e dried salmon and corn meal
porridge with zest, and slept soundly, content to leave the rest to
Allan's sense of justice. Baldy looked distrustfully at the sleeping
Jemima, and thought approvingly of the absent Mego--for Baldy was
somewhat primitive in his ideas of the hitherto gentle sex.

Shortly afterward the other team came--and then followed the excitement
and confusion that was the inevitable accompaniment of the arrival of
Pete Bernard and his howling huskies.

What an untrained lot they were--fierce and unapproachable--for no one
ever handled them but Pete, and he had no time to give to their higher
education. If they had the strength to pull, he would see that they did
it; he never used a dog physically unfit, and was perfectly willing to
go through with them any of the severe hardships they were forced to
endure. Did he not, without hesitation, drive them mercilessly through
black night and raging blizzard to bring a freezing stranger to the
hospital--a man whose one chance lay in skilled care?

It was no great thing in Pete's sight--a simple episode of the North.
The man was in dire need, he himself was strong, and his dogs would go
through anything with Pete "at the steerin' gear"--and so a life was
saved.

When the Bernard team was also stabled, Baldy was overcome with that
delicious drowsiness that follows a busy day in the open. From the house
came those strange noises that people seem to so much enjoy--else why do
they remain within reach of them instead of running far away, as did
Baldy at first? But he, like the rest of the Allan and Darling family,
had eventually become used to the phonograph; and their perfect
self-control now enabled them to lie quietly through the "Sextette from
Lucia" or the latest rag time at least with composure, if not with
pleasure.

Not so, however, Pete's uncultured brutes; such strains were melancholy
and painful to them in the extreme; and they did not hesitate to let it
be known. One by one they began to howl, till all twelve were wailing
dolefully and continuously. The Nugget dogs joined them, and Baldy
noticed with stern condemnation that Fisher and Wolf, who had not yet
acquired the repose of manner that comes of rigid discipline, were also
guilty of this breach of Road House decorum. Allan and Pete rushed out
to quell the disturbance, but the Big Man said not to interfere; that
many a dollar he had paid for an evening of Strauss or Debussy when the
clamor was j