The clerk nodded.  “She owns some orchard lands over there and to hear him talk, you’d think she had the money; Until it comes to ordering; then the Queen of Sheba isn’t in it.  ’I guess we can stand the best room in the house,’ he says.  And when I showed them the blue suite and told them Tarquina, the prima donna opening at the Metropolitan to-night, had the companion suite in rose, it’s:  ’Do you think you can put up with this blue, Annabel?’ But there comes the cameo now.  No, the other way, from the street.”

Jimmie met the prospector midway across the lobby.  “Mr. Banks?” he began genially.  “I am the lucky one this time; I came in purposely to see you.  I am Daniels, representing the Seattle Press.  My paper is particular about the Alaska news, and I came straight to headquarters to find out about the Iditarod camp.”

Banks kept on to the desk, and Jimmie turned to walk with him.  The clerk was ready with his key.  “Mrs. Banks hasn’t come in yet,” he said, smiling.

“She’s likely been kept up at Sedgewick-Wilson’s.  I introduced her to a friend of mine there.  I had to chase around to find a contractor that could ship his own scrapers and shovels across the range, and I thought the time would go quicker, for her, picking out clothes.  But,” he added, turning to the reporter, “we may as well sit down and wait for her here in the lobby.”

“I understand,” began Daniels, opening his notebook on the arm of his chair, “that your placer in the Iditarod country has panned out a clear one hundred thousand dollars.”

“Ninety-five thousand, two hundred and twenty-six,” corrected the mining man, “with the last clean-up to hear from.”

Jimmie set these figures down, then asked:  “Is the rumor true that the Morgansteins are considering an offer from you?”

“No, sir,” piped the little man.  “They made me an offer.  I gave ’em an option on my bunch of claims for a hundred and fifty thousand.  Their engineer has gone in to look the property over.  If they buy, they’ll likely send a dredger through by spring and work a big bunch of men.”

There was a silent moment while Jimmie recorded these facts, then:  “And I understand you are interested in fruit lands east of the mountains,” he said.  “It often happens that way.  Men make their pile up there in the frozen north and come back here to Washington to invest it.”

“Likely,” replied Banks shortly.  “Likely.  But it’s my wife that owns the property in the fruit belt.  And it’s a mighty promising layout; it’s up to me to stay with it till she gets her improvements in.  Afterwards—­now I want you to get this in correct.  Last time things got mixed; the young fellow wrote me down Bangs.  And I’ve read things in the newspaper lately about Hollis Tisdale that I know for a fact ain’t so.”

“Hollis Tisdale?” Jimmie suspended his pencil.  “So you know the Sphynx of the Yukon, do you?”

“That’s it.  That’s the name that blame newspaper called him.  Sphynx nothing.  Hollis Tisdale is the best known man in Alaska and the best liked.  If the Government had had the sense to put him at the head of the Alaska business, there’d been something doing, my, yes.”