t the other tenderfeet were beginning to shed their
shooting-irons.

His short hauls decreased. At times a hundred feet was all he could
stagger, and then the ominous pounding of his heart against his eardrums
and the sickening totteriness of his knees compelled him to rest. And
his rests grew longer. But his mind was busy. It was a twenty-eight-mile
portage, which represented as many days, and this, by all accounts, was
the easiest part of it. "Wait till you get to Chilkoot," others told him
as they rested and talked, "where you climb with hands and feet."

"They ain't going to be no Chilkoot," was his answer. "Not for me. Long
before that I'll be at peace in my little couch beneath the moss."

A slip and a violent, wrenching effort at recovery frightened him. He
felt that everything inside him had been torn asunder.

"If ever I fall down with this on my back, I'm a goner," he told another
packer.

"That's nothing," came the answer. "Wait till you hit the Canyon.
You'll have to cross a raging torrent on a sixty-foot pine-tree. No
guide-ropes, nothing, and the water boiling at the sag of the log to
your knees. If you fall with a pack on your back, there's no getting out
of the straps. You just stay there and drown."

"Sounds good to me," he retorted; and out of the depths of his
exhaustion he almost meant it.

"They drown three or four a day there," the man assured him. "I helped
fish a German out of there. He had four thousand in greenbacks on him."

"Cheerful, I must say," said Kit, battling his way to his feet and
tottering on.

He and the sack of beans became a perambulating tragedy. It reminded him
of the old man of the sea who sat on Sinbad's neck. And this was one of
those intensely masculine vacations, he meditated. Compared with it, the
servitude to O'Hara was sweet. Again and again he was nearly seduced by
the thought of abandoning the sack of beans in the brush and of sneaking
around the camp to the beach and catching a steamer for civilization.

But he didn't. Somewhere in him was the strain of the hard, and he
repeated over and over to himself that what other men could do, he
could. It became a nightmare chant, and he gibbered it to those that
passed him on the trail. At other times, resting, he watched and envied
the stolid, mule-footed Indians that plodded by under heavier packs.
They never seemed to rest, but went on and on with a steadiness and
certitude that were to him appalling.

He sat