Governor Walsh?
Lost with all hands and eight sleds on the Thirty Mile. Devereaux? Who
was Devereaux? Oh, the courier! Shot by Indians on Lake Marsh.
So it went. The word was passed along. Men shouldered in to ask after
friends and partners, and in turn were shouldered out, too stunned for
blasphemy. By the time Montana Kid gained the bank he was surrounded by
several hundred fur-clad miners. When he passed the Barracks he was the
centre of a procession. At the Opera House he was the nucleus of an
excited mob, each member struggling for a chance to ask after some absent
comrade. On every side he was being invited to drink. Never before had
the Klondike thus opened its arms to a che-cha-qua. All Dawson was
humming. Such a series of catastrophes had never occurred in its
history. Every man of note who had gone south in the spring had been
wiped out. The cabins vomited forth their occupants. Wild-eyed men
hurried down from the creeks and gulches to seek out this man who had
told a tale of such disaster. The Russian half-breed wife of Bettles
sought the fireplace, inconsolable, and rocked back and forth, and ever
and anon flung white wood-ashes upon her raven hair.
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