“Six.  Gettin’ into low water.”

Again the steamer swung out, hunting a new channel.

“Pitcairn’s opinion is thought a lot of.  The Geologic Survey men listen to Pitcairn.  He helped them one year.  He’s one of those extraordinary old miners who can tell from the look of things, without even panning.  When he saw that pyrites on Idaho Bar he stopped dead.  ’This looks good to me!’ he said, and, Jee-rusalem! it was good!”

They stared at the Ramparts growing bolder, the river hurrying like a mill-race, the steamer feeling its way slow and cautiously like a blind man with a stick.

“Seven.”

“Seven.”

“Seven.”

“Six and a half.”

“Pitcairn says gold is always thickest on the inside of an elbow or turn in the stream.  It’s in a place like that my claim is.”

The steamer swerved still further out from the course indicated on the chart.  The pilot was still hunting a new channel, but still the Captain stood and listened, and it was not to the sounding of the Yukon Bar.

“They say there’s no doubt about the whole country being glaciated.”

“Hey?”

“Signs of glacial erosion everywhere.”

The Captain looked sharply about as if his ship might be in some new danger.

“No doubt the gold is all concentrates.”

“Oh, is that so?” He seemed relieved on the whole.

“Eight and a half,” from below.

“Eight and a half,” from the Captain.

“Eight and a half,” from the pilot-house.

“Concentrates, eh?”

Something arresting, rich-sounding, in the news—­a triple essence of the perfume of riches.

With the incantation of technical phrase over the witch-brew of adventure, gambling, and romance, that simmers in the mind when men tell of finding gold in the ground, with the addition of this salt of science comes a savour of homely virtue, an aroma promising sustenance and strength.  It confounds suspicion and sees unbelief, first weaken, and at last do reverence.  There is something hypnotic in the terminology.  Enthusiasm, even backed by fact, will scare off your practical man, who yet will turn to listen to the theory of “the mechanics of erosion” and one of its proofs—­“up there before our eyes, the striation of the Ramparts.”

But Rainey was what he called “an old bird.”  His squinted pilot-eye came back from the glacier track and fell on the outlandish figure of his passenger.  And with an inward admiration of his quality of extreme old-birdness, the Captain struggled against the trance.

“Didn’t I hear you say something about going to Dawson?”

“Y-yes.  I think Dawson’ll be worth seeing.”

“Holy Moses, yes!  There’s never been anything like Dawson before.”

“And I want to talk to the big business men there.  I’m not a miner myself.  I mean to put my property on the market.”  As he said the words it occurred to him unpleasantly how very like McGinty they sounded.  But he went on:  “I didn’t dream of spending so much time up here as I’ve put in already.  I’ve got to get back to the States.”