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Laughing Bill stared after the girl as she hurried away; musingly he said: "The little Doc got in on no pair, for it was all her coin, of course. But she'd 'a' had to split, fifty-fifty, with a lawyer, so it ain't a bad deal all around." It had snowed during the night, but toward morning it had grown cold; now the sled-runners complained and the load dragged heavily.
They mounted a swelling ridge and rushed down to the level river ice beyond, but as they did so they felt their footing sag beneath them, heard a shivering creak on every side, and, before they could do more than cry out warningly, saw water rising about the sled-runners.
Wee Johnnie Tamarack was counted one of the best dog-mushers in the North, and as the girl had succeeded in implanting in the old man's mind an urgent need of haste, he exerted his talent to the utmost. Mile after mile, behind the flying feet of the tireless malamutes, the sled-runners slipped smoothly over the crust of the ice-hard snow.
Smoke was permitted to question the witnesses, and he was in the middle of the cross-examination of Harding when from without came the whining of dogs in harness, and the grind and churn of sled-runners. Somebody near the door peeped out. "It's Sam an' his pardner an' a dog-team hell-bent down the trail for Stewart River," the man reported.
In camp at night they bathed their swollen lids and applied a cool and healing salve. Meanwhile the weeks slipped into months and still they held like bulldogs to the trail of the man they were after. The silence of the wide, empty white wastes surrounded them, except for an occasional word, the whine of a dog, and the slithering crunch of the sled-runners.
"Nor anywhere else in the Jim River Valley, for that matter." As they approached the Roney place, looking dim and indistinct in the darkness, their voices hushed apprehensively, and the noise of the sled-runners slipping through the snow seemed to them to increase from a purr to a roar. "Here, stob a minute!" whispered Nels, in agony of discovery. "Ve're magin' an awful noise.
Jaroth's horses managed to trample the drifts into something like a hubbly path for the broad sled-runners to slip oven They went on, almost always mounting a grade, for four hours before they came to a human habitation. The driver pointed his whipstock to a black speck before them and higher up the hill which was sharply defined against the background of pure white.
Among those whose turns did not come soon was great rivalry in the matter of sled-runners. Flat bands were negligible and assigned to girls, quarter-rounds and half-rounds were somewhat but not much better, although several orthodox-shaped sleds were fitted with them.
The drivers carried bunches of greasy rags which they occasionally threw underneath the sled-runners as a lubricant to diminish the friction of their movement over the stone-paved streets. The sights in the city were strange. The shops on the narrow streets were plain and unattractive, and the signs unintelligible.
Suddenly Nick sprang from the ground, and short and sharp came his words. "Let's git on." "Ay," replied Ralph, and he turned back to the sled. And again the dogs laid foot to the ground; and again the voice of Nick roused the hollow echoes of the shimmering peaks; again the song of the sled-runners rose and fell in cadence brisk and sharp on the still, cold air.
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