"My gracious, the Hollow is like a pepper box!" said Randy one day, as he came into camp with his shirt wet through with perspiration. "Not a breath of air stirring."
"And the hotter it is, the worse the flies are," added Earl. "I declare, they seem to bother me more than even the mosquitoes."
Usually it cooled off toward seven or eight o'clock, even though the sun still shone well up in the sky, but this night proved as warm as the day had been, and most of the party went to sleep outdoors, unable to stand it inside of the close tents. Outside, they had to wind their heads and necks in mosquito netting and cover up their hands, to keep from being pestered to death. It was the most uncomfortable twenty-four hours they had yet put in.
"The old Harry take Alaska!" burst out Dr. Barwaithe, finally. One mosquito had alighted on his nose, and two others on his neck. "It's worth all the gold you can get, and more, too, to stand these impudent pests. Oh!" And making half a dozen wild slashes he finally scrambled up and ran around the tents to throw his tormentors off.
The captain was suffering from a slight attack of scurvy, brought on by eating so much salt food. The doctor had given him some medicine, but this did little good, and the captain was getting into a bad way when one of the old miners, who had just come in, came to his aid.
"Eat tomatoes, cap'n," he said. "Best thing on airth fer scurvy. Bill Watson wuz down with it wust way an' nuthin' helped him but tomatoes. He eat 'most a bushel o' 'em, an' they made a new man o' him. Eat tomatoes."
"Tomatoes may be very good," said the doctor. "They are a very strong, green vegetable, you know. You might try them."
And the captain did try them, first using up some of the cans brought along, and then buying a quart of fresh tomatoes at Dawson City, for two dollars. Sure enough, the tomatoes helped wonderfully, and about a week later the scurvy left him.
Nearly a month had now passed since the party had located at Mosquito Hollow, and in that time they had taken out three small nuggets worth probably fifty dollars apiece, and a little short of a hundred and fifty ounces of gold dust. Counting the gold dust as worth sixteen dollars an ounce, this gave them, in round figures, twenty-five hundred dollars for their labor.
"Twenty-five hundred dollars!" said Earl. "That's a good deal more than we could earn at home."