them, and
he began to gather together the bones well picked and gnawed. There was
marrow in them, he knew; and also, here and there, as he sifted the
snow, he found scraps of meat that had escaped the maws of the brutes
made careless by plenty.

He spent the rest of the morning dragging the wreckage of the moose down
the hillside. In addition, he had at least ten pounds left of the chunk
of meat he had dragged down the previous day.

"I'm good for weeks yet," was his comment as he surveyed the heap.

He had learnt how to starve and live. He cleaned his rifle and counted
the cartridges that remained to him. There were seven. He loaded the
weapon and hobbled out to his crouching-place on the bank. All day he
watched the dead trail. He watched all the week, but no life passed over
it.

Thanks to the meat he felt stronger, though his scurvy was worse and
more painful. He now lived upon soup, drinking endless gallons of the
thin product of the boiling of the moose bones. The soup grew thinner
and thinner as he cracked the bones and boiled them over and over; but
the hot water with the essence of the meat in it was good for him, and
he was more vigorous than he had been previous to the shooting of the
moose.

It was in the next week that a new factor entered into Morganson's life.
He wanted to know the date. It became an obsession. He pondered and
calculated, but his conclusions were rarely twice the same. The first
thing in the morning and the last thing at night, and all day as well,
watching by the trail, he worried about it. He awoke at night and lay
awake for hours over the problem. To have known the date would have been
of no value to him; but his curiosity grew until it equalled his hunger
and his desire to live. Finally it mastered him, and he resolved to go
to Minto and find out.

It was dark when he arrived at Minto, but this served him. No one saw
him arrive. Besides, he knew he would have moonlight by which to return.
He climbed the bank and pushed open the saloon door. The light dazzled
him. The source of it was several candles, but he had been living for
long in an unlighted tent. As his eyes adjusted themselves, he saw three
men sitting around the stove. They were trail-travellers--he knew it at
once; and since they had not passed in, they were evidently bound out.
They would go by his tent next morning.

The barkeeper emitted a long and marvelling whistle.

"I thought you was dead," he said.

"Why?