Connie Morgan in Alaska

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t cover the men who were? Isn't that the picture? And isn't it the evening of a dull grey day, just at the time when the gloom of twilight shades into the black pall of night, and way toward the edge of the world, on the indistinct horizon, a lurid red glow tints the low-hung clouds-no flames-only the dull, illusive glow that wavers and fades in the heavens above other burning hom

orth-the gaunt, white, silent land beyond the haunts o

upon the outlines of ice crags a hundred miles away. Stand there alone, enveloped by the solitude of the land where men never lived-nor ever will live-where the silence is a thing, pressing closer and closer about

ls the last word of utter solitude and desolation, is the short, quick, single bark of the Arctic fox as he pads invisible as a phantom in his haunts among the echoing rim-rocks. Amid these surroundings, brains give way. Not soften into maudlin idiocy, but explode in a frenzy of viol

ice-cavern that had served as a shelter through all the days of the great blizzard, when the wind-lashed snow, fine as fr

, the boy was strangely awed by the vastness of it all. It was unreal. He missed the black-green of the timber belt that relieved the long sweep of his own mountains, for here, from rounded foothill to topmost pinnacle, the mountains were as bare of vegetation as floating icebergs. The very silence was unnatural and the boy's lips pressed tightly together as thoughts of Ten Bow crowded his brain: the windlass-capped shafts, the fresh dumps that showed against the white snow of the valley; the red flash and glow of the fires in the night that thawed out the gravel for the next day's digging; the rough log cabins ranged up and down the gulch in t

. At the sting of the tears the little form stiffened and the boy glanced swiftly about him as, with a mittened hand, he dashed the moisture from his

'm homesick! Bah! What would Waseche say if he could see me now? And Dad? There was a man! Sam Morgan!"

ink of me like they talk of you, than to have all the gold in the world!" He leaped

n of Eagle! And I'll find Waseche, too! I'm not afraid of you! You cold, white Lillimuit-with your big, bare, frozen

that no man had ever tamed, ranged himself close at his side and, with bristling hair an

ft, and to the right the sheer wall of the glacier formed an insurmountable barrier. The dry, hard-packed snow afforded excellent footing and McDougall's trained sled dogs made good time as they followed the lead of old Boris who, trott

. As he rounded a sharp bend, Connie halted the dogs in dismay for, a short distance in front of him, the ice-wall of the glacier slanted suddenly against the granite shoulder of a high butte

did-while I slept?" Then, as his glance fell upon the dogs, he smiled. "You bet, he didn't!" he cried aloud, "not with thirteen wolf-dogs camped beside the trail. Slasher would growl and bristle up if a man came within hal

a few minutes before, he had rounded the sharp angle of the trail and gasped at the sight that met his gaze. The weather-whitened ice of the glacier wall was rent and shivered in a broad, green scar, and in the canyon a mass of broken ice fifty feet high completely blocked the back trail. He was imprisoned! Not in a man-made jail of iron bars and concrete-but

ffed industriously about the base of the glacier. Big, lumbering Mutt, who in harness could out-pull any dog in the Northland, rolled about in the snow and barked foolishly in his excitement. Slasher, more wolf tha

d in the chasm like a pistol shot. At the foot of the moraine he unharnessed and fed the dogs, spread his robes in the shelter of a bold-faced grey rock, and unrolled his sleeping bag. He built a fire and thawed out some bannock, over which he poured the grease from the pan of sizzling bacon. Connie was hungry and he devoured his solitary meal greedily, washing it down with gre

rd at the little stars that winked and glittered in cold, white brilliance wher

someway," he m

e got out, and, y

irst into Ragged Falls canyon that day, he died like a man dies-in the big outdoors, with the mountains, and the pine trees, and the snow! And that's the way I'll die! If I never get out of this hole, when they find me they won't find me in this sleeping bag-'cause I'll work to the end of my grub. I'll dig, and chop, and hack a wa