“I never learned. But Clay dealt with the situation sensibly. After all, he said, it was only a pocket; a small alluvial deposit. The stream which had brought the gold there had, no doubt, left some more in the slacker eddies, and it might be worth while to look for the mother-lode, where the metal came from. We had food enough to last while we prospected the neighborhood. The next morning we set about it, and, following up the creek, we found gold here and there; but our provisions threatened to run out before we came to the watershed.”
“Were any of the pockets as rich as the stolen one?” Ruth asked.
“No,” her father answered with a hint of reserve. “Still, we found some gold and got back safely to the coast. For a while I helped Clay, and then he told me he must go south before the ice closed in. We sailed in the vessel that he and some of his friends had bought, and when we rowed off to her one misty day through a heavy surf I did not look forward to a comfortable trip. She was an old wooden steamer that had been whaling, with tall bulwarks and cut-down masts, and the topsail yards she still carried gave her a top-heavy look. The small, dirty saloon and part of the ’tween-decks were crowded with successful miners and others who were at least fortunate in having money enough to take them out of the country before winter set in. None of them, I think, wished to see the North again, and nobody who knew it could blame them. Those who had gold had earned it by desperate labor and grim endurance; those who had none were going back broken men—frost-bitten, crippled by accidents, and ravaged by disease.
“We had some trouble in getting to sea. Several of the crew had deserted, and the rest were half-mutinous because they had been forcibly kept on board. They struck me as a slipshod, unsailorly lot. To make things worse, it was blowing fresh on-shore, and she lay, straining at her cables and dipping her bows, in the long roll, in an open roadstead. They broke a messenger chain that drove the rickety windlass in getting the stream anchor up, and the miners had to help with tackles before they could bring the kedge to the bows. Then she crawled slowly out to sea under half steam, and, although there was not much prospect of it, I hoped she would make a quick passage. The young first mate and one of the engineers seemed capable men, but there was nothing to recommend the rest, and the skipper was slack and too convivial in his habits. He was a little, slouching man, with an unsteady look.”
“How did such an old ship get passengers, and why didn’t they engage a better crew?” Ruth wanted to know.
“Passengers were not particular during the gold rush, and good seamen were scarce on the Pacific slope. All who were worth anything had gone off to the diggings.”
“Oh! Where was the gold she carried kept?”
“In a strong-room under the floor of the stern cabin; that is, the gold that was formally shipped by her, because I believe some of the miners carried as much as possible on their persons and stowed the rest under their bunks. Anyway, you saw men keeping watch while the bedroom stewards were at work, and I imagine it would have been dangerous to mistake one’s berth at night. I generally struck a match to make sure of my number. However, for the most part, the passengers seemed an honest lot, and I had more confidence in them than I had in the crew.
“Our troubles began on the first day out, for she burst a pipe in the engine room; but there was no excitement when she stopped and a cloud of steam rushed out of the skylights. Men who had faced the Alaskan winter in the wilds and poled their boats through the rapids when the ice broke up were not easily alarmed.
“‘The blamed old boiler’s surely blowing. Guess that means another day or two on the road,’ one remarked, and the fellow he spoke to coolly lighted his pipe.