"Lucky Jim, I've lost my strength, I admit, but, by gum! I've still got my judgment. I'll put it to yuh another way. Yo're a pioneer yoreself, will yuh do a pioneer a favor?"
Lucky Jim reached a hand across the table. Dad pressed it in silence.
"A year ago last fall I arrived in the camp with $2000 and the scurvy. I had been in the hills for over a year, and had lived on meat and fish straight for half that time. After I've eaten a peck of raw potatoes and put the scurvy on the run, my next choice is rheumatism. It was winter, so couldn't go nowheres.
"Now and again I used to make a trip over to the Red Fox and spend the evenin'. One night along toward spring they knock me out over there and take $1200 of my dust. Anyway, when I wake up in my cabin next morning, I've got but $400 left. I've been living on that for a year now.
"I've always blamed Pinleg Scoddy, Chenoa Pete and Mike Haggart for that trick. Next day they told me I got awful drunk and just threw my gold around like sawdust. Seein' I never did that all my life before, I'm pretty certain I didn't do it that night. Since then I've suspicioned every man that hangs around there but you.
"In the condition I'm now in, one night in the open would be the death o' me. I don't want charity, but I do want to get hold of enough dust to take me to the hot springs at Sitka and get the aches and pains boiled outa my old carcass. I figger a thousand dollars would put me on my feet again as fit as a fiddle—why, man, I'm only seventy-seven! After that I'm goin' back to the Caribou diggin's. I had good ground there in the seventies. And there's a gulch there—But never mind that. Get me a thousand dollars, Lucky Jim, and you can keep every other color you take out of Easy Money bar this summer, and keep the bar to boot."
"You'll go to Sitka next fall, Dad!"
The old man's Adam's apple worked up and down for a few moments.
"This yere Easy Money bar," he resumed, "is about two hundred miles up the river, but easily located once yuh have the key to its position. I cached my rocker under some moss on the mainland, and I reckon the high water last spring wiped out all traces of me, but yuh can't miss it. I'll tell yuh why."