to freezin' to death." But it annoyed him to think how
very little in argument a thermometer weighed against a rifle.

They said no more that day about lightening the load, but with a double
motive they made enormous inroads upon their provisions.

A morning came when the Colonel, packing hurriedly in the biting cold,
forgot to shove his pardner's gun into its accustomed place.

The Boy, returning from trail-breaking to the river, kicked at the butt
to draw attention to the omission. The Colonel flung down the end of
the ice-coated rope he had lashed the load with, and, "Pack it
yourself," says he.

The Boy let the rifle lie. But all day long he felt the loss of it
heavy on his heart, and no reconciling lightness in the sled.

The Colonel began to have qualms about the double rations they were
using. It was only the seventeenth night after turning their backs on
the Big Chimney, as the Colonel tipped the pan, pouring out half the
boiled beans into his pardner's plate, "That's the last o' the
strawberries! Don't go expectin' any more," says he.

"What!" ejaculated the Boy, aghast; then quickly, to keep a good face:
"You take my life when you do take the beans, whereby I live."

When the Colonel had disposed of his strawberries, "Lord!" he sighed,
trying to rub the stiffness out of his hands over the smoke, "the
appetite a fella can raise up here is something terrible. You eat and
eat, and it doesn't seem to make any impression. You're just as hungry
as ever."

_"And the stuff a fella can eat!"_

The Colonel recalled that speech of the Boy's the very next night,
when, after "a hell of a time" getting the fire alight, he was bending
forward in that attitude most trying to maintain, holding the
frying-pan at long range over the feebly-smoking sticks. He had to
cook, to live on snow-shoes nowadays, for the heavy Colonel had
illustrated oftener than the Boy, that going without meant breaking in,
floundering, and, finally, having to call for your pardner to haul you
out. This was one of the many uses of a pardner on the trail. The last
time the Colonel had trusted to the treacherous crust he had gone in
head foremost, and the Boy, happening to look round, saw only two
snow-shoes, bottom side up, moving spasmodically on the surface of the
drift. The Colonel was nearly suffocated by the time he was pulled out,
and after that object-lesson he stuck to snow-shoes every hour of the
twenty-four, except those spent in the s