e it got back to him. From the beginning there had been an
ancient and ramshackle cabin. Dying men had sworn to it, and to the mine
the site of which it marked, clinching their testimony with nuggets that
were unlike any known grade of gold in the Northland.

But no living man had looted this treasure house, and the dead were
dead; wherefore John Thornton and Pete and Hans, with Buck and half a
dozen other dogs, faced into the East on an unknown trail to achieve
where men and dogs as good as themselves had failed. They sledded
seventy miles up the Yukon, swung to the left into the Stewart River,
passed the Mayo and the McQuestion, and held on until the Stewart itself
became a streamlet, threading the upstanding peaks which marked the
backbone of the continent.

John Thornton asked little of man or nature. He was unafraid of the
wild. With a handful of salt and a rifle he could plunge into the
wilderness and fare wherever he pleased and as long as he pleased. Being
in no haste, Indian fashion, he hunted his dinner in the course of the
day's travel; and if he failed to find it, like the Indian, he kept on
travelling, secure in the knowledge that sooner or later he would come
to it. So, on this great journey into the East, straight meat was the
bill of fare, ammunition and tools principally made up the load on the
sled, and the time-card was drawn upon the limitless future.

To Buck it was boundless delight, this hunting, fishing, and indefinite
wandering through strange places. For weeks at a time they would hold
on steadily, day after day; and for weeks upon end they would camp, here
and there, the dogs loafing and the men burning holes through frozen
muck and gravel and washing countless pans of dirt by the heat of the
fire. Sometimes they went hungry, sometimes they feasted riotously, all
according to the abundance of game and the fortune of hunting. Summer
arrived, and dogs and men packed on their backs, rafted across blue
mountain lakes, and descended or ascended unknown rivers in slender
boats whipsawed from the standing forest.

The months came and went, and back and forth they twisted through the
uncharted vastness, where no men were and yet where men had been if
the Lost Cabin were true. They went across divides in summer blizzards,
shivered under the midnight sun on naked mountains between the timber
line and the eternal snows, dropped into summer valleys amid swarming
gnats and flies, and in the shadows of g