his masters than he had in Gutty, the husky he had
thrashed overnight, and far less than he had in Fish and Pad, the two
opponents he had found so much more difficult to trounce.

As a fact, Jan's skepticism was amply justified. In the thirty-five-day
trip thus begun--which should have been completed in sixteen days--Jan
was given as striking an example of the effects of man's muddle-headed,
slack-minded incompetence as that which Jean had furnished him of the
effects of man's able-bodied, clear-headed competence and efficiency.
Jan never worked it out in precisely this way, but after his own simple
and direct fashion he came to the definite conclusion, before he had
been two days on the trail with Beeching and Harry, that, for his part,
he would sooner thole the harshest kind of severity or even cruelty in a
master, so that it be allied with competence, than he would endure this
evils which (in the northland more than in most places) attend all the
steps of the man who is slack, shiftless, and incompetent; and, be it
noted, make miserable the days of all and sundry who are forced to be in
any way dependent on that man.

It was with much wistful regret that Jan recalled in these days the
daily round of his life, after the fight with Bill, as Jean's lead dog.
The swift, positive, and ordered evolutions of those smoothly running
days seemed merely miraculous in retrospect as Jan compared his memory
of them with the wretched muddle of Beeching's wasteful scramble across
the country: They carried no trade goods, nothing save the necessary
dog-food and creature-comforts for the two men; yet their sled--an
extra-large one--was half as heavy again to pull as Jean's had been,
despite the ten primely conditioned dogs who made up Beeching's "flash"
team.

The morning was generally far advanced when Beeching and Harry started
in to clear the muddle of their amateurish night's camp, with all its
preposterous litter of bedding, utensils (always unclean), and other
wasteful truck such as no men can afford to carry in the northland. But
the day would be half done by the time their muddled preparations were
finally completed.

And then, more often than not, one of the men would add his own not
inconsiderable weight to that of the half-packed, overladen sled; and,
at the best, Harry as a trail-breaker and finder was of no more use than
a blind kitten would have been. A dozen times in the day a halt would be
called for some enforced