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When a group of returned stampeders came in, she sat down at a rough little faro-table, leaned her elbows on it, sipped the rest of the stuff in her tumbler through a straw, and in the shelter of her arms set the straw in a knot-hole near the table-leg, and spirited the bad liquor down under the board. "Don't give me away," she said.
There was a short, sharp battle, and the stampeders returned to the rivers to nurse their grievance and curse Brute MacNair. He paid his debt to the Company and settled with his Indians, who suddenly found themselves rich. And then Bob MacNair learned a lesson which he never forgot his Indians could not stand prosperity.
It was among these men that the name of Brute, first used by the beaten stampeders, came into general use a fitting name, from their viewpoint for when one of them chanced to fall into his hands, his moments became at once fraught with tribulation.
To prevent mistakes on their property, jumping, moving of stakes, and mutilation of notices, Vance and Del, after promptly recording, started to return. But with the government seal attached to their holdings, they took it leisurely, the stampeders sliding past them in a steady stream. Midway, Del chanced to look behind. St.
Smoke laughed and got up. "Well, good-night, fellows," he said, and started down the hill, with sixty exasperated and grimly determined stampeders at his heels. He turned north past the sawmill and the hospital and took the river trail along the precipitous bluffs at the base of Moosehide Mountain.
A few minutes' cessation from this allowed the flesh to grow numb, and then most vigorous rubbing was required to produce the burning prickle of returning circulation. Often they thought they had reached the lead, but always they overtook more stampeders who had started before them.
Every night I heard the clattering hoofs of the stampeders for some new gulch, starting in the utmost secrecy to gain the first right for themselves and friends. A trifling hint induces these stampedes. A wink from one old miner to another, and hundreds mounted their horses to seek some inaccessible mountain fissure. The more remote the diggings, so much the greater the excitement.
One of his wildest plays took place in the early winter after the freeze-up. Hundreds of stampeders, after staking on other creeks than Bonanza, had gone on disgruntled down river to Forty Mile and Circle City. Daylight mortgaged one of his Bonanza dumps with the Alaska Commercial Company, and tucked a letter of credit into his pouch.
Half an hour later, the hill was climbed and the dogs unharnessed at the cabin door, the sixty stampeders grimly attendant. "Good-night, fellows," Smoke called, as he closed the door. In five minutes the candle was put out, but before half an hour had passed Smoke and Shorty emerged softly, and without lights began harnessing the dogs. "Hello, Smoke!"
These are by no means all the dangers that confronted the first Yukon stampeders there are other troublesome waters below for instance, Rink Rapids, where the river boils and bubbles like a kettle over an open fire, and Five Fingers, so-called by reason of a row of knobby, knuckled pinnacles that reach up like the stiff digits of a drowning hand and split the stream into divergent channels but those three, Miles Canon, the Squaw, and White Horse, were the worst and together they constituted a menace that tried the courage of the bravest men.
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