Often afterwards, when Kit tried to remember that night and failed to bring up aught but nightmare recollections, he wondered what must have been the sufferings of Stine and Sprague.  His one impression of himself was that he struggled through biting frost and intolerable exertion for a thousand years, more or less.

Morning found them stationary.  Stine complained of frosted fingers, and Sprague of his nose, while the pain in Kit’s cheeks and nose told him that he, too, had been touched.  With each accretion of daylight they could see farther, and as far as they could see was icy surface.  The water of the lake was gone.  A hundred yards away was the shore of the north end.  Shorty insisted that it was the opening of the river and that he could see water.  He and Kit alone were able to work, and with their oars they broke the ice and forced the boat along.  And at the last gasp of their strength they made the suck of the rapid river.  One look back showed them several boats which had fought through the night and were hopelessly frozen in; then they whirled around a bend in a current running six miles an hour.

Day by day they floated down the swift river, and day by day the shore-ice extended farther out.  When they made camp at nightfall, they chopped a space in the ice in which to lay the boat and carried the camp outfit hundreds of feet to shore.  In the morning, they chopped the boat out through the new ice and caught the current.  Shorty set up the sheet-iron stove in the boat, and over this Stine and Sprague hung through the long, drifting hours.  They had surrendered, no longer gave orders, and their one desire was to gain Dawson.  Shorty, pessimistic, indefatigable, and joyous, at frequent intervals roared out the three lines of the first four-line stanza of a song he had forgotten.  The colder it got the oftener he sang: 

     “Like Argus of the ancient times,
       We leave this Modern Greece;
      Tum-tum, tum-tum, tum-tum, tum-tum,
       To shear the Golden Fleece.”

As they passed the mouths of the Hootalinqua and the Big and Little Salmon, they found these streams throwing mush-ice into the main Yukon.  This gathered about the boat and attached itself, and at night they found themselves compelled to chop the boat out of the current.  In the morning they chopped the boat back into the current.

The last night ashore was spent between the mouths of the White River and the Stewart.  At daylight they found the Yukon, half a mile wide, running white from ice-rimmed bank to ice-rimmed bank.  Shorty cursed the universe with less geniality than usual, and looked at Kit.

“We’ll be the last boat this year to make Dawson,” Kit said.

“But they ain’t no water, Smoke.”

“Then we’ll ride the ice down.  Come on.”