As he was borne back in triumph towards camp his lower lip quivered, and two big tears rolled down his chubby cheeks, but he did not cry nor utter a complaint; nor from that time on did he make further effort to regain his lost home. The boys had hardly begun to retrace their steps when another figure loomed out of the shadows and came rapidly towards them. It looked huge in the dim light, and advanced with gigantic strides.
“Hello!” cried Phil, as he recognized the new-comer. “Where are you bound?”
“Bound to get lost along with the rest of the crew,” replied Jalap Coombs, stoutly. “Didn’t I tell ye I wouldn’t put up with your gettin’ lost alone ag’in?”
“That’s so; but you see I forgot,” laughed Phil. “Now that we are all found, though, let’s get back to the supper that you were cooking before you decided to get lost. By the way, Mr. Coombs, do you realize that this is the very stream for which we have been hunting? What do you think of our young pilot now?”
“Think of him!” exclaimed Jalap Coombs. “I think he’s jest the same as all in the piloting business—pernicketty. Knows a heap more’n he’ll ever tell, and won’t ever p’int out a channel till you’re just about to run aground. Then he’ll do it kinder keerless and onconsarned, same as the kid done jest now. Oh, he’s a regular branch pilot, he is, and up to all the tricks of the trade.”
Bright and early the following morning, thanks to Nel-te’s pilotage, the sledges were speeding up the creek on their way to Lost Lake. By nightfall they had crossed it, three other small lakes, descended an outlet of the last to Little Salmon River, and after a run of five miles down that stream found themselves once more amid the ice hummocks of the Yukon, one hundred and twenty miles above the mouth of the Pelly. Of this distance they had saved about one-third by their adventurous cut-off.
The end of another week found them one hundred and fifty miles farther up the Yukon and at the mouth of the Tahkeena. It had been a week of the roughest kind of travel, and its hard work was telling severely on the dogs.
As they made their last camp on the mighty river they were to leave for good on the morrow, they were both glad and sorry. Glad to leave its rough ice and escape the savage difficulties that it offered in the shape of cañons and roaring rapids only a few miles above, and sorry to desert its well-marked course for the little-known Tahkeena.
Still, their dogs could not hold out for another week on the Yukon, while over the smooth going of the tributary stream they might survive the hardships of the journey to its very end; and without these faithful servants our travellers would indeed be in a sorry plight. So, while they reminisced before their roaring camp-fire of the many adventures they had encountered since entering Yukon mouth, two thousand miles away, they looked hopefully forward to their journey’s end, now less than as many hundred miles from that point. To the dangers of the lofty mountain range they had yet to cross they gave but little thought, for the mountains were still one hundred miles away.