underbush. And as the steady tide of packers flowed by him, up

trail and down, he noted that the other tender-feet were beginning
to shed their shooting irons.

His short hauls decreased. At times a hundred feet was all he could
stagger, and then the ominous pounding of his heart against his ear-

drums and the sickening totteriness of his knees compelled him to
rest. And his rests grew longer. But his mind was busy. It was a

twenty-eight mile portage, which represented as many days, and this,
by all accounts, was the easiest part of it. "Wait till you get to

Chilcoot," others told him as they rested and talked, "where you
climb with hands and feet."

"They ain't going to be no Chilcoot," was his answer. "Not for me.
Long before that I'll be at peace in my little couch beneath the

moss."
A slip, and a violent wrenching effort at recovery, frightened him.

He felt that everything inside him had been torn asunder.
"If ever I fall down with this on my back I'm a goner," he told

another packer.
"That's nothing," came the answer. "Wait till you hit the Canyon.

You'll have to cross a raging torrent on a sixty-foot pine tree. No
guide ropes, nothing, and the water boiling at the sag of the log to

your knees. If you fall with a pack on your back, there's no
getting out of the straps. You just stay there and drown."

"Sounds good to me," he retorted; and out of the depths of his
exhaustion he almost half meant it.

"They drown three or four a day there," the man assured him. "I
helped fish a German out there. He had four thousand in greenbacks

on him."
"Cheerful, I must say," said Kit, battling his way to his feet and

tottering on.
He and the sack of beans became a perambulating tragedy. It

reminded him of the old man of the sea who sat on Sinbad's neck.
And this was one of those intenselymasculine vacations, he

meditated. Compared with it, the servitude to O'Hara was sweet.
Again and again he was nearly seduced by the thought of abandoning

the sack of beans in the brush and of sneaking around the camp to
the beach and catching a steamer for civilization.

But he didn't. Somewhere in him was the strain of the hard, and he
repeated over and over to himself that what other men could do, he

could. It became a nightmare chant, and he gibbered it to those
that passed him on the trail. At other times, resting, he watched

and envied the stolid, mule-footed Indians that plodded by under
heavier packs. They never seemed to rest, but went on and on with a

steadiness and certitude that was to him appalling.
He sat and cursed--he had no breath for it when under way--and

fought the temptation to sneak back to San Francisco. Before the
mile pack was ended he ceased cursing and took to crying. The tears

were tears of exhaustion and of disgust with self. If ever a man
was a wreck, he was. As the end of the pack came in sight, he

strained himself in desperation, gained the camp-site, and pitched
forward on his face, the beans on his back. It did not kill him,

but he lay for fifteen minutes before he could summon sufficient
shreds of strength to release himself from the straps. Then he

became deathly sick, and was so found by Robbie, who had similar
troubles of his own. It was this sickness of Robbie that braced him

up.
"What other men can do, we can do," Kit told him, though down in his

heart he wondered whether or not he was bluffing.
IV.

"And I am twenty-seven years old and a man," he privatelyassured
himself many times in the days that followed. There was need for

it. At the end of a week, though he had succeeded in moving his
eight hundred pounds forward a mile a day, he had lost fifteen

pounds of his own weight. His face was lean and haggard. All
resilience had gone out of his body and mind. He no longer walked,

but plodded. And on the back-trips, travelling light, his feet
dragged almost as much as when he was loaded.

He had become a work animal. He fell asleep over his food, and his
sleep was heavy and beastly, save when he was aroused, screaming

with agony, by the cramps in his legs. Every part of him ached. He
tramped on raw blisters, yet this was even easier than the fearful

bruising his feet received on the water-rounded rocks of the Dyea
Flats, across which the trail led for two miles. These two miles

represented thirty-eight miles of travelling. He washed his face
once a day. His nails, torn and broken and afflicted with

hangnails, were never cleaned. His shoulders and chest, galled by
the pack-straps, made him think, and for the first time with

understanding, of the horses he had seen on city streets.
One ordeal that nearly destroyed him at first had been the food.

The extraordinaryamount of work demanded extraordinary stoking, and
his stomach was unaccustomed to great quantities of bacon and of the

coarse, highly poisonous brown beans. As a result, his stomach went
back on him, and for several days the pain and irritation of it and

of starvation nearly broke him down. And then came the day of joy
when he could eat like a ravenous animal, and, wolf-eyed, ask for

more.
When they had moved the outfit across the foot-logs at the mouth of

the Canyon, they made a change in their plans. Word had come across
the Pass that at Lake Linderman the last available trees for

building boats were being cut. The two cousins, with tools,
whipsaw, blankets, and grub on their backs, went on, leaving Kit and

his uncle to hustle along the outfit. John Bellew now shared the
cooking with Kit, and both packed shoulder to shoulder. Time was

flying, and on the peaks the first snow was falling. To be caught
on the wrong side of the Pass meant a delay of nearly a year. The

older man put his iron back under a hundred pounds. Kit was
shocked, but he gritted his teeth and fastened his own straps to a

hundred pounds. It hurt, but he had learned the knack, and his
body, purged of all softness and fat, was beginning to harden up

with lean and bitter muscle. Also, he observed and devised. He
took note of the head-straps worn by the Indians, and manufactured

one for himself, which he used in addition to the shoulder-straps.
It made things easier, so that he began the practice of piling any

light, cumbersome piece of luggage on top. Thus, he was soon able
to bend along with a hundred pounds in the straps, fifteen or twenty

more lying loosely on top the pack and against his neck, an axe or a
pair of oars in one hand, and in the other the nested cooking-pails

of the camp.
But work as they would, the toil increased. The trail grew more

rugged; their packs grew heavier; and each day saw the snow-line
dropping down the mountains, while freight jumped to sixty cents.

No word came from the cousins beyond, so they knew they must be at
work chopping down the standing trees, and whipsawing them into

boat-planks. John Bellew grew anxious. Capturing a bunch of
Indians back-tripping from Lake Linderman, he persuaded them to put

their straps on the outfit. They charged thirty cents a pound to
carry it to the summit of Chilcoot, and it nearly broke him. As it

was, some four hundred pounds of clothes-bags and camp outfit was
not handled. He remained behind to move it along, dispatching Kit

with the Indians. At the summit Kit was to remain, slowly moving
his ton until overtaken by the four hundred pounds with which his

uncle guaranteed to catch him.
V.

Kit plodded along the trail with his Indian packers. In recognition
of the fact that it was to be a long pack, straight to the top of