“I’ve got a horse here; won’t stand,” said the woman.  “Will you hold his head?  Can leaking back here in my wagon, leaking all over my other stuff.”

The horse came round the corner.  He moved resolutely to meet them.  He was the boniest, small horse Sheila had ever seen—­a shadow of a horse, one-eyed, morose, embittered.  The harness hung loose upon his meagerness; the shafts stuck up like the points of a large collar on a small old man.

“He’s not running away,” explained the owner superfluously.  “It’s just that he can’t stop.  You’d think, to look at him, that stopping would be his favorite sport.  But you’d be mistaken.  Go he must.  He’s kind of always crazy to get there—­Lord knows where—­probably to the end of his life.”

Sheila held the horse, and rubbed his nose with her small and gentle hand.  The creature drooped under the caress and let its lower lip, with a few stiff white hairs, hang and quiver bitterly.  It half-closed its one useful eye, a pale eye of intense, colorless disillusionment.

When the wagon stopped, a dog who was trotting under it stopped too and lay down in the dust, panting.  Sheila bent her head a little to see the dog.  She had a child’s intense interest in animals.  Through the dimness she made out a big, wolfish creature with a splendid, clean, gray coat, his pointed nose, short, pointed ears, deep, wild eyes, and scarlet tongue, set in a circular ruff of black.  His bushy tail curled up over his back.

“What kind of dog is that?” asked Sheila, thinking the great animal under the wagon better fitted to pull the load than the shadowy little horse in front of it.

“Quarter wolf,” answered the woman in her casual manner of speech, her resonant voice falling pleasantly on the light coolness of the evening air; “Malamute.  This fellow was littered on the body of a dead man.”

Sheila had also the child’s interest in tales.  “Tell me about it,” she begged fervently.

The woman stopped in her business of tying down a canvas cover over her load and gave Sheila an amused and searching look.  She held an iron spike between her teeth, but spoke around it skillfully.

“Arctic exploration it was.  My brother was one of the party.  ’T was he brought me home Berg.  Berg’s mother was one of the sledge dogs.  Party was shipwrecked, starved, most of the dogs eaten, one man dead.  Berg’s mother littered on the body one night.  Next morning they were rescued and the new family was saved.  Otherwise I guess they’d have had a puppy stew and Berg and his wife and family wouldn’t be earning their living with me.”

“How do they earn their living?” asked Sheila, still peering at the hero of the tale.

“They pull my sled about winters, Hidden Creek.”

“Oh, you live in the Hidden Creek country?”

“Yes.  Got a ranch up not far from the source.  Ever been over The Hill?”

She came toward Sheila, gathered the reins into her strong, broad hands, held them in her teeth, and began to pull on her canvas gloves.  She talked with the reins between her teeth as she had with the spike, her enunciation triumphantly forceful and distinct.