Meanwhile, McNamara hired every idle man he could lay hand upon, and ripped the placers open with double shifts.  Every day a stream of yellow dust poured into the bank and was locked in his vaults, while those mine-owners who attempted to witness the clean-ups were ejected from their claims.  The politician had worked with incredible swiftness and system, and a fortnight after landing he had made good his boast to Struve, and was in charge of every good claim in the district, the owners were ousted, their appeals argued and denied, and the court gone for thirty days, leaving him a clear field for his operations.  He felt a contempt for most of his victims, who were slow-witted Swedes, grasping neither the purport nor the magnitude of his operation, and as to those litigants who were discerning enough to see its enormity, he trusted to his organization to thwart them.

The two partners had come to feel that they were beating against a wall, and had also come squarely to face the proposition that they were without funds wherewith to continue their battle.  It was maddening for them to think of the daily robbery that they suffered, for the Midas turned out many ounces of gold at every shift; and more maddening to realize the receiver’s shrewdness in crippling them by his theft of the gold in their safe.  That had been his crowning stroke.

“We must get money quick,” said Glenister.  “Do you think we can borrow?”

“Borrow?” sniffed Dextry.  “Folks don’t lend money in Alaska.”

They relapsed into a moody silence.

“I met a feller this mornin’ that’s workin’ on the Midas,” the old man resumed.  “He came in town fer a pair of gum boots, an’ he says they’ve run into awful rich ground—­so rich that they have to clean up every morning when the night shift goes off ’cause the riffles clog with gold.”

“Think of it!” Glenister growled.  “If we had even a part of one of those clean-ups we could send Wheaton outside.”

In the midst of his bitterness a thought struck him.  He made as though to speak, then closed his mouth; but his partner’s eyes were on him, filled with a suppressed but growing fire.  Dextry lowered his voice cautiously: 

“There’ll be twenty thousand dollars in them sluices to-night at midnight.”

Glenister stared back while his pulse pounded at something that lay in the other’s words.

“It belongs to us,” the young man said.  “There wouldn’t be anything wrong about it, would there?”

Dextry sneered.  “Wrong!  Right!  Them is fine an’ soundin’ titles in a mess like this.  What do they mean?  I tell you, at midnight to-night Alec McNamara will have twenty thousand dollars of our money—­”

“God!  What would happen if they caught us?” whispered the younger, following out his thought.  “They’d never let us get off the claim alive.  He couldn’t find a better excuse to shoot us down and get rid of us.  If we came up before this Judge for trial, we’d go to Sitka for twenty years.”