The rush passed on by Deep Lake and Long Lake, where fat purses could buy the assistance of pack-trains of mules as far as Linderman. When they reached the shore of this lake, they were twenty-eight miles from Dyea, with the giant bulk of Chilcoot looming between, its rugged head still wrapped in the swirling white blizzard.
From the head of Lake Linderman the boats, bought or built for different individuals, plied on the water-route which led by Lake Marsh and the Forty Forks onward to Dawson. There were small barges, but their sailings were very uncertain and could not be depended on in a rush. Each man who dared the waterway before the very maw of winter had to buy or make his craft at Linderman.
Here on the shore a motley throng congregated, with Marsh and Britton in the front ranks. Some Nevada capitalists who had lost their horses along the trail and hired Indian packers to carry their goods over the pass at sixty cents a pound, clamored for boats to a stocky Dane, who appeared to be a perfect genius at turning out freshly sawn planks as the finished product, ready seamed and caulked, with mast stepped, and altogether seaworthy. However, something else beside clamor and a profligate show of money was necessary for the securing of the vessels, and that was time. Work as they might, the boat-builders could not supply the demand, and any with skill in carpentering fell to toiling of their own will in order to get boat after boat away and thus hasten their own turn. They were pitting human celerity and skill against the unceasing advance of winter. The freeze-up was approaching with chill, unpitying certainty to snuff out delayed hopes by the close of navigation, and through superhuman effort the gold-seekers thought to forestall the frost's advent.
Every day the march of Arctic feet could be defined more clearly; every night the snow-line slid a little farther down the hills; north-east squalls blew up at unexpected hours; and the rivers strained their waters through arrays of icy teeth stuck along the margins.
Amidst the turmoil of Linderman, when others had done with exhortations, expostulations, and entreaties, through the universal desire for speed, Larry Marsh drew one Danish boat-builder aside and conferred with him.
Whatever magic he used or whatever service of old needed repayment, Britton did not know, but he saw the Dane hand over a newly launched skiff to the gray Alaskan.
"Hey! you," the latter called to him, "come and steer this boat. You're the man for me!"
Britton threw in his outfit with glad promptitude, and they shoved off through the seething shore ice, which was ground to fragments as quickly as it formed.
"Keep her head straight," warned Larry Marsh. "I'll 'tend to this here sail."
He busied himself with the squaresail, a large sheet that caught the sweeping wind and whirled them down Lake Linderman like a flash.