Here came his awakening. Away from the delirium of the camp, in contact with cold reality, he began to learn something of the serious, practical business of gold-mining. Before he had been long on the creeks he found that it was no child's play to wrest treasure from the frozen bosom of a hostile wilderness, and that, no matter how rich or how plentiful the treasure, Mother Earth guarded her secrets jealously. He began to realize that the obstacles he had so blithely overcome in getting to the Klondike were as nothing to those in the way of his further success. Of a sudden his triumphal progress slowed down and he came to a pause; he began to mark time.
There was work in plenty to be had, but, like most of the new-comers, he was not satisfied to take fixed wages. They seemed paltry indeed compared with the drunken figures that were on every lip. In the presence of the uncertain he could not content himself with a sure thing. Nevertheless, he was soon forced to the necessity of resorting to it, for through the fog of his misapprehensions, beneath the obscurity of his ignorance, he began to discover the true outline of things and to understand that his ideas were impractical.
To begin with, every foot of ground in the proven districts was taken, and even when he pushed out far afield he found that the whole country was plastered with locations: rivers, creeks and tributaries, benches and hillsides, had been staked. For many miles in every direction blazed trees and pencil notices greeted him—he found them in places where it seemed no foot but his had ever trod. In Dawson the Gold Commissioner's office was besieged by daily crowds of claimants; it would have taken years of work on the part of a hundred thousand men to even prospect the ground already recorded on the books.
Back and forth Phillips came and went, he made trips with pack and hand-sled, he slept out in spruce forests, in prospectors' tents, in new cabins the sweaty green logs of which were still dripping, and when he had finished he was poorer by a good many dollars and richer only in the possession of a few recorder's receipts, the value of which he had already begun to doubt.
Disappointed he was, but not discouraged. It was all too new and exciting for that. Every visit to Bonanza or El Dorado inspired him. It would have inspired a wooden man. For miles those valleys were smoky from the sinking fires, and their clean white carpets were spotted with piles of raw red dirt. By day they echoed to blows of axes, the crash of falling trees, the plaint of windlasses, the cries of freighters; by night they became vast caldrons filled with flickering fires; tremendous vats, the vapors from which were illuminated by hidden furnaces. One would have thought that here gold was being made, not sought—that this was a region of volcanic hot springs where every fissure and vent-hole spouted steam. It was a strange, a marvelous sight; it stirred the imagination to know that underfoot, locked in the flinty depths of the frozen gravel, was wealth unmeasured and unearned, rich hoards of yellow gold that yesterday were ownerless.
A month of stampeding dulled the keen edge of Pierce's enthusiasm, so he took a breathing-spell in which to get his bearings.
The Yukon had closed and the human flotsam and jetsam it had borne thither was settling. Pierce could feel a metamorphic agency at work in the town; already new habits of life were crystallizing among its citizens; and beneath its whirlpool surface new forms were in the making. It alarmed him to realize that as yet his own affairs were in suspense, and he argued, with all the hot impatience of youth, that it was high time he came to rest. Opportunities were on every side of him, but he knew not where or how to lay hold of them to his best advantage. More than ever he felt himself to be the toy of circumstance, more than ever he feared the fallibility of his judgment and the consequences of a mistake. He was in a mood both dissatisfied and irresolute when he encountered his two trail friends, Tom Linton and Jerry Quirk. Pierce had seen them last at Linderman, engaged in prosecuting a stampeders' divorce; he was surprised to find them reunited.
"I never dreamed you'd get through," he told them, when greetings had passed. "Did you come in one boat or in two?"
Jerry grinned. "We sawed up that outlaw four times. We'd have split her end to end finally, only we run out of pitch to cork her up."
"That boat was about worn out with our bickerings," Tom declared. "She ain't over half the length she was—all the rest is sawdust. If the nail-holes in her was laid end to end they'd reach to Forty Mile. We were the last outfit in, as it was, and we'd of missed a landing if a feller hadn't run out on the shore ice and roped us. First town I ever entered on the end of a lariat. Hope I don't leave it the same way."