At Candle he bought an entire new outfit of clothing, and after a night’s rest, pulled for Nome. On the crest of Death Valley Hill he met the girl. MacShane had never, in any sense of the word, been a lady’s man. The dance hall girls, with their association of liquor and music amused him for an evening, and were promptly forgotten. Of other women he knew nothing whatever. With MacShane the trail was the thing--the trail, and what lay just beyond. He had been in the van of a dozen stampedes. He had owned scores of good claims. But always the onrush of the stampeders had driven him on. He had plenty of gold--how much he had no idea. Much of it he had taken from the gravel with his own hands, and much of it was the proceeds of the sale of claims. He did not care for gold, only for the finding of gold. He loved the game, and he played it--not for the gold, but for the game. It was this spirit that had held him for eight years far in the North beyond the haunts of men. To find the source of the strange red gold became his fetish. The red gold appealed to him as no other gold had ever appealed. And its quest kept him sane and keen, though living apart from his kind through the long drear nights of eight Arctic winters, and the unceasing daylight of eight short summers. And now, at last, he stood upon the threshold of his golden storehouse! During all the hours of the snow-trail he had pictured to himself what he would find when he had blasted his way into that mountain of fallen rock. A pocket? A crumbling lode? He would soon know. Trailing down the Kobuk, from Shungnak he had been almost sorry he had decided to stay at Nome for the dog race. Oh, well, what did it matter. A week, a month, a year? A couple of weeks in the big camp would do him good. And then he would hit the trail, and when he again struck a camp a stampede would follow his back trail--a stampede for red gold! Then--he would move on. Would harness his dogs and hit the long trail. Where? What did it matter, just so he got away from the crowd? There were other strikes to come. Dawson had not been the last strike, nor the Koyukuk. And the Colville would not be the last strike. There always would be another strike, and he, Burr MacShane would head some other stampede, on some other far-off river. And again his name would be a by-word throughout all the North. He smiled whimsically: “They’ve all forgot me by this time. I’ve be’n too long gone. There won’t anyone know me in Nome. There wasn’t any Nome when I come through this part of the country. It’s--let’s see--it’s twenty years ago. Twenty years--an’ in a little over a year I’ll be forty! Old Man MacShane, they’ll be callin’ me, then. Yup, Old Man MacShane!” and he laughed.