"--I did your packing and your washing and your cooking, and mine, too, just because you was feeble and because I've got consideration for my seniors. I was raised that way. I honored your age, Jerry. I knew you was about all in, but I never CALLED you old. I wouldn't hurt your feelings. What did you do? You set around on your bony hips and criticized and picked at me. But you've picked my last feather off and I'm plumb raw. Right here we split!" Jerry Quirk staggered slightly and leaned against a post for support. His knees were wobbly; he, too, ached in every bone and muscle; he, too, had been goaded into an insane temper, but that which maddened him beyond expression was this unwarranted charge of incompetency. "Split it is," he agreed. "That'll take a load off my shoulders." "We'll cut our grub fifty-fifty, then I'll hit you a clout with the traces and turn you a-loose." Jerry was still dazed, for his world had come to an end, but he pretended to an extravagant joy and managed to chirp: "Good news--the first I've had since we went pardners. I'll sure kick up my heels. What'll we do with the boat?" "Cut her in two." "Right. We'll toss up for ends. We'll divide everything the same way, down to the skillet." "Every blame' thing," Linton agreed. Side by side they set off heavily through the woods. Quarrels similar to this were of daily occurrence on the trail, but especially common were they here at Linderman, for of all the devices of the devil the one most trying to human patience is a whip-saw. It is a saying in the North that to know a man one must eat a sack of flour with him; it is also generally recognized that a partnership which survives the vexations of a saw-pit is time and weather proof--a predestined union more sacred and more perfect even than that of matrimony. Few indeed have stood the test. It was in this loosening of sentimental ties, in the breach of friendships and the birth of bitter enmities, where lay the deepest tragedy of the Chilkoot and the Chilkat trails. Under ordinary, normal circumstances men of opposite temperaments may live with each other in harmony and die in mutual accord, but circumstances here were extraordinary, abnormal. Hardship, monotony, fatigue score the very soul; constant close association renders men absurdly petulant and childishly quarrelsome. Many are the heartaches charged against those early days and those early trails.