There was quite a gathering assembled next morning to see the last of Jan’s new masters.  But though he eyed the crowd closely to find them, Jan saw nothing of Jake or Jean, nor any of his old team-mates.  Beeching and Harry—­the latter a gentleman who, having apparently no faith in his own luck, believed in attaching himself firmly to any more fortunate person who would tolerate his society—­were, to all seeming, not really unpopular.  The thoroughly unpopular man is rarely guyed, with roars of open laughter and back-slapping merriment, by men who wink and nod at one another while joining forces in the matter of ragging their butt.

That was how Beeching was treated by the crowd of acquaintances who came to give him his start on the southward, seaward trail.  Harry was, for the most part, merely ignored.  It was understood that now, as in the past, he was supposed to make himself “useful” by way of paying his shot; and as he had never been known to be any other thing than useless, it was evidence rather of the easy good nature than the perspicacity of his associates that he never had actually lacked food and shelter in that place.  But that was as much, men thought, as “Tame Cat Harry” could possibly expect.  One of the last fond messages flung at Beeching, as his overloaded sled swung out on the trail, was: 

“Don’t you be letting Harry loose, mind you, or he’ll surely hark back on the trail; an’ then we’ll shoot him on sight.”

“Well, say,” yelled another man, “if you do loose him any, be sure you put a muzzle on him, so’s to keep our grub-boxes safe.”

After which crude gibe at Harry’s sponging proclivities, Homeric laughter set a period upon the town’s farewell to Jan’s new masters.  And that laughter stirred to fresh activity the uneasy want of confidence, the rather cheerless sense of foreboding, which, for close upon twenty-four hours now, had been growing in the breast of the team’s leader.  Jan should, perhaps, have felt drawn toward Beeching and Harry, since both were compatriots of his and hailed from southern England.  But England has sent a good many of her most confirmed wastrels oversea, along with the very cream of her manhood; and whether or no, Jan had no more confidence in his masters than he had in Gutty, the husky he had thrashed overnight, and far less than he had in Fish and Pad, the two opponents he had found so much more difficult to trounce.

As a fact, Jan’s skepticism was amply justified.  In the thirty-five-day trip thus begun—­which should have been completed in sixteen days—­Jan was given as striking an example of the effects of man’s muddle-headed, slack-minded incompetence as that which Jean had furnished him of the effects of man’s able-bodied, clear-headed competence and efficiency.  Jan never worked it out in precisely this way, but after his own simple and direct fashion he came to the definite conclusion, before he had been two days on the trail with Beeching and Harry, that, for his part, he would sooner thole the harshest kind of severity or even cruelty in a master, so that it be allied with competence, than he would endure this evils which (in the northland more than in most places) attend all the steps of the man who is slack, shiftless, and incompetent; and, be it noted, make miserable the days of all and sundry who are forced to be in any way dependent on that man.