Page:Hendryx--Connie Morgan with the Mounted.djvu/20

2 the toughest and most hardened of trail mushers, is fraught with peril and heart-breaking discomfort.

So it was that the big men crowded about and shouted hearty greetings to the diminutive Jehu. And Connie Morgan, the boy of the dog team, returned the greeting in kind, even as his eyes swept the faces of the encircling crowd.

“Bet a stack o’ blues I c’n name him!” cried a voice from the rear of the throng: “He’s Sam Morgan’s boy, an’ take it from me, pards, he’s shore some tillicum!” The speaker elbowed his way to the forefront and extended a huge, red hand: “Do I win?” he smiled.

“You win,” laughed the boy as the man turned toward the others:

“Heer’d ’bout him in Eagle—how he gi’n ’em all the slip an’ tuck out arter his pardner—out yonder, beyond the Ogilvies, wher’ they say—” The man paused and shuddered: “Well—they’s some here that know’d Carlson, an’ Carlson wasn’t no chechako—not what ye c’d notice. That there country got him—but this kid, here, he come back—an’ not ondly he come back hisself, but he fetched out his pardner, an’ another”