"Why! what on earth brought you then? Storekeeping? You puzzle me."
"Oh! no. I'm a writer and an artist. I came up for a Tacoma newspaper—to send articles and sketches out."
I had noticed a few drawings fastened to the logs. They had interested me. May had informed me they were her father's work, and this was the explanation.
"But you haven't been able to keep up correspondence with headquarters," I remarked. "Have you sent anything to them? Has anything been published?"
"Ah! that I don't know," he replied. "We sent some from Circle City and a few sketches, but since that, nothing. You see we soon discovered there was the chance of making more money here at gold-digging than by newspaper work, and ultimately we got up this Stewart river."
"Stewart river!" I exclaimed, "what makes you call this river so? This is the Klondyke, or a branch of it."
"No! no!" declared Mr Bell, "I assure you it is a tributary of the Stewart, here."
We had no map, no knowledge at all of the geography of the country. We only understood that the Yukon ran through it, having its sources in the Rocky Mountains to the east, and ending in Behring Sea, in the Arctic Ocean, to the north-west. Into this river we believed all other streams ran. I assured him that Meade and I came down it from the east, passing the mouth of the Stewart on the way to Dawson, where we entered the Thronda or Klondyke, which we ascended for fifty miles or so; then we came up a branch perhaps forty miles, and there we camped and had stopped since.
Now, I had come farther up this same stream for ten or twelve miles, and found them. "Certainly," I said, "we must be on a branch of the Klondyke."
Mr Bell was as sure that we were on the Stewart. We could not settle it. I believed that it was, at most, one hundred miles from my dug-out to Dawson, whilst he declared that from the shanty in which we were then talking it was more than two hundred and fifty! It was a puzzle which we could not and did not clear up then.