This hail was responded to in kind, but only after a slight but noticeable hesitation. He never removed his eye from them. They halted when they came level with him. He recognized them then as Chenoa Pete and Mike Taggart, men for whom he had little use. He had reckoned that they "didn't belong." "Whither bound?" he asked. "Oh, up the river a ways," returned Chenoa Pete. "Unhitch and stick around for a day," invited Lucky Jim. "We dassn't," spoke up Mike Taggart. "The snow is packin' fast and we've got quite a ways to go yet. Is this where you pick up your whisky dust?" Mike waved a hand embracingly. From where they stood, a dozen bars in the river were distinctly outlined, but in view of the fact that Lucky Jim had not yet done any work on Easy Money, all bars looked alike to the mushers. Lucky Jim waved his hand in the manner Mike Taggart had employed. "This is where I mean to do a little prospecting this summer," he made answer. "Let's mush," suggested Chenoa Pete. "So long," he flung up to Lucky Jim, a civility repeated by Mike Taggart a moment later, and to which Lucky Jim replied in kind. "We can't do a damned thing," swore Chenoa Pete when safely out of Lucky Jim's hearing, "until after he has gone to work. It may be any one of half a dozen bars near where he's camped. Let him do the dead work anyway, I mean to have a good long rest, beginning some time tomorrow." "I'd give something to know how he got here so quick! He's put up that shack since he arrived. He took some short cut or another." "He came fast, I'll admit, Mike, but no man in his senses would cut across the flat--summer or winter. He's probably got a crackajack team. He's some fast mover, though." Lucky Jim returned thoughtfully to his work. The meeting, from his point of view, had been an unsatisfactory one. The majority of mushers, he reasoned, would have stuck around and smoked a pipe or two, had dinner with him. "They've left a bad taste in my mind," he declared. * * * * * By May first Lucky Jim finished whipsawing lumber. He then turned his attention to a bedrock drain across the bar. The snow was about gone, but the earth was still frozen. He laid a wood fire four feet wide and about one hundred and fifty feet long diagonally across the bar, and lighted it. Next day he began to dig out the drain. Lucky Jim did not work like an ordinary man; he was as tireless as a machine. And he worked intelligently. During every day of the next three weeks he worked eighteen hours a day. Worked and slept. At the end of that time his bedrock drain was completed. It was five feet deep and on bedrock from one end to the other. He had struck good, even rich pay. He spent two days making sluice-boxes, another making riffles for them out of three-inch poles, and still another fitting the whole into his trench. [Illustration]