s also our duty to try and defeat the plans
of his enemies, who are also our enemies, and now seem to have become
yours as well. So you see we are in honor bound to push on with all
speed. Besides all this, we certainly ought to be able to reach Sitka
long before my father can get away from there, and so save him a long,
tedious, and useless journey."

"I'm not so sartain of that," demurred Jalap Coombs. "For ye've been
trying to make Sitka long's ever I've knowed ye, which is going on a
year now, and hain't come anywhere nigh to it yet. Still, as my old
friend Kite Roberson useter say, 'Jalap, my son, allers steer by
sarcumstances; for as a gineral thing they'll p'int straighter'n a
compass,' and I am free to admit that your present sarcumstances is
p'inting pretty direct towards Sitka. But how do ye propose to
sarcumvent the villyans what run off with my dogs?"

"Now you are talking straight business," laughed Phil. "As I understand
it, the main object of those fellows is to capture the next season's
trade of the Yukon Valley, and especially of the diggings at Forty Mile,
by taking advance orders at lower rates than the old company has ever
before offered. Even then their prices are certain to be exorbitant, and
with Gerald Hamer's list I am certain I can underbid them. But that
won't be of any use unless we can be first in the field, for after the
orders are given and contracts signed those other chaps could laugh at
us and our prices. So our only hope is to reach Forty Mile ahead of
them."

"Which ye can't do it without wings or steam," objected Jalap Coombs,
"seeing they's got two good days' start."

"I wouldn't care if they had six days' start," answered Phil. "I am
confident that we could still beat them with just ordinary snow-shoes
and sledges and plain every-day North American dogs. They have gone
around the great arctic bend of the Yukon, haven't they? And so have a
journey of at least seven hundred miles ahead of them before they reach
Forty Mile."

"Yes," replied Jalap. "They said as it were the only navigable channel."

"Well, it isn't, for I know of another that is equally good, and two
hundred miles or so shorter. You see, there is a big river coming from
the southeast and emptying into the Yukon somewhere in this vicinity,
called the Tananah."

"That's right," assented the sailor, "for I've already passed its mouth
twice about half-way between here and where the _St. Michaels_ is friz
in."

"