Part 7 (2/2)

As the voice of the boy thinned into the cold air, Slasher, the gaunt, red-eyed wolf-dog, that no man had ever tamed, ranged himself close at his side and, with bristling hair and bared fangs, added his rumbling, throaty growl to Connie Morgan's defiance of the North.

With a high-pitched whoop of encouragement and a loud crack of the whip, the boy swung the impatient ten-team to the westward and headed it down the canyon into the very heart of the Lillimuit. High mountains towered above him to the left, and to the right the sheer wall of the glacier formed an insurmountable barrier. The dry, hard-packed snow afforded excellent footing and McDougall's trained sled dogs made good time as they followed the lead of old Boris who, trotting in advance, unerringly picked the smoothest track between the detached ma.s.ses of ice and granite that in places all but blocked the narrowing gorge, into which the trail of Waseche Bill had led on the first day of the great blizzard.

Mile after mile they covered, and as the walls drew closer together the light dimmed, for the slanting rays of the winter sun even at midday never penetrated to the floor of the narrow canyon. As he rounded a sharp bend, Connie halted the dogs in dismay for, a short distance in front of him, the ice-wall of the glacier slanted suddenly against the granite shoulder of a high b.u.t.te. Wide eyed, he stared at the barrier.

He was in a blind pocket--a _cul-de-sac_ of the mountains! But where was Waseche? Weary and disappointed the boy seated himself on the sled to reason it out.

”There _must_ be a way out,” he argued. ”I didn't camp till the snow got so thick I couldn't see, and he had to camp, too. If he doubled back I would have seen him.” He started to his feet in a sudden panic. ”I wonder if he did--while I slept?” Then, as his glance fell upon the dogs, he smiled. ”You bet, he didn't!” he cried aloud, ”not with thirteen wolf-dogs camped beside the trail. Slasher would growl and bristle up if a man came within half a mile of us, and Waseche could never get past old Boris.” He remembered the words of Black Jack Demaree: ”Never set up yer own guess agin' a good dog's nose.” Connie Morgan was learning the North--he was trusting his dogs.

”There's a trail, somewhere,” he exclaimed, ”and it's up to me to find it!” He cracked his whip, but instead of leaping to the pull, the dogs crouched quivering in the snow. The ground trembled as in the throes of a mighty earthquake and the boy whirled in his tracks as the canyon reverberated to the crash of a thousand thunders. He dashed to the point where, a few minutes before, he had rounded the sharp angle of the trail and gasped at the sight that met his gaze. The weather-whitened ice of the glacier wall was rent and s.h.i.+vered in a broad, green scar, and in the canyon a ma.s.s of broken ice fifty feet high completely blocked the back trail. He was imprisoned! Not in a man-made jail of iron bars and concrete--but a veritable prison of the wilderness, whose impregnable walls of ice and granite seemed to touch the far-off sky. The boy's heart sank as he gazed upon the perpendicular wall that barred the trail. For just an instant his lip quivered and then the little shoulders stiffened and the blue eyes narrowed as they had narrowed that evening he faced the men of Eagle.

”You didn't get me, Lillimuit!” he shouted. ”You'll have to shoot the other barrel!” His voice echoed hollow and thin between the gloomy walls, and he turned to the dogs. Old Boris, always in search of a trail, sniffed industriously about the base of the glacier. Big, lumbering Mutt, who in harness could out-pull any dog in the Northland, rolled about in the snow and barked foolishly in his excitement.

Slasher, more wolf than dog, stood snarling his red-eyed hate in the face of the new-formed ice barrier. And McDougall's _malamutes_, wise in the ways of the snow trail, stood alert, with eyes on the face of the boy, awaiting his command.

Forty rods ahead, where the _cul-de-sac_ terminated in a great moraine, Connie could discern a tangle of scrub growth and dead timber pushed aside by the glacier. The short, three-hour day was spent, and the gloomy walls of the narrow gorge intensified the mysterious semi-darkness of the long, sub-arctic night. The boy shouted to the dogs, and the crack of his long whiplash echoed in the chasm like a pistol shot. At the foot of the moraine he unharnessed and fed the dogs, spread his robes in the shelter of a bold-faced grey rock, and unrolled his sleeping bag. He built a fire and thawed out some bannock, over which he poured the grease from the pan of sizzling bacon. Connie was hungry and he devoured his solitary meal greedily, was.h.i.+ng it down with great gulps of steaming black coffee. After supper, surrounded by the thirteen big dogs, he made a hasty inspection of the walls of his prison. The light was dim and he realized he would have to wait until daylight before making anything like a thorough examination; nevertheless, he was unwilling to sleep until he had made at least one effort to locate the trail to the outer world.

