Next morning they de parted, but he elected to stay by his eggs.And thereafter the name and fame of the man with the thousand dozen eggs began to spread through the land.Gold seekers who made in before the freeze up carried the news of his coming.Grizzled old timers of Forty Mile and Circle City, sour doughs with leathern jaws and bean calloused stomachs, called up dream memories of chickens and green things at mention of his name.Dyea and Skaguay took an interest in his being, and questioned his progress from every man who came over the passes, while Dawson golden, omeletless Dawson fretted and worried, and waylaid every chance arrival for word of him.

But of this, Rasmunsen knew nothing.The day after the wreck he patched up the Alma and pulled out.A cruel east wind blew in his teeth from Tagish, but he got the oars over the side and bucked manfully into it, though half the time he was drifting backward and chopping ice from the blades.According to the custom of the country, he was driven ashore at Windy Arm; three times on Tagish saw him swamped and beached; and Lake Marsh held him at the freeze up.The Alma was crushed in the jamming of the floes, but the eggs were intact.These he back tripped two miles across the ice to the shore, where he built a cache, which stood for years after and was pointed out by men who knew.

Half a thousand frozen miles stretched betweenhim and Dawson, and the waterway was closed.But Rasmunsen, with a peculiar tense look in his face, struck back up the lakes on foot.What he suffered on that lone trip, with naught but a single blanket, an axe, and a handful of beans, is not given to ordinary mortals to know.Only the Arctic adventurer may understand.Suffice that he was caught in a blizzard on Chilkoot and left two of his toes with the surgeon at Sheep Camp.Yet he stood on his feet and washed dishes in the scullery of the Pawona to the Puget Sound, and from there passed coal on a P. S. boat to San Francisco.It was a haggard, unkempt man who limped across the shining office floor to raise a second mortgage from the bank people.

His hollow cheeks betrayed themselves through the scraggly beard, and his eyes seemed to have retired into deep caverns where they burned with cold fires.His hands were grained from exposure and hard work, and the nails were rimmed with tight packed dirt and coal dust.He spoke vaguely of eggs and ice packs, winds and tides; but when they declined to let him have more than a second thousand, his talk became incoherent, concerning itself chiefly with the price of dogs and dog food, and such things as snowshoes and moccasins and winter trails.They let him have fifteen hundred, which was more than the cottage warranted, and breathed easier when he scrawled his signature and passed out the door.

Two weeks later he went over Chilkoot with three dog sleds of five dogs each.One team he drove, the two Indians with him driving the others.At Lake Marsh they broke out the cache and loaded up.But there was no trail.He was the first in over the ice, and to him fell the task of packing the snow and hammering away through the rough river jams.Behind him he often observed a camp fire smoke trickling thinly up through the quiet air, and he wondered why the people did not overtake him.For he was a stranger to the land and did not understand.Nor could he understand his Indians when they tried to explain.This they conceived to be a hardship, but when they balked and refused to break camp of mornings, he drove them to their work at pistol point.

When he slipped through an ice bridge near the White Horse and froze his foot, tender yet and oversensitive from the previous freezing, the Indians looked for him to lie up.But he sacrificed a blanket, and, with his foot incased in an enormous moccasin, big as a water bucket, continued to take his regular turn with the front sled.Here was the cruelest work, and they respected him, though on the side they rapped their foreheads with their knuckles and significantly shook their heads.One night they tried to run away, but the zip zip of his bullets in the snow brought them back, snarling but convinced.

Whereupon, being only savage Chilkat men, they put their heads together to kill him; but he slept like a cat, and, waking or sleeping, the chance never came.Often they tried to tell him the import of the smoke wreath in the i rear, but he could not comprehend and grew suspicious of them.And when they sulked or shirked, he was quick to let drive at them between the eyes, and quick to cool their heated souls with sight of his ready revolver.

And so it went with mutinous men, wild dogs, and a trail that broke the heart.He fought the men to stay with him, fought the dogs to keep them away from the eggs, fought the ice, the cold, and the pain of his foot, which would not heal.As fast as the young tissue renewed, it was bitten and seared by the frost, so that a running sore developed, into which he could almost shove his fist.In the mornings, when he first put his weight upon it, his head went dizzy, and he was near to fainting from the pain; but later on in the day it usually grew numb, to recommence when he crawled into his blankets and tried to sleep.

