Going into a corner among the heaps of freight, his mind still filled with the vision of the Indian with the redoubtable pack, Kit essayed to learn his own strength.  He picked out a sack of flour which he knew weighed an even hundred pounds.  He stepped astride it, reached down, and strove to get it on his shoulder.  His first conclusion was that one hundred pounds were real heavy.  His next was that his back was weak.  His third was an oath, and it occurred at the end of five futile minutes, when he collapsed on top of the burden with which he was wrestling.  He mopped his forehead, and across a heap of grub-sacks saw John Bellew gazing at him, wintry amusement in his eyes.

“God!” proclaimed that apostle of the hard.  “Out of our loins has come a race of weaklings.  When I was sixteen I toyed with things like that.”

“You forget, avuncular,” Kit retorted, “that I wasn’t raised on bear-meat.”

“And I’ll toy with it when I’m sixty.”

“You’ve got to show me.”

John Bellew did.  He was forty-eight, but he bent over the sack, applied a tentative, shifting grip that balanced it, and, with a quick heave, stood erect, the somersaulted sack of flour on his shoulder.

“Knack, my boy, knack—­and a spine.”

Kit took off his hat reverently.

“You’re a wonder, avuncular, a shining wonder.  D’ye think I can learn the knack?”

John Bellew shrugged his shoulders.  “You’ll be hitting the back trail before we get started.”

“Never you fear,” Kit groaned.  “There’s O’Hara, the roaring lion, down there.  I’m not going back till I have to.”

Kit’s first pack was a success.  Up to Finnegan’s Crossing they had managed to get Indians to carry the twenty-five-hundred-pound outfit.  From that point their own backs must do the work.  They planned to move forward at the rate of a mile a day.  It looked easy—­on paper.  Since John Bellew was to stay in camp and do the cooking, he would be unable to make more than an occasional pack; so to each of the three young men fell the task of carrying eight hundred pounds one mile each day.  If they made fifty-pound packs, it meant a daily walk of sixteen miles loaded and of fifteen miles light—­“Because we don’t back-trip the last time,” Kit explained the pleasant discovery.  Eighty-pound packs meant nineteen miles travel each day; and hundred-pound packs meant only fifteen miles.

“I don’t like walking,” said Kit.  “Therefore I shall carry one hundred pounds.”  He caught the grin of incredulity on his uncle’s face, and added hastily:  “Of course I shall work up to it.  A fellow’s got to learn the ropes and tricks.  I’ll start with fifty.”