To be sure, they did not say that to Jack,—­they only telegraphed it one to another over their cigars in the club.  Some of them actually believed it, and one man who had made money in California and later in Leadville said he knew it was so; for, said he, “Jack Ramsey never says or does a thing without a ‘reason.’”

At the end of a week this English-bred Yankee had organized the “Chinook Mining and Milling Company, Limited.”

This man was at the head of the scheme, with Jack Ramsey as Managing Director.

Ramsey was a prospector by nature made proficient by practice.  He had prospected in every mining camp from Mexico to Moose Factory.  If he were to find a real bonanza, his English-American friend used to say, he would be miserable for the balance of his days, or rather his to-morrows.  He lived in his to-morrows,—­in these and in dreams.  He loved women, wine, and music, and the laughter of little children; but better than all these he loved the wilderness and the wildflowers and the soft, low singing of mountain rills.  He loved the flowers of the North, for they were all sweet and innocent.  On all the two thousand five hundred miles of the Yukon, he used to say, there is not one poisonous plant; and he reasoned that the plants of the Peace and the Pine and the red roses of the Upper Athabasca would be the same.

And so, one March morning, he sailed up the Sound to enter his mountain-walled wonderland by the portal of Port Simpson, which opens on the Pacific.  His English-American friend went up as far as Simpson, and when the little coast steamer poked her prow into Work Channel he touched the President of the Chinook Mining and Milling Company and said, “The Gateway to God’s world.”

* * * * *

The head of the C.M. & M. Company was not surprised when Christmas came ahead of Jack Ramsey’s preliminary report.  Jack was a careful, conservative prospector, and would not send a report unless there was a good and substantial reason for writing it out.

In the following summer a letter came,—­an extremely short one, considering what it contained; for it told, tersely, of great prospects in the wonderland.  It closed with a request for a new rifle, some garden-seeds, and an H.B. letter of credit for five hundred dollars.

After a warm debate among the directors it was agreed the goods should go.

The following summer—­that is, the second summer in the life of the Chinook Company—­Dawson dawned on the world.  That year about half the floating population of the Republic went to Cuba and the other half to the Klondike.

As the stream swelled and the channel between Vancouver Island and the mainland grew black with boats, the President of the C.M. & M. Company began to pant for Ramsey, that he might join the rush to the North.  That exciting summer died and another dawned, with no news from Ramsey.

When the adventurous English-American could withstand the strain no longer, he shipped for Skagway himself.  He dropped off at Port Simpson and inquired about Ramsey.