'square-toes.' You ain't the kind to take a chance just because you're
lonesome."

"I picked you up because of your moth-eaten morals, I dare say. I was
tired of myself, and you interested me. Besides," Emerson added,
reflectively, "I have no particular cause to love the law, either."

"That's how I sized it," said Fraser, wagging his head with animation, "I
knew you'd had some kind of a run-in. What was it? This is low down, see,
and confidential, as between two crooks. I'll never snitch."

"Hold on there! I'm not a crook. I'm not sufficiently ingenious to be a
member of your honorable profession."

"Well, I guess my profession is as honorable as most. I've tried all of
them, and they're all alike. It's simply a question of how the other
fellow will separate easiest." He stopped and tightened his snow-shoe
thong, then rising, gazed curiously at the listless countenance of his
travelling companion, feeling anew the curiosity that had fretted him for
the past three weeks; finally he observed, with a trace of impatience:

"Well, if you ain't one of us, you'd ought to be. You've got the best
poker face I ever see; it's as blind as a plastered wall. You ain't had a
real expression on it since you hauled me off that ice-floe in Norton
Sound."

He swung ahead of the dogs; they rose reluctantly, and with a crack of the
whip the little caravan crawled noiselessly into the gray twilight.

An hour later they dropped from the plain, down through a gutter-like