“Yes, I, Simon Goldollar, made that bet, and I am willing to repeat it. I hope they won’t get to Forty Mile. If they don’t we’ll head them off yet, and teach them that none but the company can trade on the Yukon. I am one of the company’s most trusted clerks, and though I only came out last summer, I think I see a way to winning promotion by breaking up the plans of this impudent would-be trader in our territory, and I am going to propose my scheme to the agent at once. I am the more anxious to carry it out now that Phil Ryder, whom I hate, has turned up again, and is evidently some sort of a partner in this new concern. He thinks I stole his money when we crossed the continent together, but I didn’t. Even if I had we would now be quits, for he has stolen the fur-seal’s tooth from me. I know where it is, though, and I’ll have it back before long. I’ll find some chance to get the best of him, too, before he leaves the Yukon, and I’ll give him cause to regret that he ever saw it or Redoubt St. Michaels, either. See if I don’t.”
“At last I am allowed to speak, and I must say I think I should have been the first to be presented, for I am the Fur-seal’s Tooth. My origin is mysterious, the wonderful carving with which I am covered is unique, and of course my ultimate fate cannot be foretold; but whoever has read of me in the book that bears my name must admit that I exert a powerful influence over the affairs of men. It is said of me that he who gives me away gives good luck with me. He who receives me as a gift receives good luck. He who loses me loses his luck, and he who steals me steals bad luck that will cling to him so long as I am retained in his possession.
“Although I am now in the hands of a wretched Eskimo, I propose to leave him very shortly, to continue my travels until I reach my proper resting-place, and to exert a very considerable influence upon the forthcoming story. If you doubt my word, just bear me in mind and watch for my appearance.”
Eighty miles south of Redoubt St. Michaels, the one lonely trading-station of that bleak northern coast, the mighty Yukon pours forth its turbid flood, discoloring the waters of Bering Sea for one hundred miles off shore. In point of size, as measured by length, the Yukon ranks seventeenth among the rivers of the world and fifth among those of the United States, but its volume of water is computed to be equal to that of the Mississippi, while, like the Father of Waters, it is constantly eating away its own banks and tearing them down, acres at a time, along its entire length. Thus it has become a shoal stream of immense width, crowded with islands and sand-bars, on all of which are huge stacks of bleached driftwood piled up by springtime floods. In the neighborhood of its fan-like, many-mouthed delta the tawny giant has deposited its muddy sediment for so many ages that it has created hundreds of square miles of low swamp lands, on which only coarse grasses and stunted willows grow. In the early summer these vast swamps afford safe breeding-places for millions of swans, ducks, and geese. Here also are produced such incredible swarms of mosquitoes that neither human beings nor animals dare penetrate their watery solitudes. Nor are mosquitoes confined to the Yukon delta; but its entire valley is so infested with them that summer is a season to be dreaded by whites and natives alike. Even the wild animals of its forests retreat to the snow-clad mountains, so that there is little or no game to be procured between spring and autumn. The only compensation of the season is that it brings the finest salmon of the world into the river in such vast shoals that every dweller within one hundred miles of its banks may from them lay in his year’s supply of food by the labor of a single month.