It was the gosh-dangdest stampede I ever seen.  A thousand dog-teams hittin’ the ice.  You couldn’t see ’m fer smoke.  Two white men an’ a Swede froze to death that night, an’ there was a dozen busted their lungs.  But didn’t I see with my own eyes the bottom of the water-hole?  It was yellow with gold like a mustard-plaster.  That’s why I staked the Yukon for a minin’ claim.  That’s what made the stampede.  An’ then there was nothin’ to it.  That’s what I said—NOTHIN’ to it.  An’ I ain’t got over guessin’ yet.—Narrative of Shorty.

John Messner clung with mittened hand to the bucking gee-pole and held the sled in the trail.  With the other mittened hand he rubbed his cheeks and nose.  He rubbed his cheeks and nose every little while.  In point of fact, he rarely ceased from rubbing them, and sometimes, as their numbness increased, he rubbed fiercely.  His forehead was covered by the visor of his fur cap, the flaps of which went over his ears.  The rest of his face was protected by a thick beard, golden-brown under its coating of frost.

Behind him churned a heavily loaded Yukon sled, and before him toiled a string of five dogs.  The rope by which they dragged the sled rubbed against the side of Messner’s leg.  When the dogs swung on a bend in the trail, he stepped over the rope.  There were many bends, and he was compelled to step over it often.  Sometimes he tripped on the rope, or stumbled, and at all times he was awkward, betraying a weariness so great that the sled now and again ran upon his heels.

When he came to a straight piece of trail, where the sled could get along for a moment without guidance, he let go the gee-pole and batted his right hand sharply upon the hard wood.  He found it difficult to keep up the circulation in that hand.  But while he pounded the one hand, he never ceased from rubbing his nose and cheeks with the other.

“It’s too cold to travel, anyway,” he said.  He spoke aloud, after the manner of men who are much by themselves.  “Only a fool would travel at such a temperature.  If it isn’t eighty below, it’s because it’s seventy-nine.”

He pulled out his watch, and after some fumbling got it back into the breast pocket of his thick woollen jacket.  Then he surveyed the heavens and ran his eye along the white sky-line to the south.

“Twelve o’clock,” he mumbled, “A clear sky, and no sun.”

He plodded on silently for ten minutes, and then, as though there had been no lapse in his speech, he added:

“And no ground covered, and it’s too cold to travel.”

Suddenly he yelled “Whoa!” at the dogs, and stopped.  He seemed in a wild panic over his right hand, and proceeded to hammer it furiously against the gee-pole.

“You—poor—devils!” he addressed the dogs, which had dropped down heavily on the ice to rest.  His was a broken, jerky utterance, caused by the violence with which he hammered his numb hand upon the wood.  “What have you done anyway that a two-legged other animal should come along, break you to harness, curb all your natural proclivities, and make slave-beasts out of you?”

He rubbed his nose, not reflectively, but savagely, in order to drive the blood into it, and urged the dogs to their work again.  He travelled on the frozen surface of a great river.  Behind him it stretched away in a mighty curve of many miles, losing itself in a fantastic jumble of mountains, snow-covered and silent.  Ahead of him the river split into many channels to accommodate the freight of islands it carried on its breast.  These islands were silent and white.  No animals nor humming insects broke the silence.  No birds flew in the chill air.  There was no sound of man, no mark of the handiwork of man.  The world slept, and it was like the sleep of death.

John Messner seemed succumbing to the apathy of it all.  The frost was benumbing his spirit.  He plodded on with bowed head, unobservant, mechanically rubbing nose and cheeks, and batting his steering hand against the gee-pole in the straight trail-stretches.

But the dogs were observant, and suddenly they stopped, turning their heads and looking back at their master out of eyes that were wistful and questioning.  Their eyelashes were frosted white, as were their muzzles, and they had all the seeming of decrepit old age, what of the frost-rime and exhaustion.

The man was about to urge them on, when he checked himself, roused up with an effort, and looked around.  The dogs had stopped beside a water-hole, not a fissure, but a hole man-made, chopped laboriously with an axe through three and a half feet of ice.  A thick skin of new ice showed that it had not been used for some time.  Messner glanced about him.  The dogs were already pointing the way, each wistful and hoary muzzle turned toward the dim snow-path that left the main river trail and climbed the bank of the island.

“All right, you sore-footed brutes,” he said.  “I’ll investigate.  You’re not a bit more anxious to quit than I am.”

He climbed the bank and disappeared.  The dogs did not lie down, but on their feet eagerly waited his return.  He came back to them, took a hauling-rope from the front of the sled, and put it around his shoulders.  Then he gee’d the dogs to the right and put them at the bank on the run.  It was a stiff pull, but their weariness fell from them as they crouched low to the snow, whining with eagerness and gladness as they struggled upward to the last ounce of effort in their bodies.  When a dog slipped or faltered, the one behind nipped his hind quarters.  The man shouted encouragement and threats, and threw all his weight on the hauling-rope.

