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Don't you know the boom's busted?" "Well, no." "Has. Tax begun it. Too many cheechalkos are finishing it. Klondyke?" She laughed. "The Klondyke's goin' to hell down-grade in a hand-car." Scowl Austin was up, ready, as usual, to relieve Seymour of half the superintending, but never letting him off duty till he had seen the new shift at work.

It was something to see them come walking up the shelving bank! The cheechalkos who laughed before are contented now with running, leaving their goods behind. Sour-dough Saunders himself never dreamed the ice would push its way so far. In mid-channel a still unbroken sheet is bent yet more in the centre. Every now and then a wide crack opens near the margin, and the water rushes out with a roar.

"Oh, you'll have more visitors than you want." "Shall we, though?" Then, with a modified rapture: "Indians, I suppose, and and missionaries." "Traders, too, and miners, and this year cheechalkos as well. You are directly on the great highway of winter travel. Now that there's a good hard crust on the snow you will have dog-trains passing every week, and sometimes two or three." It was good news!

The men of Rampart stood about in groups in the small hours of the morning of the 16th of May; as usual, smoking, yarning, speculating, inventing elaborate joshes. Somebody remembered that certain cheechalkos had gone to bed at midnight. Now this was unprecedented, even impertinent. If the river is not open by the middle of May, your Sour-dough may go to bed only he doesn't.

The steamer canted, and the Captain's orders rang out clear. Several cheechalkos laid their hands on their guns as the wild fellow in the ragged buckskins shot round the motionless wheel, and brought his canoe 'long-side, while his savage-looking dog still kept the echoes of the Lower Ramparts calling. "Three cheers for the Oklahoma!"

Now, only Mac of the other men had ever seen a miner's purse before, but every one of the four cheechalkos knew instinctively what it was that Dillon held so carelessly. In that long, narrow bag, like the leg of a child's stocking, was the stuff they had all come seeking. The General smacked his lips, and set down the granite cup. "That's the argument," he said. "Got a noospaper?"

While all Minóok was "jollying" the Woodworth men, Maudie made one of her sudden raids out of the Gold Nugget. She stood nearly up to the knees of her high rubber boots in the bog of "Main Street," talking earnestly with the Colonel. Keith and the Boy, sitting on a store box outside of the saloon, had looked on at the fun over the timid cheechalkos, and looked on now at Maudie and the Colonel.

The cheechalkos' cabins are flooded to the caves. Stout fellows in hip-boots take a boat and rescue the scurvy-stricken from the roof. And still the barrier held. People began to go about their usual avocations. The empty Gold Nugget filled again. Men sat, as they had done all the winter, drinking, and reading the news of eight months before, out of soiled and tattered papers.

"Well, I'll do it," he said slowly, "and if you're right " "Oh, I'm all right," she laughed; "an' I know my McGinty backwards. But" she frowned with sudden anger "it ain't Maudie's pretty way to interfere with cheechalkos gettin' fooled. I ain't proud o' the trouble I've taken, and I'll thank you not to mention it. Not to that pardner o' yours not to nobody."

They come into the big streams every here and there, and cheechalkos are always mistaking them for the main channel. Sometimes they're wider and deeper for a mile or so than the river proper, but before you know it they land you in a marsh.