The Magnetic North | Page 3

for any sign of the Mary C.. They prospected
the hills. From the heights behind the camp they got a pretty fair idea of
the surrounding country. It was not reassuring.

"As to products, there seems to be plenty of undersized timber, plenty
of snow and plenty of river, and, as far as I can see, just nothing else."
"Well, there's oodles o' blueberries," said the Boy, his inky-looking
mouth bearing witness to veracity; "and there are black and red currants
in the snow, and rose-apples--"
"Oh, yes," returned the other, "it's a sort of garden of Eden!"
A little below here it was four miles from bank to bank of the main
channel, but at this point the river was only about two miles wide, and
white already with floating masses of floe-ice going on a swift current
down towards the sea, four hundred miles away.
The right bank presented to the mighty river a low chain of hills,
fringed at the base with a scattered growth of scrubby spruce, birch,
willow, and cotton-wood. Timber line was only two hundred feet above
the river brink; beyond that height, rocks and moss covered with
new-fallen snow.
But if their side seemed cheerless, what of the land on the left bank? A
swamp stretching endlessly on either hand, and back from the icy flood
as far as eye could see, broken only by sloughs and an occasional
ice-rimmed tarn.
"We've been travelling just eight weeks to arrive at this," said the
Kentuckian, looking at the desolate scene with a homesick eye.
"We're not only pretty far from home," grumbled another, "we're still
thirteen hundred miles away from the Klondyke."
These unenlivening calculations were catching.
"We're just about twenty-five hundred miles from the nearest railroad
or telegraph, and, now that winter's down on us, exactly eight months
from anywhere in the civilised world."
They had seen no sign of even savage life, no white trader, nothing to

show that any human foot had ever passed that way before.
In that stillness that was like the stillness of death, they went up the
hillside, with footsteps muffled in the clinging snow; and sixty feet
above the great river, in a part of the wood where the timber was least
unpromising, they marked out a site for their winter quarters.
Then this queer little company--a Denver bank-clerk, an
ex-schoolmaster from Nova Scotia, an Irish-American lawyer from San
Francisco, a Kentucky "Colonel" who had never smelt powder, and
"the Boy" (who was no boy at all, but a man of twenty-two)--these five
set to work felling trees, clearing away the snow, and digging
foundations for a couple of log-cabins--one for the Trio, as they called
themselves, the other for the Colonel and the Boy.
These two had chummed from the hour they met on the steamer that
carried them through the Golden Gate of the Pacific till--well, till the
end of my story.
The Colonel was a big tanned fellow, nearly forty--eldest of the
party--whom the others used to guy discreetly, because you couldn't
mention a place anywhere on the known globe, except the far north,
which he had not personally inspected. But for this foible, as the
untravelled considered it, he was well liked and a little feared--except
by the Boy, who liked him "first-rate," and feared him not at all. They
had promptly adopted each other before they discovered that it was
necessary to have one or more "pardners." It seemed, from all accounts,
to be true, that up there at the top of the world a man alone is a man lost,
and ultimately the party was added to as aforesaid.
Only two of them knew anything about roughing it. Jimmie O'Flynn of
'Frisco, the Irish-American lawyer, had seen something of frontier life,
and fled it, and MacCann, the Nova Scotian schoolmaster, had spent a
month in one of the Caribou camps, and on the strength of that, proudly
accepted the nickname of "the Miner."
Colonel George Warren and Morris Burnet, the Boy, had the best
outfits; but this fact was held to be more than counter-balanced by the

value of the schoolmaster's experience at Caribou, and by the
extraordinary handiness of Potts, the Denver clerk, who had helped to
build the shelter on deck for the disabled sick on the voyage up. This
young man with the big mouth and lazy air had been in the office of a
bank ever since he left school, and yet, under pressure, he discovered a
natural neat-handedness and a manual dexterity justly envied by some
of his fellow-pioneers. His outfit was not more conspicuously meagre
than O'Flynn's, yet the Irishman was held to be the moneyed man of his
party. Just why was never fully developed, but it was always said,
"O'Flynn represents capital"; and O'Flynn, whether