Page:Hendryx--Connie Morgan with the Mounted.djvu/287

Rh boy's forehead puckered in a frown as he thought of Peters.

"I liked Shorty," he muttered. "He would do anything in the world for a friend. Everybody likes him. The Superintendent said this morning that all Shorty needs to make a first-class man is a good stiff jolt that will wake him up."

For three weeks past the men of B Division had mentioned Peters's name rarely, with grave faces and in the past tense, as men speak of the dead. "Trouble with Shorty was, he never stopped to think. He did the first thing that popped into his head. But just the same he was a fool to desert. His time will be up next month. Wherever he is I bet he is wishing that he was back this very minute." With a last look at the town Connie cracked his long whip and started the dogs northward down the Yukon.

It was a late spring, and as the sled slipped smoothly over the hard-packed snow the boy thought of that other day just a year ago when he had slashed the lashings of his pack and shot those same dogs out over the shore ice to rescue Big Dan McKeever from death on the floating ice-pan.

One by one, as he mushed steadily northward,