The stick would have fallen on the Boy; he dodged it, calling excitedly, “Come here, Nig!  Here!”

“He’s my dog, and I’ll lamm him if I like.  You—­” The Colonel couldn’t see just where the Boy and the culprit were.  Stumbling a few paces away from the glare of the fire, he called out, “I’ll kill that brute if he snaps at me again!”

“Oh yes,” the Boy’s voice rang passionately out of the gloom, “I know you want him killed.”

The Colonel sat down heavily on the rolled-up bag.  Presently the bubbling of boiling snow-water roused him.  He got up, divided the biscuit, and poured the hot water over the fragments.  Then he sat down again, and waited for them to “swell like thunder.”  He couldn’t see where, a little way up the hillside, the Boy sat on a fallen tree with Nig’s head under his arm.  The Boy felt pretty low in his mind.  He sat crouched together, with his head sunk almost to his knees.  It was a lonely kind of a world after all.  Doing your level best didn’t seem to get you any forrader.  What was the use?  He started.  Something warm, caressing, touched his cold face just under one eye.  Nig’s tongue.

“Good old Nig!  You feel lonesome, too?” He gathered the rough beast up closer to him.

Just then the Colonel called, “Nig!”

“Sh! sh!  Lie quiet!” whispered the Boy.

“Nig!  Nig!”

“Good old boy!  Stay here!  He doesn’t mean well by you. Sh! quiet! Quiet, I say!”

“Nig!” and the treacherous Colonel gave the peculiar whistle both men used to call the dogs to supper.  The dog struggled to get away, the Boy’s stiff fingers lost their grip, and “the best leader in the Yukon” was running down the bank as hard as he could pelt, to the camp fire—­to the cooking-pot.

The Boy got up and floundered away in the opposite direction.  He must get out of hearing.  He toiled on, listening for the expected gunshot—­hearing it, too, and the yawp of a wounded dog, in spite of a mitten clapped at each ear.

“That’s the kind of world it is!  Do your level best, drag other fellas’ packs hundreds o’ miles over the ice with a hungry belly and bloody feet, and then—­Poor old Nig!—­’cause you’re lame—­poor old Nig!” With a tightened throat and hot water in his eyes, he kept on repeating the dog’s name as he stumbled forward in the snow.  “Nev’ mind, old boy; it’s a lonely kind o’ world, and the right trail’s hard to find.”  Suddenly he stood still.  His stumbling feet were on a track.  He had reached the dip in the saddle-back of the hill, and—­yes! this was the right trail; for down on the other side below him were faint lights—­huts—­an Indian village! with fish and food for everybody.  And Nig—­Nig was being—­

The Boy turned as if a hurricane had struck him, and tore back down the incline—­stumbling, floundering in the snow, calling hoarsely:  “Colonel, Colonel! don’t do it!  There’s a village here, Colonel!  Nig!  Colonel, don’t do it!”