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+Project Gutenberg's The Magnetic North, by Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Magnetic North
+
+Author: Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
+
+Release Date: November 10, 2003 [EBook #10038]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAGNETIC NORTH ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Anita Paque, Shawn Wheeler,
+David Schaal, Anuradha Valsa Raj and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+THE MAGNETIC NORTH
+
+By ELIZABETH ROBINS
+
+(C. E. Raimond) Author of "The Open Question," "Below the Salt," etc.
+_With a Map_
+
+1904
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER
+
+I. WINTER CAMP IN THE YUKON
+
+II. HOUSE-WARMING
+
+III. TWO NEW SPISSIMENS
+
+IV. THE BLOW-OUT
+
+V. THE SHAMÁN
+
+VI. A PENITENTIAL JOURNEY
+
+VII. KAVIAK'S CRIME
+
+VIII. CHRISTMAS
+
+IX. A CHRISTIAN AGNOSTIC
+
+X. PRINCESS MUCKLUCK
+
+XI. HOLY CROSS
+
+XII. THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE
+
+XIII. THE PIT
+
+XIV. KURILLA
+
+XV. THE ESQUIMAUX HORSE
+
+XVI. MINOOK
+
+XVII. THE GREAT STAMPEDE
+
+XVIII. A MINERS' MEETING
+
+XIX. THE ICE GOES OUT
+
+XX. THE KLONDYKE
+
+XXI. PARDNERS
+
+XXII. THE GOING HOME
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MAGNETIC NORTH
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+WINTER CAMP ON THE YUKON
+
+"To labour and to be content with that a man hath is a sweet life; but
+he that findeth a treasure is above them both."--_Ecclesiasticus_.
+
+
+Of course they were bound for the Klondyke. Every creature in the
+North-west was bound for the Klondyke. Men from the South too, and men
+from the East, had left their ploughs and their pens, their factories,
+pulpits, and easy-chairs, each man like a magnetic needle suddenly set
+free and turning sharply to the North; all set pointing the self-same
+way since that July day in '97, when the _Excelsior_ sailed into San
+Francisco harbour, bringing from the uttermost regions at the top of
+the map close upon a million dollars in nuggets and in gold-dust.
+
+Some distance this side of the Arctic Circle, on the right bank of the
+Yukon, a little detachment of that great army pressing northward, had
+been wrecked early in the month of September.
+
+They had realised, on leaving the ocean-going ship that landed them at
+St. Michael's Island (near the mouth of the great river), that they
+could not hope to reach Dawson that year. But instead of "getting cold
+feet," as the phrase for discouragement ran, and turning back as
+thousands did, or putting in the winter on the coast, they determined,
+with an eye to the spring rush, to cover as many as possible of the
+seventeen hundred miles of waterway before navigation closed.
+
+They knew, in a vague way, that winter would come early, but they had
+not counted on the big September storm that dashed their heavy-laden
+boats against the floe-ice, ultimately drove them ashore, and nearly
+cost the little party their lives. On that last day of the long
+struggle up the stream, a stiff north-easter was cutting the middle
+reach of the mighty river, two miles wide here, into a choppy and
+dangerous sea.
+
+Day by day, five men in the two little boats, had kept serious eyes on
+the shore. Then came the morning when, out of the monotonous cold and
+snow-flurries, something new appeared, a narrow white rim forming on
+the river margin--the first ice!
+
+"Winter beginning to show his teeth," said one man, with an effort at
+jocosity.
+
+Day by day, nearer came the menace; narrower and swifter still ran the
+deep black water strip between the encroaching ice-lines. But the
+thought that each day's sailing or rowing meant many days nearer the
+Klondyke, seemed to inspire a superhuman energy. Day by day each man
+had felt, and no man yet had said, "We must camp to-night for eight
+months." They had looked landward, shivered, and held on their way.
+
+But on this particular morning, when they took in sail, they realised
+it was to be that abomination of desolation on the shore or death. And
+one or other speedily.
+
+Nearer the white teeth gleamed, fiercer the gale, swifter the current,
+sweeping back the boats. The _Mary C._ was left behind, fighting for
+life, while it seemed as if no human power could keep the _Tulare_ from
+being hurled against the western shore. Twice, in spite of all they
+could do, she was driven within a few feet of what looked like certain
+death. With a huge effort, that last time, her little crew had just got
+her well in mid-stream, when a heavy roller breaking on the starboard
+side drenched the men and half filled the cockpit. Each rower, still
+pulling for dear life with one hand, bailed the boat with the other;
+but for all their promptness a certain amount of the water froze solid
+before they could get it out.
+
+"Great luck, if we're going to take in water like this," said the
+cheerful Kentuckian, shipping his oar and knocking off the ice--"great
+luck that all the stores are so well protected."
+
+"Protected!" snapped out an anxious, cast-iron-looking man at the
+rudder.
+
+"Yes, protected. How's water to get through the ice-coat that's over
+everything?"
+
+The cast-iron steersman set his jaw grimly. They seemed to be
+comparatively safe now, with half a mile of open water between them and
+the western shore.
+
+But they sat as before, stiff, alert, each man in his ice jacket that
+cracked and crunched as he bent to his oar. Now right, now left, again
+they eyed the shore.
+
+Would it be--could it be there they would have to land? And if they
+did...?
+
+Lord, how it blew!
+
+"Hard a-port!" called out the steersman. There, just ahead, was a great
+white-capped "roller" coming--coming, the biggest wave they had
+encountered since leaving open sea.
+
+But MacCann, the steersman, swung the boat straight into the crested
+roller, and the _Tulare_ took it gamely, "bow on." All was going well
+when, just in the boiling middle of what they had thought was foaming
+"white-cap," the boat struck something solid, shivered, and went
+shooting down, half under water; recovered, up again, and seemed to
+pause in a second's doubt on the very top of the great wave. In that
+second that seemed an eternity one man's courage snapped.
+
+Potts threw down his oar and swore by----and by----he wouldn't pull
+another----stroke on the----Yukon.
+
+While he was pouring out the words, the steersman sprang from the
+tiller, and seized Potts' oar just in time to save the boat from
+capsizing. Then he and the big Kentuckian both turned on the distracted
+Potts.
+
+"You infernal quitter!" shouted the steersman, and choked with fury.
+But even under the insult of that "meanest word in the language," Potts
+sat glaring defiantly, with his half-frozen hands in his pockets.
+
+"It ain't a river, anyhow, this ain't," he said. "It's plain, simple
+Hell and water."
+
+The others had no time to realise that Potts was clean out of his
+senses for the moment, and the Kentuckian, still pulling like mad,
+faced the "quitter" with a determination born of terror.
+
+"If you can't row, take the rudder! Damnation! Take that rudder! Quick,
+_or we'll kill you_!" And he half rose up, never dropping his oar.
+
+Blindly, Potts obeyed.
+
+The _Tulare_ was free now from the clinging mass at the bow, but they
+knew they had struck their first floe.
+
+Farther on they could see other white-caps bringing other ice masses
+down. But there was no time for terrors ahead. The gale was steadily
+driving them in shore again. Boat and oars alike were growing unwieldy
+with their coating of ever-increasing ice, and human strength was no
+match for the storm that was sweeping down from the Pole.
+
+Lord, how it blew!
+
+"There's a cove!" called out the Kentuckian. "Throw her in!" he shouted
+to Potts. Sullenly the new steersman obeyed.
+
+Rolling in on a great surge, the boat suddenly turned in a boiling
+eddy, and the first thing anybody knew was that the _Tulare_ was on her
+side and her crew in the water. Potts was hanging on to the gunwale and
+damning the others for not helping him to save the boat.
+
+She wasn't much of a boat when finally they got her into quiet water;
+but the main thing was they had escaped with their lives and rescued a
+good proportion of their winter provisions. All the while they were
+doing this last, the Kentuckian kept turning to look anxiously for any
+sign of the others, in his heart bitterly blaming himself for having
+agreed to Potts' coming into the _Tulare_ that day in place of the
+Kentuckian's own "pardner." When they had piled the rescued provisions
+up on the bank, and just as they were covering the heap of bacon,
+flour, and bean-bags, boxes, tools, and utensils with a tarpaulin, up
+went a shout, and the two missing men appeared tramping along the
+ice-encrusted shore.
+
+Where was the _Mary C._? Well, she was at the bottom of the Yukon, and
+her crew would like some supper.
+
+They set up a tent, and went to bed that first night extremely well
+pleased at being alive on any terms.
+
+But people get over being glad about almost anything, unless misfortune
+again puts an edge on the circumstance. The next day, not being in any
+immediate danger, the boon of mere life seemed less satisfying.
+
+In detachments they went up the river several miles, and down about as
+far. They looked in vain for any sign of the _Mary C._. They prospected
+the hills. From the heights behind the camp they got a pretty fair idea
+of the surrounding country. It was not reassuring.
+
+"As to products, there seems to be plenty of undersized timber, plenty
+of snow and plenty of river, and, as far as I can see, just nothing
+else."
+
+"Well, there's oodles o' blueberries," said the Boy, his inky-looking
+mouth bearing witness to veracity; "and there are black and red
+currants in the snow, and rose-apples--"
+
+"Oh, yes," returned the other, "it's a sort of garden of Eden!"
+
+A little below here it was four miles from bank to bank of the main
+channel, but at this point the river was only about two miles wide, and
+white already with floating masses of floe-ice going on a swift current
+down towards the sea, four hundred miles away.
+
+The right bank presented to the mighty river a low chain of hills,
+fringed at the base with a scattered growth of scrubby spruce, birch,
+willow, and cotton-wood. Timber line was only two hundred feet above
+the river brink; beyond that height, rocks and moss covered with
+new-fallen snow.
+
+But if their side seemed cheerless, what of the land on the left bank?
+A swamp stretching endlessly on either hand, and back from the icy
+flood as far as eye could see, broken only by sloughs and an occasional
+ice-rimmed tarn.
+
+"We've been travelling just eight weeks to arrive at this," said the
+Kentuckian, looking at the desolate scene with a homesick eye.
+
+"We're not only pretty far from home," grumbled another, "we're still
+thirteen hundred miles away from the Klondyke."
+
+These unenlivening calculations were catching.
+
+"We're just about twenty-five hundred miles from the nearest railroad
+or telegraph, and, now that winter's down on us, exactly eight months
+from anywhere in the civilised world."
+
+They had seen no sign of even savage life, no white trader, nothing to
+show that any human foot had ever passed that way before.
+
+In that stillness that was like the stillness of death, they went up
+the hillside, with footsteps muffled in the clinging snow; and sixty
+feet above the great river, in a part of the wood where the timber was
+least unpromising, they marked out a site for their winter quarters.
+
+Then this queer little company--a Denver bank-clerk, an ex-schoolmaster
+from Nova Scotia, an Irish-American lawyer from San Francisco, a
+Kentucky "Colonel" who had never smelt powder, and "the Boy" (who was
+no boy at all, but a man of twenty-two)--these five set to work felling
+trees, clearing away the snow, and digging foundations for a couple of
+log-cabins--one for the Trio, as they called themselves, the other for
+the Colonel and the Boy.
+
+These two had chummed from the hour they met on the steamer that
+carried them through the Golden Gate of the Pacific till--well, till
+the end of my story.
+
+The Colonel was a big tanned fellow, nearly forty--eldest of the
+party--whom the others used to guy discreetly, because you couldn't
+mention a place anywhere on the known globe, except the far north,
+which he had not personally inspected. But for this foible, as the
+untravelled considered it, he was well liked and a little
+feared--except by the Boy, who liked him "first-rate," and feared him
+not at all. They had promptly adopted each other before they discovered
+that it was necessary to have one or more "pardners." It seemed, from
+all accounts, to be true, that up there at the top of the world a man
+alone is a man lost, and ultimately the party was added to as
+aforesaid.
+
+Only two of them knew anything about roughing it. Jimmie O'Flynn of
+'Frisco, the Irish-American lawyer, had seen something of frontier
+life, and fled it, and MacCann, the Nova Scotian schoolmaster, had
+spent a month in one of the Caribou camps, and on the strength of that,
+proudly accepted the nickname of "the Miner."
+
+Colonel George Warren and Morris Burnet, the Boy, had the best outfits;
+but this fact was held to be more than counter-balanced by the value of
+the schoolmaster's experience at Caribou, and by the extraordinary
+handiness of Potts, the Denver clerk, who had helped to build the
+shelter on deck for the disabled sick on the voyage up. This young man
+with the big mouth and lazy air had been in the office of a bank ever
+since he left school, and yet, under pressure, he discovered a natural
+neat-handedness and a manual dexterity justly envied by some of his
+fellow-pioneers. His outfit was not more conspicuously meagre than
+O'Flynn's, yet the Irishman was held to be the moneyed man of his
+party. Just why was never fully developed, but it was always said,
+"O'Flynn represents capital"; and O'Flynn, whether on that account, or
+for a subtler and more efficient reason, always got the best of
+everything that was going without money and without price.
+
+On board ship O'Flynn, with his ready tongue and his golden
+background--"representing capital"--was a leading spirit. Potts the
+handy-man was a talker, too, and a good second. But, once in camp, Mac
+the Miner was cock of the walk, in those first days, quoted "Caribou,"
+and ordered everybody about to everybody's satisfaction.
+
+In a situation like this, the strongest lean on the man who has ever
+seen "anything like it" before. It was a comfort that anybody even
+_thought_ he knew what to do under such new conditions. So the others
+looked on with admiration and a pleasant confidence, while Mac boldly
+cut a hole in the brand-new tent, and instructed Potts how to make a
+flange out of a tin plate, with which to protect the canvas from the
+heat of the stove-pipe. No more cooking now in the bitter open.
+Everyone admired Mac's foresight when he said:
+
+"We must build rock fireplaces in our cabins, or we'll find our one
+little Yukon stove burnt out before the winter is over--before we have
+a chance to use it out prospecting." And when Mac said they must pool
+their stores, the Colonel and the Boy agreed as readily as O'Flynn,
+whose stores consisted of a little bacon, some navy beans, and a
+demijohn of whisky. O'Flynn, however, urged that probably every man had
+a little "mite o' somethin'" that he had brought specially for
+himself--somethin' his friends had given him, for instance. There was
+Potts, now. They all knew how the future Mrs. Potts had brought a
+plum-cake down to the steamer, when she came to say good-bye, and made
+Potts promise he wouldn't unseal the packet till Christmas. It wouldn't
+do to pool Potts' cake--never! There was the Colonel, the only man that
+had a sack of coffee. He wouldn't listen when they had told him tea was
+the stuff up here, and--well, perhaps other fellows didn't miss coffee
+as much as a Kentuckian, though he _had_ heard--Never mind; they
+wouldn't pool the coffee. The Boy had some preserved fruit that he
+seemed inclined to be a hog about--
+
+"Oh, look here. I haven't touched it!" "Just what I'm sayin'. You're
+hoardin' that fruit."
+
+It was known that Mac had a very dacint little medicine-chest. Of
+course, if any fellow was ill, Mac wasn't the man to refuse him a
+little cold pizen; but he must be allowed to keep his own medicine
+chest--and that little pot o' Dundee marmalade. As for O'Flynn, he
+would look after the "dimmi-john."
+
+But Mac was dead against the whisky clause. Alcohol had been the curse
+of Caribou, and in _this_ camp spirits were to be for medicinal
+purposes only. Whereon a cloud descended on Mr. O'Flynn, and his health
+began to suffer; but the precious demi-john was put away "in stock"
+along with the single bottles belonging to the others. Mac had taken an
+inventory, and no one in those early days dared touch anything without
+his permission.
+
+They had cut into the mountain-side for a level foundation, and were
+hard at it now hauling logs.
+
+"I wonder," said the Boy, stopping a moment in his work, and looking at
+the bleak prospect round him--"I wonder if we're going to see anybody
+all winter."
+
+"Oh, sure to," Mac thought; "Indians, anyhow."
+
+"Well, I begin to wish they'd mosy along," said Potts; and the sociable
+O'Flynn backed him up.
+
+It was towards noon on the sixth day after landing (they had come to
+speak of this now as a voluntary affair), when they were electrified by
+hearing strange voices; looked up from their work, and saw two white
+men seated on a big cake of ice going down the river with the current.
+When they recovered sufficiently from their astonishment at the
+spectacle, they ran down the hillside, and proposed to help the
+"castaways" to land. Not a bit of it.
+
+"_Land_ in that place! What you take us for? Not much! We're going to
+St. Michael's."
+
+They had a small boat drawn up by them on the ice, and one man was
+dressed in magnificent furs, a long sable overcoat and cap, and wearing
+quite the air of a North Pole Nabob.
+
+"Got any grub?" Mac called out.
+
+"Yes; want some?"
+
+"Oh no; I thought you--"
+
+"You're not going to try to live through the winter _there?_"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Lord! you _are_ in a fix!"
+
+"That's we thought about you."
+
+But the travellers on the ice-raft went by laughing and joking at the
+men safe on shore with their tents and provisions. It made some of them
+visibly uneasy. _Would_ they win through? Were they crazy to try it?
+They had looked forward eagerly to the first encounter with their kind,
+but this vision floating by on the treacherous ice, of men who rather
+dared the current and the crash of contending floes than land where
+_they_ were, seemed of evil augury. The little incident left a
+curiously sinister impression on the camp.
+
+Even Mac was found agreeing with the others of his Trio that, since
+they had a grand, tough time in front of them, it was advisable to get
+through the black months ahead with as little wear and tear as
+possible. In spite of the Trio's superior talents, they built a small
+ramshackle cabin with a tumble-down fireplace, which served them so ill
+that they ultimately spent all their waking hours in the more
+comfortable quarters of the Colonel and the Boy. It had been agreed
+that these two, with the help, or, at all events, the advice, of the
+others, should build the bigger, better cabin, where the stores should
+be kept and the whole party should mess--a cabin with a solid outside
+chimney of stone and an open fireplace, generous of proportion and
+ancient of design, "just like down South."
+
+The weather was growing steadily colder; the ice was solid now many
+feet out from each bank of the river. In the middle of the flood the
+clotted current still ran with floe-ice, but it was plain the river was
+settling down for its long sleep.
+
+Not silently, not without stress and thunder. The handful of dwellers
+on the shore would be waked in the night by the shock and crash of
+colliding floes, the sound of the great winds rushing by, and--"Hush!
+What's that?" Tired men would start up out of sleep and sit straight to
+listen. Down below, among the ice-packs, the noise as of an old-time
+battle going on--tumult and crashing and a boom! boom! like
+cannonading.
+
+Then one morning they woke to find all still, the conflict over, the
+Yukon frozen from bank to bank. No sound from that day on; no more
+running water for a good seven months.
+
+Winter had come.
+
+While the work went forward they often spoke of the only two people
+they had thus far seen. Both Potts and O'Flynn had been heard to envy
+them.
+
+Mac had happened to say that he believed the fellow in furs was an
+Englishman--a Canadian, at the very least. The Americans chaffed him,
+and said, "That accounts for it," in a tone not intended to flatter.
+Mac hadn't thought of it before, but he was prepared to swear now that
+if an Englishman--they were the hardiest pioneers on earth--or a
+Canadian was in favour of lighting out, "it must be for some good
+reason."
+
+"Oh yes; we all know that reason."
+
+The Americans laughed, and Mac, growing hot, was goaded into vaunting
+the Britisher and running down the Yankee.
+
+"Yankee!" echoed the Kentuckian. "And up in Nova Scotia they let this
+man teach school! Doesn't know the difference yet between the little
+corner they call New England and all the rest of America."
+
+"All the rest of America!" shouted Mac. "The cheeky way you people of
+the States have of gobbling the Continent (in _talk_), just as though
+the British part of it wasn't the bigger half!"
+
+"Yes; but when you think _which_ half, you ought to be obliged to any
+fellow for forgetting it." And then they referred to effete monarchical
+institutions, and by the time they reached the question of the kind of
+king the Prince of Wales would make, Mac was hardly a safe man to argue
+with.
+
+There was one bond between him and the Kentucky Colonel: they were both
+religious men; and although Mac was blue Presbyterian and an inveterate
+theologian, somehow, out here in the wilderness, it was more possible
+to forgive a man for illusions about the Apostolic Succession and
+mistaken views upon Church government. The Colonel, at all events, was
+not so lax but what he was ready to back up the Calvinist in an
+endeavour to keep the Sabbath (with a careful compromise between church
+and chapel) and help him to conduct a Saturday-night Bible-class.
+
+But if the Boy attended the Bible-class with fervour and aired his
+heresies with uncommon gusto, if he took with equal geniality Colonel
+Warren's staid remonstrance and Mac's fiery objurgation, Sunday morning
+invariably found him more "agnostic" than ever, stoutly declining to
+recognise the necessity for "service." For this was an occasion when
+you couldn't argue or floor anybody, or hope to make Mac "hoppin' mad,"
+or have the smallest kind of a shindy. The Colonel read the lessons,
+Mac prayed, and they all sang, particularly O'Flynn. Now, the Boy
+couldn't sing a note, so there was no fair division of entertainment,
+wherefore he would go off into the woods with his gun for company, and
+the Catholic O'Flynn, and even Potts, were in better odour than he
+"down in camp" on Sundays. So far you may travel, and yet not escape
+the tyranny of the "outworn creeds."
+
+The Boy came back a full hour before service on the second Sunday with
+a couple of grouse and a beaming countenance. Mac, who was cook that
+week, was the only man left in the tent. He looked agreeably surprised
+at the apparition.
+
+"Hello!" says he more pleasantly than his Sunday gloom usually
+permitted. "Back in time for service?"
+
+"I've found a native," says the Boy, speaking as proudly as any
+Columbus. "He's hurt his foot, and he's only got one eye, but he's
+splendid. Told me no end of things. He's coming here as fast as his
+foot will let him--he and three other Indians--Esquimaux, I mean. They
+haven't had anything to eat but berries and roots for seven days."
+
+The Boy was feverishly overhauling the provisions behind the stove.
+
+"Look here," says Mac, "hold on there. I don't know that we've come all
+this way to feed a lot o' dirty savages."
+
+"But they're starving." Then, seeing that that fact did not produce the
+desired impression: "My savage is an awfully good fellow. He--he's a
+converted savage, seems to be quite a Christian." Then, hastily
+following up his advantage: "He's been taught English by the Jesuits at
+the mission forty miles above us, on the river. He can give us a whole
+heap o' tips."
+
+Mac was slowly bringing out a small panful of cold boiled beans.
+
+"There are four of them," said the Boy--"big fellows, almost as big as
+our Colonel, and _awful_ hungry."
+
+Mac looked at the handful of beans and then at the small sheet-iron
+stove.
+
+"There are more cooking," says he not over-cordially.
+
+"The one that talks good English is the son of the chief. You can see
+he's different from the others. Knows a frightful lot. He's taught me
+some of his language already. The men with him said 'Kaiomi' to
+everything I asked, and that means 'No savvy.' Says he'll teach
+me--he'll teach all of us--how to snow-shoe."
+
+"We know how to snow-shoe."
+
+"Oh, I mean on those long narrow snow-shoes that make you go so fast
+you always trip up! He'll show us how to steer with a pole, and how to
+make fish-traps and--and everything."
+
+Mac began measuring out some tea.
+
+"He's got a team of Esquimaux dogs--calls 'em Mahlemeuts, and he's got
+a birch-bark canoe, and a skin kyak from the coast." Then with an
+inspiration: "His people are the sort of Royal Family down there,"
+added the Boy, thinking to appeal to the Britisher's monarchical
+instincts.
+
+Mac had meditatively laid his hand on a side of bacon, the Boy's eyes
+following.
+
+"He's asked us--_all_ of us, and we're five--up to visit him at Pymeut,
+the first village above us here." Mac took up a knife to cut the bacon.
+"And--good gracious! why, I forgot the grouse; they can have the
+grouse!"
+
+"No, they can't," said Mac firmly; "they're lucky to get bacon."
+
+The Boy's face darkened ominously. When he looked like that the elder
+men found it was "healthiest to give him his head." But the young face
+cleared as quickly as it had clouded. After all, the point wasn't worth
+fighting for, since grouse would take time to cook, and--here were the
+natives coming painfully along the shore.
+
+The Boy ran out and shouted and waved his cap. The other men of the
+camp, who had gone in the opposite direction, across the river ice to
+look at an air-hole, came hurrying back and reached camp about the same
+time as the visitors.
+
+"Thought you said they were big fellows!" commented Mac, who had come
+to the door for a glimpse of the Indians as they toiled up the slope.
+
+"Well, so they are!"
+
+"Why, the Colonel would make two of any one of them."
+
+"The Colonel! Oh well, you can't expect anybody else to be quite as big
+as that. I was in a hurry, but I suppose what I meant was, they could
+eat as much as the Colonel."
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"Well, just look how broad they are. It doesn't matter to your stomach
+whether you're big up and down, or big to and fro."
+
+"It's their furs make 'em look like that. They're the most awful little
+runts I ever saw!"
+
+"Well, I reckon _you'd_ think they were big, too--big as Nova
+Scotia--if _you'd_ found 'em--come on 'em suddenly like that in the
+woods--"
+
+"Which is the...?"
+
+"Oh, the son of the chief is in the middle, the one who is taking off
+his civilised fur-coat. He says his father's got a heap of pelts (you
+could get things for your collection, Mac), and he's got two
+reindeer-skin shirts with hoods--'parkis,' you know, like the others
+are wearing--"
+
+They were quite near now.
+
+"How do," said the foremost native affably.
+
+"How do." The Boy came forward and shook hands as though he hadn't seen
+him for a month. "This," says he, turning first to Mac and then to the
+other white men, "this is Prince Nicholas of Pymeut. Walk right in, all
+of you, and have something to eat."
+
+The visitors sat on the ground round the stove, as close as they could
+get without scorching, and the atmosphere was quickly heavy with their
+presence. When they slipped back their hoods it was seen that two of
+the men wore the "tartar tonsure," after the fashion of the coast.
+
+"Where do you come from?" inquired the Colonel of the man nearest him,
+who simply blinked and was dumb.
+
+"This is the one that talks English," said the Boy, indicating Nicholas,
+"and he lives at Pymeut, and he's been converted."
+
+"How far is Pymeut?"
+
+"We sleep Pymeut to-night," says Nicholas.
+
+"Which way?"
+
+The native jerked his head up the river.
+
+"Many people there?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"White men, too?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"How far to the nearest white men?"
+
+Nicholas's mind wandered from the white man's catechism and fixed
+itself on his race's immemorial problem: how far it was to the nearest
+thing to eat.
+
+"I thought you said he could speak English."
+
+"So he can, first rate. He and I had a great pow-wow, didn't we,
+Nicholas?"
+
+Nicholas smiled absently, and fixed his one eye on the bacon that Mac
+was cutting on the deal box into such delicate slices.
+
+"He'll talk all right," said the Boy, "when he's had some breakfast."
+
+Mac had finished the cutting, and now put the frying-pan on an open
+hole in the little stove.
+
+"Cook him?" inquired Nicholas.
+
+"Yes. Don't you cook him?"
+
+"Take heap time, cook him."
+
+"You couldn't eat it raw!"
+
+Nicholas nodded emphatically.
+
+Mac said "No," but the Boy was curious to see if they would really eat
+it uncooked.
+
+"Let them have _some_ of it raw while the rest is frying"; and he
+beckoned the visitors to the deal box. They made a dart forward,
+gathered up the fat bacon several slices at a time, and pushed it into
+their mouths.
+
+"Ugh!" said the Colonel under his breath.
+
+Mac quickly swept what was left into the frying-pan, and began to cut a
+fresh lot.
+
+The Boy divided the cold beans, got out biscuits, and poured the tea,
+while silence and a strong smell of ancient fish and rancid seal
+pervaded the little tent.
+
+O'Flynn put a question or two, but Nicholas had gone stone-deaf. There
+was no doubt about it, they had been starving.
+
+After a good feed they sat stolidly by the fire, with no sign of
+consciousness, save the blinking of beady eyes, till the Colonel
+suggested a smoke. Then they all grinned broadly, and nodded with great
+vigour. Even those who had no other English understood "tobacco."
+
+When he had puffed awhile, Nicholas took his pipe out of his mouth,
+and, looking at the Boy, said:
+
+"You no savvy catch fish in winter?"
+
+"Through the ice? No. How you do it?"
+
+"Make hole--put down trap--heap fish all winter."
+
+"You get enough to live on?" asked the Colonel.
+
+"They must have dried fish, too, left over from the summer," said Mac.
+
+Nicholas agreed. "And berries and flour. When snow begin get soft,
+Pymeuts all go off--" He motioned with his big head towards the hills.
+
+"What do you get there?" Mac was becoming interested.
+
+"Caribou, moose--"
+
+"Any furs?"
+
+"Yes; trap ermun, marten--"
+
+"Lynx, too, I suppose, and fox?"
+
+Nicholas nodded. "All kinds. Wolf--muskrat, otter--wolverine--all
+kinds."
+
+"You got some skins now?" asked the Nova Scotian.
+
+"Y--yes. More when snow get soft. You come Pymeut--me show."
+
+"Where have ye been just now?" asked O'Flynn.
+
+"St. Michael."
+
+"How long since ye left there?"
+
+"Twelve sleeps."
+
+"He means thirteen days."
+
+Nicholas nodded.
+
+"They couldn't possibly walk that far in--"
+
+"Oh yes," says the Boy; "they don't follow the windings of the river,
+they cut across the portage, you know."
+
+"Snow come--no trail--big mountains--all get lost."
+
+"What did you go to St. Michael's for?"
+
+"Oh, me pilot. Me go all over. Me leave N. A. T. and T. boat St.
+Michael's last trip."
+
+"Then you're in the employ of the great North American Trading and
+Transportation Company?"
+
+Nicholas gave that funny little duck of the head that meant yes.
+
+"That's how you learnt English," says the Colonel.
+
+"No; me learn English at Holy Cross. Me been baptize."
+
+"At that Jesuit mission up yonder?"
+
+"Forty mile."
+
+"Well," says Potts, "I guess you've had enough walking for one winter."
+
+Nicholas seemed not to follow this observation. The Boy interpreted:
+
+"You heap tired, eh? You no go any more long walk till ice go out, eh?"
+
+Nicholas grinned.
+
+"Me go Ikogimeut--all Pymeut go."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Big feast."
+
+"Oh, the Russian mission there gives a feast?"
+
+"No. Big Innuit feast."
+
+"When?"
+
+"Pretty quick. Every year big feast down to Ikogimeut when Yukon ice
+get hard, so man go safe with dog-team."
+
+"Do many people go?"
+
+"All Innuit go, plenty Ingalik go."
+
+"How far do they come?"
+
+"All over; come from Koserefsky, come from Anvik--sometime Nulato."
+
+"Why, Nulato's an awful distance from Ikogimeut."
+
+"Three hundred and twenty miles," said the pilot, proud of his general
+information, and quite ready, since he had got a pipe between his
+teeth, to be friendly and communicative.
+
+"What do you do at Ikogimeut when you have these--" "Big fire--big
+feed--tell heap stories--big dance. Oh, heap big time!"
+
+"Once every year, eh, down at Ikogimeut?"
+
+"Three times ev' year. Ev' village, and"--he lowered his voice, not
+with any hit of reverence or awe, but with an air of making a sly and
+cheerful confidence--"and when man die."
+
+"You make a feast and have a dance when a friend dies?"
+
+"If no priests. Priests no like. Priests say, 'Man no dead; man gone
+up.'" Nicholas pondered the strange saying, and slowly shook his head.
+
+"In that the priests are right," said Mac grudgingly.
+
+It was anything but politic, but for the life of him the Boy couldn't
+help chipping in:
+
+"You think when man dead he stay dead, eh, and you might as well make a
+feast?"
+
+Nicholas gave his quick nod. "We got heap muskeetah, we cold, we
+hungry. We here heap long time. Dead man, he done. Why no big feast? Oh
+yes, heap big feast."
+
+The Boy was enraptured. He would gladly have encouraged these pagan
+deliverances on the part of the converted Prince, but the Colonel was
+scandalised, and Mac, although in his heart of hearts not ill-satisfied
+at the evidence of the skin-deep Christianity of a man delivered over
+to the corrupt teaching of the Jesuits, found in this last fact all the
+stronger reason for the instant organisation of a good Protestant
+prayer-meeting. Nicholas of Pymeut must not be allowed to think it was
+only Jesuits who remembered the Sabbath day to keep it holy.
+
+And the three "pore benighted heathen" along with him, if they didn't
+understand English words, they should have an object-lesson, and Mac
+would himself pray the prayers they couldn't utter for themselves. He
+jumped up, motioned the Boy to put on more wood, cleared away the
+granite-ware dishes, filled the bean-pot and set it back to simmer,
+while the Colonel got out Mac's Bible and his own Prayer-Book.
+
+The Boy did his stoking gloomily, reading aright these portents. Almost
+eclipsed was joy in this "find" of his (for he regarded the precious
+Nicholas as his own special property). It was all going to end in
+his--the Boy's--being hooked in for service. As long as the Esquimaux
+were there _he_ couldn't, of course, tear himself away. And here was
+the chance they'd all been waiting for. Here was a native chock-full of
+knowledge of the natural law and the immemorial gospel of the North,
+who would be gone soon--oh, very soon, if Mac and the Colonel went on
+like this--and they were going to choke off Nicholas's communicativeness
+with--a service!
+
+"It's Sunday, you know," says the Colonel to the Prince, laying open
+his book, "and we were just going to have church. You are accustomed to
+going to church at Holy Cross, aren't you?"
+
+"When me kid me go church."
+
+"You haven't gone since you grew up? They still have church there,
+don't they?"
+
+"Oh, Father Brachet, him have church."
+
+"Why don't you go?"
+
+Nicholas was vaguely conscious of threatened disapproval.
+
+"Me ... me must take up fish-traps."
+
+"Can't you do that another day?"
+
+It seemed not to have occurred to Nicholas before. He sat and
+considered the matter.
+
+"Isn't Father Brachet," began the Colonel gravely--"he doesn't like it,
+does he, when you don't come to church?"
+
+"He take care him church; him know me take care me fish-trap."
+
+But Nicholas saw plainly out of his one eye that he was not growing in
+popularity. Suddenly that solitary organ gleamed with self-justification.
+
+"Me bring fish to Father Brachet and to Mother Aloysius and the
+Sisters."
+
+Mac and the Colonel exchanged dark glances.
+
+"Do Mother Aloysius and the Sisters live where Father Brachet does?"
+
+"Father Brachet, and Father Wills, and Brother Paul, and Brother
+Etienne, all here." The native put two fingers on the floor. "Big white
+cross in middle"--he laid down his pipe to personate the
+cross--"here"--indicating the other side--"here Mother Aloysius and the
+Sisters."
+
+"I thought," says Mac, "we'd be hearing of a convent convenient."
+
+"Me help Father Brachet," observed Nicholas proudly. "Me show him boys
+how make traps, show him girls how make mucklucks." "_What_!" gasps the
+horrified Mac, "Father Brachet has got a family?"
+
+"Famly?" inquired Nicholas. "Kaiomi"; and he shook his head
+uncertainly.
+
+"You say Father Brachet has got boys, and"--as though this were a yet
+deeper brand of iniquity--"_girls_?"
+
+Nicholas, though greatly mystified, nodded firmly.
+
+"I suppose he thinks away off up here nobody will ever know. Oh, these
+Jesuits!"
+
+"How many children has this shameless priest?"
+
+"Father Brachet, him got seventeen boys, and--me no savvy how much
+girl--twelve girl ... twenty girl ..."
+
+The Boy, who had been splitting with inward laughter, exploded at this
+juncture.
+
+"He keeps a native school, Mac."
+
+"Yes," says Nicholas, "teach boy make table, chair, potatoes grow--all
+kinds. Sisters teach girl make dinner, wash--all kinds. Heap good
+people up at Holy Cross."
+
+"Divil a doubt of it," says O'Flynn.
+
+But this blind belauding of the children of Loyola only fired Mac the
+more to give the heathen a glimpse of the true light. In what darkness
+must they grope when a sly, intriguing Jesuit (it was well known they
+were all like that) was for them a type of the "heap good man"--a
+priest, forsooth, who winked at Sabbath-breaking because he and his
+neighbouring nuns shared in the spoil!
+
+Well, they must try to have a truly impressive service. Mac and the
+Colonel telegraphed agreement on this head. Savages were said to be
+specially touched by music.
+
+"I suppose when you were a kid the Jesuits taught you chants and so
+on," said the Colonel, kindly.
+
+"Kaiomi," answered Nicholas after reflection.
+
+"You can sing, can't you?" asks O'Flynn.
+
+"Sing? No, me dance!"
+
+The Boy roared with delight.
+
+"Why, yes, I never thought of that. You fellows do the songs, and
+Nicholas and I'll do the dances."
+
+Mac glowered angrily. "Look here: if you don't mind being blasphemous
+for yourself, don't demoralise the natives."
+
+"Well, I like that! Didn't Miriam dance before the Lord? Why shouldn't
+Nicholas and me?"
+
+The Colonel cleared his throat, and began to read the lessons for the
+day. The natives sat and watched him closely. They really behaved very
+well, and the Boy was enormously proud of his new friends. There was a
+great deal at stake. The Boy felt he must walk warily, and he already
+regretted those light expressions about dancing before the Lord. All
+the fun of the winter might depend on a friendly relation between
+Pymeut and the camp. It was essential that the Esquimaux should not
+only receive, but make, a good impression.
+
+The singing "From Greenland's icy mountains to India's coral strand"
+seemed to please them; but when, after the Colonel's "Here endeth the
+second lesson," Mac said, in sepulchral tones, "Let us pray," the
+visitors seemed to think it was time to go home.
+
+"No," said Mac sternly, "they mustn't go in the middle of the meeting";
+and he proceeded to kneel down.
+
+But Nicholas was putting on his fur coat, and the others only waited to
+follow him out. The Boy, greatly concerned lest, after all, the visit
+should end badly, dropped on his knees to add the force of his own
+example, and through the opening phrases of Mac's prayer the agnostic
+was heard saying, in a loud stage-whisper, "Do like me--down! Look
+here! Suppose you ask us come big feast, and in the middle of your
+dance we all go home--.
+
+"Oh no," remonstrated Nicholas.
+
+"Very well. These friends o' mine no like man go home in the middle.
+They heap mad at me when I no stay. You savvy?"
+
+"Me savvy," says Nicholas slowly and rather depressed.
+
+"Kneel down, then," says the Boy. And first Nicholas, and then the
+others, went on their knees.
+
+Alternately they looked in the Boy's corner where the grub was, and
+then over their shoulders at the droning Mac and back, catching the
+Boy's eye, and returning his reassuring nods and grins.
+
+Mac, who had had no innings up to this point, was now embarked upon a
+most congenial occupation. Wrestling with the Lord on behalf of the
+heathen, he lost count of time. On and on the prayer wound its slow
+way; involution after involution, coil after coil, like a snake, the
+Boy thought, lazing in the sun. Unaccustomed knees grew sore.
+
+"Hearken to the cry of them that walk in darkness, misled by wolves in
+sheep's clothing--_wolves_, Lord, wearing the sign of the Holy Cross--"
+
+O'Flynn shuffled, and Mac pulled himself up. No light task this of
+conveying to the Creator, in covert terms, a due sense of the iniquity
+of the Jesuits, without, at the same time, stirring O'Flynn's bile, and
+seeing him get up and stalk out of meeting, as had happened once
+before.
+
+O'Flynn was not deeply concerned about religious questions, but "there
+were limits." The problem was how to rouse the Lord without rousing
+O'Flynn--a piece of negotiation so delicate, calling for a skill in
+pious invective so infinitely absorbing to Mac's particular cast of
+mind, that he was quickly stone-blind and deaf to all things else.
+
+"Not all the heathen are sunk in iniquity; but they are weak, tempted,
+and they weary, Lord!"
+
+"Amen," said the Boy, discreetly. "How long?" groaned Mac--"Oh Lord,
+how long?" But it was much longer than he realised. The Boy saw the
+visitors shifting from one knee to another, and feared the worst. But
+he sympathised deeply with their predicament. To ease his own legs, he
+changed his position, and dragged a corner of the sailcloth down off
+the little pile of provisions, and doubled it under his knees.
+
+The movement revealed the bag of dried apples within arm's length.
+Nicholas was surreptitiously reaching for his coat. No doubt about it,
+he had come to the conclusion that this was the fitting moment to
+depart. A look over his shoulder showed Mac absorbed, and taking fresh
+breath at "Sixthly, Oh Lord." The Boy put out a hand, and dragged the
+apple-bag slowly, softly towards him. The Prince dropped the sleeve of
+his coat, and fixed his one eye on his friend. The Boy undid the neck
+of the sack, thrust in his hand, and brought out a fistfull. Another
+look at Mac--still hard at it, trying to spare O'Flynn's feelings
+without mincing matters with the Almighty.
+
+The Boy winked at Nicholas, made a gesture, "Catch!" and fired a bit of
+dried apple at him, at the same time putting a piece in his own mouth
+to show him it was all right.
+
+Nicholas followed suit, and seemed pleased with the result. He showed
+all his strong, white teeth, and ecstatically winked his one eye back
+at the Boy, who threw him another bit and then a piece to each of the
+others.
+
+The Colonel had "caught on," and was making horrible frowns at the Boy.
+Potts and O'Flynn looked up, and in dumbshow demanded a share. No? Very
+well, they'd tell Mac. So the Boy had to feed them, too, to keep them
+quiet. And still Mac prayed the Lord to catch up this slip he had made
+here on the Yukon with reference to the natives. In the midst of a
+powerful peroration, he happened to open his eyes a little, and they
+fell on the magnificent great sable collar of Prince Nicholas's coat.
+
+Without any of the usual slowing down, without the accustomed warning
+of a gradual descent from the high themes of heaven to the things of
+common earth, Mac came down out of the clouds with a bump, and the
+sudden, business-like "Amen" startled all the apple-chewing
+congregation.
+
+Mac stood up, and says he to Nicholas:
+
+"Where did you get that coat?"
+
+Nicholas, still on his knees, stared, and seemed in doubt if this were
+a part of the service.
+
+"Where did you get that coat?" repeated Mac.
+
+The Boy had jumped up nimbly. "I told you his father has a lot of
+furs."
+
+"Like this?"
+
+"No," says Nicholas; "this belong white man."
+
+"Ha," says Mac excitedly, "I thought I'd seen it before. Tell us how
+you got it."
+
+"Me leave St. Michael; me got ducks, reindeer meat--oh, _plenty_
+kow-kow! [Footnote: Food] Two sleeps away St. Michael me meet Indian.
+Heap hungry. Him got bully coat." Nicholas picked it up off the floor.
+"Him got no kow-kow. Him say, 'Give me duck, give me back-fat. You take
+coat, him too heavy.' Me say, 'Yes.'"
+
+"But how did he get the coat?"
+
+"Him say two white men came down river on big ice."
+
+"Yes, yes--"
+
+"Men sick." He tapped his forehead. "Man no sick, he no go down with
+the ice"; and Nicholas shuddered. "Before Ikogimeut, ice jam. Indian
+see men jump one big ice here, more big ice here, and one... go down.
+Indian"--Nicholas imitated throwing out a line--"man tie mahout
+round--but--big ice come--" Nicholas dashed his hands together, and
+then paused significantly. "Indian sleep there. Next day ice hard.
+Indian go little way out to see. Man dead. Him heap good coat," he
+wound up unemotionally, and proceeded to put it on.
+
+"And the other white man--what became of him?"
+
+Nicholas shrugged: "Kaiomi," though it was plain he knew well enough
+the other lay under the Yukon ice.
+
+"And that--_that_ was the end of the fellows who went by jeering at
+us!"
+
+"We'd better not crow yet," said Mac. And they bade Prince Nicholas and
+his heathen retinue good-bye in a mood chastened not by prayer alone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+HOUSE-WARMING
+
+"There is a sort of moral climate in a household."--JOHN MORLEY.
+
+
+No idle ceremony this, but the great problem of the dwellers in the
+country of the Yukon.
+
+The Colonel and the Boy made up their minds that, whatever else they
+had or had not, they would have a warm house to live in. And when they
+had got it, they would have a "Blow-out" to celebrate the achievement.
+
+"We'll invite Nicholas," says the Boy. "I'll go to Pymeut myself, and
+let him know we are going to have 'big fire, big feed. Oh, heap big
+time!'"
+
+If the truth were told, it had been a difficult enough matter to keep
+away from Pymeut since the hour Nicholas had vanished in that
+direction; but until winter quarters were made, and until they were
+proved to be warm, there was no time for the amenities of life.
+
+The Big Cabin (as it was quite seriously called, in contradistinction
+to the hut of the Trio) consisted of a single room, measuring on the
+outside sixteen feet by eighteen feet.
+
+The walls of cotton-wood logs soared upward to a level of six feet, and
+this height was magnificently increased in the middle by the angle of
+the mildly gable roof. But before the cabin was breast-high the Boy had
+begun to long for a window.
+
+"Sorry we forgot the plate-glass," says Mac.
+
+"Wudn't ye like a grrand-piana?" asks O'Flynn.
+
+"What's the use of goin' all the way from Nova Scotia to Caribou," says
+the Boy to the Schoolmaster-Miner, "if you haven't learned the way to
+make a window like the Indians, out of transparent skin?"
+
+Mac assumed an air of elevated contempt.
+
+"I went to mine, not to learn Indian tricks."
+
+"When the door's shut it'll be dark as the inside of a cocoa-nut."
+
+"You ought to have thought of that before you left the sunny South,"
+said Potts.
+
+"It'll be dark all winter, window or no window," Mac reminded them.
+
+"Never mind," said the Colonel, "when the candles give out we'll have
+the fire-light. Keep all the spruce knots, boys!"
+
+But one of the boys was not pleased. The next day, looking for a
+monkey-wrench under the tarpaulin, he came across the wooden box a
+California friend had given him at parting, containing a dozen tall
+glass jars of preserved fruit. The others had growled at the extra bulk
+and weight, when the Boy put the box into the boat at St. Michael's,
+but they had now begun to look kindly on it and ask when it was to be
+opened. He had answered firmly:
+
+"Not before Christmas," modifying this since Nicholas's visit to "Not
+before the House-Warming." But one morning the Boy was found pouring
+the fruit out of the jars into some empty cans.
+
+"What you up to?"
+
+"Wait an' see." He went to O'Flynn, who was dish-washer that week, got
+him to melt a couple of buckets of snow over the open-air campfire and
+wash the fruit-jars clean.
+
+"Now, Colonel," says the Boy, "bring along that buck-saw o' yours and
+lend a hand."
+
+They took off the top log from the south wall of the cabin, measured a
+two-foot space in the middle, and the Colonel sawed out the superfluous
+spruce intervening. While he went on doing the same for the other logs
+on that side, the Boy roughly chiselled a moderately flat sill. Then
+one after another he set up six of the tall glass jars in a row, and
+showed how, alternating with the other six bottles turned upside down,
+the thick belly of one accommodating itself to the thin neck of the
+other, the twelve made a very decent rectangle of glass. When they had
+hoisted up, and fixed in place, the logs on each side, and the big
+fellow that went all across on top; when they had filled the
+inconsiderable cracks between the bottles with some of the mud-mortar
+with which the logs were to be chinked, behold a double glass window
+fit for a king!
+
+The Boy was immensely pleased.
+
+"Oh, that's an old dodge," said Mac depreciatingly. "Why, they did that
+at Caribou!"
+
+"Then, why in--Why didn't you suggest it?"
+
+"You wait till you know more about this kind o' life, and you won't go
+in for fancy touches."
+
+Nevertheless, the man who had mined at Caribou seemed to feel that some
+contribution from him was necessary to offset the huge success of that
+window. He did not feel called upon to help to split logs for the roof
+of the Big Cabin, but he sat cutting and whittling away at a little
+shelf which he said was to be nailed up at the right of the Big Cabin
+door. Its use was not apparent, but no one dared call it a "fancy
+touch," for Mac was a miner, and had been to Caribou.
+
+When the shelf was nailed up, its maker brought forth out of his
+medicine-chest a bottle of Perry Davis's Pain-killer.
+
+"Now at Caribou," says he, "they haven't got any more thermometers
+kicking round than we have here, but they discovered that when Perry
+Davis congeals you must keep a sharp look-out for frost-bite, and when
+Perry Davis freezes solid, you'd better mind your eye and stay in your
+cabin, if you don't want to die on the trail." With which he tied a
+string round Perry Davis's neck, set the bottle up on the shelf, and
+secured it firmly in place. They all agreed it was a grand advantage to
+have been to Caribou!
+
+But Mac knew things that he had probably not learned there, about
+trees, and rocks, and beasts, and their manners and customs and family
+names. If there were more than a half-truth in the significant lament
+of a very different man, "I should be a poet if only I knew the names
+of things," then, indeed, Samuel MacCann was equipped to make a mark in
+literature.
+
+From the time he set foot on the volcanic shore of St Michael's Island,
+Mac had begun his "collection."
+
+Nowadays, when he would spend over "that truck of his" hours that might
+profitably (considering his talents) be employed in helping to fortify
+the camp against the Arctic winter, his companions felt it little use
+to remonstrate.
+
+By themselves they got on rapidly with work on the roof, very much
+helped by three days' unexpectedly mild weather. When the split logs
+had been marshalled together on each side of the comb, they covered
+them with dried moss and spruce boughs.
+
+Over all they laid a thick blanket of the earth which had been dug out
+to make a level foundation. The cracks in the walls were chinked with
+moss and mud-mortar. The floor was the naked ground, "to be carpeted
+with skins by-and-by," so Mac said; but nobody believed Mac would put a
+skin to any such sensible use.
+
+The unreasonable mildness of three or four days and the little surface
+thaw, came to an abrupt end in a cold rain that turned to sleet as it
+fell. Nobody felt like going far afield just then, even after game, but
+they had set the snare that Nicholas told the Boy about on that first
+encounter in the wood. Nicholas, it seemed, had given him a noose made
+of twisted sinew, and showed how it worked in a running loop. He had
+illustrated the virtue of this noose when attached to a pole balanced
+in the crotch of a tree, caught over a horizontal stick by means of a
+small wooden pin tied to the snare. A touch at the light end of the
+suspended pole (where the baited loop dangles) loosens the pin, and the
+heavy end of the pole falls, hanging ptarmigan or partridge in the air.
+
+For some time after rigging this contrivance, whenever anyone reported
+"tracks," Mac and the Boy would hasten to the scene of action, and set
+a new snare, piling brush on each side of the track that the game had
+run in, so barring other ways, and presenting a line of least
+resistance straight through the loop.
+
+In the early days Mac would come away from these preparations saying
+with dry pleasure:
+
+"Now, with luck, we may get a _Xema Sabinii_," or some such fearful
+wildfowl.
+
+"Good to eat?" the Boy would ask, having had his disappointments ere
+now in moments of hunger for fresh meat, when Mac, with the nearest
+approach to enthusiasm he permitted himself, had brought in some
+miserable little hawk-owl or a three-toed woodpecker to add, not to the
+larder, but to the "collection."
+
+"No, you don't _eat_ Sabine gulls," Mac would answer pityingly.
+
+But those snares never seemed to know what they were there for. The
+first one was set expressly to catch one of the commonest birds that
+fly--Mac's _Lagopus albus_, the beautiful white Arctic grouse, or at
+the very least a _Bonasa umbellus_, which, being interpreted, is ruffed
+ptarmigan. The tracks had been bird tracks, but the creature that swung
+in the air next day was a baby hare. The Schoolmaster looked upon the
+incident as being in the nature of a practical joke, and resented it.
+But the others were enchanted, and professed thereafter a rooted
+suspicion of the soundness of the Schoolmaster's Natural History, which
+nobody actually felt. For he had never yet pretended to know anything
+that he didn't know well; and when Potts would say something
+disparaging of Mac's learning behind his back (which was against the
+unwritten rules of the game) the Colonel invariably sat on Potts.
+
+"Knows a darned sight too much? No, he _don't_, sir; that's just the
+remarkable thing about Mac. He isn't trying to carry any more than he
+can swing."
+
+At the same time it is to be feared that none of his companions really
+appreciated the pedagogue's learning. Nor had anyone but the Boy
+sympathised with his resolution to make a Collection. What they wanted
+was eatable game, and they affected no intelligent interest in knowing
+the manners and customs of the particular species that was sending up
+appetising odours from the pot.
+
+They even applauded the rudeness of the Boy, who one day responded to
+Mac's gravely jubilant "Look here! I've got the _Parus Hudsonicus_!"--
+
+"Poor old man! What do you do for it?"
+
+And when anybody after that was indisposed, they said he might be
+sickening for an attack of Parus Hudsonicus, and in that case it was a
+bad look-out.
+
+Well for Mac that he wouldn't have cared a red cent to impress the
+greatest naturalist alive, let alone a lot of fellows who didn't know a
+titmouse from a disease.
+
+Meanwhile work on the Big Cabin had gone steadily forward. From the
+outside it looked finished now, and distinctly imposing. From what were
+left of the precious planks out of the bottom of the best boat they had
+made the door--two by four, and opening directly in front of that
+masterpiece, the rock fireplace. The great stone chimney was the pride
+of the camp and the talk before the winter was done of all "the Lower
+River."
+
+Spurred on partly by the increased intensity of the cold, partly by the
+Colonel's nonsense about the way they did it "down South," Mac roused
+himself, and turned out a better piece of masonry for the Big Cabin
+than he had thought necessary for his own. But everybody had a share in
+the glory of that fireplace. The Colonel, Potts, and the Boy selected
+the stone, and brought it on a rude litter out of a natural quarry from
+a place a mile or more away up on the bare mountain-side. O'Flynn mixed
+and handed up the mud-mortar, while Mac put in some brisk work with it
+before it stiffened in the increasing cold.
+
+Everybody was looking forward to getting out of the tent and into the
+warm cabin, and the building of the fireplace stirred enthusiasm. It
+was two and a half feet deep, three and a half feet high, and four feet
+wide, and when furnished with ten-inch hack logs, packed in glowing
+ashes and laid one above another, with a roaring good blaze in front of
+birch and spruce, that fire would take a lot of beating, as the Boy
+admitted, "even in the tat-pine Florida country."
+
+But no fire on earth could prevent the cabin from being swept through,
+the moment the door was opened, by a fierce and icy air-current. The
+late autumnal gales revealed the fact that the sole means of
+ventilation had been so nicely contrived that whoever came in or went
+out admitted a hurricane of draught that nearly knocked him down. Potts
+said it took a good half-hour, after anyone had opened the door, to
+heat the place up again.
+
+"What! You cold?" inquired the usual culprit. The Boy had come in to
+put an edge on his chopper. "It's stopped snowin', an' you better come
+along with me, Potts. Swing an axe for a couple of hours--that'll warm
+you."
+
+"I've got rheumatism in my shoulder to-day," says Potts, hugging the
+huge fire closer.
+
+"And you've got something wrong with your eyes, eh, Mac?"
+
+Potts narrowed his and widened the great mouth; but he had turned his
+head so Mac couldn't see him.
+
+The Nova Scotian only growled and refilled his pipe. Up in the woods
+the Boy repeated the conversation to the Colonel, who looked across at
+O'Flynn several yards away, and said: "Hush!"
+
+"Why must I shut up? Mac's _eyes_ do look rather queer and bloodshot. I
+should think he'd rather feel we lay it to his eyes than know we're
+afraid he's peterin' out altogether."
+
+"I never said I was afraid--"
+
+"No, you haven't _said_ much." "I haven't opened my head about it."
+
+"No, but you've tried hard enough for five or six days to get Mac to
+the point where he would come out and show us how to whip-saw. You
+haven't _said_ anything, but you've--you've got pretty dignified each
+time you failed, and we all know what that means."
+
+"We ought to have begun sawing boards for our bunks and swing-shelf a
+week back, before this heavy snowfall. Besides, there's enough
+fire-wood now; we're only marking time until--"
+
+"Until Mac's eyes get all right. I understand."
+
+Again the Colonel had made a sound like "Sh!" and went on swinging his
+axe.
+
+They worked without words till the Boy's tree came down. Then he
+stopped a moment, and wiped his face.
+
+"It isn't so cold to-day, not by a long shot, for all Potts's howling
+about his rheumatics."
+
+"It isn't cold that starts that kind of pain."
+
+"No, siree. I'm not much of a doctor, but I can see Potts's rheumatism
+doesn't depend on the weather."
+
+"Never you mind Potts."
+
+"I don't mind Potts. I only mind Mac. What's the matter with Mac,
+anyway?"
+
+"Oh, he's just got cold feet. Maybe he'll thaw out by-and-by."
+
+"Did you ever think what Mac's like? With that square-cut jaw and
+sawed-off nose, everything about him goin' like this"--the Boy
+described a few quick blunt angles in the air--"well, sir, he's the
+livin' image of a monkey-wrench. I'm comin' to think he's as much like
+it inside as he is out. He can screw up for a prayer-meetin', or he can
+screw down for business--when he's a mind, but, as Jimmie over there
+says, 'the divil a different pace can you put him through.' I _like_
+monkey-wrenches! I'm only sayin' they aren't as limber as willa-trees."
+
+No response from the Colonel, who was making the chips fly. It had cost
+his great body a good many aches and bruises, but he was a capital
+axeman now, and not such a bad carpenter, though when the Boy said as
+much he had answered:
+
+"Carpenter! I'm just a sort of a well-meanin' wood-butcher"; and deeply
+he regretted that in all his young years on a big place in the country
+he had learnt so little about anything but horses and cattle.
+
+On the way back to dinner they spoke again of this difficulty of the
+boards. O'Flynn whistled "Rory O'More" with his pleasant air of
+detachment.
+
+"You and the others would take more interest in the subject," said the
+Boy a little hotly, "if we hadn't let you fellows use nearly all the
+boat-planks for _your_ bunks, and now we haven't got any for our own."
+
+"_Let_ us use 'em! Faith! we had a right to'm."
+
+"To boards out of _our_ boat!"
+
+"And ye can have the loan o' the whip-saw to make more, whenever the
+fancy takes ye."
+
+"Loan o' the whip-saw! Why, it's mine," says the Colonel.
+
+"Divil a bit of it, man!" says O'Flynn serenely. "Everything we've got
+belongs to all of us, except a sack o' coffee, a medicine-chest, and a
+dimmi-john. And it's mesilf that's afraid the dimmi-john--"
+
+"What's the use of my having bought a whip-saw?" interrupted the
+Colonel, hurriedly. "What's the good of it, if the only man that knows
+how to use it--"
+
+"Is more taken up wid bein' a guardjin angel to his pardner's
+dimmi-john--"
+
+The Colonel turned and frowned at the proprietor of the dimmi-john. The
+Boy had dropped behind to look at some marten tracks in the
+fresh-fallen snow.
+
+"I'll follow that trail after dinner," says he, catching up the others
+in time to hear O'Flynn say:
+
+"If it wusn't that ye think only a feller that's been to Caribou can
+teach ye annything it's Jimmie O'Flynn that 'ud show ye how to play a
+chune on that same whip-saw."
+
+"Will you show us after dinner?"
+
+"Sure I will."
+
+And he was as good as his word.
+
+This business of turning a tree into boards without the aid of a
+saw-mill is a thing many placer-miners have to learn; for, even if they
+are disposed to sleep on the floor, and to do without shelves, they
+can't do sluicing without sluice-boxes, and they can't make those long,
+narrow boxes without boards.
+
+So every party that is well fitted out has a whip-saw.
+
+"Furrst ye dig a pit," O'Flynn had said airily, stretched out before
+the fire after dinner. "Make it about four feet deep, and as long as
+ye'd like yer boards. When ye've done that I'll come and take a hand."
+
+The little job was not half finished when the light tailed. Two days
+more of soil-burning and shovelling saw it done.
+
+"Now ye sling a couple o' saplings acrost the durrt ye've chucked out.
+R-right! Now ye roll yer saw-timber inter the middle. R-right! An' on
+each side ye want a log to stand on. See? Wid yer 'guide-man' on top
+sthradlin' yer timberr, watchin' the chalk-line and doin' the pull-up,
+and the otherr fellerr in the pit lookin' afther the haul-down, ye'll
+be able to play a chune wid that there whip-saw that'll make the
+serryphims sick o' plain harps." O'Flynn superintended it all, and even
+Potts had the curiosity to come out and see what they were up to. Mac
+was "kind o' dozin'" by the fire.
+
+When the frame was finished O'Flynn helped to put the trial-log in
+place, having marked it off with charcoal to indicate inch and a
+quarter planks. Then the Colonel, down in the pit, and O'Flynn on top
+of the frame, took the great two-handled saw between them, and began
+laboriously, one drawing the big blade up, and the other down,
+vertically through the log along the charcoal line.
+
+"An' _that's_ how it's done, wid bits of yer arrums and yer back that
+have niver been called on to wurruk befure. An' whin ye've been at it
+an hour ye'll find it goes betther wid a little blasphemin';" and he
+gave his end of the saw to the reluctant Potts.
+
+Potts was about this time as much of a problem to his pardners as was
+the ex-schoolmaster. If the bank clerk had surprised them all by his
+handiness on board ship, and by making a crane to swing the pots over
+the fire, he surprised them all still more in these days by an apparent
+eclipse of his talents. It was unaccountable. Potts's carpentering,
+Potts's all-round cleverness, was, like "payrock in a pocket," as the
+miners say, speedily worked out, and not a trace of it afterwards to be
+found.
+
+But less and less was the defection of the Trio felt. The burly
+Kentucky stock-farmer was getting his hand in at "frontier" work,
+though he still couldn't get on without his "nigger," as the Boy said,
+slyly indicating that it was he who occupied this exalted post. These
+two soon had the bunks made out of the rough planks they had sawed with
+all a green-horn's pains. They put in a fragrant mattress of spring
+moss, and on that made up a bed of blankets and furs.
+
+More boards were laboriously turned out to make the great swing-shelf
+to hang up high in the angle of the roof, where the provisions might be
+stored out of reach of possible marauders.
+
+The days were very short now, bringing only about five hours of pallid
+light, so little of which struggled through the famous bottle-window
+that at all hours they depended chiefly on the blaze from the great
+fireplace. There was still a good deal of work to be done indoors,
+shelves to be put up on the left as you entered (whereon the
+granite-ware tea-service, etc., was kept), a dinner-table to be made,
+and three-legged stools. While these additions--"fancy touches," as the
+Trio called them--were being made, Potts and O'Flynn, although
+occasionally they went out for an hour or two, shot-gun on shoulder,
+seldom brought home anything, and for the most part were content with
+doing what they modestly considered their share of the cooking and
+washing. For the rest, they sat by the fire playing endless games of
+euchre, seven-up and bean poker, while Mac, more silent than ever,
+smoked and read Copps's "Mining Laws" and the magazines of the previous
+August.
+
+Nobody heard much in those days of Caribou. The Colonel had gradually
+slipped into the position of Boss of the camp. The Trio were still just
+a trifle afraid of him, and he, on his side, never pressed a dangerous
+issue too far.
+
+But this is a little to anticipate.
+
+One bitter gray morning, that had reduced Perry Davis to a solid lump
+of ice, O'Flynn, the Colonel, and the Boy were bringing into the cabin
+the last of the whip-sawed boards. The Colonel halted and looked
+steadily up the river.
+
+"Is that a beast or a human?" said he.
+
+"It's a man," the Boy decided after a moment--"no, two men, single
+file, and--yes--Colonel, it's dogs. Hooray! a dog-team at last!"
+
+They had simultaneously dropped the lumber. The Boy ran on to tell the
+cook to prepare more grub, and then pelted after O'Flynn and the
+Colonel, who had gone down to meet the newcomers--an Indian driving
+five dogs, which were hitched tandem to a low Esquimaux sled, with a
+pack and two pairs of web-foot snow-shoes lashed on it, and followed by
+a white man. The Indian was a fine fellow, younger than Prince
+Nicholas, and better off in the matter of eyes. The white man was a
+good deal older than either, with grizzled hair, a worn face, bright
+dark eyes, and a pleasant smile.
+
+"I had heard some white men had camped hereabouts," says he. "I am glad
+to see we have such substantial neighbours." He was looking up at the
+stone chimney, conspicuous a long way off.
+
+"We didn't know we had any white neighbours," said the Colonel in his
+most grand and gracious manner. "How far away are you, sir?"
+
+"About forty miles above."
+
+As he answered he happened to be glancing at the Boy, and observed his
+eagerness cloud slightly. Hadn't Nicholas said it was "about forty
+miles above" that the missionaries lived?
+
+"But to be only forty miles away," the stranger went on,
+misinterpreting the fading gladness, "is to be near neighbours in this
+country."
+
+"We aren't quite fixed yet," said the Colonel, "but you must come in
+and have some dinner with us. We can promise you a good fire, anyhow."
+
+"Thank you. You have chosen a fine site." And the bright eyes with the
+deep crow's-feet raying out from the corners scanned the country in so
+keen and knowing a fashion that the Boy, with hope reviving, ventured:
+
+"Are--are you a prospector?"
+
+"No. I am Father Wills from Holy Cross."
+
+"Oh!" And the Boy presently caught up with the Indian, and walked on
+beside him, looking back every now and then to watch the dogs or
+examine the harness. The driver spoke English, and answered questions
+with a tolerable intelligence. "Are dogs often driven without reins?"
+
+The Indian nodded.
+
+The Colonel, after the stranger had introduced himself, was just a
+shade more reserved, but seemed determined not to be lacking in
+hospitality. O'Flynn was overflowing, or would have been had the Jesuit
+encouraged him. He told their story, or, more properly, his own, and
+how they had been wrecked.
+
+"And so ye're the Father Superior up there?" says the Irishman, pausing
+to take breath.
+
+"No. Our Superior is Father Brachet. That's a well-built cabin!"
+
+The dogs halted, though they had at least five hundred yards still to
+travel before they would reach the well-built cabin.
+
+"_Mush!_" shouted the Indian.
+
+The dogs cleared the ice-reef, and went spinning along so briskly over
+the low hummocks that the driver had to run to keep up with them.
+
+The Boy was flying after when the priest, having caught sight of his
+face, called out: "Here! Wait! Stop a moment!" and hurried forward.
+
+He kicked through the ice-crust, gathered up a handful of snow, and
+began to rub it on the Boy's right cheek.
+
+"What in the name of--" The Boy was drawing back angrily.
+
+"Keep still," ordered the priest; "your cheek is frozen"; and he
+applied more snow and more friction. "You ought to watch one another in
+such weather as this. When a man turns dead-white like that, he's
+touched with frost-bite." After he had restored the circulation: "There
+now, don't go near the fire, or it will begin to hurt."
+
+"Thank you," said the Boy, a little shame-faced. "It's all right now, I
+suppose?"
+
+"I think so," said the priest. "You'll lose the skin, and you may be a
+little sore--nothing to speak of," with which he fell back to the
+Colonel's side.
+
+The dogs had settled down into a jog-trot now, but were still well on
+in front.
+
+"Is 'mush' their food?" asked the Boy.
+
+"_Mush?_ No, fish."
+
+"Why does your Indian go on like that about mush, then?"
+
+"Oh, that's the only word the dogs know, except--a--certain expressions
+we try to discourage the Indians from using. In the old days the
+dog-drivers used to say 'mahsh.' Now you never hear anything but
+swearing and 'mush,' a corruption of the French-Canadian _marche_." He
+turned to the Colonel: "You'll get over trying to wear cheechalko boots
+here--nothing like mucklucks with a wisp of straw inside for this
+country."
+
+"I agree wid ye. I got me a pair in St. Michael's," says O'Flynn
+proudly, turning out his enormous feet. "Never wore anything so
+comf'table in me life."
+
+"You ought to have drill parkis too, like this of mine, to keep out the
+wind."
+
+They were going up the slope now, obliquely to the cabin, close behind
+the dogs, who were pulling spasmodically between their little rests.
+
+Father Wills stooped and gathered up some moss that the wind had swept
+almost bare of snow. "You see that?" he said to O'Flynn, while the Boy
+stopped, and the Colonel hurried on. "Wherever you find that growing no
+man need starve."
+
+The Colonel looked back before entering the cabin and saw that the Boy
+seemed to have forgotten not alone the Indian, but the dogs, and was
+walking behind with the Jesuit, face upturned, smiling, as friendly as
+you please.
+
+Within a different picture.
+
+Potts and Mac were having a row about something, and the Colonel struck
+in sharply on their growling comments upon each other's character and
+probable destination.
+
+"Got plenty to eat? Two hungry men coming in. One's an Indian, and you
+know what that means, and the other's a Catholic priest." It was this
+bomb that he had hurried on to get exploded and done with before the
+said priest should appear on the scene.
+
+"A _what_?" Mac raised his heavy eyes with fight in every wooden
+feature.
+
+"A Jesuit priest is what I said."
+
+"He won't eat his dinner here."
+
+"That is exactly what he will do."
+
+"Not by--" Whether it was the monstrous proposition that had unstrung
+Mac, he was obliged to steady himself against the table with a shaking
+hand. But he set those square features of his like iron, and, says he,
+"No Jesuit sits down to the same table with me."
+
+"That means, then, that you'll eat alone."
+
+"Not if I know it."
+
+The Colonel slid in place the heavy wooden bar that had never before
+been requisitioned to secure the door, and he came and stood in the
+middle of the cabin, where he could let out all his inches. Just
+clearing the swing-shelf, he pulled his great figure up to its full
+height, and standing there like a second Goliath, he said quite softly
+in that lingo of his childhood that always came back to his tongue's
+tip in times of excitement: "Just as shuah as yo' bohn that priest will
+eat his dinner to-day in my cabin, sah; and if yo' going t' make any
+trouble, just say so now, and we'll get it ovah, and the place cleaned
+up again befoh our visitors arrive."
+
+"Mind what you're about, Mac," growled Potts. "You know he could lick
+the stuffin' out o' you."
+
+The ex-schoolmaster produced some sort of indignant sound in his throat
+and turned, as if he meant to go out. The Colonel came a little nearer.
+Mac flung up his head and squared for battle.
+
+Potts, in a cold sweat, dropped a lot of tinware with a rattle, while
+the Colonel said, "No, no. We'll settle this after the people go, Mac."
+Then in a whisper: "Look here: I've been trying to shield you for ten
+days. Don't give yourself away now--before the first white neighbour
+that comes to see us. You call yourself a Christian. Just see if you
+can't behave like one, for an hour or two, to a fellow-creature that's
+cold and hungry. Come, _you're_ the man we've always counted on! Do the
+honours, and take it out of me after our guests are gone."
+
+Mac seemed in a haze. He sat down heavily on some beanbags in the
+corner; and when the newcomers were brought in and introduced, he "did
+the honours" by glowering at them with red eyes, never breaking his
+surly silence.
+
+"Well!" says Father Wills, looking about, "I must say you're very
+comfortable here. If more people made homes like this, there'd be fewer
+failures." They gave him the best place by the fire, and Potts dished
+up dinner. There were only two stools made yet. The Boy rolled his
+section of sawed spruce over near the priest, and prepared to dine at
+his side.
+
+"No, no," said Father Wills firmly. "You shall sit as far away from
+this splendid blaze as you can get, or you will have trouble with that
+cheek." So the Boy had to yield his place to O'Flynn, and join Mac over
+on the bean-bags.
+
+"Why didn't you get a parki when you were at St. Michael's?" said the
+priest as this change was being effected.
+
+"We had just as much--more than we could carry. Besides, I thought we
+could buy furs up river; anyway, I'm warm enough."
+
+"No you are not," returned the priest smiling. "You must get a parki
+with a hood."
+
+"I've got an Arctic cap; it rolls down over my ears and goes all round
+my neck--just leaves a little place in front for my eyes."
+
+"Yes; wear that if you go on the trail; but the good of the parki hood
+is, that it is trimmed all round with long wolf-hair. You see"--he
+picked his parki up off the floor and showed it to the company--"those
+long hairs standing out all round the face break the force of the wind.
+It is wonderful how the Esquimaux hood lessens the chance of
+frost-bite."
+
+While the only object in the room that he didn't seem to see was Mac,
+he was most taken up with the fireplace.
+
+The Colonel laid great stress on the enormous services of the
+delightful, accomplished master-mason over there on the beanbags, who
+sat looking more than ever like a monkey-wrench incarnate.
+
+But whether that Jesuit was as wily as the Calvinist thought, he had
+quite wit enough to overlook the great chimney-builder's wrathful
+silence.
+
+He was not the least "professional," talked about the country and how
+to live here, saying incidentally that he had spent twelve years at the
+mission of the Holy Cross. The Yukon wasn't a bad place to live in, he
+told them, if men only took the trouble to learn how to live here.
+While teaching the Indians, there was a great deal to learn from them
+as well.
+
+"You must all come and see our schools," he wound up.
+
+"We'd like to awfully," said the Boy, and all but Mac echoed him. "We
+were so afraid," he went on, "that we mightn't see anybody all winter
+long."
+
+"Oh, you'll have more visitors than you want."
+
+"_Shall_ we, though?" Then, with a modified rapture: "Indians, I
+suppose, and--and missionaries."
+
+"Traders, too, and miners, and this year cheechalkos as well. You are
+directly on the great highway of winter travel. Now that there's a good
+hard crust on the snow you will have dog-trains passing every week, and
+sometimes two or three."
+
+It was good news!
+
+"We've already had one visitor before you," said the Boy, looking
+wonderfully pleased at the prospect the priest had opened out. "You
+must know Nicholas of Pymeut, don't you?"
+
+"Oh yes; we all know Nicholas"; and the priest smiled.
+
+"We _like_ him," returned the Boy as if some slighting criticism had
+been passed upon his friend.
+
+"Of course you do; so do we all"; and still that look of quiet
+amusement on the worn face and a keener twinkle glinting in the eyes.
+
+"We're afraid he's sick," the Boy began.
+
+Before the priest could answer, "He was educated at Howly Cross, he
+_says_," contributed O'Flynn.
+
+"Oh, he's been to Holy Cross, among other places."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Well, Nicholas is a most impartial person. He was born at Pymeut, but
+his father, who is the richest and most intelligent man in his tribe,
+took Nicholas to Ikogimeut when the boy was only six. He was brought up
+in the Russian mission there, as the father had been before him, and
+was a Greek--in religion--till he was fourteen. There was a famine that
+year down yonder, so Nicholas turned Catholic and came up to us. He was
+at Holy Cross some years, when business called him to Anvik, where he
+turned Episcopalian. At Eagle City, I believe, he is regarded as a
+pattern Presbyterian. There are those that say, since he has been a
+pilot, Nicholas makes six changes a trip in his religious convictions."
+
+Father Wills saw that the Colonel, to whom he most frequently addressed
+himself, took his pleasantry gravely. "Nicholas is not a bad fellow,"
+he added. "He told me you had been kind to him."
+
+"If you believe that about his insincerity," said the Colonel, "are you
+not afraid the others you spend your life teaching may turn out as
+little credit to you--to Christianity?"
+
+The priest glanced at the listening Indian. "No," said he gravely; "I
+do not think _all_ the natives are like Nicholas. Andrew here is a true
+son of the Church. But even if it were otherwise, _we_, you know"--the
+Jesuit rose from the table with that calm smile of his--"we simply do
+the work without question. The issue is not in our hands." He made the
+sign of the cross and set back his stool.
+
+"Come, Andrew," he said; "we must push on."
+
+The Indian repeated the priest's action, and went out to see to the
+dogs.
+
+"Oh, are you going right away?" said the Colonel politely, and O'Flynn
+volubly protested.
+
+"We thought," said the Boy, "you'd sit awhile and smoke and--at least,
+of course, I don't mean smoke exactly--but--"
+
+The Father smiled and shook his head.
+
+"Another time I would stay gladly."
+
+"Where are you going now?"
+
+"Andrew and I are on our way to the _Oklahoma_, the steamship frozen in
+the ice below here."
+
+"How far?" asked the Boy.
+
+"About seven miles below the Russian mission, and a mile or so up the
+Kuskoquim Slough."
+
+"Wrecked there?"
+
+"Oh no. Gone into winter quarters."
+
+"In a slew?" for it was so Father Wills pronounced s-l-o-u-g-h.
+
+"Oh, that's what they call a blind river up in this country. They come
+into the big streams every here and there, and cheechalkos are always
+mistaking them for the main channel. Sometimes they're wider and deeper
+for a mile or so than the river proper, but before you know it they
+land you in a marsh. This place I'm going to, a little way up the
+Kuskoquim, out of danger when the ice breaks up, has been chosen for a
+new station by the N. A. T. and T. Company--rival, you know, to the
+old-established Alaska Commercial, that inherited the Russian fur
+monopoly and controlled the seal and salmon trade so long. Well, the
+younger company runs the old one hard, and they've sent this steamer
+into winter quarters loaded with provisions, ready to start for Dawson
+the instant the ice goes out."
+
+"Why, then, it's the very boat that'll be takin' us to the Klondyke."
+
+"You just goin' down to have a look at her?" asked Potts enviously.
+
+"No. I go to get relief for the Pymeuts."
+
+"What's the matter with 'em?"
+
+"Epidemic all summer, starvation now."
+
+"Guess you won't find _any_body's got such a lot he wants to give it
+away to the Indians."
+
+"Our Father Superior has given much," said the priest gently; "but we
+are not inexhaustible at Holy Cross. And the long winter is before us.
+Many of the supply steamers have failed to get in, and the country is
+flooded with gold-seekers. There'll be wide-spread want this
+year--terrible suffering all up and down the river."
+
+"The more reason for people to hold on to what they've got. A white
+man's worth more 'n an Indian."
+
+The priest's face showed no anger, not even coldness.
+
+"White men have got a great deal out of Alaska and as yet done little
+but harm here. The government ought to help the natives, and we believe
+the Government will. All we ask of the captain of the _Oklahoma_ is to
+sell us, on fair terms, a certain supply, we assuming part of the risk,
+and both of us looking to the Government to make it good."
+
+"Reckon you'll find that steamer-load down in the ice is worth its
+weight in gold," said Potts.
+
+"One must always try," replied the Father.
+
+He left the doorpost, straightened his bowed back, and laid a hand on
+the wooden latch.
+
+"But Nicholas--when you left Pymeut was he--" began the Boy.
+
+"Oh, he is all right," the Father smiled and nodded. "Brother Paul has
+been looking after Nicholas's father. The old chief has enough food,
+but he has been very ill. By the way, have you any letters you want to
+send out?"
+
+"Oh, if we'd only known!" was the general chorus; and Potts flew to
+close and stamp one he had hardly more than begun to the future Mrs.
+Potts.
+
+The Boy had thoughtlessly opened the door to have a look at the dogs.
+
+"Shut that da--Don't keep the door open!" howled Potts, trying to hold
+his precious letter down on the table while he added "only two words."
+The Boy slammed the door behind him.
+
+"With all our trouble, the cabin isn't really warm," said the Colonel
+apologetically. "In a wind like this, if the door is open, we have to
+hold fast to things to keep them from running down the Yukon. It's a
+trial to anybody's temper."
+
+"Why don't you build a false wall?"
+
+"Well, I don't know; we hadn't thought of it."
+
+"You'd find it correct this draught"; and the priest explained his
+views on the subject while Potts's letter was being addressed. Andrew
+put his head in.
+
+"Ready, Father!"
+
+As the priest was pocketing the letter the Boy dashed in, put on the
+Arctic cap he set such store by, and a fur coat and mittens.
+
+"Do you mind if I go a little way with you?" he said.
+
+"Of course not," answered the priest. "I will send him back in half an
+hour," he said low to the Colonel. "It's a hitter day."
+
+It was curious how already he had divined the relation of the elder man
+to the youngest of that odd household.
+
+The moment they had gone Mac, with an obvious effort, pulled himself up
+out of his corner, and, coming towards the Colonel at the fireplace, he
+said thickly:
+
+"You've put an insult upon me, Warren, and that's what I stand from no
+man. Come outside."
+
+The Colonel looked at him.
+
+"All right, Mac; but we've just eaten a rousing big dinner. Even
+Sullivan wouldn't accept that as the moment for a round. We'll both
+have forty winks, hey? and Potts shall call us, and O'Flynn shall be
+umpire. You can have the Boy's bunk."
+
+Mac was in a haze again, and allowed himself to be insinuated into bed.
+
+The others got rid of the dinner things, and "sat round" for an hour.
+
+"Doubt if he sleeps long," says Potts a little before two; "that's what
+he's been doing all morning."
+
+"We haven't had any fresh meat for a week," returns the Colonel
+significantly. "Why don't you and O'Flynn go down to meet the Boy, and
+come round by the woods? There'll be full moon up by four o'clock; you
+might get a brace of grouse or a rabbit or two."
+
+O'Flynn was not very keen about it; but the Jesuit's visit had stirred
+him up, and he offered less opposition to the unusual call to activity
+than the Colonel expected.
+
+When at last he was left alone with the sleeping man, the Kentuckian
+put on a couple more logs, and sat down to wait. At three he got up,
+swung the crane round so that the darting tongues of flame could lick
+the hot-water pot, and then he measured out some coffee. In a quarter
+of an hour the cabin was full of the fragrance of good Mocha.
+
+The Colonel sat and waited. Presently he poured out a little coffee,
+and drank it slowly, blissfully, with half-closed eyes. But when he had
+set the granite cup down again, he stood up alert, like a man ready for
+business. Mac had been asleep nearly three hours. The others wouldn't
+be long now.
+
+Well, if they came prematurely, they must go to the Little Cabin for
+awhile. The Colonel shot the bar across door and jamb for the second
+time that day. Mac stirred and lifted himself on his elbow, but he
+wasn't really awake.
+
+"Potts," he said huskily.
+
+The Colonel made no sound. "Potts, measure me out two fingers, will
+you? Cabin's damn cold."
+
+No answer.
+
+Mac roused himself, muttering compliments for Potts. When he had
+bundled himself out over the side of the bunk, he saw the Colonel
+seemingly dozing by the fire.
+
+He waited a moment. Then, very softly, he made his way to the farther
+end of the swing-shelf.
+
+The Colonel opened one eye, shut it, and shuffled in a sleepy sort of
+way. Mac turned sharply back to the fire.
+
+The Colonel opened his eyes and yawned.
+
+"I made some cawfee a little while back. Have some?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Better; it's A 1."
+
+"Where's Potts?"
+
+"Gone out for a little. Back soon." He poured out some of the strong,
+black decoction, and presented it to his companion. "Just try it.
+Finest cawfee in the world, sir."
+
+Mac poured it down without seeming to bother about tasting it.
+
+They sat quite still after that, till the Colonel said meditatively:
+
+"You and I had a little account to settle, didn't we?"
+
+"I'm ready."
+
+But neither moved for several moments.
+
+"See here, Mac: you haven't been ill or anything like that, have you?"
+
+"No." There was no uncertain note in the answer; if anything, there was
+in it more than the usual toneless decision. Mac's voice was
+machine-made--as innocent of modulation as a buzz-saw, and with the
+same uncompromising finality as the shooting of a bolt. "I'm ready to
+stand up against any man."
+
+"Good!" interrupted the Colonel. "Glad o' that, for I'm just longing to
+see you stand up--"
+
+Mac was on his feet in a flash.
+
+"You had only to say so, if you wanted to see me stand up against any
+man alive. And when I sit down again it's my opinion one of us two
+won't be good-lookin' any more."
+
+He pushed back the stools.
+
+"I thought maybe it was only necessary to mention it," said the Colonel
+slowly. "I've been wanting for a fortnight to see you stand up"--Mac
+turned fiercely--"against Samuel David MacCann."
+
+"Come on! I'm in no mood for monkeyin'!"
+
+"Nor I. I realise, MacCann, we've come to a kind of a crisis. Things in
+this camp are either going a lot better, or a lot worse, after to-day."
+
+"There's nothing wrong, if you quit asking dirty Jesuits to sit down
+with honest men."
+
+"Yes; there's something worse out o' shape than that."
+
+Mac waited warily.
+
+"When we were stranded here, and saw what we'd let ourselves in for,
+there wasn't one of us that didn't think things looked pretty much like
+the last o' pea time. There was just one circumstance that kept us from
+throwing up the sponge; _we had a man in camp."_
+
+The Colonel paused.
+
+Mac stood as expressionless as the wooden crane.
+
+"A man we all believed in, who was going to help us pull through."
+"That was you, I s'pose." Mac's hard voice chopped out the sarcasm.
+
+"You know mighty well who it was. The Boy's all right, but he's young
+for this kind o' thing--young and heady. There isn't much wrong with me
+that I'm aware of, except that I don't know shucks. Potts's petering
+out wasn't altogether a surprise, and nobody expected anything from
+O'Flynn till we got to Dawson, when a lawyer and a fella with capital
+behind him may come in handy. But there was one man--who had a head on
+him, who had experience, and who"--he leaned over to emphasise the
+climax--"who had _character_. It was on that man's account that I
+joined this party."
+
+Mac put his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall. His face
+began to look a little more natural. The long sleep or the coffee had
+cleared his eyes.
+
+"Shall I tell you what I heard about that man last night?" asked the
+Colonel gravely.
+
+Mac looked up, but never opened his lips.
+
+"You remember you wouldn't sit here--"
+
+"The Boy was always in and out. The cabin was cold."
+
+"I left the Boy and O'Flynn at supper-time and went down to the Little
+Cabin to--"
+
+"To see what I was doin'--to spy on me."
+
+"Well, all right--maybe I was spying, too. Incidentally I wanted to
+tell you the cabin was hot as blazes, and get you to come to supper. I
+met Potts hurrying up for his grub, and I said, 'Where's Mac? Isn't he
+coming?' and your pardner's answer was: 'Oh, let him alone. He's got a
+flask in his bunk, swillin' and gruntin'; he's just in hog-heaven.'"
+
+"Damn that sneak!"
+
+"The man he was talkin' about, Mac, was the man we had all built our
+hopes on."
+
+"I'll teach Potts--"
+
+"You can't, Mac. Potts has got to die and go to heaven--perhaps to
+hell, before he'll learn any good. But you're a different breed. Teach
+MacCann."
+
+Mac suddenly sat down on the stool with his head in his hands.
+
+"The Boy hasn't caught on," said the Colonel presently, "but he said
+something this morning to show he was wondering about the change that's
+come over you."
+
+"That I don't split wood all day, I suppose, when we've got enough for
+a month. Potts doesn't either. Why don't you go for Potts?"
+
+"As the Boy said, I don't care about Potts. It's Mac that matters."
+
+"Did the Boy say that?" He looked up.
+
+The Colonel nodded.
+
+"After you had made that chimney, you know, you were a kind of hero in
+his eyes."
+
+Mac looked away. "The cabin's been cold," he muttered.
+
+"We are going to remedy that."
+
+"I didn't bring any liquor into camp. You must admit that I didn't
+intend--"
+
+"I do admit it."
+
+"And when O'Flynn said that about keeping his big demijohn out of the
+inventory and apart from the common stores, I sat on him."
+
+"So you did."
+
+"I knew it was safest to act on the 'medicinal purposes' principle."
+
+"So it is."
+
+"But I wasn't thinking so much of O'Flynn. I was thinking of ... things
+that had happened before ... for ... I'd had experience. Drink was the
+curse of Caribou. It's something of a scourge up in Nova Scotia ... I'd
+had experience."
+
+"You did the very best thing possible under the circumstances." Mac was
+feeling about after his self-respect, and must be helped to get hold of
+it. "I realise, too, that the temptation is much greater in cold
+countries," said the Kentuckian unblushingly. "Italians and Greeks
+don't want fiery drinks half as much as Russians and
+Scandinavians--haven't the same craving as Nova Scotians and
+cold-country people generally, I suppose. But that only shows,
+temperance is of more vital importance in the North."
+
+"That's right! It's not much in my line to shift blame, even when I
+don't deserve it; but you know so much you might as well know ... it
+wasn't I who opened that demijohn first."
+
+"But you don't mind being the one to shut it up--do you?"
+
+"Shut it up?"
+
+"Yes; let's get it down and--" The Colonel swung it off the shelf. It
+was nearly empty, and only the Boy's and the Colonel's single bottles
+stood unbroached. Even so, Mac's prolonged spree was something of a
+mystery to the Kentuckian. It must be that a very little was too much
+for Mac. The Colonel handed the demijohn to his companion, and lit the
+solitary candle standing on its little block of wood, held in place
+between three half-driven nails.
+
+"What's that for?"
+
+"Don't you want to seal it up?"
+
+"I haven't got any wax."
+
+"I have an inch or so." The Colonel produced out of his pocket the only
+piece in camp.
+
+Mac picked up a billet of wood, and drove the cork in flush with the
+neck. Then, placing upright on the cork the helve of the hammer, he
+drove the cork down a quarter of an inch farther.
+
+"Give me your wax. What's for a seal?" They looked about. Mac's eye
+fell on a metal button that hung by a thread from the old militia
+jacket he was wearing. He put his hand up to it, paused, glanced
+hurriedly at the Colonel, and let his fingers fall.
+
+"Yes, yes," said the Kentuckian, "that'll make a capital seal."
+
+"No; something of yours, I think, Colonel. The top of that tony
+pencil-case, hey?"
+
+The Colonel produced his gold pencil, watched Mac heat the wax, drop it
+into the neck of the demijohn, and apply the initialled end of the
+Colonel's property. While Mac, without any further waste of words, was
+swinging the wicker-bound temptation up on the shelf again, they heard
+voices.
+
+"They're coming back," says the Kentuckian hurriedly. "But we've
+settled our little account, haven't we, old man?"
+
+Mac jerked his head in that automatic fashion that with him meant
+genial and whole-hearted agreement.
+
+"And if Potts or O'Flynn want to break that seal--"
+
+"I'll call 'em down," says Mac. And the Colonel knew the seal was safe.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+"By-the-by, Colonel," said the Boy, just as he was turning in that
+night, "I--a--I've asked that Jesuit chap to the House-Warming."
+
+"Oh, you did, did you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, you'd just better have a talk with Mac about it."
+
+"Yes. I've been tryin' to think how I'd square Mac. Of course, I know
+I'll have to go easy on the raw."
+
+"I reckon you just will."
+
+"If Monkey-wrench screws down hard on me, you'll come to the rescue,
+won't you, Colonel?"
+
+"No I'll side with Mac on that subject. Whatever he says, goes!"
+
+"Humph! _that_ Jesuit's all right."
+
+Not a word out of the Colonel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+TWO NEW SPISSIMENS
+
+Medwjedew (zu Luka). Tag' mal--wer bist du? Ich
+kenne dich nicht.
+
+Luka. Kennst du denn sonst alle Leute?
+
+Medwjedew. In meinem Revier muß ich jeden kennen und dich kenn'ich
+nicht....
+
+Luka. Das kommt wohl daher Onkelchen, daß dein Revier nicht die ganze
+Erde umfasst ... 's ist da noch ein Endchen draußen geblieben....
+
+
+One of the curious results of what is called wild life, is a blessed
+release from many of the timidities that assail the easy liver in the
+centres of civilisation. Potts was the only one in the white camp who
+had doubts about the wisdom of having to do with the natives.
+
+However, the agreeable necessity of going to Pymeut to invite Nicholas
+to the Blow-out was not forced upon the Boy. They were still hard at
+it, four days after the Jesuit had gone his way, surrounding the Big
+Cabin with a false wall, that final and effectual barrier against
+Boreas--finishing touch warranted to convert a cabin, so cold that it
+drove its inmates to drink, into a dwelling where practical people,
+without cracking a dreary joke, might fitly celebrate a House-Warming.
+
+In spite of the shortness of the days, Father Wills's suggestion was
+being carried out with a gratifying success. Already manifest were the
+advantages of the stockade, running at a foot's distance round the
+cabin to the height of the eaves, made of spruce saplings not even
+lopped of their short bushy branches, but planted close together, after
+burning the ground cleared of snow. A second visitation of mild
+weather, and a further two days' thaw, made the Colonel determine to
+fill in the space between the spruce stockade and the cabin with
+"burnt-out" soil closely packed down and well tramped in. It was
+generally conceded, as the winter wore on, that to this contrivance of
+the "earthwork" belonged a good half of the credit of the Big Cabin,
+and its renown as being the warmest spot on the lower river that
+terrible memorable year of the Klondyke Rush.
+
+The evergreen wall with the big stone chimney shouldering itself up to
+look out upon the frozen highway, became a conspicuous feature in the
+landscape, welcome as the weeks went on to many an eye wearied with
+long looking for shelter, and blinded by the snow-whitened waste.
+
+An exception to what became a rule was, of all men, Nicholas. When the
+stockade was half done, the Prince and an equerry appeared on the
+horizon, with the second team the camp had seen, the driver much
+concerned to steer clear of the softened snow and keep to that part of
+the river ice windswept and firm, if roughest of all. Nicholas regarded
+the stockade with a cold and beady eye.
+
+No, he hadn't time to look at it. He had promised to "mush." He wasn't
+even hungry.
+
+It did little credit to his heart, but he seemed more in haste to leave
+his new friends than the least friendly of them would have expected.
+
+"Oh, wait a sec.," urged the deeply disappointed Boy. "I wanted awf'ly
+to see how your sled is made. It's better 'n Father Wills'."
+
+"Humph!" grunted Nicholas scornfully; "him no got Innuit sled."
+
+"Mac and I are goin' to try soon's the stockade's done--"
+
+"Goo'-bye," interrupted Nicholas.
+
+But the Boy paid no attention to the word of farewell. He knelt down in
+the snow and examined the sled carefully.
+
+"Spruce runners," he called out to Mac, "and--jee! they're shod with
+ivory! _Jee!_ fastened with sinew and wooden pegs. Hey?"--looking up
+incredulously at Nicholas--"not a nail in the whole shebang, eh?"
+
+"Nail?" says Nicholas. "Huh, no _nail!_" as contemptuously as though
+the Boy had said "bread-crumbs."
+
+"Well, she's a daisy! When you comin' back?"
+
+"Comin' pretty quick; goin' pretty quick. Goo'-bye! _Mush!_" shouted
+Nicholas to his companion, and the dogs got up off their haunches.
+
+But the Boy only laughed at Nicholas's struggles to get started. He
+hung on to the loaded sled, examining, praising, while the dogs, after
+the merest affectation of trying to make a start, looked round at him
+over their loose collars and grinned contentedly.
+
+"Me got to mush. Show nex' time. Mush!"
+
+"What's here?" the Boy shouted through the "mushing"; and he tugged at
+the goodly load, so neatly disposed under an old reindeer-skin
+sleeping-bag, and lashed down with raw hide.
+
+That? Oh, that was fish. _"Fish!_ Got so much fish at starving Pymeut
+you can go hauling it down river? Well, sir, _we_ want fish. We _must_
+have fish. Hey?" The Boy appealed to the others.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"R-right y'arre!"
+
+"I reckon we just do!"
+
+But Nicholas had other views.
+
+"No, me take him--" He hitched his body in the direction of Ikogimeut.
+
+"Bless my soul! you've got enough there for a regiment. You goin' to
+sell him? Hey?"
+
+Nicholas shook his head.
+
+"Oh, come off the roof!" advised the Boy genially.
+
+"You ain't carryin' it about for your health, I suppose?" said Potts.
+
+"The people down at Ikogimeut don't need it like us. We're white
+duffers, and can't get fish through the ice. You sell _some_ of it to
+us." But Nicholas shook his head and shuffled along on his snow-shoes,
+beckoning the dog-driver to follow.
+
+"Or trade some fur--fur tay," suggested O'Flynn.
+
+"Or for sugar," said Mac.
+
+"Or for tobacco," tempted the Colonel.
+
+And before that last word Nicholas's resolve went down. Up at the cabin
+he unlashed the load, and it quickly became manifest that Nicholas was
+a dandy at driving a bargain. He kept on saying shamelessly:
+
+"More--more shuhg. Hey? Oh yes, me give heap fish. No nuff shuhg."
+
+If it hadn't been for Mac (his own clear-headed self again, and by no
+means to be humbugged by any Prince alive) the purchase of a portion of
+that load of frozen fish, corded up like so much wood, would have laid
+waste the commissariat.
+
+But if the white men after this passage did not feel an absolute
+confidence in Nicholas's fairness of mind, no such unworthy suspicion
+of them found lodgment in the bosom of the Prince. With the exception
+of some tobacco, he left all his ill-gotten store to be kept for him by
+his new friends till he should return. When was that to be? In five
+sleeps he would be back.
+
+"Good! We'll have the stockade done by then. What do you say to our big
+chimney, Nicholas?"
+
+He emitted a scornful "Peeluck!"
+
+"What! Our chimney no good?"
+
+He shrugged: "Why you have so tall hole your house? How you cover him
+up?"
+
+"We don't want to cover him up."
+
+"Humph! winter fin' you tall hole. Winter come down--bring in
+snow--drive fire out." He shivered in anticipation of what was to
+happen. "Peeluck!"
+
+The white men laughed.
+
+"What you up to now? Where you going?"
+
+Well, the fact was, Nicholas had been sent by his great ally, the
+Father Superior of Holy Cross, on a mission, very important, demanding
+despatch.
+
+"Father Brachet--him know him heap better send Nicholas when him want
+man go God-damn quick. Me no stop--no--no stop."
+
+He drew on his mittens proudly, unjarred by remembrance of how his good
+resolution had come to grief.
+
+"Where you off to now?"
+
+"Me ketchum Father Wills--me give letter." He tapped his
+deerskin-covered chest. "Ketchum _sure_ 'fore him leave Ikogimeut."
+
+"You come back with Father Wills?"
+
+Nicholas nodded.
+
+"Hooray! we'll all work like sixty!" shouted the Boy, "and by Saturday
+(that's five sleeps) we'll have the wall done and the house warm, and
+you and"--he caught himself up; not thus in public would he break the
+news to Mac--"you'll be back in time for the big Blow-Out." To clinch
+matters, he accompanied Nicholas from the cabin to the river trail,
+explaining: "You savvy? Big feast--all same Indian. Heap good grub. No
+prayer-meetin'--you savvy?--no church this time. Big fire, big feed.
+All kinds--apples, shuhg, bacon--no cook him, you no like," he added,
+basely truckling to the Prince's peculiar taste.
+
+Nicholas rolled his single eye in joyful anticipation, and promised
+faithfully to grace the scene.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+This was all very fine ... but Father Wills! The last thing at night
+and the first thing in the morning the Boy looked the problem in the
+face, and devised now this, now that, adroit and disarming fashion of
+breaking the news to Mac.
+
+But it was only when the daring giver of invitations was safely in bed,
+and Mac equally safe down in the Little Cabin, that it seemed possible
+to broach the subject. He devised scenes in which, airily and
+triumphantly, he introduced Father Wills, and brought Mac to the point
+of pining for Jesuit society; but these scenes were actable only under
+conditions of darkness and of solitude. The Colonel refused to have
+anything to do with the matter.
+
+"Our first business, as I see it, is to keep peace in the camp, and
+hold fast to a good understanding with one another. It's just over
+little things like this that trouble begins. Mac's one of us; Father
+Wills is an outsider. I won't rile Mac for the sake of any Jesuit
+alive. No, sir; this is _your_ funeral, and you're obliged to attend."
+
+Before three of Nicholas's five sleeps were accomplished, the Boy began
+to curse the hour he had laid eyes on Father Wills. He began even to
+speculate desperately on the good priest's chances of tumbling into an
+air-hole, or being devoured by a timely wolf. But no, life was never so
+considerate as that. Yet he could neither face being the cause of the
+first serious row in camp, nor endure the thought of having his
+particular guest--drat him!--flouted, and the whole House-Warming
+turned to failure and humiliation.
+
+Indeed, the case looked desperate. Only one day more now before he
+would appear--be flouted, insulted, and go off wounded, angry, leaving
+the Boy with an irreconciliable quarrel against Mac, and the
+House-Warming turned to chill recrimination and to wretchedness.
+
+But until the last phantasmal hope went down before the logic of events
+it was impossible not to cling to the idea of melting Mac's Arctic
+heart. There was still one course untried.
+
+Since there was so little left to do to the stockade, the Boy announced
+that he thought he'd go up over the hill for a tramp. Gun in hand and
+grub in pocket, he marched off to play his last trump-card. If he could
+bring home a queer enough bird or beast for the collection, there was
+still hope. To what lengths might Mac not go if one dangled before him
+the priceless bait of a golden-tipped emperor goose, dressed in
+imperial robes of rose-flecked snow? Or who, knowing Mac, would not
+trust a _Xema Sabinii_ to play the part of a white-winged angel of
+peace? Failing some such heavenly messenger, there was nothing for it
+but that the Boy should face the ignominy of going forth to meet the
+Father on the morrow, and confess the humiliating truth. It wasn't fair
+to let him come expecting hospitality, and find--. Visions arose of Mac
+receiving the bent and wayworn missionary with the greeting: "There is
+no corner by the fire, no place in the camp for a pander to the Scarlet
+Woman." The thought lent impassioned fervour to the quest for goose or
+gull.
+
+It was pretty late when he got back to camp, and the men were at
+supper. No, he hadn't shot anything.
+
+"What's that bulging in your pocket?"
+
+"Sort o' stone."
+
+"Struck it rich?"
+
+"Don't give me any chin-music, boys; give me tea. I'm dog-tired."
+
+But when Mac got up first, as usual, to go down to the Little Cabin to
+"wood up" for the night, "I'll walk down with you," says the Boy,
+though it was plain he was dead-beat.
+
+He helped to revive the failing fire, and then, dropping on the section
+of sawed wood that did duty for a chair, with some difficulty and a
+deal of tugging he pulled "the sort o' stone" out of the pocket of his
+duck shooting-jacket.
+
+"See that?" He held the thing tightly clasped in his two red, chapped
+hands.
+
+Mac bent down, shading his eyes from the faint flame flicker.
+
+"What is it?" "Piece o' tooth."
+
+"By the Lord Harry! so it is." He took the thing nearer the faint
+light. "Fossil! Where'd you get it?"
+
+"Over yonder--by a little frozen river."
+
+"How far? Any more? Only this?"
+
+The Boy didn't answer. He went outside, and returned instantly, lugging
+in something brown and whitish, weather-stained, unwieldy.
+
+"I dropped this at the door as I came along home. Thought it might do
+for the collection."
+
+Mac stared with all his eyes, and hurriedly lit a candle. The Boy
+dropped exhausted on a ragged bit of burlap by the bunks. Mac knelt
+down opposite, pouring liberal libation of candle-grease on the
+uncouth, bony mass between them.
+
+"Part of the skull!" he rasped out, masking his ecstasy as well as he
+could.
+
+"Mastodon?" inquired the Boy.
+
+Mac shook his head.
+
+"I'll bet my boots," says Mac, "it's an _Elephas primigenius;_ and if
+I'm right, it's 'a find,' young man. Where'd you stumble on him?"
+
+"Over yonder." The Boy leaned his head against the lower bunk.
+
+"Where?" "Across the divide. The bones have been dragged up on to some
+rocks. I saw the end of a tusk stickin' up out of the snow, and I
+scratched down till I found--" He indicated the trophy between them on
+the floor.
+
+"Tusk? How long?"
+
+"'Bout nine feet." "We'll go and get it to-morrow."
+
+No answer from the Boy.
+
+"Early, hey?"
+
+"Well--a--it's a good ways."
+
+"What if it is?"
+
+"Oh, I don't mind. I'd do more 'n that for you, Mac."
+
+There was something unnatural in such devotion. Mac looked up. But the
+Boy was too tired to play the big fish any longer. "I wonder if you'll
+do something for me." He watched with a sinking heart Mac's sharp
+uprising from the worshipful attitude. It was not like any other
+mortal's gradual, many-jointed getting-up; it was more like the sudden
+springing out of the big blade of a clasp-knife.
+
+"What's your game?"
+
+"Oh, I ain't got any game," said the Boy desperately; "or, if I have,
+there's mighty little fun in it. However, I don't know as I want to
+walk ten hours again in this kind o' weather with an elephant on my
+back just for--for the poetry o' the thing." He laid his chapped hands
+on the side board of the bunk and pulled himself up on his legs.
+
+"What's your game?" repeated Mac sternly, as the Boy reached the door.
+
+"What's the good o' talkin'?" he answered; but he paused, turned, and
+leaned heavily against the rude lintel.
+
+"Course, I know you'd be shot before you'd do it, but what I'd _like_,
+would be to hear you say you wouldn't kick up a hell of a row if Father
+Wills happens in to the House-Warmin'."
+
+Mac jerked his set face, fire-reddened, towards the fossil-finder; and
+he, without waiting for more, simply opened the door, and heavily
+footed it back to the Big Cabin.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next morning when Mac came to breakfast he heard that the Boy had had
+his grub half an hour before the usual time, and was gone off on some
+tramp again. Mac sat and mused.
+
+O'Flynn came in with a dripping bucket, and sat down to breakfast
+shivering.
+
+"Which way'd he go?"
+
+"The Boy? Down river."
+
+"Sure he didn't go over the divide?"
+
+O'Flynn was sure. He'd just been down to the water-hole, and in the
+faint light he'd seen the Boy far down on the river-trail "leppin" like
+a hare in the direction of the Roosian mission."
+
+"Goin' to meet ... a ... Nicholas?"
+
+"Reckon so," said the Colonel, a bit ruffled. "Don't believe he'll run
+like a hare very far with his feet all blistered."
+
+"Did you know he'd discovered a fossil elephant?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, he has. I must light out, too, and have a look at it."
+
+"Do; it'll be a cheerful sort of House-Warming with one of you off
+scouring the country for more blisters and chilblains, and another
+huntin' antediluvian elephants." The Colonel spoke with uncommon
+irascibility. The great feast-day had certainly not dawned
+propitiously.
+
+When breakfast was done Mac left the Big Cabin without a word; but,
+instead of going over the divide across the treeless snow-waste to the
+little frozen river, where, turned up to the pale northern dawn, were
+lying the bones of a beast that had trampled tropic forests, in that
+other dawn of the Prime, the naturalist, turning his back on _Elephas
+primigenius,_ followed in the track of the Boy down the great river
+towards Ikogimeut.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the low left bank of the Yukon a little camp. On one side, a big
+rock hooded with snow. At right angles, drawn up one on top of the
+other, two sleds covered with reindeer-skins held down by stones. In
+the corner formed by the angle of rocks and sleds, a small A-tent, very
+stained and old. Burning before it on a hearth of greenwood, a little
+fire struggling with a veering wind.
+
+Mac had seen from far off the faint blue banners of smoke blowing now
+right, now left, then tossed aloft in the pallid sunshine. He looked
+about sharply for the Boy, as he had been doing this two hours. There
+was the Jesuit bending over the fire, bettering the precarious position
+of a saucepan that insisted on sitting lop-sided, looking down into the
+heart of coals. Nicholas was holding up the tent-flap.
+
+"Hello! How do!" he sang out, recognising Mac. The priest glanced up
+and nodded pleasantly. Two Indians, squatting on the other side of the
+fire, scrambled away as the shifting wind brought a cloud of stifling
+smoke into their faces. "Where's the Boy?" demanded Mac, arresting the
+stampede.
+
+Nicholas's dog-driver stared, winked, and wiped his weeping,
+smoke-reddened eyes.
+
+"Is he in there?" Mac looked towards the tent.
+
+Andrew nodded between coughs.
+
+"What's he doing in there? Call him out," ordered Mac.
+
+"He no walk."
+
+Mac's hard face took on a look of cast-iron tragedy.
+
+The wind, veering round again, had brought the last words to the priest
+on the other side of the fire.
+
+"Oh, it'll be all right by-and-by," he said cheerfully.
+
+"But knocking up like that just for blisters?"
+
+"Blisters? No; cold and general weakness. That's why we delayed--"
+
+Without waiting to hear more Mac strode over to the tent, and as he
+went in, Nicholas came out. No sign of the Boy--nobody, nothing. What?
+Down in the corner a small, yellow face lying in a nest of fur. Bright,
+dark eyes stared roundly, and as Mac glowered astonished at the
+apparition, a mouth full of gleaming teeth opened, smiling, to say in a
+very small voice:
+
+"Farva!"
+
+Astonished as Mac was, disappointed and relieved all at once, there was
+something arresting in the appeal.
+
+"I'm not your father," he said stiffly. "Who're you? Hey? You speak
+English?"
+
+The child stared at him fixedly, but suddenly, for no reason on earth,
+it smiled again. Mac stood looking down at it, seeming lost in thought.
+Presently the small object stirred, struggled about feebly under the
+encompassing furs, and, freeing itself, held out its arms. The mites of
+hands fluttered at his sleeve and made ineffectual clutches.
+
+"What do you want?" To his own vast astonishment Mac lifted the little
+thing out of its warm nest. It was woefully thin, and seemed, even to
+his inexperience, to be insufficiently clothed, though the beaded
+moccasins on its tiny feet were new and good.
+
+"Why, you're only about as big as a minute," he said gruffly. "What's
+the matter--sick?" It suddenly struck him as very extraordinary that he
+should have taken up the child, and how extremely embarrassing it would
+be if anyone came in and caught him. Clutching the small morsel
+awkwardly, he fumbled with the furs preparatory to getting rid, without
+delay, of the unusual burden. While he was straightening the things,
+Father Wills appeared at the flap, smoking saucepan in hand. The
+instant the cold air struck the child it began to cough.
+
+"Oh, you mustn't do that!" said the priest to Mac with unexpected
+severity. "Kaviak must lie in bed and keep warm." Down on the floor
+went the saucepan. The child was caught away from the surprised Mac,
+and the furs so closely gathered round the small shrunken body that
+there was once more nothing visible but the wistful yellow face and
+gleaming eyes, still turned searchingly on its most recent
+acquaintance.
+
+But the priest, without so much as a glance at the new-comer, proceeded
+to feed Kaviak out of the saucepan, blowing vigorously at each spoonful
+before administering.
+
+"He's pretty hungry," commented Mac. "Where'd you find him?"
+
+"In a little village up on the Kuskoquim. Kaviak's an Esquimaux from
+Norton Sound, aren't you, Kaviak?" But the child was wholly absorbed,
+it seemed, in swallowing and staring at Mac. "His family came up there
+from the coast in a bidarra only last summer--all dead now. Everybody
+else in the village--and there isn't but a handful--all ailing and all
+hungry. I was tramping across an igloo there a couple of days ago, and
+I heard a strange little muffled sound, more like a snared rabbit than
+anything else. But the Indian with me said no, everybody who had lived
+there was dead, and he was for hurrying on. They're superstitious, you
+know, about a place where people have died. But I crawled in, and found
+this little thing lying in a bundle of rags with its hands bound and
+dried grass stuffed in its mouth. It was too weak to stir or do more
+than occasionally to make that muffled noise that I'd heard coming up
+through the smoke-hole."
+
+"What you goin' to do with him?"
+
+"Well, I hardly know. The Sisters will look after him for a while, if I
+get him there alive."
+
+"Why shouldn't you?"
+
+Kaviak supplied the answer straightway by choking and falling into an
+appalling fit of coughing.
+
+"I've got some stuff that'll be good for that," said Mac, thinking of
+his medicine-chest. "I'll give you some when we get back to camp."
+
+The priest nodded, taking Mac's unheard of civility as a matter of
+course.
+
+"The ice is very rough; the jolting makes him cough awfully."
+
+The Jesuit had fastened his eyes on Mac's woollen muffler, which had
+been loosened during the ministering to Kaviak and had dropped on the
+ground. "Do you need that scarf?" he asked, as though he suspected Mac
+of wearing it for show. "Because if you didn't you could wrap it round
+Kaviak while I help the men strike camp." And without waiting to see
+how his suggestion was received, he caught up the saucepan, lifted the
+flap, and vanished.
+
+"Farva," remarked Kaviak, fixing melancholy eyes on Mac.
+
+"I ain't your father," muttered the gentleman so addressed. He picked
+up his scarf and hung it round his own neck.
+
+"Farva!" insisted Kaviak. They looked at each other.
+
+"You cold? That it, hey?" Mac knelt down and pulled away the furs. "God
+bless me! you only got this one rag on? God bless me!" He pulled off
+his muffler and wound the child in it mummy-wise, round and round,
+muttering the while in a surly way. When it was half done he
+stopped--thought profoundly with a furrow cutting deep into his square
+forehead between the straight brows. Slowly he pulled his gloves out of
+his pocket, and turned out from each beaver gauntlet an inner mitten of
+knitted wool. "Here," he said, and put both little moccasined feet into
+one of the capacious mittens. Much pleased with his ingenuity, he went
+on winding the long scarf until the yellow little Esquimaux bore a
+certain whimsical resemblance to one of the adorable Delia Robbia
+infants. But Mac's sinewy hands were exerting a greater pressure than
+he realized. The morsel made a remonstrant squeaking, and squirmed
+feebly.
+
+"Oh, oh! Too tight? Beg your pardon," said Mac hastily, as though not
+only English, but punctilious manners were understanded of Kaviak. He
+relaxed the woollen bandage till the morsel lay contented again within
+its folds.
+
+Nicholas came in for Kaviak, and for the furs, that he might pack them
+both in the Father's sled. Already the true son of the Church was
+undoing the ropes that lashed firm the canvas of the tent.
+
+"Where's the Boy?" said Mac suddenly. "The young fellow that's with us.
+You know, the one that found you that first Sunday and brought you to
+camp. Where is he?"
+
+Nicholas paused an instant with Kaviak on his shoulder.
+
+"Kaiomi--no savvy."
+
+"You not seen him to-day?"
+
+"No. He no up--?" With the swaddled child he made a gesture up the
+river towards the white camp.
+
+"No, he came down this morning to meet you."
+
+Nicholas shook his head, and went on gathering up the furs. As he and
+Mac came out, Andrew was undoing the last fastening that held the
+canvas to the stakes. In ten minutes they were on the trail, Andrew
+leading, with Father Wills' dogs, Kaviak lying in the sled muffled to
+the eyes, still looking round out of the corners--no, strangely enough,
+the Kaviak eye had no corners, but fixedly he stared sideways at Mac.
+"Farva," seeming not to take the smallest notice, trudged along on one
+side of him, the priest on the other, and behind came Nicholas and the
+other Indians with the second sled. It was too windy to talk much even
+had they been inclined.
+
+The only sounds were the _Mush! Mush!_ of the drivers, the grate and
+swish of the runners over the ice, and Kaviak's coughing.
+
+Mac turned once and frowned at him. It was curious that the child
+seemed not to mind these menacing looks, not in the smallest degree.
+
+By-and-by the order of march was disturbed.
+
+Kaviak's right runner, catching at some obstacle, swerved and sent the
+sled bumping along on its side, the small head of the passenger
+narrowly escaping the ice. Mac caught hold of the single-tree and
+brought the racing dogs to an abrupt halt. The priest and he righted
+the sled, and Mac straddling it, tucked in a loosened end of fur. When
+all was again in running order, Mac was on the same side as Father
+Wills. He still wore that look of dour ill-temper, and especially did
+he glower at the unfortunate Kaviak, seized with a fresh fit of
+coughing that filled the round eyes with tears.
+
+"Don't you get kind o' tired listenin' to that noise? Suppose I was to
+carry--just for a bit--. This is the roughest place on the trail. Hi!
+Stop!" he called to Andrew. The priest had said nothing; but divining
+what Mac would be at, he helped him to undo the raw-hide lashing, and
+when Kaviak was withdrawn he wrapped one of the lighter fur things
+round him.
+
+It was only when Mac had marched off, glowering still, and sternly
+refusing to meet Kaviak's tearful but grateful eyes--it was only then,
+bending over the sled and making fast the furs, that Father Wills, all
+to himself, smiled a little.
+
+It wasn't until they were in sight of the smoke from the Little Cabin
+that Mac slackened his pace. He had never for a moment found the trail
+so smooth that he could return his burden to the sled. Now, however, he
+allowed Nicholas and the priest to catch up with him.
+
+"You carry him the rest of the way," he commanded, and set his burden
+in Nicholas's arms. Kaviak was ill-pleased, but Mac, falling behind
+with the priest, stalked on with eyes upon the ground.
+
+"I've got a boy of my own," he jerked out presently, with the air of a
+man who accounts confidentially for some weakness.
+
+"Really!" returned the priest; "they didn't tell me."
+
+"I haven't told them yet."
+
+"Oh, all right."
+
+"Why is he called that heathen name?"
+
+"Kaviak? Oh, it's the name of his tribe. His people belong to that
+branch of the Innuits known as Kaviaks."
+
+"Humph! Then he's only Kaviak as I'm MacCann. I suppose you've
+christened him?"
+
+"Well, not yet--no. What shall we call him? What's your boy's name?"
+"Robert Bruce." They went on in silence till Mac said, "It's on account
+of my boy I came up here."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"It didn't use to matter if a man _was_ poor and self-taught, but in
+these days of competition it's different. A boy must have chances if
+he's going to fight the battle on equal terms. Of course, some boys
+ain't worth botherin' about. But my boy--well, he seems to have
+something in him."
+
+The priest listened silently, but with that look of brotherliness on
+his face that made it so easy to talk to him.
+
+"It doesn't really matter to those other fellows." Mac jerked his hand
+towards the camp. "It's never so important to men--who stand alone--but
+I've _got_ to strike it rich over yonder." He lifted his head, and
+frowned defiantly in the general direction of the Klondyke, thirteen
+hundred miles away. "It's my one chance," he added half to himself. "It
+means everything to Bob and me. Education, scientific education, costs
+like thunder."
+
+"In the United States?"
+
+"Oh, I mean to send my boy to the old country. I want Bob to be
+thorough."
+
+The priest smiled, but almost imperceptibly.
+
+"How old is he?"
+
+"Oh, 'bout as old as this youngster." Mac spoke with calculated
+indifference.
+
+"Six or thereabouts?"
+
+"No; four and a half. But he's bigger--"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"And you can see already--he's got a lot in him."
+
+Father Wills nodded with a conviction that brought Mac nearer
+confession than he had ever been in his life.
+
+"You see," he said quite low, and as if the words were dragged out with
+pincers, "the fact is--my married life--didn't pan out very well. And
+I--ran away from home as a little chap--after a lickin'--and never went
+back. But there's one thing I mean to make a success of--that's my
+boy."
+
+"Well, I believe you will, if you feel like that."
+
+"Why, they've gone clean past the camp trail," said Mac sharply, "all
+but Nicholas--and what in thunder?--he's put the kid back on the
+sled--"
+
+"Yes, I told my men we'd be getting on. But they were told to leave you
+the venison--"
+
+"What! You goin' straight on? Nonsense!" Mac interrupted, and began to
+shout to the Indians.
+
+"No; I _meant_ to stop; just tell your friends so," said the
+unsuspecting Father; "but with a sick child--"
+
+"What can you do for him that we can't? And to break the journey may
+make a big difference. We've got some condensed milk left--and--"
+
+"Ah yes, but we are more accustomed to--it's hardly fair to burden a
+neighbour. No, we'll be getting on."
+
+"If those fellers up there make a row about your bringing in a
+youngster"--he thrust out his jaw--"they can settle the account with
+me. I've got to do something for that cough before the kid goes on."
+
+"Well," said the priest; and so wily are these Jesuits that he never
+once mentioned that he was himself a qualified doctor in full and
+regular practice. He kept his eyes on the finished stockade and the
+great chimney, wearing majestically its floating plume of smoke.
+
+"Hi!" Mac called between his hands to the Indians, who had gone some
+distance ahead. "Hi!" He motioned them back up the hill trail.
+
+O'Flynn had come out of the Little Cabin, and seemed to be laboriously
+trundling something along the footpath. He got so excited when he heard
+the noise and saw the party that, inadvertently, he let his burden
+slide down the icy slope, bumping and bouncing clumsily from one
+impediment to another.
+
+"Faith, look at 'im! Sure, that fossle can't resthrain his j'y at
+seein' ye back. Mac, it's yer elephunt. I was takin' him in to the sate
+of honour be the foir. We thought it 'ud be a pleasant surprise fur ye.
+Sure, ye'r more surprised to see 'im leppin' down the hill to meet ye,
+like a rale Irish tarrier."
+
+Mac was angry, and didn't conceal the fact. As he ran to stop the thing
+before it should be dashed to pieces, the priest happened to glance
+back, and saw coming slowly along the river trail a solitary figure
+that seemed to make its way with difficulty.
+
+"It looks as though you'd have more than you bargained for at the
+House-Warming," he said.
+
+O'Flynn came down the hill babbling like a brook.
+
+"Good-day to ye, Father. The blessin's o' Heaven on ye fur not kapin'
+us starvin' anny longer. There's Potts been swearin', be this and be
+that, that yourself and the little divvle wudn't be at the Blow-Out at
+ahl, at ahl."
+
+"You mean the Boy hasn't come back?" called out Mac. He leaned _Elephas
+primigenius_ against a tuft of willow banked round with snow, and
+turned gloomily as if to go back down the river again.
+
+"Who's this?" They all stood and watched the limping traveller.
+
+"Why it's--of course. I didn't know him with that thing tied over his
+cap"; and Mac went to meet him.
+
+The Boy bettered his pace.
+
+"How did I miss you?" demanded Mac.
+
+"Well," said the Boy, looking rather mischievous, "I can't think how it
+happened on the way down, unless you passed when I 'd gone uphill a
+piece after some tracks. I was lyin' under the Muff a few miles down
+when you came back, and you--well, I kind o' thought you seemed to have
+your hands full." Mac looked rigid and don't-you-try-to-chaff-me-sir.
+"Besides," the Boy went on, "I couldn't cover the ground like you and
+Father Wills."
+
+"What's the matter with you?"
+
+"Oh, nothin' to howl about. But see here, Mac."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Soon's I can walk I'll go and get you the rest o' that elephant."
+
+There was no more said till they got up to the others, who had waited
+for the Indians to come back, and had unpacked Kaviak to spare him the
+jolting uphill.
+
+O'Flynn was screaming with excitement as he saw that the bundle
+Nicholas was carrying had a head and two round eyes.
+
+"The saints in glory be among us! What's that? Man alive, what _is_ it,
+be the Siven?"
+
+"That," answered Mac with a proprietary air, "is a little Esquimaux
+boy, and I'm bringing him in to doctor his cold."
+
+"Glory be! An Esquimer! And wid a cowld! Sure, he can have some o' my
+linnyeemint. Well, y'arre a boss collector, Mac! Faith, ye bang the
+Jews! And me thinkin' ye'd be satisfied wid yer elephunt. Not him, be
+the Siven! It's an Esquimer he must have to finish off his collection,
+wan wid the rale Arctic cowld in his head, and two eyes that goes
+snappin' through ye like black torpeders. Two spissimens in wan day!
