The Race for Number One

It was a foretaste of what would happen when the men reached their sleds.

Men were pouring over the other bank and piling into the jam.

They swarmed up the bank in bunches, and in bunches were dragged back by their impatient fellows.

More blows were struck, curses rose from the panting chests of those who still had wind to spare, and Smoke, curiously visioning the face of Joy Gastell, hoped that the mallets would not be brought into play.

Overthrown, trod upon, groping in the snow for his lost stakes, he at last crawled out of the crush and attacked the bank farther along.

Others were doing this, and it was his luck to have many men in advance of him in the race for the northwestern corner.

Down to the fourth corner, he tripped midway and in the long sprawling fall lost his remaining stake. For five minutes he groped in the darkness before he found it, and all the time the panting runners were passing him.

From the last corner to the creek he began overtaking men for whom the mile-run had been too much. In the creek itself Bedlam had broken loose.

A dozen sleds were piled up and overturned, and nearly a hundred dogs were locked in combat. Among them men struggled, tearing the tangled animals apart, or beating them apart with clubs.

In the fleeting glimpse he caught of it, Smoke wondered if he had ever seen a Dore grotesquery to compare.

Leaping down the bank beyond the glutted passage, he gained the hard-footing of the sled-trail and made better time. Here, in packed harbours beside the narrow trail, sleds and men waited for runners that were still behind.

From the rear came the whine and rush of dogs, and Smoke had barely time to leap aside into the deep snow.

A sled tore past, and he made out the man, kneeling and shouting madly. Scarcely was it by when it stopped with a crash of battle.

The excited dogs of a harboured sled, resenting the passing animals, had got out of hand and sprung upon them.

Smoke plunged around and by. He could see the green lantern of Von Schroeder, and, just below it, the red flare that marked his own team.

Two men were guarding Schroeder's dogs, with short clubs interposed between them and the trail.

"Come on, you Smoke! Come on, you Smoke!" he could hear Shorty calling anxiously.

"Coming!" he gasped.

By the red flare he could see the snow torn up and trampled, and from the way his partner breathed he knew a battle had been fought.

He staggered to the sled, and, in a moment he was falling on it, Shorty's whip snapped as he yelled: "Mush! you devils! Mush!"

The dogs sprang into the breast-bands, and the sled jerked abruptly ahead.

They were big animals--Hanson's prize team of Hudson Bays-- and Smoke had selected them for the first stage, which included the ten miles of Mono, the heavy-going of the cut-off across the flat at the mouth, and the first ten miles of the Yukon stretch.

"How many are ahead?" he asked.

"You shut up an' save your wind," Shorty answered. "Hi! you brutes! Hit her up! Hit her up!"

He was running behind the sled, towing on a short rope. Smoke could not see him; nor could he see the sled on which he lay at full length.

The fires had been left in the rear, and they were tearing through a wall of blackness as fast as the dogs could spring into it.

This blackness was almost sticky, so nearly did it take on the seeming of substance.

Smoke felt the sled heel up on one runner as it rounded an invisible curve, and from ahead came the snarls of beasts and the oaths of men.

This was known afterward as the Barnes-Slocum Jam.

It was the teams of these two men which first collided, and into it, at full career, piled Smoke's seven big fighters.

Scarcely more than semi- domesticated wolves, the excitement of that night on Mono Creek had sent every dog fighting-mad.

The Klondike dogs, driven without reins, cannot be stopped except by voice, so that there was no stopping this glut of struggle that heaped itself between the narrow rims of the creek.

From behind, sled after sled hurled into the turmoil. Men who had their teams nearly extricated were overwhelmed by fresh avalanches of dogs--each animal well-fed, well-rested, and ripe for battle.

"It's knock down an' drag out an' plow through!" Shorty yelled in his partner's ear.

"An' watch out for your knuckles! You drag out an' let me do the punchin'!"

What happened in the next half hour Smoke never distinctly remembered.

At the end he emerged exhausted, sobbing for breath, his jaw sore from a first-blow, his shoulder aching from the bruise of a club, the blood running warmly down one leg from the rip of a dog's fangs, and both sleeves of his parka torn to shreds.

As in a dream, while the battle still raged behind, he helped Shorty reharness the dogs.

One, dying, they cut from the traces, and in the darkness they felt their way to the repair of the disrupted harnesses.

"Now you lie down an' get your wind back," Shorty commanded.

And through the darkness the dogs sped, with unabated strength, down Mono Creek, across the long cut-off, and to the Yukon.

Here, at the junction with the main river-trail, somebody had lighted a fire, and here Shorty said good bye.

By the light of the fire, as the sled leaped behind the flying dogs, Smoke caught another of the unforgettable pictures of the North Land.

It was of Shorty, swaying and sinking down limply in the snow, yelling his parting encouragement, one eye blackened and closed, knuckles bruised and broken, and one arm, ripped and fang-torn, gushing forth a steady stream of blood.

[V.

"How many ahead?" Smoke asked, as he dropped his tired Hudson Bays and sprang on the waiting sled at the first relay station.

"I counted eleven," the man called after him, for he was already away behind the leaping dogs.

Fifteen miles they were to carry him on the next stage, which would fetch him to the mouth of White River.

There were nine of them, but they composed his weakest team.

The twenty-five miles between White River and Sixty Mile he had broken into two stages because of ice- jams, and here two of his heaviest, toughest teams were stationed.