"They've come, then," was the only remark, "but it's early for them yet."
"What is it, just a mosquito?" asked Roger.
"Just a mosquito," repeated Gersup, with a curious inflection in his voice, "just a poor innocent mosquito."
"Do you have many of them up here?" asked the boy, struck by the note of satire in the topographer's voice.
"Yes, we do," he replied curtly.
"Many of them?" put in Magee. "Why, a week from now you can wave a pint pot over your head and catch a quart of mosquitoes in it, and a month from now we'll have to cut our way through them with an ax."
"Oh, come off, now," said Roger, laughing.
"Laugh all you want to," continued the Irishman, "but it's a fact. Why, when they were building the Yukon railroad, during the months of July and August as the men went to work, they had to send the snow plow ahead of the gang in the morning in order to break a way through the banks of mosquitoes, and sometimes they had to put two engines behind the plow—make a double-header of it."
"Pretty good yarn, Magee," said the boy, "but if they're no worse than that I guess I can stand it."
Here Rivers broke in. "You will do well if you do stand it," he said, "because Magee is not so very far out. You will hardly believe it, but I would rather face a country of hostile Indians than hostile mosquitoes. That little mosquito you saw to-night means hundreds to-morrow, thousands the next day, and from that until cold weather hundreds of thousands all the time. Magee isn't exaggerating much, because Baron Munchausen would find it hard to do the Alaskan mosquitoes justice, when they get busy."