"D'ye recollect that Koyokuk rush in the early nineties?" he would hear
one say. "Well, him an' me was pardners then, tradin' an' such. We had
a dinky little steamboat, the _Blatterbat_. He named her that, an' it
stuck. He was a caution. Well, sir, as I was sayin', him an' me loaded
the little _Blatterbat_ to the guards an' started up the Koyokuk, me
firin' an' engineerin' an' him steerin', an' both of us deck-handin'.
Once in a while we'd tie to the bank an' cut firewood. It was the fall,
an' mush-ice was comin' down, an' everything gettin' ready for the
freeze up. You see, we was north of the Arctic Circle then an' still
headin' north. But they was two hundred miners in there needin' grub if
they wintered, an' we had the grub.

"Well, sir, pretty soon they begun to pass us, driftin' down the river
in canoes an' rafts. They was pullin' out. We kept track of them. When a
hundred an' ninety-four had passed, we didn't see no reason for keepin'
on. So we turned tail and started down. A cold snap had come, an' the
water was fallin' fast, an' dang me if we didn't ground on a
bar--up-stream side. The _Blatterbat_ hung up solid. Couldn't budge
her. 'It's a shame to waste all that grub,' says I, just as we was
pullin' out in a canoe. 'Let's stay an' eat it,' says he. An' dang me if
we didn't. We wintered right there on the _Blatterbat_, huntin' and
tradin' with the Indians, an' when the river broke next year we brung
down eight thousand dollars' worth of skins. Now a whole winter, just
two of us, is goin' some. But never a cross word out of him.
Best-tempered pardner I ever seen. But fight!"

"Huh!" came the other voice. "I remember the winter Oily Jones allowed
he'd clean out Forty Mile. Only he didn't, for about the second yap he
let off he ran afoul of Husky Travers. It was in the White Caribou. 'I'm