In the morning I sat down to breakfast without being asked, and ate enormously and silently. The moonshiner warmed up at this.
"You're a better sort of feller than I thought at first," he said; "I thought you was goin' to be one of them d—d polite fellers."
"Me? Oh, no; not me," I replied, "you're thinkin' of some one else, I reckon?"
After breakfast he showed me his gold dust; a little flat piece interested me, and I said, "Gimme that, I'll pay yer; what's it worth?"
"Nothin'," he replied. "Yer can take it."
Afterwards I shouldered my pack and made for the door; when I got there I stopped and looked over my shoulder and said, "So long!"
"So long to you!" he answered, looking after me with more human interest than I had previously seen in him. "Stop here when you come this way again."
I climbed out of the gulch and walked along the mountain ridge for a while, encountering, whenever there was no wind, swarms of the tiny gnats which the miners often dread worse than the mosquitoes. They are so numerous as actually to obscure the sun in places and they fill nose, ears, and eyes; there is no escape from them, for they are so small that they go through the meshes of a mosquito net with the greatest ease. On top of the ridge, where the wind blew, they disappeared. As I walked along here I met a prospector, and after a friendly talk with him, dropped down another mountain-side to the bed of Independence Creek, and followed that to the junction of Mammoth Creek, so called from the number of bones of the extinct elephant, or mammoth, which are buried there. Wading across a swamp, I found in the brush another road-house, the Mammoth Junction. This was a large log building containing a single room, which served as kitchen, dining-room, parlor, general bedroom, and barroom. At first I was the only guest, but afterwards a prospector arrived from a hard trip to the Tanana, and he related his experiences; how he had shot three bears, seven caribou, and a moose in seven days. He was a tall, well-built Cape Bretoner, Dick McDonald by name. When he got tired of talking I spread my blankets on the floor (for which privilege I paid fifty cents) and gladly stowed myself away for the night.
The next day a tramp of seventeen miles brought me to the Central House, on the way home from the diggings; for although our rendezvous should have been at Mammoth Junction, yet I concluded to wait for the others at Circle City. The trail was very bad, and during the first part of the journey the gnats were as annoying as they had been on the mountains the day before. There were millions of them. During the last part the mosquitoes got the upper hand, and gave me the strictest attention.
"Ah," I soliloquized, perspiring freely and tugging at my pack straps like a jaded horse at his harness, "the trials of an Alaskan pioneer! Stumbling and staggering through mud knee-deep, and through nigger-heads, wading streams, fighting gnats and mosquitoes, suffering often from hunger and thirst, and rolling into one's sole pair of blankets under the frosty stars or the rain-clouds!"