"I don't believe I'd specify McMillan's claims to fame, or shall we say notoriety," observed "Scotty," with a twinkle in his eye. "Then," he resumed, "there were Morte Atkinson's Blue Leaders, that Percy Blatchford drove in the second big race. When we met at Last Chance on the way back, Blatchford nearly cried when he told me how those setters had saved his hands from freezing. He had turned them loose to rest and run behind at will, knowing they would catch up at the next stop. In some way he had dropped the fur gloves he wore over his mittens, when he took them off to adjust a sled pack, and did not miss them for some time, until he ran into a fierce blizzard. Of course he could not go back for them, and he feared his hands would become useless from the cold. He was in a pretty bad fix, when up came the Blue Leaders, almost exhausted, but each with a glove in his mouth."
"Oh, that was fine," murmured Ben.
"Give me bird-dog stock every time," continued Allan, "with a native strain for strength and trail instincts. It's a combination that makes our Alaskans just about right, to my idea."
"Naturally I feel that our half-breeds are best, too. But I do wish," regretfully, "that they could all be the same sort of half-breeds—to make them more uniform as to size and style. With Kid and Spot part pointer, Irish and Rover part setter, Jack McMillan verging on the mastiff, and all the rest of them part something else, don't you think it looks the least little bit as if we had picked them up at a remnant sale?"
She caught sight of "Scotty's" face, full of shocked surprise.
"Don't say it," she exclaimed quickly; "both Ben and I know perfectly well that 'handsome is as handsome does.' I learned it in my copy-book, ages and ages ago. And it's true that they are the greatest dogs in all the world, but they don't quite look it. Of course the year you won with Berger's 'Brutes,' with that awkward, high-shouldered native, Mukluk, in the lead, I learned that looks do not go very far in Arctic racing. But certainly Fink's 'Prides' in their gay trappings of scarlet and gold did seem more to suit the rôle of Winners when Hegness came in victorious with them in the first race."
"At that, the 'Brutes' were the best dogs, and if it had not been for our delay of eighteen hours at Brown's Road House, where all of the teams had to lay up because of a howling gale, I am not at all sure that the 'Prides' would not have lost out to the 'Brutes' in that race too."
"That must have been a strange night. I know after that every one called Brown's 'The House of a Thousand Bow Wows.' How many were there?"
"Let me see; there were fifty-four racing dogs, thirty-five freighters, twenty-six belonging to the mail carriers, ten or twelve to casual mushers, and I think about the same number to Eskimo trappers. And all—men and dogs—in the one room, which, fortunately, was of pretty good size."
"Scotty" laughed heartily at the remembrance. "We, who were driving the Racing Teams, had put our leaders to bed in the few bunks there were; for we could not afford to take any chances of our leaders scrapping in such close quarters, and possibly being put out of commission. But an Outsider, a government official, I think, who was on his way to Nome as a passenger with the Mail Team, was pretty sore about it. Said 'it was a deuce of a country where the dogs slept in beds and the men on the floor.'"