The black-eyed man hesitated, then he grinned.  “You’ve got your nerve, but—­I’m blamed if I don’t like it,” said he.  “My brother Jim is cooking supper now.  Suppose we go over to the tent and ask him.”

CHAPTER II

The headwaters of the Dyea River spring from a giant’s punch-bowl.  Three miles above timber-line the valley bottom widens out into a flinty field strewn with boulders which in ages past have lost their footing on the steep hills forming the sides of the cup.  Between these boulders a thin carpet of moss is spread, but the slopes themselves are quite naked; they are seamed and cracked and weather-beaten, their surfaces are split and shattered from the play of the elements.  High up toward the crest of one of them rides a glacier—­a pallid, weeping sentinel which stands guard for the great ice-caps beyond.  Winter snows, summer fogs and rains have washed the hillsides clean; they are leached out and they present a lifeless, forbidding front to travelers.  In many places the granite fragments which still encumber them lie piled one above another in such titanic chaos as to discourage man’s puny efforts to climb over them.  Nevertheless, men have done so, and by the thousands, by the tens of thousands.  On this particular morning an unending procession of human beings was straining up and over and through the confusion.  They lifted themselves by foot and by hand; where the slope was steepest they crept on all-fours.  They formed an unbroken, threadlike stream extending from timberline to crest, each individual being dwarfed to microscopic proportions by the size of his surroundings.  They flowed across the floor of the valley, then slowly, very slowly, they flowed up its almost perpendicular wall.  Now they were lost to sight; again they reappeared clambering over glacier scars or toiling up steep, rocky slides; finally they emerged away up under the arch of the sky.

Looking down from the roof of the pass itself, the scene was doubly impressive, for the wooded valley lay outstretched clear to the sea, and out of it came that long, wavering line of ants.  They did, indeed, appear to be ants, those men, as they dragged themselves across the meadow and up the ascent; they resembled nothing more than a file of those industrious insects creeping across the bottom and up the sides of a bath-tub, and the likeness was borne out by the fact that all carried burdens.  That was in truth the marvel of the scene, for every man on the Chilkoot was bent beneath a back-breaking load.

Three miles down the gulch, where the upward march of the forests had been halted, there, among scattered outposts of scrubby spruce and wind-twisted willow, stood a village, a sprawling, formless aggregation of flimsy tents and green logs known as Sheep Camp.  Although it was a temporary, makeshift town, already it bulked big in the minds of men from Maine to California, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf, for it was the last outpost of civilization, and beyond it lay a land of mystery.  Sheep Camp had become famous by reason of the fact that it was linked with the name of that Via Dolorosa, that summit of despair, the Chilkoot.  Already it had come to stand for the weak man’s ultimate mile-post, the end of many journeys.