To begin with, every foot of ground in the proven districts was taken, and even when he pushed out far afield he found that the whole country was plastered with locations:  rivers, creeks and tributaries, benches and hillsides, had been staked.  For many miles in every direction blazed trees and pencil notices greeted him—­he found them in places where it seemed no foot but his had ever trod.  In Dawson the Gold Commissioner’s office was besieged by daily crowds of claimants; it would have taken years of work on the part of a hundred thousand men to even prospect the ground already recorded on the books.

Back and forth Phillips came and went, he made trips with pack and hand-sled, he slept out in spruce forests, in prospectors’ tents, in new cabins the sweaty green logs of which were still dripping, and when he had finished he was poorer by a good many dollars and richer only in the possession of a few recorder’s receipts, the value of which he had already begun to doubt.

Disappointed he was, but not discouraged.  It was all too new and exciting for that.  Every visit to Bonanza or El Dorado inspired him.  It would have inspired a wooden man.  For miles those valleys were smoky from the sinking fires, and their clean white carpets were spotted with piles of raw red dirt.  By day they echoed to blows of axes, the crash of falling trees, the plaint of windlasses, the cries of freighters; by night they became vast caldrons filled with flickering fires; tremendous vats, the vapors from which were illuminated by hidden furnaces.  One would have thought that here gold was being made, not sought—­that this was a region of volcanic hot springs where every fissure and vent-hole spouted steam.  It was a strange, a marvelous sight; it stirred the imagination to know that underfoot, locked in the flinty depths of the frozen gravel, was wealth unmeasured and unearned, rich hoards of yellow gold that yesterday were ownerless.

A month of stampeding dulled the keen edge of Pierce’s enthusiasm, so he took a breathing-spell in which to get his bearings.

The Yukon had closed and the human flotsam and jetsam it had borne thither was settling.  Pierce could feel a metamorphic agency at work in the town; already new habits of life were crystallizing among its citizens; and beneath its whirlpool surface new forms were in the making.  It alarmed him to realize that as yet his own affairs were in suspense, and he argued, with all the hot impatience of youth, that it was high time he came to rest.  Opportunities were on every side of him, but he knew not where or how to lay hold of them to his best advantage.  More than ever he felt himself to be the toy of circumstance, more than ever he feared the fallibility of his judgment and the consequences of a mistake.  He was in a mood both dissatisfied and irresolute when he encountered his two trail friends, Tom Linton and Jerry Quirk.  Pierce had seen them last at Linderman, engaged in prosecuting a stampeders’ divorce; he was surprised to find them reunited.