“What ye got here?” he asked, kicking the heavy case before referred to, which the boys had brought along on their own initiative. “Pianny? Don’t believe we need any pianny, up Yukon way. There’s plenty piannys in Alaska, now, but I remember the first one that was brought in. It’s up in Dawson yet. It was brought in on the first rush in ’98. Cost four hundred dollars in the States and two thousand dollars to haul up from Skagway. The last time I heard it, it was being mauled by a feenominon, who had a patent pianny-playin’ wooden arm on one side, and it sounded like a day’s work in a boiler factory at one end and a bad smash in a glass pantry at the other. I heard some o’ them educated Cheechakos talkin’ about art, but I didn’t care for it much.”
“It isn’t a piano,” said Gerald as the laugh subsided. “It’s a little enterprise of our own, and is to be put in storage in Skagway until we’re through with our work.”
“Wa’al,” replied the guide, as he tested its weight, “we don’t have to handle it then, and that’s something of a load off my mind.”
The next day when the boy Scouts awoke they found the vessel anchored in the picturesque harbor of Skagway, the end of the “Inside Passage.”
CHAPTER V.
A NEW MODE OF TRAVEL.
Their stay in Skagway was brief. It was the point of parting between Colonel Snow and his young charges, as it was necessary for him to hasten a way westward to another part of Alaska on his mission, which would occupy some weeks. The boys parted with him reluctantly and with some little feeling of homesickness, but he promised to join them as early as possible and assured them that he had placed them in safe hands, with ample means for their return to Skagway should sickness or accident befall them.
Except for the brief glimpses of native and local Alaskan life which they had obtained during the stoppages of the steamer at Metlakatla, in the Annette Islands, a reservation set apart by Congress for the now civilized Tsimpsean Indians, a tribe which, with their devoted missionary head, William Duncan, immigrated from British Columbia to secure, it is said, greater religious liberty, and at Ketchikan, a thriving town, the boys here gained their first real impressions of Alaskan conditions. They found Skagway a town of about fifteen hundred people, set in a great natural amphitheatre surrounded by mountains capped with perpetual snow. It is connected with the outside world by a cable to Seattle, and by other parts of Alaska by telegraph, and has electric lights and a telephone system. A fine school building and several churches that reminded the young Scouts of many Hudson river towns, and wiped out the last remaining evidences of homesickness, were among the attractions, and the sight of a real railroad equipped with locomotives, cars, shops and station were among the marvels found where they had expected to find a wilderness.