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chest was low to the ground, his head forward and down, while his
feet were flying like mad, the claws scarring the hard-packed snow in
parallel grooves. The sled swayed and trembled, half-started forward.
One of his feet slipped, and one man groaned aloud. Then the sled
lurched ahead in what appeared a rapid succession of jerks, though it
never really came to a dead stop again...half an inch...an inch... two
inches... The jerks perceptibly diminished; as the sled gained momentum,
he caught them up, till it was moving steadily along.

Men gasped and began to breathe again, unaware that for a moment they
had ceased to breathe. Thornton was running behind, encouraging Buck
with short, cheery words. The distance had been measured off, and as he
neared the pile of firewood which marked the end of the hundred yards,
a cheer began to grow and grow, which burst into a roar as he passed
the firewood and halted at command. Every man was tearing himself loose,
even Matthewson. Hats and mittens were flying in the air. Men were
shaking hands, it did not matter with whom, and bubbling over in a
general incoherent babel.

But Thornton fell on his knees beside Buck. Head was against head,
and he was shaking him back and forth. Those who hurried up heard him
cursing Buck, and he cursed him long and fervently, and softly and
lovingly.

"Gad, sir! Gad, sir!" spluttered the Skookum Bench king. "I'll give you
a thousand for him, sir, a thousand, sir--twelve hundred, sir."

Thornton rose to his feet. His eyes were wet. The tears were streaming
frankly down his cheeks. "Sir," he said to the Skookum Bench king, "no,
sir. You can go to hell, sir. It's the best I can do for you, sir."

Buck seized Thornton's hand in his teeth. Thornton shook him back and
forth. As though animated by a common impulse, the onlookers drew back
to a respectful distance; nor were they again indiscreet enough to
interrupt.




Chapter VII. The Sounding of the Call


When Buck earned sixteen hundred dollars in five minutes for John
Thornton, he made it possible for his master to pay off certain debts
and to journey with his partners into the East after a fabled lost mine,
the history of which was as old as the history of the country. Many men
had sought it; few had found it; and more than a few there were who had
never returned from the quest. This lost mine was steeped in tragedy and
shrouded in mystery. No one knew of the first man. The oldest tradition
stopped before it got back to him. From the beginning there had been an
ancient and ramshackle cabin. Dying men had sworn to it, and to the mine
the site of which it marked, clinching their testimony with nuggets that
were unlike any known grade of gold in the Northland.

But no living man had looted this treasure house, and the dead were
dead; wherefore John Thornton and Pete and Hans, with Buck and half a
dozen other dogs, faced into the East on an unknown trail to achieve
where men and dogs as good as themselves had failed. They sledded
seventy miles up the Yukon, swung to the left into the Stewart River,
passed the Mayo and the McQuestion, and held on until the Stewart itself
became a streamlet, threading the upstanding peaks which marked the
backbone of the continent.

John Thornton asked little of man or nature. He was unafraid of the
wild. With a handful of salt and a rifle he could plunge into the
wilderness and fare wherever he pleased and as long as he pleased. Being
in no haste, Indian fashion, he hunted his dinner in the course of the
day's travel; and if he failed to find it, like the Indian, he kept on
travelling, secure in the knowledge that sooner or later he would come
to it. So, on this great journey into the East, straight meat was the
bill of fare, ammunition and tools principally made up the load on the
sled, and the time-card was drawn upon the limitless future.

To Buck it was boundless delight, this hunting, fishing, and indefinite
wandering through strange places. For weeks at a time they would hold
on steadily, day after day; and for weeks upon end they would camp, here
and there, the dogs loafing and the men burning holes through frozen
muck and gravel and washing countless pans of dirt by the heat of the
fire. Sometimes they went hungry, sometimes they feasted riotously, all
according to the abundance of game and the fortune of hunting. Summer
arrived, and dogs and men packed on their backs, rafted across blue
mountain lakes, and descended or ascended unknown rivers in slender
boats whipsawed from the standing forest.

The months came and went, and back and forth they twisted through the
uncharted vastness, where no men were and yet where men had been if
the Lost Cabin were true. They went across divides in summer blizzards,
shivered under the midnight sun on naked mountains between the timber
line and the eternal snows, dropped into summer valleys amid swarming
gnats and flies, and in the shadows of glaciers picked strawberries and
flowers as ripe and fair as any the Southland could boast. In the fall
of the year they penetrated a weird lake country, sad and silent,
where wildfowl had been, but where then there was no life nor sign of
life--only the blowing of chill winds, the forming of ice in sheltered
places, and the melancholy rippling of waves on lonely beaches.

And through another winter they wandered on the obliterated trails of
men who had gone before. Once, they came upon a path blazed through the
forest, an ancient path, and the Lost Cabin seemed very near. But the
path began nowhere and ended nowhere, and it remained mystery, as the
man who made it and the reason he made it remained mystery. Another time
they chanced upon the time-graven wreckage of a hunting lodge, and
amid the shreds of rotted blankets John Thornton found a long-barrelled
flint-lock. He knew it for a Hudson Bay Company gun of the young days
in the Northwest, when such a gun was worth its height in beaver skins
packed flat, And that was all--no hint as to the man who in an early day
had reared the lodge and left the gun among the blankets.

Spring came on once more, and at the end of all their wandering they
found, not the Lost Cabin, but a shallow placer in a broad valley where
the gold showed like yellow butter across the bottom of the washing-pan.
They sought no farther. Each day they worked earned them thousands of
dollars in clean dust and nuggets, and they worked every day. The gold
was sacked in moose-hide bags, fifty pounds to the bag, and piled
like so much firewood outside the spruce-bough lodge. Like giants they
toiled, days flashing on the heels of days like dreams as they heaped
the treasure up.

There was nothing for the dogs to do, save the hauling in of meat now
and again that Thornton killed, and Buck spent long hours musing by
the fire. The vision of the short-legged hairy man came to him more