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Caught in a small avalanche one morning after a night of snow, and swept a hundred yards down the mountain, they emerged half-stifled and unhurt, but McCan emerged without his pack in which was all the flour. A second and larger snow-slide buried it beyond hope of recovery.
They entered the little parlour in which McGovery had shortly before been discussing his matrimonial engagements, and having closed the door, and, this time, taking care that Judy McCan was not just on the other side of it, and making Macdermot sit down opposite to him, the priest began, in the least disagreeable manner he could, to advise him on the very delicate subject in question.
The terrible toil and the cold ate up energy, yet they cut down the size of the ration they permitted themselves. One night Smoke was awakened by a sound of struggling. Distinctly he heard a gasping and strangling from where McCan slept. Kicking the fire into flame, by its light he saw Labiskwee, her hands at the Irishman's throat and forcing from his mouth a chunk of partly chewed meat.
From the crest, looking back, they saw the young men stumbling and falling on the upward climb. "They will never get here," Labiskwee said. "It is the white death. I know it, though I have never seen it. I have heard the old men talk. Soon will come a mist unlike any mist or fog or frost-smoke you ever saw. Few have seen it and lived." McCan gasped and strangled.
They made fireless camps above timber-line, thawing their meat-rations with the heat of their bodies ere they could eat. And through it all Labiskwee remained Labiskwee. Her cheer never vanished, save when she looked at McCan, and the greatest stupor of fatigue and cold never stilled the eloquence of her love for Smoke.
McCan lay on his back, his unwashed face, swarthy from camp-smoke, frozen hard as marble. The sight did not affect Labiskwee. "Look!" she cried. "A snow bird! It is a good sign." There was no evidence of the young men. Either they had died on the other side of the divide or they had turned back.
They felt a body stumble over them and fall, then heard feeble whimpering and blaspheming drowned in a violent coughing fit, and knew it was McCan who huddled against them as he wrapped his robe about him. Their own lung-strangling began, and they were racked and torn by a dry cough, spasmodic and uncontrollable. Smoke noted his temperature rising in a fever, and Labiskwee suffered similarly.
Through a vast mad phantasmagoria of suffering and toil he and Labiskwee struggled on, with McCan somehow stumbling along in the rear, babbling of San Francisco, his everlasting dream. Great peaks, pitiless and serene in the chill blue, towered about them.
The officers were in general very different in appearance from those in the Racer, though they were all very good sort of fellows. The oddest looking was Dr McCan, the surgeon. He was a jovial-faced short man, and from having lived a life of ease on shore he had grown enormously fat.
"I'll tell you what, doctor," explained Lieutenant Stokes; "I'll undertake to race you for a mile, each of us carrying another person on our backs." "Done," cried Doctor McCan; "it shall come off at once. I'll take Adair as my jockey; you can take whom you like." Adair was the lightest midshipman on board, and the doctor thought that by getting him he had stolen a march on his military competitor.
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