+Yer growin' exthravagant, Mac. Why, musha, child, if I don't think yer
+the dandy Spissimen o' the lot!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE BLOW-OUT
+
+"How good it is to invite men to the pleasant feast."
+
+
+Comfortable as rock fireplace and stockade made the cabin now, the
+Colonel had been feeling all that morning that the official
+House-Warming was fore-doomed to failure. Nevertheless, as he was cook
+that week, he could not bring himself to treat altogether lightly his
+office of Master of the Feast. There would probably be no guests. Even
+their own little company would likely be incomplete, but t here was to
+be a spread that afternoon, "anyways."
+
+Even had the Colonel needed any keeping up to the mark, the office
+would have been cheerfully undertaken by O'Flynn or by Potts, for whom
+interest in the gustatory aspect of the occasion was wholly undimmed by
+the threatened absence of Mac and the "little divvle."
+
+"There'll be the more for us," said Potts enthusiastically.
+
+O'Flynn's argument seemed to halt upon a reservation. He looked over
+the various contributions to the feast, set out on a board in front of
+the water-bucket, and, "It's mate I'm wishin' fur," says he.
+
+"We've got fish."
+
+"That's only mate on Fridays. We've had fish fur five days stiddy, an'
+befure that, bacon three times a day wid sivin days to the week, an'
+not enough bacon ayther, begob, whin all's said and done! Not enough to
+be fillin', and plenty to give us the scurrvy. May the divil dance on
+shorrt rations!"
+
+"No scurvy in this camp for a while yet," said the Colonel, throwing
+some heavy objects into a pan and washing them vigorously round and
+round.
+
+"Pitaties!" O'Flynn's eyes dwelt lovingly on the rare food. "Ye've
+hoarded 'em too long, man, they've sprouted."
+
+"That won't prevent you hoggin' more'n your share, I'll bet," said
+Potts pleasantly.
+
+"I don't somehow like wasting the sprouts," observed the Colonel
+anxiously. "It's such a wonderful sight--something growing." He had cut
+one pallid slip, and held it tenderly between knife and thumb.
+
+"Waste 'em with scurvy staring us in the face? Should think not. Mix
+'em with cold potaters in a salad."
+
+"No. Make slumgullion," commanded O'Flynn.
+
+"What's that?" quoth the Colonel.
+
+"Be the Siven! I only wonder I didn't think of it befure. Arre ye
+listening, Kentucky? Ye take lots o' wathur, an' if ye want it rich, ye
+take the wathur ye've boiled pitaties or cabbage in--a vegetable stock,
+ye mind--and ye add a little flour, salt, and pepper, an' a tomater if
+ye're in New York or 'Frisco, and ye boil all that together with a few
+fish-bones or bacon-rin's to make it rale tasty."
+
+"Yes--well?"
+
+"Well, an' that's slumgullion."
+
+"Don't sound heady enough for a 'Blow-Out,'" said the Colonel. "We'll
+sober up on slumgullion to-morrow."
+
+"Anyhow, it's mate I'm wishin' fur," sighed O'Flynn, subsiding among
+the tin-ware. "What's the good o' the little divvle and his thramps, if
+he can't bring home a burrud, or so much as the scut iv a rabbit furr
+the soup?"
+
+"Well, he's contributed a bottle of California apricots, and we'll have
+boiled rice."
+
+"An' punch, glory be!"
+
+"Y-yes," answered the Colonel. "I've been thinkin' a good deal about
+the punch."
+
+"So's myself," said O'Flynn frankly; but Potts looked at the Colonel
+suspiciously through narrowed eyes.
+
+"There's very little whiskey left, and I propose to brew a mild bowl--"
+
+"To hell with your mild bowls!"
+
+"A good enough punch, sah, but one that--that--a--well, that the whole
+kit and boodle of us can drink. Indians and everybody, you know ...
+Nicholas and Andrew may turn up. I want you two fellas to suppoht me
+about this. There are reasons foh it, sah"--he had laid a hand on
+Potts' shoulder and fixed O'Flynn with his eye--"and"--speaking very
+solemnly--"yoh neither o' yoh gentlemen that need mo' said on the
+subject."
+
+Whereupon, having cut the ground from under their feet, he turned
+decisively, and stirred the mush-pot with a magnificent air and a
+newly-whittled birch stick.
+
+To give the Big Cabin an aspect of solid luxury, they had spread the
+Boy's old buffalo "robe" on the floor, and as the morning wore on Potts
+and O'Flynn made one or two expeditions to the Little Cabin, bringing
+back selections out of Mac's hoard "to decorate the banquet-hall," as
+they said. On the last trip Potts refused to accompany his pardner--no,
+it was no good. Mac evidently wouldn't be back to see, and the laugh
+would be on them "takin' so much trouble for nothin'." And O'Flynn
+wasn't to be long either, for dinner had been absurdly postponed
+already.
+
+When the door opened the next time, it was to admit Mac, Nicholas with
+Kaviak in his arms, O'Flynn gesticulating like a windmill, and, last of
+all, the Boy.
+
+Kaviak was formally introduced, but instead of responding to his hosts'
+attentions, the only thing he seemed to care about, or even see, was
+something that in the hurly-burly everybody else overlooked--the
+decorations. Mac's stuffed birds and things made a remarkably good
+show, but the colossal success was reserved for the minute shrunken
+skin of the baby white hare set down in front of the great fire for a
+hearthrug. If the others failed to appreciate that joke, not so Kaviak.
+He gave a gurgling cry, struggled down out of Nicholas's arms, and
+folded the white hare to his breast.
+
+"Where are the other Indians?" said Mac.
+
+"Looking after the dogs," said Father Wills; and as the door opened,
+"Oh yes, give us that," he said to Andrew. "I thought"--he turned to
+the Colonel--"maybe you'd like to try some Yukon reindeer."
+
+"Hooray!"
+
+"Mate? Arre ye sayin' mate, or is an angel singin'?"
+
+"Now I _know_ that man's a Christian," soliloquised Potts.
+
+"Look here: it'll take a little time to cook," said Mac, "and it's
+worth waitin' for. Can you let us have a pail o' hot water in the
+meantime?"
+
+"Y-yes," said the Colonel, looking as if he had enough to think about
+already.
+
+"Yes, we always wash them first of all," said Father Wills, noticing
+how Mac held the little heathen off at arm's length. "Nicholas used to
+help with that at Holy Cross." He gave the new order with the old
+authoritative gesture.
+
+"And where's the liniment I lent you that you're so generous with?" Mac
+arraigned O'Flynn. "Go and get it."
+
+Under Nicholas's hands Kaviak was forced to relinquish not only the
+baby hare, but his own elf locks. He was closely sheared, his moccasins
+put off, and his single garment dragged unceremoniously wrong side out
+over his head and bundled out of doors.
+
+"Be the Siven! he's got as manny bones as a skeleton!"
+
+"Poor little codger!" The Colonel stood an instant, skillet in hand
+staring.
+
+"What's that he's got round his neck?" said the Boy, moving nearer.
+
+Kaviak, seeing the keen look menacing his treasure, lifted a shrunken
+yellow hand and clasped tight the dirty shapeless object suspended from
+a raw-hide necklace.
+
+Nicholas seemed to hesitate to divest him of this sole remaining
+possession.
+
+"You must get him to give it up," said Father Wills, "and burn it."
+
+Kaviak flatly declined to fall in with as much as he understood of this
+arrangement.
+
+"What is it, anyway?" the Boy pursued.
+
+"His amulet, I suppose." As Father Wills proceeded to enforce his
+order, and pulled the leather string over the child's head, Kaviak rent
+the air with shrieks and coughs. He seemed to say as well as he could,
+"I can do without my parki and my mucklucks, but I'll take my death
+without my amulet."
+
+Mac insinuated himself brusquely between the victim and his
+persecutors. He took the dirty object away from the priest with scant
+ceremony, in spite of the whisper, "Infection!" and gave it back to the
+wrathful owner.
+
+"You talk his language, don't you?" Mac demanded of Nicholas.
+
+The Pymeut pilot nodded.
+
+"Tell him, if he'll lend the thing to me to wash, he shall have it
+back."
+
+Nicholas explained.
+
+Kaviak, with streaming eyes and quivering lips, reluctantly handed it
+over, and watched Mac anxiously till overwhelmed by a yet greater
+misfortune in the shape of a bath for himself.
+
+"How shall I clean this thing thoroughly?" Mac condescended to ask
+Father Wills. The priest shrugged.
+
+"He'll have forgotten it to-morrow."
+
+"He shall have it to-morrow," said Mac.
+
+With his back to Kaviak, the Boy, O'Flynn, and Potts crowding round
+him, Mac ripped open the little bird-skin pouch, and took out three
+objects--an ivory mannikin, a crow's feather, and a thing that Father
+Wills said was a seal-blood plug.
+
+"What's it for?" "Same as the rest. It's an amulet; only as it's used
+to stop the flow of blood from the wound of a captive seal, it is
+supposed to be the best of all charms for anyone who spits blood."
+
+"I'll clean 'em all after the Blow-Out," said Mac, and he went out,
+buried the charms in the snow, and stuck up a spruce twig to mark the
+spot.
+
+Meanwhile, to poor Kaviak it was being plainly demonstrated what an
+awful fate descended on a person so unlucky as to part with his amulet.
+He stood straight up in the bucket like a champagne-bottle in a cooler,
+and he could not have resented his predicament more if he had been set
+in crushed ice instead of warm water. Under the remorseless hands of
+Nicholas he began to splutter and choke, to fizz, and finally explode
+with astonishment and wrath. It was quite clear Nicholas was trying to
+drown him. He took the treatment so to heart, that he kept on howling
+dismally for some time after he was taken out, and dried, and
+linimented and dosed by Mac, whose treachery about the amulet he seemed
+to forgive, since "Farva" had had the air of rescuing him from the
+horrors he had endured in that water-bucket, where, for all Kaviak
+knew, he might have stayed till he succumbed to death. The Boy
+contributed a shirt of his own, and helped Mac to put it on the
+incredibly thin little figure. The shirt came down to Kaviak's heels,
+and had to have the sleeves rolled up every two minutes. But by the
+time the reindeer-steak was nearly done Kaviak was done, too, and
+O'Flynn had said, "That Spissimen does ye credit, Mac."
+
+Said Spissimen was now staring hungrily out of the Colonel's bunk,
+holding towards Mac an appealing hand, with half a yard of shirt-sleeve
+falling over it.
+
+Mac pretended not to see, and drew up to the table the one remaining
+available thing to sit on, his back to his patient.
+
+When the dogs had been fed, and the other Indians had come in, and
+squatted on the buffalo-skin with Nicholas, the first course was sent
+round in tin cups, a nondescript, but warming, "camp soup."
+
+"Sorry we've got so few dishes, gentlemen," the Colonel had said.
+"We'll have to ask some of you to wait till others have finished."
+
+"Farva," remarked Kaviak, leaning out of the bunk and sniffing the
+savoury steam.
+
+"He takes you for a priest," said Potts, with the cheerful intention of
+stirring Mac's bile. But not even so damning a suspicion as that could
+cool the collector's kindness for his new Spissimen.
+
+"You come here," he said. Kaviak didn't understand. The Boy got up,
+limped over to the bunk, lifted the child out, and brought him to Mac's
+side.
+
+"Since there ain't enough cups," said Mac, in self-justification, and
+he put his own, half empty, to Kaviak's lips. The Spissimen imbibed
+greedily, audibly, and beamed. Mac, with unimpaired gravity, took no
+notice of the huge satisfaction this particular remedy was giving his
+patient, except to say solemnly, "Don't bubble in it."
+
+The next course was fish a la Pymeut.
+
+"You're lucky to be able to get it," said the Father, whether with
+suspicion or not no man could tell. "I had to send back for some by a
+trader and couldn't get enough."
+
+"We didn't see any trader," said the Boy to divert the current.
+
+"He may have gone by in the dusk; he was travelling hotfoot."
+
+"Thought that steamship was chockful o' grub. What did you want o'
+fish?"
+
+"Yes; they've got plenty of food, but--"
+
+"They don't relish parting with it," suggested Potts.
+
+"They haven't much to think about except what they eat; they wanted to
+try our fish, and were ready to exchange. I promised I would send a
+load back from Ikogimeut if they'd--" He seemed not to care to finish
+the sentence.
+
+"So you didn't do much for the Pymeuts after all?"
+
+"I did something," he said almost shortly. Then, with recovered
+serenity, he turned to the Boy: "I promised I'd bring back any news."
+"Yes."
+
+"Well?"
+
+Everybody stopped eating and hung on the priest's words.
+
+"Captain Rainey's heard there's a big new strike--"
+
+"In the Klondyke?"
+
+"On the American side this time."
+
+"Hail Columbia!"
+
+"Whereabouts?"
+
+"At a place called Minook."
+
+"Where's that?"
+
+"Up the river by the Ramparts."
+
+"How far?"
+
+"Oh, a little matter of six or seven hundred miles from here."
+
+"Glory to God!"
+
+"Might as well be six or seven thousand."
+
+"And very probably isn't a bona-fide strike at all," said the priest,
+"but just a stampede--a very different matter."
+
+"Well, I tell you straight: I got no use for a gold-mine in Minook at
+this time o' year."
+
+"Nop! Venison steak's more in my line than grub-stake just about now."
+
+Potts had to bestir himself and wash dishes before he could indulge in
+his "line." When the grilled reindeer did appear, flanked by
+really-truly potatoes and the Colonel's hot Kentucky biscuit, there was
+no longer doubt in any man's mind but what this Blow-Out was being a
+success.
+
+"Colonel's a daisy cook, ain't he?" the Boy appealed to Father Wills.
+
+The Jesuit assented cordially.
+
+"My family meant _me_ for the army," he said. "Seen much service,
+Colonel?"
+
+The Kentuckian laughed.
+
+"Never wasted a day soldiering in my life."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"Maybe you're wonderin'," said Potts, "why he's a Colonel!"
+
+The Jesuit made a deprecatory gesture, politely disclaiming any such
+rude curiosity.
+
+"He's from Kentucky, you see;" and the smile went round. "Beyond that,
+we can't tell you why he's a Colonel unless it's because he ain't a
+Judge;" and the boss of the camp laughed with the rest, for the Denver
+man had scored.
+
+By the time they got to the California apricots and boiled rice
+everybody was feeling pretty comfortable. When, at last, the table was
+cleared, except for the granite-ware basin full of punch, and when all
+available cups were mustered and tobacco-pouches came out, a remarkably
+genial spirit pervaded the company--with three exceptions.
+
+Potts and O'Flynn waited anxiously to sample the punch before giving
+way to complete satisfaction, and Kaviak was impervious to
+considerations either of punch or conviviality, being wrapped in
+slumber on a corner of the buffalo-skin, between Mac's stool and the
+natives, who also occupied places on the floor.
+
+Upon O'Flynn's first draught he turned to his next neighbour:
+
+"Potts, me bhoy, 'tain't s' bad."
+
+"I'll bet five dollars it won't make yer any happier."
+
+"Begob, I'm happy enough! Gentlemen, wud ye like I should sing ye a
+song?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Yes," and the Colonel thumped the table for order, infinitely relieved
+that the dinner was done, and the punch not likely to turn into a
+_casus belli_. O'Flynn began a ditty about the Widdy Malone that woke
+up Kaviak and made him rub his round eyes with astonishment. He sat up,
+and hung on to the back of Mac's coat to make sure he had some
+anchorage in the strange new waters he had so suddenly been called on
+to navigate.
+
+The song ended, the Colonel, as toast-master, proposed the health
+of--he was going to say Father Wills, but felt it discreeter to name no
+names. Standing up in the middle of the cabin, where he didn't have to
+stoop, he lifted his cup till it knocked against the swing-shelf, and
+called out, "Here's to Our Visitors, Neighbours, and Friends!"
+Whereupon he made a stately circular bow, which ended by his offering
+Kaviak his hand, in the manner of one who executes a figure in an
+old-fashioned dance. The smallest of "Our Visitors," still keeping hold
+of Mac, presented the Colonel with the disengaged half-yard of flannel
+undershirt on the other side, and the speech went on, very flowery,
+very hospitable, very Kentuckian.
+
+When the Colonel sat down there was much applause, and O'Flynn, who had
+lent his cup to Nicholas, and didn't feel he could wait till it came
+back, began to drink punch out of the dipper between shouts of:
+
+"Hooray! Brayvo! Here's to the Kurrnul! God bless him! That's rale
+oratry, Kurrnul! Here's to Kentucky--and ould Ireland."
+
+Father Wills stood up, smiling, to reply.
+
+_"Friends"_ (the Boy thought the keen eyes rested a fraction of a
+moment longer on Mac than on the rest),--_"I think in some ways this is
+the pleasantest House-Warming I ever went to. I won't take up time
+thanking the Colonel for the friendly sentiments he's expressed, though
+I return them heartily. I must use these moments you are good enough to
+give me in telling you something of what I feel is implied in the
+founding of this camp of yours.
+
+"Gentlemen, the few white dwellers in the Yukon country have not looked
+forward"_ (his eyes twinkled almost wickedly) _"with that pleasure you
+might expect in exiles, to the influx of people brought up here by the
+great Gold Discovery. We knew what that sort of craze leads to. We knew
+that in a barren land like this, more and more denuded of wild game
+every year, more and more the prey of epidemic disease--we knew that
+into this sorely tried and hungry world would come a horde of men, all
+of them ignorant of the conditions up here, most of them ill-provided
+with proper food and clothing, many of them (I can say it without
+offence in this company)--many of them men whom the older, richer
+communities were glad to get rid of. Gentlemen, I have ventured to take
+you into our confidence so far, because I want to take you still
+farther--to tell you a little of the intense satisfaction with which we
+recognise that good fortune has sent us in you just the sort of
+neighbours we had not dared to hope for. It means more to us than you
+realise. When I heard a few weeks ago that, in addition to the
+boat-loads that had already got some distance up the river beyond Holy
+Cross--"_
+
+"Going to Dawson?"
+
+"Oh, yes, Klondyke mad--"
+
+"They'll be there before us, boys!"
+
+"Anyways, they'll get to Minook."
+
+The Jesuit shook his head. "It isn't so certain. They probably made
+only a couple of hundred miles or so before the Yukon went to sleep."
+
+"Then if grub gives out they'll be comin' back here?" suggested Potts.
+
+_"Small doubt of it,"_ agreed the priest. _"And when I heard there were
+parties of the same sort stranded at intervals all along the Lower
+River--"_
+
+"You sure?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+_"And when Father Orloff of the Russian mission told us that he was
+already having trouble with the two big rival parties frozen in the ice
+below Ikogimeut--"_
+
+"Gosh! Wonder if any of 'em were on our ship?"
+
+_"Well, gentlemen, I do not disguise from you that, when I heard of the
+large amount of whiskey, the small amount of food, and the low type of
+manners brought in by these gold-seekers, I felt my fears justified.
+Such men don't work, don't contribute anything to the decent social
+life of the community, don't build cabins like this. When I came down
+on the ice the first time after you'd camped, and I looked up and saw
+your solid stone chimney"_ (he glanced at Mac), _"I didn't know what a
+House-Warming it would make; but already, from far off across the ice
+and snow, that chimney warmed my heart. Gentlemen, the fame of it has
+gone up the river and down the river. Father Orloff is coming to see it
+next week, and so are the white traders from Anvik and Andreiefsky, for
+they've heard there's nothing like it in the Yukon. Of course, I know
+that you gentlemen have not come to settle permanently. I know that
+when the Great White Silence, as they call the long winter up here, is
+broken by the thunder of the ice rushing down to the sea, you, like the
+rest, will exchange the snow-fields for the gold-fields, and pass out
+of our ken. Now, I'm not usually prone to try my hand at prophecy; but
+I am tempted to say, even on our short acquaintance, that I am
+tolerably sure that, while we shall be willing enough to spare most of
+the new-comers to the Klondyke, we shall grudge to the gold-fields the
+men who built this camp and warmed this cabin."_ (His eye rested
+reflectively on Mac.) _"I don't wish to sit down leaving an impression
+of speaking with entire lack of sympathy of the impulse that brings men
+up here for gold. I believe that, even with the sort in the two camps
+below Ikogimeut--drinking, quarrelling, and making trouble with the
+natives at the Russian mission--I believe that even with them, the gold
+they came up here for is a symbol--a fetich, some of us may think. When
+such men have it in their hands, they feel dimly that they are laying
+tangible hold at last on some elusive vision of happiness that has
+hitherto escaped them. Behind each man braving the Arctic winter up
+here, is some hope, not all ignoble; some devotion, not all
+unsanctified. Behind most of these men I seem to see a wife or child, a
+parent, or some dear dream that gives that man his share in the Eternal
+Hope. Friends, we call that thing we look for by different names; but
+we are all seekers after treasure, all here have turned our backs on
+home and comfort, hunting for the Great Reward--each man a new Columbus
+looking for the New World. Some of us looking north, some south,
+some"_--he hesitated the briefest moment, and then with a faint smile,
+half sad, half triumphant, made a little motion of his head--_"some of
+us ... looking upwards."_
+
+But quickly, as though conscious that, if he had raised the moral tone
+of the company, he had not raised its spirits, he hurried on:
+
+_"Before I sit down, gentlemen, just one word more. I must congratulate
+you on having found out so soon, not only the wisdom, but the pleasure
+of looking at this Arctic world with intelligent eyes, and learning
+some of her wonderful lessons. It is so that, now the hardest work is
+finished, you will keep up your spirits and avoid the disease that
+attacks all new-comers who simply eat, sleep, and wait for the ice to
+go out. When I hear cheechalkos complaining of boredom up here in this
+world of daily miracles, I think of the native boy in the
+history-class, who, called on to describe the progress of civilisation,
+said: 'In those days men had as many wives as they liked, and that was
+called polygamy. Now they have only one wife, and that's called
+monotony.'"_
+
+While O'Flynn howled with delight, the priest wound up:
+
+_"Gentlemen, if we find monotony up here, it's not the country's fault,
+but a defect in our own civilisation."_ Wherewith he sat down amid
+cheers.
+
+"Now, Colonel, is Mac goin' to recite some Border ballads?" inquired
+the Boy, "or will he make a speech, or do a Highland fling?"
+
+The Colonel called formally upon Mr. MacCann.
+
+Mac was no sooner on his legs than Kaviak, determined not to lose his
+grasp of the situation, climbed upon the three-legged stool just
+vacated, and resumed his former relations with the friendly coat-tail.
+
+Everybody laughed but Mac, who pretended not to know what was going on
+behind his back.
+
+"Gentlemen," he began harshly, with the air of one about to launch a
+heavy indictment, "there's one element largely represented here by
+numbers and by interests"--he turned round suddenly toward the natives,
+and almost swung Kaviak off into space--"one element not explicitly
+referred to in the speeches, either of welcome or of thanks. But,
+gentlemen, I submit that these hitherto unrecognised Natives are our
+real hosts, and a word about them won't be out of place. I've been told
+to-day that, whether in Alaska, Greenland, or British America, they
+call themselves _Innuits,_ which means human beings. They believed, no
+doubt, that they were the only ones in the world. I've been thinking a
+great deal about these Esquimaux of late--"
+
+"Hear, hear!"
+
+"About their origin and their destiny." (Mac was beginning to enjoy
+himself. The Boy was beginning to be bored and to drum softly with his
+fingers.) "Now, gentlemen, Buffon says that the poles were the first
+portions of the earth's crust to cool. While the equator, and even the
+tropics of Cancer and of Capricorn, were still too boiling hot to
+support life, up here in the Arctic regions there was a carboniferous
+era goin' on--"
+
+"Where's the coal, then?" sneered Potts.
+
+"It's bein' discovered ... all over ... ask him" (indicating Father
+Wills, who smiled assent). "Tropical forests grew where there are
+glayshers now, and elephants and mastodons began life here."
+
+"Jimminy Christmas!" interrupted the Boy, sitting up very straight. "Is
+that Buffer you quoted a good authority?"
+
+"First-rate," Mac snapped out defiantly.
+
+"Good Lord! then the Garden o' Eden was up here."
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"Course! _This_ was the cradle o' the human race. Blow the Ganges! Blow
+the Nile! It was our Yukon that saw the first people, 'cause of course
+the first people lived in the first place got ready for 'em."
+
+"That don't follow. Read your Bible."
+
+"If I'm not right, how did it happen there were men here when the North
+was first discovered?"
+
+"Sh!"
+
+"Mac's got the floor."
+
+"Shut up!"
+
+But the Boy thumped the table with one hand and arraigned the
+schoolmaster with the other.
+
+"Now, Mac, I put it to you as a man o' science: if the race had got a
+foothold in any other part o' the world, what in Sam Hill could make
+'em come up here?"
+
+"_We're_ here."
+
+"Yes, tomfools after gold. They never dreamed there was gold. No,
+Sir_ee!_ the only thing on earth that could make men stay here, would
+be that they were born here, and didn't know any better. Don't the
+primitive man cling to his home, no matter what kind o' hole it is?
+He's _afraid_ to leave it. And these first men up here, why, it's plain
+as day--they just hung on, things gettin' worse and worse, and colder
+and colder, and some said, as the old men we laugh at say at home, 'The
+climate ain't what it was when I was a boy,' and nobody believed 'em,
+but everybody began to dress warmer and eat fat, and--"
+
+"All that Buffon says is--"
+
+"Yes--and they invented one thing after another to meet the new
+conditions--kaiaks and bidarras and ivory-tipped harpoons"--he was
+pouring out his new notions at the fastest express rate--"and the
+animals that couldn't stand it emigrated, and those that stayed behind
+got changed--"
+
+"Dry up."
+
+"One at a time."
+
+"Buffon--"
+
+"Yes, yes, Mac, and the hares got white, and the men, playin' a losin'
+game for centuries, got dull in their heads and stunted in their
+legs--always cramped up in a kaiak like those fellas at St. Michael's.
+And, why, it's clear as crystal--they're survivals! The Esquimaux are
+the oldest race in the world."
+
+"Who's makin' this speech?"
+
+"Order!"
+
+"Order!"
+
+"Well, see here: _do_ you admit it, Mac? Don't you see there were just
+a few enterprisin' ones who cleared out, or, maybe, got carried away in
+a current, and found better countries and got rich and civilised, and
+became our forefathers? Hey, boys, ain't I right?"
+
+"You sit down."
+
+"You'll get chucked out."
+
+"Buffon--"
+
+Everybody was talking at once.
+
+"Why, it goes on still," the Boy roared above the din. "People who
+stick at home, and are patient, and put up with things, they're doomed.
+But look at the fellas that come out o' starvin' attics and stinkin'
+pigsties to America. They live like lords, and they look at life like
+men."
+
+Mac was saying a great deal about the Ice Age and the first and second
+periods of glaciation, but nobody could hear what.
+
+_"Prince_ Nicholas? Well, I should smile. He belongs to the oldest
+family in the world. Hoop-la!" The Boy jumped up on his stool and
+cracked his head against the roof; but he only ducked, rubbed his wild,
+long hair till it stood out wilder than ever, and went on: "Nicholas's
+forefathers were kings before Caesar; they were here before the
+Pyramids--"
+
+The Colonel came round and hauled the Boy down. Potts was egging the
+miscreant on. O'Flynn, poorly disguising his delight in a scrimmage,
+had been shouting: "Ye'll spoil the Blow-Out, ye meddlin' jackass!
+Can't ye let Mac make his spache? No; ye must ahlways be huntin' round
+fur harrum to be doin' or throuble to make."
+
+In the turmoil and the contending of many voices Nicholas began to
+explain to his friends that it wasn't a real fight, as it had every
+appearance of being, and the visitors were in no immediate danger of
+their lives. But Kaviak feared the worst, and began to weep forlornly.
+
+"The world is dyin' at top and bottom!" screamed the Boy, writhing
+under the Colonel's clutch. "The ice will spread, the beasts will turn
+white, and we'll turn yella, and we'll all dress in skins and eat fat
+and be exactly like Kaviak, and the last man'll be found tryin' to warm
+his hands at the Equator, his feet on an iceberg and his nose in a
+snowstorm. Your old Buffer's got a long head, Mac. Here's to Buffer!"
+Whereupon he subsided and drank freely of punch.
+
+"Well," said the Colonel, severely, "you've had a Blow-Out if nobody
+else has!"
+
+"Feel better?" inquired Potts, tenderly.
+
+"Now, Mac, you shall have a fair field," said the Colonel, "and if the
+Boy opens his trap again--"
+
+"I'll punch 'im," promised O'Flynn, replenishing the disturber's cup.
+
+But Mac wouldn't be drawn. Besides, he was feeding Kaviak. So the
+Colonel filled in the breach with "My old Kentucky Home," which he sang
+with much feeling, if not great art.
+
+This performance restored harmony and a gentle reflectiveness.
+
+Father Wills told about his journey up here ten years before and of a
+further expedition he'd once made far north to the Koyukuk.
+
+"But Nicholas knows more about the native life and legends than anyone
+I ever met, except, of course, Yagorsha."
+
+"Who's Yag----?" began the Boy.
+
+"Oh, that's the Village Story-teller." He was about to speak of
+something else, but, lifting his eyes, he caught Mac's sudden glance of
+grudging attention. The priest looked away, and went on: "There's a
+story-teller in every settlement. He has always been a great figure in
+the native life, I believe, but now more than ever."
+
+"Why's that?"
+
+"Oh, battles are over and blood-feuds are done, but the need for a
+story-teller abides. In most villages he is a bigger man than the
+chief--they're all 'ol' chiefs,' the few that are left--and when they
+die there will be no more. So the tribal story-teller comes to be the
+most important character"--the Jesuit smiled in that shrewd and gentle
+way of his--"that is, of course, after the Shamán, as the Russians call
+him, the medicine-man, who is a teller of stories, too, in his more
+circumscribed fashion. But it's the Story-teller who helps his people
+through the long winter--helps them to face the terrible new enemies,
+epidemic disease and famine. He has always been their best defence
+against that age-old dread they all have of the dark. Yes, no one
+better able to send such foes flying than Yagorsha of Pymeut. Still,
+Nicholas is a good second." The Prince of Pymeut shook his head.
+
+"Tell them 'The White Crow's Last Flight,'" urged the priest.
+
+But Nicholas was not in the vein, and when they all urged him overmuch,
+he, in self-defence, pulled a knife out of his pocket and a bit of
+walrus ivory about the size of his thumb, and fell to carving.
+
+"What you makin'?"
+
+"Button," says Nicholas; "me heap hurry get him done."
+
+"It looks more like a bird than a button," remarked the Boy.
+
+"Him bird--him button," replied the imperturbable one.
+
+"Half the folk-lore of the North has to do with the crow (or raven),"
+the priest went on. "Seeing Kaviak's feather reminded me of a native
+cradle-song that's a kind of a story, too. It's been roughly
+translated."
+
+"Can you say it?"
+
+"I used to know how it went."
+
+He began in a deep voice:
+
+  "'The wind blows over the Yukon.
+  My husband hunts deer on the Koyukun mountains.
+  Ahmi, ahmi, sleep, little one.
+
+  There is no wood for the fire,
+  The stone-axe is broken, my husband carries the other.
+  Where is the soul of the sun? Hid in the dam of the beaver, waiting the
+  spring-time.
+  Ahmi, ahmi, sleep little one, wake not!
+
+  Look not for ukali, old woman.
+  Long since the cache was emptied, the crow lights no more on the ridge
+  pole.
+  Long since, my husband departed. Why does he wait in the mountains?
+  Ahmi, ahmi, sleep little one, softly.
+
+  Where, where, where is my own?
+  Does he lie starving on the hillside? Why does he linger?
+  Comes he not soon I must seek him among the mountains.
+  Ahmi, ahmi, little one, sleep sound.
+
+  Hush! hush! hush! The crow cometh laughing.
+  Red is his beak, his eyes glisten, the false one!
+  "Thanks for a good meal to Kuskokala the Shamán--
+  On the far mountain quietly lieth your husband."
+  Ahmi, ahmi, sleep little one, wake not.
+
+  "Twenty deers' tongues tied to the pack on his shoulders;
+  Not a tongue in his mouth to call to his wife with.
+  Wolves, foxes, and ravens are tearing and fighting for morsels.
+  Tough and hard are the sinews; not so the child in your bosom."
+  Ahmi, ahmi, sleep little one, wake not!
+
+  Over the mountain slowly staggers the hunter.
+  Two bucks' thighs on his shoulders.
+  Twenty deers' tongues in his belt.
+  "Go, gather wood, kindle a fire, old woman!"
+  Off flew the crow--liar, cheat and deceiver.
+  Wake, oh sleeper, awake! welcome your father!
+
+  He brings you back fat, marrow, venison fresh from the mountain
+  Tired and worn, yet he's carved you a toy of the deer's horn,
+  While he was sitting and waiting long for the deer on the hillside.
+  Wake! see the crow! hiding himself from the arrow;
+  Wake, little one, wake! here is your father safe home.'"
+
+"Who's 'Kuskokala the Shamán'?" the Boy inquired.
+
+"Ah, better ask Nicholas," answered the priest.
+
+But Nicholas was absorbed in his carving.
+
+Again Mr. O'Flynn obliged, roaring with great satisfaction:
+
+  "'I'm a stout rovin' blade, and what matther my name,
+  For I ahlways was wild, an' I'll niver be tame;
+  An' I'll kiss putty gurrls wheriver I go,
+  An' what's that to annyone whether or no.
+
+    _Chorus._
+
+  "'Ogedashin, den thashin, come, boys! let us drink;
+  'Tis madness to sorra, 'tis folly to think.
+  For we're ahl jolly fellows wheriver we go--
+  Ogedashin, den thashin, na boneen sheen lo!'"
+
+Potts was called on. No, he couldn't sing, but he could show them a
+trick or two. And with his grimy euchre-deck he kept his word, showing
+that he was not the mere handy-man, but the magician of the party. The
+natives, who know the cards as we know our A B C's, were enthralled,
+and began to look upon Potts as a creature of more than mortal skill.
+
+Again the Boy pressed Nicholas to dance. "No, no;" and under his
+breath: "You come Pymeut."
+
+Meanwhile, O'Flynn, hugging the pleasant consciousness that he had
+distinguished himself--his pardner, too--complained that the only
+contribution Mac or the Boy had made was to kick up a row. What steps
+were they going to take to retrieve their characters and minister to
+the public entertainment?
+
+"I've supplied the decorations," said Mac in a final tone.
+
+"Well, and the Bhoy? What good arre ye, annyway?"
+
+"Hard to say," said the person addressed; but, thinking hard: "Would
+you like to see me wag my ears?" Some languid interest was manifested
+in this accomplishment, but it fell rather flat after Potts' splendid
+achievements with the euchre-deck.
+
+"No, ye ain't good fur much as an enthertainer," said O'Flynn frankly.
+
+Kaviak had begun to cry for more punch, and Mac was evidently growing a
+good deal perplexed as to the further treatment for his patient.
+
+"Did ye be tellin' some wan, Father, that when ye found that Esquimer
+he had grass stuffed in his mouth? Sure, he'll be missin' that grass.
+Ram somethin' down his throat."
+
+"Was it done to shorten his sufferings?" the Colonel asked in an
+undertone.
+
+"No," answered the priest in the same low voice; "if they listen long
+to the dying, the cry gets fixed in their imagination, and they hear it
+after the death, and think the spirit haunts the place. Their fear and
+horror of the dead is beyond belief. They'll turn a dying man out of
+his own house, and not by the door, but through a hole in the roof. Or
+they pull out a log to make an opening, closing it up quick, so the
+spirit won't find his way back."
+
+Kaviak continued to lament.
+
+"Sorry we can't offer you some blubber, Kaviak."
+
+"'Tain't that he's missin'; he's got an inexhaustible store of his own.
+His mistake is offerin' it to us."
+
+"I know what's the matter with that little shaver," said the Boy. "He
+hasn't got any stool, and you keep him standin' on those legs of his
+like matches."
+
+"Let him sit on the buffalo-skin there," said Mac gruffly.
+
+"Don't you s'pose he's thought o' the buffalo-skin? But he'd hate it. A
+little fella likes to be up where he can see what's goin' on. He'd feel
+as lost 'way down there on the buffalo as a puppy in a corn-brake."
+
+The Boy was standing up, looking round.
+
+"I know. Elephas! come along, Jimmie!" In spite of remonstrance, they
+rushed to the door and dragged in the "fossle." When Nicholas and his
+friends realised what was happening, they got up grunting and
+protesting. "Lend a hand, Andrew," the Boy called to the man nearest.
+
+"No--no!" objected the true son of the Church, with uncommon fervour.
+
+"You, then, Nicholas."
+
+_"Oo,_ ha, _oo!_ No touch! No touch!"
+
+"What's up? You don't know what this is."
+
+"Huh! Nicholas know plenty well. Nicholas no touch bones of dead
+devils." This view of the "fossle" so delighted the company that,
+acting on a sudden impulse, they pushed the punch-bowl out of the way,
+and, with a whoop, hoisted the huge thing on the table. Then the Boy
+seized the whimpering Kaviak, and set him high on the throne. So
+surprised was the topmost Spissimen that he was as quiet for a moment
+as the one underneath him, staring about, blinking. Then, looking down
+at Mac's punch-cup, he remembered his grievance, and took up the wail
+where he had left it off.
+
+"Nuh, nuh! don't you do that," said the Boy with startling suddenness.
+"If you make that noise, I'll have to make a worse one. If you cry,
+Kaviak, I'll have to sing. Hmt, hmt! don't you do it." And as Kaviak,
+in spite of instructions, began to bawl, the Boy began to do a
+plantation jig, crooning monotonously:
+
+  "'Grashoppah sett'n on de swee' p'tater vine,
+  Swee' p'tater vine, swee' p'tater vine;
+  Grasshoppah--'"
+
+He stopped as suddenly as he'd begun. "_Now_, will you be good?"
+
+Kaviak drew a breath with a catch in it, looked round, and began as
+firmly as ever:
+
+"Weh!--eh!--eh!"
+
+"Sh--sh!" The Boy clapped his hands, and lugubriously intoned:
+
+  "'Dey's de badger and de bah,
+  En de funny lil hah,
+  En de active lil flea,
+  En de lil armadillah
+  Dat sleeps widouter pillah,
+  An dey all gottah mate but me--ee--ee!'
+
+"Farva!" Kaviak gasped.
+
+"Say, do a nigger breakdown," solicited Potts.
+
+"Ain't room; besides, I can't do it with blisters."
+
+They did the impossible--they made room, and turned back the
+buffalo-skin. Only the big Colonel, who was most in the way of all,
+sat, not stirring, staring in the fire. Such a look on the absent,
+tender face as the great masters, the divinest poets cannot often
+summon, but which comes at the call of some foolish old nursery jingle,
+some fragment of half-forgotten folk-lore, heard when the world was
+young--when all hearing was music, when all sight was "pictures," when
+every sense brought marvels that seemed the everyday way of the
+wonderful, wonderful world.
+
+For an obvious reason it is not through the utterances of the greatest
+that the child receives his first intimations of the beauty and the
+mystery of things. These come in lowly guise with familiar everyday
+voices, but their eloquence has the incommunicable grace of infancy,
+the promise of the first dawn, the menace of the first night.
+
+"Do you remember the thing about the screech-owl and the weather
+signs?" said the Colonel, roused at last by the jig on his toes and the
+rattle of improvised "bones" almost in his face.
+
+"Reckon I do, honey," said the Boy, his feet still flying and flapping
+on the hard earthen floor.
+
+  "_'Wen de screech-owl light on de gable en'
+  En holler, Who--ool oh--oh!'_"
+
+He danced up and hooted in Kaviak's face.
+
+  "_'Den yo' bettah keep yo eyeball peel,
+  Kase 'e bring bad luck t' yo'.
+  Oh--oh! oh-oh!'_"
+
+Then, sinking his voice, dancing slowly, and glancing anxiously under the
+table:
+
+  "_'Wen de ole black cat widdee yalla eyes
+  Slink round like she atterah mouse,
+  Den yo' bettah take keer yo'self en frien's,
+  Kase deys sholy a witch en de house.'_"
+
+An awful pause, a shiver, and a quick change of scene, indicated by a
+gurgling whoop, ending in a quacking:
+
+  "_'Wen de puddle-duck'e leave de pon',
+  En start t' comb e fedder,
+  Den yo' bettah take yo' omberel,
+  Kase deys gwine tubbee wet wedder.'_"
+
+"Now comes the speckly rooster," the Colonel prompted.
+
+The Boy crowed long and loud:
+
+  "_'Effer ole wile rooster widder speckly tail
+  Commer crowin' befoh de do',
+  En yo got some comp'ny a'ready,
+  Yo's gwinter have some mo'.'_"
+
+Then he grunted, and went on all fours. "Kaviak!" he called, "you take
+warnin'----
+
+  "_'Wen yo' see a pig agoin' along--'_"
+
+Look here: Kaviak's never seen a pig! I call it a shame.
+
+  _"'Wen yo' see a pig agoin' along
+  Widder straw en de sider 'is mouf,
+  It'll be a tuhble winter,
+  En yo' bettuh move down Souf.'"_
+
+He jumped up and dashed into a breakdown, clattering the bones, and
+screeching:
+
+  _"'Squirl he got a bushy tail,
+  Possum's tail am bah,
+  Raccoon's tail am ringed all roun'--
+  Touch him ef yo dah!
+  Rabbit got no tail at all,
+  Cep a little bit o' bunch o' hah.'"_
+
+The group on the floor, undoubtedly, liked that part of the
+entertainment that involved the breakdown, infinitely the best of all,
+but simultaneously, at its wildest moment, they all turned their heads
+to the door. Mac noticed the movement, listened, and then got up,
+lifted the latch, and cautiously looked out. The Boy caught a glimpse
+of the sky over Mac's shoulder.
+
+"Jimminy Christmas!" He stopped, nearly breathless. "It can't be a
+fire. Say, boys! they're havin' a Blow-Out up in heaven."
+
+The company crowded out. The sky was full of a palpitant light. An
+Indian appeared from round the stockade; he was still staring up at the
+stone chimney.
+
+"Are we on fire?"
+
+"How-do." He handed Father Wills a piece of dirty paper.
+
+"Hah! Yes. All right. Andrew!"
+
+Andrew needed no more. He bustled away to harness the dogs. The white
+men were staring up at the sky. "What's goin' on in heaven, Father?
+S'pose you call this the Aurora Borealis--hey?"
+
+"Yes," said the priest; "and finer than we often get it. We are not far
+enough north for the great displays."
+
+He went in to put on his parki.
+
+Mac, after looking out, had shut the door and stayed behind with
+Kaviak.
+
+On Father Will's return Farva, speaking apparently less to the priest
+than to the floor, muttered: "Better let him stop where he is till his
+cold's better."
+
+The Colonel came in.
+
+"Leave the child here!" ejaculated the priest.
+
+"--till he's better able to travel."
+
+"Why not?" said the Colonel promptly.
+
+"Well, it would be a kindness to keep him a few days. I'll _have_ to
+travel fast tonight."
+
+"Then it's settled." Mac bundled Kaviak into the Boy's bunk.
+
+When the others were ready to go out again, Farva caught up his fur
+coat and went along with them.
+
+The dogs were not quite ready. The priest was standing a little
+absentmindedly, looking up. The pale green streamers were fringed with
+the tenderest rose colour, and from the corona uniting them at the
+zenith, they shot out across the heavens, with a rapid circular and
+lateral motion, paling one moment, flaring up again the next.
+
+"Wonder what makes it," said the Colonel.
+
+"Electricity," Mac snapped out promptly.
+
+The priest smiled.
+
+"One mystery for another."
+
+He turned to the Boy, and they went on together, preceding the others,
+a little, on the way down the trail towards the river.
+
+"I think you must come and see us at Holy Cross--eh? Come soon;" and
+then, without waiting for an answer: "The Indians think these flitting
+lights are the souls of the dead at play. But Yagorsha says that long
+ago a great chief lived in the North who was a mighty hunter. It was
+always summer up here then, and the big chief chased the big game from
+one end of the year to another, from mountain to mountain and from
+river to sea. He killed the biggest moose with a blow of his fist, and
+caught whales with his crooked thumb for a hook. One long day in summer
+he'd had a tremendous chase after a wonderful bird, and he came home
+without it, deadbeat and out of temper. He lay down to rest, but the
+sunlight never winked, and the unending glare maddened him. He rolled,
+and tossed, and roared, as only the Yukon roars when the ice rushes
+down to the sea. But he couldn't sleep. Then in an awful fury he got
+up, seized the day in his great hands, tore it into little bits, and
+tossed them high in the air. So it was dark. And winter fell on the
+world for the first time. During months and months, just to punish this
+great crime, there was no bright sunshine; but often in the long night,
+while the chief was wearying for summer to come again, he'd be
+tantalised by these little bits of the broken day that flickered in the
+sky. Coming, Andrew?" he called back.
+
+The others trooped down-hill, dogs, sleds, and all. There was a great
+hand-shaking and good-byeing.
+
+Nicholas whispered:
+
+"You come Pymeut?"
+
+"I should just pretty nearly think I would."
+
+"You dance heap good. Buttons no all done." He put four little ivory
+crows into the Boy's hands. They were rudely but cleverly carved, with
+eyes outlined in ink, and supplied under the breast with a neat
+inward-cut shank.
+
+"Mighty fine!" The Boy examined them by the strange glow that
+brightened in the sky.
+
+"You keep."
+
+"Oh no, can't do that."
+
+"_Yes!_" Nicholas spoke peremptorily. "Yukon men have big feast, must
+bring present. Me no got reindeer, me got button." He grinned.
+"Goo'-bye." And the last of the guests went his way.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was only habit that kept the Colonel toasting by the fire before he
+turned in, for the cabin was as warm to-night as the South in
+mid-summer.
+
+  _"Grasshoppah sett'n on a swee' p'tater vine,"_
+
+The Boy droned sleepily as he untied the leathern thongs that kept up
+his muckluck legs--
+
+  _"Swee' p'tater vine, swee' p'ta--"_
+
+"All those othahs"--the Colonel waved a hand in the direction of
+Pymeut--"I think we dreamed 'em, Boy. You and me playing the Big Game
+with Fohtune. Foolishness! Klondyke? Yoh crazy. Tell me the river's
+hard as iron and the snow's up to the windah? Don' b'lieve a wo'd of
+it. We're on some plantation, Boy, down South, in the niggah quawtaws."
+
+The Boy was turning back the covers, and balancing a moment on the side
+of the bunk.
+
+
+ _"Sett'n on a swee' p'tater vine, swee' p'ta--"_
+
+"Great Caesar's ghost!" He jumped up, and stood staring down at the
+sleeping Kaviak.
+
+"Ah--a--didn't you know? He's been left behind for a few days."
+
+"Yes, I can see he's left behind. No, Colonel, I reckon we're in the
+Arctic regions all right when it comes to catchin' Esquimers in your
+bed!"
+
+He pulled the furs over Kaviak and himself, and curled down to sleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE SHAMÁN.
+
+"For my part, I have ever believed and do now know, that there are
+witches."--_Religio Medici._
+
+
+The Boy had hoped to go to Pymeut the next day, but his feet refused to
+carry him. Mac took a diagram and special directions, and went after
+the rest of elephas, conveying the few clumsy relics home, bit by bit,
+with a devotion worthy of a pious pilgrim.
+
+For three days the Boy growled and played games with Kaviak, going
+about at first chiefly on hands and knees.
+
+On the fifth day after the Blow-Out, "You comin' long to Pymeut this
+mornin'?" he asked the Colonel.
+
+"What's the rush?"
+
+"_Rush!_ Good Lord! it's 'most a week since they were here. And it's
+stopped snowin', and hasn't thought of sleetin' yet or anything else
+rambunksious. Come on, Colonel."
+
+But Father Wills had shown the Colonel the piece of dirty paper the
+Indian had brought on the night of the Blow-Out.
+
+"_Trouble threatened. Pymeuts think old chief dying not of consumption,
+but of a devil. They've sent a dogteam to bring the Shamán down over
+the ice. Come quickly.--_PAUL."
+
+"Reckon we'd better hold our horses till we hear from Holy Cross."
+
+"Hear what?"
+
+The Colonel didn't answer, but the Boy didn't wait to listen. He
+swallowed his coffee scalding hot, rolled up some food and stuff for
+trading, in a light reindeer skin blanket, lashed it packwise on his
+back, shouldered his gun, and made off before the Trio came in to
+breakfast.
+
+The first sign that he was nearing a settlement, was the appearance of
+what looked like sections of rude wicker fencing, set up here and there
+in the river and frozen fast in the ice. High on the bank lay one of
+the long cornucopia-shaped basket fish-traps, and presently he caught
+sight of something in the bleak Arctic landscape that made his heart
+jump, something that to Florida eyes looked familiar.
+
+"Why, if it doesn't make me think of John Fox's cabin on Cypress
+Creek!" he said to himself, formulating an impression that had vaguely
+haunted him on the Lower River in September; wondering if the Yukon
+flooded like the Caloosahatchee, and if the water could reach as far up
+as all that.
+
+He stopped to have a good look at this first one of the Pymeut caches,
+for this modest edifice, like a Noah's Ark on four legs, was not a
+habitation, but a storehouse, and was perched so high, not for fear of
+floods, but for fear of dogs and mice. This was manifest from the fact
+that there were fish-racks and even ighloos much nearer the river.
+
+The Boy stopped and hesitated; it was a sore temptation to climb up and
+see what they had in that cache. There was an inviting plank all ready,
+with sticks nailed on it transversely to prevent the feet from
+slipping. But the Boy stopped at the rude ladder's foot, deciding that
+this particular mark of interest on the part of a stranger might be
+misinterpreted. It would, perhaps, be prudent to find Nicholas first of
+all. But where was Nicholas?--where was anybody?
+
+The scattered, half-buried huts were more like earth-mounds,
+snow-encrusted, some with drift-logs propped against the front face
+looking riverwards.
+
+While he was cogitating how to effect an entrance to one of these, or
+to make his presence known, he saw, to his relief, the back of a
+solitary Indian going in the direction of an ighloo farther up the
+river.
+
+"Hi, hi!" he shouted, and as the figure turned he made signs. It
+stopped.
+
+"How-do?" the Boy called out when he got nearer. "You talk English?"
+
+The native laughed. A flash of fine teeth and sparkling eyes lit up a
+young, good-looking face. This boy seemed promising.
+
+"How d'ye do? You know Nicholas?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+The laugh was even gayer. It seemed to be a capital joke to know
+Nicholas.
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+The figure turned and pointed, and then: "Come. I show you."
+
+This was a more highly educated person than Nicholas, thought the
+visitor, remarking the use of the nominative scorned of the Prince.
+
+They walked on to the biggest of the underground dwellings.
+
+"Is this where the King hangs out? Nicholas' father lives here?"
+
+"No. This is the Kazhga."
+
+"Oh, the Kachime. Ain't you comin' in?"
+
+"Oh no."
+
+"Why?"
+
+His guide had a fit of laughter, and then turned to go.
+
+"Say, what's your name?"
+
+The answer sounded like "Muckluck."
+
+And just then Nicholas crawled out of the tunnel-like opening leading
+into the council-house. He jumped up, beaming at the sight of his
+friend.
+
+"Say, Nicholas, who's this fella that's always laughing, no matter what
+you say? Calls himself 'Muckluck.'"
+
+The individual referred to gave way to another spasm of merriment,
+which infected Nicholas.
+
+"My sister--this one," he explained.
+
+"Oh-h!" The Boy joined in the laugh, and pulled off his Arctic cap with
+a bow borrowed straight from the Colonel.
+
+"Princess Muckluck, I'm proud to know you."
+
+"Name no Muckluck," began Nicholas; "name Mahk----"
+
+"Mac? Nonsense! Mac's a man's name--she's Princess Muckluck. Only,
+how's a fella to tell, when you dress her like a man?"
+
+The Princess still giggled, while her brother explained.
+
+"No like man. See?" He showed how the skirt of her deerskin parki,
+reaching, like her brother's, a little below the knee, was shaped round
+in front, and Nicholas's own--all men's parkis were cut straight
+across.
+
+"I see. How's your father?"
+
+Nicholas looked grave; even Princess Muckluck stopped laughing.
+
+"Come," said Nicholas, and the Boy followed him on all fours into the
+Kachime.
+
+Entering on his stomach, he found himself in a room about sixteen by
+twenty feet, two-thirds underground, log-walls chinked with moss, a
+roof of poles sloping upwards, tent-like, but leaving an opening in the
+middle for a smoke-hole some three feet square, and covered at present
+by a piece of thin, translucent skin. With the sole exception of the
+smoke-hole, the whole thing was so covered with earth, and capped with
+snow, that, expecting a mere cave, one was surprised at the wood-lining
+within. The Boy was still more surprised at the concentration, there,
+of malignant smells.
+
+He gasped, and was for getting out again as fast as possible, when the
+bearskin flap fell behind him over the Kachime end of the
+entrance-tunnel.
+
+Through the tobacco-smoke and the stifling air he saw, vaguely, a grave
+gathering of bucks sitting, or, rather, lounging and squatting, on the
+outer edge of the wide sleeping-bench that ran all round the room,
+about a foot and a half from the hewn-log floor.
+
+Their solemn, intent faces were lit grotesquely by the uncertain glow
+of two seal-oil lamps, mounted on two posts, planted one in front of
+the right sleeping-bench, the other on the left.
+
+The Boy hesitated. Was it possible he could get used to the atmosphere?
+Certainly it was warm in here, though there was no fire that he could
+see. Nicholas was talking away very rapidly to the half-dozen grave and
+reverend signiors, they punctuating his discourse with occasional
+grunts and a well-nigh continuous coughing. Nicholas wound up in
+English.
+
+"Me tell you: he heap good friend. You ketch um tobacco?" he inquired
+suddenly of his guest. Fortunately, the Boy had remembered to "ketch"
+that essential, and his little offering was laid before the
+council-men. More grunts, and room made for the visitor on the
+sleeping-bench next the post that supported one of the lamps, a clay
+saucer half-full of seal-oil, in which a burning wick of twisted moss
+gave forth a powerful odour, a fair amount of smoke, and a faint light.
+
+The Boy sat down, still staring about him, taking note of the well-hewn
+logs, and of the neat attachment of the timbers by a saddle-joint at
+the four corners of the roof.
+
+"Who built this?" he inquired of Nicholas.
+
+"Ol' father, an' ... heap ol' men gone dead."
+
+"Gee! Well, whoever did it was on to his job," he said. "I don't seen a
+nail in the whole sheebang."
+
+"No, no nail."
+
+The Boy remembered Nicholas's sled, and, looking again at the
+disproportionately small hands of the men about him, corrected his
+first impression that they were too feminine to be good for much.
+
+A dirty old fellow, weak and sickly in appearance, began to talk
+querulously. All the others listened with respect, smoking and making
+inarticulate noises now and then. When that discourse was finished, a
+fresh one was begun by yet another coughing councillor.
+
+"What's it all about?" the Boy asked.
+
+"Ol' Chief heap sick," said the buck on the Boy's right.
+
+"Ol' Chief, ol' father, b'long me," Nicholas observed with pride.
+
+"Yes; but aren't the Holy Cross people nursing him?"
+
+"Brother Paul gone; white medicine no good."
+
+They all shook their heads and coughed despairingly.
+
+"Then try s'm' other--some yella-brown, Esquimaux kind," hazarded the
+Boy lightly, hardly noticing what he was saying till he found nearly
+all the eyes of the company fixed intently upon him. Nicholas was
+translating, and it was clear the Boy had created a sensation.
+
+"Father Wills no like," said one buck doubtfully. "He make cross-eyes
+when Shamán come."
+
+"Oh yes, medicine-man," said the Boy, following the narrative eagerly.
+
+"Shamán go way," volunteered an old fellow who hitherto had held his
+peace; "all get sick"--he coughed painfully--"heap Pymeuts die."
+
+"Father Wills come." Nicholas took up the tale afresh. "Shamán come.
+Father Wills heap mad. He no let Shamán stay."
+
+"No; him say, 'Go! plenty quick, plenty far. Hey, you! _Mush!_'"
+
+They smoked awhile in silence broken only by coughs.
+
+"Shamán say, 'Yukon Inua plenty mad.'"
+
+"Who is Yukon Inua? Where does he live?"
+
+"Unner Yukon ice," whispered Nicholas. "Oh, the river spirit?... Of
+course."
+
+"Him heap strong. Long time"--he motioned back into the ages with one
+slim brown hand--"fore Holy Cross here, Yukon Inua take good care
+Pymeuts."
+
+"No tell Father Wills?"
+
+"No."
+
+Then in a low guttural voice: "Shamán come again."
+
+"Gracious! When?"
+
+"To-night."
+
+"Jiminny Christmas!"
+
+They sat and smoked and coughed. By-and-by, as if wishing thoroughly to
+justify their action, Nicholas resumed:
+
+"You savvy, ol' father try white medicine--four winter, four summer. No
+good. Ol' father say, 'Me well man? Good friend Holy Cross, good friend
+Russian mission. Me ol'? me sick? Send for Shamán.'"
+
+The entire company grunted in unison.
+
+"You no tell?" Nicholas added with recurrent anxiety.
+
+"No, no; they shan't hear through me. I'm safe."
+
+Presently they all got up, and began removing and setting back the hewn
+logs that formed the middle of the floor. It then appeared that,
+underneath, was an excavation about two feet deep. In the centre,
+within a circle of stones, were the charred remains of a fire, and here
+they proceeded to make another.
+
+As soon as it began to blaze, Yagorsha the Story-teller took the cover
+off the smoke-hole, so the company was not quite stifled.
+
+A further diversion was created by several women crawling in, bringing
+food for the men-folk, in old lard-cans or native wooden kantaks. These
+vessels they deposited by the fire, and with an exchange of grunts went
+out as they had come.
+
+Nicholas wouldn't let the Boy undo his pack.
+
+"No, we come back," he said, adding something in his own tongue to the
+company, and then crawled out, followed by the Boy. Their progress was
+slow, for the Boy's "Canadian webfeet" had been left in the Kachime,
+and he sank in the snow at every step. Twice in the dusk he stumbled
+over an ighloo, or a sled, or some sign of humanity, and asked of the
+now silent, preoccupied Nicholas, "Who lives here?" The answer had
+been, "Nobody; all dead."
+
+The Boy was glad to see approaching, at last, a human figure. It came
+shambling through the snow, with bent head and swaying, jerking gait,
+looked up suddenly and sheered off, flitting uncertainly onward, in the
+dim light, like a frightened ghost.
+
+"Who is that?"
+
+"Shamán. Him see in dark all same owl. Him know you white man."
+
+The Boy stared after him. The bent figure of the Shamán looked like a
+huge bat flying low, hovering, disappearing into the night.
+
+"Those your dogs howling?" the visitor asked, thinking that for sheer
+dismalness Pymeut would be hard to beat.
+
+Nicholas stopped suddenly and dropped down; the ground seemed to open
+and swallow him. The Boy stooped and saw his friend's feet disappearing
+in a hole. He seized one of them. "Hold on; wait for me!"
+
+Nicholas kicked, but to no purpose; he could make only such progress as
+his guest permitted.
+
+Presently a gleam. Nicholas had thrust away the flap at the tunnel's
+end, and they stood in the house of the Chief of the Pymeuts, that
+native of whom Father Wills had said, "He is the richest and most
+intelligent man of his tribe."
+
+The single room seemed very small after the spaciousness of the
+Kachime, but it was the biggest ighloo in the settlement.
+
+A fire burnt brightly in the middle of the earthen floor, and over it
+was bending Princess Muckluck, cooking the evening meal. She nodded,
+and her white teeth shone in the blaze. Over in the corner, wrapped in
+skins, lay a man on the floor groaning faintly. The salmon, toasting on
+sticks over wood coals, smelt very appetising.
+
+"Why, your fish are whole. Don't you clean 'em first?" asked the
+visitor, surprised out of his manners.
+
+"No," said Nicholas; "him better no cut."
+
+They sat down by the fire, and the Princess waited on them. The Boy
+discovered that it was perfectly true. Yukon salmon broiled in their
+skins over a birch fire are the finest eating in the world, and any
+"other way" involves a loss of flavour.
+
+He was introduced for the first time to the delights of reindeer
+"back-fat," and found even that not so bad.
+
+"You are lucky, Nicholas, to have a sister--such a nice one, too"--(the
+Princess giggled)--"to keep house for you."
+
+Nicholas understood, at least, that politeness was being offered, and
+he grinned.
+
+"I've got a sister myself. I'll show you her picture some day. I care
+about her a lot. I've come up here to make a pile so that we can buy
+back our old place in Florida."
+
+He said this chiefly to the Princess, for she evidently had profited
+more by her schooling, and understood things quite like a Christian.
+
+"Did you ever eat an orange, Princess?" he continued.
+
+"Kind o' fish?"
+
+"No, fruit; a yella ball that grows on a tree."
+
+"Me know," said Nicholas; "me see him in boxes St. Michael's. Him
+bully."
+
+"Yes. Well, we had a lot of trees all full of those yella balls, and we
+used to eat as many as we liked. We don't have much winter down where I
+live--summer pretty nearly all the time."
+
+"I'd like go there," said the girl.
+
+"Well, will you come and see us, Muckluck? When I've found a gold-mine
+and have bought back the Orange Grove, my sister and me are goin' to
+live together, like you and Nicholas."
+
+"She look like you?"
+
+"No; and it's funny, too, 'cause we're twins."
+
+"Twins! What's twins?"
+
+"Two people born at the same time."
+
+"No!" ejaculated Nicholas.
+
+"Why, yes, and they always care a heap about each other when they're
+twins."
+
+But Muckluck stared incredulously.
+
+"_Two_ at the same time!" she exclaimed. "It's like that, then, in your
+country?"
+
+The Boy saw not astonishment alone, but something akin to disgust in
+the face of the Princess. He felt, vaguely, he must justify his
+twinship.
+
+"Of course; there's nothing strange about it; it happens quite often."
+
+"_Often?_"
+
+"Yes; people are very much pleased. Once in a while there are even
+three--"
+
+"All at the same time!" Her horror turned into shrieks of laughter.
+"Why, your women are like our dogs! Human beings and seals never have
+more than one at a time!"
+
+The old man in the corner began to moan and mutter feverishly. Nicholas
+went to him, bent down, and apparently tried to soothe him. Muckluck
+gathered up the supper-things and set them aside.
+
+"You were at the Holy Cross school?" asked the Boy.
+
+"Six years--with Mother Aloysius and the Sisters. They very good."
+
+"So you're a Catholic, then?"
+
+"Oh yes."
+
+"You speak the best English I've heard from a native."
+
+"I love Sister Winifred. I want to go back--unless"--she regarded the
+Boy with a speculative eye--"unless I go your country."
+
+The sick man began to talk deliriously, and lifted up a terrible old
+face with fever-bright eyes glaring through wisps of straight gray
+hair. No voice but his was heard for some time in the ighloo, then, "I
+fraid," said Muckluck, crouching near the fire, but with head turned
+over shoulder, staring at the sick man.
+
+"No wonder," said the Boy, thinking such an apparition enough to
+frighten anybody.
+
+"Nicholas 'fraid, too," she whispered, "when the devil talks."
+
+"The devil?"
+
+"Yes. Sh! You hear?"
+
+The delirious chatter went on, rising to a scream. Nicholas came
+hurrying back to the fire with a look of terror in his face.
+
+"Me go get Shamán."
+
+"No; he come soon." Muckluck clung to him.
+
+They both crouched down by the fire.
+
+"You 'fraid he'll die before the Shamán gets here?"
+
+"Oh no," said Muckluck soothingly, but her face belied her words.
+
+The sick man called hoarsely. Nicholas got him some water, and propped
+him up to drink. He glared over the cup with wild eyes, his teeth
+chattering against the tin. The Boy, himself, felt a creep go down his
+spine.
+
+Muckluck moved closer to him.
+
+"Mustn't say he die," she whispered. "If Nicholas think he die, he drag
+him out--leave him in the snow." "Never!"
+
+"Sh!" she made him a sign to be quiet. The rambling fever-talk went on,
+Nicholas listening fascinated. "No Pymeut," she whispered, "like live
+in ighloo any more if man die there."
+
+"You mean, if they know a person's dying they haul him out o'
+doors--and _leave_ him a night like this?"
+
+"If not, how get him out ... after?"
+
+"Why, carry him out."
+
+"_Touch_ him? Touch _dead_ man?" She shuddered. "Oh, no. Bad, bad! I no
+think he die," she resumed, raising her voice. But Nicholas rejoined
+them, silent, looking very grave. Was he contemplating turning the poor
+old fellow out? The Boy sat devising schemes to prevent the barbarism
+should it come to that. The wind had risen; it was evidently going to
+be a rough night.
+
+With imagination full of sick people turned out to perish, the Boy
+started up as a long wail came, muffled, but keen still with anguish,
+down through the snow and the earth, by way of the smoke-hole, into the
+dim little room.
+
+"Oh, Nicholas! what was that?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Wait! Listen! There, that! Why, it's a child crying."
+
+"No, him Chèe."
+
+"Let's go and bring him in."
+
+"Bring dog in here?"
+
+"Dog! That's no dog."
+
+"Yes, him dog; him my Chèe."
+
+"Making a human noise like that?"
+
+Nicholas nodded. The only sounds for some time were the doleful
+lamenting of the Mahlemeut without, and the ravings of the Pymeut Chief
+within.
+
+The Boy was conscious of a queer, dream-like feeling. All this had been
+going on up here for ages. It had been like this when Columbus came
+over the sea. All the world had changed since then, except the
+steadfast North. The Boy sat up suddenly, and rubbed his eyes. With
+that faculty on the part of the unlearned that one is tempted to call
+"American," a faculty for assimilating the grave conclusions of the
+doctors, and importing them light-heartedly into personal experience,
+he realised that what met his eyes here in Nicholas' house was one of
+the oldest pictures humanity has presented. This was what was going on
+by the Yukon, when King John, beside that other river, was yielding
+Magna Charta to the barons. While the Caesars were building Rome the
+Pymeut forefathers were building just such ighloos as this. While
+Pheidias wrought his marbles, the men up here carved walrus-ivory, and,
+in lieu of Homer, recited "The Crow's Last Flight" and "The Legend of
+the Northern Lights."
+
+Nicholas had risen again, his mouth set hard, his small hands shaking.
+He unrolled an old reindeer-skin full of holes, and examined it. At
+this the girl, who had been about to make up the fire, threw down the
+bit of driftwood and hid her face.
+
+The sick man babbled on.
+
+Faint under the desolate sound another--sibilant, clearer, uncannily
+human. Nicholas had heard, too, for he threw down the tattered
+deerskin, and went to the other side of the fire. Voices in the tunnel.
+Nicholas held back the flap and gravely waited there, till one Pymeut
+after another crawled in. They were the men the Boy had seen at the
+Kachime, with one exception--a vicious-looking old fellow, thin, wiry,
+with a face like a smoked chimpanzee and eyes of unearthly brightness.
+He was given the best place by the fire, and held his brown claws over
+the red coals while the others were finding their places.
+
+The Boy, feeling he would need an interpreter, signed to Muckluck to
+come and sit by him. Grave as a judge she got up, and did as she was
+bid.
+
+"That the Shamán?" whispered the Boy.
+
+She nodded. It was plain that this apparition, however hideous, had
+given her great satisfaction.
+
+"Any more people coming?"
+
+"Got no more now in Pymeut."
+
+"Where is everybody?"
+
+"Some sick, some dead."
+
+The old Chief rambled on, but not so noisily.
+
+"See," whispered Muckluck, "devil 'fraid already. He begin to speak
+small."
+
+The Shamán never once looked towards the sufferer till he himself was
+thoroughly warm. Even then he withdrew from the genial glow, only to
+sit back, humped together, blinking, silent. The Boy began to feel
+that, if he did finally say something it would be as surprising as to
+hear an aged monkey break into articulate speech.
+
+Nicholas edged towards the Shamán, presenting something in a birch-bark
+dish.
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"A deer's tongue," whispered Muckluck.
+
+The Boy remembered the Koyukun song, "Thanks for a good meal to
+Kuskokala, the Shamán."
+
+Nicholas seemed to be haranguing the Shamán deferentially, but with
+spirit. He pulled out from the bottom of his father's bed three fine
+marten-skins, shook them, and dangled them before the Shamán. They
+produced no effect. He then took a box of matches and a plug of the
+Boy's tobacco out of his pocket, and held the lot towards the Shamán,
+seeming to say that to save his life he couldn't rake up another
+earthly thing to tempt his Shamánship. Although the Shamán took the
+offerings his little black eyes glittered none the less rapaciously, as
+they flew swiftly round the room, falling at last with a vicious snap
+and gleam upon the Boy. Then it was that for the first time he spoke.
+
+"Nuh! nuh!" interrupted Muckluck, chattering volubly, and evidently
+commending the Boy to the Shamán. Several of the old bucks laughed.
+
+"He say Yukon Inua no like you."
+
+"He think white men bring plague, bring devils."
+
+"Got some money?" whispered Muckluck.
+
+"Not here."
+
+The Boy saw the moment when he would be turned out. He plunged his
+hands down into his trousers pockets and fished up a knife, his
+second-best one, fortunately.
+
+"Tell him I'm all right, and he can give this to Yukon Inua with my
+respects."
+
+Muckluck explained and held up the shining object, blades open,
+corkscrew curling attractively before the covetous eyes of the Shamán.
+When he could endure the temptation no longer his two black claws shot
+out, but Nicholas intercepted the much-envied object, while, as it
+seemed, he drove a more advantageous bargain. Terms finally settled,
+the Shamán seized the knife, shut it, secreted it with a final grunt,
+and stood up.
+
+Everyone made way for him. He jerked his loosely-jointed body over to
+the sick man, lifted the seal-oil lamp with his shaky old hands, and
+looked at the patient long and steadily. When he had set the lamp down
+again, with a grunt, he put his black thumb on the wick and squeezed
+out the light. When he came back to the fire, which had burnt low, he
+pulled open his parki and drew out an ivory wand, and a long eagle's
+feather with a fluffy white tuft of some sort at the end. He deposited
+these solemnly, side by side, on the ground, about two feet apart.
+
+Turning round to the dying fire, he took a stick, and with Nicholas's
+help gathered the ashes up and laid them over the smouldering brands.
+
+The ighloo was practically dark. No one dared speak save the yet
+unabashed devil in the sick man, who muttered angrily. It was curious
+to see how the coughing of the others, which in the Kachime had been
+practically constant, was here almost silenced. Whether this was
+achieved through awe and respect for the Shamán, or through nervous
+absorption in the task he had undertaken, who shall say?
+
+The Boy felt rather than saw that the Shamán had lain down between the
+ivory wand and the eagle's feather. Each man sat as still as death,
+listening, staring, waiting.
+
+Presently a little jet of flame sprang up out of the ashes. The Shamán
+lifted his head angrily, saw it was no human hand that had dared turn
+on the light, growled, and pulled something else from under his
+inexhaustible parki. The Boy peered curiously. The Shamán seemed to be
+shutting out the offensive light by wrapping himself up in something,
+head and all.
+
+"What's he doing now?" the Boy ventured to whisper under cover of the
+devil's sudden loud remonstrance, the sick man at this point breaking
+into ghastly groans.
+
+"He puts on the Kamlayka. Sh!"
+
+The Shamán, still enveloped head and body, began to beat softly,
+keeping time with the eagle's feather. You could follow the faint gleam
+of the ivory wand, but on what it fell with that hollow sound no eye
+could see. Now, at intervals, he uttered a cry, a deep bass
+danger-note, singularly unnerving. Someone answered in a higher key,
+and they kept this up in a kind of rude, sharply-timed duet, till one
+by one the whole group of natives was gathered into the swing of it,
+swept along involuntarily, it would seem, by some magnetic attraction
+of the rhythm.
+
+_"Ung hi yah! ah-ha-yah! yah-yah-yah!"_ was the chorus to that deep,
+recurrent cry of the Shamán. Its accompanying drum-note was muffled
+like far-off thunder, conjured out of the earth by the ivory wand.
+
+Presently a scream of terror from the bundle of skins and bones in the
+corner.
+
+"Ha!" Muckluck clasped her hands and rocked back and forth.
+
+"They'll frighten the old man to death if he's conscious," said the
+Boy, half rising.
+
+She pulled him down.
+
+"No, no; frighten devil." She was shaking with excitement and with
+ecstacy.
+
+The sick man cried aloud. A frenzy seemed to seize the Shamán. He
+raised his voice in a series of blood-curdling shrieks, then dropped
+it, moaning, whining, then bursting suddenly into diabolic laughter,
+bellowing, whispering, ventriloquising, with quite extraordinary skill.
+The dim and foetid cave might indeed be full of devils.
+
+If the hideous outcry slackened, but an instant, you heard the sick man
+raving with the preternatural strength of delirium, or of mad
+resentment. For some time it seemed a serious question as to who would
+come out ahead. Just as you began to feel that the old Chief was at the
+end of his tether, and ready to give up the ghost, the Shamán, rising
+suddenly with a demoniac yell, flung himself down on the floor in a
+convulsion. His body writhed horribly; he kicked and snapped and
+quivered.
+
+The Boy was for shielding Muckluck from the crazy flinging out of legs
+and arms; but she leaned over, breathless, to catch what words might
+escape the Shamán during the fit, for these were omens of deep
+significance.
+
+When at last the convulsive movements quieted, and the Shamán lay like
+one dead, except for an occasional faint twitch, the Boy realised for
+the first time that the sick man, too, was dumb. Dead? The only sound
+now was the wind up in the world above. Even the dog was still.
+
+The silence was more horrible than the hell-let-loose of a few minutes
+before.
+
+The dim group sat there, motionless, under the spell of the stillness
+even more than they had been under the spell of the noise. At last a
+queer, indescribable scratching and scraping came up out of the bowels
+of the earth.
+
+How does the old devil manage to do that? thought the Boy. But the
+plain truth was that his heart was in his mouth, for the sound came
+from the opposite direction, behind the Boy, and not near the Shamán at
+all. It grew louder, came nearer, more inexplicable, more awful. He
+felt he could not bear it another minute, sprang up, and stood there,
+tense, waiting for what might befall. Were _all_ the others dead, then?
+
+Not a sound in the place, only that indescribable stirring of something
+in the solid earth under his feet.
+
+The Shamán had his knife. A ghastly sensation of stifling came over the
+Boy as he thought of a struggle down there under the earth and the
+snow.
+
+On came the horrible underground thing. Desperately the Boy stirred the
+almost extinct embers with his foot, and a faint glow fell on the
+terror-frozen faces of the natives, fell on the bear-skin flap. _It
+moved!_ A huge hand came stealing round. A hand? The skeleton of a
+hand--white, ghastly, with fingers unimaginably long. No mortal in
+Pymeut had a hand like that--no mortal in all the world!
+
+A crisp, smart sound, and a match blazed. A tall, lean figure rose up
+from behind the bear-skin and received the sudden brightness full in
+his face, pale and beautiful, but angry as an avenging angel's. For an
+instant the Boy still thought it a spectre, the delusion of a
+bewildered brain, till the girl cried out, "Brother Paul!" and fell
+forward on the floor, hiding her face in her hands.
+
+"Light! make a light!" he commanded. Nicholas got up, dazed but
+obedient, and lit the seal-oil lamp.
+
+The voice of the white man, the call for light, reached the Shamán. He
+seemed to shiver and shrink under the folds of the Kamlayka. But
+instead of getting up and looking his enemy in the face, he wriggled
+along on his belly, still under cover of the Kamlayka, till he got to
+the bear-skin, pushed it aside with a motion of the hooded head, and
+crawled out like some snaky symbol of darkness and superstition fleeing
+before the light.
+
+"Brother Paul!" sobbed the girl, "don't, _don't_ tell Sister Winifred."
+
+He took no notice of her, bending down over the motionless bundle in
+the corner.
+
+"You've killed him, I suppose?"
+
+"Brother Paul--" began Nicholas, faltering.
+
+"Oh, I heard the pandemonium." He lifted his thin white face to the
+smoke-hole. "It's all useless, useless. I might as well go and leave
+you to your abominations. But instead, go _you_, all of you--go!" He
+flung out his long arms, and the group broke and scuttled, huddling
+near the bear-skin, fighting like rats to get out faster than the
+narrow passage permitted.
+
+The Boy turned from watching the instantaneous flight, the scuffle, and
+the disappearance, to find the burning eyes of the Jesuit fixed
+fascinated on his face. If Brother Paul had appeared as a spectre in
+the ighloo, it was plain that he looked upon the white face present at
+the diabolic rite as dream or devil. The Boy stood up. The lay-brother
+started, and crossed himself.
+
+"In Christ's name, what--who are you?"
+
+"I--a--I come from the white camp ten miles below."
+
+"And you were _here_--you allowed this? Ah-h!" He flung up his arms,
+the pale lips moved convulsively, but no sound came forth.
+
+"I--you think I ought to have interfered?" began the Boy.
+
+"I think--" the Brother began bitterly, checked himself, knelt down,
+and felt the old man's pulse.
+
+Nicholas at the bear-skin was making the Boy signs to come.
+
+The girl was sobbing with her face on the ground. Again Nicholas
+beckoned, and then disappeared. There seemed to be nothing to do but to
+follow his host. When the bear-skin had dropped behind the Boy, and he
+crawled after Nicholas along the dark passage, he heard the muffled
+voice of the girl praying: "Oh, Mary, Mother of God, don't let him tell
+Sister Winifred."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+A PENITENTIAL JOURNEY
+
+  "... Certain London parishes still receive £12 per annum
+   for fagots to burn heretics."--JOHN RICHARD GREEN.
+
+
+The Boy slept that night in the Kachime beside a very moody, restless
+host. Yagorsha dispensed with the formality of going to bed, and seemed
+bent on doing what he could to keep other people awake. He sat
+monologuing under the seal lamp till the Boy longed to throw the dish
+of smouldering oil at his head. But strangely enough, when, through
+sheer fatigue, his voice failed and his chin fell on his broad chest, a
+lad of fourteen or so, who had also had difficulty to keep awake, would
+jog Yagorsha's arm, repeating interrogatively the last phrase used,
+whereon the old Story-Teller would rouse himself and begin afresh, with
+an iteration of the previous statement. If the lad failed to keep him
+going, one or other of the natives would stir uneasily, lift a head
+from under his deerskin, and remonstrate. Yagorsha, opening his eyes
+with a guilty start, would go on with the yarn. When morning came, and
+the others waked, Yagorsha and the lad slept.
+
+Nicholas and all the rest who shared the bench at night, and the fire
+in the morning, seemed desperately depressed and glum. A heavy cloud
+hung over Pymeut, for Pymeut was in disgrace.
+
+About sunset the women came in with the kantaks and the lard-cans.
+Yagorsha sat up and rubbed his eyes. He listened eagerly, while the
+others questioned the women. The old Chief wasn't dead at all. No, he
+was much better. Brother Paul had been about to all the house-bound
+sick people, and given everybody medicine, and flour, and a terrible
+scolding. Oh yes, he was angrier than anybody had ever been before.
+Some natives from the school at Holy Cross were coming for him
+tomorrow, and they were all going down river and across the southern
+portage to the branch mission at Kuskoquim.
+
+"Down river? Sure?"
+
+Yes, sure. Brother Paul had not waited to come with those others, being
+so anxious to bring medicine and things to Ol' Chief quick; and this
+was how he was welcomed back to the scene of his labours. A Devil's
+Dance was going on! That was what he called it.
+
+"You savvy?" said Nicholas to his guest. "Brother Paul go plenty soon.
+You wait."
+
+I'll have company back to camp, was the Boy's first thought, and
+then--would there be any fun in that after all? It was plain Brother
+Paul was no such genial companion as Father Wills.
+
+And so it was that he did not desert Nicholas, although Brother Paul's
+companions failed to put in an appearance on the following morning.
+However, on the third day after the incident of the Shamán (who seemed
+to have vanished into thin air), Brother Paul shook the snow of Pymeut
+from his feet, and with three Indians from the Holy Cross school and a
+dog-team, he disappeared from the scene. Not till he had been gone some
+time did Nicholas venture to return to the parental roof.
+
+They found Muckluck subdued but smiling, and the old man astonishingly
+better. It looked almost as if he had turned the corner, and was
+getting well.
+
+There was certainly something very like magic in such a recovery, but
+it was quickly apparent that this aspect of the case was not what
+occupied Nicholas, as he sat regarding his parent with a keen and
+speculative eye. He asked him some question, and they discussed the
+point volubly, Muckluck following the argument with close attention.
+Presently it seemed that father and son were taking the guest into
+consideration. Muckluck also turned to him now and then, and by-and-by
+she said: "I think he go."
+
+"Go where?"
+
+"Holy Cross," said the old man eagerly.
+
+"Brother Paul," Nicholas explained. "He go _down_ river. We get Holy
+Cross--more quick."
+
+"I see. Before he can get back. But why do you want to go?"
+
+"See Father Brachet."
+
+"Sister Winifred say: 'Always tell Father Brachet; then everything all
+right,'" contributed Muckluck.
+
+"You tell Pymeut belly solly," the old Chief said.
+
+"Nicholas know he not able tell all like white man," Muckluck
+continued. "Nicholas say you good--hey? you good?"
+
+"Well--a--pretty tollable, thank you."
+
+"You go with Nicholas; you make Father Brachet unnerstan'--forgive.
+Tell Sister Winifred--" She stopped, perplexed, vaguely distrustful at
+the Boy's chuckling.
+
+"You think we can explain it all away, hey?" He made a gesture of happy
+clearance. "Shamán and everything, hey?"
+
+"Me no can," returned Nicholas, with engaging modesty. "_You_--" He
+conveyed a limitless confidence.
+
+"Well, I'll be jiggered if I don't try. How far is it?"
+
+"Go slow--one sleep."
+
+"Well, we won't go slow. We've got to do penance. When shall we start?"
+
+"Too late now. Tomalla," said the Ol' Chief.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+They got up very early--it seemed to the Boy like the middle of the
+night--stole out of the dark Kachime, and hurried over the hard crust
+that had formed on the last fall of snow, down the bleak, dim slope to
+the Ol' Chief's, where they were to breakfast.
+
+Not only Muckluck was up and doing, but the Ol' Chief seemed galvanised
+into unwonted activity. He was doddering about between his bed and the
+fire, laying out the most imposing parkis and fox-skins, fur blankets,
+and a pair of seal-skin mittens, all of which, apparently, he had had
+secreted under his bed, or between it and the wall.
+
+They made a sumptuous breakfast of tea, the last of the bacon the Boy
+had brought, and slapjacks.
+
+The Boy kept looking from time to time at the display of furs. Father
+Wills was right; he ought to buy a parki with a hood, but he had meant
+to have the priest's advice, or Mac's, at least, before investing. Ol'
+Chief watching him surreptitiously, and seeing he was no nearer making
+an offer, felt he should have some encouragement. He picked up the
+seal-skin mittens and held them out.
+
+"Present," said Ol' Chief. "You tell Father Brachet us belly solly."
+
+"Oh, I'll handle him without gloves," said the Boy, giving back the
+mittens. But Ol' Chief wouldn't take them. He was holding up the
+smaller of the two parkis.
+
+"You no like?"
+
+"Oh, very nice."
+
+"You no buy?"
+
+"You go sleep on trail," said Nicholas, rising briskly. "You die, no
+parki."
+
+The Boy laughed and shook his head, but still Ol' Chief held out the
+deer-skin shirt, and caressed the wolf-fringe of the hood.
+
+"Him cheap."
+
+"How cheap?"
+
+"Twenty-fi' dollah."
+
+"Don't know as I call that cheap."
+
+"Yes," said Nicholas. "St. Michael, him fifty dollah."
+
+The Boy looked doubtful.
+
+"I saw a parki there at the A. C. Store about like this for twenty."
+
+"A. C. parki, peeluck," Nicholas said contemptuously. Then patting the
+one his father held out, "You wear _him_ fifty winter."
+
+"Lord forbid! Anyhow, I've only got about twenty dollars' worth of
+tobacco and stuff along with me."
+
+"Me come white camp," Nicholas volunteered. "Me get more fi' dollah."
+
+"Oh, will you? Now, that's very kind of you." But Nicholas, impervious
+to irony, held out the parki. The Boy laughed, and took it. Nicholas
+stooped, picked up the fur mittens, and, laying them on the Boy's arm,
+reiterated his father's "Present!" and then departed to the Kachime to
+bring down the Boy's pack.
+
+The Princess meanwhile had withdrawn to her own special corner, where
+in the daytime appeared only a roll of plaited mats, and a little,
+cheap, old hat-box, which she evidently prized most of all she had in
+the world.
+
+"You see? Lock!"
+
+The Boy expressed surprise and admiration.
+
+"No! Really! I call that fine."
+
+"I got present for Father Brachet"; and turning over the rags and
+nondescript rubbish of the hat-box, she produced an object whose use
+was not immediately manifest. A section of walrus ivory about six
+inches long had been cut in two. One of these curved halves had been
+mounted on four ivory legs. In the upper flat side had been stuck, at
+equal distances from the two ends and from each other, two delicate
+branches of notched ivory, standing up like horns. Between these sat an
+ivory mannikin, about three inches long, with a woeful countenance and
+with arms held out like one beseeching mercy.
+
+"It's fine," said the Boy, "but--a--what's it for? Just look pretty?"
+
+"Wait, I show you." She dived into the hat-box, and fished up a bit of
+battered pencil. With an air of pride, she placed the pencil across the
+outstretched hands of the ivory suppliant, asking the Boy in dumb-show,
+was not this a pen-rest that might be trusted to melt the heart of the
+Holy Father?
+
+"This way, too." She illustrated how anyone embarrassed by the
+possession of more than one pencil could range them in tiers on the
+ivory horns above the head of the Woeful One.
+
+"I call that scrumptious! And he looks as if he was saying he was sorry
+all the time."
+
+She nodded, delighted that the Boy comprehended the subtle symbolism.
+
+"One more!" she said, showing her dazzling teeth. Like a child playing
+a game, she half shut the hat-box and hugged it lovingly. Then with
+eyes sparkling, slowly the small hand crept in--was thrust down the
+side and drew out with a rapturous "Ha!" a gaudy advertisement card,
+setting forth the advantages of smoking "Kentucky Leaf" She looked at
+it fondly. Then slowly, regretfully, all the fun gone now, she passed
+it to the Boy.
+
+"For Sister Winifred!" she said, like one who braces herself to make
+some huge renunciation. "You tell her I send with my love, and I always
+say my prayers. I very good. Hey? You tell Sister Winifred?"
+
+"_Sure_," said the Boy.
+
+The Ol' Chief was pulling the other parki over his head. Nicholas
+reappeared with the visitor's effects. Under the Boy's eyes, he calmly
+confiscated all the tea and tobacco. But nothing had been touched in
+the owner's absence.
+
+"Look here: just leave me enough tea to last till I get home. I'll make
+it up to you."
+
+Nicholas, after some reflection, agreed. Then he bustled about,
+gathered together an armful of things, and handed the Boy a tea-kettle
+and an axe.
+
+"You bring--dogs all ready. Mush!" and he was gone.
+
+To the Boy's surprise, while he and Muckluck were getting the food and
+presents together, the lively Ol' Chief--so lately dying--made off, in
+a fine new parki, on all fours, curious, no doubt, to watch the
+preparations without.
+
+But not a bit of it. The Ol' Chief's was a more intimate concern in the
+expedition. When the Boy joined him, there he was sitting up in
+Nicholas's sled, appallingly emaciated, but brisk as you please,
+ordering the disposition of the axe and rifle along either side, the
+tea-kettle and grub between his feet, showing how the deer-skin
+blankets should be wrapped, and especially was he dictatorial about the
+lashing of the mahout.
+
+"How far's he comin'?" asked the Boy, astonished.
+
+"All the way," said Muckluck. "He want to be _sure_."
+
+Several bucks came running down from the Kachime, and stood about,
+coughed and spat, and offered assistance or advice. When at last Ol'
+Chief was satisfied with the way the raw walrus-hide was laced and
+lashed, Nicholas cracked his whip and shouted, "Mush! God-damn! Mush!"
+
+"Good-bye, Princess. We'll take care of your father, though I'm sure he
+oughtn't to go."
+
+"Oh yes," answered Muckluck confidently; then lower, "Shamán make all
+well quick. Hey? Goo'-bye."
+
+"Good-bye."
+
+"Don't forget tell Sister Winifred I say my p--" But the Boy had to run
+to keep up with the sled.
+
+For some time he kept watching the Ol' Chief with unabated
+astonishment, wondering if he'd die on the way. But, after all, the
+open-air cure was tried for his trouble in various other parts of the
+world--why not here?
+
+There was no doubt about it, Nicholas had a capital team of dogs, and
+knew how to drive them. Two-legged folk often had to trot pretty
+briskly to keep up. Pymeut was soon out of sight.
+
+"Nicholas, what'll you take for a couple o' your dogs?"
+
+"No sell."
+
+"Pay you a good long price."
+
+"No sell."
+
+"Well, will you help me to get a couple?"
+
+"Me try"; but he spoke dubiously.
+
+"What do they cost?"
+
+"Good leader cost hunder and fifty in St. Michael."
+
+"You don't mean dollahs?"
+
+"Mean dollahs."
+
+"Come off the roof!"
+
+But Nicholas seemed to think there was no need.
+
+"You mean that if I offer you a hundred and fifty dollahs for your
+leader, straight off, this minute, you won't take it?"
+
+"No, no take," said the Prince, stolidly.
+
+And his friend reflected. Nicholas without a dog-team would be
+practically a prisoner for eight months of the year, and not only that,
+but a prisoner in danger of starving to death. After all, perhaps a
+dog-team in such a country _was_ priceless, and the Ol' Chief was
+travelling in truly royal style.
+
+However, it was stinging cold, and running after those expensive dogs
+was an occupation that palled. By-and-by, "How much is your sled
+worth?" he asked Ol' Chief.
+
+"Six sables," said the monarch.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a comfort to sight a settlement off there on the point.
+
+"What's this place?"
+
+"Fish-town."
+
+"Pymeuts there?"
+
+"No, all gone. Come back when salmon run."
+
+Not a creature there, as Nicholas had foretold--a place built wilfully
+on the most exposed point possible, bleak beyond belief. If you open
+your mouth at this place on the Yukon, you have to swallow a hurricane.
+The Boy choked, turned his back to spit out the throttling blast, and
+when he could catch his breath inquired:
+
+"This a good place for a village?"
+
+"Bully. Wind come, blow muskeetah--"
+
+Nicholas signified a remote destination with his whip.
+
+"B'lieve you! This kind o' thing would discourage even a mosquito."
+
+In the teeth of the blast they went past the Pymeut Summer Resort.
+Unlike Pymeut proper, its cabins were built entirely above ground, of
+logs unchinked, its roofs of watertight birch-bark.
+
+A couple of hours farther on Nicholas permitted a halt on the edge of a
+struggling little grove of dwarfed cotton-wood.
+
+The kettle and things being withdrawn from various portions of the Ol'
+Chief's person, he, once more warmly tucked up and tightly lashed down,
+drew the edge of the outer coverlid up till it met the wolf-skin fringe
+of his parki hood, and relapsed into slumber.
+
+Nicholas chopped down enough green wood to make a hearth.
+
+"What! bang on the snow?"
+
+Nicholas nodded, laid the logs side by side, and on them built a fire
+of the seasoned wood the Boy had gathered. They boiled the kettle, made
+tea, and cooked some fish.
+
+Ol' Chief waked up just in time to get his share. The Boy, who had kept
+hanging about the dogs with unabated interest, had got up from the fire
+to carry them the scraps, when Nicholas called out quite angrily, "No!
+no feed dogs," and waved the Boy off.
+
+"What! It's only some of my fish. Fish is what they eat, ain't it?"
+
+"No feed now; wait till night."
+
+"What for? They're hungry."
+
+"You give fish--dogs no go any more."
+
+Peremptorily he waved the Boy off, and fell to work at packing up. Not
+understanding Nicholas's wisdom, the Boy was feeling a little sulky and
+didn't help. He finished up the fish himself, then sat on his heels by
+the fire, scorching his face while his back froze, or wheeling round
+and singeing his new parki while his hands grew stiff in spite of
+seal-skin mittens.
+
+No, it was no fun camping with the temperature at thirty degrees below
+zero--better to be trotting after those expensive and dinnerless dogs;
+and he was glad when they started again.
+
+But once beyond the scant shelter of the cottonwood, it was evident the
+wind had risen. It was blowing straight out of the north and into their
+faces. There were times when you could lean your whole weight against
+the blast.
+
+After sunset the air began to fill with particles of frozen snow. They
+did not seem to fall, but continually to whirl about, and present
+stinging points to the travellers' faces. Talking wasn't possible even
+if you were in the humour, and the dead, blank silence of all nature,
+unbroken hour after hour, became as nerve-wearing as the cold and
+stinging wind. The Boy fell behind a little. Those places on his heels
+that had been so badly galled had begun to be troublesome again. Well,
+it wouldn't do any good to holla about it--the only thing to do was to
+harden one's foolish feet. But in his heart he felt that all the
+time-honoured conditions of a penitential journey were being complied
+with, except on the part of the arch sinner. Ol' Chief seemed to be
+getting on first-rate.
+
+The dogs, hardly yet broken in to the winter's work, were growing
+discouraged, travelling so long in the eye of the wind. And Nicholas,
+in the kind of stolid depression that had taken possession of him,
+seemed to have forgotten even to shout "Mush!" for a very long time.
+
+By-and-by Ol' Chief called out sharply, and Nicholas seemed to wake up.
+He stopped, looked back, and beckoned to his companion.
+
+The Boy came slowly on.
+
+"Why you no push?"
+
+"Push what?"
+
+"Handle-bar."
+
+He went to the sled and illustrated, laying his hands on the
+arrangement at the back that stood out like the handle behind a baby's
+perambulator. The Boy remembered. Of course, there were usually two men
+with each sled. One ran ahead and broke trail with snow-shoes, but that
+wasn't necessary today, for the crust bore. But the other man's
+business was to guide the sled from behind and keep it on the trail.
+
+"Me gottah drive, you gottah push. Dogs heap tired."
+
+Nicholas spoke severely. The Boy stared a moment at what he mentally
+called "the nerve of the fella," laughed, and took hold, swallowing
+Nicholas's intimation that he, after all, was far more considerate of
+the dogs than the person merely sentimental, who had been willing to
+share his dinner with them.
+
+"How much farther?"
+
+"Oh, pretty quick now."
+
+The driver cracked his whip, called out to the dogs, and suddenly
+turned off from the river course. Unerringly he followed an invisible
+trail, turning sharply up a slough, and went zig-zagging on without
+apparent plan. It was better going when they got to a frozen lake, and
+the dogs seemed not to need so much encouragement. It would appear an
+impossible task to steer accurately with so little light; but once on
+the other side of the lake it was found that Nicholas had hit a
+well-beaten track as neatly as a thread finds the needle's eye.
+
+Far off, out of the dimness, came a sound--welcome because it was
+something to break the silence but hardly cheerful in itself.
+
+"Hear that, Nicholas?"
+
+"Mission dogs."
+
+Their own had already thrown up their noses and bettered the pace.
+
+The barking of the dogs had not only announced the mission to the
+travellers, but to the mission a stranger at the gates.
+
+Before anything could be seen of the settlement, clumsy, fur-clad
+figures had come running down the slope and across the ice, greeting
+Nicholas with hilarity.
+
+Indian or Esquimaux boys they seemed to be, who talked some jargon
+understanded of the Pymeut pilot. The Boy, lifting tired eyes, saw
+something white glimmering high in the air up on the right river bank.
+In this light it refused to form part of any conceivable plan, but hung
+there in the air detached, enigmatic, spectral. Below it, more on
+humanity's level, could be dimly distinguished, now, the Mission
+Buildings, apparently in two groups with an open space in the middle.
+Where are the white people? wondered the Boy, childishly impatient.
+Won't they come and welcome us? He followed the Esquimaux and Indians
+from the river up to the left group of buildings. With the heathen
+jargon beating on his ears, he looked up suddenly, and realized what
+the white thing was that had shone out so far. In the middle of the
+open space a wooden cross stood up, encrusted with frost crystals, and
+lifting gleaming arms out of the gloom twenty feet or so above the
+heads of the people.
+
+"Funny thing for an Agnostic," he admitted to himself, "but I'm right
+glad to see a Christian sign." And as he knocked at the door of the big
+two-story log-house on the left he defended himself. "It's the
+swing-back of the pendulum after a big dose of Pymeut and heathen
+tricks. I welcome it as a mark of the white man." He looked over his
+shoulder a little defiantly at the Holy Cross. Recognition of what the
+high white apparition was had given him a queer jolt, stirring
+unsuspected things in imagination and in memory. He had been accustomed
+to see that symbol all his life, and it had never spoken to him before.
+Up here it cried aloud and dominated the scene. "Humph!" he said to
+himself, "to look at you a body'd think 'The Origin' had never been
+written, and Spencer and Huxley had never been born.' He knocked again,
+and again turned about to scan the cross.
+
+"Just as much a superstition, just as much a fetich as Kaviak's
+seal-plug or the Shamán's eagle feather. With long looking at a couple
+of crossed sticks men grow as dazed, as hypnotized, as Pymeuts watching
+a Shamán's ivory wand. All the same, I'm not sure that faith in 'First
+Principles' would build a house like this in the Arctic Regions, and
+it's convenient to find it here--if only they'd open the door."
+
+He gave another thundering knock, and then nearly fell backwards into
+the snow, for Brother Paul stood on the threshold holding up a lamp.
+
+"I--a--oh! How do you do? Can I come in?"
+
+Brother Paul, still with the look of the Avenging Angel on his pale,
+young face, held the door open to let the Boy come in. Then, leaning
+out into the night and lifting the lamp high, "Is that Nicholas?" he
+said sternly.
+
+But the Pymeuts and the school-boys had vanished. He came in and set
+down the lamp.
+
+"We--a--we heard you were going down river," said the Boy, tamely, for
+he had not yet recovered himself after such an unexpected blow.
+
+"Are you cold? Are you wet?" demanded Brother Paul, standing erect,
+unwelcoming, by the table that held the lamp.
+
+The Boy pulled himself together.
+
+"Look here"--he turned away from the comforting stove and confronted
+the Jesuit--"those Pymeuts are not only cold and wet and sick too, but
+they're sorry. They've come to ask forgiveness."
+
+"It's easily done."
+
+Such scorn you would hardly expect from a follower of the meek
+Galilean.
+
+"No, not easily done, a penance like this. I know, for I've just
+travelled that thirty miles with 'em over the ice from Pymeut."
+
+"You? Yes, it amuses you."
+
+The sombre eyes shone with a cold, disconcerting light.
+
+"Well, to tell you the truth, I've been better amused."
+
+The Boy looked down at his weary, wounded feet. And the others--where
+were his fellow pilgrims? It struck him as comic that the upshot of the
+journey should be that he was doing penance for the Pymeuts, but he
+couldn't smile with that offended archangel in front of him.
+
+"Thirty miles over the ice, in the face of a norther, hasn't been so
+'easy' even for me. And I'm not old, nor sick--no, nor frightened,
+Brother Paul."
+
+He flung up his head, but his heart failed him even while he made the
+boast. Silently, for a moment, they confronted each other.
+
+"Where are you bound for?"
+
+"I--a--" The Boy had a moment of wondering if he was expected to answer
+"Hell," and he hesitated.
+
+"Are you on your way up the river?"
+
+"No--I" (was the man not going to let them rest their wicked bones
+there a single night?)--"a--I--"
+
+The frozen river and the wind-racked wood were as hospitable as the
+beautiful face of the brother. Involuntarily the Boy shivered.
+
+"I came to see the Father Superior."
+
+He dropped back into a chair.
+
+"The Father Superior is busy."
+
+"I'll wait."
+
+"And very tired."
+
+"So'm I."
+
+"--worn out with the long raging of the plague. I have waited till he
+is less harassed to tell him about the Pymeuts' deliberate depravity.
+Nicholas, too!--one of our own people, one of the first pupils of the
+school, a communicant in the church; distinguished by a thousand
+kindnesses. And this the return!"
+
+"The return is that he takes his backsliding so to heart, he can't rest
+without coming to confess and to beg the Father Superior--"
+
+"I shall tell the Father Superior what I heard and saw. He will agree
+that, for the sake of others who are trying to resist temptation, an
+example should be made of Nicholas and of his father."
+
+"And yet you nursed the old man and were kind to him, I believe, after
+the offense."
+
+"I--I thought you had killed him. But even you must see that we cannot
+have a man received here as Nicholas was--the most favoured child of
+the mission--who helps to perpetuate the degrading blasphemies of his
+unhappy race. It's nothing to you; you even encourage--"
+
+"'Pon my soul--" But Brother Paul struck in with an impassioned
+earnestness:
+
+"We spend a life-time making Christians of these people; and such as
+you come here, and in a week undo the work of years."
+
+"I--_I?_"
+
+"It's only eighteen months since I myself came, but already I've
+seen--" The torrent poured out with never a pause. "Last summer some
+white prospectors bribed our best native teacher to leave us and become
+a guide. He's a drunken wreck now somewhere up on the Yukon Flats. You
+take our boys for pilots, you entice our girls away with trinkets--"
+
+"Great Caesar! _I_ don't."
+
+But vain was protest. For Brother Paul the visitor was not a particular
+individual. He stood there for the type of the vicious white
+adventurer.
+
+The sunken eyes of the lay-brother, burning, impersonal, saw not a
+particular young man and a case compounded of mixed elements, but--The
+Enemy! against whom night and day he waged incessant warfare.
+
+"The Fathers and Sisters wear out their lives to save these people. We
+teach them with incredible pains the fundamental rules of civilization;
+we teach them how to save their souls alive." The Boy had jumped up and
+laid his hand on the door-knob. "_You_ come. You teach them to smoke--"
+
+The Boy wheeled round.
+
+"I don't smoke."
+
+"... and to gamble."
+
+"Nicholas taught _me_ to gamble. Brother Paul, I swear--"
+
+"Yes, and to swear and get drunk, and so find the shortest way to
+hell."
+
+"Father Brachet! Father Wills!" a voice called without.
+
+The door-knob turned under the Boy's hand, and before he could more
+than draw back, a whiff of winter blew into the room, and a creature
+stood there such as no man looks to find on his way to an Arctic gold
+camp. A girl of twenty odd, with the face of a saint, dressed in the
+black habit of the Order of St. Anne.
+
+"Oh, Brother Paul! you are wanted--wanted quickly. I think Catherine is
+worse; don't wait, or she'll die without--" And as suddenly as she came
+the vision vanished, carrying Brother Paul in the wake of her streaming
+veil.
+
+The Boy sat down by the stove, cogitating how he should best set about
+finding Nicholas to explain the failure of their mission.... What was
+that? Voices from the other side. The opposite door opened and a man
+appeared, with Nicholas and his father close behind, looking anything
+but cast down or decently penitential.
+
+"How do you do?" The white man's English had a strong French accent. He
+shook hands with great cordiality. "We have heard of you from Father
+Wills also. These Pymeut friends of ours say you have something to tell
+me."
+
+He spoke as though this something were expected to be highly
+gratifying, and, indeed, the cheerfulness of Nicholas and his father
+would indicate as much.
+
+As the Boy, hesitating, did not accept the chair offered, smiling, the
+Jesuit went on:
+
+"Will you talk of zis matter--whatever it is--first, or will you first
+go up and wash, and have our conference after supper?"
+
+"No, thank you--a--Are you the Father Superior?"
+
+He bowed a little ceremoniously, but still smiling.
+
+"I am Father Brachet."
+
+"Oh, well, Nicholas is right. The first thing to do is to explain why
+we're here."
+
+Was it the heat of the stove after the long hours of cold that made him
+feel a little dizzy? He put up his hand to his head.
+
+"I have told zem to take hot water upstairs," the Father was saying,
+"and I zink a glass of toddy would be a good sing for you." He slightly
+emphasised the "you," and turned as if to supplement the original
+order.
+
+"No, no!" the Boy called after him, choking a little, half with
+suppressed merriment, half with nervous fatigue. "Father Brachet, if
+you're kind to us, Brother Paul will never forgive you. We're all in
+disgrace."
+
+"Hein! What?"
+
+"Yes, we're all desperately wicked."
+
+"No, no," objected Nicholas, ready to go back on so tactless an
+advocate.
+
+"And Brother Paul has just been saying--"
+
+"What is it, what is it?"
+
+The Father Superior spoke a little sharply, and himself sat down in the
+wooden armchair he before had placed for his white guest.
+
+The three culprits stood in front of him on a dead level of iniquity.
+
+"You see, Father Brachet, Ol' Chief has been very ill--"
+
+"I know. Much as we needed him here, Paul insisted on hurrying back to
+Pymeut"--he interrupted himself as readily as he had interrupted the
+Boy--"but ze Ol' Chief looks lively enough."
+
+"Yes; he--a--his spirits have been raised by--a--what you will think an
+unwarrantable and wicked means."
+
+Nicholas understood, at least, that objectionable word "wicked"
+cropping up again, and he was not prepared to stand it from the Boy.
+
+He grunted with displeasure, and said something low to his father.
+
+"Brother Paul found them--found _us_ having a séance with the Shamán."
+
+Father Brachet turned sharply to the natives.
+
+"Ha! you go back to zat."
+
+Nicholas came a step forward, twisting his mittens and rolling his eye
+excitedly.
+
+"Us no wicked. Shamán say he gottah scare off--" He waved his arm
+against an invisible army. Then, as it were, stung into plain speaking:
+"Shamán say _white man_ bring sickness--bring devils--"
+
+"Maybe the old Orang Outang's right."
+
+The Boy drew a tired breath, and sat down without bidding in one of the
+wooden chairs. What an idiot he'd been not to take the hot grog and the
+hot bath, and leave these people to fight their foolishness out among
+themselves! It didn't concern him. And here was Nicholas talking away
+comfortably in his own tongue, and the Father was answering. A native
+opened the door and peeped in cautiously.
+
+Nicholas paused.
+
+"Hein!" said Father Brachet, "what is it!"
+
+The Indian came in with two cups of hot tea and a cracker in each
+saucer. He stopped at the priest's side.
+
+"You get sick, too. Please take. Supper little late." He nodded to
+Nicholas, and gave the white stranger the second cup. As he was going
+out: "Same man here in July. You know"--he tapped himself on the left
+side--"man with sore heart."
+
+"Yansey?" said the priest quickly. "Well, what about Yansey?"
+
+"He is here."
+
+"But no! Wiz zose ozzers?"
+
+"No, I think they took the dogs and deserted him. He's just been
+brought in by our boys; they are back with the moose-meat. Sore heart
+worse. He will die."
+
+"Who's looking after him?"
+
+"Brother Paul"; and he padded out of the room in his soft native shoes.
+
+"Then Brother Paul has polished off Catherine," thought the Boy, "and
+he won't waste much time over a sore heart. It behoves us to hurry up
+with our penitence." This seemed to be Nicholas's view as well. He was
+beginning again in his own tongue.
+
+"You know we like best for you to practise your English," said the
+priest gently; "I expect you speak very well after working so long on
+ze John J. Healy."
+
+"Yes," Nicholas straightened himself. "Me talk all same white man now."
+(He gleamed at the Boy: "Don't suppose I need you and your perfidious
+tongue.") "No; us Pymeuts no wicked!"
+
+Again he turned away from the priest, and challenged the Boy to repeat
+the slander. Then with an insinuating air, "Shamán no say you wicked,"
+he reassured the Father. "Shamán say Holy Cross all right. Cheechalko
+no good; Cheechalko bring devils; Cheechalko all same _him_," he wound
+up, flinging subterfuge to the winds, and openly indicating his
+faithless ambassador.
+
+"Strikes me I'm gettin' the worst of this argument all round. Brother
+Paul's been sailing into me on pretty much the same tack."
+
+"No," said Nicholas, firmly; "Brother Paul no unnerstan'. _You_
+unnerstan'." He came still nearer to the Father, speaking in a
+friendly, confidential tone. "You savvy! Plague come on steamboat up
+from St. Michael. One white man, he got coast sickness. Sun shining.
+Salmon run big. Yukon full o' boats. Two days: no canoe on river. Men
+all sit in tent like so." He let his mittens fall on the floor,
+crouched on his heels, and rocked his head in his hands. Springing up,
+he went on with slow, sorrowful emphasis: "Men begin die--"
+
+"Zen we come," said the Father, "wiz nurses and proper medicine--"
+
+Nicholas gave the ghost of a shrug, adding the damaging fact: "Sickness
+come to Holy Cross."
+
+The Father nodded.
+
+"We've had to turn ze schools into wards for our patients," he
+explained to the stranger. "We do little now but nurse ze sick and
+prepare ze dying. Ze Muzzer Superieure has broken down after heroic
+labours. Paul, I fear, is sickening too. Yes, it's true: ze disease
+came to us from Pymeut."
+
+In the Father's mind was the thought of contagion courageously faced in
+order to succour "the least of these my brethren." In Nicholas's mind
+was the perplexing fact that these white men could bring sickness, but
+not stay it. Even the heap good people at Holy Cross were not saved by
+their deaf and impotent God.
+
+"Fathers sick, eight Sisters sick, boy die in school, three girl die.
+Holy Cross people kind--" Again he made that almost French motion of
+the shoulders. "Shamán say, 'Peeluck!' No good be kind to devils; scare
+'em--make 'em run."
+
+"Nicholas," the priest spoke wearily, "I am ashamed of you. I sought
+you had learned better. Zat old Shamán--he is a rare old rogue. What
+did you give him?"
+
+Nicholas' mental processes may not have been flattering, but their
+clearness was unmistakable. If Father Brachet was jealous of the rival
+holy man's revenue, it was time to bring out the presents.
+
+Ol' Chief had a fine lynx-skin over his arm. He advanced at a word from
+Nicholas, and laid it down before the Father.
+
+"No!" said Father Brachet, with startling suddenness; "take it away and
+try to understand."
+
+Nicholas approached trembling, but no doubt remembering how necessary
+it had been to add to the Shamán's offering before he would consent to
+listen with favour to Pymeut prayers, he pulled out of their respective
+hiding--places about his person a carved ivory spoon and an embroidered
+bird-skin pouch, advanced boldly under the fire of the Superior's keen
+eyes and sharp words, and laid the further offering on the lynx-skin at
+his feet.
+
+"Take zem away," said the priest, interrupting his brief homily and
+standing up. "Don't you understand yet zat we are your friends wizzout
+money and wizzout price? We do not want zese sings. Shamán takes
+ivories from ze poor, furs from ze shivering, and food from zem zat
+starve. And he gives nossing in return--nossing! Take zese sings away;
+no one wants zem at Holy Cross."
+
+Ol' Chief wiped his eyes pathetically. Nicholas, the picture of
+despair, turned in a speechless appeal to his despised ambassador.
+Before anyone could speak, the door-knob rattled rudely, and the big
+bullet-head of a white man was put in.
+
+"Pardon, mon Père; cet homme qui vient de Minóok--faudrait le coucher
+de suite--mais où, mon Dieu, où?"
+
+While the Superior cogitated, "How-do, Brother Etienne?" said Nicholas,
+and they nodded.
+
+Brother Etienne brought the rest of his heavy body half inside the
+door. He wore aged, weather-beaten breeches, and a black sweater over
+an old hickory shirt.
+
+"Ses compagnons l'ont laissé, là, je crois. Mais ça ne durera pas
+longtemps."
+
+"Faudra bien qu'il reste ici--je ne vois pas d'autre moyen," said the
+Father. "Enfin--on verra. Attendez quelques instants."
+
+"C'est bien." Brother Etienne went out.
+
+Ol' Chief was pulling the Boy's sleeve during the little colloquy, and
+saying, "You tell." But the Boy got up like one who means to make an
+end.
+
+"You haven't any time or strength for this--"
+
+"Oh yes," said Father Brachet, smiling, and arresting the impetuous
+movement. "Ziz is--part of it."
+
+"Well," said the Boy, still hesitating, "they _are_ sorry, you know,
+_really_ sorry."
+
+"You sink so?" The question rang a little sceptically.
+
+"Yes, I do, and I'm in a position to know. You'd forgive them if you'd
+seen, as I did, how miserable and overwhelmed they were when Brother
+Paul--when--I'm not saying it's the highest kind of religion that
+they're so almighty afraid of losing your good opinion, but it--it
+gives you a hold, doesn't it?" And then, as the Superior said nothing,
+only kept intent eyes on the young face, the Boy wound up a little
+angrily: "Unless, of course, you're like Brother Paul, ready to throw
+away the power you've gained--"
+
+"Paul serves a great and noble purpose--but--zese questions are--a--not
+in his province." Still he bored into the young face with those kind
+gimlets, his good little eyes, and--
+
+"You are--one of us?" he asked, "of ze Church?"
+
+"No, I--I'm afraid I'm not of any Church."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"And I ought to take back 'afraid.' But I'm telling you the truth when
+I say there never were honester penitents than the Pymeuts. The whole
+Kachime's miserable. Even the girl, Ol' Chief's daughter she cried like
+anything when she thought Sister--"
+
+"Winifred?"
+
+"Sister Winifred would be disappointed in her."
+
+"Ah, yes; Sister Winifred has zem--" he held out his hand, spread the
+fingers apart, and slowly, gently closed them. "Comme ça."
+
+"But what's the good of it if Brother Paul--"
+
+"Ah, it is not just zere Paul comes in. But I tell you, my son, Paul
+does a work here no ozzer man has done so well."
+
+"He is a flint--a fanatic."
+
+"Fanatique!" He flung out an expressive hand. "It is a name, my son. It
+often means no more but zat a man is in earnest. Out of such a 'flint'
+we strike sparks, and many a generous fire is set alight. We all do
+what we can here at Holy Cross, but Paul will do what we cannot."
+
+"Well, give _me_--" He was on the point of saying "Father Wills," but
+changed it to "a man who is tolerant."
+
+"Tolerant? Zere are plenty to be tolerant, my son. Ze world is full.
+But when you find a man zat can _care_, zat can be 'fanatique'--ah! It
+is"--he came a little nearer--"it is but as if I would look at you and
+say, 'He has earnest eyes! He will go far _whatever_ road he follow.'"
+He drew off, smiling shrewdly. "You may live, my son, to be yourself
+called 'fanatique.' Zen you will know how little--"
+
+"I!" the Boy broke in. "You are pretty wide of the mark this time."
+
+"Ah, perhaps! But zere are more trails zan ze Yukon for a fanatique.
+You have zere somesing to show me?"
+
+"I promised the girl that cried so--I promised her to bring the Sister
+this." He had pulled out the picture. In spite of the careful wrapping,
+it had got rather crumpled. The Father looked at it, and then a swift
+glance passed between him and the Boy.
+
+"You could see it was like pulling out teeth to part with it. Can it go
+up there till the Sister sends for it?"
+
+Father Brachet nodded, and the gorgeous worldling, counselling all men
+to "Smoke Kentucky Leaf!" was set up in the high place of honour on the
+mantel-shelf, beside a print of the Madonna and the Holy Child.
+Nicholas cheered up at this, and Ol' Chief stopped wiping his eyes.
+While the Boy stood at the mantel with his back to Father Brachet,
+acting on a sudden impulse, he pulled the ivory pen-rest out of his
+shirt, and stuck its various parts together, saying as he did so, "She
+sent an offering to you, too. If the Ol' Chief an' I fail to convince
+you of our penitence, we're all willin' to let this gentleman plead for
+us." Whereupon he wheeled round and held up the Woeful One before the
+Father's eyes.
+
+The priest grasped the offering with an almost convulsive joy, and
+instantly turned his back that the Pymeuts might not see the laugh that
+twisted up his humorous old features. The penitents looked at each
+other, and telegraphed in Pymeut that after all the Boy had come up to
+time. The Father had refused the valuable lynx-skin and Nicholas'
+superior spoon, but was ready, it appeared, to look with favour on
+anything the Boy offered.
+
+But very seriously the priest turned round upon the Pymeuts. "I will
+just say a word to you before we wash and go in to supper." With a
+kindly gravity he pronounced a few simple sentences about the
+gentleness of Christ with the ignorant, but how offended the Heavenly
+Father was when those who knew the true God descended to idolatrous
+practices, and how entirely He could be depended upon to punish wicked
+people.
+
+Ol' Chief nodded vigorously and with sudden excitement. "Me jus' like
+God."
+
+"Hein?"
+
+"Oh, yes. Me no stan' wicked people. When me young me kill two ol'
+squaws--_witches!_" With an outward gesture of his lean claws he swept
+these wicked ones off the face of the earth, like a besom of the Lord.
+
+A sudden change had passed over the tired face of the priest. "Go, go!"
+he called out, driving the Pymeuts forth as one shoos chickens out of a
+garden. "Go to ze schoolhouse and get fed, for it's all you seem able
+to get zere."
+
+But the perplexed flight of the Pymeuts was arrested. Brother Paul and
+Brother Etienne blocked the way with a stretcher. They all stood back
+to let the little procession come in. Nobody noticed them further, but
+the Pymeuts scuttled away the instant they could get by. The Boy,
+equally forgotten, sat down in a corner, while the three priests
+conferred in low-voiced French over the prostrate figure.
+
+"Father Brachet," a weak voice came up from the floor.
+
+Brother Paul hurried out, calling Brother Etienne softly from the door.
+
+"I am here." The Superior came from the foot of the pallet, and knelt
+down near the head.
+
+"You--remember what you said last July?"
+
+"About--"
+
+"About making restitution."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, I can do it now."
+
+"I am glad."
+
+"I've brought you the papers. That's why--I--_had_ to come. Will
+you--take them--out of my--"
+
+The priest unbuckled a travel-stained buckskin miner's belt and laid it
+on the floor. All the many pockets were empty save the long one in the
+middle. He unbuttoned the flap and took out some soiled, worn-looking
+papers. "Are zese in proper form?" he asked, but the man seemed to have
+dropped into unconsciousness. Hurriedly the priest added: "Zere is no
+time to read zem. Ah! Mr.--will you come and witness zis last will and
+testament?"
+
+The Boy got up and stood near. The man from Minóok opened his eyes.
+
+"Here!" The priest had got writing materials, and put a pen into the
+slack hand, with a block of letter-paper under it.
+
+"I--I'm no lawyer," said the faint voice, "but I think it's all--in
+shape. Anyhow--you write--and I'll sign." He half closed his eyes, and
+the paper slipped from under his hand. The Boy caught it, and set down
+the faint words:--"will and bequeath to John M. Berg, Kansas City, my
+right and title to claim No. 11 Above, Little Minóok, Yukon Ramparts--"
+
+And the voice fell away into silence. They waited a moment, and the
+Superior whispered:
+
+"Can you sign it?"
+
+The dull eyes opened. "Didn't I--?"
+
+Father Brachet held him up; the Boy gave him the pen and steadied the
+paper. "Thank you, Father. Obliged to you, too." He turned his dimming
+eyes upon the Boy, who wrote his name in witness. "You--going to
+Minóok?"
+
+"I hope so."
+
+The Father went to the writing-table, where he tied up and sealed the
+packet.
+
+"Anybody that's going to Minóok will have to hustle." The slang of
+everyday energy sounded strangely from dying lips--almost a whisper,
+and yet like a far-off bugle calling a captive to battle.
+
+The Boy leaned down to catch the words, yet fainter:
+
+"Good claims going like hot cakes."
+
+"How much," the Boy asked, breathless, "did you get out of yours?"
+
+"Waiting till summer. Nex' summer--" The eyelids fell.
+
+"So it isn't a fake after all." The Boy stood up. "The camp's all
+right!"
+
+"You'll see. It will out-boom the Klondyke."
+
+"Ha! How long have you been making the trip?"
+
+"Since August."
+
+The wild flame of enterprise sunk in the heart of the hearer.
+
+"Since _August_?"
+
+"No cash for steamers; we had a canoe. She went to pieces up by--" The
+weak voice fell down into that deep gulf that yawns waiting for man's
+last word.
+
+"But there is gold at Minóok, you're sure? You've seen it?"
+
+The Father Superior locked away the packet and stood up. But the Boy
+was bending down fascinated, listening at the white lips. "There is
+gold there?" he repeated.
+
+Out of the gulf came faintly back like an echo:
+
+"Plenty o' gold there--plenty o' gold."
+
+"Jee-rusalem!" He stood up and found himself opposite the contemplative
+face of the priest.
+
+"We have neglected you, my son. Come upstairs to my room."
+
+They went out, the old head bent, and full of thought; the young head
+high, and full of dreams. Oh, to reach this Minóok, where there was
+"plenty of gold, plenty of gold," before the spring floods brought
+thousands. What did any risk matter? Think of the Pymeuts doing their
+sixty miles over the ice just to apologise to Father Brachet for being
+Pymeuts. This other, this white man's penance might, would involve a
+greater mortification of the flesh. What then? The reward was
+proportionate--"plenty of gold." The faint whisper filled the air.
+
+A little more hardship, and the long process of fortune-building is
+shortened to a few months. No more office grind. No more anxiety for
+those one loves.
+
+Gold, plenty of gold, while one is young and can spend it gaily--gold
+to buy back the Orange Grove, to buy freedom and power, to buy wings,
+and to buy happiness!
+
+On the stairs they passed Brother Paul and the native.
+
+"Supper in five minutes, Father."
+
+The Superior nodded.
+
+"There is a great deal to do," the native went on hurriedly to Paul.
+"We've got to bury Catherine to-morrow--"
+
+"And this man from Minóok," agreed Paul, pausing with his hand on the
+door.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+KAVIAK'S CRIME
+
+  "My little son, who look'd from thoughtful eyes,
+   And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
+   Having my law the seventh time disobey'd,
+   I struck him, and dismiss'd
+   With hard words and unkiss'd...."
+
+
+Even with the plague and Brother Paul raging at the mission--even with
+everyone preoccupied by the claims of dead and dying, the Boy would
+have been glad to prolong his stay had it not been for "nagging"
+thoughts of the Colonel. As it was, with the mercury rapidly rising and
+the wind fallen, he got the Pymeuts on the trail next day at noon,
+spent what was left of the night at the Kachime, and set off for camp
+early the following day. He arrived something of a wreck, and with an
+enormous respect for the Yukon trail.
+
+It did him good to sight the big chimney, and still more to see the big
+Colonel putting on his snow-shoes near the bottom of the hill, where
+the cabin trail met the river trail. When the Boss o' the camp looked
+up and saw the prodigal coming along, rather groggy on his legs, he
+just stood still a moment. Then he kicked off his web-feet, turned back
+a few paces uphill, and sat down on a spruce stump, folded his arms,
+and waited. Was it the knapsack on his back that bowed him so?
