udie lowered her voice.

"No need to mention it to pardners and people. You don't want every
feller to know you're goin' about loaded; but will you take my dust up
to Dawson and get it sent to 'Frisco on the first boat?"

"The ice! the ice! It's moving!"

"The ice is going out!"

"Look! the ice!"

From end to end of the settlement the cry was taken up. People darted
out of cabins like beavers out of their burrows. Three little
half-breed Indian boys, yelling with excitement, tore past the Gold
Nugget, crying now in their mother's Minook, now in their father's
English, "The ice is going out!" From the depths of the store-box
whereon his master had sat, Nig darted, howling excitedly and waving a
muddy tail like a draggled banner, saying in Mahlemeut: "The ice is
going out! The fish are coming in." All the other dogs waked and gave
tongue, running in and out among the huddled rows of people gathered on
the Ramparts.

Every ear full of the rubbing, grinding noise that came up out of the
Yukon--noise not loud, but deep--an undercurrent of heavy sound. As
they stood there, wide-eyed, gaping, their solid winter world began to
move. A compact mass of ice, three-quarters of a mile wide and four
miles long, with a great grinding and crushing went down the valley.
Some distance below the town it jammed, building with incredible
quickness a barrier twenty feet high.

The people waited breathless. Again the ice-mass trembled. But the
watchers lifted their eyes to the heights above. Was that thunder in
the hills? No, the ice again; again crushing, grinding, to the low
accompaniment of thunder that seemed to come from far away.

Sections a mile long and half a mile wide were forced up, carried over
the first ice-pack, and summarily stopped below the barrier. Huge
pieces, broken off from the sides, came crunching their way angrily up
the bank, as if acting on some independent impulse. There they sat,
great fragments, glistening in the sunlight, as big as cabins. It was
something to see them come walking up the shelving bank! The
cheechalkos who laughed before are contented now with running, leaving
their goods behind. Sour-dough Saunders himself never dreamed the ice
would push its way so far.

In mid-channel a still unbroken sheet is bent yet more in the centre.
Every now and then a wide crack opens near the margin, and the water
rushes out with a roar. Once more the mass is nearly still, and now
all's silent. Not till the