“Fifty dollars from San Francisco to Dyea, two hundred from Dyea to Linderman, passengers pay for the boat—­two hundred and fifty all told,” she summed up swiftly.

“And a hundred for my clothes and personal outfit,” he went on happily; “that leaves a margin of five hundred for emergencies.  And what possible emergencies can arise?”

Alma shrugged her shoulders and elevated her brows.  If that vast Northland was capable of swallowing up a man and a thousand dozen eggs, surely there was room and to spare for whatever else he might happen to possess.  So she thought, but she said nothing.  She knew David Rasmunsen too well to say anything.

“Doubling the time because of chance delays, I should make the trip in two months.  Think of it, Alma!  Four thousand in two months!  Beats the paltry hundred a month I’m getting now.  Why, we’ll build further out where we’ll have more space, gas in every room, and a view, and the rent of the cottage’ll pay taxes, insurance, and water, and leave something over.  And then there’s always the chance of my striking it and coming out a millionaire.  Now tell me, Alma, don’t you think I’m very moderate?”

And Alma could hardly think otherwise.  Besides, had not her own cousin,—­though a remote and distant one to be sure, the black sheep, the harum-scarum, the ne’er-do-well,—­had not he come down out of that weird North country with a hundred thousand in yellow dust, to say nothing of a half-ownership in the hole from which it came?

David Rasmunsen’s grocer was surprised when he found him weighing eggs in the scales at the end of the counter, and Rasmunsen himself was more surprised when he found that a dozen eggs weighed a pound and a half—­fifteen hundred pounds for his thousand dozen!  There would be no weight left for his clothes, blankets, and cooking utensils, to say nothing of the grub he must necessarily consume by the way.  His calculations were all thrown out, and he was just proceeding to recast them when he hit upon the idea of weighing small eggs.  “For whether they be large or small, a dozen eggs is a dozen eggs,” he observed sagely to himself; and a dozen small ones he found to weigh but a pound and a quarter.  Thereat the city of San Francisco was overrun by anxious-eyed emissaries, and commission houses and dairy associations were startled by a sudden demand for eggs running not more than twenty ounces to the dozen.

Rasmunsen mortgaged the little cottage for a thousand dollars, arranged for his wife to make a prolonged stay among her own people, threw up his job, and started North.  To keep within his schedule he compromised on a second-class passage, which, because of the rush, was worse than steerage; and in the late summer, a pale and wabbly man, he disembarked with his eggs on the Dyea beach.  But it did not take him long to recover his land legs and appetite.  His first interview with the Chilkoot packers straightened him