+
+"Hello, Kentucky!"
+
+But the Colonel didn't look up till the Boy got quite near, chanting in
+his tuneless voice:
+
+   "'Grasshoppah sett'n on a swee' p'tater vine,
+     Swee' p'tater vine, swee' p'tater vine--'"
+
+"What's the matter, hey, Colonel? Sorry as all that to see me back?"
+
+"Reckon it's the kind o' sorrah I can bear," said the Colonel. "We
+thought you were dead."
+
+"You ought t' known me better. Were you just sendin' out a rescue-party
+of one?"
+
+The Colonel nodded. "That party would have started before, but I cut my
+foot with the axe the day you left. Where have you been, in the name o'
+the nation?"
+
+"Pymeut an' Holy Cross."
+
+"Holy Cross? Holy Moses! _You?_"
+
+"Yes; and do you know, one thing I saw there gave me a serious nervous
+shock."
+
+"That don't surprise me. What was it?"
+
+"Sheets. When I came to go to bed--a real bed, Colonel, on legs--I
+found I was expected to sleep between sheets, and I just about
+fainted."
+
+"That the only shock you had?"
+
+"No, I had several. I saw an angel. I tell you straight, Colonel--you
+can bank on what I'm sayin'--that Jesuit outfit's all right."
+
+"Oh, you think so?" The rejoinder came a little sharply.
+
+"Yes, sir, I just do. I think I'd be bigoted not to admit it."
+
+"So, you'll be thick as peas in a pod with the priests now?"
+
+"Well, I'm the one that can afford to be. They won't convert _me!_ And,
+from my point o' view, it don't matter what a man is s' long's he's a
+decent fella."
+
+The Colonel's only answer was to plunge obliquely uphill.
+
+"Say, Boss, wait for me."
+
+The Colonel looked back. The Boy was holding on to a scrub willow that
+put up wiry twigs above the snow.
+
+"Feel as if I'd never get up the last rungs o' this darn ice-ladder!"
+
+"Tired? H'm! Something of a walk to Holy Cross even on a nice mild day
+like this." The Colonel made the reflection with obvious satisfaction,
+took off his knapsack, and sat down again. The Boy did the same. "The
+very day you lit out Father Orloff came up from the Russian mission."
+
+"What's he like?"
+
+"Oh, little fella in petticoats, with a beard an' a high pot-hat, like
+a Russian. And that same afternoon we had a half-breed trader fella
+here, with two white men. Since that day we haven't seen a human
+creature. We bought some furs of the trader. Where'd you get yours?"
+
+"Pymeut. Any news about the strike?"
+
+"Well, the trader fella was sure it was all gammon, and told us stories
+of men who'd sacrificed everything and joined a stampede, and got
+sold--sold badly. But the two crazy whites with him--miners from
+Dakotah--they were on fire about Minóok. Kept on bragging they hadn't
+cold feet, and swore they'd get near to the diggins as their dogs'd
+take 'em. The half-breed said they might do a hundred miles more, but
+probably wouldn't get beyond Anvik."
+
+"Crazy fools! I tell you, to travel even thirty miles on the Yukon in
+winter, even with a bully team and old Nick to drive 'em, and not an
+extra ounce on your back--I tell you, Colonel, it's no joke."
+
+"B'lieve you, sonny."
+
+It wasn't thirty seconds before sonny was adding: "Did that half-breed
+think it was any use our trying to get dogs?"
+
+"Ain't to be had now for love or money."
+
+"Lord, Colonel, if we had a team--"
+
+"Yes, I know. We'll probably owe our lives to the fact that we
+haven't."
+
+It suddenly occurred to the Boy that, although he had just done a
+pretty good tramp and felt he'd rather die than go fifty feet further,
+it was the Colonel who was most tired.
+
+"How's everybody?"
+
+"Oh, I s'pose we might all of us be worse off."
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+He was so long answering that the Boy's eyes turned to follow the
+serious outward gaze of the older man, even before he lifted one hand
+and swept it down the hill and out across the dim, grey prospect.
+
+"This," said the Colonel.
+
+Their eyes had dropped down that last stretch of the steep snow slope,
+across the two miles of frozen river, and ran half round the wide
+horizon-line, like creatures in a cage. Whether they liked it or
+whether they didn't, for them there was no way out.
+
+"It's the awful stillness." The Colonel arraigned the distant
+ice-plains.
+
+They sat there looking, listening, as if they hoped their protest might
+bring some signal of relenting. No creature, not even a crystal-coated
+willow-twig, nothing on all the ice-bound earth stirred by as much as a
+hair; no mark of man past or present broke the grey monotony; no sound
+but their two voices disturbed the stillness of the world. It was a
+quiet that penetrated, that pricked to vague alarm. Already both knew
+the sting of it well.
+
+"It's the kind of thing that gets on a fella's nerves," said the
+Colonel. "I don't know as I ever felt helpless in any part of the world
+before. But a man counts for precious little up here. Do you notice how
+you come to listen to the silence?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I've noticed."
+
+"Stop." Again he lifted his hand, and they strained their ears. "I've
+done that by the hour since you left and the daft gold-diggers went up
+trail after you. The other fellas feel it, too. Don't know what we'd
+have done without Kaviak. Think we ought to keep that kid, you know."
+
+"I could get on without Kaviak if only we had some light. It's this
+villainous twilight that gets into my head. All the same, you know"--he
+stood up suddenly--"we came expecting to stand a lot, didn't we?"
+
+The elder man nodded. "Big game, big stakes. It's all right."
+
+Eventless enough after this, except for the passing of an Indian or
+two, the days crawled by.
+
+The Boy would get up first in the morning, rake out the dead ashes, put
+on a couple of back-logs, bank them with ashes, and then build the fire
+in front. He broke the ice in the water-bucket, and washed; filled
+coffee-pot and mush-kettle with water (or ice), and swung them over the
+fire; then he mixed the corn-bread, put it in the Dutch oven, covered
+it with coals, and left it to get on with its baking. Sometimes this
+part of the programme was varied by his mixing a hoe-cake on a board,
+and setting it up "to do" in front of the fire. Then he would call the
+Colonel--
+
+  "'Wake up Massa,
+     De day am breakin';
+   Peas in de pot, en de
+   Hoe-cake bakin''"--
+
+for it was the Colonel's affair to take up proceedings at this
+point--make the coffee and the mush and keep it from burning, fry the
+bacon, and serve up breakfast.
+
+Saturday brought a slight variation in the early morning routine. The
+others came straggling in, as usual, but once a week Mac was sure to be
+first, for he had to get Kaviak up. Mac's view of his whole duty to man
+seemed to centre in the Saturday scrubbing of Kaviak. Vainly had the
+Esquimer stood out against compliance with this most repulsive of
+foreign customs. He seemed to be always ready with some deep-laid
+scheme for turning the edge of Mac's iron resolution. He tried hiding
+at the bottom of the bed. It didn't work. The next time he crouched far
+back under the lower bunk. He was dragged out. Another Saturday he
+embedded himself, like a moth, in a bundle of old clothes. Mac shook
+him out. He had been very sanguine the day he hid in the library. This
+was a wooden box nailed to the wall on the right of the door. Most of
+the bigger books--Byron, Wordsworth, Dana's "Mineralogy," and two
+Bibles--he had taken out and concealed in the lower bunk very
+skilfully, far back behind the Colonel's feet. Copps's "Mining" and the
+two works on "Parliamentary Law" piled at the end of the box served as
+a pillow. After climbing in and folding himself up into an incredibly
+small space, Kaviak managed with superhuman skill to cover himself
+neatly with a patchwork quilt of _Munsey, Scribner, Century, Strand_,
+and _Overland_ for August, '97. No one would suspect, glancing into
+that library, that underneath the usual top layer of light reading, was
+matter less august than Law, Poetry, Science, and Revelation.
+
+It was the base Byron, tipping the wink to Mac out of the back of the
+bunk, that betrayed Kaviak.
+
+It became evident that "Farva" began to take a dour pride in the Kid's
+perseverance. One morning he even pointed out to the camp the strong
+likeness between Kaviak and Robert Bruce.
+
+"No, sah; the Scottish chief had to have an object-lesson, but
+Kaviak--Lawd!--Kaviak could give points to any spider livin'!"
+
+This was on the morning that the Esquimer thought to escape scrubbing,
+even at the peril of his life, by getting up on to the swing-shelf
+--how, no man ever knew. But there he sat in terror, like a
+very young monkey in a wind-rocked tree, hardly daring to breathe, his
+arms clasped tight round the demijohn; but having Mac to deal with, the
+end of it was that he always got washed, and equally always he seemed
+to register a vow that, s'help him, Heaven! it should never happen
+again.
+
+After breakfast came the clearing up. It should have been done (under
+this régime) by the Little Cabin men, but it seldom was. O'Flynn was
+expected to keep the well-hole in the river chopped open and to bring
+up water every day. This didn't always happen either, though to drink
+snow-water was to invite scurvy, Father Wills said. There was also a
+daily need, if the Colonel could be believed, for everybody to chop
+firewood.
+
+"We got enough," was Potts' invariable opinion.
+
+"For how long? S'pose we get scurvy and can't work; we'd freeze to
+death in a fortnight."
+
+"Never saw a fireplace swalla logs whole an' never blink like this
+one."
+
+"But you got no objection to sittin' by while the log-swallerin' goes
+on."
+
+The Colonel or the Boy cooked the eternal beans, bacon and mush dinner,
+after whatever desultory work was done; as a matter of fact, there was
+extraordinarily little to occupy five able-bodied men. The fun of
+snow-shoeing, mitigated by frostbite, quickly degenerated from a sport
+into a mere means of locomotion. One or two of the party went hunting,
+now and then, for the scarce squirrel and the shy ptarmigan. They
+tried, with signal lack of success, to catch fish, Indian fashion,
+through a hole in the ice.
+
+But, for the most part, as winter darkened round them, they lounged
+from morning till night about the big fireplace, and smoked, and
+growled, and played cards, and lived as men do, finding out a deal
+about each other's characters, something about each other's opinions,
+and little or nothing about each other's history.
+
+In the appalling stillness of the long Arctic night, any passer-by was
+hailed with enthusiasm, and although the food-supply in the Big Cabin
+was plainly going to run short before spring, no traveller--white,
+Indian, or Esquimaux--was allowed to go by without being warmed and
+fed, and made to tell where he came from and whither he was
+bound--questions to tax the sage. Their unfailing hospitality was not
+in the least unexpected or unusual, being a virtue practised even by
+scoundrels in the great North-west; but it strained the resources of
+the little camp, a fourth of whose outfit lay under the Yukon ice.
+
+In the state of lowered vitality to which the poor, ill-cooked food,
+the cold and lack of exercise, was slowly reducing them, they talked to
+one another less and less as time went on, and more and more--silently
+and each against his will--grew hyper-sensitive to the shortcomings and
+even to the innocent "ways" of the other fellow.
+
+Not Mac's inertia alone, but his trick of sticking out his jaw became
+an offence, his rasping voice a torture. The Boy's occasional
+ebullition of spirits was an outrage, the Colonel's mere size
+intolerable. O'Flynn's brogue, which had amused them, grew to be just
+part of the hardship and barbarism that had overtaken them like an evil
+dream, coercing, subduing all the forces of life. Only Kaviak seemed
+likely to come unscathed through the ordeal of the winter's captivity;
+only he could take the best place at the fire, the best morsel at
+dinner, and not stir angry passions; only he dared rouse Mac when the
+Nova Scotian fell into one of his bear-with-a-sore-head moods. Kaviak
+put a stop to his staring angrily by the hour into the fire, and set
+him to whittling out boats and a top, thereby providing occupation for
+the morrow, since it was one man's work to break Kaviak of spinning the
+one on the table during mealtime, and sailing the other in the
+drinking-water bucket at all times when older eyes weren't watching.
+The Colonel wrote up his journal, and read the midsummer magazines and
+Byron, in the face of Mac's "I do not like Byron's thought; I do not
+consider him healthy or instructive." In one of his more energetic
+moods the Colonel made a four-footed cricket for Kaviak, who preferred
+it to the high stool, and always sat on it except at meals.
+
+Once in a while, when for hours no word had been spoken except some
+broken reference to a royal flush or a jack-pot, or O'Flynn had said,
+"Bedad! I'll go it alone," or Potts had inquired anxiously, "Got the
+joker? Guess I'm euchred, then," the Boy in desperation would catch up
+Kaviak, balance the child on his head, or execute some other gymnastic,
+soothing the solemn little heathen's ruffled feelings, afterwards, by
+crooning out a monotonous plantation song. It was that kind of addition
+to the general gloom that, at first, would fire O'Flynn to raise his
+own spirits, at least, by roaring out an Irish ditty. But this was
+seldomer as time went on. Even Jimmie's brogue suffered, and grew less
+robust.
+
+In a depressed sort of way Mac was openly teaching Kaviak his letters,
+and surreptitiously, down in the Little Cabin, his prayers. He was very
+angry when Potts and O'Flynn eavesdropped and roared at Kaviak's
+struggles with "Ow Farva." In fact, Kaviak did not shine as a student
+of civilisation, though that told less against him with O'Flynn, than
+the fact that he wasn't "jolly and jump about, like white children."
+Moreover, Jimmie, swore there was something "bogey" about the boy's
+intermittent knowledge of English. Often for days he would utter
+nothing but "Farva" or "Maw" when he wanted his plate replenished, then
+suddenly he would say something that nobody could remember having
+taught him or even said in his presence.
+
+It was not to be denied that Kaviak loved sugar mightily, and stole it
+when he could. Mac lectured him and slapped his minute yellow hands,
+and Kaviak stole it all the same. When he was bad--that is, when he had
+eaten his daily fill of the camp's scanty store (in such a little place
+it was not easy to hide from such a hunter as Kaviak)--he was taken
+down to the Little Cabin, smacked, and made to say "Ow Farva." Nobody
+could discover that he minded much, though he learnt to try to shorten
+the ceremony by saying "I solly" all the way to the cabin.
+
+As a rule he was strangely undemonstrative; but in his own grave little
+fashion he conducted life with no small intelligence, and learned, with
+an almost uncanny quickness, each man's uses from the Kaviak point of
+view. The only person he wasn't sworn friends with was the handy-man,
+and there came to be a legend current in the camp, that Kaviak's first
+attempt at spontaneously stringing a sentence under that roof was, "Me
+got no use for Potts."
+
+The best thing about Kaviak was that his was no craven soul. He was
+obliged to steal the sugar because he lived with white people who were
+bigger than he, and who always took it away when they caught him. But
+once the sugar was safe under his shirt, he owned up without the
+smallest hesitation, and took his smacking like a man. For the rest, he
+flourished, filled out, and got as fat as a seal, but never a whit less
+solemn.
+
+One morning the Colonel announced that now the days had grown so short,
+and the Trio were so late coming to breakfast, and nobody did any work
+to speak of, it would be a good plan to have only two meals a day.
+
+The motion was excessively unpopular, but it was carried by a plain,
+and somewhat alarming, exposition of the state of supplies.
+
+"We oughtn't to need as much food when we lazy round the fire all day,"
+said the Colonel. But Potts retorted that they'd need a lot more if
+they went on adoptin' the aborigines.
+
+They knocked off supper, and all but the aborigine knew what it meant
+sometimes to go hungry to bed.
+
+Towards the end of dinner one day late in December, when everybody else
+had finished except for coffee and pipe, the aborigine held up his
+empty plate.
+
+"Haven't you had enough?" asked the Colonel mildly, surprised at
+Kaviak's bottomless capacity.
+
+"Maw." Still the plate was extended.
+
+"There isn't a drop of syrup left," said Potts, who had drained the
+can, and even wiped it out carefully with halves of hot biscuit.
+
+"He don't really want it."
+
+"Mustn't open a fresh can till to-morrow."
+
+"No, sir_ee_. We've only got--"
+
+"Besides, he'll bust."
+
+Kaviak meanwhile, during this paltry discussion, had stood up on the
+high stool "Farva" had made for him, and personally inspected the big
+mush-pot. Then he turned to Mac, and, pointing a finger like a straw
+(nothing could fatten those infinitesimal hands), he said gravely and
+fluently:
+
+"Maw in de plenty-bowl."
+
+"Yes, maw mush, but no maw syrup."
+
+The round eyes travelled to the store corner.
+
+"We'll have to open a fresh can some time--what's the odds?"
+
+Mac got up, and not only Kaviak watched him--for syrup was a luxury not
+expected every day--every neck had craned, every pair of eyes had
+followed anxiously to that row of rapidly diminishing tins, all that
+was left of the things they all liked best, and they still this side of
+Christmas!
+
+"What you rubber-neckin' about?" Mac snapped at the Boy as he came back
+with the fresh supply. This unprovoked attack was ample evidence that
+Mac was uneasy under the eyes of the camp, angry at his own weakness,
+and therefore the readier to dare anybody to find fault with him.
+
+"How can I help watchin' you?" said the Boy. Mac lifted his eyes
+fiercely. "I'm fascinated by your winnin' ways; we're all like that."
+Kaviak had meanwhile made a prosperous voyage to the plenty-bowl, and
+returned to Mac's side--an absurd little figure in a strange
+priest-like cassock buttoned from top to bottom (a waistcoat of Mac's),
+and a jacket of the Boy's, which was usually falling off (and trailed
+on the ground when it wasn't), and whose sleeves were rolled up in
+inconvenient muffs. Still, with a gravity that did not seem impaired by
+these details, he stood clutching his plate anxiously with both hands,
+while down upon the corn-mush descended a slender golden thread,
+manipulated with a fine skill to make the most of its sweetness. It
+curled and spiralled, and described the kind of involved and
+long-looped flourishes which the grave and reverend of a hundred years
+ago wrote jauntily underneath the most sober names.
+
+Lovingly the dark eyes watched the engrossing process. Even when the
+attenuated thread was broken, and the golden rain descended in slow,
+infrequent drops, Kaviak stood waiting, always for just one drop more.
+
+"That's enough, greedy."
+
+"Now go away and gobble."
+
+But Kaviak daintily skimmed off the syrupy top, and left his mush
+almost as high a hill as before.
+
+It wasn't long after the dinner, things had been washed up, and the
+Colonel settled down to the magazines--he was reading the
+advertisements now--that Potts drew out his watch.
+
+"Golly! do you fellers know what o'clock it is?" He held the open
+timepiece up to Mac. "Hardly middle o' the afternoon. All these hours
+before bedtime, and nothin' to eat till to-morrow!"
+
+"Why, you've just finished--"
+
+"But look at the _time!_"
+
+The Colonel said nothing. Maybe he had been a little previous with
+dinner today; it was such a relief to get it out of the way. Oppressive
+as the silence was, the sound of Potts's voice was worse, and as he
+kept on about how many hours it would be till breakfast, the Colonel
+said to the Boy:
+
+"'Johnny, get your gun,' and we'll go out."
+
+In these December days, before the watery sun had set, the great,
+rich-coloured moon arose, having now in her resplendent fulness quite
+the air of snuffing out the sun. The pale and heavy-eyed day was put to
+shame by this brilliant night-lamp, that could cast such heavy shadows,
+and by which men might read.
+
+The instant the Big Cabin door was opened Kaviak darted out between the
+Colonel's legs, threw up his head like a Siwash dog, sniffed at the
+frosty air and the big orange moon, flung up his heels, and tore down
+to the forbidden, the fascinating fish-hole. If he hadn't got snared in
+his trailing coat he would have won that race. When the two hunters had
+captured Kaviak, and shut him indoors, they acted on his implied
+suggestion that the fish-trap ought to be examined. They chopped away
+the fresh-formed ice. Empty, as usual.
+
+It had been very nice, and neighbourly, of Nicholas, as long ago as the
+1st of December, to bring the big, new, cornucopia-shaped trap down on
+his sled on the way to the Ikogimeut festival. It had taken a long time
+to cut through the thick ice, to drive in the poles, and fasten the
+slight fencing, in such relation to the mouth of the sunken trap, that
+all well-conducted fish ought easily to find their way thither. As a
+matter of fact, they didn't. Potts said it was because the Boy was
+always hauling out the trap "to see"; but what good would it be to have
+it full of fish and not know?
+
+They had been out about an hour when the Colonel brought down a
+ptarmigan, and said he was ready to go home. The Boy hesitated.
+
+"Going to give in, and cook that bird for supper?"
+
+It was a tempting proposition, but the Colonel said, rather sharply:
+"No, sir. Got to keep him for a Christmas turkey."
+
+"Well, I'll just see if I can make it a brace."
+
+The Colonel went home, hung his trophy outside to freeze, and found the
+Trio had decamped to the Little Cabin. He glanced up anxiously to see
+if the demijohn was on the shelf. Yes, and Kaviak sound asleep in the
+bottom bunk. The Colonel would climb up and have forty winks in the top
+one before the Boy got in for their game of chess. He didn't know how
+long he had slept when a faint scratching pricked through the veil of
+slumber, and he said to himself, "Kaviak's on a raid again," but he was
+too sodden with sleep to investigate. Just before he dropped off again,
+however, opening a heavy eye, he saw Potts go by the bunk, stop at the
+door and listen. Then he passed the bunk again, and the faint noise
+recommenced. The Colonel dropped back into the gulf of sleep, never
+even woke for his chess, and in the morning the incident had passed out
+of his mind.
+
+Just before dinner the next day the Boy called out:
+
+"See here! who's spilt the syrup?"
+
+"Spilt it?"
+
+"Syrup?"
+
+"No; it don't seem to be spilt, either." He patted the ground with his
+hand.
+
+"You don't mean that new can--"
+
+"Not a drop in it." He turned it upside down.
+
+Every eye went to Kaviak. He was sitting on his cricket by the fire
+waiting for dinner. He returned the accusing looks of the company with
+self-possession.
+
+"Come here." He got up and trotted over to "Farva."
+
+"Have you been to the syrup?"
+
+Kaviak shook his head.
+
+"You _must_ have been."
+
+"No."
+
+"You sure?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"How did it go--all away--Do you know?"
+
+Again the silent denial. Kaviak looked over his shoulder at the dinner
+preparations, and then went back to his cricket. It was the best place
+from which to keep a strict eye on the cook.
+
+"The gintlemin don't feel conversaytional wid a pint o' surrup in his
+inside."
+
+"I tell you he'd be currled up with colic if he--"
+
+"Well," said O'Flynn hopefully, "bide a bit. He ain't lookin' very
+brash."
+
+"Come here."
+
+Kaviak got up a second time, but with less alacrity.
+
+"Have you got a pain?"
+
+He stared.
+
+"Does it hurt you there?" Kaviak doubled up suddenly.
+
+"He's awful ticklish," said the Boy.
+
+Mac frowned with perplexity, and Kaviak retired to the cricket.
+
+"Does the can leak anywhere?"
+
+"That excuse won't hold water 'cause the can will." The Colonel had
+just applied the test.
+
+"Besides, it would have leaked on to something," Mac agreed.
+
+"Oh, well, let's mosy along with our dinner," said Potts.
+
+"It's gettin' pretty serious," remarked the Colonel. "We can't afford
+to lose a pint o' syrup."
+
+"No, _Siree_, we can't; but there's one thing about Kaviak," said the
+Boy, "he always owns up. Look here, Kiddie: don't say no; don't shake
+your head till you've thought. Now, think _hard_."
+
+Kaviak's air of profound meditation seemed to fill every requirement.
+
+"Did you take the awful good syrup and eat it up?"
+
+Kaviak was in the middle of a head-shake when he stopped abruptly. The
+Boy had said he wasn't to do that. Nobody had seemed pleased when he
+said "No."
+
+"I b'lieve we're on the right track. He's remembering. Think again. You
+are a tip-top man at finding sugar, aren't you?"
+
+"Yes, fin' shugh." Kaviak modestly admitted his prowess in that
+direction.
+
+"And you get hungry in the early morning?"
+
+Yes, he would go so far as to admit that he did.
+
+"You go skylarkin' about, and you remember--the syrup can! And you get
+hold of it--didn't you?"
+
+"To-malla."
+
+"You mean yesterday--this morning?"
+
+"N--"
+
+"Sh!"
+
+Kaviak blinked.
+
+"Wait and think. Yesterday this was full. You remember Mac opened it
+for you?"
+
+Kaviak nodded.
+
+"And now, you see"--he turned the can bottom side up--"all gone!"
+
+"Oh-h!" murmured Kaviak with an accent of polite regret. Then, with
+recovered cheerfulness, he pointed to the store corner: "Maw!"
+
+Potts laughed in his irritating way, and Mac's face got red. Things
+began to look black for Kaviak.
+
+"Say, fellas, see here!" The Boy hammered the lid on the can with his
+fist, and then held it out. "It was put away shut up, for I shut it,
+and even one of us can't get that lid off without a knife or something
+to pry it."
+
+The company looked at the small hands doubtfully. They were none too
+little for many a forbidden feat. How had he got on the swing-shelf?
+How--
+
+"Ye see, crayther, it must uv been yersilf, becuz there isn't annybuddy
+else."
+
+"Look here," said the Colonel, "we'll forgive you this time if you'll
+own up. Just tell us--"
+
+"Kaviak!" Again that journey from the cricket to the judgment-seat.
+
+"Show us"--Mac had taken the shut tin, and now held it out--"show us
+how you got the lid off."
+
+But Kaviak turned away. Mac seized him by the shoulder and jerked him
+round.
+
+Everyone felt it to be suspicious that Kaviak was unwilling even to try
+to open the all too attractive can. Was he really cunning, and did he
+want not to give himself away? Wasn't he said to be much older than he
+looked? and didn't he sometimes look a hundred, and wise for his years?
+
+"See here: I haven't caught you in a lie yet, but if I do--"
+
+Kaviak stared, drew a long breath, and seemed to retire within himself.
+
+"You'd better attend to me, for I mean business."
+
+Kaviak, recalled from internal communing, studied "Farva" a moment, and
+then retreated to the cricket, as to a haven now, hastily and with
+misgiving, tripping over his trailing coat. Mac stood up.
+
+"Wait, old man." The Colonel stooped his big body till he was on a
+level with the staring round eyes. "Yo' see, child, yo' can't have any
+dinnah till we find out who took the syrup."
+
+The little yellow face was very serious. He turned and looked at the
+still smoking plenty-bowl.
+
+"Are yoh hungry?"
+
+He nodded, got up briskly, held up his train, and dragged his high
+stool to the table, scrambled up, and established himself.
+
+"Look at that!" said the Colonel triumphantly. "That youngster hasn't
+just eaten a pint o' syrup."
+
+Mac was coming slowly up behind Kaviak with a face that nobody liked
+looking at.
+
+"Oh, let the brat alone, and let's get to our grub!" said Potts, with
+an extreme nervous irritation.
+
+Mac swept Kaviak off the stool. "You come with me!"
+
+Only one person spoke after that till the meal was nearly done. That
+one had said, "Yes, Farva," and followed Mac, dinnerless, out to the
+Little Cabin.
+
+The Colonel set aside a plateful for each of the two absent ones, and
+cleared away the things. Potts stirred the fire in a shower of sparks,
+picked up a book and flung it down, searched through the sewing-kit for
+something that wasn't lost, and then went to the door to look at the
+weather--so he said. O'Flynn sat dozing by the fire. He was in the way
+of the washing-up.
+
+"Stir your stumps, Jimmie," said the Colonel, "and get us a bucket of
+water." Sleepily O'Flynn gave it as his opinion that he'd be damned if
+he did.
+
+With unheard-of alacrity, "I'll go," said Potts.
+
+The Colonel stared at him, and, by some trick of the brain, he had a
+vision of Potts listening at the door the night before, and then
+resuming that clinking, scratching sound in the corner--the store
+corner.
+
+"Hand me over my parki, will you?" Potts said to the Boy. He pulled it
+over his head, picked up the bucket, and went out.
+
+"Seems kind o' restless, don't he?"
+
+"Yes. Colonel--"
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"Nothin'."
+
+Ten minutes--a quarter of an hour went by.
+
+"Funny Mac don't come for his dinner, isn't it? S'pose I go and look
+'em up?"
+
+"S'pose you do."
+
+Not far from the door he met Mac coming in.
+
+"Well?" said the Boy, meaning, Where's the kid?
+
+"Well?" Mac echoed defiantly. "I lammed him, as I'd have lammed Robert
+Bruce if he'd lied to me."
+
+The Boy stared at this sudden incursion into history, but all he said
+was: "Your dinner's waitin'."
+
+The minute Mac got inside he looked round hungrily for the child. Not
+seeing him, he went over and scrutinised the tumbled contents of the
+bunks.
+
+"Where's Kaviak?"
+
+"P'raps you'll tell us."
+
+"You mean he isn't here?" Mac wheeled round sharply.
+
+"_Here?_"
+
+"He didn't come back here for his dinner?"
+
+"Haven't seen him since you took him out." Mac made for the door. The
+Boy followed.
+
+"Kaviak!" each called in turn. It was quite light enough to see if he
+were anywhere about, although the watery sun had sunk full half an hour
+before. The fantastically huge full-moon hung like a copper shield on a
+steel-blue wall.
+
+"Do you see anything?" whispered Mac.
+
+"No."
+
+"Who's that yonder?"
+
+"Potts gettin' water."
+
+The Boy was bending down looking for tracks. Mac looked, too, but
+ineffectually, feverishly.
+
+"Isn't Potts calling?"
+
+"I knew he would if he saw us. He's never carried a bucket uphill yet
+without help. See, there are the Kid's tracks going. We must find some
+turned the other way."
+
+They were near the Little Cabin now.
+
+"Here!" shouted the Boy; "and ... yes, here again!" And so it was.
+Clean and neatly printed in the last light snowfall showed the little
+footprints. "We're on the right trail now. Kaviak!"
+
+Through his parki the Boy felt a hand close vise-like on his shoulder,
+and a voice, not like MacCann's:
+
+"Goin' straight down to the fish-trap hole!"
+
+The two dashed forward, down the steep hill, the Boy saying breathless
+as they went: "And Potts--where's Potts?"
+
+He had vanished, but there was no time to consider how or where.
+
+"Kaviak!"
+
+"Kaviak!" And as they got to the river:
+
+"Think I hear--"
+
+"So do I--"
+
+"Coming! coming! Hold on tight! Coming, Kaviak!"
+
+They made straight for the big open fish-hole. Farther away from the
+Little Cabin, and nearer the bank, was the small well-hole. Between the
+two they noticed, as they raced by, the water-bucket hung on that heavy
+piece of driftwood that had frozen aslant in the river. Mac saw that
+the bucket-rope was taut, and that it ran along the ice and disappeared
+behind the big funnel of the fish-trap.
+
+The sound was unmistakable now--a faint, choked voice calling out of
+the hole, "Help!"
+
+"Coming!"
+
+"Hold tight!"
+
+"Half a minute!"
+
+And how it was done or who did it nobody quite knew, but Potts, still
+clinging by one hand to the bucket-rope, was hauled out and laid on the
+ice before it was discovered that he had Kaviak under his arm--Kaviak,
+stark and unconscious, with the round eyes rolled back till one saw the
+whites and nothing more.
+
+Mac picked the body up and held it head downwards; laid it flat again,
+and, stripping off the great sodden jacket, already beginning to
+freeze, fell to putting Kaviak through the action of artificial
+breathing.
+
+"We must get them up to the cabin first thing," said the Boy.
+
+But Mac seemed not to hear.
+
+"Don't you see Kaviak's face is freezing?"
+
+Still Mac paid no heed. Potts lifted a stiff, uncertain hand, and, with
+a groan, let it fall heavily on his own cheek.
+
+"Come on; I'll help you in, anyhow, Potts."
+
+"Can't walk in this damned wet fur."
+
+With some difficulty having dragged off Potts' soaked parki, already
+stiffening unmanageably, the Boy tried to get him on his feet.
+
+"Once you're in the cabin you're all right."
+
+But the benumbed and miserable Potts kept his eyes on Kaviak, as if
+hypnotised by the strange new death-look in the little face.
+
+"Well, I can't carry you up," said the Boy; and after a second he began
+to rub Potts furiously, glancing over now and then to see if Kaviak was
+coming to, while Mac, dumb and tense, laboured on without success.
+Potts, under the Boy's ministering, showed himself restored enough to
+swear feebly.
+
+"H'ray! my man's comin' round. How's yours?" No answer, but he could
+see that the sweat poured off Mac's face as he worked unceasingly over
+the child. The Boy pulled Potts into a sitting posture. It was then
+that Mac, without looking up, said:
+
+"Run and get whiskey. Run like hell!"
+
+When he got back with the Colonel and the whiskey, O'Flynn floundering
+in the distance, Potts was feebly striking his breast with his arms,
+and Mac still bent above the motionless little body.
+
+They tried to get some of the spirit down the child's throat, but the
+tight-clenched teeth seemed to let little or nothing pass. The stuff
+ran down towards his ears and into his neck. But Mac persisted, and
+went on pouring, drop by drop, whenever he stopped trying to restore
+the action of the lungs. O'Flynn just barely managed to get "a swig"
+for Potts in the interval, though they all began to feel that Mac was
+working to bring back something that had gone for ever. The Boy went
+and bent his face down close over the rigid mouth to feel for the
+breath. When he got up he turned away sharply, and stood looking
+through tears into the fish-hole, saying to himself, "Yukon Inua has
+taken him."
+
+"He was in too long." Potts' teeth were chattering, and he looked
+unspeakably wretched. "When my arm got numb I couldn't keep his head
+up;" and he swallowed more whiskey. "You fellers oughtn't to have left
+that damn trap up!"
+
+"What's that got to do with it?" said the Boy guiltily.
+
+"Kaviak knew it ought to be catchin' fish. When I came down he was
+cryin' and pullin' the trap backwards towards the hole. Then he
+slipped."
+
+"Come, Mac," said the Colonel quietly, "let's carry the little man to
+the cabin."
+
+"No, no, not yet; stuffy heat isn't what he wants;" and he worked on.
+
+They got Potts up on his feet.
+
+"I called out to you fellers. Didn't you hear me?"
+
+"Y-yes, but we didn't understand."
+
+"Well, you'd better have come. It's too late now." O'Flynn half
+dragged, half carried him up to the cabin, for he seemed unable to walk
+in his frozen trousers. The Colonel and the Boy by a common impulse
+went a little way in the opposite direction across the ice.
+
+"What can we do, Colonel?"
+
+"Nothing. It's not a bit o' use." They turned to go back.
+
+"Well, the duckin' will be good for Potts' parki, anyhow," said the Boy
+in an angry and unsteady voice.
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"When he asked me to hand it to him I nearly stuck fast to it. It's all
+over syrup; and we don't wear furs at our meals."
+
+"Tchah!" The Colonel stopped with a face of loathing.
+
+"Yes, he was the only one of us that didn't bully the kid to-day."
+
+"Couldn't go _that_ far, but couldn't own up."
+
+"Potts is a cur."
+
+"Yes, sah." Then, after an instant's reflection: "But he's a cur that
+can risk his life to save a kid he don't care a damn for."
+
+They went back to Mac, and found him pretty well worn out. The Colonel
+took his place, but was soon pushed away. Mac understood better, he
+said; had once brought a chap round that everybody said was ... dead.
+He wasn't dead. The great thing was not to give in.
+
+A few minutes after, Kaviak's eyelids fluttered, and came down over the
+upturned eyeballs. Mac, with a cry that brought a lump to the Colonel's
+throat, gathered the child up in his arms and ran with him up the hill
+to the cabin.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three hours later, when they were all sitting round the fire, Kaviak
+dosed, and warm, and asleep in the lower bunk, the door opened, and in
+walked a white man followed by an Indian.
+
+"I'm George Benham." They had all heard of the Anvik trader, a man of
+some wealth and influence, and they made him welcome.
+
+The Indian was his guide, he said, and he had a team outside of seven
+dogs. He was going to the steamship _Oklahoma_ on some business, and
+promised Father Wills of Holy Cross that he'd stop on the way, and
+deliver a letter to Mr. MacCann.
+
+"Stop on the way! I should think so."
+
+"We were goin' to have supper to-night, anyhow, and you'll stay and
+sleep here."
+
+All Mac's old suspicions of the Jesuits seemed to return with the
+advent of that letter.
+
+"I'll read it presently." He laid it on the mantel-shelf, between the
+sewing-kit and the tobacco-can, and he looked at it, angrily, every now
+and then, while he helped to skin Mr. Benham. That gentleman had thrown
+back his hood, pulled off his great moose-skin gauntlets and his
+beaver-lined cap, and now, with a little help, dragged the drill parki
+over his head, and after that the fine lynx-bordered deer-skin,
+standing revealed at last as a well-built fellow, of thirty-eight or
+so, in a suit of mackinaws, standing six feet two in his heelless
+salmon-skin snow-boots. "Bring in my traps, will you?" he said to the
+Indian, and then relapsed into silence. The Indian reappeared with his
+arms full.
+
+"Fine lot o' pelts you have there," said the Colonel.
+
+Benham didn't answer. He seemed to be a close-mouthed kind of a chap.
+As the Indian sorted and piled the stuff in the corner, Potts said:
+
+"Got any furs you want to sell?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Where you takin' 'em?"
+
+"Down to the _Oklahoma_."
+
+"All this stuff for Cap'n Rainey?"
+
+Benham nodded.
+
+"I reckon there's a mistake about the name, and he's Cap'n Tom Thumb or
+Commodore Nutt." The Boy had picked up a little parki made carefully of
+some very soft dark fur and trimmed with white rabbit, the small hood
+bordered with white fox.
+
+"That's a neat piece of work," said the Colonel.
+
+Benham nodded. "One of the Shageluk squaws can do that sort of thing."
+
+"What's the fur?"
+
+"Musk-rat." And they talked of the weather--how the mercury last week
+had been solid in the trading-post thermometer, so it was "over forty
+degrees, anyhow."
+
+"What's the market price of a coat like that?" Mac said suddenly.
+
+"That isn't a 'market' coat. It's for a kid of Rainey's back in the
+States."
+
+Still Mac eyed it enviously.
+
+"What part of the world are you from, sir?" said the Colonel when they
+had drawn up to the supper table.
+
+"San Francisco. Used to teach numskulls Latin and mathematics in the
+Las Palmas High School."
+
+"What's the value of a coat like that little one?" interrupted Mac.
+
+"Oh, about twenty dollars."
+
+"The Shageluks ask that much?"
+
+Benham laughed. "If _you_ asked the Shageluks, they'd say forty."
+
+"You've been some time in this part of the world, I understand," said
+the Colonel.
+
+"Twelve years."
+
+"Without going home?"
+
+"Been home twice. Only stayed a month. Couldn't stand it."
+
+"I'll give you twenty-two dollars for that coat," said Mac.
+
+"I've only got that one, and as I think I said--"
+
+"I'll give you twenty-four."
+
+"It's an order, you see. Rainey--"
+
+"I'll give you twenty-six."
+
+Benham shook his head.
+
+"Sorry. Yes, it's queer about the hold this country gets on you. The
+first year is hell, the second is purgatory, with glimpses ... of
+something else. The third--well, more and more, forever after, you
+realise the North's taken away any taste you ever had for civilisation.
+That's when you've got the hang of things up here, when you've learned
+not to stay in your cabin all the time, and how to take care of
+yourself on the trail. But as for going back to the boredom of
+cities--no, thank you."
+
+Mac couldn't keep his eyes off the little coat. Finally, to enable him
+to forget it, as it seemed, he got up and opened Father Wills' letter,
+devoured its contents in silence, and flung it down on the table. The
+Colonel took it up, and read aloud the Father's thanks for all the
+white camp's kindness to Kaviak, and now that the sickness was about
+gone from Holy Cross, how the Fathers felt that they must relieve their
+neighbours of further trouble with the little native.
+
+"I've said I'd take him back with me when I come up river about
+Christmas."
+
+"We'd be kind o' lost, now, without the little beggar," said the Boy,
+glancing sideways at Mac.
+
+"There's nothin' to be got by luggin' him off to Holy Cross," answered
+that gentleman severely.
+
+"Unless it's clo'es," said Potts.
+
+"He's all right in the clo'es he's got," said Mac, with the air of one
+who closes an argument. He stood up, worn and tired, and looked at his
+watch.
+
+"You ain't goin' to bed this early?" said Potts, quite lively and
+recovered from his cold bath. That was the worst of sleeping in the
+Little Cabin. Bedtime broke the circle; you left interesting visitors
+behind, and sometimes the talk was better as the night wore on.
+
+"Well, someone ought to wood up down yonder. O'Flynn, will you go?"
+
+O'Flynn was in the act of declining the honour. But Benham, who had
+been saying, "It takes a year in the Yukon for a man to get on to
+himself," interrupted his favourite theme to ask: "Your other cabin
+like this?"
+
+Whereon, O'Flynn, shameless of the contrast in cabins, jumped up, and
+said: "Come and see, while I wood up."
+
+"You're very well fixed here," said Benham, rising and looking round
+with condescension; "but men like you oughtn't to try to live without
+real bread. No one can live and work on baking-powder."
+
+There was a general movement to the door, of which Benham was the
+centre.
+
+"I tell you a lump of sour dough, kept over to raise the next batch, is
+worth more in this country than a pocket full of gold."
+
+"I'll give you twenty-eight for that musk-rat coat," said Mac.
+
+Benham turned, stared back at him a moment, and then laughed.
+
+"Oh, well, I suppose I can get another made for Rainey before the first
+boat goes down."
+
+"Then is it on account o' the bread," the Colonel was saying, "that the
+old-timer calls himself a Sour-dough?"
+
+"All on account o' the bread."
+
+They crowded out after Benham.
+
+"Coming?" The Boy, who was last, held the door open. Mac shook his
+head.
+
+It wasn't one of the bitter nights; they'd get down yonder, and talk by
+the fire, till he went in and disturbed them. That was all he had
+wanted. For Mac was the only one who had noticed that Kaviak had waked
+up. He was lying as still as a mouse.
+
+Alone with him at last, Mac kept his eyes religiously turned away, sat
+down by the fire, and watched the sparks. By-and-by a head was put up
+over the board of the lower bunk. Mac saw it, but sat quite still.
+
+"Farva."
+
+He meant to answer the appeal, half cleared his throat, but his voice
+felt rusty; it wouldn't turn out a word.
+
+Kaviak climbed timidly, shakily out, and stood in the middle of the
+floor in his bare feet.
+
+"Farva!"
+
+He came a little nearer till the small feet sank into the rough brown
+curls of the buffalo. The child stooped to pick up his wooden cricket,
+wavered, and was about to fall. Mac shot out a hand, steadied him an
+instant without looking, and then set the cricket in front of the fire.
+He thereupon averted his face, and sat as before with folded arms. He
+hadn't deliberately meant to make Kaviak be the first to "show his
+hand" after all that had happened, but something had taken hold of him
+and made him behave as he hadn't dreamed of behaving. It was, perhaps,
+a fear of playing the fool as much as a determination to see how much
+ground he'd lost with the youngster.
+
+The child was observing him with an almost feverish intensity. With
+eyes fixed upon the wooden face to find out how far he might venture,
+shakily he dragged the cricket from where Mac placed it, closer,
+closer, and as no terrible change in the unmoved face warned him to
+desist, he pulled it into its usual evening position between Mac's
+right foot and the fireplace. He sank down with a sigh of relief, as
+one who finishes a journey long and perilous. The fire crackled and the
+sparks flew gaily. Kaviak sat there in the red glow, dressed only in a
+shirt, staring with incredulous, mournful eyes at the Farva who had--
+
+Then, as Mac made no sign, he sighed again, and held out two little
+shaky hands to the blaze.
+
+Mac gave out a sound between a cough and a snort, and wiped his eyes on
+the back of his hand.
+
+Kaviak had started nervously.
+
+"You cold?" asked Mac.
+
+Kaviak nodded.
+
+"Hungry?"
+
+He nodded again, and fell to coughing.
+
+Mac got up and brought the newly purchased coat to the fire.
+
+"It's for you," he said, as the child's big eyes grew bigger with
+admiration.
+
+"Me? Me own coat?" He stood up, and his bare feet fluttered up and down
+feebly, but with huge delight.
+
+As the parki was held ready the child tumbled dizzily into it, and Mac
+held him fast an instant.
+
+In less than five minutes Kaviak was once more seated on the cricket,
+but very magnificent now in his musk-rat coat, so close up to Mac that
+he could lean against his arm, and eating out of a plenty-bowl on his
+knees a discreet spoonful of mush drowned in golden syrup--a supper for
+a Sultan if only there had been more!
+
+When he had finished, he set the bowl down, and, as a puppy might, he
+pushed at Mac's arm till he found a way in, laid his head down on
+"Farva's" knee with a contented sigh, and closed his heavy eyes.
+
+Mac put his hand on the cropped head and began:
+
+"About that empty syrup-can--"
+
+Kaviak started up, shaking from head to foot. Was the obscure nightmare
+coming down to crush him again?
+
+Mac tried to soothe him. But Kaviak, casting about for charms to disarm
+the awful fury of the white man--able to endure with dignity any
+reverse save that of having his syrup spilt--cried out:
+
+"I solly--solly. Our Farva--"
+
+"I'm sorry, too, Kaviak," Mac interrupted, gathering the child up to
+him; "and we won't either of us do it any more."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+CHRISTMAS
+
+  "Himlen morkner, mens Jordens Trakt
+   Straaler lys som i Stjernedragt.
+   Himlen er bleven Jordens Gjaest
+   Snart er det Julens sode Fest."
+
+
+It had been moved, seconded, and carried by acclamation that they
+should celebrate Christmas, not so much by a feast of reason as by a
+flow of soul and a bang-up dinner, to be followed by speeches and some
+sort of cheerful entertainment.
+
+"We're goin' to lay ourselves out on this entertainment," said the Boy,
+with painful misgivings as to the "bang-up dinner."
+
+Every time the banquet was mentioned somebody was sure to say, "Well,
+anyhow, there's Potts's cake," and that reflection never failed to
+raise the tone of expectation, for Potts's cake was a beauty, evidently
+very rich and fruity, and fitted by Nature to play the noble part of
+plum-pudding. But, in making out the bill of fare, facts had to be
+faced. "We've got our everyday little rations of beans and bacon, and
+we've got Potts's cake, and we've got one skinny ptarmigan to make a
+banquet for six hungry people!"
+
+"But we'll have a high old time, and if the bill o' fare is a little
+... restricted, there's nothin' to prevent our programme of toasts,
+songs, and miscellaneous contributions from bein' rich and varied."
+
+"And one thing we can get, even up here"--the Colonel was looking at
+Kaviak--"and that's a little Christmas-tree."
+
+"Y-yes," said Potts, "you can get a little tree, but you can't get the
+smallest kind of a little thing to hang on it."
+
+"Sh!" said the Boy, "it must be a surprise."
+
+And he took steps that it should be, for he began stealing away
+Kaviak's few cherished possessions--his amulet, his top from under the
+bunk, his boats from out the water-bucket, wherewith to mitigate the
+barrenness of the Yukon tree, and to provide a pleasant surprise for
+the Esquimer who mourned his playthings as gone for ever. Of an evening
+now, after sleep had settled on Kaviak's watchful eyes, the Boy worked
+at a pair of little snow-shoes, helped out by a ball of sinew he had
+got from Nicholas. Mac bethought him of the valuable combination of
+zoological and biblical instruction that might be conveyed by means of
+a Noah's Ark. He sat up late the last nights before the 25th,
+whittling, chipping, pegging in legs, sharpening beaks, and inking
+eyes, that the more important animals might be ready for the Deluge by
+Christmas.
+
+The Colonel made the ark, and O'Flynn took up a collection to defray
+the expense of the little new mucklucks he had ordered from Nicholas.
+They were to come "_sure_ by Christmas Eve," and O'Flynn was in what he
+called "a froightful fanteeg" as the short day of the 24th wore towards
+night, and never a sign of the one-eyed Pymeut. Half a dozen times
+O'Flynn had gone beyond the stockade to find out if he wasn't in sight,
+and finally came back looking intensely disgusted, bringing a couple of
+white travellers who had arrived from the opposite direction; very
+cold, one of them deaf, and with frost-bitten feet, and both so tired
+they could hardly speak. Of course, they were made as comfortable as
+was possible, the frozen one rubbed with snow and bandaged, and both
+given bacon and corn-bread and hot tea.
+
+"You oughtn't to let yourself get into a state like this," said Mac,
+thinking ruefully of these strangers' obvious inability to travel for a
+day or two, and of the Christmas dinner, to which Benham alone had been
+bidden, by a great stretch of hospitality.
+
+"That's all very well," said the stranger, who shouted when he talked
+at all, "but how's a man to know his feet are going to freeze?"
+
+"Ye see, sorr," O'Flynn explained absent-mindedly, "Misther MacCann
+didn't know yer pardner was deaf."
+
+This point of view seemed to thaw some of the frost out of the two
+wayfarers. They confided that they were Salmon P. Hardy and Bill
+Schiff, fellow-passengers in the _Merwin_, "locked in the ice down
+below," and they'd mined side by side back in the States at Cripple
+Creek. "Yes, sir, and sailed for the Klondyke from Seattle last July."
+And now at Christmas they were hoping that, with luck, they might reach
+the new Minóok Diggings, seven hundred miles this side of the Klondyke,
+before the spring rush. During this recital O'Flynn kept rolling his
+eyes absently.
+
+"Theyse a quare noise without."
+
+"It's the wind knockin' down yer chimbly," says Mr. Hardy
+encouragingly.
+
+"It don't sound like Nich'las, annyhow. May the divil burrn him in
+tarment and ile fur disappoyntin' th' kid."
+
+A rattle at the latch, and the Pymeut opened the door.
+
+"Lorrd love ye! ye're a jool, Nich'las!" screamed O'Flynn; and the
+mucklucks passed from one to the other so surreptitiously that for all
+Kaviak's wide-eyed watchfulness he detected nothing.
+
+Nicholas supped with his white friends, and seemed bent on passing the
+night with them. He had to be bribed with tobacco and a new half-dollar
+to go home and keep Christmas in the bosom of his family. And still, at
+the door, he hesitated, drew back, and laid the silver coin on the
+table.
+
+"No. It nights."
+
+"But it isn't really dark."
+
+"Pretty soon heap dark."
+
+"Why, I thought you natives could find your way day or night?"
+
+"Yes. Find way."
+
+"Then what's the matter?"
+
+"Pymeut no like dark;" and it was not until Mac put on his own
+snow-shoes and offered to go part of the way with him that Nicholas was
+at last induced to return home.
+
+The moment Kaviak was ascertained to be asleep, O'Flynn displayed the
+mucklucks. No mistake, they were dandies! The Boy hung one of them up,
+by its long leg, near the child's head at the side of the bunk, and
+then conferred with O'Flynn.
+
+"The Colonel's made some little kind o' sweet-cake things for the tree.
+I could spare you one or two."
+
+"Divil a doubt Kaviak'll take it kindly, but furr mesilf I'm thinkin' a
+pitaty's a dale tastier."
+
+There was just one left in camp. It had rolled behind the flour-sack,
+and O'Flynn had seized on it with rapture. Where everybody was in such
+need of vegetable food, nobody under-estimated the magnificence of
+O'Flynn's offering, as he pushed the pitaty down into the toe of the
+muckluck.
+
+"Sure, the little haythen'll have a foine Christian Christmas wid that
+same to roast in the coals, begorra!" and they all went to bed save
+Mac, who had not returned, and the Boy, who put on his furs, and went
+up the hill to the place where he kept the Christmas-tree lodged in a
+cotton-wood.
+
+He shook the snow off its branches, brought it down to the cabin,
+decorated it, and carried it back.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mac, Salmon P. Hardy, and the frost-bitten Schiff were waked, bright
+and early Christmas morning, by the Boy's screaming with laughter.
+
+The Colonel looked down over the bunk's side, and the men on the
+buffalo-skin looked up, and they all saw Kaviak sitting in bed, holding
+in one hand an empty muckluck by the toe, and in the other a half-eaten
+raw potato.
+
+"Keep the rest of it to roast, anyhow, or O'Flynn's heart will be
+broken."
+
+So they deprived Kaviak of the gnawed fragment, and consoled him by
+helping him to put on his new boots.
+
+When the Little Cabin contingent came in to breakfast, "Hello! what you
+got up on the roof?" says Potts.
+
+"Foot of earth and three feet o' snow!"
+
+"But what's in the bundle!"
+
+"Bundle?" echoes the Boy.
+
+"If you put a bundle on the roof, I s'pose you know what's in it," says
+the Colonel severely.
+
+The occupants of the two cabins eyed each other with good-humoured
+suspicion.
+
+"Thank you," says the Boy, "but we're not takin' any bundles to-day."
+
+"Call next door," advised the Colonel.
+
+"You think we're tryin' to jolly you, but just go out and see for
+yourself--"
+
+"No, sir, you've waked the wrong passenger!"
+
+"They're tryin' it on _us_," said Potts, and subsided into his place at
+the breakfast-table.
+
+During the later morning, while the Colonel wrestled with the dinner
+problem, the Boy went through the thick-falling snow to see if the tree
+was all right, and the dogs had not appropriated the presents. Half-way
+up to the cotton-wood, he glanced back to make sure Kaviak wasn't
+following, and there, sure enough, just as the Little Cabin men had
+said--there below him on the broad-eaved roof was a bundle packed round
+and nearly covered over with snow. He went back eyeing it suspiciously.
+
+Whatever it was, it seemed to be done up in sacking, for a bit stuck
+out at the corner where the wind struck keen. The Boy walked round the
+cabin looking, listening. Nobody had followed him, or nothing would
+have induced him to risk the derision of the camp. As it was, he would
+climb up very softly and lightly, and nobody but himself would be the
+wiser even if it was a josh. He brushed away the snow, touching the
+thing with a mittened hand and a creepy feeling at his spine. It was
+precious heavy, and hard as iron. He tugged at the sacking. "Jee! if I
+don't b'lieve it's meat." The lid of an old cardboard box was bound
+round the frozen mass with a string, and on the cardboard was written:
+"Moose and Christmas Greeting from Kaviak's friends at Holy Cross to
+Kaviak's friends by the Big Chimney."
+
+"H'ray! h'ray! Come out, you fellas! Hip! hip! hurrah!" and the Boy
+danced a breakdown on the roof till the others had come out, and then
+he hurled the moose-meat down over the stockade, and sent the placard
+flying after. They all gathered round Mac and read it.
+
+"Be the Siven!"
+
+"Well, I swan!"
+
+"Don't forget, Boy, you're not takin' any."
+
+"Just remember, if it hadn't been for me it might have stayed up there
+till spring."
+
+"You run in, Kaviak, or you'll have no ears."
+
+But that gentleman pulled up his hood and stood his ground.
+
+"How did it get on the roof, in the name o' the nation?" asked the
+Colonel, stamping his feet.
+
+"Never hear of Santa Claus? Didn't I tell you, Kaviak, he drove his
+reindeer team over the roofs?"
+
+"Did you hear any dogs go by in the night?"
+
+"I didn't; Nicholas brought it, I s'pose, and was told to cache it up
+there. Maybe that's why he came late to give us a surprise."
+
+"Don't believe it; we'd have heard him. Somebody from the mission came
+by in the night and didn't want to wake us, and saw there were dogs--"
+
+"It's froze too hard to cut," interrupted Salmon P. Hardy, who had been
+trying his jack-knife on one end; "it's too big to go in any mortal
+pot."
+
+"And it'll take a month to thaw!"
+
+They tried chopping it, but you could more easily chop a bolt of linen
+sheeting. The axe laboriously chewed out little bits and scattered
+shreds.
+
+"Stop! We'll lose a lot that way."
+
+While they were lamenting this fact, and wondering what to do, the dogs
+set up a racket, and were answered by some others. Benham was coming
+along at a rattling pace, his dogs very angry to find other dogs there,
+putting on airs of possession.
+
+"We got all this moose-meat," says Potts, when Benham arrived on the
+scene, "but we can't cut it."
+
+"Of course not. Where's your hand-saw?"
+
+The Boy brought it, and Mr. Benham triumphantly sawed off two fine
+large steaks. Kaviak scraped up the meat saw-dust and ate it with grave
+satisfaction. With a huge steak in each hand, the Colonel, beaming, led
+the procession back to the cabin. The Boy and Mac cached the rest of
+the moose on the roof and followed.
+
+"Fine team, that one o' yours," said Salmon P. Hardy to the trader.
+"_You'll_ get to Minóok, anyhow."
+
+"Not me."
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"I'm not going that way."
+
+"Mean to skip the country? Got cold feet?"
+
+"No. I'm satisfied enough with the country," said the trader quietly,
+and acknowledged the introduction to Mr. Schiff, sitting in bandages by
+the fire.
+
+Benham turned back and called out something to his guide.
+
+"I thought maybe you'd like some oysters for your Christmas dinner," he
+said to the Colonel when he came in again, "so I got a couple o' cans
+from the A. C. man down below;" and a mighty whoop went up.
+
+The great rapture of that moment did not, however, prevent O'Flynn's
+saying under his breath:
+
+"Did ye be chanct, now, think of bringin' a dtrop o'--hey?"
+
+"No," says Benham a little shortly.
+
+"Huh! Ye say that like's if ye wuz a taytotlerr?"
+
+"Not me. But I find it no good to drink whiskey on the trail."
+
+"Ah!" says Salmon P. with interest, "you prefer brandy?"
+
+"No," says Benham, "I prefer tea."
+
+"Lorrd, now! look at that!"
+
+"Drink spirit, and it's all very fine and reviving for a few minutes;
+but a man can't work on it."
+
+"It's the wan thing, sorr," says O'Flynn with solemnity--"it's the wan
+thing on the top o' God's futstool that makes me feel I cud wurruk."
+
+"Not in this climate; and you're safe to take cold in the reaction."
+
+"Cowld is ut? Faith, ye'll be tellin' us Mr. Schiff got his toes froze
+wid settin' too clost be the foire."
+
+"You don't seriously mean you go on the trail without any alcohol?"
+asks the Colonel.
+
+"No, I don't go without, but I keep it on the outside of me, unless I
+have an accident."
+
+Salmon P. studied the trader with curiosity. A man with seven
+magnificent dogs and a native servant, and the finest furs he'd ever
+seen--here was either a capitalist from the outside or a man who had
+struck it rich "on the inside."
+
+"Been in long?"
+
+"Crossed the Chilcoot in June, '85."
+
+"What! twelve year ago?"
+
+Benham nodded.
+
+"Gosh! then you've been in the Klondyke?"
+
+"Not since the gold was found."
+
+"And got a team like that 'n outside, and not even goin' to Minóok?"
+
+"Guess not!"
+
+What made the feller so damn satisfied? Only one explanation was
+possible: he'd found a mine without going even as far as Minóok. He was
+a man to keep your eye on.
+
+A goodly aroma of steaming oysters and of grilling moose arose in the
+air. The Boy set up the amended bill of fare, lit the Christmas
+candles--one at the top, one at the bottom of the board--and the
+Colonel announced the first course, though it wasn't one o'clock, and
+they usually dined at four.
+
+The soup was too absorbingly delicious to admit of conversation. The
+moose-steaks had vanished like the "snaw-wreath in the thaw" before
+anything much was said, save:
+
+"Nothin' th' matter with moose, hey?"
+
+"Nop! Bet your life."
+
+The "Salmi of ptarmigan" appeared as a great wash of gravy in which
+portions of the much cut-up bird swam in vain for their lives. But the
+high flat rim of the dish was plentifully garnished by fingers of
+corn-bread, and the gravy was "galoppshus," so Potts said.
+
+Salmon P., having appeased the pangs of hunger, returned to his
+perplexed study of Benham.
+
+"Did I understand you to say you came into this country to _prospect_?"
+
+"Came down the Never-Know-What and prospected a whole summer at Forty
+Mile."
+
+"What river did you come by?"
+
+"Same as you go by--the Yukon. Indians up yonder call it the
+Never-Know-What, and the more you find out about it, the better you
+think the name."
+
+"Did you do any good at Forty Mile?"
+
+"Not enough to turn my head, so I tried the Koyukuk--and other diggins
+too."
+
+"Hear that, Schiff?" he roared at his bandaged friend. "Never say die!
+This gen'l'man's been at it twelve years--tried more 'n one camp, but
+now--well, he's so well fixed he don't care a cuss about the Klondyke."
+
+Schiff lit up and pulled hard at the cutty.
+
+O'Flynn had taken Kaviak to the fire, and was showing him how to roast
+half a petaty in wood ashes; but he was listening to the story and
+putting in "Be the Siven!" at appropriate moments.
+
+Schiff poured out a cloud of rank smoke.
+
+"Gen'lemen," he said, "the best Klondyke claims'll be potted. Minóok's
+the camp o' the future. You'd better come along with us."
+
+"Got no dogs," sighed the Boy; but the two strangers looked hard at the
+man who hadn't that excuse.
+
+Benham sat and idly watched preparations for the next course.
+
+"Say, a nabob like you might give us a tip. How did you do the trick?"
+
+"Well, I'd been playing your game for three years, and no galley slave
+ever worked half as hard--"
+
+"That's it! work like the devil for a couple o' years and then live
+like a lord for ever after."
+
+"Yes; well, when the time came for me to go into the Lord business I
+had just forty-two dollars and sixty cents to set up on."
+
+"What had you done with the rest?"
+
+"I'd spent the five thousand dollars my father left me, and I'd cleaned
+up just forty-two dollars sixty cents in my three years' mining."
+
+The announcement fell chill on the company.
+
+"I was dead broke and I had no credit. I went home."
+
+"But"--Mac roused himself--"you didn't stay--"
+
+"No, you don't stay--as a rule;"--Mac remembered Caribou--"get used to
+this kind o' thing, and miss it. Miss it so you--"
+
+"You came back," says Salmon P., impatient of generalities.
+
+"And won this time," whispered Schiff.
+
+For that is how every story must end. The popular taste in fiction is
+universal.
+
+"A friend at home grub-staked me, and I came in again--came down on the
+high water in June. Prospected as long as my stuff lasted, and
+then--well, I didn't care about starving, I became an A. C. Trader."
+
+A long pause. This was no climax; everybody waited.
+
+"And now I'm on my own. I often make more money in a day trading with
+the Indians in furs, fish, and cord-wood, than I made in my whole
+experience as a prospector and miner."
+
+A frost had fallen on the genial company.
+
+"But even if _you_ hadn't any luck," the Boy suggested, "you must have
+seen others--"
+
+"Oh, I saw some washing gravel that kept body and soul together, and I
+saw some ... that didn't."
+
+In the pause he added, remorseless:
+
+"I helped to bury some of them."
+
+"Your experience was unusual, or why do men come back year after year?"
+
+"Did you ever hear of a thing called Hope?"
+
+They moved uneasily on their stools, and some rubbed stubbly chins with
+perplexed, uncertain fingers, and they all glowered at the speaker. He
+was uncomfortable, this fellow.
+
+"Well, there mayn't be as much gold up here as men think, but there's
+more hope than anywhere on earth."
+
+"To hell with hope; give me certainty," says Salmon P.
+
+"Exactly. So you shuffle the cards, and laugh down the five-cent limit.
+You'll play one last big game, and it'll be for life this time as well
+as fortune."
+
+"Cheerful cuss, ain't he?" whispered Schiff.
+
+"They say we're a nation of gamblers. Well, sir, the biggest game we
+play is the game that goes on near the Arctic Circle."
+
+"What's the matter with Wall Street?"
+
+"'Tisn't such a pretty game, and they don't play for their lives. I
+tell you it's love of gambling brings men here, and it's the splendid
+stiff game they find going on that keeps them. There's nothing like it
+on earth."
+
+His belated enthusiasm deceived nobody.
+
+"It don't seem to have excited you much," said Mac.
+
+"Oh, I've had my turn at it. And just by luck I found I could play
+another--a safer game, and not bad fun either." He sat up straight and
+shot his hands down deep in the pockets of his mackinaws. "I've got a
+good thing, and I'm willing to stay with it."
+
+The company looked at him coldly.
+
+"Well," drawled Potts, "you can look after the fur trade; give me a
+modest little claim in the Klondyke."
+
+"Oh, Klondyke! Klondyke!" Benham got up and stepped over Kaviak on his
+way to the fire. He lit a short briarwood with a flaming stick and
+turned about. "Shall I tell you fellows a little secret about the
+Klondyke?" He held up the burning brand in the dim room with telling
+emphasis. The smoke and flame blew black and orange across his face as
+he said:
+
+"_Every dollar that's taken out of the Klondyke in gold-dust will cost
+three dollars in coin_."
+
+A sense of distinct dislike to Benham had spread through the company--a
+fellow who called American enterprise love of gambling, for whom
+heroism was foolhardy, and hope insane. Where was a pioneer so bold he
+could get up now and toast the Klondyke? Who, now, without grim
+misgiving, could forecast a rosy future for each man at the board? And
+that, in brief, had been the programme.
+
+"Oh, help the puddin', Colonel," said the Boy like one who starts up
+from an evil dream.
+
+But they sat chilled and moody, eating plum-pudding as if it had been
+so much beans and bacon. Mac felt Robert Bruce's expensive education
+slipping out of reach. Potts saw his girl, tired of waiting, taking up
+with another fellow. The Boy's Orange Grove was farther off than
+Florida. Schiff and Hardy wondered, for a moment, who was the gainer
+for all their killing hardship? Not they, at present, although there
+was the prospect--the hope--oh, damn the Trader!
+
+The Colonel made the punch. O'Flynn drained his cup without waiting for
+the mockery of that first toast--_To our Enterprise_--although no one
+had taken more interest in the programme than O'Flynn. Benham talked
+about the Anvik saw-mill, and the money made in wood camps along the
+river. Nobody listened, though everyone else sat silent, smoking and
+sulkily drinking his punch.
+
+Kaviak's demand for some of the beverage reminded the Boy of the
+Christmas-tree. It had been intended as a climax to wind up the
+entertainment, but to produce it now might save the situation. He got
+up and pulled on his parki.
+
+"Back 'n a minute." But he was gone a long time.
+
+Benham looked down the toast-list and smiled inwardly, for it was
+Klondyked from top to bottom. The others, too, stole uneasy glances at
+that programme, staring them in the face, unabashed, covertly
+ironic--nay, openly jeering. They actually hadn't noticed the fact
+before, but every blessed speech was aimed straight at the wonderful
+gold camp across the line--not the Klondyke of Benham's croaking, but
+the Klondyke of their dreams.
+
+Even the death's head at the feast regretted the long postponement of
+so spirited a programme, interspersed, as it promised to be, with
+songs, dances, and "tricks," and winding up with an original poem, "He
+won't be happy till he gets it."
+
+Benham's Indian had got up and gone out. Kaviak had tried to go too,
+but the door was slammed in his face. He stood there with his nose to
+the crack exactly as a dog does. Suddenly he ran back to Mac and tugged
+at his arm. Even the dull white men could hear an ominous snarling
+among the Mahlemeuts.
+
+Out of the distance a faint answering howl of derision from some enemy,
+advancing or at bay. It was often like this when two teams put up at
+the Big Chimney Camp.
+
+"Reckon our dogs are gettin' into trouble," said Salmon P. anxiously to
+his deaf and crippled partner.
+
+"It's nothing," says the Trader. "A Siwash dog of any spirit is always
+trailing his coat"; and Salmon P. subsided.
+
+Not so Kaviak. Back to the door, head up, he listened. They had
+observed the oddity before. The melancholy note of the Mahlemeut never
+yet had failed to stir his sombre little soul. He was standing now
+looking up at the latch, high, and made for white men, eager, breathing
+fast, listening to that dismal sound that is like nothing else in
+nature--listening as might an exiled Scot to the skirl of bagpipes;
+listening as a Tyrolese who hears yodelling on foreign hills, or as the
+dweller in a distant land to the sound of the dear home speech.
+
+The noise outside grew louder, the air was rent with howls of rage and
+defiance.
+
+"Sounds as if there's 'bout a million mad dogs on your front stoop,"
+says Schiff, knowing there must be a great deal going on if any of it
+reached his ears.
+
+"You set still." His pardner pushed him down on his stool. "Mr. Benham
+and I'll see what's up."
+
+The Trader leisurely opened the door, Salmon P. keeping modestly
+behind, while Kaviak darted forward only to be caught back by Mac. An
+avalanche of sound swept in--a mighty howling and snarling and cracking
+of whips, and underneath the higher clamour, human voices--and in
+dashes the Boy, powdered with snow, laughing and balancing carefully in
+his mittened hands a little Yukon spruce, every needle diamond-pointed,
+every sturdy branch white with frost crystals and soft woolly snow, and
+bearing its little harvest of curious fruit--sweet-cake rings and stars
+and two gingerbread men hanging by pack-thread from the white and green
+branches, the Noah's Ark lodged in one crotch, the very amateur
+snow-shoes in another, and the lost toys wrapped up, transfigured in
+tobacco-foil, dangling merrily before Kaviak's incredulous eyes.
+
+"There's your Christmas-tree!" and the bringer, who had carried the
+tree so that no little puff of snow or delicate crystal should fall
+off, having made a successful entrance and dazzled the child, gave way
+to the strong excitement that shot light out of his eyes and brought
+scarlet into his cheeks. "Here, take it!" He dashed the tree down in
+front of Kaviak, and a sudden storm agitated its sturdy branches; it
+snowed about the floor, and the strange fruit whirled and spun in the
+blast. Kaviak clutched it, far too dazed to do more than stare. The Boy
+stamped the snow off his mucklucks on the threshold, and dashed his cap
+against the lintel, calling out:
+
+"Come in! come in! let the dogs fight it out." Behind him, between the
+snow-walls at the entrance, had appeared two faces--weather-beaten men,
+crowding in the narrow space, craning to see the reception of the
+Christmas-tree and the inside of the famous Big Chimney Cabin.
+
+"These gentlemen," says the Boy, shaking with excitement as he ushered
+them in, "are Mr. John Dillon and General Lighter. They've just done
+the six hundred and twenty-five miles from Minóok with dogs over the
+ice! They've been forty days on the trail, and they're as fit as
+fiddles. An' no yonder, for Little Minóok has made big millionaires o'
+both o' them!"
+
+Millionaires or not, they'll never, either of them, create a greater
+sensation than they did that Christmas Day, in the Big Chimney Cabin,
+on the bleak hillside, up above the Never-Know-What. Here was Certainty
+at last! Here was Justification!
+
+Precious symbols of success, they were taken by both hands, they were
+shaken and wildly welcomed, "peeled," set down by the fire, given
+punch, asked ten thousand questions all in a breath, rejoiced over, and
+looked up to as glorious dispellers of doubt, blessed saviours from
+despair.
+
+Schiff had tottered forward on bandaged feet, hand round ear, mouth
+open, as if to swallow whole whatever he couldn't hear. The Colonel
+kept on bowing magnificently at intervals and pressing refreshment,
+O'Flynn slapping his thigh and reiterating, "Be the Siven!" Potts not
+only widened his mouth from ear to ear, but, as O'Flynn said after,
+"stretched it clane round his head and tyed it up furr jy in a nate
+knot behind." Benham took a back seat, and when anybody remembered him
+for the next hour it was openly to gloat over his discomfiture.
+
+John Dillon was one of those frontiersmen rightly called typically
+American. You see him again and again--as a cowboy in Texas, as a miner
+or herdsman all through the Far West; you see him cutting lumber along
+the Columbia, or throwing the diamond hitch as he goes from camp to
+camp for gold and freedom. He takes risks cheerfully, and he never
+works for wages when he can go "on his own."
+
+John Dillon was like the majority, tall, lean, muscular, not an ounce
+of superfluous flesh on his bones, a face almost gaunt in its clearness
+of cut, a thin straight nose, chin not heavy but well curved out, the
+eye orbit arched and deep, a frown fixed between thick eyebrows, and
+few words in his firm, rather grim-looking mouth. He was perhaps
+thirty-six, had been "in" ten years, and had mined before that in
+Idaho. Under his striped parki he was dressed in spotted deer-skin,
+wore white deer-skin mucklucks, Arctic cap, and moose mittens. Pinned
+on his inner shirt was the badge of the Yukon Order of Pioneers--a
+footrule bent like the letter A above a scroll of leaves, and in the
+angle two linked O's over Y. P.
+
+It was the other man--the western towns are full of General
+Lighters--who did the talking. An attorney from Seattle, he had come up
+in the July rush with very little but boundless assurance, fell in with
+an old miner who had been grubstaked by Captain Rainey out of the
+_Oklahoma's_ supplies, and got to Minóok before the river went to
+sleep.
+
+"No, we're not pardners exactly," he said, glancing good-humouredly at
+Dillon; "we've worked separate, but we're going home two by two like
+animals into the Ark. We've got this in common. We've both 'struck
+ile'--haven't we, Dillon?"
+
+Dillon nodded.
+
+"Little Minóok's as rich a camp as Dawson, and the gold's of higher
+grade--isn't it, Dillon?"
+
+"That's right."
+
+"One of the many great advantages of Minóok is that it's the _nearest_
+place on the river where they've struck pay dirt." says the General.
+"And another great advantage is that it's on the American side of the
+line."
+
+"What advantage is that?" Mac grated out.
+
+"Just the advantage of not having all your hard earnings taken away by
+an iniquitous tax."
+
+"Look out! this fella's a Britisher--"
+
+"Don't care if he is, and no disrespect to you, sir. The Canadians in
+the Klondyke are the first to say the tax is nothing short of highway
+robbery. You'll see! The minute they hear of gold across the line
+there'll be a stampede out of Dawson. I can put you in the way of
+getting a claim for eight thousand dollars that you can take eighty
+thousand out of next August, with no inspector coming round to check
+your clean-up, and no Government grabbing at your royalties."
+
+"Why aren't you taking out that eighty thousand yourself?" asked Mac
+bluntly.
+
+"Got more 'n one man can handle," answered the General. "Reckon we've
+earned a holiday."
+
+Dillon backed him up.
+
+"Then it isn't shortage in provisions that takes you outside," said the
+Boy.
+
+"Not much."
+
+"Plenty of food at Rampart City; that's the name o' the town where the
+Little Minóok meets the Yukon."
+
+"Food at gold-craze prices, I suppose."
+
+"No. Just about the same they quote you in Seattle."
+
+"How is that possible when it's been carried four thousand miles?"
+
+"Because the A. C. and N. A. T. and T. boats got frozen in this side of
+Dawson. They know by the time they get there in June a lot of stuff
+will have come in by the short route through the lakes, and the town
+will be overstocked. So there's flour and bacon to burn when you get up
+as far as Minóok. It's only along the Lower River there's any real
+scarcity."
+
+The Big Chimney men exchanged significant looks.
+
+"And there are more supply-boats wintering up at Fort Yukon and at
+Circle City," the General went on. "I tell you on the Upper River
+there's food to burn."
+
+Again the Big Chimney men looked at one another. The General kept
+helping himself to punch, and as he tossed it off he would say,
+"Minóok's the camp for me!" When he had given vent to this conviction
+three times, Benham, who hadn't spoken since their entrance, said
+quietly:
+
+"And you're going away from it as hard as you can pelt."
+
+The General turned moist eyes upon him.
+
+"Are you a man of family, sir?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then I cannot expect you to understand." His eyes brimmed at some
+thought too fine and moving for public utterance.
+
+Each member of the camp sat deeply cogitating. Not only gold at Minóok,
+but food! In the inner vision of every eye was a ship-load of
+provisions "frozen in" hard by a placer claim; in every heart a fervid
+prayer for a dog-team.
+
+The Boy jumped up, and ran his fingers through his long wild hair. He
+panted softly like a hound straining at a leash. Then, with an obvious
+effort to throw off the magic of Minóok, he turned suddenly about, and
+"Poor old Kaviak!" says he, looking round and speaking in quite an
+everyday sort of voice.
+
+The child was leaning against the door clasping the forgotten
+Christmas-tree so tight against the musk-rat coat that the branches hid
+his face. From time to time with reverent finger he touched silver boat
+and red-foil top, and watched, fascinated, how they swung. A white
+child in a tenth of the time would have eaten the cakes, torn off the
+transfiguring tinfoil, tired of the tree, and forgotten it. The Boy
+felt some compunction at the sight of Kaviak's steadfast fidelity.
+
+"Look here, we'll set the tree up where you can see it better." He put
+an empty bucket on the table, and with Mac's help, wedged the spruce in
+it firmly, between some blocks of wood and books of the law.
+
+The cabin was very crowded. Little Mr. Schiff was sitting on the
+cricket. Kaviak retired to his old seat on Elephas beyond the bunks,
+where he still had a good view of the wonderful tree, agreeably lit by
+what was left of the two candles.
+
+"Those things are good to eat, you know," said the Colonel kindly.
+
+Mac cut down a gingerbread man and gave it into the tiny hands.
+
+"What wind blew that thing into your cabin?" asked the General,
+squinting up his snow-blinded eyes at the dim corner where Kaviak sat.
+
+There wasn't a man in the camp who didn't resent the millionaire's
+tone.
+
+"This is a great friend of ours--ain't you, Kaviak?" said the Boy.
+"He's got a soul above gold-mines, haven't you? He sees other fellas
+helping themselves to his cricket and his high chair--too polite to
+object--just goes and sits like a philosopher on the bones of dead
+devils and looks on. Other fellas sittin' in his place talkin' about
+gold and drinkin' punch--never offerin' him a drop--"
+
+Several cups were held out, but Mac motioned them back.
+
+"I don't think," says John Dillon slyly--"don't think _this_ punch will
+hurt the gentleman."
+
+And a roar went up at the Colonel's expense. General Lighter pulled
+himself to his feet, saying there was a little good Old Rye left
+outside, and he could stock up again when he got to the _Oklahoma_.
+
+"Oh, and it's yersilf that don't shoy off from a dthrop o' the craythur
+whin yer thravellin' the thrail."
+
+Everybody looked at Benham. He got up and began to put on his furs; his
+dog-driver, squatting by the door, took the hint, and went out to see
+after the team.
+
+"Oh, well," said the General to O'Flynn, "it's Christmas, you know";
+and he picked his way among the closely-packed company to the door.
+
+"We ought to be movin', too," said Dillon, straightening up. The
+General halted, depressed at the reminder. "You know we swore we
+wouldn't stop again unless--"
+
+"Look here, didn't you hear me saying it was Christmas?"
+
+"You been sayin' that for twenty-four hours. Been keepin' Christmas
+right straight along since yesterday mornin." But the General had gone
+out to unpack the whisky. "He knocked up the mission folks, bright and
+early yesterday, to tell 'em about the Glad News Tiding's--Diggin's, I
+mean."
+
+"What did they say?"
+
+"Weren't as good an audience as the General's used to; that's why we
+pushed on. We'd heard about your camp, and the General felt a call to
+preach the Gospel accordin' to Minóok down this way."
+
+"He don't seem to be standin' the racket as well as you," said Schiff.
+
+"Well, sir, this is the first time I've found him wantin' to hang round
+after he's thoroughly rubbed in the news."
+
+Dillon moved away from the fire; the crowded cabin was getting hot.
+
+Nevertheless the Colonel put on more wood, explaining to Salmon P. and
+the others, who also moved back, that it was for illuminating
+purposes--those two candles burning down low, each between three nails
+in a little slab of wood--those two had been kept for Christmas, and
+were the last they had.
+
+In the general movement from the fire, Benham, putting on his cap and
+gloves, had got next to Dillon.
+
+"Look here," said the Trader, under cover of the talk about candles,
+"what sort of a trip have you had?"
+
+The Yukon pioneer looked at him a moment, and then took his pipe out of
+his mouth to say:
+
+"Rank."
+
+"No fun, hey?"
+
+"That's right." He restored the pipe, and drew gently.
+
+"And yet to hear the General chirp--"
+
+"He's got plenty o' grit, the General has."
+
+"Has he got gold?"
+
+Dillon nodded. "Or will have."
+
+"Out of Minóok?"
+
+"Out of Minóok."
+
+"In a sort of a kind of a way. I think I understand." Benham wagged his
+head. "He's talkin' for a market."
+
+Dillon smoked.
+
+"Goin' out to stir up a boom, and sell his claim to some sucker."
+
+The General reappeared with the whisky, stamping the snow off his feet
+before he joined the group at the table, where the Christmas-tree was
+seasonably cheek by jowl with the punch-bowl between the low-burnt
+candles. Mixing the new brew did not interrupt the General's ecstatic
+references to Minóok.
+
+"Look here!" he shouted across to Mac, "I'll give you a lay on my best
+claim for two thousand down and a small royalty."
+
+Mac stuck out his jaw.
+
+"I'd like to take a look at the country before I deal."
+
+"Well, see here. When will you go?"
+
+"We got no dogs."
+
+"_We_ have!" exclaimed Salmon P. and Scruff with one voice.
+
+"Well, I _can_ offer you fellows--"
+
+"How many miles did you travel a day?"
+
+"Sixty," said the General promptly.
+
+"Oh Lord!" ejaculated Benham, and hurriedly he made his good-byes.
+
+"What's the matter with _you?_" demanded the General with dignity.
+
+"I'm only surprised to hear Minóok's twenty-four hundred miles away."
+
+"More like six hundred," says the Colonel.
+
+"And you've been forty days coming, and you cover sixty miles a
+day--Good-bye," he laughed, and was gone.
+
+"Well--a--" The General looked round.
+
+"Travelin' depends on the weather." Dillon helped him out.
+
+"Exactly. Depends on the weather," echoed the General. "You don't get
+an old Sour-dough like Dillon to travel at forty degrees."
+
+"How are you to know?" whispered Schiff.
+
+"Tie a little bottle o' quick to your sled," answered Dillon.
+
+"Bottle o' what?" asked the Boy.
+
+"Quicksilver--mercury," interpreted the General.
+
+"No dog-puncher who knows what he's about travels when his quick goes
+dead."
+
+"If the stuff's like lead in your bottle--" The General stopped to
+sample the new brew. In the pause, from the far side of the cabin
+Dillon spat straight and clean into the heart of the coals.
+
+"Well, what do you do when the mercury freezes?" asked the Boy.
+
+"Camp," said Dillon impassively, resuming his pipe.
+
+"I suppose," the Boy went on wistfully--"I suppose you met men all the
+way making straight for Minóok?"
+
+"Only on this last lap."
+
+"They don't get far, most of 'em."
+
+"But... but it's worth trying!" the Boy hurried to bridge the chasm.
+
+The General lifted his right arm in the attitude of the orator about to
+make a telling hit, but he was hampered by having a mug at his lips. In
+the pause, as he stood commanding attention, at the same time that he
+swallowed half a pint of liquor, he gave Dillon time leisurely to get
+up, knock the ashes out of his pipe stick it in his belt, put a slow
+hand behind him towards his pistol pocket, and bring out his buckskin
+gold sack. Now, only Mac of the other men had ever seen a miner's purse
+before, but every one of the four cheechalkos knew instinctively what
+it was that Dillon held so carelessly. In that long, narrow bag, like
+the leg of a child's stocking, was the stuff they had all come seeking.
+
+The General smacked his lips, and set down the granite cup.
+
+"_That's_ the argument," he said. "Got a noospaper?"
+
+The Colonel looked about in a flustered way for the tattered San
+Francisco _Examiner_; Potts and the Boy hustled the punch-bowl on to
+the bucket board, recklessly spilling some of the precious contents.
+O'Flynn and Salmon P. whisked the Christmas tree into the corner, and
+not even the Boy remonstrated when a gingerbread man broke his neck,
+and was trampled under foot.
+
+"Quick! the candles are going out!" shouted the Boy, and in truth each
+wick lay languishing in a little island of grease, now flaring bravely,
+now flickering to dusk. It took some time to find in the San Francisco
+_Examiner_ of August 7 a foot square space that was whole. But as
+quickly as possible the best bit was spread in the middle of the table.
+Dillon, in the breathless silence having slowly untied the thongs, held
+his sack aslant between the two lights, and poured out a stream-nuggets
+and coarse bright gold.
+
+The crowd about the table drew audible breath. Nobody actually spoke at
+first, except O'Flynn, who said reverently: "Be--the Siven! Howly
+Pipers!--that danced at me--gran'-mother's weddin'--when the
+divvle--called the chune!" Even the swimming wicks flared up, and
+seemed to reach out, each a hungry tongue of flame to touch and taste
+the glittering heap, before they went into the dark. Low exclamations,
+hands thrust out to feel, and drawn back in a sort of superstitious
+awe.
+
+Here it was, this wonderful stuff they'd come for! Each one knew by the
+wild excitement in his own breast, how in secret he had been brought to
+doubt its being here. But here it was lying in a heap on the Big Cabin
+table! and--now it was gone.
+
+The right candle had given out, and O'Flynn, blowing with impatience
+like a walrus, had simultaneously extinguished the other.
+
+For an instant a group of men with strained and dazzled eyes still bent
+above the blackness on the boards.
+
+"Stir the fire," called the Colonel, and flew to do it himself.
+
+"I'll light a piece of fat pine," shouted the Boy, catching up a stick,
+and thrusting it into the coals.
+
+"Where's your bitch?" said Dillon calmly.
+
+"Bitch?"
+
+"Haven't you got a condensed milk can with some bacon grease in it, and
+a rag wick? Makes a good enough light."
+
+But the fire had been poked up, and the cabin was full of dancing
+lights and shadows. Besides that, the Boy was holding a resinous stick
+alight over the table, and they all bent down as before.
+
+"It was passin' a bank in 'Frisco wid a windy full o' that stuff that
+brought me up here," said O'Flynn.
+
+"It was hearin' about that winder brought _me_" added Potts.
+
+Everyone longed to touch and feel about in the glittering pile, but no
+one as yet had dared to lay a finger on the smallest grain in the
+hoard. An electrical shock flashed through the company when the General
+picked up one of the biggest nuggets and threw it down with a rich,
+full-bodied thud. "That one is four ounces."
+
+He took up another.
+
+"This is worth about sixty dollars."
+
+"More like forty," said Dillon.
+
+They were of every conceivable shape and shapelessness, most of them
+flattened; some of them, the greenhorn would swear, were fashioned by
+man into roughly embossed hearts, or shells, or polished discs like
+rude, defaced coins. One was a perfect staple, another the letter "L,"
+another like an axe-head, and one like a peasant's sabot. Some were
+almost black with iron stains, and some were set with "jewels" of
+quartz, but for the most part they were formless fragments of a rich
+and brassy yellow.
+
+"Lots of the little fellas are like melon-seeds"; and the Boy pointed a
+shaking finger, longing and still not daring to touch the treasure.
+
+Each man had a dim feeling in the back of his head that, after all, the
+hillock of gold was an illusion, and his own hand upon the dazzling
+pile would clutch the empty air.
+
+"Where's your dust?" asked the Boy.
+
+Dillon stared.
+
+"Why, here."
+
+"This is all nuggets and grains."
+
+"Well, what more do you want?"
+
+"Oh, it'd do well enough for me, but it ain't dust."
+
+"It's what we call dust."
+
+"As coarse as this?"
+
+The Sour-dough nodded, and Lighter laughed.
+
+"There's a fox's mask," said the Colonel at the bottom of the table,
+pointing a triangular bit out.
+
+"Let me look at it a minute," begged the Boy.
+
+"Hand it round," whispered Schiff.
+
+It was real. It was gold. Their fingers tingled under the first
+contact. This was the beginning.
+
+The rude bit of metal bred a glorious confidence. Under the magic of
+its touch Robert Bruce's expensive education became a simple certainty.
+In Potts's hand the nugget gave birth to a mighty progeny. He saw
+himself pouring out sackfuls before his enraptured girl.
+
+The Boy lifted his flaring torch with a victorious sense of having just
+bought back the Orange Grove; and Salmon P. passed the nugget to his
+partner with a blissful sigh.
+
+"Well, I'm glad we didn't get cold feet," says he.
+
+"Yes," whispered Schiff; "it looks like we goin' to the right place."
+
+The sheen of the heap of yellow treasure was trying even to the nerves
+of the Colonel.
+
+"Put it away," he said quite solemnly, laying the nugget on the
+paper--"put it all away before the firelight dies down."
+
+Dillon leisurely gathered it up and dropped the nuggets, with an
+absent-minded air, into the pouch which Lighter held.
+
+But the San Francisco _Examiner_ had been worn to the softness of an
+old rag and the thinness of tissue. Under Dillon's sinewy fingers
+pinching up the gold the paper gave way.
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed more than one voice, as at some grave mishap.
+
+Dillon improvised a scoop out of a dirty envelope. Nobody spoke and
+everybody watched, and when, finally, with his hand, he brushed the
+remaining grains off the torn paper into the envelope, poured them into
+the gaping sack-mouth, and lazily pulled at the buckskin draw-string,
+everybody sat wondering how much, if any, of the precious metal had
+escaped through the tear, and how soon Dillon would come out of his
+brown study, remember, and recover the loss. But a spell seemed to have
+fallen on the company. No one spoke, till Dillon, with that lazy
+motion, hoisting one square shoulder and half turning his body round,
+was in the act of returning the sack to his hip-pocket.
+
+"Wait!" said Mac, with the explosiveness of a firearm, and O'Flynn
+jumped.
+
+"You ain't got it all," whispered Schiff hurriedly.
+
+"Oh, I'm leavin' the fox-face for luck," Dillon nodded at the Colonel.
+
+But Schiff pointed reverently at the tear in the paper, as Dillon only
+went on pushing his sack deep down in his pocket, while Mac lifted the
+_Examiner_. All but the two millionaires bent forward and scrutinised
+the table. O'Flynn impulsively ran one lone hand over the place where
+the gold-heap had lain, his other hand held ready at the table's edge
+to catch any sweepings. None! But the result of O'Flynn's action was
+that those particles of gold that that fallen through the paper were
+driven into the cracks and inequalities of the board.
+
+"There! See?"
+
+"Now look what you've done!"
+
+Mac pointed out a rough knot-hole, too, that slyly held back a pinch of
+gold.
+
+"Oh, that!"
+
+Dillon slapped his hip, and settled into his place. But the men nearest
+the crack and the knot-hole fell to digging out the renegade grains,
+and piously offering them to their lawful owner.
+
+"That ain't worth botherin' about," laughed Dillon; "you always reckon
+to lose a little each time, even if you got a China soup-plate."
+
+"Plenty more where that came from," said the General, easily.
+
+Such indifference was felt to be magnificent indeed. The little
+incident said more for the richness of Minóok than all the General's
+blowing; they forgot that what was lost would amount to less than fifty
+cents. The fact that it was gold--Minóok gold--gave it a symbolic value
+not to be computed in coin.
+
+"How do you go?" asked the Colonel, as the two millionaires began
+putting on their things.
+
+"We cut across to Kuskoquim. Take on an Indian guide there to Nushagak,
+and from there with dogs across the ocean ice to Kadiak."
+
+"Oh! the way the letters go out."
+
+"When they _do_," smiled Dillon. "Yes, it's the old Russian Post Trail,
+I believe. South of Kadiak Island the sea is said to be open as early
+as the first of March. We'll get a steamer to Sitka, and from Sitka, of
+course, the boats run regular."
+
+"Seattle by the middle of March!" says the General. "Come along,
+Dillon; the sooner you get to Seattle, and blow in a couple o' hundred
+thousand, the sooner you'll get back to Minóok."
+
+Dillon went out and roused up the dogs, asleep in the snow, with their
+bushy tails sheltering their sharp noses.
+
+"See you later?"
+
+"Yes, 'outside.'"
+
+"Outside? No, sir! _Inside_."
+
+Dillon swore a blood-curdling string of curses and cracked his whip
+over the leader.
+
+"Why, you comin' back?"
+
+"Bet your life!"
+
+And nobody who looked at the face of the Yukon pioneer could doubt he
+meant what he said.
+
+They went indoors. The cabin wore an unwonted and a rakish air. The
+stools seemed to have tried to dance the lancers and have fallen out
+about the figure. Two were overturned. The unwashed dishes were tossed
+helter-skelter. A tipsy Christmas tree leaned in drunken fashion
+against the wall, and under its boughs lay a forgotten child asleep. On
+the other side of the cabin an empty whisky bottle caught a ray of
+light from the fire, and glinted feebly back. Among the ashes on the
+hearth was a screw of paper, charred at one end, and thrown there after
+lighting someone's pipe. The Boy opened it. The famous programme of the
+Yukon Symposium!
+
+"It's been a different sort of Christmas from what we planned,"
+observed the Colonel, not quite as gaily as you might expect.
+
+"Begob!" says O'Flynn, stretching out his interminable legs; "ye can't
+say we haven't hearrd Glad Tidings of gr-reat j'y--"
+
+"Colonel," interrupts the Boy, throwing the Programme in the fire,
+"let's look at your nugget again."
+
+And they all took turns. Except Potts. He was busy digging the
+remaining gold-grains out of the crack and the knothole.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+A CHRISTIAN AGNOSTIC
+
+  "--giver mig Rum!
+   Himlen bar Stjerner Natten er stum."
+
+
+It was a good many days before they got the dazzle of that gold out of
+their eyes. They found their tongues again, and talked "Minóok" from
+morning till night among themselves and with the rare passer up or down
+the trail.
+
+Mac began to think they might get dogs at Anvik, or at one of the
+Ingalik villages, a little further on. The balance of opinion in the
+camp was against this view. But he had Potts on his side. When the New
+Year opened, the trail was in capital condition. On the second of
+January two lots of Indians passed, one with dogs hauling flour and
+bacon for Benham, and the other lot without dogs, dragging light
+hand-sleds. Potts said restlessly:
+
+"After all, _they_ can do it."
+
+"So can we if we've a mind to," said Mac.
+
+"Come on, then."
+
+The camp tried hard to dissuade them. Naturally neither listened. They
+packed the Boy's sled and set off on the morning of the third, to
+Kaviak's unbounded surprise and disgust, his view of life being that,
+wherever Mac went, he was bound to follow. And he did follow--made off
+as hard as his swift little feet could carry him, straight up the Yukon
+trail, and Farva lost a good half of that first morning bringing him
+home.
+
+Just eight days later the two men walked into the Cabin and sat
+down--Potts with a heart-rending groan, Mac with his jaw almost
+dislocated in his cast-iron attempt to set his face against defeat;
+their lips were cracked with the cold, their faces raw from frostbite,
+their eyes inflamed. The weather--they called it the weather--had been
+too much for them. It was obvious they hadn't brought back any dogs,
+but--
+
+"What did you think of Anvik?" says the Boy.
+
+"Anvik? You don't suppose we got to Anvik in weather like this!"
+
+"How far _did_ you get?"
+
+Mac didn't answer. Potts only groaned. He had frozen his cheek and his
+right hand.
+
+They were doctored and put to bed.
+
+"Did you see my friends at Holy Cross?" the Boy asked Potts when he
+brought him a bowl of hot bean-soup.
+
+"You don't suppose we got as far as Holy Cross, with the wind--"
+
+"Well, where _did_ you get to? Where you been?"
+
+"Second native village above."
+
+"Why, that isn't more'n sixteen miles."
+
+"Sixteen miles too far."
+
+Potts breathed long and deep between hot and comforting swallows.
+
+"Where's the Boy's sled?" said the Colonel, coming in hurriedly.
+
+"We cached it," answered Potts feebly.
+
+"Couldn't even bring his sled home! _Where've_ you cached it?"
+
+"It's all right--only a few miles back."
+
+Potts relinquished the empty soup-bowl, and closed his eyes.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+When he opened them again late in the evening it was to say:
+
+"Found some o' those suckers who were goin' so slick to Minóok; some o'
+_them_ down at the second village, and the rest are winterin' in Anvik,
+so the Indians say. Not a single son of a gun will see the diggins till
+the ice goes out."
+
+"Then, badly off as we are here," says the Colonel to the Boy, "it's
+lucky for us we didn't join the procession."
+
+When Mac and the Boy brought the sled home a couple of days later, it
+was found that a portion of its cargo consisted of a toy kyak and two
+bottles of hootchino, the maddening drink concocted by the natives out
+of fermented dough and sugar.
+
+Apart from the question of drinking raised again by the "hootch," it is
+perhaps possible that, having so little else to do, they were ready to
+eat the more; it is also true that, busy or idle, the human body
+requires more nourishment in the North than it does in the South.
+
+Certainly the men of the little Yukon camp began to find their rations
+horribly short commons, and to suffer a continual hunger, never wholly
+appeased. It is conditions like these that bring out the brute latent
+in all men. The day came to mean three scant meals. Each meal came to
+mean a silent struggle in each man's soul not to let his stomach get
+the better of his head and heart. At first they joked and laughed about
+their hunger and the scarcity. By-and-by it became too serious, the
+jest was wry-faced and rang false. They had, in the beginning, each
+helped himself from common dishes set in the middle of the rough plank
+table. Later, each found how, without meaning to--hating himself for
+it--he watched food on its way to others' plates with an evil eye. When
+it came to his turn, he had an ever-recurrent struggle with himself not
+to take the lion's share. There were ironical comments now and then,
+and ill-concealed bitterness. No one of the five would have believed he
+could feel so towards a human being about a morsel of food, but those
+who think they would be above it, have not wintered in the Arctic
+regions or fought in the Boer War. The difficulty was frankly faced at
+last, and it was ordained in council that the Colonel should be
+dispenser of the food.
+
+"Can't say I like the office," quoth he, "but here goes!" and he cut
+the bacon with an anxious hand, and spooned out the beans solemnly as
+if he weighed each "go." And the Trio presently retired to the Little
+Cabin to discuss whether the Colonel didn't show favouritism to the
+Boy, and, when Mac was asleep, how they could get rid of Kaviak.
+
+So presently another council was called, and the Colonel resigned his
+office, stipulating that each man in turn should hold it for a week,
+and learn how ungrateful it was. Moreover, that whoever was, for the
+nonce, occupying the painful post, should be loyally upheld by all the
+others, which arrangement was in force to the end.
+
+And still, on grounds political, religious, social, trivial, the
+disaffection grew. Two of the Trio sided against the odd man, Potts,
+and turned him out of the Little Cabin one night during a furious
+snowstorm, that had already lasted two days, had more than half buried
+the hut, and nearly snowed up the little doorway. The Colonel and the
+Boy had been shovelling nearly all the day before to keep free the
+entrance to the Big Cabin and the precious "bottle" window, as well as
+their half of the path between the two dwellings. O'Flynn and Potts had
+played poker and quarrelled as usual.
+
+The morning after the ejection of Potts, and his unwilling reception at
+the Big Cabin, Mac and O'Flynn failed to appear for breakfast.
+
+"Guess they're huffy," says Potts, stretching out his feet, very
+comfortable in their straw-lined mucklucks, before the big blaze.
+"Bring on the coffee, Kaviak."
+
+"No," says the Colonel, "we won't begin without the other fellows."
+
+"By the living Jingo, _I_ will then!" says Potts, and helps himself
+under the Colonel's angry eyes.
+
+The other two conferred a moment, then drew on their parkis and
+mittens, and with great difficulty, in spite of yesterday's work, got
+the door open. It was pretty dark, but there was no doubt about it, the
+Little Cabin had disappeared.
+
+"Look! isn't that a curl of smoke?" said the Boy.
+
+"Yes, by George! they're snowed under!"
+
+"Serve 'em right!"
+
+A heavy sigh from the Colonel. "Yes, but _we'll_ have to dig 'em out!"
+
+"Look here, Colonel"--the Boy spoke with touching solemnity--"_not
+before breakfast!_"
+
+"Right you are!" laughed the Colonel; and they went in.
+
+It was that day, after the others had been released and fed, that the
+Boy fell out with Potts concerning who had lost the hatchet--and they
+came to blows. A black eye and a bloody nose might not seem an
+illuminating contribution to the question, but no more was said about
+the hatchet after the Colonel had dragged the Boy off the prostrate
+form of his adversary.
+
+But the Colonel himself lost his temper two days later when O'Flynn
+broached the seal set months before on the nearly empty demijohn. For
+those famous "temperance punches" the Colonel had drawn on his own
+small stock. He saw his blunder when O'Flynn, possessing himself of the
+demijohn, roared out:
+
+"It's my whisky, I tell you! I bought it and paid furr it, and but for
+me it would be at the bottom o' the Yukon now."
+
+"Yes, and you'd be at the bottom of the Yukon yourself if you hadn't
+been dragged out by the scruff o' your neck. And you'd be in a pretty
+fix now, if we left you alone with your whisky, which is about all
+you've got."
+
+"We agreed," Potts chipped in, "that it should be kept for medicinal
+purposes only."
+
+Sullenly O'Flynn sipped at his grog. Potts had "hogged most of the
+hootch."
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Look here, Boy," said Mac at supper, "I said I wouldn't eat off this
+plate again."
+
+"Oh, dry up! One tin plate's like another tin plate."
+
+"Are you reflecting on the washer-up, Mr. MacCann?" asked Potts.
+
+"I'm saying what I've said before--that I've scratched my name on my
+plate, and I won't eat off this rusty, battered kettle-lid."
+
+He held it up as if to shy it at the Boy. The young fellow turned with
+a flash in his eye and stood taut. Then in the pause he said quite low:
+
+"Let her fly, MacCann."
+
+But MacCann thought better of it. He threw the plate down on the table
+with a clatter. The Colonel jumped up and bent over the mush-pot at the
+fire, beside the Boy, whispering to him.
+
+"Oh, all right."
+
+When the Boy turned back to the table, with the smoking kettle, the
+cloud had gone from his face. MacCann had got up to hang a blanket over
+the door. While his back was turned the Boy brought a tin plate, still
+in good condition, set it down at Mac's place, planted a nail on end in
+the middle, and with three blows from a hammer fastened the plate
+firmly to the board.
+
+"Maybe you can't hand it up for more as often as you like, but you'll
+always find it there," he said when McCann came back. And the laugh
+went against the dainty pioneer, who to the end of the chapter ate from
+a plate nailed fast to the table.
+
+"I begin to understand," says the Colonel to the Boy, under cover of
+the others' talk, "why it's said to be such a devil of a test of a
+fellow's decency to winter in this infernal country."
+
+"They say it's always a man's pardner he comes to hate most," returned
+the Boy, laughing good-humouredly at the Colonel.
+
+"Naturally. Look at the row in the Little Cabin."
+
+"That hasn't been the only row," the Boy went on more thoughtfully. "I
+say, Colonel"--he lowered his voice--"do you know there'll have to be a
+new system of rations? I've been afraid--now I'm _sure_--the grub won't
+last till the ice goes out."
+
+"I know it," said the Colonel very gravely.
+
+"Was there a miscalculation?"
+
+"I hope it was that--or else," speaking still lower, "the stores have
+been tampered with, and not by Kaviak either. There'll be a hell of a
+row." He looked up, and saw Potts watching them suspiciously. It had
+come to this: if two men talked low the others pricked their ears. "But
+lack of grub," resumed the Colonel in his usual voice, as though he had
+not noticed, "is only one of our difficulties. Lack of work is just
+about as bad. It breeds a thousand devils. We're a pack o' fools. Here
+we are, all of us, hard hit, some of us pretty well cleaned out o'
+ready cash, and here's dollars and dollars all round us, and we sit
+over the fire like a lot of God-forsaken natives."
+
+"Dollars! Where?"
+
+"Growin' on the trees, boys; a forest full."
+
+"Oh, timber." Enthusiasm cooled.
+
+"Look at what they say about those fellows up at Anvik, what they made
+last year."
+
+"They've got a saw-mill."
+
+"_Now_ they have. But they cut and sold cord-wood to the steamers two
+years before they got a mill, and next summer will be the biggest
+season yet. We ought to have set to, as soon as the cabins were built,
+and cut wood for the summer traffic. But since there are five of us, we
+can make a good thing of it yet."
+
+The Colonel finally carried the day. They went at it next morning, and,
+as the projector of the work had privately predicted, a better spirit
+prevailed in the camp for some time. But here were five men, only one
+of whom had had any of the steadying grace of stiff discipline in his
+life, men of haphazard education, who had "chucked" more or less easy
+berths in a land of many creature comforts ... for this--to fell and
+haul birch and fir trees in an Arctic climate on half-rations! It began
+to be apparent that the same spirit was invading the forest that had
+possession of the camp; two, or at most three, did the work, and the
+rest shirked, got snow-blindness and rheumatism, and let the others do
+his share, counting securely, nevertheless, on his fifth of the
+proceeds, just as he counted (no matter what proportion he had
+contributed) on his full share of the common stock of food.
+
+"I came out here a Communist--" said the Boy one day to the Colonel.
+
+"And an agnostic," smiled the older man.
+
+"Oh, I'm an agnostic all right, now and for ever. But this winter has
+cured my faith in Communism."
+
+Early February brought not only lengthening daylight, but a radical
+change in the weather. The woodsmen worked in their shirt-sleeves,
+perspired freely, and said in the innocence of their hearts, "If winter
+comes early up here, spring does the same." The whole hillside was one
+slush, and the snow melting on the ill-made Little Cabin roof brought a
+shower-bath into the upper bunk.
+
+Few things in nature so surely stir the pulse of man as the untimely
+coming of a few spring days, that have lost their way in the calendar,
+and wandered into winter. No trouble now to get the Big Chimney men
+away from the fireside. They held up their bloodless faces in the faint
+sunshine, and their eyes, with the pupils enlarged by the long reign of
+night, blinked feebly, like an owl's forced to face the morning.
+
+There were none of those signs in the animal world outside, of
+premature stir and cheerful awaking, that in other lands help the
+illusion that winter lies behind, but there was that even more
+stimulating sweet air abroad, that subtle mixture of sun and yielding
+frost, that softened wind that comes blowing across the snow, still
+keen to the cheek, but subtly reviving to the sensitive nostril, and
+caressing to the eyes. The Big Chimney men drew deep breaths, and said
+in their hearts the battle was over and won.
+
+Kaviak, for ever following at Mac's heels "like a rale Irish tarrier,"
+found his allegiance waver in these stirring, blissful days, if ever
+Farva so belied character and custom as to swing an axe for any length
+of time. Plainly out of patience, Kaviak would throw off the musk-rat
+coat, and run about in wet mucklucks and a single garment--uphill,
+downhill, on important errands which he confided to no man.
+
+It is part of the sorcery of such days that men's thoughts, like
+birds', turn to other places, impatient of the haven that gave them
+shelter in rough weather overpast. The Big Chimney men leaned on their
+axes and looked north, south, east, west.
+
+Then the Colonel would give a little start, turn about, lift his
+double-bitter, and swing it frontier fashion, first over one shoulder,
+then over the other, striking cleanly home each time, working with a
+kind of splendid rhythm more harmonious, more beautiful to look at,
+than most of the works of men. This was, perhaps, the view of his
+comrades, for they did a good deal of looking at the Colonel. He said
+he was a modest man and didn't like it, and Mac, turning a little rusty
+under the gibe, answered:
+
+"Haven't you got the sense to see we've cut all the good timber just
+round here?" and again he turned his eyes to the horizon line.
+
+"Mac's right," said the Boy; and even the Colonel stood still a moment,
+and they all looked away to that land at the end of the world where the
+best materials are for the building of castles--it's the same country
+so plainly pointed out by the Rainbow's End, and never so much as in
+the springtime does it lure men with its ancient promise.
+
+"Come along, Colonel; let's go and look for real timber--"
+
+"And let's find it nearer water-level--where the steamers can see it
+right away."
+
+"What about the kid?"
+
+"Me come," said Kaviak, with a highly obliging air.
+
+"No; you stay at home."
+
+"No; go too."
+
+"Go too, thou babbler! Kaviak's a better trail man than some I could
+mention."
+
+"We'll have to carry him home," objected Potts.
+
+"Now don't tell us you'll do any of the carryin', or we'll lose
+confidence in you, Potts."
+
+The trail was something awful, but on their Canadian snowshoes they got
+as far as an island, six miles off. One end of it was better wooded
+than any easily accessible place they had seen.
+
+"Why, this is quite like real spruce," said the Boy, and O'Flynn
+admitted that even in California "these here would be called 'trees'
+wid no intintion o' bein' sarcaustic."
+
+So they cut holes in the ice, and sounded for the channel.
+
+"Yes, sir, the steamers can make a landin' here, and here's where we'll
+have our wood-rack."
+
+They went home in better spirits than they had been in since that
+welter of gold had lain on the Big Cabin table.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+But a few days sufficed to wear the novelty off the new wood camp for
+most of the party. Potts and O'Flynn set out in the opposite direction
+one morning with a hand-sled, and provisions to last several days. They
+were sick of bacon and beans, and were "goin' huntin'." No one could
+deny that a moose or even a grouse--anything in the shape of fresh
+meat--was sufficiently needed. But Potts and O'Flynn were really sick
+and sore from their recent slight attack of wood-felling. They were
+after bigger game, too, as well as grouse, and a few days "off." It had
+turned just enough colder to glaze the trail and put it in fine
+condition. They went down the river to the _Oklahoma,_ were generously
+entertained by Captain Rainey, and learned that, with earlier contracts
+on his hands, he did not want more wood from them than they had already
+corded. They returned to the camp without game, but with plenty of
+whisky, and information that freed them from the yoke of labour, and
+from the lash of ironic comment. In vain the Colonel urged that the
+_Oklahoma_ was not the only steamer plying the Yukon, that with the big
+rush of the coming season the traffic would be enormous, and a
+wood-pile as good as a gold mine. The cause was lost.
+
+"You won't get us to make galley-slaves of ourselves on the off-chance
+of selling. Rainey says that wood camps have sprung up like mushrooms
+all along the river. The price of wood will go down to--"
+
+"All along the river! There isn't one between us and Andreievsky, nor
+between here and Holy Cross."
+
+But it was no use. The travellers pledged each other in _Oklahoma_
+whisky, and making a common cause once more, the original Trio put in a
+night of it. The Boy and the Colonel turned into their bunks at eleven
+o'clock. They were roused in the small hours, by Kaviak's frightened
+crying, and the noise of angry voices.
+
+"You let the kid alone."
+
+"Well, it's mesilf that'll take the liberty o' mintionin' that I ain't
+goin' to stand furr another minyit an Esquimer's cuttin' down _my_
+rations. Sure it's a fool I've been!"
+
+"You can't help that," Mac chopped out.
+
+"Say Mac," said Potts in a drunken voice, "I'm talkin' to you like a
+friend. You want to get a move on that kid."
+
+"Kaviak's goin' won't make any more difference than a fly's."
+
+The other two grumbled incoherently.
+
+"But I tell you what _would_ make a difference: if you two would quit
+eatin' on the sly--out o' meal-times."
+
+"Be the Siven!"
+
+"You lie!" A movement, a stool overturned, and the two men in the bunks
+were struck broad awake by the smart concussion of a gun-shot. Nobody
+was hurt, and between them they disarmed Potts, and turned the Irishman
+out to cool off in his own cabin. It was all over in a minute. Kaviak,
+reassured, curled down to sleep again. Mac and Potts stretched
+themselves on the buffalo-robe half under the table, and speedily fell
+to snoring. The Boy put on some logs. He and the Colonel sat and
+watched the sparks.
+
+"It's a bad business."
+
+"It can't go on," says the Colonel; "but Mac's right: Kaviak's being
+here isn't to blame. They--we, too--are like a lot of powder-cans."
+
+The Boy nodded. "Any day a spark, and _biff!_ some of us are in a
+blaze, and wh-tt! bang! and some of us are in Kingdom Come."
+
+"I begin to be afraid to open my lips," said the Colonel. "We all are;
+don't you notice?"
+
+"Yes. I wonder why we came."
+
+"_You_ had no excuse," said the elder man almost angrily.
+
+"Same excuse as you."
+
+The Colonel shook his head.
+
+"Exactly," maintained the Boy. "Tired of towns and desk-work,
+and--and--" The Boy shifted about on his wooden stool, and held up his
+hands to the reviving blaze. "Life owes us steady fellows one year of
+freedom, anyhow--one year to make ducks and drakes of. Besides, we've
+all come to make our fortunes. Doesn't every mother's son of us mean to
+find a gold-mine in the spring when we get to the Klondyke--eh?" And he
+laughed again, and presently he yawned, and tumbled back into his bunk.
+But he put his head out in a moment. "Aren't you going to bed?"
+
+"Yes." The Colonel stood up.
+
+"Did you know Father Wills went by, last night, when those fellows
+began to row about getting out the whisky?"
+
+"No."
+
+"He says there's another stampede on."
+
+"Where to?"
+
+"Koyukuk this time."
+
+"Why didn't he come in?"
+
+"Awful hurry to get to somebody that sent for him. Funny fellas these
+Jesuits. They _believe_ all those odd things they teach."
+
+"So do other men," said the Colonel, curtly.
+
+"Well, I've lived in a Christian country all my life, but I don't know
+that I ever saw Christianity _practised_ till I went up the Yukon to
+Holy Cross."
+
+"I must say you're complimentary to the few other Christians scattered
+about the world."
+
+"Don't get mifft, Colonel. I've known plenty of people straight as a
+die, and capital good fellows. I've seen them do very decent things now
+and then. But with these Jesuit missionaries--Lord! there's no let up
+to it."
+
+No answer from the Protestant Colonel. Presently the Boy in a sleepy
+voice added elegantly:
+
+"No Siree! The Jesuits go the whole hog!"
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+Winter was down on the camp again. The whole world was hard as iron.
+The men kept close to the Big Chimney all day long, and sat there far
+into the small hours of the morning, saying little, heavy-eyed and
+sullen. The dreaded insomnia of the Arctic had laid hold on all but the
+Colonel. Even his usually unbroken repose was again disturbed one night
+about a week later. Some vague sort of sound or movement in the
+room--Kaviak on a raid?--or--wasn't that the closing of a door?
+
+"Kaviak!" He put his hand down and felt the straight hair of the
+Esquimaux in the under bunk. "Potts! Who's there?" He half sat up.
+"Boy! Did you hear that, Boy?"
+
+He leaned far down over the side and saw distinctly by the fire-light
+there was nobody but Kaviak in the under bunk.
+
+The Colonel was on his legs in a flash, putting his head through his
+parki and drawing on his mucklucks. He didn't wait to cross and tie the
+thongs. A presentiment of evil was strong upon him. Outside in the
+faint star-light he thought a dim shape was passing down towards the
+river.
+
+"Who's that? Hi, there! Stop, or I'll shoot!" He hadn't brought his
+gun, but the ruse worked.
+
+"Don't shoot!" came back the voice of the Boy.
+
+The Colonel stumbled down the bank in the snow, and soon stood by the
+shape. The Boy was dressed for a journey. His Arctic cap was drawn down
+over his ears and neck. The wolf-skin fringe of his parki hood stood
+out fiercely round the defiant young face. Wound about one of his
+seal-skin mittens was the rope of the new hand-sled he'd been
+fashioning so busily of nights by the camp fire. His two blankets were
+strapped on the sled, Indian fashion, along with a gunny sack and his
+rifle.
+
+The two men stood looking angrily at each other a moment, and then the
+Colonel politely inquired:
+
+"What in hell are you doing?"
+
+"Goin' to Minóok."
+
+"The devil you are!"
+
+"Yes, the devil I am!"
+
+They stood measuring each other in the dim light, till the Colonel's
+eyes fell on the loaded sled. The Boy's followed.
+
+"I've only taken short rations for two weeks. I left a statement in the
+cabin; it's about a fifth of what's my share, so there's no need of a
+row."
+
+"What are you goin' for?"
+
+"Why, to be first in the field, and stake a gold-mine, of course."
+
+The Colonel laid a rough hand on the Boy's shoulder. He shook it off
+impatiently, and before the older man could speak:
+
+"Look here, let's talk sense. Somebody's got to go, or there'll be
+trouble. Potts says Kaviak. But what difference would Kaviak make? I've
+been afraid you'd get ahead of me. I've watched you for a week like a
+hawk watches a chicken. But it's clear I'm the one to go."
+
+He pulled up the rope of the sled, and his little cargo lurched towards
+him. The Colonel stepped in front of him.
+
+"Boy--" he began, but something was the matter with his voice; he got
+no further.
+
+"I'm the youngest," boasted the other, "and I'm the strongest, and--I'm
+the hungriest."
+
+The Colonel found a perturbed and husky voice in which to say:
+
+"I didn't know you were such a Christian."
+
+"Nothin' o' the sort."
+
+"What's this but--"
+
+"Why, it's just--just my little scheme."
+
+"You're no fool. You know as well as I do you've got the devil's own
+job in hand."
+
+"Somebody's got to go," he repeated doggedly.
+
+"Look here," said the Colonel, "you haven't impressed me as being tired
+of life."
+
+"Tired of life!" The young eyes flashed in that weird aureole of long
+wolf-hair. "Tired of life! Well, I should just pretty nearly think I
+wasn't."
+
+"H'm! Then if it isn't Christianity, it must be because you're young."
+
+"Golly, man! it's because I'm hungry--HUNGRY! Great Jehosaphat! I could
+eat an ox!"
+
+"And you leave your grub behind, to be eaten by a lot of--"
+
+"I can't stand here argyfying with the thermometer down to--" The Boy
+began to drag the sled over the snow.
+
+"Come back into the cabin."
+
+"No."
+
+"Come with me, I say; I've got something to propose." Again the Colonel
+stood in front, barring the way. "Look here," he went on gently, "are
+you a friend of mine?"
+
+"Oh, so-so," growled the Boy. But after looking about him for an angry
+second or two, he flung down the rope of his sled, walked sulkily
+uphill, and kicked off his snow-shoes at the door of the cabin, all
+with the air of one who waits, but is not baulked of his purpose. They
+went in and stripped off their furs.
+
+"Now see here: if you've made up your mind to light out, I'm not going
+to oppose you."
+
+"Why didn't you say anything as sensible as that out yonder?"
+
+"Because I won't be ready to go along till to-morrow."
+
+"You?"
+
+"Yep."
+
+There was a little silence.
+
+"I wish you wouldn't, Colonel."
+
+"It's dangerous alone--not for two."
+
+"Yes, it IS dangerous, and you know it."
+
+"I'm goin' along, laddie." Seeing the Boy look precious grave and
+harassed: "What's the matter?"
+
+"I'd hate awfully for anything to happen to you."
+
+The Colonel laughed. "Much obliged, but it matters uncommon little if I
+do drop in my tracks."
+
+"You be blowed!"
+
+"You see I've got a pretty bad kind of a complaint, anyhow." The Boy
+leaned over in the firelight and scanned the Colonel's face.
+
+"What's wrong?"
+
+The Colonel smiled a queer little one-sided smile. "I've been out o'
+kelter nearly ten years."
+
+"Oh, _that's_ all right. You'll go on for another thirty if you stay
+where you are till the ice goes out."
+
+The Colonel bent his head, and stared at the smooth-trodden floor at
+the edge of the buffalo-skin. "To tell the truth, I'll be glad to go,
+not only because of--" He hitched his shoulders towards the corner
+whence came the hoarse and muffled breathing of the Denver clerk. "I'll
+be glad to have something to tire me out, so I'll sleep--sleep too
+sound to dream. That's what I came for, not to sit idle in a God-damn
+cabin and think--think--" He got up suddenly and strode the tiny space
+from fire to door, a man transformed, with hands clenching and dark
+face almost evil. "They say the men who winter up here either take to
+drink or go mad. I begin to see it is so. It's no place to do any
+forgetting in." He stopped suddenly before the Boy with glittering
+eyes. "It's the country where your conscience finds you out."
+
+"That religion of yours is makin' you morbid, Colonel." The Boy spoke
+with the detached and soothing air of a sage.
+
+"You don't know what you're talking about." He turned sharply away. The
+Boy relapsed into silence. The Colonel in his renewed prowling brought
+up against the wooden crane. He stood looking down into the fire. Loud
+and regular sounded the sleeping man's breathing in the quiet little
+room.
+
+"I did a wrong once to a woman--ten years ago," said the Colonel,
+speaking to the back-log--"although I loved her." He raised a hand to
+his eyes with a queer choking sound. "I loved her," he repeated, still
+with his back to the Boy. "By-and-by I could have righted it, but
+she--she wasn't the kind to hang about and wait on a man's better
+nature when once he'd shown himself a coward. She skipped the country."
+He leaned his head against the end of the shelf over the fire, and said
+no more.
+
+"Go back in the spring, find out where she is, and--"
+
+"I've spent every spring and every summer, every fall and every winter
+till this one, trying to do just that thing."
+
+"You can't find her?"
+
+"Nobody can find her."
+
+"She's dead--"
+
+"She's _not_ dead!"
+
+The Boy involuntarily shrank back; the Colonel looked ready to smash
+him. The action recalled the older man to himself.
+
+"I feel sure she isn't dead," he said more quietly, but still
+trembling. "No, no; she isn't dead. She had some money of her own, and
+she went abroad. I followed her. I heard of her in Paris, in Rome. I
+saw her once in a droschky in Vienna; there I lost the trail. Her
+people said she'd gone to Japan. _I_ went to Japan. I'm sure she wasn't
+in the islands. I've spent my life since trying to find her--writing
+her letters that always come back--trying--" His voice went out like a
+candle-wick suddenly dying in the socket. Only the sleeper was audible
+for full five minutes. Then, as though he had paused only a comma's
+space, the Colonel went on: "I've been trying to put the memory of her
+behind me, as a sane man should. But some women leave an arrow sticking
+in your flesh that you can never pull out. You can only jar against it,
+and cringe under the agony of the reminder all your life long.... Bah!
+Go out, Boy, and bring in your sled."
+
+And the Boy obeyed without a word.
+
+Two days after, three men with a child stood in front of the larger
+cabin, saying good-bye to their two comrades who were starting out on
+snow-shoes to do a little matter of 625 miles of Arctic travelling,
+with two weeks' scant provisioning, some tea and things for trading,
+bedding, two rifles, and a kettle, all packed on one little hand-sled.
+
+There had been some unexpected feeling, and even some real generosity
+shown at the last, on the part of the three who were to profit by the
+exodus--falling heir thereby to a bigger, warmer cabin and more food.
+
+O'Flynn was moved to make several touching remonstrances. It was a sign
+of unwonted emotion on Mac's part that he gave up arguing (sacrificing
+all the delight of a set debate), and simply begged and prayed them not
+to be fools, not to fly in the face of Providence.
+
+But Potts was made of sterner stuff. Besides, the thing was too good to
+be true. O'Flynn, when he found they were not to be dissuaded, solemnly
+presented each with a little bottle of whisky. Nobody would have
+believed O'Flynn would go so far as that. Nor could anyone have
+anticipated that close-fisted Mac would give the Boy his valuable
+aneroid barometer and compass, or that Potts would be so generous with
+his best Virginia straight-cut, filling the Colonel's big pouch without
+so much as a word.
