“I’ll do it,” he said.  “I’ll win it.”

The glad light in her eyes seemed to promise a greater meed than all the gold in the Mono claim.  He was aware of a movement of her hand in her lap next to his.  Under the screen of the tablecloth he thrust his own hand across and met a firm grip of woman’s fingers that sent another wave of warmth through him.

“What will Shorty say?” was the thought that flashed whimsically through his mind as he withdrew his hand.  He glanced almost jealously at the faces of Von Schroeder and Jones, and wondered if they had not divined the remarkableness and deliciousness of this woman who sat beside him.

He was aroused by her voice, and realized that she had been speaking some moments.

“So you see, Arizona Bill is a white Indian,” she was saying.  “And Big Olaf is a bear wrestler, a king of the snows, a mighty savage.  He can out-travel and out-endure an Indian, and he’s never known any other life but that of the wild and the frost.”

“Who’s that?” Captain Consadine broke in from across the table.

“Big Olaf,” she answered.  “I was just telling Mr. Bellew what a traveller he is.”

“You’re right,” the Captain’s voice boomed.  “Big Olaf is the greatest traveller in the Yukon.  I’d back him against Old Nick himself for snow-bucking and ice-travel.  He brought in the government dispatches in 1895, and he did it after two couriers were frozen on Chilkoot and the third drowned in the open water of Thirty Mile.”

Smoke had travelled in a leisurely fashion up to Mono Creek, fearing to tire his dogs before the big race.  Also, he had familiarized himself with every mile of the trail and located his relay camps.  So many men had entered the race that the hundred and ten miles of its course was almost a continuous village.  Relay camps were everywhere along the trail.  Von Schroeder, who had gone in purely for the sport, had no less than eleven dog-teams—­a fresh one for every ten miles.  Arizona Bill had been forced to content himself with eight teams.  Big Olaf had seven, which was the complement of Smoke.  In addition, over two score of other men were in the running.  Not every day, even in the golden north, was a million dollars the prize for a dog race.  The country had been swept of dogs.  No animal of speed and endurance escaped the fine-tooth comb that had raked the creeks and camps, and the prices of dogs had doubled and quadrupled in the course of the frantic speculation.

Number Three below Discovery was ten miles up Mono Creek from its mouth.  The remaining hundred miles was to be run on the frozen breast of the Yukon.  On Number Three itself were fifty tents and over three hundred dogs.  The old stakes, blazed and scrawled sixty days before by Cyrus Johnson, still stood, and every man had gone over the boundaries of the claim again and again, for the race with the dogs was to be preceded by a foot and obstacle race.  Each man had to relocate the claim for himself, and this meant that he must place two center-stakes and four corner-stakes and cross the creek twice, before he could start for Dawson with his dogs.