Steve wrote to me once, and his letter seemed irritated.  He took it kind of hard because I’d left him with Spot.  Also, he said he’d used the “rough-on-rats,” per directions, and that there was nothing doing.  A year went by.  I was back in the office and prospering in all ways—­even getting a bit fat.  And then Steve arrived.  He didn’t look me up.  I read his name in the steamer list, and wondered why.  But I didn’t wonder long.  I got up one morning and found that Spot chained to the gatepost and holding up the milkman.  Steve went north to Seattle, I learned, that very morning.  I didn’t put on any more weight.  My wife made me buy him a collar and tag, and within an hour he showed his gratitude by killing her pet Persian cat.  There is no getting rid of that Spot.  He will be with me until I die, for he’ll never die.  My appetite is not so good since he arrived, and my wife says I am looking peaked.  Last night that Spot got into Mr. Harvey’s hen-house (Harvey is my next door neighbor) and killed nineteen of his fancy-bred chickens.  I shall have to pay for them.  My neighbors on the other side quarreled with my wife and then moved out.  Spot was the cause of it.  And that is why I am disappointed in Stephen Mackaye.  I had no idea he was so mean a man.

[Illustration]

TRUST

All lines had been cast off, and the Seattle No. 4 was pulling slowly out from the shore.  Her decks were piled high with freight and baggage, and swarmed with a heterogeneous company of Indians, dogs, and dog-mushers, prospectors, traders, and homeward-bound gold-seekers.  A goodly portion of Dawson was lined up on the bank, saying good-by.  As the gang-plank came in and the steamer nosed into the stream, the clamor of farewell became deafening.  Also, in that eleventh moment, everybody began to remember final farewell messages and to shout them back and forth across the widening stretch of water.  Louis Bondell, curling his yellow mustache with one hand and languidly waving the other hand to his friends on shore, suddenly remembered something and sprang to the rail.

“Oh, Fred!” he bawled.  “Oh, Fred!”

The “Fred” desired thrust a strapping pair of shoulders through the forefront of the crowd on the bank and tried to catch Louis Bondell’s message.  The latter grew red in the face with vain vociferation.  Still the water widened between steamboat and shore.

“Hey you, Captain Scott!” he yelled at the pilot-house.  “Stop the boat!”

The gongs clanged, and the big stern wheel reversed, then stopped.  All hands on steamboat and on bank took advantage of this respite to exchange final, new, and imperative farewells.  More futile than ever was Louis Bondell’s effort to make himself heard.  The Seattle No. 4 lost way and drifted down-stream, and Captain Scott had to go ahead and reverse a second time.  His head disappeared inside the pilot-house, coming into view a moment later behind a big megaphone.