Dalzene was no fool. Traveling in the night down the Koyukuk from Nolan, he had resisted the impulse to swing eastward at Coldfoot when by crossing the South Fork, and a high divide, he could have headed down through the wind-swept Chandalar Gap, and thus avoided being seen by any one for upwards of a hundred miles. He knew a better plan, and in the carrying out of this plan it was within his scheme of things to be seen at the roadhouse, and later at Bettles. For having ascertained that he had pulled southward from Bettles, his pursuers would take it for granted that he would follow the main trail to Fort Gibbon. And except for the remote possibility of their meeting someone on the trail, they would be unable to check up on his movements until the Yukon was reached, for the new mail trail to Fort Gibbon leaves the river and swings southward before the native village of Arctic City is reached. At the roadhouse he had stopped to feed his dogs and eat breakfast, and had immediately pushed on, arriving at Bettles, forty miles down the river, late that night. In Bettles he hunted up one, Andrew, a worthless half-breed who had occasionally helped him to dispose of hooch among the Indians. Andrew’s cabin was well on the edge of the camp, and there Dalzene spent the remainder of the night, and there he fed his dogs liberally, all except the unfortunate Skookum, who, still wound in the blanket, he carried into the cabin and deposited upon the floor without even so much as loosening a turn of the babiche line that had held him in his cramped position on the sled without food or water for nearly thirty hours. It was Dalzene’s intention to strike away from the river a few miles below Bettles, and hit for the cabin at the head of Dall River, but the thing that had been worrying him all the way was how to leave the river without leaving a trail for his pursuers to follow. This difficulty solved itself quite by accident, as he was devouring the meal Andrew prepared for him. Standing against the wall in a corner of the cabin was a toboggan. Now, the toboggan is rarely used on the Koyukuk, the river trails being without exception sled trails. Only those Indians whose hunting grounds lay in the soft snow country to the eastward of the river traveled with toboggans, and it was from one of these Indians that Andrew had got it in trade. The moment his eyes fell upon it, Dalzene knew that his problem was solved. He would pull out of Bettles in the morning with a sled, but he would leave the river with the toboggan, and instead of his own Yukon snowshoes, he would be wearing Andrew’s Siwash shoes.