For Tom—­Husky Travers, the Yukoners named him—­never thought that the end approached.  A temporary illness, he called it, the natural enfeeblement following upon a prolonged bout with Yucatan fever.  In the spring he would be right and fit again.  Cold weather was what he needed.  His blood had been cooked.  In the meantime it was a case of take it easy and make the most of the rest.

And no one undeceived him—­not even the Yukoners, who smoked pipes and black cigars and chewed tobacco on Frederick’s broad verandas until he felt like an intruder in his own house.  There was no touch with them.  They regarded him as a stranger to be tolerated.  They came to see Tom.  And their manner of seeing him was provocative of innocent envy pangs to Frederick.  Day after day he watched them.  He would see the Yukoners meet, perhaps one just leaving the sick room and one just going in.  They would clasp hands, solemnly and silently, outside the door.  The newcomer would question with his eyes, and the other would shake his head.  And more than once Frederick noted the moisture in their eyes.  Then the newcomer would enter and draw his chair up to Tom’s, and with jovial voice proceed to plan the outfitting for the exploration of the upper Kuskokeem; for it was there Tom was bound in the spring.  Dogs could be had at Larabee’s—­a clean breed, too, with no taint of the soft Southland strains.  It was rough country, it was reported, but if sour-doughs couldn’t make the traverse from Larabee’s in forty days they’d like to see a chechako do it in sixty.

And so it went, until Frederick wondered, when he came to die, if there was one man in the county, much less in the adjoining county, who would come to him at his bedside.

Seated at his desk, through the open windows would drift whiffs of strong tobacco and rumbling voices, and he could not help catching snatches of what the Yukoners talked.

“D’ye recollect that Koyokuk rush in the early nineties?” he would hear one say.  “Well, him an’ me was pardners then, tradin’ an’ such.  We had a dinky little steamboat, the Blatterbat.  He named her that, an’ it stuck.  He was a caution.  Well, sir, as I was sayin’, him an’ me loaded the little Blatterbat to the guards an’ started up the Koyokuk, me firin’ an’ engineerin’ an’ him steerin’, an’ both of us deck-handin’.  Once in a while we’d tie to the bank an’ cut firewood.  It was the fall, an’ mush-ice was comin’ down, an’ everything gettin’ ready for the freeze up.  You see, we was north of the Arctic Circle then an’ still headin’ north.  But they was two hundred miners in there needin’ grub if they wintered, an’ we had the grub.