“The old miners threw away the values that are now being saved,” he went on. “One day I showed an old-timer a pan I had just finished washing, and asked him how much he thought it would run. The pan contained a few flakes of gold and quite a little fine flour gold. The miner tilted it so that the grains ran to one side, and then took his thumb and scraped out the flour and threw it away. He threw out just the sort of stuff which we are trying to save, and upon which all our calculations are based.” The dredges, by which much of the gold is now being taken out, operate in ground that has to be thawed before it can be worked. With the exception of a foot or so at the surface, this whole Klondike region is one mass of ice, mixed with boulders, pebbles, and sand that has been frozen for thousands of years. The ice goes down no one knows how deep. Diamond drills sunk to a depth of three hundred feet have gone all the way through frozen earth. The mixture is covered by a thin bed of muck, on top of which grows a layer of arctic moss. It is only when the moss and the muck are stripped off that the hot summer sun makes any impression on the ice below. Sprinkled through this ice, earth, and rock lies the gold in the proportion of from thirty to sixty cents’ worth to the ton. In a wagon load of this mass there is not more pure gold than you can pinch up between your forefinger and thumb. Yet methods for mining it have been devised that make it worth going after. There is a little gold not far from the surface, but most of it is at bed-rock, which may be thirty, forty, or fifty feet down. The earth has to be thawed out, inch by inch, and foot by foot, in such a way that the dredges can bite into it and gulp it down at the rate of twenty-six bites to the minute and about one third of a ton to the bite. The dredges do their work so thoroughly that no bit of earth ever escapes them. You can throw a red cent into the heart of a ten-acre field that is to be upturned by these machines and be sure that the coin will come out with the gold. A common amusement is to saw a dime in two and then bet whether the dredges will bring up one of the pieces. The man who bets in the negative holds one of the halves, and the other is buried in the earth. As soon as that spot is dredged, the missing half is almost certain to turn up. The first miners kept wood fires burning until they had thawed their shafts down to the gold. Other fires were then built along the bed-rock and the earth was dugout until they had made great caverns and tunnels thirty or forty feet under the frozen earth overhead. They used hot stones to aid in the thawing and took out the loosened material in wheel-barrows and raised it to the surface with buckets and a windlass like an old-fashioned well-sweep. The earth being frozen, the miners did not have to bother to use any timbers to support the roofs of their tunnels.