The boys stopped their teams so that they could see to better advantage and took a look at the object in the distance.
“Looks like the top of some miner’s cabin,” was Jack’s opinion. “As it is about noon let’s go over, invite ourselves in, eat and be miserable.”
“Mush!” they bawled out and made for the cabin which was nearly a mile away.
As they came up to it the only sign of life they saw was a couple of gaunt huskies that looked more like starved timber wolves than animals of the domesticated canine breed. They snarled and snapped at the boys, which ill manners made the team dogs furiously mad and had they not been in the traces they would have made short work of them. Bill threw each of the starved dogs a piece of fish and in the hopes of getting more they curbed their tempers a bit. In the meantime Jack hallooed time and again outside the door but there was no response from the cabin.
“Whoever lives here can’t be very far away or his dogs wouldn’t stick around,” said Jack. Then he pounded vigorously on the door and hallooed again.
He was about to give it up for a bad job when the door opened a little, but instead of a miner to greet him he was astonished almost out of his wits when he saw before him the frail, wasted form of a young half-breed girl. Then Bill stepped up and he got the shock of his life too.
The girl, who was not more than fifteen years old, said never a word but stared appealingly at them with her big, dark hollow eyes, and then fell suddenly to the floor. The boys were inside the cabin in an instant and it was easy to guess that hers was a case of pure and simple starvation. Bill picked her up as though she were a baby and he was going to lay her on a bunk near by when he saw a white man stretched out motionless on it. Hastily laying the girl on another bunk he went to the man, listened to his heart and found that he was still alive.
Jack had not been idle in the meantime but had made some tea and prepared some bouillon and these he gave to both the girl and the man. The tea acted as a stimulant, the bouillon as a food and together they had an almost immediate effect on the girl, for now she opened her wan, lusterless eyes and looked at her benefactors. Then she feebly smiled her appreciation of the kindness of these two strange white boys whom she felt had been sent in this hour of her extreme need by the Great Spirit.
Having got the girl well on the mend, both Jack and Bill gave their undivided attention to the man; but he did not recover so rapidly for with him starvation was an after effect, the primary cause having its origin in a cancer of the stomach which was of several years’ standing. But with all of Jack’s medical lore and Bill’s skill in making new men out of broken down ones; in spite of the strengthening food and careful nursing, Michael Carscadden, better known as Moosehide Mike, steadily grow worse; for he was sorely in need of an operation.
In the early morning hours he always seemed to be better and on the fifth day after the boys reached the cabin they believed he had a fighting chance; it was on this basis that they held out the hope of his recovery to the girl Eileen. But Michael knew his condition better than did the boys and that same evening, just as the red Arctic sun was slipping down behind the White Mountains, this mighty hunter of moose and of gold knew that he was slipping with it to his last rest. Death had staked out its claim on him. Knowing that the end was not far off he took Eileen in his arms and called the boys to his bedside.