Bill looked up and blinked his eyes at his partner.
“Yes, it was a great fight all right. I’m sorry you missed it and I wish you could have seen it from the place I did. I allus did prefer broilin’ moose-steaks as against killin’ a b’ar, and hereafter youse gets the wood. See?”
So ended their hunt for big game.
Now if you will look at a map of Alaska you will see that the Porcupine River is like the letter U laid over on its side; that is to say, its head waters are in Alaska and the stream then flows east over the International boundary into the Yukon Territory, thence north by northeast across the Arctic Circle and when it reaches latitude 137 degrees and longitude about 67-1/2 degrees, it makes a sharp bend and flows back west by southwest for a couple of hundred miles, when it empties into the Yukon River, between the towns of Beaver and Fort Yukon.
The boys had followed Jack’s scheme of going out in every direction like spokes from the hub of a wheel, in which case, as has been previously explained, the hub was the base of their supplies on the Big Black River. And it will also be seen by a reference to the map that this river is a tributary of the Porcupine River and empties into it near Fort Yukon. In fact, Alaska is a country of rivers and nearly all of them, except those along the coast, are feeders for the Yukon River.
By the middle of March the boys had completed about half of the spokes of the wheel and on this particular trip they had found greater evidences of gold in larger quantities than on any one they had previously made. It was their sixth trip, which took them due south of their base, and at the end of it they came to the head waters of the Porcupine River. Then they traveled down it, or perhaps it would be better to say up it, for in its inception it flows northwest. They met more miners on, and in the vicinity of, the Porcupine River than in all of the rest of their trips put together.
Every little way they would come across a handful of miners who were engaged in the irksome but albeit pleasant task of picking out the pay-streak in a mine, hauling it to the surface and piling it up on the dump. At these camps the boys always lost a lot of time for they would have to stop and give, or get, the latest news from down under which in most instances was from three to five months old. All of the men they met were in the most cheerful and sanguine frame of mind, which of itself was enough to show that the claims they had staked out were rich in the yellow metal.
At every camp the boys received a most hearty welcome from these rough and hardy men who were wresting treasure from old Mother Earth here in the high, high North. Often they felt that they must push on but they simply could not withstand the temptation of accepting an invite to stay for dinner, supper or breakfast, or as long as they had a mind to, for the men were making their piles and under such auspicious circumstances they craved the company of their fellow kind.
Thus it was that when the boys went into the rough log cabins, which were often no better and sometimes a great deal worse than their own, they saw glittering things lying around loose the like of which their cabin could not boast, and these were nuggets of gold in abundance. In one cabin they saw an old molasses can with the cover melted off and it was filled to overflowing with nuggets; in another cabin there was a bucket heaped high with nuggets, while in still another, nuggets were piled up in the corner like coal.
And this treasure was only a small part, an incidental part, of the winnings of these men, for the nuggets were picked up from the pay-streak as it was picked out and shoveled into the buckets, while the gold dust which had a far greater worth was still out in the dumps waiting to be washed in the final clean-up which would take place in the spring.