Smoke groaned.  “And you sold them all?” he asked.

“Yes.  How were we to know?”

“Now mightn’t there have been a couple of odd sacks left?—­accidentally, you know, mislaid on the steamer?”

She shook her head, as he thought, a trifle belatedly, then added, “We never found any.”

“But mightn’t there?” he persisted.

“How do I know?” she rasped angrily.  “I didn’t have charge of the commissary.”

“And Amos Wentworth did,” he jumped to the conclusion.  “Very good.  Now what is your private opinion—­just between us two.  Do you think Wentworth has any raw potatoes stored away somewhere?”

“No; certainly not.  Why should he?”

“Why shouldn’t he?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

Struggle as he would with her, Smoke could not bring her to admit the possibility.

“Wentworth’s a swine,” was Shorty’s verdict, when Smoke told his suspicions.

“And so is Laura Sibley,” Smoke added.  “She believes he has the potatoes, and is keeping it quiet, and trying to get him to share with her.”

“An’ he won’t come across, eh?” Shorty cursed frail human nature with one of his best flights, and caught his breath.  “They both got their feet in the trough.  May God rot them dead with scurvy for their reward, that’s all I got to say, except I’m goin’ right up now an’ knock Wentworth’s block off.”

But Smoke stood out for diplomacy.  That night, when the camp groaned and slept, or groaned and did not sleep, he went to Wentworth’s unlighted cabin.

“Listen to me, Wentworth,” he said.  “I’ve got a thousand dollars in dust right here in this sack.  I’m a rich man in this country, and I can afford it.  I think I’m getting touched.  Put a raw potato in my hand and the dust is yours.  Here, heft it.”

And Smoke thrilled when Amos Wentworth put out his hand in the darkness and hefted the gold.  Smoke heard him fumble in the blankets, and then felt pressed into his hand, not the heavy gold-sack, but the unmistakable potato, the size of a hen’s egg, warm from contact with the other’s body.

Smoke did not wait till morning.  He and Shorty were expecting at any time the deaths of their worst two cases, and to this cabin the partners went.  Grated and mashed up in a cup, skin, and clinging specks of the earth, and all, was the thousand-dollar potato—­a thick fluid, that they fed, several drops at a time, into the frightful orifices that had once been mouths.  Shift by shift, through the long night, Smoke and Shorty relieved each other at administering the potato juice, rubbing it into the poor swollen gums where loose teeth rattled together and compelling the swallowing of every drop of the precious elixir.

By evening of the next day the change for the better in the two patients was miraculous and almost unbelievable.  They were no longer the worst cases.  In forty-eight hours, with the exhaustion of the potato, they were temporarily out of danger, though far from being cured.