“McCaskey!”

“He’s an old pal of Anderson’s.”

“Does Big Lars know he’s a thief?”

Jerry shrugged.  “Lars ain’t the kind that listens to scandal and we ain’t the kind that carries it.”

Pierce meditated briefly; then he said, slowly, “If your lay turns out good so will McCaskey’s.”  His frown deepened.  “Well, if there’s a law of compensation, if there’s such a thing as retributive justice—­you have a bad piece of ground.”

“But there ain’t any such thing,” Tom quickly asserted.  “Anyhow, it don’t work in mining-camps.  If it did the saloons would be reading-rooms and the gamblers would take in washing.  Look at the lucky men in this camp—­bums, most of ’em.  George Carmack was a squaw-man, and he made the strike.”

Pierce felt no fear of Joe McCaskey, only dislike and a desire to avoid further contact with him.  The prospect of a long winter in close proximity to a proven scoundrel was repugnant.  Balanced against this was the magic of Big Lars’ name.  It was a problem; again indecision rose to trouble him.

“I’ll think it over,” he said, finally.

Farther down the street Phillips’ attention was arrested by an announcement of the opening of the Rialto Saloon and Theater, Miller & Best, proprietors.  Challenged by the name of his former employer and drawn by the sounds of merriment from within, Pierce entered.  He had seen little of Laure since his arrival; he had all but banished her from his thoughts, in fact; but he determined now to look her up.

The Rialto was the newest and the most pretentious of Dawson’s amusement palaces.  It comprised a drinking-place with a spacious gambling-room adjoining.  In the rear of the latter was the theater, a huge log annex especially designed as the home of Bacchus and Terpsichore.

The front room was crowded; through an archway leading to the gambling-hall came the noise of many voices, and over all the strains of an orchestra at the rear.  Ben Miller, a famous sporting character, was busy weighing gold dust at the massive scales near the door when Pierce entered.

The theater, too, was packed.  Here a second bar was doing a thriving business, and every chair on the floor, every box in the balcony overhanging three sides of it, was occupied.  Waiters were scurrying up and down the wide stairway; the general hubbub was punctuated by the sound of exploding corks as the Klondike spendthrifts advertised their prosperity in a hilarious contest of prodigality.

All Dawson had turned out for the opening, and Pierce recognized several of the El Dorado kings, among them Big Lars Anderson.

These new-born magnates were as thriftless as locusts, and in the midst of their bacchanalian revels Pierce felt very poor, very obscure.  Here was the roisterous spirit of the Northland at full play; it irked the young man intensely to feel that he could afford no part in it.  Laure was not long in discovering him.  She sped to him with the swiftness of a swallow; breathlessly she inquired: