"The same to you!" answered the others.
The freemasonry of the gold-seeker holds throughout the world, and its handshake is honest. Three gold-seekers have been introduced to the reader in this chapter; and these pages will tell something of what befell them in what was probably the most spectacular gold-rush in the history of the world.
John Berwick, who is by way of being our hero, shall have a chapter to himself.
CHAPTER II
JOHN BERWICK
Like most men whose success in life is largely the whim of fortune, John Berwick had for years accepted her rulings without protest, and regarded passing little incidents as signs of her influence.
One night in the December preceding his setting out for the Klondike, he was lying in his bunk on Judas Creek—one of the innumerable streams in British Columbia in which colours of gold, otherwise "prospects" could be found—reading a month old newspaper that a trapper, who had passed the previous night with him, had brought from the settlement, and in its columns had found an item of news telling of the recent rich discoveries in the Yukon. He read the paragraph carefully again and again, striving to separate exaggeration from truth, and to satisfy himself that there was truth in it.
By the camp stove sat Joe, the French-Canadian whom he employed, smoking and gazing at the glow of the fire with stolid and witless eyes. He would sit thus for hours; to a man of Berwick's temperament he was a satisfactory companion. On the Claim things had gone none too well. True, by great effort they had reached bed-rock at thirty feet, and were beginning to cross-cut in search of a pay-streak. There was certainly little gold in the gravel on the bed-rock already uncovered, and the flow of water into the working was very great: indeed, as much time was taken in keeping the shaft free of water as in all their other works combined. And up to three days previously rain had been incessant, though relief was apparently at hand, owing to the frost that had succeeded. The earth had hardened; Judas Creek was already flowing in less volume, and the boulders in the stream were becoming massed with ice.