"I'll write you when I know; maybe I'll even send you what I owe you, but I don't feel like boastin' at the moment. Nig!"
"You can't walk."
"Did you never happen to notice that one-legged fella pluggin' about Dawson?"
He had gone down on his hands and knees to see if Nig was asleep under the camp-bed. The Colonel got up, went to the door, and let down the flap. When he turned, the traveller and the dog were at his elbow. He squared his big frame at the entrance, looking down at the two, tried to speak, but the Boy broke in: "Don't let's get sentimental, Colonel; just stand aside."
Never stirring, he found a voice to say, "I'm not askin' you to stay"—the other turned and whistled, for Nig had retired again to the seclusion of the gray blanket screen—"I only want to tell you something before you go."
The Boy frowned a little, but rested his pack against the table in that way in which the Klondyker learns to make a chair-back of his burden.
"You seem to think you've been tellin' me news," said the Colonel. "When you said that about goin' on, the night before we got to Snow Camp, I knew you simply meant you still intended to come out alive. I had thrown up my hands—at least, I thought I had. The only difference between us—I had given in and you hadn't."
The other shook his head. "There was a lot more in it than that."
"You meant to take the only means there were—to carry off the sled that I couldn't pull any farther——" The Boy looked up quickly. Something stern and truth-compelling in the dark face forced the Colonel to add: "And along with the sled you meant to carry off—the—the things that meant life to us."
"Just that——" The Boy knotted his brown fingers in Nig's hair as if to keep tight hold of one friend in the wreck.