climb and rest alternately. Then, after
a meal and a short breathing spell, he would go back alone after the
second load. They were footsore, and their bodies ached with weariness
that verged on pain when they gained the pass that cut the summit of
the Klappan Range.

"Well, we're over the hump," Bill remarked thankfully. "It's a
downhill shoot to the Skeena. I don't think it's more than fifty or
sixty miles to where we can take to the water."

They made better time on the western slope, but the journey became a
matter of sheer endurance. Summer was on them in full blaze. The
creeks ran full and strong. Thunderstorms blew up out of a clear sky
to deluge them. Food was scanty--flour and salt and tea; with meat and
fish got by the way. And the black flies and mosquitoes swarmed about
them maddeningly day and night.

So they came at last to the Skeena, and Hazel's heart misgave her when
she took note of its swirling reaches, the sinuous eddies--a deep,
swift, treacherous stream. But Bill rested overnight, and in the
morning sought and felled a sizable cedar, and began to hew. Slowly
the thick trunk shaped itself to the form of a boat under the steady
swing of his ax. Hazel had seen the type in use among the coast
Siwashes, twenty-five feet in length, narrow-beamed, the sides cut to a
half inch in thickness, the bottom left heavier to withstand scraping
over rock, and to keep it on an even keel. A rude and tricky craft,
but one wholly efficient in capable hands.

In a week it was finished. They loaded the sack of gold, the bundle of
furs, their meager camp outfit amidships, and swung off into the stream.

The Skeena drops fifteen hundred feet in a hundred miles. Wherefore
there are rapids, boiling stretches of white water in which many a good
canoe has come to grief. Some of these they ran at imminent peril.
Over the worst they lined the canoe from the bank. One or two short
canons they portaged, dragging the heavy dugout through the brush by
main strength. Once they came to a wall-sided gorge that ran away
beyond any attempt at portage, and they abandoned the dugout, to build
another at the lower end. But between these natural barriers they
clicked off the miles in hot haste, such was the swiftness of the
current. And in the second week of July they brought up at the head of
Kispiox Canon. Hazleton lay a few miles below. But the Kispiox stayed
them, a sluice box cut through solid stone, in which