All about them the stampede was on the move, hurrying along the deep trench of trampled snow which constituted the trail. The throng hauled loaded hand-sleds, drove dogs attached to loaded dog-sleds or went by man-power under enormous packs. Ever these packs were cast down without care at the side of the trail while the owners back-tripped for more till the side snows were heaped with bags, boxes and rope-lashed bundles of all descriptions.
On the right of Cantine and Blera, on their left, ahead of them, behind them were tons upon tons of provisions, yet they dared not put forth their hands to lift a morsel. Well they knew the Northland law concerning wayside caches, and well they knew the punishment that fell upon him who broke the law. The bitter resentment they nursed against Bassett who had ejected them from Happy Camp and against all the rest who had consented to that ejection blazed into a sort of savagery, a hatred of their own breed which mocked and tantalized and ostracized them.
Every man of that breed bound inward had a vision before his eyes and a hope in his heart. Each worked in a frenzy and performed prodigies of toil for the attainment of his vision and the realizing of his high ambition, but the jaded souls of Cantine and Blera did not respond to any such spur.
From the start they had been under no spell but the spell of shallow, garish enticements; and the unlooked-for collision with Tom Bassett and the specter of another day had seared them into callousness. Without lifting eyes to their companions of the trail who passed, met, repassed and oftentimes jostled them, they plodded, pariahs of their race, down the frozen surface of Long Lake.
Near Long Lake’s foot a string of seven sleds drawn by swift dog-teams, and going light, overtook them. They drove down upon the two without the customary warning hail.
Cantine and the woman had barely time to throw themselves prone into the side snow before the lead-dog of the first team, ripping at them with vicious fangs, flashed past. The other teams flashed alter, each dog taking the chance to snap futilely at their moccasined heels and the drivers with raucous laughter flicking their whiplashes like long, black snakes into the drifts around the heads of the fallen pair.
Although no blow had been landed on them, the demonstration rankled in the hearts of Jose and Blera. Blera knew that had it not been for the fact that she was a woman the blows would surely have been sent home and perhaps the wolf-dogs swerved from their course to rend them as they ran. More bitter still her anger flared, and Jose himself quivered with passion as he clambered out of the side snow back into the trail and reviled the disappearing seven. He could not fully identify the befurred and parka-clad drivers, but he had a suspicion that they were Tom Bassett and the six men who had sat around the stove the night before in the Saxon Saloon.
On down to Lake Linderman, the end of the twenty-eight-mile portage over Chilcoot from Dyea Beach, he carried his suspicion, and there at Linderman Landing he found his suspicions justified.
The shore of the lake was dotted with log-cabins, half-log and half-canvas cabins and flimsy tents, standing where the whipsaws had swept the trees away. On the edge of the main trail just at the dip to the ice bulked the Linderman Restaurant run by Flambald. It flaunted a huge cotton sign painted with pies and prices and advertised a satiating meal for ten dollars in gold. Instinctively Cantine and Blera increased their pace as they made for it.
There was a crowd about the door. Cantine went to push through and suddenly recoiled. Tom Bassett lounged on one end of the log door-step with his back against the log wall.