able to work, and with their oars they broke the ice and forced the
boat along. And at the last gasp of their strength they made the
suck of the rapid river. One look back showed them several boats
which had fought through the night and were hopelessly frozen in;
then they whirled around a bend in a current running six miles an
hour.



VI.

Day by day they floated down the swift river, and day by day the
shore-ice extended farther out. When they made camp at nightfall,
they chopped a space in the ice in which to lay the boat, and
carried the camp outfit hundreds of feet to shore. In the morning,
they chopped the boat out through the new ice and caught the
current. Shorty set up the sheet-iron stove in the boat, and over
this Stine and Sprague hung through the long, drifting hours. They
had surrendered, no longer gave orders, and their one desire was to
gain Dawson. Shorty, pessimistic, indefatigable, and joyous, at
frequent intervals roared out the three lines of the first four-line
stanza of a song he had forgotten. The colder it got the oftener he
sang:

"Like Argus of the ancient times,
We leave this Modern Greece;
Tum-tum, tum-tum; tum-tum, tum-tum,
To shear the Golden Fleece."

As they passed the mouths of the Hootalinqua and the Big and Little