Lucky Jim waved his hand in the manner Mike Taggart had employed.
"This is where I mean to do a little prospecting this summer," he made answer.
"Let's mush," suggested Chenoa Pete. "So long," he flung up to Lucky Jim, a civility repeated by Mike Taggart a moment later, and to which Lucky Jim replied in kind.
"We can't do a damned thing," swore Chenoa Pete when safely out of Lucky Jim's hearing, "until after he has gone to work. It may be any one of half a dozen bars near where he's camped. Let him do the dead work anyway, I mean to have a good long rest, beginning some time tomorrow."
"I'd give something to know how he got here so quick! He's put up that shack since he arrived. He took some short cut or another."
"He came fast, I'll admit, Mike, but no man in his senses would cut across the flat—summer or winter. He's probably got a crackajack team. He's some fast mover, though."
Lucky Jim returned thoughtfully to his work. The meeting, from his point of view, had been an unsatisfactory one. The majority of mushers, he reasoned, would have stuck around and smoked a pipe or two, had dinner with him.
"They've left a bad taste in my mind," he declared.
By May first Lucky Jim finished whipsawing lumber. He then turned his attention to a bedrock drain across the bar. The snow was about gone, but the earth was still frozen. He laid a wood fire four feet wide and about one hundred and fifty feet long diagonally across the bar, and lighted it. Next day he began to dig out the drain.