attack its master in the shins. It either held back with a power
superhuman, or it lunged forward with a momentum that capsized its
weary conductor. Its manners grew steadily worse as the travellers
pushed farther and farther into the wilderness, beyond the exorcising
power of Holy Cross, beyond the softening influences of Christian
hospitality at Episcopal Anvik, even beyond Tischsocket, the last of
the Indian villages for a hundred miles.

The two who had been scornful of the frailty of temper they had seen
common in men's dealings up here in the North, began to realize that
all other trials of brotherhood pale before the strain of life on the
Arctic trail. Beyond any question, after a while something goes wrong
with the nerves. The huge drafts on muscular endurance have, no doubt,
something to do with it. They worked hard for fourteen, sometimes
seventeen, hours at a stretch; they were ill-fed, suffering from
exposure, intense cold, and a haunting uncertainty of the end of the
undertaking. They were reasonable fellows as men go, with a respect for
each other, but when hardship has got on the nerves, when you are
suffering the agonies of snow-blindness, sore feet, and the pangs of
hunger, you are not, to put it mildly, at your best as a member of the
social order. They sometimes said things they were ashamed to remember,
but both men grew carefuller at crucial moments, and the talkative one
more silent as time went on.

By the rule of the day the hard shift before dinner usually fell to the
Boy. It was the worst time in the twenty-four hours, and equally
dreaded by both men. It was only the first night out from Anvik, after
an unusually trying day, the Boy was tramping heavily ahead, bent like
an old man before the cutting sleet, fettered like a criminal, hands
behind back, rope-wound, stiff, straining at the burden of the slow and
sullen sled. On a sudden he stopped, straightened his back, and
remonstrated with the Colonel in unprintable terms, for putting off the
halt later than ever they had yet, "after such a day."

"Can't make fire with green cotton-wood," was the Colonel's rejoiner.

"Then let's stop and rest, anyhow."

"Nuh! We know where that would land us. Men who stop to rest, go to
sleep in the snow, and men who go to sleep in the snow on empty
stomachs don't wake up."

They pushed on another mile. When the Colonel at last called the halt,
the Boy sank down on the sled too exhausted to speak. But it