In the meantime Foy kept pounding away.  Occasionally a soiled pedestrian would slide down the slope, tell a wild tale of rich strikes, and a hundred men would quit work and head for the highlands.  Foy would storm and swear and coax by turns, but to no purpose; for they were like so many steers, and as easily stampeded.  When the Atlin boom struck the camp, Foy lost five hundred men in as many minutes.  Scores of graders dropped their tools and started off on a trot.  The prospector who had told the fable had thrown his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the general direction.  Nobody had thought to ask how far.  Many forgot to let go; and Heney’s picks and shovels, worth over a dollar apiece, went away with the stampeders.  As the wild mob swept on, the tethered blasters cut the cables that guyed them to the hills, and each loped away with a piece of rope around one ankle.

Panting, they passed over the range, these gold-crazed Coxeys, without a bun or a blanket, a crust or a crumb, many without a cent or even a sweat-mark where a cent had slept in their soiled overalls.

When Foy had exhausted the English, Irish, and Alaskan languages in wishing the men luck in various degrees, he rounded up the remnant of his army and began again.  In a day or two the stampeders began to limp back hungry and weary, and every one who brought a pick or a shovel was re-employed.  But hundreds kept on toward Lake Bennett, and thence by water up Windy Arm to the Atlin country, and many of them have not yet returned to claim their time-checks.

The autumn waned.  The happy wives of young engineers, who had been tented along the line during the summer, watched the wildflowers fade with a feeling of loneliness and deep longing for their stout-hearted, strong-limbed husbands, who were away up in the cloud-veiled hills; and they longed, too, for other loved ones in the lowlands of their childhood.  Foy’s blasters and builders buttoned their coats and buckled down to keep warm.  Below, they could hear loud peals of profanity as the trailers, packers, and pilgrims pounded their dumb slaves over the trail.  Above, the wind cried and moaned among the crags, constantly reminding them that winter was near at hand.  The nights were longer than the days.  The working day was cut from ten to eight hours, but the pay of the men had been raised from thirty to thirty-five cents an hour.

One day a black cloud curtained the canon, and the workmen looked up from their picks and drills to find that it was November and night.  The whole theatre, stage and all, had grown suddenly dark; but they knew, by the strange, weird noise in the wings, that the great tragedy of winter was on.  Hislop’s horse and dog went down the trail.  Hawkins and Hislop and Heney walked up and down among the men, as commanding officers show themselves on the eve of battle.  Foy chaffed the laborers and gave them more rope; but no amount of levity could prevail against