It was indeed a blizzard of the roaring, ramping type that only the Yukon knows, and it increased to diabolical fury as the toilers reached the steepest pitch of the mountain. Men went down beside the trail in sheer exhaustion, and the agony of their position appealed more strongly to Britton on account of his inability to render any lasting aid. This, of all the northern trails, was the Iron Trail where none but the strong could survive.
Seeing old-timers and hardened sourdoughs fall behind filled Britton with a glow of pride in his own capabilities. He understood that he was one of the fit to whom reward must finally come, and the thought instilled new hope.
Over towering Chilcoot he climbed, in the teeth of that memorable blizzard which froze a score of gold-seekers between the Scales and the divide from Crater Lake. Nothing but his magnificent physique and indomitable purpose carried him on, and when he staggered across the little glacier which sloped to Crater Lake he had won his way to the front, and was once more in the van of a stampede. As Britton thawed himself in the camp there beside a grizzled Alaskan who had followed every strike from Nome to Klondike City, the old-timer regarded him admiringly.
"You're the hot stuff, mate," he averred, "when you can heel old Larry Marsh over Chilcoot in that there hell-warmer. You're some stampeder, too! Wasn't you in the front 'long of me at Juneau and Glacier Bay?"
"I believe I remember you," Britton said, "although it did us precious little good to be in the front."
The old man warmed his hairy paws for the tenth time and shook his gray locks.
"Don't whine! Never whine, friend," he remarked. "You get experience, grantin' nothin' else. You're sure some stampeder, and I reckon they'll be namin' you 'long of Larry Marsh–him that named Marsh Lake!"
And forthwith Britton's name travelled widely in fulfilment of the old-timer's prophecy; they began to designate him as one of their stampeders, that much-respected minority of men who have the grit and the power to stay in the lead of the maddest of all mad races–the gold-rush.
The halt at Crater Lake Camp was, of necessity, very short. The stragglers were limping in, frost-bitten and exhausted, telling of some who would never come in, when Marsh and Britton again hit the trail. Dead men nor mountains, frosts nor blizzards, sufficed to stay the stampede.
The lower levels were strangely quiet after the bellowings of the windy pass, and the cold did not bite so keenly.