f snarling
wolf dogs, too cowardly to spring, too wolfish to cover their fangs.
They were not handsome creatures. Neither was Sitka Charley. All three
were frightful-looking. There was no flesh to their faces; their
cheekbones were massed with hideous scabs which had cracked and frozen
alternately under the intense frost; while their eyes burned luridly
with the light which is born of desperation and hunger. Men so
situated, beyond the pale of the honor and the law, are not to be
trusted. Sitka Charley knew this; and this was why he had forced them
to abandon their rifles with the rest of the camp outfit ten days
before. His rifle and Captain Eppingwell's were the only ones that
remained.

'Come, get a fire started,' he commanded, drawing out the precious
matchbox with its attendant strips of dry birchbark.

The two Indians fell sullenly to the task of gathering dead branches
and underwood. They were weak and paused often, catching themselves, in
the act of stooping, with giddy motions, or staggering to the center of
operations with their knees shaking like castanets.

After each trip they rested for a moment, as though sick and deadly
weary. At times their eyes took on the patient stoicism of dumb
suffering; and again the ego seemed almost burst forth with its wild
cry, 'I, I, I want to exist!'--the dominant note of the whole living
universe.

A light breath of air blew from the south, nipping the exposed portions
of their bodies and driving the frost, in needles of fire, through fur
and flesh to the bones. So, when the fire had grown lusty and thawed a
damp circle in the snow about it, Sitka Charley forced his reluctant
comrades to lend a hand in pitching a fly. It was a primitive affair,
merely a blanket stretched parallel with the fire and to windward of
it, at an angle of perhaps forty-five degrees. This shut out the chill
wind and threw the heat backward and down upon those who were to huddle
in its shelter. Then a layer of green spruce boughs were spread, that
their bodies might not come in contact with the snow. When this task
was completed, Kah-Chucte and Gowhee proceeded to take care of their
feet. Their icebound moccasins were sadly worn by much travel, and the
sharp ice of the river jams had cut them to rags.

Their Siwash socks were similarly conditioned, and when these had been
thawed and removed, the dead-white tips of the toes, in the various
stages of mortification, told their simple tale of the t