“Yes, but it’s so all the same,” the younger man argued. “Every time you talk that way, old man, you’re just putting in an advance order for hard luck.”
And in the silence that followed, he studied the other man’s face, round, heavily bearded, bearing marks of dissipation about the eyes.
Steel was young, twenty-five, and he had come north solely in a spirit of adventure. To him good luck and hard luck were all a part of the game. Miller, on the other hand, was nearer forty, and whatever spirit of adventure he once might have possessed had long since been lost in his life of hard reality. He made life hard. He had ceased to have visions. Among men he had earned the name of “Hardrock” Miller because of an incident that occurred one fall down on the— But no matter. That is another story.
To get back to Steel: he was, at the present moment, beginning to regret his accompanying the older man on the trip through to Fairbanks. Miller was proving himself far from the best of company. And the young man reflected that he might better have waited until someone else was going through. But there, no use grumbling. The trip would soon be over. In the future, however, he assured himself, he would pick his trail partners with considerable more care.
“Well, let’s be movin’,” Miller remarked shortly, rising from the log he had been sitting on. “Suppose you take a turn breakin’ trail, kid.”
“Sure,” said Steel willingly, “I was just going to suggest that.” And he took his snowshoes which he had stuck upright in the snow behind him, and proceeded to put them on. He added, as he did so, “Here’s hoping the drifts aren’t so bad up ahead. Likely they won’t be.”
“Oh, they will be,” the other corrected, stepping to the handlebars of the sled. “The devil knows when I’m comin’ along and sprinkles the stuff heavy along the trail.”
Steel chuckled, and in another moment, at a word from the man behind the sleigh, they started forward. The sun, which had put in a brief half-hour’s appearance, had now gone down amid a bank of purple mist, and the world which a while ago had sparkled like a carpet of diamonds was now a dull, cheerless gray. The long Arctic night was closing in. Too, it was growing steadily colder.
After perhaps half a mile had been covered, Steel observed, “Hello! There’s a cabin up there on the left.” He pointed a mittened hand. “Could just as well have stopped there for dinner, if we’d known.”
“Wasn’t there six years ago,” Miller replied. “That was the last time I mushed this trail.”