GRIT OF WOMEN


A wolfish head, wistful-eyed and frost-rimed, thrust aside the
tent-flaps.

"Hi! Chook! Siwash! Chook, you limb of Satan!" chorused the protesting
inmates. Bettles rapped the dog sharply with a tin plate, and it
withdrew hastily. Louis Savoy refastened the flaps, kicked a frying-pan
over against the bottom, and warmed his hands. It was very cold without.
Forty-eight hours gone, the spirit thermometer had burst at sixty-eight
below, and since that time it had grown steadily and bitterly colder.
There was no telling when the snap would end. And it is poor policy,
unless the gods will it, to venture far from a stove at such times, or to
increase the quantity of cold atmosphere one must breathe. Men sometimes
do it, and sometimes they chill their lungs. This leads up to a dry,
hacking cough, noticeably irritable when bacon is being fried. After
that, somewhere along in the spring or summer, a hole is burned in the
frozen muck. Into this a man's carcass is dumped, covered over with
moss, and left with the assurance that it will rise on the crack of Doom,
wholly and frigidly intact. For those of little faith, sceptical of
material integration on that fateful day, no fitter country than the
Klondike can be recommended to die in. But it is not to be inferred from
this that it is a fit country for living purposes.

It was very cold without, but it was not over-warm within. The only