His calculations were all thrown out, and he was just
proceeding to recast them when he hit upon the idea of weighing
small eggs. "For whether they be large or small, a dozen eggs is a
dozen eggs," he observed sagely to himself; and a dozen small ones
he found to weigh but a pound and a quarter. Thereat the city of
San Francisco was overrun by anxious-eyed emissaries, and
commission houses and dairy associations were startled by a sudden
demand for eggs running not more than twenty ounces to the dozen.
Rasmunsen mortgaged the little cottage for a thousand dollars,
arranged for his wife to make a prolonged stay among her own
people, threw up his job, and started North. To keep within his
schedule he compromised on a second-class passage, which, because
of the rush, was worse than steerage; and in the late summer, a
pale and wabbly man, he disembarked with his eggs on the Dyea
beach. But it did not take him long to recover his land legs and
appetite. His first interview with the Chilkoot packers
straightened him up and stiffened his backbone. Forty cents a
pound they demanded for the twenty-eight-mile portage, and while he
caught his breath and swallowed, the price went up to forty-three.
Fifteen husky Indians put the straps on his packs at forty-five,
but took them off at an offer of forty-seven from a Skaguay Croesus
in dirty shirt and ragged overalls who had lost his horses on the
White Pass trail and was now making a last desperate drive at the
country by way of Chilkoot.
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