“I’ve been holding back to give you a chance,” Smoke jeered.

“An’ I’m plum troddin’ on your heels.  If you can’t do better, let me go ahead and set pace.”

Smoke quickened, and was soon at the rear of the nearest bunch of stampeders.

“Hike along, you, Smoke,” the other urged.  “Walk over them unburied dead.  This ain’t no funeral.  Hit the frost like you was goin’ somewheres.”

Smoke counted eight men and two women in this party, and before the way across the jam-ice was won, he and Shorty had passed another party twenty strong.  Within a few feet of the west bank, the trail swerved to the south, emerging from the jam upon smooth ice.  The ice, however, was buried under several feet of fine snow.  Through this the sled-trail ran, a narrow ribbon of packed footing barely two feet in width.  On either side one sank to his knees and deeper in the snow.  The stampeders they overtook were reluctant to give way, and often Smoke and Shorty had to plunge into the deep snow and by supreme efforts flounder past.

Shorty was irrepressible and pessimistic.  When the stampeders resented being passed, he retorted in kind.

“What’s your hurry?” one of them asked.

“What’s yours?” he answered.  “A stampede come down from Indian River yesterday afternoon an’ beat you to it.  They ain’t no claims left.”

“That being so, I repeat, what’s your hurry?”

“Who?  Me?  I ain’t no stampeder.  I’m workin’ for the government.  I’m on official business.  I’m just traipsin’ along to take the census of Squaw Creek.”

To another, who hailed him with:  “Where away, little one?  Do you really expect to stake a claim?” Shorty answered: 

“Me?  I’m the discoverer of Squaw Creek.  I’m just comin’ back from recordin’ so as to see no blamed chechako jumps my claim.”

The average pace of the stampeders on the smooth going was three miles and a half an hour.  Smoke and Shorty were doing four and a half, though sometimes they broke into short runs and went faster.

“I’m going to travel your feet clean off, Shorty,” Smoke challenged.

“Huh!  I can hike along on the stumps an’ wear the heels off your moccasins.  Though it ain’t no use.  I’ve been figgerin’.  Creek claims is five hundred feet.  Call ’em ten to the mile.  They’s a thousand stampeders ahead of us, an’ that creek ain’t no hundred miles long.  Somebody’s goin’ to get left, an’ it makes a noise like you an’ me.”

Before replying, Smoke let out an unexpected link that threw Shorty half a dozen feet in the rear.  “If you saved your breath and kept up, we’d cut down a few of that thousand,” he chided.

“Who?  Me?  If you’d get outa the way I’d show you a pace what is.”

Smoke laughed, and let out another link.  The whole aspect of the adventure had changed.  Through his brain was running a phrase of the mad philosopher—­“the transvaluation of values.”  In truth, he was less interested in staking a fortune than in beating Shorty.  After all, he concluded, it wasn’t the reward of the game but the playing of it that counted.  Mind, and muscle, and stamina, and soul, were challenged in a contest with this Shorty, a man who had never opened the books, and who did not know grand opera from rag-time, nor an epic from a chilblain.