“Doc,” he murmured admiringly.  “You can sure go some.”

The weary black eyes, under heavy lids, acknowledged the compliment.

“But that ain’t the question.  Rocky is clawed something scand’lous.  As I said before, I helped sew up his in’ards.  Doc....”  He shook the man, whose eyes had again closed.  “I say, Doc!  The question is:  can you go some more?—­hear me?  I say, can you go some more?”

The weary dogs snapped and whimpered when kicked from their sleep.  The going was slow, not more than two miles an hour, and the animals took every opportunity to lie down in the wet snow.

“Twenty miles of it, and we’ll be through the gorge,” Daw encouraged.  “After that the ice can go to blazes, for we can take to the bank, and it’s only ten more miles to camp.  Why, Doc, we’re almost there.  And when you get Rocky fixed up, you can come down in a canoe in one day.”

But the ice grew more uneasy under them, breaking loose from the shore-line and rising steadily inch by inch.  In places where it still held to the shore, the water overran and they waded and slushed across.  The Little Peco growled and muttered.  Cracks and fissures were forming everywhere as they battled on for the miles that each one of which meant ten along the tops.

“Get on the sled, Doc, an’ take a snooze,” Daw invited.

The glare from the black eyes prevented him from repeating the suggestion.

As early as midday they received definite warning of the beginning of the end.  Cakes of ice, borne downward in the rapid current, began to thunder beneath the ice on which they stood.  The dogs whimpered anxiously and yearned for the bank.

“That means open water above,” Daw explained.  “Pretty soon she’ll jam somewheres, an’ the river’ll raise a hundred feet in a hundred minutes.  It’s us for the tops if we can find a way to climb out.  Come on!  Hit her up I!  An’ just to think, the Yukon’ll stick solid for weeks.”

Unusually narrow at this point, the great walls of the canyon were too precipitous to scale.  Daw and Linday had to keep on; and they kept on till the disaster happened.  With a loud explosion, the ice broke asunder midway under the team.  The two animals in the middle of the string went into the fissure, and the grip of the current on their bodies dragged the lead-dog backward and in.  Swept downstream under the ice, these three bodies began to drag to the edge the two whining dogs that remained.  The men held back frantically on the sled, but were slowly drawn along with it.  It was all over in the space of seconds.  Daw slashed the wheel-dog’s traces with his sheath-knife, and the animal whipped over the ice-edge and was gone.  The ice on which they stood, broke into a large and pivoting cake that ground and splintered against the shore ice and rocks.  Between them they got the sled ashore and up into a crevice in time to see the ice-cake up-edge, sink, and down-shelve from view.