“What?”

“I don’t know.  That’s the trouble.  But it has a bearing, if only I could remember it.”

“Now you look here, Smoke; don’t you go an’ get bug-house,” Shorty pleaded.  “Think of me!  Let your think-slats rip.  Come on an’ help me pull that shack down.  I’d set her afire, if it wa’n’t for roastin’ them spuds.”

“That’s it!” Smoke exploded, as he sprang to his feet.  “Just what I was trying to remember.  Where’s that kerosene-can?  I’m with you, Shorty.  The potatoes are ours.”

“What’s the game?”

“Watch me, that’s all,” Smoke baffled.  “I always told you, Shorty, that a deficient acquaintance with literature was a handicap, even in the Klondike.  Now what we’re going to do came out of a book.  I read it when I was a kid, and it will work.  Come on.”

Several minutes later, under a pale-gleaming, greenish aurora borealis, the two men crept up to Amos Wentworth’s cabin.  Carefully and noiselessly they poured kerosene over the logs, extra-drenching the door-frame and window-sash.  Then the match was applied, and they watched the flaming oil gather headway.  They drew back beyond the growing light and waited.

They saw Wentworth rush out, stare wildly at the conflagration, and plunge back into the cabin.  Scarcely a minute elapsed when he emerged, this time slowly, half doubled over, his shoulders burdened by a sack heavy and unmistakable.  Smoke and Shorty sprang at him like a pair of famished wolves.  They hit him right and left, at the same instant.  He crumpled down under the weight of the sack, which Smoke pressed over with his hands to make sure.  Then he felt his knees clasped by Wentworth’s arms as the man turned a ghastly face upward.

“Give me a dozen, only a dozen—­half a dozen—­and you can have the rest,” he squalled.  He bared his teeth and, with mad rage, half inclined his head to bite Smoke’s leg, then he changed his mind and fell to pleading.  “Just half a dozen,” he wailed.  “Just half a dozen.  I was going to turn them over to you—­to-morrow.  Yes, to-morrow.  That was my idea.  They’re life!  They’re life!  Just half a dozen!”

“Where’s the other sack?” Smoke bluffed.

“I ate it up,” was the reply, unimpeachably honest.  “That sack’s all that’s left.  Give me a few.  You can have the rest.”

“Ate ’em up!” Shorty screamed.  “A whole sack!  An’ them geezers dyin’ for want of ’em!  This for you!  An’ this!  An’ this!  An’ this!  You swine!  You hog!”

The first kick tore Wentworth away from his embrace of Smoke’s knees.  The second kick turned him over in the snow.  But Shorty went on kicking.

“Watch out for your toes,” was Smoke’s only interference.

“Sure; I’m usin’ the heel,” Shorty answered.  “Watch me.  I’ll cave his ribs in.  I’ll kick his jaw off.  Take that!  An’ that!  Wisht I could give you the boot instead of the moccasin.  You swine!”