"Gad! What a smudge!" sniffed the younger man. "You ought to be in
quarantine."

"I'd ruther smell like a man than talk like a kid. You desecrate
the hour of meditation with rhapsodies on nature when your
aesthetics ain't honed up to the beauties of good tobacco."

The other laughed, inflating his deep chest. In the gloom he
stretched his muscles restlessly, as though an excess of vigor
filled him.

They were lounging upon the dock, while before them lay the Santa
Maria ready for her midnight sailing. Behind slept Unalaska,
quaint, antique, and Russian, rusting amid the fogs of Bering Sea.
Where, a week before, mild-eyed natives had dried their cod among
the old bronze cannon, now a frenzied horde of gold-seekers paused
in their rush to the new El Dorado. They had come like a locust
cloud, thousands strong, settling on the edge of the Smoky Sea,
waiting the going of the ice that barred them from their Golden
Fleece--from Nome the new, where men found fortune in a night.

The mossy hills back of the village were ridged with graves of
those who had died on the out-trip the fall before, when a plague
had gripped the land--but what of that? Gold glittered in the
sands, so said the survivors; therefore men came in armies.
Glenister and Dextry had left Nome the autumn previous, the young
man raving with fever. Now they returned to their own land.

"This air whets every animal instinct in me," Glenister broke out
again. "Away from the cities I turn savage. I feel the old