“There’s forty-eight places named Washington now,” says he. “I’ve looked it up. There ought to be just one. The capital of the United States. And the map is pitted with ’em like smallpox.” “Washington, D.C., Maryland,” says Frisco Baldy, haulin’ in slack on the diamond hitch. “Virginia,” says Kultus Jake, on the other side of the pack. Edmund he just give ’em both a witherin’ look, and he whirls back into the store and gets to work at his desk. Wouldn’t come out to tell the old men good-by when they started off up the river, although he was grubstakin’ ’em for nothin’. They didn’t know that, of course. Expected to pay him in furs when they come back in the spring. “You’ll not get very far to-day,” says an onlooker to the departin’ junipers. “You’re makin’ a late start.” “Camp at Early Winter,” one of ’em says. Early Winter was a creek that come into the main stream about halfway to the Robinson Cabin. “_Wake la-le hyas cole snass_,” says the Siwash mail-carrier. “Oh, no, it ain’t,” says a Texan, lookin’ the weather up and down. “Well, I think maybe it will,” says another, sweepin’ his eyes around the sky. “And maybe it won’t.” So that sets ’em discussin’ the probabilities of a big snow and if Siwashes knowed about such things more’n white men did. They concluded Siwashes was inferior to white men in every respect, and it wasn’t goin’ to snow. “Good luck!” one of ’em calls out. But Kultus Jake and Frisco Baldy was by that time on the bridge over the North Fork, and couldn’t hear him.