"What makes you think that?" laughed the Boy, poking his brown fingers through the knee-hole of his breeches.
"Arre ye contint wid that gowld-mine at Minóok? No, be the Siven! What's wan gowld-mine to a millionaire? What forr wud ye be prospectin that desert oiland, you and yer faithful man Froyday, if ye wasn't rooned intoirely be riches?"
The Boy tore himself away from his old friends, and followed the arbiter of his fate. The engines had started up again, and they were going on.
"I'm told," said the Captain rather severely, "that Minóok's a busted camp."
"Oh, is it?" returned the ragged one cheerfully. Then he remembered that this Captain Rainey had grub-staked a man in the autumn—a man who was reported to know where to look for the Mother Lode, the mighty parent of the Yukon placers. "I can tell you the facts about Minóok." He followed the Captain up on the hurricane-deck, giving him details about the new strike, and the wonderful richness of Idaho Bar. "Nobody would know about it to-day, but that the right man went prospecting there." (One in the eye for whoever said Minóok was "busted," and another for the prospector Rainey had sent to look for——) "You see, men like Pitcairn have given up lookin' for the Mother Lode. They say you might as well look for Mother Eve; you got to make out with her descendants. Yukon gold, Pitcairn says, comes from an older rock series than this"—he stood in the shower of sparks constantly spraying from the smoke-stack to the fireproof deck, and he waved his hand airily at the red rock of the Ramparts—"far older than any of these. The gold up here has all come out o' rock that went out o' the rock business millions o' years ago. Most o' that Mother Lode the miners are lookin' for is sand now, thirteen hundred miles away in Norton Sound."
"Just my luck," said the Captain gloomily, going a little for'ard, as though definitely giving up mining and returning to his own proper business.
"But the rest o' the Mother Lode, the gold and magnetic iron, was too heavy to travel. That's what's linin' the gold basins o' the North—linin' Idaho Bar thick."
The Captain sighed.
"Twelve," a voice sang out on the lower deck.
"Twelve," repeated the Captain.