on forty year. Kurilla say: 'Must have
dogs--men like that!'" He limped back again and solemnly offered his
hand to each of the travellers in turn. "Shake!" says he. Then, as
though fascinated by the silver picture, he dropped down by the Boy,
staring absently at the Great Katharine's effigy. The general murmur
was arrested by a movement from Peetka--he took his pipe out of his
mouth and says he, handsomely:

"No liars. Sell dog," adding, with regretful eye on the apostate
Leader, "Him bully dog!"

And that was how the tobacco famine ended, and how the white men got
their team.

CHAPTER XV

THE ESQUIMAUX HORSE

"Plus je connais les hommes, plus j'aime les chiens."

It doesn't look hard to drive a dog-team, but just you try it. In
moments of passion, the first few days after their acquisition, the
Colonel and the Boy wondered why they had complicated a sufficiently
difficult journey by adding to other cares a load of fish and three
fiends.

"Think how well they went for Peetka."

"Oh yes; part o' their cussedness. They know we're green hands, and
they mean to make it lively."

Well, they did. They sat on their haunches in the snow, and grinned at
the whip-crackings and futile "Mush, mush!" of the Colonel. They
snapped at the Boy and made sharp turns, tying him up in the traces and
tumbling him into the snow. They howled all night long, except during a
blessed interval of quiet while they ate their seal-skin harness. But
man is the wiliest of the animals, and the one who profits by
experience. In the end, the Boy became a capital driver; the dogs came
to know he "meant business," and settled into submission. "Nig," as he
called the bully dog for short, turned out "the best leader in the
Yukon."

They were much nearer Kaltag than they had realised, arriving after
only two hours' struggle with the dogs at the big Indian village on the
left bank of the river. But their first appearance here was clouded by
Nig's proposal to slay all the dogs in sight. He was no sooner
unharnessed than he undertook the congenial job. It looked for a few
minutes as if Peetka's bully dog would chew up the entire canine
population, and then lie down and die of his own wounds. But the
Kaltags understood the genus Siwash better than the white man, and took
the tumult calmly.

It turned out that Nig was not so much bloodthirsty as
"bloody-proud"--one of those high souls for ever concerned about
supremacy. His first social