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"Sit down!" he commanded. She obediently sat down in the snow. He slipped his pack from his back, and spread a blanket for her feet. From above came the voices of the stampeders who followed them. "Let Shorty stake," she urged. "Go on, Shorty," Smoke said, as he attacked her moccasins, already stiff with ice. "Pace off a thousand feet and place the two center-stakes.

He lined up with his eye a blasted willow tree and a big and recognizable spruce. He returned to the stream where were the center-stakes. He followed the bed of the creek around a wide horseshoe bend through the flat and found that the two creeks were the same creek. Smoke plodded back to the little camp. Shorty, at the end of washing a pan of gravel, exploded at sight of him. "We got it!"

Each man had to relocate the claim for himself, and this meant that he must place two center-stakes and four corner-stakes and cross the creek twice, before he could start for Dawson with his dogs. Furthermore, there were to be no "sooners." Not until the stroke of midnight of Friday night was the claim open for relocation, and not until the stroke of midnight could a man plant a stake.

He just straight declared I wasn't goin' to stake twenty-eight. An' I told him " "Yes, yes," Joy cried. "What did you tell him?" "Well, I told him straight that if he didn't back up plum five hundred feet I'd sure punch his frozen nose into ice-cream an' chocolate eclaires. He backed up, an' I've got in the center-stakes of two full an' honest five-hundred-foot creek claims.