But this was not the worst of it. As recognized leader of the team, Bill
could endure Jan's officious zeal, and even make shift to suffer the big
hound's real supremacy, while by craft he could avoid a conflagration.
So far, then, Bill had remained a force making for discipline and the
working efficiency of the team. As wheeler, he became at one stride a
crafty and embittered mutineer, aiming primarily at Jan's discomfiture,
and generally at the disruption of the team as a compact entity. When
not occupied in working off his vindictive spleen upon poor Blackfoot,
whose hind quarters he gashed at every opportunity, Bill concentrated
all his notable energies upon stirring up disorder, indiscipline,
confusion, and strife among his mates.

Jean flogged Bill pretty severely; and in the interval he said:

"Tha's all right, Bill. Jan 'll lick all thees outer you, bimeby."

And that was where Jean's mistake lay. Jan could safely be trusted to
lick pretty well anything into, or out of, the rest of the team; but
there was that in Bill, the ex-leader, which no power on earth would
lick out of him. He knew it; and Jan knew it. And that was where, in
this one matter, they both saw a little farther than the astute Jean.
The thing of it was that what they saw did not trouble either of them.
They were content to bide the issue. But had he known of it, Jean would
not have been at all content with anything of the sort. Far from it.

In any event, the issue involved loss for Jean, since, as both dogs well
knew, it meant death for Jan or for Bill. They were quite content in
their knowledge. But Jean could not conceivably have found content in
any prospect involving himself in monetary loss; for that would have
been contrary to the only guiding principles he knew. Pride in his own
unfailing knowledge of dogs and life in the north helped to make Jean
establish Jan as leader of the team. But if he could have foreseen
monetary loss in the arrangement, his pride had assuredly been called
down and Bill re-established in the lead.

Jean saw that Jan made an exceptionally fine leader. There was no sort
of doubt about it. He set a tremendously high working standard, and
hustled the team into accepting it by the exercise of an almost
uncannily far-seeing severity. Nothing escaped him, least of all a hint
of any kind of shirking. He was quicker than Jean's whip, more sure, and
more compelling. But while Jean saw all this, and more, with genuine