The tiny stream slipping down the mossy-lipped stone seemed suddenly to increase the volume of its gurgling noise.  Save for the meadow larks, there was no other sound.  The great yellow butterflies drifted silently through the sunshine and lost themselves in the drowsy shadows.  Madge gazed triumphantly at her husband.

A few minutes later Wolf got upon his feet.  Decision and deliberation marked his movements.  He did not glance at the man and woman.  His eyes were fixed up the trail.  He had made up his mind.  They knew it.  And they knew, so far as they were concerned, that the ordeal had just begun.

He broke into a trot, and Madge’s lips pursed, forming an avenue for the caressing sound that it was the will of her to send forth.  But the caressing sound was not made.  She was impelled to look at her husband, and she saw the sternness with which he watched her.  The pursed lips relaxed, and she sighed inaudibly.

Wolf’s trot broke into a run.  Wider and wider were the leaps he made.  Not once did he turn his head, his wolf’s brush standing out straight behind him.  He cut sharply across the curve of the trail and was gone.

[Illustration]

THAT SPOT

I don’t think much of Stephen Mackaye any more, though I used to swear by him.  I know that in those days I loved him more than my own brother.  If ever I meet Stephen Mackaye again, I shall not be responsible for my actions.  It passes beyond me that a man with whom I shared food and blanket, and with whom I mushed over the Chilcoot Trail, should turn out the way he did.  I always sized Steve up as a square man, a kindly comrade, without an iota of anything vindictive or malicious in his nature.  I shall never trust my judgment in men again.  Why, I nursed that man through typhoid fever; we starved together on the headwaters of the Stewart; and he saved my life on the Little Salmon.  And now, after the years we were together, all I can say of Stephen Mackaye is that he is the meanest man I ever knew.

We started for the Klondike in the fall rush of 1897, and we started too late to get over Chilcoot Pass before the freeze-up.  We packed our outfit on our backs part way over, when the snow began to fly, and then we had to buy dogs in order to sled it the rest of the way.  That was how we came to get that Spot.  Dogs were high, and we paid one hundred and ten dollars for him.  He looked worth it.  I say looked, because he was one of the finest appearing dogs I ever saw.  He weighed sixty pounds, and he had all the lines of a good sled animal.  We never could make out his breed.  He wasn’t husky, nor Malemute, nor Hudson Bay; he looked like all of them and he didn’t look like any of them; and on top of it all he had some of the white man’s dog in him, for on one side, in the thick of the mixed yellow-brown-red-and-dirty-white that was his prevailing color, there was a spot of coal-black as big as a water-bucket.  That was why we called him Spot.