“Huh!” pursued Shorty.  “Mebbe I couldn’t ‘a’ married if I’d a mind to!  An’ mebbe I wouldn’t ‘a’ been married without a mind to, if I hadn’t hiked for tall timber.  Smoke, d’you want to know what saved me?  I’ll tell you.  My wind.  I just kept a-runnin’.  I’d like to see any skirt run me outa breath.”

Smoke released the animal and turned his own steaming, stick-propped moccasins.  “We’ve got to rest over to-morrow and make moccasins,” he vouchsafed.  “That little crust is playing the devil with their feet.”

“We oughta keep goin’ somehow,” Shorty objected.  “We ain’t got grub enough to turn back with, and we gotta strike that run of caribou or them white Indians almighty soon or we’ll be eatin’ the dogs, sore feet an’ all.  Now who ever seen them white Indians anyway?  Nothin’ but hearsay.  An’ how can a Indian be white?  A black white man’d be as natural.  Smoke, we just oughta travel to-morrow.  The country’s plumb dead of game.  We ain’t seen even a rabbit-track in a week, you know that.  An’ we gotta get out of this dead streak into somewhere that meat’s runnin’.”

“They’ll travel all the better with a day’s rest for their feet and moccasins all around,” Smoke counseled.  “If you get a chance at any low divide, take a peep over at the country beyond.  We’re likely to strike open rolling country any time now.  That’s what La Perle told us to look for.”

“Huh!  By his own story, it was ten years ago that La Perle come through this section, an’ he was that loco from hunger he couldn’t know what he did see.  Remember what he said of whoppin’ big flags floatin’ from the tops of the mountains?  That shows how loco he was.  An’ he said himself he never seen any white Indians—­that was Anton’s yarn.  An’, besides, Anton kicked the bucket two years before you an’ me come to Alaska.  But I’ll take a look to-morrow.  An’ mebbe I might pick up a moose.  What d’ you say we turn in?”

Smoke spent the morning in camp, sewing dog-moccasins and repairing harnesses.  At noon he cooked a meal for two, ate his share, and began to look for Shorty’s return.  An hour later he strapped on his snow-shoes and went out on his partner’s trail.  The way led up the bed of the stream, through a narrow gorge that widened suddenly into a moose-pasture.  But no moose had been there since the first snow of the preceding fall.  The tracks of Shorty’s snow-shoes crossed the pasture and went up the easy slope of a low divide.  At the crest Smoke halted.  The tracks continued down the other slope.  The first spruce-trees, in the creek bed, were a mile away, and it was evident that Shorty had passed through them and gone on.  Smoke looked at his watch, remembered the oncoming darkness, the dogs, and the camp, and reluctantly decided against going farther.  But before he retraced his steps he paused for a long look.  All the eastern sky-line was saw-toothed by the snowy backbone of the Rockies.  The whole mountain