“If I get her--she’ll weigh up a million to the pan.” The inner voice was persistent: “You’ll be tied down. What’ll you do when the long trail calls? There will be times when you will want to roam.” “God, ain’t I roamed enough? But, if the long trail calls, we’ll harness the dogs an’ roam double.” “It’s only February. The snow is deep. Wait till spring.” “I’ve waited too long, now. It seems like--I can hear her callin’ me. An’ I ain’t seen the snow in twenty-five years that could stop me--with a toboggan.” His trail pack made up, MacShane sat beside the stove and smoked until his dog food had cooked, and when it was done he lashed it onto his toboggan and harnessed his dogs. “Wait till tomorrow,” urged the inner voice, “It’s nearly midnight.” “Midnight, or noon, what’s the difference in this God-forsaken land? It’s all dark, anyhow. You might as well shut up. You lose. My hunch says ‘go now!’ An’ I’m ridin’ my hunch.” At Shungnak where MacShane arrived four days later, he entered the saloon where a dozen men were assembled. “If you want to go where you can shovel more gold out of the gravel in a day than you can here in a year, just follow my back trail,” he announced. “It’s red gold--under the big rock slide west of the igloo. There’s a stove an’ considerable grub an’ some robes left in the igloo, an’ a good sled, an’ a half a ton of powder. You’re welcome to ’em if you want ’em. But you better hit out before my trail snows under or you’ll never find it.” The men looked at each other, and grinned. “No, thanks, Stranger, we don’t like gravel as rich as all that. It’s too heavy to shovel.” The witticism of the miner produced its roar of laughter, and MacShane shrugged, indifferently: “All right, boys, don’t hurt your backs none. So long.” “Who is he?” asked someone, when the door had closed behind MacShane. The proprietor answered: “Oh, he’s be’n up on the Colville fer years, proddin’ around in the gravel. He’s be’n there too long. They git that way after a while. He wouldn’t even come after his own grub. Used to send the Kobuks for it. The only times I ever see him was when he went down to Nome last spring, an’ when he come back. He was batty then. Bet agin John Johnson’s dogs, even money, an’ then bet on them Gordon dogs. I give him ten-to-one, an’ he took two hundred of it. When he came back through, he stopped in for to get his dust. I guess it was more gold than he ever seen before or heard tell of, an’ now he thinks he’s shovelled it out of the gravel.” “Don’t know as he was so _damn_ batty--bettin’ on them Gordon dogs,” opined the man who objected to heavy gravel, “They win, didn’t they?” “Sure they win, all right. But, it was a fool bet, at that. Who the hell ever heard of them dogs?” “Maybe he had.” “Hell! He didn’t even know they was a race! An’ way up where he hung out he couldn’t hear nothin’ about nothin’.”