"Come from Australia?" The stranger had evidently been sizing them up. "There are a whole lot going inside from Australia, I hear."
"The only man I know on board is George Bruce here, my mate; but there is such a crowd about—there may be others!"
"The passes are already crowded—a whole lot of these fellows don't know what they are up against." The man shook his head with an aspect of melancholy.
"Been in the Klondike before?" Berwick asked him.
"Yes, five years ago. I came down from the River in '96, just before the news of Carmack's discovery reached Forty Mile, or else I would have been in on the best of it. The fellows sent me out word right after, but I didn't think the pay streak would hold, so didn't go in last year. But this spring I got so dead sick of civilization I just had to get away, although I don't think there's much chance of my striking it rich."
"Your dogs are Yukon dogs?"
"Yes, Malamoots. I brought them out with me just to kind of keep me from getting homesick, but they worked the other way. I took them back on the home ranch, and every time they set up a howl on winter nights I began to see the old Northern Lights sky-shooting overhead, and smell the bean-pot boiling, and I'd feel like getting down a hole to bed-rock somewhere and trying a pan of dirt. Besides, the folks outside, I don't like their ways; they ask a man so many fool questions. They all want to know why I ain't a millionaire. You see I've been up to Bonanza Creek where Carmack made his discovery, and where the rich claims have been discovered, a dozen times. We used to call it Rabbit Creek, and there were always a half-dozen moose or so mooching round, and we used to go shooting then."
"Didn't you ever try a dish of gravel?" asked George, for the first time entering the conversation.
The stranger looked at him, and evidently did not understand. John cleared the situation by saying, "I think what you call a pan we call a dish in Australia."
"Oh, yes, I've panned it often enough; but could not get more than a few colours to the pan of dirt. Fellows writing me say they go down through twenty feet of black muck before they strike the gravel and bed-rock. I was not looking for any proposition like that. How Carmack found out the gold was underneath I don't know."