“Just as I expected,” he said. “I’ve come at the right time for you, though. You want to stake that ground right away, and then I’ll stake what’s left. We can’t be too quick about it, either. You may see forty men coming over the hill at any minute. If you got all this with a wooden stick and a bread pan, there’s stuff enough there for all of us. Wait a minute, though, let’s see what father-in-law says.”
He stepped down to his boat for a moment, then came back.
“Father-in-law is gone,” he said. “Couldn’t raise him anywhere. Guess this is the place he meant for me to come to. No need of his staying round, long as the job’s done. Now let’s stake that ground, then we’ll be safe. You are entitled to five claims. One of you is the discoverer. He can stake discovery claim and number one above and number one below; then the other can have one above him and one below him. That’s all you are good for. Then I come in with one above and one below, and I’ve got powers of attorney enough in my pocket to stake all the rest of the creek. Got about forty men to give me powers of attorney when I left on this trip. They get half of each claim I stake for them. I get the other half, which ain’t so bad in this case. Come on.”
They worked steadily for several days, cutting and shaping stakes from driftwood, measuring distances carefully with Blenship’s fifty-foot tape, posting location notices, and now and then stopping to prospect a locality. Blenship always went down to “bed rock” for his prospects. He handled a pan with the marvelous skill of an old timer, and his eyes always glistened at the result.
“Boys,” he declared one day enthusiastically, “this is the richest creek the world ever saw, I believe. I want you to elect me recorder of this district. We’ll call it the Arctic District, and I have a notion that I’d like to call this ‘Candle Creek,’ ’cause its prospects are so bright. Then I’ll record the claims duly, and we’ll be all registered and can hold everything according to law. What do you say?”
The boys were only too glad to thus find a mentor and friend, and cheerfully agreed to everything. An Alaska mining claim, according to United States law, consists of twenty acres, generally laid out in a parallelogram, 330 feet each side of the creek, making a width of 660 in all. Their five claims meant a hundred acres, and, if even moderately rich, were a fortune. In the end they had the entire creek staked from source to mouth, the number of powers of attorney which Blenship produced being prodigious.
In spite of the hard work, perhaps because they were living well on civilized food, they never seemed to tire, and were as frisky as young colts. Ten days had passed, and never a sign of the invasion of prospectors which Blenship had so confidently predicted. Since the father-in-law episode the little man had given no signs of his “queerness,” unless this story of thousands to the south were one. On the other hand, he seemed very sane and shrewd, and kindly in all ways. He shared his provisions in return for help in staking his numerous claims, and the boys could see that his advice was friendly and worth following. The day the last stake was driven he insisted that they celebrate, and got up a bountiful meal with his own hand, making a bread pudding with real raisins from his stores, which filled the boys with unalloyed delight.
“There!” he said, as he lighted his pipe after the meal was finished, “now we’re fixed. If old Tom Lane comes up here and wants the earth, he can have it, but he’ll have to pay good for it. You and I could work those claims and take out a few hundred dollars’ worth of gold a day until the ground freezes up, and then we wouldn’t more’n pay our expenses up here and back and the cost of living. That isn’t the way money is made in the mining business. You just stake the claims and hold on to them until the man comes along who has the millions to work ’em in a big way. There’s several of those men up in Nome already, but the king of them all is old Tom Lane. He’s got his men out spying round all over the country, and it won’t be long before one of them drops on to this place. Then we’ll drive a bargain that’ll make the old man’s eyes stick out. Meantime I’ll just show you boys how to build and work a rocker, and we’ll get out a few hundred a day and wait developments.”
Blenship showed them how to handle the rocker that very day, and left them at Ptarmigan Bend gleefully running sand through it while he prospected his various claims more thoroughly.