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Updated: June 20, 2025
The ice, however, was buried under several feet of fine snow. Through this the sled-trail ran, a narrow ribbon of packed footing barely two feet in width. On either side one sank to his knees and deeper in the snow. The stampeders they overtook were reluctant to give way, and often Smoke and Shorty had to plunge into the deep snow and by supreme efforts flounder past.
Old Whiskers folded his tent and returned to Blackwater, where many of the stampeders had preceded him; and Dusty Rhodes, with a guilty grin, folded his check and started for the railroad.
The indispensability of some eye protection when travelling in the late winter, and the serious consequences that follow its neglect, were once again demonstrated at Mouse Point. The road-house was crowded with "busted" stampeders coming out of the Nowikaket country.
Up the drive with slow and solemn tread, swaying under the gale, pelted with rain, came the valiant stampeders, a procession of blanket-mantled figures in dingy white, the water dripping from their coverings in streams, squashing and churning in their boots as they splashed indifferently onward through mud or grass alike; such miserable-looking rats!
Shorty was irrepressible and pessimistic. When the stampeders resented being passed, he retorted in kind. "What's your hurry?" one of them asked. "What's yours?" he answered. "A stampede come down from Indian River yesterday afternoon an' beat you to it. They ain't no claims left." "That being so, I repeat, what's your hurry?" "WHO? Me? I ain't no stampeder. I'm workin' for the government.
They're a wild lot, an' you know boys hev more nerve than grown men, because they don't know what danger is. I'm not denyin' there's danger. But they glory in it, an' mebbe I like it myself anyway, we'll stick. We're goin' to drive the herd on the far side of the first break of Deception Pass. There's a great round valley over there, an' no ridges or piles of rocks to aid these stampeders.
The average pace of the stampeders on the smooth going was three miles and a half an hour. Smoke and Shorty were doing four and a half, though sometimes they broke into short runs and went faster. "I'm going to travel your feet clean off, Shorty," Smoke challenged. "Huh! I can hike along on the stumps an' wear the heels off your moccasins. Though it ain't no use.
And now, known as the King of the Klondike, carrying several other royal titles, such as Eldorado King, Bonanza King, the Lumber Baron, and the Prince of the Stampeders, not to omit the proudest appellation of all, namely, the Father of the Sourdoughs, he was more afraid of women than ever. As never before they held out their arms to him, and more women were flocking into the country day by day.
The others were loud in their oaths and threats of vengeance; Buck was silent and somehow, Whitey could not help feeling that Buck was the most dangerous enemy the sheepmen would have to deal with. This round-up lasted a full week. During it Walt Lampson had found time to consider his course of action against the stampeders of his herd.
The stream, frozen solidly to bottom, was from twenty to thirty feet wide and ran between six- and eight-foot earth banks of alluvial wash. No recent feet had disturbed the snow that lay upon its ice, and they knew they were above the Discovery claim and the last stakes of the Sea Lion stampeders. "Look out for springs," Joy warned, as Smoke led the way down the creek.
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