"We intend to stake claims, and we intend to hold them."
"You do, eh?—well, I bet you won't. You fellows should have brought your nurse-girls with you to teach you the A B C."
The party was then joined by Frank, the habitual smile on his face; but his eyes were heavy.
"Cost me fifty dollars!" he said.
"You got off easy—better get in and cook breakfast to wake you up. We haven't eaten yet, and meals up town cost two dollars and a half!"
"Say! if you fellows want to you can use my tent and things, but I have no grub to give away."
This invitation from the new-found pessimist was accepted, and Frank went to work cooking while their host let loose his opinions upon life.
He told them how the manager of a great trading company had the autumn before addressed the crowd, prophesying famine through the winter and exhorting all to leave the place by the only avenue of escape—the river, then filling with ice. It was a dismal picture enough, but happily worse than the reality. He spoke well of the police, and praised the way they had rushed the mail in and out with dog-teams. "And it ain't their fault there is so much grafting; they don't graft themselves."
He told of the fabulous wealth of Eldorado, Bonanza, and Hunker Creeks, and of Alec McDonald, the "Big Moose," estimated to be worth $26,000,000. He expatiated at length upon the irregularities of the Gold Commissioner's office; the iniquitous Orders-in-Council from Ottawa, such as the imposition of ten per cent. royalty on the production of the creeks, and the reserving to the Crown of every alternate claim on Dominion Creek, of all other creeks on which new discoveries might have been made, and of the hillside claims.
Frank, with his Yankee predilections, was ready to believe anything bad of Canada, and chuckled at the account. John and George, though they had had experience of official corruption in Australia, thought the accounts fantastic, and could not believe such things possible in British dominions. "The Gold Commissioner is not in the graft; he's honest—but he's like a baby, and the gang play with him as they like."