+
+"It's a crazy scheme," says he, shaking the giant Kentuckian by the
+hand, "and you won't get thirty miles before you find it out."
+
+"Call it an expedition to Anvik," urged Mac. "Load up there with
+reindeer meat, and come back. If we don't get some fresh meat soon,
+we'll be having scurvy."
+
+"What you're furr doin'," says O'Flynn for the twentieth time, "has
+niver been done, not ayven be Indians. The prastes ahl say so."
+
+"So do the Sour-doughs," said Mac. "It isn't as if you had dogs."
+
+"Good-bye," said the Colonel, and the men grasped hands.
+
+Potts shook hands with the Boy as heartily as though that same hand had
+never half throttled him in the cause of a missing hatchet.
+
+"Good-bye, Kiddie. I bequeath you my share o' syrup."
+
+"Good-bye; meet you in the Klondyke!"
+
+"Good-bye. Hooray for the Klondyke in June!"
+
+"Klondyke in June! Hoop-la!"
+
+The two travellers looked back, laughing and nodding, as jolly as you
+please. The Boy stooped, made a snow-ball, and fired it at Kaviak. The
+child ducked, chuckling, and returned as good as he got. His loosely
+packed ball broke in a splash on the back of the Boy's parki, and
+Kaviak was loudly cheered.
+
+Still, as they went forward, they looked back. The Big Chimney wore an
+air wondrous friendly, and the wide, white world looked coldly at them,
+with small pretence of welcome or reward.
+
+"I don't believe I ever really knew how awful jolly the Big Chimney
+was--till this minute."
+
+The Colonel smiled. "Hardly like myself, to think whatever else I see,
+I'll never see that again."
+
+"Better not boast."
+
+The Colonel went on in front, breaking trail in the newfallen snow, the
+Boy pulling the sled behind him as lightly as if its double burden were
+a feather.
+
+"They look as if they thought it'd be a picnic," says Mac, grimly.
+
+"I wonder be the Siven Howly Pipers! will we iver see ayther of 'em
+again."
+
+"If they only stay a couple o' nights at Anvik," said Potts, with
+gloomy foreboding, "they could get back here inside a week."
+
+"No," answered Mac, following the two figures with serious eyes, "they
+may be dead inside a week, but they won't be back here."
+
+And Potts felt his anxiety eased. A man who had mined at Caribou ought
+to know.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+PRINCESS MUCKLUCK
+
+  "We all went to Tibbals to see the Kinge, who used my mother
+   and my aunt very gratiouslie; but we all saw a great chaunge
+   betweene the fashion of the Court as it was now, and of y in ye
+   Queene's, for we were all lowzy by sittinge in Sr Thomas
+   Erskin's chamber." _Memoir: Anne Countess of Dorset_, 1603.
+
+
+It was the 26th of February, that first day that they "hit the Long
+Trail."
+
+Temperature only about twenty degrees, the Colonel thought, and so
+little wind it had the effect of being warmer. Trail in fair condition,
+weather gray and steady. Never men in better spirits. To have left the
+wrangling and the smouldering danger of the camp behind, that alone, as
+the Boy said, was "worth the price of admission." Exhilarating, too, to
+men of their temperament, to have cut the Gordian knot of the
+difficulty by risking themselves on this unprecedented quest for peace
+and food. Gold, too? Oh, yes--with a smile to see how far that main
+object had drifted into the background--they added, "and for gold."
+
+They believed they had hearkened well to the counsel that bade them
+"travel light." "Remember, every added ounce is against you." "Nobody
+in the North owns anything that's heavy," had been said in one fashion
+or another so often that it lost its ironic sound in the ears of men
+who had come so far to carry away one of the heaviest things under the
+sun.
+
+The Colonel and the Boy took no tent, no stove, not even a miner's pick
+and pan. These last, General Lighter had said, could be obtained at
+Minóok; and "there isn't a cabin on the trail," Dillon had added,
+"without 'em."
+
+For the rest, the carefully-selected pack on the sled contained the
+marmot-skin, woollen blankets, a change of flannels apiece, a couple of
+sweaters, a Norfolk jacket, and several changes of foot-gear. This last
+item was dwelt on earnestly by all. "Keep your feet dry," John Dillon
+had said, "and leave the rest to God Almighty." They were taking barely
+two weeks' rations, and a certain amount of stuff to trade with the
+up-river Indians, when their supplies should be gone. They carried a
+kettle, an axe, some quinine, a box of the carbolic ointment all miners
+use for foot-soreness, O'Flynn's whisky, and two rifles and ammunition.
+In spite of having eliminated many things that most travellers would
+count essential, they found their load came to a little over two
+hundred pounds. But every day would lessen it, they told each other
+with a laugh, and with an inward misgiving, lest the lightening should
+come all too quickly.
+
+They had seen in camp that winter so much of the frailty of human
+temper that, although full of faith by now in each other's native sense
+and fairness, they left nothing to a haphazard division of labour. They
+parcelled out the work of the day with absolute impartiality. To each
+man so many hours of going ahead to break trail, if the snow was soft,
+while the other dragged the sled; or else while one pulled in front,
+the other pushed from behind, in regular shifts by the watch, turn and
+turn about. The Colonel had cooked all winter, so it was the Boy's turn
+at that--the Colonel's to decide the best place to camp, because it was
+his affair to find seasoned wood for fuel, his to build the fire in the
+snow on green logs laid close together--his to chop enough wood to cook
+breakfast the next morning. All this they had arranged before they left
+the Big Chimney.
+
+That they did not cover more ground that first day was a pure chance,
+not likely to recur, due to an unavoidable loss of time at Pymeut.
+
+Knowing the fascination that place exercised over his companion, the
+Colonel called a halt about seven miles off from the Big Chimney, that
+they might quickly despatch a little cold luncheon they carried in
+their pockets, and push on without a break till supper.
+
+"We've got no time to waste at Pymeut," observes the Colonel
+significantly.
+
+"I ain't achin' to stop at Pymeut," says his pardner with a superior
+air, standing up, as he swallowed his last mouthful of cold bacon and
+corn-bread, and cheerfully surveyed the waste. "Who says it's cold,
+even if the wind is up? And the track's bully. But see here, Colonel,
+you mustn't go thinkin' it's smooth glare-ice, like this, all the way."
+
+"Oh, I was figurin' that it would be." But the Boy paid no heed to the
+irony.
+
+"And it's a custom o' the country to get the wind in your face, as a
+rule, whichever way you go."
+
+"Well, I'm not complainin' as yet."
+
+"Reckon you needn't if you're blown like dandelion-down all the way to
+Minóok. Gee! the wind's stronger! Say, Colonel, let's rig a sail."
+
+"Foolishness."
+
+"No, sir. We'll go by Pymeut in an ice-boat, lickety split. And it'll
+be a good excuse for not stopping, though I think we ought to say
+good-bye to Nicholas."
+
+This view inclined the Colonel to think better of an ice-boat. He had
+once crossed the Bay of Toronto in that fashion, and began to wonder if
+such a mode of progression applied to sleds might not aid largely in
+solving the Minóok problem.
+
+While he was wondering the Boy unlashed the sled-load, and pulled off
+the canvas cover as the Colonel came back with his mast. Between them,
+with no better tools than axe, jack-knives, and a rope, and with
+fingers freezing in the south wind, they rigged the sail.
+
+The fact that they had this increasingly favourable wind on their very
+first day showed that they were specially smiled on by the great
+natural forces. The superstitious feeling that only slumbers in most
+breasts, that Mother Nature is still a mysterious being, who has her
+favourites whom she guards, her born enemies whom she baulks, pursues,
+and finally overwhelms, the age-old childishness stirred pleasantly in
+both men, and in the younger came forth unabashed in speech:
+
+"I tell you the omens are good! This expedition's goin' to get there."
+Then, with the involuntary misgiving that follows hard upon such
+boasting, he laughed uneasily and added, "I mean to sacrifice the first
+deer's tongue I don't want myself, to Yukon Inua; but here's to the
+south wind!" He turned some corn-bread crumbs out of his pocket, and
+saw, delighted, how the gale, grown keener, snatched eagerly at them
+and hurried them up the trail. The ice-boat careened and strained
+eagerly to sail away. The two gold-seekers, laughing like schoolboys,
+sat astride the pack; the Colonel shook out the canvas, and they
+scudded off up the river like mad. The great difficulty was the
+steering; but it was rip-roaring fun, the Boy said, and very soon there
+were natives running down to the river, to stare open-mouthed at the
+astounding apparition, to point and shout something unintelligible that
+sounded like "Muchtaravik!"
+
+"Why, it's the Pymeuts! Pardner, we'll be in Minóok by supper-ti--"
+
+The words hadn't left his lips when he saw, a few yards in front of
+them, a faint cloud of steam rising up from the ice--that dim
+danger-signal that flies above an air-hole. The Colonel, never
+noticing, was heading straight for the ghastly trap.
+
+"God, Colonel! Blow-hole!" gasped the Boy.
+
+The Colonel simply rolled off the pack turning over and over on the
+ice, but keeping hold of the rope.
+
+The sled swerved, turned on her side, and slid along with a sound of
+snapping and tearing.
+
+While they were still headed straight for the hole, the Boy had
+gathered himself for a clear jump to the right, but the sled's sudden
+swerve to the left broke his angle sharply. He was flung forward on the
+new impetus, spun over the smooth surface, swept across the verge and
+under the cloud, clutching wildly at the ragged edge of ice as he went
+down.
+
+All Pymeut had come rushing pell-mell.
+
+The Colonel was gathering himself up and looking round in a dazed kind
+of way as Nicholas flashed by. Just beyond, in that yawning hole, fully
+ten feet wide by fifteen long, the Boy's head appeared an instant, and
+then was lost like something seen in a dream. Some of the Pymeuts with
+quick knives were cutting the canvas loose. One end was passed to
+Nicholas; he knotted it to his belt, and went swiftly, but gingerly,
+forward nearer the perilous edge. He had flung himself down on his
+stomach just as the Boy rose again. Nicholas lurched his body over the
+brink, his arms outstretched, straining farther, farther yet, till it
+seemed as if only the counterweight of the rest of the population at
+the other end of the canvas prevented his joining the Boy in the hole.
+But Nicholas had got a grip of him, and while two of the Pymeuts hung
+on to the half-stunned Colonel to prevent his adding to the
+complication, Nicholas, with a good deal of trouble in spite of
+Yagorsha's help, hauled the Boy out of the hole and dragged him up on
+the ice-edge. The others applied themselves lustily to their end of the
+canvas, and soon they were all at a safe distance from the yawning
+danger.
+
+The Boy's predominant feeling had been one of intense surprise. He
+looked round, and a hideous misgiving seized him.
+
+"Anything the matter with you, Colonel?" His tone was so angry that, as
+they stared at each other, they both fell to laughing.
+
+"Well, I rather thought that was what _I_ was going to say"; and
+Kentucky heaved a deep sigh of relief.
+
+The Boy's teeth began to chatter, and his clothes were soon freezing on
+him. They got him up off the ice, and Nicholas and the sturdy old
+Pymeut story-teller, Yagorsha, walked him, or ran him rather, the rest
+of the way to Pymeut, for they were not so near the village as the
+travellers had supposed on seeing nearly the whole male population. The
+Colonel was not far behind, and several of the bucks were bringing the
+disabled sled. Before reaching the Kachime, they were joined by the
+women and children, Muckluck much concerned at the sight of her friend
+glazed in ice from head to heel. Nicholas and Yagorsha half dragged,
+half pulled him into the Kachime. The entire escort followed, even two
+or three very dirty little boys--everybody, except the handful of women
+and girls left at the mouth of the underground entrance and the two men
+who had run on to make a fire. It was already smoking viciously as
+though the seal-lamps weren't doing enough in that line, when Yagorsha
+and Nicholas laid the half-frozen traveller on the sleeping-bench.
+
+The Pymeuts knew that the great thing was to get the ice-stiffened
+clothes off as quickly as might be, and that is to be done
+expeditiously only by cutting them off. In vain the Boy protested.
+Recklessly they sawed and cut and stripped him, rubbed him and wrapped
+him in a rabbit-blanket, the fur turned inside, and a wolverine skin
+over that. The Colonel at intervals poured small doses of O'Flynn's
+whisky down the Boy's throat in spite of his unbecoming behaviour, for
+he was both belligerent and ungrateful, complaining loudly of the ruin
+of his clothes with only such intermission as the teeth-chattering,
+swallowing, and rude handling necessitated.
+
+"I didn't like--bein' in--that blow-hole. (Do you know--it was so
+cold--it burnt!) But I'd rather--be--in a blow-hole--than--br-r-r!
+Blow-hole isn't so s-s-melly as these s-s-kins!'
+
+"You better be glad you've got a whole skin of your own and ain't
+smellin' brimstone," said the Colonel, pouring a little more whisky
+down the unthankful throat. "Pretty sort o' Klondyker you are--go and
+get nearly drowned first day out!" Several Pymeut women came in
+presently and joined the men at the fire, chattering low and staring at
+the Colonel and the Boy.
+
+"I can't go--to the Klondyke--naked--no, nor wrapped in a
+rabbit-skin--like Baby Bunting--"
+
+Nicholas was conferring with the Colonel and offering to take him to
+Ol' Chief's.
+
+"Oh, yes; Ol' Chief got two clo'es. You come. Me show"; and they
+crawled out one after the other.
+
+"You pretty near dead that time," said one of the younger women
+conversationally.
+
+"That's right. Who are you, anyway?"
+
+"Me Anna--Yagorsha's daughter."
+
+"Oh, yes, I thought I'd seen you before." She seemed to be only a
+little older than Muckluck, but less attractive, chiefly on account of
+her fat and her look of ill-temper. She was on specially bad terms with
+a buck they called Joe, and they seemed to pass all their time abusing
+one another.
+
+The Boy craned his neck and looked round. Except just where he was
+lying, the Pymeut men and women were crowded together, on that side of
+the Kachime, at his head and at his feet, thick as herrings on a
+thwart. They all leaned forward and regarded him with a beady-eyed
+sympathy. He had never been so impressed by the fact before, but all
+these native people, even in their gentlest moods, frowned in a chronic
+perplexity and wore their wide mouths open. He reflected that he had
+never seen one that didn't, except Muckluck.
+
+Here she was, crawling in with a tin can.
+
+"Got something there to eat?"
+
+The rescued one craned his head as far as he could.
+
+"Too soon," she said, showing her brilliant teeth in the fire-light.
+She set the tin down, looked round, a little embarrassed, and stirred
+the fire, which didn't need it.
+
+"Well"--he put his chin down under the rabbit-skin once more--"how goes
+the world, Princess?"
+
+She flashed her quick smile again and nodded reassuringly. "You stay
+here now?"
+
+"No; goin' up river."
+
+"What for?" She spoke disapprovingly.
+
+"Want to get an Orange Grove."
+
+"Find him up river?"
+
+"Hope so."
+
+"I think I go, too"; and all the grave folk, sitting so close on the
+sleeping-bench, stretched their wide mouths wider still, smiling
+good-humouredly.
+
+"You better wait till summer."
+
+"Oh!" She lifted her head from the fire as one who takes careful note
+of instructions. "Nex' summer?"
+
+"Well, summer's the time for squaws to travel."
+
+"I come nex' summer," she said.
+
+By-and-by Nicholas returned with a new parki and a pair of wonderful
+buckskin breeches--not like anything worn by the Lower River natives,
+or by the coast-men either: well cut, well made, and handsomely fringed
+down the outside of the leg where an officer's gold stripe goes.
+
+"Chaparejos!" screamed the Boy. "Where'd you get 'em?"
+
+"Ol' Chief--he ketch um."
+
+"They're _bully!_" said the Boy, holding the despised rabbit-skin under
+his chin with both hands, and craning excitedly over it. He felt that
+his fortunes were looking up. Talk about a tide in the affairs of men!
+Why, a tide that washes up to a wayfarer's feet a pair o' chaparejos
+like that--well! legs so habited would simply _have_ to carry a fella
+on to fortune. He lay back on the sleeping-bench with dancing eyes,
+while the raw whisky hummed in his head. In the dim light of seal-lamps
+vague visions visited him of stern and noble chiefs out of the Leather
+Stocking Stories of his childhood--men of daring, whose legs were
+invariably cased in buck-skin with dangling fringes. But the dashing
+race was not all Indian, nor all dead. Famous cowboys reared before him
+on bucking bronchos, their leg-fringes streaming on the blast, and
+desperate chaps who held up coaches and potted Wells Fargo guards.
+Anybody must needs be a devil of a fellow who went about in "shaps," as
+his California cousins called chaparejos. Even a peaceable fella like
+himself, not out after gore at all, but after an Orange Grove--even he,
+once he put on--He laughed out loud at his childishness, and then grew
+grave. "Say, Nicholas, what's the tax?"
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"How much?"
+
+"Oh, your pardner--he pay."
+
+"Humph! I s'pose I'll know the worst on settlin'-day."
+
+Then, after a few moments, making a final clutch at economy before the
+warmth and the whisky subdued him altogether:
+
+"Say, Nicholas, have you got--hasn't the Ol' Chief got any--less
+glorious breeches than those?"
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"Anything little cheaper?"
+
+"Nuh," says Nicholas.
+
+The Boy closed his eyes, relieved on the whole. Fate had a mind to see
+him in chaparejos. Let her look to the sequel, then!
+
+When consciousness came back it brought the sound of Yagorsha's yarning
+by the fire, and the occasional laugh or grunt punctuating the eternal
+"Story."
+
+The Colonel was sitting there among them, solacing himself by adding to
+the smoke that thickened the stifling air.
+
+Presently the Story-teller made some shrewd hit, that shook the Pymeut
+community into louder grunts of applause and a general chuckling. The
+Colonel turned his head slowly, and blew out a fresh cloud: "Good
+joke?"
+
+In the pause that fell thereafter, Yagorsha, imperturbable, the only
+one who had not laughed, smoothed his lank, iron-gray locks down on
+either side of his wide face, and went on renewing the sinew open-work
+in his snow-shoe.
+
+"When Ol' Chief's father die--"
+
+All the Pymeuts chuckled afresh. The Boy listened eagerly. Usually
+Yagorsha's stories were tragic, or, at least, of serious interest,
+ranging from bereaved parents who turned into wolverines, all the way
+to the machinations of the Horrid Dwarf and the Cannibal Old Woman.
+
+The Colonel looked at Nicholas. He seemed as entertained as the rest,
+but quite willing to leave his family history in professional hands.
+
+"Ol' Chief's father, Glovotsky, him Russian," Yagorsha began again,
+laying down his sinew-thread a moment and accepting some of the
+Colonel's tobacco.
+
+"I didn't know you had any white blood in you," interrupted the
+Colonel, offering his pouch to Nicholas. "I might have suspected
+Muckluck--"
+
+"Heap got Russian blood," interrupted Joe.
+
+As the Story-teller seemed to be about to repeat the enlivening
+tradition concerning the almost mythical youth of Ol' Chief's father,
+that subject of the great Katharine's, whose blood was flowing still in
+Pymeut veins, just then in came Yagorsha's daughter with some message
+to her father. He grunted acquiescence, and she turned to go. Joe
+called something after her, and she snapped back. He jumped up to bar
+her exit. She gave him a smart cuff across the eyes, which surprised
+him almost into the fire, and while he was recovering his equilibrium
+she fled. Yagorsha and all the Pymeuts laughed delightedly at Joe's
+discomfiture.
+
+The Boy had been obliged to sit up to watch this spirited encounter.
+The only notice the Colonel took of him was to set the kettle on the
+fire. While he was dining his pardner gathered up the blankets and
+crawled out.
+
+"Comin' in half a minute," the Boy called after him. The answer was
+swallowed by the tunnel.
+
+"Him go say goo'-bye Ol' Chief," said Nicholas, observing how the
+Colonel's pardner was scalding himself in his haste to despatch a
+second cup of tea.
+
+But the Boy bolted the last of his meal, gathered up the kettle, mug,
+and frying-pan, which had served him for plate as well, and wormed his
+way out as fast as he could. There was the sled nearly packed for the
+journey, and watching over it, keeping the dogs at bay, was an
+indescribably dirty little boy in a torn and greasy denim parki over
+rags of reindeer-skin. Nobody else in sight but Yagorsha's daughter
+down at the water-hole.
+
+"Where's my pardner gone?" The child only stared, having no English
+apparently.
+
+While the Boy packed the rest of the things, and made the tattered
+canvas fast under the lashing, Joe came out of the Kachime. He stood
+studying the prospect a moment, and his dull eyes suddenly gleamed.
+Anna was coming up from the river with her dripping pail. He set off
+with an affectation of leisurely indifference, but he made straight for
+his enemy. She seemed not to see him till he was quite near, then she
+sheered off sharply. Joe hardly quickened his pace, but seemed to gain.
+She set down her bucket, and turned back towards the river.
+
+"Idiot!" ejaculated the Boy; "she could have reached her own ighloo."
+The dirty child grinned, and tore off towards the river to watch the
+fun. Anna was hidden now by a pile of driftwood. The Boy ran down a few
+yards to bring her within range again. For all his affectation of
+leisureliness and her obvious fluster, no doubt about it, Joe was
+gaining on her. She dropped her hurried walk and frankly took to her
+heels, Joe doing the same; but as she was nearly as fleet of foot as
+Muckluck, in spite of her fat, she still kept a lessening distance
+between herself and her pursuer.
+
+The ragged child had climbed upon the pile of drift-wood, and stood
+hunched with the cold, his shoulders up to his ears, his hands
+withdrawn in his parki sleeves, but he was grinning still. The Boy, a
+little concerned as to possible reprisals upon so impudent a young
+woman, had gone on and on, watching the race down to the river, and
+even across the ice a little way. He stood still an instant staring as
+Joe, going now as hard as he could, caught up with her at last. He took
+hold of the daughter of the highly-respected Yagorsha, and fell to
+shaking and cuffing her. The Boy started off full tilt to the rescue.
+Before he could reach them Joe had thrown her down on the ice. She half
+got up, but her enemy, advancing upon her again, dealt her a blow that
+made her howl and sent her flat once more.
+
+"Stop that! You hear? _Stop_ it!" the Boy called out.
+
+But Joe seemed not to hear. Anna had fallen face downward on the ice
+this time, and lay there as if stunned. Her enemy caught hold of her,
+pulled her up, and dragged her along in spite of her struggles and
+cries.
+
+"Let her alone!" the Boy shouted. He was nearly up to them now. But
+Joe's attention was wholly occupied in hauling Anna back to the
+village, maltreating her at intervals by the way. Now the girl was
+putting up one arm piteously to shield her bleeding face from his
+fists. "Don't you hit her again, or it'll be the worse for you." But
+again Joe's hand was lifted. The Boy plunged forward, caught the blow
+as it descended, and flung the arm aside, wrenched the girl free, and
+as Joe came on again, looking as if he meant business, the Boy planted
+a sounding lick on his jaw. The Pymeut staggered, and drew off a little
+way, looking angry enough, but, to the Boy's surprise, showing no
+fight.
+
+It occurred to him that the girl, her lip bleeding, her parki torn,
+seemed more surprised than grateful; and when he said, "You come back
+with me; he shan't touch you," she did not show the pleased alacrity
+that you would expect. But she was no doubt still dazed. They all stood
+looking rather sheepish, and like actors "stuck" who cannot think of
+the next line, till Joe turned on the girl with some mumbled question.
+She answered angrily. He made another grab at her. She screamed, and
+got behind the Boy. Very resolutely he widened his bold buck-skin legs,
+and dared Joe to touch the poor frightened creature cowering behind her
+protector. Again silence.
+
+"What's the trouble between you two?"
+
+They looked at each other, and then away. Joe turned unexpectedly, and
+shambled off in the direction of the village. Not a word out of Anna as
+she returned by the side of her protector, but every now and then she
+looked at him sideways. The Boy felt her inexpressive gratitude, and
+was glad his journey had been delayed, or else, poor devil--
+
+Joe had stopped to speak to--
+
+"Who on earth's that white woman?"
+
+"Nicholas' sister."
+
+"Not Muckluck?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"What's she dressed like that for?"
+
+"Often like that in summer. Me, too--me got Holy Cross clo'es."
+
+Muckluck went slowly up towards the Kachime with Joe. When the others
+got to the water-hole, Anna turned and left the Boy without a word to
+go and recover her pail. The Boy stood a moment, looking for some sign
+of the Colonel, and then went along the river bank to Ol' Chief's. No,
+the Colonel had gone back to the Kachime.
+
+The Boy came out again, and to his almost incredulous astonishment,
+there was Joe dragging the unfortunate Anna towards an ighloo. As he
+looked back, to steer straight for the entrance-hole, he caught sight
+of the Boy, dropped his prey, and disappeared with some precipitancy
+into the ground. When Anna had gathered herself up, the Boy was
+standing in front of her.
+
+"You don't seem to be able to take very good care o' yourself." She
+pushed her tousled hair out of her eyes. "I don't wonder your own
+people give it up if you have to be rescued every half-hour. What's the
+matter with you and Joe?" She kept looking down. "What have you done to
+make him like this?" She looked up suddenly and laughed, and then her
+eyes fell.
+
+"Done nothin'."
+
+"Why should he want to kill you, then?"
+
+"No _kill_" she said, smiling, a little rueful and embarrassed again,
+with her eyes on the ground. Then, as the Boy still stood there
+waiting, "Joe," she whispered, glancing over her shoulder--"Joe want me
+be he squaw."
+
+The Boy fell back an astonished step.
+
+"Jee-rusalem! He's got a pretty way o' sayin' so. Why don't you tell
+your father?"
+
+"Tell--father?" It seemed never to have occurred to her.
+
+"Yes; can't Yagorsha protect you?"
+
+She looked about doubtfully and then over her shoulder.
+
+"That Joe's ighloo," she said.
+
+He pictured to himself the horror that must assail her blood at the
+sight. Yes, he was glad to have saved any woman from so dreadful a
+fate. Did it happen often? and did nobody interfere? Muckluck was
+coming down from the direction of the Kachime. The Boy went to meet
+her, throwing over his shoulder, "You'd better stick to me, Anna, as
+long as I'm here. I don't know, I'm sure, _what'll_ happen to you when
+I'm gone." Anna followed a few paces, and then sat down on the snow to
+pull up and tie her disorganized leg-gear.
+
+Muckluck was standing still, looking at the Boy with none of the
+kindness a woman ought to show to one who had just befriended her sex.
+
+"Did you see that?"
+
+She nodded. "See that any day."
+
+The Boy stopped, appalled at the thought of woman in a perpetual state
+of siege.
+
+"Brute! hound!" he flung out towards Joe's ighloo.
+
+"No," says Muckluck firmly; "Joe all right."
+
+"You say that, after what's happened this morning?" Muckluck declined
+to take the verdict back. "Did you see him strike her?"
+
+"No _hurt_."
+
+"Oh, didn't it? He threw her down, as hard as he could, on the ice."
+
+"She get up again."
+
+He despised Muckluck in that moment.
+
+"You weren't sorry to see another girl treated so?"
+
+She smiled.
+
+"What if it had been you?"
+
+"Oh, he not do that to _me_."
+
+"Why not? You can't tell."
+
+"Oh, yes." She spoke with unruffled serenity.
+
+"It will very likely be you the next time." The Boy took a brutal
+pleasure in presenting the hideous probability.
+
+"No," she returned unmoved. "Joe savvy I no marry Pymeut."
+
+The Boy stared, mystified by the lack of sequence. "Poor Anna doesn't
+want to marry _that_ Pymeut."
+
+Muckluck nodded.
+
+The Boy gave her up. Perversity was not confined to the civilized of
+her sex. He walked on to find the Colonel. Muckluck followed, but the
+Boy wouldn't speak to her, wouldn't look at her.
+
+"You like my Holy Cross clo'es?" she inquired. "Me--I look like your
+kind of girls now, huh?" No answer, but she kept up with him. "See?"
+She held up proudly a medallion, or coin of some sort, hung on a narrow
+strip of raw-hide.
+
+He meant not to look at it at all, and he jerked his head away after
+the merest glance that showed him the ornament was tarnished silver, a
+little bigger than an American dollar, and bore no device familiar to
+his eyes. He quickened his pace, and walked on with face averted. The
+Colonel appeared just below the Kachime.
+
+"Well, aren't you _ever_ comin'?" he called out.
+
+"I've been ready this half-hour--hangin' about waitin' for you. That
+devil Joe," he went on, lowering his voice as he came up and speaking
+hurriedly, "has been trying to drag Yagorsha's girl into his ighloo.
+They've just had a fight out yonder on the ice. I got her away, but not
+before he'd thrown her down and given her a bloody face. We ought to
+tell old Yagorsha, hey?"
+
+Muckluck chuckled. The Boy turned on her angrily, and saw her staring
+back at Joe's ighloo. There, sauntering calmly past the abhorred trap,
+was the story-teller's daughter. Past it? No. She actually halted and
+busied herself with her legging thong.
+
+"That girl must be an imbecile!" Or was it the apparition of her
+father, up at the Kachime entrance, that inspired such temerity?
+
+The Boy had gone a few paces towards her, and then turned. "Yagorsha!"
+he called up the slope. Yagorsha stood stock-still, although the Boy
+waved unmistakable danger-signals towards Joe's ighloo. Suddenly an arm
+flashed out of the tunnel, caught Anna by the ankle, and in a twinkling
+she lay sprawling on her back. Two hands shot out, seized her by the
+heels, and dragged the wretched girl into the brute's lair. It was all
+over in a flash. A moment's paralysis of astonishment, and the
+involuntary rush forward was arrested by Muckluck, who fastened herself
+on to the rescuer's parki-tail and refused to be detached. "Yagorsha!"
+shouted the Boy. But it was only the Colonel who hastened towards them
+at the summons. The poor girl's own father stood calmly smoking, up
+there, by the Kachime, one foot propped comfortably on the travellers'
+loaded sled. "Yagorsha!" he shouted again, and then, with a jerk to
+free himself from Muckluck, the Boy turned sharply towards the ighloo,
+seeming in a bewildered way to be, himself, about to transact this
+paternal business for the cowardly old loafer. But Muckluck clung to
+his arm, laughing.
+
+"Yagorsha know. Joe give him nice mitts--sealskin--_new_ mitts."
+
+"Hear that, Colonel? For a pair of mitts he sells his daughter to that
+ruffian."
+
+Without definite plan, quite vaguely and instinctively, he shook
+himself free from Muckluck, and rushed down to the scene of the
+tragedy. Muffled screams and yells issued with the smoke. Muckluck
+turned sharply to the Colonel, who was following, and said something
+that sent him headlong after the Boy. He seized the doughty champion by
+the feet just as he was disappearing in the tunnel, and hauled him out.
+
+"What in thunder--All right, you go first, then. _Quick_! as more
+screams rent the still air.
+
+"Don't be a fool. You've been interruptin' the weddin' ceremonies."
+
+Muckluck had caught up with them, and Yagorsha was advancing leisurely
+across the snow.
+
+"She no want _you_," whispered Muckluck to the Boy. "She _like_
+Joe--like him best of all." Then, as the Boy gaped incredulously: "She
+tell me heap long time ago she want Joe."
+
+"That's just part of the weddin' festivity," says the Colonel, as
+renewed shrieks issued from under the snow. "You've been an officious
+interferer, and I think the sooner I get you out o' Pymeut the
+healthier it'll be for you."
+
+The Boy was too flabbergasted to reply, but he was far from convinced.
+The Colonel turned back to apologise to Yagorsha.
+
+"No like this in your country?" inquired Muckluck of the crestfallen
+champion.
+
+"N-no--not exactly."
+
+"When you like girl--what you do?"
+
+"Tell her so," muttered the Boy mechanically.
+
+"Well--Joe been tellin' Anna--all winter."
+
+"And she hated him."
+
+"No. She like Joe--best of any."
+
+"What did she go on like that for, then?"
+
+"Oh-h! She know Joe savvy."
+
+The Boy felt painfully small at his own lack of _savoir_, but no less
+angry.
+
+"When you marry"--he turned to her incredulously--"will it be"--again
+the shrieks--"like this?"
+
+"I no marry Pymeut."
+
+Glancing riverwards, he saw the dirty imp, who had been so wildly
+entertained by the encounter on the ice, still huddled on his
+drift-wood observatory, presenting as little surface to the cold as
+possible, but grinning still with rapture at the spirited last act of
+the winter-long drama. As the Boy, with an exclamation of "Well, I give
+it up," walked slowly across the slope after the Colonel and Yagorsha,
+Muckluck lingered at his side.
+
+"In your country when girl marry--she no scream?"
+
+"Well, no; not usually, I believe."
+
+"She go quiet? Like--like she _want_--" Muckluck stood still with
+astonishment and outraged modesty.
+
+"They agree," he answered irritably. "They don't go on like wild
+beasts."
+
+Muckluck pondered deeply this matter of supreme importance.
+
+"When you--get you squaw, you no _make_ her come?"
+
+The Boy shook his head, and turned away to cut short these excursions
+into comparative ethnology.
+
+But Muckluck was athirst for the strange new knowledge.
+
+"What you do?"
+
+He declined to betray his plan of action.
+
+"When you--all same Joe? Hey?"
+
+Still no answer.
+
+"When you _know_--girl like you best--you no drag her home?"
+
+"No. Be quiet."
+
+_"No?_ How you marry you self, then?"
+
+The conversation would be still more embarrassing before the Colonel,
+so he stopped, and said shortly: "In our country nobody beats a woman
+because he likes her."
+
+"How she know, then?"
+
+"They _agree_, I tell you."
+
+"Oh--an' girl--just come--when he call? Oh-h!" She dropped her jaw, and
+stared. "No fight a _little?"_ she gasped. "No scream quite _small?"_
+
+_"No_, I tell you." He ran on and joined the Colonel. Muckluck stood
+several moments rooted in amazement.
+
+Yagorsha had called the rest of the Pymeuts out, for these queer guests
+of theirs were evidently going at last.
+
+They all said "Goo'-bye" with great goodwill. Only Muckluck in her
+chilly "Holy Cross clo'es" stood sorrowful and silent, swinging her
+medal slowly back and forth.
+
+Nicholas warned them that the Pymeut air-hole was not the only one.
+
+"No," Yagorsha called down the slope; "better no play tricks with
+_him_." He nodded towards the river as the travellers looked back. "Him
+no like. Him got heap plenty mouths--chew you up." And all Pymeut
+chuckled, delighted at their story-teller's wit.
+
+Suddenly Muckluck broke away from the group, and ran briskly down to
+the river trail.
+
+"I will pray for you--hard." She caught hold of the Boy's hand, and
+shook it warmly. "Sister Winifred says the Good Father--"
+
+"Fact is, Muckluck," answered the Boy, disengaging himself with
+embarrassment, "my pardner here can hold up that end. Don't you think
+you'd better square Yukon Inua? Don't b'lieve he likes me."
+
+And they left her, shivering in her "Holy Cross clo'es," staring after
+them, and sadly swinging her medal on its walrus-string.
+
+"I don't mind sayin' I'm glad to leave Pymeut behind," said the
+Colonel.
+
+"Same here."
+
+"You're safe to get into a muss if you mix up with anything that has to
+do with women. That Muckluck o' yours is a minx."
+
+"She ain't my Muckluck, and I don't believe she's a minx, not a little
+bit."
+
+Not wishing to be too hard on his pardner, the Colonel added:
+
+"I lay it all to the chaparejos myself." Then, observing his friend's
+marked absence of hilarity, "You're very gay in your fine fringes."
+
+"Been a little too gay the last two or three hours."
+
+"Well, now, I'm glad to hear you say that. I think myself we've had
+adventures enough right here at the start."
+
+"I b'lieve you. But there's something in that idea o' yours. Other
+fellas have noticed the same tendency in chaparejos."
+
+"Well, if the worst comes to the worst," drawled the Colonel, "we'll
+change breeches."
+
+The suggestion roused no enthusiasm.
+
+"B'lieve I'd have a cammin' influence. Yes, sir, I reckon I could keep
+those fringes out o' kinks."
+
+"Oh, I think they'll go straight enough after this"; and the Boy's good
+spirits returned before they passed the summer village.
+
+It came on to snow again, about six o'clock, that second day out, and
+continued steadily all the night. What did it matter? They were used to
+snow, and they were as jolly as clams at high-tide.
+
+The Colonel called a halt in the shelter of a frozen slough, between
+two banks, sparsely timbered, but promising all the wood they needed,
+old as well as new. He made his camp fire on the snow, and the Boy soon
+had the beef-tea ready--always the first course so long as Liebig
+lasted.
+
+Thereafter, while the bacon was frying and the tea brewing, the Colonel
+stuck up in the snow behind the fire some sticks on which to dry their
+foot-gear. When he pulled off his mucklucks his stockinged feet smoked
+in the frosty air. The hint was all that was needed, that first night
+on the trail, for the Boy to follow suit and make the change into dry
+things. The smoky background was presently ornamented with German
+socks, and Arctic socks (a kind of felt slipper), and mucklucks, each
+with a stick run through them to the toe, all neatly planted in a row,
+like monstrous products of a snow-garden. With dry feet, burning faces
+and chilly backs, they hugged the fire, ate supper, laughed and talked,
+and said that life on the trail wasn't half bad. Afterwards they rolled
+themselves in their blankets, and went to sleep on their spruce-bough
+spring mattresses spread near the fire on the snow.
+
+After about half an hour of oblivion the Boy started up with the drowsy
+impression that a flying spark from the dying fire had set their stuff
+ablaze. No. But surely the fire had been made up again--and--he rubbed
+the sleep out of his incredulous eyes--yes, Muckluck was standing
+there!
+
+"What in thunder!" he began. "Wh-what is it?"
+
+"It is me."
+
+"I can see that much. But what brings you here?"
+
+Shivering with cold, she crouched close to the fire, dressed, as he
+could see now, in her native clothes again, and it was her parki that
+had scorched--was scorching still.
+
+"Me--I--" Smiling, she drew a stiff hand out of its mitten and held it
+over the reviving blaze, glancing towards the Colonel. He seemed to be
+sleeping very sound, powdered over already with soft wet snow; but she
+whispered her next remark.
+
+"I think I come help you find that Onge Grove."
+
+"I think you'll do nothing of the kind." He also spoke with a
+deliberate lowering of the note. His great desire not to wake the
+Colonel gave an unintentional softness to his tone.
+
+"You think winter bad time for squaws to travel?" She shook her head,
+and showed her beautiful teeth an instant in the faint light. Then,
+rising, half shy, but very firm, "I no wait till summer."
+
+He was so appalled for the moment, at the thought of having her on
+their hands, all this way from Pymeut, on a snowy night, that words
+failed him. As she watched him she, too, grew grave.
+
+"You say me nice girl."
+
+"When did I say that?" He clutched his head in despair.
+
+"When you first come. When Shamán make Ol' Chief all well."
+
+"I don't remember it."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I think you misunderstood me, Muckluck."
+
+"Heh?" Her countenance fell, but more puzzled than wounded.
+
+"That is--oh, yes--of course--you're a nice girl."
+
+"I think--Anna, too--you like me best." She helped out the white man's
+bashfulness. But as her interlocutor, appalled, laid no claim to the
+sentiment, she lifted the mittened hand to her eyes, and from under it
+scanned the white face through the lightly falling snow. The other
+hand, still held out to the comfort of the smoke, was trembling a
+little, perhaps not altogether with the cold.
+
+"The Colonel'll have to take over the breeches," said the Boy, with the
+air of one wandering in his head. Then, desperately: "What _am_ I to
+do? What am I to _say?_"
+
+"Say? You say you no like girl scream, no like her fight like Anna.
+Heh? So, me--I come like your girls--quite, quite good.... Heh?"
+
+"You don't understand, Muckluck. I--you see, I could never find that
+Orange Grove if you came along."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Well--a--no woman ever goes to help to find an Orange Grove.
+Th-there's a law against it."
+
+"Heh? Law?"
+
+Alas! she knew too little to be impressed by the Majesty invoked.
+
+"You see, women, they--they come by-and-by--when the Orange Grove's
+all--all ready for 'em. No man _ever_ takes a woman on that kind of
+hunt."
+
+Her saddened face was very grave. The Boy took heart.
+
+"Now, the Pymeuts are going in a week or two, Nicholas said, to hunt
+caribou in the hills."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"But they won't take you to hunt caribou. No; they leave you at home.
+It's exactly the same with Orange Groves. No nice girl _ever_ goes
+hunting."
+
+Her lip trembled.
+
+"Me--I can fish."
+
+"Course you can." His spirits were reviving. "You can do
+anything--except hunt." As she lifted her head with an air of sudden
+protest he quashed her. "From the beginning there's been a law against
+that. Squaws must stay at home and let the men do the huntin'."
+
+"Me ... I can cook"--she was crying now--"while you hunt. Good supper
+all ready when you come home."
+
+He shook his head solemnly.
+
+"Perhaps you don't know"--she flashed a moment's hope through her
+tears--"me learn sew up at Holy Cross. Sew up your socks for you when
+they open their mouths." But she could see that not even this grand new
+accomplishment availed.
+
+"Can help pull sled," she suggested, looking round a little wildly as
+if instantly to illustrate. "Never tired," she added, sobbing, and
+putting her hands up to her face.
+
+"Sh! sh! Don't wake the Colonel." He got up hastily and stood beside
+her at the smouldering fire. He patted her on the shoulder. "Of course
+you're a nice girl. The nicest girl in the Yukon"--he caught himself up
+as she dropped her hands from her face--"that is, you will be, if you
+go home quietly."
+
+Again she hid her eyes.
+
+Go home? How could he send her home all that way at this time of night?
+It was a bothering business!
+
+Again her hands fell from the wet unhappy face. She shivered a little
+when she met his frowning looks, and turned away. He stooped and picked
+up her mitten. Why, you couldn't turn a dog away on a night like this--
+
+Plague take the Pymeuts, root and branch! She had shuffled her feet
+into her snow-shoe straps, and moved off in the dimness. But for the
+sound of sobbing, he could not have told just where, in the
+softly-falling snow, Muckluck's figure was fading into the dusk. He
+hurried after her, conscience-stricken, but most unwilling.
+
+"Look here," he said, when he had caught up with her, "I'm sorry you
+came all this way in the cold--very sorry." Her sobs burst out afresh,
+and louder now, away from the Colonel's restraining presence. "But, see
+here: I can't send you off like this. You might die on the trail."
+
+"Yes, I think me die," she agreed.
+
+"No, don't do that. Come back, and we'll tell the Colonel you're going
+to stay by the fire till morning, and then go home."
+
+She walked steadily on. "No, I go now."
+
+"But you can't, Muckluck. You can't find the trail."
+
+"I tell you before, I not like your girls. I can go in winter as good
+as summer. I _can_ hunt!" She turned on him fiercely. "Once I hunt a
+owel. Ketch him, too!" She sniffed back her tears. "I can do all
+kinds."
+
+"No, you can't hunt Orange Groves," he said, with a severity that might
+seem excessive. "But I can't let you go off in this snowstorm--"
+
+"He soon stop. Goo'-bye."
+
+Never word of sweeter import in his ears than that. But he was far from
+satisfied with his conduct all the same. It was quite possible that the
+Pymeuts, discovering her absence, would think he had lured her away,
+and there might be complications. So it was with small fervour that he
+said: "Muckluck, I wish you'd come back and wait till morning."
+
+"No, I go now." She was in the act of darting forward on those
+snow-shoes, that she used so skillfully, when some sudden thought cried
+halt. She even stopped crying. "I no like go near blow-hole by night. I
+keep to trail--"
+
+"But how the devil do you do it?"
+
+She paid no heed to the interruption, seeming busy in taking something
+over her head from round her neck.
+
+"To-morrow," she said, lowering her tear-harshened voice, "you find
+blow-hole. You give this to Yukon Inua--say I send it. He will not hate
+you any more." She burst into a fresh flood of tears. In a moment the
+dim sight of her, the faint trail of crying left in her wake, had so
+wholly vanished that, but for the bit of string, as it seemed to be,
+left in his half-frozen hands, he could almost have convinced himself
+he had dreamt the unwelcome visit.
+
+The half-shut eye of the camp fire gleamed cheerfully, as he ran back,
+and crouched down where poor little Muckluck had knelt, so sure of a
+welcome. Muckluck, cogitated the Boy, will believe more firmly than
+ever that, if a man doesn't beat a girl, he doesn't mean business. What
+was it he had wound round one hand? What was it dangling in the acrid
+smoke? _That_, then--her trinket, the crowning ornament of her Holy
+Cross holiday attire, that was what she was offering the old ogre of
+the Yukon--for his unworthy sake. He stirred up the dying fire to see
+it better. A woman's face--some Catholic saint? He held the medal lower
+to catch the fitful blaze. "_D. G. Autocratrix Russorum_." The Great
+Katharine! Only a little crown on her high-rolled hair, and her
+splendid chest all uncovered to the Arctic cold.
+
+Her Yukon subjects must have wondered that she wore no parki--this lady
+who had claimed sole right to all the finest sables found in her new
+American dominions. On the other side of the medal, Minerva, with a
+Gorgon-furnished shield and a beautiful bone-tipped harpoon, as it
+looked, with a throwing-stick and all complete. But she, too, would
+strike the Yukon eye as lamentably chilly about the legs. How had these
+ladies out of Russia and Olympus come to lodge in Ol' Chief's ighloo?
+Had Glovotsky won this guerdon at Great Katharine's hands? Had he
+brought it on that last long journey of his to Russian America, and
+left it to his Pymeut children with his bones? Well, Yukon Inua should
+not have it yet. The Boy thrust the medal into a pocket of his
+chaparejos, and crawled into his snow-covered bed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+HOLY CROSS
+
+"Raise the stone, and ye shall find me; cleave the wood, and there am
+I."
+
+
+The stars were shining frostily, in a clear sky, when the Boy crawled
+out from under his snow-drift in the morning. He built up the fire,
+quaking in the bitter air, and bustled the breakfast.
+
+"You seem to be in something of a hurry," said the Colonel, with a yawn
+stifled in a shiver.
+
+"We haven't come on this trip to lie abed in the morning," his pardner
+returned with some solemnity. "I don't care how soon I begin caperin'
+ahead with that load again."
+
+"Well, it'll be warmin', anyway," returned the Colonel, "and I can't
+say as much for your fire."
+
+It was luck that the first forty miles of the trail had already been
+traversed by the Boy. He kept recognising this and that in the
+landscape, with an effect of good cheer on both of them. It postponed a
+little the realization of their daring in launching themselves upon the
+Arctic waste, without a guide or even a map that was of the smallest
+use.
+
+Half an hour after setting off, they struck into the portage. Even with
+a snow-blurred trail, the Boy's vivid remembrance of the other journey
+gave them the sustaining sense that they were going right. The Colonel
+was working off the surprising stiffness with which he had wakened, and
+they were both warm now; but the Colonel's footsoreness was
+considerable, an affliction, besides, bound to be worse before it was
+better.
+
+The Boy spoke with the old-timer's superiority, of his own experience,
+and was so puffed up, at the bare thought of having hardened his feet,
+that he concealed without a qualm the fact of a brand-new blister on
+his heel. A mere nothing that, not worth mentioning to anyone who
+remembered the state he was in at the end of that awful journey of
+penitence.
+
+It was well on in the afternoon before it began to snow again, and they
+had reached the frozen lake. The days were lengthening, and they still
+had good light by which to find the well-beaten trail on the other
+side.
+
+"Now in a minute we'll hear the mission dogs. What did I tell you?" Out
+of the little wood, a couple of teams were coming, at a good round
+pace. They were pulled up at the waterhole, and the mission natives ran
+on to meet the new arrivals. They recognised the Boy, and insisted on
+making the Colonel, who was walking very lame, ride to the mission in
+the strongest sled, and they took turns helping the dogs by pushing
+from behind. The snow was falling heavily again, and one of the
+Indians, Henry, looking up with squinted eyes, said, "There'll be
+nothing left of that walrus-tusk."
+
+"Hey?" inquired the Boy, straining at his sled-rope and bending before
+the blast. "What's that?"
+
+"Don't you know what makes snow?" said Henry.
+
+"No. What does?"
+
+"Ivory whittlings. When they get to their carving up yonder then we
+have snow."
+
+What was happening to the Colonel?
+
+The mere physical comfort of riding, instead of serving as packhorse,
+great as it was, not even that could so instantly spirit away the
+weariness, and light up the curious, solemn radiance that shone on the
+Colonel's face. It struck the Boy that good old Kentucky would look
+like that when he met his dearest at the Gate of Heaven--if there was
+such a place.
+
+The Colonel was aware of the sidelong wonder of his comrade's glance,
+for the sleds, abreast, had come to a momentary halt. But still he
+stared in front of him, just as a sailor in a storm dares not look away
+from the beacon-light an instant, knowing all the waste about him
+abounds in rocks and eddies and in death, and all the world of hope and
+safe returning is narrowed to that little point of light.
+
+After the moment's speculation the Boy turned his eyes to follow the
+Colonel's gaze into space.
+
+"The Cross! the Cross!" said the man on the sled. "Don't you see it?"
+
+"Oh, that? Yes."
+
+At the Boy's tone the Colonel, for the first time, turned his eyes away
+from the Great White Symbol.
+
+"Don't know what you're made of, if, seeing that... you needn't be a
+Church member, but only a man, I should think, to--to--" He blew out
+his breath in impotent clouds, and then went on. "We Americans think a
+good deal o' the Stars and Stripes, but that up yonder--that's the
+mightier symbol."
+
+"Huh!" says the Boy. "Stars and Stripes tell of an ideal of united
+states. That up there tells of an ideal of United Mankind. It's the
+great Brotherhood Mark. There isn't any other standard that men would
+follow just to build a hospice in a place like this."
+
+At an upper window, in a building on the far side of the white symbol,
+the travellers caught a glimpse, through the slanting snow, of one of
+the Sisters of St. Ann shutting in the bright light with thick
+curtains.
+
+_"Glass!"_ ejaculated the Colonel.
+
+One of the Indians had run on to announce them, and as they drew up at
+the door--that the Boy remembered as a frame for Brother Paul, with his
+lamp, to search out iniquity, and his face of denunciation--out came
+Father Brachet, brisk, almost running, his two hands outstretched, his
+face a network of welcoming wrinkles. No long waiting, this time, in
+the reception-room. Straight upstairs to hot baths and mild, reviving
+drinks, and then, refreshed and already rested, down to supper.
+
+With a shade of anxiety the Boy looked about for Brother Paul. But
+Father Wills was here anyhow, and the Boy greeted him, joyfully, as a
+tried friend and a man to be depended on. There was Brother Etienne,
+and there were two strange faces.
+
+Father Brachet put the Colonel on his right and the Boy on his left,
+introducing: "Fazzer Richmond, my predecessor as ze head of all ze
+Alaskan missions," calmly eliminating Greek, Episcopalian, and other
+heretic establishments. "Fazzer Richmond you must have heard much of.
+He is ze great ausority up here. He is now ze Travelling Priest. You
+can ask him all. He knows everysing."
+
+In no wise abashed by this flourish, Father Richmond shook hands with
+the Big Chimney men, smiling, and with a pleasant ease that
+communicated itself to the entire company.
+
+It was instantly manifest that the scene of this Jesuit's labours had
+not been chiefly, or long, beyond the borders of civilization. In the
+plain bare room where, for all its hospitality and good cheer, reigned
+an air of rude simplicity and austerity of life--into this somewhat
+rarefied atmosphere Father Richmond brought a whiff from another world.
+As he greeted the two strangers, and said simply that he had just
+arrived, himself, by way of the Anvik portage, the Colonel felt that he
+must have meant from New York or from Paris instead of the words he
+added, "from St. Michael's."
+
+He claimed instant kinship with the Colonel on the strength of their
+both being Southerners.
+
+"I'm a Baltimore man," he said, with an accent no Marylander can purge
+of pride.
+
+"How long since you've been home?"
+
+"Oh, I go back every year."
+
+"He goes all over ze world, to tell ze people--"
+
+"--something of the work being done here by Father Brachet--and all of
+them." He included the other priests and lay-brothers in a slight
+circular movement of the grizzled head.
+
+And to collect funds! the Colonel rightly divined, little guessing how
+triumphantly he achieved that end.
+
+"Alaska is so remote," said the Travelling Priest, as if in apology for
+popular ignorance, "and people think of it so... inadequately, shall we
+say? In trying to explain the conditions up here, I have my chief
+difficulty in making them realise the great distances we have to cover.
+You tell them that in the Indian tongue Alaska means "the great
+country," they smile, and think condescendingly of savage imagery. It
+is vain to say we have an area of six hundred thousand square miles. We
+talk much in these days of education; but few men and no women can
+count! Our Eastern friends get some idea of what we mean, when we tell
+them Alaska is bigger than all the Atlantic States from Maine to
+Louisiana with half of great Texas thrown in. With a coast-line of
+twenty six thousand miles, this Alaska of ours turns to the sea a
+greater frontage than all the shores of all the United States combined.
+It extends so far out towards Asia that it carries the dominions of the
+Great Republic as far west of San Francisco as New York is east of it,
+making California a central state. I try to give Europeans some idea of
+it by saying that if you add England, Ireland, and Scotland together,
+and to that add France, and to that add Italy, you still lack enough to
+make a country the size of Alaska. I do not speak of our mountains,
+seventeen, eighteen, nineteen thousand feet high, and our Yukon,
+flowing for more than two thousand miles through a country almost
+virgin still."
+
+"You travel about up here a good deal?"
+
+"He travels _all_ ze time. He will not rest," said Father Brachet as
+one airing an ancient grievance.
+
+"Yes, I will rest now--a little. I have been eight hundred miles over
+the ice, with dogs, since January 1."
+
+The Boy looked at him with something very like reverence. Here was a
+man who could give you tips!
+
+"You have travelled abroad, too," the Colonel rather stated than asked.
+
+"I spent a good deal of my youth in France and Germany."
+
+"Educated over there?"
+
+"Well, I am a Johns Hopkins man, but I may say I found my education in
+Rome. Speaking of education"--he turned to the other priests--"I have
+greatly advanced my grammar since we parted." Father Brachet answered
+with animation in French, and the conversation went forward for some
+minutes in that tongue. The discussion was interrupted to introduce the
+other new face, at the bottom of the table, to the Big Chimney men:
+"Resident Fazzer Roget of ze Kuskoquim mission."
+
+"That is the best man on snow-shoes in Central Alaska," said Father
+Richmond low to the Colonel, nodding at the Kuskoquim priest.
+
+"And he knows more of two of ze native dialects here zan anyone else,"
+added the Father Superior.
+
+"You must forgive our speaking much of the Indian tongues," said Father
+Richmond. "We are all making dictionaries and grammars; we have still
+to translate much of our religious instruction, and the great variety
+in dialect of the scattered tribes keeps us busy with linguistic
+studies."
+
+"Tomorrow you must see our schools," said Father Brachet.
+
+But the Boy answered quickly that they could not afford the time. He
+was surprised at the Colonel's silence; but the Boy didn't know what
+the Colonel's feet felt like.
+
+Kentucky ain't sorry, he said to himself, to have a back to his chair,
+and to eat off china again. Kentucky's a voluptuary! I'll have to drag
+him away by main force; and the Boy allowed Father Richmond to help him
+yet more abundantly to the potatoes and cabbage grown last summer in
+the mission garden!
+
+It was especially the vegetables that lent an element of luxury to the
+simple meal. The warm room, the excellent food, better cooked than any
+they had had for seven months, produced a gentle somnolence. The
+thought of the inviting look of the white-covered bed upstairs lay like
+a balm on the spirits of men not born to roughing it. As the travellers
+said an early and grateful good-night, the Boy added sleepily something
+about the start at dawn.
+
+Father Brachet answered, "Morning will bring counsel, my son. I sink ze
+bleezzar-r will not let us lose you so soon."
+
+They overslept themselves, and they knew it, in that way the would-be
+early riser does, before ever he looks into the accusing face of his
+watch. The Boy leapt out of bed.
+
+"Hear that?" The wind was booming among the settlement buildings.
+"Sounds as if there was weather outside." A glance between the curtains
+showed the great gale at its height. The snow blew level in sheets and
+darkened the air.
+
+"Well," said the Colonel, splashing mightily in the ice-cold water, "I
+don't know as I mind giving my feet twenty-four hours' time to come to
+their senses."
+
+A hurried toilet and they went downstairs, sharp-set for breakfast
+after the long, refreshing sleep.
+
+Father Richmond was writing on his knee by the stove in the
+reception-room.
+
+"Good-morning--good-morning." He rang the bell.
+
+"Well, what did we tell you? I don't think you'll get far today. Let
+these gentlemen know when breakfast is ready," he said, as Christopher
+put his head in. He looked at his watch. "I hope you will find
+everything you need," he said; and, continuing to talk about the gale
+and some damage it had done to one of the outbuildings, he went into
+the entry, just beyond the reception-room door, and began to put on his
+furs.
+
+"_You are_ not going out in such weather!" the Colonel called after him
+incredulously.
+
+"Only as far as the church."
+
+"Oh, is there church today?" inquired the Boy more cheerfully than one
+might expect.
+
+The Colonel started and made a signal for discretion.
+
+"Blest if it isn't Sunday!" he said under his breath.
+
+"He doesn't seem dead-set on our observing it," whispered the Boy.
+
+The Colonel warmed himself luxuriously at the stove, and seemed to
+listen for that summons from the entry that never came. Was Father
+Richmond out there still, or had he gone?
+
+"Do they think we are heathens because we are not Jesuits?" he said
+under his breath, suddenly throwing out his great chest.
+
+"Perhaps we ought to... Hey? They've been awfully considerate of
+_us--_"
+
+The Colonel went to the door. Father Richmond was struggling with his
+snow-boots.
+
+"With your permission, sir," says the Colonel in his most magnificent
+manner, "we will accompany you, or follow if you are in haste."
+
+"With all my heart. Come," said the priest, "if you will wait and
+breakfast with us after Mass."
+
+It was agreed, and the immediate order was countermanded. The sound of
+a bell came, muffled, through the storm.
+
+With thoughts turning reluctantly from breakfast, "What's that?" asked
+the Boy.
+
+"That is our church bell." The Father had helped the Colonel to find
+his parki.
+
+"Oh--a--of course--"
+
+"A fine tone, don't you think? But you can't tell so well in this
+storm. We are fond of our bell. It is the first that ever rang out in
+the Yukon valley. Listen!"
+
+They stood still a moment before opening the front door. The Boy,
+seeing the very look of a certain high-shouldered gray stone "St.
+Andrew's" far away, and himself trotting along beside that figure,
+inseparable from first memories, was dimly aware again, as he stood at
+the Jesuit's door, in these different days, of the old Sunday feeling
+invading, permeating his consciousness, half reluctant, half amused.
+
+The Colonel sat in a rural church and looked at the averted face of a
+woman.
+
+Only to the priest was the sound all music.
+
+"That language," he said, "speaks to men whatever tongue they call
+their own. The natives hear it for miles up the river, and down the
+river, and over the white hills, and far across the tundra. They come
+many miles to Mass--"
+
+He opened the door, and the gale rushed in.
+
+"I do not mean on days like this," he wound up, smiling, and out they
+went into the whirling snow.
+
+The church was a building of logs like the others, except that it was
+of one story. Father Brachet was already there, with Father Wills and
+Brother Etienne; and, after a moment, in came Brother Paul, looking
+more waxen and aloof than ever, at the head of the school, the rear
+brought up by Brother Vincent and Henry.
+
+In a moment the little Mother Superior appeared, followed by two nuns,
+heading a procession of native women and girls. They took their places
+on the other side of the church and bowed their heads.
+
+"Beautiful creature!" ejaculated the Colonel under his breath, glancing
+back.
+
+His companion turned his head sharply just in time to see Sister
+Winifred come last into the church, holding by either hand a little
+child. Both men watched her as she knelt down. Between the children's
+sallow, screwed-up, squinting little visages the calm, unconscious face
+of the nun shone white like a flower.
+
+The strangers glanced discreetly about the rude little church, with its
+pictures and its modest attempt at stained glass.
+
+"No wonder all this impresses the ignorant native," whispered the
+Colonel, catching himself up suddenly from sharing in that weakness.
+
+Without, the wild March storm swept the white world; within another
+climate reigned--something of summer and the far-off South, of Italy
+herself, transplanted to this little island of civilisation anchored in
+the Northern waste.
+
+"S'pose you've seen all the big cathedrals, eh?"
+
+"Good many."
+
+There was still a subdued rustling in the church, and outside, still
+the clanging bell contended with the storm.
+
+"And this--makes you smile?"
+
+"N--no," returned the older man with a kind of reluctance. "I've seen
+many a worse church; America's full of 'em."
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"So far as--dignity goes--" The Colonel was wrestling with some vague
+impression difficult for him to formulate. "You see, you can't build
+anything with wood that's better than a log-cabin. For looks--just
+_looks_--it beats all your fancy gimcracks, even brick; beats
+everything else hollow, except stone. Then they've got candles. We went
+on last night about the luxury of oil-lamps. They don't bring 'em in
+here!"
+
+"_We_ do in our prairie and Southern country churches."
+
+"I know. But look at those altar lights." The Boy was too busy looking
+at Sister Winifred. "I tell you, sir, a man never made a finer thing
+than a tall wax candle."
+
+"Sh! Mustn't talk in church."
+
+The Colonel stared a moment at the Boy's presumption, drew himself up a
+little pompously, and crossed his arms over his huge chest.
+
+"Why, they've got an organ!" The Boy forgot his strict views on church
+etiquette as the sudden sweetness swelled in the air. Brother Paul,
+with head thrown back and white face lifted, was playing, slowly,
+absently, like one who listens to some great choir invisible, and keeps
+their time with a few obedient but unnecessary chords. And yet--
+
+"The fella can play," the Colonel admitted.
+
+The native choir, composed entirely of little dark-faced boys, sang
+their way truly through the service, Father Brachet celebrating Mass.
+
+"Brother Paul's ill, isn't he? Look!" The lay-brother had swayed, and
+drooped forward over the keyboard, but his choir sang steadily on. He
+recovered himself, and beckoned one of the boys to his side. When he
+rose, the child nodded and took the organist's place, playing quite
+creditably to the end. Brother Paul sat in the corner with bowed head.
+
+Coming out, they were in time to confront Sister Winifred, holding back
+the youngest children, eager to anticipate their proper places in the
+procession.
+
+The Boy looked fixedly at her, wondering. Suddenly meeting The clear
+eyes, he smiled, and then shrank inwardly at his forwardness. He could
+not tell if she remembered him.
+
+The Colonel, finding himself next her at the door, bowed, and stood
+back for her to pass.
+
+"No," she said gently; "my little children must wait for the older
+ones."
+
+"You have them under good discipline, madam." He laid his hand on the
+furry shoulder of the smallest.
+
+The Boy stood behind the Colonel, unaccountably shy in the presence of
+the only white woman he had seen in nearly seven months. She couldn't
+be any older than he, and yet she was a nun. What a gulf opened at the
+word! Sister Winifred and her charges fell into rank at the tail of the
+little procession, and vanished in the falling snow. At breakfast the
+Colonel would not sit down till he was presented to Brother Paul.
+
+"Sir," he said in his florid but entirely sincere fashion, "I should
+like to thank you for the pleasure of hearing that music to-day. We
+were much impressed, sir, by the singing. How old is the boy who played
+the organ?"
+
+"Ten," said Brother Paul, and for the first time the Boy saw him smile.
+"Yes, I think he has music in him, our little Jerome."
+
+"And how well _all_ your choir has the service by heart! Their unison
+is perfect."
+
+"Yes," said Father Brachet from the head of the table, "our music has
+never been so good as since Paul came among us." He lifted his hand,
+and every one bowed his head.
+
+After grace Father Richmond took the floor, conversationally, as seemed
+to be his wont, and breakfast went on, as supper had the night before,
+to the accompaniment of his shrewd observations and lively anecdotes.
+In the midst of all the laughter and good cheer Brother Paul sat at the
+end of the board, eating absently, saying nothing, and no one speaking
+to him.
+
+Father Richmond especially, but, indeed, all of them, seemed arrant
+worldlings beside the youngest of the lay-brethren. The Colonel could
+more easily imagine Father Richmond walking the streets of Paris or of
+Rome, than "hitting the Yukon trail." He marvelled afresh at the
+devotion that brought such a man to wear out his fine attainments, his
+scholarship, his energy, his wide and Catholic knowledge, in travelling
+winter after winter, hundreds of miles over the ice from one Indian
+village to another. You could not divorce Father Richmond in your mind
+from the larger world outside; he spoke with its accent, he looked with
+his humourous, experienced eyes. You found it natural to think of him
+in very human relations. You wondered about his people, and what
+brought him to this.
+
+Not so with Brother Paul. He was one of those who suggest no country
+upon any printed map. You have to be reminded that you do not know his
+birthplace or his history. It was this same Brother Paul who, after
+breakfast and despite the Pymeut incident, offered to show the
+gold-seekers over the school. The big recitation-room was full of
+natives and decidedly stuffy. They did not stay long. Upstairs, "I
+sleep here in the dormitory," said the Brother, "and I live with the
+pupils--as much as I can. I often eat with them," he added as one who
+mounts a climax. "They have to be taught _everything_, and they have to
+be taught it over again every day."
+
+"Except music, apparently."
+
+"Except music--and games. Brother Vincent teaches them football and
+baseball, and plays with them and works with them. Part of each day is
+devoted to manual training and to sport."
+
+He led the way to the workshop.
+
+"One of our brothers is a carpenter and master mechanic."
+
+He called to a pupil passing the door, and told him the strangers would
+like to inspect the school work. Very proudly the lad obeyed. He
+himself was a carpenter, and showed his half-finished table. The Boy's
+eye fell on a sled.
+
+"Yes," said the lad, "that kind better. Your kind no good." He had
+evidently made intimate acquaintance with the Boy's masterpiece.
+
+"Yours is splendid," admitted the unskilled workman.
+
+"Will you sell it?" the Colonel asked Brother Paul.
+
+"They make them to sell," was the answer, and the transaction was soon
+effected.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+"It has stopped snowing and ze wind is fallen," said Father Brachet,
+going to the reception-room window an hour or so after they had come in
+from dinner.
+
+The Colonel exchanged looks with the Boy, and drew out his watch.
+
+"Later than I thought."
+
+"Much," the Colonel agreed, and sat considering, watch in hand.
+
+"I sink our friends must see now ze girls' school, and ze laundry,
+hein?"
+
+"To be sure," agreed Father Richmond. "I will take you over and give
+you into the hands of our Mother Superior."
+
+"Why, it's much warmer," said the Boy as they went by the cross; and
+Father Richmond greeted the half-dozen native boys, who were packing
+down the fresh snow under their broad shoes, laughing and shouting to
+one another as they made anew the familiar mission trails.
+
+The door of the two-story house, on the opposite side of the
+settlement, was opened by Sister Winifred.
+
+"Friends of ours from the White Camp below."
+
+She acknowledged the nameless introduction, smiling; but at the request
+that followed, "Ah, it is too bad that just to-day--the Mother
+Superior--she is too faint and weak to go about. Will you see her,
+Father?"
+
+"Yes, if you will show these strangers the school and laundry and--"
+
+"Oh, yes, I will show them."
+
+She led the way into the cheerful schoolroom, where big girls and
+little girls were sitting about, amusing themselves in the quiet of a
+long Sunday afternoon. Several of the younger children ran to her as
+she came in, and stood holding fast to the folds of her black habit,
+staring up at the strangers, while she explained the kind of
+instruction given, the system, and the order reigning in each
+department. Finally, she persuaded a little girl, only six years old,
+to take her dusky face out of the long flowing veil of the nun, and
+show how quickly she could read a sentence that Sister Winifred wrote
+on the blackboard. Then others were called on, and gave examples of
+their accomplishments in easy arithmetic and spelling. The children
+must have been very much bored with themselves that stormy Sunday, for
+they entered into the examination with a quite unnatural zest.
+
+Two of the elder girls recited, and some specimens of penmanship and
+composition were shown. The delicate complexion of the little nun
+flushed to a pretty wild-rose pink as these pupils of hers won the
+Colonel's old fashioned compliments.
+
+"And they are taught most particularly of all," she hastened to say,
+"cooking, housekeeping, and sewing."
+
+Whereupon specimens of needlework were brought out and cast like pearls
+before the swine's eyes of the ignorant men. But they were impressed in
+their benighted way, and said so.
+
+"And we teach them laundry-work." She led the way, with the children
+trooping after, to the washhouse. "No, run back. You'll take cold. Run
+back, and you shall sing for the strangers before they go."
+
+She smiled them away--a happy-faced, clean little throng, striking
+contrast to the neglected, filthy children seen in the native villages.
+As they were going into the laundry, Father Richmond came out of the
+house, and stopped to point out to the Colonel a snow-covered
+enclosure--"the Sisters' garden"--and he told how marvellously, in the
+brief summer, some of the hardier vegetables flourished there.
+
+"They spring up like magic at the edge of the snow-drifts, and they do
+not rest from their growing all night. If the time is short, they have
+twice as much sunlight as with you. They drink it in the whole summer
+night as well as all the day. And over here is the Fathers' garden."
+Talking still, he led the way towards a larger enclosure on the other
+side of the Cross.
+
+Sister Winifred paused a moment, and then, as they did not turn back,
+and the Boy stood waiting, she took him into the drying-room and into
+the ironing-room, and then returned to the betubbed apartment first
+invaded. There was only one blot on the fairness of that model
+laundry--a heap of torn and dirty canvas in the middle of the floor.
+
+The Boy vaguely thought it looked familiar, before the Sister, blushing
+faintly, said: "We hope you won't go before we have time to repair it."
+
+"Why, it's our old sled-cover!"
+
+"Yes; it is very much cut and torn. But you do not go at once?"
+
+"Yes, to-morrow."
+
+"Oh! Father Brachet thought you would stay for a few days, at least."
+
+"We have no time."
+
+"You go, like the rest, for gold?"
+
+"Like the rest."
+
+"But you came before to help poor Nicholas out of his trouble."
+
+"He was quite able to help himself, as it turned out."
+
+"Why will you go so far, and at such risk?" she said, with a suddenness
+that startled them both.
+
+"I--I--well, I think I go chiefly because I want to get my home back. I
+lost my home when I was a little chap. Where is your home?"
+
+"Here."
+
+"How long have you been here?"
+
+"Nearly two years."
+
+"Then how can you call it home?"
+
+"I do that only that I may--speak your language. Of course, it is not
+my real home."
+
+"Where is the real home?"
+
+"I hope it is in heaven," she said, with a simplicity that took away
+all taint of cant or mere phrase-making.
+
+"But where do you come from?"
+
+"I come from Montreal."
+
+"Oh! and don't you ever go back to visit your people?"
+
+"No, I never go back."
+
+"But you will some time?"
+
+"No; I shall never go back."
+
+"Don't you _want_ to?"
+
+She dropped her eyes, but very steadfastly she said:
+
+"My work is here."
+
+"But you are young, and you may live a great, great many years."
+
+She nodded, and looked out of the open door. The Colonel and the
+Travelling Priest were walking in Indian file the new-made, hard-packed
+path.
+
+"Yes," she said in a level voice, "I shall grow old here, and here I
+shall be buried."
+
+"I shall never understand it. I have such a longing for my home. I came
+here ready to bear anything that I might be able to get it back."
+
+She looked at him steadily and gravely.
+
+"I may be wrong, but I doubt if you would be satisfied even if you got
+it back--now."
+
+"What makes you think that?" he said sharply.
+
+"Because"--and she checked herself as if on the verge of something too
+personal--"you can never get back a thing you've lost. When the old
+thing is there again, you are not as you were when you lost it, and the
+change in you makes the old thing new--and strange."
+
+"Oh, it's plain I am very different from you," but he said it with a
+kind of uneasy defiance. "Besides, in any case, I shall do it for my
+sister's sake."
+
+"Oh, you have a sister?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"How long since you left her?"
+
+"It's a good while now."
+
+"Perhaps your sister won't want that particular home any more than you
+when you two meet again." Then, seeming not to notice the shade on her
+companion's face: "I promised my children they should sing for you. Do
+you mind? Will your friend come in, too?" And, looking from the door
+after the Colonel and the Father as they turned to rejoin them: "He is
+odd, that big friend of yours," she said--quite like a human being, as
+the Boy thought instantly.
+
+"He's not odd, I assure you."
+
+"He called me 'madam.'" She spoke with a charming piqued childishness.
+
+"You see, he didn't know your name. What is your name?"
+
+"Sister Winifred."
+
+"But your real name?" he said, with the American's insistence on his
+own point of view.
+
+"That is my only name," she answered with dignity, and led the way back
+into the schoolroom. Another, older, nun was there, and when the others
+rejoined them they made the girls sing.
+
+"Now we have shown you enough," said Father Richmond, rising; "boasted
+to you enough of the very little we are able to accomplish here. We
+must save something for to-morrow."
+
+"Ah, to-morrow we take to the trail again," said the Colonel, and added
+his "Good-bye, madam."
+
+Sister Winifred, seeing he expected it, gave him her hand.
+
+"Good-bye, and thank you for coming."
+
+"For your poor," he said shyly, as he turned away and left a gift in
+her palm.
+
+"Thank you for showing us all this," the Boy said, lingering, but not
+daring to shake hands. "It--it seems very wonderful. I had no idea a
+mission meant all this."
+
+"Oh, it means more--more than anything you can _see_."
+
+"Good-bye."
+
+"Good-bye."
+
+In the early evening the reception-room was invaded by the lads' school
+for their usual Sunday night entertainment. Very proudly these boys and
+young men sang their glees and choruses, played the fiddle, recited,
+even danced.
+
+"Pity Mac isn't here!"
+
+"Awful pity. Sunday, too."
+
+Brother Etienne sang some French military songs, and it came out that
+he had served in the French army. Father Roget sang, also in French,
+explaining himself with a humourous skill in pantomime that set the
+room in a roar.
+
+"Well," said the Colonel when he stood up to say good-night, "I haven't
+enjoyed an evening so much for years."
+
+"It is very early still," said Father Brachet, wrinkling up his face in
+a smile.
+
+"Ah, but we have to make such an early start."
+
+The Colonel went up to bed, leaving the Boy to go to Father Richmond's
+room to look at his Grammar of the Indian language.
+
+The instant the door was shut, the priest set down the lamp, and laid
+his hands on the young man's shoulders.
+
+"My son, you must not go on this mad journey."
+
+"I must, you know."
+
+"You must _not_. Sit there." He pushed him into a chair. "Let me tell
+you. I do not speak as the ignorant. I have in my day travelled many
+hundreds of miles on the ice; but I've done it in the season when the
+trail's at its best, with dogs, my son, and with tried native
+servants."
+
+"I know it is pleasanter that way, but--"
+
+"Pleasanter? It is the way to keep alive."
+
+"But the Indians travel with hand-sleds."
+
+"For short distances, yes, and they are inured to the climate. You? You
+know nothing of what lies before you."
+
+"But we'll find out as other people have." The Boy smiled confidently.
+
+"I assure you, my son, it is madness, this thing you are trying to do.
+The chances of either of you coming out alive, are one in fifty. In
+fifty, did I say? In five hundred."
+
+"I don't think so, Father. We don't mean to travel when--"
+
+"But you'll have to travel. To stay in such places as you'll find
+yourself in will be to starve. Or if by any miracle you escape the
+worst effects of cold and hunger, you'll get caught in the ice in the
+spring break-up, and go down to destruction on a floe. You've no
+conception what it's like. If you were six weeks earlier, or six weeks
+later, I would hold my peace."
+
+The Boy looked at the priest and then away. _Was_ it going to be so
+bad? Would they leave their bones on the ice? Would they go washing by
+the mission in the great spring flood, that all men spoke of with the
+same grave look? He had a sudden vision of the torrent as it would be
+in June. Among the whirling ice-masses that swept by--two bodies,
+swollen, unrecognisable. One gigantic, one dressed gaily in chaparejos.
+And neither would lift his head, but, like men bent grimly upon some
+great errand, they would hurry on, past the tall white cross with never
+a sign--on, on to the sea.
+
+"Be persuaded, my son."
+
+Dimly the Boy knew he was even now borne along upon a current equally
+irresistible, this one setting northward, as that other back to the
+south. He found himself shaking his head under the Jesuit's remonstrant
+eyes.
+
+"We've lost so much time already. We couldn't possibly turn back--now."
+
+"Then here's my Grammar." With an almost comic change of tone and
+manner the priest turned to the table where the lamp stood, among piles
+of neatly tied-up and docketed papers.
+
+He undid one of the packets, with an ear on the sudden sounds outside
+in the passage.
+
+"Brother Paul's got it in the schoolhouse."
+
+Brother Paul! He hadn't been at the entertainment, and no one seemed to
+have missed him.
+
+"How did Sister Winifred know?" asked another voice.
+
+"Old Maria told her."
+
+Father Richmond got up and opened the door.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"It's a new-born Indian baby." The Father looked down as if it might be
+on the threshold. "Brother Paul found it below at the village all done
+up ready to be abandoned."
+
+"Tell Sister Winifred I'll see about it in the morning."
+
+"She says--pardon me, Father--she says that is like a man. If I do not
+bring the little Indian in twenty minutes she will come herself and get
+it."
+
+Father Richmond laughed.
+
+"Good-night, my son"; and he went downstairs with the others.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Colonel, you asleep?" the Boy asked softly.
+
+"No."
+
+He struggled in silence with his mucklucks. Presently, "Isn't it
+frightfully strange," he mused aloud. "Doesn't it pull a fella up by
+the roots, somehow, to see Americans on this old track?"
+
+The Colonel had the bedclothes drawn up to his eyes. Under the white
+quilt he made some undistinguishable sound, but he kept his eyes
+fastened on his pardner.
+
+"Everything that we Americans have done, everything that we are, is
+achieved by the grace of goin' bang the other way." The Boy pulled off
+a muckluck and threw it half across the room. "And yet, and yet--"
+
+He sat with one stocking-foot in his hand and stared at the candle.
+
+"I wonder, Colonel, if it _satisfies_ anybody to be a hustler and a
+millionaire."
+
+"Satisfies?" echoed the Colonel, pushing his chin over the bed-clothes.
+"Who expects to be satisfied?"
+
+"Why, every man, woman and child on the top o' the earth; and it just
+strikes me I've never, personally, known anybody get there but these
+fellas at Holy Cross."
+
+The Colonel pushed back the bedclothes a little farther with his chin.
+
+"Haven't you got the gumption to see why it is this place and these men
+take such a hold on you? It's because you've eaten, slept, and lived
+for half a year in a space the size of this bedroom. We've got so used
+to narrowing life down, that the first result of a little larger
+outlook is to make us dizzy. Now, you hurry up and get to bed. You'll
+sleep it off."
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Boy woke at four o'clock, and after the match-light, by which he
+consulted his watch, had flickered out, he lay a long time staring at
+the dark.
+
+Silence still reigned supreme, when at last he got up, washed and
+dressed, and went downstairs. An irresistible restlessness had seized
+hold of him.
+
+He pulled on his furs, cautiously opened the door, and went out--down,
+over the crisp new crust, to the river and back in the dimness, past
+the Fathers' House to the settlement behind, then to the right towards
+the hillside. As he stumbled up the slope he came to a little
+burial-ground. Half hidden in the snow, white wooden crosses marked the
+graves. "And here I shall be buried," she had said--"here." He came
+down the hill and round by the Sisters' House.
+
+That window! That was where a light had shone the evening they arrived,
+and a nun--Sister Winifred--had stood drawing the thick curtains,
+shutting out the world.
+
+He thought, in the intense stillness, that he heard sounds from that
+upper room. Yes, surely an infant's cry.
+
+A curious, heavy-hearted feeling came upon him, as he turned away, and
+went slowly back towards the other house.
+
+He halted a moment under the Cross, and stared up at it. The door of
+the Fathers' House opened, and the Travelling Priest stood on the
+threshold. The Boy went over to him, nodding good-morning.
+
+"So you are all ready--eager to go from us?"
+
+"No; but, you see--"
+
+"I see."
+
+He held the door open, and the Boy went in.
+
+"I don't believe the Colonel's awake yet," he said, as he took off his
+furs. "I'll just run up and rouse him."
+
+"It is very early"--the priest laid his hand on the young man's
+arm--"and he will not sleep so well for many a night to come. It is an
+hour till breakfast."
+
+Henry had lit the fire, and now left it roaring. The priest took a
+chair, and pushed one forward for his guest.
+
+The Boy sat down, stretched his legs out straight towards the fire, and
+lifting his hands, clasped them behind his head. The priest read the
+homesick face like a book.
+
+"Why are you up here?" Before there was time for reply he added:
+"Surely a young man like you could find, nearer home, many a gate ajar.
+And you must have had glimpses through of--things many and fair."
+
+"Oh, yes, I've had glimpses of those things."
+
+"Well----"
+
+"What I wanted most I never saw."
+
+"You wanted----"
+
+"To be--_sure_."
+
+"Ah! it is one of the results of agnosticism."
+
+The Boy never saw the smile.
+
+"I've said--and I was not lying--that I came away to shorten the
+business of fortune-making--to buy back an old place we love, my sister
+and I; but----"
+
+"Which does she love best, the old place or the young brother?"
+
+"Oh, she cares about me--no doubt o' that." He smiled the smile of
+faith.
+
+"Has she ... an understanding heart?"
+
+"The most I know."
+
+"Then she would be glad to know you had found a home for the spirit. A
+home for the body, what does it matter?"
+
+In the pause, Father Brachet opened the door, but seemed suddenly to
+remember some imperative call elsewhere. The Boy jumped up, but the
+Superior had vanished without even "Good-morning." The Boy sat down
+again.
+
+"Of course," he went on, with that touch of pedantry so common in
+American youth, "the difficulty in my case is an intellectual one. I
+think I appreciate the splendid work you do, and I see as I never saw
+before----" He stopped.
+
+"You strike your foot against the same stone of stumbling over which
+the Pharisees fell, when the man whom Jesus healed by the way replied
+to their questioning: 'Whether He be a sinner or no, I know not. One
+thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see.'"
+
+"I don't deny that the life here has been a revelation to me. I'm not
+talkin' about creeds (for I don't know much about them, and I don't
+think it's in me to care much); but so far as the work here is
+concerned--" He paused.
+
+"We can take little credit for that; it is the outcome of our Order."
+
+The Boy failed to catch the effect of the capital letter.
+
+"Yes, it's just that--the order, the good government! A fella would be
+a bigot if he couldn't see that the system is as nearly perfect as a
+human institution can be."
+
+"That has been said before of the Society of Jesus." But he spoke with
+the wise man's tolerance for the discoveries of the young. Still, it
+was not to discuss the merits of his Order that he had got up an hour
+before his time. "I understand, maybe better than yourself, something
+of the restlessness that drove you here."
+
+"You understand?"
+
+The priest nodded.
+
+"You had the excuse of the old plantation and the sister--"
+
+The Boy sat up suddenly, a little annoyed.
+
+The priest kept on: "But you felt a great longing to make a breach in
+the high walls that shut you in. You wanted to fare away on some voyage
+of discovery. Wasn't that it?". He paused now in his turn, but the Boy
+looked straight before him, saying nothing. The priest leaned forward
+with a deeper gravity.
+
+"It will be a fortunate expedition, this, my son, _if thou discover
+thyself_--and in time!" Still the Boy said nothing. The other resumed
+more lightly: "In America we combine our travels with business. But it
+is no new idea in the world that a young man should have his Wanderjahr
+before he finds what he wants, or even finds acquiescence. It did not
+need Wilhelm Meister to set the feet of youth on that trail; it did not
+need the Crusades. It's as old as the idea of a Golden Fleece or a
+Promised Land. It was the first man's first inkling of heaven."
+
+The Boy pricked his ears. Wasn't this heresy?
+
+"The old idea of the strenuous, to leave home and comfort and security,
+and go out to search for wisdom, or holiness, or happiness--whether it
+is gold or the San Grael, the instinct of Search is deep planted in the
+race. It is this that the handful of men who live in what they call
+'the world'--it is this they forget. Every hour in the greater world
+outside, someone, somewhere, is starting out upon this journey. He may
+go only as far as Germany to study philosophy, or to the nearest
+mountain-top, and find there the thing he seeks; or he may go to the
+ends of the earth, and still not find it. He may travel in a Hindu gown
+or a Mongolian tunic, or he comes, like Father Brachet, out of his
+vineyards in 'the pleasant land of France,' or, like you, out of a
+country where all problems are to be solved by machinery. But my point
+is, _they come_! When all the other armies of the world are disbanded,
+that army, my son, will be still upon the march."
+
+They were silent awhile, and still the young face gave no sign.
+
+"To many," the Travelling Priest went on, "the impulse is a blind one
+or a shy one, shrinking from calling itself by the old names. But none
+the less this instinct for the Quest is still the gallant way of youth,
+confronted by a sense of the homelessness they cannot think will last."
+
+"That's it, Father! That's it!" the Boy burst out. "Homelessness! To
+feel that is to feel something urging you----" He stopped, frowning.
+
+"----urging you to take up your staff," said the priest.
+
+They were silent a moment, and then the same musical voice tolled out
+the words like a low bell: "But with all your journeying, my son, you
+will come to no Continuing City."
+
+"It's no use to say this to me. You see, I am----"
+
+"I'll tell you why I say it." The priest laid a hand on his arm. "I see
+men going up and down all their lives upon this Quest. Once in a great
+while I see one for whom I think the journey may be shortened."
+
+"How shortened?"
+
+A heavy step on the stair, and the Boy seemed to wake from a dream.
+
+"Good-morning," said the Colonel, coming in cheerily, rubbing his
+hands.
+
+"I am very jealous!" He glanced at the Boy's furs on the floor. "You
+have been out, seeing the rest of the mission without me."
+
+"No--no, we will show you the rest--as much as you care for, after
+breakfast."
+
+"I'm afraid we oughtn't to delay--"
+
+But they did--"for a few minutes while zey are putting a little fresh
+meat on your sled," as Father Brachet said. They went first to see the
+dogs fed. For they got breakfast when they were at home, those pampered
+mission dogs.
+
+"And now we will show you our store-house, our caches--"
+
+While Father Brachet looked in the bunch for the key he wanted, a
+native came by with a pail. He entered the low building on the left,
+leaving wide the door.
+
+"What? No! Is it really? No, not _really!_" The Colonel was more
+excited than the Boy had ever seen him. Without the smallest ceremony
+he left the side of his obliging host, strode to the open door, and
+disappeared inside.
+
+"What on earth's the matter?"
+
+"I cannot tell. It is but our cow-house."
+
+They followed, and, looking in at the door, the Boy saw a picture that
+for many a day painted itself on his memory. For inside the dim,
+straw-strewn place stood the big Kentuckian, with one arm round the
+cow, talking to her and rubbing her nose, while down his own a tear
+trickled.
+
+"Hey? Well, yes! Just my view, Sukey. Yes, old girl, Alaska's a funny
+kind o' place for you and me to be in, isn't it? Hey? Ye-e-yes." And he
+stroked the cow and sniffed back the salt water, and called out, seeing
+the Boy, "Look! They've got a thoroughbred bull, too, an' a heifer.
+Lord, I haven't been in any place so like home for a coon's age! You go
+and look at the caches. I'll stay here while Sambo milks her."
+
+"My name is Sebastian."
+
+"Oh, all right; reckon you can milk her under that name, too."
+
+When they came back, the Colonel was still there exchanging views about
+Alaska with Sukey, and with Sebastian about the bull. Sister Winifred
+came hurrying over the snow to the cow-house with a little tin pail in
+her hand.
+
+"Ah, but you are slow, Sebastian!" she called out almost petulantly.
+"Good-morning," she said to the others, and with a quick clutch at a
+respectful and submissive demeanour, she added, half aside: "What do
+you think, Father Brachet? They forgot that baby because he is good and
+sleeps late. They drink up all the milk."
+
+"Ah, there is very little now."
+
+"Very little, Father," said Sebastian, returning to the task from which
+the Colonel's conversation had diverted him.
+
+"I put aside some last night, and they used it. I send you to bring me
+only a little drop"--she was by Sebastian now, holding out the small
+pail, unmindful of the others, who were talking stock--"and you stay,
+and stay--"
+
+"Give me your can." The Boy took it from her, and held it inside the
+big milk-pail, so that the thin stream struck it sharply.
+
+"There; it is enough."
+
+Her shawl had fallen. The Colonel gathered it up.
+
+"I will carry the milk back for you," said the Boy, noticing how red
+and cold the slim hands were. "Your fingers will be frostbitten if you
+don't wrap them up." She pulled the old shawl closely round her, and
+set a brisk pace back to the Sisters' House.
+
+"I must go carefully or I might slip, and if I spilt the milk--"
+
+"Oh, you mustn't do that!"
+
+She paused suddenly, and then went on, but more slowly than before. A
+glaze had formed on the hard-trodden path, and one must needs walk
+warily. Once she looked back with anxiety, and, seeing that the
+precious milk was being carried with due caution, her glance went
+gratefully to the Boy's face. He felt her eyes.
+
+"I'm being careful," he laughed, a little embarrassed and not at first
+lifting his bent head. When, after an instant, he did so, he found the
+beautiful calm eyes full upon him. But no self-consciousness there. She
+turned away, gentle and reflective, and was walking on when some quick
+summons seemed to reach her. She stopped quite still again, as if
+seized suddenly by a detaining hand. Her own hands dropped straight at
+her sides, and the rusty shawl hung free. A second time she turned, the
+Boy thought to him again; but as he glanced up, wondering, he saw that
+the fixed yet serene look went past him like a homing-dove. A
+neglected, slighted feeling came over him. She wasn't thinking of him
+the least in the world, nor even of the milk he was at such pains to
+carry for her. What was she staring at? He turned his head over his
+right shoulder. Nothing. No one. As he came slowly on, he kept glancing
+at her. She, still with upturned face, stood there in the attitude of
+an obedient child receiving admonition. One cold little hand fluttered
+up to her silver cross. Ah! He turned again, understanding now the
+drift, if not the inner meaning, of that summons that had come.
+
+"Your friend said something--" She nodded faintly, riverwards, towards
+the mission sign. "Did you feel like that about it--when you saw it
+first?"
+
+"Oh--a--I'm not religious like the Colonel."
+
+She smiled, and walked on.
+
+At the door, as she took the milk, instead of "Thank you," "Wait a
+moment."
+
+She was back again directly.
+
+"You are going far beyond the mission ... so carry this with you. I
+hope it will guide you as it guides us."
+
+On his way back to the Fathers' House, he kept looking at what Sister
+Winifred had given him--a Latin cross of silver scarce three inches
+long. At the intersection of the arms it bore a chased lozenge on which
+was a mitre; above it, the word "Alaska," and beneath, the crossed keys
+of St. Peter and the letters, "P.T.R."
+
+As he came near to where the Colonel and his hosts were, he slipped the
+cross into his pocket. His fingers encountered Muckluck's medal. Upon
+some wholly involuntary impulse, he withdrew Sister Winifred's gift,
+and transferred it to another pocket. But he laughed to himself. "Both
+sort o' charms, after all." And again he looked at the big cross and
+the heaven above it, and down at the domain of the Inua, the jealous
+god of the Yukon.
+
+Twenty minutes later the two travellers were saying good-bye to the men
+of Holy Cross, and making their surprised and delighted acknowledgments
+for the brand-new canvas cover they found upon the Colonel's new sled.
+
+"Oh, it is not we," said Father Brachet; "it is made by ze Sisters. Zey
+shall know zat you were pleased."
+
+Father Richmond held the Boy's hand a moment.
+
+"I see you go, my son, but I shall see you return."
+
+"No, Father, I shall hardly come this way again."
+
+Father Brachet, smiling, watched them start up the long trail.
+
+"I sink we shall meet again," were his last words.
+
+"What does he mean?" asked the Colonel, a little high and mightily.
+"What plan has he got for a meeting?"
+
+"Same plan as you've got, I s'pose. I believe you both call it
+'Heaven.'"
+
+The Holy Cross thermometer had registered twenty degrees below zero,
+but the keen wind blowing down the river made it seem more like forty
+below. When they stopped to lunch, they had to crouch down behind the
+sled to stand the cold, and the Boy found that his face and ears were
+badly frost-bitten. The Colonel discovered that the same thing had
+befallen the toes of his left foot. They rubbed the afflicted members,
+and tried not to let their thoughts stray backwards. The Jesuits had
+told them of an inhabited cabin twenty-three miles up the river, and
+they tried to fix their minds on that. In a desultory way, when the
+wind allowed it, they spoke of Minóok, and of odds and ends they'd
+heard about the trail. They spoke of the Big Chimney Cabin, and of how
+at Anvik they would have their last shave. The one subject neither
+seemed anxious to mention was Holy Cross. It was a little "marked," the
+Colonel felt; but he wasn't going to say the first word, since he meant
+to say the last.
+
+About five o'clock the gale went down, but it came on to snow. At seven
+the Colonel said decidedly: "We can't make that cabin to-night."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because I'm not going any further, with this foot--" He threw down the
+sled-rope, and limped after wood for the fire.
+
+The Boy tilted the sled up by an ice-hummock, and spread the new canvas
+so that it gave some scant shelter from the snow. Luckily, for once,
+the wind how grown quite lamb-like--for the Yukon. It would be thought
+a good stiff breeze almost anywhere else.
+
+Directly they had swallowed supper the Colonel remarked: "I feel as
+ready for my bed as I did Saturday night."
+
+Ah! Saturday night--that was different. They looked at each other with
+the same thought.
+
+"Well, that bed at Holy Cross isn't any whiter than this," laughed the
+Boy.
+
+But the Colonel was not to be deceived by this light and airy
+reference. His own unwilling sentiments were a guide to the Boy's, and
+he felt it incumbent upon him to restore the Holy Cross incident to its
+proper proportions. Those last words of Father Brachet's bothered him.
+Had they been "gettin' at" the Boy?
+
+"You think all that mission business mighty wonderful--just because you
+run across it in Alaska."
+
+"And isn't it wonderful at all?"
+
+The Boy spoke dreamily, and, from force of old habit, held out his
+mittened hands to the unavailing fire.
+
+The Colonel gave a prefatory grunt of depreciation, but he was pulling
+his blankets out from under the stuff on the sled.
+
+The Boy turned his head, and watched him with a little smile. "I'll
+admit that I always _used_ to think the Jesuits were a shady lot--"
+
+"So they are--most of 'em."
+
+"Well, I don't know about 'most of 'em.' You and Mac used to talk a lot
+about the 'motives' of the few I do know. But as far as I can see,
+every creature who comes up to this country comes to take something out
+of it--except those Holy Cross fellas. They came to bring something."
+
+The Colonel had got the blankets out now, but where was the rubber
+sheet? He wouldn't sleep on it in this weather, again, for a kingdom,
+but when the thaws came, if those explorer fellas were right--
+
+In his sense of irritation at a conscientious duty to perform and no
+clear notion of how to discharge it, he made believe it was the
+difficulty in finding the rubber sheet he didn't want that made him out
+of sorts.
+
+"It's bitter work, anyhow, this making beds with your fingers stiff and
+raw," he said.
+
+"Is it?"
+
+Dignity looked at Impudence sitting in the shelter, smiling.
+
+"Humph! Just try it," growled the Colonel.
+
+"I s'pose the man over the fire cookin' supper does _look_ better off
+than the 'pore pardner' cuttin' down trees and makin' beds in the snow.
+But he isn't."
+
+"Oh, isn't he?" It was all right, but the Big Chimney boss felt he had
+chosen the lion's share of the work in electing to be woodman; still,
+it wasn't _that_ that troubled him. Now, what was it he had been going
+to say about the Jesuits? Something very telling.
+
+"If you mean that you'd rather go back to the cookin'," the Boy was
+saying, "_I'm_ agreeable."
+
+"Well, you start in to-morrow, and see if you're so agreeable."
+
+"All right. I think I dote on one job just about as much as I do on
+t'other."
+
+But still the Colonel frowned. He couldn't remember that excellent
+thing he had been going to say about Romanists. But he sniffed
+derisively, and flung over his shoulder:
+
+"To hear you goin' on, anybody'd think the Jesuits were the only
+Christians. As if there weren't others, who--"
+
+"Oh, yes, Christians with gold shovels and Winchester rifles. I know
+'em. But if gold hadn't been found, how many of the army that's invaded
+the North--how many would be here, if it hadn't been for the gold? But
+all this Holy Cross business would be goin' on just the same, as it has
+done for years and years."
+
+With a mighty tug the Colonel dragged out the rubber blanket, flung it
+down on the snow, and squared himself, back to the fire, to make short
+work of such views.
+
+"I'd no notion you were such a sucker. You can bet," he said darkly,
+"those fellas aren't making a bad thing out of that 'Holy Cross
+business,' as you call it."
+
+"I didn't mean business in that sense."
+
+"What else could they do if they didn't do this?"
+
+"Ask the same of any parson."
+
+But the Colonel didn't care to.
+
+"I suppose," he said severely, "you could even make a hero out of that
+hang-dog Brother Etienne."
+
+"No, but he _could_ do something else, for he's served in the French
+army."
+
+"Then there's that mad Brother Paul. What good would he be at anything
+else?"
+
+"Well, I don't know."
+
+"Brachet and Wills are decent enough men, but where else would they
+have the power and the freedom they have at Holy Cross? Why, they live
+there like feudal barons."
+
+"Father Richmond could have done anything he chose."
+
+"Ah, Father Richmond--" The Colonel shut his mouth suddenly, turned
+about, and proceeded to crawl under his blankets, feet to the fire.
+
+"Well?"
+
+No answer.
+
+"Well?" insisted the Boy.
+
+"Oh, Father Richmond must have seen a ghost."
+
+"_What!_"
+
+"Take my word for it. _He_ got frightened somehow. A man like Father
+Richmond has to be scared into a cassock."
+
+The Boy's sudden laughter deepened the Colonel's own impression that
+the instance chosen had not been fortunate. One man of courage knows
+another man of courage when he sees him, and the Colonel knew he had
+damned his own argument.
+
+"Wouldn't care for the job myself," the Boy was saying.
+
+"What job?"
+
+"Scarin' Father Richmond."
+
+The Boy sat watching the slow wet snow-flakes fall and die in the fire.
+His clothes were pretty damp, but he was warm after a chilly fashion,
+as warmth goes on the trail.
+
+The Colonel suddenly put his head out from under the marmot-skin to say
+discontentedly, "What you sittin' up for?"
+
+"Oh ... for instance!" But aside from the pertness of the answer,
+already it was dimly recognised as an offence for one to stay up longer
+than the other.
+
+"Can't think how it is," the Colonel growled, "that you don't see that
+their principle is wrong. Through and through mediaeval, through and
+through despotic. They make a virtue of weakness, a fetich of vested
+authority. And it isn't American authority, either."
+
+The Boy waited for him to quiet down. "What's the first rule," demanded
+the Colonel, half sitting up, "of the most powerful Catholic Order?
+Blind obedience to an old gentleman over in Italy."
+
+"I said last night, you know," the Boy put in quite meekly, "that it
+all seemed very un-American."
+
+"Huh! Glad you can see that much." The Colonel drove his huge fist at
+the provision-bag, as though to beat the stiffnecked beans into a
+feathery yielding. "Blind submission don't come easy to most Americans.
+The Great Republic was built upon revolt;" and he pulled the covers
+over his head.
+
+"I know, I know. We jaw an awful lot about freedom and about what's
+American. There's plenty o' free speech in America and plenty o'
+machinery, but there's a great deal o' human nature, too, I guess." The
+Boy looked out of the corner of his eye at the blanketed back of his
+big friend. "And maybe there'll always be some people who--who think
+there's something in the New Testament notion o' sacrifice and
+service."
+
+The Colonel rolled like an angry leviathan, and came to the surface to
+blow. But the Boy dashed on, with a fearful joy in his own temerity.
+"The difference between us, Colonel, is that I'm an unbeliever, and I
+know it, and you're a cantankerous old heathen, and you _don't_ know
+it." The Colonel sat suddenly bolt upright. "Needn't look at me like
+that. You're as bad as anybody--rather worse. Why are you _here?_
+Dazzled and lured by the great gold craze. An' you're not even poor.
+You want _more_ gold. You've got a home to stay in; but you weren't
+satisfied, not even in the fat lands down below."
+
+"Well," said the Colonel solemnly, blinking at the fire, "I hope I'm a
+Christian, but as to bein' satisfied--"
+
+"Church of England can't manage it, hey?"
+
+"Church of England's got nothing to do with it. It's a question o'
+character. Satisfied! We're little enough, God knows, but we're too big
+for that."
+
+The Boy stood up, back to the fire, eyes on the hilltops whitening in
+the starlight.
+
+"Perhaps--not--all of us."
+
+"Yes, sah, all of us." The Colonel lifted his head with a fierce look
+of most un-Christian pride. Behind him the hills, leaving the
+struggling little wood far down the slope, went up and up into dimness,
+reaching to the near-by stars, and looking down to the far-off camp
+fire by the great ice-river's edge.
+
+"Yes, sah," the Colonel thundered again, "all that have got good
+fightin' blood in 'em, like you and me. 'Tisn't as if we came of any
+worn-out, frightened, servile old stock. You and I belong to the
+free-livin', hard-ridin', straight-shootin' Southerners. The people
+before us fought bears, and fought Indians, and beat the British, and
+when there wasn't anything else left to beat, turned round and began to
+beat one another. It was the one battle we found didn't pay. We
+finished that job up in '65, and since then we've been lookin' round
+for something else to beat. We've got down now to beatin' records, and
+foreign markets, and breedin' prize bulls; but we don't breed
+cowards--yet; and we ain't lookin' round for any asylums. The Catholic
+Church is an asylum. It's for people who never had any nerve, or who
+have lost it."
+
+The Colonel turned about, wagged his head defiantly at the icy hills
+and the night, and in the after-stillness fell sound asleep in the
+snow.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE
+
+  "--paa dit Firmament
+    Den klare Nordlyslampe taendt...."
+
+
+Innocently thinking that they had seen Arctic travelling at its worst,
+and secretly looking upon themselves as highly accomplished trailmen,
+they had covered the forty-one miles from Holy Cross to Anvik in less
+than three days.
+
+The Colonel made much of the pleasant and excellent man at the head of
+the Episcopal mission there, and the Boy haunted Benham's store,
+picking up a little Ingalik and the A. C. method of trading with the
+Indians, who, day and night, with a number of stranded Klondykers,
+congregated about the grateful warmth of the big iron stove.
+
+The travellers themselves did some business with the A. C. agent,
+laying in supplies of fresh meat, and even augmenting their hitherto
+carefully restricted outfit, for they were going far beyond the reach
+of stores, or even of missions. Anvik was the last white settlement
+below Nulato; Nulato was said to be over two hundred miles to the
+northward.
+
+And yet after all their further preparation and expense, each man kept
+saying in his heart, during those first days out from Anvik, that the
+journey would be easy enough but for their "comforts"--the burden on
+the sled. By all the rules of arithmetic, the daily subtraction of
+three meals from the store should have lightened the load. It seemed to
+have the opposite effect. By some process of evil enchantment every
+ounce grew to weigh a pound, every pound a hundredweight. The sled
+itself was bewitched. Recall how lightsomely it ran down the snowy
+slope, from the Big Chimney Cabin to the river trail, that morning they
+set forth. The Boy took its pretty impetuosity for a happy augury--the
+very sled was eager for the mighty undertaking.
+
+But never in all that weary march did it manifest again any such modest
+alacrity. If, thereafter, in the long going "up river" there came an
+interval of downhill, the sled turned summersaults in the air, wound
+its forward or backward rope round willow scrub or alder, or else
+advanced precipitately with an evil, low-comedy air, bottom side up, to
+attack its master in the shins. It either held back with a power
+superhuman, or it lunged forward with a momentum that capsized its
+weary conductor. Its manners grew steadily worse as the travellers
+pushed farther and farther into the wilderness, beyond the exorcising
+power of Holy Cross, beyond the softening influences of Christian
+hospitality at Episcopal Anvik, even beyond Tischsocket, the last of
+the Indian villages for a hundred miles.
+
+The two who had been scornful of the frailty of temper they had seen
+common in men's dealings up here in the North, began to realize that
+all other trials of brotherhood pale before the strain of life on the
+Arctic trail. Beyond any question, after a while something goes wrong
+with the nerves. The huge drafts on muscular endurance have, no doubt,
+something to do with it. They worked hard for fourteen, sometimes
+seventeen, hours at a stretch; they were ill-fed, suffering from
+exposure, intense cold, and a haunting uncertainty of the end of the
+undertaking. They were reasonable fellows as men go, with a respect for
+each other, but when hardship has got on the nerves, when you are
+suffering the agonies of snow-blindness, sore feet, and the pangs of
+hunger, you are not, to put it mildly, at your best as a member of the
+social order. They sometimes said things they were ashamed to remember,
+but both men grew carefuller at crucial moments, and the talkative one
+more silent as time went on.
+
+By the rule of the day the hard shift before dinner usually fell to the
+Boy. It was the worst time in the twenty-four hours, and equally
+dreaded by both men. It was only the first night out from Anvik, after
+an unusually trying day, the Boy was tramping heavily ahead, bent like
+an old man before the cutting sleet, fettered like a criminal, hands
+behind back, rope-wound, stiff, straining at the burden of the slow and
+sullen sled. On a sudden he stopped, straightened his back, and
+remonstrated with the Colonel in unprintable terms, for putting off the
+halt later than ever they had yet, "after such a day."
+
+"Can't make fire with green cotton-wood," was the Colonel's rejoiner.
+
+"Then let's stop and rest, anyhow."
+
+"Nuh! We know where that would land us. Men who stop to rest, go to
+sleep in the snow, and men who go to sleep in the snow on empty
+stomachs don't wake up."
+
+They pushed on another mile. When the Colonel at last called the halt,
+the Boy sank down on the sled too exhausted to speak. But it had grown
+to be a practice with them not to trust themselves to talk at this
+hour. The Colonel would give the signal to stop, simply by ceasing to
+push the sled that the boy was wearily dragging. The Boy had invariably
+been feeling (just as the Colonel had before, during his shift in
+front) that the man behind wasn't helping all he might, whereupon
+followed a vague, consciously unreasonable, but wholly irresistible
+rage against the partner of his toil. But however much the man at the
+back was supposed to spare himself, the man in front had never yet
+failed to know when the impetus from behind was really removed.
+
+The Boy sat now on the sled, silent, motionless, while the Colonel
+felled and chopped and brought the wood. Then the Boy dragged himself
+up, made the fire and the beef-tea. But still no word even after that
+reviving cup--the usual signal for a few remarks and more social
+relations to be established. Tonight no sound out of either. The
+Colonel changed his footgear and the melted snow in the pot began to
+boil noisily. But the Boy, who had again betaken himself to the sled,
+didn't budge. No man who really knows the trail would have dared, under
+the circumstances, to remind his pardner that it was now his business
+to get up and fry the bacon. But presently, without looking up, the
+hungry Colonel ventured:
+
+"Get your dry things!"
+
+"Feet aren't wet."
+
+"Don't talk foolishness; here are your things." The Colonel flung in
+the Boy's direction the usual change, two pairs of heavy socks, the
+"German knitted" and "the felt."
+
+"Not wet," repeated the Boy.
+
+"You know you are."
+
+"Could go through water in these mucklucks."
+
+"I'm not saying the wet has come in from outside; but you know as well
+as I do a man sweats like a horse on the trail."
+
+Still the Boy sat there, with his head sunk between his shoulders.
+
+"First rule o' this country is to keep your feet dry, or else
+pneumonia, rheumatism--God knows what!"
+
+"First rule o' this country is mind your own business, or else--God
+knows what!"
+
+The Colonel looked at the Boy a moment, and then turned his back. The
+Boy glanced up conscience-stricken, but still only half alive, dulled
+by the weight of a crushing weariness. The Colonel presently bent over
+the fire and was about to lift off the turbulently boiling pot. The Boy
+sprang to his feet, ready to shout, "You do your work, and keep your
+hands off mine," but the Colonel turned just in time to say with
+unusual gentleness:
+
+"If you _like_, I'll make supper to-night;" and the Boy, catching his
+breath, ran forward, swaying a little, half blind, but with a different
+look in his tired eyes.
+
+"No, no, old man. It isn't as bad as that."
+
+And again it was two friends who slept side by side in the snow.
+
+The next morning the Colonel, who had been kept awake half the night by
+what he had been thinking was neuralgia in his eyes, woke late, hearing
+the Boy calling:
+
+"I say, Kentucky, aren't you _ever_ goin' to get up?"
+
+"Get up?" said the Colonel. "Why should I, when it's pitch-dark?"
+
+"_What?_"
+
+"Fire clean out, eh?" But he smelt the tea and bacon, and sat up
+bewildered, with a hand over his smarting eyes. The Boy went over and
+knelt down by him, looking at him curiously.
+
+"Guess you're a little snow-blind, Colonel; but it won't last, you
+know."
+
+"Blind!"
+
+"No, no, only _snow_-blind. Big difference;" and he took out his rag of
+a handkerchief, got some water in a tin cup, and the eyes were bathed
+and bandaged.
+
+"It won't last, you know. You'll just have to take it easy for a few
+days."
+
+The Colonel groaned.
+
+For the first time he seemed to lose heart. He sat during breakfast
+with bandaged eyes, and a droop of the shoulders, that seemed to say
+old age had come upon him in a single night. The day that followed was
+pretty dark to both men. The Boy had to do all the work, except the
+monotonous, blind, pushing from behind, in whatever direction the Boy
+dragged the sled.
+
+Now, snow-blindness is not usually dangerous, but it is horribly
+painful while it lasts. Your eyes swell up and are stabbed continually
+by cutting pains; your head seems full of acute neuralgia, and often
+there is fever and other complications. The Colonel's was a bad case.
+But he was a giant for strength and "sound as a dollar," as the Boy
+reminded him, "except for this little bother with your eyes, and you're
+a whole heap better already."
+
+At a very slow rate they plodded along.
+
+They had got into a region where there was no timber; but, as they
+couldn't camp without a fire, they took an extra rest that day at four
+o'clock, and regaled themselves on some cold grub. Then they took up
+the line of march again. But they had been going only about half an
+hour when the Colonel suddenly, without warning, stopped pushing the
+sled, and stood stock-still on the trail. The Boy, feeling the removal
+of the pressure, looked round, went back to him, and found nothing in
+particular was the matter, but he just thought he wouldn't go any
+further.
+
+"We can camp here."
+
+"No, we can't," says the Boy; "there isn't a tree in sight."
+
+But the Colonel seemed dazed. He thought he'd stop anyhow--"right where
+he was."
+
+"Oh, no," says the Boy, a little frightened; "we'll camp the minute we
+come to wood." But the Colonel stood as if rooted. The Boy took his arm
+and led him on a few paces to the sled. "You needn't push hard, you
+know. Just keep your hand there so, without looking, you'll know where
+I'm going." This was very subtle of the Boy. For he knew the Colonel
+was blind as a bat and as sensitive as a woman. "We'll get through all
+right yet," he called back, as he stooped to take up the sledrope. "I
+bet on Kentucky."
+
+Like a man walking in his sleep, the Colonel followed, now holding on
+to the sled and unconsciously pulling a little, and when the Boy, very
+nearly on his last legs, remonstrated, leaning against it, and so
+urging it a little forward.
+
+Oh, but the wood was far to seek that night!
+
+Concentrated on the two main things--to carry forward his almost
+intolerable load, and to go the shortest way to the nearest wood--the
+Boy, by-and-by, forgot to tell his tired nerves to take account of the
+unequal pressure from behind. If he felt it--well, the Colonel was a
+corker; if he didn't feel it--well, the Colonel was just about tuckered
+out. It was very late when at last the Boy raised a shout. Behind the
+cliff overhanging the river-bed that they were just rounding, there,
+spread out in the sparkling starlight, as far as he could see, a vast
+primeval forest. The Boy bettered his lagging pace.
+
+"Ha! you haven't seen a wood like this since we left 'Frisco. It's all
+right now, Kentucky;" and he bent to his work with a will.
+
+When he got to the edge of the wood, he flung down the rope and
+turned--to find himself alone.
+
+"Colonel! Colonel! Where are you? _Colonel!_"
+
+He stood in the silence, shivering with a sudden sense of desolation.
+He took his bearings, propped a fallen fir sapling aslant by the sled,
+and, forgetting he was ready to drop, he ran swiftly hack along the way
+he came. They had travelled all that afternoon and evening on the river
+ice, hard as iron, retaining no trace of footprint or of runner
+possible to verify even in daylight. The Yukon here was fully three
+miles wide. They had meant to hug the right bank, but snow and ice
+refashion the world and laugh at the trustful geography of men. A
+traveller on this trail is not always sure whether he is following the
+mighty Yukon or some slough equally mighty for a few miles, or whether,
+in the protracted twilight, he has not wandered off upon some frozen
+swamp.
+
+On the Boy went in the ghostly starlight, running, stumbling, calling
+at regular intervals, his voice falling into a melancholy monotony that
+sounded foreign to himself. It occurred to him that were he the Colonel
+he wouldn't recognise it, and he began instead to call "Kentucky!
+Ken-tuck-kee!" sounding those fine barbaric syllables for the first
+time, most like, in that world of ice and silence.
+
+He stood an instant after his voice died, and listened to the quiet.
+Yes, the people were right who said nothing was so hard to bear in this
+country of hardship--nothing ends by being so ghastly--as the silence.
+No bird stirs. The swift-flashing fish are sealed under ice, the wood
+creatures gone to their underground sleep. No whispering of the pointed
+firs, stiff, snowclotted; no swaying of the scant herbage sheathed in
+ice or muffled under winter's wide white blanket. No greater hush can
+reign in the interstellar spaces than in winter on the Yukon.
+
+"Colonel!"
+
+Silence--like a negation of all puny things, friendship, human life--
+
+"Colonel!"
+
+Silence. No wonder men went mad up here, when they didn't drown this
+silence in strong drink.
+
+On and on he ran, till he felt sure he must have passed the Colonel,
+unless--yes, there were those air-holes in the river ice ... He felt
+choked and stopped to breathe. Should he go back? It was horrible to
+turn. It was like admitting that the man was not to be found--that this
+was the end.
+
+"Colonel!"
+
+He said to himself that he would go back, and build a fire for a
+signal, and return; but he ran on farther and farther away from the
+sled and from the forest. Was it growing faintly light? He looked up.
+Oh, yes; presently it would be brighter still. Those streamers of pale
+light dancing in the North; they would be green and scarlet and orange
+and purple, and the terrible white world would be illumined as by
+conflagration. He stopped again. That the Colonel should have dropped
+so far back as this, and the man in front not know--it was incredible.
+What was that? A shadow on the ice. A frozen hummock? No, a man. Was it
+really....? Glory hallelujah--it _was!_ But the shadow lay there
+ghastly still and the Boy's greeting died in his throat. He had found
+the Colonel, but he had found him delivered over to that treacherous
+sleep that seldom knows a waking. The Boy dropped down beside his
+friend, and wasn't far off crying. But it was a tonic to young nerves
+to see how, like one dead, the man lay there, for all the calling and
+tugging by the arm. The Boy rolled the body over, pulled open the
+things at the neck, and thrust his hand down, till he could feel the
+heart beating. He jumped up, got a handful of snow, and rubbed the
+man's face with it. At last a feeble protest--an effort to get away
+from the Boy's rude succour.
+
+"Thank God! Colonel! Colonel! wake up!"
+
+He shook him hard. But the big man only growled sullenly, and let his
+leaden weight drop back heavily on the ice. The Boy got hold of the
+neck of the Colonel's parki and pulled him frantically along the ice a
+few yards, and then realised that only the terror of the moment gave
+him the strength to do that much. To drag a man of the Colonel's weight
+all the way to the wood was stark impossibility. He couldn't get him
+eighty yards. If he left him and went for the sled and fuel, the man
+would be dead by the time he got back. If he stayed, they would both be
+frozen in a few hours. It was pretty horrible.
+
+He felt faint and dizzy. It occurred to him that he would pray. He was
+an agnostic all right, but the Colonel was past praying for himself;
+and here was his friend--an agnostic--here he was on his knees. He
+hadn't prayed since he was a little chap down in the South. How did the
+prayers go? "Our Father"--he looked up at the reddening aurora--"Our
+Father, who art in heaven--" His eyes fell again on his friend. He
+leapt to his feet like a wild animal, and began to go at the Colonel
+with his fists. The blows rained thick on the chest of the prostrate
+man, but he was too well protected to feel more than the shock. But now
+they came battering down, under the ear--right, left, as the man turned
+blindly to avoid them--on the jaw, even on the suffering eyes, and that
+at last stung the sleeper into something like consciousness.
+
+He struggled to his feet with a roar like a wounded bull, lunging
+heavily forward as the Boy eluded him, and he would have pounded the
+young fellow out of existence in no time had he stood his ground. That
+was exactly what the Boy didn't mean to do--he was always just a little
+way on in front; but as the Colonel's half-insane rage cooled, and he
+slowed down a bit, the Boy was at him again like some imp of Satan.
+Sound and lithe and quick-handed as he was, he was no match for the
+Colonel at his best. But the Colonel couldn't see well, and his brain
+was on fire. He'd kill that young devil, and then he'd lie down and
+sleep again.
+
+Meanwhile Aurora mounted the high heavens; from a great corona in the
+zenith all the sky was hung with banners, and the snow was stained as
+if with blood. The Boy looked over his shoulder, and saw the huge
+figure of his friend, bearing down upon him, with his discoloured face
+rage-distorted, and murder in his tortured eyes. A moment's sense of
+the monstrous spectacle fell so poignant upon the Boy, that he felt
+dimly he must have been full half his life running this race with
+death, followed by a maniac bent on murder, in a world whose winter was
+strangely lit with the leaping fires of hell.
+
+At last, on there in front, the cliff! Below it, the sharp bend in the
+river, and although he couldn't see it yet, behind the cliff the
+forest, and a little hand-sled bearing the means of life.
+
+The Colonel was down again, but it wasn't safe to go near him just yet.
+The Boy ran on, unpacked the sled, and went, axe in hand, along the
+margin of the wood. Never before was a fire made so quickly. Then, with
+the flask, back to the Colonel, almost as sound asleep as before.
+
+The Boy never could recall much about the hours that followed. There
+was nobody to help, so it must have been he who somehow got the Colonel
+to the fire, got him to swallow some food, plastered his wounded face
+over with the carbolic ointment, and got him into bed, for in the
+morning all this was seen to have been done.
+
+They stayed in camp that day to "rest up," and the Boy shot a rabbit.
+The Colonel was coming round; the rest, or the ointment, or the
+tea-leaf poultice, had been good for snowblindness. The generous
+reserve of strength in his magnificent physique was quick to announce
+itself. He was still "frightfully bunged up," but "I think we'll push
+on to-morrow," he said that night, as he sat by the fire smoking before
+turning in.
+
+"Right you are!" said the Boy, who was mending the sled-runner. Neither
+had referred to that encounter on the river-ice, that had ended in
+bringing the Colonel where there was succour. Nothing was said, then or
+for long after, in the way of deliberate recognition that the Boy had
+saved his life. It wasn't necessary; they understood each other.
+
+But in the evening, after the Boy had finished mending the sled, it
+occurred to him he must also mend the Colonel before they went to bed.
+He got out the box of ointment and bespread the strips of torn
+handkerchief.
+
+"Don't know as I need that to-night," says the Colonel. "Musn't waste
+ointment." But the Boy brought the bandages round to the Colonel's
+side of the fire. For an instant they looked at each other by the
+flickering light, and the Colonel laid his hand on the Boy's arm. His
+eyes looked worse for the moment, and began to water. He turned away
+brusquely, and knocked the ashes out of his pipe on a log.
+
+"What in hell made you think of it?"
+
+"Ask me an easy one," says the Boy. "But I know what the Jesuit Fathers
+would say."
+
+"Jesuits and George Warren! Humph! precious little we'd agree about."
+
+"You would about this. It flashed over me when I looked back and saw
+you peltin' after me."
+
+"Small wonder I made for you! I'm not findin' fault, but what on earth
+put it into your head to go at me with your fists like that?"
+
+"You'll never prove it by me. But when I saw you comin' at me like a
+mad bull, I thought to myself, thinks I, the Colonel and the Jesuits,
+they'd both of 'em say this was a direct answer to prayer."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE PIT
+
+"L'humanité a commencé tout entière par le crime .... C'était le vieux
+nourricier des hommes des cavernes."--ANATOLE FRANCE.
+
+
+An old story now, these days of silent plodding through the driving
+snow.
+
+But if outward conditions lacked variety, not so their cumulative
+effect upon poor human nature. A change was going on in the travellers
+that will little commend them to the sentimentalist.
+
+"I've come to think a snow-storm's all right to travel in, all right to
+sleep in," said the Colonel one morning; "but to cook in, eat in, make
+or break camp in--it's the devil's champion invention." For three days
+they had worked like galley-slaves, and yet covered less than ten miles
+a day. "And you never get rested," the Colonel went on; "I get up as
+tired as I go to bed." Again the Boy only nodded. His body, if not his
+temper, had got broken into the trail, but for a talkative person he
+had in these days strangely little to say. It became manifest that, in
+the long run, the Colonel would suffer the most physically; but his
+young companion, having less patience and more ambition, more sheer
+untamed vitality in him, would suffer the most in spirit. Every sense
+in him was becoming numbed, save the gnawing in his stomach, and that
+other, even more acute ache, queer compound of fatigue and anger. These
+two sensations swallowed up all else, and seemed to grow by what they
+fed on.
+
+The loaded sled was a nightmare. It weighed a thousand tons. The very
+first afternoon out from Anvik, when in the desperate hauling and
+tugging that rescued it from a bottomless snow-drift, the lashing
+slipped, the load loosened, tumbled off, and rolled open, the Colonel
+stood quite still and swore till his half-frozen blood circulated
+freely again. When it came to repacking, he considered in detail the
+items that made up the intolerable weight, and fell to wondering which
+of them they could do without.
+
+The second day out from Anvik they had decided that it was absurd,
+after all, to lug about so much tinware. They left a little saucepan
+and the extra kettle at that camp. The idea, so potent at Anvik, of
+having a tea-kettle in reserve--well, the notion lost weight, and the
+kettle seemed to gain.
+
+Two pairs of boots and some flannels marked the next stopping-place.
