ght the ice, the cold, and the pain of his foot,
which would not heal. As fast as the young tissue renewed, it was bitten
and scared by the frost, so that a running sore developed, into which he
could almost shove his fist. In the mornings, when he first put his
weight upon it, his head went dizzy, and he was near to fainting from the
pain; but later on in the day it usually grew numb, to recommence when he
crawled into his blankets and tried to sleep. Yet he, who had been a
clerk and sat at a desk all his days, toiled till the Indians were
exhausted, and even out-worked the dogs. How hard he worked, how much he
suffered, he did not know. Being a man of the one idea, now that the
idea had come, it mastered him. In the foreground of his consciousness
was Dawson, in the background his thousand dozen eggs, and midway between
the two his ego fluttered, striving always to draw them together to a
glittering golden point. This golden point was the five thousand
dollars, the consummation of the idea and the point of departure for
whatever new idea might present itself. For the rest, he was a mere
automaton. He was unaware of other things, seeing them as through a
glass darkly, and giving them no thought. The work of his hands he did
with machine-like wisdom; likewise the work of his head. So the look on
his face grew very tense, till even the Indians were afraid of it, and
marvelled at the strange white man who had made them slaves and forced
them to toil with such foolishness.

Then came a snap on Lake Le Barge, when the cold of outer space smote the
tip of the planet, and the force ranged sixty and odd degrees below zero.
Here, labouring with open mouth that he might breathe more freely, he
chilled his lungs, and for the rest of the trip he was troubled with a
dry, hacking cough, especially irritable in smoke of camp or under stress
of undue exertion. On the Thirty Mile river he found much open water,
spanned by precarious ice bridges and fringed with narrow rim ice, tricky
and uncertain. The rim ice was impossible to reckon on, and he dared it
without reckoning, falling back on his revolver when his drivers
demurred. But on the ice bridges, covered with snow though they were,
precautions could be taken. These they crossed on their snowshoes, with
long poles, held crosswise in their hands, to which to cling in case of
accident. Once over, the dogs were called to follow. And on such a
bridge, where the absence