.
"We're in for a good cold snap. It's sixty-two below now, and still
goin' down. Better wait till she breaks."

Daylight laughed, and the old sour-doughs around him laughed.

"Just like you short-horns," Bettles cried, "afeard of a little frost.
And blamed little you know Daylight, if you think frost kin stop 'm."

"Freeze his lungs if he travels in it," was the reply.

"Freeze pap and lollypop! Look here, Hines, you only ben in this here
country three years. You ain't seasoned yet. I've seen Daylight do
fifty miles up on the Koyokuk on a day when the thermometer busted at
seventy-two."

Hines shook his head dolefully.

"Them's the kind that does freeze their lungs," he lamented. "If
Daylight pulls out before this snap breaks, he'll never get
through--an' him travelin' without tent or fly."

"It's a thousand miles to Dyea," Bettles announced, climbing on the
chair and supporting his swaying body by an arm passed around
Daylight's neck. "It's a thousand miles, I'm sayin' an' most of the
trail unbroke, but I bet any chechaquo--anything he wants--that
Daylight makes Dyea in thirty days."

"That's an average of over thirty-three miles a day," Doc Watson
warned, "and I've travelled some myself. A blizzard on Chilcoot would
tie him up for a week."

"Yep," Bettles retorted, "an' Daylight'll do the second thousand back
again on end in thirty days more, and I got five hundred dollars that
says so, and damn the blizzards."

To emphasize his remarks, he pulled out a gold-sack the size of a
bologna sausage and thumped it down on the bar. Doc Watson thumped his
own sack alongside.

"Hold on!" Daylight cried. "Bettles's right, and I want in on this. I
bet five hundred that sixty days from now I pull up at the Tivoli door
with the Dyea mail."

A sceptical roar went up, and a dozen men pulled out their sacks.

Jack Kearns crowded in close and caught Daylight's attention.

"I take you, Daylight," he cried. "Two to one you don't--not in
seventy-five days."

"No charity, Jack," was the reply. "The bettin's even, and the time is
sixty days."

"Seventy-five days, and two to one you don't," Kearns insisted. "Fifty
Mile'll be wide open and the rim-ice rotten."

"What you win from me is yours," Daylight went on. "And, by thunder,
Jack, you can't give it back that way. I won't bet with you. You're
trying to give me money. But I tell you-all one thing, Jack, I got
another hunch. I'm goin' to win it back