“I’m going to have a square meal before I start,” Smoke said.  “And when I start it will be up the McQuestion, not down.  I want you to go along with me, Breck.  We’re going to search that other bank for the man that really did the killing.”

“If you’ll listen to me, you’ll head down for the Stewart and the Yukon,” Breck objected.  “When this gang gets back from my low-grade hydraulic proposition, it will be seeing red.”

Smoke laughed and shook his head.

“I can’t jump this country, Breck.  I’ve got interests here.  I’ve got to stay and make good.  I don’t care whether you believe me or not, but I’ve found Surprise Lake.  That’s where that gold came from.  Besides, they took my dogs, and I’ve got to wait to get them back.  Also, I know what I’m about.  There was a man hidden on that bank.  He came pretty close to emptying his magazine at me.”

Half an hour afterward, with a big plate of moose-steak before him and a big mug of coffee at his lips, Smoke half-started up from his seat.  He had heard the sounds first.  Lucy threw open the door.

“Hello, Spike; hello, Methody,” she greeted the two frost-rimed men who were bending over the burden on their sled.

“We just come down from Upper Camp,” one said, as the pair staggered into the room with a fur-wrapped object which they handled with exceeding gentleness.  “An’ this is what we found by the way.  He’s all in, I guess.”

“Put him in the near bunk there,” Lucy said.  She bent over and pulled back the furs, disclosing a face composed principally of large, staring, black eyes, and of skin, dark and scabbed by repeated frost-bite, tightly stretched across the bones.

“If it ain’t Alonzo!” she cried.  “You pore, starved devil!”

“That’s the man on the other bank,” Smoke said in an undertone to Breck.

“We found it raidin’ a cache that Harding must ‘a’ made,” one of the men was explaining.  “He was eatin’ raw flour an’ frozen bacon, an’ when we got ‘m he was cryin’ an’ squealin’ like a hawg.  Look at him!  He’s all starved, an’ most of him frozen.  He’ll kick at any moment.”

Half an hour later, when the furs had been drawn over the face of the still form in the bunk, Smoke turned to Lucy.  “If you don’t mind, Mrs. Peabody, I’ll have another whack at that steak.  Make it thick and not so well done.  I’m a meat-eater, I am.”

VI.  THE RACE FOR NUMBER THREE.

“Huh!  Get on to the glad rags!”

Shorty surveyed his partner with simulated disapproval, and Smoke, vainly attempting to rub the wrinkles out of the pair of trousers he had just put on, was irritated.

“They sure fit you close for a second-hand buy,” Shorty went on.  “What was the tax?”

“One hundred and fifty for the suit,” Smoke answered.  “The man was nearly my own size.  I thought it was remarkably reasonable.  What are you kicking about?”