and cursed--he had no breath for it when under way--and fought
the temptation to sneak back to San Francisco. Before the mile pack
was ended he ceased cursing and took to crying. The tears were tears of
exhaustion and of disgust with self. If ever a man was a wreck, he
was. As the end of the pack came in sight, he strained himself in
desperation, gained the camp-site, and pitched forward on his face, the
beans on his back. It did not kill him, but he lay for fifteen minutes
before he could summon sufficient shreds of strength to release himself
from the straps. Then he became deathly sick, and was so found by
Robbie, who had similar troubles of his own. It was this sickness of
Robbie that braced Kit up.

"What other men can do, we can do," Kit told Robbie, though down in his
heart he wondered whether or not he was bluffing.

"And I am twenty-seven years old and a man," he privately assured
himself many times in the days that followed. There was need for it. At
the end of a week, though he had succeeded in moving his eight hundred
pounds forward a mile a day, he had lost fifteen pounds of his own
weight. His face was lean and haggard. All resilience had gone out
of his body and mind. He no longer walked, but plodded. And on the
back-trips, travelling light, his feet dragged almost as much as when he
was loaded.

He had become a work animal. He fell asleep over his food, and his sleep
was heavy and beastly, save when he was aroused, screaming with agony,
by the cramps in his legs. Every part of him ached. He tramped on raw
blisters; yet even this was easier than the fearful bruising his feet
received on the water-rounded rocks of the Dyea Flats, across which the
trail led for two miles. These two miles represented thirty-eight miles
of travelling. He washed his face once a day. His nails, torn and broken
and afflicted with hangnails, were never cleaned. His shoulders and
chest, galled by the pack-straps, made him think, and for the first time
with understanding, of the horses he had seen on city streets.

One ordeal that nearly destroyed him at first had been the food. The
extraordinary amount of work demanded extraordinary stoking, and his
stomach was unaccustomed to great quantities of bacon and of the coarse,
highly poisonous brown beans. As a result, his stomach went back on him,
and for several days the pain and irritation of it and of starvation
nearly broke him down. And then came the day of joy when he could