It was
hard, and fine, and dry. It was more like sugar. Kick it, and
it flew with a hissing noise like sand. There was no cohesion
among the particles, and it could not be moulded into snow-
balls. It was not composed of flakes, but of crystals--tiny,
geometrical frost-crystals. In truth, it was not snow, but
frost.
The weather was warm, as well, barely twenty below zero, and the
two men, with raised ear-flaps and dangling mittens, sweated as
they toiled. They failed to make Forty Mile that night, and when
they passed that camp next day Daylight paused only long enough
to get the mail and additional grub. On the afternoon of the
following day they camped at the mouth of the Klondike River.
Not a soul had they encountered since Forty Mile, and they had
made their own trail. As yet, that winter, no one had travelled
the river south of Forty Mile, and, for that matter, the whole
winter through they might be the only ones to travel it. In that
day the Yukon was a lonely land. Between the Klondike River and
Salt Water at Dyea intervened six hundred miles of snow-covered
wilderness, and in all that distance there were but two places
where Daylight might look forward to meeting men.
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