the universal feeling of dread that seemed to settle upon the whole army.  This weird Alaska, so wild and grand, so cool and sweet and sunny in summer, so strangely sad in autumn,—­this many-mooded, little known Alaska that seemed doomed ever to be misunderstood, either over-lauded or lied about,—­what would she do to them?  How cruel, how cold, how weird, how wickedly wild her winters must be!  Most men are brave, and an army of brave men will breast great peril when God’s lamp lights the field; but the stoutest heart dreads the darkness.  These men were sore afraid, all of them; and yet no one was willing to be the first to fall out, so they stood their ground.  They worked with a will born of desperation.

The wind moaned hoarsely.  The temperature dropped to thirty-five degrees below zero, but the men, in sheltered places, kept pounding.  Sometimes they would work all day cleaning the snow from the grade made the day before, and the next day it would probably be drifted full again.  At times the task seemed hopeless; but Heney had promised to build to the summit of White Pass without a stop, and Foy had given Heney his hand across a table at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Skagway.

At times the wind blew so frightfully that the men had to hold hands; but they kept pegging away between blasts, and in a little while were ready to begin bridging the gulches and deep side-canons.  One day—­or one night, rather, for there were no days then—­a camp cook, crazed by the cold and the endless night, wandered off to die.  Hislop and Heney found him, but he refused to be comforted.  He wanted to quit, but Heney said he could not be spared.  He begged to be left alone to sleep in the warm, soft snow, but Heney brought him back to consciousness and to camp.

A premature blast blew a man into eternity.  The wind moaned still more drearily.  The snow drifted deeper and deeper, and one day they found that, for days and days, they had been blasting ice and snow when they thought they were drilling the rock.  Heney and Foy faced each other in the dim light of a tent lamp that night.  “Must we give up?” asked the contractor.

“No,” said Foy, slowly, speaking in a whisper; “we’ll build on snow, for it’s hard and safe; and in the spring we’ll ease it down and make a road-bed.”

They did so.  They built and bedded the cross-ties on the snow, ballasted with snow, and ran over that track until spring without an accident.

They were making mileage slowly, but the awful strain was telling on the men and on the bank account.  The president of the company was almost constantly travelling between Washington and Ottawa, pausing now and again to reach over to London for another bag of gold, for they were melting it up there in the arctic night—­literally burning it up, were these dynamiters of Foy’s.