“Two years ago and nobody cared a pin to go to Nome. You couldn’t induce the boys to come. You had to bribe even Louis. Now forty thousand people, and all that tangle on the beach.” Her eyes were eager. “Nome, at this minute, must be the most wonderful sight in the world.”
“It’s the dump-heap of the nations! I’ll tell you what happened a week ago.” Mr. Mar was almost voluble in his anxiety to convince his daughter of the unfitness of Nome as a subject of feminine curiosity. “I’d been to the A.C. store and got a small draft cashed. Then I went up to Penny River and was gone all day. As I came back, behind the big Music Hall tent, I was held up. Two men turned out my pockets and made off with my thirty dollars. It was no use reporting the robbery. I was very tired, and I went to bed. I was waked up by some one rummaging about. But before I realized what was happening inside, I saw there were holes cut in the off wall of my tent, and two pairs of eyes were watching me. A little lower down the bores of a couple of pistols were sticking through. I lay perfectly still, and presently the man inside, who’d been going through my grip-sack, threw it down. ‘Where do you keep your stuff, anyhow?’ he said, and then I recognized him. ‘You’re not in luck. You’ve got hold of the same person twice,’ I said. ‘Think we didn’t know that?’ he said. ‘We made such a devilish poor haul we thought we’d give you another chance. Come along,’ he said, ‘where do you keep the rest?’ And when he found there wasn’t anything in the tent but a match and a pistol—well, he was good enough to tell me his opinion of me.”
“I don’t understand—isn’t it daylight all night?”
“Yes, but some of the honest people try to sleep, and then the crooks take over the town. The place is full of the professional criminal class. And if it weren’t, Nome, as it is to-day, would breed them. My next-door neighbor says if he owned all the Nome district and owned hell, he’d sell Nome and live in hell.”
“But the thing that brought everybody here—the gold!”
“The sour-doughs are getting some out of the creeks. But there aren’t any more windfalls for late comers, since the beach was worked out.”
“I did see one or two cheechalkers rocking in a hole here and there,” said Cheviot.
“Go back to-morrow; you won’t see the same faces. ‘Poor man’s country!’—where bread costs more than luxuries anywhere else on earth! Any business that’s done in Nome to-day is buying and selling and brokerage precisely as it is in Wall Street. For the moneyless mass there isn’t only disappointment, there isn’t only hardship; there’s acute suffering down on the beach. I don’t know, for my part, where it’s going to end.”
“I don’t mind not staying long,” said Miss Mar obligingly, “in a place where you wake up to find pistols and eyes peering in at you; but I wouldn’t, for all the world, I wouldn’t miss just seeing it.”
Mr. Mar moved his stick impatiently.