Like a man walking in his sleep, the Colonel followed, now holding on to the sled and unconsciously pulling a little, and when the Boy, very nearly on his last legs, remonstrated, leaning against it, and so urging it a little forward.

Oh, but the wood was far to seek that night!

Concentrated on the two main things—­to carry forward his almost intolerable load, and to go the shortest way to the nearest wood—­the Boy, by-and-by, forgot to tell his tired nerves to take account of the unequal pressure from behind.  If he felt it—­well, the Colonel was a corker; if he didn’t feel it—­well, the Colonel was just about tuckered out.  It was very late when at last the Boy raised a shout.  Behind the cliff overhanging the river-bed that they were just rounding, there, spread out in the sparkling starlight, as far as he could see, a vast primeval forest.  The Boy bettered his lagging pace.

“Ha! you haven’t seen a wood like this since we left ’Frisco.  It’s all right now, Kentucky;” and he bent to his work with a will.

When he got to the edge of the wood, he flung down the rope and turned—­to find himself alone.

“Colonel!  Colonel!  Where are you? Colonel!”

He stood in the silence, shivering with a sudden sense of desolation.  He took his bearings, propped a fallen fir sapling aslant by the sled, and, forgetting he was ready to drop, he ran swiftly hack along the way he came.  They had travelled all that afternoon and evening on the river ice, hard as iron, retaining no trace of footprint or of runner possible to verify even in daylight.  The Yukon here was fully three miles wide.  They had meant to hug the right bank, but snow and ice refashion the world and laugh at the trustful geography of men.  A traveller on this trail is not always sure whether he is following the mighty Yukon or some slough equally mighty for a few miles, or whether, in the protracted twilight, he has not wandered off upon some frozen swamp.

On the Boy went in the ghostly starlight, running, stumbling, calling at regular intervals, his voice falling into a melancholy monotony that sounded foreign to himself.  It occurred to him that were he the Colonel he wouldn’t recognise it, and he began instead to call “Kentucky!  Ken-tuck-kee!” sounding those fine barbaric syllables for the first time, most like, in that world of ice and silence.

He stood an instant after his voice died, and listened to the quiet.  Yes, the people were right who said nothing was so hard to bear in this country of hardship—­nothing ends by being so ghastly—­as the silence.  No bird stirs.  The swift-flashing fish are sealed under ice, the wood creatures gone to their underground sleep.  No whispering of the pointed firs, stiff, snowclotted; no swaying of the scant herbage sheathed in ice or muffled under winter’s wide white blanket.  No greater hush can reign in the interstellar spaces than in winter on the Yukon.