of a grinning skull. Always Jim
moaned and pleaded:

"Leave me, dear boys, leave me!"

He was like a drunken man, and his every step was agony.

We threw away our packs. We no longer had the strength to bear them. The
last thing to go was the Halfbreed's rifle. Several times it dropped out
of his hand. He picked it up in a dazed way. Again and again it
dropped, but at last the time came when he no longer picked it up. He
looked at it for a stupid while, then staggered on without it.

At night we would rest long hours round the camp-fire. Often far into the
day would we rest. Jim lay like a dead man, moaning continually, while
we, staring into each other's ghastly faces, talked in jerks. It was an
effort to hunt food. It was an effort to goad ourselves to continue the
journey.

"Sure the river empties into the Yukon, boys," said the Halfbreed.
"'Tain't so far, either. If we can just make a few miles more we'll be
all right."

At night, in my sleep, I was a prey to the strangest hallucinations.
People I had known came and talked to me. They were so real that, when I
awoke, I could scarce believe I had been dreaming. Berna came to me
often. She came quite close, with great eyes of pity that looked into
mine. Her lips moved.

"Be brave, my boy. Don't despair," she pleaded. Always in my dreams she
pleaded like that, and I think that but for her I would have given up.

The Halfbreed was the most resolute of the party. He never lost his
head. At times we others raved a little, or laughed a little, or cried a
little, but the Halfbreed remained cool and grim. Ceaselessly he foraged
for food. Once he found a nest of grouse eggs, and, breaking them open,
discovered they contained half-formed birds. We ate them just as they
were, crunched them between our swollen gums. Snails, too, we ate
sometimes, and grass roots and moss which we scraped from the trees.
But our greatest luck was the decayed grouse eggs.

Early one afternoon we were all resting by a camp-fire on which was
boiling some moss, when suddenly the Halfbreed pointed. There, in a
glade down by the river's edge, were a cow moose and calf. They were
drinking. Stupidly we gazed. I saw the Halfbreed's hand go out as if to
clutch the rifle. Alas! his fingers closed on the empty air. So near
they were we could have struck them with a stone. Taking his sheath
knife in his mouth, the Halfbreed started to crawl on his belly towards
them. He had gone but a few yards whe