“Several thousand, I imagine.  We passed over three hundred.  And they weren’t wasting any time.”

“It’s the old story,” she said bitterly.  “The new-comers get in on the rich creeks, and the old-timers, who dared and suffered and made this country, get nothing.  Old-timers made this discovery on Squaw Creek—­how it leaked out is the mystery—­and they sent word up to all the old-timers on Sea Lion.  But it’s ten miles farther than Dawson, and when they arrive they’ll find the creek staked to the skyline by the Dawson chechakos.  It isn’t right, it isn’t fair, such perversity of luck.”

“It is too bad,” Smoke sympathized.  “But I’m hanged if I know what you’re going to do about it.  First come, first served, you know.”

“I wish I could do something,” she flashed back at him.  “I’d like to see them all freeze on the trail, or have everything terrible happen to them, so long as the Sea Lion stampede arrived first.”

“You’ve certainly got it in for us hard,” he laughed.

“It isn’t that,” she said quickly.  “Man by man, I know the crowd from Sea Lion, and they are men.  They starved in this country in the old days, and they worked like giants to develop it.  I went through the hard times on the Koyukuk with them when I was a little girl.  And I was with them in the Birch Creek famine, and in the Forty Mile famine.  They are heroes, and they deserve some reward, and yet here are thousands of green softlings who haven’t earned the right to stake anything, miles and miles ahead of them.  And now, if you’ll forgive my tirade, I’ll save my breath, for I don’t know when you and all the rest may try to pass dad and me.”

No further talk passed between Joy and Smoke for an hour or so, though he noticed that for a time she and her father talked in low tones.

“I know ’em now,” Shorty told Smoke.  “He’s old Louis Gastell, an’ the real goods.  That must be his kid.  He come into this country so long ago they ain’t nobody can recollect, an’ he brought the girl with him, she only a baby.  Him an’ Beetles was tradin’ partners an’ they ran the first dinkey little steamboat up the Koyukuk.”

“I don’t think we’ll try to pass them,” Smoke said.  “We’re at the head of the stampede, and there are only four of us.”

Shorty agreed, and another hour of silence followed, during which they swung steadily along.  At seven o’clock, the blackness was broken by a last display of the aurora borealis, which showed to the west a broad opening between snow-clad mountains.

“Squaw Creek!” Joy exclaimed.

“Goin’ some,” Shorty exulted.  “We oughtn’t to been there for another half hour to the least, accordin’ to my reckonin’.  I must ‘a’ been spreadin’ my legs.”

It was at this point that the Dyea trail, baffled by ice-jams, swerved abruptly across the Yukon to the east bank.  And here they must leave the hard-packed, main-travelled trail, mount the jams, and follow a dim trail, but slightly packed, that hovered the west bank.