Once, Smoke lighted a match and glanced at his watch. He never
repeated it, for so quick was the bite of the frost on his bared
hands, that half an hour passed before they were again comfortable.

"Four o'clock," he said, as he pulled on his mittens, "and we've
already passed three hundred."

"Three hundred and thirty-eight," Shorty corrected. "I ben keepin'
count. Get outa the way, stranger. Let somebody stampede that
knows how to stampede."

The latter was addressed to a man, evidently exhausted, who could no
more than stumble along, and who blocked the trail. This, and one
other, were the only played-out men they encountered, for they were
very near to the head of the stampede. Nor did they learn till
afterwards the horrors of that night. Exhausted men sat down to
rest by the way, and failed to get up. Seven were frozen to death,
while scores of amputations of toes, feet, and fingers were
performed in the Dawson hospitals on the survivors. For of all
nights for a stampede, the one to Squaw Creek occurred on the
coldest night of the year. Before morning, the spirit thermometers
at Dawson registered seventy degrees below zero. The men composing
the stampede, with few exceptions, were new-comers in the country
who did not know the way of the cold.

The other played-out man they found a few minutes later, revealed by
a streamer of aurora borealis that shot like a searchlight from
horizon to zenith. He was sitting on a piece of ice beside the
trail.