“Can’t you keep still?” Smoke chided.  “Leave the almanac alone.  You’ll have all Dawson awake and after us.”

“Huh!  See the light in that cabin?  An’ in that one over there?  An’ hear that door slam?  Oh, sure Dawson’s asleep.  Them lights?  Just buryin’ their dead.  They ain’t stampedin’, betcher life they ain’t.”

By the time they reached the foot of the hill and were fairly in Dawson, lights were springing up in the cabins, doors were slamming, and from behind came the sound of many moccasins on the hard-packed snow.  Again Shorty delivered himself.

“But it beats hell the amount of mourners there is.”

They passed a man who stood by the path and was calling anxiously in a low voice:  “Oh, Charley; get a move on.”

“See that pack on his back, Smoke?  The graveyard’s sure a long ways off when the mourners got to pack their blankets.”

By the time they reached the main street a hundred men were in line behind them, and while they sought in the deceptive starlight for the trail that dipped down the bank to the river, more men could be heard arriving.  Shorty slipped and shot down the thirty-foot chute into the soft snow.  Smoke followed, knocking him over as he was rising to his feet.

“I found it first,” he gurgled, taking off his mittens to shake the snow out of the gauntlets.

The next moment they were scrambling wildly out of the way of the hurtling bodies of those that followed.  At the time of the freeze-up, a jam had occurred at this point, and cakes of ice were up-ended in snow-covered confusion.  After several hard falls, Smoke drew out his candle and lighted it.  Those in the rear hailed it with acclaim.  In the windless air it burned easily, and he led the way more quickly.

“It’s a sure stampede,” Shorty decided.  “Or might all them be sleep-walkers?”

“We’re at the head of the procession at any rate,” was Smoke’s answer.

“Oh, I don’t know.  Mebbe that’s a firefly ahead there.  Mebbe they’re all fireflies—­that one, an’ that one.  Look at ’em!  Believe me, they is a whole string of processions ahead.”

It was a mile across the jams to the west bank of the Yukon, and candles flickered the full length of the twisting trail.  Behind them, clear to the top of the bank they had descended, were more candles.

“Say, Smoke, this ain’t no stampede.  It’s a exode-us.  They must be a thousand men ahead of us an’ ten thousand behind.  Now, you listen to your uncle.  My medicine’s good.  When I get a hunch it’s sure right.  An’ we’re in wrong on this stampede.  Let’s turn back an’ hit the sleep.”

“You’d better save your breath if you intend to keep up,” Smoke retorted gruffly.

“Huh!  My legs is short, but I slog along slack at the knees an’ don’t worry my muscles none, an’ I can sure walk every piker here off the ice.”

And Smoke knew he was right, for he had long since learned his comrade’s phenomenal walking powers.