the time."

VIII. THE HANGING OF CULTUS GEORGE

The way led steeply up through deep, powdery snow that was unmarred
by sled-track or moccasin impression. Smoke, in the lead, pressed the
fragile crystals down under his fat, short snow-shoes. The task required
lungs and muscle, and he flung himself into it with all his strength.
Behind, on the surface he packed, strained the string of six dogs, the
steam-jets of their breathing attesting their labor and the lowness of
the temperature. Between the wheel-dog and the sled toiled Shorty, his
weight divided between the guiding gee-pole and the haul, for he was
pulling with the dogs. Every half-hour he and Smoke exchanged places,
for the snow-shoe work was even more arduous than that of the gee-pole.

The whole outfit was fresh and strong. It was merely hard work being
efficiently done--the breaking of a midwinter trail across a divide. On
this severe stretch, ten miles a day they called a decent stint.
They kept in condition, but each night crawled well tired into their
sleeping-furs. This was their sixth day out from the lively camp of
Mucluc on the Yukon. In two days, with the loaded sled, they had covered
the fifty miles of packed trail up Moose Creek. Then had come the
struggle with the four feet of untouched snow that was really not snow,
but frost-crystals, so lacking in cohesion that when kicked it flew with
the thin hissing of granulated sugar. In three days they had wallowed
thirty miles up Minnow Creek and across the series of low divides that
separate the several creeks flowing south into Siwash River; and now
they were breasting the big divide, past the Bald Buttes, where the
way would lead them down Porcupine Creek to the middle reaches of Milk
River. Higher up Milk River, it was fairly rumored, were deposits of
copper. And this was their goal--a hill of pure copper, half a mile to
the right and up the first creek after Milk River issued from a deep
gorge to flow across a heavily timbered stretch of bottom. They would
know it when they saw it. One-Eyed McCarthy had described it with sharp
definiteness. It was impossible to miss it--unless McCarthy had lied.

Smoke was in the lead, and the small scattered spruce-trees were
becoming scarcer and smaller, when he saw one, dead and bone-dry, that
stood in their path. There was no need for speech. His glance to Shorty
was acknowledged by a stentorian "Whoa!" The dogs stood in the traces
till they saw Shorty