As day after day passed with no word from the men who had taken Dalzene’s trail, Lou Gordon’s spirits sank lower and lower. Her hope of recovering Skookum diminished with each passing day and with it came the one big disappointment of her life. Ever since Pete Enright had suggested that she enter her dogs in the Alaska Sweepstakes, anticipation of the trip to Nome had filled her mind to the exclusion of everything else. Nome! The very name breathed enchantment. And, she herself, Lou Gordon, should actually see Nome! Nome, with its great stores, with its windows glittering with diamonds and wonderfully wrought jewelry. With its hotel that had running water and wonderful white bath tubs that would be filled with hot water by the simple turning of a faucet. With its big church and its wonderful organ. With its mines whose great dumps were piled higher than the top of the tallest tree, veritable mountains of pay dirt. And all these things that Rim Rock had seen and described to her, she should see for herself. Of course, she had always known that such things existed. In books and magazines they were depicted in the advertisements, and were mentioned casually in the stories as common appurtenances to the everyday life of that wonder land that was the “outside.” But her world, far within the Arctic Circle--the world she lived and knew, was so far removed in her imagination from the world of the great “outside” that it had always seemed to her that the “outside” was a fanciful world of enchantment. True, most of the men she knew had seen these things at some time in their lives, had even accepted them as a part of their normal existence, had ridden in railway trains, and great steamboats, and even in automobiles, but that was before they had come into the Arctic.