mates at the fore, arrived at Skaguay. They were in a wretched
state, worn out and worn down. Buck's one hundred and forty pounds
had dwindled to one hundred and fifteen. The rest of his mates, though
lighter dogs, had relatively lost more weight than he. Pike, the
malingerer, who, in his lifetime of deceit, had often successfully
feigned a hurt leg, was now limping in earnest. Sol-leks was limping,
and Dub was suffering from a wrenched shoulder-blade.

They were all terribly footsore. No spring or rebound was left in them.
Their feet fell heavily on the trail, jarring their bodies and doubling
the fatigue of a day's travel. There was nothing the matter with them
except that they were dead tired. It was not the dead-tiredness that
comes through brief and excessive effort, from which recovery is a
matter of hours; but it was the dead-tiredness that comes through the
slow and prolonged strength drainage of months of toil. There was no
power of recuperation left, no reserve strength to call upon. It had
been all used, the last least bit of it. Every muscle, every fibre,
every cell, was tired, dead tired. And there was reason for it. In less
than five months they had travelled twenty-five hundred miles, during
the last eighteen hundred of which they had had but five days' rest.
When they arrived at Skaguay they were apparently on their last legs.
They could barely keep the traces taut, and on the down grades just
managed to keep out of the way of the sled.

"Mush on, poor sore feets," the driver encouraged them as they tottered
down the main street of Skaguay. "Dis is de las'. Den we get one long
res'. Eh? For sure. One bully long res'."

The drivers confidently expected a long stopover. Themselves, they had
covered twelve hundred miles with two days' rest, and in the nature of
reason and common justice they deserved an interval of loafing. But so
many were the men who had rushed into the Klondike, and so many were the
sweethearts, wives, and kin that had not rushed in, that the congested
mail was taking on Alpine proportions; also, there were official orders.
Fresh batches of Hudson Bay dogs were to take the places of those
worthless for the trail. The worthless ones were to be got rid of, and,
since dogs count for little against dollars, they were to be sold.

Three days passed, by which time Buck and his mates found how really
tired and weak they were. Then, on the morning of the fourth day, two
men from the States ca