Since Vancouver's hotels and inns could not accommodate them all, whole families were sleeping in the open. Their present hardships were a foretaste of what was in store for them in the future, without shelter in such harsh weather.

For most of these poor people, life would be no more comfortable on board the ships taking them to Skagway or during the interminable, frightful journey from Skagway to Dawson City. The ship's bow and stern cabins could barely hold the passengers who were willing to pay the price. Some families were crowded into the steerage for the voyage of six or seven days, during which they would have to attend to their own needs. There were even some who allowed themselves to be shut up in the hold like animals, and even that was better than being on the open deck exposed to the severe weather conditions, the icy squalls and snowstorms so frequent in the region near the Arctic Circle.

It was not only immigrants from the distant lands of the Old and New Worlds who came swarming into Vancouver at that time. There were also hundreds of miners who had no intention of spending the cold winter season in the iceboxes of Dawson City, when it was impossible to work their claims. All activity comes to a halt when the ground is covered with ten or twelve feet of snow. In temperatures of forty or fifty degrees below zero it becomes as hard as granite and breaks the pickaxes.

And so, those prospectors who could afford it, who had enjoyed a certain measure of good fortune, preferred to return to the larger towns and cities of British Columbia. They had gold to spend, and they spent it with a carefree abandon that staggers the imagination. They were convinced that fortune would not forsake them . . . that the next season would be a good one ... the new strikes discovered along the tributaries of the Yukon and the Klondike would fill their hands with piles of nuggets. The end of April or the beginning of May it would be time to go back to the placers and begin again. These men had the best hotel rooms for the six or seven months of winter, just as they would have the best cabins on the voyage to Skagway, where they would continue their northward journey.

Summy Skim soon realized that this class of miners included the most violent, the most uncouth, and the most quarrelsome types, the ones who indulged in every excess in the gambling houses and casinos, where, money in hand, they talked as if they owned the place.

And here is how Summy Skim came to make the acquaintance of one of these disreputable prospectors. Unfortunately, the contact that began on that occasion would not end there, as we shall see.

On the morning of April 15, Skim and Raddle were walking along the dock when they heard the sound of a steam whistle.

"Is that the Football at last?" asked the more impatient of the two cousins.

"I don't think so," said the other. "That sound is coming from the south, but the Football will be coming from the north."

It was indeed a steamship on its way to the port of Vancouver. Since it was coming up Juan de Fuca Strait, it could not be coming from Skagway.

However, Raddle and Skim walked out to the end of the dock and joined the crowds that the arrival of a ship always attracts. Several hundred passengers were about to disembark and wait to book passage on one of the northbound steamships.

The ship was the Smyth, a vessel of 2500 tons, which had stopped at every port on the North American coast from the Mexican port of Acapulco onward. After leaving its passengers in Vancouver it would return to its home port since it was assigned specifically to the coastal service. Its passengers would swell the throng of people who had to decide in Vancouver whether to make their way to the Klondike via Skagway or via St. Michael. The Football could certainly not carry everyone, and most of the immigrants heading for Dawson City would be obliged to wait for other vessels to arrive.

Of course, Skim and Raddle would have preferred that the steam whistle, whose screeches grew louder as the ship entered the harbor, had been announcing the arrival of the Football, but even though it was the Smyth, they watched out of curiosity as the passengers disembarked.

When the steamer reached the landing stage, one of the passengers was seen struggling furiously to be among the first to reach the gangplank. No doubt he was in a hurry to book his passage on the Football. He was a large man, rough and energetic, with a bushy black beard, the bronzed complexion of a southerner, a forbidding look in his eyes, an unpleasant face, and a disagreeable manner. There was another passenger with him who seemed to be of the same nationality and who appeared to be equally impatient and unsociable.

There must have been others in just as much of a hurry to disembark as this arrogant and noisy passenger. But it would have been difficult to get ahead of him as he elbowed his way to the landing stage, paying no heed to the orders of the officers and the captain, pushing his neighbors aside and insulting them in a harsh voice that added to the fierceness of the insults spoken in a mixture of English and Spanish.

"Well," exclaimed Skim, "that's what you might call a pleasant traveling companion. If he's going to book passage on the Football ..

"The voyage will only last a few days," replied Raddle, "and we can manage to keep our distance from him during that time."

At that very moment, an onlooker standing near the two cousins shouted out, "Right! There's that damned Hunter.