Boyle spent in the neighbourhood of a half million dollars apiece for some of the dredges with which he scooped up the earth thawed out by the sun. They were the largest ever built up to that time, and were manufactured especially for his purposes. They were brought in pieces by sea to Skagway, Alaska, carried over the coast mountains by train, and transported down the Yukon by steamer to Dawson, where they were put to work. They are now lifting the bed of the Klondike Valley and turning it upside down at the rate of five hundred tons in an hour. Buckets that hold a ton apiece pick up boulders as big as a half-bushel basket and earth as fine as flour. They raise this stuff to the height of a six-story house and pour it through revolving screens. The rock, gravel, and sand are carried away, and the gold is caught in layers of coconut matting. Every twenty-four hours the mats containing the gold are lifted and washed. The gold and the black sand fall to the bottom and the mats are put back again. While I was cashing a draft at the Bank of British North America the other day, I had concrete evidence of the wealth being won, grain by grain, from the Klondike. I saw a shipment of gold ready to be sent out. It had come to the bank in the form of dust and nuggets and had been melted down into bricks. There were fifty thousand dollars’ worth of these bricks lying on the counter, covering a space about three feet square. They were of a light yellow colour, and some were almost white on account of their high percentage of silver. Some were the size of a cake of laundry soap while others were only as big as a cake of milk chocolate. I lifted one of the larger ones. It weighed a little more than twelve pounds and its value was two thousand dollars. Later I saw the bank clerk put the bricks into canvas bags and label them for export by registered mail. Leaving the bank, I dropped in at the offices of the Northern Commercial Company, where I watched gold dust and nuggets being made ready for shipment to the States. The gold filled two satchels and was worth in the neighbourhood of one hundred thousand dollars. It was put up in little sacks the size of a five-pound salt bag. Each sack was worth from five to ten thousand dollars. All gold that is shipped out of Canada pays a royalty or tax to the government, and everyone who leaves the Klondike is examined to see that he has no gold upon him. Once a woman succeeded in smuggling out a large quantity of nuggets and dust. She was examined by the inspectors, but they took no account of a big flower pot containing a rose bush that she was carrying with her. Not until she got safely away was it learned that the soil with which the pot seemed to be filled was only half an inch deep and that underneath were hundreds of dollars’ worth of almost pure gold. CHAPTER XXXVI ROMANCES OF THE KLONDIKE