Yet he, who had been a clerk and sat at a desk all his days, toiled till the Indians were exhausted, and even outworked the dogs.How hard he worked, how much he suffered, he did not know.Being a man of the one idea, now that the idea had come, it mastered him.In the foreground of his consciousness was Dawson, in the background his thousand dozen eggs, and midway between the two his ego fluttered, striving alway to draw them together to a glittering golden point.This golden point was the five thousand dollars, the consummation of the idea and the point of departure for whatever new idea might present itself.For the rest, he was a mere automaton.He was unaware of other things, seeing them as through a glass darkly, and giving them no thought.

The work of his hands he did with machine like wisdom; likewise the work of his head.So the look on his face grew very tense, till even the Indians were afraid of it, and marvelled at the strange white man who had made them slaves and forced them to toil with such foolishness.

Then came a snap on Lake Le Barge, when the cold of outer space smote the tip of the planet, and the frost ranged sixty and odd degrees below zero.Here, laboring with open mouth that he might breathe more freely, he chilled his lungs, and for the rest of the trip he was troubled with a dry, hacking cough, especially irritable in smoke of camp or under stress of undue exertion.On the Thirty Mile river he found much open water, spanned by precarious ice bridges and fringed with narrow rim ice, tricky and uncertain.The rim ice was impossible to reckon on, and he dared it without reckoning, falling back on his revolver when his drivers demurred.

But on the ice bridges, covered with snow though they were, precautions could be taken.These they crossed on their snowshoes, with long poles, held crosswise in their hands, to which to cling in case of accident.Once over, the dogs were called to follow.And on such a bridge, where the absence of the centre ice was masked by the snow, one of the Indians met his end.He went through as quickly aand neatly as a knife through thin cream, and the current swept him from view down under the stream ice.

That night his mate fled away through the pale moonlight, Rasmunsen futilely puncturing the silence with his revolver a thing that he handled with more celerity than cleverness.Thirty six hours later the Indian made a police camp on the Big Salmon.“Um um um funny mans what you call? top um head all loose,” the interpreter explained to the puzzled captain.“Eh ?Yep, crazy, much crazy mans.Eggs, eggs, all a time eggs savvy?Comebime by.”

It was several days before Rasmunsen arrived, the three sleds lashed together, and all the dogs in a single team.It was awkward, and where the going was bad he was compelled to back trip it sled by sled, though he managed most of the time, through herculean efforts, to bring all along on the one haul.He did not seem moved when the captain of police told him his man was hitting the high places for Dawson, and was by that time, probably, halfway between Selkirk and Stewart.Nor did he appear interested when informed that the police had broken the trail as far as Pelly; for he had attained to a fatalistic acceptance of all natural dispensations, good or ill.But when they told him that Dawson was in the bitter clutch of famine, he smiled, threw the harness on his dogs, and pulled out.

But it was at his next halt that the mystery of the smoke was explained.With the word at Big Salmon that the trail was broken to Pelly, there was no longer any need for the smoke wreath to linger in his wake; and Rasmunsen, crouching over his lonely fire, saw a motley string of sleds go by.First came the courier and the half breed who had hauled him out from Bennett; then mail carriers for Circle City, two sleds of them, and a mixed following of ingoing Klondikers.Dogs and men were fresh and fat, while Rasmunsen and his brutes were jaded and worn down to the skin and bone.They of the smoke wreath had travelled one day in three, resting and reserving their strength for thei dash to come when broken trail was met with; while each day he had plunged and floundered forward, breaking the spirit of his dogs and, robbing them of their mettle.

As for himself, he was unbreakable.They thanked him kindly for his efforts in their behalf, those fat, fresh men, thanked him kindly, with broad grins and ribald laughter; and now, when he understood, he made no answer.Nor did he cherish silent bitterness.It was immaterial.The idea the fact behind the idea was not changed.Here he was and his thousand dozen; there was Dawson; the problem was unaltered.

