ke him away with you?" Madge asked
tremulously.

The man nodded.

"Back into that awful Klondike world of suffering?"

He nodded and added: "Oh, it ain't so bad as all that. Look at me.
Pretty healthy specimen, ain't I?"

"But the dogs! The terrible hardship, the heart-breaking toil, the
starvation, the frost! Oh, I've read about it and I know."

"I nearly ate him once, over on Little Fish River," Miller volunteered
grimly. "If I hadn't got a moose that day was all that saved 'm."

"I'd have died first!" Madge cried.

"Things is different down here," Miller explained. "You don't have to
eat dogs. You think different just about the time you're all in. You've
never ben all in, so you don't know anything about it."

"That's the very point," she argued warmly. "Dogs are not eaten in
California. Why not leave him here? He is happy. He'll never want for
food--you know that. He'll never suffer from cold and hardship. Here
all is softness and gentleness. Neither the human nor nature is savage.
He will never know a whip-lash again. And as for the weather--why, it
never snows here."

"But it's all-fired hot in summer, beggin' your pardon," Skiff Miller
laughed.

"But you do not answer," Madge continued passionately. "What have you to
offer him in that northland life?"

"Grub, when I've got it, and that's most of the time," came the answer.

"And the rest of the time?"

"No grub."

"And the work?"

"Yes, plenty of work," Miller blurted out impatiently. "Work without
end, an' famine, an' frost, an all the rest of the miseries--that's what
he'll get when he comes with me. But he likes it. He is used to it. He
knows that life. He was born to it an' brought up to it. An' you don't
know anything about it. You don't know what you're talking about. That's
where the dog belongs, and that's where he'll be happiest."

"The dog doesn't go," Walt announced in a determined voice. "So there is
no need of further discussion."

"What's that?" Skiff Miller demanded, his brows lowering and an obstinate
flush of blood reddening his forehead.

"I said the dog doesn't go, and that settles it. I don't believe he's
your dog. You may have seen him sometime. You may even sometime have
driven him for his owner. But his obeying the ordinary driving commands
of the Alaskan trail is no demonstration that he is yours. Any dog in
Alaska would obey you as he obeyed. Besides, he is undoubtedly a
valuable dog