With the newcomers hopeless and forlorn, and the old team worn out by
twenty-five hundred miles of continuous trail, the outlook was anything
but bright. The two men, however, were quite cheerful. And they were
proud, too. They were doing the thing in style, with fourteen dogs.
They had seen other sleds depart over the Pass for Dawson, or come in
from Dawson, but never had they seen a sled with so many as fourteen
dogs. In the nature of Arctic travel there was a reason why fourteen
dogs should not drag one sled, and that was that one sled could not
carry the food for fourteen dogs. But Charles and Hal did not know
this. They had worked the trip out with a pencil, so much to a dog, so
many dogs, so many days, Q.E.D. Mercedes looked over their shoulders
and nodded comprehensively, it was all so very simple.
Late next morning Buck led the long team up the street. There was
nothing lively about it, no snap or go in him and his fellows. They
were starting dead weary. Four times he had covered the distance
between Salt Water and Dawson, and the knowledge that, jaded and tired,
he was facing the same trail once more, made him bitter. His heart was
not in the work, nor was the heart of any dog. The Outsides were timid
and frightened, the Insides without confidence in their masters.
Buck felt vaguely that there was no depending upon these two men and
the woman. They did not know how to do anything, and as the days went
by it became apparent that they could not learn. They were slack in all
things, without order or discipline. It took them half the night to
pitch a slovenly camp, and half the morning to break that camp and get
the sled loaded in fashion so slovenly that for the rest of the day
they were occupied in stopping and rearranging the load. Some days they
did not make ten miles. On other days they were unable to get started
at all. And on no day did they succeed in making more than half the
distance used by the men as a basis in their dog-food computation.
It was inevitable that they should go short on dog-food. But they
hastened it by overfeeding, bringing the day nearer when underfeeding
would commence. The Outside dogs, whose digestions had not been trained
by chronic famine to make the most of little, had voracious appetites.
And when, in addition to this, the worn-out huskies pulled weakly, Hal
decided that the orthodox ration was too small. He doubled it. And to
cap it all, when Mercedes, with tears in her pretty eyes and a quaver
in her throat, could not cajole him into giving the dogs still more,
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