue touched by the frost,
but they now began to slough off, giving rise to a
dry, hacking cough. Any unusually severe exertion
precipitated spells of coughing, during which he was
almost like a man in a fit. The blood congested
in his eyes till they bulged, while the tears ran
down his cheeks. A whiff of the smoke from frying
bacon would start him off for a half-hour’s
paroxysm, and he kept carefully to windward when Daylight
was cooking.