They cleared the bank with a rush, swung to the left, and dashed up to a small log cabin.  It was a deserted cabin of a single room, eight feet by ten on the inside.  Messner unharnessed the animals, unloaded his sled and took possession.  The last chance wayfarer had left a supply of firewood.  Messner set up his light sheet-iron stove and starred a fire.  He put five sun-cured salmon into the oven to thaw out for the dogs, and from the water-hole filled his coffee-pot and cooking-pail.

While waiting for the water to boil, he held his face over the stove.  The moisture from his breath had collected on his beard and frozen into a great mass of ice, and this he proceeded to thaw out.  As it melted and dropped upon the stove it sizzled and rose about him in steam.  He helped the process with his fingers, working loose small ice-chunks that fell rattling to the floor.

A wild outcry from the dogs without did not take him from his task.  He heard the wolfish snarling and yelping of strange dogs and the sound of voices.  A knock came on the door.

“Come in,” Messner called, in a voice muffled because at the moment he was sucking loose a fragment of ice from its anchorage on his upper lip.

The door opened, and, gazing out of his cloud of steam, he saw a man and a woman pausing on the threshold.

“Come in,” he said peremptorily, “and shut the door!”

Peering through the steam, he could make out but little of their personal appearance.  The nose and cheek strap worn by the woman and the trail-wrappings about her head allowed only a pair of black eyes to be seen.  The man was dark-eyed and smooth-shaven all except his mustache, which was so iced up as to hide his mouth.

“We just wanted to know if there is any other cabin around here,” he said, at the same time glancing over the unfurnished state of the room.  “We thought this cabin was empty.”

“It isn’t my cabin,” Messner answered.  “I just found it a few minutes ago.  Come right in and camp.  Plenty of room, and you won’t need your stove.  There’s room for all.”

At the sound of his voice the woman peered at him with quick curiousness.

“Get your things off,” her companion said to her.  “I’ll unhitch and get the water so we can start cooking.”

Messner took the thawed salmon outside and fed his dogs.  He had to guard them against the second team of dogs, and when he had reëntered the cabin the other man had unpacked the sled and fetched water.  Messner’s pot was boiling.  He threw in the coffee, settled it with half a cup of cold water, and took the pot from the stove.  He thawed some sour-dough biscuits in the oven, at the same time heating a pot of beans he had boiled the night before and that had ridden frozen on the sled all morning.

Removing his utensils from the stove, so as to give the newcomers a chance to cook, he proceeded to take his meal from the top of his grub-box, himself sitting on his bed-roll.  Between mouthfuls he talked trail and dogs with the man, who, with head over the stove, was thawing the ice from his mustache.  There were two bunks in the cabin, and into one of them, when he had cleared his lip, the stranger tossed his bed-roll.

“We’ll sleep here,” he said, “unless you prefer this bunk.  You’re the first comer and you have first choice, you know.”

“That’s all right,” Messner answered.  “One bunk’s just as good as the other.”

He spread his own bedding in the second bunk, and sat down on the edge.  The stranger thrust a physician’s small travelling case under his blankets at one end to serve for a pillow.

“Doctor?” Messner asked.

“Yes,” came the answer, “but I assure you I didn’t come into the Klondike to practise.”

The woman busied herself with cooking, while the man sliced bacon and fired the stove.  The light in the cabin was dim, filtering through in a small window made of onion-skin writing paper and oiled with bacon grease, so that John Messner could not make out very well what the woman looked like.  Not that he tried.  He seemed to have no interest in her.  But she glanced curiously from time to time into the dark corner where he sat.

“Oh, it’s a great life,” the doctor proclaimed enthusiastically, pausing from sharpening his knife on the stovepipe.  “What I like about it is the struggle, the endeavor with one’s own hands, the primitiveness of it, the realness.”

“The temperature is real enough,” Messner laughed.

“Do you know how cold it actually is?” the doctor demanded.

The other shook his head.

“Well, I’ll tell you.  Seventy-four below zero by spirit thermometer on the sled.”

“That’s one hundred and six below freezing point—too cold for travelling, eh?”

“Practically suicide,” was the doctor’s verdict.  “One exerts himself.  He breathes heavily, taking into his lungs the frost itself.  It chills his lungs, freezes the edges of the tissues.  He gets a dry, hacking cough as the dead tissue sloughs away, and dies the following summer of pneumonia, wondering what it’s all about.  I’ll stay in this cabin for a week, unless the thermometer rises at least to fifty below.”

“I say, Tess,” he said, the next moment, “don’t you think that coffee’s boiled long enough!”

