“Bad?”

“Shoulder dislocated.  Some ribs broke for sure.  Right arm broke.  An’ clawed clean to the bone most all over but the face.  We sewed up two or three bad places temporary, and tied arteries with twine.”

“That settles it,” Linday sneered.  “Where were they?”

“Stomach.”

“He’s a sight by now.”

“Not on your life.  Washed clean with bug-killin’ dope before we stitched.  Only temporary anyway.  Had nothin’ but linen thread, but washed that, too.”

“He’s as good as dead,” was Linday’s judgment, as he angrily fingered the cards.

“Nope.  That man ain’t goin’ to die.  He knows I’ve come for a doctor, an’ he’ll make out to live until you get there.  He won’t let himself die.  I know him.”

“Christian Science and gangrene, eh?” came the sneer.  “Well, I’m not practising.  Nor can I see myself travelling a hundred miles at fifty below for a dead man.”

“I can see you, an’ for a man a long ways from dead.”

Linday shook his head.  “Sorry you had your trip for nothing.  Better stop over for the night.”

“Nope.  We’ll be pullin’ out in ten minutes.”

“What makes you so cocksure?” Linday demanded testily.

Then it was that Tom Daw made the speech of his life.

“Because he’s just goin’ on livin’ till you get there, if it takes you a week to make up your mind.  Besides, his wife’s with him, not sheddin’ a tear, or nothin’, an’ she’s helpin’ him live till you come.  They think a almighty heap of each other, an’ she’s got a will like hisn.  If he weakened, she’d just put her immortal soul into hisn an’ make him live.  Though he ain’t weakenin’ none, you can stack on that.  I’ll stack on it.  I’ll lay you three to one, in ounces, he’s alive when you get there.  I got a team of dawgs down the bank.  You ought to allow to start in ten minutes, an’ we ought to make it back in less’n three days because the trail’s broke.  I’m goin’ down to the dawgs now, an’ I’ll look for you in ten minutes.”

Tom Daw pulled down his earflaps, drew on his mittens, and passed out.

“Damn him!” Linday cried, glaring vindictively at the closed door.

II

That night, long after dark, with twenty-five miles behind them, Linday and Tom Daw went into camp.  It was a simple but adequate affair:  a fire built in the snow; alongside, their sleeping-furs spread in a single bed on a mat of spruce boughs; behind the bed an oblong of canvas stretched to refract the heat.  Daw fed the dogs and chopped ice and firewood.  Linday’s cheeks burned with frost-bite as he squatted over the cooking.  They ate heavily, smoked a pipe and talked while they dried their moccasins before the fire, and turned in to sleep the dead sleep of fatigue and health.

Morning found the unprecedented cold snap broken.  Linday estimated the temperature at fifteen below and rising.  Daw was worried.  That day would see them in the canyon, he explained, and if the spring thaw set in the canyon would run open water.  The walls of the canyon were hundreds to thousands of feet high.  They could be climbed, but the going would be slow.