red
and difficult commands, others have been jealous only for the technical
efficiency of their work.

[Sidenote: MORE SNOW]

There are many allowances to be made for young men taken from the
society of their kind and thrust out hundreds of miles in the wilderness
to sit down for a year or two at one of these isolated spots. They may
see no women save those amongst a straggling band of Indians for the
whole time of their exile; they may see no white man save a
mail-carrier--and in many places not even a mail-carrier--for weeks
together. Time sometimes hangs very heavily on their hands, for trees
are not always blowing down, nor wires snapping through the tension of
the cold, and at some stations there will not be a dozen telegraph
messages sent the whole winter through. If a young man be at all
ambitious of self-improvement, here is splendid opportunity of leisure,
but a great many are not at all so disposed. Character, except the most
firmly founded, is apt to deteriorate under such circumstances;
standards of conduct to be lowered. And what is here written of the
young men of the signal-corps may well apply in great measure to a large
proportion of all the white men in the country.

The "eighty-mile portage" we had heard of at Nome became ninety miles at
Unalaklik, and added another five to itself here, so that although we
had travelled forty-two miles that day we were told that there were yet
fifty-three ahead before we reached the Yukon.

So we decided not to attempt it in one day and to rest the next night at
a "repair cabin" twenty-eight miles farther, making a somewhat late
start in view of a short journey. It had been wiser to have started
early. During our night at Old Woman Mountain some three inches of snow
fell, and we found as we descended the Yukon slope that all the moisture
that had fallen upon us as rain the previous day had fallen on this side
as snow. The trail was filled full and buried, and so soft and mushy was
it that although snow-shoes were badly needed they were impossible. The
snow clung to them and came off the ground with them in heavy, clogging
masses every time they were lifted. It clung to the sled, to the
harness, to the dogs' feet, to everything that touched it; it gathered
in ever-increasing snowballs on the long hair of the dogs. Travelling in
warm weather in loose, new snow is most disagreeable work. We plugged
along for twenty miles, and then in the dark in an open country with