It was late enough for rest, especially for weary workers such as they: so they passed through the streets directly for the home-camp. Dawson was now the home of twenty thousand people, ninety-nine per cent. adult males. Its streets were a wide range of strange sights and wild scenes. Its outskirts were of tents, and yet more tents.
They went to bed with the waking dreams of wealth very close to them. John Berwick, who had some qualms at taking advantage of what he had overheard, felt it was an unsatisfactory condition of things in which such a malefactor as Poo-Bah could swagger and flourish.
CHAPTER XX
A LOTTERY
On the second day after leaving Dawson, John Berwick and his partners camped on Dominion Creek, worn out and weary. Their commissariat was equal to a three weeks' stay, and their tools and their bedding were added to the load. Hugh remained their leader. While John and George had been prospecting their quartz find, he had visited Dominion Creek, and found many miners looking with avidity towards the claims on the left limit of the creek, several miles below the confluence of Caribou. It was to this locality that he directed the party.
The laws governing the taking up of placer-claims in the Yukon demanded that the applicant should swear to the finding of gold. No quantity was mentioned. John and George had met this difficulty when they applied for the placer-claims on the Bonanza hillsides; but this technicality had been smilingly dispensed with by the record clerk on the consideration that nobody wanted the ground for placer. In the case of the Dominion Creek hillsides, however, they determined to make discoveries, if possible.
They pitched their tent upon the hillside, which rose in a gentle incline from the creek. If any former channel ran underneath the ground they had chosen it could not be very far to bed-rock.
They picked their four claims, and numbered them 1, 2, 3, 4. They drew lots for them. John had 1, Hugh 2, Frank 3, and George the 4th.