This day he stood in the door of his post staring up the sun-lit
river, absorbing the warmth of the Arctic afternoon. The Yukon swept
down around the great bend beneath the high, cut banks and past the
little town, disappearing behind the wooded point below, which
masked the up-coming steamers till one heard the sighing labor of
their stacks before he saw their smoke. It was a muddy, rushing
giant, bearing a burden of sand and silt, so that one might hear it
hiss and grind by stooping at its edge to listen; but the slanting
sun this afternoon made it appear like a boiling flood of molten
gold which issued silently out of a land of mystery and vanished
into a valley of forgetfulness. At least so the trader fancied, and
found himself wishing that it might carry away on its bosom the
heavy trouble which weighed him down, and bring in its place
forgetfulness of all that had gone before. Instead, however, it
seemed to hurry with news of those strange doings "up-river," news
that every down-coming steamboat verified. For years he had known
that some day this thing would happen, that some day this isolation
would be broken, that some day great hordes of men would overrun
this unknown land, bringing with them that which he feared to meet,
that which had made him what he was. And now that the time had come,
he was unprepared.

The sound of shouting caused him to turn his head. Down-stream, a
thousand yards away, men were raising a flag-staff made from the
trunk of a slender fir, from which the bark had been stripped,
heaving on their tackle as they sang in unison. They stood well out
upon the river's bank before a group of well-made houses, the peeled
timbers of which shone yellow in the sun. He noted the symmetrical
arrangement of the buildings, noted the space about them that had