CARIBOO 51

could only find the cabin again by means of
the gunshots that the others kept firing as a
signal. Two dozen people slept that night in
the log shack; and when dawn came, four feet
of snow lay on the ground and the great ever-
greens looked like huge sugar-cones. On
snowshoes [Ireland and three others set out
to find the lost men and women on the lower
trail. They found them at sundown camped
in a ravine beside a rock, with their blankets
up to keep off the wind, thawing themselves
out before a fire. A high wind was blowing
and it was bitterly cold. The lost people had
not eaten for three days. Twenty men from
the cabin dug a way through the drifts with
their snowshoes and brought horses to carry
the women back to the coloured man’s roof.

But it was not of the perils of the trail that
the outside werld heard. The outside world
heard of claims which any man might find
and from which gold to the value of a hundred
and fifty thousand dollars could be dug and
washed in three months. The outside world
thought that gold could be picked up amid
the rocks of British Columbia. Necessity is
the mother of invention. She is also the hard
foster-mother of desperation and folly. Times

Asien ae tte enepmmmnats

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