At the Little Salmon, being short of dog food, the dogs got into his grub, and from there to Selkirk he lived on beans coarse, brown beans, big beans, grossly nutritive, which griped his stomach and doubled him up at two hour intervals.But the Factor at Selkirk had a notice on the door of the Post to the effect that no steamer had been up the Yukon for two years, and in consequence grub was beyond price.He offered to swap flour, however, at the rate of a cupful for each egg, but Ras munsen shook his head and hit the trail.Below the Post he managed to buy frozen horse hide for the dogs, the horses having been slain by the Chilkat cattle men, and the scraps and offal preserved by the Indians.He tackled the hide himself, but the hair worked into the bean sores of his mouth, and was beyond endurance.

Here at Selkirk, he met the forerunners of the hungry exodus of Dawson, and from there on they crept over the trail, a dismal throng.“No grub!” was the song they sang.“No grub, and had to go.”“Every body holding candles for a rise in the spring.”“Flour dollar’n a half a pound, and no sellers.”

“Eggs?” one of them answered.“Dollar apiece, but they ain’t none.”Rasmunsen made a rapid calculation.“Twelve thousand dollars,”he said aloud.

“Hey?” the man asked.

“Nothing,” he answered, and mushed the dogs along.

When he arrived at Stewart River, seventy miles from Dawson, five of his dogs were gone, and the remainder were falling in the traces.He, also, was in the traces, hauling with what little strength was left in him.Even then he was barely crawling along ten miles a day.His cheekbones and nose, frost bitten again and again, were turned bloody black and hideous.The thumb, which was separated from the fingers by the gee pole, had likewise been nipped and gave him great pain.The monstrous moccasin still incased his foot, and strange pains were beginning to rack the leg.

At Sixty Mile, the last beans, which he had been rationing for some time, were finished; yet he steadfastly refused to touch the eggs.He could not reconcile his mind to the legitimacy of it, and staggered and fell along the way to Indian River.Here a fresh killed moose and an open handed old timer gave him and his dogs new strength, and at Ainslie’s he felt repaid for it all when a stampede, ripe from Dawson in five hours, was sure he could get a dollar and a quarter for every egg he possessed.

He came up the steep bank by the Dawson barracks with fluttering heart and shaking knees.The dogs were so weak that he was forced to rest them, and, waiting, he leaned limply against the gee pole.A man, an eminently decorous looking man, came sauntering by in a great bearskin coat.He glanced at Rasmunsen curiously, then stopped and ran a speculative eye over the dogs and the three lashed sleds.

“What you got?” he asked.

“Eggs,” Rasmunsen answered huskily, hardly able to pitch his voice above a whisper.

“Eggs!Whoopee!Whoopee!”He sprang up into the air, gyrated madly, and finished with half a dozen war steps.“You don’t say all of ’em?”

“All of ’em.”

“Say, you must be the Egg Man.”He walked around and viewed Rasmunsen from the other side.“Come, now, ain't you the Egg Man?”Rasmunsen didn't know, but supposed he was,and the man sobered down a bit.

“What d’ye expect to get for ’em?” he asked cautiously.

Rasmunsen became audacious.“Dollar’n a half,” he said.

“Done !” the man came back promptly.“Gimme a dozen.”

“I I mean a dollar’n a half apiece,” Rasmunsen hesitatingly explained.

“Sure.I heard you.Make it two dozen.Here’s the dust.”The man pulled out a healthy gold sack the size of a small sausage and knocked it negligently against the gee pole.Rasmunsen felt a strange trembling in the pit of his stomach, a tickling of the nostrils, and an almost overwhelming desire to sit down and cry.But a curious, wide eyed crowd was beginning to collect, and man after man was calling out for eggs.He was without scales, but the man with the bearskin coat fetched a pair and obligingly weighed in the dust while Rasmunsen passed out the goods.

