"A friend at home grub-staked me, and I came in again—came down on the high water in June. Prospected as long as my stuff lasted, and then—well, I didn't care about starving, I became an A. C. Trader."
A long pause. This was no climax; everybody waited.
"And now I'm on my own. I often make more money in a day trading with the Indians in furs, fish, and cord-wood, than I made in my whole experience as a prospector and miner."
A frost had fallen on the genial company.
"But even if you hadn't any luck," the Boy suggested, "you must have seen others—"
"Oh, I saw some washing gravel that kept body and soul together, and I saw some ... that didn't."
In the pause he added, remorseless:
"I helped to bury some of them."
"Your experience was unusual, or why do men come back year after year?"
"Did you ever hear of a thing called Hope?"