They left their packs just inside the door of the log-cabin, indicated as “Bunk House for the men on No. 6, Above”—­a fearsome place, where, on shelf above shelf, among long unwashed bedclothes, the unwashed workmen of a prosperous company lay in the stupor of sore fatigue and semi-asphyxiation.  Someone stirred as the door opened, and out of the fetid dusk of the unventilated, closely-shuttered cabin came a voice: 

“Night shift on?”

“No.”

“Then, damn you! shut the door.”

As the never-resting sun “forced” the Dawson market-garden and the wild-roses of the trail, so here on the creek men must follow the strenuous example.  No pause in the growing or the toiling of this Northern world.  The day-gang on No. 0 was hard at it down there where lengthwise in the channel was propped a line of sluice-boxes, steadied by regularly spaced poles laid from box to bank on gravel ridge.  Looking down from above, the whole was like a huge fish-bone lying along the bed of the creek.  A little group of men with picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows were reducing the “dump” of winter pay, piled beside a windlass, conveying it to the sluices.  Other men in line, four or five feet below the level of the boxes, were “stripping,” picking, and shovelling the gravel off the bed-rock—­no easy business, for even this summer temperature thawed but a few inches a day, and below, the frost of ten thousand years cemented the rubble into iron.

“Where is the Superintendent?”

“That’s Seymour in the straw hat.”

It was felt that even the broken and dilapidated article mentioned was a distinction and a luxury.

Yes, it was too hot up here in the Klondyke.

They made their way to the man in authority, a dark, quiet-mannered person, with big, gentle eyes, not the sort of Superintendent they had expected to find representing such a man as the owner of No. 0.

Having read Ryan’s letter and slowly scanned the applicants:  “What do you know about it?” He nodded at the sluice.

“All of nothing,” said the Boy.

“Does it call for any particular knowing?” asked the Colonel.

“Calls for muscle and plenty of keep-at-it.”  His voice was soft, but as the Colonel looked at him he realized why a hard fellow like Scoville Austin had made this Southerner Superintendent.

“Better just try us.”

“I can use one more man on the night shift, a dollar and a half an hour.”

“All right,” said the Boy.

The Colonel looked at him.  “Is this job yours or mine?”

The Superintendent had gone up towards the dam.

“Whichever you say.”

The Boy did not like to suggest that the Colonel seemed little fit for this kind of exercise.  They had been in the Klondyke long enough to know that to be in work was to be in luck.

“I’ll tell you,” the younger man said quickly, answering something unspoken, but plain in the Colonel’s face; “I’ll go up the gulch and see what else there is.”