"Cool yourself, Lessari," he said soothingly, "and we'll get this sled." They could never get it, but he hoped the artifice might serve! Even that attempt at reason proved useless, for the Corsican redoubled his efforts. The eternal cold, his illness, the death of the dogs, the fever of the gold-finding, and the loss of their provisions had all combined to drive him mad.
"Devil!" he screamed, "you threw the food down!" And Rex knew he was indeed demented.
Fighting every inch of the way, Britton was forced toward the abyss. Three feet from it, he felt the necessity for desperate action. Watching his opportunity, he tripped Lessari on the iced rock, and they both fell heavily. Rex wound his arms about the Corsican, putting forth the last ounce of strength; that grip of steel would have held a giant, but it could not hold a madman. Lessari tore himself free and gained the uppermost position, with hands on Britton's throat.
Rex gazed into the rolling eyes, the wild, distorted visage of the Corsican, and felt himself shoved to the very brink of the crevasse. He wrenched violently at Lessari's wrists and arms, but they were as iron rods, and the movement brought his head out over the rim of the rock.
In one fleeting vision he saw the white, rising ice-fields cutting into the blue sky, with glacier-capped peaks banking up behind; he saw three of the five circling hills, their frozen gorges shining emerald in the sun; then, as Lessari's wolfish face came closer to his own and his arms were pressed down, the fingers felt the revolver butt in his belt.
In sheer despair he grasped it as a drowning man snatches at an oar. Its report cracked out and rattled in a hundred blatant echoes down the gorge. Lessari uttered a gasping groan and lurched to one side, his fingers lax and weak.
Britton wormed his shoulders back from the edge of the abyss, shifting the Corsican's weight with his legs, and arose in safety. His lungs were heaving with the tremendous strain like those of a spent Channel-swimmer, and the cords of his throat were taut.
When he turned over the limp form at his feet, he looked into Lessari's dead face.
CHAPTER XV.
Back in Dawson, on the evening of the same day when Britton stood alone with the awful Klondike solitude at the edge of Five Mountain Gulch–as it came to be named afterwards–when he faced at once the icy phantom Cold, the grisly skeleton Starvation, and the devil-faced thing Remorse, when he halted with death at his feet and its dread power pervading the desolate snows about him, there occurred, in the golden city, a strikingly different scene, a scene palpitating with warmth and life.