“So you see you and I are in the same class—everything going out and nothing coming in and I’ve been wondering a lot lately what we could scare up that would make a noise like a million dollars. Say Bill, did you ever read Jack London’s ‘Call of the Wild’?” Jack put the question without notice.
“‘Call o’ the Wild’?” mused Bill, turning the phrase over in his dome of thought; “I’ve heard all kinds o’ calls o’ wild men an’ wild women but never do I remember any wild call by this blokie Jack London. Who is this guy anyway?”
“There’s no use talking to a fellow like that,” thought Jack, but then, as in dozens of other instances in the past, he patiently explained who Jack London was and repeated the tale as told by that past master of fiction, for the benefit of his less well-read pal.
“Now the point I’m driving at is this,” he went on. “Jack London tells us that white men who were prospecting in the land of the Yeehats, a tribe of Indians in the gold country of Alaska, found diggings where there was gold, gold, nothing but gold, I tell you, and they packed it in moosehide sacks so that they could get it back to civilization. Then the Yeehats came upon and killed them and the shining yellow metal fell into their hands. The gold must still be up there, and you can’t dispute it either.”
At this recital Bill’s big blue eyes bulged out like those of a spider watching a fly. He had caught the drift of what Jack was saying and if there is any one thing that will set an inert imagination to functioning quicker or fix the attention of the human mind faster than another it is the mordant of seeking out this precious metal that we call gold. Then he blinked his eyes and shook his head.
“It sounds to me,” he said finally, which in the lingo of the cowboy, means that he had his doubts. “If this is a yarn this London feller wrote how do we know that he didn’t make up the Yeehats and the gold just like he made up the rest of it,” Bill wanted to know, and not without reason.
“I’ll tell you how. That book was given to me for a birthday present when I was about ten years old and whenever I wanted to read a good story I took it up just as everybody, from the rag-picker to the president, re-reads ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and ‘Treasure Island.’ So one fine day, not long after we got back from the oil-fields I spied the book and read it again; then all of a sudden this ending about the Yeehats and the gold in sacks struck me that there might be some truth lurking behind the fiction like a greaser behind a giant cactus or a Siwash behind a totem pole.”
“But how can we find out for sure?”
“I have found out already. I wrote to the Secretary of the Bureau of Ethnology at Washington and to the Minister of the Interior of Canada, and they sent me handbooks that tell all about the Indians of Alaska and the Yukon Territory and I’ve got the real dope on them.”
Bill had a high regard for Jack’s way of boring into things and this scheme of going to the governments for information about the Indians up there in the far Northland seemed to his untrained mind to approach very closely to a high order of genius. Still he was not entirely convinced.