“What’s the use of talking that way, Harry?” he raged weakly--this on a day when Garth had once more gone out to waste powder and lead. “You know well enough we couldn’t make five miles a day in the condition we’re in now.” Then, with a jeering laugh: “This is the end of it.... With gold enough up there on the dump to sink a ship, we’re starving to death. With a world full of food only thirty or forty miles away, we can’t buy enough to keep us alive until the snows go.” But Bromley, cheerful to the last, refused to be daunted. “While there’s life, there’s hope,” he insisted. “The snow is melting fast now.” “It doesn’t make any difference to us how fast it melts; you and I will never leave this gulch alive, Harry. As I’ve said, neither one of us could tramp five miles in a day, even over a level trail. It’s the end.” “You say ‘you and I’. Big Jim doesn’t complain much, but he is as badly off as either of us.” Philip, propped in his bunk, rocked his head on the blanket pillow. “I don’t trust Garth,” he muttered. “One of these days, when he is sure we’re too nearly dead to try to trail him, he’ll go and we’ll never see him again.” “Oh, give us a rest!” snapped Bromley, losing, for once in a way, the cheerful equanimity which had enabled him to grapple sanely, thus far, with the hardships and deprivations, “I wouldn’t have your narrow angle on humanity for all the gold there is in the ‘Little Jean’! Why, good Lord, man!--Jim has been loyalty itself, from start to finish! You’ve simply got a crooked convolution in your brain, Philip!” “Call it what you like; he’ll go, just the same. You’ll see. And after he’s given us time to die properly, he’ll come back and take over the mine.” Bromley gave it up and crept from his bunk to the hearth to get a light for his pipe, tobacco being the only provision supply that was not completely exhausted. As the day wore away, the echo of distant rifle shots penetrated to the cabin interior from time to time, but the sounds meant nothing more to them than that Garth was trying again, as he had heretofore, to kill something for the pot; trying and failing, as a matter of course. The sun had gone down and a cloudy twilight was filling the gulch with shadows when Garth returned, dragging the hind quarters of a deer after him. Gaunt, bush-bearded and long-haired, the giant was by this time a mere bony framework of a man; and as he sank down upon his bunk he was gasping for breath and whimpering like a hurt child. “I got a doe, after the longest,” he choked; “an’ then I had to go an’ leave most o’ the meat for the coyotes and buzzards--durn ’em--’cause I couldn’t tote it home! Time was when I could’ve took that li’l’ doe across my shoulders and brought her in whole; but I ain’t no damn’ good no more whatsoever!” Bromley stumbled hastily out of his bunk.