I was breaking north, the year of the big find, when I struck hard luck. That’s too long a yarn to tell. But the end was that I landed two hundred miles from Nowhere, cracked in the head from behind and left for dead in the snow. The Malemute that did it had his finish in Dawson that winter by the rope route, spoiling the shot I was saving for him. I was stooping over, fixing a sled-runner, when—biff!... I woke up in an Indian hut filled with smoke. The whole works were buzzing round, and a lot of big husky bucks and squaws grunting over me. I was for getting up and cleaning them out, but I hadn’t the strength. For a month I was plum nutty. But every little while, when my head cleared, I’d look up to see a good-natured looking brown girl with black eyes taking care of me as carefully as if she was a trained nurse. As I got over the fever slowly, I made out, she telling me in Chinook, that she had found me half frozen to death, and had carried me fifty miles by sled. How she did it the Lord only knows. Maybe it was because she was gone on me, which I oughtn’t to say, neither, but she sure was. I did a heap of thinking. She had grit and gentleness, and the feelings of a lady, which is what every woman that calls herself such hasn’t got, and the more I saw of her the better I liked her. So when I got well I had a pow-wow with her father, who was chief of the tribe, and I bought her for ten dogs on tick and my gun, which the durned thief had forgot in the mix-up, and sixty tin tags I’d been saving from plucks of tobacco to get a free meerschaum pipe with. We were married Indian fashion, which is pretty easy, and she came and lived with me in my hut. Since then I’ve had plenty of the stuff that’s supposed to make a man happy, but I’m blowed if I was ever happier than I was that winter, living with the tribe and married to Kate. Well, that winter was over with at last. It came spring, or what you might call such, with the ice beginning to melt and the sun getting up for a little while every day, lighter and lighter. One day Kate and I went fishing. She pulled in her line and I saw something that made me forget I was an Indian, adopted into the tribe, all regular. Her sinker was a gold nugget as big as the fist on a papoose! I knew it the minute I laid my eyes on it, though it was all black with water and weather. I grabbed it and cut it. It was as soft as lead, reddish yellow. “Where did you ever get that?” I said. “Up by the Katakoolanat Pass,” she said, unconcerned-like, as if it was pig-iron. “I picked it up because it was heavy.” “Can you find the place again?” I asked her.