edin' prize bulls; but we don't breed
cowards--yet; and we ain't lookin' round for any asylums. The Catholic
Church is an asylum. It's for people who never had any nerve, or who
have lost it."

The Colonel turned about, wagged his head defiantly at the icy hills
and the night, and in the after-stillness fell sound asleep in the
snow.

CHAPTER XII

THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE

"--paa dit Firmament
Den klare Nordlyslampe taendt...."

Innocently thinking that they had seen Arctic travelling at its worst,
and secretly looking upon themselves as highly accomplished trailmen,
they had covered the forty-one miles from Holy Cross to Anvik in less
than three days.

The Colonel made much of the pleasant and excellent man at the head of
the Episcopal mission there, and the Boy haunted Benham's store,
picking up a little Ingalik and the A. C. method of trading with the
Indians, who, day and night, with a number of stranded Klondykers,
congregated about the grateful warmth of the big iron stove.

The travellers themselves did some business with the A. C. agent,
laying in supplies of fresh meat, and even augmenting their hitherto
carefully restricted outfit, for they were going far beyond the reach
of stores, or even of missions. Anvik was the last white settlement
below Nulato; Nulato was said to be over two hundred miles to the
northward.

And yet after all their further preparation and expense, each man kept
saying in his heart, during those first days out from Anvik, that the
journey would be easy enough but for their "comforts"--the burden on
the sled. By all the rules of arithmetic, the daily subtraction of
three meals from the store should have lightened the load. It seemed to
have the opposite effect. By some process of evil enchantment every
ounce grew to weigh a pound, every pound a hundredweight. The sled
itself was bewitched. Recall how lightsomely it ran down the snowy
slope, from the Big Chimney Cabin to the river trail, that morning they
set forth. The Boy took its pretty impetuosity for a happy augury--the
very sled was eager for the mighty undertaking.

But never in all that weary march did it manifest again any such modest
alacrity. If, thereafter, in the long going "up river" there came an
interval of downhill, the sled turned summersaults in the air, wound
its forward or backward rope round willow scrub or alder, or else
advanced precipitately with an evil, low-comedy air, bottom side up, to