Jacob Welse pulled on his bearskin coat and mittens, and they passed through the outer offices into the main store.  So large was it, that the tenscore purchasers before the counters made no apparent crowd.  Many were serious-faced, and more than one looked darkly at the head of the company as he passed.  The clerks were selling everything except grub, and it was grub that was in demand.  “Holding it for a rise.  Famine prices,” a red-whiskered miner sneered.  Jacob Welse heard it, but took no notice.  He expected to hear it many times and more unpleasantly ere the scare was over.

On the sidewalk he stopped to glance over the public bulletins posted against the side of the building.  Dogs lost, found, and for sale occupied some space, but the rest was devoted to notices of sales of outfits.  The timid were already growing frightened.  Outfits of five hundred pounds were offering at a dollar a pound, without flour; others, with flour, at a dollar and a half.  Jacob Welse saw Melton talking with an anxious-faced newcomer, and the satisfaction displayed by the Bonanzo king told that he had succeeded in filling his winter’s cache.

“Why don’t you smell out the sugar, Dave?” Jacob Welse asked, pointing to the bulletins.

Dave Harney looked his reproach.  “Mebbe you think I ain’t ben smellin’.  I’ve clean wore my dogs out chasin’ round from Klondike City to the Hospital.  Can’t git yer fingers on it fer love or money.”

They walked down the block-long sidewalk, past the warehouse doors and the long teams of waiting huskies curled up in wolfish comfort in the snow.  It was for this snow, the first permanent one of the fall, that the miners up-creek had waited to begin their freighting.

“Curious, ain’t it?” Dave hazarded suggestively, as they crossed the main street to the river bank.  “Mighty curious—­me ownin’ two five-hundred-foot Eldorado claims an’ a fraction, wuth five millions if I’m wuth a cent, an’ no sweetenin’ fer my coffee or mush!  Why, gosh-dang-it! this country kin go to blazes!  I’ll sell out!  I’ll quit it cold!  I’ll—­I’ll—­go back to the States!”

“Oh, no, you won’t,” Jacob Welse answered.  “I’ve heard you talk before.  You put in a year up Stuart River on straight meat, if I haven’t forgotten.  And you ate salmon-belly and dogs up the Tanana, to say nothing of going through two famines; and you haven’t turned your back on the country yet.  And you never will.  And you’ll die here as sure as that’s the Laura’s spring being hauled aboard.  And I look forward confidently to the day when I shall ship you out in a lead-lined box and burden the San Francisco end with the trouble of winding up your estate.  You are a fixture, and you know it.”

As he talked he constantly acknowledged greetings from the passers-by.  Those who knew him were mainly old-timers and he knew them all by name, though there was scarcely a newcomer to whom his face was not familiar.