horty caught him up. "Well, we're
takin' it, ain't we?" He punctuated his query by bringing half the tent
down on top of them.

They broke their way through the thin ice in the little harbor, and came
out on the lake, where the water, heavy and glassy, froze on their oars
with every stroke. The water soon became like mush, clogging the stroke
of the oars and freezing in the air even as it dripped. Later the
surface began to form a skin, and the boat proceeded slower and slower.

Often afterwards, when Kit tried to remember that night and failed to
bring up aught but nightmare recollections, he wondered what must have
been the sufferings of Stine and Sprague. His one impression of himself
was that he struggled through biting frost and intolerable exertion for
a thousand years, more or less.

Morning found them stationary. Stine complained of frosted fingers, and
Sprague of his nose, while the pain in Kit's cheeks and nose told him
that he, too, had been touched. With each accretion of daylight they
could see farther, and as far as they could see was icy surface. The
water of the lake was gone. A hundred yards away was the shore of the
north end. Shorty insisted that it was the opening of the river and that
he could see water. He and Kit alone were able to work, and with their
oars they broke the ice and forced the boat along. And at the last gasp
of their strength they made the suck of the rapid river. One look back
showed them several boats which had fought through the night and were
hopelessly frozen in; then they whirled around a bend in a current
running six miles an hour.

Day by day they floated down the swift river, and day by day the
shore-ice extended farther out. When they made camp at nightfall, they
chopped a space in the ice in which to lay the boat and carried the camp
outfit hundreds of feet to shore. In the morning, they chopped the
boat out through the new ice and caught the current. Shorty set up
the sheet-iron stove in the boat, and over this Stine and Sprague hung
through the long, drifting hours. They had surrendered, no longer gave
orders, and their one desire was to gain Dawson. Shorty, pessimistic,
indefatigable, and joyous, at frequent intervals roared out the three
lines of the first four-line stanza of a song he had forgotten. The
colder it got the oftener he sang:

"Like Argus of the ancient times,
We leave this Modern Greece;
Tum-tum, tum-tum, tum-tum, tum-tum,