“Tired?  H’m!  Something of a walk to Holy Cross even on a nice mild day like this.”  The Colonel made the reflection with obvious satisfaction, took off his knapsack, and sat down again.  The Boy did the same.  “The very day you lit out Father Orloff came up from the Russian mission.”

“What’s he like?”

“Oh, little fella in petticoats, with a beard an’ a high pot-hat, like a Russian.  And that same afternoon we had a half-breed trader fella here, with two white men.  Since that day we haven’t seen a human creature.  We bought some furs of the trader.  Where’d you get yours?”

“Pymeut.  Any news about the strike?”

“Well, the trader fella was sure it was all gammon, and told us stories of men who’d sacrificed everything and joined a stampede, and got sold—­sold badly.  But the two crazy whites with him—­miners from Dakotah—­they were on fire about Minook.  Kept on bragging they hadn’t cold feet, and swore they’d get near to the diggins as their dogs’d take ’em.  The half-breed said they might do a hundred miles more, but probably wouldn’t get beyond Anvik.”

“Crazy fools!  I tell you, to travel even thirty miles on the Yukon in winter, even with a bully team and old Nick to drive ’em, and not an extra ounce on your back—­I tell you, Colonel, it’s no joke.”

“B’lieve you, sonny.”

It wasn’t thirty seconds before sonny was adding:  “Did that half-breed think it was any use our trying to get dogs?”

“Ain’t to be had now for love or money.”

“Lord, Colonel, if we had a team—­”

“Yes, I know.  We’ll probably owe our lives to the fact that we haven’t.”

It suddenly occurred to the Boy that, although he had just done a pretty good tramp and felt he’d rather die than go fifty feet further, it was the Colonel who was most tired.

“How’s everybody?”

“Oh, I s’pose we might all of us be worse off.”

“What’s the matter?”

He was so long answering that the Boy’s eyes turned to follow the serious outward gaze of the older man, even before he lifted one hand and swept it down the hill and out across the dim, grey prospect.

“This,” said the Colonel.

Their eyes had dropped down that last stretch of the steep snow slope, across the two miles of frozen river, and ran half round the wide horizon-line, like creatures in a cage.  Whether they liked it or whether they didn’t, for them there was no way out.

“It’s the awful stillness.”  The Colonel arraigned the distant ice-plains.

They sat there looking, listening, as if they hoped their protest might bring some signal of relenting.  No creature, not even a crystal-coated willow-twig, nothing on all the ice-bound earth stirred by as much as a hair; no mark of man past or present broke the grey monotony; no sound but their two voices disturbed the stillness of the world.  It was a quiet that penetrated, that pricked to vague alarm.  Already both knew the sting of it well.