We knew naught of it until the next morning, when, breakfast done and the sled lashed, we were ready to hitch the dogs and depart. They had been put in the horse stable for there was no dog house; the health resorter, actual or prospective, is not likely to be a dog man one supposes; but they were loose in the morning and came to the call, all but one--Nanook. Him we sought high and low, and at last Arthur found him, but in what pitiful case! He dragged himself slowly and painfully along, his poor bowels hanging down in the outer hide of his belly, fearfully injured internally, done for and killed already. It was not difficult to account for it. When the horses came in at midnight, one of them had kicked the dog and ruptured his whole abdomen. There was no use in inquiring whose fault it was. The dogs should have been chained; so much was our fault. But it was hard to resist some bitter recollection that before this "exploitation" of the springs, when there was a modest road-house instead of a mammoth hotel, there had been kennels for dogs instead of nothing but stables for horses. I doubt if all the veterinary surgeons in the world could have saved the dog, but there was none to try; and there was only one thing to do, hate it as we might. Arthur and I were grateful that neither of us had to do it, for the driver of the mail stage, who had some compunctions of conscience, I think, volunteered to save us the painful duty. "I know how you feel," he said slowly and kindly; "I've got a dog I think a heap of myself, but that dog ain't nothin' to me an' I'll do it for you." Nanook knew perfectly well that it was all over with him. Head and tail down, the picture of resigned dejection, he stood like a petrified dog. And when I put my face down to his and said "Good-bye," he licked me for the first time in his life. In the six years I had owned him and driven him I had never felt his tongue before, though I had always loved him best of the bunch. He was not the licking kind. We hitched up our diminished team and pulled out, for we had thirty miles to make in the short daylight and we had lost time already; and as we crossed the bridge over the steaming slough we saw the man going slowly down to the river with the dog, the chain in one hand, a gun in the other. My eyes filled with tears; I could not look at Arthur nor he at me as I passed forward to run ahead of the team, and I was glad when I realised that we had drawn out of ear-shot.