“You don’t mean the flood’ll come up here?”

“Mebbe you’ve arranged so she won’t this year.”

The cheechalkos consulted.  In the end, four of them occupied the next two hours (to the infinite but masked amusement of the town) in floundering about in the mud, setting up tents in the boggy wood above the settlement, and with much pains transporting thither as many of their possessions as they did not lose in the bottomless pit of the mire.

When the business was ended, Minook self-control gave way.  The cheechalkos found themselves the laughing-stock of the town.  The others, who had dared to build down on the bank, but who “hadn’t scared worth a cent,” sauntered up to the Gold Nugget to enjoy the increased esteem of the Sour-doughs, and the humiliation of the men who had thought “the Yukon was goin’ over the Ramparts this year—­haw, haw!”

It surprises the average mind to discover that one of civilization’s most delicate weapons is in such use and is so potently dreaded among the roughest frontier spirits.  No fine gentleman in a drawing-room, no sensitive girl, shrinks more from what Meredith calls “the comic laugh,” none feels irony more keenly than your ordinary American pioneer.  The men who had moved up into the soaking wood saw they had run a risk as great to them as the fabled danger of the river—­the risk of the josher’s irony, the dire humiliation of the laugh.  If a man up here does you an injury, and you kill him, you haven’t after all taken the ultimate revenge.  You might have “got the laugh on him,” and let him live to hear it.

While all Minook 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.  It crossed the Boy’s mind that they’d be putting up a josh on his pardner pretty soon, and at the thought he frowned.

Keith had been saying that the old miners had nearly all got “squawed.”  He had spoken almost superstitiously of the queer, lasting effect of the supposedly temporary arrangement.

“No, they don’t leave their wives as often as you’d expect, but in most cases it seems to kill the pride of the man.  He gives up all idea of ever going home, and even if he makes a fortune, they say, he stays on here.  And year by year he sinks lower and lower, till he’s farther down in the scale of things human than his savage wife.”

“Yes, it’s awful to think how the life up here can take the stiffening out of a fella.”

He looked darkly at the two out there in the mud.  Keith nodded.

“Strong men have lain down on the trail this winter and cried.”  But it wasn’t that sort of thing the other meant.  Keith followed his new friend’s glowering looks.