grown up with the land. He knew no other land. Civilization was
a dream of some previous life. Camps like Forty Mile and Circle
City were to him metropolises. And not alone had he grown up
with the land, for, raw as it was, he had helped to make it. He
had made history and geography, and those that followed wrote of
his traverses and charted the trails his feet had broken.

Heroes are seldom given to hero-worship, but among those of that
young land, young as he was, he was accounted an elder hero. In
point of time he was before them. In point of deed he was beyond
them. In point of endurance it was acknowledged that he could
kill the hardiest of them. Furthermore, he was accounted a nervy
man, a square man, and a white man.

In all lands where life is a hazard lightly played with and
lightly flung aside, men turn, almost automatically, to gambling
for diversion and relaxation. In the Yukon men gambled their
lives for gold, and those that won gold from the ground gambled
for it with one another. Nor was Elam Harnish an exception. He
was a man's man primarily, and the instinct in him to play the
game of life was strong. Environment had determined what form
that game should take. He was born on an Iowa farm, and his
father had emigrated to eastern Oregon, in which mining country
Elam's boyhood was lived. He had known nothing but hard knocks
for big stakes. Pluck and endurance counted in the game, but the
great god Chance dealt the cards. Honest work for sure but
meagre returns did not count. A man played big. He risked
everything for everything, and anything less than everything
meant that he was a loser. So for twelve Yukon years, Elam
Harnish had been a loser. True, on Moosehide Creek the past