and declared he had given the missive
into the hands of the mail-carrier on the very hour of his departure.
By this time, doubtless, it was nearly to Nome. Soon thereafter
Harkness forgot all about the incident.

Folsom was a fast worker. He hired men and cross-cut the most
promising claim. Bed-rock was shallow, and he soon proved it to be
barren, so he went on to the next property. When he had prospected
this claim with no better results than before he wrote his wife
confessing doubts of the district and voicing the fear that his
winter's work would be wasted. Again he let his pen run as it would;
the letter he gave to a neighbor who was leaving for Candle Creek in
the morning.

Folsom's neighbor was a famous "musher," a seasoned, self-reliant man,
thoroughly accustomed to all the hazards of winter travel, but ten
miles from his destination he crossed an inch-deep overflow which
rendered the soles of his muk-luks slippery, and ten yards further on,
where the wind had laid the glare-ice bare, he lost his footing. He
fell and wrenched his ankle and came hobbling into Candle half an hour
after the monthly mail for Nome had left.

Three weeks later Folsom wrote his wife for the third time, and again
a month after that. All three letters joined company in Candle Creek;
for meanwhile the mail-man's lead dog had been killed in a fight with
a big malamute at Lane's Landing, causing its owner to miss a trip.
Now dog-fights are common; by no logic could one attribute weighty
results to the loss of a sixty-pound leader, but in this instance it
so happened that the mail-carrier's schedule suffered so that his
contract was canceled.

Meanwhile a lonely woman waited anxiously in Nome, and as the result
of a stranger's spite, a wet muk-luk, and a vicious malamute her
anxiety turned to bitterness and distrust.

It is never difficult to forward mail in the north, for every "musher"
is a postman. When news came to Candle Creek that the Government
service had been discontinued the storekeeper, one end of whose bar
served as post-office, sacked his accumulated letters and intrusted
them to some friends who were traveling southward on the morrow. The
trader was a canny man, but he loved to gamble, so when his friends
offered to bet him that they could lower the record from Candle to
Nome he went out into the night, sniffed the air and studied the
stars, then laid them a hundred dollars that they could not.

Excited to recklessness