the whining, begging Wentworth. "You ain't
even touched with scurvy. You got outside a whole sack, an' you're
loaded against scurvy for twenty years. Knowin' you, I've come to
understand God. I always wondered why he let Satan live. Now I know. He
let him live just as I let you live. But it's a cryin' shame, just the
same."

"A word of advice," Smoke told Wentworth. "These men are getting well
fast; Shorty and I are leaving in a week, and there will be nobody to
protect you when these men go after you. There's the trail. Dawson's
eighteen days' travel."

"Pull your freight, Amos," Shorty supplemented, "or what I done to you
won't be a circumstance to what them convalescents'll do to you."

"Gentlemen, I beg of you, listen to me," Wentworth whined. "I'm a
stranger in this country. I don't know its ways. I don't know the trail.
Let me travel with you. I'll give you a thousand dollars if you'll let
me travel with you."

"Sure," Smoke grinned maliciously. "If Shorty agrees."

"WHO? ME?" Shorty stiffened for a supreme effort. "I ain't nobody.
Woodticks ain't got nothin' on me when it comes to humility. I'm a worm,
a maggot, brother to the pollywog an' child of the blow-fly. I ain't
afraid or ashamed of nothin' that creeps or crawls or stinks. But travel
with that mistake of creation! Go 'way, man. I ain't proud, but you turn
my stomach."

And Amos Wentworth went away, alone, dragging a sled loaded with
provisions sufficient to last him to Dawson. A mile down the trail
Shorty overhauled him.

"Come here to me," was Shorty's greeting. "Come across. Fork over. Cough
up."

"I don't understand," Wentworth quavered, shivering from recollection of
the two beatings, hand and foot, he had already received from Shorty.

"That thousand dollars, d' ye understand that? That thousand dollars
gold Smoke bought that measly potato with. Come through."

And Amos Wentworth passed the gold-sack over.

"Hope a skunk bites you an' you get howlin' hydrophoby," were the terms
of Shorty's farewell.

X. A FLUTTER IN EGGS

It was in the A. C. Company's big store at Dawson, on a morning of crisp
frost, that Lucille Arral beckoned Smoke Bellew over to the dry-goods
counter. The clerk had gone on an expedition into the storerooms, and,
despite the huge, red-hot stoves, Lucille had drawn on her mittens
again.

Smoke obeyed her call with alacrity. The man did not exist in Dawson
who would not have been flattered by the notice of