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Show 99 One afternoon as I stood idly watching the crowd, someone grabbed me from behind, clutching me so I could hardly breathe. When I finally got one arm free, ready to swing at him, I saw who it was-Snorin' Sam from the steamer. And he was just hugging me. That' s how lonely it was in the North. "Erickson," he exclaimed. "Good to see you. My, how you've grown. How you have grown!" I just thought my clothes had shrunk from contact with the Yukon River rapids. "How long have you been here?" I asked. "And how did we both get here without passing each other?" He said he and his two partners had gone White Pass route with horses, and they had built their boat below Lake Bennett. He had been in Dawson City two weeks. Two weeks in Dawson City and he knew everything, some of which we had just found out. The golden creeks of the Klondike were already claimed, he said, and just a few xreeks before we arrived some lucky cheechakos found gold on the foothills and started another stampede. "However," Sam said, "every few days a rumor goes around about gold somewhere else-seventy-five, one hundred miles from here. And overnight half of Dawson disappears. Even the high-heeled dancing girls run out their back doors with lanterns and Dicks-and skip over the hills." |