(at about ten cents apiece) in July and August;
while common outdoor garden-truck of all kinds is plentiful and good in
its short season.

We had another canine misfortune while we lay there. Doc, one of our
leaders, got his chain twisted around his foot the night before we were
to leave, and, in pulling to free it, stopped the circulation of the
blood and the foot froze. It was as hard as wood and sounded like wood
when it hit the sidewalks, from which the snow had been cleared, as the
dog came limping along. An hour's soaking in cold water drew the frost
out of the foot, and we swathed it in cotton saturated with carron oil,
upon which it swelled so greatly that it was impossible to tell the
extent of the injury or to determine whether or not the dog would ever
be of use again. A kindly nurse at the hospital undertook his care, and
we left him behind. One does not buy a dog so late in the season, with
all the idle summer to feed him through, if any shift can be made to
avoid it, and there was a Great Dane pup at the Salchaket, forty miles
away, that I might pick up as I passed and perhaps make some use of for
the remainder of the winter.

That mission was the next stop on our journey, and we reached it over
the level mail trail, the chief winter highway of Alaska, connecting
Fairbanks with Valdez on the coast. Three times a week there is a horse
stage with mail and passengers passing over this trail each way,
together with much other travel. The Alaska Road Commission has lavished
large sums of money upon it, and the four hundred miles or thereabout is
made in a week.

[Sidenote: THE SALCHAKET]

A day and a half brought us to the Salchaket, one of a chain of missions
along the Tanana River, established by the energy and zeal of the
Reverend Charles Eugene Betticher, Jr., during his incumbency at
Fairbanks, that have already brought a great change for the better in
native conditions. Five years had elapsed since last I visited this
tribe, a reconnoitring visit on one of the first steamboats that ever
went up the Tanana River above Fairbanks, and it was a delight to see
the new, clean village with the little gardens round the cabins, and to
note the appreciative attitude which the Indians showed. So highly do
they value the missionary nurse in charge that however far afield their
hunting may lead them, one of their number is sent back every week to
see that the mission does not lack wood and water and meat; a simpl