Here was the poor man’s country. If you didn’t want to rock out a fortune for yourself, you could earn fifteen dollars a day working for others. “The beach for miles is lined with miners’ tents. Anvil City (hereafter to be called Nome) is booming. “Building lots that six months ago were worth nothing, to-day bring thousands of dollars. “Where a year ago was only a bare, wind-swept beach on Bering Sea—one of the most desolate places to be found on earth and beside which the Yukon country has a fine climate—there is to-day a city of several thousand people, surrounded by the richest placer-diggings the world has seen.” The gold-laden miners returning to Seattle by the last boats of the autumn, told the reporters with a single voice, “The world has known nothing like Cape Nome.” Tongues went trumpeting the mighty news, pens flew to set it down, and telegraph operators flicked the tidings from one end of the earth to the other. The word “Nome,” that had meant nothing for so long to any man but Mar—it became a syllable of strangest portent; stirring imaginations that had slept before, heralding hope to despairing thousands, setting in motion a vast machinery of ships and of strange devices, and of complicated human lives. New lines of steamships bought up every craft that could keep afloat; companies were formed to exploit the last new gold-saving device; men who had fallen out of the ranks, returned to the struggle saying, “After all, there’s Nome!” “And this is the moment Mr. Mar will naturally choose for turning his back on the North.” It was so that his wife successfully masked her secret anxiety for his return. It was as if she resented so sorely her growing uneasiness about him—fought so valiantly against the slow-dawning consciousness of the share she had in his exile, that she must more than ever veil secret self-criticism by openly berating him. Above all she must disguise the impatience with which she awaited his return “this autumn, at the latest.” “Now,” she would say, “now that even he couldn’t fail to make a good thing by staying, he—oh, yes, to be sure, _he’ll_ come hustling home!” If only she had been the man! One of the last boats brought a letter. There _was_ gold in the beach sand, Mar wrote, but every inch was being worked over and over, and its richness had been exaggerated. The place was overrun with the penniless and the desperate. The United States military post established there was powerless to maintain law and order. Drunkenness, violence, crime, were the order of the day. The beach was a strange and moving spectacle. “Spectacle! He goes and looks on!” was Mrs. Mar’s way of disguising her dismay. He returned the boys’ money, “since it was sent for a purpose so explicit.” He was “staying in.” Other letters, brought by the same steamer, told what Mr. Mar had omitted to mention: that typhoid fever was at work as well as those gold-diggers on the famous beach.