orth. For days they marched through desolation, without glimpse of
human habitation, without sight of track or trail, without sound of a
human voice to break the monotony. There was no game in the country,
with the exception of an occasional bird or rabbit, nothing but the
white hills, the fringe of alder tops along the watercourses, and the
thickets of gnarled, unhealthy spruce in the smothered valleys.

Their destination was a mysterious stream at the headwaters of the
unmapped Kuskokwim, where rumor said there was gold, and whither they
feared other men were hastening from the mining country far to the
north.

Now it is a penalty of the White Country that men shall think of women;
Cantwell began to brood upon the Katmai girl, for she was the last; her
eyes were haunting and distance had worked its usual enchantment. He
reflected that Mort had shouldered him aside and won her favor, then
boasted of it. Johnny awoke one night with a dream of her, and lay
quivering.

"She was only a squaw," he said, half aloud. "If I'd really tried--"

Grant lay beside him, snoring, the heat of their bodies intermingled.
The waking man tried to compose himself, but his partner's stertorous
breathing irritated him beyond measure; for a long time he remained
motionless, staring into the gray blurr of the tent top. He had played
out. He owed his life to the man who had cheated him of the Katmai girl,
and that man knew it. He had become a weak, helpless thing, dependent
upon another's strength, and that other now accepted his superiority as
a matter of course. The obligation was insufferable, and--it was
unjust. The North had played him a devilish trick, it had betrayed him,
it had bound him to his benefactor with chains of gratitude which were
irksome. Had they been real chains they could have galled him no more
than at this moment.

As time passed the men spoke less frequently to each other. Grant joshed
his mate roughly, once or twice, masking beneath an assumption of
jocularity his own vague irritation at the change that had come over
them. It was as if he had probed at an open wound with clumsy fingers.

Cantwell had by this time assumed most of those petty camp tasks which
provoke tired trailers, those humdrum duties which are so trying to
exhausted nerves, and of course they wore upon him as they wear upon
every man. But, once he had taken them over, he began to resent Grant's
easy relinquishment; it rankled him to realize how