“You had any proposition yet?” The Captain led the way to his private room.

“About my claim?  Not yet; but once I get it on the market——­”

So full was he of a scheme of his own he failed to see that he had no need to go to Dawson for a buyer.

The Captain set out drinks, and still the talk was of the Bar.  It had come now to seem impossible, even to an old bird, that, given those exact conditions, gold should not be gathered thick along that Bar.

“I regard it as a sure thing.  Anyhow, it’s recorded, and the assessment’s done.  All the district wants now is capital to develop it.”

“Districts like that all over the map,” said the old bird, with a final flutter of caution.  “Even if the capital’s found—­if everything’s ready for work, the summer’s damn short.  But if it’s a question of goin’ huntin’ for the means of workin’——­”

“There’s time,” returned the other quietly, “but there’s none to waste.  You take me and my pardner——­”

“Thought you didn’t have a pardner,” snapped the other, hot over such duplicity.

“Not in ownership; he’s got another claim.  But you take my pardner and me to Dawson——­”

The Captain stood on his legs and roared: 

“I can’t, I tell you!”

“You can if you will—­you will if you want that farm!”

Rainey gaped.

“Take us to Dawson, and I’ll get a deed drawn up in Minook turning over one-third of my Idaho Bar property to John R. Rainey.”

John R. Rainey gaped the more, and then finding his tongue: 

“No, no.  I’d just as soon come in on the Bar, but it’s true what I’m tellin’ you.  There simply ain’t an unoccupied inch on the Oklahoma this trip.  It’s been somethin’ awful, the way I’ve been waylaid and prayed at for a passage.  People starvin’ with bags o’ money waitin’ for ’em at the Dawson Bank!  Settlements under water—­men up in trees callin’ to us to stop for the love of God—­men in boats crossin’ our channel, headin’ us off, thinkin’ nothin’ o’ the risk o’ bein’ run down.  ’Take us to Dawson!’ it’s the cry for fifteen hundred miles.”

“Oh, come! you stopped for me.”

The Captain smiled shrewdly.

“I didn’t think it necessary at the time to explain.  We’d struck bottom just then—­new channel, you know; it changes a lot every time the ice goes out and the floods come down.  I reversed our engines and went up to talk to the pilot.  We backed off just after you boarded us.  I must have been rattled to take you even to Minook.”

“No.  It was the best turn you’ve done yourself in a long while.”

The Captain shook his head.  It was true:  the passengers of the Oklahoma were crowded like cattle on a Kansas stock-car.  He knew he ought to unload and let a good portion wait at Minook for that unknown quantity the next boat.  He would issue the order, but that he knew it would mean a mutiny.

“I’ll get into trouble for overloading as it is.”