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Then he spoke slowly, in a low, tense voice. "Look here, Messner, if you refuse to get out, I'll thrash you. This isn't California. I'll beat you to a jelly with my two fists." Messner shrugged his shoulders. "If you do, I'll call a miners' meeting and see you strung up to the nearest tree. As you said, this is not California.

Ahead of him the river split into many channels to accommodate the freight of islands it carried on its breast. These islands were silent and white. No animals nor humming insects broke the silence. No birds flew in the chill air. There was no sound of man, no mark of the handiwork of man. The world slept, and it was like the sleep of death. John Messner seemed succumbing to the apathy of it all.

The dogs had stopped beside a water- hole, not a fissure, but a hole man-made, chopped laboriously with an axe through three and a half feet of ice. A thick skin of new ice showed that it had not been used for some time. Messner glanced about him.

John Messner closed the door softly behind him, and, as he started the dogs, looked back at the cabin with a great relief in his face. At the bottom of the bank, beside the water-hole, he halted the sled. He worked the sack of gold out between the lashings and carried it to the water- hole. Already a new skin of ice had formed. This he broke with his fist.

I will prove my monks, and see if they recognize that obedience is the first duty in a cloister." "While Messner assembles the priests, shall the bell sound for mass?" "Hasten, Brother Anastasius; in ten minutes we must be all in the church." "And you expect to save me by celebrating high mass?" said Frederick, shrugging his shoulders. "Yes, sire, I expect it.

At the sound of his voice the woman peered at him with quick curiousness. "Get your things off," her companion said to her. "I'll unhitch and get the water so we can start cooking." Messner took the thawed salmon outside and fed his dogs. He had to guard them against the second team of dogs, and when he had reentered the cabin the other man had unpacked the sled and fetched water.

"Well, what I was trying to get at was what had become of them. I was wondering if you had heard. They left no trace, hide nor hair." "He covered his tracks cunningly." Haythorne cleared his throat. "There was rumor that they went to the South Seas were lost on a trading schooner in a typhoon, or something like that." "I never heard that," Messner said. "You remember the case, Mrs. Haythorne?"

The stranger thrust a physician's small travelling case under his blankets at one end to serve for a pillow. "Doctor?" Messner asked. "Yes," came the answer, "but I assure you I didn't come into the Klondike to practise." The woman busied herself with cooking, while the man sliced bacon and fired the stove.

They served their meal on their grub-box, sitting on Messner's grub-box and facing him. He had stretched out on his bunk to rest, lying on his side, his head on his arm. In the close quarters it was as though the three were together at table. "What part of the States do you come from?" Messner asked. "San Francisco," answered the doctor. "I've been in here two years, though."

"I hail from California myself," was Messner's announcement. The woman looked at him appealingly, but he smiled and went on: "Berkeley, you know." The other man was becoming interested. "U. C.?" he asked. "Yes, Class of '86." "I meant faculty," the doctor explained. "You remind me of the type." "Sorry to hear you say so," Messner smiled back.