Even Mac was found agreeing with the others of his Trio that, since they had a grand, tough time in front of them, it was advisable to get through the black months ahead with as little wear and tear as possible.  In spite of the Trio’s superior talents, they built a small ramshackle cabin with a tumble-down fireplace, which served them so ill that they ultimately spent all their waking hours in the more comfortable quarters of the Colonel and the Boy.  It had been agreed that these two, with the help, or, at all events, the advice, of the others, should build the bigger, better cabin, where the stores should be kept and the whole party should mess—­a cabin with a solid outside chimney of stone and an open fireplace, generous of proportion and ancient of design, “just like down South.”

The weather was growing steadily colder; the ice was solid now many feet out from each bank of the river.  In the middle of the flood the clotted current still ran with floe-ice, but it was plain the river was settling down for its long sleep.

Not silently, not without stress and thunder.  The handful of dwellers on the shore would be waked in the night by the shock and crash of colliding floes, the sound of the great winds rushing by, and—­“Hush!  What’s that?” Tired men would start up out of sleep and sit straight to listen.  Down below, among the ice-packs, the noise as of an old-time battle going on—­tumult and crashing and a boom! boom! like cannonading.

Then one morning they woke to find all still, the conflict over, the Yukon frozen from bank to bank.  No sound from that day on; no more running water for a good seven months.

Winter had come.

While the work went forward they often spoke of the only two people they had thus far seen.  Both Potts and O’Flynn had been heard to envy them.

Mac had happened to say that he believed the fellow in furs was an Englishman—­a Canadian, at the very least.  The Americans chaffed him, and said, “That accounts for it,” in a tone not intended to flatter.  Mac hadn’t thought of it before, but he was prepared to swear now that if an Englishman—­they were the hardiest pioneers on earth—­or a Canadian was in favour of lighting out, “it must be for some good reason.”

“Oh yes; we all know that reason.”

The Americans laughed, and Mac, growing hot, was goaded into vaunting the Britisher and running down the Yankee.

“Yankee!” echoed the Kentuckian.  “And up in Nova Scotia they let this man teach school!  Doesn’t know the difference yet between the little corner they call New England and all the rest of America.”

“All the rest of America!” shouted Mac.  “The cheeky way you people of the States have of gobbling the Continent (in talk), just as though the British part of it wasn’t the bigger half!”

“Yes; but when you think which half, you ought to be obliged to any fellow for forgetting it.”  And then they referred to effete monarchical institutions, and by the time they reached the question of the kind of king the Prince of Wales would make, Mac was hardly a safe man to argue with.