+
+On the following day, when the Boy's rifle kept slipping and making a
+brake to hold back the sled, "I reckon you'll have to plant that rifle
+o' yours in the next big drift," said the Colonel; "one's all we need,
+anyway."
+
+"One's all you need, and one's all I need," answered the Boy stiffly.
+
+But it wasn't easy to see immediate need for either. Never was country
+so bare of game, they thought, not considering how little they hunted,
+and how more and more every faculty, every sense, was absorbed in the
+bare going forward.
+
+The next time the Colonel said something about the uselessness of
+carrying two guns, the Boy flared up: "If you object to guns, leave
+yours."
+
+This was a new tone for the Boy to use to the Colonel.
+
+"Don't you think we'd better hold on to the best one?"
+
+Now the Boy couldn't deny that the Colonel's was the better, but none
+the less he had a great affection for his own old 44 Marlin, and the
+Colonel shouldn't assume that he had the right to dictate. This
+attitude of the "wise elder" seemed out of place on the trail.
+
+"A gun's a necessity. I haven't brought along any whim-whams."
+
+"Who has?"
+
+"Well, it wasn't me that went loadin' up at Anvik with fool
+thermometers and things."
+
+"Thermometer! Why, it doesn't weigh--"
+
+"Weighs something, and it's something to pack; frozen half the time,
+too. And when it isn't, what's the good of havin' it hammered into us
+how near we are to freezin' to death." But it annoyed him to think how
+very little in argument a thermometer weighed against a rifle.
+
+They said no more that day about lightening the load, but with a double
+motive they made enormous inroads upon their provisions.
+
+A morning came when the Colonel, packing hurriedly in the biting cold,
+forgot to shove his pardner's gun into its accustomed place.
+
+The Boy, returning from trail-breaking to the river, kicked at the butt
+to draw attention to the omission. The Colonel flung down the end of
+the ice-coated rope he had lashed the load with, and, "Pack it
+yourself," says he.
+
+The Boy let the rifle lie. But all day long he felt the loss of it
+heavy on his heart, and no reconciling lightness in the sled.
+
+The Colonel began to have qualms about the double rations they were
+using. It was only the seventeenth night after turning their backs on
+the Big Chimney, as the Colonel tipped the pan, pouring out half the
+boiled beans into his pardner's plate, "That's the last o' the
+strawberries! Don't go expectin' any more," says he.
+
+"What!" ejaculated the Boy, aghast; then quickly, to keep a good face:
+"You take my life when you do take the beans, whereby I live."
+
+When the Colonel had disposed of his strawberries, "Lord!" he sighed,
+trying to rub the stiffness out of his hands over the smoke, "the
+appetite a fella can raise up here is something terrible. You eat and
+eat, and it doesn't seem to make any impression. You're just as hungry
+as ever."
+
+_"And the stuff a fella can eat!"_
+
+The Colonel recalled that speech of the Boy's the very next night,
+when, after "a hell of a time" getting the fire alight, he was bending
+forward in that attitude most trying to maintain, holding the
+frying-pan at long range over the feebly-smoking sticks. He had to
+cook, to live on snow-shoes nowadays, for the heavy Colonel had
+illustrated oftener than the Boy, that going without meant breaking in,
+floundering, and, finally, having to call for your pardner to haul you
+out. This was one of the many uses of a pardner on the trail. The last
+time the Colonel had trusted to the treacherous crust he had gone in
+head foremost, and the Boy, happening to look round, saw only two
+snow-shoes, bottom side up, moving spasmodically on the surface of the
+drift. The Colonel was nearly suffocated by the time he was pulled out,
+and after that object-lesson he stuck to snow-shoes every hour of the
+twenty-four, except those spent in the sleeping-bag.
+
+But few things on earth are more exasperating than trying to work
+mounted on clumsy, long web-feet that keep jarring against, yet holding
+you off from, the tree you are felling, or the fire you are cooking
+over. You are constrained to stand wholly out of natural relation to
+the thing you are trying to do--the thing you've got to do, if you mean
+to come out alive.
+
+The Colonel had been through all this time and time again. But as he
+squatted on his heels to-night, cursing the foot and a half of
+snow-shoe that held him away from the sullen fire, straining every
+muscle to keep the outstretched frying-pan over the best of the blaze,
+he said to himself that what had got him on the raw was that speech of
+the Boy's yesterday about the stuff he had to eat. If the Boy objected
+to having his rice parboiled in smoked water he was damned
+unreasonable, that was all.
+
+The culprit reappeared at the edge of the darkening wood. He came up
+eagerly, and flung down an armful of fuel for the morning, hoping to
+find supper ready. Since it wasn't, he knew that he mustn't stand about
+and watch the preparations. By this time he had learned a good deal of
+the trail-man's unwritten law. On no account must you hint that the
+cook is incompetent, or even slow, any more than he may find fault with
+your moment for calling halt, or with your choice of timber. So the
+woodman turned wearily away from the sole spot of brightness in the
+waste, and went back up the hill in the dark and the cold, to busy
+himself about his own work, even to spin it out, if necessary, till he
+should hear the gruff "Grub's ready!" And when that dinner-gong sounds,
+don't you dally! Don't you wait a second. You may feel uncomfortable if
+you find yourself twenty minutes late for a dinner in London or New
+York, but to be five minutes late for dinner on the Winter Trail is to
+lay up lasting trouble.
+
+By the time the rice and bacon were done, and the flap-jack, still raw
+in the middle, was burnt to charcoal on both sides, the Colonel's eyes
+were smarting, in the acrid smoke, and the tears were running down his
+cheeks.
+
+"Grub's ready!"
+
+The Boy came up and dropped on his heels in the usual attitude. The
+Colonel tore a piece off the half-charred, half-raw pancake.
+
+"Maybe you'll think the fire isn't thoroughly distributed, but _that's
+_got to do for bread," he remarked severely, as if in reply to some
+objection.
+
+The Boy saw that something he had said or looked had been
+misinterpreted.
+
+"Hey? Too much fire outside, and not enough in? Well, sir, I'll trust
+_my_ stomach to strike a balance. Guess the heat'll get distributed all
+right once I've swallowed it."
+
+When the Colonel, mollified, said something about cinders in the rice,
+the Boy, with his mouth full of grit, answered: "I'm pretendin' it's
+sugar."
+
+Not since the episode of the abandoned rifle had he shown himself so
+genial.
+
+"Never in all my bohn life," says the Colonel after eating steadily for
+some time--"never in a year, sah, have I thought as much about food as
+I do in a day on this----trail."
+
+"Same here."
+
+"And it's quantity, not quality."
+
+"Ditto."
+
+The Boy turned his head sharply away from the fire. "Hear that?"
+
+No need to ask. The Colonel had risen upright on his cramped legs, red
+eyes starting out of his head. The Boy got up, turned about in the
+direction of the hollow sound, and made one step away from the fire.
+
+"You stay right where you are!" ordered the Colonel, quite in the old
+way.
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"That's a bird-song."
+
+"Thought so."
+
+"Mr. Wolf smelt the cookin'; want's the rest of the pack to know
+there's something queer up here on the hill." Then, as the Boy moved to
+one side in the dark: "What you lookin' for?"
+
+"My gun."
+
+"Mine's here."
+
+Oh yes! His own old 44 Marlin was lying far down the river under
+eight-and-fifty hours of snow. It angered him newly and more than ever
+to remember that if he had a shot at anything now it must needs be by
+favour of the Colonel.
+
+They listened for that sound again, the first since leaving Anvik not
+made by themselves.
+
+"Seems a lot quieter than it did," observed the Colonel by-and-bye.
+
+The Boy nodded.
+
+Without preface the Colonel observed: "It's five days since I washed my
+face and hands."
+
+"What's the good o' rememberin'?" returned the Boy sharply. Then more
+mildly: "People talk about the bare necessaries o' life. Well, sir,
+when they're really bare you find there ain't but three--food, warmth,
+sleep."
+
+Again in the distance that hollow baying.
+
+"Food, warmth, sleep," repeated the Colonel. "We've about got down to
+the wolf basis."
+
+He said it half in defiance of the trail's fierce lessoning; but it was
+truer than he knew.
+
+They built up the fire to frighten off the wolves, but the Colonel had
+his rifle along when they went over and crawled into their
+sleeping-bag. Half in, half out, he laid the gun carefully along the
+right on his snow-shoes. As the Boy buttoned the fur-lined flap down
+over their heads he felt angrier with the Colonel than he had ever been
+before.
+
+"Took good care to hang on to his own shootin'-iron. Suppose anything
+should happen"; and he said it over and over.
+
+Exactly what could happen he did not make clear; the real danger was
+not from wolves, but it was _something_. And he would need a rifle....
+And he wouldn't have one.... And it was the Colonel's fault.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now, it had long been understood that the woodman is lord of the wood.
+When it came to the Colonel's giving unasked advice about the lumber
+business, the Boy turned a deaf ear, and thought well of himself for
+not openly resenting the interference.
+
+"The Colonel talks an awful lot, anyway. He has more hot air to offer
+than muscle."
+
+When they sighted timber that commended itself to the woodman, if _he_
+thought well of it, why, he just dropped the sled-rope without a word,
+pulled the axe out of the lashing, trudged up the hillside, holding the
+axe against his shirt underneath his parki, till he reached whatever
+tree his eye had marked for his own. Off with the fur mitt, and bare
+hand protected by the inner mitt of wool, he would feel the axe-head,
+for there was always the danger of using it so cold that the steel
+would chip and fly. As soon as he could be sure the proper molecular
+change had been effected, he would take up his awkward attitude before
+the selected spruce, leaning far forward on his snow-shoes, and seeming
+to deliver the blows on tip-toe.
+
+But the real trouble came when, after felling the dead tree, splitting
+an armful of fuel and carrying it to the Colonel, he returned to the
+task of cutting down the tough green spruce for their bedding. Many
+strained blows must be delivered before he could effect the chopping of
+even a little notch. Then he would shift his position and cut a
+corresponding notch further round, so making painful circuit of the
+bole. To-night, what with being held off by his snow-shoes, what with
+utter weariness and a dulled axe, he growled to himself that he was
+"only gnawin' a ring round the tree like a beaver!"
+
+"Damn the whole--Wait!" Perhaps the cursed snow was packed enough now
+to bear. He slipped off the web-feet, and standing gingerly, but
+blessedly near, made effectual attack. Hooray! One more good 'un and
+the thing was down. Hah! ugh! Woof-ff! The tree was down, but so was
+he, floundering breast high, and at every effort to get out only
+breaking down more of the crust and sinking deeper.
+
+This was not the first time such a thing had happened. Why did he feel
+as if it was for him the end of the world? He lay still an instant. It
+would be happiness just to rest here and go to sleep. The Colonel! Oh,
+well, the Colonel had taken his rifle. Funny there should be
+orange-trees up here. He could smell them. He shut his eyes. Something
+shone red and glowing. Why, that was the sun making an effect of
+stained glass as it shone through the fat pine weather-boarding of his
+little bedroom on the old place down in Florida. Suddenly a face. _Ah,
+that face!_ He must be up and doing. He knew perfectly well how to get
+out of this damn hole. You lie on your side and roll. Gradually you
+pack the softness tight till it bears--not if you stand up on your
+feet, but bears the length of your body, while you worm your way
+obliquely to the top, and feel gingerly in the dimness after your
+snow-shoes.
+
+But if it happens on a pitch-dark night, and your pardner has chosen
+camp out of earshot, you feel that you have looked close at the end of
+the Long Trail.
+
+On getting back to the fire, he found the Colonel annoyed at having
+called "Grub!" three times--"yes, sah! three times, sah!"
+
+And they ate in silence.
+
+"Now I'm going to bed," said the Boy, rising stiffly.
+
+"You just wait a minute."
+
+"No."
+
+Now, the Colonel himself had enunciated the law that whenever one of
+them was ready to sleep the other must come too. He didn't know it, but
+it is one of the iron rules of the Winter Trail. In absence of its
+enforcement, the later comer brings into the warmed up sleeping-bag not
+only the chill of his own body, he lets in the bitter wind, and brings
+along whatever snow and ice is clinging to his boots and clothes. The
+melting and warming-up is all to be done again.
+
+But the Colonel was angry.
+
+"Most unreasonable," he muttered--"damned unreasonable!"
+
+Worse than the ice and the wet in the sleeping-bag, was this lying in
+such close proximity to a young jackanapes who wouldn't come when you
+called "Grub!" and wouldn't wait a second till you'd felt about in the
+dimness for your gun. Hideous to lie so close to a man who snored, and
+who'd deprived you of your 44 Marlin. Although it meant life, the Boy
+grudged the mere animal heat that he gave and that he took. Full of
+grudging, he dropped asleep. But the waking spirit followed him into
+his dreams. An ugly picture painted itself upon the dark, and
+struggling against the vision, he half awoke. With the first returning
+consciousness came the oppression of the yoke, the impulse to match the
+mental alienation with that of the body--strong need to move away.
+
+You can't move away in a sleeping-bag.
+
+In a city you may be alone, free.
+
+On the trail, you walk in bonds with your yoke-fellow, make your bed
+with him, with him rise up, and with him face the lash the livelong
+day.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Well," sighed the Colonel, after toiling onward for a couple of hours
+the next morning, "this is the worst yet."
+
+But by the middle of the afternoon, "What did I say? Why, this
+morning--_everything_ up till now has been child's play." He kept
+looking at the Boy to see if he could read any sign of halt in the
+tense, scarred face.
+
+Certainly the wind was worse, the going was worse. The sled kept
+breaking through and sinking to the level of the load. There it went!
+in again. They tugged and hauled, and only dragged the lashing loose,
+while the sled seemed soldered to the hard-packed middle of the drift.
+As they reloaded, the thermometer came to light. The Colonel threw it
+out, with never a word. They had no clothes now but what they stood in,
+and only one thing on the sled they could have lived without--their
+money, a packet of trading stores. But they had thrown away more than
+they knew. Day by day, not flannels and boots alone, not merely extra
+kettle, thermometer and gun went overboard, but some grace of courtesy,
+some decency of life had been left behind.
+
+About three o'clock of this same day, dim with snow, and dizzy in a
+hurricane of wind, "We can't go on like this," said the Boy suddenly.
+
+"Wish I knew the way we _could_ go on," returned the Colonel, stopping
+with an air of utter helplessness, and forcing his rigid hands into his
+pockets. The Boy looked at him. The man of dignity and resource, who
+had been the boss of the Big Chimney Camp--what had become of him? Here
+was only a big, slouching creature, with ragged beard, smoke-blackened
+countenance, and eyes that wept continually.
+
+"Come on," said his equally ruffianly-looking pardner, "we'll both go
+ahead."
+
+So they abandoned their sled for awhile, and when they had forged a
+way, came back, and one pulling, the other pushing, lifting, guiding,
+between them, with infinite pains they got their burden to the end of
+the beaten track, left it, and went ahead again--travelling three miles
+to make one.
+
+"What's the matter now?"
+
+The Boy was too tired to turn his head round and look back, but he knew
+that the other man wasn't doing his share. He remembered that other
+time when the Colonel had fallen behind. It seemed years ago, and even
+further away was the vague recollection of how he'd cared. How horribly
+frightened he'd been! Wasn't he frightened now? No. It was only a dull
+curiosity that turned him round at last to see what it was that made
+the Colonel peg out this time. He was always peggin' out. Yes, there he
+was, stoppin' to stroke himself. Trail-man? An old woman! Fit only for
+the chimney-corner. And even when they went on again he kept saying to
+himself as he bent to the galling strain, "An old woman--just an old
+woman!" till he made a refrain of the words, and in the level places
+marched to the tune. After that, whatever else his vague thought went
+off upon, it came back to "An old woman--just an old woman!"
+
+It was at a bad place towards the end of that forced march that the
+Colonel, instead of lifting the back of the sled, bore hard on the
+handle-bar. With a vicious sound it snapped. The Boy turned heavily at
+the noise. When he saw the Colonel standing, dazed, with the splintered
+bar in his hand, his dull eyes flashed. With sudden vigour he ran back
+to see the extent of the damage.
+
+"Well, it's pretty discouragin'," says the Colonel very low.
+
+The Boy gritted his teeth with suppressed rage. It was only a chance
+that it hadn't happened when he himself was behind, but he couldn't see
+that. No; it was the Colonel's bungling--tryin' to spare himself;
+leanin' on the bar instead o' liftin' the sled, as he, the Boy, would
+have done.
+
+With stiff hands they tried to improvise a makeshift with a stick of
+birch and some string.
+
+"Don't know what you think," says the Colonel presently, "but I call
+this a desperate business we've undertaken."
+
+The Boy didn't trust himself to call it anything. With a bungled job
+they went lamely on. The loose snow was whirling about so, it was
+impossible to say whether it was still falling, or only
+hurricane-driven.
+
+To the Colonel's great indignation it was later than usual before they
+camped.
+
+Not a word was spoken by either till they had finished their first
+meal, and the Colonel had melted a frying-pan full of snow preparatory
+to the second. He took up the rice-bag, held it by the top, and ran his
+mittened hand down the gathered sack till he had outlined the contents
+at the bottom.
+
+"Lord! That's all there is."
+
+The boy only blinked his half-shut eyes. The change in him, from
+talkativeness to utter silence, had grown horribly oppressive to the
+Colonel. He often felt he'd like to shake him till he shook some words
+out. "I told you days ago," he went on, "that we ought to go on
+rations."
+
+Silence.
+
+"But no! you knew so much better."
+
+The Boy shut his eyes, and suddenly, like one struggling against sleep
+or swooning, he roused himself.
+
+"I thought I knew the more we took off the damn sled the lighter it'd
+be. 'Tisn't so."
+
+"And we didn't either of us think we'd come down from eighteen miles a
+day to six," returned the Colonel, a little mollified by any sort of
+answer. "I don't believe we're going to put this job through."
+
+Now this was treason.
+
+Any trail-man may think that twenty times a day, but no one ought to
+say it. The Boy set his teeth, and his eyes closed. The whole thing was
+suddenly harder--doubt of the issue had been born into the world. But
+he opened his eyes again. The Colonel had carefully poured some of the
+rice into the smoky water of the pan. What was the fool doing? Such a
+little left, and making a second supper?
+
+Only that morning the Boy had gone a long way when mentally he called
+the boss of the Big Chimney Camp "an old woman." By night he was saying
+in his heart, "The Colonel's a fool." His pardner caught the look that
+matched the thought.
+
+"No more second helpin's," he said in self-defence; "this'll freeze
+into cakes for luncheon."
+
+No answer. No implied apology for that look. In the tone his pardner
+had come to dread the Colonel began: "If we don't strike a settlement
+to-morrow----"
+
+"Don't _talk!"_
+
+The Boy's tired arm fell on the handle of the frying-pan. Over it
+went--rice, water, and all in the fire. The culprit sprang up
+speechless with dismay, enraged at the loss of the food he was hungry
+for--enraged at "the fool fry-pan"--enraged at the fool Colonel for
+balancing it so badly.
+
+A column of steam and smoke rose into the frosty air between the two
+men. As it cleared away a little the Boy could see the Colonel's
+bloodshot eyes. The expression was ill to meet.
+
+When they crouched down again, with the damped-out fire between them, a
+sense of utter loneliness fell upon each man's heart.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next morning, when they came to digging the sled out of the last
+night's snow-drift, the Boy found to his horror that he was
+weaker--yes, a good deal. As they went on he kept stumbling. The
+Colonel fell every now and then. Sometimes he would lie still before he
+could pull himself on his legs again.
+
+In these hours they saw nothing of the grim and splendid waste; nothing
+of the ranks of snow-laden trees; nothing of sun course or of stars,
+only the half-yard of dazzling trail in front of them, and
+--clairvoyant--the little store of flour and bacon that seemed to
+shrink in the pack while they dragged it on.
+
+Apart from partial snow-blindness, which fell at intervals upon the
+Colonel, the tiredness of the eyes was like a special sickness upon
+them both. For many hours together they never raised their lids,
+looking out through slits, cat-like, on the world.
+
+They had not spoken to each other for many days--or was it only
+hours?--when the Colonel, looking at the Boy, said:
+
+"You've got to have a face-guard. Those frostbites are eating in."
+
+"'Xpect so."
+
+"You ought to stop it. Make a guard."
+
+"Out of a snow-ball, or chunk o' ice?"
+
+"Cut a piece out o' the canvas o' the bag." But he didn't.
+
+The big sores seemed such small matters beside the vast overshadowing
+doubt, Shall we come out of this alive?--doubt never to be openly
+admitted by him, but always knocking, knocking----
+
+"You can't see your own face," the Colonel persisted.
+
+"One piece o' luck, anyhow."
+
+The old habit of looking after the Boy died hard. The Colonel
+hesitated. For the last time he would remonstrate. "I used to think
+frost_bite_ was a figure o' speech," said he, "but the teeth were set
+in _your_ face, sonny, and they've bitten deep; they'll leave awful
+scars."
+
+"Battles do, I b'lieve." And it was with an effort that he remembered
+there had been a time when they had been uncomfortable because they
+hadn't washed their faces. Now, one man was content to let the very
+skin go if he could keep the flesh on his face, and one was little
+concerned even for that. Life--life! To push on and come out alive.
+
+The Colonel had come to that point where he resented the Boy's staying
+power, terrified at the indomitable young life in him. Yes, the Colonel
+began to feel old, and to think with vague wrath of the insolence of
+youth.
+
+Each man fell to considering what he would do, how he would manage if
+he were alone. And there ceased to be any terror in the thought.
+
+"If it wasn't for him"--so and so; till in the gradual deadening of
+judgment all the hardship was somehow your pardner's fault. Your nerves
+made him responsible even for the snow and the wind. By-and-by he was
+The Enemy. Not but what each had occasional moments of lucidity, and
+drew back from the pit they were bending over. But the realisation
+would fade. No longer did even the wiser of the two remember that this
+is that same abyss out of which slowly, painfully, the race has
+climbed. With the lessened power to keep from falling in, the terror of
+it lessened. Many strange things grew natural. It was no longer
+difficult or even shocking to conceive one's partner giving out and
+falling by the way. Although playing about the thought, the one thing
+that not even the Colonel was able actually to realise, was the
+imminent probability of death for himself. Imagination always pictured
+the other fellow down, one's self somehow forging ahead.
+
+This obsession ended on the late afternoon when the Colonel broke
+silence by saying suddenly:
+
+"We must camp; I'm done." He flung himself down under a bare birch, and
+hid his face.
+
+The Boy remonstrated, grew angry; then, with a huge effort at
+self-control, pointed out that since it had stopped snowing this was
+the very moment to go on.
+
+"Why, you can see the sun. Three of 'em! Look, Colonel!"
+
+But Arctic meteorological phenomena had long since ceased to interest
+the Kentuckian. Parhelia were less to him than covered eyes, and the
+perilous peace of the snow. It seemed a long time before he sat up, and
+began to beat the stiffness out of his hands against his breast. But
+when he spoke, it was only to say:
+
+"I mean to camp."
+
+"For how long?"
+
+"Till a team comes by--or something."
+
+The Boy got up abruptly, slipped on his snow-shoes, and went round the
+shoulder of the hill, and up on to the promontory, to get out of
+earshot of that voice, and determine which of the two ice-roads,
+stretching out before them, was main channel and which was tributary.
+
+He found on the height only a cutting wind, and little enlightenment as
+to the true course. North and east all nimbus still. A brace of
+sun-dogs following the pale God of Day across the narrow field of
+primrose that bordered the dun-coloured west. There would be more snow
+to-morrow, and meanwhile the wind was rising again. Yes, sir, it was a
+mean outlook.
+
+As he took Mac's aneroid barometer out of his pocket, a sudden gust cut
+across his raw and bleeding cheek. He turned abruptly; the barometer
+slipped out of his numb fingers. He made a lunge to recover it,
+clutched the air, and, sliding suddenly forward, over he went, flying
+headlong down the steep escarpment.
+
+He struck a jutting rock, only half snowed under, that broke the sheer
+face of the promontory, and he bounded once like a rubber ball, struck
+a second time, caught desperately at a solitary clump of ice-sheathed
+alders, crashed through the snow-crust just below them, and was held
+there like a mudlark in its cliff nest, halfway between bluff and
+river.
+
+His last clear thought had been an intense anxiety about his snow-shoes
+as they sailed away, two liberated kites, but as he went on falling,
+clutching at the air--falling--and felt the alder twigs snap under his
+hands, he said to himself, "This is death," but calmly, as if it were a
+small matter compared to losing one's snow-shoes.
+
+It was only when he landed in the snow, that he was conscious of any of
+the supposed natural excitement of a man meeting a violent end. It was
+then, before he even got his breath back, that he began to struggle
+frantically to get a foothold; but he only broke down more of the thin
+ice-wall that kept him from the sheer drop to the river, sixty or
+seventy feet below. He lay quite still. Would the Colonel come after
+him? If he did come, would he risk his life to----If he did risk his
+life, was it any use to try to----He craned his neck and looked up,
+blinked, shut his eyes, and lay back in the snow with a sound of
+far-off singing in his head. "Any use?" No, sir; it just about wasn't.
+That bluff face would be easier to climb up than to climb down, and
+either was impossible.
+
+Then it was, that a great tide of longing swept over him--a flood of
+passionate desire for more of this doubtful blessing, life. All the
+bitter hardship--why, how sweet it was, after all, to battle and to
+overcome! It was only this lying helpless, trapped, that was evil. The
+endless Trail? Why, it was only the coming to the end that a man
+minded.
+
+Suddenly the beauty that for days had been veiled shone out. Nothing in
+all the earth was glorious with the glory of the terrible white North.
+And he had only just been wakened to it. Here, now, lying in his grave,
+had come this special revelation of the rapture of living, and the
+splendour of the visible universe.
+
+The sky over his head--he had called it "a mean outlook," and turned
+away. It was the same sky that bent over him now with a tenderness that
+made him lift his cramped arms with tears, as a sick child might to its
+mother. The haloed sun with his attendant dogs--how little the wonder
+had touched him! Never had he seen them so dim and sad as to-night ...
+saying good-bye to one who loved the sun.
+
+The great frozen road out of sight below, road that came winding,
+winding down out of the Arctic Circle--what other highway so majestic,
+mysterious?--shining and beckoning on. An earthly Milky Way, leading to
+the golden paradise he had been travelling towards since summer.
+
+And he was to go no further?--not till the June rains and thaws and
+winds and floods should carry him back, as he had foreseen, far below
+there at Holy Cross.
+
+With a sharp contraction of the heart he shut his eyes again. When he
+opened them they rested on the alder-twig, a couple of yards above,
+holding out mocking finger-tips, and he turned his head in the snow
+till again he could see the mock-suns looking down.
+
+"As well try to reach the sky as reach the alder-bush. What did that
+mean? That he was really going to lie there till he died? _He_ die, and
+the Colonel and everybody else go on living?"
+
+He half rose on his elbow at the monstrous absurdity of the idea. "I
+won't die!" he said out loud.
+
+Crack, crack! warned the ice-crust between him and that long fall to
+the river. With horror at his heart he shrank away and hugged the face
+of the precipice. Presently he put out his hand and broke the ice-crust
+above. With mittened fists and palms he pounded firm a little ledge of
+snow. Reaching out further, he broke the crust obliquely just above,
+and having packed the snow as well as he could immediately about, and
+moving lengthwise with an infinite caution, he crawled up the few
+inches to the narrow ledge, balancing his stiff body with a nicety
+possible only to acrobat or sleep-walker.
+
+It was in no normal state of ordinary waking senses that the work went
+on--with never a downward look, nor even up, eyes riveted to the patch
+of snow on which the mittened hands fell as steady and untrembling as
+steel hammers. In the seconds of actual consciousness of his situation
+that twice visited him, he crouched on the ledge with closed eyes, in
+the clutch of an overmastering horror, absolutely still, like a bird in
+the talons of a hawk. Each time when he opened his eyes he would stare
+at the snow-ledge till hypnotised into disregard of danger, balance his
+slight body, lift one hand, and go on pounding firm another shallow
+step. When he reached the alder-bush his heart gave a great leap of
+triumph. Then, for the first time since starting, he looked up. His
+heart fell down. It seemed farther than ever, and the light waning.
+
+But the twilight would be long, he told himself, and in that other,
+beneficent inner twilight he worked on, packing the snow, and crawling
+gingerly up the perilous stair a half-inch at a time.
+
+At last he was on the jutting rock, and could stand secure. But here he
+could see that the top of the bluff really did shelve over. To think so
+is so common an illusion to the climber that the Boy had heartened
+himself by saying, when he got there he would find it like the rest,
+horribly steep, but not impossible. Well, it _was_ impossible. After
+all his labour, he was no better off on the rock than in the snow-hole
+below the alder, down there where he dared not look. The sun and his
+dogs had travelled down, down. They touched the horizon while he sat
+there; they slipped below the world's wide rim. He said in his heart,
+"I'm freezing to death." Unexpectedly to himself his despair found
+voice:
+
+"Colonel!"
+
+"Hello!"
+
+He started violently.
+
+Had he really heard that, or was imagination playing tricks with echo?
+
+"Colonel!"
+
+"Where the devil----"
+
+A man's head appeared out of the sky.
+
+"Got the rope?"
+
+Words indistinguishable floated down--the head withdrawn--silence. The
+Boy waited a very long time, but he stamped his feet, and kept his
+blood in motion. The light was very grey when the head showed again at
+the sky-line. He couldn't hear what was shouted down, and it occurred
+to him, even in his huge predicament, that the Colonel was "giving him
+hot air" as usual, instead of a life-line. Down the rope came, nearer,
+and stopped about fifteen feet over his head.
+
+"Got the axe? Let her down."
+
+      *        *        *        *        *
+
+The night was bright with moonlight when the Boy stood again on the top
+of the bluff.
+
+"Humph!" says the Colonel, with agreeable anticipation; "you'll be glad
+to camp for a few days after this, I reckon."
+
+"Reckon I won't."
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+In their colossal fatigue they slept the clock round; their watches run
+down, their sense of the very date blurred. Since the Colonel had made
+the last laconic entry in the journal--was it three days or two--or
+twenty?
+
+In spite of a sensation as of many broken bones, the Boy put on the
+Colonel's snow-shoes, and went off looking along the foot of the cliff
+for his own. No luck, but he brought back some birch-bark and a handful
+of willow-withes, and set about making a rude substitute.
+
+Before they had despatched breakfast the great red moon arose, so it
+was not morning, but evening. So much the better. The crust would be
+firmer. The moon was full; it was bright enough to travel, and travel
+they must.
+
+"No!" said the Colonel, with a touch of his old pompous authority,
+"we'll wait awhile."
+
+The Boy simply pointed to the flour-bag. There wasn't a good handful
+left.
+
+They ate supper, studiously avoiding each other's eyes. In the
+background of the Boy's mind: "He saved my life, but he ran no risk....
+And I saved his. We're quits." In the Colonel's, vague, insistent,
+stirred the thought, "I might have left him there to rot, half-way up
+the precipice. Oh, he'd go! _And he'd take the sled_! No!" His vanished
+strength flowed back upon a tide of rage. Only one sleeping-bag, one
+kettle, one axe, one pair of snow-shoes ... _one gun_! No, by the
+living Lord! not while I have a gun. Where's my gun? He looked about
+guiltily, under his lowered lids. What? No! Yes! It was gone! Who
+packed at the last camp? Why, he--himself, and he'd left it behind.
+"Then it was because I didn't see it; the Boy took care I shouldn't see
+it! Very likely he buried it so that I shouldn't see it! He--yes--if I
+refuse to go on, he----"
+
+And the Boy, seeing without looking, taking in every move, every shade
+in the mood of the broken-spirited man, ready to die here, like a dog,
+in the snow, instead of pressing on as long as he could crawl--the Boy,
+in a fever of silent rage, called him that "meanest word in the
+language--a quitter." And as, surreptitiously, he took in the vast
+discouragement of the older man, there was nothing in the Boy's changed
+heart to say, "Poor fellow! if he can't go on, I'll stay and die with
+him"; but only, "He's _got_ to go on! ... and if he refuses ...
+well----" He felt about in his deadened brain, and the best he could
+bring forth was: "I won't leave him--_yet_."
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+A mighty river-jam had forced them up on the low range of hills. It was
+about midnight to judge by the moon--clear of snow and the wind down.
+The Boy straightened up at a curious sight just below them. Something
+black in the moonlight. The Colonel paused, looked down, and passed his
+hand over his eyes.
+
+The Boy had seen the thing first, and had said to himself, "Looks like
+a sled, but it's a vision. It's come to seeing things now."
+
+When he saw the Colonel stop and stare, he threw down his rope and
+began to laugh, for there below were the blackened remains of a big
+fire, silhouetted sharply on the snow.
+
+"Looks like we've come to a camp, Boss!"
+
+He hadn't called the Colonel by the old nickname for many a day. He
+stood there laughing in an idiotic kind of way, wrapping his stiff
+hands in his parki, Indian fashion, and looking down to the level of
+the ancient river terrace, where the weather-stained old Indian sled
+was sharply etched on the moonlit whiteness.
+
+Just a sled lying in the moonlight. But the change that can be wrought
+in a man's heart upon sight of a human sign! it may be idle to speak of
+that to any but those who have travelled the desolate ways of the
+North.
+
+Side by side the two went down the slope, slid and slipped and couldn't
+stop themselves, till they were below the landmark. Looking up, they
+saw that a piece of soiled canvas or a skin, held down with a
+drift-log, fell from under the sled, portière-wise from the top of the
+terrace, straight down to the sheltered level, where the camp fire had
+been. Coming closer, they saw the curtain was not canvas, but dressed
+deerskin.
+
+"Indians!" said the Colonel.
+
+But with the rubbing out of other distinctions this, too, was curiously
+faint. Just so there were human beings it seemed enough. Within four
+feet of the deerskin door the Colonel stopped, shot through by a sharp
+misgiving. What was behind? A living man's camp, or a dead man's tomb?
+Succour, or some stark picture of defeat, and of their own oncoming
+doom?
+
+The Colonel stood stock-still waiting for the Boy. For the first time
+in many days even he hung back. He seemed to lack the courage to be the
+one to extinguish hope by the mere drawing of a curtain from a
+snow-drift's face. The Kentuckian pulled himself together and went
+forward. He lifted his hand to the deerskin, but his fingers shook so
+he couldn't take hold:
+
+"Hello!" he called. No sound. Again: "Hello!"
+
+"Who's there?"
+
+The two outside turned and looked into each other's faces--but if you
+want to know all the moment meant, you must travel the Winter Trail.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+KURILLA
+
+"And I swear to you Athenians--by the dog I swear!--for I must tell you
+the truth----."--SOCRATES.
+
+
+The voice that had asked the question belonged to one of two stranded
+Klondykers, as it turned out, who had burrowed a hole in the snow and
+faced it with drift-wood. They had plenty of provisions, enough to
+spare, and meant to stay here till the steamers ran, for the younger of
+the pair had frosted his feet and was crippled.
+
+The last of their dogs had been frozen to death a few miles back on the
+trail, and they had no idea, apparently, how near they were to that
+"first Indian settlement this side of Kaltag" reached by the Colonel
+and the Boy after two days of rest and one day of travel.
+
+No one ever sailed more joyfully into the Bay of Naples, or saw with
+keener rapture Constantinople's mosques and minarets arise, than did
+these ice-armoured travellers, rounding the sharp bend in the river,
+sight the huts and hear the dogs howl on the farther shore.
+
+"First thing I do, sah, is to speculate in a dog-team," said the
+Colonel.
+
+Most of the bucks were gone off hunting, and most of the dogs were with
+them. Only three left in the village--but they were wonderful fellows
+those three! Where were they? Well, the old man you see before you,
+"_me_--got two."
+
+He led the way behind a little shack, a troop of children following,
+and there were two wolf-dogs, not in the best condition, one reddish,
+with a white face and white forelegs, the other grey with a black
+splotch on his chest and a white one on his back.
+
+"How much?"
+
+"Fiftee dolla."
+
+"And this one?"
+
+"Fiftee dolla." As the Colonel hesitated, the old fellow added: "Bohf
+eightee dolla."
+
+"Oh, eightee for the two?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Well, where's the other?"
+
+"Hein?"
+
+"The other--the third dog. Two are no good."
+
+"Yes. Yes," he said angrily, "heap good dog."
+
+"Well, I'll give you eighty dollars for these" (the Ingalik, taking a
+pipe out of his parki, held out one empty hand); "but who's got the
+other?"
+
+For answer, a head-shake, the outstretched hand, and the words,
+"Eightee dolla--tabak--tea."
+
+"Wait," interrupted the Boy, turning to the group of children; "where's
+the other dog?"
+
+Nobody answered. The Boy pantomimed. "We want _three_ dogs." He held up
+as many fingers. "We got two--see?--must have one more." A lad of about
+thirteen turned and began pointing with animation towards a slowly
+approaching figure.
+
+"Peetka--him got."
+
+The old man began to chatter angrily, and abuse the lad for introducing
+a rival on the scene. The strangers hailed the new-comer.
+
+"How much is your dog?"
+
+Peetka stopped, considered, studied the scene immediately before him,
+and then the distant prospect.
+
+"You got dog?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Well, how much?"
+
+"Sixty dolla."
+
+"_One_ dog, sixty?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"But this man says the price is eighty for two."
+
+"My dog--him Leader."
+
+After some further conversation, "Where is your dog?" demanded the
+Colonel.
+
+The new-comer whistled and called. After some waiting, and
+well-simulated anger on the part of the owner, along comes a dusky
+Siwash, thin, but keen-looking, and none too mild-tempered.
+
+The children all brightened and craned, as if a friend, or at least a
+highly interesting member of the community, had appeared on the scene.
+
+"The Nigger's the best!" whispered the Boy.
+
+"Him bully," said the lad, and seemed about to pat him, but the Siwash
+snarled softly, raising his lip and showing his Gleaming fangs. The lad
+stepped back respectfully, but grinned, reiterating, "Bully dog."
+
+"Well, I'll give you fifty for him," said the Colonel.
+
+"Sixty."
+
+"Well, all right, since he's a leader. Sixty."
+
+The owner watched the dog as it walked round its master smelling the
+snow, then turning up its pointed nose interrogatively and waving its
+magnificent feathery tail. The oblique eyes, acute angle of his short
+ears, the thick neck, broad chest, and heavy forelegs, gave an
+impression of mingled alertness and strength you will not see surpassed
+in any animal that walks the world. Jet-black, except for his grey
+muzzle and broad chest, he looks at you with the face of his near
+ancestor, the grizzled wolf. If on short acquaintance you offer any
+familiarity, as the Colonel ventured to do, and he shows his double row
+of murderous-looking fangs, the reminder of his fierce forefathers is
+even more insistent. Indeed, to this day your Siwash of this sort will
+have his moments of nostalgia, in which he turns back to his wild
+kinsfolk, and mates again with the wolf.
+
+When the Leader looked at the Colonel with that indescribably horrid
+smile, the owner's approval of the proud beast seemed to overcome his
+avarice.
+
+"Me no sell," he decided abruptly, and walked off in lordly fashion
+with his dusky companion at his side, the Leader curling his feathery
+tail arc-like over his back, and walking with an air princes might
+envy.
+
+The Colonel stood staring. Vainly the Boy called, "Come back. Look
+here! Hi!" Neither Siwash nor Ingalik took the smallest notice. The Boy
+went after them, eliciting only airs of surly indifference and repeated
+"Me no sell." It was a bitter disappointment, especially to the Boy. He
+liked the looks of that Nigger dog. When, plunged in gloom, he returned
+to the group about the Colonel, he found his pardner asking about
+"feed." No, the old man hadn't enough fish to spare even a few days'
+supply. Would anybody here sell fish? No, he didn't think so. All the
+men who had teams were gone to the hills for caribou; there was nobody
+to send to the Summer Caches. He held out his hand again for the first
+instalment of the "eightee dolla," in kind, that he might put it in his
+pipe.
+
+"But dogs are no good to us without something to feed 'em."
+
+The Ingalik looked round as one seeking counsel.
+
+"Get fish tomalla."
+
+"No, sir. To-day's the only day in my calendar. No buy dogs till we get
+fish."
+
+When the negotiations fell through the Indian took the failure far more
+philosophically than the white men, as was natural. The old fellow
+could quite well get on without "eightee dolla"--could even get on
+without the tobacco, tea, sugar, and matches represented by that sum,
+but the travellers could not without dogs get to Minóok. It had been
+very well to feel set up because they had done the thing that everybody
+said was impossible. It had been a costly victory. Yes, it had come
+high. "And, after all, if we don't get dogs we're beaten."
+
+"Oh, beaten be blowed! We'll toddle along somehow."
+
+"Yes, we'll toddle along _if_ we get dogs."
+
+And the Boy knew the Colonel was right.
+
+They inquired about Kaltag.
+
+"I reckon we'd better push ahead while we can," said the Colonel. So
+they left the camp that same evening intending to "travel with the
+moon." The settlement was barely out of sight when they met a squaw
+dragging a sled-load of salmon. Here was luck! "And now we'll go back
+and get those two dogs."
+
+As it was late, and trading with the natives, even for a fish, was a
+matter of much time and patience, they decided not to hurry the dog
+deal. It was bound to take a good part of the evening, at any rate.
+Well, another night's resting up was welcome enough.
+
+While the Colonel was re-establishing himself in the best cabin, the
+Boy cached the sled and then went prowling about. As he fully intended,
+he fell in with the Leader--that "bully Nigger dog." His master not in
+sight--nobody but some dirty children and the stranger there to see how
+the Red Dog, in a moment of aberration, dared offer insolence to the
+Leader. It all happened through the Boy's producing a fish, and
+presenting it on bended knee at a respectful distance. The Leader
+bestowed a contemptuous stare upon the stranger and pointedly turned
+his back. The Red Dog came "loping" across the snow. As he made for the
+fish the Leader quietly headed him off, pointed his sharp ears, and
+just looked the other fellow out of countenance. Red said things under
+his breath as he turned away. The more he thought the situation over
+the more he felt himself outraged. He looked round over his shoulder.
+There they still were, the stranger holding out the fish, the Leader
+turning his back on it, but telegraphing Red at the same time _not to
+dare!_ It was more than dog-flesh could bear; Red bounded back,
+exploding in snarls. No sound out of the Leader. Whether this unnatural
+calm misled Red, he came up closer, braced his forelegs, and thrust his
+tawny muzzle almost into the other dog's face, drew back his lips from
+all those shining wicked teeth, and uttered a muffled hiss.
+
+Well, it was magnificently done, and it certainly looked as if the
+Leader was going to have a troubled evening. But he didn't seem to
+think so. He "fixed" the Red Dog as one knowing the power of the
+master's eye to quell. Red's reply, unimaginably bold, was, as the Boy
+described it to the Colonel, "to give the other fella the curse." The
+Boy was proud of Red's pluck--already looking upon him as his own--but
+he jumped up from his ingratiating attitude, still grasping the dried
+fish. It would be a shame if that Leader got chewed up! And there was
+Red, every tooth bared, gasping for gore, and with each passing second
+seeming to throw a deeper damnation into his threat, and to brace
+himself more firmly for the hurling of the final doom.
+
+At that instant, the stranger breathing quick and hard, the elder
+children leaning forward, some of the younger drawing back in
+terror--if you'll believe it, the Leader blinked in a bored way, and
+sat down on the snow. A question only of last moments now, poor brute!
+and the bystanders held their breath. But no! Red, to be sure, broke
+into the most awful demonstrations, and nearly burst himself with fury;
+but he backed away, as though the spectacle offered by the Leader were
+too disgusting for a decent dog to look at. He went behind the shack
+and told the Spotty One. In no time they were back, approaching the Boy
+and the fish discreetly from behind. Such mean tactics roused the
+Leader's ire. He got up and flew at them. They made it hot for him, but
+still the Leader seemed to be doing pretty well for himself, when the
+old Ingalik (whom the Boy had sent a child to summon) hobbled up with a
+raw-hide whip, and laid it on with a practised hand, separating the
+combatants, kicking them impartially all round, and speaking injurious
+words.
+
+"Are your two hurt?" inquired the future owner anxiously.
+
+The old fellow shook his head.
+
+"Fur thick," was the reassuring answer; and once more the Boy realised
+that these canine encounters, though frequently ending in death, often
+look and sound much more awful than they are.
+
+As the Leader feigned to be going home, he made a dash in passing at
+the stranger's fish. It was held tight, and the pirate got off with
+only a fragment. Leader gave one swallow and looked back to see how the
+theft was being taken. That surprising stranger simply stood there
+laughing, and holding out the rest of a fine fat fish! Leader
+considered a moment, looked the alien up and down, came back, all on
+guard for sudden rushes, sly kicks, and thwackings, to pay him out. But
+nothing of the kind. The Nigger dog said as plain as speech could make
+it:
+
+"You cheechalko person, you look as if you're actually offering me that
+fish in good faith. But I'd be a fool to think so."
+
+The stranger spoke low and quietly.
+
+They talked for some time.
+
+The owner of the two had shuffled off home again, with Spotty and Red
+at his heels.
+
+The Leader came quite near, looking almost docile; but he snapped
+suddenly at the fish with an ugly gleam of eye and fang. The Boy nearly
+made the fatal mistake of jumping, but he controlled the impulse, and
+merely held tight to what was left of the salmon. He stood quite still,
+offering it with fair words. The Leader walked all round him, and
+seemed with difficulty to recover from his surprise. The Boy felt that
+they were just coming to an understanding, when up hurries Peetka,
+suspicious and out of sorts.
+
+_"My dog!"_ he shouted. "No sell white man my dog. Huh! ho--_oh_ no!"
+He kicked the Leader viciously, and drove him home, abusing him all the
+way. The wonder was that the wolfish creature didn't fly at his
+master's throat and finish him.
+
+Certainly the stranger's sympathies were all with the four-legged one
+of the two brutes.
+
+"--something about the Leader--" the Boy said sadly, telling the
+Colonel what had happened. "Well, sir, I'd give a hundred dollars to
+own that dog."
+
+"So would I," was the dry rejoinder, "if I were a millionaire like
+you."
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+After supper, their host, who had been sent out to bring in the owner
+of Red and Spotty, came back saying, "He come. All come. Me tell--you
+from below Holy Cross!" He laughed and shook his head in a
+well-pantomimed incredulity, representing popular opinion outside. Some
+of the bucks, he added, who had not gone far, had got back with small
+game.
+
+"And dogs?"
+
+"No. Dogs in the mountains. Hunt moose--caribou."
+
+The old Ingalik came in, followed by others. "Some" of the bucks? There
+seemed no end to the throng.
+
+Opposite the white men the Indians sat in a semicircle, with the sole
+intent, you might think, of staring all night at the strangers. Yet
+they had brought in Arctic hares and grouse, and even a haunch of
+venison. But they laid these things on the floor beside them, and sat
+with grave unbroken silence till the strangers should declare
+themselves. They had also brought, or permitted to follow, not only
+their wives and daughters, but their children, big and little.
+
+Behind the semicircle of men, three or four deep, were ranged the ranks
+of youth--boys and girls from six to fourteen--standing as silent as
+their elders, but eager, watchful, carrying king salmon, dried
+deer-meat, boot-soles, thongs for snow-shoes, rabbits, grouse. A little
+fellow of ten or eleven had brought in the Red Dog, and was trying to
+reconcile him to his close quarters. The owner of Red and Spotty sat
+with empty hands at the semicircle's farthest end. But he was the
+capitalist of the village, and held himself worthily, yet not quite
+with the high and mighty unconcern of the owner of the Leader.
+
+Peetka came in late, bringing in the Nigger dog against the Nigger
+dog's will, just to tantalise the white men with the sight of something
+they couldn't buy from the poor Indian. Everybody made way for Peetka
+and his dog, except the other dog. Several people had to go to the
+assistance of the little boy to help him to hold Red.
+
+"Just as well, perhaps," said the Colonel, "that we aren't likely to
+get all three."
+
+"Oh, if they worked together they'd be all right," answered the Boy.
+"I've noticed that before." But the Leader, meanwhile, was flatly
+refusing to stay in the same room with Red. He howled and snapped and
+raged. So poor Red was turned out, and the little boy mourned loudly.
+
+Behind the children, a row of squaws against the wall, with and without
+babies strapped at their backs. Occasionally a young girl would push
+aside those in front of her, craning and staring to take in the
+astonishing spectacle of the two white men who had come so far without
+dogs--pulling a hand-sled a greater distance than any Indian had ever
+done--if they could be believed!
+
+Anyhow, these men with their sack of tea and magnificent bundle of
+matches, above all with their tobacco--they could buy out the
+town--everything except Peetka's dog.
+
+The Colonel and the Boy opened the ball by renewing their joint offer
+of eighty dollars for Red and Spotty. Although this had been the old
+Ingalik's own price, it was discussed fully an hour by all present
+before the matter could be considered finally settled, even then the
+Colonel knew it was safest not to pay till just upon leaving. But he
+made a little present of tobacco in token of satisfactory arrangement.
+The old man's hands trembled excitedly as he pulled out his pipe and
+filled it. The bucks round him, and even a couple of the women at the
+back, begged him for some. He seemed to say, "Do your own deal; the
+strangers have plenty more."
+
+By-and-by, in spite of the limited English of the community, certain
+facts stood out: that Peetka held the white man in avowed detestation,
+that he was the leading spirit of the place, that they had all been
+suffering from a tobacco famine, and that much might be done by a
+judicious use of Black Jack and Long Green. The Colonel set forth the
+magnificent generosity of which he would be capable, could he secure a
+good Leader. But Peetka, although he looked at his empty pipe with
+bitterness, shook his head.
+
+Everybody in the village would profit, the Colonel went on; everybody
+should have a present if--
+
+Peetka interrupted with a snarl, and flung out low words of
+contemptuous refusal.
+
+The Leader waked from a brief nap cramped and uneasy, and began to howl
+in sympathy. His master stood up, the better to deliver a brutal kick.
+This seemed to help the Leader to put up with cramp and confinement,
+just as one great discomfort will help his betters to forget several
+little ones. But the Boy had risen with angry eyes. Very well, he said
+impulsively; if he and his pardner couldn't get a third dog (two were
+very little good) they would not stock fresh meat here. In vain the
+Colonel whispered admonition. No, sir, they would wait till they got to
+the next village.
+
+"Belly far," said a young hunter, placing ostentatiously in front his
+brace of grouse.
+
+"We're used to going belly far. Take all your game away, and go home."
+
+A sorrowful silence fell upon the room. They sat for some time like
+that, no one so much as moving, till a voice said, "We want tobacco,"
+and a general murmur of assent arose. Peetka roused himself, pulled out
+of his shirt a concave stone and a little woody-looking knot. The Boy
+leaned forward to see what it was. A piece of dried fungus--the kind
+you sometimes see on the birches up here. Peetka was hammering a
+fragment of it into powder, with his heavy clasp-knife, on the concave
+stone. He swept the particles into his pipe and applied to one of the
+fish-selling women for a match, lit up, and lounged back against the
+Leader, smiling disagreeably at the strangers. A little laugh at their
+expense went round the room. Oh, it wasn't easy to get ahead of Peetka!
+But even if he chose to pretend that he didn't want cheechalko tobacco,
+it was very serious--it was desperate--to see all that Black Jack going
+on to the next village. Several of the hitherto silent bucks
+remonstrated with Peetka--even one of the women dared raise her voice.
+She had not been able to go for fish: where was _her_ tobacco and tea?
+
+Peetka burst into voluble defence of his position. Casting occasional
+looks of disdain upon the strangers, he addressed most of his remarks
+to the owner of Red and Spotty. Although the Colonel could not
+understand a word, he saw the moment approaching when that person would
+go back on his bargain. With uncommon pleasure he could have throttled
+Peetka.
+
+The Boy, to create a diversion, had begun talking to a young hunter in
+the front row about "the Long Trail," and, seeing that several others
+craned and listened, he spoke louder, more slowly, dropping out all
+unnecessary or unusual words. Very soon he had gained an audience and
+Peetka had lost one. As the stranger went on describing their
+experiences the whole room listened with an attentiveness that would
+have been flattering had it been less strongly dashed with unbelief.
+From beyond Anvik they had come? Like that--with no dogs? What! From
+below Koserefsky? Not really? Peetka grunted and shook his head. Did
+they think the Ingaliks were children? Without dogs that journey was
+impossible. Low whispers and gruff exclamations filled the room. White
+men were great liars. They pretended that in their country the bacon
+had legs, and could run about, and one had been heard to say he had
+travelled in a thing like a steamboat, only it could go without water
+under it--ran over the dry land on strips of iron--ran quicker than any
+steamer! Oh, they were awful liars. But these two, who pretended they'd
+dragged a sled all the way from Holy Cross, they were the biggest liars
+of all. Just let them tell that yarn to Unookuk. They all laughed at
+this, and the name ran round the room.
+
+"Who is Unookuk?"
+
+"Him guide."
+
+"Him know."
+
+"Where is him?" asked the Boy.
+
+"Him sick."
+
+But there was whispering and consultation. This was evidently a case
+for the expert. Two boys ran out, and the native talk went on,
+unintelligible save for the fact that it centred round Unookuk. In a
+few minutes the boys came back with a tall, fine-looking native, about
+sixty years old, walking lame, and leaning on a stick. The semicircle
+opened to admit him. He limped over to the strangers, and stood looking
+at them gravely, modestly, but with careful scrutiny.
+
+The Boy held out his hand.
+
+"How do you do?"
+
+"How do you do?" echoed the new-comer, and he also shook hands with the
+Colonel before he sat down.
+
+"Are you Unookuk?"
+
+"Yes. How far you come?"
+
+Peetka said something rude, before the strangers had time to answer,
+and all the room went into titters. But Unookuk listened with dignity
+while the Colonel repeated briefly the story already told. Plainly it
+stumped Unookuk.
+
+"Come from Anvik?" he repeated.
+
+"Yes; stayed with Mr. Benham."
+
+"Oh, Benham!" The trader's familiar name ran round the room with
+obvious effect. "It is good to have A. C. Agent for friend," said
+Unookuk guardedly. "Everybody know Benham."
+
+"He is not A. C. Agent much longer," volunteered the Boy.
+
+"That so?"
+
+"No; he will go 'on his own' after the new agent gets in this spring."
+
+"It is true," answered Unookuk gravely, for the first time a little
+impressed, for this news was not yet common property. Still, they could
+have heard it from some passer with a dog-team. The Boy spoke of Holy
+Cross, and Unookuk's grave unbelief was painted on every feature.
+
+"It was good you get to Holy Cross before the big storm," he said, with
+a faint smile of tolerance for the white man's tall story. But Peetka
+laughed aloud.
+
+"What good English you speak!" said the Boy, determined to make friends
+with the most intelligent-appearing native he had seen.
+
+"Me; I am Kurilla!" said Unookuk, with a quiet magnificence. Then,
+seeing no electric recognition of the name, he added: "You savvy
+Kurilla!"
+
+The Colonel with much regret admitted that he did not.
+
+"But I am Dall's guide--Kurilla."
+
+"Oh, Dall's guide, are you," said the Boy, without a glimmer of who
+Dall was, or for what, or to what, he was "guided." "Well, Kurilla,
+we're pleased and proud to meet you," adding with some presence of
+mind, "And how's Dall?"
+
+"It is long I have not hear. We both old now. I hurt my knee on the ice
+when I come down from Nulato for caribou."
+
+"Why do you have two names?"
+
+"Unookuk, Nulato name. My father big Nulato Shamán. Him killed, mother
+killed, everybody killed in Koyukuk massacre. They forget kill me. Me
+kid. Russians find Unookuk in big wood. Russians give food. I stay with
+Russians--them call Unookuk 'Kurilla.' Dall call Unookuk 'Kurilla.'"
+
+"Dall--Dall," said the Colonel to the Boy; "was that the name of the
+explorer fella--"
+
+Fortunately the Boy was saved from need to answer.
+
+"First white man go down Yukon to the sea," said Kurilla with pride.
+"Me Dall's guide."
+
+"Oh, wrote a book, didn't he? Name's familiar somehow," said the
+Colonel.
+
+Kurilla bore him out.
+
+"Mr. Dall great man. Thirty year he first come up here with Survey
+people. Make big overland tel-ee-grab."
+
+"Of course. I've heard about that." The Colonel turned to the Boy. "It
+was just before the Russians sold out. And when a lot of exploring and
+surveying and pole-planting was done here and in Siberia, the Atlantic
+cable was laid and knocked the overland scheme sky-high."
+
+Kurilla gravely verified these facts.
+
+"And me, Dall's chief guide. Me with Dall when he make portage from
+Unalaklik to Kaltag. He see the Yukon first time. He run down to be
+first on the ice. Dall and the coast natives stare, like so"--Kurilla
+made a wild-eyed, ludicrous face--"and they say: 'It is not a river--it
+is another sea!'"
+
+"No wonder. I hear it's ten miles wide up by the flats, and even a
+little below where we wintered, at Ikogimeut, it's four miles across
+from bank to bank."
+
+Kurilla looked at the Colonel with dignified reproach. Why did he go on
+lying about his journey like that to an expert?
+
+"Even at Holy Cross--" the Boy began, but Kurilla struck in:
+
+"When you there?"
+
+"Oh, about three weeks ago."
+
+Peetka made remarks in Ingalik.
+
+"Father MacManus, him all right?" asked Kurilla, politely cloaking his
+cross-examination.
+
+"MacManus? Do you mean Wills, or the Superior, Father Brachet?"
+
+"Oh yes! MacManus at Tanana." He spoke as though inadvertently he had
+confused the names. As the strangers gave him the winter's news from
+Holy Cross, his wonder and astonishment grew.
+
+Presently, "Do you know my friend Nicholas of Pymeut?" asked the Boy.
+
+Kurilla took his empty pipe out of his mouth and smiled in broad
+surprise. "Nicholas!" repeated several others. It was plain the Pymeut
+pilot enjoyed a wide repute.
+
+The Boy spoke of the famine and Ol' Chief's illness.
+
+"It is true," said Unookuk gravely, and turning, he added something in
+Ingalik to the company. Peetka answered back as surly as ever. But the
+Boy went on, telling how the Shaman had cured Ol' Chief, and that
+turned out to be a surprisingly popular story. Peetka wouldn't
+interrupt it, even to curse the Leader for getting up and stretching
+himself. When the dog--feeling that for some reason discipline was
+relaxed--dared to leave his cramped quarters, and come out into the
+little open space between the white men and the close-packed assembly,
+the Boy forced himself to go straight on with his story as if he had
+not observed the liberty the Leader was taking. When, after standing
+there an instant, the dog came over and threw himself down at the
+stranger's feet as if publicly adopting him, the white story-teller
+dared not meet Peetka's eye. He was privately most uneasy at the Nigger
+dog's tactless move, and he hurried on about how Brother Paul caught
+the Shamán, and about the Penitential Journey--told how, long before
+that, early in the Fall, Nicholas had got lost, making the portage from
+St. Michael's, and how the white camp had saved him from starvation;
+how in turn the Pymeuts had pulled the speaker out of a blow-hole; what
+tremendous friends the Pymeuts were with these particular, very good
+sort of white men. Here he seemed to allow by implication for Peetka's
+prejudice--there were two kinds of pale-face strangers--and on an
+impulse he drew out Muckluck's medal. He would have them to know, so
+highly were these present specimens of the doubtful race regarded by
+the Pymeuts--such friends were they, that Nicholas' sister had given
+him this for an offering to Yukon Inua, that the Great Spirit might
+help them on their way. He owned himself wrong to have delayed this
+sacrifice. He must to-morrow throw it into the first blow-hole he came
+to--unless indeed... his eye caught Kurilla's. With the help of his
+stick the old Guide pulled his big body up on his one stout leg,
+hobbled nearer and gravely eyed Muckluck's offering as it swung to and
+fro on its walrus-string over the Leader's head. The Boy, quite
+conscious of some subtle change in the hitherto immobile face of the
+Indian, laid the token in his hand. Standing there in the centre of the
+semicircle between the assembly and the dog, Kurilla turned the Great
+Katharine's medal over, examining it closely, every eye in the room
+upon him.
+
+When he lifted his head there was a rustle of expectation and a craning
+forward.
+
+"It is the same." Kurilla spoke slowly like one half in a dream. "When
+I go down river, thirty winter back, with the Great Dall, he try buy
+this off Nicholas's mother. She wear it on string red Russian beads.
+Oh, it is a thing to remember!" He nodded his grey head significantly,
+but he went on with the bare evidence: "When _John J. Healy_ make last
+trip down this fall--Nicholas pilot you savvy--they let him take his
+sister, Holy Cross to Pymeut. I see she wear this round neck."
+
+The weight of the medal carried the raw-hide necklace slipping through
+his fingers. Slowly now, with even impulse, the silver disc swung
+right, swung left, like the pendulum of a clock. Even the Nigger dog
+seemed hypnotised, following the dim shine of the tarnished token.
+
+"I say Nicholas's sister: 'It is thirty winters I see that silver
+picture first; I give you two dolla for him.' She say 'No.' I say, 'Gi'
+fi' dolla.' 'No.' I sit and think far back--thirty winters back. 'I gi'
+ten dolla,' I say. She say, 'I no sell; no--not for a hunner'--but she
+_give_ it him! for to make Yukon Inua to let him go safe. Hein? Savvy?"
+And lapsing into Ingalik, he endorsed this credential not to be denied.
+
+"It is true," he wound up in English. The "Autocratrix Russorum" was
+solemnly handed back. "You have make a brave journey. It is I who
+unnerstan'--I, too, when I am young, I go with Dall on the Long Trail.
+_We had dogs._" All the while, from all about the Leader's owner, and
+out of every corner of the crowded room, had come a spirited
+punctuation of Kurilla's speech--nods and grunts. "Yes, perhaps _these_
+white men deserved dogs--even Peetka's!"
+
+Kurilla limped back to his place, but turned to the Ingaliks before he
+sat down, and bending painfully over his stick, "Not Kurilla," he said,
+as though speaking of one absent--"not _Dall_ make so great journey, no
+dogs. Kurilla? Best guide in Yukon forty year. Kurilla say: 'Must have
+dogs--men like that!'" He limped back again and solemnly offered his
+hand to each of the travellers in turn. "Shake!" says he. Then, as
+though fascinated by the silver picture, he dropped down by the Boy,
+staring absently at the Great Katharine's effigy. The general murmur
+was arrested by a movement from Peetka--he took his pipe out of his
+mouth and says he, handsomely:
+
+"No liars. Sell dog," adding, with regretful eye on the apostate
+Leader, "Him bully dog!"
+
+And that was how the tobacco famine ended, and how the white men got
+their team.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE ESQUIMAUX HORSE
+
+  "Plus je connais les hommes, plus j'aime les chiens."
+
+
+It doesn't look hard to drive a dog-team, but just you try it. In
+moments of passion, the first few days after their acquisition, the
+Colonel and the Boy wondered why they had complicated a sufficiently
+difficult journey by adding to other cares a load of fish and three
+fiends.
+
+"Think how well they went for Peetka."
+
+"Oh yes; part o' their cussedness. They know we're green hands, and
+they mean to make it lively."
+
+Well, they did. They sat on their haunches in the snow, and grinned at
+the whip-crackings and futile "Mush, mush!" of the Colonel. They
+snapped at the Boy and made sharp turns, tying him up in the traces and
+tumbling him into the snow. They howled all night long, except during a
+blessed interval of quiet while they ate their seal-skin harness. But
+man is the wiliest of the animals, and the one who profits by
+experience. In the end, the Boy became a capital driver; the dogs came
+to know he "meant business," and settled into submission. "Nig," as he
+called the bully dog for short, turned out "the best leader in the
+Yukon."
+
+They were much nearer Kaltag than they had realised, arriving after
+only two hours' struggle with the dogs at the big Indian village on the
+left bank of the river. But their first appearance here was clouded by
+Nig's proposal to slay all the dogs in sight. He was no sooner
+unharnessed than he undertook the congenial job. It looked for a few
+minutes as if Peetka's bully dog would chew up the entire canine
+population, and then lie down and die of his own wounds. But the
+Kaltags understood the genus Siwash better than the white man, and took
+the tumult calmly.
+
+It turned out that Nig was not so much bloodthirsty as
+"bloody-proud"--one of those high souls for ever concerned about
+supremacy. His first social act, on catching sight of his fellow, was
+to howl defiance at him. And even after they have fought it out and
+come to some sort of understanding, the first happy thought of your
+born Leader on awakening is to proclaim himself boss of the camp.
+
+No sooner has he published this conviction of high calling than he is
+set upon by the others, punishes them soundly, or is himself vanquished
+and driven off. Whereupon he sits on his haunches in the snow, and,
+with his pointed nose turned skyward, howls uninterruptedly for an hour
+or two, when all is forgiven and forgotten--till the next time.
+
+Order being restored, the travellers got new harness for the dogs, new
+boots for themselves, and set out for the white trading post, thirty
+miles above.
+
+Here, having at last come into the region of settlements, they agreed
+never again to overtax the dogs. They "travelled light" out of Nulato
+towards the Koyukuk.
+
+The dogs simply flew over those last miles. It was glorious going on a
+trail like glass.
+
+They had broken the back of the journey now, and could well afford,
+they thought, to halt an hour or two on the island at the junction of
+the two great rivers, stake out a trading post, and treat themselves to
+town lots. Why town lots, in Heaven's name! when they were bound for
+Minóok, and after that the Klondyke, hundreds of miles away? Well,
+partly out of mere gaiety of heart, and partly, the Colonel would have
+told you gravely, that in this country you never know when you have a
+good thing. They had left the one white layman at Nulato seething with
+excitement over an Indian's report of still another rich strike up
+yonder on the Koyukuk, and this point, where they were solemnly staking
+out a new post, the Nulato Agent had said, was "dead sure to be a great
+centre." That almost unknown region bordering the great tributary of
+the Yukon, haunt of the fiercest of all the Indians of the North, was
+to be finally conquered by the white man. It had been left practically
+unexplored ever since the days when the bloodthirsty Koyukons came down
+out of their fastnesses and perpetrated the great Nulato massacre,
+doing to death with ghastly barbarity every man, woman, and child at
+the post, Russian or Indian, except Kurilla, not sparing the unlucky
+Captain Barnard or his English escort, newly arrived here in their
+search for the lost Sir John Franklin. But the tables were turned now,
+and the white man was on the trail of the Indian.
+
+While the Colonel and the Boy were staking out this future stronghold
+of trade and civilisation it came on to snow; but "Can't last this time
+o' year," the Colonel consoled himself, and thanked God "the big,
+unending snows are over for this season."
+
+So they pushed on. But the Colonel seemed to have thanked God
+prematurely. Down the snow drifted, soft, sticky, unending. The evening
+was cloudy, and the snow increased the dimness overhead as well as the
+heaviness under foot. They never knew just where it was in the hours
+between dusk and dark that they lost the trail. The Boy believed it was
+at a certain steep incline that Nig did his best to rush down.
+
+"I thought he was at his tricks," said the Boy ruefully some hours
+after. "I believe I'm an ass, and Nig is a gentleman and a scholar. He
+knew perfectly what he was about."
+
+"Reckon we'll camp, pardner."
+
+"Reckon we might as well."
+
+After unharnessing the dogs, the Boy stood an instant looking enviously
+at them as he thawed out his stiff hands under his parki. Exhausted and
+smoking hot, the dogs had curled down in the snow as contented-looking
+as though on a hearth-rug before a fire, sheltering their sharp noses
+with their tails.
+
+"Wish I had a tail to shelter my face," said the Boy, as if a tail were
+the one thing lacking to complete his bliss.
+
+"You don't need any shelter _now_," answered the Colonel.
+
+"Your face is gettin' well--" And he stopped suddenly, carried back to
+those black days when he had vainly urged a face-guard. He unpacked
+their few possessions, and watched the Boy take the axe and go off for
+wood, stopping on his way, tired as he was, to pull Nig's pointed ears.
+The odd thing about the Boy was that it was only with these Indian
+curs--Nig in particular, who wasn't the Boy's dog at all--only with
+these brute-beasts had he seemed to recover something of that buoyancy
+and ridiculous youngness that had first drawn the Colonel to him on the
+voyage up from 'Frisco. It was also clear that if the Boy now drew away
+from his pardner ever so little, by so much did he draw nearer to the
+dogs.
+
+He might be too tired to answer the Colonel; he was seldom too tired to
+talk nonsense to Nig, never too tired to say, "Well, old boy," or even
+"Well, _pardner_," to the dumb brute. It was, perhaps, this that the
+Colonel disliked most of all.
+
+Whether the U.S. Agent at Nulato was justified or not in saying all the
+region hereabouts was populous in the summer with Indian camps, the
+native winter settlements, the half-buried ighloo, or the rude log-hut,
+where, for a little tea, tobacco, or sugar, you could get as much fish
+as you could carry, these welcome, if malodorous, places seemed, since
+they lost the trail, to have vanished off the face of the earth. No
+question of the men sharing the dogs' fish, but of the dogs sharing the
+men's bacon and meal. That night the meagre supper was more meagre
+still that the "horses" might have something, too. The next afternoon
+it stopped snowing and cleared, intensely cold, and that was the
+evening the Boy nearly cried for joy when, lifting up his eyes, he saw,
+a good way off, perched on the river bank, the huts and high caches of
+an Indian village etched black against a wintry sunset--a fine picture
+in any eye, but meaning more than beauty to the driver of hungry dogs.
+
+"Fish, Nig!" called out the Boy to his Leader. "You hear me, you Nig?
+_Fish_, old fellow! Now, look at that, Colonel! you tell me that Indian
+dog doesn't understand English. I tell you what: we had a mean time
+with these dogs just at first, but that was only because we didn't
+understand one another."
+
+The Colonel preserved a reticent air.
+
+"You'll come to my way of thinking yet. The Indian dog--he's a daisy."
+
+"Glad you think so." The Colonel, with some display of temper, had
+given up trying to drive the team only half an hour before, and was
+still rather sore about it.
+
+"When you get to _understand_ him," persisted the Boy, "he's the most
+marvellous little horse ever hitched in harness. He pulls, pulls, pulls
+all day long in any kind o' weather--"
+
+"Yes, pulls you off your legs or pulls you the way you don't want to
+go."
+
+"Oh, that's when you rile him! He's just like any other American
+gentleman: he's got his feelin's. Ain't you got feelin's, Nig? Huh!
+rather. I tell you what, Colonel, many a time when I'm pretty well beat
+and ready to snap at anybody, I've looked at Nig peggin' away like a
+little man, on a rotten trail, with a blizzard in his eyes, and it's
+just made me sick after that to hear myself grumblin'. Yes, sir, the
+Indian dog is an example to any white man on the trail." The Boy seemed
+not to relinquish the hope of stirring the tired Colonel to enthusiasm.
+"Don't you like the way, after the worst sort of day, when you stop, he
+just drops down in the snow and rolls about a little to rest his
+muscles, and then lies there as patient as anything till you are ready
+to unharness him and feed him?"
+
+"--and if you don't hurry up, he saves you the trouble of unharnessing
+by eating the traces and things."
+
+"Humph! So would you if that village weren't in sight, if you were sure
+the harness wouldn't stick in your gizzard. And think of what a dog
+gets to reward him for his plucky day: one dried salmon or a little
+meal-soup when he's off on a holiday like this. Works without a let-up,
+and keeps in good flesh on one fish a day. Doesn't even get anything to
+drink; eats a little snow after dinner, digs his bed, and sleeps in a
+drift till morning."
+
+"When he doesn't howl all night."
+
+"Oh, that's when he meets his friends, and they talk about old times
+before they came down in the world."
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"Yes; when they were wolves and made us run instead of our making them.
+Make any fellow howl. Instead of carrying our food about we used to
+carry theirs, and run hard to keep from giving it up, too."
+
+"Nig's at it again," said the Colonel. "Give us your whip."
+
+"No," said the Boy; "I begin to see now why he stops and goes for Red
+like that. Hah! Spot's gettin it, too, this time. They haven't been
+pullin' properly. You just notice: if they aren't doin' their share
+Nig'll turn to every time and give 'em 'Hail, Columbia!' You'll see,
+when he's freshened 'em up a bit we'll have 'em on a dead run." The Boy
+laughed and cracked his whip.
+
+"They've got keen noses. _I_ don't smell the village this time. Come
+on, Nig, Spot's had enough; he's sorry, good and plenty. Cheer up,
+Spot! Fish, old man! You hear me talkin' to you, Red? _Fish!_ Caches
+full of it. Whoop!" and down they rushed, pell-mell, men and dogs
+tearing along like mad across the frozen river, and never slowing till
+it came to the stiff pull up the opposite bank.
+
+"Funny I don't hear any dogs," panted the Boy.
+
+They came out upon a place silent as the dead--a big deserted village,
+emptied by the plague, or, maybe, only by the winter; caches emptied,
+too; not a salmon, not a pike, not a lusk, not even a whitefish left
+behind.
+
+It was a bitter blow. They didn't say anything; it was too bad to talk
+about. The Colonel made the fire, and fried a little bacon and made
+some mush: that was their dinner. The bacon-rinds were boiled in the
+mush-pot with a great deal of snow and a little meal, and the "soup" so
+concocted was set out to cool for the dogs. They were afraid to sleep
+in one of the cabins; it might be plague-infected. The Indians had cut
+all the spruce for a wide radius round about--no boughs to make a bed.
+They hoisted some tent-poles up into one of the empty caches, laid them
+side by side, and on this bed, dry, if hard, they found oblivion.
+
+The next morning a thin, powdery snow was driving about. Had they lost
+their way in the calendar as well as on the trail, and was it December
+instead of the 29th of March? The Colonel sat on the packed sled,
+undoing with stiff fingers the twisted, frozen rope. He knew the axe
+that he used the night before on the little end of bacon was lying,
+pressed into the snow, under one runner. But that was the last thing to
+go on the pack before the lashing, and it wouldn't get lost pinned down
+under the sled. Nig caught sight of it, and came over with a cheerful
+air of interest, sniffed bacon on the steel, and it occurred to him it
+would be a good plan to lick it.
+
+A bitter howling broke the stillness. The Boy came tearing up with a
+look that lifted the Colonel off the sled, and there was Nig trying to
+get away from the axe-head, his tongue frozen fast to the steel, and
+pulled horribly long out of his mouth like a little pink rope. The Boy
+had fallen upon the agonized beast, and forced him down close to the
+steel. Holding him there between his knees, he pulled off his outer
+mits and with hands and breath warmed the surface of the axe, speaking
+now and then to the dog, who howled wretchedly, but seemed to
+understand something was being done for him, since he gave up
+struggling. When at last the Boy got him free, the little horse pressed
+against his friend's legs with a strange new shuddering noise very
+pitiful to hear.
+
+The Boy, blinking hard, said: "Yes, old man, I know, that was a mean
+breakfast; and he patted the shaggy chest. Nig bent his proud head and
+licked the rescuing hand with his bleeding tongue.
+
+"An' you say that dog hasn't got feelin's!"
+
+They hitched the team and pushed on. In the absence of a trail, the
+best they could do was to keep to the river ice. By-and-bye:
+
+"Can you see the river bank?"
+
+"I'm not sure," said the Boy.
+
+"I thought you were going it blind."
+
+"I believe I'd better let Nig have his head," said the Boy, stopping;
+"he's the dandy trail-finder. Nig, old man, I takes off my hat to you!"
+
+They pushed ahead till the half-famished dogs gave out. They camped
+under the lee of the propped sled, and slept the sleep of exhaustion.
+
+The next morning dawned clear and warm. The Colonel managed to get a
+little wood and started a fire. There were a few spoonfuls of meal in
+the bottom of the bag and a little end of bacon, mostly rind. The sort
+of soup the dogs had had yesterday was good enough for men to-day. The
+hot and watery brew gave them strength enough to strike camp and move
+on. The elder man began to say to himself that he would sell his life
+dearly. He looked at the dogs a good deal, and then would look at the
+Boy, but he could never catch his eye. At last: "They say, you know,
+that men in our fix have sometimes had to sacrifice a dog."
+
+"Ugh!" The Boy's face expressed nausea at the thought.
+
+"Yes, it is pretty revolting."
+
+"We could never do it."
+
+"N-no," said the Colonel.
+
+The three little Esquimaux horses were not only very hungry, their feet
+were in a bad condition, and were bleeding. The Boy had shut his eyes
+at first at the sight of their red tracks in the snow. He hardly
+noticed them now.
+
+An hour or so later: "Better men than we," says the Colonel
+significantly, "have had to put their feelings in their pockets." As if
+he found the observation distinctly discouraging, Nig at this moment
+sat down in the melting snow, and no amount of "mushing" moved him.
+
+"Let's give him half an hour's rest, Colonel. Valuable beast, you
+know--altogether best team on the river," said the Boy, as if to show
+that his suggestion was not inspired by mere pity for the bleeding
+dogs. "And you look rather faded yourself, Colonel. Sit down and rest."
+
+Nothing more was said for a full half-hour, till the Colonel, taking
+off his fur hat, and wiping his beaded forehead on the back of his
+hand, remarked: "Think of the Siege of Paris."
+
+"Eh? What?" The Boy stared as if afraid his partner's brain had given
+way.
+
+"When the horses gave out they had to eat dogs, cats, rats even. Think
+of it--rats!"
+
+"The French are a dirty lot. Let's mush, Colonel. I'm as fit as a
+fiddle." The Boy got up and called the dogs. In ten minutes they were
+following the blind trail again. But the sled kept clogging, sticking
+fast and breaking down. After a desperate bout of ineffectual pulling,
+the dogs with one mind stopped again, and lay down in their bloody
+tracks.
+
+The men stood silent for a moment; then the Colonel remarked:
+
+"Red is the least valuable"--a long pause--"but Nig's feet are in the
+worst condition. That dog won't travel a mile further. Well," added the
+Colonel after a bit, as the Boy stood speechless studying the team,
+"what do you say?"
+
+"Me?" He looked up like a man who has been dreaming and is just awake.
+"Oh, I should say our friend Nig here has had to stand more than his
+share of the racket."
+
+"Poor old Nig!" said the Colonel, with a somewhat guilty air. "Look
+here: what do you say to seeing whether they can go if we help 'em with
+that load?"
+
+"Good for you, Colonel!" said the Boy, with confidence wonderfully
+restored. "I was just thinking the same."
+
+They unlashed the pack, and the Colonel wanted to make two bundles of
+the bedding and things; but whether the Boy really thought the Colonel
+was giving out, or whether down in some corner of his mind he
+recognised the fact that if the Colonel were not galled by this extra
+burden he might feel his hunger less, and so be less prone to thoughts
+of poor Nig in the pot--however it was, he said the bundle was his
+business for the first hour. So the Colonel did the driving, and the
+Boy tramped on ahead, breaking trail with thirty-five pounds on his
+back. And he didn't give it up, either, though he admitted long after
+it was the toughest time he had ever put in in all his life.
+
+"Haven't you had about enough of this?" the Colonel sang out at dusk.
+
+"Pretty nearly," said the Boy in a rather weak voice. He flung off the
+pack, and sat on it.
+
+"Get up," says the Colonel; "give us the sleepin'-bag." When it was
+undone, the Norfolk jacket dropped out. He rolled it up against the
+sled, flung himself down, and heavily dropped his head on the rough
+pillow. But he sprang up.
+
+"What? Yes. By the Lord!" He thrust his hand into the capacious pocket
+of the jacket, and pulled out some broken ship's biscuit. "Hard tack,
+by the living Jingo!" He was up, had a few sticks alight, and the
+kettle on, and was melting snow to pour on the broken biscuit. "It
+swells, you know, like thunder!"
+
+The Boy was still sitting on the bundle of "trade" tea and tobacco. He
+seemed not to hear; he seemed not to see the Colonel, shakily hovering
+about the fire, pushing aside the green wood and adding a few sticks of
+dry.
+
+There was a mist before the Colonel's eyes. Reaching after a bit of
+seasoned spruce, he stumbled, and unconsciously set his foot on Nig's
+bleeding paw. The dog let out a yell and flew at him. The Colonel fell
+back with an oath, picked up a stick, and laid it on. The Boy was on
+his feet in a flash.
+
+"Here! stop that!" He jumped in between the infuriated man and the
+infuriated dog.
+
+"Stand back!" roared the Colonel.
+
+"It was your fault; you trod--"
+
+"Stand back, damn you! or you'll get hurt."
+
+The stick would have fallen on the Boy; he dodged it, calling
+excitedly, "Come here, Nig! Here!"
+
+"He's my dog, and I'll lamm him if I like. You--" The Colonel couldn't
+see just where the Boy and the culprit were. Stumbling a few paces away
+from the glare of the fire, he called out, "I'll kill that brute if he
+snaps at me again!"
+
+"Oh yes," the Boy's voice rang passionately out of the gloom, "I know
+you want him killed."
+
+The Colonel sat down heavily on the rolled-up bag. Presently the
+bubbling of boiling snow-water roused him. He got up, divided the
+biscuit, and poured the hot water over the fragments. Then he sat down
+again, and waited for them to "swell like thunder." He couldn't see
+where, a little way up the hillside, the Boy sat on a fallen tree with
+Nig's head under his arm. The Boy felt pretty low in his mind. He sat
+crouched together, with his head sunk almost to his knees. It was a
+lonely kind of a world after all. Doing your level best didn't seem to
+get you any forrader. What was the use? He started. Something warm,
+caressing, touched his cold face just under one eye. Nig's tongue.
+
+"Good old Nig! You feel lonesome, too?" He gathered the rough beast up
+closer to him.
+
+Just then the Colonel called, "Nig!"
+
+"Sh! sh! Lie quiet!" whispered the Boy.
+
+"Nig! Nig!"
+
+"Good old boy! Stay here! He doesn't mean well by you. _Sh!_ quiet!
+_Quiet_, I say!"
+
+"Nig!" and the treacherous Colonel gave the peculiar whistle both men
+used to call the dogs to supper. The dog struggled to get away, the
+Boy's stiff fingers lost their grip, and "the best leader in the Yukon"
+was running down the bank as hard as he could pelt, to the camp
+fire--to the cooking-pot.
+
+The Boy got up and floundered away in the opposite direction. He must
+get out of hearing. He toiled on, listening for the expected
+gunshot--hearing it, too, and the yawp of a wounded dog, in spite of a
+mitten clapped at each ear.
+
+"That's the kind of world it is! Do your level best, drag other fellas'
+packs hundreds o' miles over the ice with a hungry belly and bloody
+feet, and then--Poor old Nig!--'cause you're lame--poor old Nig!" With
+a tightened throat and hot water in his eyes, he kept on repeating the
+dog's name as he stumbled forward in the snow. "Nev' mind, old boy;
+it's a lonely kind o' world, and the right trail's hard to find."
+Suddenly he stood still. His stumbling feet were on a track. He had
+reached the dip in the saddle-back of the hill, and--yes! this was the
+_right_ trail; for down on the other side below him were faint
+lights--huts--an Indian village! with fish and food for everybody. And
+Nig--Nig was being--
+
+The Boy turned as if a hurricane had struck him, and tore back down the
+incline--stumbling, floundering in the snow, calling hoarsely:
+"Colonel, Colonel! don't do it! There's a village here, Colonel! Nig!
+Colonel, don't do it!"
+
+He dashed into the circle of firelight, and beheld Nig standing with a
+bandaged paw, placidly eating softened biscuit out of the family
+frying-pan.
+
+It was short work getting down to the village. They had one king salmon
+and two white fish from the first Indian they saw, who wanted hootch
+for them, and got only tabak.
+
+In the biggest of the huts, nearly full of men, women, and children,
+coughing, sickly-looking, dejected, the natives made room for the
+strangers. When the white men had supped they handed over the remains
+of their meal (as is expected) to the head of the house. This and a few
+matches or a little tobacco on parting, is all he looks for in return
+for shelter, room for beds on the floor, snow-water laboriously melted,
+use of the fire, and as much wood as they like to burn, even if it is a
+barren place, and fuel is the precious far-travelled "drift."
+
+It is curious to see how soon travellers get past that first cheeckalko
+feeling that it is a little "nervy," as the Boy had said, to walk into
+another man's house uninvited, an absolute stranger, and take
+possession of everything you want without so much as "by your leave."
+You soon learn it is the Siwash[*] custom.
+
+[Footnote: Siwash, corruption of French-Canadian _sauvage_, applied all
+over the North to the natives, their possessions and their customs.]
+
+Nothing would have seemed stranger now, or more inhuman, than the
+civilized point of view.
+
+The Indians trailed out one by one, all except the old buck to whom the
+hut belonged. He hung about for a bit till he was satisfied the
+travellers had no hootch, not even a little for the head of the house,
+and yet they seemed to be fairly decent fellows. Then he rolls up his
+blankets, for there is a premium on sleeping-space, and goes out, with
+never a notion that he is doing more than any man would, anywhere in
+the world, to find a place in some neighbour's hut to pass the night.
+
+He leaves the two strangers, as Indian hospitality ordains, to the
+warmest places in the best hut, with two young squaws, one old one, and
+five children, all sleeping together on the floor, as a matter of
+course.
+
+The Colonel and the Boy had flung themselves down on top of their
+sleeping-bag, fed and warmed and comforted. Only the old squaw was
+still up. She had been looking over the travellers' boots and "mitts,"
+and now, without a word or even a look being exchanged upon the
+subject, she sat there in the corner, by the dim, seal-oil light,
+sewing on new thongs, patching up holes, and making the strange men
+tidy--men she had never seen before and would never see again. And
+this, no tribute to the Colonel's generosity or the youth and friendly
+manners of the Boy. They knew the old squaw would have done just the
+same had the mucklucks and the mitts belonged to "the tramp of the
+Yukon," with nothing to barter and not a cent in his pocket. This,
+again, is a Siwash custom.
+
+The old squaw coughed and wiped her eyes. The children coughed in their
+sleep.
+
+The dogs outside were howling like human beings put to torture. But the
+sound no longer had power to freeze the blood of the trail-men.
+
+The Colonel merely damned them. The Boy lifted his head, and listened
+for Nig's note. The battle raged nearer; a great scampering went by the
+tent.
+
+"Nig!"
+
+A scuffling and snuffing round the bottom of the tent. The Boy, on a
+sudden impulse, reached out and lifted the flap.
+
+"Got your bandage on? Come here."
+
+Nig brisked in with the air of one having very little time to waste.
+
+"Lord! I should think you'd be glad to lie down. _I_ am. Let's see your
+paw. Here, come over to the light." He stepped very carefully over the
+feet of the other inhabitants till he reached the old woman's corner.
+Nig, following calmly, walked on prostrate bodies till he reached his
+friend.
+
+"Now, your paw, pardner. F-ith! Bad, ain't it?" he appealed to the
+toothless squaw. Her best friend could not have said her wizened regard
+was exactly sympathetic, but it was attentive. She seemed intelligent
+as well as kind.
+
+"Look here," whispered the Boy, "let that muckluck string o' mine
+alone." He drew it away, and dropped it between his knees. "Haven't you
+got something or other to make some shoes for Nig? Hein?" He
+pantomimed, but she only stared. "Like this." He pulled out his knife,
+and cut off the end of one leg of his "shaps," and gathered it gently
+round Nig's nearest foot. "Little dog-boots. See? Give you some bully
+tabak if you'll do that for Nig. Hein?"
+
+She nodded at last, and made a queer wheezy sound, whether friendly
+laughing or pure scorn, the Boy wasn't sure. But she set about the
+task.
+
+"Come 'long, Nig," he whispered. "You just see if I don't shoe my
+little horse." And he sneaked back to bed, comfortable in the assurance
+that the Colonel was asleep. Nig came walking after his friend straight
+over people's heads.
+
+One of the children sat up and whimpered. The Colonel growled sleepily.
+
+"You black devil!" admonished the Boy under his breath. "Look what
+you're about. Come here, sir." He pushed the devil down between the
+sleeping-bag and the nearest baby.
+
+The Colonel gave a distinct grunt of disapproval, and then, "Keepin'
+that brute in here?"
+
+"He's a lot cleaner than our two-legged friends," said the Boy sharply,
+as if answering an insult.
+
+"Right," said the Colonel with conviction.
+
+His pardner was instantly mollified. "If you wake another baby, you'll
+get a lickin'," he said genially to the dog; and then he stretched out
+his feet till they reached Nig's back, and a feeling of great comfort
+came over the Boy.
+
+"Say, Colonel," he yawned luxuriously, "did you know
+that--a--to-night--when Nig flared up, did you know you'd trodden on
+his paw?"
+
+"Didn't know it till you told me," growled the Colonel.
+
+"I thought you didn't. Makes a difference, doesn't it?"
+
+"You needn't think," says the Colonel a little defiantly, "that I've
+weakened on the main point just because I choose to give Nig a few
+cracker crumbs. If it's a question between a man's life and a dog's
+life, only a sentimental fool would hesitate."
+
+"I'm not talking about that; we can get fish now. What I'm pointin' out
+is that Nig didn't fly at you for nothin'."
+
+"He's got a devil of a temper, that dog."
+
+"It's just like Nicholas of Pymeut said." The Boy sat up, eager in his
+advocacy and earnest as a judge. "Nicholas of Pymeut said: 'You treat a
+Siwash like a heathen, and he'll show you what a hell of a heathen he
+can be.'"
+
+"Oh, go to sleep."
+
+"I'm goin', Colonel."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+MINÓOK
+
+"For whatever... may come to pass, it lies with me to have it serve
+me."--EPICTETUS.
+
+
+The Indians guided them back to the trail. The Colonel and the Boy made
+good speed to Novikakat, laid in supplies at Korkorines, heard the
+first doubtful account of Minóok at Tanana, and pushed on. Past camps
+Stoneman and Woodworth, where the great Klondyke Expeditions lay fast
+in the ice; along the white strip of the narrowing river, pent in now
+between mountains black with scant, subarctic timber, or gray with
+fantastic weather-worn rock--on and on, till they reached the bluffs of
+the Lower Ramparts.
+
+Here, at last, between the ranks of the many-gabled heights, Big Minóok
+Creek meets Father Yukon. Just below the junction, perched jauntily on
+a long terrace, up above the frozen riverbed, high and dry, and out of
+the coming trouble when river and creek should wake--here was the long,
+log-built mining town, Minóok, or Rampart, for the name was still
+undetermined in the spring of 1898.
+
+It was a great moment.
+
+"Shake, pardner," said the Boy. The Colonel and he grasped hands. Only
+towering good spirits prevented their being haughty, for they felt like
+conquerors, and cared not a jot that they looked like gaol-birds.
+
+It was two o'clock in the morning. The Gold Nugget Saloon was flaring
+with light, and a pianola was perforating a tune. The travellers pushed
+open a frosted door, and looked into a long, low, smoke-veiled room,
+hung with many kerosene lamps, and heated by a great red-hot iron
+stove.
+
+"Hello!" said a middle-aged man in mackinaws, smoking near the door-end
+of the bar.
+
+"Hello! Is Blandford Keith here? There are some letters for him."
+
+"Say, boys!" the man in mackinaws shouted above the pianola, "Windy
+Jim's got in with the mail."
+
+The miners lounging at the bar and sitting at the faro-tables looked up
+laughing, and seeing the strangers through the smoke-haze, stopped
+laughing to stare.
+
+"Down from Dawson?" asked the bartender hurrying forward, a magnificent
+creature in a check waistcoat, shirt-sleeves, four-in-hand tie, and a
+diamond pin.
+
+"No, t'other way about. Up from the Lower River."
+
+"Oh! May West or Muckluck crew? Anyhow, I guess you got a thirst on
+you," said the man in the mackinaws. "Come and licker up."
+
+The bartender mixed the drinks in style, shooting the liquor from a
+height into the small gin-sling glasses with the dexterity that had
+made him famous.
+
+When their tired eyes had got accustomed to the mingled smoke and
+glare, the travellers could see that in the space beyond the card
+tables, in those back regions where the pianola reigned, there were
+several couples twirling about--the clumsily-dressed miners pirouetting
+with an astonishing lightness on their moccasined feet. And women!
+White women!
+
+They stopped dancing and came forward to see the new arrivals.
+
+The mackinaw man was congratulating the Colonel on "gettin' back to
+civilization."
+
+"See that plate-glass mirror?" He pointed behind the bar, below the
+moose antlers. "See them ladies? You've got to a place where you can
+rake in the dust all day, and dance all night, and go buckin' the tiger
+between whiles. Great place, Minóok. Here's luck!" He took up the last
+of the gin slings set in a row before the party.
+
+"Have you got some property here?" asked the Boy.
+
+The man, without putting down his glass, simply closed one eye over the
+rim.
+
+"We've heard some bad accounts of these diggin's," said the Colonel.
+
+"I ain't sayin' there's millions for _every_body. You've got to get the
+inside track. See that feller talkin' to the girl? Billy Nebrasky
+tipped him the wink in time to git the inside track, just before the
+Fall Stampede up the gulch."
+
+"Which gulch?"
+
+He only motioned with his head. "Through havin' that tip, he got there
+in time to stake number three Below Discovery. He's had to hang up
+drinks all winter, but he's a millionaire all right. He's got a hundred
+thousand dollars _in sight,_ only waitin' for runnin' water to wash it
+out."
+
+"Then there _is_ gold about here?"
+
+"There is gold? Say, Maudie," he remarked in a humourous half-aside to
+the young woman who was passing with No--thumb-Jack, "this fellow wants
+to know if there is gold here."
+
+She laughed. "Guess he ain't been here long."
+
+Now it is not to be denied that this rejoinder was susceptible of more
+than one interpretation, but the mackinaw man seemed satisfied, so much
+so that he offered Maudie the second gin-sling which the Colonel had
+ordered "all round." She eyed the strangers over the glass. On the hand
+that held it a fine diamond sparkled. You would say she was twenty-six,
+but you wouldn't have been sure. She had seemed at least that at a
+distance. Now she looked rather younger. The face wore an impudent
+look, yet it was delicate, too. Her skin showed very white and fine
+under the dabs of rouge. The blueness was not yet faded out of her
+restless eyes.
+
+"Minóok's all right. No josh about that," she said, setting down her
+glass. Then to the Boy, "Have a dance?"
+
+"Not much," he replied rather roughly, and turned away to talk about
+the diggin's to two men on the other side.
+
+Maudie laid her hand on the Colonel's arm, and the diamond twitched the
+light. "_You_ will," she said.
+
+"Well, you see, ma'am"--the Colonel's smile was charming in spite of
+his wild beard--"we've done such a lot o' dancin' lately--done nothin'
+else for forty days; and after seven hundred miles of it we're just a
+trifle tired, ma'am."
+
+She laughed good-naturedly.
+
+"Pity you're tired," said the mackinaw man. "There's a pretty good
+thing goin' just now, but it won't be goin' long."
+
+The Boy turned his head round again with reviving interest in his own
+group.
+
+"Look here, Si," Maudie was saying: "if you want to let a lay on your
+new claim to _anybody_, mind it's got to be me."
+
+But the mackinaw man was glancing speculatively over at another group.
+In haste to forestall desertion, the Boy inquired:
+
+"Do you know of anything good that isn't staked yet?"
+
+"Well, mebbe I don't--and mebbe I do." Then, as if to prove that he
+wasn't overanxious to pursue the subject: "Say, Maudie, ain't that
+French Charlie over there?" Maudie put her small nose in the air.
+"Ain't you made it up with Charlie yet?'"
+
+"No, I ain't."
+
+"Then we'll have another drink all round."
+
+While he was untying the drawstring of his gold sack, Maudie said,
+half-aside, but whether to the Colonel or the Boy neither could tell:
+"Might do worse than keep your eye on Si McGinty." She nodded briskly
+at the violet checks on the mackinaw back. "Si's got a cinch up there
+on Glory Hallelujah, and nobody's on to it yet."
+
+The pianola picked out a polka. The man Si McGinty had called French
+Charlie came up behind the girl and said something. She shook her head,
+turned on her heel, and began circling about in the narrow space till
+she found another partner, French Charlie scowling after them, as they
+whirled away between the faro-tables back into the smoke and music at
+the rear. McGinty was watching Jimmie, the man at the gold scales,
+pinch up some of the excess dust in the scale-pan and toss it back into
+the brass blower.
+
+"Where did that gold come from?" asked the Colonel.
+
+"Off a claim o' mine"; and he lapsed into silence.
+
+You are always told these fellows are so anxious to rope in strangers.
+This man didn't seem to be. It made him very interesting. The Boy acted
+strictly on the woman's hint, and kept an eye on the person who had a
+sure thing up on Glory Hallelujah. But when the lucky man next opened
+his mouth it was to say:
+
+"Why, there's Butts down from Circle City."
+
+"Butts?" repeated the Boy, with little affectation of interest.
+
+"Yep. Wonder what the son of a gun is after here." But he spoke
+genially, even with respect.
+
+"Who's Butts?"
+
+"Butts? Ah--well--a--Butts is the smartest fellow with his fingers in
+all 'laska"; and McGinty showed his big yellow teeth in an appreciative
+smile.
+
+"Smart at washin' gold out?"
+
+"Smarter at pickin' it out." The bartender joined in Si's laugh as that
+gentleman repeated, "Yes, sir! handiest feller with his fingers I ever
+seen."
+
+"What does he do with his fingers?" asked the Boy, with impatient
+suspicion.
+
+"Well, he don't dare do much with 'em up here. 'Tain't popular."
+
+"What ain't?"
+
+"Butts's little game. But Lord! he is good at it." Butts had been
+introduced as a stalking-horse, but there was no doubt about Si's
+admiration of his "handiness." "Butts is wasted up here," he sighed.
+"There's some chance for a murderer in Alaska, but a thief's a goner."
+
+"Oh, well; you were sayin' that gold o' yours came from--"
+
+"Poor old Butts! Bright feller, too."
+
+"How far off is your--"
+
+"I tell you, sir, Butts is brains to his boots. Course you know Jack
+McQuestion?"
+
+"No, but I'd like to hear a little about your--"
+
+"Y' don' know Jack McQuestion? Well, sir, Jack's the biggest man in the
+Yukon. Why, he built Fort Reliance six miles below the mouth of the
+Klondyke in '73; he discovered gold on the Stewart in '85, and
+established a post there. _Everybody_ knows Jack McQuestion;
+an"--quickly, as he saw he was about to be interrupted--"you heard
+about that swell watch we all clubbed together and give him? No? Well,
+sir, there ain't an eleganter watch in the world. Is there?"
+
+"Guess not," said the bartender.
+
+"Repeater, you know. Got twenty-seven di'mon's in the case. One of
+'em's this size." He presented the end of a gnarled and muscular thumb.
+"And inside, the case is all wrote in--a lot of soft sawder; but Jack
+ain't got _any_thing he cares for so much. You can see he's always
+tickled to death when anybody asks him the time. But do you think he
+ever lets that watch out'n his own hands? Not _much_. Let's anybody
+_look_ at it, and keeps a holt o' the stem-winder. Well, sir, we was
+all in a saloon up at Circle, and that feller over there--Butts--he bet
+me fifty dollars that he'd git McQuestion's watch away from him before
+he left the saloon. An' it was late. McQuestion was thinkin' a'ready
+about goin' home to that squaw wife that keeps him so straight. Well,
+sir, Butts went over and began to gas about outfittin', and McQuestion
+answers and figures up the estimates on the counter, and, by Gawd! in
+less 'n quarter of an hour Butts, just standin' there and listenin', as
+you'd think--he'd got that di'mon' watch off'n the chain an' had it in
+his pocket. I knew he done it, though I ain't exactly seen _how_ he
+done it. The others who were in the game, they swore he hadn't got it
+yet, but, by Gawd, Butts says he'll think over McQuestion's terms, and
+wonders what time it is. He takes that di'mon' watch out of his pocket,
+glances at it, and goes off smooth as cream, sayin' 'Good-night.' Then
+he come a grinnin' over to us. 'Jest you go an' ask the Father o' the
+Yukon Pioneers what time it is, will yer?' An' I done it. Well, sir,
+when he put his hand in his pocket, by Gawd! I wish y' could a' saw
+McQuestion's face. Yes, sir, Butts is brains to his boots."
+
+"How far out are the diggin's?"
+
+"What diggin's?"
+
+"Yours."
+
+"Oh--a--my gulch ain't fur."
+
+There was a noise about the door. Someone bustled in with a torrent of
+talk, and the pianola was drowned in a pandemonium of shouts and
+laughter.
+
+"Windy Jim's reely got back!"
+
+Everybody crowded forward. Maudie was at the Colonel's elbow explaining
+that the little yellow-bearded man with the red nose was the
+letter-carrier. He had made a contract early in the winter to go to
+Dawson and bring down the mail for Minóok. His agreement was to make
+the round trip and be back by the middle of February. Since early March
+the standing gag in the camp had been: "Well, Windy Jim got in last
+night."
+
+The mild jest had grown stale, and the denizens of Minóok had given up
+the hope of ever laying eyes on Windy again, when lo! here he was with
+twenty-two hundred letters in his sack. The patrons of the Gold Nugget
+crowded round him like flies round a lump of sugar, glad to pay a
+dollar apiece on each letter he handed out. "And you take _all_ that's
+addressed to yer at that price or you get none." Every letter there had
+come over the terrible Pass. Every one had travelled twelve hundred
+miles by dog-team, and some had been on the trail seven months.
+
+"Here, Maudie, me dear." The postman handed her two letters. "See how
+he dotes on yer."
+
+"Got anything fur--what's yer names?" says the mackinaw man, who seemed
+to have adopted the Colonel and the Boy.
+
+He presented them without embarrassment to "Windy Jim Wilson, of Hog'em
+Junction, the best trail mail-carrier in the 'nited States."
+
+Those who had already got letters were gathered in groups under the
+bracket-lights reading eagerly. In the midst of the lull of
+satisfaction or expectancy someone cried out in disgust, and another
+threw down a letter with a shower of objurgation.
+
+"Guess you got the mate to mine, Bonsor," said a bystander with a
+laugh, slowly tearing up the communication he had opened with fingers
+so eager that they shook.
+
+"You pay a dollar apiece for letters from folks you never heard of,
+asking you what you think of the country, and whether you'd advise 'em
+to come out."
+
+"Huh! don't I wish they would!"
+
+"It's all right. _They will._"
+
+"And then trust Bonsor to git even."
+
+Salaman, "the luckiest man in camp," who had come in from his valuable
+Little Minóok property for the night only, had to pay fifteen dollars
+for his mail. When he opened it, he found he had one home letter,
+written seven months before, eight notes of inquiry, and six
+advertisements.
+
+Maudie had put her letters unopened in her pocket, and told the man at
+the scales to weigh out two dollars to Windy, and charge to her. Then
+she began to talk to the Colonel.
+
+The Boy observed with scant patience that his pardner treated Maudie
+with a consideration he could hardly have bettered had she been the
+first lady in the land. "Must be because she's little and cute-lookin'.
+The Colonel's a sentimental ol' goslin'."
+
+"What makes you so polite to that dance-hall girl?" muttered the Boy
+aside. "She's no good."
+
+"Reckon it won't make her any better for me to be impolite to her,"
+returned the Colonel calmly.
+
+But finding she could not detach the Kentuckian from his pardner,
+Maudie bestowed her attention elsewhere. French Charlie was leaning
+back against the wall, his hands jammed in his pockets, and his big
+slouch-hat pulled over his brows. Under the shadow of the wide brim
+furtively he watched the girl. Another woman came up and asked him to
+dance. He shook his head.
+
+"Reckon we'd better go and knock up Blandford Keith and get a bed,"
+suggested the Boy regretfully, looking round for the man who had a
+cinch up on Glory Hallelujah, and wouldn't tell you how to get there.
+
+"Reckon we'd better," agreed the Colonel.
+
+But they halted near Windy Jim, who was refreshing himself, and at the
+same time telling Dawson news, or Dawson lies, as the company evidently
+thought. And still the men crowded round, listening greedily, just as
+everybody devours certain public prints without ceasing to impeach
+their veracity. Lacking newspapers at which to pish! and pshaw! they
+listened to Windy Jim, disbelieving the only unvarnished tale that
+gentleman had ever told. For Windy, with the story-teller's instinct,
+knew marvellous enough would sound the bare recital of those awful
+Dawson days when the unprecedented early winter stopped the provision
+boats at Circle, and starvation stared the over-populated Klondyke in
+the face.
+
+Having disposed of their letters, the miners crowded round the courier
+to hear how the black business ended--matter of special interest to
+Minóok, for the population here was composed chiefly of men who, by the
+Canadian route, had managed to get to Dawson in the autumn, in the
+early days of the famine scare, and who, after someone's panic-proposal
+to raid the great Stores, were given free passage down the river on the
+last two steamers to run.
+
+When the ice stopped them (one party at Circle, the other at Fort
+Yukon), they had held up the supply boats and helped themselves under
+the noses of Captain Ray and Lieutenant Richardson, U. S. A.
+
+"Yes, sir," McGinty had explained, "we Minóok boys was all in that
+picnic. But we give our bond to pay up at mid-summer, and after the fun
+was over we dropped down here."
+
+He pushed nearer to Windy to hear how it had fared with the men who had
+stayed behind in the Klondyke--how the excitement flamed and menaced;
+how Agent Hansen of the Alaska Commercial Company, greatest of the
+importers of provisions and Arctic equipment, rushed about, half crazy,
+making speeches all along the Dawson River front, urging the men to fly
+for their lives, back to the States or up to Circle, before the ice
+stopped moving!
+
+But too many of these men had put everything they had on earth into
+getting here; too many had abandoned costly outfits on the awful Pass,
+or in the boiling eddies of the White Horse Rapids, paying any price in
+money or in pain to get to the goldfields before navigation closed. And
+now! here was Hansen, with all the authority of the A. C., shouting
+wildly: "Quick, quick! go up or down. It's a race for life!"
+
+Windy went on to tell how the horror of the thing dulled the men, how
+they stood about the Dawson streets helpless as cattle, paralysed by
+the misery that had overtaken them. All very well for Hansen to try to
+relieve the congestion at the Klondyke--the poor devils knew that to go
+either way, up or down, as late as this meant death. Then it was
+whispered how Captain Constantine of the Mounted Police was getting
+ready to drive every man out of the Klondyke, at the point of the
+bayonet, who couldn't show a thousand pounds of provisions. Yet most of
+the Klondykers still stood about dazed, silent, waiting for the final
+stroke.
+
+A few went up, over the way they had come, to die after all on the
+Pass, and some went down, their white, despairing faces disappearing
+round the Klondyke bend as they drifted with the grinding ice towards
+the Arctic Circle, where the food was caught in the floes. And how one
+came back, going by without ever turning his head, caring not a jot for
+Golden Dawson, serene as a king in his capital, solitary, stark on a
+little island of ice.
+
+"Lord! it was better, after all, at the Big Chimney."
+
+"Oh, it wasn't so bad," said Windy cheerfully. "About the time one o'
+the big companies announced they was sold out o' everything but sugar
+and axe-handles, a couple o' steamers pushed their way in through the
+ice. After all, just as old J. J. Healy said, it was only a question of
+rations and proper distribution. Why, flour's fell from one hundred and
+twenty dollars a sack to fifty! And there's a big new strike on the
+island opposite Ensley Creek. They call it Monte Cristo; pay runs eight
+dollars to the pan. Lord! Dawson's the greatest gold camp on the
+globe."
+
+But no matter what befell at Dawson, business must be kept brisk at
+Minóok. The pianola started up, and Buckin' Billy, who called the
+dances, began to bawl invitations to the company to come and waltz.
+
+Windy interrupted his own music for further refreshment, pausing an
+instant, with his mouth full of dried-apple pie to say:
+
+"Congress has sent out a relief expedition to Dawson."
+
+"No!"
+
+"Fact! Reindeer."
+
+"Ye mean peacocks."
+
+"Mean reindeer! It's all in the last paper come over the Pass. A
+Reindeer Relief Expedition to save them poor starvin' Klondykers."
+
+"Haw, haw! Good old Congress!"
+
+"Well, did you find any o' them reindeer doin' any relievin' round
+Dawson?"
+
+"Naw! What do _you_ think? Takes more'n Congress to git over the Dalton
+Trail"; and Windy returned to his pie.
+
+Talking earnestly with Mr. Butts, French Charlie pushed heavily past
+the Boy on his way to the bar. From his gait it was clear that he had
+made many similar visits that evening. In his thick Canadian accent
+Charlie was saying:
+
+"I blowed out a lot o' dust for dat girl. She's wearin' my di'mon' now,
+and won't look at me. Say, Butts, I'll give you twenty dollars if you
+sneak dat ring."
+
+"Done with you," says Butts, as calm as a summer's day. In two minutes
+Maudie was twirling about with the handy gentleman, who seemed as
+accomplished with his toes as he was reputed to be with his fingers.
+
+He came up with her presently and ordered some wine.
+
+"Wine, b-gosh!" muttered Charlie in drunken appreciation, propping
+himself against the wall again, and always slipping sideways. "Y' tink
+he's d' fines' sor' fella, don't you? Hein? Wai' 'n see!"
+
+The wine disappears and the two go off for another dance. Inside of ten
+minutes up comes Butts and passes something to French Charlie. That
+gentleman laughs tipsily, and, leaning on Butts's arm, makes his way to
+the scales.
+
+"Weigh out twen' dollars dis gen'man," he ordered.
+
+Butts pulled up the string of his poke and slipped to one side, as
+noise reached the group at the bar of a commotion at the other end of
+the saloon.
+
+"My ring! it's gone! My diamond ring! Now, you've got it"; and Maudie
+came running out from the dancers after one of the Woodworth gentlemen.
+
+Charlie straightened up and grinned, almost sobered in excess of joy
+and satisfied revenge. The Woodworth gentleman is searched and
+presently exonerated. Everybody is told of the loss, every nook and
+corner investigated. Maudie goes down on hands and knees, even creeping
+behind the bar.
+
+"I know'd she go on somethin' awful," said Charlie, so gleefully that
+Bonsor, the proprietor of the Gold Nugget, began to look upon him with
+suspicion.
+
+When Maudie reappeared, flushed, and with disordered hair, after her
+excursion under the counter, French Charlie confronted her.
+
+"Looky here. You treated me blame mean, Maudie; but wha'd' you say if
+I's to off' a rewar' for dat ring?"
+
+"Reward! A healthy lot o' good that would do."
+
+"Oh, very well; 'f you don' wan' de ring back--"
+
+"I _do,_ Charlie."
+
+He hammered on the bar.
+
+"Ev'body gottah look fur ring. I give a hunner 'n fifty dollah rewar'."
+
+Maudie stared at the princely offer. But instantly the commotion was
+greater than ever. "Ev'body" did what was expected of them, especially
+Mr. Butts. They flew about, looking in possible and impossible places,
+laughing, screaming, tumbling over one another. In the midst of the
+uproar French Charlie lurches up to Maudie.
+
+"Dat look anyt'in' like it?"
+
+"Oh, _Charlie!"_
+
+She looked the gratitude she could not on the instant speak.
+
+In the midst of the noise and movement the mackinaw man said to the
+Boy:
+
+"Don't know as you'd care to see my new prospect hole?"
+
+"Course I'd like to see it."
+
+"Well, come along tomorrow afternoon. Meet me here 'bout two. Don't
+_say_ nothin' to nobody," he added still lower. "We don't want to get
+overrun before we've recorded."
+
+The Boy could have hugged that mackinaw man.
+
+Outside it was broad day, but still the Gold Nugget lights were flaring
+and the pianola played.
+
+They had learned from the bartender where to find Blandford Keith--"In
+the worst-looking shack in the camp." But "It looks good to me," said
+the Boy, as they went in and startled Keith out of his first sleep. The
+man that brings you letters before the ice goes out is your friend.
+Keith helped them to bring in their stuff, and was distinctly troubled
+because the travellers wouldn't take his bunk. They borrowed some dry
+blankets and went to sleep on the floor.
+
+It was after two when they woke in a panic, lest the mackinaw man
+should have gone without them. While the Colonel got breakfast the Boy
+dashed round to the Gold Nugget, found Si McGinty playing craps, and
+would have brought him back in triumph to breakfast--but no, he would
+"wait down yonder below the Gold Nugget, and don't you say nothin' yit
+about where we're goin', or we'll have the hull town at our heels."
+
+About twelve miles "back in the mountains" is a little gulch that makes
+into a big one at right angles.
+
+"That's the pup where my claim is."
+
+"The what?"
+
+"Little creek; call 'em pups here."
+
+Down in the desolate hollow a ragged A tent, sagged away from the
+prevailing wind. Inside, they found that the canvas was a mere shelter
+over a prospect hole. A rusty stove was almost buried by the heap of
+earth and gravel thrown up from a pit several feet deep.
+
+"This is a winter diggins y' see," observed the mackinaw man with
+pride. "It's only while the ground is froze solid you can do this kind
+o' minin'. I've had to burn the ground clean down to bed-rock. Yes,
+sir, thawed my way inch by inch to the old channel."
+
+"Well, and what have you found?"
+
+"S'pose we pan some o' this dirt and see."
+
+His slow caution impressed his hearers. They made up a fire, melted
+snow, and half filled a rusty pan with gravel and soil from the bottom
+of the pit.
+
+"Know how to pan?"
+
+The Colonel and the Boy took turns. They were much longer at it than
+they ever were again, but the mackinaw man seemed not in the least
+hurry. The impatience was all theirs. When they had got down to fine
+sand, "Look!" screamed the Boy.
+
+"By the Lord!" said the Colonel softly.
+
+"Is that--"
+
+"Looks like you got some colours there. Gosh! Then I ain't been
+dreamin' after all."
+
+"Hey? Dreamin'? What? Look! Look!"
+
+"That's why I brought you gen'l'men out," says the mackinaw man. "I was
+afraid to trust my senses--thought I was gettin' wheels in my head."
+
+"Lord! look at the gold!"
+
+They took about a dollar and twenty cents out of that pan.
+
+"Now see here, you gen'l'men jest lay low about this strike." His
+anxiety seemed intense. They reassured him. "I don't suppose you mind
+our taking up a claim apiece next you," pleaded the Boy, "since the law
+don't allow you to stake more'n one."
+
+"Oh, that's all right," said the mackinaw man, with an air of princely
+generosity. "And I don't mind if you like to let in a few of your
+particular pals, if you'll agree to help me organise a district. An'
+I'll do the recordin' fur ye."
+
+Really, this mackinaw man was a trump. The Colonel took twenty-five
+dollars out of a roll of bills and handed it to him.
+
+"What's this fur?"
+
+"For bringing us out--for giving us the tip. I'd make it more, but till
+I get to Dawson--"
+
+"Oh!" laughed the mackinaw man, "_that's_ all right," and indifferently
+he tucked the bills into his baggy trousers.
+
+The Colonel felt keenly the inadequacy of giving a man twenty-five
+dollars who had just introduced him to hundreds of thousands--and who
+sat on the edge of his own gold-mine--but it was only "on account."
+
+The Colonel staked No. 1 Above the Discovery, and the Boy was in the
+act of staking No. 1 Below when--
+
+"No, no," says that kind mackinaw man, "the heavier gold will be found
+further up the gulch--stake No. 2 Above"; and he told them natural
+facts about placer-mining that no after expert knowledge could ever
+better. But he was not as happy as a man should be who has just struck
+pay.
+
+"Fact is, it's kind of upsettin' to find it so rich here."
+
+"Give you leave to upset me that way all day."
+
+"Y' see, I bought another claim over yonder where I done a lot o' work
+last summer and fall. Built a cabin and put up a sluice. I _got_ to be
+up there soon as the ice goes out. Don't see how I got time to do my
+assessment here too. Wish I was twins."
+
+"Why don't you sell this?"
+
+"Guess I'll have to part with a share in it." He sighed and looked
+lovingly into the hole. "Minin's an awful gamble," he said, as though
+admonishing Si McGinty; "but we _know_ there's gold just there."
+
+The Colonel and the Boy looked at their claims and felt the pinch of
+uncertainty. "What do you want for a share in your claim, Mr.
+McGinty?"
+
+"Oh, well, as I say, I'll let it go reasonable to a feller who'd do the
+assessment, on account o' my having that other property. Say three
+thousand dollars."
+
+The Colonel shook his head. "Why, it's dirt-cheap! Two men can take a
+hundred and fifty dollars a day out of that claim without outside help.
+And properly worked, the summer ought to show forty thousand dollars."
+
+On the way home McGinty found he could let the thing go for "two
+thousand spot cash."
+
+"Make it quarter shares," suggested the Boy, thrilled at such a chance,
+"and the Colonel and I together'll raise five hundred and do the rest
+of the assessment work for you."
+
+But they were nearly back at Minóok before McGinty said, "Well, I ain't
+twins, and I can't personally work two gold-mines, so we'll call it a
+deal." And the money passed that night.
+
+And the word passed, too, to an ex-Governor of a Western State and his
+satellites, newly arrived from Woodworth, and to a party of men just
+down from Circle City. McGinty seemed more inclined to share his luck
+with strangers than with the men he had wintered amongst. "Mean lot,
+these Minóok fellers." But the return of the ex-Governor and so large a
+party from quietly staking their claims, roused Minóok to a sense that
+"somethin' was goin' on."
+
+By McGinty's advice, the strangers called a secret meeting, and elected
+McGinty recorder. All the claim-holders registered their properties and
+the dates of location. The Recorder gave everybody his receipt, and
+everybody felt it was cheap at five dollars. Then the meeting proceeded
+to frame a code of Laws for the new district, stipulating the number of
+feet permitted each claim (being rigidly kept by McGinty within the
+limits provided by the United States Laws on the subject), and
+decreeing the amount of work necessary to hold a claim a year, settling
+questions of water rights, etc., etc.
+
+Not until Glory Hallelujah Gulch was a full-fledged mining district did
+Minóok in general know what was in the wind. The next day the news was
+all over camp.
+
+If McGinty's name inspired suspicion, the Colonel's and the
+ex-Governor's reassured, the Colonel in particular (he had already
+established that credit that came so easy to him) being triumphantly
+quoted as saying, "Glory Hallelujah Gulch was the richest placer he'd
+ever struck." Nobody added that it was also the only one. But this
+matter of a stampede is not controlled by reason; it is a thing of the
+nerves; while you are ridiculing someone else your legs are carrying
+you off on the same errand.
+
+In a mining-camp the saloon is the community's heart. However little a
+man cares to drink, or to dance, or to play cards, he goes to the
+saloon as to the one place where he may meet his fellows, do business,
+and hear the news. The saloon is the Market Place. It is also the Café,
+the Theatre, the Club, the Stock Exchange, the Barber's Shop, the
+Bank--in short, you might as well be dead as not be a patron of the
+Gold Nugget.
+
+Yet neither the Colonel nor the Boy had been there since the night of
+their arrival. On returning from that first triumphant inspection of
+McGinty's diggings, the Colonel had been handed a sealed envelope
+without address.
+
+"How do you know it's for me?"
+
+"She said it was for the Big Chap," answered Blandford Keith.
+
+The Colonel read:
+
+"_Come to the Gold Nugget as soon as you get this, and hear something
+to your advantage_.--MAUDIE."
+
+So he had stayed away, having plenty to occupy him in helping to
+organise the new district. He was strolling past the saloon the morning
+after the Secret Meeting, when down into the street, like a kingfisher
+into a stream, Maudie darted, and held up the Colonel.
+
+"Ain't you had my letter?"
+
+"Oh--a--yes--but I've been busy."
+
+"Guess so!" she said with undisguised scorn. "Where's Si McGinty?"
+
+"Reckon he's out at the gulch. I've got to go down to the A. C. now and
+buy some grub to take out." He was moving on.
+
+"Take where?" She followed him up.
+
+"To McGinty's gulch."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Why, to live on, while my pardner and I do the assessment work."
+
+"Then it's true! McGinty's been fillin' you full o' guff." The Colonel
+looked at her a little haughtily.
+
+"See here: I ain't busy, as a rule, about other folks' funerals, but--"
+She looked at him curiously. "It's cold here; come in a minute." There
+was no hint of vulgar nonsense, but something very earnest in the pert
+little face that had been so pretty. They went in. "Order drinks," she
+said aside, "and don't talk before Jimmie."
+
+She chaffed the bartender, and leaned idly against the counter. When a
+group of returned stampeders came in, she sat down at a rough little
+faro-table, leaned her elbows on it, sipped the rest of the stuff in
+her tumbler through a straw, and in the shelter of her arms set the
+straw in a knot-hole near the table-leg, and spirited the bad liquor
+down under the board. "Don't give me away," she said.
+
+The Colonel knew she got a commission on the drinks, and was there to
+bring custom. He nodded.
+
+"I hoped I'd see you in time," she went on hurriedly--"in time to warn
+you that McGinty was givin' you a song and dance."
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"Tellin" you a ghost story."
+
+"You mean--"
+
+"Can't you understand plain English?" she said, irritated at such
+obtuseness. "I got worried thinkin' it over, for it was me told that
+pardner o' yours--" She smiled wickedly. "I expected McGinty'd have
+some fun with the young feller, but I didn't expect you'd be such a
+Hatter." She wound up with the popular reference to lunacy.
+
+The Colonel pulled up his great figure with some pomposity. "I don't
+understand."
+
+"Any feller can see that. You're just the kind the McGintys are layin'
+for." She looked round to see that nobody was within earshot. "Si's
+been layin' round all winter waitin' for the spring crop o' suckers."
+
+"If you mean there isn't gold out at McGinty's gulch, you're wrong;
+I've seen it."
+
+"Course you have."
+
+He paused. She, sweeping the Gold Nugget with vigilant eye, went on in
+a voice of indulgent contempt.
+
+"Some of 'em load up an old shot-gun with a little charge o' powder and
+a quarter of an ounce of gold-dust on top, fire that into the prospect
+hole a dozen times or so, and then take a sucker out to pan the stuff.
+But I bet Si didn't take any more trouble with you than to have some
+colours in his mouth, to spit in the shovel or the pan, when you wasn't
+lookin'--just enough to drive you crazy, and get you to boost him into
+a Recordership. Why, he's cleaned up a tub o' money in fees since you
+struck the town."
+
+The Colonel moved uneasily, but faith with him died hard.
+
+"McGinty strikes me as a very decent sort of man, with a knowledge of
+practical mining and of mining law--"
+
+Maudie made a low sound of impatience, and pushed her empty glass
+aside.
+
+"Oh, very well, go your own way! Waste the whole spring doin' Si's
+assessment for him. And when the bottom drops out o' recordin', you'll
+see Si gettin' some cheechalko to buy an interest in that rottin' hole
+o' his--"
+
+Her jaw fell as she saw the Colonel's expression.
+
+"He's got you too!" she exclaimed.
+
+"Well, didn't you say yourself that night you'd be glad if McGinty'd
+let you a lay?"
