CHAPTER IX
THE TEST
The late evening twilight deepened as Special Constable Connie Morgan, of the Royal North-west Mounted Police, paused upon the edge of a tiny clearing to reconnoitre. Before him a small cabin of mud-chinked logs perched precariously between the steep, rock-studded shoulder of a mountain and the high-water line of a nameless feeder to the upper Stewart River. For a mile the boy had followed a well-defined trail that led from a point on the main river where a crude flatboat lay upon the bank ready for launching. He had expected to find a cabin—but, a cabin with curtains! Three hundred miles from the Yukon, in the very heart of the high outlands! This, he most certainly had not expected to find.
His glance strayed from the cabin to a rude sluice box in the bed of the stream, and back again to the cabin with its single chintz-curtained win-
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