down.

"Ever hear of the Dead Horse Trail?"

He glanced up meditatively and Fortune shook his head, inwardly chafing
at the delay.

"Sometimes there are meetings under circumstances which make men
remember," Uri continued, speaking in a low voice and very slowly, "and I
met a man under such circumstances on the Dead Horse Trail. Freighting
an outfit over the White Pass in '97 broke many a man's heart, for there
was a world of reason when they gave that trail its name. The horses
died like mosquitoes in the first frost, and from Skaguay to Bennett they
rotted in heaps. They died at the Rocks, they were poisoned at the
Summit, and they starved at the Lakes; they fell off the trail, what
there was of it, or they went through it; in the river they drowned under
their loads, or were smashed to pieces against the boulders; they snapped
their legs in the crevices and broke their backs falling backwards with
their packs; in the sloughs they sank from sight or smothered in the
slime, and they were disembowelled in the bogs where the corduroy logs
turned end up in the mud; men shot them, worked them to death, and when
they were gone, went back to the beach and bought more. Some did not
bother to shoot them,--stripping the saddles off and the shoes and
leaving them where they fell. Their hearts turned to stone--those which
did not break--and they became beasts, the men on Dead Horse Trail.

"It was there I met a man with the heart of a Christ and the patience.
And he was honest. When he rested at midday he took the packs from the
horses so that they, too, might rest. He paid $50 a hundred-weight for
their fodder, and more. He used his own bed to blanket their backs when