Time went on and the cabin was quietly nearing completion. The roof of poles was in place. It only remained to cover it with moss and thawed-out earth to make it our future home. I think these were the happiest days I spent in the North. We were such a united trio. Each was eager to do more than the other, and we vied in little acts of mutual consideration.
Once again I congratulated myself on my partners. Jim, though sometimes bellicosely evangelical, was the soul of kindly goodness, cheerfulness and patience. It was refreshing to know among so many sin-calloused men one who always rang true, true as the gold in the pan. As for the Prodigal, he was a Prince. I often thought that God at the birth of him must have reached out to the sunshine and crammed a mighty handful of it into the boy. Surely it is better than all the riches in the world to have a temperament of eternal cheer.
As for me, I have ever been at the mercy of my moods, easily elated, quickly cast down. I have always been abnormally sensitive, affected by sunshine and by shadows, vacillating, intense in my feelings. I was truly happy in those days, finding time in the long evenings to think of the scenes of stress and sorrow I had witnessed, reconstructing the past, and having importune me again and again the many characters in my life drama.
Always and always I saw the Girl, elusively sweet, almost unreal, a thing to enshrine in that ideal alcove of our hearts we keep for our saints. (And God help us always to keep shining there a great light.)
Many others importuned me: Pinklove, Globstock, Pondersby, Marks, old Wilovich, all dead; Bullhammer, the Jam-wagon, Mosher, the Winklesteins, plunged in the vortex of the gold-born city; and lastly, looming over all, dark and ominous, the handsome, bold, sinister face of Locasto. Well, maybe I would never see any of them again.
Yet more and more my dream hours were jealously consecrated to Berna. How ineffably sweet were they! How full of delicious imaginings! How pregnant of high hope! O, I was born to love, I think, and I never loved but one. This story of my life is the story of Berna. It is a thing of words and words and words, yet every word is Berna, Berna. Feel the heartache behind it all. Read between the lines, Berna, Berna.
Often in the evenings we went to the Forks, which was a lively place indeed. Here was all the recklessness and revel of Dawson on a smaller scale, and infinitely more gross. Here were the dance-hall girls, not the dazzling creatures in diamonds and Paris gowns, the belles of the Monte Carlo and the Tivoli, but drabs self-convicted by their coarse, puffy faces. Here the men, fresh from their day's work, the mud of the claim hardly dry on their boot-tops, were buying wine with nuggets they had filched from sluice-box, dump and drift.
There was wholesale robbery going on in the gold-camp. On many claims where the owners were known to be unsuspicious, men would work for small wages because of the gold they were able to filch. On the other hand, many of the operators were paying their men in trade-dust valued at sixteen dollars an ounce, yet so adulterated with black sand as to be really worth about fourteen. All these things contributed to the low morale of the camp. Easy come, easy go with money, a wild intoxication of success in the air; gold gouged in glittering heaps from the ground during the day, and at night squandered in a carnival of lust and sin.
The Prodigal was always "snooping" around and gleaning information from most mysterious sources. One evening he came to us.
"Boys, get ready, quick. There's a rumour of a stampede for a new creek, Ophir Creek they call it, away on the other side of the divide somewhere. A prospector went down ten feet and got fifty-cent dirt. We've got to get in on this. There's a mob coming from Dawson, but we'll get there before the rush."