“Cheerful, I must say,” said Kit, battling his way to his feet and tottering on.

He and the sack of beans became a perambulating tragedy.  It reminded him of the old man of the sea who sat on Sinbad’s neck.  And this was one of those intensely masculine vacations, he meditated.  Compared with it, the servitude to O’Hara was sweet.  Again and again he was nearly seduced by the thought of abandoning the sack of beans in the brush and of sneaking around the camp to the beach and catching a steamer for civilization.

But he didn’t.  Somewhere in him was the strain of the hard, and he repeated over and over to himself that what other men could do, he could.  It became a nightmare chant, and he gibbered it to those that passed him on the trail.  At other times, resting, he watched and envied the stolid, mule-footed Indians that plodded by under heavier packs.  They never seemed to rest, but went on and on with a steadiness and certitude that were to him appalling.

He sat and cursed—­he had no breath for it when under way—­and fought the temptation to sneak back to San Francisco.  Before the mile pack was ended he ceased cursing and took to crying.  The tears were tears of exhaustion and of disgust with self.  If ever a man was a wreck, he was.  As the end of the pack came in sight, he strained himself in desperation, gained the camp-site, and pitched forward on his face, the beans on his back.  It did not kill him, but he lay for fifteen minutes before he could summon sufficient shreds of strength to release himself from the straps.  Then he became deathly sick, and was so found by Robbie, who had similar troubles of his own.  It was this sickness of Robbie that braced Kit up.

“What other men can do, we can do,” Kit told Robbie, though down in his heart he wondered whether or not he was bluffing.

“And I am twenty-seven years old and a man,” he privately assured himself many times in the days that followed.  There was need for it.  At the end of a week, though he had succeeded in moving his eight hundred pounds forward a mile a day, he had lost fifteen pounds of his own weight.  His face was lean and haggard.  All resilience had gone out of his body and mind.  He no longer walked, but plodded.  And on the back-trips, travelling light, his feet dragged almost as much as when he was loaded.

He had become a work animal.  He fell asleep over his food, and his sleep was heavy and beastly, save when he was aroused, screaming with agony, by the cramps in his legs.  Every part of him ached.  He tramped on raw blisters; yet even this was easier than the fearful bruising his feet received on the water-rounded rocks of the Dyea Flats, across which the trail led for two miles.  These two miles represented thirty-eight miles of travelling.  He washed his face once a day.  His nails, torn and broken and afflicted with hangnails, were never cleaned.  His shoulders and chest, galled by the pack-straps, made him think, and for the first time with understanding, of the horses he had seen on city streets.