“Come on, Colonel!” she commanded, with a new sharpness.  “Keep up your lick.”

But the Colonel had had about enough of this gait.  From now on he fell more and more behind.  But the Boy was with her neck and neck.

“Guess you’re goin’ to get there.”

“Guess I am.”

Some men behind them began to run.  They passed.  They had pulled off their parkis, and left them where they fell.  They threw off their caps now, and the sweat rolled down their faces.  Not a countenance but wore that immobile look, the fixed, unseeing eye of the spent runner, who is overtaxing heart and lungs.  Not only Maudie now, but everyone was silent.  Occasionally a man would rouse himself out of a walk, as if out of sleep, and run a few yards, going the more weakly after.  Several of the men who had been behind caught up.

Where was Kentucky?

If Maudie wondered, she wasted no time over the speculation.  For his own good she had admonished him to keep up his lick, but of course the main thing was that Maudie should keep up hers.

“What if this is the great day of my life!” thought the Boy.  “Shall I always look back to this?  Why, it’s Sunday.  Wonder if Kentucky remembers?” Never pausing, the Boy glanced back, vaguely amused, and saw the Colonel plunging heavily along in front of half a dozen, who were obviously out of condition for such an expedition—­eyes bloodshot, lumbering on with nervous “whisky gait,” now whipped into a breathless gallop, now half falling by the way.  Another of the Gold Nugget women with two groggy-looking men, and somewhere down the trail, the crippled Swede swearing at his squaw.  A dreamy feeling came over the Boy.  Where in the gold basins of the North was this kind of thing not happening—­finished yesterday, or planned for to-morrow?  Yes, it was typical.  Between patches of ragged black spruce, wide stretches of snow-covered moss, under a lowering sky, and a mob of men floundering through the drifts to find a fortune.  “See how they run!”—­mad mice.  They’d been going on stampedes all winter, and would go year in, year out, until they died.  The prizes were not for such as they.  As for himself—­ah, it was a great day for him!  He was going at last to claim that gold-mine he had come so far to find.  This was the decisive moment of his life.  At the thought he straightened up, and passed Maudie.  She gave him a single sidelong look, unfriendly, even fierce.  That was because he could run like sixty, and keep it up.  “When I’m a millionaire I shall always remember that I’m rich because I won the race.”  A dizzy feeling came over him.  He seemed to be running through some softly resisting medium like water—­no, like wine jelly.  His heart was pounding up in his throat.  “What if something’s wrong, and I drop dead on the way to my mine?  Well, Kentucky’ll look after things.”