Adventure Magazine Cover — page 105: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The End of the Trail Daly surmised. “Reckon I better dangle out there. Might get a shot-at him.” As he pulled on his clothes a hearty kick sounded on the door. ‘‘Who’s there!” he cried. “Tt’s me, Ryan. Lemme in,’’ came the response. Daly sprang to the door and drew the bolt. Ryan staggered into the room. “Lord, boys, ’m plumb glad to find you here,”’ he gasped. ‘“‘What’s up, Jim? Whaat’s wrong?” ‘“‘Bishop’s shot himself. I come to get your dogs.” Once more that night Jim Ryan set out on a journey. But this time it was one of ease. With a huge hot meal stowed away beneath his ribs and snugly wrapped in frost-excluding robes he lay at full length in the rawhide basket of a big toboggan and slept the sleep of exhaustion, while the to- boggan sped steadily onward over moonlit ice in the wake of eight powerful huskies, with young Mike Daly officiating at the handle-bars to keep it right side up. It was forty hours later when thirteen malemiuts, their sharp ears standing up- right and brushes curled proudly over shaggy frost-covered backs, burst from the wall of forest and bounded down to the frozen surface of a vast, wind-swept lake. Back of them bobbed a big toboggan con- taining the robe-wrapped body of the wounded trapper, with Daly at the handle- bars and Ryan trotting behind. As the leader reached the ice he stopped suddenly, looked questioningly to the left and the right, then back at the men. Across the expanse of ice ahead no sign of trail was visible. Ryan and Daly hurried out ahead of the dogs and circling in opposite directions re- turned to the toboggan. “What luck?” Daly asked. Ryan slowly shook his head. ‘‘None,”’ he said. ‘There must have been consider- able snow when the Siwashes broke out the trail in the Fall, and last night’s wind swept er away slick and clean. There ain’t a bloomin’ scratch to tell which way she goes from here.” ‘“‘Just some more of our same kind of rot- ten luck,” Daly growled. It seemed that misfortune had indeed cast her lot with them the moment they loaded Bishop into the toboggan and started south on the hundred-and-fifty- GS mile journey to the mission hospital at Fort Yukon. Straining every muscle to make the greatest speed and wasting not a moment of time that could be saved, their patience had been taxed to the limit by countless annoying incidents, from broken harness and dog-fights to open water on the river which necessitated wide detours in loose, unbroken snow. When they reached the portage trail and the shelter of the timber with only sixty miles between them and their goal they felt the greatest difficulties had been passed. It was not so, however. Across long stretches of swamp and in spaces where the timber was sparse the loose snow on either side of the packed trail had been swept away and the trail stood up eight inches above the ground, a narrow, slippery back- bone that required the constant effort of both men to keep the toboggan upon it. And then they arrived on the shore of the lake to find the trail entirely obliter- ated. They looked hopelessly out across the ice toward the dim line of forest that marked the other side, in whose ten or twelve miles of length there was one tiny spot where the trail led through its otherwise im- penetrable wall. That spot they had to find. “I know this lake—Fish Lake, the Si- washes call it,” Ryan declared. “But I don’t know no more’n the man in the moon where the trail quits it. It may be straight across, or at the south end or the north end or anywhere in between. It’s got my nanny; I don’t know what the to do.” “Well we gotta keep movin’, that’s a cinch,” Daly answered. “If we stand here much longer we’ll be froze stiffer’n a poker. Looks like a toss-up to me. Le’s leave it to the dogs. That old leader of mine is a plumb wise miut. He’s pulled me out o’ more’n one tight hole before now. Maybe he can smell us out o’ this one.”’ There was nothing else to be done Ryan hopped into the toboggan, and Daly stepped on to the foot-board at the rear and spoke to the dogs: : “Come, you mutts! Come alive there!’ They sprang up in readiness to go. The leader again looked to the right, to the left and behind. “Mush on, Nugget! Mush on there!” Then Nugget with his nose close to the ice set off in a diagonal direction toward the southern end of the lake. They were nearing the other side when GOMIIGHOO S (© inn