The Colonel stood staring.  Vainly the Boy called, “Come back.  Look here!  Hi!” Neither Siwash nor Ingalik took the smallest notice.  The Boy went after them, eliciting only airs of surly indifference and repeated “Me no sell.”  It was a bitter disappointment, especially to the Boy.  He liked the looks of that Nigger dog.  When, plunged in gloom, he returned to the group about the Colonel, he found his pardner asking about “feed.”  No, the old man hadn’t enough fish to spare even a few days’ supply.  Would anybody here sell fish?  No, he didn’t think so.  All the men who had teams were gone to the hills for caribou; there was nobody to send to the Summer Caches.  He held out his hand again for the first instalment of the “eightee dolla,” in kind, that he might put it in his pipe.

“But dogs are no good to us without something to feed ’em.”

The Ingalik looked round as one seeking counsel.

“Get fish tomalla.”

“No, sir.  To-day’s the only day in my calendar.  No buy dogs till we get fish.”

When the negotiations fell through the Indian took the failure far more philosophically than the white men, as was natural.  The old fellow could quite well get on without “eightee dolla”—­could even get on without the tobacco, tea, sugar, and matches represented by that sum, but the travellers could not without dogs get to Minook.  It had been very well to feel set up because they had done the thing that everybody said was impossible.  It had been a costly victory.  Yes, it had come high.  “And, after all, if we don’t get dogs we’re beaten.”

“Oh, beaten be blowed!  We’ll toddle along somehow.”

“Yes, we’ll toddle along if we get dogs.”

And the Boy knew the Colonel was right.

They inquired about Kaltag.

“I reckon we’d better push ahead while we can,” said the Colonel.  So they left the camp that same evening intending to “travel with the moon.”  The settlement was barely out of sight when they met a squaw dragging a sled-load of salmon.  Here was luck!  “And now we’ll go back and get those two dogs.”

As it was late, and trading with the natives, even for a fish, was a matter of much time and patience, they decided not to hurry the dog deal.  It was bound to take a good part of the evening, at any rate.  Well, another night’s resting up was welcome enough.

While the Colonel was re-establishing himself in the best cabin, the Boy cached the sled and then went prowling about.  As he fully intended, he fell in with the Leader—­that “bully Nigger dog.”  His master not in sight—­nobody but some dirty children and the stranger there to see how the Red Dog, in a moment of aberration, dared offer insolence to the Leader.  It all happened through the Boy’s producing a fish, and presenting it on bended knee at a respectful distance.  The Leader bestowed a contemptuous stare upon the stranger and pointedly turned his back.  The Red Dog came