An hour later he crawled into his sleeping bag and lay a long time looking upward at the little stars that winked and glittered in cold, white brilliance where the narrow panel of black-blue showed between the towering walls of the canyon.

”I'll get out someway,” he muttered bravely.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ”My dad would have got out, and, you bet, so will I!”]

”If I can't walk out, I'll _crawl_ out, or _climb_ out, or _dig_ out! My dad would have got out, and, you bet, so will I! _He_ wasn't afraid to tackle _big_ things--he was ready for 'em. What got him was a _little_ thing--just a little piece of loose ice on a smooth trail--he wasn't _looking_ for it--that's all. But, at that, when he pitched head first into Ragged Falls canyon that day, he died like a _man_ dies--in the big outdoors, with the mountains, and the pine trees, and the snow! And that's the way I'll die! If I never get out of this hole, when they find me they won't find me in this sleeping bag--'cause I'll work to the end of my grub. I'll dig, and chop, and hack a way out till my grub's gone, then I'll--I'll eat Mac's dogs--and when they're gone I'll--No! By Jimminy! I _won't_ eat old Boris, nor Slasher, nor Mutt--I'll--I'll _starve first_!” He reached for the flap of his sleeping bag, and as he drew it over his head there came, faint and far from the rim-rocks, the short, sharp bark of a starving fox.

CHAPTER VIII

WASECHE BILL TO THE RESCUE

When Waseche Bill sent his dogs flying over the surface of the glacier in answer to the bell-like call of old Boris, he fully expected that the end of a half-hour would find him at the dog's side. Sound carries far in the keen northern air, and the man urged his team to its utmost. As the sled runners slipped smoothly over the ice and frozen snow, his mind was filled with perplexing questions. How came old Boris into the Lillimuit? Had he deserted the boy and followed the trail of his old master?

”No, no!” muttered the man. ”He wouldn't pull out on the kid, that-a-way--an', what's mo', if he had, he'd of catched up with me long befo' now.”

Was it possible that the boy had taken the trail? The man's brow puckered. What was it Joe said, that night in Eagle?

”S'pose he follers ye?”

”He couldn't of!” argued Waseche. ”It's plumb onpossible, with them there three ol' dawgs. An' he'd of neveh got past Eagle--Fiddle Face, an' Joe, an' Jim Sontag, they wouldn't of let him by--not fo' to go to the Lillimuit, they wouldn't--not in a hund'ed yea's.”

The dogs swerved, bringing the outfit to an abrupt halt on the brink of a yawning fissure. Waseche Bill scowled at the delay.

”Sho' some creva.s.se,” he growled, as he peered into the depths of the great ice crack fifty feet wide, which barred his path. Suddenly his eye lighted and he swung the dogs to the southward where, a quarter of a mile away, a great white snow bridge spanned the chasm in a glittering arch. Seizing his axe, he chopped two parallel trenches in the ice close to the end of the bridge. Into these eight-inch depressions he worked the runners of the heavily loaded sled, taking care that the blunt rear end of the runners rested firmly against the vertical ends of the trenches. Uncoiling a long _bab.i.+.c.he_ line, he tied one end to the tail rope of the anch.o.r.ed sled and, after making the other end fast about his waist, ventured cautiously out upon the snow bridge. Foot by foot he advanced, testing its strength. The bridge was wide and thick, and evidently quite old and firm, but Waseche Bill was a man who took no foolish risks.

Men who seek gold learn to face danger bravely--it is part of the day's work--for death dogs close upon the trail of the men of the North and must be reckoned with upon short notice. Every _tillic.u.m_ in the White Country, if he would, could tell of hairbreadth escapes, and of times when a clear brain and iron nerve alone stood between him and the Great Beyond. But of these things they rarely speak--for they know of the others, like Sam Morgan, whose work is done, and whose names are burned into the little wooden crosses that dot the white snow of Aurora Land; and whose memory remains fresh in the haunts of the sourdoughs, where their deeds are remembered long and respected when the flash bravado of the reckless tin-horn is scorned and forgotten.

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