“One hundred-and seventy,” he corrected.

“You don’t look as though you had ever been troubled with sickness.  Never an invalid?”

“N-no.”

“And your comrades?  They are miners?”

“Never mining in their lives.  They worked in the same establishment with me.  That’s what makes it so hard, don’t you see!  We’d known one another for years!  And to go off and leave me just because I couldn’t keep up!”

“My friend,” and Frona knew she was speaking for the race, “you are strong as they.  You can work just as hard as they; pack as much.  But you are weak of heart.  This is no place for the weak of heart.  You cannot work like a horse because you will not.  Therefore the country has no use for you.  The north wants strong men,—­strong of soul, not body.  The body does not count.  So go back to the States.  We do not want you here.  If you come you will die, and what then of| your wife and babies?  So sell out your outfit and go back.  You will be home in three weeks.  Good-by.”

She passed through Sheep Camp.  Somewhere above, a mighty glacier, under the pent pressure of a subterranean reservoir, had burst asunder and hurled a hundred thousand tons of ice and water down the rocky gorge.  The trail was yet slippery with the slime of the flood, and men were rummaging disconsolately in the rubbish of overthrown tents and caches.  But here and there they worked with nervous haste, and the stark corpses by the trail-side attested dumbly to their labor.  A few hundred yards beyond, the work of the rush went on uninterrupted.  Men rested their packs on jutting stones, swapped escapes whilst they regained their breath, then stumbled on to their toil again.

The mid-day sun beat down upon the stone “Scales.”  The forest had given up the struggle, and the dizzying heat recoiled from the unclothed rock.  On either hand rose the ice-marred ribs of earth, naked and strenuous in their nakedness.  Above towered storm-beaten Chilcoot.  Up its gaunt and ragged front crawled a slender string of men.  But it was an endless string.  It came out of the last fringe of dwarfed shrub below, drew a black line across a dazzling stretch of ice, and filed past Frona where she ate her lunch by the way.  And it went on, up the pitch of the steep, growing fainter and smaller, till it squirmed and twisted like a column of ants and vanished over the crest of the pass.

Even as she looked, Chilcoot was wrapped in rolling mist and whirling cloud, and a storm of sleet and wind roared down upon the toiling pigmies.  The light was swept out of the day, and a deep gloom prevailed; but Frona knew that somewhere up there, clinging and climbing and immortally striving, the long line of ants still twisted towards the sky.  And she thrilled at the thought, strong with man’s ancient love of mastery, and stepped into the line which came out of the storm behind and disappeared into the storm before.