Jack didn’t say anything about it then but he made up his mind that when he went ’round the world on a pleasure jaunt, or anywhere else, Bill could go with him however crude his speech, and rough his manner.
They limped back to their base of supplies and stayed there for a week until the dogs got into shape again.
CHAPTER IX
THE LAND OF THE YEEHATS
On the various trips they had made from their base of supplies on the Big Black River the boys had kept a sharp lookout for marks or signs or other visual evidence which might indicate in some way the location of the treasure they sought. Jack’s hunch was responsible for his belief that so great a store of gold would not, in fact could not, have been abandoned without some clew which would serve as a key to its recovery.
They often dug off the snow from a pile of dirt which they thought might cover the sacks of gold; as wood was frequently hard to get, they couldn’t thaw it out and, consequently, had to work like “niggers” with their picks and shovels to penetrate it. And to what purpose?—usually only to find it was the dump of some discarded mine. But a gold seeker wots not of either hardship or work if his efforts give promise of bringing about the desired result. And they hoped great hopes.
Again they would find a cache (pronounced cash) but it was not of the kind that is formed of a hole in the ground, or a cavity under a pile of stones, but a box-like structure erected on poles set in the ground. Some of the better ones had notched logs which served as steps and these were set up at an angle on one side so that access to the cache could be made with greater ease and lesser agility. These caches were used by prospectors and miners who transported their outfits on their backs, or hauled them on sleds, and who had to double back on the trail time and time again before they got to their journey’s end.
In nearly all of these caches the stores were of ancient vintage, a few of them dating back to the pioneers of ’94 or perhaps a little later, and those who made the caches never returned to claim their contents either because they found they could get along without them, or were killed or died, or grew disheartened and made their way back to the river towns of the Yukon. In only a couple of them did they find fresh stores and in one of these, curiously enough, there was a poke[5] of gold nuggets. Its owner, in all probability, had laid it down when he was stocking the cache and forgot to take it with him when he went.
| [5] | A poke is a small bag usually of deerskin. |
Neither did the boys take it, nor disturb the stores in any of the caches they found, for it is an unwritten law in the barren north that no man shall touch anything cached which belongs to another.
On the fifth trip out they drove east, or more accurately east by south, crossed the International boundary line and headed straight for Mount Burgess forty miles away. As Jack had said, they cared not whether they found the gold in Alaska, in the Yukon Territory or on top of the North Pole, as long as they found it. After they had covered about thirty miles they ran into a scrub forest and the first thing Jack spied was a pair of moose antlers lashed to a tree.