The boys thought that he must be tired of life. But hold there matey, just as they had timed her to strike the rock he bore down hard on his wheel to port and the boat missed the rock by the skin of its teeth, Their hearts dropped back from their throats to their thoraxes again and they believed they still stood a fair chance of finding the gold they were after.
And now comes Dawson into view—Dawson in the heart of the Klondike—the Dawson of tradition, adventure, romance and—of gold! This is the identical town where that great army of pioneer gold seekers, who braved the rigors of the winters, the dangers of the rapids, the stresses of starvation and the robbers of Soapy Smith’s gang, found themselves if they were unfortunate enough to be so fortunate.
As the steamboat ties up here for half a day to load and unload its cargo the boys went on a hike over to an Indian village called Moosehide, a little way down the trail from Dawson. On returning to town they got the borry, as Bill called it, of a couple of horses and rode out eight or ten miles where some great dredges were at work bringing up the sand and gravel from the streams and hydraulicking equipments were washing the gold out of it.
“This kind of mining,” Jack said to his partner, “is simply panning out gold on a big scale by machinery, and gold fields that are not rich enough to be worked profitably by a prospector will yield gold on a paying basis where hydraulicking can be taken advantage of.”
“It’s too slow a game for me,” was Bill’s idea of the scheme, “I wants to pick it up in chunks.”
“That’s what we’re here for,” Jack made answer.
They left Dawson that evening and the next morning still found them in the Yukon Territory, but shortly after breakfast the boat crossed the International boundary line and they were on good old U. S. soil again. The boat soon made a landing at Eagle City where Fort Egbert is located and the first thing Jack spied was a big wireless station which he knew belonged to the U. S. Army.
From Eagle to Circle City, or just Circle as it is called for short, is a sail of a hundred and ninety miles. Both Jack and Bill were dead tired of traveling and they hailed Circle as heartily as they would have hailed their own home town. But they didn’t know what they were hailing. The only outstanding fact with them was that they had arrived, or at any rate they had gone as far as trains and boats could carry them toward the goal of their desires. The bridge was swung ashore and they got off without delay. The whistle blew a couple of sonorous blasts, and the boat backed off and went on her way down stream.
In the days of the gold rush Circle had been the great outfitting town in these parts. It was built up entirely of log cabins and it had more log cabins than any town had ever gathered together before or since. Why Circle City? Whence the name? Because when the town was started it was believed to be located right on the Arctic Circle but later it was learned that it was a good eighty miles below the Circle.
As the boys stepped ashore they were greeted by a few white men, some Indians and the ear-splitting howls of the huskies.