make them more uniform as to size and style. With Kid and Spot part
pointer, Irish and Rover part setter, Jack McMillan verging on the
mastiff, and all the rest of them part something else, don't you think
it looks the least little bit as if we had picked them up at a remnant
sale?"

She caught sight of "Scotty's" face, full of shocked surprise.

"Don't say it," she exclaimed quickly; "both Ben and I know perfectly
well that 'handsome is as handsome does.' I learned it in my copy-book,
ages and ages ago. And it's true that they are the greatest dogs in all
the world, but they don't quite look it. Of course the year you won with
Berger's 'Brutes,' with that awkward, high-shouldered native, Mukluk, in
the lead, I learned that looks do not go very far in Arctic racing. But
certainly Fink's 'Prides' in their gay trappings of scarlet and gold did
seem more to suit the role of Winners when Hegness came in victorious
with them in the first race."

"At that, the 'Brutes' were the best dogs, and if it had not been for
our delay of eighteen hours at Brown's Road House, where all of the
teams had to lay up because of a howling gale, I am not at all sure that
the 'Prides' would not have lost out to the 'Brutes' in that race too."

"That must have been a strange night. I know after that every one called
Brown's 'The House of a Thousand Bow Wows.' How many were there?"

"Let me see; there were fifty-four racing dogs, thirty-five freighters,
twenty-six belonging to the mail carriers, ten or twelve to casual
mushers, and I think about the same number to Eskimo trappers. And
all--men and dogs--in the one room, which, fortunately, was of pretty
good size."

"Scotty" laughed heartily at the remembrance. "We, who were driving the
Racing Teams, had put our leaders to bed in the few bunks there were;
for we could not afford to take any chances of our leaders scrapping in
such close quarters, and possibly being put out of commission. But an
Outsider, a government official, I think, who was on his way to Nome as
a passenger with the Mail Team, was pretty sore about it. Said 'it was a
deuce of a country where the dogs slept in beds and the men on the
floor.'"

"How perfectly ridiculous," said the Woman indignantly. "You might know
he was not an Alaskan. He was as bad as that squaw who wouldn't give you
her mukluks."

"What was that, Mr. Allan?" questioned the boy, eagerly.

"I'm afraid, Ben, that some of these incidents look a littl