Lucky Jim filled a sack with provisions and, followed by the claim-jumpers, went down the trail cut in the bank to the beach. There he was ordered aboard a raft tied to the root of a drift log, then told to call his dogs aboard. When this was done, they untied the rope and shoved the raft out into the current.
"So long," called Lucky Jim. "I'll see you in Totatla City when you come down."
"You've got some wait!" cried Chenoa Pete.
Lucky Jim started. "So they mean to go out by way of Kantishna, huh?" he mused.
"I still think we'd ought to have tied him," quoth Mike Haggart.
"You're a good man with your hands, Mike, but you ain't got the brains of a flea. Just suppose he was to get into Totatla City in that condition? They'd have something on us, wouldn't they? Or suppose he got drowned in the rapids and goes floatin' down the river and winds up on a bar—which Alaskan rivers are always doin'. Wouldn't the whole marshal's force at Fairbanks be put to work on the case? He's got nothing on us at all. The worst he can do is to get an injunction to throw us off, and he'd have to go to Fairbanks to get that. By which time the season would be over. And seein' he has no witnesses to corroborate his statement, I don't believe he could even get an injunction. Lucky Jim knows all this. He'll swallow his medicine and take a chance on meeting up with us some other time. Which he'll never get the chance. About the middle of September we'll duck across to Ruby and catch a down-river boat for Nome. We've got possession. Let's get to work. What shift do you want to take?"
"Night shift for mine; it's cooler."
"All right. Go on to bed. We've got to take advantage of every hour of the high water."
Chenoa went up the river about two hundred yards and crossed the mainland to the bar by way of Lucky Jim's log bridge. Five minutes afterward the water was racing through the sluices, and Chenoa Pete shoveling and picking in the pay dirt from the sides of the bedrock drain.
After watching the raft disappear around a bend Mike Haggart climbed the trail to the bank, thence to the cabin.