he
fleeting glimpse he caught of it, Smoke wondered if he had ever seen a
Dore grotesquery to compare.

Leaping down the bank beyond the glutted passage, he gained the
hard-footing of the sled-trail and made better time. Here, in packed
harbors beside the narrow trail, sleds and men waited for runners that
were still behind. From the rear came the whine and rush of dogs, and
Smoke had barely time to leap aside into the deep snow. A sled tore
past, and he made out the man kneeling and shouting madly. Scarcely
was it by when it stopped with a crash of battle. The excited dogs of
a harbored sled, resenting the passing animals, had got out of hand and
sprung upon them.

Smoke plunged around and by. He could see the green lantern of Von
Schroeder and, just below it, the red flare that marked his own team.
Two men were guarding Schroeder's dogs, with short clubs interposed
between them and the trail.

"Come on, you Smoke! Come on, you Smoke!" he could hear Shorty calling
anxiously.

"Coming!" he gasped.

By the red flare, he could see the snow torn up and trampled, and
from the way his partner breathed he knew a battle had been fought. He
staggered to the sled, and, in a moment he was falling on it, Shorty's
whip snapped as he yelled: "Mush! you devils! Mush!"

The dogs sprang into the breast-bands, and the sled jerked abruptly
ahead. They were big animals--Hanson's prize team of Hudson Bays--and
Smoke had selected them for the first stage, which included the ten
miles of Mono, the heavy going of the cut-off across the flat at the
mouth, and the first ten miles of the Yukon stretch.

"How many are ahead?" he asked.

"You shut up an' save your wind," Shorty answered. "Hi! you brutes! Hit
her up! Hit her up!"

He was running behind the sled, towing on a short rope. Smoke could not
see him; nor could he see the sled on which he lay at full length. The
fires had been left in the rear, and they were tearing through a wall of
blackness as fast as the dogs could spring into it. This blackness was
almost sticky, so nearly did it take on the seeming of substance.

Smoke felt the sled heel up on one runner as it rounded an invisible
curve, and from ahead came the snarls of beasts and the oaths of men.
This was known afterward as the Barnes-Slocum Jam. It was the teams of
these two men which first collided, and into it, at full career, piled
Smoke's seven big fighters. Scarcely more than semi-domesticated wolves,
the excit