The Silver Horde | Page 2

landscape into a blurred monotone, playing strange pranks with the eye that grew tired trying to pierce it.
The travellers had been plodding sullenly, hour after hour, dispirited by the weight of the storm, which bore them down like some impalpable, resistless burden. There was no reality in earth, air, or sky. Their vision was rested by no spot of color save themselves, apparently swimming through an endless, formless atmosphere of gray.
"Fingerless" Fraser broke trail, but to Boyd Emerson, who drove, he seemed to be a sort of dancing doll, bobbing and swaying grotesquely, as if suspended by invisible wires. At times, it seemed to the driver's whimsical fancy as if each of them trod a measure in the centre of a colorless universe, something after the fashion of goldfish floating in a globe.
Fraser pulled up without warning and instantly the dogs stopped, straightway beginning to soothe their trail-worn pads and to strip the ice-pellets from between their toes. But the "wheelers" were too tired to make the effort, so Emerson went forward and performed the task for them, while Fraser floundered back and sank to a sitting posture on the sled.
"Whew!" he exclaimed, "this is sure tough. If I don't see a tree or something with enough color to bust this monotony I'll go dotty."
"Another day like this and we'd both be snow-blind," observed Emerson grimly, as he bent to his task. "But it can't be far to the river now."
"This fall has covered the trail till I have to feel it out with my feet," grumbled Fraser. "When I step off to one side I go in up to my hips. It's like walking a plank a foot deep in feathers, and I feel like I was a mile above the earth in a heavy fog." After a moment he continued: "Speaking of feathers, how'd you like to have a fried chicken a la Maryland?"
"Shut up!" said the man at the dogs, crossly.
"Well, it don't do any harm to think about it," growled Fraser, good- naturedly. He felt out a pipe from his pocket and endeavored unsuccessfully to blow through it, then complained:
"The damn thing is froze. It seems like a man can't practice no vices whatever in this country. I'm glad I'm getting out of it."
"So am I," agreed the younger man. Having completed his task, he came back to the sled and seated himself beside the other.
"As I was saying a mile back yonder," Fraser resumed, "whatever made you snatch me away from them blue-coated minions of the law, I don't know. You says it's for company, to be sure, but we visit with one another about like two deef-mutes. Why did you do it, Bo?"
"Well, you talk enough for both of us."
"Yes, but that ain't no reason why you should lay yourself liable to the 'square-toes.' You ain't the kind to take a chance just because you're lonesome."
"I picked you up because of your moth-eaten morals, I dare say. I was tired of myself, and you interested me. Besides," Emerson added, reflectively, "I have no particular cause to love the law, either."
"That's how I sized it," said Fraser, wagging his head with animation, "I knew you'd had some kind of a run-in. What was it? This is low down, see, and confidential, as between two crooks. I'll never snitch."
"Hold on there! I'm not a crook. I'm not sufficiently ingenious to be a member of your honorable profession."
"Well, I guess my profession is as honorable as most. I've tried all of them, and they're all alike. It's simply a question of how the other fellow will separate easiest." He stopped and tightened his snow-shoe thong, then rising, gazed curiously at the listless countenance of his travelling companion, feeling anew the curiosity that had fretted him for the past three weeks; finally he observed, with a trace of impatience:
"Well, if you ain't one of us, you'd ought to be. You've got the best poker face I ever see; it's as blind as a plastered wall. You ain't had a real expression on it since you hauled me off that ice-floe in Norton Sound."
He swung ahead of the dogs; they rose reluctantly, and with a crack of the whip the little caravan crawled noiselessly into the gray twilight.
An hour later they dropped from the plain, down through a gutter-like gully to the river, where they found a trail, glass-hard beneath its downy covering. A cold breath sucked up from the sea; ahead they saw the ragged ice up-ended by the tide, but their course was well marked now, so they swung themselves upon the sled, while the dogs shook off their lethargy and broke into their pattering, tireless wolf-trot.
At length they came to a point where the trail divided, one branch leading off at right angles from the shore