“Well, I should say it was! About three thousand miles! And, as Sitka is all of twenty-one hundred miles from here, I wish you would tell me how you have managed to miss it so completely, and drift up into this latitude?”
As Nikrik ran the ship aground on a mud-flat just then, there was plenty of time, while waiting for the tide to float her off, for the lads to relate the story of their wanderings and adventures. The fur-trader listened to it with profound interest, and, when it was concluded, he said:
“If that doesn’t beat all the roundabout travelling and hard luck that ever I heard of! I should think you would be sick of the sea, and willing to try dry land for a while by this time.”
“So we are,” answered Serge; “but, as the railroad isn’t even laid out yet, I suppose we shall have to go back on this ship――at least, as far as Oonalaska.”
“But she isn’t going there,” said Mr. Hamer. “She is chartered to carry a cargo of furs from here to China.”
“Whew!” whistled Phil. “And is that where you are going?”
“Oh no, I am bound for Sitka,” laughed the trader.
“Yes, I mean it; though, to be sure, I expect to reach there in rather a curious way. You see, I have in this ship a steamboat in sections, a saw-mill, some mining machinery, and a couple of hundred tons of merchandise. I am going to put my steamboat together as soon as we get on shore, load my freight aboard, and take her a thousand miles up the Yukon River to the mining camp at Forty-mile Creek. There I shall leave her for the winter and go out on snow-shoes, with dog-sledges, seven hundred miles across country to Pyramid Harbor, where I can get a steamer most any time for Sitka, or Juneau, either of which is only about one hundred miles farther. From one of those places I shall go down to San Francisco for a new stock of goods, and have them up here in time to meet my steamboat again in the early summer.
“Most of the men I have with me now are ship-carpenters, who will go back on this steamer to San Francisco, by way of China; so only about half a dozen will remain with me, and I should be very glad of a couple more hands. Now, if you care to take this trip with me and are willing to work your passage, I will pay all your expenses, and guarantee to land you in Sitka, sooner or later. What do you say? Will you do it?”