The more I think of that Spot, the more I am convinced that there are things in this world that go beyond science.  On no scientific grounds can that Spot be explained.  It’s psychic phenomena, or mysticism, or something of that sort, I guess, with a lot of Theosophy thrown in.  The Klondike is a good country.  I might have been there yet, and become a millionaire, if it hadn’t been for Spot.  He got on my nerves.  I stood him for two years altogether, and then I guess my stamina broke.  It was the summer of 1899 when I pulled out.  I didn’t say anything to Steve.  I just sneaked.  But I fixed it up all right.  I wrote Steve a note, and enclosed a package of “rough-on-rats,” telling him what to do with it.  I was worn down to skin and bone by that Spot, and I was that nervous that I’d jump and look around when there wasn’t anybody within hailing distance.  But it was astonishing the way I recuperated when I got quit of him.  I got back twenty pounds before I arrived in San Francisco, and by the time I’d crossed the ferry to Oakland I was my old self again, so that even my wife looked in vain for any change in me.

Steve wrote to me once, and his letter seemed irritated.  He took it kind of hard because I’d left him with Spot.  Also, he said he’d used the “rough-on-rats,” per directions, and that there was nothing doing.  A year went by.  I was back in the office and prospering in all ways—­even getting a bit fat.  And then Steve arrived.  He didn’t look me up.  I read his name in the steamer list, and wondered why.  But I didn’t wonder long.  I got up one morning and found that Spot chained to the gate-post and holding up the milkman.  Steve went north to Seattle, I learned, that very morning.  I didn’t put on any more weight.  My wife made me buy him a collar and tag, and within an hour he showed his gratitude by killing her pet Persian cat.  There is no getting rid of that Spot.  He will be with me until I die, for he’ll never die.  My appetite is not so good since he arrived, and my wife says I am looking peaked.  Last night that Spot got into Mr. Harvey’s hen-house (Harvey is my next-door neighbour) and killed nineteen of his fancy-bred chickens.  I shall have to pay for them.  My neighbours on the other side quarrelled with my wife and then moved out.  Spot was the cause of it.  And that is why I am disappointed in Stephen Mackaye.  I had no idea he was so mean a man.

FLUSH OF GOLD

Lon McFane was a bit grumpy, what of losing his tobacco pouch, or else he might have told me, before we got to it, something about the cabin at Surprise Lake.  All day, turn and turn about, we had spelled each other at going to the fore and breaking trail for the dogs.  It was heavy snowshoe work, and did not tend to make a man voluble, yet Lon McFane might have found breath enough at noon, when we stopped to boil coffee, with which to tell me.  But he didn’t.