Page:Revolution and Other Essays.djvu/205

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The years came and went, but he remained true to his resolve. For eleven long years, with snow-shoe and canoe, pickaxe and goldpan, he wrote out his life on the face of the land. Upper Yukon, Middle Yukon, Lower Yukon, — he prospected faithfully and well. His bed was anywhere. Winter or summer he carried neither tent nor stove, and his six-pound sleeping-robe of Arctic hare was the warmest covering he was ever known to possess. Rabbit tracks and salmon bellies were his diet with a vengeance, for he depended largely on his rifle and fishing-tackle. His endurance equalled his courage. On a wager he lifted thirteen fifty- pound sacks of flour and walked off with them. Winding up a seven- hundred-mile trip on the ice with a forty-mile run, he came into camp at six o'clock in the evening and found a "squaw dance" under way. He should have been exhausted. Anyway, his muclucs were frozen stiff. But he kicked them off and danced all night in stocking-feet.

At the last fortune came to him. The quest was ended, and he gathered up his gold and pulled for the outside. And his own end was as. fitting as that of his quest. Illness came upon him down in San Francisco,