"Sh! sh! Lie quiet!" whispered the Boy.
"Nig! Nig!"
"Good old boy! Stay here! He doesn't mean well by you. Sh! quiet! Quiet, I say!"
"Nig!" and the treacherous Colonel gave the peculiar whistle both men used to call the dogs to supper. The dog struggled to get away, the Boy's stiff fingers lost their grip, and "the best leader in the Yukon" was running down the bank as hard as he could pelt, to the camp fire—to the cooking-pot.
The Boy got up and floundered away in the opposite direction. He must get out of hearing. He toiled on, listening for the expected gunshot—hearing it, too, and the yawp of a wounded dog, in spite of a mitten clapped at each ear.
"That's the kind of world it is! Do your level best, drag other fellas' packs hundreds o' miles over the ice with a hungry belly and bloody feet, and then—Poor old Nig!—'cause you're lame—poor old Nig!" With a tightened throat and hot water in his eyes, he kept on repeating the dog's name as he stumbled forward in the snow. "Nev' mind, old boy; it's a lonely kind o' world, and the right trail's hard to find." Suddenly he stood still. His stumbling feet were on a track. He had reached the dip in the saddle-back of the hill, and—yes! this was the right trail; for down on the other side below him were faint lights—huts—an Indian village! with fish and food for everybody. And Nig—Nig was being—
The Boy turned as if a hurricane had struck him, and tore back down the incline—stumbling, floundering in the snow, calling hoarsely: "Colonel, Colonel! don't do it! There's a village here, Colonel! Nig! Colonel, don't do it!"
He dashed into the circle of firelight, and beheld Nig standing with a bandaged paw, placidly eating softened biscuit out of the family frying-pan.
It was short work getting down to the village. They had one king salmon and two white fish from the first Indian they saw, who wanted hootch for them, and got only tabak.
In the biggest of the huts, nearly full of men, women, and children, coughing, sickly-looking, dejected, the natives made room for the strangers. When the white men had supped they handed over the remains of their meal (as is expected) to the head of the house. This and a few matches or a little tobacco on parting, is all he looks for in return for shelter, room for beds on the floor, snow-water laboriously melted, use of the fire, and as much wood as they like to burn, even if it is a barren place, and fuel is the precious far-travelled "drift."