The man shook his head.

“Three hundred.  Three-fifty.”

At four hundred, the man nodded, and said, “Come on over to my cabin an’ weigh out the dust.”

The two squeezed their way to the door, and slipped out.  After a few minutes Breck returned alone.

Harding was testifying, when Smoke saw the door shoved open slightly, and in the crack appear the face of the man who had sold the flour.  He was grimacing and beckoning emphatically to some one inside, who arose from near the stove and started to work toward the door.

“Where are you goin’, Sam?” Shunk Wilson demanded.

“I’ll be back in a jiffy,” Sam explained.  “I jes’ got to go.”

Smoke was permitted to question the witnesses, and he was in the middle of the cross-examination of Harding when from without came the whining of dogs in harness, and the grind and churn of sled-runners.  Somebody near the door peeped out.

“It’s Sam an’ his pardner an’ a dog-team hell-bent down the trail for Stewart River,” the man reported.

Nobody spoke for a long half-minute, but men glanced significantly at one another, and a general restlessness pervaded the packed room.  Out of the corner of his eye, Smoke caught a glimpse of Breck, Lucy, and her husband whispering together.

“Come on, you,” Shunk Wilson said gruffly to Smoke.  “Cut this questionin’ short.  We know what you’re tryin’ to prove—­that the other bank wa’n’t searched.  The witness admits it.  We admit it.  It wa’n’t necessary.  No tracks led to that bank.  The snow wa’n’t broke.”

“There was a man on the other bank just the same,” Smoke insisted.

“That’s too thin for skatin’, young man.  There ain’t many of us on the McQuestion, an’ we got every man accounted for.”

“Who was the man you hiked out of camp two weeks ago?” Smoke asked.

“Alonzo Miramar.  He was a Mexican.  What’s that grub-thief got to do with it?”

“Nothing, except that you haven’t accounted for him, Mr. Judge.”

“He went down the river, not up.”

“How do you know where he went?”

“Saw him start.”

“And that’s all you know of what became of him?”

“No, it ain’t, young man.  I know, we all know, he had four days’ grub an’ no gun to shoot meat with.  If he didn’t make the settlement on the Yukon he’d croaked long before this.”

“I suppose you’ve got all the guns in this part of the country accounted for, too,” Smoke observed pointedly.

Shunk Wilson was angry.  “You’d think I was the prisoner the way you slam questions into me.  Now then, come on with the next witness.  Where’s French Louis?”

While French Louis was shoving forward, Lucy opened the door.

“Where you goin’?” Shunk Wilson shouted.

“I reckon I don’t have to stay,” she answered defiantly.  “I ain’t got no vote, an’ besides, my cabin’s so jammed up I can’t breathe.”