He did, and ambled gaily along the trail.  He dropped the sack at the next camp-site and ambled back.  It was easier than he had thought.  But two miles had rubbed off the velvet of his strength and exposed the underlying softness.  His second pack was sixty-five pounds.  It was more difficult, and he no longer ambled.  Several times, following the custom of all packers, he sat down on the ground, resting the pack behind him on a rock or stump.  With the third pack he became bold.  He fastened the straps to a ninety-five-pound sack of beans and started.  At the end of a hundred yards he felt that he must collapse.  He sat down and mopped his face.

“Short hauls and short rests,” he muttered.  “That’s the trick.”

Sometimes he did not make a hundred yards, and each time he struggled to his feet for another short haul the pack became undeniably heavier.  He panted for breath, and the sweat streamed from him.  Before he had covered a quarter of a mile he stripped off his woollen shirt and hung it on a tree.  A little later he discarded his hat.  At the end of half a mile he decided he was finished.  He had never exerted himself so in his life, and he knew that he was finished.  As he sat and panted, his gaze fell upon the big revolver and the heavy cartridge-belt.

“Ten pounds of junk!” he sneered, as he unbuckled it.

He did not bother to hang it on a tree, but flung it into the underbush.  And as the steady tide of packers flowed by him, up trail and down, he noted that the other tenderfeet were beginning to shed their shooting-irons.

His short hauls decreased.  At times a hundred feet was all he could stagger, and then the ominous pounding of his heart against his eardrums and the sickening totteriness of his knees compelled him to rest.  And his rests grew longer.  But his mind was busy.  It was a twenty-eight-mile portage, which represented as many days, and this, by all accounts, was the easiest part of it.  “Wait till you get to Chilkoot,” others told him as they rested and talked, “where you climb with hands and feet.”

“They ain’t going to be no Chilkoot,” was his answer.  “Not for me.  Long before that I’ll be at peace in my little couch beneath the moss.”

A slip and a violent, wrenching effort at recovery frightened him.  He felt that everything inside him had been torn asunder.

“If ever I fall down with this on my back, I’m a goner,” he told another packer.

“That’s nothing,” came the answer.  “Wait till you hit the Canyon.  You’ll have to cross a raging torrent on a sixty-foot pine-tree.  No guide-ropes, nothing, and the water boiling at the sag of the log to your knees.  If you fall with a pack on your back, there’s no getting out of the straps.  You just stay there and drown.”

“Sounds good to me,” he retorted; and out of the depths of his exhaustion he almost meant it.

“They drown three or four a day there,” the man assured him.  “I helped fish a German out of there.  He had four thousand in greenbacks on him.”