d temper. And to the consternation of an
already thoroughly demoralized team, it brought also the serving out, in
a heap as before--this cruel and messy trick, more perhaps than any
other one thing, marked the men's wretched slackness and incompetence;
qualities generally more cruel in their effects than any harshness or
over-severity--of fish representing in the aggregate rather less than
half a day's ration for each dog in the team.

The next day, and the next, and the next brought a similar dispensation
to the dogs; no more. By this time the nightly feeding had become a
horrid and bloody battle.

"Nasty savage brutes!" said sponging Harry.

"Blood does tell," observed the oracular Beeching, himself by repute a
man of family. "They're every one of 'em mongrels."

The son of lordly Finn and queenly Desdemona attached no meaning to
these words, of course; but were it not for the discipline, the
generations of discipline in his blood, he could have strangled these
two muddlers for the tragic folly of their incompetence, the gross
exhibition of their slackness.

As the men themselves began to feel the belly-pinch, they brought up no
reserves of manhood, but, on the contrary, they took to cruelly beating
their now weakened team, when the dogs were safely tethered in the
traces, and to cowardly avoidance of the poor brutes at all other times.
Harry was quite unashamedly afraid to throw the dogs their beggarly half
or quarter ration; and but for Beeching, it may be the dogs had starved
while food still remained on the sled.

Maybe the fact that Beeching, with all his faults, had never reached
Harry's depths as a sponger, preserved him from this particular crime.
But he had small ground in that for self-gratulation, since it is a fact
remembered in the country that when he did eventually stagger down to
salt water with his sadly reduced team, the dogs had positively not had
their harness off for a week. Mr. Beeching and his precious partner had
been afraid to let their dogs out of the traces and the safe reach of
their whips!

The fatally unwise Gutty was the first to succumb. Fish downed him for a
morsel of food he had grabbed; and when the team had been over the spot
on which he fell, there simply was no Gutty left. Poll, the slighter of
the two bitches, died under Harry's whip--the haft of it--or she, like
Jinny, would have seen salt water, because their sex was their
protection--from their fellow-dogs, though not