The few that possessed sufficient faith to remain were busy building log cabins against the coming of winter.
Carmack and his Indian relatives were occupied in building a sluice box and getting a head of water.
The work was slow, for they had to saw their lumber by hand from the standing forest.
But farther down Bonanza were four men who had drifted in from up river, Dan McGilvary, Dave McKay, Dave Edwards, and Harry Waugh.
They were a quiet party, neither asking nor giving confidences, and they herded by themselves.
But Daylight, who had panned the spotted rim of Carmack's claim and shaken coarse gold from the grass-roots, and who had panned the rim at a hundred other places up and down the length of the creek and found nothing, was curious to know what lay on bed-rock.
He had noted the four quiet men sinking a shaft close by the stream, and he had heard their whip-saw going as they made lumber for the sluice boxes.
He did not wait for an invitation, but he was present the first day they sluiced.
And at the end of five hours' shovelling for one man, he saw them take out thirteen ounces and a half of gold.
It was coarse gold, running from pinheads to a twelve-dollar nugget, and it had come from off bed-rock.
The first fall snow was flying that day, and the Arctic winter was closing down; but Daylight had no eyes for the bleak-gray sadness of the dying, short-lived summer.
He saw his vision coming true, and on the big flat was upreared anew his golden city of the snows.
Gold had been found on bed-rock. That was the big thing.
Carmack's strike was assured.
Daylight staked a claim in his own name adjoining the three he had purchased with his plug tobacco.
This gave him a block of property two thousand feet long and extending in width from rim-rock to rim-rock.
Returning that night to his camp at the mouth of Klondike, he found in it Kama, the Indian he had left at Dyea.
Kama was travelling by canoe, bringing in the last mail of the year.
In his possession was some two hundred dollars in gold-dust, which Daylight immediately borrowed.
In return, he arranged to stake a claim for him, which he was to record when he passed through Forty Mile.
When Kama departed next morning, he carried a number of letters for Daylight, addressed to all the old-timers down river, in which they were urged to come up immediately and stake.
Also Kama carried letters of similar import, given him by the other men on Bonanza.
"It will sure be the gosh-dangdest stampede that ever was," Daylight chuckled, as he tried to vision the excited populations of Forty Mile and Circle City tumbling into poling-boats and racing the hundreds of miles up the Yukon; for he knew that his word would be unquestioningly accepted.
With the arrival of the first stampeders, Bonanza Creek woke up, and thereupon began a long-distance race between unveracity and truth, wherein, lie no matter how fast, men were continually overtaken and passed by truth.
When men who doubted Carmack's report of two and a half to the pan, themselves panned two and a half, they lied and said that they were getting an ounce.
And long ere the lie was fairly on its way, they were getting not one ounce but five ounces.
This they claimed was ten ounces; but when they filled a pan of dirt to prove the lie, they washed out twelve ounces.
And so it went. They continued valiantly to lie, but the truth continued to outrun them.
One day in December Daylight filled a pan from bed rock on his own claim and carried it into his cabin.
Here a fire burned and enabled him to keep water unfrozen in a canvas tank.
He squatted over the tank and began to wash.
Earth and gravel seemed to fill the pan.
As he imparted to it a circular movement, the lighter, coarser particles washed out over the edge. At times he combed the surface with his fingers, raking out handfuls of gravel.
The contents of the pan diminished.
As it drew near to the bottom, for the purpose of fleeting and tentative examination, he gave the pan a sudden sloshing movement, emptying it of water.
And the whole bottom showed as if covered with butter.
Thus the yellow gold flashed up as the muddy water was flirted away.
It was gold—gold-dust, coarse gold, nuggets, large nuggets.
He was all alone.
He set the pan down for a moment and thought long thoughts.
Then he finished the washing, and weighed the result in his scales.
At the rate of sixteen dollars to the ounce, the pan had contained seven hundred and odd dollars.
It was beyond anything that even he had dreamed.
His fondest anticipation's had gone no farther than twenty or thirty thousand dollars to a claim; but here were claims worth half a million each at the least, even if they were spotted.
He did not go back to work in the shaft that day, nor the next, nor the next.
Instead, capped and mittened, a light stampeding outfit, including his rabbit skin robe, strapped on his back, he was out and away on a many-days' tramp over creeks and divides, inspecting the whole neighboring territory.
On each creek he was entitled to locate one claim, but he was chary in thus surrendering up his chances.
On Hunker Creek only did he stake a claim.
Bonanza Creek he found staked from mouth to source, while every little draw and pup and gulch that drained into it was like-wise staked.
Little faith was had in these side-streams. They had been staked by the hundreds of men who had failed to get in on Bonanza.