+
+"Pshaw! I was only givin' you a song and dance. Not you neither, but
+that pardner o' yours. I thought I'd learn that young man a lesson. But
+I didn't know you'd get flim-flammed out o' your boots. Thought you
+looked like you got some sense."
+
+Unmoved by the Colonel's aspect of offended dignity, faintly dashed
+with doubt, she hurried on:
+
+"Before you go shellin' out any more cash, or haulin' stuff to Glory
+Hallelujah, just you go down that prospect hole o' McGinty's when
+McGinty ain't there, and see how many colours you can ketch."
+
+The Colonel looked at her.
+
+"Well, I'll do it," he said slowly, "and if you're right--"
+
+"Oh, I'm all right," she laughed; "an' I know my McGinty backwards.
+But"--she frowned with sudden anger--"it ain't Maudie's pretty way to
+interfere with cheechalkos gettin' fooled. I ain't proud o' the trouble
+I've taken, and I'll thank you not to mention it. Not to that pardner
+o' yours--not to nobody."
+
+She stuck her nose in the air, and waved her hand to French Charlie,
+who had just then opened the door and put his head in. He came straight
+over to her, and she made room for him on the bench.
+
+The Colonel went out full of thought. He listened attentively when the
+ex-Governor, that evening at Keith's, said something about the woman up
+at the Gold Nugget--"Maudie--what's the rest of her name?"
+
+"Don't believe anybody knows. Oh, yes, they must, too; it'll be on her
+deeds. She's got the best hundred by fifty foot lot in the place. Held
+it down last fall herself with a six-shooter, and she owns that cabin
+on the corner. Isn't a better business head in Minóok than Maudie's.
+She got a lay on a good property o' Salaman's last fall, and I guess
+she's got more ready dust even now, before the washin' begins, than
+anybody here except Salaman and the A.C. There ain't a man in Minóok
+who wouldn't listen respectfully to Maudie's views on any business
+proposition--once he was sure she wasn't fooling."
+
+And Keith told a string of stories to show how the Minóok miners
+admired her astuteness, and helped her unblushingly to get the better
+of one another.
+
+The Colonel stayed in Minóok till the recording was all done, and
+McGinty got tired of living on flap-jacks at the gulch.
+
+The night McGinty arrived in town the Colonel, not even taking the Boy
+into his confidence, hitched up and departed for the new district.
+
+He came back the next day a sadder and a wiser man. They had been sold.
+
+McGinty was quick to gather that someone must have given him away. It
+had only been a question of time, after all. He had lined his pockets,
+and could take the new turn in his affairs with equanimity.
+
+"Wait till the steamers begin to run," Maudie said; "McGinty'll play
+that game with every new boat-load. Oh, McGinty'll make another
+fortune. Then he'll go to Dawson and blow it in. Well, Colonel, sorry
+you ain't cultivatin' rheumatism in a damp hole up at Glory
+Hallelujah?"
+
+"I--I am very much obliged to you for saving me from--"
+
+She cut him short. "You see you've got time now to look about you for
+something really good, if there _is_ anything outside of Little
+Minóok."
+
+"It was very kind of you to--"
+
+"No it wasn't," she said shortly.
+
+The Colonel took out a roll of bank bills and selected one, folded it
+small, and passed it towards her under the ledge of the table. She
+glanced down.
+
+"Oh, I don't want that."
+
+"Yes, please."
+
+"Tell you I don't."
+
+"You've done me a very good turn; saved me a lot of time and expense."
+
+Slowly she took the money, as one thinking out something.
+
+"Where do you come from?" he asked suddenly.
+
+"'Frisco. I was in the chorus at the Alcazar."
+
+"What made you go into the chorus?"
+
+"Got tired o' life on a sheep-ranch. All work and no play. Never saw a
+soul. Seen plenty since."
+
+"Got any people belonging to you?"
+
+"Got a kind of a husband."
+
+"A kind of a husband?"
+
+"Yes--the kind you'd give away with a pound o' tea."
+
+The little face, full of humourous contempt and shrewd scorn, sobered;
+she flung a black look round the saloon, and her eyes came back to the
+Colonel's face.
+
+"I've got a girl," she said, and a sudden light flashed across her
+frowning as swiftly as a meteor cuts down along a darkened sky. "Four
+years old in June. _She_ ain't goin' into no chorus, bet your life!
+_She's_ going to have money, and scads o' things I ain't never had."
+
+That night the Colonel and the Boy agreed that, although they had
+wasted some valuable time and five hundred and twenty-five dollars on
+McGinty, they still had a chance of making their fortunes before the
+spring rush.
+
+The next day they went eight miles out in slush and in alternate rain
+and sunshine, to Little Minóok Creek, where the biggest paying claims
+were universally agreed to be. They found a place even more ragged and
+desolate than McGinty's, where smoke was rising sullenly from
+underground fires and the smell of burning wood filled the air, the
+ground turned up and dotted at intervals with piles of frozen gravel
+that had been hoisted from the shafts by windlass, forlorn little
+cabins and tents scattered indiscriminately, a vast number of empty
+bottles and cans sown broadcast, and, early as it was, a line of
+sluices upon Salaman's claim.
+
+They had heard a great deal about the dark, keen-looking young Oregon
+lawyer, for Salaman was the most envied man in Minóok. "Come over to my
+dump and get some nuggets," says Mr. Salaman, as in other parts of the
+world a man will say, "Come into the smoking-room and have a cigar."
+
+The snow was melted from the top of Salaman's dump, and his guests had
+no difficulty in picking several rough little bits of gold out of the
+thawing gravel. It was an exhilarating occupation.
+
+"Come down my shaft and see my cross-cuts"; and they followed him.
+
+He pointed out how the frozen gravel made solid wall, or pillar, and no
+curbing was necessary. With the aid of a candle and their host's
+urging, they picked out several dollars' worth of coarse gold from the
+gravel "in place" at the edge of the bed-rock. When he had got his
+guests thoroughly warmed up:
+
+"Yes, I took out several thousand last fall, and I'll have twenty
+thousand more out of my first summer clean-up."
+
+"And after that?"
+
+"After that I'm going home. I wouldn't stay here and work this way and
+live this way another winter, not for twenty millions."
+
+"I'm surprised to hear _you_ talking like that, sah."
+
+"Well, you won't be once you have tried it yourself. Mining up here's
+an awful gamble. Colours pretty well everywhere, and a few flakes of
+flour gold, just enough to send the average cheechalko crazy, but no
+real 'pay' outside of this little gulch. And even here, every inch has
+been scrambled for--and staked, too--and lots of it fought over. Men
+died here in the fall defending their ground from the jumpers--ground
+that hadn't a dollar in it."
+
+"Well, your ground was worth looking after, and John Dillon's. Which is
+his claim?"
+
+Salaman led the way over the heaps of gravel and round a windlass to
+No. 6, admitting:
+
+"Oh, yes, Dillon and I, and a few others, have come out of it all
+right, but Lord! it's a gamble."
+
+Dillon's pardner, Kennedy, did the honours, showing the Big Chimney men
+the very shaft out of which their Christmas heap of gold had been
+hoisted. It was true after all. For the favoured there _was_ "plenty o'
+gold--plenty o' gold."
+
+"But," said Salaman, "there are few things more mysterious than its
+whereabouts or why it should be where it is. Don't talk to me about
+mining experts--we've had 'em here. But who can explain the mystery of
+Minóok? There are six claims in all this country that pay to work. The
+pay begins in No. 5; before that, nothing. Just up yonder, above No.
+10, the pay-streak pinches out. No mortal knows why. A whole winter's
+toiling and moiling, and thousands of dollars put into the ground,
+haven't produced an ounce of gold above that claim or below No. 5. I
+tell you it's an awful gamble. Hunter Creek, Hoosier, Bear, Big Minóok,
+I You, Quail, Alder, Mike Hess, Little Nell--the whole blessed country,
+rivers, creeks, pups, and all, staked for a radius of forty miles just
+because there's gold here, where we're standing."
+
+"You don't mean there's _nothing_ left!"
+
+"Nothing within forty miles that somebody hasn't either staked or made
+money by abandoning."
+
+"Made money?"
+
+Salaman laughed.
+
+"It's money in your pocket pretty nearly every time you don't take up a
+claim. Why, on Hunter alone they've spent twenty thousand dollars this
+winter."
+
+"And how much have they taken out?"
+
+With index-finger and thumb Salaman made an "O," and looked shrewdly
+through it.
+
+"It's an awful gamble," he repeated solemnly.
+
+"It doesn't seem possible there's _nothing_ left," reiterated the Boy,
+incredulous of such evil luck.
+
+"Oh, I'm not saying you may not make something by getting on some other
+fellow's property, if you've a mind to pay for it. But you'd better not
+take anything on trust. I wouldn't trust my own mother in Alaska.
+Something in the air here that breeds lies. You can't believe anybody,
+yourself included." He laughed, stooped, and picked a little nugget out
+of the dump. "You'll have the same man tell you an entirely different
+story about the same matter within an hour. Exaggeration is in the air.
+The best man becomes infected. You lie, he lies, they all lie. Lots of
+people go crazy in Alaska every year--various causes, but it's chiefly
+from believing their own lies."
+
+They returned to Rampart.
+
+It was decidedly inconvenient, considering the state of their finances,
+to have thrown away that five hundred dollars on McGinty. They messed
+with Keith, and paid their two-thirds of the household expenses; but
+Dawson prices reigned, and it was plain there were no Dawson prizes.
+
+"Well," said the Colonel in the morning, "we've got to live somehow
+till the ice goes out." The Boy sat thinking. The Colonel went on: "And
+we can't go to Dawson cleaned out. No tellin' whether there are any
+proper banks there or whether my Louisville instructions got through.
+Of course, we've got the dogs yet."
+
+"Don't care how soon we sell Red and Spot."
+
+After breakfast the Boy tied Nig up securely behind Keith's shack, and
+followed the Colonel about with a harassed and watchful air.
+
+"No market for dogs now," seemed to be the general opinion, and one
+person bore up well under the news.
+
+But the next day a man, very splashed and muddy, and obviously just in
+from the gulches, stopped, in going by Keith's, and looked at Nig.
+
+"Dog market's down," quoted the Boy internally to hearten himself.
+
+"That mahlemeut's for sale," observed the Colonel to the stranger.
+
+"These are." The Boy hastily dragged Red and Spot upon the scene.
+
+"How much?"
+
+"Seventy-five dollars apiece."
+
+The man laughed. "Ain't you heard the dog season's over?"
+
+"Well, don't you count on livin' to the next?"
+
+The man pushed his slouch over his eyes and scratched the back of his
+head.
+
+"Unless I can git 'em reasonable, dogs ain't worth feedin' till next
+winter."
+
+"I suppose not," said the Boy sympathetically; "and you can't get fish
+here."
+
+"Right. Feedin' yourn on bacon, I s'pose, at forty cents a pound?'
+
+"Bacon and meal."
+
+"Guess you'll get tired o' that."
+
+"Well, we'd sell you the red dog for sixty dollars," admitted the Boy.
+
+The man stared. "Give you thirty for that black brute over there."
+
+"Thirty dollars for Nig!"
+
+"And not a--cent more. Dogs is down." He could get a dozen as good for
+twenty-five dollars.
+
+"Just you try." But the Colonel, grumbling, said thirty dollars was
+thirty dollars, and he reckoned he'd call it a deal. The Boy stared,
+opened his mouth to protest, and shut it without a sound.
+
+The Colonel had untied Nig, and the Leader, unmindful of the impending
+change in his fortunes, dashed past the muddy man from the gulch with
+such impetuosity that he knocked that gentleman off his legs. He picked
+himself up scowling, and was feeling for his gold sack.
+
+"Got scales here?"
+
+"No need of scales." The Boy whipped out a little roll of money,
+counted out thirty dollars, and held it towards the Colonel. "I can
+afford to keep Nig awhile if that's his figure."
+
+The stranger was very angry at this new turn in the dog deal. He had
+seen that Siwash out at the gulch, heard he was for sale, and came in
+"a purpose to git him."
+
+"The dog season's over," said the Boy, pulling Nig's ears and smiling.
+
+"Oh, _is_ it? Well, the season for eatin' meals ain't over. How'm I to
+git grub out to my claim without a dog?"
+
+"We are offerin' you a couple o' capital draught dogs."
+
+"I bought that there Siwash, and I'd a paid fur him if he hadn't a
+knocked me down." He advanced threateningly. "An' if you ain't huntin'
+trouble--"
+
+The big Colonel stepped in and tried to soothe the stranger, as well as
+to convince him that this was not the party to try bullying on.
+
+"I'll give you forty dollars for the dog," said the muddy man sulkily
+to the Boy.
+
+"No."
+
+"Give you fifty, and that's my last word."
+
+"I ain't sellin' dogs."
+
+He cursed, and offered five dollars more.
+
+"Can't you see I _mean_ it? I'm goin' to keep that dog--awhile."
+
+"S'pose you think you'll make a good thing o' hirin' him out?"
+
+He hadn't thought of it, but he said: "Why not? Best dog in the Yukon."
+
+"Well, how much?"
+
+"How much'll you give?"
+
+"Dollar a day."
+
+"Done."
+
+So Nig was hired out, Spot was sold for twenty dollars, and Red later
+for fifteen.
+
+"Well," said the Colonel when they went in, "I didn't know you were so
+smart. But you can't live _here_ on Nig's seven dollars a week."
+
+The Boy shook his head. Their miserable canned and salted fare cost
+about four dollars a day per man.
+
+"I'm goin' to take Nig's tip," he said--"goin' to work."
+
+Easier said than done. In their high rubber boots they splashed about
+Rampart in the mild, thawing weather, "tryin' to scare up a job," as
+one of them stopped to explain to every likely person: "Yes, sah,
+lookin' for any sort of honourable employment till the ice goes out."
+
+"Nothin' doin'."
+
+"Everything's at a standstill."
+
+"Just keepin' body and soul together myself till the boats come in."
+
+They splashed out to the gulch on the same errand.
+
+Yes, wages were fifteen dollars a day when they were busy. Just now
+they were waiting for the thorough thaw.
+
+"Should think it was pretty thorough without any waitin'."
+
+Salaman shook his head. "Only in the town and tundra. The frost holds
+on to the deep gulch gravel like grim death. And the diggin's were
+already full of men ready to work for their keep-at least, they say
+so," Salaman added.
+
+Not only in the great cities is human flesh and blood held cheaper than
+that of the brutes. Even in the off season, when dogs was down, Nig
+could get his dollar a day, but his masters couldn't get fifty cents.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE GREAT STAMPEDE
+
+"Die Menchen suchen und suchen, wollen immer was Besseres finden....
+Gott geb' ihnen nur Geduld!"
+
+
+Men in the Gold Nugget were talking about some claims, staked and
+recorded in due form, but on which the statutory work had not been
+done.
+
+"What about 'em?"
+
+"They're jumpable at midnight."
+
+French Charlie invited the Boy to go along, but neither he nor the
+Colonel felt enthusiastic.
+
+"They're no good, those claims, except to sell to some sucker, and
+we're not in that business _yet_, sah."
+
+They had just done twenty miles in slush and mire, and their hearts
+were heavier than their heels. No, they would go to bed while the
+others did the jumpin', and next day they would fill Keith's wood-bin.
+
+"So if work does turn up we won't have to worry about usin' up his
+firin'." In the chill of the next evening they were cording the results
+of the day's chopping, when Maudie, in fur coat, skirts to the knee,
+and high rubber boots, appeared behind Keith's shack. Without deigning
+to notice the Boy, "Ain't seen you all day," says she to the Colonel.
+
+"Busy," he replied, scarcely looking up.
+
+"Did you do any jumpin' last night?"
+
+"No."
+
+"_That's_ all right."
+
+She seated herself with satisfaction on a log. She looked at the Boy
+impudently, as much as to say, "When that blot on the landscape is
+removed, I'll tell you something." The Boy had not the smallest
+intention of removing the blot.
+
+Grudgingly he admitted to himself that, away from the unsavory
+atmosphere of the Gold Nugget, there was nothing in Maudie positively
+offensive. At this moment, with her shrewd little face peering pertly
+out from her parki-hood, she looked more than ever like an audacious
+child, or like some strange, new little Arctic animal with a whimsical
+human air.
+
+"Look here, Colonel," she said presently, either despairing of getting
+rid of the Boy or ceasing to care about it: "you got to get a wiggle on
+to-morrow."
+
+"What for?"
+
+She looked round, first over one shoulder, then over the other. "Well,
+it's on the quiet."
+
+The Kentuckian nodded. But she winked her blue eyes suspiciously at the
+Boy.
+
+"Oh, _he's_ all right."
+
+"Well, you been down to Little Minóok, ain't you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And you seen how the pay pinches out above No. 10?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, now, if it ain't above No. 10, where is it?" No answer. "Where
+does it _go_?" she repeated severely, like a schoolmarm to a class of
+backward boys.
+
+"That's what everybody'd like to know."
+
+"Then let 'em ask Pitcairn."
+
+"What's Pitcairn say?"
+
+She got up briskly, moved to another log almost at the Colonel's feet,
+and sat looking at him a moment as if making up her mind about
+something serious. The Colonel stood, fists at his sides, arrested by
+that name Pitcairn.
+
+"You know Pitcairn's the best all-round man we got here," she asserted
+rather than asked.
+
+The Colonel nodded.
+
+"He's an Idaho miner, Pitcairn is!"
+
+"I know."
+
+"Well, he's been out lookin' at the place where the gold gives out on
+Little Minóok. There's a pup just there above No. 10--remember?"
+
+"Perfectly."
+
+"And above the pup, on the right, there's a bed of gravel."
+
+"Couldn't see much of that for the snow."
+
+"Well, sir, that bed o' gravel's an old channel."
+
+"No!"
+
+She nodded. "Pitcairn's sunk a prospect, and found colours in his first
+pan."
+
+"Oh, colours!"
+
+"But the deeper he went, the better prospects he got." She stood up
+now, close to the Colonel. The Boy stopped work and leaned on the wood
+pile, listening. "Pitcairn told Charlie and me (on the strict q. t.)
+that the gold channel crossed the divide at No. 10, and the only gold
+on Little Minóokust what spilt down on those six claims as the gold
+went crossin' the gulch. The real placer is that old channel above the
+pup, and boys"--in her enthusiasm she even included the Colonel's
+objectionable pardner--"boys, it's rich as blazes!"
+
+"I wonder----" drawled the Colonel, recovering a little from his first
+thrill.
+
+"I wouldn't advise you to waste much time wonderin'," she said with
+fire. "What I'm tellin' you is scientific. Pitcairn is straight as a
+string. You won't get any hymns out o' Pitcairn, but you'll get fair
+and square. His news is worth a lot. If you got any natchral gumption
+anywhere about you, you can have a claim worth anything from ten to
+fifty thousand dollars this time to-morrow."
+
+"Well, well! Good Lord! Hey, Boy, what we goin' to do?"
+
+"Well, you don't want to get excited," admonished the queer little
+Arctic animal, jumping up suddenly; "but you can bunk early and get a
+four a.m. wiggle on. Charlie and me'll meet you on the Minóokl. Ta-ta!"
+tad she whisked away as suddenly as a chipmunk.
+
+They couldn't sleep. Some minutes before the time named they were
+quietly leaving Keith's shack. Out on the trail there were two or three
+men already disappearing towards Little Minóok here was Maudie, all by
+herself, sprinting along like a good fellow, on the thin surface of the
+last night's frost. She walked in native water-boots, but her
+snow-shoes stuck out above the small pack neatly lashed on her straight
+little shoulders. They waited for her.
+
+She came up very brisk and businesslike. To their good-mornings she
+only nodded in a funny, preoccupied way, never opening her lips.
+
+"Charlie gone on?" inquired the Colonel presently.
+
+She shook her head. "Knocked out."
+
+"Been fightin'?"
+
+"No; ran a race to Hunter."
+
+"To jump that claim?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"Did he beat?"
+
+She laughed. "Butts had the start. They got there together at nine
+o'clock!"
+
+"Three hours before jumpin' time?"
+
+Again she nodded. "And found four more waitin' on the same fool
+errand."
+
+"What did they do?"
+
+"Called a meetin'. Couldn't agree. It looked like there'd be a fight,
+and a fast race to the Recorder among the survivors. But before the
+meetin' was adjourned, those four that had got there first (they were
+pretty gay a'ready), they opened some hootch, so Butts and Charlie knew
+they'd nothing to fear except from one another."
+
+On the top of the divide that gave them their last glimpse of Rampart
+she stopped an instant and looked back. The quick flash of anxiety
+deepening to defiance made the others turn. The bit they could see of
+the water-front thoroughfare was alive. The inhabitants were rushing
+about like a swarm of agitated ants.
+
+"What's happening?"
+
+"It's got out," she exploded indignantly. "They're comin', too!"
+
+She turned, flew down the steep incline, and then settled into a
+steady, determined gait, that made her gain on the men who had got so
+long a start. Her late companions stood looking back in sheer
+amazement, for the town end of the trail was black with figures. The
+Boy began to laugh.
+
+"Look! if there isn't old Jansen and his squaw wife."
+
+The rheumatic cripple, huddled on a sled, was drawn by a native man and
+pushed by a native woman. They could hear him swearing at both
+impartially in broken English and Chinook.
+
+The Colonel and the Boy hurried after Maudie. It was some minutes
+before they caught up. The Boy, feeling that he couldn't be
+stand-offish in the very act of profiting by her acquaintance, began to
+tell her about the crippled but undaunted Swede. She made no answer,
+just trotted steadily on. The Boy hazarded another remark--an opinion
+that she was making uncommon good time for a woman.
+
+"You'll want all the wind you got before you get back," she said
+shortly, and silence fell on the stampeders.
+
+Some of the young men behind were catching up. Maudie set
+her mouth very firm and quickened her pace. This spectacle touched
+up those that followed; they broke into a canter, floundered in a
+drift, recovered, and passed on. Maudie pulled up.
+
+"That's all right! Let 'em get good and tired, half-way. We got to save
+all the run we got in us for the last lap."
+
+The sun was hotter, the surface less good.
+
+She loosened her shoulder-straps, released her snow-shoes, and put them
+on. As she tightened her little pack the ex-Governor came puffing up
+with apoplectic face.
+
+"Why, she can throw the diamond hitch!" he gasped with admiration.
+
+"S'pose you thought the squaw hitch would be good enough for me."
+
+"Well, it is for me," he laughed breathlessly.
+
+"That's 'cause you're an ex-Governor"; and steadily she tramped along.
+
+In twenty minutes Maudie's party came upon those same young men who had
+passed running. They sat in a row on a fallen spruce. One had no rubber
+boots, the other had come off in such a hurry he had forgotten his
+snow-shoes. Already they were wet to the waist.
+
+"Step out, Maudie," said one with short-breathed hilarity; "we'll be
+treadin' on your heels in a minute;" but they were badly blown.
+
+Maudie wasted not a syllable. Her mouth began to look drawn. There were
+violet shadows under the straight-looking eyes.
+
+The Colonel glanced at her now and then. Is she thinking about that
+four-year-old? Is Maudie stampedin' through the snow so that other
+little woman need never dance at the Alcazar? No, the Colonel knew well
+enough that Maudie rather liked this stampedin' business.
+
+She had passed one of those men who had got the long start of her. He
+carried a pack. Once in a while she would turn her strained-looking
+face over her shoulder, glancing back, with the frank eyes of an enemy,
+at her fellow-citizens labouring along the trail.
+
+"Come on, Colonel!" she commanded, with a new sharpness. "Keep up your
+lick."
+
+But the Colonel had had about enough of this gait. From now on he fell
+more and more behind. But the Boy was with her neck and neck.
+
+"Guess you're goin' to get there."
+
+"Guess I am."
+
+Some men behind them began to run. They passed. They had pulled off
+their parkis, and left them where they fell. They threw off their caps
+now, and the sweat rolled down their faces. Not a countenance but wore
+that immobile look, the fixed, unseeing eye of the spent runner, who is
+overtaxing heart and lungs. Not only Maudie now, but everyone was
+silent. Occasionally a man would rouse himself out of a walk, as if out
+of sleep, and run a few yards, going the more weakly after. Several of
+the men who had been behind caught up.
+
+Where was Kentucky?
+
+If Maudie wondered, she wasted no time over the speculation. For his
+own good she had admonished him to keep up his lick, but of course the
+main thing was that Maudie should keep up hers.
+
+"What if this is the great day of my life!" thought the Boy. "Shall I
+always look back to this? Why, it's Sunday. Wonder if Kentucky
+remembers?" Never pausing, the Boy glanced back, vaguely amused, and
+saw the Colonel plunging heavily along in front of half a dozen, who
+were obviously out of condition for such an expedition--eyes bloodshot,
+lumbering on with nervous "whisky gait," now whipped into a breathless
+gallop, now half falling by the way. Another of the Gold Nugget women
+with two groggy-looking men, and somewhere down the trail, the crippled
+Swede swearing at his squaw. A dreamy feeling came over the Boy. Where
+in the gold basins of the North was this kind of thing not
+happening--finished yesterday, or planned for to-morrow? Yes, it was
+typical. Between patches of ragged black spruce, wide stretches of
+snow-covered moss, under a lowering sky, and a mob of men floundering
+through the drifts to find a fortune. "See how they run!"--mad mice.
+They'd been going on stampedes all winter, and would go year in, year
+out, until they died. The prizes were not for such as they. As for
+himself--ah, it was a great day for him! He was going at last to claim
+that gold-mine he had come so far to find. This was the decisive moment
+of his life. At the thought he straightened up, and passed Maudie. She
+gave him a single sidelong look, unfriendly, even fierce. That was
+because he could run like sixty, and keep it up. "When I'm a
+millionaire I shall always remember that I'm rich because I won the
+race." A dizzy feeling came over him. He seemed to be running through
+some softly resisting medium like water--no, like wine jelly. His heart
+was pounding up in his throat. "What if something's wrong, and I drop
+dead on the way to my mine? Well, Kentucky'll look after things."
+
+Maudie had caught up again, and here was Little Minóok at last! A
+couple of men, who from the beginning had been well in advance of
+everyone else, and often out of sight, had seemed for the last five
+minutes to be losing ground. But now they put on steam, Maudie too. She
+stepped out of her snowshoes, and flung them up on the low roof of the
+first cabin. Then she ducked her head, crooked her arms at the elbow,
+and, with fists uplifted, she broke into a run, jumping from pile to
+pile of frozen pay, gliding under sluice-boxes, scrambling up the bank,
+slipping on the rotting ice, recovering, dashing on over fallen timber
+and through waist-deep drifts, on beyond No. 10 up to the bench above.
+
+When the Boy got to Pitcairn's prospect hole, there were already six
+claims gone. He proceeded to stake the seventh, next to Maudie's. That
+person, with flaming cheeks, was driving her last location-post into a
+snow-drift with a piece of water-worn obsidian.
+
+The Colonel came along in time to stake No. 14 Below, under Maudie's
+personal supervision.
+
+Not much use, in her opinion, "except that with gold, it's where you
+find it, and that's all any man can tell you."
+
+As she was returning alone to her own claim, behold two brawny Circle
+City miners pulling out her stakes and putting in their own. She flew
+at them with remarks unprintable.
+
+"You keep your head shut," advised one of the men, a big, evil-looking
+fellow. "This was our claim first. We was here with Pitcairn yesterday.
+Somebody's took away our location-posts."
+
+"You take me for a cheechalko?" she screamed, and her blue eyes flashed
+like smitten steel. She pulled up her sweater and felt in her belt.
+"You--take your stakes out! Put mine back, unless you want----" A
+murderous-looking revolver gleamed in her hand.
+
+"Hold on!" said the spokesman hurriedly. "Can't you take a joke?"
+
+"No; this ain't my day for jokin'. You want to put them stakes o' mine
+back." She stood on guard till it was done. "And now I'd advise you,
+like a mother, to back-track home. You'll find this climate very tryin'
+to your health."
+
+They went farther up the slope and marked out a claim on the incline
+above the bench.
+
+In a few hours the mountain-side was staked to the very top, and still
+the stream of people struggled out from Rampart to the scene of the new
+strike. All day long, and all the night, the trail was alive with the
+coming or the going of the five hundred and odd souls that made up the
+population. In the town itself the excitement grew rather than waned.
+Men talked themselves into a fever, others took fire, and the epidemic
+spread like some obscure nervous disease. Nobody slept, everybody drank
+and hurrahed, and said it was the greatest night in the history of
+Minóok. In the Gold Nugget saloon, crowded to suffocation, Pitcairn
+organized the new mining district, and named it the Idaho Bar. French
+Charlie and Keith had gone out late in the day. On their return, Keith
+sold his stake to a woman for twenty-five dollars, and Charlie
+advertised a half-interest in his for five thousand. Between these two
+extremes you could hear Idaho Bar quoted at any figure you liked.
+
+Maudie was in towering spirits. She drank several cocktails, and in her
+knee-length "stampedin' skirt" and her scarlet sweater she danced the
+most audacious jig even Maudie had ever presented to the Gold Nugget
+patrons. The miners yelled with delight. One of them caught her up and
+put her on the counter of the bar, where, no whit at a loss, she
+curveted and spun among the bottles and the glasses as lightly as a
+dragonfly dips and whirls along a summer brook. The enthusiasm grew
+delirious. The men began to throw nuggets at her, and Maudie, never
+pausing in the dance, caught them on the fly.
+
+Suddenly she saw the Big Chap turn away, and, with his back to her,
+pretend to read the notice on the wall, written in charcoal on a great
+sheet of brown wrapping-paper:
+
+"MINÓOK, April 30.
+
+"To who it may concern:
+
+"Know all men by these presents that I, James McGinty, now of Minóok
+(or Rampart City), Alaska, do hereby give notice of my intention to
+hold and claim a lien by virtue of the statue in such case----"
+
+He had read so far when Maudie, having jumped down off the bar with her
+fists full of nuggets, and dodging her admirers, wormed her way to the
+Colonel. She thrust her small person in between the notice and the
+reader, and scrutinised the tanned face, on which the Rochester burners
+shed a flood of light. "You lookin' mighty serious," she said.
+
+"Am I?"
+
+"M-hm! Thinkin' 'bout home sweet home?"
+
+"N-no--not just then."
+
+"Say, I told you 'bout--a--'bout me. You ain't never told me nothin'."
+
+He seemed not to know the answer to that, and pulled at his ragged
+beard. She leaned back against McGinty's notice, and blurred still more
+the smudged intention "by virtue of the statue."
+
+"Married, o' course," she said.
+
+"No."
+
+"Widder?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Never hitched up yet?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Never goin' to, I s'pose."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," he laughed, and turned his head over his shoulder
+to the curious scene between them and the bar. It was suddenly as if he
+had never seen it before; then, while Maudie waited, a little scornful,
+a little kind, his eyes went through the window to the pink and orange
+sunrise. As some change came over the Colonel's face, "She died!" said
+Maudie.
+
+"No--no--she didn't die;" then half to himself, half to forestall
+Maudie's crude probing, "but I lost her," he finished.
+
+"Oh, you lost her!"
+
+He stood, looking past the ugliness within to the morning majesty
+without. But it was not either that he saw. Maudie studied him.
+
+"Guess you ain't give up expectin' to find her some day?"
+
+"No--no, not quite."
+
+"Humph! Did you guess you'd find her here?"
+
+"No," and his absent smile seemed to remove him leagues away. "No, not
+here."
+
+"I could a' told you----" she began savagely. "I don't know for certain
+whether any--what you call good women come up here, but I'm dead sure
+none stay."
+
+"When do you leave for home, Maudie?" he said gently.
+
+But at the flattering implication the oddest thing happened. As she
+stood there, with her fists full of gold, Maudie's eyes filled. She
+turned abruptly and went out. The crowd began to melt away. In half an
+hour only those remained who had more hootch than they could carry off
+the premises. They made themselves comfortable on the floor, near the
+stove, and the greatest night Minóok had known was ended.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+A MINERS' MEETING
+
+"Leiden oder triumphiren Hammer oder Amboss sein."--Goethe.
+
+
+In a good-sized cabin, owned by Bonsor, down near the A. C., Judge
+Corey was administering Miners' Law. The chief magistrate was already a
+familiar figure, standing on his dump at Little Minóok, speculatively
+chewing and discussing "glayshal action," but most of the time at the
+Gold Nugget, chewing still, and discussing more guardedly the action
+some Minóok man was threatening to bring against another. You may treat
+a glacier cavalierly, but Miners' Law is a serious matter. Corey was
+sitting before a deal table, littered with papers strewn round a
+central bottle of ink, in which a steel pen stuck upright. The Judge
+wore his usual dilapidated business suit of brown cheviot that had once
+been snuff-coloured and was now a streaky drab. On his feet, stretched
+out under the magisterial table till they joined the jury, a pair of
+moccasins; on his grizzled head a cowboy hat, set well back. He could
+spit farther than any man in Minóok, and by the same token was a better
+shot. They had unanimously elected him Judge.
+
+The first-comers had taken possession of the chairs and wooden stools
+round the stove. All the later arrivals, including Keith and his
+friends, sat on the floor.
+
+"There's a good many here."
+
+"They'll keep comin' as long as a lean man can scrouge in."
+
+"Yes," said Keith, "everybody's got to come, even if it's only the
+usual row between pardners, who want to part and can't agree about
+dividing the outfit."
+
+"Got to come?"
+
+Keith laughed. "That's the way everybody feels. There'll be a debate
+and a chance to cast a vote. Isn't your true-born American always
+itching to hold a meeting about something?"
+
+"Don't know about that," said McGinty, "but I do know there's more
+things happens in a minute to make a man mad in Alaska, than happens in
+a year anywhere else." And his sentiment was loudly applauded. The
+plaintiff had scored a hit.
+
+"I don't know but two partnerships," the ex-Governor was saying, "of
+all those on my ship and on the Muckluck and the May West--just two,
+that have stood the Alaska strain. Everyone that didn't break on the
+boats, or in camp, went to smash on the trail."
+
+They all admitted that the trail was the final test. While they smoked
+and spat into or at the stove, and told trail yarns, the chief
+magistrate arranged papers, conferred with the clerk and another man,
+wrinkled deeply his leathery forehead, consulted his Waterbury, and
+shot tobacco-juice under the table.
+
+"Another reason everybody comes," whispered Keith, "is because the side
+that wins always takes the town up to the Nugget and treats to hootch.
+Whenever you see eighty or ninety more drunks than usual, you know
+there's either been a stampede or else justice has been administered."
+
+"Ain't Bonsor late?" asked someone.
+
+"No, it's a quarter of."
+
+"Why do they want Bonsor?"
+
+"His case on the docket--McGinty v. Burt Bonsor, proprietor of the Gold
+Nugget."
+
+"If they got a row on----"
+
+"If they got a row? Course they got a row. Weren't they pardners?"
+
+"But McGinty spends all his time at the Gold Nugget."
+
+"Well, where would he spend it?"
+
+"A Miners' Meetin's a pretty poor machine," McGinty was saying to the
+ex-Governor, "but it's the best we got."
+
+"----in a country bigger than several of the nations of Europe put
+together," responded that gentleman, with much public spirit.
+
+"A Great Country!"
+
+"Right!"
+
+"You bet!"
+
+"----a country that's paid for its purchase over and over again, even
+before we discovered gold here."
+
+"Did she? Good old 'laska."
+
+"----and the worst treated part o' the Union."
+
+"That's so."
+
+"After this, when I read about Russian corruption and Chinese cruelty,
+I'll remember the way Uncle Sam treats the natives up----"
+
+"----and us, b'gosh! White men that are openin' up this great, rich
+country fur Uncle Sam----"
+
+"----with no proper courts--no Government protection--no help--no
+justice--no nothin'."
+
+"Yer forgittin' them reindeer!" And the court-room rang with derisive
+laughter.
+
+"Congress started that there Relief Expedition all right," the josher
+went on, "only them blamed reindeer had got the feed habit, and when
+they'd et up everything in sight they set down on the Dalton Trail--and
+there they're settin' yit, just like they was Congress. But I don't
+like to hear no feller talkin' agin' the Gover'ment."
+
+"Yes, it's all very funny," said McGinty gloomily, "but think o' the
+fix a feller's in wot's had a wrong done him in the fall, and knows
+justice is thousands o' miles away, and he can't even go after her for
+eight months; and in them eight months the feller wot robbed him has et
+up the money, or worked out the claim, and gone dead-broke."
+
+"No, sir! we don't wait, and we don't go trav'lin'. We stay at home and
+call a meetin'."
+
+The door opened, and Bonsor and the bar-tender, with great difficulty,
+forced their way in. They stood flattened against the wall. During the
+diversion McGinty was growling disdainfully, "Rubbidge!"
+
+"Rubbidge? Reckon it's pretty serious rubbidge."
+
+"Did you ever know a Miners' Meetin' to make a decision that didn't
+become law, with the whole community ready to enforce it if necessary?
+Rubbidge!
+
+"Oh, we'll hang a man if we don't like his looks," grumbled McGinty;
+but he was overborne. There were a dozen ready to uphold the majesty of
+the Miners' Meetin'.
+
+"No, sir! No funny business about our law! This tribunal's final."
+
+"I ain't disputin' that it's final. I ain't talkin' about law. I was
+mentionin' Justice."
+
+"The feller that loses is always gassin' 'bout Justice. When you win
+you don't think there's any flies on the Justice."
+
+"Ain't had much experience with winnin'. We all knows who wins in these
+yere Meetin's."
+
+"Who?" But they turned their eyes on Mr. Bonsor, over by the door.
+
+"Who wins?" repeated a Circle City man.
+
+"The feller that's got the most friends."
+
+"It's so," whispered Keith.
+
+"----same at Circle," returned the up-river man.
+
+McGinty looked at him. Was this a possible adherent?
+
+"You got a Push at Circle?" he inquired, but without genuine interest
+in the civil administration up the river. "Why, 'fore this yere town
+was organised, when we hadn't got no Court of Arbitration to fix a
+boundary, or even to hang a thief, we had our 'main Push,' just like we
+was 'Frisco." He lowered his voice, and leaned towards his Circle
+friend. "With Bonsor's help they 'lected Corey Judge o' the P'lice
+Court, and Bonsor ain't never let Corey forgit it."
+
+"What about the other?" inquired a Bonsorite, "the shifty Push that got
+you in for City Marshal?"
+
+"What's the row on to-night?" inquired the Circle City man.
+
+"Oh, Bonsor, over there, he lit out on a stampede 'bout Christmas, and
+while he was gone a feller by the name o' Lawrence quit the game.
+Fanned out one night at the Gold Nugget. I seen for days he was wantin'
+to be a angil, and I kep' a eye on 'im. Well, when he went to the
+boneyard, course it was my business, bein' City Marshal, to take
+possession of his property fur his heirs!"
+
+There was unseemly laughter behind the stove-pipe.
+
+"Among his deeds and traps," McGinty went on, unheeding, "there was
+fifteen hundred dollars in money. Well, sir, when Bonsor gits back he
+decides he'd like to be the custodian o' that cash. Mentions his idee
+to me. I jest natchrally tell him to go to hell. No, sir, he goes to
+Corey over there, and gits an order o' the Court makin' Bonsor
+administrator o' the estate o' James Lawrence o' Noo Orleens, lately
+deceased. Then Bonsor comes to me, shows me the order, and demands that
+fifteen hundred."
+
+"Didn't he tell you you could keep all the rest o' Lawrence's stuff?"
+asked the Bonsorite.
+
+McGinty disdained to answer this thrust.
+
+"But I knows my dooty as City Marshal, and I says, 'No,' and Bonsor
+says, says he, 'If you can't git the idee o' that fifteen hundred
+dollars out o' your head, I'll git it out fur ye with a bullet,' an' he
+draws on me."
+
+"An' McGinty weakens," laughed the mocker behind the stove-pipe.
+
+"Bonsor jest pockets the pore dead man's cash," says McGinty, with
+righteous indignation, "and I've called this yer meetin' t' arbitrate
+the matter."
+
+"Minoók doesn't mind arbitrating," says Keith low to the Colonel, "but
+there isn't a man in camp that would give five cents for the interest
+of the heirs of Lawrence in that fifteen hundred dollars."
+
+A hammering on the clerk's little table announced that it was seven
+p.m.
+
+The Court then called for the complaint filed by McGinty v. Bonsor, the
+first case on the docket. The clerk had just risen when the door was
+flung open, and hatless, coatless, face aflame, Maudie stood among the
+miners.
+
+"Boys!" said she, on the top of a scream, "I been robbed."
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"Robbed?"
+
+"Golly!"
+
+"Maudie robbed?" They spoke all together. Everybody had jumped up.
+
+"While we was on that stampede yesterday, somebody found my--all
+my----" She choked, and her eyes filled. "Boys! my nuggets, my dust, my
+dollars--they're gone!"
+
+"Where did you have 'em?"
+
+"In a little place under--in a hole." Her face twitched, and she put
+her hand up to hide it.
+
+"Mean shame."
+
+"Dirt mean."
+
+"We'll find him, Maudie."
+
+"An' when we do, we'll hang him on the cottonwood."
+
+"Did anybody know where you kept your----"
+
+"I didn't think so, unless it was----No!" she screamed hysterically,
+and then fell into weak crying. "Can't think who could have been such a
+skunk."
+
+"But who do you suspect?" persisted the Judge.
+
+"How do I know?" she retorted angrily. "I suspect everybody till--till
+I know." She clenched her hands.
+
+That a thief should be "operating" in Minoók on somebody who wasn't
+dead yet, was a matter that came home to the business and the bosoms of
+all the men in the camp. In the midst of the babel of speculation and
+excitement, Maudie, still crying and talking incoherently about skunks,
+opened the door. The men crowded after her. Nobody suggested it, but
+the entire Miners' Meeting with one accord adjourned to the scene of
+the crime. Only a portion could be accommodated under Maudie's roof,
+but the rest crowded in front of her door or went and examined the
+window. Maudie's log-cabin was a cheerful place, its one room, neatly
+kept, lined throughout with red and white drill, hung with marten and
+fox, carpeted with wolf and caribou. The single sign of disorder was
+that the bed was pulled out a little from its place in the angle of the
+wall above the patent condenser stove. Behind the oil-tank, where the
+patent condensation of oil into gas went on, tiers of shelves,
+enamelled pots and pans ranged below, dishes and glasses above. On the
+very top, like a frieze, gaily labelled ranks of "tinned goods." On the
+table under the window a pair of gold scales. A fire burned in the
+stove. The long-lingering sunlight poured through the "turkey-red" that
+she had tacked up for a half-curtain, and over this, one saw the
+slouch-hats and fur caps of the outside crowd.
+
+Clutching Judge Corey by the arm, Maudie pulled him after her into the
+narrow space behind the head-board and the wall.
+
+"It was here--see?" She stooped down.
+
+Some of the men pulled the bed farther out, so that they, too, could
+pass round and see.
+
+"This piece o' board goes down so slick you'd never know it lifted
+out." She fitted it in with shaking hands, and then with her nails and
+a hairpin got it out. "And way in, underneath, I had this box. I always
+set it on a flat stone." She spoke as if this oversight were the
+thief's chief crime. "See? Like that."
+
+She fitted the cigar-box into unseen depths of space and then brought
+it out again, wet and muddy. The ground was full of springs hereabouts,
+and the thaw had loosed them.
+
+"Boys!" She stood up and held out the box. "Boys! it was full."
+
+Eloquently she turned it upside down.
+
+"How much do you reckon you had?" She handed the muddy box to the
+nearest sympathiser, sat down on the fur-covered bed, and wiped her
+eyes.
+
+"Any idea?"
+
+"I weighed it all over again after I got in from the Gold Nugget the
+night we went on the stampede."
+
+As she sobbed out the list of her former possessions, Judge Corey took
+it down on the back of a dirty envelope. So many ounces of dust, so
+many in nuggets, so much in bills and coin, gold and silver. Each item
+was a stab.
+
+"Yes, all that--all that!" she jumped up wildly, "and it's gone! But we
+got to find it. What you hangin' round here for? Why, if you boys had
+any natchral spunk you'd have the thief strung up by now."
+
+"We got to find him fust."
+
+"You won't find him standin' here."
+
+They conferred afresh.
+
+"It must have been somebody who knowed where you kept the stuff."
+
+"N-no." Her red eyes wandered miserably, restlessly, to the window.
+Over the red half-curtain French Charlie and Butts looked in. They had
+not been to the meeting.
+
+Maudie's face darkened as she caught sight of the Canadian.
+
+"Oh, yes, you can crow over me now," she shouted shrilly above the buzz
+of comment and suggestion. The Canadian led the way round to the door,
+and the two men crowded in.
+
+"You just get out," Maudie cried in a fury. "Didn't I turn you out o'
+this and tell you never----"
+
+"Hol' on," said French Charlie in a conciliatory tone. "This true 'bout
+your losin'----"
+
+"Yes, it's true; but I ain't askin' your sympathy!"
+
+He stopped short and frowned.
+
+"Course not, when you can get his." Under his slouch-hat he glowered at
+the Colonel.
+
+Maudie broke into a volley of abuse. The very air smelt of brimstone.
+When finally, through sheer exhaustion, she dropped on the side of the
+bed, the devil prompted French Charlie to respond in kind. She jumped
+up and turned suddenly round upon Corey, speaking in a voice quite
+different, low and hoarse: "You asked me, Judge, if anybody knew where
+I kept my stuff. Charlie did."
+
+The Canadian stopped in the middle of a lurid remark and stared
+stupidly. The buzz died away. The cabin was strangely still.
+
+"Wasn't you along with the rest up to Idaho Bar?" inquired the Judge in
+a friendly voice.
+
+"Y-yes."
+
+"Not when we all were! No!" Maudie's tear-washed eyes were regaining a
+dangerous brightness. "I wanted him to come with me. He wouldn't, and
+we quarrelled."
+
+"We didn't."
+
+"You didn't quarrel?" put in the Judge.
+
+"We did," said Maudie, breathless.
+
+"Not about that. It was because she wanted another feller to come,
+too." Again he shot an angry glance at the Kentuckian.
+
+"And Charlie said if I gave the other feller the tip, he wouldn't come.
+And he'd get even with me, if it took a leg!"
+
+"Well, it looks like he done it."
+
+"Can't you prove an alibi? Thought you said you was along with the rest
+to Idaho Bar?" suggested Windy Jim.
+
+"So I was."
+
+"I didn't see you," Maudie flashed.
+
+"When were you there?" asked the Judge.
+
+"Last night."
+
+"Oh, yes! When everybody else was comin' home. You all know if that's
+the time Charlie usually goes on a stampede!"
+
+"You----"
+
+If words could slay, Maudie would have dropped dead, riddled with a
+dozen mortal wounds. But she lived to reply in kind. Charlie's
+abandonment of coherent defence was against him. While he wallowed
+blindly in a mire of offensive epithet, his fellow-citizens came to
+dark conclusions. He had an old score to pay off against Maudie, they
+all knew that. Had he chosen this way? What other so effectual? He
+might even say most of that dust was his, anyway. But it was an
+alarming precedent. The fire of Maudie's excitement had caught and
+spread. Eve the less inflammable muttered darkly that it was all up
+with Minoók, if a person couldn't go on a stampede without havin' his
+dust took out of his cabin. The crowd was pressing Charlie, and twenty
+cross-questions were asked him in a minute. He, beside himself with
+rage, or fear, or both, lost all power except to curse.
+
+The Judge seemed to be taking down damning evidence on the dirty
+envelope. Some were suggesting:
+
+"Bring him over to the court."
+
+"Yes, try him straight away."
+
+No-Thumb-Jack was heard above the din, saying it was all gammon wasting
+time over a trial, or even--in a plain case like this--for the Judge to
+require the usual complaint made in writing and signed by three
+citizens.
+
+Two men laid hold of the Canadian, and he turned ghastly white under
+his tan.
+
+"Me? Me tief? You--let me alone!" He began to struggle. His terrified
+eyes rolling round the little cabin, fell on Butts.
+
+"I don' know but one tief in Minóok," he said wildly, like a man
+wandering in a fever, and unconscious of having spoken, till he noticed
+there was a diversion of some sort. People were looking at Butts. A
+sudden inspiration pierced the Canadian's fog of terror.
+
+"You know what Butts done to Jack McQuestion. You ain't forgot how he
+sneaked Jack's watch!" The incident was historic.
+
+Every eye on Butts. Charlie caught up breath and courage.
+
+"An' t'odder night w'en Maudie treat me like she done"--he shot a
+blazing glance at the double-dyed traitor--"I fixed it up with Butts.
+Got him to go soft on 'er and nab 'er ring."
+
+"You didn't!" shouted Maudie.
+
+With a shaking finger Charlie pointed out Jimmie, the cashier.
+
+"Didn't I tell you to weigh me out twenty dollars for Butts that
+night?"
+
+"Right," says Jimmie.
+
+"It was to square Butts fur gittin' that ring away from Maudie."
+
+"You put up a job like that on me?" To be fooled publicly was worse
+than being robbed.
+
+Charlie paid no heed to her quivering wrath. The menace of the
+cotton-wood gallows outrivalled even Maudie and her moods.
+
+"Why should I pay Butts twenty dollars if I could work dat racket
+m'self? If I want expert work, I go to a man like Butts, who knows his
+business. I'm a miner--like the rest o' yer!"
+
+The centre of gravity had shifted. It was very grave indeed in the
+neighbourhood of Mr. Butts.
+
+"Hold on," said the Judge, forcing his way nearer to the man whose
+fingers had a renown so perilous. "'Cause a man plays a trick about a
+girl's ring don't prove he stole her money. This thing happened while
+the town was emptied out on the Little Minóok trail. Didn't you go off
+with the rest yesterday morning?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Ha!" gasped Maudie, as though this were conclusive--"had business in
+town, did you?"
+
+Mr. Butts declined to answer.
+
+"You thought the gold-mine out on the gulch could wait--and the
+gold-mine in my cabin couldn't."
+
+"You lie!" remarked Mr. Butts.
+
+"What time did you get to Idaho Bar?" asked Corey.
+
+"Didn't get there at all."
+
+"Where were you?"
+
+"Here in Rampart."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Wait! Wait!" commanded the Judge, as the crowd rocked towards Butts:
+"P'raps you'll tell us what kept you at home?"
+
+Butts shut his mouth angrily, but a glance at the faces nearest him
+made him think an answer prudent.
+
+"I was tired."
+
+The men, many of them ailing, who had nearly killed themselves to get
+to Idaho Bar, sneered openly.
+
+"I'd been jumpin' a claim up at Hunter."
+
+"So had Charlie. But he joined the new stampede in the afternoon."
+
+"Well, I didn't."
+
+"Why, even the old cripple Jansen went on this stampede."
+
+"Can't help that."
+
+"Mr. Butts, you're the only able-bodied white man in the district that
+stayed at home." Corey spoke in his, most judicial style.
+
+Mr. Butts must have felt the full significance of so suspicious a fact,
+but all he said was:
+
+"Y' ought to fix up a notice. Anybody that don't join a stampede will
+be held guilty o' grand larceny." Saying this Butts had backed a step
+behind the stove-pipe, and with incredible quickness had pulled out a
+revolver. But before he had brought it into range, No-Thumb-Jack had
+struck his arm down, and two or three had sprung at the weapon and
+wrested it away.
+
+"Search him!"
+
+"No tellin' what else he's got!"
+
+"----and he's so damned handy!"
+
+"Search him!"
+
+Maudie pressed forward as the pinioned man's pockets were turned out.
+Only tobacco, a small buckskin bag with less than four ounces of dust,
+a pipe, and a knife.
+
+"Likely he'd be carrying my stuff about on him!" said she, contemptuous
+of her own keen interest.
+
+"Get out a warrant to search Butts' premises," said a voice in the
+crowd.
+
+"McGinty and Johnson are down there now!"
+
+"Think he'd leave anything layin' round?"
+
+Maudie pressed still closer to the beleaguered Butts.
+
+"Say, if I make the boys let you go back to Circle, will you tell me
+where you've hid my money?"
+
+"Ain't got your money!"
+
+"Look at 'im," whispered Charlie, still so terrified he could hardly
+stand.
+
+"Butts ain't borrowin' no trouble."
+
+And this formulating of the general impression did Butts no good. As
+they had watched the calm demeanour of the man, under suspicion of what
+was worse, in their eyes, than murder, there had come over the
+bystanders a wave of that primitive cruelty that to this hour will wake
+in modern men and cry as loud as in Judean days, or in the Saga times
+of Iceland, "Retribution! Let him suffer! Let him pay in blood!" And
+here again, on the Yukon, that need of visible atonement to right the
+crazy injustice of the earth.
+
+Even the women--the others had crowded in--were eager for Butts'
+instant expiation of the worst crime such a community knows. They told
+one another excitedly how they'd realised all along it was only a
+question of time before Butts would be tryin' his game up here. Nobody
+was safe. Luckily they were on to him. But look! He didn't care a
+curse. It would be a good night's job to make him care.
+
+Three men had hold of him, and everybody talked at once. Minnie Bryan
+was sure she had seen him skulking round Maudie's after that lady had
+gone up the trail, but everybody had been too excited about the
+stampede to notice particularly.
+
+The Judge and Bonsor were shouting and gesticulating, Butts answering
+bitterly but quietly still. His face was pretty grim, but it looked as
+if he were the one person in the place who hadn't lost his head. Maudie
+was still crying at intervals, and advertising to the newcomers that
+wealth she had hitherto kept so dark, and between whiles she stared
+fixedly at Butts, as conviction of his guilt deepened to a rage to see
+him suffer for his crime.
+
+She would rather have her nuggets back, but, failing that--let Butts
+pay! He owed her six thousand dollars. Let him pay!
+
+The miners were hustling him to the door--to the Court House or to the
+cotton-wood--a toss-up which.
+
+"Look here!" cried out the Colonel; "McGinty and Johnson haven't got
+back!"
+
+Nobody listened. Justice had been sufficiently served in sending them.
+They had forced Butts out across the threshold, the crowd packed close
+behind. The only men who had not pressed forward were Keith, the
+Colonel, and the Boy, and No-Thumb-Jack, still standing by the
+oil-tank.
+
+"What are they going to do with him?" The Colonel turned to Keith with
+horror in his face.
+
+Keith's eyes were on the Boy, who had stooped and picked up the block
+of wood that had fitted over the treasure-hole. He was staring at it
+with dilated eyes. Sharply he turned his head in the direction where
+No-Thumb-Jack had stood. Jack was just making for the door on the heels
+of the last of those pressing to get out.
+
+The Boy's low cry was drowned in the din. He lunged forward, but the
+Colonel gripped him. Looking up, he saw that Kentucky understood, and
+meant somehow to manage the business quietly.
+
+Jack was trying, now right, now left, to force his way through the
+congestion at the door, like a harried rabbit at a wattled fence. A
+touch on the shoulder simultaneously with the click of a trigger at his
+ear brought his face round over his shoulder. He made the instinctive
+pioneer motion to his hip, looked into the bore of the Colonel's
+pistol, and under Keith's grip dropped his "gun-hand" with a smothered
+oath.
+
+Or was it that other weapon in the Colonel's left that bleached the
+ruddy face? Simply the block of wood. On the under side, dried in, like
+a faint stain, four muddy finger-prints, index joint lacking. Without a
+word the Colonel turned the upper side out. A smudge?--no--the grain of
+human skin clean printed--a distorted palm without a thumb. Only one
+man in Minóok could make that sign manual!
+
+The last of the crowd were over the threshold now, and still no word
+was spoken by those who stayed behind, till the Colonel said to the
+Boy:
+
+"Go with 'em, and look after Butts. Give us five minutes; more if you
+can!"
+
+He laid the block on a cracker-box, and, keeping pistol and eye still
+on the thief, took his watch in his left hand, as the Boy shot through
+the door.
+
+Butts was making a good fight for his life, but he was becoming
+exhausted. The leading spirits were running him down the bank to where
+a crooked cotton-wood leaned cautiously over the Never-Know-What, as if
+to spy out the river's secret.
+
+But after arriving there, they were a little delayed for lack of what
+they called tackle. They sent a man off for it, and then sent another
+to hurry up the man. The Boy stood at the edge of the crowd, a little
+above them, watching Maudie's door, and with feverish anxiety turning
+every few seconds to see how it was with Butts.
+
+Up in the cabin No-Thumb-Jack had pulled out of the usual capacious
+pockets of the miner's brown-duck-pockets that fasten with a patent
+snap--a tattered pocket-book, fat with bills. He plunged deeper and
+brought up Pacific Coast eagles and five-dollar pieces, Canadian and
+American gold that went rolling out of his maimed and nervous hand
+across the tablet to the scales and set the brass pans sawing up and
+down.
+
+Keith, his revolver still at full cock, had picked up a trampled bit of
+paper near the stove. Corey's list. Left-handedly he piled up the
+money, counting, comparing.
+
+"Quick! the dust!" ordered the Colonel. Out of a left hip-pocket a
+long, tight-packed buckskin bag. Another from a side-pocket, half the
+size and a quarter as full.
+
+"That's mine," said Jack, and made a motion to recover.
+
+"Let it alone. Turn out everything. Nuggets!"
+
+A miner's chamois belt unbuckled and flung heavily down. The scales
+jingled and rocked; every pocket in the belt was stuffed.
+
+"Where's the rest?"
+
+"There ain't any rest. That's every damned pennyweight."
+
+"Maybe we ought to weigh it, and see if he's lying?"
+
+"'Fore God it's all! Let me go!" He had kept looking through the crack
+of the door.
+
+"Reckon it's about right," said Keith.
+
+"'Tain't right! There's more there'n I took. My stuff's there too. For
+Christ's sake, let me go!"
+
+"Look here, Jack, is the little bag yours?"
+
+Jack wet his dry lips and nodded "Yes."
+
+The Colonel snatched up the smaller bag and thrust it into the man's
+hands. Jack made for the door. The Colonel stopped him.
+
+"Better take to the woods," he said, with a motion back towards the
+window. The Colonel opened the half-closed door and looked out, as Jack
+pushed aside the table, tore away the red curtain, hammered at the
+sash, then, desperate, set his shoulder at it and forced the whole
+thing out. He put his maimed hand on the sill and vaulted after the
+shattered glass.
+
+They could see him going like the wind up towards his own shack at the
+edge of the wood, looking back once or twice, doubling and tacking to
+keep himself screened by the haphazard, hillside cabins, out of sight
+of the lynchers down at the river.
+
+"Will you stay with this?" the Colonel had asked Keith hurriedly,
+nodding at the treasure-covered table, and catching up the
+finger-marked block before Jack was a yard from the window.
+
+"Yes," Keith had said, revolver still in hand and eyes on the man
+Minóok was to see no more. The Colonel met the Boy running breathless
+up the bank.
+
+"Can't hold 'em any longer," he shouted; "you're takin' it pretty easy
+while a man's gettin' killed down here."
+
+"Stop! Wait!" The Colonel floundered madly through the slush and mud,
+calling and gesticulating, "I've got the thief!"
+
+Presto all the backs of heads became faces.
+
+"Got the money?" screamed Maudie, uncovering her eyes. She had gone to
+the execution, but after the rope was brought, her nerve failed her,
+and she was sobbing hysterically into her two palms held right over her
+eyes.
+
+"Oh, you had it, did you?" called out McGinty with easy insolence.
+
+"Look here!" The Colonel held up the bit of flooring with rapid
+explanation.
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"Got him locked up?"
+
+Everybody talked at once. The Colonel managed to keep them going for
+some moments before he admitted.
+
+"Reckon he's lit out." And then the Colonel got it hot and strong for
+his clumsiness.
+
+"Which way'd he go?"
+
+The Colonel turned his back to the North Pole, and made a fine large
+gesture in the general direction of the Equator.
+
+"Where's my money?"
+
+"Up in your cabin. Better go and count it."
+
+A good many were willing to help since they'd been cheated out of a
+hanging, and even defrauded of a shot at a thief on the wing. Nobody
+seemed to care to remain in the neighbourhood of the crooked
+cotton-wood. The crowd was dispersing somewhat sheepishly.
+
+Nobody looked at Butts, and yet he was a sight to see. His face and his
+clothes were badly mauled. He was covered with mud and blood. When the
+men were interrupted in trying to get the noose over his head, he had
+stood quite still in the midst of the crowd till it broke and melted
+away from him. He looked round, passed his hand over his eyes, threw
+open his torn coat, and felt in his pockets.
+
+"Who's got my tobacco?" says he.
+
+Several men turned back suddenly, and several pouches were held out,
+but nobody met Butts' eyes. He filled his pipe, nor did his hand shake
+any more than those that held the tobacco-bags. When he had lit up,
+"Who's got my Smith and Wesson?" he called out to the backs of the
+retiring citizens. Windy Jim stood and delivered. Butts walked away to
+his cabin, swaying a little, as if he'd had more hootch than he could
+carry.
+
+"What would you have said," demanded the Boy, "if you'd hung the wrong
+man?"
+
+"Said?" echoed McGinty. "Why, we'd 'a' said that time the corpse had
+the laugh on us." A couple of hours later Keith put an excited face
+into his shack, where the Colonel and the Boy were just crawling under
+their blankets.
+
+"Thought you might like to know, that Miners' Meeting that was
+interrupted is having an extra session."
+
+They followed him down to the Court through a fine rain. The night was
+heavy and thick. As they splashed along Keith explained:
+
+"Of course, Charlie knew there wasn't room enough in Alaska now for
+Butts and him; and he thought he'd better send Butts home. So he took
+his gun and went to call."
+
+"Don't tell me that poor devil's killed after all."
+
+"Not a bit. Butts is a little bunged up, but he's the handier man, even
+so. He drew the first bead."
+
+"Charlie hurt?"
+
+"No, he isn't hurt. He's dead. Three or four fellows had just looked
+in, on the quiet, to kind of apologise to Butts. They're down at
+Corey's now givin' evidence against him."
+
+"So Butts'll have to swing after all. Is he in Court?"
+
+"Yes--been a busy day for Butts."
+
+A confused noise came suddenly out of the big cabin they were nearing.
+They opened the door with difficulty, and forced their way into the
+reeking, crowded room for the second time that night. Everybody seemed
+to be talking--nobody listening. Dimly through dense clouds of
+tobacco-smoke "the prisoner at the Bar" was seen to be--what--no!
+Yes--shaking hands with the Judge.
+
+"Verdict already?"
+
+"Oh, that kind o' case don't take a feller like Corey long."
+
+"What's the decision?"
+
+"Prisoner discharged. Charlie Le Gros committed suicide."
+
+"Suicide!"
+
+"--by goin' with his gun to Butts' shack lookin' f trouble."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+THE ICE GOES OUT
+
+"I am apart of all that I have seen."
+
+
+It had been thawing and freezing, freezing and thawing, for so long
+that men lost account of the advance of a summer coming, with such
+balked, uncertain steps. Indeed, the weather variations had for several
+weeks been so great that no journey, not the smallest, could be
+calculated with any assurance. The last men to reach Minoók were two
+who had made a hunting and prospecting trip to an outlying district.
+They had gone there in six days, and were nineteen in returning.
+
+The slush was waist-deep in the gulches. On the benches, in the snow,
+holes appeared, as though red-hot stones had been thrown upon the
+surface. The little settlement by the mouth of the Minoók sat
+insecurely on the boggy hillside, and its inhabitants waded knee-deep
+in soaking tundra moss and mire.
+
+And now, down on the Never-Know-What, water was beginning to run on the
+marginal ice. Up on the mountains the drifted snow was honey-combed.
+Whole fields of it gave way and sunk a foot under any adventurous shoe.
+But although these changes had been wrought slowly, with backsets of
+bitter nights, when everything was frozen hard as flint, the illusion
+was general that summer came in with a bound. On the 9th of May, Minoók
+went to bed in winter, and woke to find the snow almost gone under the
+last nineteen hours of hot, unwinking sunshine, and the first geese
+winging their way up the valley--sight to stir men's hearts. Stranger
+still, the eight months' Arctic silence broken suddenly by a thousand
+voices. Under every snow-bank a summer murmur, very faint at first, but
+hourly louder--the sound of falling water softly singing over all the
+land.
+
+As silence had been the distinguishing feature of the winter, so was
+noise the sign of the spring. No ear so dull but now was full of it.
+All the brooks on all the hills, tinkling, tumbling, babbling of some
+great and universal joy, all the streams of all the gulches joining
+with every little rill to find the old way, or to carve a new, back to
+the Father of Waters.
+
+And the strange thing had happened on the Yukon. The shore-edges of the
+ice seemed sunken, and the water ran yet deeper there. But of a
+certainty the middle part had risen! The cheechalkos thought it an
+optical illusion. But old Brandt from Forty-Mile had seen the ice go
+out for two-and-twenty years, and he said it went out always so--"humps
+his back, an' gits up gits, and when he's a gitten', jest look out!"
+Those who, in spite of warning, ventured in hip-boots down on the
+Never-Know-What, found that, in places, the under side of the ice was
+worn nearly through. If you bent your head and listened, you could
+plainly hear that greater music of the river running underneath, low as
+yet, but deep, and strangely stirring--dominating in the hearer's ears
+all the clear, high clamour from gulch and hill.
+
+In some men's hearts the ice "went out" at the sound, and the melting
+welled up in their eyes. Summer and liberty were very near.
+
+"Oh, hurry, Yukon Inua; let the ice go out and let the boats come in."
+
+But the next few days hung heavily. The river-ice humped its back still
+higher, but showed no disposition to "git." The wonder was it did not
+crack under the strain; but Northern ice ahs the air of being strangely
+flexile. Several feet in depth, the water ran now along the margin.
+
+More geese and ducks appeared, and flocks of little birds--Canada jays,
+robins, joined the swelling chorus of the waters.
+
+Oh, hurry, hurry Inua, and open the great highway! Not at Minóok alone:
+at every wood camp, mining town and mission, at every white post and
+Indian village, all along the Yukon, groups were gathered waiting the
+great moment of the year. No one had ever heard of the ice breaking up
+before the 11th of May or later than the 28th. And yet men had begun to
+keep a hopeful eye on the river from the 10th of April, when a white
+ptarmigan was reported wearing a collar of dark-brown feathers, and his
+wings tipped brown. That was a month ago, and the great moment could
+not possibly be far now.
+
+The first thing everybody did on getting up, and the last thing
+everybody did on going to bed, was to look at the river. It was not
+easy to go to bed; and even if you got so far it was not easy to sleep.
+The sun poured into the cabins by night as well as by day, and there
+was nothing to divide one part of the twenty-four hours from another.
+You slept when you were too tired to watch the river. You breakfasted,
+like as not, at six in the evening; you dined at midnight. Through all
+your waking hours you kept an eye on the window overlooking the river.
+In your bed you listened for that ancient Yukon cry, "The ice is going
+out!"
+
+For ages it had meant to the timid: Beware the fury of the shattered
+ice-fields; beware the caprice of the flood. Watch! lest many lives go
+out with the ice as aforetime. And for ages to the stout-hearted it had
+meant: Make ready the kyaks and the birch canoes; see that tackle and
+traps are strong--for plenty or famine wait upon the hour. As the white
+men waited for boats to-day, the men of the older time had waited for
+the salmon--for those first impatient adventurers that would force
+their way under the very ice-jam, tenderest and best of the season's
+catch, as eager to prosecute that journey from the ocean to the
+Klondyke as if they had been men marching after the gold boom.
+
+No one could settle to anything. It was by fits and starts that the
+steadier hands indulged even in target practice, with a feverish
+subconsciousness that events were on the way that might make it
+inconvenient to have lost the art of sending a bullet straight. After a
+diminutive tin can, hung on a tree, had been made to jump at a hundred
+paces, the marksman would glance at the river and forget to fire. It
+was by fits and starts that they even drank deeper or played for higher
+stakes.
+
+The Wheel of Fortune, in the Gold Nugget, was in special demand. It was
+a means of trying your luck with satisfactory despatch "between drinks"
+or between long bouts of staring at the river. Men stood in
+shirt-sleeves at their cabin doors in the unwinking sunshine, looking
+up the valley or down, betting that the "first boat in" would be one of
+those nearest neighbours, May West or Muckluck, coming up from
+Woodworth; others as ready to back heavily their opinion that the first
+blast of the steam whistle would come down on the flood from Circle or
+from Dawson.
+
+The Colonel had bought and donned a new suit of "store clothes," and
+urged on his companion the necessity of at least a whole pair of
+breeches in honour of his entrance into the Klondyke. But the Boy's
+funds were low and his vanity chastened. Besides, he had other business
+on his mind.
+
+After sending several requests for the immediate return of his dog,
+requests that received no attention, the Boy went out to the gulch to
+recover him. Nig's new master paid up all arrears of wages readily
+enough, but declined to surrender the dog. "Oh, no, the ice wasn't
+thinkin' o' goin' out yit."
+
+"I want my dog."
+
+"You'll git him sure."
+
+"I'm glad you understand that much."
+
+"I'll bring him up to Rampart in time for the first boat."
+
+"Where's my dog?"
+
+No answer. The Boy whistled. No Nig. Dread masked itself in choler. He
+jumped on the fellow, forced him down, and hammered him till he cried
+for mercy.
+
+"Where's my dog, then?"
+
+"He--he's up to Idyho Bar," whimpered the prostrate one. And there the
+Boy found him, staggering under a pair of saddle-bags, hired out to
+Mike O'Reilly for a dollar and a half a day. Together they returned to
+Rampart to watch for the boat.
+
+Certainly the ice was very late breaking up this year. The men of
+Rampart stood about in groups in the small hours of the morning of the
+16th of May; as usual, smoking, yarning, speculating, inventing
+elaborate joshes. Somebody remembered that certain cheechalkos had gone
+to bed at midnight. Now this was unprecedented, even impertinent. If
+the river is not open by the middle of May, your Sour-dough may go to
+bed--only he doesn't. Still, he may do as he lists. But your
+cheechalko--why, this is the hour of his initiation. It was as if a man
+should yawn at his marriage or refuse to sleep at his funeral. The
+offenders were some of those Woodworth fellows, who, with a dozen or so
+others, had built shacks below "the street" yet well above the river.
+At two in the morning Sour-dough Saunders knocked them up.
+
+"The ice is goin' out!"
+
+In a flash the sleepers stood at the door.
+
+"Only a josh." One showed fight.
+
+"Well, it's true what I'm tellin' yer," persisted Saunders seriously:
+"the ice is goin' out, and it's goin' soon, and when you're washed out
+o' yer bunks ye needn't blame me, fur I warned yer."
+
+"You don't mean the flood'll come up here?"
+
+"Mebbe you've arranged so she won't this year."
+
+The cheechalkos consulted. In the end, four of them occupied the next
+two hours (to the infinite but masked amusement of the town) in
+floundering about in the mud, setting up tents in the boggy wood above
+the settlement, and with much pains transporting thither as many of
+their possessions as they did not lose in the bottomless pit of the
+mire.
+
+When the business was ended, Minóok self-control gave way. The
+cheechalkos found themselves the laughing-stock of the town. The
+others, who had dared to build down on the bank, but who "hadn't scared
+worth a cent," sauntered up to the Gold Nugget to enjoy the increased
+esteem of the Sour-doughs, and the humiliation of the men who had
+thought "the Yukon was goin' over the Ramparts this year--haw, haw!"
+
+It surprises the average mind to discover that one of civilization's
+most delicate weapons is in such use and is so potently dreaded among
+the roughest frontier spirits. No fine gentleman in a drawing-room, no
+sensitive girl, shrinks more from what Meredith calls "the comic
+laugh," none feels irony more keenly than your ordinary American
+pioneer. The men who had moved up into the soaking wood saw they had
+run a risk as great to them as the fabled danger of the river--the risk
+of the josher's irony, the dire humiliation of the laugh. If a man up
+here does you an injury, and you kill him, you haven't after all taken
+the ultimate revenge. You might have "got the laugh on him," and let
+him live to hear it.
+
+While all Minóok was "jollying" the Woodworth men, Maudie made one of
+her sudden raids out of the Gold Nugget. She stood nearly up to the
+knees of her high rubber boots in the bog of "Main Street," talking
+earnestly with the Colonel. Keith and the Boy, sitting on a store box
+outside of the saloon, had looked on at the fun over the timid
+cheechalkos, and looked on now at Maudie and the Colonel. It crossed
+the Boy's mind that they'd be putting up a josh on his pardner pretty
+soon, and at the thought he frowned.
+
+Keith had been saying that the old miners had nearly all got "squawed."
+He had spoken almost superstitiously of the queer, lasting effect of
+the supposedly temporary arrangement.
+
+"No, they don't leave their wives as often as you'd expect, but in most
+cases it seems to kill the pride of the man. He gives up all idea of
+ever going home, and even if he makes a fortune, they say, he stays on
+here. And year by year he sinks lower and lower, till he's farther down
+in the scale of things human than his savage wife."
+
+"Yes, it's awful to think how the life up here can take the stiffening
+out of a fella."
+
+He looked darkly at the two out there in the mud. Keith nodded.
+
+"Strong men have lain down on the trail this winter and cried." But it
+wasn't that sort of thing the other meant. Keith followed his new
+friend's glowering looks.
+
+"Yes. That's just the kind of man that gets taken in."
+
+"What?" said the Boy brusquely.
+
+"Just the sort that goes and marries some flighty creature."
+
+"Well," said his pardner haughtily, "he could afford to marry 'a
+flighty creature.' The Colonel's got both feet on the ground." And
+Keith felt properly snubbed. But what Maudie was saying to the Colonel
+was:
+
+"You're goin' up in the first boat, I s'pose?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Looks like I'll be the only person left in Minóok."
+
+"I don't imagine you'll be quite alone."
+
+"No? Why, there's only between five and six hundred expectin' to board
+a boat that'll be crowded before she gets here."
+
+"Does everybody want to go to Dawson?"
+
+"Everybody except a few boomers who mean to stay long enough to play
+off their misery on someone else before they move on."
+
+The Colonel looked a trifle anxious.
+
+"I hadn't thought of that. I suppose there will be a race for the
+boat."
+
+"There'll be a race all the way up the river for all the early boats.
+Ain't half enough to carry the people. But you look to me like you'll
+stand as good a chance as most, and anyhow, you're the one man I know,
+I'll trust my dough to."
+
+The Colonel stared.
+
+"You see, I want to get some money to my kiddie, an' besides, I got
+m'self kind o' scared about keepin' dust in my cabin. I want it in a
+bank, so's if I should kick the bucket (there'll be some pretty high
+rollin' here when there's been a few boats in, and my life's no better
+than any other feller's), I'd feel a lot easier if I knew the kiddie'd
+have six thousand clear, even if I did turn up my toes. See?"
+
+"A--yes--I see. But----"
+
+The door of the cabin next the saloon opened suddenly. A graybeard with
+a young face came out rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He stared
+interrogatively at the river, and then to the world in general:
+
+"What time is it?"
+
+"Half-past four."
+
+"Mornin' or evenin'?" and no one thought the question strange.
+
+Maudie lowered her voice.
+
+"No need to mention it to pardners and people. You don't want every
+feller to know you're goin' about loaded; but will you take my dust up
+to Dawson and get it sent to 'Frisco on the first boat?"
+
+"The ice! the ice! It's moving!"
+
+"The ice is going out!"
+
+"Look! the ice!"
+
+From end to end of the settlement the cry was taken up. People darted
+out of cabins like beavers out of their burrows. Three little
+half-breed Indian boys, yelling with excitement, tore past the Gold
+Nugget, crying now in their mother's Minóok, now in their father's
+English, "The ice is going out!" From the depths of the store-box
+whereon his master had sat, Nig darted, howling excitedly and waving a
+muddy tail like a draggled banner, saying in Mahlemeut: "The ice is
+going out! The fish are coming in." All the other dogs waked and gave
+tongue, running in and out among the huddled rows of people gathered on
+the Ramparts.
+
+Every ear full of the rubbing, grinding noise that came up out of the
+Yukon--noise not loud, but deep--an undercurrent of heavy sound. As
+they stood there, wide-eyed, gaping, their solid winter world began to
+move. A compact mass of ice, three-quarters of a mile wide and four
+miles long, with a great grinding and crushing went down the valley.
+Some distance below the town it jammed, building with incredible
+quickness a barrier twenty feet high.
+
+The people waited breathless. Again the ice-mass trembled. But the
+watchers lifted their eyes to the heights above. Was that thunder in
+the hills? No, the ice again; again crushing, grinding, to the low
+accompaniment of thunder that seemed to come from far away.
+
+Sections a mile long and half a mile wide were forced up, carried over
+the first ice-pack, and summarily stopped below the barrier. Huge
+pieces, broken off from the sides, came crunching their way angrily up
+the bank, as if acting on some independent impulse. There they sat,
+great fragments, glistening in the sunlight, as big as cabins. It was
+something to see them come walking up the shelving bank! The
+cheechalkos who laughed before are contented now with running, leaving
+their goods behind. Sour-dough Saunders himself never dreamed the ice
+would push its way so far.
+
+In mid-channel a still unbroken sheet is bent yet more in the centre.
+Every now and then a wide crack opens near the margin, and the water
+rushes out with a roar. Once more the mass is nearly still, and now
+all's silent. Not till the water, dammed and thrown back by the ice,
+not until it rises many feet and comes down with a volume and momentum
+irresistible, will the final conflict come.
+
+Hour after hour the people stand there on the bank, waiting to see the
+barrier go down. Unwillingly, as the time goes on, this one, that one,
+hurries away for a few minutes to prepare and devour a meal, back
+again, breathless, upon rumour of that preparatory trembling, that
+strange thrilling of the ice. The grinding and the crushing had begun
+again.
+
+The long tension, the mysterious sounds, the sense of some great
+unbridled power at work, wrought on the steadiest nerves. People did
+the oddest things. Down at the lower end of the town a couple of
+miners, sick of the scurvy, had painfully clambered on their
+roof--whether to see the sights or be out of harm's way, no one knew.
+The stingiest man in Minóok, who had refused to help them in their
+cabin, carried them food on the roof. A woman made and took them the
+Yukon remedy for their disease. They sat in state in sight of all men,
+and drank spruce tea.
+
+By one o'clock in the afternoon the river had risen eight feet, but the
+ice barrier still held. The people, worn out, went away to sleep. All
+that night the barrier held, though more ice came down and still the
+water rose. Twelve feet now. The ranks of shattered ice along the shore
+are claimed again as the flood widens and licks them in. The
+cheechalkos' cabins are flooded to the caves. Stout fellows in
+hip-boots take a boat and rescue the scurvy-stricken from the roof. And
+still the barrier held.
+
+People began to go about their usual avocations. The empty Gold Nugget
+filled again. Men sat, as they had done all the winter, drinking, and
+reading the news of eight months before, out of soiled and tattered
+papers.
+
+Late the following day everyone started up at a new sound. Again
+miners, Indians, and dogs lined the bank, saw the piled ice masses
+tremble, heard a crashing and grinding as of mountains of glass hurled
+together, saw the barrier give way, and the frozen wastes move down on
+the bosom of the flood. Higher yet the water rose--the current ran
+eight miles an hour. And now the ice masses were less enormous, more
+broken. Somewhere far below another jam. Another long bout of waiting.
+
+Birds are singing everywhere. Between the white snowdrifts the Arctic
+moss shows green and yellow, white flowers star the hills.
+
+Half the town is packed, ready to catch the boat at five minutes'
+notice. With door barred and red curtain down, Maudie is doing up her
+gold-dust for the Colonel to take to Dawson. The man who had washed it
+out of a Birch Creek placer, and "blowed it in fur the girl"--up on the
+hillside he sleeps sound.
+
+The two who had broken the record for winter travel on the Yukon, side
+by side in the sunshine, on a plank laid across two mackerel firkins,
+sit and watch the brimming flood. They speak of the Big Chimney men,
+picture them, packed and waiting for the Oklahoma, wonder what they
+have done with Kaviak, and what the three months have brought them.
+
+"When we started out that day from the Big Chimney, we thought we'd be
+made if only we managed to reach Minóok."
+
+"Well, we've got what we came for--each got a claim."
+
+"Oh, yes."
+
+"A good claim, too."
+
+"Guess so."
+
+"Don't you know the gold's there?"
+
+"Yes; but where are the miners? You and I don't propose to spend the
+next ten years in gettin' that gold out."
+
+"No; but there are plenty who would if we gave 'em the chance. All we
+have to do is to give the right ones the chance."
+
+The Colonel wore an air of reflection.
+
+"The district will be opened up," the Boy went on cheerfully, "and
+we'll have people beggin' us to let 'em get out our gold, and givin' us
+the lion's share for the privilege."
+
+"Do you altogether like the sound o' that?"
+
+"I expect, like other people, I'll like the result."
+
+"We ought to see some things clearer than other people. We had our
+lesson on the trail," said the Colonel quietly. "Nobody ought ever to
+be able to fool us about the power and the value of the individual
+apart from society. Seems as if association did make value. In the
+absence of men and markets a pit full of gold is worth no more than a
+pit full of clay."
+
+"Oh, yes; I admit, till the boats come in, we're poor men."
+
+"Nobody will stop here this summer--they'll all be racing on to
+Dawson."
+
+"Dawson's 'It,' beyond a doubt."
+
+The Colonel laughed a little ruefully.
+
+"We used to say Minóok."
+
+"I said Minóok, just to sound reasonable, but, of course, I meant
+Dawson."
+
+And they sat there thinking, watching the ice-blocks meet, crash, go
+down in foam, and come up again on the lower reaches, the Boy idly
+swinging the great Katharine's medal to and fro. In his buckskin pocket
+it has worn so bright it catches at the light like a coin fresh from
+the mint.
+
+No doubt Muckluck is on the river-bank at Pymeut; the one-eyed Prince,
+the story-teller Yagorsha, even Ol' Chief--no one will be indoors
+to-day.
+
+Sitting there together, they saw the last stand made by the ice, and
+shared that moment when the final barrier, somewhere far below, gave
+way with boom and thunder. The mighty flood ran free, tearing up trees
+by their roots as it ran, detaching masses of rock, dissolving islands
+into swirling sand and drift, carving new channels, making and unmaking
+the land. The water began to fall. It had been a great time: it was
+ended.
+
+"Pardner," says the Colonel, "we've seen the ice go out."
+
+"No fella can call you and me cheechalkos after to-day."
+
+"No, sah. We've travelled the Long Trail, we've seen the ice go out,
+and we're friends yet."
+
+The Kentuckian took his pardner's brown hand with a gentle solemnity,
+seemed about to say something, but stopped, and turned his bronzed face
+to the flood, carried back upon some sudden tide within himself to
+those black days on the trail, that he wanted most in the world to
+forget. But in his heart he knew that all dear things, all things kind
+and precious--his home, a woman's face--all, all would fade before he
+forgot those last days on the trail. The record of that journey was
+burnt into the brain of the men who had made it. On that stretch of the
+Long Trail the elder had grown old, and the younger had forever lost
+his youth. Not only had the roundness gone out of his face, not only
+was it scarred, but such lines were graven there as commonly takes the
+antique pencil half a score of years to trace.
+
+"Something has happened," the Colonel said quite low. "We aren't the
+same men who left the Big Chimney."
+
+"Right!" said the Boy, with a laugh, unwilling as yet to accept his own
+personal revelation, preferring to put a superficial interpretation on
+his companion's words. He glanced at the Colonel, and his face changed
+a little. But still he would not understand. Looking down at the
+chaparejos that he had been so proud of, sadly abbreviated to make
+boots for Nig, jagged here and there, and with fringes now not all
+intentional, it suited him to pretend that the "shaps" had suffered
+most.
+
+"Yes, the ice takes the kinks out."
+
+"Whether the thing that's happened is good or evil, I don't pretend to
+say," the other went on gravely, staring at the river. "I only know
+something's happened. There were possibilities--in me, anyhow--that
+have been frozen to death. Yes, we're different."
+
+The Boy roused himself, but only to persist in his misinterpretation.
+
+"You ain't different to hurt. If I started out again tomorrow----"
+
+"The Lord forbid!"
+
+"Amen. But if I had to, you're the only man in Alaska--in the
+world--I'd want for my pardner."
+
+"Boy----!" he wrestled with a slight bronchial huskiness, cleared his
+throat, tried again, and gave it up, contenting himself with, "Beg your
+pardon for callin' you 'Boy.' You're a seasoned old-timer, sah." And
+the Boy felt as if some Sovereign had dubbed him Knight.
+
+In a day or two now, from north or south, the first boat must appear.
+The willows were unfolding their silver leaves. The alder-buds were
+bursting; geese and teal and mallard swarmed about the river margin.
+Especially where the equisetae showed the tips of their feathery green
+tails above the mud, ducks flocked and feasted. People were too
+excited, "too busy," they said, looking for the boats, to do much
+shooting. The shy birds waxed daring. Keith, standing by his shack,
+knocked over a mallard within forty paces of his door.
+
+It was eight days after that first cry, "The ice is going out!" four
+since the final jam gave way and let the floes run free, that at one
+o'clock in the afternoon the shout went up, "A boat! a boat!"
+
+Only a lumberman's bateau, but two men were poling her down the current
+with a skill that matched the speed. They swung her in. A dozen hands
+caught at the painter and made fast. A young man stepped ashore and
+introduced himself as Van Alen, Benham's "Upper River pardner, on the
+way to Anvik."
+
+His companion, Donovan, was from Circle City, and brought appalling
+news. The boats depended on for the early summer traffic, Bella, and
+three other N.A.T. and T. steamers, as well as the A.C.'s Victoria and
+the St. Michael, had been lifted up by the ice "like so many feathers,"
+forced clean out of the channel, and left high and dry on a sandy
+ridge, with an ice wall eighty feet wide and fifteen high between them
+and open water.
+
+"All the crews hard at work with jackscrews," said Donovan; "and if
+they can get skids under, and a channel blasted through the ice, they
+may get the boats down here in fifteen or twenty days."
+
+A heavy blow. But instantly everyone began to talk of the May West and
+the Muckluck as though all along they had looked for succour to come
+up-stream rather than down. But as the precious hours passed, a deep
+dejection fastened on the camp. There had been a year when, through one
+disaster after another, no boats had got to the Upper River. Not even
+the arrival from Dawson of the Montana Kid, pugilist and gambler, could
+raise spirits so cast down, not even though he was said to bring
+strange news from outside.
+
+There was war in the world down yonder--war had been formally declared
+between America and Spain.
+
+Windy slapped his thigh in humourous despair.
+
+"Why hadn't he thought o' gettin' off a josh like that?"
+
+To those who listened to the Montana Kid, to the fretted spirits of men
+eight months imprisoned, the States and her foreign affairs were far
+away indeed, and as for the other party to the rumoured war--Spain?
+They clutched at school memories of Columbus, Americans finding through
+him the way to Spain, as through him Spaniards had found the way to
+America. So Spain was not merely a State historic! She was still in the
+active world. But what did these things matter? Boats mattered: the
+place where the Klondykers were caught, this Minóok, mattered. And so
+did the place they wanted to reach--Dawson mattered most of all. By the
+narrowed habit of long months, Dawson was the centre of the universe.
+
+More little boats going down, and still nothing going up. Men said
+gloomily:
+
+"We're done for! The fellows who go by the Canadian route will get
+everything. The Dawson season will be half over before we're in the
+field--if we ever are!"
+
+The 28th of May! Still no steamer had come, but the mosquitoes
+had--bloodthirsty beyond any the temperate climates know. It was clear
+that some catastrophe had befallen the Woodworth boats. And Nig had
+been lured away by his quondam master! No, they had not gone back to
+the gulch--that was too easy. The man had a mind to keep the dog, and,
+since he was not allowed to buy him, he would do the other thing.
+
+He had not been gone an hour, rumour said--had taken a scow and
+provisions, and dropped down the river. Utterly desperate, the Boy
+seized his new Nulato gun and somebody else's canoe. Without so much as
+inquiring whose, he shot down the swift current after the dog-thief. He
+roared back to the remonstrating Colonel that he didn't care if an
+up-river steamer did come while he was gone--he was goin' gunnin'.
+
+At the same time he shared the now general opinion that a Lower River
+boat would reach them first, and he was only going to meet her, meting
+justice by the way.
+
+He had gone safely more than ten miles down, when suddenly, as he was
+passing an island, he stood up in his boat, balanced himself, and
+cocked his gun.
+
+Down there, on the left, a man was standing knee-deep in the water,
+trying to free his boat from a fallen tree; a Siwash dog watched him
+from the bank.
+
+The Boy whistled. The dog threw up his nose, yapped and whined. The man
+had turned sharply, saw his enemy and the levelled gun. He jumped into
+the boat, but she was filling while he bailed; the dog ran along the
+island, howling fit to raise the dead. When he was a little above the
+Boy's boat he plunged into the river. Nig was a good swimmer, but the
+current here would tax the best. The Boy found himself so occupied with
+saving Nig from a watery grave, while he kept the canoe from capsizing,
+that he forgot all about the thief till a turn in the river shut him
+out of sight.
+
+The canoe was moored, and while trying to restrain Nig's dripping
+caresses, his master looked up, and saw something queer off there,
+above the tops of the cottonwoods. As he looked he forgot the
+dog--forgot everything in earth or heaven except that narrow cloud
+wavering along the sky. He sat immovable in the round-shouldered
+attitude learned in pulling a hand-sled against a gale from the Pole.
+If you are moderately excited you may start, but there is an excitement
+that "nails you."
+
+Nig shook his wolf's coat and sprayed the water far and wide, made
+little joyful noises, and licked the face that was so still. But his
+master, like a man of stone, stared at that long gray pennon in the
+sky. If it isn't a steamer, what is it? Like an echo out of some lesson
+he had learned and long forgot, "Up-bound boats don't run the channel:
+they have to hunt for easy water." Suddenly he leaped up. The canoe
+tipped, and Nig went a second time into the water. Well for him that
+they were near the shore; he could jump in without help this time. No
+hand held out, no eye for him. His master had dragged the painter free,
+seized the oars, and, saying harshly, "Lie down, you black devil!" he
+pulled back against the current with every ounce he had in him. For the
+gray pennon was going round the other side of the island, and the Boy
+was losing the boat to Dawson.
+
+Nig sat perkily in the bow, never budging till his master, running into
+the head of the island, caught up a handful of tough root fringes, and,
+holding fast by them, waved his cap, and shouted like one possessed,
+let go the fringes, caught up his gun, and fired. Then Nig, realising
+that for once in a way noise seemed to be popular, pointed his nose at
+the big object hugging the farther shore, and howled with a right
+goodwill.
+
+"They see! They see! Hooray!"
+
+The Boy waved his arms, embraced Nig, then snatched up the oars. The
+steamer's engines were reversed; now she was still. The Boy pulled
+lustily. A crowded ship. Crew and passengers pressed to the rails. The
+steamer canted, and the Captain's orders rang out clear. Several
+cheechalkos laid their hands on their guns as the wild fellow in the
+ragged buckskins shot round the motionless wheel, and brought his canoe
+'long-side, while his savage-looking dog still kept the echoes of the
+Lower Ramparts calling.
+
+"Three cheers for the Oklahoma!"
+
+At the sound of the Boy's voice a red face hanging over the stern broke
+into a broad grin.
+
+"Be the Siven! Air ye the little divvle himself, or air ye the divvle's
+gran'fatherr?"
+
+The apparition in the canoe was making fast and preparing to board the
+ship.
+
+"Can't take another passenger. Full up!" said the Captain. He couldn't
+hear what was said in reply, but he shook his head. "Been refusin' 'em
+right along." Then, as if reproached by the look in the wild young
+face, "We thought you were in trouble."
+
+"So I am if you won't----"
+
+"I tell you we got every ounce we can carry."
+
+"Oh, take me back to Minóok, anyway!"
+
+He said a few words about fare to the Captain's back. As that magnate
+did not distinctly say "No"--indeed, walked off making conversation
+with the engineer--twenty hands helped the new passenger to get Nig and
+the canoe on board.
+
+"Well, got a gold-mine?" asked Potts.
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Where's the Colonel?" Mac rasped out, with his square jaw set for
+judgment.
+
+"Colonel's all right--at Minóok. We've got a gold-mine apiece."
+
+"Anny gowld in 'em?"
+
+"Yes, sir, and no salt, neither."
+
+"Sorry to see success has gone to your head," drawled Potts, eyeing the
+Boy's long hair. "I don't see any undue signs of it elsewhere."
+
+"Faith! I do, thin. He's turned wan o' thim hungry, grabbin'
+millionaires."
+
+"What makes you think that?" laughed the Boy, poking his brown fingers
+through the knee-hole of his breeches.
+
+"Arre ye contint wid that gowld-mine at Minóok? No, be the Siven!
+What's wan gowld-mine to a millionaire? What forr wud ye be prospectin
+that desert oiland, you and yer faithful man Froyday, if ye wasn't
+rooned intoirely be riches?"
+
+The Boy tore himself away from his old friends, and followed the
+arbiter of his fate. The engines had started up again, and they were
+going on.
+
+"I'm told," said the Captain rather severely, "that Minóok's a busted
+camp."
+
+"Oh, is it?" returned the ragged one cheerfully. Then he remembered
+that this Captain Rainey had grub-staked a man in the autumn--a man who
+was reported to know where to look for the Mother Lode, the mighty
+parent of the Yukon placers. "I can tell you the facts about Minóok."
+He followed the Captain up on the hurricane-deck, giving him details
+about the new strike, and the wonderful richness of Idaho Bar. "Nobody
+would know about it to-day, but that the right man went prospecting
+there." (One in the eye for whoever said Minóok was "busted," and
+another for the prospector Rainey had sent to look for----) "You see,
+men like Pitcairn have given up lookin' for the Mother Lode. They say
+you might as well look for Mother Eve; you got to make out with her
+descendants. Yukon gold, Pitcairn says, comes from an older rock series
+than this"--he stood in the shower of sparks constantly spraying from
+the smoke-stack to the fireproof deck, and he waved his hand airily at
+the red rock of the Ramparts--"far older than any of these. The gold up
+here has all come out o' rock that went out o' the rock business
+millions o' years ago. Most o' that Mother Lode the miners are lookin'
+for is sand now, thirteen hundred miles away in Norton Sound."
+
+"Just my luck," said the Captain gloomily, going a little for'ard, as
+though definitely giving up mining and returning to his own proper
+business.
+
+"But the rest o' the Mother Lode, the gold and magnetic iron, was too
+heavy to travel. That's what's linin' the gold basins o' the
+North--linin' Idaho Bar thick."
+
+The Captain sighed.
+
+"Twelve," a voice sang out on the lower deck.
+
+"Twelve," repeated the Captain.
+
+"Twelve," echoed the pilot at the wheel.
+
+"Twelve and a half," from the man below, a tall, lean fellow, casting
+the sounding-pole. With a rhythmic nonchalance he plants the long black
+and white staff at the ship's side, draws it up dripping, plunges it
+down again, draws it up, and sends it down hour after hour. He never
+seems to tire; he never seems to see anything but the water-mark, never
+to say anything but what he is chanting now, "Twelve and a half," or
+some variation merely numerical. You come to think him as little human
+as the calendar, only that his numbers are told off with the
+significance of sound, the suggested menace of a cry. If the "sounding"
+comes too near the steamer's draught, or the pilot fails to hear the
+reading, the Captain repeats it. He often does so when there is no
+need; it is a form of conversation, noncommittal, yet smacking of
+authority.
+
+"Ten."
+
+"Ten," echoed the pilot, while the Captain was admitting that he had
+been mining vicariously "for twenty years, and never made a cent.
+Always keep thinkin' I'll soon be able to give up steamboatin' and buy
+a farm."
+
+He shook his head as one who sees his last hope fade.
+
+But his ragged companion turned suddenly, and while the sparks fell in
+a fresh shower, "Well, Captain," says he, "you've got the chance of
+your life right now."
+
+"Ten and a half."
+
+"Just what they've all said. Wish I had the money I've wasted on
+grub-stakin'."
+
+The ragged one thrust his hands in the pockets of his chaparejos.
+
+"I grub-staked myself, and I'm very glad I did."
+
+"Nobody in with you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Nine."
+
+Echo, "Nine."
+
+"Ten."
+
+"Pitcairn says, somehow or other, there's been gold-washin' goin' on up
+here pretty well ever since the world began."
+
+"Indians?"
+
+"No; seems to have been a bigger job than even white men could manage.
+Instead o' stamp-mills, glaciers grindin' up the Mother Lode; instead
+o' little sluice-boxes, rivers; instead o' riffles, gravel bottoms.
+Work, work, wash, wash, day and night, every summer for a million
+years. Never a clean-up since the foundation of the world. No, sir,
+waitin' for us to do that--waitin' now up on Idaho Bar."
+
+The Captain looked at him, trying to conceal the envy in his soul. They
+were sounding low water, but he never heard. He looked round sharply as
+the course changed.
+
+"I've done my assessment," the ragged man went on joyously, "and I'm
+going to Dawson."
+
+This was bad navigation. He felt instantly he had struck a snag. The
+Captain smiled, and passed on sounding: "Nine and a half."
+
+"But I've got a fortune on the Bar. I'm not a boomer, but I believe in
+the Bar."
+
+"Six."
+
+"Six. Gettin' into low water."
+
+Again the steamer swung out, hunting a new channel.
+
+"Pitcairn's opinion is thought a lot of. The Geologic Survey men listen
+to Pitcairn. He helped them one year. He's one of those extraordinary
+old miners who can tell from the look of things, without even panning.
+When he saw that pyrites on Idaho Bar he stopped dead. 'This looks good
+to me!' he said, and, Jee-rusalem! it was good!"
+
+They stared at the Ramparts growing bolder, the river hurrying like a
+mill-race, the steamer feeling its way slow and cautiously like a blind
+man with a stick.
+
+"Seven."
+
+"Seven."
+
+"Seven."
+
+"Six and a half."
+
+"Pitcairn says gold is always thickest on the inside of an elbow or
+turn in the stream. It's in a place like that my claim is."
+
+The steamer swerved still further out from the course indicated on the
+chart. The pilot was still hunting a new channel, but still the Captain
+stood and listened, and it was not to the sounding of the Yukon Bar.
+
+"They say there's no doubt about the whole country being glaciated."
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"Signs of glacial erosion everywhere."
+
+The Captain looked sharply about as if his ship might be in some new
+danger.
+
+"No doubt the gold is all concentrates."
+
+"Oh, is that so?" He seemed relieved on the whole.
+
+"Eight and a half," from below.
+
+"Eight and a half," from the Captain.
+
+"Eight and a half," from the pilot-house.
+
+"Concentrates, eh?"
+
+Something arresting, rich-sounding, in the news--a triple essence of
+the perfume of riches.
+
+With the incantation of technical phrase over the witch-brew of
+adventure, gambling, and romance, that simmers in the mind when men
+tell of finding gold in the ground, with the addition of this salt of
+science comes a savour of homely virtue, an aroma promising sustenance
+and strength. It confounds suspicion and sees unbelief, first weaken,
+and at last do reverence. There is something hypnotic in the
+terminology. Enthusiasm, even backed by fact, will scare off your
+practical man, who yet will turn to listen to the theory of "the
+mechanics of erosion" and one of its proofs--"up there before our eyes,
+the striation of the Ramparts."
+
+But Rainey was what he called "an old bird." His squinted pilot-eye
+came back from the glacier track and fell on the outlandish figure of
+his passenger. And with an inward admiration of his quality of extreme
+old-birdness, the Captain struggled against the trance.
+
+"Didn't I hear you say something about going to Dawson?"
+
+"Y-yes. I think Dawson'll be worth seeing."
+
+"Holy Moses, yes! There's never been anything like Dawson before."
+
+"And I want to talk to the big business men there. I'm not a miner
+myself. I mean to put my property on the market." As he said the words
+it occurred to him unpleasantly how very like McGinty they sounded. But
+he went on: "I didn't dream of spending so much time up here as I've
+put in already. I've got to get back to the States."
+
+"You had any proposition yet?" The Captain led the way to his private
+room.
+
+"About my claim? Not yet; but once I get it on the market----"
+
+So full was he of a scheme of his own he failed to see that he had no
+need to go to Dawson for a buyer.
+
+The Captain set out drinks, and still the talk was of the Bar. It had
+come now to seem impossible, even to an old bird, that, given those
+exact conditions, gold should not be gathered thick along that Bar.
+
+"I regard it as a sure thing. Anyhow, it's recorded, and the
+assessment's done. All the district wants now is capital to develop
+it."
+
+"Districts like that all over the map," said the old bird, with a final
+flutter of caution. "Even if the capital's found--if everything's ready
+for work, the summer's damn short. But if it's a question of goin'
+huntin' for the means of workin'----"
+
+"There's time," returned the other quietly, "but there's none to waste.
+You take me and my pardner----"
+
+"Thought you didn't have a pardner," snapped the other, hot over such
+duplicity.
+
+"Not in ownership; he's got another claim. But you take my pardner and
+me to Dawson----"
+
+The Captain stood on his legs and roared:
+
+"I can't, I tell you!"
+
+"You can if you will--you will if you want that farm!"
+
+Rainey gaped.
+
+"Take us to Dawson, and I'll get a deed drawn up in Minóok turning over
+one-third of my Idaho Bar property to John R. Rainey."
+
+John R. Rainey gaped the more, and then finding his tongue:
+
+"No, no. I'd just as soon come in on the Bar, but it's true what I'm
+tellin' you. There simply ain't an unoccupied inch on the Oklahoma this
+trip. It's been somethin' awful, the way I've been waylaid and prayed
+at for a passage. People starvin' with bags o' money waitin' for 'em at
+the Dawson Bank! Settlements under water--men up in trees callin' to us
+to stop for the love of God--men in boats crossin' our channel, headin'
+us off, thinkin' nothin' o' the risk o' bein' run down. 'Take us to
+Dawson!' it's the cry for fifteen hundred miles."
+
+"Oh, come! you stopped for me."
+
+The Captain smiled shrewdly.
+
+"I didn't think it necessary at the time to explain. We'd struck bottom
+just then--new channel, you know; it changes a lot every time the ice
+goes out and the floods come down. I reversed our engines and went up
+to talk to the pilot. We backed off just after you boarded us. I must
+have been rattled to take you even to Minóok."
+
+"No. It was the best turn you've done yourself in a long while."
+
+The Captain shook his head. It was true: the passengers of the Oklahoma
+were crowded like cattle on a Kansas stock-car. He knew he ought to
+unload and let a good portion wait at Minóok for that unknown quantity
+the next boat. He would issue the order, but that he knew it would mean
+a mutiny.
+
+"I'll get into trouble for overloading as it is."
+
+"You probably won't; people are too busy up here. If you do, I'm
+offerin' you a good many thousand dollars for the risk."
+
+"God bless my soul! where'd I put you? There ain't a bunk."
+
+"I've slept by the week on the ice."
+
+"There ain't room to lie down."
+
+"Then we'll stand up."
+
+Lord, Lord! what could you do with such a man? Owner of Idaho Bar, too.
+"Mechanics of erosion," "Concentrates," "a third interest"--it all rang
+in his head. "I've got nine fellers sleepin' in here," he said
+helplessly, "in my room."
+
+"Can we come if we find our own place, and don't trouble you?"
+
+"Well, I won't have any pardner--but perhaps you----"
+
+"Oh, pardner's got to come too."
+
+Whatever the Captain said the nerve-tearing shriek of the whistle
+drowned. It was promptly replied to by the most horrible howls.
+
+"Reckon that's Nig! He's got to come too," said this dreadful ragged
+man.
+
+"God bless me, this must be Minóok!"
+
+The harassed Captain hustled out.
+
+"You must wait long enough here to get that deed drawn, Captain!"
+called out the other, as he flew down the companionway.
+
+Nearly six hundred people on the bank. Suddenly controlling his
+eagerness, the Boy contented himself with standing back and staring
+across strange shoulders at the place he knew so well. There was "the
+worst-lookin' shack in the town," that had been his home, the A. C.
+store looming importantly, the Gold Nugget, and hardly a face to which
+he could not give a name and a history: Windy Jim and the crippled
+Swede; Bonsor, cheek by jowl with his enemy, McGinty; Judge Corey
+spitting straight and far; the gorgeous bartender, all checks and
+diamonds, in front of a pitiful group of the scurvy-stricken (thirty of
+them in the town waiting for rescue by the steamer); Butts, quite
+bland, under the crooked cottonwood, with never a thought of how near
+he had come, on that very spot, to missing the first boat of the year,
+and all the boats of all the years to follow.
+
+Maudie, Keith and the Colonel stood with the A. C. agent at the end of
+the baggage-bordered plank-walk that led to the landing. Behind them,
+at least four hundred people packed and waiting with their possessions
+at their feet, ready to be put aboard the instant the Oklahoma made
+fast. The Captain had called out "Howdy" to the A. C. Agent, and
+several greetings were shouted back and forth. Maudie mounted a huge
+pile of baggage and sat there as on a throne, the Colonel and Keith
+perching on a heap of gunny-sacks at her feet. That woman almost the
+only person in sight who did not expect, by means of the Oklahoma, to
+leave misery behind! The Boy stood thinking "How will they bear it when
+they know?"
+
+The Oklahoma was late, but she was not only the first boat--she might
+conceivably be the last.
+
+Potts and O'Flynn had spotted the man they were looking for, and called
+out "Hello! Hello!" as the big fellow on the pile of gunnies got up and
+waved his hat.
+
+Mac leaned over the rail, saying gruffly, "That you, Colonel?" trying,
+as the Boss of the Big Chimney saw--"tryin' his darndest not to look
+pleased," and all the while O'Flynn was waving his hat and howling with
+excitement:
+
+"How's the gowld? How's yersilf?"
+
+The gangway began its slow swing round preparatory to lowering into
+place. The mob on shore caught up boxes, bundles, bags, and pressed
+forward.
+
+"No, no! Stand back!" ordered the Captain.
+
+"Take your time!" said people trembling with excitement. "There's no
+rush."
+
+"There's no room!" called out the purser to a friend.
+
+"No room?" went from mouth to mouth, incredulous that the information
+could concern the speaker. He was only one. There was certainly room
+for him; and every man pushed the harder to be the sole exception to
+the dreadful verdict.
+
+"Stand back there! Can't take even a pound of freight. Loaded to the
+guards!"
+
+A whirlwind of protest and appeal died away in curses. Women wept, and
+sick men turned away their faces. The dogs still howled, for nothing is
+so lacerating to the feelings of your Siwash as a steam-whistle blast.
+The memory of it troubles him long after the echo of it dies. Suddenly
+above the din Maudie's shrill voice:
+
+"I thought that was Nig!"
+
+Before the gangway had dropped with a bang her sharp eyes had picked
+out the Boy.
+
+"Well I'll be----See who that is behind Nig? Trust him to get in on the
+ground-floor. He ain't worryin' for fear his pardner'll lose the boat,"
+she called to the Colonel, who was pressing forward as Rainey came down
+the gangway.
+
+"How do you do, Captain?"
+
+The man addressed never turned his head. He was forcing his way through
+the jam up to the A. C. Store.
+
+"You may recall me, sah; I am----"
+
+"If you are a man wantin' to go to Dawson, it doesn't matter who you
+are. I can't take you."
+
+"But, sah----" It was no use.
+
+A dozen more were pushing their claims, every one in vain. The Oklahoma
+passengers, bent on having a look at Minóok, crowded after the Captain.
+Among those who first left the ship, the Boy, talking to the purser,
+hard upon Rainey's heels. The Colonel stood there as they passed, the
+Captain turning back to say something to the Boy, and then they
+disappeared together through the door of the A. C.
+
+Never a word for his pardner, not so much as a look. Bitterness fell
+upon the Colonel's heart. Maudie called to him, and he went back to his
+seat on the gunny-sacks.
+
+"He's in with the Captain now," she said; "he's got no more use for
+us."
+
+But there was less disgust than triumph in her face.
+
+O'Flynn was walking over people in his frantic haste to reach the
+Colonel. Before he could accomplish his design he had three separate
+quarrels on his hands, and was threatening with fury to "settle the
+hash" of several of his dearest new friends.
+
+Potts meanwhile was shaking the Big Chimney boss by the hand and
+saying, "Awfully sorry we can't take you on with us;" adding lower: "We
+had a mighty mean time after you lit out."
+
+Then Mac thrust his hand in between the two, and gave the Colonel a
+monkey-wrench grip that made the Kentuckian's eyes water.
+
+"Kaviak? Well, I'll tell you."
+
+He shouldered Potts out of his way, and while the talk and movement
+went on all round Maudie's throne, Mac, ignoring her, set forth grimly
+how, after an awful row with Potts, he had adventured with Kaviak to
+Holy Cross. "An awful row, indeed," thought the Colonel, "to bring Mac
+to that;" but the circumstances had little interest for him, beside the
+fact that his pardner would be off to Dawson in a few minutes, leaving
+him behind and caring "not a sou markee."
+
+Mac was still at Holy Cross. He had seen a woman there--"calls herself
+a nun--evidently swallows those priests whole. Kind of mad, believes it
+all. Except for that, good sort of girl. The kind to keep her
+word"--and she had promised to look after Kaviak, and never let him
+away from her till Mac came back to fetch him.
+
+"Fetch him?"
+
+"Fetch him!"
+
+"Fetch him where?"
+
+"Home!"
+
+"When will that be?"
+
+"Just as soon as I've put through the job up yonder." He jerked his
+head up the river, indicating the common goal.
+
+And now O'Flynn, roaring as usual, had broken away from those who had
+obstructed his progress, and had flung himself upon the Colonel. When
+the excitement had calmed down a little, "Well," said the Colonel to
+the three ranged in front of him, Maudie looking on from above, "what
+you been doin' all these three months?"
+
+"Doin'?"
+
+"Well--a----"
+
+"Oh, we done a lot."
+
+They looked at one another out of the corners of their eyes and then
+they looked away. "Since the birds came," began Mac in the tone of one
+who wishes to let bygones be bygones.
+
+"Och, yes; them burruds was foine!"
+
+Potts pulled something out of his trousers pocket----a strange
+collapsed object. He took another of the same description out of
+another pocket. Mac's hands and O'Flynn's performed the same action.
+Each man seemed to have his pockets full of these----
+
+"What are they?"
+
+"Money-bags, me bhoy! Made out o' the fut o' the 'Lasky swan, God bless
+'em! Mac cahls 'em some haythen name, but everybuddy else cahls 'em
+illegant money-bags!"
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+In less than twenty minutes the steamer whistle shrieked. Nig bounded
+out of the A. C., frantic at the repetition of the insult; other dogs
+took the quarrel up, and the Ramparts rang.
+
+The Boy followed the Captain out of the A. C. store. All the motley
+crew that had swarmed off to inspect Minóok, swarmed back upon the
+Oklahoma. The Boy left the Captain this time, and came briskly over to
+his friends, who were taking leave of the Colonel.
+
+"So you're all goin' on but me!" said the Colonel very sadly.
+
+The Colonel's pardner stopped short, and looked at the pile of baggage.
+
+"Got your stuff all ready!" he said.
+
+"Yes." The answer was not free from bitterness. "I'll have the pleasure
+of packin' it back to the shack after you're gone."
+
+"So you were all ready to go off and leave me," said the Boy.
+
+The Colonel could not stoop to the obvious retort. His pardner came
+round the pile and his eyes fell on their common sleeping-bag, the two
+Nulato rifles, and other "traps," that meant more to him than any
+objects inanimate in all the world.
+
+"What? you were goin' to carry off my things too?" exclaimed the Boy.
+
+"That's all you get," Maudie burst out indignantly--"all you get for
+packin' his stuff down to the landin', to have it all ready for him,
+and worryin' yourself into shoe-strings for fear he'd miss the boat."
+
+Mac, O'Flynn, and Potts condoled with the Colonel, while the fire of
+the old feud flamed and died.
+
+"Yes," the Colonel admitted, "I'd give five hundred dollars for a
+ticket on that steamer."
+
+He looked in each of the three faces, and knew the vague hope behind
+his words was vain. But the Boy had only laughed, and caught up the
+baggage as the last whistle set the Rampart echoes flying, piping, like
+a lot of frightened birds.
+
+"Come along, then."
+
+"Look here!" the Colonel burst out. "That's my stuff."
+
+"It's all the same. You bring mine. I've got the tickets. You and me
+and Nig's goin' to the Klondyke."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+THE KLONDYKE
+
+"Poverty is an odious calling."--Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.
+
+
+On Monday morning, the 6th of June, they crossed the British line; but
+it was not till Wednesday, the 8th, at four in the afternoon, just ten
+months after leaving San Francisco, that the Oklahoma's passengers saw
+between the volcanic hills on the right bank of the Yukon a stretch of
+boggy tundra, whereon hundreds of tents gleamed, pink and saffron. Just
+beyond the bold wooded height, wearing the deep scar of a landslide on
+its breast, just round that bend, the Klondyke river joins the
+Yukon--for this is Dawson, headquarters of the richest Placer Diggings
+the world has seen, yet wearing more the air of a great army
+encampment.
+
+For two miles the river-bank shines with sunlit canvas--tents, tents
+everywhere, as far as eye can see, a mushroom growth masking the older
+cabins. The water-front swarms with craft, scows and canoes, birch,
+canvas, peterboro; the great bateaux of the northern lumberman, neat
+little skiffs, clumsy rafts; heavy "double-enders," whip-sawed from
+green timber, with capacity of two to five tons; lighters and barges
+carrying as much as forty tons--all having come through the perils of
+the upper lakes and shot the canon rapids.
+
+As the Oklahoma steams nearer, the town blossoms into flags; a great
+murmur increases to a clamour; people come swarming down to the
+water-front, waving Union Jacks and Stars and Stripes as well----What
+does it all mean? A cannon booms, guns are fired, and as the Oklahoma
+swings into the bank a band begins to play; a cheer goes up from
+fifteen thousand throats: "Hurrah for the first steamer!"
+
+The Oklahoma has opened the Klondyke season of 1898!
+
+They got their effects off the boat, and pitched the old tent up on the
+Moosehide; then followed days full to overflowing, breathless, fevered,
+yet without result beyond a general stringing up of nerves. The special
+spell of Dawson was upon them all--the surface aliveness, the inner
+deadness, the sense of being cut off from all the rest of the world, as
+isolated as a man is in a dream, with no past, no future, only a
+fantastic, intensely vivid Now. This was the summer climate of the
+Klondyke. The Colonel, the Boy, and Captain Rainey maintained the
+illusion of prosecuting their affairs by frequenting the offices,
+stores, and particularly saloons, where buyers and sellers most did
+congregate. Frequent mention was made of a certain valuable piece of
+property.
+
+Where was it?
+
+"Down yonder at Minóok;" and then nobody cared a straw.
+
+It was true there was widespread dissatisfaction with the Klondyke.
+Everyone agreed it had been overdone. It would support one-quarter of
+the people already here, and tens of thousands on their way! "Say
+Klondyke, and instantly your soberest man goes mad; say anything else,
+and he goes deaf."
+
+Minóok was a good camp, but it had the disadvantage of lying outside
+the magic district. The madness would, of course, not last, but
+meanwhile the time went by, and the people poured in day and night. Six
+great steamers full came up from the Lower River, and still the small
+craft kept on flocking like coveys of sea-fowl through the Upper Lakes,
+each party saying, "The crowd is behind."
+
+On the 14th of June a toy whistle sounded shrill above the town, and in
+puffed a Liliputian "steel-hull" steamer that had actually come "on her
+own" through the canon and shot the White Horse Rapids. A steamer from
+the Upper River! after that, others. Two were wrecked, but who minded?
+And still the people pouring in, and still that cry, "The crowd's
+behind!" and still the clamour for quicker, ampler means of transport
+to the North, no matter what it cost. The one consideration "to get
+there," and to get there "quickly," brought most of the horde by the
+Canadian route; yet, as against the two ocean steamers--all-sufficient
+the year before to meet the five river boats at St. Michael's--now, by
+the All-American route alone, twenty ocean steamers and forty-seven
+river boats, double-deckers, some two hundred and twenty-five feet
+long, and every one crowded to the guards with people coming to the
+Klondyke.
+
+Meanwhile, many of those already there were wondering why they came and
+how they could get home. In the tons of "mail matter" for Dawson,
+stranded at Skaguay, must be those "instructions" from the Colonel's
+bank, at home, to the Canadian Bank of Commerce, Dawson City. He agreed
+with the Boy that if--very soon now--they had not disposed of the
+Minóok property, they would go to the mines.
+
+"What's the good?" rasped Mac. "Every foot staked for seventy miles."
+
+"For my part," admitted the Boy, "I'm less grand than I was. I meant to
+make some poor devil dig out my Minóok gold for me. It'll be the other
+way about: I'll dig gold for any man on Bonanza that'll pay me wages."
+
+They sat slapping at the mosquitoes till a whistle screamed on the
+Lower River. The Boy called to Nig, and went down to the town to hear
+the news. By-and-by Mac came out with a pack, and said he'd be back in
+a day or two. After he had disappeared among the tents--a conquering
+army that had forced its way far up the hill by now--the Colonel got up
+and went to the spring for a drink. He stood there a long time looking
+out wistfully, not towards the common magnet across the Klondyke, but
+quite in the other direction towards the nearer gate of exit--towards
+home.
+
+"What special brand of fool am I to be here?"
+
+Down below, Nig, with hot tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth,
+now followed, now led, his master, coming briskly up the slope.
+
+"That was the Weare we heard whistlin'," said the Boy, breathless. "And
+who d'you think's aboard?"
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Nicholas a' Pymeut, pilot. An' he's got Princess Muckluck along."
+
+"No," laughed the Colonel, following the Boy to the tent. "What's the
+Princess come for?"
+
+"How should I know?"
+
+"Didn't she say?"
+
+"Didn't stop to hear."
+
+"Reckon she was right glad to see you," chaffed the Colonel. "Hey?
+Wasn't she?"
+
+"I--don't think she noticed I was there."
+
+"What! you bolted?" No reply. "See here, what you doin'?"
+
+"Packin' up."
+
+"Where you goin'?"
+
+"Been thinkin' for some time I ain't wealthy enough to live in this
+metropolis. There may be a place for a poor man, but Dawson isn't It."
+
+"Well, I didn't think you were that much of a coward--turnin' tail like
+this just because a poor little Esquimaux--Besides, she may have got
+over it. Even the higher races do." And he went on poking his fun till
+suddenly the Boy said:
+
+"You're in such high spirits, I suppose you must have heard Maudie's up
+from Minóok.
+
+"You're jokin'!"
+
+"It ain't my idea of a joke. She's comin' up here soon's she's landed
+her stuff."
+
+"She's not comin' up here!"
+
+"Why not? Anybody can come up on the Moosehide, and everybody's doin'
+it. I'm goin' to make way for some of 'em."
+
+"Did she see you?"
+
+"Well, she's seen Potts, anyhow."
+
+"You're right about Dawson," said the Colonel suddenly; "it's too rich
+for my blood."
+
+They pinned a piece of paper on the tent-flap to say they were "Gone
+prospecting: future movements uncertain."
+
+Each with a small pack, and sticking out above it the Klondyke shovel
+that had come all the way from San Francisco, Nig behind with
+provisions in his little saddle-bags, and tongue farther out than ever,
+they turned their backs on Dawson, crossed the lower corner of Lot 6,
+behind the Government Reserve, stared with fresh surprise at the young
+market-garden flourishing there, down to the many-islanded Klondyke,
+across in the scow-ferry, over the Corduroy, that cheers and deceives
+the new-comer for that first mile of the Bonanza Trail, on through pool
+and morass to the thicket of white birches, where the Colonel thought
+it well to rest awhile.
+
+"Yes, he felt the heat," he said, as he passed the time of day with
+other men going by with packs, pack-horses, or draught-dogs, cursing at
+the trail and at the Government that taxed the miners so cruelly and
+then did nothing for them, not even making a decent highway to the
+Dominion's source of revenue. But out of the direct rays of the sun the
+traveller found refreshment, and the mosquitoes were blown away by the
+keen breeze that seemed to come from off some glacier. And the birds
+sang loud, and the wild-flowers starred the birch-grove, and the
+briar-roses wove a tangle on either side the swampy trail.
+
+On again, dipping to a little valley--Bonanza Creek! They stood and
+looked.
+
+"Well, here we are."
+
+"Yes, this is what we came for."
+
+And it was because of "this" that so vast a machinery of ships,
+engines, and complicated human lives had been set in motion. What was
+it? A dip in the hills where a little stream was caught up into
+sluices. On either side of every line of boxes, heaps and windrows of
+gravel. Above, high on log-cabin staging, windlasses. Stretching away
+on either side, gentle slopes, mossed and flower starred. Here and
+there upon this ancient moose pasture, tents and cabins set at random.
+In the bed of the creek, up and down in every direction, squads of men
+sweating in the sun--here, where for untold centuries herds of
+leisurely and majestic moose had come to quench their thirst. In the
+older cabins their horns still lorded it. Their bones were bleaching in
+the fire-weed.
+
+On from claim to claim the new-comers to these rich pastures went, till
+they came to the junction of the El Dorado, where huddles the haphazard
+settlement of the Grand Forks, only twelve miles from Dawson. And now
+they were at the heart of "the richest Placer Mining District the world
+has seen." But they knew well enough that every inch was owned, and
+that the best they could look for was work as unskilled labourers, day
+shift or night, on the claims of luckier men.
+
+They had brought a letter from Ryan, of the North-West Mounted Police,
+to the Superintendent of No. 10, Above Discovery, a claim a little this
+side of the Forks. Ryan had warned them to keep out of the way of the
+part-owner, Scoville Austin, a surly person naturally, so exasperated
+at the tax, and so enraged at the rumour of Government spies
+masquerading as workmen, checking his reports, that he was "a
+first-rate man to avoid." But Seymour, the Superintendent, was, in the
+words of the soothing motto of the whole American people, "All right."
+
+They left their packs just inside the door of the log-cabin, indicated
+as "Bunk House for the men on No. 6, Above"--a fearsome place, where,
+on shelf above shelf, among long unwashed bedclothes, the unwashed
+workmen of a prosperous company lay in the stupor of sore fatigue and
+semi-asphyxiation. Someone stirred as the door opened, and out of the
+fetid dusk of the unventilated, closely-shuttered cabin came a voice:
+
+"Night shift on?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then, damn you! shut the door."
+
+As the never-resting sun "forced" the Dawson market-garden and the
+wild-roses of the trail, so here on the creek men must follow the
+strenuous example. No pause in the growing or the toiling of this
+Northern world. The day-gang on No. 0 was hard at it down there where
+lengthwise in the channel was propped a line of sluice-boxes, steadied
+by regularly spaced poles laid from box to bank on gravel ridge.
