Whereupon and almost with bodily violence the correspondents clamoured to go with him, fluttered greenbacks before his eyes, and spilled yellow twenties from hand to hand.  He could not hear of it, but they over-persuaded him, and he reluctantly consented to take them at three hundred apiece.  Also they pressed upon him the passage money in advance.  And while they wrote to their respective journals concerning the Good Samaritan with the thousand dozen eggs, the Good Samaritan was hurrying back to the Swede at Linderman.

“Here, you!  Gimme that boat!” was his salutation, his hand jingling the correspondents’ gold pieces and his eyes hungrily bent upon the finished craft.

The Swede regarded him stolidly and shook his head.

“How much is the other fellow paying?  Three hundred?  Well, here’s four.  Take it.”

He tried to press it upon him, but the man backed away.

“Ay tank not.  Ay say him get der skiff boat.  You yust wait—­”

“Here’s six hundred.  Last call.  Take it or leave it.  Tell ’m it’s a mistake.”

The Swede wavered.  “Ay tank yes,” he finally said, and the last Rasmunsen saw of him his vocabulary was going to wreck in a vain effort to explain the mistake to the other fellows.

The German slipped and broke his ankle on the steep hogback above Deep Lake, sold out his stock for a dollar a dozen, and with the proceeds hired Indian packers to carry him back to Dyea.  But on the morning Rasmunsen shoved off with his correspondents, his two rivals followed suit.

“How many you got?” one of them, a lean little New Englander, called out.

“One thousand dozen,” Rasmunsen answered proudly.

“Huh!  I’ll go you even stakes I beat you in with my eight hundred.”

The correspondents offered to lend him the money; but Rasmunsen declined, and the Yankee closed with the remaining rival, a brawny son of the sea and sailor of ships and things, who promised to show them all a wrinkle or two when it came to cracking on.  And crack on he did, with a large tarpaulin square-sail which pressed the bow half under at every jump.  He was the first to run out of Linderman, but, disdaining the portage, piled his loaded boat on the rocks in the boiling rapids.  Rasmunsen and the Yankee, who likewise had two passengers, portaged across on their backs and then lined their empty boats down through the bad water to Bennett.

Bennett was a twenty-five-mile lake, narrow and deep, a funnel between the mountains through which storms ever romped.  Rasmunsen camped on the sand-pit at its head, where were many men and boats bound north in the teeth of the Arctic winter.  He awoke in the morning to find a piping gale from the south, which caught the chill from the whited peaks and glacial valleys and blew as cold as north wind ever blew.  But it was fair, and he also found the Yankee staggering past the first bold headland with all sail set.  Boat after boat was getting under way, and the correspondents fell to with enthusiasm.