that summer, and how did he _savve_ our cabin out of all the
cabins? How did he know we were in Dawson, anyway? I leave it to you.
But don't forget what I said about his intelligence and that immortal
something I have seen glimmering in his eyes.

There was no getting rid of him any more. There were too many people in
Dawson who had bought him up on Chilcoot, and the story got around. Half
a dozen times we put him on board steamboats going down the Yukon; but he
merely went ashore at the first landing and trotted back up the bank. We
couldn't sell him, we couldn't kill him (both Steve and I had tried), and
nobody else was able to kill him. He bore a charmed life. I've seen him
go down in a dogfight on the main street with fifty dogs on top of him,
and when they were separated, he'd appear on all his four legs, unharmed,
while two of the dogs that had been on top of him would be lying dead.

I saw him steal a chunk of moose-meat from Major Dinwiddie's cache so
heavy that he could just keep one jump ahead of Mrs. Dinwiddie's squaw
cook, who was after him with an axe. As he went up the hill, after the
squaw gave up, Major Dinwiddie himself came out and pumped his Winchester
into the landscape. He emptied his magazine twice, and never touched
that Spot. Then a policeman came along and arrested him for discharging
firearms inside the city limits. Major Dinwiddie paid his fine, and
Steve and I paid him for the moose-meat at the rate of a dollar a pound,
bones and all. That was what he paid for it. Meat was high that year.

I am only telling what I saw with my own eyes. And now I'll tell you
something also. I saw that Spot fall through a water-hole. The ice was
three and a half feet thick, and the current sucked him under like a
straw. Three hundred yards below was the big water-hole used by the
hospital. Spot crawled out of the hospital water-hole, licked off the
water, bit out the ice that had formed between his toes, trotted up the
bank, and whipped a big Newfoundland belonging to the Gold Commissioner.

In the fall of 1898, Steve and I poled up the Yukon on the last water,
bound for Stewart River. We took the dogs along, all except Spot. We
figured we'd been feeding him long enough. He'd cost us more time and
trouble and money and grub than we'd got by selling him on the
Chilcoot--especially grub. So Steve and I tied him down in the cabin and
pulled our freight. We camped that night at the mouth of