"So long," called Lucky Jim. "I'll see you in Totatla City when you come down." "You've got some wait!" cried Chenoa Pete. Lucky Jim started. "So they mean to go out by way of Kantishna, huh?" he mused. "I still think we'd ought to have tied him," quoth Mike Haggart. "You're a good man with your hands, Mike, but you ain't got the brains of a flea. Just suppose he was to get into Totatla City in that condition? They'd have something on us, wouldn't they? Or suppose he got drowned in the rapids and goes floatin' down the river and winds up on a bar--which Alaskan rivers are always doin'. Wouldn't the whole marshal's force at Fairbanks be put to work on the case? He's got nothing on us at all. The worst he can do is to get an injunction to throw us off, and he'd have to go to Fairbanks to get that. By which time the season would be over. And seein' he has no witnesses to corroborate his statement, I don't believe he could even get an injunction. Lucky Jim knows all this. He'll swallow his medicine and take a chance on meeting up with us some other time. Which he'll never get the chance. About the middle of September we'll duck across to Ruby and catch a down-river boat for Nome. We've got possession. Let's get to work. What shift do you want to take?" "Night shift for mine; it's cooler." "All right. Go on to bed. We've got to take advantage of every hour of the high water." Chenoa went up the river about two hundred yards and crossed the mainland to the bar by way of Lucky Jim's log bridge. Five minutes afterward the water was racing through the sluices, and Chenoa Pete shoveling and picking in the pay dirt from the sides of the bedrock drain. After watching the raft disappear around a bend Mike Haggart climbed the trail to the bank, thence to the cabin. "I thought I had put everybody off my trail," Lucky Jim was saying to himself, "who might happen to be interested in my movements. I got away clean enough, but the same snow storm that protected that, also gave me away--the untracked snow about my cabin. Of course, one of them must have followed Dad and me to his cabin the night he made me the proposition. Well, there they are, and here I am. I guess Dad's trip to Sitka is all off." Thoughts of this riled him. "They're robbin' an old pioneer, that's what they're doin'! And I had it figured out that he'd spend the rest of his days in comfort. And, by gum, he will, too!" [Illustration] When about two miles below the bar Lucky Jim steered the raft into a slough and went ashore. He kindled a fire and made himself a small pail full of coffee. Hour after hour he sat there drinking the warm liquid, and now and again throwing a couple of small sticks on the fire. Around seven in the morning he cooked and ate his breakfast, then went to sleep.