There was no sleep in camp that night.  Hour after hour Smoke and Shorty went the rounds, doling the life-renewing potato-juice, a quarter of a spoonful at a dose, into the poor ruined mouths of the population.  And through the following day, while one slept the other kept up the work.

There were no more deaths.  The most awful cases began to mend with an immediacy that was startling.  By the third day, men who had not been off their backs for weeks crawled out of their bunks and tottered around on crutches.  And on that day, the sun, two months then on its journey into northern declination, peeped cheerfully over the crest of the canyon for the first time.

“Nary a potato,” Shorty told the whining, begging Wentworth.  “You ain’t even touched with scurvy.  You got outside a whole sack, an’ you’re loaded against scurvy for twenty years.  Knowin’ you, I’ve come to understand God.  I always wondered why he let Satan live.  Now I know.  He let him live just as I let you live.  But it’s a cryin’ shame, just the same.”

“A word of advice,” Smoke told Wentworth.  “These men are getting well fast; Shorty and I are leaving in a week, and there will be nobody to protect you when these men go after you.  There’s the trail.  Dawson’s eighteen days’ travel.”

“Pull your freight, Amos,” Shorty supplemented, “or what I done to you won’t be a circumstance to what them convalescents’ll do to you.”

“Gentlemen, I beg of you, listen to me,” Wentworth whined.  “I’m a stranger in this country.  I don’t know its ways.  I don’t know the trail.  Let me travel with you.  I’ll give you a thousand dollars if you’ll let me travel with you.”

“Sure,” Smoke grinned maliciously.  “If Shorty agrees.”

“Who?  Me?” Shorty stiffened for a supreme effort.  “I ain’t nobody.  Woodticks ain’t got nothin’ on me when it comes to humility.  I’m a worm, a maggot, brother to the pollywog an’ child of the blow-fly.  I ain’t afraid or ashamed of nothin’ that creeps or crawls or stinks.  But travel with that mistake of creation!  Go ’way, man.  I ain’t proud, but you turn my stomach.”

And Amos Wentworth went away, alone, dragging a sled loaded with provisions sufficient to last him to Dawson.  A mile down the trail Shorty overhauled him.

“Come here to me,” was Shorty’s greeting.  “Come across.  Fork over.  Cough up.”

“I don’t understand,” Wentworth quavered, shivering from recollection of the two beatings, hand and foot, he had already received from Shorty.

“That thousand dollars, d’ ye understand that?  That thousand dollars gold Smoke bought that measly potato with.  Come through.”

And Amos Wentworth passed the gold-sack over.

“Hope a skunk bites you an’ you get howlin’ hydrophoby,” were the terms of Shorty’s farewell.

X. A Flutter in Eggs