was a fly at their backs,--a sheet of canvas stretched between two trees
and angling at forty-five degrees. This caught the radiating heat from
the fire and flung it down upon the skin. Another man sat on a sled,
drawn close to the blaze, mending moccasins. To the right, a heap of
frozen gravel and a rude windlass denoted where they toiled each day in
dismal groping for the pay-streak. To the left, four pairs of snowshoes
stood erect, showing the mode of travel which obtained when the stamped
snow of the camp was left behind.

That Schwabian folk-song sounded strangely pathetic under the cold
northern stars, and did not do the men good who lounged about the fire
after the toil of the day. It put a dull ache into their hearts, and a
yearning which was akin to belly-hunger, and sent their souls questing
southward across the divides to the sun-lands.

"For the love of God, Sigmund, shut up!" expostulated one of the men. His
hands were clenched painfully, but he hid them from sight in the folds of
the bearskin upon which he lay.

"And what for, Dave Wertz?" Sigmund demanded. "Why shall I not sing when
the heart is glad?"

"Because you've got no call to, that's why. Look about you, man, and
think of the grub we've been defiling our bodies with for the last
twelvemonth, and the way we've lived and worked like beasts!"

Thus abjured, Sigmund, the golden-haired, surveyed it all, and the frost-
rimmed wolf-dogs and the vapor breaths of the men. "And why shall not
the heart be glad?" he laughed. "It is good; it is all good. As for the
grub--" He doubled up his arm and caressed the swelling biceps. "And if