"

"We're covering this spruce-tea route four times a day, and there are
eighty of you to be dosed each time," Smoke informed Laura Sibley. "So
we've no time to fool. Will you take it or must I hold your nose?" His
thumb and forefinger hovered eloquently above her. "It's vegetable, so
you needn't have any qualms."

"Qualms!" Shorty snorted. "No, sure, certainly not. It's the
deliciousest dope!"

Laura Sibley hesitated. She gulped her apprehension.

"Well?" Smoke demanded peremptorily.

"I'll--I'll take it," she quavered. "Hurry up!"

That night, exhausted as by no hard day of trail, Smoke and Shorty
crawled into their blankets.

"I'm fairly sick with it," Smoke confessed. "The way they suffer is
awful. But exercise is the only remedy I can think of, and it must be
given a thorough trial. I wish we had a sack of raw potatoes."

"Sparkins he can't wash no more dishes," Shorty said. "It hurts him so
he sweats his pain. I seen him sweat it. I had to put him back in the
bunk, he was that helpless."

"If only we had raw potatoes," Smoke went on. "The vital, essential
something is missing from that prepared stuff. The life has been
evaporated out of it."

"An' if that young fellow Jones in the Brownlow cabin don't croak before
morning I miss my guess."

"For Heaven's sake be cheerful," Smoke chided.

"We got to bury him, ain't we?" came the indignant snort. "I tell you
that boy's something awful--"

"Shut up," Smoke said.

And after several more indignant snorts, the heavy breathing of sleep
arose from Shorty's bunk.

In the morning, not only was Jones dead, but one of the stronger men
who had worked on the firewood squad was found to have hanged himself. A
nightmare procession of days set in. For a week, steeling himself to the
task, Smoke enforced the exercise and the spruce-tea. And one by one,
and in twos and threes, he was compelled to knock off the workers. As
he was learning, exercise was the last thing in the world for scurvy
patients. The diminishing burial squad was kept steadily at work, and a
surplus half-dozen graves were always burned down and waiting.

"You couldn't have selected a worse place for a camp," Smoke told Laura
Sibley. "Look at it--at the bottom of a narrow gorge, running east and
west. The noon sun doesn't rise above the top of the wall. You can't
have had sunlight for several months."

"But how was I to know?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "I don't see why not, if you could le