FullReads

It was during the quieter hours when the place rumbled to snores that Folsom yielded to his desire to write his wife, a desire which had been growing steadily. He was disgusted with Harkness, disappointed with the whole Kobuk enterprise, and in a peculiarly softened mood, therefore, he wrote with no attempt to conceal his yearning, homesick tenderness.

But when he read the letter in the morning it struck him as weak and sentimental, just the sort of letter he would regret having written if it should transpire that Lois did not altogether share his feelings. So he tore it up.

Those were the days of faint trails and poor accommodations; as yet the road to the Arctic was little traveled and imperfectly known, so Harkness acted as guide. He had bragged that he knew every inch of the country, but he soon proved that his ideas of distance were vague and faulty–a serious shortcoming in a land with no food, no shelter, and no firewood except green willows in the gulch-bottoms. Folsom began to fear that the fellow’s sense of direction was equally bad, and taxed him with it, but Harkness scoffed at the idea.

Leaving the last road-house behind them, they came into a hilly section of great white domes, high hog-backs, and ramifying creeks, each one exactly like its neighbor; two days’ travel through this, according to Harkness, should have brought them to the Imnachuck, where there was food and shelter again. But when they pitched camp for the second night Folsom felt compelled to remind his partner that they were behind their schedule, and that this was the last of their grub.

“Are you sure you’re going right?” he inquired.

“Sure? Of course I’m sure. D’you think I’m lost?”

Folsom fed some twisted willow-tops into the sheet-iron stove. “I wouldn’t recommend you as a pathfinder,” said he. “You said we’d sleep out one night. This is two, and to-morrow we’ll walk hungry.”

“Well, don’t blame me!” challenged the other. “I’m going slow on your account.”

Now nothing could have galled Folsom more than a reflection upon his ability to travel. His lips whitened, he was upon the point of speaking his mind, but managed to check himself in time. Harkness’s personality rasped him to the raw, and he had for days struggled against an utterly absurd but insistent desire to seize the little coxcomb by the throat and squeeze the arrogance out of him as juice is squeezed out of a lemon. There is flesh for which one’s fingers itch.

“I notice you’re ready to camp when I am,” the larger man muttered. “Understand, this is no nice place to be without grub, for it’s liable to storm any hour, and storms last at this season.”

“Now don’t get cold feet.” Harkness could be maddeningly patronizing when he chose. “Leave it to me. I’ll take you a short cut, and we’ll eat lunch in a cabin to-morrow noon.”

But noon of the next day found Harkness still plodding up the river with the dogs close at his heels. The hills to the northward were growing higher, and Folsom’s general knowledge of direction told him that they were in danger of going too far.

“I think the Imnachuck is over there,” said he.

Harkness hesitated, then he nodded: “Right-o! It’s just over that low saddle.” He indicated a sweeping hillside ahead, and a half-mile further on he left the creek and began to climb. This was heavy work for the dogs, and mid-afternoon came before the partners had gained the summit only to discover that they were not upon a saddleback after all, but upon the edge of a vast rolling tableland from which a fanlike system of creeks radiated. In all directions was a desolate waste of barren peaks.

Folsom saw that the sky ahead was thick and dark, as if a storm impended, and realizing only too well the results of the slightest error in judgment he called to Harkness. But the latter pretended not to hear, and took advantage of the dogs’ fatigue to hurry out of earshot. It was some time before the team overhauled him.