n men and his desire for their help
and companionship--even after five weeks with Beeching and Harry--were
greatly stronger than the same factors were in any of his team-mates.
The culminative influences of hundreds of generations of civilization
spoke in him here.

And so, trailing beside him the gnawed-off ends of his traces, Jan
dragged his emaciated frame along in jerks over the hard-trodden snow
while the folk of the town cheered the departing steamer. In a little
while Jan came to a small tent, the flap of which hung loose and open.
At the entrance Jan smelt the fresh trail of a man; from within came--to
nostrils cunning as Jan's--the odor of foodstuffs. Jan propped and
jerked himself feebly into the tent, though for months now he had known
that it was forbidden to enter the habitations of men-folk.

Nosing weakly to and fro, Jan found on a low shelf a can of milk. A
half-blind jab of his muzzle brought it tumbling to the ground. Its lid
was open, but the milk was firmly frozen. Jan licked at it, cutting his
deep flews as he did so on the uneven edges of the tin. The warmth of
his tongue extracted a certain sweet milkiness from this. But the metal
edges were raw and sharp; Jan's exhaustion was very great, and presently
he sank down upon the twig-strewn ground, and lay there, breathing in
weak, sobbingly uncertain gasps, the milk-can between his outstretched
paws.

Jan was now drawing very near, nearer than he had ever been before, to
the Great Divide.

Within a hundred yards of Jan were groups of solid frame houses, with
warm kitchens in them, and abundant food. But the tent, standing by
itself, came first; and, though he could not know it, the tent was, on
the whole, the very best of all the habitations in that bleak little
town--for Jan. For this tent was the temporary home of an American named
Willis--James Gurney Willis; as knowledgeable a man as Jean himself and,
in addition, one known wherever he went into the northland as a white
man.

Not many minutes after Jan's lying down there Jim Willis came striding
up to his tent from the wharf, and found the half of its floor-space
occupied by the gaunt wreck of the biggest hound he had ever seen.
Willis was a man of experience in other places than the northland, and
he would always have known a bloodhound when he saw one. But never had
he seen a hound of any kind with such a frame as that he saw before him
now. The dead, blood-matted black and iron-gray coat