ht of this,
Montana Kid was tempted to take his dogs and escape to the mainland, but
on closer inspection he discovered a rapid current flooding on top.
Below, the river twisted sharply to the west, and in this turn its breast
was studded by a maze of tiny islands.

"That's where she'll jam," he remarked to himself.

Half a dozen sleds, evidently bound up-stream to Dawson, were splashing
through the chill water to the tail of the island. Travel on the river
was passing from the precarious to the impossible, and it was nip and
tuck with them till they gained the island and came up the path of the
wood-choppers toward the cabin. One of them, snow-blind, towed
helplessly at the rear of a sled. Husky young fellows they were, rough-
garmented and trail-worn, yet Montana Kid had met the breed before and
knew at once that it was not his kind.

"Hello! How's things up Dawson-way?" queried the foremost, passing his
eye over Donald and Davy and settling it upon the Kid.

A first meeting in the wilderness is not characterized by formality. The
talk quickly became general, and the news of the Upper and Lower
Countries was swapped equitably back and forth. But the little the
newcomers had was soon over with, for they had wintered at Minook, a
thousand miles below, where nothing was doing. Montana Kid, however, was
fresh from Salt Water, and they annexed him while they pitched camp,
swamping him with questions concerning the outside, from which they had
been cut off for a twelvemonth.

A shrieking split, suddenly lifting itself above the general uproar on
the river, drew everybody to the bank. The surface water had increased
in depth, and the ice, assailed from above and below, was struggling to
tear itself from the grip of the shores. Fissures reverberated into life
before their eyes, and the air was filled with multitudinous crackling,
crisp and sharp, like the sound that goes up on a clear day from the
firing line.

From up the river two men were racing a dog team toward them on an
uncovered stretch of ice. But even as they looked, the pair struck the
water and began to flounder through. Behind, where their feet had sped
the moment before, the ice broke up and turned turtle. Through this
opening the river rushed out upon them to their waists, burying the sled
and swinging the dogs off at right angles in a drowning tangle. But the
men stopped their flight to give the animals a fighting chance, and they
groped hu