we knew at last that we had struck
it. We eyed one another suspiciously, for we each of us remembered how
you had been treated, and we began to talk about the necessity of
recording our claims and discovery. Neither of us would trust the
other to go alone, for we both wanted the claim on which we had been
working, where the rich streak had been located, so we set out
together. At first we travelled leisurely, speaking to one another;
but soon we grew silent, and began to race. My partner was a lighter
built man than I, and had the better team of dogs, and carried no gun.
Very soon he began to draw away from me; but I relied on my superior
strength to catch him up, for the journey was long. Then, somehow, as
he ran farther and farther ahead, the belief grew up within me, that,
whatever I might do, God meant him to get there first as a punishment
to me for what I had done to you. At that thought all my lust after
power, and the memory of the mastery which I had lost, came back, and
I said, 'I will outwit God this time, however.'

"Mechanically, almost without thinking, I levelled my gun and
fired--and saw my partner drop. When I came up with him, he was lying
face-downwards, with his arms stretched out before him along the
ground. I turned him over and called on him to rouse. I kicked him
with the toe of my snowshoe, and tried to get angry, pretending to
myself that he was shamming. Then I knelt down beside him and covered
him with a robe, deceiving myself that he had fainted and would
presently awake. After I had waited for what seemed to be ages, I
called him by name, and, when he did not stir, I laid my finger on his
eyeballs--and so I knew that he was dead. When I knew that, fear got
hold upon me; at every crack of the ice I persuaded myself that
someone was coming up or down the frozen river, or had already seen
me, and lay hidden behind a snow-ridge, watching all my doings. So I
took up my comrade, and thrust him upright into a hole in the ice,
trusting that because he had been my friend he would understand, and
never tell. But his arms, which he had extended in falling, stuck out
above the surface, as if signing my secret to all the world. They had
grown stiff and frozen, and I could not bend them, so I knocked off,
and piled up around and above them, blocks of ice.

"Then, because I was fearful lest my coming alone without my partner
into Dawson to record a claim might arouse suspicion, I turned back to
the Gol