Futilely protesting, Sprague and Stine were bundled on board.  For half an hour, with axes, Kit and Shorty struggled to cut a way into the swift but solid stream.  When they did succeed in clearing the shore-ice, the floating ice forced the boat along the edge for a hundred yards, tearing away half of one gunwale and making a partial wreck of it.  Then, at the lower end of the bend, they caught the current that flung off-shore.  They proceeded to work farther toward the middle.  The stream was no longer composed of mush-ice but of hard cakes.  In between the cakes only was mush-ice, that froze solidly as they looked at it.  Shoving with the oars against the cakes, sometimes climbing out on the cakes in order to force the boat along, after an hour they gained the middle.  Five minutes after they ceased their exertions, the boat was frozen in.  The whole river was coagulating as it ran.  Cake froze to cake, until at last the boat was the center of a cake seventy-five feet in diameter.  Sometimes they floated sideways, sometimes stern-first, while gravity tore asunder the forming fetters in the moving mass, only to be manacled by faster-forming ones.  While the hours passed, Shorty stoked the stove, cooked meals, and chanted his war-song.

Night came, and after many efforts, they gave up the attempt to force the boat to shore, and through the darkness they swept helplessly onward.

“What if we pass Dawson?” Shorty queried.

“We’ll walk back,” Kit answered, “if we’re not crushed in a jam.”

The sky was clear, and in the light of the cold, leaping stars they caught occasional glimpses of the loom of mountains on either hand.  At eleven o’clock, from below, came a dull, grinding roar.  Their speed began to diminish, and cakes of ice to up-end and crash and smash about them.  The river was jamming.  One cake, forced upward, slid across their cake and carried one side of the boat away.  It did not sink, for its own cake still upbore it, but in a whirl they saw dark water show for an instant within a foot of them.  Then all movement ceased.  At the end of half an hour the whole river picked itself up and began to move.  This continued for an hour, when again it was brought to rest by a jam.  Once again it started, running swiftly and savagely, with a great grinding.  Then they saw lights ashore, and, when abreast, gravity and the Yukon surrendered, and the river ceased for six months.

On the shore at Dawson, curious ones, gathered to watch the river freeze, heard from out of the darkness the war-song of Shorty: 

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

For three days Kit and Shorty labored, carrying the ton and a half of outfit from the middle of the river to the log-cabin Stine and Sprague had bought on the hill overlooking Dawson.  This work finished, in the warm cabin, as twilight was falling, Sprague motioned Kit to him.  Outside the thermometer registered sixty-five below zero.