ed, and they watched
the flaming oil gather headway. They drew back beyond the growing light
and waited.

They saw Wentworth rush out, stare wildly at the conflagration, and
plunge back into the cabin. Scarcely a minute elapsed when he emerged,
this time slowly, half doubled over, his shoulders burdened by a sack
heavy and unmistakable. Smoke and Shorty sprang at him like a pair of
famished wolves. They hit him right and left, at the same instant. He
crumpled down under the weight of the sack, which Smoke pressed
over with his hands to make sure. Then he felt his knees clasped by
Wentworth's arms as the man turned a ghastly face upward.

"Give me a dozen, only a dozen--half a dozen--and you can have the
rest," he squalled. He bared his teeth and, with mad rage, half inclined
his head to bite Smoke's leg, then he changed his mind and fell to
pleading. "Just half a dozen," he wailed. "Just half a dozen. I was
going to turn them over to you--to-morrow. Yes, to-morrow. That was my
idea. They're life! They're life! Just half a dozen!"

"Where's the other sack?" Smoke bluffed.

"I ate it up," was the reply, unimpeachably honest. "That sack's all
that's left. Give me a few. You can have the rest."

"Ate 'em up!" Shorty screamed. "A whole sack! An' them geezers dyin' for
want of 'em! This for you! An' this! An' this! An' this! You swine! You
hog!"

The first kick tore Wentworth away from his embrace of Smoke's knees.
The second kick turned him over in the snow. But Shorty went on kicking.

"Watch out for your toes," was Smoke's only interference.

"Sure; I'm usin' the heel," Shorty answered. "Watch me. I'll cave his
ribs in. I'll kick his jaw off. Take that! An' that! Wisht I could give
you the boot instead of the moccasin. You swine!"

There was no sleep in camp that night. Hour after hour Smoke and Shorty
went the rounds, doling the life-renewing potato-juice, a quarter of a
spoonful at a dose, into the poor ruined mouths of the population. And
through the following day, while one slept the other kept up the work.

There were no more deaths. The most awful cases began to mend with an
immediacy that was startling. By the third day, men who had not been off
their backs for weeks crawled out of their bunks and tottered around on
crutches. And on that day, the sun, two months then on its journey into
northern declination, peeped cheerfully over the crest of the canyon for
the first time.

"Nary a potato," Shorty told