A GOOD OLD SCOUT By Theodore Seixas Solomons By the author of “Two Stirs Forward--Three Back,” Etc. It was a question of sentiment--which had the more genuine, the old-timer or the more modern prospector. When a rich haul of gold was at stake, which man would cast aside his finer feelings and become a heartless grabber? “It’s a land a-flowin’ with milk and money,” quoted old “Nock” Whipple, in a high and hopeful voice, “Jest as the Good Book says. Only the conditions is different. You got ter stew down the berries to git the honey--and it’s some puckery. Fer the milk--why, jest catch a caribou or a cow moose.” He turned his gaunt frame on his elbow to laugh, his gray-bearded head and hollow neck emerging from the dingy blankets of his bed on the bough-strewn floor of the tent. His merriment ended in a fit of coughing. “Get back under there, old scout!” admonished McAdams severely, striding to him and giving the blankets a jerk into place. “And shut up. You talk too much!” He shoved a stick or two of wood into the battered sheet-iron stove--a fortunate pick-up of the afternoon before, relic of a winter camp of earlier prospecting days. “Don’t be so harsh to him, Aleck,” said a third man reprovingly. He was sitting in the corner, hunched over a diary or memorandum book of some sort, in which he was industriously writing. “Aw, I know how to handle the old guy,” returned McAdams good-naturedly, as he slipped through the tent flap, bent on cutting stove wood for the night. The prospect without was a dreary one. The pleasant, springlike summer of the Far North had ended weeks before, and the fall, brief precursor of the long and hard, white time, had already painted the few deciduous shrubs into danger signals, giving to the dun landscape of the arctic highland that little warmth of color the year knew. Rock and moss filled the near vistas of the landscape, its stream valleys of low relief and intricate contours marked by pencilings of fringing willows, with a hint, southward, of spruce forests where hazy patches of the hue of faded indigo revealed the lower reaches of the Porcupine, most northern tributary of the mighty Yukon. The three had been out all summer on a prospecting trip through that far, unmapped region of Alaska--Enoch Whipple, pioneer Montanan, pioneer Alaskan, leading on the last of his once stout legs; Aleck McAdams, for some years his friend and occasional companion; and Mr. Alfred Lawrence Turner, a thirty-year-old mining engineer, rather down on his luck. It was a scoured watershed country--eroding to a new “base level,” as Turner put it, with little of the older gravels left. But old Nock Whipple had told them as much, though, in different language. What hadn’t been washed away, old pals had said, was sometimes gold bearing. A “pockety” country, hard to get to, and the pockets too rare to tempt any but bold men desperate for a grubstake.