THE TOIL OF TRAD TRAIL
Thirty days from the time it left Dawson, the Salt Water Mail, with Bud his mates at the fore, arrived at Skaguay. They were in a wretched state, worn out and worn down. Bucks one hundred and forty pounds had dwio one hundred and fifteen. The rest of his mates, though lighter dogs, had relatively lost more weight than he. Pike, the malingerer, who, in his lifetime of deceit, had often successfully feigned a hurt leg, was now limping in ear. Sol-leks was limping, and Dub was suffering from a wrenched shoulder blade.
They were all terribly footsore. N or rebound was left iheir feet fell heavily orail, jarring their bodies and doubling the fatigue of a days travel. There was nothing the matter with them except that they were dead tired. It was not the dead tiredhat es through brief and excessive effort, from which recovery is a matter of hours; but it was the dead tiredhat es through the slorolorength drainage of months of toil. There was no power of recuperatio, no reserve strength to call upon. It had been all used, the last least bit of it. Every muscle, every fiber, every cell, was tired, dead tired. And there was reason for it. Ihan five months they had traveled twenty-five hundred miles, during the last eighteen hundred of which they had but five days rest. When they arrived at Skaguay, they were apparently on their last legs. They could barely keep the traces taut, and on the down grades just mao keep out of the way of the sled.
"Mush on, poor sore feets," the driver enced them as they tottered down the main street of Skaguay. "Dis is de last. De one lo. Eh? For sure. One bully lo."
The drivers fidently expected a long stopover. Themselves, they had covered twelve hundred miles with two days rest, and iure of reason and on justice they deserved an interval of loafing. But so mahe men who had rushed into the Klondike, and so mahe sweethearts, wives, and kin that had not rushed in, that the gested mail was taking on Alpine proportions; also, there were official orders. Fresh batches of Hudson Bay dogs were to take the places of those worthless for the trail. The worthless ones were to be got rid of, and, since dogs t for little against dollars, they were to be sold.
Three days passed, by which time Bud his mates found how really tired ahey were. Then, on the m of the fourth day, two men from the States came along and bought them, harness and all, for a song. The men addressed each other as "Hal" and "Charles". Charles was a middle-aged, lightish colored man, with weak and watery eyes and a mustache that twisted fiercely and vigorously up, giving the lie to the limply drooping lip it cealed. Hal was a youngster of een or twenty, with a big Colts revolver and a hunting krapped about him on a belt that fairly bristled with cartridges. This belt was the most salient thing about him. It advertised his callowness--a callowness sheer and unutterable. Both men were maly out of place, and why such as they should advehe North is part of the mystery of things that passes uanding.
Buck heard the chaffering, saw the money pass between the man and the Gover agent, and khat the Scotch half-breed and the mail-train drivers were passing out of his life on the heels of Perrault and Francois and the others who had gone before. When driven with his mates to the new owners camp, Buck saw a slipshod and slovenly affair, tent half-stretched, dishes unwashed, everything in disorder; also, he saw