"But, man, you should have made a fortune, there!"
"I did!" came Jim's laconic answer.
"I made a hundred thousand dollars in three months."
"What happened to it, then?"
"That," said the old prospector, leaning back, and looking at his two hearers, "is a wild an' woolly yarn! Do you want to hear it, or do I go on to the findin' o' that ore you've got in your hand?"
"Oh, tell the yarn, Jim!" pleaded Clem, who was less interested in Jim's strike than was the mine-owner. Owens nodded assent.
"Pannin' gold," Jim began, "is pretty much the same all over. One minin' camp is a good deal like another, though Forty-Mile was the cleanest an' straightest camp I ever struck. I could spin a good many yarns o' Forty-Mile an' near-by camps, but I'll leave 'em to another time an' tell you how it was I got poor, again, all in a hurry.
"With a bunch o' buckskin bags holdin' a hundred thousand dollars in the coarse nuggety gold o' Forty-Mile, I was good an' ready to take the back trail. I thought maybe I'd get back again next spring, for I'd become a sure-enough 'sour-dough' (old-timer of the northern gold-fields, so-called from camp bread). But I wanted to eat heavy an' lie soft for a while. I'd spend one winter in 'Frisco, any way, an' have a run for my money.
"The more I thought of it, the less I liked the notion o' goin' back over the Chilkoot Pass. Savin' for the first climb, the out trail was worse'n the in. All the rapids'd have to be portaged.