At the sound of the woman’s name, John Messner became suddenly alert.  He looked at her quickly, while across his face shot a haunting expression, the ghost of some buried misery achieving swift resurrection.  But the next moment, and by an effort of will, the ghost was laid again.  His face was as placid as before, though he was still alert, dissatisfied with what the feeble light had shown him of the woman’s face.

Automatically, her first act had been to set the coffee-pot back.  It was not until she had done this that she glanced at Messner.  But already he had composed himself.  She saw only a man sitting on the edge of the bunk and incuriously studying the toes of his moccasins.  But, as she turned casually to go about her cooking, he shot another swift look at her, and she, glancing as swiftly back, caught his look.  He shifted on past her to the doctor, though the slightest smile curled his lip in appreciation of the way she had trapped him.

She drew a candle from the grub-box and lighted it.  One look at her illuminated face was enough for Messner.  In the small cabin the widest limit was only a matter of several steps, and the next moment she was alongside of him.  She deliberately held the candle close to his face and stared at him out of eyes wide with fear and recognition.  He smiled quietly back at her.

“What are you looking for, Tess?” the doctor called.

“Hairpins,” she replied, passing on and rummaging in a clothes-bag on the bunk.

They served their meal on their grub-box, sitting on Messner’s grub-box and facing him.  He had stretched out on his bunk to rest, lying on his side, his head on his arm.  In the close quarters it was as though the three were together at table.

“What part of the States do you come from?” Messner asked.

“San Francisco,” answered the doctor.  “I’ve been in here two years, though.”

“I hail from California myself,” was Messner’s announcement.

The woman looked at him appealingly, but he smiled and went on:

“Berkeley, you know.”

The other man was becoming interested.

“U. C.?” he asked.

“Yes, Class of ’86.”

“I meant faculty,” the doctor explained.  “You remind me of the type.”

“Sorry to hear you say so,” Messner smiled back.  “I’d prefer being taken for a prospector or a dog-musher.”

“I don’t think he looks any more like a professor than you do a doctor,” the woman broke in.

“Thank you,” said Messner.  Then, turning to her companion, “By the way, Doctor, what is your name, if I may ask?”

“Haythorne, if you’ll take my word for it.  I gave up cards with civilization.”

“And Mrs. Haythorne,” Messner smiled and bowed.

She flashed a look at him that was more anger than appeal.

Haythorne was about to ask the other’s name.  His mouth had opened to form the question when Messner cut him off.

“Come to think of it, Doctor, you may possibly be able to satisfy my curiosity.  There was a sort of scandal in faculty circles some two or three years ago.  The wife of one of the English professors—er, if you will pardon me, Mrs. Haythorne—disappeared with some San Francisco doctor, I understood, though his name does not just now come to my lips.  Do you remember the incident?”

Haythorne nodded his head.  “Made quite a stir at the time.  His name was Womble—Graham Womble.  He had a magnificent practice.  I knew him somewhat.”

“Well, what I was trying to get at was what had become of them.  I was wondering if you had heard.  They left no trace, hide nor hair.”

“He covered his tracks cunningly.”  Haythorne cleared his throat.  “There was rumor that they went to the South Seas—were lost on a trading schooner in a typhoon, or something like that.”

“I never heard that,” Messner said.  “You remember the case, Mrs. Haythorne?”

“Perfectly,” she answered, in a voice the control of which was in amazing contrast to the anger that blazed in the face she turned aside so that Haythorne might not see.

The latter was again on the verge of asking his name, when Messner remarked:

“This Dr. Womble, I’ve heard he was very handsome, and—er—quite a success, so to say, with the ladies.”

“Well, if he was, he finished himself off by that affair,” Haythorne grumbled.

“And the woman was a termagant—at least so I’ve been told.  It was generally accepted in Berkeley that she made life—er—not exactly paradise for her husband.”

“I never heard that,” Haythorne rejoined.  “In San Francisco the talk was all the other way.”

“Woman sort of a martyr, eh?—crucified on the cross of matrimony?”

The doctor nodded.  Messner’s gray eyes were mildly curious as he went on:

“That was to be expected—two sides to the shield.  Living in Berkeley I only got the one side.  She was a great deal in San Francisco, it seems.”

“Some coffee, please,” Haythorne said.

The woman refilled his mug, at the same time breaking into light laughter.

“You’re gossiping like a pair of beldames,” she chided them.

“It’s so interesting,” Messner smiled at her, then returned to the doctor.  “The husband seems then to have had a not very savory reputation in San Francisco?”

“On the contrary, he was a moral prig,” Haythorne blurted out, with apparently undue warmth.  “He was a little scholastic shrimp without a drop of red blood in his body.”

“Did you know him?”

“Never laid eyes on him.  I never knocked about in university circles.”

“One side of the shield again,” Messner said, with an air of weighing the matter judicially.  “While he did not amount to much, it is true&mdas............