Theodore Seixas Solomons

“ Miss O'Brien and her friend, Miss Anderson, were living in a big tent and cooking for a number of men besides Collins and Hennessy. Their way of living in Nome was impossible in the camp at Midas, even had Collins not had his own reasons for observing the proprieties. He hoped what, in fact, was true, that neither Waring, Manners, nor Joan knew anything about the little house on the outskirts of Nome. Nevertheless it was not humanly possible for either Joan or Bruce to fail to suspect the truth. ”

“ In principle they are one—The Stampede, that tense, fantastic drama of the North, whose placers, locked in frost and hidden beneath an inexpressive mantle of tundra mosses as spacious as a nation's territory, must still challenge the red-rimmed eyes and staggering feet of generations of prospectors to come. ”

“ Why not start a few holes up on the bank, where it's drier?”
“Take too long to put 'em down,” said Collins briefly. “We'll get more idea of the lay of the pay streak in a week of drifting from your shafts than we could in two months of sinking new holes.”
Ticely knew that. He had an obvious defense, however—that these prospect holes were upon ground which he and Bruce had wholly retained. No one else had a right to work upon them. The claims in which he had sold the fractional interests that had been pooled in the Midas Mining and Development. Company were as yet untouched by pick or shovel. ”

“ Right now they could hitch up again and beat it back to Nome, after putting us through a mighty ugly ordeal. But if we get 'em to take off their things and stay a while—make camps, and quarrel a little over the choicest sites for cabins and stores, and start building and getting the big outfits in and unpacked and housed—get to feeling at home, you know, and well rooted to the place—why, then, you see the meager prospects won't drive them off! They'll get obstinate and hopeful. ”

“ That Midas Creek was too rich for a cautious and canny fellow like Fred Ticely to have told the truth about it!
But the way the different individual minds and characters reacted to the events of their coming were as different as were the men and women themselves. One or two of the advance guard, thrown rapidly ahead. to cut more timber, could scarcely keep their hands out of the flooded shafts in the creek. If unrestrained by the others, they would have ignored their orders to cut wood, and gone to bailing out the holes to get at the gravel. ”

“ For the time being, the guess would have to do, he told Ticely; and when they returned to the scene of building operations where Bruce, heading a gang of axmen, was hewing and notching logs as fast as they were snaked downhill by the horse teams, Collins drew the group toward Waring, so that the latter must at least hear, even if he did not join, in the ensuing conversation, and proposed that a prospecting crew be put to work at once bailing out the shafts. ”

“ Even in his thorough concern over the future the salesman in him could not but smack his lips at each new evidence of the spell he had cast upon them. Then he jerked back to action. “We'd better bring them over the flat yonder, and stow them your town-site stakes. ”