“She ain’t jumped,” Kink assured him.  “It’s No. 24, and it stands.  The chechaquos took it serious, and they begun stakin’ where you left off.  Staked clean over the divide, too.  I was gassin’ with one of them which has just got in with cramps in his legs.”

It was then, and for the first time, that they heard the slow and groping utterance of Ans Handerson.

“Ay like the looks,” he was saying to the bar-keeper.  “Ay tank Ay gat a claim.”

The partners winked at each other, and a few minutes later a surprised and grateful Swede was drinking bad whisky with two hard-hearted strangers.  But he was as hard-headed as they were hard-hearted.  The sack made frequent journeys to the scales, followed solicitously each time by Kink Mitchell’s eyes, and still Ans Handerson did not loosen up.  In his pale blue eyes, as in summer seas, immortal dreams swam up and burned, but the swimming and the burning were due to the tales of gold and prospect pans he heard, rather than to the whisky he slid so easily down his throat.

The partners were in despair, though they appeared boisterous and jovial of speech and action.

“Don’t mind me, my friend,” Hootchinoo Bill hiccoughed, his hand upon Ans Handerson’s shoulder.  “Have another drink.  We’re just celebratin’ Kink’s birthday here.  This is my pardner, Kink, Kink Mitchell.  An’ what might your name be?”

This learned, his hand descended resoundingly on Kink’s back, and Kink simulated clumsy self-consciousness in that he was for the time being the centre of the rejoicing, while Ans Handerson looked pleased and asked them to have a drink with him.  It was the first and last time he treated, until the play changed and his canny soul was roused to unwonted prodigality.  But he paid for the liquor from a fairly healthy-looking sack.  “Not less ’n eight hundred in it,” calculated the lynx-eyed Kink; and on the strength of it he took the first opportunity of a privy conversation with Bidwell, proprietor of the bad whisky and the tent.

“Here’s my sack, Bidwell,” Kink said, with the intimacy and surety of one old-timer to another.  “Just weigh fifty dollars into it for a day or so more or less, and we’ll be yours truly, Bill an’ me.”

Thereafter the journeys of the sack to the scales were more frequent, and the celebration of Kink’s natal day waxed hilarious.  He even essayed to sing the old-timer’s classic, “The Juice of the Forbidden Fruit,” but broke down and drowned his embarrassment in another round of drinks.  Even Bidwell honoured him with a round or two on the house; and he and Bill were decently drunk by the time Ans Handerson’s eyelids began to droop and his tongue gave promise of loosening.

Bill grew affectionate, then confidential.  He told his troubles and hard luck to the bar-keeper and the world in general, and to Ans Handerson in particular.  He required no histrionic powers to act the part.  The bad whisky attended to that.  He worked himself into a great sorrow for himself and Bill, and his tears were sincere when he told how he and his partner were thinking of selling a half-interest in good ground just because they were short of grub.  Even Kink listened and believed.