The One Thousand Dozen

David Rasmunsen was a hustler, and, like many a greater man, a man of the one idea.

Wherefore, when the clarion call of the North rang on his ear, he conceived an adventure in eggs and bent all his energy to its achievement.

He figured briefly and to the point, and the adventure became iridescent-hued, splendid.

That eggs would sell at Dawson for five dollars a dozen was a safe working premise.

Whence it was incontrovertible that one thousand dozen would bring, in the Golden Metropolis, five thousand dollars.

On the other hand, expense was to be considered, and he considered it well, for he was a careful man, keenly practical, with a hard head and a heart that imagination never warmed.

At fifteen cents a dozen, the initial cost of his thousand dozen would be one hundred and fifty dollars, a mere bagatelle in face of the enormous profit.

And suppose, just suppose, to be wildly extravagant for once, that transportation for himself and eggs should run up eight hundred and fifty more; he would still have four thousand clear cash and clean when the last egg was disposed of and the last dust had rippled into his sack.

“You see, Alma,” — he figured it over with his wife, the cosy dining-room submerged in a sea of maps, government surveys, guide-books, and Alaskan itineraries, — “you see, expenses don’t really begin till you make Dyea — fifty dollars’ll cover it with a first-class passage thrown in.

Now from Dyea to Lake Linderman, Indian packers take your goods over for twelve cents a pound, twelve dollars a hundred, or one hundred and twenty dollars a thousand.

Say I have fifteen hundred pounds, it’ll cost one hundred and eighty dollars — call it two hundred and be safe.

I am creditably informed by a Klondiker just come out that I can buy a boat for three hundred.

But the same man says I’m sure to get a couple of passengers for one hundred and fifty each, which will give me the boat for nothing, and, further, they can help me manage it.

And . . . that’s all; I put my eggs ashore from the boat at Dawson.

Now let me see how much is that?”

“Fifty dollars from San Francisco to Dyea, two hundred from Dyea to Linderman, passengers pay for the boat — two hundred and fifty all told,” she summed up swiftly.