After a while John again came up to the old man resting by the side of the trail, who blurted out, "I thought I had given you enough to send you out of the country!"
"Then you didn't. Tell me this, are you aware of any case of a miner being cheated out of his claim?"
"Yes, lots. There's my own, for one."
"Where and how was that?"
The old man was not disinclined to talk.
"Well, stranger, it was this way. Me and my partner staked a claim on French Hill, and we was sure first on the ground. We went to Dawson and gave a lawyer a hundred dollars to apply for the claim for us. They told him that we must have a survey before they would give the grant. Well, we gave a surveyor two hundred dollars to survey the claim for us, and we went out there with him. When we got there with the surveyor we found a dozen fellows with rockers taking the rich pay off the rim rock. It was three weeks before we got our grant. The Gold Commissioner's gang took $30,000 out of it, and now we have the leavings, not worth much! If we hadn't thought of getting the lawyer, we wouldn't have even got the leavings!"
That was enough for John. He arose and pushed through the bushes on the opposite side of the trail, walking in the general direction of the hill-top. He desired solitude that he might think.
He felt fiercely angry at these wrongs. They were intolerable; they struck at the simplest principles of human liberty. Here were men enduring privations which sometimes caused permanent bodily harm—John remembered the snow-blinded traveller of Cape Le Berge—only to have the fruits of their strenuous endeavour mercilessly taken from them!
Before he could control his indignation he had wandered miles from Dawson, and gained the summit of the hill, where he sat to eat his luncheon.
To the eastward was the valley of the great gold-bearing creek, Bonanza. He noted the great rounded ridges, which, with their intervening valleys, ran along the slopes to its bottom. He marvelled at the softness and beauty of their lines, each of which ended in a gracefully-rounded head, standing sentinel over the creek. And well they might appear to guard its riches, for those heads contained immense deposits of bench gravels that were to cause extraordinary sensation in the days to come.