“Well, I will abstain from frills, and try and not weary you.”
“You won’t do that,” I said with assurance.
“With your permission, Auntie, I shall in my telling of my adventures affect the manner of the miner at his camp-fire. Now and again I may mention details that appear inconsequent.”
“Never mind, go on!”
“Well, about September, 1900, I was at Skagway on the Alaskan Coast without money, and with no prospect of profitable employment.
“The Canadian Customs at Skagway gave me short jobs, but by the end of the month they petered out and I was faced with the necessity of finding means even for food.
“There seemed no alternative but to go south. But I harboured the idea of going to Dawson and some fiend nourished it. No more quixotic plan can ever have entered the mind of man, but I went.
“I crossed to White Horse, the port on the Upper Yukon River. The thermometer had sunk below zero, though the weather was mild. I spent some days figuring ways and means of carrying out my mad idea, and spent more dollars than I could afford. I shall always maintain that friendships struck up in a bar-room are productive of nothing but losses and waste of time.
“Possibly I was inspired with a blind faith in fortune or I didn’t care a ——— button. Somebody suggested I should try and work my way on one of the steamers. I tried and failed. A good thing too, for I would have earned little or no money that way and been landed five hundred miles nearer the north pole, and so much further from civilization.
“Then came the voice of destiny; a man called from a scow tied to the dock: ‘Do you want to go to Dawson? Give you seven and a half dollars per day.’ ‘All right,’ said I.