e trail crept betwixt; 'Twas as if the earth had gaped too far and her stony jaws were fixt. Then the winter fell with a sudden swoop, and the heavy clouds sagged low, And earth and sky were blotted out in a whirl of driving snow. We were climbing up a glacier in the neck of a mountain pass, When the Dago Kid slipped down and fell into a deep crevasse. When we got him out one leg hung limp, and his brow was wreathed with pain, And he says: "'Tis badly broken, boys, and I'll never walk again. It's death for all if ye linger here, and that's no cursed lie; Go on, go on while the trail is good, and leave me down to die." He raved and swore, but we tended him with our uncouth, clumsy care. The camp-fire gleamed and he gazed and dreamed with a fixed and curious stare. Then all at once he grabbed my gun and he put it to his head, And he says: "I'll fix it for you, boys"—them are the words he said. So we sewed him up in a canvas sack and we slung him to a tree; And the stars like needles stabbed our eyes, and woeful men were we. And on we went on our woeful way, wrapped in a daze of dream, And the Northern Lights in the crystal nights came forth with a mystic gleam. They danced and they danced the devil-dance over the naked snow; And soft they rolled like a tide upshoaled with a ceaseless ebb and flow. They rippled green with a wondrous sheen, they fluttered out like a fan; They spread with a blaze of rose-pink rays never yet seen of man. They writhed like a brood of angry snakes, hissing and sulphur pale; Then swift they changed to a dragon vast, lashing a cloven tail. It seemed to us, as we gazed aloft with an everlasting stare, The sky was a pit of bale and dread, and a monster revelled there. We climbed the rise of a hog-back range that was desolate and drear, When the Sailor Swed