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1Men gasped and began to breathe again, unaware that for a moment they had ceased to breathe. Thornton was running
2behind, encouraging Buck with short, cheery words. The distance had been measured off, and as he neared the pile of
3firewood which marked the end of the hundred yards, a cheer began to grow and grow, which burst into a roar as he passed
4the firewood and halted at command. Every man was tearing himself loose, even Matthewson. Hats and mittens were flying
5in the air. Men were shaking hands, it did not matter with whom, and bubbling over in a general incoherent babel. But
6Thornton fell on his knees beside Buck. Head was against head, and he was shaking him back and forth. Those who hurried
7up heard him cursing Buck, and he cursed him long and fervently, and softly and lovingly. "Gad, sir! Gad, sir!"
8spluttered the Skookum Bench king. "I'll give you a thousand for him, sir, a thousand, sir--twelve hundred, sir."
9Thornton rose to his feet. His eyes were wet. The tears were streaming frankly down his cheeks. "Sir," he said to the
10Skookum Bench king, "no, sir. You can go to hell, sir. It's the best I can do for you, sir." Buck seized Thornton's hand
11in his teeth. Thornton shook him back and forth. As though animated by a common impulse, the onlookers drew back to a
12respectful distance; nor were they again indiscreet enough to interrupt. Chapter VII. The Sounding of the Call When Buck
13earned sixteen hundred dollars in five minutes for John Thornton, he made it possible for his master to pay off certain
14debts and to journey with his partners into the East after a fabled lost mine, the history of which was as old as the
15history of the country. Many men had sought it; few had found it; and more than a few there were who had never returned
16from the quest. This lost mine was steeped in tragedy and shrouded in mystery. No one knew of the first man. The oldest
17tradition stopped before it got back to him. From the beginning there had been an ancient and ramshackle cabin. Dying
18men had sworn to it, and to the mine the site of which it marked, clinching their testimony with nuggets that were
19unlike any known grade of gold in the Northland. But no living man had looted this treasure house, and the dead were
20dead; wherefore John Thornton and Pete and Hans, with Buck and half a dozen other dogs, faced into the East on an
21unknown trail to achieve where men and dogs as good as themselves had failed. They sledded seventy miles up the Yukon,
22swung to the left into the Stewart River, passed the Mayo and the McQuestion, and held on until the Stewart itself
23became a streamlet, threading the upstanding peaks which marked the backbone of the continent. John Thornton asked
24little of man or nature. He was unafraid of the wild. With a handful of salt and a rifle he could plunge into the
25wilderness and fare wherever he pleased and as long as he pleased. Being in no haste, Indian fashion, he hunted his
26dinner in the course of the day's travel; and if he failed to find it, like the Indian, he kept on travelling, secure in
27the knowledge that sooner or later he would come to it. So, on this great journey into the East, straight meat was the
28bill of fare, ammunition and tools principally made up the load on the sled, and the time-card was drawn upon the
29limitless future. To Buck it was boundless delight, this hunting, fishing, and indefinite wandering through strange
30places. For weeks at a time they would hold on steadily, day after day; and for weeks upon end they would camp, here and
31there, the dogs loafing and the men burning holes through frozen muck and gravel and washing countless pans of dirt by
32the heat of the fire. Sometimes they went hungry, sometimes they feasted riotously, all according to the abundance of
33game and the fortune of hunting. Summer arrived, and dogs and men packed on their backs, rafted across blue mountain
34lakes, and descended or ascended unknown rivers in slender boats whipsawed from the standing forest. The months came and
35went, and back and forth they twisted through the uncharted vastness, where no men were and yet where men had been if
36the Lost Cabin were true. They went across divides in summer blizzards, shivered under the midnight sun on naked
37mountains between the timber line and the eternal snows, dropped into summer valleys amid swarming gnats and flies, and
38in the shadows of glaciers picked strawberries and flowers as ripe and fair as any the Southland could boast. In the
39fall of the year they penetrated a weird lake country, sad and silent, where wildfowl had been, but where then there was
40no life nor sign of life--only the blowing of chill winds, the forming of ice in sheltered places, and the melancholy
41rippling of waves on lonely beaches. And through another winter they wandered on the obliterated trails of men who had
42gone before. Once, they came upon a path blazed through the forest, an ancient path, and the Lost Cabin seemed very
43near. But the path began nowhere and ended nowhere, and it remained mystery, as the man who made it and the reason he
44made it remained mystery. Another time they chanced upon the time-graven wreckage of a hunting lodge, and amid the
45shreds of rotted blankets John Thornton found a long-barrelled flint-lock. He knew it for a Hudson Bay Company gun of
46the young days in the Northwest, when such a gun was worth its height in beaver skins packed flat, And that was all--no
47hint as to the man who in an early day had reared the lodge and left the gun among the blankets. Spring came on once
48more, and at the end of all their wandering they found, not the Lost Cabin, but a shallow placer in a broad valley where
49the gold showed like yellow butter across the bottom of the washing-pan. They sought no farther. Each day they worked
50earned them thousands of dollars in clean dust and nuggets, and they worked every day. The gold was sacked in moose-hide
51bags, fifty pounds to the bag, and piled like so much firewood outside the spruce-bough lodge. Like giants they toiled,
52days flashing on the heels of days like dreams as they heaped the treasure up. There was nothing for the dogs to do,
53save the hauling in of meat now and again that Thornton killed, and Buck spent long hours musing by the fire. The vision
54of the short-legged hairy man came to him more frequently, now that there was little work to be done; and often,
55blinking by the fire, Buck wandered with him in that other world which he remembered. The salient thing of this other
56world seemed fear. When he watched the hairy man sleeping by the fire, head between his knees and hands clasped above,
57Buck saw that he slept restlessly, with many starts and awakenings, at which times he would peer fearfully into the
58darkness and fling more wood upon the fire. Did they walk by the beach of a sea, where the hairy man gathered shellfish
59and ate them as he gathered, it was with eyes that roved everywhere for hidden danger and with legs prepared to run like
60the wind at its first appearance. Through the forest they crept noiselessly, Buck at the hairy man's heels; and they
61were alert and vigilant, the pair of them, ears twitching and moving and nostrils quivering, for the man heard and
62smelled as keenly as Buck. The hairy man could spring up into the trees and travel ahead as fast as on the ground,
63swinging by the arms from limb to limb, sometimes a dozen feet apart, letting go and catching, never falling, never
64missing his grip. In fact, he seemed as much at home among the trees as on the ground; and Buck had memories of nights
65of vigil spent beneath trees wherein the hairy man roosted, holding on tightly as he slept.
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