his meal from the top of his grub-
box, himself sitting on his bed-roll. Between mouthfuls he talked trail
and dogs with the man, who, with head over the stove, was thawing the ice
from his mustache. There were two bunks in the cabin, and into one of
them, when he had cleared his lip, the stranger tossed his bed-roll.

"We'll sleep here," he said, "unless you prefer this bunk. You're the
first comer and you have first choice, you know."

"That's all right," Messner answered. "One bunk's just as good as the
other."

He spread his own bedding in the second bunk, and sat down on the edge.
The stranger thrust a physician's small travelling case under his
blankets at one end to serve for a pillow.

"Doctor?" Messner asked.

"Yes," came the answer, "but I assure you I didn't come into the Klondike
to practise."

The woman busied herself with cooking, while the man sliced bacon and
fired the stove. The light in the cabin was dim, filtering through in a
small window made of onion-skin writing paper and oiled with bacon
grease, so that John Messner could not make out very well what the woman
looked like. Not that he tried. He seemed to have no interest in her.
But she glanced curiously from time to time into the dark corner where he
sat.

"Oh, it's a great life," the doctor proclaimed enthusiastically, pausing
from sharpening his knife on the stovepipe. "What I like about it is the
struggle, the endeavor with one's own hands, the primitiveness of it, the
realness."

"The temperature is real enough," Messner laughed.

"Do you know how cold it actually is?" the doctor demanded.

The other shook his head.

"Well, I'll tell you. Seventy-four below zero by spirit thermometer on
the sled."

"That's one hundred and six below freezing point--too cold for
travelling, eh?"

"Practically suicide," was the doctor's verdict. "One exerts himself. He
breathes heavily, taking into his lungs the frost itself. It chills his
lungs, freezes the edges of the tissues. He gets a dry, hacking cough as
the dead tissue sloughs away, and dies the following summer of pneumonia,
wondering what it's all about. I'll stay in this cabin for a week,
unless the thermometer rises at least to fifty below."

"I say, Tess," he said, the next moment, "don't you think that coffee's
boiled long enough!"

At the sound of the woman's name, John Messner became suddenly alert. He
looked at her quickly, while across his face shot a haunting