“We’re covering this spruce-tea route four times a day, and there are eighty of you to be dosed each time,” Smoke informed Laura Sibley.  “So we’ve no time to fool.  Will you take it or must I hold your nose?” His thumb and forefinger hovered eloquently above her.  “It’s vegetable, so you needn’t have any qualms.”

“Qualms!” Shorty snorted.  “No, sure, certainly not.  It’s the deliciousest dope!”

Laura Sibley hesitated.  She gulped her apprehension.

“Well?” Smoke demanded peremptorily.

“I’ll—­I’ll take it,” she quavered.  “Hurry up!”

That night, exhausted as by no hard day of trail, Smoke and Shorty crawled into their blankets.

“I’m fairly sick with it,” Smoke confessed.  “The way they suffer is awful.  But exercise is the only remedy I can think of, and it must be given a thorough trial.  I wish we had a sack of raw potatoes.”

“Sparkins he can’t wash no more dishes,” Shorty said.  “It hurts him so he sweats his pain.  I seen him sweat it.  I had to put him back in the bunk, he was that helpless.”

“If only we had raw potatoes,” Smoke went on.  “The vital, essential something is missing from that prepared stuff.  The life has been evaporated out of it.”

“An’ if that young fellow Jones in the Brownlow cabin don’t croak before morning I miss my guess.”

“For Heaven’s sake be cheerful,” Smoke chided.

“We got to bury him, ain’t we?” came the indignant snort.  “I tell you that boy’s something awful—­”

“Shut up,” Smoke said.

And after several more indignant snorts, the heavy breathing of sleep arose from Shorty’s bunk.

In the morning, not only was Jones dead, but one of the stronger men who had worked on the firewood squad was found to have hanged himself.  A nightmare procession of days set in.  For a week, steeling himself to the task, Smoke enforced the exercise and the spruce-tea.  And one by one, and in twos and threes, he was compelled to knock off the workers.  As he was learning, exercise was the last thing in the world for scurvy patients.  The diminishing burial squad was kept steadily at work, and a surplus half-dozen graves were always burned down and waiting.

“You couldn’t have selected a worse place for a camp,” Smoke told Laura Sibley.  “Look at it—­at the bottom of a narrow gorge, running east and west.  The noon sun doesn’t rise above the top of the wall.  You can’t have had sunlight for several months.”

“But how was I to know?”

He shrugged his shoulders.  “I don’t see why not, if you could lead a hundred fools to a gold-mine.”

She glared malevolently at him and hobbled on.  Several minutes afterward, coming back from a trip to where a squad of groaning patients was gathering spruce-boughs, Smoke saw the seeress entering Amos Wentworth’s cabin and followed after her.  At the door he could hear her voice, whimpering and pleading.