able. The days of labor were followed by nights of watchful
anxiety and council. Nature's batteries were against them. But the
lurking human danger was even more serious in the minds of these men.
Nature they knew. They had learned her arts of war, and their counters
were studied, and the outcome of fierce experience. But the other was
new, or, at least, sufficiently new to require the straining of every
nerve to meet it successfully, should it come. They were under no
delusions on the subject. Come it would. How? Where? But more than
all--when?

For all their skill, for all their well-thought organization, these men
could not hope to escape scathless against the forces of nature opposed
to them. They lost horses in the miry hollows. The surgical skill of
Dr. Bill was frequently needed for the drivers and packmen. There was
a toll of material, too.

The land seemed scored with narrow chasms, the cause of which was
beyond all imagination. There were cul-de-sacs which possessed no
seeming rhyme or reason. Time and again the advancing scout party,
seeking the better road, found itself trapped in valleys of muskeg with
no other outlet than the way by which it had entered. Wherever the eye
searched, rugged rock facets, with ragged patches of vegetation growing
in the crevices confronted them. It was a maze of desolation, and
magnificent hills and forests of primordial growth. It was as crude
and half complete in the days when the waters first receded.

But the lure of the precious metal was in every heart. Even Kars lay
under its fascination once more, now that the strenuous goal lay within
sight. He knew it was there, and in great quantities. And, for all
the saner purposes he had in his mind, its influence made itself deeply
felt.

The gold seeker, be he master or wage earner, is beyond redemption.
Murray McTavish had said that all men north of "sixty" were wage
slaves. He might have included all the world. But the truth of his
assertion was beyond all question. Not a man in the outfit Kars had
organized but was a wage slave, down to the least civilized Indian who
labored under a pack.

Bodily ease counted for nothing. These men were inured to all
hardship. They were men who had committed themselves to a war against
the elements, a war against all that opposed them in their hunger for
the wage they were determined to tear from the frigid bosom of an earth
which they regarded as the vulture r