Yes, the Hudson people said, it was quite probable that Ramsey had passed in that way.  Some hundreds of prospectors had gone in during the past three years, but the current created by the Klondike rush had drawn most of them out and up the Sound.

One man declared that he had seen Ramsey ship for Skagway on the “Dirigo,” and, after a little help and a few more drinks, gave a minute description of a famous nugget pin which the passing pilgrim said the prospector wore.

And so the capitalist took the next boat for Skagway.

By the time he reached Dawson the death-rattle had begun to assert itself in the bosom of the boom.  The most diligent inquiry failed to reveal the presence of the noted prospector.  On the contrary, many old-timers from Colorado and California declared that Ramsey had never reached the Dike—­that is, not since the boom.  In a walled tent on a shimmering sand-bar at the mouth of the crystal Klondike, Captain Jack Crawford, the “Poet Scout,” severely sober in that land of large thirsts, wearing his old-time halo of lady-like behavior and hair, was conducting an “Ice Cream Emporium and Soft-drink Saloon.”

“No,” said the scout, with the tips of his tapered fingers trembling on an empty table, straining forward and staring into the stranger’s face; “no, Jack Ramsey has not been here; and if what you say be true—­he sleeps alone in yonder fastness.  Alas, poor Ramsey!—­Ah knew ’im well”; and he sank on a seat, shaking with sobs.

* * * * *

The English-American, on his way out, stopped at Simpson again.  From a half-breed trapper he heard of a white man who had crossed the Coast Range three grasses ago.  This white man had three or four head of cattle, a Cree servant, and a queer-looking cayuse with long ears and a mournful, melancholy cry.  This latter member of the gang carried the outfit.

Taking this half-caste Cree to guide him, the mining man set out in search of the long-lost Ramsey.  They crossed the first range and searched the streams north of the Peace River pass, almost to the crest of the continent, but found no trace of the prospector.

When the summer died and the wilderness was darkened by the Northern night, the search was abandoned.

The years drifted into the past, and finally the Chinook Mining and Milling Company went to the wall.  The English-American promoter, smarting under criticism, reimbursed each of his associates and took over the office, empty ink-stands and blotting paper, and so blotted out all records of the one business failure of his life.

But he could not blot out Jack Ramsey from his memory.  There was a “reason,” he would say, for Ramsey’s silence.

One day, when in Edmonton, he met Mayor Ross, who had come into the country by the back door some thirty years ago.  The tales coaxed from the Mayor’s memory corresponded with Ramsey’s report; and having nothing but time and money, the ex-President of the C.M. & M. Company determined to go in via the Peace River pass and see for himself.  He made the acquaintance of Smith “The Silent,” as he was called, who was at that time pathfinding for the Grand Trunk Pacific, and secured permission to go in with the engineers.