"Only under certain conditions," answered the older man. "You can't crush the quartz rock except with heavy machinery, and you can easily see that it's no light job getting huge crushers up here. And that's not all: after you have spent thousands of dollars in buying the machinery and more thousands in moving it to this forsaken spot, you then have to spend tens of thousands building up a water power development, or else face the still more difficult problem of transporting coal to run your engines. Then high wages are a big factor, too!" "Then, if it's so hard to get at, what drew the crowds at the time of the Yukon and Nome 'strikes?'" asked Roger. "The desire to get rich quick," was the reply. "It is safe to say that not more than ten per cent. of the thousands of people who came to Alaska in the gold rush succeeded. Alaska is no Eldorado to pick up wealth idly, though the gold industry, properly capitalized, is important and worth $20,000,000 annually to the country." "But surely some one made money in the Klondike and Nome fields?" "There was a lot of gold near the surface, and the first-comers got that without much trouble, as well as getting the richest claims. There is plenty more there, but it is in frozen gravels and hard to get out. Prospecting for gold is the best thing I know to keep away from, unless you are willing to live in solitude and disappointment all your life, living on the bare hope that some time you may be lucky enough to strike a rich 'pocket.'" [Illustration: THE END OF A HARD CLIMB. A station made in the Land of Snow, the seated figure on a bank which never melts. _Photograph by U.S.G.S._] CHAPTER XVI DECLARING WAR ON UNCLE SAM The broad lower reaches of the Cantwell River, the perfect weather, the smoothly flowing current had made the couple of days prior to the finding of the gold almost a pleasure trip and compensated to Roger for the hardship through which he had gone in the rapids above. But one evening, while at supper, one of the men suddenly smacked the top of one hand with the palm of the other, then held it out silently for inspection. On it was a small mosquito such as are seen in thousands during the summer all over America. "They've come, then," was the only remark, "but it's early for them yet." "What is it, just a mosquito?" asked Roger. "Just a mosquito," repeated Gersup, with a curious inflection in his voice, "just a poor innocent mosquito." "Do you have many of them up here?" asked the boy, struck by the note of satire in the topographer's voice. "Yes, we do," he replied curtly. "Many of them?" put in Magee. "Why, a week from now you can wave a pint pot over your head and catch a quart of mosquitoes in it, and a month from now we'll have to cut our way through them with an ax." "Oh, come off, now," said Roger, laughing.