“You probably won’t; people are too busy up here.  If you do, I’m offerin’ you a good many thousand dollars for the risk.”

“God bless my soul! where’d I put you?  There ain’t a bunk.”

“I’ve slept by the week on the ice.”

“There ain’t room to lie down.”

“Then we’ll stand up.”

Lord, Lord! what could you do with such a man?  Owner of Idaho Bar, too.  “Mechanics of erosion,” “Concentrates,” “a third interest”—­it all rang in his head.  “I’ve got nine fellers sleepin’ in here,” he said helplessly, “in my room.”

“Can we come if we find our own place, and don’t trouble you?”

“Well, I won’t have any pardner—­but perhaps you——­”

“Oh, pardner’s got to come too.”

Whatever the Captain said the nerve-tearing shriek of the whistle drowned.  It was promptly replied to by the most horrible howls.

“Reckon that’s Nig!  He’s got to come too,” said this dreadful ragged man.

“God bless me, this must be Minook!”

The harassed Captain hustled out.

“You must wait long enough here to get that deed drawn, Captain!” called out the other, as he flew down the companionway.

Nearly six hundred people on the bank.  Suddenly controlling his eagerness, the Boy contented himself with standing back and staring across strange shoulders at the place he knew so well.  There was “the worst-lookin’ shack in the town,” that had been his home, the A. C. store looming importantly, the Gold Nugget, and hardly a face to which he could not give a name and a history:  Windy Jim and the crippled Swede; Bonsor, cheek by jowl with his enemy, McGinty; Judge Corey spitting straight and far; the gorgeous bartender, all checks and diamonds, in front of a pitiful group of the scurvy-stricken (thirty of them in the town waiting for rescue by the steamer); Butts, quite bland, under the crooked cottonwood, with never a thought of how near he had come, on that very spot, to missing the first boat of the year, and all the boats of all the years to follow.

Maudie, Keith and the Colonel stood with the A. C. agent at the end of the baggage-bordered plank-walk that led to the landing.  Behind them, at least four hundred people packed and waiting with their possessions at their feet, ready to be put aboard the instant the Oklahoma made fast.  The Captain had called out “Howdy” to the A. C. Agent, and several greetings were shouted back and forth.  Maudie mounted a huge pile of baggage and sat there as on a throne, the Colonel and Keith perching on a heap of gunny-sacks at her feet.  That woman almost the only person in sight who did not expect, by means of the Oklahoma, to leave misery behind!  The Boy stood thinking “How will they bear it when they know?”

The Oklahoma was late, but she was not only the first boat—­she might conceivably be the last.

Potts and O’Flynn had spotted the man they were looking for, and called out “Hello!  Hello!” as the big fellow on the pile of gunnies got up and waved his hat.