over the huge cakes by the strength of
their arms and lowered it down again. Here the dogs were well-nigh
useless, and both they and the men were tried excessively by the
roughness of the way. An hour's extra running that night caught up
only part of the lost time.

In the morning they awoke to find ten inches of snow on their robes.
The dogs were buried under it and were loath to leave their comfortable
nests. This new snow meant hard going. The sled runners would not
slide over it so well, while one of the men must go in advance of the
dogs and pack it down with snowshoes so that they should not wallow.
Quite different was it from the ordinary snow known to those of the
Southland. It was hard, and fine, and dry. It was more like sugar.
Kick it, and it flew with a hissing noise like sand. There was no
cohesion among the particles, and it could not be moulded into
snowballs. It was not composed of flakes, but of crystals--tiny,
geometrical frost-crystals. In truth, it was not snow, but frost.

The weather was warm, as well, barely twenty below zero, and the two
men, with raised ear-flaps and dangling mittens, sweated as they
toiled. They failed to make Forty Mile that night, and when they
passed that camp next day Daylight paused only long enough to get the
mail and additional grub. On the afternoon of the following day they
camped at the mouth of the Klondike River. Not a soul had they
encountered since Forty Mile, and they had made their own trail. As
yet, that winter, no one had travelled the river south of Forty Mile,
and, for that matter, the whole winter through they might be the only
ones to travel it. In that day the Yukon was a lonely land. Between
the Klondike River and Salt Water at Dyea intervened six hundred miles
of snow-covered wilderness, and in all that distance there were but two
places where Daylight might look forward to meeting men. Both were
isolated trading-posts, Sixty Mile and Fort Selkirk. In the
summer-time Indians might be met with at the mouths of the Stewart and
White rivers, at the Big and Little Salmons, and on Lake Le Barge; but
in the winter, as he well knew, they would be on the trail of the
moose-herds, following them back into the mountains.

That night, camped at the mouth of the Klondike, Daylight did not turn
in when the evening's work was done. Had a white man been present,
Daylight would have remarked that he felt his "hunch" working. As it
was, he tied on hi