CHAPTER XX. 
HALT ! 
INTER — a white valley between dark moun- 
tain walls reaching up, up, into the cold blue 
ice of eternal glaciers, until they lose themselves 
in white frost clouds, impenetrable in their clammy folds 
— two log huts, or rather shanties, one of them contain- 
ing, besides two women, one black and the other white, 
a sick girl, tossing feverishly on the pile of fir and cedar 
boughs that serve for a bed. 
Reader, I told you in the last chapter that you could 
read in one sentence the story of the misfortune that had 
been threatening the Buttons ever since the miserable 
adventure at Fort Selkirk, and which had stared them 
plainly in the face ere they had accomplished half the 
distance between the river and their fateful goal. Fever 
had overtaken our sunny-haired little Flossie. Far from 
every physician and every comfort of home, the mother 
had seen with agony the symptoms gaining from day to- 
day. 
Why did they not turn and hasten back to the settle- 
ments ? you say. Because return up the Yukon, against 
the swift current, was impossible with the only means of 
230 
