up and stiffened his backbone.  Forty cents a pound they demanded for the twenty-eight-mile portage, and while he caught his breath and swallowed, the price went up to forty-three.  Fifteen husky Indians put the straps on his packs at forty-five, but took them off at an offer of forty-seven from a Skaguay Croesus in dirty shirt and ragged overalls who had lost his horses on the White Pass trail and was now making a last desperate drive at the country by way of Chilkoot.

But Rasmunsen was clean grit, and at fifty cents found takers, who, two days later, set his eggs down intact at Linderman.  But fifty cents a pound is a thousand dollars a ton, and his fifteen hundred pounds had exhausted his emergency fund and left him stranded at the Tantalus point where each day he saw the fresh-whipsawed boats departing for Dawson.  Further, a great anxiety brooded over the camp where the boats were built.  Men worked frantically, early and late, at the height of their endurance, caulking, nailing, and pitching in a frenzy of haste for which adequate explanation was not far to seek.  Each day the snow-line crept farther down the bleak, rock-shouldered peaks, and gale followed gale, with sleet and slush and snow, and in the eddies and quiet places young ice formed and thickened through the fleeting hours.  And each morn, toil-stiffened men turned wan faces across the lake to see if the freeze-up had come.  For the freeze-up heralded the death of their hope—­the hope that they would be floating down the swift river ere navigation closed on the chain of lakes.

To harrow Rasmunsen’s soul further, he discovered three competitors in the egg business.  It was true that one, a little German, had gone broke and was himself forlornly back-tripping the last pack of the portage; but the other two had boats nearly completed, and were daily supplicating the god of merchants and traders to stay the iron hand of winter for just another day.  But the iron hand closed down over the land.  Men were being frozen in the blizzard which swept Chilkoot, and Rasmunsen frosted his toes ere he was aware.  He found a chance to go passenger with his freight in a boat just shoving off through the rubble, but two hundred hard cash, was required, and he had no money.

“Ay tank you yust wait one leedle w’ile,” said the Swedish boat-builder, who had struck his Klondike right there and was wise enough to know it—­“one leedle w’ile und I make you a tam fine skiff boat, sure Pete.”

With this unpledged word to go on, Rasmunsen hit the back trail to Crater Lake, where he fell in with two press correspondents whose tangled baggage was strewn from Stone House, over across the Pass, and as far as Happy Camp.

“Yes,” he said with consequence.  “I’ve a thousand dozen eggs at Linderman, and my boat’s just about got the last seam caulked.  Consider myself in luck to get it.  Boats are at a premium, you know, and none to be had.”