By the following Monday the boys had seen everything that Seattle and the surrounding country had to offer but the only things that interested Bill were the Siwash Indians and Mount Ranier.
“I suppose you’ll say that the New Yorkers are dirtier than these Siwashes and that Mount Ranier can’t hold a candle to the Palisades,” Jack bantered him.
“Somebody must have taken the wash out of them Siwashes from the way they smell, and as for Mount Ranier, I’ll say it’s a real mountain. Let’s climb it, what say, Jack?”
“After we get the gold,” was his pal’s comeback.
The five days that followed on the S. S. Princess Alice were long, bright, glorious, tiresome ones and the boys would have enjoyed every minute of the time if that disconcerting, maddening, magic word gold had not kept burning in their brains. They saw yellow and the nearer they came to that wonderful land in the far north, which the discoveries of gold had made as famous as diamonds have made the Kimberly mines or watered stock has made Wall Street, their very beings seemed to be transmuted into the precious metal.
Hence, neither the great Coast Range Mountains nor the wonderful glaciers appealed overmuch to these youngsters who had set their hearts on getting gold out of the Yukon-Arctic district just as firmly as had ever the most seasoned prospector.
But Juneau did make an impression on Bill for he heard tales of gold up there the like of which he had never heard before. Only once did he think to belittle the town by making odious comparisons of it with his “Noo York” but with Jack’s help he smothered the attempt for he was in the gold country now and was carried away by that malignant disease known as the gold fever.
CHAPTER III
ON THE EDGE OF THINGS
The Princess Alice made a stop for a few hours at Juneau, a town standing on a promontory between Lynn Canal and the Taku River, and the boys, with many other passengers, disembarked to see what they could see. Here for the first time they felt they were getting pretty close to the field of their future activities for they were in Alaska, the land of the midnight sun and the aurora borealis, the moose and the caribou, the prehistoric glaciers and—hidden gold.
Across the water a great mill was in full blast and as they stood looking at it a big, grisly sort of a man, who appeared to be between fifty and sixty, and whose clothes showed that he was an old time prospector, moved over toward them. Evidently he had in mind the idea of holding some small conversation with them, for up on top of the world the inhabitants do not consider formal introductions as being at all necessary when they feel like talking to any one.