applied themselves to the
top layer of eggs.

"The h-hell it will!" answered the shivering one, savagely. With the
exception of their notes, films, and cameras, they had sacrificed their
outfit. He bent over, laid hold of an egg-box, and began to worry it out
from under the lashing.

"Drop it! Drop it, I say!"

Rasmunsen had managed to draw his revolver, and with the crook of his arm
over the sweep head, was taking aim. The correspondent stood up on the
thwart, balancing back and forth, his face twisted with menace and
speechless anger.

"My God!"

So cried his brother correspondent, hurling himself, face downward, into
the bottom of the boat. The _Alma_, under the divided attention of
Rasmunsen, had been caught by a great mass of water and whirled around.
The after leach hollowed, the sail emptied and jibed, and the boom,
sweeping with terrific force across the boat, carried the angry
correspondent overboard with a broken back. Mast and sail had gone over
the side as well. A drenching sea followed, as the boat lost headway,
and Rasmunsen sprang to the bailing bucket.

Several boats hurtled past them in the next half-hour,--small boats,
boats of their own size, boats afraid, unable to do aught but run madly
on. Then a ten-ton barge, at imminent risk of destruction, lowered sail
to windward and lumbered down upon them.

"Keep off! Keep off!" Rasmunsen screamed.

But his low gunwale ground against the heavy craft, and the remaining
correspondent clambered aboard. Rasmunsen was over the eggs like a cat
and in the bow of the _Alma_, striving with numb fingers to bend the
hauling-lines together.

"Come on!" a red-whiskered man yelled at him.

"I've a thousand dozen eggs here," he shouted back. "Gimme a tow! I'll
pay you!"

"Come on!" they howled in chorus.

A big whitecap broke just beyond, washing over the barge and leaving the
_Alma_ half swamped. The men cast off, cursing him as they ran up their
sail. Rasmunsen cursed back and fell to bailing. The mast and sail,
like a sea anchor, still fast by the halyards, held the boat head on to
wind and sea and gave him a chance to fight the water out.

Three hours later, numbed, exhausted, blathering like a lunatic, but
still bailing, he went ashore on an ice-strewn beach near Cariboo
Crossing. Two men, a government courier and a half-breed voyageur,
dragged him out of the surf, saved his cargo, and beached the Alma. They
were paddling out of the