ed' it one hundred fifty
miles. My whole digestive paraphernalia is in a state of _innocuous
desuetude_, if you know what that is, because all I save from the wreck
is a flour-sack full of cigarette-papers and a package of chocolate
pills about the size of a match-head. Each one of these pellets is
warranted to contain sufficient nourishment to last the Germany army for
one month. I read it on the label. They may have had it in them; I don't
know. I swallowed one every morning and then filled up on reindeer moss
till I felt like the leaping-pad in a circus.

"Now, when I reach camp I find there ain't any fresh grub to speak of.
But I can't get away, so I stick on until spring. See! In time we begin
to have scurvy something terrible. One man out of every five cashes in.
I'm living in a cabin with a lot of Frenchmen and we bury seven from
this one shack--seven, that's all! It gets on my nerves finally. I don't
like dead men. Now, the last two who fall sick is old man Manard and my
pal, young Pete De Foe. Pete has a ten-dollar gold piece and Manard owns
a dog. Inasmuch as they both knew that they can't weather it out till
the break-up, Pete bets his ten dollars against the dog that he'll die
before Manard. Well, this is something new in the sporting line, and we
begin to string our bets pretty free. There ain't much excitement going
on, so the boys visit the cabin every day, look over the entries, then
go outside and make book. I open up a Paris mutuel. The old man is a
seven-to-one favorite at the start because he had all the best of it on
form, but the youngster puts up a grand race. For three weeks they
seesaw back and forth. First one looks like a winner, then the other.
It's as pretty running as I ever see. Then Pete lets out a wonderful
burst of speed, 'zings' over the last quarter, noses out Manard at the
wire, and brings home the money. He dies at 3 A.M. and wins by four
hours. I cop eighty-four dollars, six pairs of suspenders, a keg of wire
nails, and a frying-pan, which constitutes all the circulating medium of
the camp. I'm the stakeholder for the late deceased also, so I find
myself the administrator of Manard's dog and the ten dollars that Pete
put up.

"Now, seeing that it had been a killing finish, we arrange for a
double-barreled burial and a swell funeral. The ground is froze, of
course, but we dig two holes through the gravel till we break a
pick-point and decide to let it go at that. The 'Bare-headed'