“Right-o,” said the lieutenant.  “I’ll get my men together and station them.  We can’t have any trouble here, and we won’t have.  But you’d better get up and talk to them.”

“There must be some mistake, fellows,” Smoke began in a loud voice.  “We’re not ready to sell lots.  The streets are not surveyed yet.  But next week we shall have the grand opening sale.”

He was interrupted by an outburst of impatience and indignation.

“We don’t want lots,” a young miner cried out.  “We don’t want what’s on top of the ground.  We’ve come for what’s under the ground.”

“We don’t know what we’ve got under the ground,” Smoke answered.  “But we do know we’ve got a fine town-site on top of it.”

“Sure,” Shorty added.  “Grand for scenery an’ solitude.  Folks lovin’ solitude come a-flockin’ here by thousands.  Most popular solitude on the Yukon.”

Again the impatient cries arose, and Saltman, who had been talking with the later comers, came to the front.

“We’re here to stake claims,” he opened.  “We know what you’ve did—­filed a string of five quartz claims on end, and there they are over there running across the town-site on the line of the slide and the canyon.  Only you misplayed.  Two of them entries is fake.  Who is Seth Bierce?  No one ever heard of him.  You filed a claim this mornin’ in his name.  An’ you filed a claim in the name of Harry Maxwell.  Now Harry Maxwell ain’t in the country.  He’s down in Seattle.  Went out last fall.  Them two claims is open to relocation.”

“Suppose I have his power of attorney?” Smoke queried.

“You ain’t,” Saltman answered.  “An’ if you have you got to show it.  Anyway, here’s where we relocate.  Come on, fellows.”

Saltman, stepping across the dead-line, had turned to encourage a following, when the police lieutenant’s voice rang out and stopped the forward surge of the great mass.

“Hold on there!  You can’t do that, you know!”

“Can’t, eh?” said Bill Saltman.  “The law says a fake location can be relocated, don’t it?”

“Thet’s right, Bill!  Stay with it!” the crowd cheered from the safe side of the line.

“It’s the law, ain’t it?” Saltman demanded truculently of the lieutenant.

“It may be the law,” came the steady answer.  “But I can’t and won’t allow a mob of five thousand men to attempt to jump two claims.  It would be a dangerous riot, and we’re here to see there is no riot.  Here, now, on this spot, the Northwest police constitute the law.  The next man who crosses that line will be shot.  You, Bill Saltman, step back across it.”

Saltman obeyed reluctantly.  But an ominous restlessness became apparent in the mass of men, irregularly packed and scattered as it was over a landscape that was mostly up-and-down.

“Heavens,” the lieutenant whispered to Smoke.  “Look at them like flies on the edge of the cliff there.  Any disorder in that mass would force hundreds of them over.”