+Looking down from above, the whole was like a huge fish-bone lying
+along the bed of the creek. A little group of men with picks, shovels,
+and wheelbarrows were reducing the "dump" of winter pay, piled beside a
+windlass, conveying it to the sluices. Other men in line, four or five
+feet below the level of the boxes, were "stripping," picking, and
+shovelling the gravel off the bed-rock--no easy business, for even this
+summer temperature thawed but a few inches a day, and below, the frost
+of ten thousand years cemented the rubble into iron.
+
+"Where is the Superintendent?"
+
+"That's Seymour in the straw hat."
+
+It was felt that even the broken and dilapidated article mentioned was
+a distinction and a luxury.
+
+Yes, it was too hot up here in the Klondyke.
+
+They made their way to the man in authority, a dark, quiet-mannered
+person, with big, gentle eyes, not the sort of Superintendent they had
+expected to find representing such a man as the owner of No. 0.
+
+Having read Ryan's letter and slowly scanned the applicants: "What do
+you know about it?" He nodded at the sluice.
+
+"All of nothing," said the Boy.
+
+"Does it call for any particular knowing?" asked the Colonel.
+
+"Calls for muscle and plenty of keep-at-it." His voice was soft, but as
+the Colonel looked at him he realized why a hard fellow like Scoville
+Austin had made this Southerner Superintendent.
+
+"Better just try us."
+
+"I can use one more man on the night shift, a dollar and a half an
+hour."
+
+"All right," said the Boy.
+
+The Colonel looked at him. "Is this job yours or mine?"
+
+The Superintendent had gone up towards the dam.
+
+"Whichever you say."
+
+The Boy did not like to suggest that the Colonel seemed little fit for
+this kind of exercise. They had been in the Klondyke long enough to
+know that to be in work was to be in luck.
+
+"I'll tell you," the younger man said quickly, answering something
+unspoken, but plain in the Colonel's face; "I'll go up the gulch and
+see what else there is."
+
+It crossed his mind that there might be something less arduous than
+this shovelling in the wet thaw or picking at frozen gravel in the hot
+sun. If so, the Colonel might be induced to exchange. It was obvious
+that, like so many Southerners, he stood the sun very ill. While they
+were agreeing upon a rendezvous the Superintendent came back.
+
+"Our bunk-house is yonder," he said, pointing. A kind of sickness came
+over the Kentuckian as he recalled the place. He turned to his pardner.
+
+"Wish we'd got a pack-mule and brought our tent out from Dawson." Then,
+apologetically, to the Superintendent: "You see, sah, there are men who
+take to bunk-houses just as there are women who want to live in hotels;
+and there are others who want a place to call home, even if it's a
+tent."
+
+The Superintendent smiled. "That's the way we feel about it in
+Alabama." He reflected an instant. "There's that big new tent up there
+on the hill, next to the Buckeyes' cabin. Good tent; belongs to a
+couple o' rich Englishmen, third owners in No. 0. Gone to Atlin. Told
+me to do what I liked with that tent. You might bunk there while
+they're away."
+
+"Now, that's mighty good of you, sah. Next whose cabin did you say?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know their names. They have a lay on seventeen. Ohio men.
+They're called Buck One and Buck Two. Anybody'll show you to the
+Buckeyes';" and he turned away to shout "Gate!" for the head of water
+was too strong, and he strode off towards the lock.
+
+As the Boy tramped about looking for work he met a great many on the
+same quest. It seemed as if the Colonel had secured the sole job on the
+creek. Still, vacancies might occur any hour.
+
+In the big new tent the Colonel lay asleep on a little camp-bed,
+(mercifully left there by the rich Englishmen), "gettin' ready for the
+night-shift." As he stood looking down upon him, a sudden wave of pity
+came over the Boy. He knew the Colonel didn't "really and truly have to
+do this kind of thing; he just didn't like givin' in." But behind all
+that there was a sense in the younger mind that here was a life unlike
+his own, which dimly he foresaw was to find its legitimate expression
+in battle and in striving. Here, in the person of the Colonel, no
+soldier fore-ordained, but a serene and equable soul wrenched out of
+its proper sphere by a chance hurt to a woman, forsooth! an imagination
+so stirred that, if it slept at all, it dreamed and moaned in its
+sleep, as now; a conscience wounded and refusing to heal. Had he not
+said himself that he had come up here to forget? It was best to let him
+have the job that was too heavy for him--yes, it was best, after all.
+
+And so they lived for a few days, the Boy chafing and wanting to move
+on, the Colonel very earnest to have him stay.
+
+"Something sure to turn up, and, anyhow, letters--my instruction----"
+And he encouraged the acquaintance the Boy had struck up with the
+Buckeyes, hoping against hope that to go over and smoke a pipe, and
+exchange experiences with such mighty good fellows would lighten the
+tedium of the long day spent looking for a job.
+
+"I call it a very pleasant cabin," the Colonel would say as he lit up
+and looked about. Anything dismaller it would be hard to find. Not
+clean and shipshape as the Boy kept the tent. But with double army
+blankets nailed over the single window it was blessedly dark, if
+stuffy, and in crying need of cleaning. Still, they were mighty good
+fellows, and they had a right to be cheerful. Up there, on the rude
+shelf above the stove, was a row of old tomato-cans brimful of Bonanza
+gold. There they stood, not even covered. Dim as the light was, you
+could see the little top nuggets peering out at you over the ragged
+tin-rims, in a never locked shanty, never molested, never bothered
+about. Nearly every cabin on the creek had similar chimney ornaments,
+but not everyone boasted an old coat, kept under the bunk, full of the
+bigger sort of nuggets.
+
+The Colonel was always ready with pretended admiration of such
+bric-à-brac, but the truth was he cared very little about this gold he
+had come so far to find. His own wages, paid in dust, were kept in a
+jam-pot the Boy had found "lyin' round."
+
+The growing store shone cheerfully through the glass, but its value in
+the Colonel's eyes seemed to be simply as an argument to prove that
+they had enough, and "needn't worry." When the Boy said there was no
+doubt this was the district in all the world the most overdone, the
+Colonel looked at him with sun-tired, reproachful eyes.
+
+"You want to dissolve the pardnership--I see."
+
+"I don't."
+
+But the Colonel, after any such interchange, would go off and smoke by
+himself, not even caring for Buckeyes'. The work was plainly overtaxing
+him. He slept badly, was growing moody and quick to take offence. One
+day when he had been distinctly uncivil he apologized for himself by
+saying that, standing with feet always in the wet, head always in the
+scorching sun, he had taken a hell of a cold. Certain it was that,
+without sullenness, he would give in to long fits of silence; and his
+wide, honest eyes were heavy again, as if the snow-blindness of the
+winter had its analogue in a summer torment from the sun. And his
+sometimes unusual gentleness to his companion was sharply alternated
+with unusual choler, excited by a mere nothing. Enough if the Boy were
+not in the tent when the Colonel came and went. Of course, the Boy did
+the cooking. The Colonel ate almost nothing, but he made a great point
+of his pardner's service in doing the cooking. He would starve, he
+said, if he had to cook for himself as well as swing a shovel; and the
+Boy, acting on pure instinct, pretended that he believed this was so.
+
+Then came the evening when the Boy was so late the Colonel got his own
+breakfast; and when the recreant did get home, it was to announce that
+a man over at the Buckeyes' had just offered him a job out on Indian
+River. The Colonel set down his tea-cup and stared. His face took on
+an odd, rigid look. But almost indifferently he said:
+
+"So you're goin'?"
+
+"Of course, you know I must. I started with an outfit and fifteen
+hundred dollars, now I haven't a cent."
+
+The Kentuckian raised his heavy eyes to the jam-jar. "Oh, help
+yourself."
+
+The Boy laughed, and shook his head.
+
+"I wish you wouldn't go," the other said very low.
+
+"You see, I've got to. Why, Nig and I owe you for a week's grub
+already."
+
+Then the Colonel stood up and swore--swore till he was scarlet and
+shaking with excitement.
+
+"If the life up here has brought us to 'Scowl' Austin's point of view,
+we are poorly off." And he spoke of the way men lived in his part of
+Kentucky, where the old fashion of keeping open house survived. And
+didn't he know it was the same thing in Florida? "Wouldn't you do as
+much for me?"
+
+"Yes, only I can't--and--I'm restless. The summer's half gone. Up here
+that means the whole year's half gone."
+
+The Colonel had stumbled back into his seat, and now across the deal
+table he put out his hand.
+
+"Don't go, Boy. I don't know how I'd get on without----" He stopped,
+and his big hand was raised as if to brush away some cloud between him
+and his pardner. "If you go, you won't come back."
+
+"Oh, yes, I will. You'll see."
+
+"I know the kind," the other went on, as if there had been no
+interruption. "They never come back. I don't know as I ever cared quite
+as much for my brother--little fella that died, you know." Then, seeing
+that his companion did not instantly iterate his determination to go,
+"That's right," he said, getting up suddenly, and leaving his breakfast
+barely touched. "We've been through such a lot together, let's see it
+out."
+
+Without waiting for an answer, he went off to his favourite seat under
+the little birch-tree. But the incident had left him nervous. He would
+come up from his work almost on the run, and if he failed to find his
+pardner in the tent there was the devil to pay. The Boy would laugh to
+himself to think what a lot he seemed able to stand from the Colonel;
+and then he would grow grave, remembering what he had to make up for.
+Still, his sense of obligation did not extend to giving up this
+splendid chance down on Indian River. On Wednesday, when the fellow
+over at the Buckeyes' was for going back, the Boy would go along.
+
+On Sunday morning he ran a crooked, rusty nail into his foot. Clumsily
+extracted, it left an ugly wound. Walking became a torture, and the
+pain a banisher of sleep. It was during the next few days that he found
+out how much the Colonel lay awake. Who could sleep in this blazing
+sun? Black tents were not invented then, so they lay awake and talked
+of many things.
+
+The man from Indian River went back alone. The Boy would limp after the
+Colonel down to the sluice, and sit on a dump heap with Nig. Few people
+not there strictly on business were tolerated on No. 0, but Nig and his
+master had been on good terms with Seymour from the first. Now they
+struck up acquaintance with several of the night-gang, especially with
+the men who worked on either side of the Colonel. An Irish gentleman,
+who did the shovelling just below, said he had graduated from Dublin
+University. He certainly had been educated somewhere, and if the
+discussion were theologic, would take out of his linen-coat pocket a
+little testament in the Vulgate to verify a bit of Gospel. He could
+even pelt the man next but one in his native tongue, calling the
+Silesian "Uebermensch." There existed some doubt whether this were the
+gentleman's real name, but none at all as to his talking philosophy
+with greater fervour than he bestowed on the puddling box.
+
+The others were men more accustomed to work with their hands, but, in
+spite of the conscious superiority of your experienced miner, a very
+good feeling prevailed in the gang--a general friendliness that
+presently centred about the Colonel, for even in his present mood he
+was far from disagreeable, except now and then, to the man he cared the
+most for.
+
+Seymour admitted that he had placed the Southerner where he thought
+he'd feel most at home. "Anyhow, the company is less mixed," he said,
+"than it was all winter up at twenty-three, where they had a
+Presbyterian missionary down the shaft, a Salvation Army captain
+turnin' the windlass, a nigger thief dumpin' the becket, and a
+dignitary of the Church of England doin' the cookin', with the help of
+a Chinese chore-boy. They're all there now (except one) washin' out
+gold for the couple of San Francisco card-sharpers that own the claim."
+
+"Vich von is gone?" asked the Silesian, who heard the end of the
+conversation.
+
+"Oh, the Chinese chore-boy is the one who's bettered himself," said the
+Superintendent--"makin' more than all the others put together ever made
+in their lives; runnin' a laundry up at Dawson."
+
+The Boy, since this trouble with his foot, had fallen into the way of
+turning night into day. The Colonel liked to have him down there at the
+sluice, and when he thought about it, the Boy marvelled at the hours he
+spent looking on while others worked.
+
+At first he said he came down only to make Scowl Austin mad. And it did
+make him mad at first, but the odd thing was he got over it, and used
+to stop and say something now and then. This attention on the part of
+the owner was distinctly perilous to the Boy's good standing with the
+gang. Not because Austin was the owner; there was the millionaire
+Swede, Ole Olsen--any man might talk to him. He was on the square,
+treated his workmen mighty fair, and when the other owners tried to
+reduce wages, and did, Ole wouldn't join them--went right along paying
+the highest rate on the creek.
+
+Various stories were afloat about Austin. Oh, yes, Scowl Austin was a
+hard man--the only owner on the creek who wouldn't even pay the little
+subscription every poor miner contributed to keep the Dawson Catholic
+Hospital going.
+
+The women, too, had grievances against Austin, not only "the usual lot"
+up at the Gold Belt, who sneered at his close fist, but some of the
+other sort--those few hard-working wives or "women on their own," or
+those who washed and cooked for this claim or that. They had stories
+about Austin that shed a lurid light. And so by degrees the gathered
+experience, good and ill, of "the greatest of all placer diggin's"
+flowed by the idler on the bank.
+
+"You seem to have a lot to do," Seymour would now and then say with a
+laugh.
+
+"So I have."
+
+"What do you call it?"
+
+"Takin' stock."
+
+"Of us?"
+
+"Of things in general."
+
+"What did you mean by that?" demanded the Colonel suspiciously when the
+Superintendent had passed up the line.
+
+The shovelling in was done for the time being. The water was to be
+regulated, and then the clean-up as soon as the owner came down.
+
+"Better not let Austin hear you say you're takin' stock. He'll run you
+out o' the creek."
+
+The Boy only smiled, and went on fillipping little stones at Nig.
+
+"What did you mean?" the Colonel persisted, with a look as suspicious
+as Scowl Austin's own.
+
+"Oh, nothin'. I'm only thinkin' out things."
+
+"Your future, I suppose?" he said testily.
+
+"Mine and other men's. The Klondyke's a great place to get things clear
+in your head."
+
+"Don't find it so." The Colonel put up his hand with that now familiar
+action as if to clear away a cloud. "It's days since I had anything
+clear in my head, except the lesson we learned on the trail."
+
+The Boy stopped throwing stones, and fixed his eyes on his friend, as
+the Colonel went on:
+
+"We had that hammered into us, didn't we?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Oh, that--you know--that--I don't know quite how to put it so it'll
+sound as orthodox as it might be, bein' true; but it looks pretty clear
+even to me"--again the big hand brushing at the unmoted sunshine--"that
+the only reason men got over bein' beasts was because they began to be
+brothers."
+
+"Don't," said the Boy.
+
+"Don't what?"
+
+"I've always known I should have to tell you some time. I won't be able
+to put it off if I stay ... and I hate tellin' you now. See here: I
+b'lieve I'll get a pack-mule and go over to Indian River."
+
+The Colonel looked round angrily. Standing high against the sky,
+Seymour, with the gateman up at the lock, was moderating the strong
+head of water. It began to flow sluggishly over the gravel-clogged
+riffles, and Scowl Austin was coming down the hill.
+
+"I don't know what you're drivin' at, about somethin' to tell. I know
+one thing, though, and I learned it up here in the North: men were
+meant to stick to one another."
+
+"Don't, I say."
+
+"Here's Austin," whispered the Colonel.
+
+The Silesian philosopher stood in his "gum-boots" in the puddling-box
+as on a rostrum; but silent now, as ever, when Scowl Austin was in
+sight. With the great sluice-fork, the philosopher took up, washed, and
+threw out the few remaining big stones that they might not clog the
+narrow boxes below.
+
+Seymour had so regulated the stream that, in place of the gush and foam
+of a few minutes before, there was now only a scant and gently falling
+veil of water playing over the bright gravel caught in the riffle-lined
+bottoms of the boxes.
+
+As the Boy got up and reached for his stick, Austin stood there saying,
+to nobody in particular, that he'd just been over to No. 29, where they
+were trying a new-fangled riffle.
+
+"Don't your riffles do the trick all right?" asked the Boy.
+
+"If you're in any doubt, come and see," he said.
+
+They stood together, leaning over the sluice, looking in at one of the
+things human industry has failed to disfigure, nearly as beautiful
+to-day as long ago on Pactolus' banks when Lydian shepherds, with great
+stones, fastened fleeces in the river that they might catch and gather
+for King Croesus the golden sands of Tmolus. Improving, not in beauty,
+but economy, quite in the modern spirit, the Greeks themselves
+discovered that they lost less gold if they led the stream through
+fleece-lined water-troughs--and beyond this device of those early
+placer-miners we have not progressed so far but that, in every long,
+narrow sluice-box in the world to-day, you may see a Lydian
+water-trough with a riffle in the bottom for a golden fleece.
+
+The rich Klondyker and the poor one stood together looking in at the
+water, still low, still slipping softly over polished pebbles, catching
+at the sunlight, winking, dimpling, glorifying flint and jasper, agate
+and obsidian, dazzling the uncommercial eye to blind forgetfulness of
+the magic substance underneath.
+
+Austin gathered up, one by one, a handful of the shining stones, and
+tossed them out. Then, bending down, "See?"
+
+There, under where the stones had been, neatly caught in the lattice of
+the riffle, lying thick and packed by the water action, a heavy ridge
+of black and yellow--magnetic sand and gold.
+
+"Riffles out!" called Seymour, and the men, who had been extracting the
+rusty nails that held them firm, lifted out from the bottom of each box
+a wooden lattice, soused it gently in the water, and laid it on the
+bank.
+
+The Boy had turned away again, but stood an instant noticing how the
+sun caught at the countless particles of gold still clinging to the
+wood; for this was one of the old riffles, frayed by the action of much
+water and the fret of many stones. Soon it would have to be burned, and
+out of its ashes the careful Austin would gather up with mercury all
+those million points of light.
+
+Meanwhile, Seymour had called to the gateman for more water, and
+himself joining the gang, armed now with flat metal scoops, they all
+began to turn over and throw back against the stream the debris in the
+bottom of the boxes, giving the water another chance to wash out the
+lighter stuff and clean the gold from all impurity. Away went the last
+of the sand, and away went the pebbles, dark or bright, away went much
+of the heavy magnetic iron. Scowl Austin, at the end of the line, had a
+corn-whisk with which he swept the floor of the box, always upstream,
+gathering the contents in a heap, now on this side, now on that,
+letting the water play and sort and carry away, condensing, hastening
+the process that for ages had been concentrating gold in the Arctic
+placers.
+
+"Say, look here!" shouted Austin to the Boy, already limping up the
+hill.
+
+When he had reached the sluice again he found that all Scowl Austin
+wanted, apparently, was to show him how, when he held the water back
+with the whisk, it eddied softly at each side of the broad little
+broom, leaving exposed the swept-up pile.
+
+"See?"
+
+"What's all that?"
+
+"What do you think?"
+
+"Looks like a heap o' sawdust."
+
+Austin actually laughed.
+
+"See if it feels like sawdust. Take it up like this," he ordered.
+
+His visitor obeyed, lifting a double handful out of the water and
+holding it over the box, dripping, gleaming, the most beautiful thing
+that comes out of the earth, save only life, and the assertion may
+stand, even if the distinction is without difference, if the crystal is
+born, grows old, and dies as undeniably as the rose.
+
+The Boy held the double handful of well-washed gold up to the sunshine,
+feeling to the full the immemorial spell cast by the King of Metals.
+Nothing that men had ever made out of gold was so entirely beautiful as
+this.
+
+Scowl Austin's grim gratification was openly heightened with the rich
+man's sense of superiority, but his visitor seemed to have forgotten
+him.
+
+"Colonel! here a minute. We thought it looked wonderful enough on the
+Big Chimney table--but Lord! to see it like this, out o' doors, mixed
+with sunshine and water!"
+
+Still he stood there fascinated, leaning heavily against the
+sluice-box, still with his dripping hands full, when, after a hurried
+glance, the Colonel returned to his own box. None of the gang ever
+talked in the presence of the owner.
+
+"Guess that looks good to you." Austin slightly stressed the pronoun.
+He had taken a reasonless liking for the young man, who from the first
+had smiled into his frowning face, and treated him as he treated
+others. Or perhaps Austin liked him because, although the Boy did a
+good deal of "gassin' with the gang," he had never hung about at
+clean-ups. At all events, he should stay to-night, partly because when
+the blue devils were down on Scowl Austin nothing cheered him like
+showing his "luck" off to someone. And it was so seldom safe in these
+days. People talked. The authorities conceived unjust suspicions of a
+man's returns. And then, far back in his head, that vague need men
+feel, when a good thing has lost its early zest, to see its dimmed
+value shine again in an envious eye. Here was a young fellow, who,
+before he went lame, had been all up and down the creek for days
+looking for a job--probably hadn't a penny--livin' off his friend, who
+himself would starve but for the privilege Austin gave him of washing
+out Austin's gold. Let the young man stop and see the richest clean-up
+at the Forks.
+
+And so it was with the acrid pleasure he had promised himself that he
+said to the visitor, bending over the double handful of gold, "Guess it
+looks good to you."
+
+"Yes, it looks good!" But he had lifted his eyes, and seemed to be
+studying the man more than the metal.
+
+A couple of newcomers, going by, halted.
+
+"Christ!" said the younger, "look at that!"
+
+The Boy remembered them; they had been to Seymour only a couple of
+hours before asking for work. One was old for that country--nearly
+sixty--and looked, as one of the gang had said, "as if, instid o'
+findin' the pot o' gold, he had got the end of the rainbow slam in his
+face--kind o' blinded."
+
+At sound of the strange voice Austin had wheeled about with a fierce
+look, and heavily the strangers plodded by. The owner turned again to
+the gold. "Yes," he said curtly, "there's something about that that
+looks good to most men."
+
+"What I was thinkin'," replied the Boy slowly, "was that it was the
+only clean gold I'd ever seen--but it isn't so clean as it was."
+
+"What do you mean?" Austin bent and looked sharply into the full hands.
+
+"I was thinkin' it was good to look at because it hadn't got into dirty
+pockets yet." Austin stared at him an instant. "Never been passed
+round--never bought anybody. No one had ever envied it, or refused it
+to help someone out of a hole. That was why I thought it looked
+good--because it was clean gold ... a little while ago." And he plunged
+his hands in the water and washed the clinging particles off his
+fingers.
+
+Austin had stared, and then turned his back with a blacker look than
+even "Scowl" had ever worn before.
+
+"Gosh! guess there's goin' to be trouble," said one of the gang.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+PARDNERS
+
+"He saw, and first of brotherhood had sight...."
+
+
+It was morning, and the night-shift might go to bed; but in the absent
+Englishmen's tent there was little sleep and less talk that day. The
+Boy, in an agony, with a foot on fire, heard the Colonel turning,
+tossing, growling incoherently about "the light."
+
+It seemed unreasonable, for a frame had been built round his bed, and
+on it thick gray army blankets were nailed--a rectangular tent. Had he
+cursed the heat now? But no: "light," "God! the light, the light!" just
+as if he were lying as the Boy was, in the strong white glare of the
+tent. But hour after hour within the stifling fortress the giant tossed
+and muttered at the swords of sunshine that pierced his semi-dusk
+through little spark-burnt hole or nail-tear, torturing sensitive eyes.
+
+Near three hours before he needed, the Colonel got up and splashed his
+way through a toilet at the tin basin. The Boy made breakfast without
+waiting for the usual hour. They had nearly finished when it occurred
+to the Colonel that neither had spoken since they went to bed. He
+glanced across at the absorbed face of his friend.
+
+"You'll come down to the sluice to-night, won't you?"
+
+"Why shouldn't I?"
+
+"No reason on earth, only I was afraid you were broodin' over what you
+said to Austin."
+
+"Austin? Oh, I'm not thinkin' about Austin."
+
+"What, then? What makes you so quiet?"
+
+"Well, I'm thinkin' I'd be better satisfied to stay here a little
+longer if----"
+
+"If what?"
+
+"If there was truth between us two."
+
+"I thought there was."
+
+"No. What's the reason you want me to stay here?"
+
+"Reason? Why"--he laughed in his old way--"I don't defend my taste, but
+I kind o' like to have you round."
+
+His companion's grave face showed no lightening. "Why do you want me
+round more than someone else?"
+
+"Haven't got anyone else."
+
+"Oh, yes, you have! Every man on Bonanza's a friend o' yours, or would
+be."
+
+"It isn't just that; we understand each other."
+
+"No, we don't."
+
+"What's wrong?"
+
+No answer. The Boy looked through the door across Bonanza to the hills.
+
+"I thought we understood each other if two men ever did. Haven't we
+travelled the Long Trail together and seen the ice go out?"
+
+"That's just it, Colonel. We know such a lot more than men do who
+haven't travelled the Trail, and some of the knowledge isn't
+oversweet."
+
+A shadow crossed the kind face opposite.
+
+"You're thinkin' about the times I pegged out--didn't do my share."
+
+"Lord, no!" The tears sprang up in the young eyes. "I'm thinkin' o' the
+times--I--" He laid his head down on the rude table, and sat so for an
+instant with hidden face; then he straightened up. "Seems as if it's
+only lately there's been time to think it out. And before, as long as I
+could work I could get on with myself.... Seemed as if I stood a chance
+to ... a little to make up."
+
+"Make up?"
+
+"But it's always just as it was that day on the Oklahoma, when the
+captain swore he wouldn't take on another pound. I was awfully happy
+thinkin' if I made him bring you it might kind o' make up, but it
+didn't."
+
+"Made a big difference to me," the Colonel said, still not able to see
+the drift, but patiently brushing now and then at the dazzling mist and
+waiting for enlightenment.
+
+"It's always the same," the other went on. "Whenever I've come up
+against something I'd hoped was goin' to make up, it's turned out to be
+a thing I'd have to do anyway, and there was no make up about it. For
+all that, I shouldn't mind stayin' on awhile since you want me to----"
+
+The Colonel interrupted him, "That's right!"
+
+"Only if I do, you've got to know--what I'd never have guessed myself,
+but for the Trail. After I've told you, if you can bear to see me
+round----" He hesitated and suddenly stood up, his eyes still wet, but
+his head so high an onlooker who did not understand English would have
+called the governing impulse pride, defiance even. "It seems I'm the
+kind of man, Colonel--the kind of man who could leave his pardner to
+die like a dog in the snow."
+
+"If any other fella said so, I'd knock him down."
+
+"That night before we got to Snow Camp, when you wouldn't--couldn't go
+any farther, I meant to go and leave you--take the sled, and take--I
+guess I meant to take everything and leave you to starve."
+
+They looked into each other's faces, and years seemed to go by. The
+Colonel was the first to drop his eyes; but the other, pitilessly, like
+a judge arraigning a felon, his steady scrutiny never flinching: "Do
+you want that kind of a man round, Colonel?"
+
+The Kentuckian turned quickly as if to avoid the stab of the other's
+eye, and sat hunched together, elbows on knees, head in hands.
+
+"I knew you didn't." The Boy answered his own question. He limped over
+to his side of the tent, picked up some clothes, his blanket and few
+belongings, and made a pack. Not a word, not a sound, but some birds
+twittering outside in the sun and a locust making that frying sound in
+the fire-weed. The pack was slung on the Boy's back, and he was
+throwing the diamond hitch to fasten it when the Colonel at last looked
+round.
+
+"Lord, what you doin'?"
+
+"Guess I'm goin' on."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"I'll write you when I know; maybe I'll even send you what I owe you,
+but I don't feel like boastin' at the moment. Nig!"
+
+"You can't walk."
+
+"Did you never happen to notice that one-legged fella pluggin' about
+Dawson?"
+
+He had gone down on his hands and knees to see if Nig was asleep under
+the camp-bed. The Colonel got up, went to the door, and let down the
+flap. When he turned, the traveller and the dog were at his elbow. He
+squared his big frame at the entrance, looking down at the two, tried
+to speak, but the Boy broke in: "Don't let's get sentimental, Colonel;
+just stand aside."
+
+Never stirring, he found a voice to say, "I'm not askin' you to
+stay"--the other turned and whistled, for Nig had retired again to the
+seclusion of the gray blanket screen--"I only want to tell you
+something before you go."
+
+The Boy frowned a little, but rested his pack against the table in that
+way in which the Klondyker learns to make a chair-back of his burden.
+
+"You seem to think you've been tellin' me news," said the Colonel.
+"When you said that about goin' on, the night before we got to Snow
+Camp, I knew you simply meant you still intended to come out alive. I
+had thrown up my hands--at least, I thought I had. The only difference
+between us--I had given in and you hadn't."
+
+The other shook his head. "There was a lot more in it than that."
+
+"You meant to take the only means there were--to carry off the sled
+that I couldn't pull any farther----" The Boy looked up quickly.
+Something stern and truth-compelling in the dark face forced the
+Colonel to add: "And along with the sled you meant to carry
+off--the--the things that meant life to us."
+
+"Just that----" The Boy knotted his brown fingers in Nig's hair as if
+to keep tight hold of one friend in the wreck.
+
+"We couldn't divide," the Colonel hurried on. "It was a case of
+crawlin' on together, and, maybe, come out alive, or part and one die
+sure."
+
+The Boy nodded, tightening his lips.
+
+"I knew well enough you'd fight for the off-chance. But"--the Colonel
+came away from the door and stood in front of his companion--"so would
+I. I hadn't really given up the struggle."
+
+"You were past strugglin', and I would have left you sick----"
+
+"You wouldn't have left me--if I'd had my gun."
+
+The Boy remembered that he had more than suspected that at the time,
+but the impression had by-and-by waxed dim. It was too utterly unlike
+the Colonel--a thing dreamed. He had grown as ashamed of the dream as
+of the thing he knew was true. The egotism of memory absorbed itself in
+the part he himself had played--that other, an evil fancy born of an
+evil time. And here was the Colonel saying it was true. The Boy dropped
+his eyes. It had all happened in the night. There was something in the
+naked truth too ghastly for the day. But the Colonel went on in a harsh
+whisper:
+
+"I looked round for my gun; if I'd found it I'd have left you behind."
+
+And the Boy kept looking down at Nig, and the birds sang, and the
+locust whirred, and the hot sun filled the tent as high-tide flushes a
+sea-cave.
+
+"You've been a little hard on me, Boy, bringin' it up like
+this--remindin' me--I wouldn't have gone on myself, and makin' me
+admit----"
+
+"No, no, Colonel."
+
+"Makin' me admit that before I would have let you go on I'd have shot
+you!"
+
+"Colonel!" He loosed his hold of Nig.
+
+"I rather reckon I owe you my life--and something else besides"--the
+Colonel laid one hand on the thin shoulder where the pack-strap
+pressed, and closed the other hand tight over his pardner's right--"and
+I hadn't meant even to thank you neither."
+
+"Don't, for the Lord's sake, don't!" said the younger, and neither
+dared look at the other.
+
+A scratching on the canvas, the Northern knock at the door.
+
+"You fellers sound awake?"
+
+A woman's voice. Under his breath, "Who the devil's that?" inquired the
+Colonel, brushing his hand over his eyes. Before he got across the tent
+Maudie had pushed the flap aside and put in her head.
+
+"Hello!"
+
+"Hell-o! How d'e do?"
+
+He shook hands, and the younger man nodded, "Hello."
+
+"When did you come to town?" asked the Colonel mendaciously.
+
+"Why, nearly three weeks ago, on the Weare. Heard you had skipped out
+to Sulphur with MacCann. I had some business out that way, so that's
+where I been."
+
+"Have some breakfast, won't you--dinner, I mean?"
+
+"I put that job through at the Road House. Got to rustle around now and
+get my tent up. Where's a good place?"
+
+"Well, I--I hardly know. Goin' to stay some time?"
+
+"Depends."
+
+The Boy slipped off his pack.
+
+"They've got rooms at the Gold Belt," he said.
+
+"You mean that Dance Hall up at the Forks?"
+
+"Oh, it ain't so far. I remember you can walk."
+
+"I can do one or two other things. Take care you don't hurt yourself
+worryin' about me."
+
+"Hurt myself?"
+
+"Yes. Bein' so hospittable. The way you're pressin' me to settle right
+down here, near's possible--why, it's real touchin'."
+
+He laughed, and went to the entrance to tic back the door-flap, which
+was whipping and snapping in the breeze. Heaven be praised! the night
+was cooler. Nig had been perplexed when he saw the pack pushed under
+the table. He followed his master to the door, and stood looking at the
+flap-tying, ears very pointed, critical eye cocked, asking as plain as
+could be, "You wake me up and drag me out here into the heat and
+mosquitoes just to watch you doin' that? Well, I've my opinion of you."
+
+"Colonel gone down?" inquired the Silesian, passing by.
+
+"Not yet."
+
+"Anything I can do?" the gentleman inside was saying with a sound of
+effort in his voice. The lady was not even at the pains to notice the
+perfunctory civility.
+
+"Well, Colonel, now you're here, what do you think o' the Klondyke?"
+
+"Think? Well, there's no doubt they've taken a lot o' gold out o'
+here."
+
+"Reg'lar old Has Been, hey?"
+
+"Oh, I don't say it hasn't got a future."
+
+"What! Don't you know the boom's busted?"
+
+"Well, no."
+
+"Has. Tax begun it. Too many cheechalkos are finishing it. Klondyke?"
+She laughed. "The Klondyke's goin' to hell down-grade in a hand-car."
+
+Scowl Austin was up, ready, as usual, to relieve Seymour of half the
+superintending, but never letting him off duty till he had seen the new
+shift at work. As the Boy limped by with the German, Austin turned his
+scowl significantly towards the Colonel's tent.
+
+"Good-mornin'--good-night, I mean," laughed the lame man, just as if
+his tongue had not run away with him the last time the two had met. It
+was not often that anyone spoke so pleasantly to the owner of No. 0.
+Perhaps the circumstance weighed with him; at all events, he stopped
+short. When the German had gone on, "Foot's better," Austin asserted.
+
+"Perhaps it is a little," though the lame man had no reason to think
+so.
+
+"Lucky you heal quick. Most people don't up here--livin' on the stale
+stuff we get in this----country. Seymour said anything to you about a
+job?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, since you're on time, you better come on the night shift,
+instead o' that lazy friend o' yours."
+
+"Oh, he ain't lazy--been up hours. An old acquaintance dropped in;
+he'll be down in a minute."
+
+"'Tisn't only his bein' late. You better come on the shift."
+
+"Don't think I could do that. What's the matter?"
+
+"Don't say there's anything very much the matter yet. But he's sick,
+ain't he?"
+
+"Sick? No, except as we all are--sick o' the eternal glare."
+
+The Colonel was coming slowly down the hill. Of course, a man doesn't
+look his best if he hasn't slept. The Boy limped a little way back to
+meet him.
+
+"Anything the matter with you, Colonel?"
+
+"Well, my Bonanza headache ain't improved."
+
+"I suppose you wouldn' like me to take over the job for two or three
+days?"
+
+"You? Crippled! Look here--" The Colonel flushed suddenly. "Austin been
+sayin' anything?"
+
+"Oh, I was just thinkin' about the sun."
+
+"Well, when I want to go in out of the sun, I'll say so." And, walking
+more quickly than he had done for long, he left his companion, marched
+down to the creek, and took his place near the puddling-box.
+
+By the time the Boy got to the little patch of shade, offered by the
+staging, Austin had turned his back on the gang, and was going to speak
+to the gateman at the locks. He had evidently left the Colonel very
+much enraged at some curt comment.
+
+"He meant it for us all," the Dublin gentleman was saying soothingly.
+By-and-by, as they worked undisturbed, serenity returned. Oh, the
+Colonel was all right--even more chipper than usual. What a
+good-looking fella he was, with that clear skin and splendid colour!
+
+A couple of hours later the Colonel set his long shovel against the
+nearest of the poles steadying the sluice, and went over to the staging
+for a drink. He lifted the can of weak tea to his lips and took a long
+draught, handed the can back to the Boy, and leant against the staging.
+They talked a minute or two in undertones.
+
+A curt voice behind said: "Looks like you've got a deal to attend to
+to-day, beside your work."
+
+They looked round, and there was Austin. As the Colonel saw who it was
+had spoken, the clear colour in the tan deepened; he threw back his
+shoulders, hesitated, and then, without a word, went and took up his
+shovel.
+
+Austin walked on. The Boy kept looking at his friend. What was the
+matter with the Colonel? It was not only that his eyes were queer--most
+of the men complained of their eyes, unless they slept in cabins. But
+whether through sun-blindness or shaken by anger, the Colonel was
+handling his shovel uncertainly, fumbling at the gravel, content with
+half a shovelful, and sometimes gauging the distance to the box so
+badly that some of the pay fell down again in the creek. As Austin came
+back on the other side of the line, he stopped opposite to where the
+Colonel worked, and suddenly called: "Seymour!"
+
+Like so many on Bonanza, the Superintendent could not always sleep when
+the time came. He was walking about "showing things" to a stranger, "a
+newspaper woman," it was whispered--at all events, a lady who, armed
+with letters from the highest British officials, had come to "write up
+the Klondyke."
+
+Seymour had left her at his employer's call. The lady, thin, neat,
+alert, with crisply curling iron-gray hair, and pleasant but
+unmistakably dignified expression, stood waiting for him a moment on
+the heap of tailings, then innocently followed her guide.
+
+Although Austin lowered his voice, she drew nearer, prepared to take an
+intelligent interest in the "new riffles up on Skookum."
+
+When Austin had first called Seymour, the Colonel started, looked up,
+and watched the little scene with suspicion and growing anger. Seeing
+Seymour's eyes turn his way, the Kentuckian stopped shovelling, and, on
+a sudden impulse, called out:
+
+"See here, Austin: if you've any complaints to make, sah, you'd better
+make them to my face, sah."
+
+The conversation about riffles thus further interrupted, a little
+silence fell. The Superintendent stood in evident fear of his employer,
+but he hastened to speak conciliatory words.
+
+"No complaint at all--one of the best hands."
+
+"May be so when he ain't sick," said Austin contemptuously.
+
+"Sick!" the Boy called out. "Why, you're dreamin'. He's our strong
+man--able to knock spots out of anyone on the creek, ain't he?"
+appealing to the gang.
+
+"I shall be able to spare him from my part of the creek after
+to-night."
+
+"Do I understand you are dismissing me?"
+
+"Oh, go to hell!"
+
+The Colonel dropped his shovel and clenched his hands.
+
+"Get the woman out o' the way," said the owner; "there's goin' to be
+trouble with this fire-eating Southerner."
+
+The woman turned quickly. The Colonel, diving under the sluice-box for
+a plunge at Austin, came up face to face with her.
+
+"The lady," said the Colonel, catching his breath, shaking with rage,
+but pulling off his hat--"the lady is quite safe, but I'm not so sure
+about you." He swerved as if to get by.
+
+"Safe? I should think so!" she said steadily, comprehending all at
+once, and not unwilling to create a diversion.
+
+"This is no place for a woman, not if she's got twenty letters from the
+Gold Commissioner."
+
+Misunderstanding Austin's jibe at the official, the lady stood her
+ground, smiling into the face of the excited Kentuckian.
+
+"Several people have asked me if I was not afraid to be alone here, and
+I've said no. It's quite true. I've travelled so much that I came to
+know years ago, it's not among men like you a woman has anything to
+fear."
+
+It was funny and pathetic to see the infuriate Colonel clutching at his
+grand manner, bowing one instant to the lady, shooting death and
+damnation the next out of heavy eyes at Austin. But the wiry little
+woman had the floor, and meant, for peace sake, to keep it a few
+moments.
+
+"At home, in the streets of London, I have been rudely spoken to; I
+have been greatly annoyed in Paris; in New York I have been subject to
+humorous impertinence; but in the great North-West every man has seemed
+to be my friend. In fact, wherever our English tongue is spoken," she
+wound up calmly, putting the great Austin in his place, "a woman may go
+alone."
+
+Austin seemed absorbed in filling his pipe. The lady tripped on to the
+next claim with a sedate "Good-night" to the men on No. 0. She thought
+the momentary trouble past, and never turned to see how the Kentuckian,
+waiting till she should be out of earshot, came round in front of
+Austin with a low question.
+
+The gang watched the Boy dodge under the sluice and hobble hurriedly
+over the chaos of stones towards the owner. Before he reached him he
+called breathless, but trying to laugh:
+
+"You think the Colonel's played out, but, take my word for it, he ain't
+a man to fool with."
+
+The gang knew from Austin's sneering look as he turned to strike a
+match on a boulder--they knew as well as if they'd been within a yard
+of him that Scowl had said something "pretty mean." They saw the
+Colonel make a plunge, and they saw him reel and fall among the stones.
+
+The owner stood there smoking while the night gang knocked off work
+under his nose and helped the Boy to get the Colonel on his feet. It
+was no use. Either he had struck his head or he was dazed--unable, at
+all events, to stand. They lifted him up and started for the big tent.
+
+Three Indians accosted the cripple leading the procession. He started,
+and raised his eyes. "Nicholas! Muckluck!" They shook hands, and all
+went on together, the Boy saying the Colonel had a little sunstroke.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day Scowl Austin was found lying face down among the
+cotton-woods above the benches on Skookum, a bullet-wound in his back.
+He had fainted from loss of blood, when he was picked up by the two
+Vermonters, the men who had twice gone by No. 0 the night before the
+quarrel, and who had enraged Austin by stopping an instant during the
+clean-up to look at his gold. They carried him back to Bonanza.
+
+The Superintendent and several of the day gang got the wounded man into
+bed. He revived sufficiently to say he had not seen the man that shot
+him, but he guessed he knew him all the same. Then he turned on his
+side, swore feebly at the lawlessness of the South, and gave up the
+ghost.
+
+Not a man on the creek but understood who Scowl Austin meant.
+
+"Them hot-headed Kentuckians, y' know, they'd dowse a feller's glim for
+less 'n that."
+
+"Little doubt the Colonel done it all right. Why, his own pardner says
+to Austin's face, says he, 'The Colonel's a bad man to fool with,' and
+just then the big chap plunged at Austin like a mad bull."
+
+But they were sorry to a man, and said among themselves that they'd see
+he was defended proper even if he hadn't nothin' but a little dust in a
+jam-pot.
+
+The Grand Forks constable had put a watch on the big tent, despatched a
+man to inform the Dawson Chief of Police, and set himself to learn the
+details of the quarrel. Meanwhile the utter absence of life in the
+guarded tent roused suspicion. It was recalled now that since the
+Indians had left a little while after the Colonel was carried home,
+sixteen hours ago, no one had seen either of the Southerners. The
+constable, taking alarm at this, left the crowd at Scowl Austin's, and
+went hurriedly across the meadow to the new centre of interest. Just as
+he reached the tent the flap was turned back, and Maudie put her head
+out.
+
+"Hah!" said the constable, with some relief, "they both in there?"
+
+"The Colonel is."
+
+Now, it was the Colonel he had wanted till he heard he was there. As
+the woman came out he looked in to make certain. Yes, there he was,
+calmly sleeping, with the gray blanket of the screen thrown up for air.
+It didn't look much like----
+
+"Where's the other feller?"
+
+"Gone to Dawson."
+
+"With that lame leg?"
+
+"Went on horseback."
+
+It had as grand a sound as it would have in the States to say a man had
+departed in a glass coach drawn by six cream-coloured horses. But he
+had been "in a hell of a hurry," evidently. Men were exchanging
+glances.
+
+"Funny nobody saw him."
+
+"When'd he light out?"
+
+"About five this morning."
+
+Oh, that explained it. The people who were up at five were abed now.
+And the group round the tent whispered that Austin had done the unheard
+of--had gone off and left the night gang at three o'clock in the
+morning. They had said so as the day shift turned out.
+
+"But how'd the young feller get such a thing as a horse?"
+
+"Hired it off a stranger out from Dawson yesterday," Maudie answered
+shortly.
+
+"Oh, that Frenchman--Count--a--Whirligig?"
+
+But Maudie was tired of giving information and getting none. The answer
+came from one in the group.
+
+"Yes, that French feller came in with a couple o' fusst-class horses.
+He's camped away over there beyond Muskeeter." He pointed down Bonanza.
+
+"P'raps you won't mind just mentionin'," said Maudie with growing
+irritation, "why you're makin' yourself so busy about my friends?"
+(Only strong resentment could have induced the plural.)
+
+When she heard what had happened and what was suspected she uttered a
+contemptuous "Tschah!" and made for the tent. The constable followed.
+She wheeled fiercely round.
+
+"The man in there hasn't been out o' this tent since he was carried up
+from the creek last night. I can swear to it."
+
+"Can you swear the other was here all the time?"
+
+No answer.
+
+"Did he say what he went to Dawson for?"
+
+"The doctor."
+
+One or two laughed. "Who's sick enough to send for a Dawson doctor?"
+
+"So you think he's gone for a----"
+
+"I know he is."
+
+"And do you know what it costs to have a doctor come all the way out
+here?"
+
+"Yes, beasts! won't budge till you've handed over five hundred dollars.
+Skunks!"
+
+"Did your friend mention how he meant to raise the dust?"
+
+"He's got it," she said curtly.
+
+"Why, he was livin' off his pardner. Hadn't a red cent."
+
+"She's shieldin' him," the men about the door agreed.
+
+"Lord! he done it well--got away with five hundred and a horse!"
+
+"He had words with Austin, himself, the night o' the clean-up. Sassed
+Scowl Austin! Right quiet, but, oh my! Told him to his face his gold
+was dirty, and washed it off his hands with a look----Gawd! you could
+see Austin was mad clear through, from his shirt-buttons to his spine.
+You bet Scowl said something back that got the young feller's monkey
+up."
+
+They all agreed that the only wonder was that Austin had lived as
+long--"On the other side o' the line--Gee!"
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+That evening the Boy, riding hard, came into camp with a doctor,
+followed discreetly in the rear by an N. W. M. P., really mounted this
+time. It had occurred to the Boy that people looked at him hard, and
+when he saw the groups gathered about the tent his heart contracted
+sharply. Had the Colonel died? He flung himself off the horse, winced
+as his foot cried out, told Joey Bludsoe to look after both beasts a
+minute, and led the Dawson doctor towards the tent.
+
+The constable followed.
+
+Maudie, at the door, looked at her old enemy queerly, and just as,
+without greeting, he pushed by, "S'pose you've heard Scowl Austin's
+dead?" she said in a low voice.
+
+"No! Dead, eh? Well, there's one rattlesnake less in the woods."
+
+The constable stopped him with a touch on the shoulder: "We have a
+warrant for you."
+
+The Colonel lifted his head and stared about, in a dazed way, as the
+Boy stopped short and stammered, "Warr--what for?"
+
+"For the murder of Scoville----"
+
+"Look here," he whispered: "I--I don't know what you mean, but I'll go
+along with you, of course, only don't talk before this man. He's
+sick----" He beckoned the doctor. "This is the man I brought you to
+see." Then he turned his back on the wide, horrified eyes of his
+friend, saying, "Back in a minute, Kentucky." Outside: "Give me a
+second, boys, will you?" he said to the N. W. M. P.'s, "just till I
+hear what that doctor fella says about my pardner."
+
+He stood there with the Buckeyes, the police, and the various day gangs
+that were too excited to go to bed. And he asked them where Austin was
+found, and other details of the murder, wearily conscious that the
+friendliest there felt sure that the man who questioned could best fill
+in the gaps in the story. When the doctor came out, Maudie at his heels
+firing off quick questions, the Boy hobbled forward.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Temperature a hundred and four," said the Dawson doctor.
+
+"Oh, is--is that much or little?"
+
+"Well, it's more than most of us go in for."
+
+"Can you tell what's the matter with him?"
+
+"Oh, typhoid, of course."
+
+The Boy pulled his hat over his eyes.
+
+"Guess you won't mind my stayin' now?" said Maudie at his elbow,
+speaking low.
+
+He looked up. "You goin' to take care of him? Good care?" he asked
+harshly.
+
+But Maudie seemed not to mind. The tears went down her cheeks, as, with
+never a word, she nodded, and turned towards the tent.
+
+"Say," he hobbled after her, "that doctor's all right--only wanted
+fifty." He laid four hundred-dollar bills in her hand. She seemed about
+to speak, when he interrupted hoarsely, "And look here: pull the
+Colonel through, Maudie--pull him through!"
+
+"I'll do my darnedest."
+
+He held out his hand. He had never given it to her before, and he
+forgot that few people would care now to take it. But she gave him hers
+with no grudging. Then, on a sudden, impulse, "You ain't takin' him to
+Dawson to-night?" she said to the constable.
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Why, he's done the trip twice already."
+
+"I can do it again well enough."
+
+"Then you got to wait a minute." She spoke to the constable as if she
+had been Captain Constantine himself. "Better just go in and see the
+Colonel," she said to the Boy. "He's been askin' for you."
+
+"N-no, Maudie; I can go to Dawson all right, but I don't feel up to
+goin' in there again."
+
+"You'll be sorry if you don't." And then he knew what a temperature at a
+hundred and four foreboded.
+
+He went back into the tent, dreading to face the Colonel more than he
+had ever dreaded anything in his life.
+
+But the sick man lay, looking out drowsily, peacefully, through
+half-shut eyes, not greatly concerned, one would say, about anything.
+The Boy went over and stood under the gray blanket canopy, looking down
+with a choking sensation that delayed his question: "How you feelin'
+now, Kentucky?"
+
+"All right."
+
+"Why, that's good news. Then you--you won't mind my goin' off to--to do
+a little prospectin'?"
+
+The sick man frowned: "You stay right where you are. There's plenty in
+that jampot."
+
+"Yes, yes! jampot's fillin' up fine."
+
+"Besides," the low voice wavered on, "didn't we agree we'd learned the
+lesson o' the North?"
+
+"The lesson o' the North?" repeated the other with filling eyes.
+
+"Yes, sah. A man alone's a man lost. We got to stick together, Boy."
+The eyelids fell heavily.
+
+"Yes, yes, Colonel." He pressed the big hand. His mouth made the
+motion, not the sound, "Good-bye, pardner."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+THE GOING HOME
+
+  "Despair lies down and grovels, grapples not
+  With evil, casts the burden of its lot.
+  This Age climbs earth.
+  --To challenge heaven.
+  --Not less The lower deeps.
+  It laughs at Happiness."
+    --George Meredith
+
+
+Everybody on Bonanza knew that the Colonel had left off struggling to
+get out of his bed to go to work, had left off calling for his pardner.
+Quite in his right senses again, he could take in Maudie's explanation
+that the Boy was gone to Dawson, probably to get something for the
+Colonel to eat. For the Doctor was a crank and wouldn't let the sick
+man have his beans and bacon, forbade him even such a delicacy as fresh
+pork, though the Buckeyes nobly offered to slaughter one of their
+newly-acquired pigs, the first that ever rooted in Bonanza refuse, and
+more a terror to the passing Indian than any bear or wolf.
+
+"But the Boy's a long time," the Colonel would say wistfully.
+
+Before this quieter phase set in, Maudie had sent into Dawson for
+Potts, O'Flynn and Mac, that they might distract the Colonel's mind
+from the pardner she knew could not return. But O'Flynn, having married
+the girl at the Moosehorn Café, had excuse of ancient validity for not
+coming; Potts was busy breaking the faro bank, and Mac was waiting till
+an overdue Lower River steamer should arrive.
+
+Nicholas of Pymeut had gone back as pilot of the Weare, but Princess
+Muckluck was still about, now with Skookum Bill, son of the local
+chief, now alone, trudging up and down Bonanza like one looking for
+something lost. The Colonel heard her voice outside the tent and had
+her in.
+
+"You goin' to marry Skookum Bill, as they say?"
+
+Muckluck only laughed, but the Indian hung about waiting the Princess's
+pleasure.
+
+"When your pardner come back?" she would indiscreetly ask the Colonel.
+"Why he goes to Dawson?" And every few hours she would return: "Why he
+stay so long?"
+
+At last Maudie took her outside and told her.
+
+Muckluck gaped, sat down a minute, and rocked her body back and forth
+with hidden face, got up and called sharply: "Skookum!"
+
+They took the trail for town. Potts said, when he passed them, they
+were going as if the devil were at their heels--wouldn't even stop to
+say how the Colonel was. So Potts had come to see for himself--and to
+bring the Colonel some letters just arrived.
+
+Mac was close behind ... but the Boy? No-no. They wouldn't let anybody
+see him; and Potts shook his head.
+
+"Well, you can come in," said Maudie, "if you keep your head shut about
+the Boy."
+
+The Colonel was lying flat, with that unfaltering ceiling-gaze of the
+sick. Now his vision dropped to the level of faces at the door.
+"Hello!" But as they advanced he looked behind them anxiously. Only
+Mac--no, Kaviak at his heels! and the sick man's disappointment
+lightened to a smile. He would have held out a hand, but Maudie stopped
+him. She took the little fellow's fingers and laid them on the
+Colonel's.
+
+"Now sit down and be quiet," she said nervously.
+
+Potts and Mac obeyed, but Kaviak had fastened his fine little hand on
+the weak one, and anchored so, stared about taking his bearings.
+
+"How did you get to the Klondyke, Kaviak?" said the Colonel in a thin,
+breathy voice.
+
+"Came up with Sister Winifred," Farva answered for him. "She was sent
+for to help with the epidemic. Dyin' like flies in Dawson--h'm--ahem!"
+(Apologetic glance at Maudie.) "Sister Winifred promised to keep Kaviak
+with her. Woman of her word."
+
+"Well, what you think o' Dawson?" the low voice asked.
+
+Kaviak understood the look at least, and smiled back, grew suddenly
+grave, intent, looked sharply round, loosed his hold of the Colonel,
+bent down, and retired behind the bed. That was where Nig was. Their
+foregathering added nothing to the tranquility of the occasion, and
+both were driven forth by Maudie.
+
+Potts read the Colonel his letters, and helped him to sign a couple of
+cheques. The "Louisville instructions" had come through at last.
+
+After that the Colonel slept, and when he woke it was only to wander
+away into that world where Maudie was lost utterly, and where the
+Colonel was at home. There was chastening in such hours for Maudie of
+Minóok. "Now he's found the Other One," she would say to herself--"the
+One he was looking for."
+
+That same evening, as they sat in the tent in an interval of relief
+from the Colonel's muttering monotone, they heard Nig making some sort
+of unusual manifestation outside; heard the grunting of those pioneer
+pigs; heard sounds of a whispered "Sh! Kaviak. Shut up, Nig!" Then a
+low, tuneless crooning:
+
+  "Wen yo' see a pig a-goin' along
+    Widder straw in de sider 'is mouf,
+  It'll be er tuhble wintuh,
+    En yo' bettah move down Souf."
+
+"Why, the Boy's back!" said the Colonel suddenly in a clear, collected
+voice.
+
+Maudie had jumped up, but the Boy put his head in the tent, smiling,
+and calling out:
+
+"They told me he was getting on all right, but I just thought maybe he
+was asleep." He came in and bent over his pardner. "Hello, everybody!
+Why, you got it so fine and dark in here, I can hardly see how well
+you're lookin', Colonel!" And he dropped into the nurse's place by the
+bedside.
+
+"Maudie's lined the tent with black drill," said the Colonel. "You
+brought home anything to eat?"
+
+"Well, no----" (Maudie telegraphed); "found it all I could do to bring
+myself back."
+
+"Oh, well, that's the main thing," said the Colonel, battling with
+disappointment. Pricked by some quickened memory of the Boy's last
+home-coming: "I've had pretty queer dreams about you: been givin'
+Maudie the meanest kind of a time."
+
+"Don't go gassin', Colonel," admonished the nurse.
+
+"It's pretty tough, I can tell you," he said irritably, "to be as weak
+as a day-old baby, and to have to let other people----"
+
+"Mustn't talk!" ordered Mac. The Colonel raised his head with sudden
+anger. It did not mend matters that Maudie was there to hold him down
+before a lot of men.
+
+"You go to Halifax," said the Boy to Mac, blustering a trifle. "The
+Colonel may stand a little orderin' about from Maudie--don't blame him
+m'self. But Kentucky ain't going to be bossed by any of us."
+
+The Colonel lay quite still again, and when he spoke it was quietly
+enough.
+
+"Reckon I'm in the kind of a fix when a man's got to take orders."
+
+"Foolishness! Don't let him jolly you, boys. The Colonel's always
+sayin' he ain't a soldier, but I reckon you better look out how you
+rile Kentucky!"
+
+The sick man ignored the trifling. "The worst of it is bein' so
+useless."
+
+"Useless! You just wait till you see what a lot o' use we mean to make
+of you. No crawlin' out of it like that."
+
+"It's quite true," said Mac harshly; "we all kind of look to you
+still."
+
+"Course we do!" The Boy turned to the others. "The O'Flynns comin' all
+the way out from Dawson to-morrow to get Kentucky's opinion on a big
+scheme o' theirs. Did you ever hear what that long-headed Lincoln said
+when the Civil War broke out? 'I would like to have God on my side, but
+I must have Kentucky.'"
+
+"I've been so out o' my head, I thought you were arrested."
+
+"No 'out of your head' about it--was arrested. They thought I'd cleared
+Scowl Austin off the earth."
+
+"Do they know who did?" Potts and Maudie asked in a breath.
+
+"That Klondyke Indian that's sweet on Princess Muckluck."
+
+"What had Austin done to him?"
+
+"Nothin'. Reckon Skookum Bill was about the only man on Bonanza who had
+no objection to the owner of o. Said so in Court."
+
+"What did he kill him for?"
+
+"Well," said the Boy, "it's just one o' those topsy-turvy things that
+happen up here. You saw that Indian that came in with Nicholas? Some
+years ago he killed a drunken white man who was after him with a knife.
+There was no means of tryin' the Indian where the thing happened, so he
+was taken outside.
+
+"The Court found he'd done the killin' in self-defence, and sent him
+back. Well, sir, that native had the time of his life bein' tried for
+murder. He'd travelled on a railroad, seen a white man's city, lived
+like a lord, and came home to be the most famous man of his tribe. Got
+a taste for travel, too. Comes to the Klondyke, and his fame fires
+Skookum Bill. All you got to do is to kill one o' these white men, and
+they take you and show you all the wonders o' the earth. So he puts a
+bullet into Austin."
+
+"Why didn't he own up, then, and get his reward?"
+
+"Muckluck knew better--made him hold his tongue about it."
+
+"And then made him own up when she saw----"
+
+The boy nodded.
+
+"What's goin' to happen?"
+
+"Oh, he'll swing to-morrow instead o' me. By the way, Colonel, a fella
+hunted me up this mornin' who'd been to Minóok. Looked good to him.
+I've sold out Idaho Bar."
+
+"'Nough to buy back your Orange Grove?"
+
+He shook his head. "'Nough to pay my debts and start over again."
+
+When the Dawson doctor left that night Maudie, as usual, followed him
+out. They waited a long time for her to come back.
+
+"Perhaps she's gone to her own tent;" and the Boy went to see. He
+found her where the Colonel used to go to smoke, sitting, staring out
+to nowhere.
+
+As the boy looked closer he saw she had been crying, for even in the
+midst of honest service Maudie, like many a fine lady before her, could
+not forego the use of cosmetic. Her cheeks were streaked and stained.
+
+"Five dollars a box here, too," she said mechanically, as she wiped
+some of the rouge off with a handkerchief. Her hand shook.
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+"It's all up," she answered.
+
+"Not with him?" He motioned towards the tent.
+
+She nodded.
+
+"Doctor says so?"
+
+"----and I knew it before, only I wouldn't believe it."
+
+She had spoken with little agitation, but now she flung her arms out
+with a sudden anguish that oddly took the air of tossing into space
+Bonanza and its treasure. It was the motion of one who renounces the
+thing that means the most--a final fling in the face of the gods. The
+Boy stood quite still, submitting his heart to that first quick rending
+and tearing asunder which is only the initial agony of parting.
+
+"How soon?" he said, without raising his eyes.
+
+"Oh, he holds on--it may be a day or two."
+
+The Boy walked slowly away towards the ridge of the low hill. Maudie
+turned and watched him. On the top of the divide he stopped, looking
+over. Whatever it was he saw off there, he could not meet it yet. He
+flung himself down with his face in the fire-weed, and lay there all
+night long.
+
+Kaviak was sent after him in the morning, but only to say, "Breakfast,
+Maudie's tent."
+
+The Boy saw that Mac and Potts knew. For the first time the Big Chimney
+men felt a barrier between them and that one who had been the common
+bond, keeping the incongruous allied and friendly. Only Nig ran in and
+out, unchilled by the imminence of the Colonel's withdrawal from his
+kind.
+
+Towards noon the O'Flynns came up the creek, and were stopped near the
+tent by the others. They all stood talking low till a noise of
+scuffling broke the silence within. They drew nearer, and heard the
+Colonel telling Maudie not to turn out Nig and Kaviak.
+
+"I like seein' my friends. Where's the Boy?"
+
+So they went in.
+
+Did he know? He must know, or he would have asked O'Flynn what the
+devil made him look like that! All he said was: "Hello! How do you do,
+madam?" and he made a weak motion of one hand towards Mrs. O'Flynn to
+do duty for that splendid bow of his. Then, as no one spoke, "You're
+too late, O'Flynn."
+
+"Too late?"
+
+"Had a job in your line...." Then suddenly: "Maudie's worth the whole
+lot of you."
+
+They knew it was his way of saying "She's told me." They all sat and
+looked at the floor. Nothing happened for a long time. At last: "Well,
+you all know what my next move is; what's yours?"
+
+There was another silence, but not nearly so long.
+
+"What prospects, pardners?" he repeated.
+
+The Boy looked at Maudie. She made a little gesture of "I've done all
+the fightin' I'm good for." The Colonel's eyes, clear again and
+tranquil, travelled from face to face.
+
+O'Flynn cleared his throat, but it was Mac who spoke.
+
+"Yes--a--we would like to hold a last--hold a counsel o' war. We've
+always kind o' followed your notions--at least"--veracity pared down
+the compliment--"at least, you can't say but what we've always listened
+to you."
+
+"Yes, you might just--a--start us as well as you can," says Potts.
+
+The Colonel smiled a little. Each man still "starting"--forever
+starting for somewhere or something, until he should come to this place
+where the Colonel was. Even he, why, he was "starting" too. For him
+this was no end other than a chapter's ending. But these men he had
+lived and suffered with, they all wanted to talk the next move
+over--not his, theirs--all except the Boy, it seemed.
+
+Mac was in the act of changing his place to be nearer the Colonel, when
+Potts adroitly forestalled him. The others drew off a little and made
+desultory talk, while Potts in an undertone told how he'd had a run of
+bad luck. No doubt it would turn, but if ever he got enough again to
+pay his passage home, he'd put it in the bank and never risk it.
+
+"I swear I wouldn't! I've got to go out in the fall--goin' to get
+myself married Christmas; and, if she's willing, we'll come up here on
+the first boat in the spring--with backing this time."
+
+He showed a picture. The Colonel studied it.
+
+"I believe she'll come," he said.
+
+And Potts was so far from clairvoyance that he laughed, awkwardly
+flattered; then anxiously: "Wish I was sure o' my passage money."
+
+When Potts, before he meant to, had yielded place to O'Flynn, the
+Colonel was sworn to secrecy, and listened to excited whispers of gold
+in the sand off yonder on the coast of the Behring Sea. The world in
+general wouldn't know the authenticity of the new strike till next
+season. He and Mrs. O'Flynn would take the first boat sailing out of
+San Francisco in the spring.
+
+"Oh, you're going outside too?"
+
+"In the fahll--yes, yes. Ye see, I ain't like the rest. I've got Mrs.
+O'Flynn to consider. Dawson's great, but it ain't the place to start a
+famully."
+
+"Where you goin', Mac?" said the Colonel to the irate one, who was
+making for the door. "I want a little talk with you."
+
+Mac turned back, and consented to express his opinion of the money
+there was to be made out of tailings by means of a new hydraulic
+process. He was going to lend Kaviak to Sister Winifred again on the
+old terms. She'd take him along when she returned to Holy Cross, and
+Mac would go outside, raise a little capital, return, and make a
+fortune. For the moment he was broke--hadn't even passage money. Did
+the Colonel think he could----
+
+The Colonel seemed absorbed in that eternal interrogation of the
+tent-top.
+
+"Mine, you know"--Mac drew nearer still, and went on in the lowered
+voice--"mine's a special case. A man's bound to do all he can for his
+boys."
+
+"I didn't know you had boys."
+
+Mac jerked "Yes" with his square head. "Bobbie's goin' on six now."
+
+"The others older?"
+
+"Others?" Mac stared an instant. "Oh, there's only one more." He
+grinned with embarrassment, and hitched his head towards Kaviak.
+
+"I guess you've jawed enough," said Maudie, leaving the others and
+coming to the foot of the bed.
+
+"And Maudie's goin' back, too," said the sick man.
+
+She nodded.
+
+"And you're never goin' to leave her again?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Maudie's a little bit of All Right," said the patient. The Big Chimney
+men assented, but with sudden misgiving.
+
+"What was that job ye said ye were wantin' me forr?"
+
+"Oh, Maudie's got a friend of hers to fix it up."
+
+"Fix what up?" demanded Potts.
+
+"Little postscript to my will."
+
+Mac jerked his head at the nurse. With that clear sight of dying eyes
+the Colonel understood. A meaner spirit would have been galled at the
+part those "Louisville Instructions" had been playing, but cheap
+cynicism was not in the Colonel's line. He knew the awful pinch of life
+up here, and he thought no less of his comrades for asking that last
+service of getting them home. But it was the day of the final
+"clean-up" for the Colonel; he must not leave misapprehension behind.
+
+"I wanted Maudie to have my Minóok claim----"
+
+"Got a Minóok claim o' my own."
+
+"So I've left it to be divided----"
+
+They all looked up.
+
+"One-half to go to a little girl in 'Frisco, and the other half--well,
+I've left the other half to Kaviak. Strikes me he ought to have a
+little piece o' the North."
+
+"Y-yes!"
+
+"Oh, yes!"
+
+"Good idea!"
+
+"Mac thought he'd go over to the other tent and cook some dinner. There
+was a general movement. As they were going out:
+
+"Boy!"
+
+"Yes?" He came back, Nig followed, and the two stood by the camp-bed
+waiting their Colonel's orders.
+
+"Don't you go wastin' any more time huntin' gold-mines."
+
+"I don't mean to."
+
+"Go back to your own work; go back to your own people."
+
+The Boy listened and looked away.
+
+"It's good to go pioneering, but it's good to go home. Oh-h--!" the
+face on the pillow was convulsed for that swift passing moment--"best
+of all to go home. And if you leave your home too long, your home
+leaves you."
+
+"Home doesn't seem so important as it did when I came up here."
+
+The Colonel fastened one hand feverishly on his pardner's arm.
+
+"I've been afraid of that. It's magic; break away. Promise me you'll go
+back and stay. Lord, Lord!" he laughed feebly, "to think a fella should
+have to be urged to leave the North alone. Wonderful place, but there's
+Black Magic in it. Or who'd ever come--who'd ever stay?"
+
+He looked anxiously into the Boy's set face.
+
+"I'm not saying the time was wasted," he went on; "I reckon it was a
+good thing you came."
+
+"Yes, it was a good thing I came."
+
+"You've learned a thing or two."
+
+"Several."
+
+"Specially on the Long Trail."
+
+"Most of all on the Long Trail."
+
+The Colonel shut his eyes. Maudie came and held a cup to his lips.
+
+"Thank you. I begin to feel a little foggy. What was it we learned on
+the Trail, pardner?" But the Boy had turned away. "Wasn't it--didn't we
+learn how near a tolerable decent man is to bein' a villain?"
+
+"We learned that a man can't be quite a brute as long as he sticks to
+another man."
+
+"Oh, was that it?"
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the night Maudie went away to sleep. The Boy watched.
+
+"Do you know what I'm thinking about?" the sick man said suddenly.
+
+"About--that lady down at home?"
+
+"Guess again."
+
+"About--those fellas at Holy Cross?"
+
+"No, I never was as taken up with the Jesuits as you were. No, Sah, I'm
+thinkin' about the Czar." (Poor old Colonel! he was wandering again.)
+"Did I ever tell you I saw him once?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Did--had a good look at him. Knew a fella in Petersburg, too, that--"
+He rested a moment. "That Czar's all right. Only he sends the wrong
+people to Siberia. Ought to go himself, and take his Ministers, for a
+winter on the Trail." On his face suddenly the old half-smiling,
+half-shrewd look. "But, Lord bless you! 'tisn't only the Czar. We all
+have times o' thinkin' we're some punkins. Specially Kentuckians. I
+reckon most men have their days when they're twelve feet high, and
+wouldn't stoop to say 'Thank ye' to a King. Let 'em go on the Winter
+Trail."
+
+"Yes," agreed the Boy, "they'd find out--" And he stopped.
+
+"Plenty o' use for Head Men, though." The faint voice rang with an echo
+of the old authority. "No foolishness, but just plain: 'I'm the one
+that's doin' the leadin'--like Nig here--and it's my business to lick
+the hind dog if he shirks.'" He held out his hand and closed it over
+his friend's. "I was Boss o' the Big Chimney, Boy, but you were Boss o'
+the Trail."
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Colonel was buried in the old moose pasture, with people standing
+by who knew that the world had worn a friendlier face because he had
+been in it. That much was clear, even before it was found that he had
+left to each of the Big Chimney men five hundred dollars, not to be
+drawn except for the purpose of going home.
+
+They thought it was the sense of that security that made them put off
+the day. They would "play the game up to the last moment, and see--"
+
+September's end brought no great change in fortune, but a change withal
+of deep significance. The ice had begun to run in the Yukon. No man
+needed telling it would "be a tuhble wintah, and dey'd better move down
+Souf." All the late boats by both routes had been packed. Those men who
+had failed, and yet, most tenacious, were hanging on for some last
+lucky turn of the wheel, knew the risk they ran. And now to-day the
+final boat of the year was going down the long way to the Behring Sea,
+and by the Canadian route, open a little longer, the Big Chimney men,
+by grace of that one left behind, would be on the last ship to shoot
+the rapids in '98.
+
+Not only to the thousands who were going, to those who stayed behind
+there was something in the leaving of the last boat--something that
+knocked upon the heart. They, too, could still go home. They gathered
+at the docks and told one another they wouldn't leave Dawson for fifty
+thousand dollars, then looked at the "failures" with home-sick eyes,
+remembering those months before the luckiest Klondyker could hear from
+the world outside. Between now and then, what would have come to pass
+up here, and what down there below!
+
+The Boy had got a place for Muckluck in the A. C. Store. She was handy
+at repairing and working in fur, and said she was "all right" on this
+bright autumn morning when the Boy went in to say good-bye. With a
+white woman and an Indian boy, in a little room overlooking the
+water-front, Muckluck was working in the intervals of watching the
+crowds on the wharf. Eyes more experienced than hers might well stare.
+Probably in no other place upon the globe was gathered as motley a
+crew: English, Indian, Scandinavian, French, German, Negroes, Chinese,
+Poles, Japs, Finns. All the fine gentlemen had escaped by earlier
+boats. All the smart young women with their gold-nugget buttons as big
+as your thumb, lucky miners from the creeks with heavy consignments of
+dust to take home, had been too wary to run any risk of the
+Never-Know-What closing inopportunely. The great majority here, on the
+wharf, dazed or excited, lugging miscellaneous possessions--things they
+had clung to in straits so desperate they knew no more how to relax
+their hold than dead fingers do--these were men whose last chance had
+been the Klondyke, and who here, as elsewhere, had failed. Many who
+came in young were going out old; but the odd thing was that those
+worst off went out game--no whining, none of the ostentatious pathos of
+those broken on the wheel of a great city.
+
+A man under Muckluck's window, dressed in a moose-skin shirt, straw
+hat, broadcloth trousers, and carpet slippers, in one hand a tin pail,
+in the other something tied in a handkerchief, called out lustily to a
+ragged individual, cleaving a way through the throng, "Got your stuff
+aboard?"
+
+"Yes, goin' to get it off. I ain't goin' home till next year."
+
+And the face above the moose-skin shirt was stricken with a sudden
+envy. Without any telling, he knew just how his pardner's heart had
+failed him, when it came to turning his tattered back on the
+possibilities of the Klondyke.
+
+"Oh, I'm comin' back soon's I get a grub-stake."
+
+"I ain't," said another with a dazed expression--a Klondyker carrying
+home his frying-pan, the one thing, apparently, saved out of the wreck.
+
+"You think you ain't comin' back? Just wait! Once you've lived up here,
+the Outside ain't good enough fur yer."
+
+"Right!" said an old Forty-miler, "you can try it; but Lord! how you'll
+miss this goll-darn Yukon."
+
+Among the hundreds running about, talking, bustling, hauling
+heterogeneous luggage, sending last letters, doing last deals, a score
+of women either going by this boat or saying good-bye to those who
+were; and Potts, the O'Flynns, and Mac waiting to hand over Kaviak to
+Sister Winifred.
+
+The Boy at the open window above, staring down on the tatterdemalion
+throng, remembered his first meeting with the Big Chimney men as the
+Washington City steamed out of San Francisco's Golden Gate a year and a
+month before.
+
+Of course, even in default of finding millions, something stirring
+might have happened, something heroic, rewarding to the spirit, if no
+other how; but (his own special revelation blurred, swamped for the
+moment in the common wreck) he said to himself that nothing of the sort
+had befallen the Big Chimney men any more than to the whipped and
+bankrupt crew struggling down there on the wharf. They simply had
+failed--all alike. And yet there was between them and the common
+failures of the world one abiding difference: these had greatly dared.
+As long as the meanest in that crowd drew breath and held to memory, so
+long might he remember the brave and terrible days of the Klondyke
+Rush, and that he had borne in it his heavy share. No share in any mine
+save that--the knowledge that he was not among the vast majority who
+sit dully to the end beside what things they were born to--the earnings
+of other men, the savings of other women, afraid to go seeking after
+better lest they lose the good they have. They had failed, but it could
+never be said of a Klondyker that he had not tried. He might, in truth,
+look down upon the smug majority that smiles at unusual endeavour,
+unless success excuses, crowns it. No one there, after all, so poor but
+he had one possession treasured among kings. And he had risked it. What
+could a man do more?
+
+"Good-bye, Muckluck."
+
+"Goo'-bye? Boat Canada way no go till Thursday."
+
+"Thursday, yes," he said absently, eyes still on the American ship.
+
+"Then why you say goo'-bye to-day?"
+
+"Lot to do. I just wanted to make sure you were all right."
+
+Her creamy face was suddenly alight, but not with gratitude.
+
+"Oh, yes, all right here," she said haughtily. "I not like much the
+Boston men--King George men best." It was so her sore heart abjured her
+country. For among the natives of the Klondyke white history stops
+where it began when George the Third was King. "I think"--she shot
+sideways a shrewd look--"I think I marry a King George man."
+
+And at the prospect her head drooped heavily.
+
+"Then you'll want to wear this at your wedding."
+
+The Boy drew his hand out of his pocket, threw a walrus-string over her
+bent head, and when she could see clear again, her Katharine medal was
+swinging below her waist, and "the Boston man" was gone.
+
+She stared with blinded eyes out of the window, till suddenly in the
+mist one face was clear. The Boy! Standing still down there in the
+hurly-burly, hands in pockets, staring at the ship.
+
+Suddenly Sister Winifred, her black veil swirling in the wind. An
+orderly from St. Mary's Hospital following with a little trunk. At the
+gangway she is stopped by the purser, asked some questions, smiles at
+first and shakes her head, and then in dismay clasps her hands, seeming
+to plead, while the whistle shrieks.
+
+Muckluck turned and flew down the dark little stair, threaded her way
+in and out among the bystanders on the wharf till she reached the
+Sister's side. The nun was saying that she not only had no money, but
+that a Yukon purser must surely know the Sisters were forbidden to
+carry it. He could not doubt but the passage money would be made good
+when they got to Holy Cross. But the purser was a new man, and when Mac
+and others who knew the Yukon custom expostulated, he hustled them
+aside and told Sister Winifred to stand back, the gangway was going up.
+It was then the Boy came and spoke to the man, finally drew out some
+money and paid the fare. The nun, not recognising him, too bewildered
+by this rough passage with the world even to thank the stranger, stood
+motionless, grasping Kaviak's hand--two children, you would say--her
+long veil blowing, hurrying on before her to that haven in the waste,
+the mission at Holy Cross.
+
+Again the Boy was delaying the upward swing of the gangway: the nun's
+trunk must come on board. Two men rushed for it while he held down the
+gang.
+
+"Mustn't cry," he said to Muckluck. "You'll see Sister Winifred again."
+
+"Not for that I cry. Ah, I never shall have happiness!"
+
+"Yes, that trunk!" he called.
+
+In the babel of voices shouting from ship and shore, the Boy heard
+Princess Muckluck saying, with catches in her breath:
+
+"I always knew I would get no luck!"
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Ah! I was a bad child. The baddest of all the Pymeut children."
+
+"Yes, yes, they've got it now!" the Boy shouted up to the Captain. Then
+low, and smiling absently: "What did you do that was so bad. Princess?"
+
+"Me? I--I mocked at the geese. It was the summer they were so late; and
+as they flew past Pymeut I--yes, I mocked at them."
+
+A swaying and breaking of the crowd, the little trunk flung on board,
+the men rushing back to the wharf, the gang lifted, and the last Lower
+River boat swung out into the ice-flecked stream.
+
+Keen to piercing a cry rang out--Muckluck's:
+
+"Stop! They carry him off! It is meestake! Oh! Oh!"
+
+The Boy was standing for'ard, Nig beside him.
+
+O'Flynn rushed to the wharf's edge and screamed at the Captain to
+"Stop, be the Siven!" Mac issued orders most peremptory. Muckluck wept
+as excitedly as though there had never been question of the Boy's going
+away. But while the noise rose and fell, Potts drawled a "Guess he
+means to go that way!"
+
+"No, he don't!"
+
+"Stop, you--------, Captain!"
+
+"Stop your----boat!"
+
+"Well," said a bystander, "I never seen any feller as calm as that who
+was bein' took the way he didn't want to go."
+
+"D'ye mean there's a new strike?"
+
+The suggestion flashed electric through the crowd. It was the only
+possible explanation.
+
+"He knows what he's about."
+
+"Lord! I wish I'd 'a' froze to him!"
+
+"Yep," said Buck One, "never seen that young feller when he looked more
+like he wouldn't give a whoop in hell to change places with anybody."
+
+As O'Flynn, back from his chase, hoarse and puffing, stopped suddenly:
+
+"Be the Siven! Father Brachet said the little divil 'd be coming back
+to Howly Cross!"
+
+"Where's that?"
+
+"Lower River camp."
+
+"Gold there?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then you're talking through your hat!"
+
+"Say, Potts, where in hell is he goin'?"
+
+"Damfino!"
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Magnetic North
+by Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAGNETIC NORTH ***
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+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Magnetic North, by Elizabeth Robins</title>
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's The Magnetic North, by Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Magnetic North
+
+Author: Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
+
+Release Date: November 10, 2003 [EBook #10038]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAGNETIC NORTH ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Anita Paque, Shawn Wheeler, David Schaal, Anuradha Valsa Raj and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<p>
+<img src="cover_ill.jpg" alt="" width="100%">
+</p>
+
+<h1>
+    THE MAGNETIC NORTH
+</h1>
+
+<h3>By</h3>
+
+<h2>ELIZABETH ROBINS</h2>
+
+<h3>
+    (C. E. Raimond) Author of "The Open Question," "Below the Salt," etc.</h3>
+
+<h3>
+<a href="map_l.jpg">With a Map</a>
+</h3>
+
+<h3>
+    1904
+</h3>
+
+
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#2HCH2">
+CHAPTER I: WINTER CAMP IN THE YUKON
+</a></p>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#2HCH3">
+CHAPTER II: HOUSE-WARMING
+</a></p>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#2HCH4">
+CHAPTER III: TWO NEW SPISSIMENS
+</a></p>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#2HCH5">
+CHAPTER IV: THE BLOW-OUT
+</a></p>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#2HCH6">
+CHAPTER V: THE SHAMÁN
+</a></p>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#2HCH7">
+CHAPTER VI: A PENITENTIAL JOURNEY
+</a></p>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#2HCH8">
+CHAPTER VII: KAVIAK'S CRIME
+</a></p>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#2HCH9">
+CHAPTER VIII: CHRISTMAS
+</a></p>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#2HCH10">
+CHAPTER IX: A CHRISTIAN AGNOSTIC
+</a></p>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#2HCH11">
+CHAPTER X: PRINCESS MUCKLUCK
+</a></p>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#2HCH12">
+CHAPTER XI: HOLY CROSS
+</a></p>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#2HCH13">
+CHAPTER XII: THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE
+</a></p>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#2HCH14">
+CHAPTER XIII: THE PIT
+</a></p>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#2HCH15">
+CHAPTER XIV: KURILLA
+</a></p>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#2HCH16">
+CHAPTER XV: THE ESQUIMAUX HORSE
+</a></p>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#2HCH17">
+CHAPTER XVI: MINOOK
+</a></p>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#2HCH18">
+CHAPTER XVII: THE GREAT STAMPEDE
+</a></p>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#2HCH19">
+CHAPTER XVIII: A MINERS' MEETING
+</a></p>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#2HCH20">
+CHAPTER XIX: THE ICE GOES OUT
+</a></p>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#2HCH21">
+CHAPTER XX: THE KLONDYKE
+</a></p>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#2HCH22">
+CHAPTER XXI: PARDNERS
+</a></p>
+<p class="ctr"><a href="#2HCH23">
+CHAPTER XXII: THE GOING HOME
+</a></p>
+
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2>
+    THE MAGNETIC NORTH
+</h2>
+
+<a name="2HCH2"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER I
+</h2>
+<center>
+    WINTER CAMP ON THE YUKON
+</center>
+<p class="ind">
+    "To labour and to be content with that a man hath is a sweet life; but
+    he that findeth a treasure is above them both."&mdash;<i>Ecclesiasticus</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Of course they were bound for the Klondyke. Every creature in the
+    North-west was bound for the Klondyke. Men from the South too, and men
+    from the East, had left their ploughs and their pens, their factories,
+    pulpits, and easy-chairs, each man like a magnetic needle suddenly set
+    free and turning sharply to the North; all set pointing the self-same
+    way since that July day in '97, when the <i>Excelsior</i> sailed into San
+    Francisco harbour, bringing from the uttermost regions at the top of
+    the map close upon a million dollars in nuggets and in gold-dust.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Some distance this side of the Arctic Circle, on the right bank of the
+    Yukon, a little detachment of that great army pressing northward, had
+    been wrecked early in the month of September.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They had realised, on leaving the ocean-going ship that landed them at
+    St. Michael's Island (near the mouth of the great river), that they
+    could not hope to reach Dawson that year. But instead of "getting cold
+    feet," as the phrase for discouragement ran, and turning back as
+    thousands did, or putting in the winter on the coast, they determined,
+    with an eye to the spring rush, to cover as many as possible of the
+    seventeen hundred miles of waterway before navigation closed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They knew, in a vague way, that winter would come early, but they had
+    not counted on the big September storm that dashed their heavy-laden
+    boats against the floe-ice, ultimately drove them ashore, and nearly
+    cost the little party their lives. On that last day of the long
+    struggle up the stream, a stiff north-easter was cutting the middle
+    reach of the mighty river, two miles wide here, into a choppy and
+    dangerous sea.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Day by day, five men in the two little boats, had kept serious eyes on
+    the shore. Then came the morning when, out of the monotonous cold and
+    snow-flurries, something new appeared, a narrow white rim forming on
+    the river margin&mdash;the first ice!
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Winter beginning to show his teeth," said one man, with an effort at
+    jocosity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Day by day, nearer came the menace; narrower and swifter still ran the
+    deep black water strip between the encroaching ice-lines. But the
+    thought that each day's sailing or rowing meant many days nearer the
+    Klondyke, seemed to inspire a superhuman energy. Day by day each man
+    had felt, and no man yet had said, "We must camp to-night for eight
+    months." They had looked landward, shivered, and held on their way.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But on this particular morning, when they took in sail, they realised
+    it was to be that abomination of desolation on the shore or death. And
+    one or other speedily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nearer the white teeth gleamed, fiercer the gale, swifter the current,
+    sweeping back the boats. The <i>Mary C.</i> was left behind, fighting for
+    life, while it seemed as if no human power could keep the <i>Tulare</i> from
+    being hurled against the western shore. Twice, in spite of all they
+    could do, she was driven within a few feet of what looked like certain
+    death. With a huge effort, that last time, her little crew had just got
+    her well in mid-stream, when a heavy roller breaking on the starboard
+    side drenched the men and half filled the cockpit. Each rower, still
+    pulling for dear life with one hand, bailed the boat with the other;
+    but for all their promptness a certain amount of the water froze solid
+    before they could get it out.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Great luck, if we're going to take in water like this," said the
+    cheerful Kentuckian, shipping his oar and knocking off the ice&mdash;"great
+    luck that all the stores are so well protected."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Protected!" snapped out an anxious, cast-iron-looking man at the
+    rudder.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, protected. How's water to get through the ice-coat that's over
+    everything?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The cast-iron steersman set his jaw grimly. They seemed to be
+    comparatively safe now, with half a mile of open water between them and
+    the western shore.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But they sat as before, stiff, alert, each man in his ice jacket that
+    cracked and crunched as he bent to his oar. Now right, now left, again
+    they eyed the shore.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Would it be&mdash;could it be there they would have to land? And if they
+    did...?
+</p>
+<p>
+    Lord, how it blew!
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hard a-port!" called out the steersman. There, just ahead, was a great
+    white-capped "roller" coming&mdash;coming, the biggest wave they had
+    encountered since leaving open sea.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But MacCann, the steersman, swung the boat straight into the crested
+    roller, and the <i>Tulare</i> took it gamely, "bow on." All was going well
+    when, just in the boiling middle of what they had thought was foaming
+    "white-cap," the boat struck something solid, shivered, and went
+    shooting down, half under water; recovered, up again, and seemed to
+    pause in a second's doubt on the very top of the great wave. In that
+    second that seemed an eternity one man's courage snapped.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Potts threw down his oar and swore by&mdash;&mdash;and by&mdash;&mdash;he wouldn't pull
+    another&mdash;&mdash;stroke on the&mdash;&mdash;Yukon.
+</p>
+<p>
+    While he was pouring out the words, the steersman sprang from the
+    tiller, and seized Potts' oar just in time to save the boat from
+    capsizing. Then he and the big Kentuckian both turned on the distracted
+    Potts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You infernal quitter!" shouted the steersman, and choked with fury.
+    But even under the insult of that "meanest word in the language," Potts
+    sat glaring defiantly, with his half-frozen hands in his pockets.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It ain't a river, anyhow, this ain't," he said. "It's plain, simple
+    Hell and water."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The others had no time to realise that Potts was clean out of his
+    senses for the moment, and the Kentuckian, still pulling like mad,
+    faced the "quitter" with a determination born of terror.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If you can't row, take the rudder! Damnation! Take that rudder! Quick,
+    <i>or we'll kill you</i>!" And he half rose up, never dropping his oar.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Blindly, Potts obeyed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The <i>Tulare</i> was free now from the clinging mass at the bow, but they
+    knew they had struck their first floe.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Farther on they could see other white-caps bringing other ice masses
+    down. But there was no time for terrors ahead. The gale was steadily
+    driving them in shore again. Boat and oars alike were growing unwieldy
+    with their coating of ever-increasing ice, and human strength was no
+    match for the storm that was sweeping down from the Pole.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Lord, how it blew!
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There's a cove!" called out the Kentuckian. "Throw her in!" he shouted
+    to Potts. Sullenly the new steersman obeyed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Rolling in on a great surge, the boat suddenly turned in a boiling
+    eddy, and the first thing anybody knew was that the <i>Tulare</i> was on her
+    side and her crew in the water. Potts was hanging on to the gunwale and
+    damning the others for not helping him to save the boat.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She wasn't much of a boat when finally they got her into quiet water;
+    but the main thing was they had escaped with their lives and rescued a
+    good proportion of their winter provisions. All the while they were
+    doing this last, the Kentuckian kept turning to look anxiously for any
+    sign of the others, in his heart bitterly blaming himself for having
+    agreed to Potts' coming into the <i>Tulare</i> that day in place of the
+    Kentuckian's own "pardner." When they had piled the rescued provisions
+    up on the bank, and just as they were covering the heap of bacon,
+    flour, and bean-bags, boxes, tools, and utensils with a tarpaulin, up
+    went a shout, and the two missing men appeared tramping along the
+    ice-encrusted shore.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Where was the <i>Mary C.</i>? Well, she was at the bottom of the Yukon, and
+    her crew would like some supper.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They set up a tent, and went to bed that first night extremely well
+    pleased at being alive on any terms.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But people get over being glad about almost anything, unless misfortune
+    again puts an edge on the circumstance. The next day, not being in any
+    immediate danger, the boon of mere life seemed less satisfying.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In detachments they went up the river several miles, and down about as
+    far. They looked in vain for any sign of the <i>Mary C.</i>. They prospected
+    the hills. From the heights behind the camp they got a pretty fair idea
+    of the surrounding country. It was not reassuring.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "As to products, there seems to be plenty of undersized timber, plenty
+    of snow and plenty of river, and, as far as I can see, just nothing
+    else."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, there's oodles o' blueberries," said the Boy, his inky-looking
+    mouth bearing witness to veracity; "and there are black and red
+    currants in the snow, and rose-apples&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, yes," returned the other, "it's a sort of garden of Eden!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    A little below here it was four miles from bank to bank of the main
+    channel, but at this point the river was only about two miles wide, and
+    white already with floating masses of floe-ice going on a swift current
+    down towards the sea, four hundred miles away.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The right bank presented to the mighty river a low chain of hills,
+    fringed at the base with a scattered growth of scrubby spruce, birch,
+    willow, and cotton-wood. Timber line was only two hundred feet above
+    the river brink; beyond that height, rocks and moss covered with
+    new-fallen snow.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But if their side seemed cheerless, what of the land on the left bank?
+    A swamp stretching endlessly on either hand, and back from the icy
+    flood as far as eye could see, broken only by sloughs and an occasional
+    ice-rimmed tarn.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We've been travelling just eight weeks to arrive at this," said the
+    Kentuckian, looking at the desolate scene with a homesick eye.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We're not only pretty far from home," grumbled another, "we're still
+    thirteen hundred miles away from the Klondyke."
+</p>
+<p>
+    These unenlivening calculations were catching.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We're just about twenty-five hundred miles from the nearest railroad
+    or telegraph, and, now that winter's down on us, exactly eight months
+    from anywhere in the civilised world."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They had seen no sign of even savage life, no white trader, nothing to
+    show that any human foot had ever passed that way before.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In that stillness that was like the stillness of death, they went up
+    the hillside, with footsteps muffled in the clinging snow; and sixty
+    feet above the great river, in a part of the wood where the timber was
+    least unpromising, they marked out a site for their winter quarters.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then this queer little company&mdash;a Denver bank-clerk, an ex-schoolmaster
+    from Nova Scotia, an Irish-American lawyer from San Francisco, a
+    Kentucky "Colonel" who had never smelt powder, and "the Boy" (who was
+    no boy at all, but a man of twenty-two)&mdash;these five set to work felling
+    trees, clearing away the snow, and digging foundations for a couple of
+    log-cabins&mdash;one for the Trio, as they called themselves, the other for
+    the Colonel and the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    These two had chummed from the hour they met on the steamer that
+    carried them through the Golden Gate of the Pacific till&mdash;well, till
+    the end of my story.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel was a big tanned fellow, nearly forty&mdash;eldest of the
+    party&mdash;whom the others used to guy discreetly, because you couldn't
+    mention a place anywhere on the known globe, except the far north,
+    which he had not personally inspected. But for this foible, as the
+    untravelled considered it, he was well liked and a little
+    feared&mdash;except by the Boy, who liked him "first-rate," and feared him
+    not at all. They had promptly adopted each other before they discovered
+    that it was necessary to have one or more "pardners." It seemed, from
+    all accounts, to be true, that up there at the top of the world a man
+    alone is a man lost, and ultimately the party was added to as
+    aforesaid.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Only two of them knew anything about roughing it. Jimmie O'Flynn of
+    'Frisco, the Irish-American lawyer, had seen something of frontier
+    life, and fled it, and MacCann, the Nova Scotian schoolmaster, had
+    spent a month in one of the Caribou camps, and on the strength of that,
+    proudly accepted the nickname of "the Miner."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Colonel George Warren and Morris Burnet, the Boy, had the best outfits;
+    but this fact was held to be more than counter-balanced by the value of
+    the schoolmaster's experience at Caribou, and by the extraordinary
+    handiness of Potts, the Denver clerk, who had helped to build the
+    shelter on deck for the disabled sick on the voyage up. This young man
+    with the big mouth and lazy air had been in the office of a bank ever
+    since he left school, and yet, under pressure, he discovered a natural
+    neat-handedness and a manual dexterity justly envied by some of his
+    fellow-pioneers. His outfit was not more conspicuously meagre than
+    O'Flynn's, yet the Irishman was held to be the moneyed man of his
+    party. Just why was never fully developed, but it was always said,
+    "O'Flynn represents capital"; and O'Flynn, whether on that account, or
+    for a subtler and more efficient reason, always got the best of
+    everything that was going without money and without price.
+</p>
+<p>
+    On board ship O'Flynn, with his ready tongue and his golden
+    background&mdash;"representing capital"&mdash;was a leading spirit. Potts the
+    handy-man was a talker, too, and a good second. But, once in camp, Mac
+    the Miner was cock of the walk, in those first days, quoted "Caribou,"
+    and ordered everybody about to everybody's satisfaction.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In a situation like this, the strongest lean on the man who has ever
+    seen "anything like it" before. It was a comfort that anybody even
+    <i>thought</i> he knew what to do under such new conditions. So the others
+    looked on with admiration and a pleasant confidence, while Mac boldly
+    cut a hole in the brand-new tent, and instructed Potts how to make a
+    flange out of a tin plate, with which to protect the canvas from the
+    heat of the stove-pipe. No more cooking now in the bitter open.
+    Everyone admired Mac's foresight when he said:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We must build rock fireplaces in our cabins, or we'll find our one
+    little Yukon stove burnt out before the winter is over&mdash;before we have
+    a chance to use it out prospecting." And when Mac said they must pool
+    their stores, the Colonel and the Boy agreed as readily as O'Flynn,
+    whose stores consisted of a little bacon, some navy beans, and a
+    demijohn of whisky. O'Flynn, however, urged that probably every man had
+    a little "mite o' somethin'" that he had brought specially for
+    himself&mdash;somethin' his friends had given him, for instance. There was
+    Potts, now. They all knew how the future Mrs. Potts had brought a
+    plum-cake down to the steamer, when she came to say good-bye, and made
+    Potts promise he wouldn't unseal the packet till Christmas. It wouldn't
+    do to pool Potts' cake&mdash;never! There was the Colonel, the only man that
+    had a sack of coffee. He wouldn't listen when they had told him tea was
+    the stuff up here, and&mdash;well, perhaps other fellows didn't miss coffee
+    as much as a Kentuckian, though he <i>had</i> heard&mdash;Never mind; they
+    wouldn't pool the coffee. The Boy had some preserved fruit that he
+    seemed inclined to be a hog about&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, look here. I haven't touched it!" "Just what I'm sayin'. You're
+    hoardin' that fruit."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was known that Mac had a very dacint little medicine-chest. Of
+    course, if any fellow was ill, Mac wasn't the man to refuse him a
+    little cold pizen; but he must be allowed to keep his own medicine
+    chest&mdash;and that little pot o' Dundee marmalade. As for O'Flynn, he
+    would look after the "dimmi-john."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Mac was dead against the whisky clause. Alcohol had been the curse
+    of Caribou, and in <i>this</i> camp spirits were to be for medicinal
+    purposes only. Whereon a cloud descended on Mr. O'Flynn, and his health
+    began to suffer; but the precious demi-john was put away "in stock"
+    along with the single bottles belonging to the others. Mac had taken an
+    inventory, and no one in those early days dared touch anything without
+    his permission.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They had cut into the mountain-side for a level foundation, and were
+    hard at it now hauling logs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I wonder," said the Boy, stopping a moment in his work, and looking at
+    the bleak prospect round him&mdash;"I wonder if we're going to see anybody
+    all winter."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, sure to," Mac thought; "Indians, anyhow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I begin to wish they'd mosy along," said Potts; and the sociable
+    O'Flynn backed him up.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was towards noon on the sixth day after landing (they had come to
+    speak of this now as a voluntary affair), when they were electrified by
+    hearing strange voices; looked up from their work, and saw two white
+    men seated on a big cake of ice going down the river with the current.
+    When they recovered sufficiently from their astonishment at the
+    spectacle, they ran down the hillside, and proposed to help the
+    "castaways" to land. Not a bit of it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>Land</i> in that place! What you take us for? Not much! We're going to
+    St. Michael's."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They had a small boat drawn up by them on the ice, and one man was
+    dressed in magnificent furs, a long sable overcoat and cap, and wearing
+    quite the air of a North Pole Nabob.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Got any grub?" Mac called out.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes; want some?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh no; I thought you&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You're not going to try to live through the winter <i>there?</i>"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Lord! you <i>are</i> in a fix!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's we thought about you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the travellers on the ice-raft went by laughing and joking at the
+    men safe on shore with their tents and provisions. It made some of them
+    visibly uneasy. <i>Would</i> they win through? Were they crazy to try it?
+    They had looked forward eagerly to the first encounter with their kind,
+    but this vision floating by on the treacherous ice, of men who rather
+    dared the current and the crash of contending floes than land where
+    <i>they</i> were, seemed of evil augury. The little incident left a
+    curiously sinister impression on the camp.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Even Mac was found agreeing with the others of his Trio that, since
+    they had a grand, tough time in front of them, it was advisable to get
+    through the black months ahead with as little wear and tear as
+    possible. In spite of the Trio's superior talents, they built a small
+    ramshackle cabin with a tumble-down fireplace, which served them so ill
+    that they ultimately spent all their waking hours in the more
+    comfortable quarters of the Colonel and the Boy. It had been agreed
+    that these two, with the help, or, at all events, the advice, of the
+    others, should build the bigger, better cabin, where the stores should
+    be kept and the whole party should mess&mdash;a cabin with a solid outside
+    chimney of stone and an open fireplace, generous of proportion and
+    ancient of design, "just like down South."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The weather was growing steadily colder; the ice was solid now many
+    feet out from each bank of the river. In the middle of the flood the
+    clotted current still ran with floe-ice, but it was plain the river was
+    settling down for its long sleep.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Not silently, not without stress and thunder. The handful of dwellers
+    on the shore would be waked in the night by the shock and crash of
+    colliding floes, the sound of the great winds rushing by, and&mdash;"Hush!
+    What's that?" Tired men would start up out of sleep and sit straight to
+    listen. Down below, among the ice-packs, the noise as of an old-time
+    battle going on&mdash;tumult and crashing and a boom! boom! like
+    cannonading.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then one morning they woke to find all still, the conflict over, the
+    Yukon frozen from bank to bank. No sound from that day on; no more
+    running water for a good seven months.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Winter had come.
+</p>
+<p>
+    While the work went forward they often spoke of the only two people
+    they had thus far seen. Both Potts and O'Flynn had been heard to envy
+    them.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac had happened to say that he believed the fellow in furs was an
+    Englishman&mdash;a Canadian, at the very least. The Americans chaffed him,
+    and said, "That accounts for it," in a tone not intended to flatter.
+    Mac hadn't thought of it before, but he was prepared to swear now that
+    if an Englishman&mdash;they were the hardiest pioneers on earth&mdash;or a
+    Canadian was in favour of lighting out, "it must be for some good
+    reason."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh yes; we all know that reason."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Americans laughed, and Mac, growing hot, was goaded into vaunting
+    the Britisher and running down the Yankee.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yankee!" echoed the Kentuckian. "And up in Nova Scotia they let this
+    man teach school! Doesn't know the difference yet between the little
+    corner they call New England and all the rest of America."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "All the rest of America!" shouted Mac. "The cheeky way you people of
+    the States have of gobbling the Continent (in <i>talk</i>), just as though
+    the British part of it wasn't the bigger half!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes; but when you think <i>which</i> half, you ought to be obliged to any
+    fellow for forgetting it." And then they referred to effete monarchical
+    institutions, and by the time they reached the question of the kind of
+    king the Prince of Wales would make, Mac was hardly a safe man to argue
+    with.
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was one bond between him and the Kentucky Colonel: they were both
+    religious men; and although Mac was blue Presbyterian and an inveterate
+    theologian, somehow, out here in the wilderness, it was more possible
+    to forgive a man for illusions about the Apostolic Succession and
+    mistaken views upon Church government. The Colonel, at all events, was
+    not so lax but what he was ready to back up the Calvinist in an
+    endeavour to keep the Sabbath (with a careful compromise between church
+    and chapel) and help him to conduct a Saturday-night Bible-class.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But if the Boy attended the Bible-class with fervour and aired his
+    heresies with uncommon gusto, if he took with equal geniality Colonel
+    Warren's staid remonstrance and Mac's fiery objurgation, Sunday morning
+    invariably found him more "agnostic" than ever, stoutly declining to
+    recognise the necessity for "service." For this was an occasion when
+    you couldn't argue or floor anybody, or hope to make Mac "hoppin' mad,"
+    or have the smallest kind of a shindy. The Colonel read the lessons,
+    Mac prayed, and they all sang, particularly O'Flynn. Now, the Boy
+    couldn't sing a note, so there was no fair division of entertainment,
+    wherefore he would go off into the woods with his gun for company, and
+    the Catholic O'Flynn, and even Potts, were in better odour than he
+    "down in camp" on Sundays. So far you may travel, and yet not escape
+    the tyranny of the "outworn creeds."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy came back a full hour before service on the second Sunday with
+    a couple of grouse and a beaming countenance. Mac, who was cook that
+    week, was the only man left in the tent. He looked agreeably surprised
+    at the apparition.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hello!" says he more pleasantly than his Sunday gloom usually
+    permitted. "Back in time for service?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've found a native," says the Boy, speaking as proudly as any
+    Columbus. "He's hurt his foot, and he's only got one eye, but he's
+    splendid. Told me no end of things. He's coming here as fast as his
+    foot will let him&mdash;he and three other Indians&mdash;Esquimaux, I mean. They
+    haven't had anything to eat but berries and roots for seven days."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy was feverishly overhauling the provisions behind the stove.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look here," says Mac, "hold on there. I don't know that we've come all
+    this way to feed a lot o' dirty savages."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But they're starving." Then, seeing that that fact did not produce the
+    desired impression: "My savage is an awfully good fellow. He&mdash;he's a
+    converted savage, seems to be quite a Christian." Then, hastily
+    following up his advantage: "He's been taught English by the Jesuits at
+    the mission forty miles above us, on the river. He can give us a whole
+    heap o' tips."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac was slowly bringing out a small panful of cold boiled beans.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There are four of them," said the Boy&mdash;"big fellows, almost as big as
+    our Colonel, and <i>awful</i> hungry."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac looked at the handful of beans and then at the small sheet-iron
+    stove.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There are more cooking," says he not over-cordially.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The one that talks good English is the son of the chief. You can see
+    he's different from the others. Knows a frightful lot. He's taught me
+    some of his language already. The men with him said 'Kaiomi' to
+    everything I asked, and that means 'No savvy.' Says he'll teach
+    me&mdash;he'll teach all of us&mdash;how to snow-shoe."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We know how to snow-shoe."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I mean on those long narrow snow-shoes that make you go so fast
+    you always trip up! He'll show us how to steer with a pole, and how to
+    make fish-traps and&mdash;and everything."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac began measuring out some tea.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He's got a team of Esquimaux dogs&mdash;calls 'em Mahlemeuts, and he's got
+    a birch-bark canoe, and a skin kyak from the coast." Then with an
+    inspiration: "His people are the sort of Royal Family down there,"
+    added the Boy, thinking to appeal to the Britisher's monarchical
+    instincts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac had meditatively laid his hand on a side of bacon, the Boy's eyes
+    following.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He's asked us&mdash;<i>all</i> of us, and we're five&mdash;up to visit him at Pymeut,
+    the first village above us here." Mac took up a knife to cut the bacon.
+    "And&mdash;good gracious! why, I forgot the grouse; they can have the
+    grouse!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, they can't," said Mac firmly; "they're lucky to get bacon."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy's face darkened ominously. When he looked like that the elder
+    men found it was "healthiest to give him his head." But the young face
+    cleared as quickly as it had clouded. After all, the point wasn't worth
+    fighting for, since grouse would take time to cook, and&mdash;here were the
+    natives coming painfully along the shore.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy ran out and shouted and waved his cap. The other men of the
+    camp, who had gone in the opposite direction, across the river ice to
+    look at an air-hole, came hurrying back and reached camp about the same
+    time as the visitors.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Thought you said they were big fellows!" commented Mac, who had come
+    to the door for a glimpse of the Indians as they toiled up the slope.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, so they are!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, the Colonel would make two of any one of them."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The Colonel! Oh well, you can't expect anybody else to be quite as big
+    as that. I was in a hurry, but I suppose what I meant was, they could
+    eat as much as the Colonel."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How do you know?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, just look how broad they are. It doesn't matter to your stomach
+    whether you're big up and down, or big to and fro."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's their furs make 'em look like that. They're the most awful little
+    runts I ever saw!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I reckon <i>you'd</i> think they were big, too&mdash;big as Nova
+    Scotia&mdash;if <i>you'd</i> found 'em&mdash;come on 'em suddenly like that in the
+    woods&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Which is the...?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, the son of the chief is in the middle, the one who is taking off
+    his civilised fur-coat. He says his father's got a heap of pelts (you
+    could get things for your collection, Mac), and he's got two
+    reindeer-skin shirts with hoods&mdash;'parkis,' you know, like the others
+    are wearing&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    They were quite near now.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How do," said the foremost native affably.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How do." The Boy came forward and shook hands as though he hadn't seen
+    him for a month. "This," says he, turning first to Mac and then to the
+    other white men, "this is Prince Nicholas of Pymeut. Walk right in, all
+    of you, and have something to eat."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The visitors sat on the ground round the stove, as close as they could
+    get without scorching, and the atmosphere was quickly heavy with their
+    presence. When they slipped back their hoods it was seen that two of
+    the men wore the "tartar tonsure," after the fashion of the coast.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where do you come from?" inquired the Colonel of the man nearest him,
+    who simply blinked and was dumb.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This is the one that talks English," said the Boy, indicating Nicholas,
+    "and he lives at Pymeut, and he's been converted."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How far is Pymeut?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We sleep Pymeut to-night," says Nicholas.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Which way?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The native jerked his head up the river.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Many people there?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "White men, too?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How far to the nearest white men?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas's mind wandered from the white man's catechism and fixed
+    itself on his race's immemorial problem: how far it was to the nearest
+    thing to eat.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I thought you said he could speak English."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So he can, first rate. He and I had a great pow-wow, didn't we,
+    Nicholas?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas smiled absently, and fixed his one eye on the bacon that Mac
+    was cutting on the deal box into such delicate slices.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He'll talk all right," said the Boy, "when he's had some breakfast."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac had finished the cutting, and now put the frying-pan on an open
+    hole in the little stove.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Cook him?" inquired Nicholas.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes. Don't you cook him?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Take heap time, cook him."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You couldn't eat it raw!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas nodded emphatically.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac said "No," but the Boy was curious to see if they would really eat
+    it uncooked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Let them have <i>some</i> of it raw while the rest is frying"; and he
+    beckoned the visitors to the deal box. They made a dart forward,
+    gathered up the fat bacon several slices at a time, and pushed it into
+    their mouths.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ugh!" said the Colonel under his breath.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac quickly swept what was left into the frying-pan, and began to cut a
+    fresh lot.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy divided the cold beans, got out biscuits, and poured the tea,
+    while silence and a strong smell of ancient fish and rancid seal
+    pervaded the little tent.
+</p>
+<p>
+    O'Flynn put a question or two, but Nicholas had gone stone-deaf. There
+    was no doubt about it, they had been starving.
+</p>
+<p>
+    After a good feed they sat stolidly by the fire, with no sign of
+    consciousness, save the blinking of beady eyes, till the Colonel
+    suggested a smoke. Then they all grinned broadly, and nodded with great
+    vigour. Even those who had no other English understood "tobacco."
+</p>
+<p>
+    When he had puffed awhile, Nicholas took his pipe out of his mouth,
+    and, looking at the Boy, said:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You no savvy catch fish in winter?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Through the ice? No. How you do it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Make hole&mdash;put down trap&mdash;heap fish all winter."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You get enough to live on?" asked the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They must have dried fish, too, left over from the summer," said Mac.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas agreed. "And berries and flour. When snow begin get soft,
+    Pymeuts all go off&mdash;" He motioned with his big head towards the hills.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What do you get there?" Mac was becoming interested.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Caribou, moose&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Any furs?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes; trap ermun, marten&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Lynx, too, I suppose, and fox?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas nodded. "All kinds. Wolf&mdash;muskrat, otter&mdash;wolverine&mdash;all
+    kinds."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You got some skins now?" asked the Nova Scotian.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Y&mdash;yes. More when snow get soft. You come Pymeut&mdash;me show."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where have ye been just now?" asked O'Flynn.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "St. Michael."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How long since ye left there?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Twelve sleeps."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He means thirteen days."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They couldn't possibly walk that far in&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh yes," says the Boy; "they don't follow the windings of the river,
+    they cut across the portage, you know."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Snow come&mdash;no trail&mdash;big mountains&mdash;all get lost."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What did you go to St. Michael's for?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, me pilot. Me go all over. Me leave N. A. T. and T. boat St.
+    Michael's last trip."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then you're in the employ of the great North American Trading and
+    Transportation Company?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas gave that funny little duck of the head that meant yes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's how you learnt English," says the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No; me learn English at Holy Cross. Me been baptize."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "At that Jesuit mission up yonder?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Forty mile."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well," says Potts, "I guess you've had enough walking for one winter."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas seemed not to follow this observation. The Boy interpreted:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You heap tired, eh? You no go any more long walk till ice go out, eh?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas grinned.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me go Ikogimeut&mdash;all Pymeut go."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What for?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Big feast."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, the Russian mission there gives a feast?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No. Big Innuit feast."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pretty quick. Every year big feast down to Ikogimeut when Yukon ice
+    get hard, so man go safe with dog-team."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do many people go?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "All Innuit go, plenty Ingalik go."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How far do they come?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "All over; come from Koserefsky, come from Anvik&mdash;sometime Nulato."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, Nulato's an awful distance from Ikogimeut."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Three hundred and twenty miles," said the pilot, proud of his general
+    information, and quite ready, since he had got a pipe between his
+    teeth, to be friendly and communicative.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What do you do at Ikogimeut when you have these&mdash;" "Big fire&mdash;big
+    feed&mdash;tell heap stories&mdash;big dance. Oh, heap big time!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Once every year, eh, down at Ikogimeut?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Three times ev' year. Ev' village, and"&mdash;he lowered his voice, not
+    with any hit of reverence or awe, but with an air of making a sly and
+    cheerful confidence&mdash;"and when man die."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You make a feast and have a dance when a friend dies?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If no priests. Priests no like. Priests say, 'Man no dead; man gone
+    up.'" Nicholas pondered the strange saying, and slowly shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In that the priests are right," said Mac grudgingly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was anything but politic, but for the life of him the Boy couldn't
+    help chipping in:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You think when man dead he stay dead, eh, and you might as well make a
+    feast?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas gave his quick nod. "We got heap muskeetah, we cold, we
+    hungry. We here heap long time. Dead man, he done. Why no big feast? Oh
+    yes, heap big feast."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy was enraptured. He would gladly have encouraged these pagan
+    deliverances on the part of the converted Prince, but the Colonel was
+    scandalised, and Mac, although in his heart of hearts not ill-satisfied
+    at the evidence of the skin-deep Christianity of a man delivered over
+    to the corrupt teaching of the Jesuits, found in this last fact all the
+    stronger reason for the instant organisation of a good Protestant
+    prayer-meeting. Nicholas of Pymeut must not be allowed to think it was
+    only Jesuits who remembered the Sabbath day to keep it holy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And the three "pore benighted heathen" along with him, if they didn't
+    understand English words, they should have an object-lesson, and Mac
+    would himself pray the prayers they couldn't utter for themselves. He
+    jumped up, motioned the Boy to put on more wood, cleared away the
+    granite-ware dishes, filled the bean-pot and set it back to simmer,
+    while the Colonel got out Mac's Bible and his own Prayer-Book.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy did his stoking gloomily, reading aright these portents. Almost
+    eclipsed was joy in this "find" of his (for he regarded the precious
+    Nicholas as his own special property). It was all going to end in
+    his&mdash;the Boy's&mdash;being hooked in for service. As long as the Esquimaux
+    were there <i>he</i> couldn't, of course, tear himself away. And here was
+    the chance they'd all been waiting for. Here was a native chock-full of
+    knowledge of the natural law and the immemorial gospel of the North,
+    who would be gone soon&mdash;oh, very soon, if Mac and the Colonel went on
+    like this&mdash;and they were going to choke off Nicholas's communicativeness
+    with&mdash;a service!
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's Sunday, you know," says the Colonel to the Prince, laying open
+    his book, "and we were just going to have church. You are accustomed to
+    going to church at Holy Cross, aren't you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When me kid me go church."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You haven't gone since you grew up? They still have church there,
+    don't they?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, Father Brachet, him have church."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why don't you go?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas was vaguely conscious of threatened disapproval.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me ... me must take up fish-traps."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Can't you do that another day?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    It seemed not to have occurred to Nicholas before. He sat and
+    considered the matter.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Isn't Father Brachet," began the Colonel gravely&mdash;"he doesn't like it,
+    does he, when you don't come to church?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He take care him church; him know me take care me fish-trap."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Nicholas saw plainly out of his one eye that he was not growing in
+    popularity. Suddenly that solitary organ gleamed with self-justification.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me bring fish to Father Brachet and to Mother Aloysius and the
+    Sisters."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac and the Colonel exchanged dark glances.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do Mother Aloysius and the Sisters live where Father Brachet does?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Father Brachet, and Father Wills, and Brother Paul, and Brother
+    Etienne, all here." The native put two fingers on the floor. "Big white
+    cross in middle"&mdash;he laid down his pipe to personate the
+    cross&mdash;"here"&mdash;indicating the other side&mdash;"here Mother Aloysius and the
+    Sisters."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I thought," says Mac, "we'd be hearing of a convent convenient."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me help Father Brachet," observed Nicholas proudly. "Me show him boys
+    how make traps, show him girls how make mucklucks." "<i>What</i>!" gasps the
+    horrified Mac, "Father Brachet has got a family?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Famly?" inquired Nicholas. "Kaiomi"; and he shook his head
+    uncertainly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You say Father Brachet has got boys, and"&mdash;as though this were a yet
+    deeper brand of iniquity&mdash;"<i>girls</i>?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas, though greatly mystified, nodded firmly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I suppose he thinks away off up here nobody will ever know. Oh, these
+    Jesuits!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How many children has this shameless priest?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Father Brachet, him got seventeen boys, and&mdash;me no savvy how much
+    girl&mdash;twelve girl ... twenty girl ..."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy, who had been splitting with inward laughter, exploded at this
+    juncture.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He keeps a native school, Mac."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes," says Nicholas, "teach boy make table, chair, potatoes grow&mdash;all
+    kinds. Sisters teach girl make dinner, wash&mdash;all kinds. Heap good
+    people up at Holy Cross."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Divil a doubt of it," says O'Flynn.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But this blind belauding of the children of Loyola only fired Mac the
+    more to give the heathen a glimpse of the true light. In what darkness
+    must they grope when a sly, intriguing Jesuit (it was well known they
+    were all like that) was for them a type of the "heap good man"&mdash;a
+    priest, forsooth, who winked at Sabbath-breaking because he and his
+    neighbouring nuns shared in the spoil!
+</p>
+<p>
+    Well, they must try to have a truly impressive service. Mac and the
+    Colonel telegraphed agreement on this head. Savages were said to be
+    specially touched by music.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I suppose when you were a kid the Jesuits taught you chants and so
+    on," said the Colonel, kindly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Kaiomi," answered Nicholas after reflection.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You can sing, can't you?" asks O'Flynn.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sing? No, me dance!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy roared with delight.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, yes, I never thought of that. You fellows do the songs, and
+    Nicholas and I'll do the dances."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac glowered angrily. "Look here: if you don't mind being blasphemous
+    for yourself, don't demoralise the natives."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I like that! Didn't Miriam dance before the Lord? Why shouldn't
+    Nicholas and me?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel cleared his throat, and began to read the lessons for the
+    day. The natives sat and watched him closely. They really behaved very
+    well, and the Boy was enormously proud of his new friends. There was a
+    great deal at stake. The Boy felt he must walk warily, and he already
+    regretted those light expressions about dancing before the Lord. All
+    the fun of the winter might depend on a friendly relation between
+    Pymeut and the camp. It was essential that the Esquimaux should not
+    only receive, but make, a good impression.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The singing "From Greenland's icy mountains to India's coral strand"
+    seemed to please them; but when, after the Colonel's "Here endeth the
+    second lesson," Mac said, in sepulchral tones, "Let us pray," the
+    visitors seemed to think it was time to go home.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," said Mac sternly, "they mustn't go in the middle of the meeting";
+    and he proceeded to kneel down.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Nicholas was putting on his fur coat, and the others only waited to
+    follow him out. The Boy, greatly concerned lest, after all, the visit
+    should end badly, dropped on his knees to add the force of his own
+    example, and through the opening phrases of Mac's prayer the agnostic
+    was heard saying, in a loud stage-whisper, "Do like me&mdash;down! Look
+    here! Suppose you ask us come big feast, and in the middle of your
+    dance we all go home&mdash;.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh no," remonstrated Nicholas.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Very well. These friends o' mine no like man go home in the middle.
+    They heap mad at me when I no stay. You savvy?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me savvy," says Nicholas slowly and rather depressed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Kneel down, then," says the Boy. And first Nicholas, and then the
+    others, went on their knees.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Alternately they looked in the Boy's corner where the grub was, and
+    then over their shoulders at the droning Mac and back, catching the
+    Boy's eye, and returning his reassuring nods and grins.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac, who had had no innings up to this point, was now embarked upon a
+    most congenial occupation. Wrestling with the Lord on behalf of the
+    heathen, he lost count of time. On and on the prayer wound its slow
+    way; involution after involution, coil after coil, like a snake, the
+    Boy thought, lazing in the sun. Unaccustomed knees grew sore.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hearken to the cry of them that walk in darkness, misled by wolves in
+    sheep's clothing&mdash;<i>wolves</i>, Lord, wearing the sign of the Holy Cross&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    O'Flynn shuffled, and Mac pulled himself up. No light task this of
+    conveying to the Creator, in covert terms, a due sense of the iniquity
+    of the Jesuits, without, at the same time, stirring O'Flynn's bile, and
+    seeing him get up and stalk out of meeting, as had happened once
+    before.
+</p>
+<p>
+    O'Flynn was not deeply concerned about religious questions, but "there
+    were limits." The problem was how to rouse the Lord without rousing
+    O'Flynn&mdash;a piece of negotiation so delicate, calling for a skill in
+    pious invective so infinitely absorbing to Mac's particular cast of
+    mind, that he was quickly stone-blind and deaf to all things else.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not all the heathen are sunk in iniquity; but they are weak, tempted,
+    and they weary, Lord!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Amen," said the Boy, discreetly. "How long?" groaned Mac&mdash;"Oh Lord,
+    how long?" But it was much longer than he realised. The Boy saw the
+    visitors shifting from one knee to another, and feared the worst. But
+    he sympathised deeply with their predicament. To ease his own legs, he
+    changed his position, and dragged a corner of the sailcloth down off
+    the little pile of provisions, and doubled it under his knees.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The movement revealed the bag of dried apples within arm's length.
+    Nicholas was surreptitiously reaching for his coat. No doubt about it,
+    he had come to the conclusion that this was the fitting moment to
+    depart. A look over his shoulder showed Mac absorbed, and taking fresh
+    breath at "Sixthly, Oh Lord." The Boy put out a hand, and dragged the
+    apple-bag slowly, softly towards him. The Prince dropped the sleeve of
+    his coat, and fixed his one eye on his friend. The Boy undid the neck
+    of the sack, thrust in his hand, and brought out a fistfull. Another
+    look at Mac&mdash;still hard at it, trying to spare O'Flynn's feelings
+    without mincing matters with the Almighty.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy winked at Nicholas, made a gesture, "Catch!" and fired a bit of
+    dried apple at him, at the same time putting a piece in his own mouth
+    to show him it was all right.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas followed suit, and seemed pleased with the result. He showed
+    all his strong, white teeth, and ecstatically winked his one eye back
+    at the Boy, who threw him another bit and then a piece to each of the
+    others.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel had "caught on," and was making horrible frowns at the Boy.
+    Potts and O'Flynn looked up, and in dumbshow demanded a share. No? Very
+    well, they'd tell Mac. So the Boy had to feed them, too, to keep them
+    quiet. And still Mac prayed the Lord to catch up this slip he had made
+    here on the Yukon with reference to the natives. In the midst of a
+    powerful peroration, he happened to open his eyes a little, and they
+    fell on the magnificent great sable collar of Prince Nicholas's coat.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Without any of the usual slowing down, without the accustomed warning
+    of a gradual descent from the high themes of heaven to the things of
+    common earth, Mac came down out of the clouds with a bump, and the
+    sudden, business-like "Amen" startled all the apple-chewing
+    congregation.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac stood up, and says he to Nicholas:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where did you get that coat?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas, still on his knees, stared, and seemed in doubt if this were
+    a part of the service.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where did you get that coat?" repeated Mac.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy had jumped up nimbly. "I told you his father has a lot of
+    furs."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Like this?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," says Nicholas; "this belong white man."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ha," says Mac excitedly, "I thought I'd seen it before. Tell us how
+    you got it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me leave St. Michael; me got ducks, reindeer meat&mdash;oh, <i>plenty</i>
+    kow-kow! [Footnote: Food] Two sleeps away St. Michael me meet Indian.
+    Heap hungry. Him got bully coat." Nicholas picked it up off the floor.
+    "Him got no kow-kow. Him say, 'Give me duck, give me back-fat. You take
+    coat, him too heavy.' Me say, 'Yes.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But how did he get the coat?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Him say two white men came down river on big ice."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, yes&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Men sick." He tapped his forehead. "Man no sick, he no go down with
+    the ice"; and Nicholas shuddered. "Before Ikogimeut, ice jam. Indian
+    see men jump one big ice here, more big ice here, and one... go down.
