"Shake her, she's spying on us."

"Who is she?" asked Miss Chester, a moment later.

"Her husband manages one of the big companies. She's an old cat."

Gaining her first view of the land, the girl cried out, sharply.
They rode on an oily sea, tinted like burnished copper, while on
all sides, amid the faint rattle and rumble of machinery, scores
of ships were belching cargoes out upon living swarms of scows,
tugs, stern-wheelers, and dories. Here and there Eskimo oomiaks,
fat, walrus-hide boats, slid about like huge, many-legged water-
bugs. An endless, ant-like stream of tenders, piled high with
freight, plied to and from the shore. A mile distant lay the city,
stretched like a white ribbon between the gold of the ocean sand
and the dun of the moss-covered tundra. It was like no other in
the world. At first glance it seemed all made of new white canvas.
In a week its population had swelled from three to thirty
thousand. It now wandered in a slender, sinuous line along the
coast for miles, because only the beach afforded dry camping
ground. Mounting to the bank behind, one sank knee-deep in moss
and water, and, treading twice in the same tracks, found a bog of
oozing, icy mud. Therefore, as the town doubled daily in size, it
grew endwise like a string of dominoes, till the shore from Cape
Nome to Penny River was a long reach of white, glinting in the low
rays of the arctic sunset like foamy breakers on a tropic island.

"That's Anvil Creek up yonder," said Glenister. "There's where the
Midas lies. See!" He indicated a gap in the buttress of mountains
rolling back from the coast. "It's the greatest creek in the