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"Them skeeters'll be the death of me yet," Kink Mitchell whimpered, as the canoe felt the current on her nose, and leaped out from the bank "Cheer up, cheer up. We're about done," Hootchinoo Bill answered, with an attempted heartiness in his funereal tones that was ghastly. "We'll be in Forty Mile in forty minutes, and then cursed little devil!"
"Huh! couldn't see us for smoke," Hootchinoo Bill chuckled, flirting the stinging sweat from his brow and glancing swiftly back along the way they had come. Three men emerged from where the trail broke through the trees. Two followed close at their heels, and then a man and a woman shot into view. "Come on, you Kink! Hit her up! Hit her up!" Bill quickened his pace.
"Gosh!" said Hootchinoo Bill, and he said it reverently. "Yes, Bill, gosh!" said Kink Mitchell; and they went out softly and closed the door. David Rasmunsen was a hustler, and, like many a greater man, a man of the one idea. Wherefore, when the clarion call of the North rang on his ear, he conceived an adventure in eggs and bent all his energy to its achievement.
They could not conceive of themselves raising a wail over a business transaction, so they could not understand it in another man. "The poor, ornery chechaquo," murmured Hootchinoo Bill, as they watched the sorrowing Swede disappear up the trail. "But this ain't Too Much Gold," Kink Mitchell said cheerfully.
He could think of nothing else, talk of nothing else, till Hootchinoo Bill rose up in anger and disgust. "Gosh darn Dawson, say I!" he cried. "Same here," said Kink Mitchell, with a brightening face. "One'd think something was doin' up there, 'stead of bein' a mere stampede of greenhorns an' tinhorns." But a boat came into view from downstream. It was long and slim.
Ain't I right, Bill?" "Right you are," said Bill. "But speakin' of this Dawson-place how like did it happen to be, Jim?" "Ounce to the pan on a creek called Bonanza, an' they ain't got to bed-rock yet." "Who struck it?" "Carmack." At mention of the discoverer's name the partners stared at each other disgustedly. Then they winked with great solemnity. "Siwash George," sniffed Hootchinoo Bill.
Such unamiable reluctance to sell advertised but one thing to him, and he was aware of a great relief when Hootchinoo Bill sank snoring to the floor, and he was free to turn his attention to his less intractable partner. Kink Mitchell was persuadable, though a poor mathematician.
Perhaps this appearance of immortal dreaming was due to a supreme and vacuous innocence. At any rate, this was the valuation men of ordinary clay put upon him, and there was nothing extraordinary about the composition of Hootchinoo Bill and Kink Mitchell.
"Where's the girls?" Hootchinoo Bill shouted, with affected geniality. "Gone," was the ancient bar-keeper's reply, in a voice thin and aged as himself, and as unsteady as his hand. "Where's Bidwell and Barlow?" "Gone." "And Sweetwater Charley?" "Gone." "And his sister?" "Gone too." "Your daughter Sally, then, and her little kid?" "Gone, all gone."
Kink Mitchell's reply was just as casual as though he, too, were unaware of any strange perturbation of spirit. "Looks as they was all Baptists, then, and took the boats to go by water," was his contribution. "My ol' dad was a Baptist," Hootchinoo Bill supplemented. "An' he always did hold it was forty thousand miles nearer that way." This was the end of their levity.
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