Just beyond Soloman he had come face to face with Lou Gordon. One glance at Skookum, and he had swung wide to avoid the white fangs that had bared at sight and scent of him, and as the girl passed, the abysmal hate that had smouldered for weeks in his warped soul burst into a volcano of insane rage. Here, was the primal cause of all his misfortune. The dogs which had beaten him out of his fifteen thousand dollars--all he owned in the world except his outfit, and the single load of hooch cached at Rampart City. And here, glaring at him in all eagerness to finish a job only well begun, stood the great leader of those dogs, crouching with bared fangs. And in the brief interval before the outfit passed, it seemed as though the memory of each moment of pain that had been his since those fangs had struck, surged up within him, until as the outfit disappeared down the trail, he wiped cold sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his parka. In Nome he learned that the Gordon dogs were entered in the race and that Old Man Gordon was to drive. In Nome, as in Council, John Johnson’s team was the favorite. But Nome knew nothing of the Gordon dogs, and he, Dalzene, did know. The Gordon dogs were a joke in Nome. They were offering ten-to-one against them--and no takers. But, they had never seen those dogs run! The first thought that entered Dalzene’s head was to take the short end of that ten-to-one money. If the Gordon dogs won, he could clean up big. But right there, the supreme hatred of his soul manifested itself. The talk in Nome was that already the stakes for the race had mounted to seven thousand dollars, and that in all probability from fifteen hundred to two thousand would be added from the proceeds of a big dance that was to be held on the night of the twelfth. If he won, so would the Gordons! All Alaska would be talking of the great dog that led the team, and of the old man who drove them--the dog that had maimed him for life, and the man who had caused him to lose his fifteen thousand dollars! No! He would bet even money on Johnson’s dogs, and somehow he would put the Gordon team out of the running. He’d show ’em! They couldn’t beat him out of his money and get away with it! They weren’t on the Koyukuk, now! And this was only the beginning. Wait till he appeared suddenly on Myrtle--then the real squaring of accounts would come off!