s! You beasts!"

John Messner closed the door softly behind him, and, as he started the
dogs, looked back at the cabin with a great relief in his face. At the
bottom of the bank, beside the water-hole, he halted the sled. He worked
the sack of gold out between the lashings and carried it to the water-
hole. Already a new skin of ice had formed. This he broke with his
fist. Untying the knotted mouth with his teeth, he emptied the contents
of the sack into the water. The river was shallow at that point, and two
feet beneath the surface he could see the bottom dull-yellow in the
fading light. At the sight of it, he spat into the hole.

He started the dogs along the Yukon trail. Whining spiritlessly, they
were reluctant to work. Clinging to the gee-pole with his right band and
with his left rubbing cheeks and nose, he stumbled over the rope as the
dogs swung on a bend.

"Mush-on, you poor, sore-footed brutes!" he cried. "That's it, mush-on!"

THE WHITE MAN'S WAY

"To cook by your fire and to sleep under your roof for the night," I had
announced on entering old Ebbits's cabin; and he had looked at me blear-
eyed and vacuous, while Zilla had favored me with a sour face and a
contemptuous grunt. Zilla was his wife, and no more bitter-tongued,
implacable old squaw dwelt on the Yukon. Nor would I have stopped there
had my dogs been less tired or had the rest of the village been
inhabited. But this cabin alone had I found occupied, and in this cabin,
perforce, I took my shelter.

Old Ebbits now and again pulled his tangled wits together, and hints and
sparkles of intelligence came and went in his eyes. Several times during
the preparation of my supper he even essayed hospitable inquiries about
my health, the condition and number of my dogs, and the distance I had
travelled that day. And each time Zilla had looked sourer than ever and
grunted more contemptuously.

Yet I confess that there was no particular call for cheerfulness on their
part. There they crouched by the fire, the pair of them, at the end of
their days, old and withered and helpless, racked by rheumatism, bitten
by hunger, and tantalized by the frying-odors of my abundance of meat.
They rocked back and forth in a slow and hopeless way, and regularly,
once every five minutes, Ebbits emitted a low groan. It was not so much
a groan of pain, as of pain-weariness. He was oppressed by the weight
and the torment of this thing called life,