“You think so?” Guth looked up, grateful for the first word of encouragement he had heard.

“It’s a cinch!  Only don’t lose your courage.”

“I—­I’ll do what’s right by you, Mr. Folsom,” declared the other.  “I’ll deed you a half interest in the Lulu.”

But Folsom shook his head.  “I don’t want it.  There’s nothing there except moss and muck and salmon berries, and it’s a mile to bed-rock.  No, you’re welcome to my share; maybe you can sell the claim for enough to make a new start or to buy grub for the wife and the kid.  I’ll look for another job.”

For a month or more the lonesome husband “stevedored,” wrestling freight on the lighters, then he disappeared.  He left secretly, in the night, for by now he had grown fanciful and he dared to hope that he could dodge his Nemesis.  He turned up in Fairbanks, a thousand miles away, and straightway lost himself in the hills.

He had not covered his tracks, however, for bad luck followed him.

Now no man starves in Alaska, for there is always work for the able-bodied; but whatever Folsom turned his hand to failed, and by and by his courage went.  He had been a man of consequence in Nome; he had made money and he had handled other men, therefore his sense of failure was the bitterer.

Meanwhile, somewhere in him there remained the ghost of his faith in Lois, the faintly flickering hope that some day they would come together again.  It lay dormant in him, like an irreligious man’s unacknowledged faith in God and a hereafter, but it, too, vanished when he read in a Seattle newspaper, already three months old, the announcement of his wife’s divorce.  He flinched when he read that it had been won on the grounds of desertion, and thereafter he shunned newspapers.

Spring found him broke, as usual.  He had become bad company and men avoided him.  It amused him grimly to learn that a new strike had been made in Nome, the biggest discovery in the camp’s history, and to realize that he had fled just in time to miss the opportunity of profiting by it.  He heard talk of a prehistoric sea-beach line, a streak of golden sands which paralleled the shore and lay hidden below the tundra mud.  News came of overnight fortunes, of friends grown prosperous and mighty.  Embittered anew, Folsom turned again to the wilderness, and he did not reappear until the summer was over.  He came to town resolved to stay only long enough to buy bacon and beans, but he had lost his pocket calendar and arrived on a Sunday, when the stores were closed.

Even so little a thing as the loss of that calendar loomed big in the light of later events, for in walking the streets he encountered a friend but just arrived from the Behring coast.

The man recognized him, despite his beard and his threadbare mackinaws and they had a drink together.

“I s’pose you heard about that Third Beach Line?” the new-comer inquired.  Folsom nodded.  “Well, they’ve opened it up for miles, and it’s just a boulevard of solid gold.  ‘Cap’ Carter’s into it big, and so are the O’Brien boys and Old Man Hendricks.  They’re lousy with pay.”