It was the first time she had ever displayed any real depth of feeling,
and it was like balm to him. But his obstinacy prevailed, for in the dish
was a normal day's ration for the two of them.

"Maybe you think we'll drop across food on trail, but we won't. There's
nothin' to be got until the first freighter comes up the river. Better
put it back."

She took her arm away and went to the dish.

"If you won't eat, I'll throw it away--I swear I will!"

"Angela!"

"It's your own maxim, your own teaching--share and share alike. I won't
recognize any other doctrine. It shall go to the birds unless...."

She meant what she said, and he knew it.

"All right--I'll eat," he mumbled.

Half an hour later, feeling a hundred per cent. better, he rose to his
feet and entered the tent, where Angela was busily engaged putting down
the blankets on improvised mattresses of gathered moss and young bracken.

"See," she said, "I've split up the food again. How long will it last if
eked out?"

He turned out one of the sacks and ran his eye over the contents.

"Two days, at a pinch."

"And how soon can we make Dawson?"

"A week, hard plugging."

"Then it looks as though the 'pinch' will have to be resorted to--and
expanded."

He saw she was smiling as she tucked his bottom blanket carefully under
the moss.

"When you put it that way we can make anything," he said. "If I had a
canoe we could push up the river a good deal faster than overland, but I
ain't got one--and that's the rub."

"Then we'll have to depend on luck."

"No friend o' mine. Luck don't cut much ice up here."

Angela shook her head. She had a slight suspicion that luck had not
entirely deserted them. Though the future seemed black and threatening,
were there not compensating elements? There were worse things than dying
in the wilderness with a "wild man."

CHAPTER XX

COMPLICATIONS

Devinne's trading-post was not the sort of place one expected to find in
Alaska. Devinne himself was a queer customer, a man of good education and
birth. That he chose to establish a trading-post on the upper reaches of
the Yukon was a mystery to all who knew him. The real reason was a secret
in the heart of Devinne, and had reference to a quarrel in a Parisian club
in which a blow had been struck in a moment of pardonable fury, resulting
in the death of a revered citizen of Paris.

Devinne found the Yukon district a comparatively "healthy" spot. He had
star