It was after the run-out of ice cakes that the work of sluicing began. The men of the creeks worked that spring with an air of tense expectancy. What would the “clean-up” show? Men knew that the strike was rich, the test pans had showed that. But, how rich? All day long, in rapidly lengthening days the sourdoughs toiled wet to their middles in snow water to answer that question. For the “clean-up” is the harvest of the gold diggers. And the clean-up that year was big. Work on the frozen dumps had scarcely started before men knew that the prediction that they were riding the richest strike yet made was an established fact. Rumor piled upon rumor as the dust poured into the camp. Dawson real estate increased in value by leaps and bounds. McCarty, his safe full to overflowing, was forced to decline storage room for the dust that poured in from the creeks. Summer brought the first rush of the _chechakos_. Down the Yukon they came in canoes, in boats of every shape, kind and description, on rafts and on anything that by any possible act of manipulation could be made to float. They swarmed the camp and spread out into the hills. Stampedes were of daily occurrence. Every creek, and feeder, and pup was staked from rim to rim--and still they came. Although wages were high, few of that first onrush were content to work for wages. They heard the stories of gold, gazed with blazing eyes upon coarse gold in the scales, saw men shake raw gold from the mouths of sacks in payment for drinks at the bar, and straightway they headed into the hills. It was pitiful, but there was none to pity. The newcomers looked on and did likewise, and the sourdoughs looked on, and grinned. Their fortunes were assured, and they knew that in the fall laborers would be plenty. As MacShane had predicted, however, not all of the sourdoughs sluiced great wealth from their dumps. A few there were who struck it big, counting their dust in hundreds of thousands, many counted in thousands and tens of thousands, and many more found that their dumps had yielded scarcely better than wages. Among these latter was Old Man Gordon. The pay streak on his claim turned out to be all in the grass roots, that is, the only gravel that was really worth working lay close to the surface. His whole dump averaged better than wages, but the lean gravel thrown from the deeper half of the shaft showed that the pay streak would peter out long before bed rock was reached. By the time Gordon discovered this fact the _chechakos_ had already staked the country for miles around, and although he located several new claims, he failed to strike anything that showed. For three years he stayed by his claim, getting what there was on the surface by top stripping, and only now and then sinking a shaft in hope of hitting a lucky spot on the lower level.