Outside of the tent lay two pack saddles, canvas bags, a few prospecting tools. On the bare slope of the stream valley, two old mules, that had been sleek enough some months before, but were now skin-covered skeletons, browsed philosophically on frost-dried herbage. McAdams browsed for dead willow sticks in drift litter under the banks of the creek. From the tent, hastily pitched the afternoon before, when Enoch Whipple’s legs had succumbed to the weakness of fever, came the droning sound of the old scout’s voice, high, almost senile, as he “knocked” the country to which he had gone, years before, yet too late in life for a chance to win--and probably lose again--another fortune in the West and Northwest. McAdams, between his cracking of sticks, listened with a quizzical smile, to the old man’s ravings. “Yes, she’s a land o’ gold, all right, Alfred. Klondike, Forty-Mile, Nome, Fairbanks, Iditarod. Fortunes made. Millions of ’em. Well, anyhow, a dozen or two. Natcherly, a few of us didn’t get nothin’--leastways a million or two of us didn’t. The hull country was covered with gold, the papers said, when the old Klondike strike was boomin’--covered with gold like an old carpet with dust, they told us. “I ’member a feller camped near us at Split-up Island at the mouth of the Stewart. He was playin’ a lone hand. Had a big awk’erd skiff loaded with s’plies--funniest junk you ever see. Hunnerd and five different articles o’ grub, he told us. One I ’member was _manioca_--somethin’ like that. Kinder cousin to tapioca, he says. Build yer up. Great stuff. He was a big, six-foot counterjumper from Kansas City or some’eres. Growed a beard to look like a sure-enough Western man. An’ every day while we was all splittin’ up, this guy--they called him Willie--would set up a little lookin’-glass against a tree and comb out his whiskers and slick up his long, wavy, brown hair. “One mornin’ he ’pears on the river bank with a pack sack on his shoulders, loaded down with bacon an’ _manioca_ and sich. He was startin’ to locate his claim. Where was he goin’, with the Klondike a hunnerd miles off yet? ‘Why,’ says he, ‘I’m a-goin’ up some creek anywheres,’ says he, ‘before we gets too close to Dawson where the crowd must ’a’ staked everything. I’m a-goin’ ter locate me a reg’lar claim. I’ll take out enough for to git me home and show the folks the gold, and then I’m a bringin’ in some of ’em--mother, mebbe, too--and we’ll work her out, and back to old Kansas City,’ he says, just like that!” Old Whipple turned on his elbow for another laugh--and a coughing spell. “Keep under your blankets, Whipple,” admonished Turner, merely pausing a moment in his note-making. “And don’t laugh like that, my good man. Bad for you and nerve-racking to me.”