“Soon there was a pushing and shoving and shouldering, and a great clamor.Everybody wanted to buy and to be served first.And as the excitement grew, Rasmunsen cooled down.This would never do.There must be something behind the fact of their buying so eagerly.It would be wiser if he rested first and sized up the market.Perhaps eggs were worth two dollars apiece.Anyway, whenever he wished to sell, he was sure of a dollar and a half.“Stop!” he cried, when a couple of hundred had been sold.“No more now.I’m played out.I’vegot to get a cabin, and then you can come and see me.”

A groan went up at this, but the man with the bearskin coat approved.Twenty four of the frozen eggs went rattling in his capacious pockets and he didn't care whether the rest of the town ate or not.Besides, he could see Rasmunsen was on his last legs.

“There's a cabin right around the second corner from the Monte Carlo,” he told him “the one with the sody bottle window.It ain't mine, but I've got charge of it.Rents for ten a day and cheap for the money.You move right in,and I’ll see you later.Don’t forget the sody bottle window.”

“Tra la loo!” he called back a moment later.“I'm goin’ up the hill to eat eggs and dream of home.”

On his way to the cabin, Rasmunsen recollected he was hungry and bought a small supply of provisions at the N. A. T. & T. store also a beefsteak at the butcher shop and dried salmon for the dogs.He found the cabin without difficulty and left the dogs in the harness while he started the fire and got the coffee under way.

“A dollar’n a half apiece one thousand dozen eighteen thousand dollars!”He kept muttering it to himself, over and over, as he went about his work.

As he flopped the steak into the frying pan the door opened.He turned.It was the man with the bearskin coat.He seemed to come in with determination, as though bound on some explicit errand, but as he looked at Rasmunsen an expression of perplexity came into his face.

“I say now I say ” he began, then halted.

Rasmunsen wondered if he wanted the rent.

“I say, damn it, you know, them eggs is bad.”

Rasmunsen staggered.He felt as though some one had struck him an astounding blow between the eyes.The walls of the cabin reeled and tilted up.He put out his hand to steady himself and rested it on the stove.The sharp pain and the smell of the burning flesh brought him back to himself.

“I see,” he said slowly, fumbling in his pocket for the sack.“You want your money back.

“It ain’t the money,” the man said, “but hadn’t you got any eggs good ?”

Rasmunsen shook his head.“You’d better take the money.”

But the man refused and backed away.“I’ll come back,” he said, “when you've taken stock, and get what’s comin’.”

Rasmunsen rolled the chopping block into the cabin and carried in the eggs.He went about it quite calmly.He took up the hand axe, and, one by one, chopped the eggs in half.These halves he examined care fully and let fall to the floor.At first he sampled from the different cases, then deliberately emptied one case at a time.The heap on the floor grew larger.The coffee boiled over and the smoke of the burning beefsteak filled the cabin.He chopped steadfastly and monotonously till the last case was finished.

Somebody knocked at the door, knocked again, and let himself in.

“What a mess!” he remarked, as he paused and surveyed the scene.

The severed eggs were beginning to thaw in the heat of the stove, and a miserable odor was growing stronger.

“Must a happened on the steamer,” he suggested.

Rasmunsen looked at him long and blankly.

“I’m Murray, Big Jim Murray, everybody knows me,” the man volunteered.“I'm just hearin’ your eggs is rotten, and I'm offerin’ you two hundred for the batch.They ain't good as salmon, but still they’re fair scoffin’s for dogs.”

Rasmunsen seemed turned to stone.He did not move.“You go to hell,” he said passionlessly.

“Now just consider.I pride myself it's a decent price for a mess like that, and it's better'n nothin’.Two hundred.What you say?”

“You go to hell,” Rasmunsen repeated softly, “and get out of here.”

Murray gaped with a great awe, then went out carefully, backward, with his eyes fixed on the other’s face.

Rasmunsen followed himout and turned the dogs loose.He threw them all the salmon he had bought, and coiled a sled lashing up in his hand.Then he reentered the cabin and drew the latch in after him.The smoke from the cindered steak made his eyes smart.He stood on the bunk, passed the lashing over the ridge pole, and measured the swingoff with his eye.It did not seem to satisfy, for he put the stool on the bunk and climbed upon the stool.He drove a noose in the end of the lashing and slipped his head through.The other end he made fast.Then he kicked the stool out from under.