Page:GB Lancaster--law-bringer.djvu/97

Rh savagery such as they loved. The huge short-haired Mackenzie hound was buckled into his rightful place in the lead, where he proclaimed his content with head up. Sharkey, the one husky of the team, backed his vigorously-curled tail against the sled, and along the traces between Dick strung the mongrels, quick and certainly. They stood motionless as Tempest brought the second team round the corner at a run. And then Dick slipped his feet into the snow-shoe thongs.

"Get busy," he said to Kennedy. "Mush, boys. Mush along."

He cracked the long whip once, and at the yard gate he wheeled to send Poley a parting word of cheer.

"I gave Alice another sketch of you last night, Poley," he shouted.

On the lip of the forest Dick sprang ahead to break trail; swinging his weight on alternate feet and jerking up the heel of the long shoe with the kick born of much practice. The new-fallen snow packed in the shoe-lacings and before the runners, and all Dick's endurance and great muscle-power were sternly taxed before he halted, taking heavy breaths through his nostrils, and reached his coat from the sled.

"Get down to it," he said.

Kennedy hesitated. This was his first winter trail, and he was soft.

"Suppose I get cramp, or the snow-shoe heel?" he suggested. "Suppose you don't," said Dick with meaning, and dropped into place beside the sleds.

This trip promised all the elements that were good for Dick. There was danger, there was unusualness, there was likely to be sufficient bodily discomfort to flog quiet in him the restless passions that grew during stagnation. Early in the fall a handful of men and women had come from the States and up the water-ways, calling themselves a lost tribe of Israel, and thrusting through the wilderness in the certain expectation of finding the land of Canaan at the North Pole. Remembering a recent march of the Doukhobors in "the altogether," when the Mounted Police chased them with underclothing and much tact, Tempest