+    Indian"&mdash;Nicholas imitated throwing out a line&mdash;"man tie mahout
+    round&mdash;but&mdash;big ice come&mdash;" Nicholas dashed his hands together, and
+    then paused significantly. "Indian sleep there. Next day ice hard.
+    Indian go little way out to see. Man dead. Him heap good coat," he
+    wound up unemotionally, and proceeded to put it on.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And the other white man&mdash;what became of him?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas shrugged: "Kaiomi," though it was plain he knew well enough
+    the other lay under the Yukon ice.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And that&mdash;<i>that</i> was the end of the fellows who went by jeering at
+    us!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We'd better not crow yet," said Mac. And they bade Prince Nicholas and
+    his heathen retinue good-bye in a mood chastened not by prayer alone.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH3"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER II
+</h2>
+<center>
+    HOUSE-WARMING
+</center>
+<p class="ind">
+    "There is a sort of moral climate in a household."&mdash;JOHN MORLEY.
+</p>
+<p>
+    No idle ceremony this, but the great problem of the dwellers in the
+    country of the Yukon.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel and the Boy made up their minds that, whatever else they
+    had or had not, they would have a warm house to live in. And when they
+    had got it, they would have a "Blow-out" to celebrate the achievement.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We'll invite Nicholas," says the Boy. "I'll go to Pymeut myself, and
+    let him know we are going to have 'big fire, big feed. Oh, heap big
+    time!'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    If the truth were told, it had been a difficult enough matter to keep
+    away from Pymeut since the hour Nicholas had vanished in that
+    direction; but until winter quarters were made, and until they were
+    proved to be warm, there was no time for the amenities of life.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Big Cabin (as it was quite seriously called, in contradistinction
+    to the hut of the Trio) consisted of a single room, measuring on the
+    outside sixteen feet by eighteen feet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The walls of cotton-wood logs soared upward to a level of six feet, and
+    this height was magnificently increased in the middle by the angle of
+    the mildly gable roof. But before the cabin was breast-high the Boy had
+    begun to long for a window.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sorry we forgot the plate-glass," says Mac.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Wudn't ye like a grrand-piana?" asks O'Flynn.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's the use of goin' all the way from Nova Scotia to Caribou," says
+    the Boy to the Schoolmaster-Miner, "if you haven't learned the way to
+    make a window like the Indians, out of transparent skin?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac assumed an air of elevated contempt.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I went to mine, not to learn Indian tricks."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When the door's shut it'll be dark as the inside of a cocoa-nut."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You ought to have thought of that before you left the sunny South,"
+    said Potts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It'll be dark all winter, window or no window," Mac reminded them.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Never mind," said the Colonel, "when the candles give out we'll have
+    the fire-light. Keep all the spruce knots, boys!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    But one of the boys was not pleased. The next day, looking for a
+    monkey-wrench under the tarpaulin, he came across the wooden box a
+    California friend had given him at parting, containing a dozen tall
+    glass jars of preserved fruit. The others had growled at the extra bulk
+    and weight, when the Boy put the box into the boat at St. Michael's,
+    but they had now begun to look kindly on it and ask when it was to be
+    opened. He had answered firmly:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not before Christmas," modifying this since Nicholas's visit to "Not
+    before the House-Warming." But one morning the Boy was found pouring
+    the fruit out of the jars into some empty cans.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What you up to?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Wait an' see." He went to O'Flynn, who was dish-washer that week, got
+    him to melt a couple of buckets of snow over the open-air campfire and
+    wash the fruit-jars clean.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now, Colonel," says the Boy, "bring along that buck-saw o' yours and
+    lend a hand."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They took off the top log from the south wall of the cabin, measured a
+    two-foot space in the middle, and the Colonel sawed out the superfluous
+    spruce intervening. While he went on doing the same for the other logs
+    on that side, the Boy roughly chiselled a moderately flat sill. Then
+    one after another he set up six of the tall glass jars in a row, and
+    showed how, alternating with the other six bottles turned upside down,
+    the thick belly of one accommodating itself to the thin neck of the
+    other, the twelve made a very decent rectangle of glass. When they had
+    hoisted up, and fixed in place, the logs on each side, and the big
+    fellow that went all across on top; when they had filled the
+    inconsiderable cracks between the bottles with some of the mud-mortar
+    with which the logs were to be chinked, behold a double glass window
+    fit for a king!
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy was immensely pleased.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, that's an old dodge," said Mac depreciatingly. "Why, they did that
+    at Caribou!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then, why in&mdash;Why didn't you suggest it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You wait till you know more about this kind o' life, and you won't go
+    in for fancy touches."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nevertheless, the man who had mined at Caribou seemed to feel that some
+    contribution from him was necessary to offset the huge success of that
+    window. He did not feel called upon to help to split logs for the roof
+    of the Big Cabin, but he sat cutting and whittling away at a little
+    shelf which he said was to be nailed up at the right of the Big Cabin
+    door. Its use was not apparent, but no one dared call it a "fancy
+    touch," for Mac was a miner, and had been to Caribou.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the shelf was nailed up, its maker brought forth out of his
+    medicine-chest a bottle of Perry Davis's Pain-killer.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now at Caribou," says he, "they haven't got any more thermometers
+    kicking round than we have here, but they discovered that when Perry
+    Davis congeals you must keep a sharp look-out for frost-bite, and when
+    Perry Davis freezes solid, you'd better mind your eye and stay in your
+    cabin, if you don't want to die on the trail." With which he tied a
+    string round Perry Davis's neck, set the bottle up on the shelf, and
+    secured it firmly in place. They all agreed it was a grand advantage to
+    have been to Caribou!
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Mac knew things that he had probably not learned there, about
+    trees, and rocks, and beasts, and their manners and customs and family
+    names. If there were more than a half-truth in the significant lament
+    of a very different man, "I should be a poet if only I knew the names
+    of things," then, indeed, Samuel MacCann was equipped to make a mark in
+    literature.
+</p>
+<p>
+    From the time he set foot on the volcanic shore of St Michael's Island,
+    Mac had begun his "collection."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nowadays, when he would spend over "that truck of his" hours that might
+    profitably (considering his talents) be employed in helping to fortify
+    the camp against the Arctic winter, his companions felt it little use
+    to remonstrate.
+</p>
+<p>
+    By themselves they got on rapidly with work on the roof, very much
+    helped by three days' unexpectedly mild weather. When the split logs
+    had been marshalled together on each side of the comb, they covered
+    them with dried moss and spruce boughs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Over all they laid a thick blanket of the earth which had been dug out
+    to make a level foundation. The cracks in the walls were chinked with
+    moss and mud-mortar. The floor was the naked ground, "to be carpeted
+    with skins by-and-by," so Mac said; but nobody believed Mac would put a
+    skin to any such sensible use.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The unreasonable mildness of three or four days and the little surface
+    thaw, came to an abrupt end in a cold rain that turned to sleet as it
+    fell. Nobody felt like going far afield just then, even after game, but
+    they had set the snare that Nicholas told the Boy about on that first
+    encounter in the wood. Nicholas, it seemed, had given him a noose made
+    of twisted sinew, and showed how it worked in a running loop. He had
+    illustrated the virtue of this noose when attached to a pole balanced
+    in the crotch of a tree, caught over a horizontal stick by means of a
+    small wooden pin tied to the snare. A touch at the light end of the
+    suspended pole (where the baited loop dangles) loosens the pin, and the
+    heavy end of the pole falls, hanging ptarmigan or partridge in the air.
+</p>
+<p>
+    For some time after rigging this contrivance, whenever anyone reported
+    "tracks," Mac and the Boy would hasten to the scene of action, and set
+    a new snare, piling brush on each side of the track that the game had
+    run in, so barring other ways, and presenting a line of least
+    resistance straight through the loop.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In the early days Mac would come away from these preparations saying
+    with dry pleasure:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now, with luck, we may get a <i>Xema Sabinii</i>," or some such fearful
+    wildfowl.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good to eat?" the Boy would ask, having had his disappointments ere
+    now in moments of hunger for fresh meat, when Mac, with the nearest
+    approach to enthusiasm he permitted himself, had brought in some
+    miserable little hawk-owl or a three-toed woodpecker to add, not to the
+    larder, but to the "collection."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, you don't <i>eat</i> Sabine gulls," Mac would answer pityingly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But those snares never seemed to know what they were there for. The
+    first one was set expressly to catch one of the commonest birds that
+    fly&mdash;Mac's <i>Lagopus albus</i>, the beautiful white Arctic grouse, or at
+    the very least a <i>Bonasa umbellus</i>, which, being interpreted, is ruffed
+    ptarmigan. The tracks had been bird tracks, but the creature that swung
+    in the air next day was a baby hare. The Schoolmaster looked upon the
+    incident as being in the nature of a practical joke, and resented it.
+    But the others were enchanted, and professed thereafter a rooted
+    suspicion of the soundness of the Schoolmaster's Natural History, which
+    nobody actually felt. For he had never yet pretended to know anything
+    that he didn't know well; and when Potts would say something
+    disparaging of Mac's learning behind his back (which was against the
+    unwritten rules of the game) the Colonel invariably sat on Potts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Knows a darned sight too much? No, he <i>don't</i>, sir; that's just the
+    remarkable thing about Mac. He isn't trying to carry any more than he
+    can swing."
+</p>
+<p>
+    At the same time it is to be feared that none of his companions really
+    appreciated the pedagogue's learning. Nor had anyone but the Boy
+    sympathised with his resolution to make a Collection. What they wanted
+    was eatable game, and they affected no intelligent interest in knowing
+    the manners and customs of the particular species that was sending up
+    appetising odours from the pot.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They even applauded the rudeness of the Boy, who one day responded to
+    Mac's gravely jubilant "Look here! I've got the <i>Parus Hudsonicus</i>!"&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Poor old man! What do you do for it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    And when anybody after that was indisposed, they said he might be
+    sickening for an attack of Parus Hudsonicus, and in that case it was a
+    bad look-out.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Well for Mac that he wouldn't have cared a red cent to impress the
+    greatest naturalist alive, let alone a lot of fellows who didn't know a
+    titmouse from a disease.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Meanwhile work on the Big Cabin had gone steadily forward. From the
+    outside it looked finished now, and distinctly imposing. From what were
+    left of the precious planks out of the bottom of the best boat they had
+    made the door&mdash;two by four, and opening directly in front of that
+    masterpiece, the rock fireplace. The great stone chimney was the pride
+    of the camp and the talk before the winter was done of all "the Lower
+    River."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Spurred on partly by the increased intensity of the cold, partly by the
+    Colonel's nonsense about the way they did it "down South," Mac roused
+    himself, and turned out a better piece of masonry for the Big Cabin
+    than he had thought necessary for his own. But everybody had a share in
+    the glory of that fireplace. The Colonel, Potts, and the Boy selected
+    the stone, and brought it on a rude litter out of a natural quarry from
+    a place a mile or more away up on the bare mountain-side. O'Flynn mixed
+    and handed up the mud-mortar, while Mac put in some brisk work with it
+    before it stiffened in the increasing cold.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Everybody was looking forward to getting out of the tent and into the
+    warm cabin, and the building of the fireplace stirred enthusiasm. It
+    was two and a half feet deep, three and a half feet high, and four feet
+    wide, and when furnished with ten-inch hack logs, packed in glowing
+    ashes and laid one above another, with a roaring good blaze in front of
+    birch and spruce, that fire would take a lot of beating, as the Boy
+    admitted, "even in the tat-pine Florida country."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But no fire on earth could prevent the cabin from being swept through,
+    the moment the door was opened, by a fierce and icy air-current. The
+    late autumnal gales revealed the fact that the sole means of
+    ventilation had been so nicely contrived that whoever came in or went
+    out admitted a hurricane of draught that nearly knocked him down. Potts
+    said it took a good half-hour, after anyone had opened the door, to
+    heat the place up again.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What! You cold?" inquired the usual culprit. The Boy had come in to
+    put an edge on his chopper. "It's stopped snowin', an' you better come
+    along with me, Potts. Swing an axe for a couple of hours&mdash;that'll warm
+    you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've got rheumatism in my shoulder to-day," says Potts, hugging the
+    huge fire closer.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And you've got something wrong with your eyes, eh, Mac?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Potts narrowed his and widened the great mouth; but he had turned his
+    head so Mac couldn't see him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Nova Scotian only growled and refilled his pipe. Up in the woods
+    the Boy repeated the conversation to the Colonel, who looked across at
+    O'Flynn several yards away, and said: "Hush!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why must I shut up? Mac's <i>eyes</i> do look rather queer and bloodshot. I
+    should think he'd rather feel we lay it to his eyes than know we're
+    afraid he's peterin' out altogether."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I never said I was afraid&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, you haven't <i>said</i> much." "I haven't opened my head about it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, but you've tried hard enough for five or six days to get Mac to
+    the point where he would come out and show us how to whip-saw. You
+    haven't <i>said</i> anything, but you've&mdash;you've got pretty dignified each
+    time you failed, and we all know what that means."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We ought to have begun sawing boards for our bunks and swing-shelf a
+    week back, before this heavy snowfall. Besides, there's enough
+    fire-wood now; we're only marking time until&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Until Mac's eyes get all right. I understand."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Again the Colonel had made a sound like "Sh!" and went on swinging his
+    axe.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They worked without words till the Boy's tree came down. Then he
+    stopped a moment, and wiped his face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It isn't so cold to-day, not by a long shot, for all Potts's howling
+    about his rheumatics."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It isn't cold that starts that kind of pain."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, siree. I'm not much of a doctor, but I can see Potts's rheumatism
+    doesn't depend on the weather."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Never you mind Potts."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't mind Potts. I only mind Mac. What's the matter with Mac,
+    anyway?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, he's just got cold feet. Maybe he'll thaw out by-and-by."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did you ever think what Mac's like? With that square-cut jaw and
+    sawed-off nose, everything about him goin' like this"&mdash;the Boy
+    described a few quick blunt angles in the air&mdash;"well, sir, he's the
+    livin' image of a monkey-wrench. I'm comin' to think he's as much like
+    it inside as he is out. He can screw up for a prayer-meetin', or he can
+    screw down for business&mdash;when he's a mind, but, as Jimmie over there
+    says, 'the divil a different pace can you put him through.' I <i>like</i>
+    monkey-wrenches! I'm only sayin' they aren't as limber as willa-trees."
+</p>
+<p>
+    No response from the Colonel, who was making the chips fly. It had cost
+    his great body a good many aches and bruises, but he was a capital
+    axeman now, and not such a bad carpenter, though when the Boy said as
+    much he had answered:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Carpenter! I'm just a sort of a well-meanin' wood-butcher"; and deeply
+    he regretted that in all his young years on a big place in the country
+    he had learnt so little about anything but horses and cattle.
+</p>
+<p>
+    On the way back to dinner they spoke again of this difficulty of the
+    boards. O'Flynn whistled "Rory O'More" with his pleasant air of
+    detachment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You and the others would take more interest in the subject," said the
+    Boy a little hotly, "if we hadn't let you fellows use nearly all the
+    boat-planks for <i>your</i> bunks, and now we haven't got any for our own."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>Let</i> us use 'em! Faith! we had a right to'm."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To boards out of <i>our</i> boat!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And ye can have the loan o' the whip-saw to make more, whenever the
+    fancy takes ye."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Loan o' the whip-saw! Why, it's mine," says the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Divil a bit of it, man!" says O'Flynn serenely. "Everything we've got
+    belongs to all of us, except a sack o' coffee, a medicine-chest, and a
+    dimmi-john. And it's mesilf that's afraid the dimmi-john&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's the use of my having bought a whip-saw?" interrupted the
+    Colonel, hurriedly. "What's the good of it, if the only man that knows
+    how to use it&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Is more taken up wid bein' a guardjin angel to his pardner's
+    dimmi-john&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel turned and frowned at the proprietor of the dimmi-john. The
+    Boy had dropped behind to look at some marten tracks in the
+    fresh-fallen snow.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll follow that trail after dinner," says he, catching up the others
+    in time to hear O'Flynn say:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If it wusn't that ye think only a feller that's been to Caribou can
+    teach ye annything it's Jimmie O'Flynn that 'ud show ye how to play a
+    chune on that same whip-saw."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Will you show us after dinner?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sure I will."
+</p>
+<p>
+    And he was as good as his word.
+</p>
+<p>
+    This business of turning a tree into boards without the aid of a
+    saw-mill is a thing many placer-miners have to learn; for, even if they
+    are disposed to sleep on the floor, and to do without shelves, they
+    can't do sluicing without sluice-boxes, and they can't make those long,
+    narrow boxes without boards.
+</p>
+<p>
+    So every party that is well fitted out has a whip-saw.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Furrst ye dig a pit," O'Flynn had said airily, stretched out before
+    the fire after dinner. "Make it about four feet deep, and as long as
+    ye'd like yer boards. When ye've done that I'll come and take a hand."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The little job was not half finished when the light tailed. Two days
+    more of soil-burning and shovelling saw it done.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now ye sling a couple o' saplings acrost the durrt ye've chucked out.
+    R-right! Now ye roll yer saw-timber inter the middle. R-right! An' on
+    each side ye want a log to stand on. See? Wid yer 'guide-man' on top
+    sthradlin' yer timberr, watchin' the chalk-line and doin' the pull-up,
+    and the otherr fellerr in the pit lookin' afther the haul-down, ye'll
+    be able to play a chune wid that there whip-saw that'll make the
+    serryphims sick o' plain harps." O'Flynn superintended it all, and even
+    Potts had the curiosity to come out and see what they were up to. Mac
+    was "kind o' dozin'" by the fire.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the frame was finished O'Flynn helped to put the trial-log in
+    place, having marked it off with charcoal to indicate inch and a
+    quarter planks. Then the Colonel, down in the pit, and O'Flynn on top
+    of the frame, took the great two-handled saw between them, and began
+    laboriously, one drawing the big blade up, and the other down,
+    vertically through the log along the charcoal line.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "An' <i>that's</i> how it's done, wid bits of yer arrums and yer back that
+    have niver been called on to wurruk befure. An' whin ye've been at it
+    an hour ye'll find it goes betther wid a little blasphemin';" and he
+    gave his end of the saw to the reluctant Potts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Potts was about this time as much of a problem to his pardners as was
+    the ex-schoolmaster. If the bank clerk had surprised them all by his
+    handiness on board ship, and by making a crane to swing the pots over
+    the fire, he surprised them all still more in these days by an apparent
+    eclipse of his talents. It was unaccountable. Potts's carpentering,
+    Potts's all-round cleverness, was, like "payrock in a pocket," as the
+    miners say, speedily worked out, and not a trace of it afterwards to be
+    found.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But less and less was the defection of the Trio felt. The burly
+    Kentucky stock-farmer was getting his hand in at "frontier" work,
+    though he still couldn't get on without his "nigger," as the Boy said,
+    slyly indicating that it was he who occupied this exalted post. These
+    two soon had the bunks made out of the rough planks they had sawed with
+    all a green-horn's pains. They put in a fragrant mattress of spring
+    moss, and on that made up a bed of blankets and furs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    More boards were laboriously turned out to make the great swing-shelf
+    to hang up high in the angle of the roof, where the provisions might be
+    stored out of reach of possible marauders.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The days were very short now, bringing only about five hours of pallid
+    light, so little of which struggled through the famous bottle-window
+    that at all hours they depended chiefly on the blaze from the great
+    fireplace. There was still a good deal of work to be done indoors,
+    shelves to be put up on the left as you entered (whereon the
+    granite-ware tea-service, etc., was kept), a dinner-table to be made,
+    and three-legged stools. While these additions&mdash;"fancy touches," as the
+    Trio called them&mdash;were being made, Potts and O'Flynn, although
+    occasionally they went out for an hour or two, shot-gun on shoulder,
+    seldom brought home anything, and for the most part were content with
+    doing what they modestly considered their share of the cooking and
+    washing. For the rest, they sat by the fire playing endless games of
+    euchre, seven-up and bean poker, while Mac, more silent than ever,
+    smoked and read Copps's "Mining Laws" and the magazines of the previous
+    August.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nobody heard much in those days of Caribou. The Colonel had gradually
+    slipped into the position of Boss of the camp. The Trio were still just
+    a trifle afraid of him, and he, on his side, never pressed a dangerous
+    issue too far.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But this is a little to anticipate.
+</p>
+<p>
+    One bitter gray morning, that had reduced Perry Davis to a solid lump
+    of ice, O'Flynn, the Colonel, and the Boy were bringing into the cabin
+    the last of the whip-sawed boards. The Colonel halted and looked
+    steadily up the river.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Is that a beast or a human?" said he.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's a man," the Boy decided after a moment&mdash;"no, two men, single
+    file, and&mdash;yes&mdash;Colonel, it's dogs. Hooray! a dog-team at last!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    They had simultaneously dropped the lumber. The Boy ran on to tell the
+    cook to prepare more grub, and then pelted after O'Flynn and the
+    Colonel, who had gone down to meet the newcomers&mdash;an Indian driving
+    five dogs, which were hitched tandem to a low Esquimaux sled, with a
+    pack and two pairs of web-foot snow-shoes lashed on it, and followed by
+    a white man. The Indian was a fine fellow, younger than Prince
+    Nicholas, and better off in the matter of eyes. The white man was a
+    good deal older than either, with grizzled hair, a worn face, bright
+    dark eyes, and a pleasant smile.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I had heard some white men had camped hereabouts," says he. "I am glad
+    to see we have such substantial neighbours." He was looking up at the
+    stone chimney, conspicuous a long way off.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We didn't know we had any white neighbours," said the Colonel in his
+    most grand and gracious manner. "How far away are you, sir?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "About forty miles above."
+</p>
+<p>
+    As he answered he happened to be glancing at the Boy, and observed his
+    eagerness cloud slightly. Hadn't Nicholas said it was "about forty
+    miles above" that the missionaries lived?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But to be only forty miles away," the stranger went on,
+    misinterpreting the fading gladness, "is to be near neighbours in this
+    country."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We aren't quite fixed yet," said the Colonel, "but you must come in
+    and have some dinner with us. We can promise you a good fire, anyhow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Thank you. You have chosen a fine site." And the bright eyes with the
+    deep crow's-feet raying out from the corners scanned the country in so
+    keen and knowing a fashion that the Boy, with hope reviving, ventured:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Are&mdash;are you a prospector?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No. I am Father Wills from Holy Cross."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh!" And the Boy presently caught up with the Indian, and walked on
+    beside him, looking back every now and then to watch the dogs or
+    examine the harness. The driver spoke English, and answered questions
+    with a tolerable intelligence. "Are dogs often driven without reins?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Indian nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel, after the stranger had introduced himself, was just a
+    shade more reserved, but seemed determined not to be lacking in
+    hospitality. O'Flynn was overflowing, or would have been had the Jesuit
+    encouraged him. He told their story, or, more properly, his own, and
+    how they had been wrecked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And so ye're the Father Superior up there?" says the Irishman, pausing
+    to take breath.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No. Our Superior is Father Brachet. That's a well-built cabin!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The dogs halted, though they had at least five hundred yards still to
+    travel before they would reach the well-built cabin.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>Mush!</i>" shouted the Indian.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The dogs cleared the ice-reef, and went spinning along so briskly over
+    the low hummocks that the driver had to run to keep up with them.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy was flying after when the priest, having caught sight of his
+    face, called out: "Here! Wait! Stop a moment!" and hurried forward.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He kicked through the ice-crust, gathered up a handful of snow, and
+    began to rub it on the Boy's right cheek.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What in the name of&mdash;" The Boy was drawing back angrily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Keep still," ordered the priest; "your cheek is frozen"; and he
+    applied more snow and more friction. "You ought to watch one another in
+    such weather as this. When a man turns dead-white like that, he's
+    touched with frost-bite." After he had restored the circulation: "There
+    now, don't go near the fire, or it will begin to hurt."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Thank you," said the Boy, a little shame-faced. "It's all right now, I
+    suppose?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I think so," said the priest. "You'll lose the skin, and you may be a
+    little sore&mdash;nothing to speak of," with which he fell back to the
+    Colonel's side.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The dogs had settled down into a jog-trot now, but were still well on
+    in front.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Is 'mush' their food?" asked the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>Mush?</i> No, fish."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why does your Indian go on like that about mush, then?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, that's the only word the dogs know, except&mdash;a&mdash;certain expressions
+    we try to discourage the Indians from using. In the old days the
+    dog-drivers used to say 'mahsh.' Now you never hear anything but
+    swearing and 'mush,' a corruption of the French-Canadian <i>marche</i>." He
+    turned to the Colonel: "You'll get over trying to wear cheechalko boots
+    here&mdash;nothing like mucklucks with a wisp of straw inside for this
+    country."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I agree wid ye. I got me a pair in St. Michael's," says O'Flynn
+    proudly, turning out his enormous feet. "Never wore anything so
+    comf'table in me life."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You ought to have drill parkis too, like this of mine, to keep out the
+    wind."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They were going up the slope now, obliquely to the cabin, close behind
+    the dogs, who were pulling spasmodically between their little rests.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Father Wills stooped and gathered up some moss that the wind had swept
+    almost bare of snow. "You see that?" he said to O'Flynn, while the Boy
+    stopped, and the Colonel hurried on. "Wherever you find that growing no
+    man need starve."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel looked back before entering the cabin and saw that the Boy
+    seemed to have forgotten not alone the Indian, but the dogs, and was
+    walking behind with the Jesuit, face upturned, smiling, as friendly as
+    you please.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Within a different picture.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Potts and Mac were having a row about something, and the Colonel struck
+    in sharply on their growling comments upon each other's character and
+    probable destination.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Got plenty to eat? Two hungry men coming in. One's an Indian, and you
+    know what that means, and the other's a Catholic priest." It was this
+    bomb that he had hurried on to get exploded and done with before the
+    said priest should appear on the scene.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A <i>what</i>?" Mac raised his heavy eyes with fight in every wooden
+    feature.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A Jesuit priest is what I said."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He won't eat his dinner here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That is exactly what he will do."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not by&mdash;" Whether it was the monstrous proposition that had unstrung
+    Mac, he was obliged to steady himself against the table with a shaking
+    hand. But he set those square features of his like iron, and, says he,
+    "No Jesuit sits down to the same table with me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That means, then, that you'll eat alone."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not if I know it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel slid in place the heavy wooden bar that had never before
+    been requisitioned to secure the door, and he came and stood in the
+    middle of the cabin, where he could let out all his inches. Just
+    clearing the swing-shelf, he pulled his great figure up to its full
+    height, and standing there like a second Goliath, he said quite softly
+    in that lingo of his childhood that always came back to his tongue's
+    tip in times of excitement: "Just as shuah as yo' bohn that priest will
+    eat his dinner to-day in my cabin, sah; and if yo' going t' make any
+    trouble, just say so now, and we'll get it ovah, and the place cleaned
+    up again befoh our visitors arrive."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mind what you're about, Mac," growled Potts. "You know he could lick
+    the stuffin' out o' you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The ex-schoolmaster produced some sort of indignant sound in his throat
+    and turned, as if he meant to go out. The Colonel came a little nearer.
+    Mac flung up his head and squared for battle.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Potts, in a cold sweat, dropped a lot of tinware with a rattle, while
+    the Colonel said, "No, no. We'll settle this after the people go, Mac."
+    Then in a whisper: "Look here: I've been trying to shield you for ten
+    days. Don't give yourself away now&mdash;before the first white neighbour
+    that comes to see us. You call yourself a Christian. Just see if you
+    can't behave like one, for an hour or two, to a fellow-creature that's
+    cold and hungry. Come, <i>you're</i> the man we've always counted on! Do the
+    honours, and take it out of me after our guests are gone."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac seemed in a haze. He sat down heavily on some beanbags in the
+    corner; and when the newcomers were brought in and introduced, he "did
+    the honours" by glowering at them with red eyes, never breaking his
+    surly silence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well!" says Father Wills, looking about, "I must say you're very
+    comfortable here. If more people made homes like this, there'd be fewer
+    failures." They gave him the best place by the fire, and Potts dished
+    up dinner. There were only two stools made yet. The Boy rolled his
+    section of sawed spruce over near the priest, and prepared to dine at
+    his side.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, no," said Father Wills firmly. "You shall sit as far away from
+    this splendid blaze as you can get, or you will have trouble with that
+    cheek." So the Boy had to yield his place to O'Flynn, and join Mac over
+    on the bean-bags.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why didn't you get a parki when you were at St. Michael's?" said the
+    priest as this change was being effected.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We had just as much&mdash;more than we could carry. Besides, I thought we
+    could buy furs up river; anyway, I'm warm enough."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No you are not," returned the priest smiling. "You must get a parki
+    with a hood."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've got an Arctic cap; it rolls down over my ears and goes all round
+    my neck&mdash;just leaves a little place in front for my eyes."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes; wear that if you go on the trail; but the good of the parki hood
+    is, that it is trimmed all round with long wolf-hair. You see"&mdash;he
+    picked his parki up off the floor and showed it to the company&mdash;"those
+    long hairs standing out all round the face break the force of the wind.
+    It is wonderful how the Esquimaux hood lessens the chance of
+    frost-bite."
+</p>
+<p>
+    While the only object in the room that he didn't seem to see was Mac,
+    he was most taken up with the fireplace.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel laid great stress on the enormous services of the
+    delightful, accomplished master-mason over there on the beanbags, who
+    sat looking more than ever like a monkey-wrench incarnate.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But whether that Jesuit was as wily as the Calvinist thought, he had
+    quite wit enough to overlook the great chimney-builder's wrathful
+    silence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He was not the least "professional," talked about the country and how
+    to live here, saying incidentally that he had spent twelve years at the
+    mission of the Holy Cross. The Yukon wasn't a bad place to live in, he
+    told them, if men only took the trouble to learn how to live here.
+    While teaching the Indians, there was a great deal to learn from them
+    as well.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You must all come and see our schools," he wound up.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We'd like to awfully," said the Boy, and all but Mac echoed him. "We
+    were so afraid," he went on, "that we mightn't see anybody all winter
+    long."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, you'll have more visitors than you want."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>Shall</i> we, though?" Then, with a modified rapture: "Indians, I
+    suppose, and&mdash;and missionaries."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Traders, too, and miners, and this year cheechalkos as well. You are
+    directly on the great highway of winter travel. Now that there's a good
+    hard crust on the snow you will have dog-trains passing every week, and
+    sometimes two or three."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was good news!
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We've already had one visitor before you," said the Boy, looking
+    wonderfully pleased at the prospect the priest had opened out. "You
+    must know Nicholas of Pymeut, don't you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh yes; we all know Nicholas"; and the priest smiled.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We <i>like</i> him," returned the Boy as if some slighting criticism had
+    been passed upon his friend.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Of course you do; so do we all"; and still that look of quiet
+    amusement on the worn face and a keener twinkle glinting in the eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We're afraid he's sick," the Boy began.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Before the priest could answer, "He was educated at Howly Cross, he
+    <i>says</i>," contributed O'Flynn.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, he's been to Holy Cross, among other places."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What do you mean?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, Nicholas is a most impartial person. He was born at Pymeut, but
+    his father, who is the richest and most intelligent man in his tribe,
+    took Nicholas to Ikogimeut when the boy was only six. He was brought up
+    in the Russian mission there, as the father had been before him, and
+    was a Greek&mdash;in religion&mdash;till he was fourteen. There was a famine that
+    year down yonder, so Nicholas turned Catholic and came up to us. He was
+    at Holy Cross some years, when business called him to Anvik, where he
+    turned Episcopalian. At Eagle City, I believe, he is regarded as a
+    pattern Presbyterian. There are those that say, since he has been a
+    pilot, Nicholas makes six changes a trip in his religious convictions."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Father Wills saw that the Colonel, to whom he most frequently addressed
+    himself, took his pleasantry gravely. "Nicholas is not a bad fellow,"
+    he added. "He told me you had been kind to him."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If you believe that about his insincerity," said the Colonel, "are you
+    not afraid the others you spend your life teaching may turn out as
+    little credit to you&mdash;to Christianity?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The priest glanced at the listening Indian. "No," said he gravely; "I
+    do not think <i>all</i> the natives are like Nicholas. Andrew here is a true
+    son of the Church. But even if it were otherwise, <i>we</i>, you know"&mdash;the
+    Jesuit rose from the table with that calm smile of his&mdash;"we simply do
+    the work without question. The issue is not in our hands." He made the
+    sign of the cross and set back his stool.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come, Andrew," he said; "we must push on."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Indian repeated the priest's action, and went out to see to the
+    dogs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, are you going right away?" said the Colonel politely, and O'Flynn
+    volubly protested.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We thought," said the Boy, "you'd sit awhile and smoke and&mdash;at least,
+    of course, I don't mean smoke exactly&mdash;but&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Father smiled and shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Another time I would stay gladly."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where are you going now?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Andrew and I are on our way to the <i>Oklahoma</i>, the steamship frozen in
+    the ice below here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How far?" asked the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "About seven miles below the Russian mission, and a mile or so up the
+    Kuskoquim Slough."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Wrecked there?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh no. Gone into winter quarters."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In a slew?" for it was so Father Wills pronounced s-l-o-u-g-h.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, that's what they call a blind river up in this country. They come
+    into the big streams every here and there, and cheechalkos are always
+    mistaking them for the main channel. Sometimes they're wider and deeper
+    for a mile or so than the river proper, but before you know it they
+    land you in a marsh. This place I'm going to, a little way up the
+    Kuskoquim, out of danger when the ice breaks up, has been chosen for a
+    new station by the N. A. T. and T. Company&mdash;rival, you know, to the
+    old-established Alaska Commercial, that inherited the Russian fur
+    monopoly and controlled the seal and salmon trade so long. Well, the
+    younger company runs the old one hard, and they've sent this steamer
+    into winter quarters loaded with provisions, ready to start for Dawson
+    the instant the ice goes out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, then, it's the very boat that'll be takin' us to the Klondyke."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You just goin' down to have a look at her?" asked Potts enviously.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No. I go to get relief for the Pymeuts."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's the matter with 'em?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Epidemic all summer, starvation now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Guess you won't find <i>any</i>body's got such a lot he wants to give it
+    away to the Indians."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Our Father Superior has given much," said the priest gently; "but we
+    are not inexhaustible at Holy Cross. And the long winter is before us.
+    Many of the supply steamers have failed to get in, and the country is
+    flooded with gold-seekers. There'll be wide-spread want this
+    year&mdash;terrible suffering all up and down the river."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The more reason for people to hold on to what they've got. A white
+    man's worth more 'n an Indian."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The priest's face showed no anger, not even coldness.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "White men have got a great deal out of Alaska and as yet done little
+    but harm here. The government ought to help the natives, and we believe
+    the Government will. All we ask of the captain of the <i>Oklahoma</i> is to
+    sell us, on fair terms, a certain supply, we assuming part of the risk,
+    and both of us looking to the Government to make it good."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Reckon you'll find that steamer-load down in the ice is worth its
+    weight in gold," said Potts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "One must always try," replied the Father.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He left the doorpost, straightened his bowed back, and laid a hand on
+    the wooden latch.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But Nicholas&mdash;when you left Pymeut was he&mdash;" began the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, he is all right," the Father smiled and nodded. "Brother Paul has
+    been looking after Nicholas's father. The old chief has enough food,
+    but he has been very ill. By the way, have you any letters you want to
+    send out?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, if we'd only known!" was the general chorus; and Potts flew to
+    close and stamp one he had hardly more than begun to the future Mrs.
+    Potts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy had thoughtlessly opened the door to have a look at the dogs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Shut that da&mdash;Don't keep the door open!" howled Potts, trying to hold
+    his precious letter down on the table while he added "only two words."
+    The Boy slammed the door behind him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "With all our trouble, the cabin isn't really warm," said the Colonel
+    apologetically. "In a wind like this, if the door is open, we have to
+    hold fast to things to keep them from running down the Yukon. It's a
+    trial to anybody's temper."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why don't you build a false wall?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I don't know; we hadn't thought of it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You'd find it correct this draught"; and the priest explained his
+    views on the subject while Potts's letter was being addressed. Andrew
+    put his head in.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ready, Father!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    As the priest was pocketing the letter the Boy dashed in, put on the
+    Arctic cap he set such store by, and a fur coat and mittens.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you mind if I go a little way with you?" he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Of course not," answered the priest. "I will send him back in half an
+    hour," he said low to the Colonel. "It's a hitter day."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was curious how already he had divined the relation of the elder man
+    to the youngest of that odd household.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The moment they had gone Mac, with an obvious effort, pulled himself up
+    out of his corner, and, coming towards the Colonel at the fireplace, he
+    said thickly:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You've put an insult upon me, Warren, and that's what I stand from no
+    man. Come outside."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel looked at him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "All right, Mac; but we've just eaten a rousing big dinner. Even
+    Sullivan wouldn't accept that as the moment for a round. We'll both
+    have forty winks, hey? and Potts shall call us, and O'Flynn shall be
+    umpire. You can have the Boy's bunk."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac was in a haze again, and allowed himself to be insinuated into bed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The others got rid of the dinner things, and "sat round" for an hour.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Doubt if he sleeps long," says Potts a little before two; "that's what
+    he's been doing all morning."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We haven't had any fresh meat for a week," returns the Colonel
+    significantly. "Why don't you and O'Flynn go down to meet the Boy, and
+    come round by the woods? There'll be full moon up by four o'clock; you
+    might get a brace of grouse or a rabbit or two."
+</p>
+<p>
+    O'Flynn was not very keen about it; but the Jesuit's visit had stirred
+    him up, and he offered less opposition to the unusual call to activity
+    than the Colonel expected.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When at last he was left alone with the sleeping man, the Kentuckian
+    put on a couple more logs, and sat down to wait. At three he got up,
+    swung the crane round so that the darting tongues of flame could lick
+    the hot-water pot, and then he measured out some coffee. In a quarter
+    of an hour the cabin was full of the fragrance of good Mocha.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel sat and waited. Presently he poured out a little coffee,
+    and drank it slowly, blissfully, with half-closed eyes. But when he had
+    set the granite cup down again, he stood up alert, like a man ready for
+    business. Mac had been asleep nearly three hours. The others wouldn't
+    be long now.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Well, if they came prematurely, they must go to the Little Cabin for
+    awhile. The Colonel shot the bar across door and jamb for the second
+    time that day. Mac stirred and lifted himself on his elbow, but he
+    wasn't really awake.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Potts," he said huskily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel made no sound. "Potts, measure me out two fingers, will
+    you? Cabin's damn cold."
+</p>
+<p>
+    No answer.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac roused himself, muttering compliments for Potts. When he had
+    bundled himself out over the side of the bunk, he saw the Colonel
+    seemingly dozing by the fire.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He waited a moment. Then, very softly, he made his way to the farther
+    end of the swing-shelf.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel opened one eye, shut it, and shuffled in a sleepy sort of
+    way. Mac turned sharply back to the fire.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel opened his eyes and yawned.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I made some cawfee a little while back. Have some?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Better; it's A 1."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where's Potts?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Gone out for a little. Back soon." He poured out some of the strong,
+    black decoction, and presented it to his companion. "Just try it.
+    Finest cawfee in the world, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac poured it down without seeming to bother about tasting it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They sat quite still after that, till the Colonel said meditatively:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You and I had a little account to settle, didn't we?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm ready."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But neither moved for several moments.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "See here, Mac: you haven't been ill or anything like that, have you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No." There was no uncertain note in the answer; if anything, there was
+    in it more than the usual toneless decision. Mac's voice was
+    machine-made&mdash;as innocent of modulation as a buzz-saw, and with the
+    same uncompromising finality as the shooting of a bolt. "I'm ready to
+    stand up against any man."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good!" interrupted the Colonel. "Glad o' that, for I'm just longing to
+    see you stand up&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac was on his feet in a flash.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You had only to say so, if you wanted to see me stand up against any
+    man alive. And when I sit down again it's my opinion one of us two
+    won't be good-lookin' any more."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He pushed back the stools.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I thought maybe it was only necessary to mention it," said the Colonel
+    slowly. "I've been wanting for a fortnight to see you stand up"&mdash;Mac
+    turned fiercely&mdash;"against Samuel David MacCann."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come on! I'm in no mood for monkeyin'!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nor I. I realise, MacCann, we've come to a kind of a crisis. Things in
+    this camp are either going a lot better, or a lot worse, after to-day."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There's nothing wrong, if you quit asking dirty Jesuits to sit down
+    with honest men."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes; there's something worse out o' shape than that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac waited warily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When we were stranded here, and saw what we'd let ourselves in for,
+    there wasn't one of us that didn't think things looked pretty much like
+    the last o' pea time. There was just one circumstance that kept us from
+    throwing up the sponge; <i>we had a man in camp."</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel paused.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac stood as expressionless as the wooden crane.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A man we all believed in, who was going to help us pull through."
+    "That was you, I s'pose." Mac's hard voice chopped out the sarcasm.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You know mighty well who it was. The Boy's all right, but he's young
+    for this kind o' thing&mdash;young and heady. There isn't much wrong with me
+    that I'm aware of, except that I don't know shucks. Potts's petering
+    out wasn't altogether a surprise, and nobody expected anything from
+    O'Flynn till we got to Dawson, when a lawyer and a fella with capital
+    behind him may come in handy. But there was one man&mdash;who had a head on
+    him, who had experience, and who"&mdash;he leaned over to emphasise the
+    climax&mdash;"who had <i>character</i>. It was on that man's account that I
+    joined this party."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac put his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall. His face
+    began to look a little more natural. The long sleep or the coffee had
+    cleared his eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Shall I tell you what I heard about that man last night?" asked the
+    Colonel gravely.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac looked up, but never opened his lips.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You remember you wouldn't sit here&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The Boy was always in and out. The cabin was cold."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I left the Boy and O'Flynn at supper-time and went down to the Little
+    Cabin to&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To see what I was doin'&mdash;to spy on me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, all right&mdash;maybe I was spying, too. Incidentally I wanted to
+    tell you the cabin was hot as blazes, and get you to come to supper. I
+    met Potts hurrying up for his grub, and I said, 'Where's Mac? Isn't he
+    coming?' and your pardner's answer was: 'Oh, let him alone. He's got a
+    flask in his bunk, swillin' and gruntin'; he's just in hog-heaven.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Damn that sneak!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The man he was talkin' about, Mac, was the man we had all built our
+    hopes on."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll teach Potts&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You can't, Mac. Potts has got to die and go to heaven&mdash;perhaps to
+    hell, before he'll learn any good. But you're a different breed. Teach
+    MacCann."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac suddenly sat down on the stool with his head in his hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The Boy hasn't caught on," said the Colonel presently, "but he said
+    something this morning to show he was wondering about the change that's
+    come over you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That I don't split wood all day, I suppose, when we've got enough for
+    a month. Potts doesn't either. Why don't you go for Potts?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "As the Boy said, I don't care about Potts. It's Mac that matters."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did the Boy say that?" He looked up.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "After you had made that chimney, you know, you were a kind of hero in
+    his eyes."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac looked away. "The cabin's been cold," he muttered.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We are going to remedy that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I didn't bring any liquor into camp. You must admit that I didn't
+    intend&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I do admit it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And when O'Flynn said that about keeping his big demijohn out of the
+    inventory and apart from the common stores, I sat on him."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So you did."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I knew it was safest to act on the 'medicinal purposes' principle."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So it is."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But I wasn't thinking so much of O'Flynn. I was thinking of ... things
+    that had happened before ... for ... I'd had experience. Drink was the
+    curse of Caribou. It's something of a scourge up in Nova Scotia ... I'd
+    had experience."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You did the very best thing possible under the circumstances." Mac was
+    feeling about after his self-respect, and must be helped to get hold of
+    it. "I realise, too, that the temptation is much greater in cold
+    countries," said the Kentuckian unblushingly. "Italians and Greeks
+    don't want fiery drinks half as much as Russians and
+    Scandinavians&mdash;haven't the same craving as Nova Scotians and
+    cold-country people generally, I suppose. But that only shows,
+    temperance is of more vital importance in the North."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's right! It's not much in my line to shift blame, even when I
+    don't deserve it; but you know so much you might as well know ... it
+    wasn't I who opened that demijohn first."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But you don't mind being the one to shut it up&mdash;do you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Shut it up?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes; let's get it down and&mdash;" The Colonel swung it off the shelf. It
+    was nearly empty, and only the Boy's and the Colonel's single bottles
+    stood unbroached. Even so, Mac's prolonged spree was something of a
+    mystery to the Kentuckian. It must be that a very little was too much
+    for Mac. The Colonel handed the demijohn to his companion, and lit the
+    solitary candle standing on its little block of wood, held in place
+    between three half-driven nails.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's that for?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't you want to seal it up?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I haven't got any wax."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I have an inch or so." The Colonel produced out of his pocket the only
+    piece in camp.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac picked up a billet of wood, and drove the cork in flush with the
+    neck. Then, placing upright on the cork the helve of the hammer, he
+    drove the cork down a quarter of an inch farther.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Give me your wax. What's for a seal?" They looked about. Mac's eye
+    fell on a metal button that hung by a thread from the old militia
+    jacket he was wearing. He put his hand up to it, paused, glanced
+    hurriedly at the Colonel, and let his fingers fall.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, yes," said the Kentuckian, "that'll make a capital seal."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No; something of yours, I think, Colonel. The top of that tony
+    pencil-case, hey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel produced his gold pencil, watched Mac heat the wax, drop it
+    into the neck of the demijohn, and apply the initialled end of the
+    Colonel's property. While Mac, without any further waste of words, was
+    swinging the wicker-bound temptation up on the shelf again, they heard
+    voices.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They're coming back," says the Kentuckian hurriedly. "But we've
+    settled our little account, haven't we, old man?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac jerked his head in that automatic fashion that with him meant
+    genial and whole-hearted agreement.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And if Potts or O'Flynn want to break that seal&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll call 'em down," says Mac. And the Colonel knew the seal was safe.
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    "By-the-by, Colonel," said the Boy, just as he was turning in that
+    night, "I&mdash;a&mdash;I've asked that Jesuit chap to the House-Warming."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, you did, did you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, you'd just better have a talk with Mac about it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes. I've been tryin' to think how I'd square Mac. Of course, I know
+    I'll have to go easy on the raw."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I reckon you just will."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If Monkey-wrench screws down hard on me, you'll come to the rescue,
+    won't you, Colonel?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No I'll side with Mac on that subject. Whatever he says, goes!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Humph! <i>that</i> Jesuit's all right."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Not a word out of the Colonel.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH4"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER III
+</h2>
+<center>
+    TWO NEW SPISSIMENS
+</center>
+<p class="ind">
+    Medwjedew (zu Luka). Tag' mal&mdash;wer bist du? Ich
+    kenne dich nicht.
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+    Luka. Kennst du denn sonst alle Leute?
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+    Medwjedew. In meinem Revier muß ich jeden kennen und dich kenn'ich
+    nicht....
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+    Luka. Das kommt wohl daher Onkelchen, daß dein Revier nicht die ganze
+    Erde umfasst ... 's ist da noch ein Endchen draußen geblieben....
+</p>
+<p>
+    One of the curious results of what is called wild life, is a blessed
+    release from many of the timidities that assail the easy liver in the
+    centres of civilisation. Potts was the only one in the white camp who
+    had doubts about the wisdom of having to do with the natives.
+</p>
+<p>
+    However, the agreeable necessity of going to Pymeut to invite Nicholas
+    to the Blow-out was not forced upon the Boy. They were still hard at
+    it, four days after the Jesuit had gone his way, surrounding the Big
+    Cabin with a false wall, that final and effectual barrier against
+    Boreas&mdash;finishing touch warranted to convert a cabin, so cold that it
+    drove its inmates to drink, into a dwelling where practical people,
+    without cracking a dreary joke, might fitly celebrate a House-Warming.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In spite of the shortness of the days, Father Wills's suggestion was
+    being carried out with a gratifying success. Already manifest were the
+    advantages of the stockade, running at a foot's distance round the
+    cabin to the height of the eaves, made of spruce saplings not even
+    lopped of their short bushy branches, but planted close together, after
+    burning the ground cleared of snow. A second visitation of mild
+    weather, and a further two days' thaw, made the Colonel determine to
+    fill in the space between the spruce stockade and the cabin with
+    "burnt-out" soil closely packed down and well tramped in. It was
+    generally conceded, as the winter wore on, that to this contrivance of
+    the "earthwork" belonged a good half of the credit of the Big Cabin,
+    and its renown as being the warmest spot on the lower river that
+    terrible memorable year of the Klondyke Rush.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The evergreen wall with the big stone chimney shouldering itself up to
+    look out upon the frozen highway, became a conspicuous feature in the
+    landscape, welcome as the weeks went on to many an eye wearied with
+    long looking for shelter, and blinded by the snow-whitened waste.
+</p>
+<p>
+    An exception to what became a rule was, of all men, Nicholas. When the
+    stockade was half done, the Prince and an equerry appeared on the
+    horizon, with the second team the camp had seen, the driver much
+    concerned to steer clear of the softened snow and keep to that part of
+    the river ice windswept and firm, if roughest of all. Nicholas regarded
+    the stockade with a cold and beady eye.
+</p>
+<p>
+    No, he hadn't time to look at it. He had promised to "mush." He wasn't
+    even hungry.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It did little credit to his heart, but he seemed more in haste to leave
+    his new friends than the least friendly of them would have expected.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, wait a sec.," urged the deeply disappointed Boy. "I wanted awf'ly
+    to see how your sled is made. It's better 'n Father Wills'."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Humph!" grunted Nicholas scornfully; "him no got Innuit sled."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mac and I are goin' to try soon's the stockade's done&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Goo'-bye," interrupted Nicholas.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the Boy paid no attention to the word of farewell. He knelt down in
+    the snow and examined the sled carefully.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Spruce runners," he called out to Mac, "and&mdash;jee! they're shod with
+    ivory! <i>Jee!</i> fastened with sinew and wooden pegs. Hey?"&mdash;looking up
+    incredulously at Nicholas&mdash;"not a nail in the whole shebang, eh?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nail?" says Nicholas. "Huh, no <i>nail!</i>" as contemptuously as though
+    the Boy had said "bread-crumbs."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, she's a daisy! When you comin' back?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Comin' pretty quick; goin' pretty quick. Goo'-bye! <i>Mush!</i>" shouted
+    Nicholas to his companion, and the dogs got up off their haunches.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the Boy only laughed at Nicholas's struggles to get started. He
+    hung on to the loaded sled, examining, praising, while the dogs, after
+    the merest affectation of trying to make a start, looked round at him
+    over their loose collars and grinned contentedly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me got to mush. Show nex' time. Mush!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's here?" the Boy shouted through the "mushing"; and he tugged at
+    the goodly load, so neatly disposed under an old reindeer-skin
+    sleeping-bag, and lashed down with raw hide.
+</p>
+<p>
+    That? Oh, that was fish. <i>"Fish!</i> Got so much fish at starving Pymeut
+    you can go hauling it down river? Well, sir, <i>we</i> want fish. We <i>must</i>
+    have fish. Hey?" The Boy appealed to the others.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "R-right y'arre!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I reckon we just do!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Nicholas had other views.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, me take him&mdash;" He hitched his body in the direction of Ikogimeut.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Bless my soul! you've got enough there for a regiment. You goin' to
+    sell him? Hey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, come off the roof!" advised the Boy genially.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You ain't carryin' it about for your health, I suppose?" said Potts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The people down at Ikogimeut don't need it like us. We're white
+    duffers, and can't get fish through the ice. You sell <i>some</i> of it to
+    us." But Nicholas shook his head and shuffled along on his snow-shoes,
+    beckoning the dog-driver to follow.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Or trade some fur&mdash;fur tay," suggested O'Flynn.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Or for sugar," said Mac.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Or for tobacco," tempted the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And before that last word Nicholas's resolve went down. Up at the cabin
+    he unlashed the load, and it quickly became manifest that Nicholas was
+    a dandy at driving a bargain. He kept on saying shamelessly:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "More&mdash;more shuhg. Hey? Oh yes, me give heap fish. No nuff shuhg."
+</p>
+<p>
+    If it hadn't been for Mac (his own clear-headed self again, and by no
+    means to be humbugged by any Prince alive) the purchase of a portion of
+    that load of frozen fish, corded up like so much wood, would have laid
+    waste the commissariat.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But if the white men after this passage did not feel an absolute
+    confidence in Nicholas's fairness of mind, no such unworthy suspicion
+    of them found lodgment in the bosom of the Prince. With the exception
+    of some tobacco, he left all his ill-gotten store to be kept for him by
+    his new friends till he should return. When was that to be? In five
+    sleeps he would be back.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good! We'll have the stockade done by then. What do you say to our big
+    chimney, Nicholas?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He emitted a scornful "Peeluck!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What! Our chimney no good?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He shrugged: "Why you have so tall hole your house? How you cover him
+    up?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We don't want to cover him up."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Humph! winter fin' you tall hole. Winter come down&mdash;bring in
+    snow&mdash;drive fire out." He shivered in anticipation of what was to
+    happen. "Peeluck!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The white men laughed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What you up to now? Where you going?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Well, the fact was, Nicholas had been sent by his great ally, the
+    Father Superior of Holy Cross, on a mission, very important, demanding
+    despatch.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Father Brachet&mdash;him know him heap better send Nicholas when him want
+    man go God-damn quick. Me no stop&mdash;no&mdash;no stop."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He drew on his mittens proudly, unjarred by remembrance of how his good
+    resolution had come to grief.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where you off to now?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me ketchum Father Wills&mdash;me give letter." He tapped his
+    deerskin-covered chest. "Ketchum <i>sure</i> 'fore him leave Ikogimeut."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You come back with Father Wills?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hooray! we'll all work like sixty!" shouted the Boy, "and by Saturday
+    (that's five sleeps) we'll have the wall done and the house warm, and
+    you and"&mdash;he caught himself up; not thus in public would he break the
+    news to Mac&mdash;"you'll be back in time for the big Blow-Out." To clinch
+    matters, he accompanied Nicholas from the cabin to the river trail,
+    explaining: "You savvy? Big feast&mdash;all same Indian. Heap good grub. No
+    prayer-meetin'&mdash;you savvy?&mdash;no church this time. Big fire, big feed.
+    All kinds&mdash;apples, shuhg, bacon&mdash;no cook him, you no like," he added,
+    basely truckling to the Prince's peculiar taste.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas rolled his single eye in joyful anticipation, and promised
+    faithfully to grace the scene.
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    This was all very fine ... but Father Wills! The last thing at night
+    and the first thing in the morning the Boy looked the problem in the
+    face, and devised now this, now that, adroit and disarming fashion of
+    breaking the news to Mac.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But it was only when the daring giver of invitations was safely in bed,
+    and Mac equally safe down in the Little Cabin, that it seemed possible
+    to broach the subject. He devised scenes in which, airily and
+    triumphantly, he introduced Father Wills, and brought Mac to the point
+    of pining for Jesuit society; but these scenes were actable only under
+    conditions of darkness and of solitude. The Colonel refused to have
+    anything to do with the matter.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Our first business, as I see it, is to keep peace in the camp, and
+    hold fast to a good understanding with one another. It's just over
+    little things like this that trouble begins. Mac's one of us; Father
+    Wills is an outsider. I won't rile Mac for the sake of any Jesuit
+    alive. No, sir; this is <i>your</i> funeral, and you're obliged to attend."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Before three of Nicholas's five sleeps were accomplished, the Boy began
+    to curse the hour he had laid eyes on Father Wills. He began even to
+    speculate desperately on the good priest's chances of tumbling into an
+    air-hole, or being devoured by a timely wolf. But no, life was never so
+    considerate as that. Yet he could neither face being the cause of the
+    first serious row in camp, nor endure the thought of having his
+    particular guest&mdash;drat him!&mdash;flouted, and the whole House-Warming
+    turned to failure and humiliation.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Indeed, the case looked desperate. Only one day more now before he
+    would appear&mdash;be flouted, insulted, and go off wounded, angry, leaving
+    the Boy with an irreconciliable quarrel against Mac, and the
+    House-Warming turned to chill recrimination and to wretchedness.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But until the last phantasmal hope went down before the logic of events
+    it was impossible not to cling to the idea of melting Mac's Arctic
+    heart. There was still one course untried.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Since there was so little left to do to the stockade, the Boy announced
+    that he thought he'd go up over the hill for a tramp. Gun in hand and
+    grub in pocket, he marched off to play his last trump-card. If he could
+    bring home a queer enough bird or beast for the collection, there was
+    still hope. To what lengths might Mac not go if one dangled before him
+    the priceless bait of a golden-tipped emperor goose, dressed in
+    imperial robes of rose-flecked snow? Or who, knowing Mac, would not
+    trust a <i>Xema Sabinii</i> to play the part of a white-winged angel of
+    peace? Failing some such heavenly messenger, there was nothing for it
+    but that the Boy should face the ignominy of going forth to meet the
+    Father on the morrow, and confess the humiliating truth. It wasn't fair
+    to let him come expecting hospitality, and find&mdash;. Visions arose of Mac
+    receiving the bent and wayworn missionary with the greeting: "There is
+    no corner by the fire, no place in the camp for a pander to the Scarlet
+    Woman." The thought lent impassioned fervour to the quest for goose or
+    gull.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was pretty late when he got back to camp, and the men were at
+    supper. No, he hadn't shot anything.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's that bulging in your pocket?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sort o' stone."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Struck it rich?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't give me any chin-music, boys; give me tea. I'm dog-tired."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But when Mac got up first, as usual, to go down to the Little Cabin to
+    "wood up" for the night, "I'll walk down with you," says the Boy,
+    though it was plain he was dead-beat.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He helped to revive the failing fire, and then, dropping on the section
+    of sawed wood that did duty for a chair, with some difficulty and a
+    deal of tugging he pulled "the sort o' stone" out of the pocket of his
+    duck shooting-jacket.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "See that?" He held the thing tightly clasped in his two red, chapped
+    hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac bent down, shading his eyes from the faint flame flicker.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What is it?" "Piece o' tooth."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "By the Lord Harry! so it is." He took the thing nearer the faint
+    light. "Fossil! Where'd you get it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Over yonder&mdash;by a little frozen river."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How far? Any more? Only this?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy didn't answer. He went outside, and returned instantly, lugging
+    in something brown and whitish, weather-stained, unwieldy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I dropped this at the door as I came along home. Thought it might do
+    for the collection."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac stared with all his eyes, and hurriedly lit a candle. The Boy
+    dropped exhausted on a ragged bit of burlap by the bunks. Mac knelt
+    down opposite, pouring liberal libation of candle-grease on the
+    uncouth, bony mass between them.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Part of the skull!" he rasped out, masking his ecstasy as well as he
+    could.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mastodon?" inquired the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll bet my boots," says Mac, "it's an <i>Elephas primigenius;</i> and if
+    I'm right, it's 'a find,' young man. Where'd you stumble on him?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Over yonder." The Boy leaned his head against the lower bunk.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where?" "Across the divide. The bones have been dragged up on to some
+    rocks. I saw the end of a tusk stickin' up out of the snow, and I
+    scratched down till I found&mdash;" He indicated the trophy between them on
+    the floor.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tusk? How long?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "'Bout nine feet." "We'll go and get it to-morrow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    No answer from the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Early, hey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well&mdash;a&mdash;it's a good ways."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What if it is?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I don't mind. I'd do more 'n that for you, Mac."
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was something unnatural in such devotion. Mac looked up. But the
+    Boy was too tired to play the big fish any longer. "I wonder if you'll
+    do something for me." He watched with a sinking heart Mac's sharp
+    uprising from the worshipful attitude. It was not like any other
+    mortal's gradual, many-jointed getting-up; it was more like the sudden
+    springing out of the big blade of a clasp-knife.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's your game?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I ain't got any game," said the Boy desperately; "or, if I have,
+    there's mighty little fun in it. However, I don't know as I want to
+    walk ten hours again in this kind o' weather with an elephant on my
+    back just for&mdash;for the poetry o' the thing." He laid his chapped hands
+    on the side board of the bunk and pulled himself up on his legs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's your game?" repeated Mac sternly, as the Boy reached the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's the good o' talkin'?" he answered; but he paused, turned, and
+    leaned heavily against the rude lintel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Course, I know you'd be shot before you'd do it, but what I'd <i>like</i>,
+    would be to hear you say you wouldn't kick up a hell of a row if Father
+    Wills happens in to the House-Warmin'."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac jerked his set face, fire-reddened, towards the fossil-finder; and
+    he, without waiting for more, simply opened the door, and heavily
+    footed it back to the Big Cabin.
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    Next morning when Mac came to breakfast he heard that the Boy had had
+    his grub half an hour before the usual time, and was gone off on some
+    tramp again. Mac sat and mused.
+</p>
+<p>
+    O'Flynn came in with a dripping bucket, and sat down to breakfast
+    shivering.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Which way'd he go?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The Boy? Down river."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sure he didn't go over the divide?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    O'Flynn was sure. He'd just been down to the water-hole, and in the
+    faint light he'd seen the Boy far down on the river-trail "leppin" like
+    a hare in the direction of the Roosian mission."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Goin' to meet ... a ... Nicholas?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Reckon so," said the Colonel, a bit ruffled. "Don't believe he'll run
+    like a hare very far with his feet all blistered."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did you know he'd discovered a fossil elephant?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, he has. I must light out, too, and have a look at it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do; it'll be a cheerful sort of House-Warming with one of you off
+    scouring the country for more blisters and chilblains, and another
+    huntin' antediluvian elephants." The Colonel spoke with uncommon
+    irascibility. The great feast-day had certainly not dawned
+    propitiously.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When breakfast was done Mac left the Big Cabin without a word; but,
+    instead of going over the divide across the treeless snow-waste to the
+    little frozen river, where, turned up to the pale northern dawn, were
+    lying the bones of a beast that had trampled tropic forests, in that
+    other dawn of the Prime, the naturalist, turning his back on <i>Elephas
+    primigenius,</i> followed in the track of the Boy down the great river
+    towards Ikogimeut.
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    On the low left bank of the Yukon a little camp. On one side, a big
+    rock hooded with snow. At right angles, drawn up one on top of the
+    other, two sleds covered with reindeer-skins held down by stones. In
+    the corner formed by the angle of rocks and sleds, a small A-tent, very
+    stained and old. Burning before it on a hearth of greenwood, a little
+    fire struggling with a veering wind.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac had seen from far off the faint blue banners of smoke blowing now
+    right, now left, then tossed aloft in the pallid sunshine. He looked
+    about sharply for the Boy, as he had been doing this two hours. There
+    was the Jesuit bending over the fire, bettering the precarious position
+    of a saucepan that insisted on sitting lop-sided, looking down into the
+    heart of coals. Nicholas was holding up the tent-flap.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hello! How do!" he sang out, recognising Mac. The priest glanced up
+    and nodded pleasantly. Two Indians, squatting on the other side of the
+    fire, scrambled away as the shifting wind brought a cloud of stifling
+    smoke into their faces. "Where's the Boy?" demanded Mac, arresting the
+    stampede.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas's dog-driver stared, winked, and wiped his weeping,
+    smoke-reddened eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Is he in there?" Mac looked towards the tent.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Andrew nodded between coughs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's he doing in there? Call him out," ordered Mac.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He no walk."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac's hard face took on a look of cast-iron tragedy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The wind, veering round again, had brought the last words to the priest
+    on the other side of the fire.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, it'll be all right by-and-by," he said cheerfully.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But knocking up like that just for blisters?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Blisters? No; cold and general weakness. That's why we delayed&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Without waiting to hear more Mac strode over to the tent, and as he
+    went in, Nicholas came out. No sign of the Boy&mdash;nobody, nothing. What?
+    Down in the corner a small, yellow face lying in a nest of fur. Bright,
+    dark eyes stared roundly, and as Mac glowered astonished at the
+    apparition, a mouth full of gleaming teeth opened, smiling, to say in a
+    very small voice:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Farva!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Astonished as Mac was, disappointed and relieved all at once, there was
+    something arresting in the appeal.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm not your father," he said stiffly. "Who're you? Hey? You speak
+    English?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The child stared at him fixedly, but suddenly, for no reason on earth,
+    it smiled again. Mac stood looking down at it, seeming lost in thought.
+    Presently the small object stirred, struggled about feebly under the
+    encompassing furs, and, freeing itself, held out its arms. The mites of
+    hands fluttered at his sleeve and made ineffectual clutches.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What do you want?" To his own vast astonishment Mac lifted the little
+    thing out of its warm nest. It was woefully thin, and seemed, even to
+    his inexperience, to be insufficiently clothed, though the beaded
+    moccasins on its tiny feet were new and good.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, you're only about as big as a minute," he said gruffly. "What's
+    the matter&mdash;sick?" It suddenly struck him as very extraordinary that he
+    should have taken up the child, and how extremely embarrassing it would
+    be if anyone came in and caught him. Clutching the small morsel
+    awkwardly, he fumbled with the furs preparatory to getting rid, without
+    delay, of the unusual burden. While he was straightening the things,
+    Father Wills appeared at the flap, smoking saucepan in hand. The
+    instant the cold air struck the child it began to cough.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, you mustn't do that!" said the priest to Mac with unexpected
+    severity. "Kaviak must lie in bed and keep warm." Down on the floor
+    went the saucepan. The child was caught away from the surprised Mac,
+    and the furs so closely gathered round the small shrunken body that
+    there was once more nothing visible but the wistful yellow face and
+    gleaming eyes, still turned searchingly on its most recent
+    acquaintance.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the priest, without so much as a glance at the new-comer, proceeded
+    to feed Kaviak out of the saucepan, blowing vigorously at each spoonful
+    before administering.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He's pretty hungry," commented Mac. "Where'd you find him?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In a little village up on the Kuskoquim. Kaviak's an Esquimaux from
+    Norton Sound, aren't you, Kaviak?" But the child was wholly absorbed,
+    it seemed, in swallowing and staring at Mac. "His family came up there
+    from the coast in a bidarra only last summer&mdash;all dead now. Everybody
+    else in the village&mdash;and there isn't but a handful&mdash;all ailing and all
+    hungry. I was tramping across an igloo there a couple of days ago, and
+    I heard a strange little muffled sound, more like a snared rabbit than
+    anything else. But the Indian with me said no, everybody who had lived
+    there was dead, and he was for hurrying on. They're superstitious, you
+    know, about a place where people have died. But I crawled in, and found
+    this little thing lying in a bundle of rags with its hands bound and
+    dried grass stuffed in its mouth. It was too weak to stir or do more
+    than occasionally to make that muffled noise that I'd heard coming up
+    through the smoke-hole."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What you goin' to do with him?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I hardly know. The Sisters will look after him for a while, if I
+    get him there alive."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why shouldn't you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak supplied the answer straightway by choking and falling into an
+    appalling fit of coughing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've got some stuff that'll be good for that," said Mac, thinking of
+    his medicine-chest. "I'll give you some when we get back to camp."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The priest nodded, taking Mac's unheard of civility as a matter of
+    course.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The ice is very rough; the jolting makes him cough awfully."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Jesuit had fastened his eyes on Mac's woollen muffler, which had
+    been loosened during the ministering to Kaviak and had dropped on the
+    ground. "Do you need that scarf?" he asked, as though he suspected Mac
+    of wearing it for show. "Because if you didn't you could wrap it round
+    Kaviak while I help the men strike camp." And without waiting to see
+    how his suggestion was received, he caught up the saucepan, lifted the
+    flap, and vanished.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Farva," remarked Kaviak, fixing melancholy eyes on Mac.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I ain't your father," muttered the gentleman so addressed. He picked
+    up his scarf and hung it round his own neck.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Farva!" insisted Kaviak. They looked at each other.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You cold? That it, hey?" Mac knelt down and pulled away the furs. "God
+    bless me! you only got this one rag on? God bless me!" He pulled off
+    his muffler and wound the child in it mummy-wise, round and round,
+    muttering the while in a surly way. When it was half done he
+    stopped&mdash;thought profoundly with a furrow cutting deep into his square
+    forehead between the straight brows. Slowly he pulled his gloves out of
+    his pocket, and turned out from each beaver gauntlet an inner mitten of
+    knitted wool. "Here," he said, and put both little moccasined feet into
+    one of the capacious mittens. Much pleased with his ingenuity, he went
+    on winding the long scarf until the yellow little Esquimaux bore a
+    certain whimsical resemblance to one of the adorable Delia Robbia
+    infants. But Mac's sinewy hands were exerting a greater pressure than
+    he realized. The morsel made a remonstrant squeaking, and squirmed
+    feebly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, oh! Too tight? Beg your pardon," said Mac hastily, as though not
+    only English, but punctilious manners were understanded of Kaviak. He
+    relaxed the woollen bandage till the morsel lay contented again within
+    its folds.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas came in for Kaviak, and for the furs, that he might pack them
+    both in the Father's sled. Already the true son of the Church was
+    undoing the ropes that lashed firm the canvas of the tent.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where's the Boy?" said Mac suddenly. "The young fellow that's with us.
+    You know, the one that found you that first Sunday and brought you to
+    camp. Where is he?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas paused an instant with Kaviak on his shoulder.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Kaiomi&mdash;no savvy."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You not seen him to-day?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No. He no up&mdash;?" With the swaddled child he made a gesture up the
+    river towards the white camp.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, he came down this morning to meet you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas shook his head, and went on gathering up the furs. As he and
+    Mac came out, Andrew was undoing the last fastening that held the
+    canvas to the stakes. In ten minutes they were on the trail, Andrew
+    leading, with Father Wills' dogs, Kaviak lying in the sled muffled to
+    the eyes, still looking round out of the corners&mdash;no, strangely enough,
+    the Kaviak eye had no corners, but fixedly he stared sideways at Mac.
+    "Farva," seeming not to take the smallest notice, trudged along on one
+    side of him, the priest on the other, and behind came Nicholas and the
+    other Indians with the second sled. It was too windy to talk much even
+    had they been inclined.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The only sounds were the <i>Mush! Mush!</i> of the drivers, the grate and
+    swish of the runners over the ice, and Kaviak's coughing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac turned once and frowned at him. It was curious that the child
+    seemed not to mind these menacing looks, not in the smallest degree.
+</p>
+<p>
+    By-and-by the order of march was disturbed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak's right runner, catching at some obstacle, swerved and sent the
+    sled bumping along on its side, the small head of the passenger
+    narrowly escaping the ice. Mac caught hold of the single-tree and
+    brought the racing dogs to an abrupt halt. The priest and he righted
+    the sled, and Mac straddling it, tucked in a loosened end of fur. When
+    all was again in running order, Mac was on the same side as Father
+    Wills. He still wore that look of dour ill-temper, and especially did
+    he glower at the unfortunate Kaviak, seized with a fresh fit of
+    coughing that filled the round eyes with tears.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't you get kind o' tired listenin' to that noise? Suppose I was to
+    carry&mdash;just for a bit&mdash;. This is the roughest place on the trail. Hi!
+    Stop!" he called to Andrew. The priest had said nothing; but divining
+    what Mac would be at, he helped him to undo the raw-hide lashing, and
+    when Kaviak was withdrawn he wrapped one of the lighter fur things
+    round him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was only when Mac had marched off, glowering still, and sternly
+    refusing to meet Kaviak's tearful but grateful eyes&mdash;it was only then,
+    bending over the sled and making fast the furs, that Father Wills, all
+    to himself, smiled a little.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It wasn't until they were in sight of the smoke from the Little Cabin
+    that Mac slackened his pace. He had never for a moment found the trail
+    so smooth that he could return his burden to the sled. Now, however, he
+    allowed Nicholas and the priest to catch up with him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You carry him the rest of the way," he commanded, and set his burden
+    in Nicholas's arms. Kaviak was ill-pleased, but Mac, falling behind
+    with the priest, stalked on with eyes upon the ground.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've got a boy of my own," he jerked out presently, with the air of a
+    man who accounts confidentially for some weakness.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Really!" returned the priest; "they didn't tell me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I haven't told them yet."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, all right."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why is he called that heathen name?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Kaviak? Oh, it's the name of his tribe. His people belong to that
+    branch of the Innuits known as Kaviaks."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Humph! Then he's only Kaviak as I'm MacCann. I suppose you've
+    christened him?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, not yet&mdash;no. What shall we call him? What's your boy's name?"
+    "Robert Bruce." They went on in silence till Mac said, "It's on account
+    of my boy I came up here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It didn't use to matter if a man <i>was</i> poor and self-taught, but in
+    these days of competition it's different. A boy must have chances if
+    he's going to fight the battle on equal terms. Of course, some boys
+    ain't worth botherin' about. But my boy&mdash;well, he seems to have
+    something in him."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The priest listened silently, but with that look of brotherliness on
+    his face that made it so easy to talk to him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It doesn't really matter to those other fellows." Mac jerked his hand
+    towards the camp. "It's never so important to men&mdash;who stand alone&mdash;but
+    I've <i>got</i> to strike it rich over yonder." He lifted his head, and
+    frowned defiantly in the general direction of the Klondyke, thirteen
+    hundred miles away. "It's my one chance," he added half to himself. "It
+    means everything to Bob and me. Education, scientific education, costs
+    like thunder."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In the United States?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I mean to send my boy to the old country. I want Bob to be
+    thorough."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The priest smiled, but almost imperceptibly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How old is he?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, 'bout as old as this youngster." Mac spoke with calculated
+    indifference.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Six or thereabouts?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No; four and a half. But he's bigger&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Of course."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And you can see already&mdash;he's got a lot in him."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Father Wills nodded with a conviction that brought Mac nearer
+    confession than he had ever been in his life.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You see," he said quite low, and as if the words were dragged out with
+    pincers, "the fact is&mdash;my married life&mdash;didn't pan out very well. And
+    I&mdash;ran away from home as a little chap&mdash;after a lickin'&mdash;and never went
+    back. But there's one thing I mean to make a success of&mdash;that's my
+    boy."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I believe you will, if you feel like that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, they've gone clean past the camp trail," said Mac sharply, "all
+    but Nicholas&mdash;and what in thunder?&mdash;he's put the kid back on the
+    sled&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, I told my men we'd be getting on. But they were told to leave you
+    the venison&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What! You goin' straight on? Nonsense!" Mac interrupted, and began to
+    shout to the Indians.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No; I <i>meant</i> to stop; just tell your friends so," said the
+    unsuspecting Father; "but with a sick child&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What can you do for him that we can't? And to break the journey may
+    make a big difference. We've got some condensed milk left&mdash;and&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah yes, but we are more accustomed to&mdash;it's hardly fair to burden a
+    neighbour. No, we'll be getting on."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If those fellers up there make a row about your bringing in a
+    youngster"&mdash;he thrust out his jaw&mdash;"they can settle the account with
+    me. I've got to do something for that cough before the kid goes on."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well," said the priest; and so wily are these Jesuits that he never
+    once mentioned that he was himself a qualified doctor in full and
+    regular practice. He kept his eyes on the finished stockade and the
+    great chimney, wearing majestically its floating plume of smoke.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hi!" Mac called between his hands to the Indians, who had gone some
+    distance ahead. "Hi!" He motioned them back up the hill trail.
+</p>
+<p>
+    O'Flynn had come out of the Little Cabin, and seemed to be laboriously
+    trundling something along the footpath. He got so excited when he heard
+    the noise and saw the party that, inadvertently, he let his burden
+    slide down the icy slope, bumping and bouncing clumsily from one
+    impediment to another.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Faith, look at 'im! Sure, that fossle can't resthrain his j'y at
+    seein' ye back. Mac, it's yer elephunt. I was takin' him in to the sate
+    of honour be the foir. We thought it 'ud be a pleasant surprise fur ye.
+    Sure, ye'r more surprised to see 'im leppin' down the hill to meet ye,
+    like a rale Irish tarrier."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac was angry, and didn't conceal the fact. As he ran to stop the thing
+    before it should be dashed to pieces, the priest happened to glance
+    back, and saw coming slowly along the river trail a solitary figure
+    that seemed to make its way with difficulty.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It looks as though you'd have more than you bargained for at the
+    House-Warming," he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    O'Flynn came down the hill babbling like a brook.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good-day to ye, Father. The blessin's o' Heaven on ye fur not kapin'
+    us starvin' anny longer. There's Potts been swearin', be this and be
+    that, that yourself and the little divvle wudn't be at the Blow-Out at
+    ahl, at ahl."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You mean the Boy hasn't come back?" called out Mac. He leaned <i>Elephas
+    primigenius</i> against a tuft of willow banked round with snow, and
+    turned gloomily as if to go back down the river again.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who's this?" They all stood and watched the limping traveller.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why it's&mdash;of course. I didn't know him with that thing tied over his
+    cap"; and Mac went to meet him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy bettered his pace.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How did I miss you?" demanded Mac.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well," said the Boy, looking rather mischievous, "I can't think how it
+    happened on the way down, unless you passed when I 'd gone uphill a
+    piece after some tracks. I was lyin' under the Muff a few miles down
+    when you came back, and you&mdash;well, I kind o' thought you seemed to have
+    your hands full." Mac looked rigid and don't-you-try-to-chaff-me-sir.
+    "Besides," the Boy went on, "I couldn't cover the ground like you and
+    Father Wills."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's the matter with you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, nothin' to howl about. But see here, Mac."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Soon's I can walk I'll go and get you the rest o' that elephant."
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was no more said till they got up to the others, who had waited
+    for the Indians to come back, and had unpacked Kaviak to spare him the
+    jolting uphill.
+</p>
+<p>
+    O'Flynn was screaming with excitement as he saw that the bundle
+    Nicholas was carrying had a head and two round eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The saints in glory be among us! What's that? Man alive, what <i>is</i> it,
+    be the Siven?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That," answered Mac with a proprietary air, "is a little Esquimaux
+    boy, and I'm bringing him in to doctor his cold."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Glory be! An Esquimer! And wid a cowld! Sure, he can have some o' my
+    linnyeemint. Well, y'arre a boss collector, Mac! Faith, ye bang the
+    Jews! And me thinkin' ye'd be satisfied wid yer elephunt. Not him, be
+    the Siven! It's an Esquimer he must have to finish off his collection,
+    wan wid the rale Arctic cowld in his head, and two eyes that goes
+    snappin' through ye like black torpeders. Two spissimens in wan day!
+    Yer growin' exthravagant, Mac. Why, musha, child, if I don't think yer
+    the dandy Spissimen o' the lot!"
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH5"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER IV
+</h2>
+<center>
+    THE BLOW-OUT
+</center>
+<p class="ind">
+    "How good it is to invite men to the pleasant feast."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Comfortable as rock fireplace and stockade made the cabin now, the
+    Colonel had been feeling all that morning that the official
+    House-Warming was fore-doomed to failure. Nevertheless, as he was cook
+    that week, he could not bring himself to treat altogether lightly his
+    office of Master of the Feast. There would probably be no guests. Even
+    their own little company would likely be incomplete, but t here was to
+    be a spread that afternoon, "anyways."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Even had the Colonel needed any keeping up to the mark, the office
+    would have been cheerfully undertaken by O'Flynn or by Potts, for whom
+    interest in the gustatory aspect of the occasion was wholly undimmed by
+    the threatened absence of Mac and the "little divvle."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There'll be the more for us," said Potts enthusiastically.
+</p>
+<p>
+    O'Flynn's argument seemed to halt upon a reservation. He looked over
+    the various contributions to the feast, set out on a board in front of
+    the water-bucket, and, "It's mate I'm wishin' fur," says he.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We've got fish."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's only mate on Fridays. We've had fish fur five days stiddy, an'
+    befure that, bacon three times a day wid sivin days to the week, an'
+    not enough bacon ayther, begob, whin all's said and done! Not enough to
+    be fillin', and plenty to give us the scurrvy. May the divil dance on
+    shorrt rations!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No scurvy in this camp for a while yet," said the Colonel, throwing
+    some heavy objects into a pan and washing them vigorously round and
+    round.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pitaties!" O'Flynn's eyes dwelt lovingly on the rare food. "Ye've
+    hoarded 'em too long, man, they've sprouted."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That won't prevent you hoggin' more'n your share, I'll bet," said
+    Potts pleasantly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't somehow like wasting the sprouts," observed the Colonel
+    anxiously. "It's such a wonderful sight&mdash;something growing." He had cut
+    one pallid slip, and held it tenderly between knife and thumb.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Waste 'em with scurvy staring us in the face? Should think not. Mix
+    'em with cold potaters in a salad."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No. Make slumgullion," commanded O'Flynn.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's that?" quoth the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Be the Siven! I only wonder I didn't think of it befure. Arre ye
+    listening, Kentucky? Ye take lots o' wathur, an' if ye want it rich, ye
+    take the wathur ye've boiled pitaties or cabbage in&mdash;a vegetable stock,
+    ye mind&mdash;and ye add a little flour, salt, and pepper, an' a tomater if
+    ye're in New York or 'Frisco, and ye boil all that together with a few
+    fish-bones or bacon-rin's to make it rale tasty."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes&mdash;well?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, an' that's slumgullion."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't sound heady enough for a 'Blow-Out,'" said the Colonel. "We'll
+    sober up on slumgullion to-morrow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Anyhow, it's mate I'm wishin' fur," sighed O'Flynn, subsiding among
+    the tin-ware. "What's the good o' the little divvle and his thramps, if
+    he can't bring home a burrud, or so much as the scut iv a rabbit furr
+    the soup?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, he's contributed a bottle of California apricots, and we'll have
+    boiled rice."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "An' punch, glory be!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Y-yes," answered the Colonel. "I've been thinkin' a good deal about
+    the punch."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So's myself," said O'Flynn frankly; but Potts looked at the Colonel
+    suspiciously through narrowed eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There's very little whiskey left, and I propose to brew a mild bowl&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To hell with your mild bowls!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A good enough punch, sah, but one that&mdash;that&mdash;a&mdash;well, that the whole
+    kit and boodle of us can drink. Indians and everybody, you know ...
+    Nicholas and Andrew may turn up. I want you two fellas to suppoht me
+    about this. There are reasons foh it, sah"&mdash;he had laid a hand on
+    Potts' shoulder and fixed O'Flynn with his eye&mdash;"and"&mdash;speaking very
+    solemnly&mdash;"yoh neither o' yoh gentlemen that need mo' said on the
+    subject."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Whereupon, having cut the ground from under their feet, he turned
+    decisively, and stirred the mush-pot with a magnificent air and a
+    newly-whittled birch stick.
+</p>
+<p>
+    To give the Big Cabin an aspect of solid luxury, they had spread the
+    Boy's old buffalo "robe" on the floor, and as the morning wore on Potts
+    and O'Flynn made one or two expeditions to the Little Cabin, bringing
+    back selections out of Mac's hoard "to decorate the banquet-hall," as
+    they said. On the last trip Potts refused to accompany his pardner&mdash;no,
+    it was no good. Mac evidently wouldn't be back to see, and the laugh
+    would be on them "takin' so much trouble for nothin'." And O'Flynn
+    wasn't to be long either, for dinner had been absurdly postponed
+    already.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the door opened the next time, it was to admit Mac, Nicholas with
+    Kaviak in his arms, O'Flynn gesticulating like a windmill, and, last of
+    all, the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak was formally introduced, but instead of responding to his hosts'
+    attentions, the only thing he seemed to care about, or even see, was
+    something that in the hurly-burly everybody else overlooked&mdash;the
+    decorations. Mac's stuffed birds and things made a remarkably good
+    show, but the colossal success was reserved for the minute shrunken
+    skin of the baby white hare set down in front of the great fire for a
+    hearthrug. If the others failed to appreciate that joke, not so Kaviak.
+    He gave a gurgling cry, struggled down out of Nicholas's arms, and
+    folded the white hare to his breast.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where are the other Indians?" said Mac.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Looking after the dogs," said Father Wills; and as the door opened,
+    "Oh yes, give us that," he said to Andrew. "I thought"&mdash;he turned to
+    the Colonel&mdash;"maybe you'd like to try some Yukon reindeer."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hooray!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mate? Arre ye sayin' mate, or is an angel singin'?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now I <i>know</i> that man's a Christian," soliloquised Potts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look here: it'll take a little time to cook," said Mac, "and it's
+    worth waitin' for. Can you let us have a pail o' hot water in the
+    meantime?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Y-yes," said the Colonel, looking as if he had enough to think about
+    already.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, we always wash them first of all," said Father Wills, noticing
+    how Mac held the little heathen off at arm's length. "Nicholas used to
+    help with that at Holy Cross." He gave the new order with the old
+    authoritative gesture.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And where's the liniment I lent you that you're so generous with?" Mac
+    arraigned O'Flynn. "Go and get it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Under Nicholas's hands Kaviak was forced to relinquish not only the
+    baby hare, but his own elf locks. He was closely sheared, his moccasins
+    put off, and his single garment dragged unceremoniously wrong side out
+    over his head and bundled out of doors.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Be the Siven! he's got as manny bones as a skeleton!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Poor little codger!" The Colonel stood an instant, skillet in hand
+    staring.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's that he's got round his neck?" said the Boy, moving nearer.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak, seeing the keen look menacing his treasure, lifted a shrunken
+    yellow hand and clasped tight the dirty shapeless object suspended from
+    a raw-hide necklace.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas seemed to hesitate to divest him of this sole remaining
+    possession.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You must get him to give it up," said Father Wills, "and burn it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak flatly declined to fall in with as much as he understood of this
+    arrangement.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What is it, anyway?" the Boy pursued.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "His amulet, I suppose." As Father Wills proceeded to enforce his
+    order, and pulled the leather string over the child's head, Kaviak rent
+    the air with shrieks and coughs. He seemed to say as well as he could,
+    "I can do without my parki and my mucklucks, but I'll take my death
+    without my amulet."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac insinuated himself brusquely between the victim and his
+    persecutors. He took the dirty object away from the priest with scant
+    ceremony, in spite of the whisper, "Infection!" and gave it back to the
+    wrathful owner.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You talk his language, don't you?" Mac demanded of Nicholas.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Pymeut pilot nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tell him, if he'll lend the thing to me to wash, he shall have it
+    back."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas explained.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak, with streaming eyes and quivering lips, reluctantly handed it
+    over, and watched Mac anxiously till overwhelmed by a yet greater
+    misfortune in the shape of a bath for himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How shall I clean this thing thoroughly?" Mac condescended to ask
+    Father Wills. The priest shrugged.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He'll have forgotten it to-morrow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He shall have it to-morrow," said Mac.
+</p>
+<p>
+    With his back to Kaviak, the Boy, O'Flynn, and Potts crowding round
+    him, Mac ripped open the little bird-skin pouch, and took out three
+    objects&mdash;an ivory mannikin, a crow's feather, and a thing that Father
+    Wills said was a seal-blood plug.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's it for?" "Same as the rest. It's an amulet; only as it's used
+    to stop the flow of blood from the wound of a captive seal, it is
+    supposed to be the best of all charms for anyone who spits blood."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll clean 'em all after the Blow-Out," said Mac, and he went out,
+    buried the charms in the snow, and stuck up a spruce twig to mark the
+    spot.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Meanwhile, to poor Kaviak it was being plainly demonstrated what an
+    awful fate descended on a person so unlucky as to part with his amulet.
+    He stood straight up in the bucket like a champagne-bottle in a cooler,
+    and he could not have resented his predicament more if he had been set
+    in crushed ice instead of warm water. Under the remorseless hands of
+    Nicholas he began to splutter and choke, to fizz, and finally explode
+    with astonishment and wrath. It was quite clear Nicholas was trying to
+    drown him. He took the treatment so to heart, that he kept on howling
+    dismally for some time after he was taken out, and dried, and
+    linimented and dosed by Mac, whose treachery about the amulet he seemed
+    to forgive, since "Farva" had had the air of rescuing him from the
+    horrors he had endured in that water-bucket, where, for all Kaviak
+    knew, he might have stayed till he succumbed to death. The Boy
+    contributed a shirt of his own, and helped Mac to put it on the
+    incredibly thin little figure. The shirt came down to Kaviak's heels,
+    and had to have the sleeves rolled up every two minutes. But by the
+    time the reindeer-steak was nearly done Kaviak was done, too, and
+    O'Flynn had said, "That Spissimen does ye credit, Mac."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Said Spissimen was now staring hungrily out of the Colonel's bunk,
+    holding towards Mac an appealing hand, with half a yard of shirt-sleeve
+    falling over it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac pretended not to see, and drew up to the table the one remaining
+    available thing to sit on, his back to his patient.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the dogs had been fed, and the other Indians had come in, and
+    squatted on the buffalo-skin with Nicholas, the first course was sent
+    round in tin cups, a nondescript, but warming, "camp soup."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sorry we've got so few dishes, gentlemen," the Colonel had said.
+    "We'll have to ask some of you to wait till others have finished."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Farva," remarked Kaviak, leaning out of the bunk and sniffing the
+    savoury steam.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He takes you for a priest," said Potts, with the cheerful intention of
+    stirring Mac's bile. But not even so damning a suspicion as that could
+    cool the collector's kindness for his new Spissimen.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You come here," he said. Kaviak didn't understand. The Boy got up,
+    limped over to the bunk, lifted the child out, and brought him to Mac's
+    side.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Since there ain't enough cups," said Mac, in self-justification, and
+    he put his own, half empty, to Kaviak's lips. The Spissimen imbibed
+    greedily, audibly, and beamed. Mac, with unimpaired gravity, took no
+    notice of the huge satisfaction this particular remedy was giving his
+    patient, except to say solemnly, "Don't bubble in it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The next course was fish a la Pymeut.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You're lucky to be able to get it," said the Father, whether with
+    suspicion or not no man could tell. "I had to send back for some by a
+    trader and couldn't get enough."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We didn't see any trader," said the Boy to divert the current.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He may have gone by in the dusk; he was travelling hotfoot."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Thought that steamship was chockful o' grub. What did you want o'
+    fish?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes; they've got plenty of food, but&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They don't relish parting with it," suggested Potts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They haven't much to think about except what they eat; they wanted to
+    try our fish, and were ready to exchange. I promised I would send a
+    load back from Ikogimeut if they'd&mdash;" He seemed not to care to finish
+    the sentence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So you didn't do much for the Pymeuts after all?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I did something," he said almost shortly. Then, with recovered
+    serenity, he turned to the Boy: "I promised I'd bring back any news."
+    "Yes."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Everybody stopped eating and hung on the priest's words.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Captain Rainey's heard there's a big new strike&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In the Klondyke?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "On the American side this time."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hail Columbia!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Whereabouts?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "At a place called Minook."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where's that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Up the river by the Ramparts."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How far?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, a little matter of six or seven hundred miles from here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Glory to God!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Might as well be six or seven thousand."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And very probably isn't a bona-fide strike at all," said the priest,
+    "but just a stampede&mdash;a very different matter."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I tell you straight: I got no use for a gold-mine in Minook at
+    this time o' year."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nop! Venison steak's more in my line than grub-stake just about now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Potts had to bestir himself and wash dishes before he could indulge in
+    his "line." When the grilled reindeer did appear, flanked by
+    really-truly potatoes and the Colonel's hot Kentucky biscuit, there was
+    no longer doubt in any man's mind but what this Blow-Out was being a
+    success.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Colonel's a daisy cook, ain't he?" the Boy appealed to Father Wills.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Jesuit assented cordially.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My family meant <i>me</i> for the army," he said. "Seen much service,
+    Colonel?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Kentuckian laughed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Never wasted a day soldiering in my life."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Maybe you're wonderin'," said Potts, "why he's a Colonel!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Jesuit made a deprecatory gesture, politely disclaiming any such
+    rude curiosity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He's from Kentucky, you see;" and the smile went round. "Beyond that,
+    we can't tell you why he's a Colonel unless it's because he ain't a
+    Judge;" and the boss of the camp laughed with the rest, for the Denver
+    man had scored.
+</p>
+<p>
+    By the time they got to the California apricots and boiled rice
+    everybody was feeling pretty comfortable. When, at last, the table was
+    cleared, except for the granite-ware basin full of punch, and when all
+    available cups were mustered and tobacco-pouches came out, a remarkably
+    genial spirit pervaded the company&mdash;with three exceptions.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Potts and O'Flynn waited anxiously to sample the punch before giving
+    way to complete satisfaction, and Kaviak was impervious to
+    considerations either of punch or conviviality, being wrapped in
+    slumber on a corner of the buffalo-skin, between Mac's stool and the
+    natives, who also occupied places on the floor.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Upon O'Flynn's first draught he turned to his next neighbour:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Potts, me bhoy, 'tain't s' bad."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll bet five dollars it won't make yer any happier."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Begob, I'm happy enough! Gentlemen, wud ye like I should sing ye a
+    song?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes," and the Colonel thumped the table for order, infinitely relieved
+    that the dinner was done, and the punch not likely to turn into a
+    <i>casus belli</i>. O'Flynn began a ditty about the Widdy Malone that woke
+    up Kaviak and made him rub his round eyes with astonishment. He sat up,
+    and hung on to the back of Mac's coat to make sure he had some
+    anchorage in the strange new waters he had so suddenly been called on
+    to navigate.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The song ended, the Colonel, as toast-master, proposed the health
+    of&mdash;he was going to say Father Wills, but felt it discreeter to name no
+    names. Standing up in the middle of the cabin, where he didn't have to
+    stoop, he lifted his cup till it knocked against the swing-shelf, and
+    called out, "Here's to Our Visitors, Neighbours, and Friends!"
+    Whereupon he made a stately circular bow, which ended by his offering
+    Kaviak his hand, in the manner of one who executes a figure in an
+    old-fashioned dance. The smallest of "Our Visitors," still keeping hold
+    of Mac, presented the Colonel with the disengaged half-yard of flannel
+    undershirt on the other side, and the speech went on, very flowery,
+    very hospitable, very Kentuckian.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the Colonel sat down there was much applause, and O'Flynn, who had
+    lent his cup to Nicholas, and didn't feel he could wait till it came
+    back, began to drink punch out of the dipper between shouts of:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hooray! Brayvo! Here's to the Kurrnul! God bless him! That's rale
+    oratry, Kurrnul! Here's to Kentucky&mdash;and ould Ireland."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Father Wills stood up, smiling, to reply.
+</p>
+<p>
+    <i>"Friends"</i> (the Boy thought the keen eyes rested a fraction of a
+    moment longer on Mac than on the rest),&mdash;<i>"I think in some ways this is
+    the pleasantest House-Warming I ever went to. I won't take up time
+    thanking the Colonel for the friendly sentiments he's expressed, though
+    I return them heartily. I must use these moments you are good enough to
+    give me in telling you something of what I feel is implied in the
+    founding of this camp of yours.</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+    <i>"Gentlemen, the few white dwellers in the Yukon country have not looked
+    forward"</i> (his eyes twinkled almost wickedly) <i>"with that pleasure you
+    might expect in exiles, to the influx of people brought up here by the
+    great Gold Discovery. We knew what that sort of craze leads to. We knew
+    that in a barren land like this, more and more denuded of wild game
+    every year, more and more the prey of epidemic disease&mdash;we knew that
+    into this sorely tried and hungry world would come a horde of men, all
+    of them ignorant of the conditions up here, most of them ill-provided
+    with proper food and clothing, many of them (I can say it without
+    offence in this company)&mdash;many of them men whom the older, richer
+    communities were glad to get rid of. Gentlemen, I have ventured to take
+    you into our confidence so far, because I want to take you still
+    farther&mdash;to tell you a little of the intense satisfaction with which we
+    recognise that good fortune has sent us in you just the sort of
+    neighbours we had not dared to hope for. It means more to us than you
+    realise. When I heard a few weeks ago that, in addition to the
+    boat-loads that had already got some distance up the river beyond Holy
+    Cross&mdash;"</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Going to Dawson?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, yes, Klondyke mad&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They'll be there before us, boys!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Anyways, they'll get to Minook."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Jesuit shook his head. "It isn't so certain. They probably made
+    only a couple of hundred miles or so before the Yukon went to sleep."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then if grub gives out they'll be comin' back here?" suggested Potts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    <i>"Small doubt of it,"</i> agreed the priest. <i>"And when I heard there were
+    parties of the same sort stranded at intervals all along the Lower
+    River&mdash;"</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You sure?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    <i>"And when Father Orloff of the Russian mission told us that he was
+    already having trouble with the two big rival parties frozen in the ice
+    below Ikogimeut&mdash;"</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Gosh! Wonder if any of 'em were on our ship?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    <i>"Well, gentlemen, I do not disguise from you that, when I heard of the
+    large amount of whiskey, the small amount of food, and the low type of
+    manners brought in by these gold-seekers, I felt my fears justified.
+    Such men don't work, don't contribute anything to the decent social
+    life of the community, don't build cabins like this. When I came down
+    on the ice the first time after you'd camped, and I looked up and saw
+    your solid stone chimney"</i> (he glanced at Mac), <i>"I didn't know what a
+    House-Warming it would make; but already, from far off across the ice
+    and snow, that chimney warmed my heart. Gentlemen, the fame of it has
+    gone up the river and down the river. Father Orloff is coming to see it
+    next week, and so are the white traders from Anvik and Andreiefsky, for
+    they've heard there's nothing like it in the Yukon. Of course, I know
+    that you gentlemen have not come to settle permanently. I know that
+    when the Great White Silence, as they call the long winter up here, is
+    broken by the thunder of the ice rushing down to the sea, you, like the
+    rest, will exchange the snow-fields for the gold-fields, and pass out
+    of our ken. Now, I'm not usually prone to try my hand at prophecy; but
+    I am tempted to say, even on our short acquaintance, that I am
+    tolerably sure that, while we shall be willing enough to spare most of
+    the new-comers to the Klondyke, we shall grudge to the gold-fields the
+    men who built this camp and warmed this cabin."</i> (His eye rested
+    reflectively on Mac.) <i>"I don't wish to sit down leaving an impression
+    of speaking with entire lack of sympathy of the impulse that brings men
+    up here for gold. I believe that, even with the sort in the two camps
+    below Ikogimeut&mdash;drinking, quarrelling, and making trouble with the
+    natives at the Russian mission&mdash;I believe that even with them, the gold
+    they came up here for is a symbol&mdash;a fetich, some of us may think. When
+    such men have it in their hands, they feel dimly that they are laying
+    tangible hold at last on some elusive vision of happiness that has
+    hitherto escaped them. Behind each man braving the Arctic winter up
+    here, is some hope, not all ignoble; some devotion, not all
+    unsanctified. Behind most of these men I seem to see a wife or child, a
+    parent, or some dear dream that gives that man his share in the Eternal
+    Hope. Friends, we call that thing we look for by different names; but
+    we are all seekers after treasure, all here have turned our backs on
+    home and comfort, hunting for the Great Reward&mdash;each man a new Columbus
+    looking for the New World. Some of us looking north, some south,
+    some"</i>&mdash;he hesitated the briefest moment, and then with a faint smile,
+    half sad, half triumphant, made a little motion of his head&mdash;<i>"some of
+    us ... looking upwards."</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+    But quickly, as though conscious that, if he had raised the moral tone
+    of the company, he had not raised its spirits, he hurried on:
+</p>
+<p>
+    <i>"Before I sit down, gentlemen, just one word more. I must congratulate
+    you on having found out so soon, not only the wisdom, but the pleasure
+    of looking at this Arctic world with intelligent eyes, and learning
+    some of her wonderful lessons. It is so that, now the hardest work is
+    finished, you will keep up your spirits and avoid the disease that
+    attacks all new-comers who simply eat, sleep, and wait for the ice to
+    go out. When I hear cheechalkos complaining of boredom up here in this
+    world of daily miracles, I think of the native boy in the
+    history-class, who, called on to describe the progress of civilisation,
+    said: 'In those days men had as many wives as they liked, and that was
+    called polygamy. Now they have only one wife, and that's called
+    monotony.'"</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+    While O'Flynn howled with delight, the priest wound up:
+</p>
+<p>
+    <i>"Gentlemen, if we find monotony up here, it's not the country's fault,
+    but a defect in our own civilisation."</i> Wherewith he sat down amid
+    cheers.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now, Colonel, is Mac goin' to recite some Border ballads?" inquired
+    the Boy, "or will he make a speech, or do a Highland fling?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel called formally upon Mr. MacCann.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac was no sooner on his legs than Kaviak, determined not to lose his
+    grasp of the situation, climbed upon the three-legged stool just
+    vacated, and resumed his former relations with the friendly coat-tail.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Everybody laughed but Mac, who pretended not to know what was going on
+    behind his back.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Gentlemen," he began harshly, with the air of one about to launch a
+    heavy indictment, "there's one element largely represented here by
+    numbers and by interests"&mdash;he turned round suddenly toward the natives,
+    and almost swung Kaviak off into space&mdash;"one element not explicitly
+    referred to in the speeches, either of welcome or of thanks. But,
+    gentlemen, I submit that these hitherto unrecognised Natives are our
+    real hosts, and a word about them won't be out of place. I've been told
+    to-day that, whether in Alaska, Greenland, or British America, they
+    call themselves <i>Innuits,</i> which means human beings. They believed, no
+    doubt, that they were the only ones in the world. I've been thinking a
+    great deal about these Esquimaux of late&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hear, hear!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "About their origin and their destiny." (Mac was beginning to enjoy
+    himself. The Boy was beginning to be bored and to drum softly with his
+    fingers.) "Now, gentlemen, Buffon says that the poles were the first
+    portions of the earth's crust to cool. While the equator, and even the
+    tropics of Cancer and of Capricorn, were still too boiling hot to
+    support life, up here in the Arctic regions there was a carboniferous
+    era goin' on&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where's the coal, then?" sneered Potts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's bein' discovered ... all over ... ask him" (indicating Father
+    Wills, who smiled assent). "Tropical forests grew where there are
+    glayshers now, and elephants and mastodons began life here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Jimminy Christmas!" interrupted the Boy, sitting up very straight. "Is
+    that Buffer you quoted a good authority?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "First-rate," Mac snapped out defiantly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good Lord! then the Garden o' Eden was up here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Course! <i>This</i> was the cradle o' the human race. Blow the Ganges! Blow
+    the Nile! It was our Yukon that saw the first people, 'cause of course
+    the first people lived in the first place got ready for 'em."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That don't follow. Read your Bible."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If I'm not right, how did it happen there were men here when the North
+    was first discovered?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sh!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mac's got the floor."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Shut up!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the Boy thumped the table with one hand and arraigned the
+    schoolmaster with the other.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now, Mac, I put it to you as a man o' science: if the race had got a
+    foothold in any other part o' the world, what in Sam Hill could make
+    'em come up here?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>We're</i> here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, tomfools after gold. They never dreamed there was gold. No,
+    Sir<i>ee!</i> the only thing on earth that could make men stay here, would
+    be that they were born here, and didn't know any better. Don't the
+    primitive man cling to his home, no matter what kind o' hole it is?
+    He's <i>afraid</i> to leave it. And these first men up here, why, it's plain
+    as day&mdash;they just hung on, things gettin' worse and worse, and colder
+    and colder, and some said, as the old men we laugh at say at home, 'The
+    climate ain't what it was when I was a boy,' and nobody believed 'em,
+    but everybody began to dress warmer and eat fat, and&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "All that Buffon says is&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes&mdash;and they invented one thing after another to meet the new
+    conditions&mdash;kaiaks and bidarras and ivory-tipped harpoons"&mdash;he was
+    pouring out his new notions at the fastest express rate&mdash;"and the
+    animals that couldn't stand it emigrated, and those that stayed behind
+    got changed&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Dry up."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "One at a time."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Buffon&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, yes, Mac, and the hares got white, and the men, playin' a losin'
+    game for centuries, got dull in their heads and stunted in their
+    legs&mdash;always cramped up in a kaiak like those fellas at St. Michael's.
+    And, why, it's clear as crystal&mdash;they're survivals! The Esquimaux are
+    the oldest race in the world."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who's makin' this speech?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Order!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Order!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, see here: <i>do</i> you admit it, Mac? Don't you see there were just
+    a few enterprisin' ones who cleared out, or, maybe, got carried away in
+    a current, and found better countries and got rich and civilised, and
+    became our forefathers? Hey, boys, ain't I right?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You sit down."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You'll get chucked out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Buffon&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Everybody was talking at once.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, it goes on still," the Boy roared above the din. "People who
+    stick at home, and are patient, and put up with things, they're doomed.
+    But look at the fellas that come out o' starvin' attics and stinkin'
+    pigsties to America. They live like lords, and they look at life like
+    men."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac was saying a great deal about the Ice Age and the first and second
+    periods of glaciation, but nobody could hear what.
+</p>
+<p>
+    <i>"Prince</i> Nicholas? Well, I should smile. He belongs to the oldest
+    family in the world. Hoop-la!" The Boy jumped up on his stool and
+    cracked his head against the roof; but he only ducked, rubbed his wild,
+    long hair till it stood out wilder than ever, and went on: "Nicholas's
+    forefathers were kings before Caesar; they were here before the
+    Pyramids&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel came round and hauled the Boy down. Potts was egging the
+    miscreant on. O'Flynn, poorly disguising his delight in a scrimmage,
+    had been shouting: "Ye'll spoil the Blow-Out, ye meddlin' jackass!
+    Can't ye let Mac make his spache? No; ye must ahlways be huntin' round
+    fur harrum to be doin' or throuble to make."
+</p>
+<p>
+    In the turmoil and the contending of many voices Nicholas began to
+    explain to his friends that it wasn't a real fight, as it had every
+    appearance of being, and the visitors were in no immediate danger of
+    their lives. But Kaviak feared the worst, and began to weep forlornly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The world is dyin' at top and bottom!" screamed the Boy, writhing
+    under the Colonel's clutch. "The ice will spread, the beasts will turn
+    white, and we'll turn yella, and we'll all dress in skins and eat fat
+    and be exactly like Kaviak, and the last man'll be found tryin' to warm
+    his hands at the Equator, his feet on an iceberg and his nose in a
+    snowstorm. Your old Buffer's got a long head, Mac. Here's to Buffer!"
+    Whereupon he subsided and drank freely of punch.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well," said the Colonel, severely, "you've had a Blow-Out if nobody
+    else has!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Feel better?" inquired Potts, tenderly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now, Mac, you shall have a fair field," said the Colonel, "and if the
+    Boy opens his trap again&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll punch 'im," promised O'Flynn, replenishing the disturber's cup.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Mac wouldn't be drawn. Besides, he was feeding Kaviak. So the
+    Colonel filled in the breach with "My old Kentucky Home," which he sang
+    with much feeling, if not great art.
+</p>
+<p>
+    This performance restored harmony and a gentle reflectiveness.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Father Wills told about his journey up here ten years before and of a
+    further expedition he'd once made far north to the Koyukuk.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But Nicholas knows more about the native life and legends than anyone
+    I ever met, except, of course, Yagorsha."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who's Yag&mdash;&mdash;?" began the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, that's the Village Story-teller." He was about to speak of
+    something else, but, lifting his eyes, he caught Mac's sudden glance of
+    grudging attention. The priest looked away, and went on: "There's a
+    story-teller in every settlement. He has always been a great figure in
+    the native life, I believe, but now more than ever."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why's that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, battles are over and blood-feuds are done, but the need for a
+    story-teller abides. In most villages he is a bigger man than the
+    chief&mdash;they're all 'ol' chiefs,' the few that are left&mdash;and when they
+    die there will be no more. So the tribal story-teller comes to be the
+    most important character"&mdash;the Jesuit smiled in that shrewd and gentle
+    way of his&mdash;"that is, of course, after the Shamán, as the Russians call
+    him, the medicine-man, who is a teller of stories, too, in his more
+    circumscribed fashion. But it's the Story-teller who helps his people
+    through the long winter&mdash;helps them to face the terrible new enemies,
+    epidemic disease and famine. He has always been their best defence
+    against that age-old dread they all have of the dark. Yes, no one
+    better able to send such foes flying than Yagorsha of Pymeut. Still,
+    Nicholas is a good second." The Prince of Pymeut shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tell them 'The White Crow's Last Flight,'" urged the priest.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Nicholas was not in the vein, and when they all urged him overmuch,
+    he, in self-defence, pulled a knife out of his pocket and a bit of
+    walrus ivory about the size of his thumb, and fell to carving.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What you makin'?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Button," says Nicholas; "me heap hurry get him done."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It looks more like a bird than a button," remarked the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Him bird&mdash;him button," replied the imperturbable one.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Half the folk-lore of the North has to do with the crow (or raven),"
+    the priest went on. "Seeing Kaviak's feather reminded me of a native
+    cradle-song that's a kind of a story, too. It's been roughly
+    translated."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Can you say it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I used to know how it went."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He began in a deep voice:
+</p>
+
+<p class="ind">
+  "'The wind blows over the Yukon.<br>
+  My husband hunts deer on the Koyukun mountains.<br>
+  Ahmi, ahmi, sleep, little one.
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+  There is no wood for the fire,<br>
+  The stone-axe is broken, my husband carries the other.<br>
+  Where is the soul of the sun? Hid in the dam of the beaver, waiting the
+  spring-time.<br>
+  Ahmi, ahmi, sleep little one, wake not!
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+  Look not for ukali, old woman.<br>
+  Long since the cache was emptied, the crow lights no more on the ridge
+  pole.<br>
+  Long since, my husband departed. Why does he wait in the mountains?<br>
+  Ahmi, ahmi, sleep little one, softly.
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+  Where, where, where is my own?<br>
+  Does he lie starving on the hillside? Why does he linger?<br>
+  Comes he not soon I must seek him among the mountains.<br>
+  Ahmi, ahmi, little one, sleep sound.
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+  Hush! hush! hush! The crow cometh laughing.<br>
+  Red is his beak, his eyes glisten, the false one!<br>
+  "Thanks for a good meal to Kuskokala the Shamán&mdash;<br>
+  On the far mountain quietly lieth your husband."<br>
+  Ahmi, ahmi, sleep little one, wake not.
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+  "Twenty deers' tongues tied to the pack on his shoulders;<br>
+  Not a tongue in his mouth to call to his wife with.<br>
+  Wolves, foxes, and ravens are tearing and fighting for morsels.<br>
+  Tough and hard are the sinews; not so the child in your bosom."<br>
+  Ahmi, ahmi, sleep little one, wake not!
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+  Over the mountain slowly staggers the hunter.<br>
+  Two bucks' thighs on his shoulders.<br>
+  Twenty deers' tongues in his belt.<br>
+  "Go, gather wood, kindle a fire, old woman!"<br>
+  Off flew the crow&mdash;liar, cheat and deceiver.<br>
+  Wake, oh sleeper, awake! welcome your father!
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+  He brings you back fat, marrow, venison fresh from the mountain<br>
+  Tired and worn, yet he's carved you a toy of the deer's horn,<br>
+  While he was sitting and waiting long for the deer on the hillside.<br>
+  Wake! see the crow! hiding himself from the arrow;<br>
+  Wake, little one, wake! here is your father safe home.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who's 'Kuskokala the Shamán'?" the Boy inquired.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, better ask Nicholas," answered the priest.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Nicholas was absorbed in his carving.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Again Mr. O'Flynn obliged, roaring with great satisfaction:
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+  "'I'm a stout rovin' blade, and what matther my name,<br>
+  For I ahlways was wild, an' I'll niver be tame;<br>
+  An' I'll kiss putty gurrls wheriver I go,<br>
+  An' what's that to annyone whether or no.
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+    <i>Chorus.</i>
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+  "'Ogedashin, den thashin, come, boys! let us drink;<br>
+  'Tis madness to sorra, 'tis folly to think.<br>
+  For we're ahl jolly fellows wheriver we go&mdash;<br>
+  Ogedashin, den thashin, na boneen sheen lo!'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Potts was called on. No, he couldn't sing, but he could show them a
+    trick or two. And with his grimy euchre-deck he kept his word, showing
+    that he was not the mere handy-man, but the magician of the party. The
+    natives, who know the cards as we know our A B C's, were enthralled,
+    and began to look upon Potts as a creature of more than mortal skill.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Again the Boy pressed Nicholas to dance. "No, no;" and under his
+    breath: "You come Pymeut."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Meanwhile, O'Flynn, hugging the pleasant consciousness that he had
+    distinguished himself&mdash;his pardner, too&mdash;complained that the only
+    contribution Mac or the Boy had made was to kick up a row. What steps
+    were they going to take to retrieve their characters and minister to
+    the public entertainment?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've supplied the decorations," said Mac in a final tone.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, and the Bhoy? What good arre ye, annyway?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hard to say," said the person addressed; but, thinking hard: "Would
+    you like to see me wag my ears?" Some languid interest was manifested
+    in this accomplishment, but it fell rather flat after Potts' splendid
+    achievements with the euchre-deck.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, ye ain't good fur much as an enthertainer," said O'Flynn frankly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak had begun to cry for more punch, and Mac was evidently growing a
+    good deal perplexed as to the further treatment for his patient.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did ye be tellin' some wan, Father, that when ye found that Esquimer
+    he had grass stuffed in his mouth? Sure, he'll be missin' that grass.
+    Ram somethin' down his throat."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Was it done to shorten his sufferings?" the Colonel asked in an
+    undertone.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," answered the priest in the same low voice; "if they listen long
+    to the dying, the cry gets fixed in their imagination, and they hear it
+    after the death, and think the spirit haunts the place. Their fear and
+    horror of the dead is beyond belief. They'll turn a dying man out of
+    his own house, and not by the door, but through a hole in the roof. Or
+    they pull out a log to make an opening, closing it up quick, so the
+    spirit won't find his way back."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak continued to lament.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sorry we can't offer you some blubber, Kaviak."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "'Tain't that he's missin'; he's got an inexhaustible store of his own.
+    His mistake is offerin' it to us."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I know what's the matter with that little shaver," said the Boy. "He
+    hasn't got any stool, and you keep him standin' on those legs of his
+    like matches."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Let him sit on the buffalo-skin there," said Mac gruffly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't you s'pose he's thought o' the buffalo-skin? But he'd hate it. A
+    little fella likes to be up where he can see what's goin' on. He'd feel
+    as lost 'way down there on the buffalo as a puppy in a corn-brake."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy was standing up, looking round.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I know. Elephas! come along, Jimmie!" In spite of remonstrance, they
+    rushed to the door and dragged in the "fossle." When Nicholas and his
+    friends realised what was happening, they got up grunting and
+    protesting. "Lend a hand, Andrew," the Boy called to the man nearest.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No&mdash;no!" objected the true son of the Church, with uncommon fervour.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You, then, Nicholas."
+</p>
+<p>
+    <i>"Oo,</i> ha, <i>oo!</i> No touch! No touch!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's up? You don't know what this is."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Huh! Nicholas know plenty well. Nicholas no touch bones of dead
+    devils." This view of the "fossle" so delighted the company that,
+    acting on a sudden impulse, they pushed the punch-bowl out of the way,
+    and, with a whoop, hoisted the huge thing on the table. Then the Boy
+    seized the whimpering Kaviak, and set him high on the throne. So
+    surprised was the topmost Spissimen that he was as quiet for a moment
+    as the one underneath him, staring about, blinking. Then, looking down
+    at Mac's punch-cup, he remembered his grievance, and took up the wail
+    where he had left it off.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nuh, nuh! don't you do that," said the Boy with startling suddenness.
+    "If you make that noise, I'll have to make a worse one. If you cry,
+    Kaviak, I'll have to sing. Hmt, hmt! don't you do it." And as Kaviak,
+    in spite of instructions, began to bawl, the Boy began to do a
+    plantation jig, crooning monotonously:
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+  "'Grashoppah sett'n on de swee' p'tater vine,<br>
+  Swee' p'tater vine, swee' p'tater vine;<br>
+  Grasshoppah&mdash;'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He stopped as suddenly as he'd begun. "<i>Now</i>, will you be good?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak drew a breath with a catch in it, looked round, and began as
+    firmly as ever:
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+    "Weh!&mdash;eh!&mdash;eh!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sh&mdash;sh!" The Boy clapped his hands, and lugubriously intoned:
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+  "'Dey's de badger and de bah,<br>
+  En de funny lil hah,<br>
+  En de active lil flea,<br>
+  En de lil armadillah<br>
+  Dat sleeps widouter pillah,<br>
+  An dey all gottah mate but me&mdash;ee&mdash;ee!'
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Farva!" Kaviak gasped.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Say, do a nigger breakdown," solicited Potts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ain't room; besides, I can't do it with blisters."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They did the impossible&mdash;they made room, and turned back the
+    buffalo-skin. Only the big Colonel, who was most in the way of all,
+    sat, not stirring, staring in the fire. Such a look on the absent,
+    tender face as the great masters, the divinest poets cannot often
+    summon, but which comes at the call of some foolish old nursery jingle,
+    some fragment of half-forgotten folk-lore, heard when the world was
+    young&mdash;when all hearing was music, when all sight was "pictures," when
+    every sense brought marvels that seemed the everyday way of the
+    wonderful, wonderful world.
+</p>
+<p>
+    For an obvious reason it is not through the utterances of the greatest
+    that the child receives his first intimations of the beauty and the
+    mystery of things. These come in lowly guise with familiar everyday
+    voices, but their eloquence has the incommunicable grace of infancy,
+    the promise of the first dawn, the menace of the first night.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you remember the thing about the screech-owl and the weather
+    signs?" said the Colonel, roused at last by the jig on his toes and the
+    rattle of improvised "bones" almost in his face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Reckon I do, honey," said the Boy, his feet still flying and flapping
+    on the hard earthen floor.
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+  "<i>'Wen de screech-owl light on de gable en'<br>
+  En holler, Who&mdash;ool oh&mdash;oh!'</i>"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He danced up and hooted in Kaviak's face.
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+  "<i>'Den yo' bettah keep yo eyeball peel,<br>
+  Kase 'e bring bad luck t' yo'.<br>
+  Oh&mdash;oh! oh-oh!'</i>"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then, sinking his voice, dancing slowly, and glancing anxiously under the
+    table:
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+  "<i>'Wen de ole black cat widdee yalla eyes<br>
+  Slink round like she atterah mouse,<br>
+  Den yo' bettah take keer yo'self en frien's,<br>
+  Kase deys sholy a witch en de house.'</i>"
+</p>
+<p>
+    An awful pause, a shiver, and a quick change of scene, indicated by a
+    gurgling whoop, ending in a quacking:
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+  "<i>'Wen de puddle-duck'e leave de pon',<br>
+  En start t' comb e fedder,<br>
+  Den yo' bettah take yo' omberel,<br>
+  Kase deys gwine tubbee wet wedder.'</i>"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now comes the speckly rooster," the Colonel prompted.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy crowed long and loud:
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+  "<i>'Effer ole wile rooster widder speckly tail<br>
+  Commer crowin' befoh de do',<br>
+  En yo got some comp'ny a'ready,<br>
+  Yo's gwinter have some mo'.'</i>"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then he grunted, and went on all fours. "Kaviak!" he called, "you take
+    warnin'&mdash;&mdash;
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+  "<i>'Wen yo' see a pig agoin' along&mdash;'</i>"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Look here: Kaviak's never seen a pig! I call it a shame.
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+  <i>"'Wen yo' see a pig agoin' along<br>
+  Widder straw en de sider 'is mouf,<br>
+  It'll be a tuhble winter,<br>
+  En yo' bettuh move down Souf.'"</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+    He jumped up and dashed into a breakdown, clattering the bones, and
+    screeching:
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+  <i>"'Squirl he got a bushy tail,<br>
+  Possum's tail am bah,<br>
+  Raccoon's tail am ringed all roun'&mdash;<br>
+  Touch him ef yo dah!<br>
+  Rabbit got no tail at all,<br>
+  Cep a little bit o' bunch o' hah.'"</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+    The group on the floor, undoubtedly, liked that part of the
+    entertainment that involved the breakdown, infinitely the best of all,
+    but simultaneously, at its wildest moment, they all turned their heads
+    to the door. Mac noticed the movement, listened, and then got up,
+    lifted the latch, and cautiously looked out. The Boy caught a glimpse
+    of the sky over Mac's shoulder.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Jimminy Christmas!" He stopped, nearly breathless. "It can't be a
+    fire. Say, boys! they're havin' a Blow-Out up in heaven."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The company crowded out. The sky was full of a palpitant light. An
+    Indian appeared from round the stockade; he was still staring up at the
+    stone chimney.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Are we on fire?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How-do." He handed Father Wills a piece of dirty paper.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hah! Yes. All right. Andrew!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Andrew needed no more. He bustled away to harness the dogs. The white
+    men were staring up at the sky. "What's goin' on in heaven, Father?
+    S'pose you call this the Aurora Borealis&mdash;hey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes," said the priest; "and finer than we often get it. We are not far
+    enough north for the great displays."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He went in to put on his parki.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac, after looking out, had shut the door and stayed behind with
+    Kaviak.
+</p>
+<p>
+    On Father Will's return Farva, speaking apparently less to the priest
+    than to the floor, muttered: "Better let him stop where he is till his
+    cold's better."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel came in.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Leave the child here!" ejaculated the priest.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "&mdash;till he's better able to travel."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why not?" said the Colonel promptly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, it would be a kindness to keep him a few days. I'll <i>have</i> to
+    travel fast tonight."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then it's settled." Mac bundled Kaviak into the Boy's bunk.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the others were ready to go out again, Farva caught up his fur
+    coat and went along with them.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The dogs were not quite ready. The priest was standing a little
+    absentmindedly, looking up. The pale green streamers were fringed with
+    the tenderest rose colour, and from the corona uniting them at the
+    zenith, they shot out across the heavens, with a rapid circular and
+    lateral motion, paling one moment, flaring up again the next.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Wonder what makes it," said the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Electricity," Mac snapped out promptly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The priest smiled.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "One mystery for another."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He turned to the Boy, and they went on together, preceding the others,
+    a little, on the way down the trail towards the river.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I think you must come and see us at Holy Cross&mdash;eh? Come soon;" and
+    then, without waiting for an answer: "The Indians think these flitting
+    lights are the souls of the dead at play. But Yagorsha says that long
+    ago a great chief lived in the North who was a mighty hunter. It was
+    always summer up here then, and the big chief chased the big game from
+    one end of the year to another, from mountain to mountain and from
+    river to sea. He killed the biggest moose with a blow of his fist, and
+    caught whales with his crooked thumb for a hook. One long day in summer
+    he'd had a tremendous chase after a wonderful bird, and he came home
+    without it, deadbeat and out of temper. He lay down to rest, but the
+    sunlight never winked, and the unending glare maddened him. He rolled,
+    and tossed, and roared, as only the Yukon roars when the ice rushes
+    down to the sea. But he couldn't sleep. Then in an awful fury he got
+    up, seized the day in his great hands, tore it into little bits, and
+    tossed them high in the air. So it was dark. And winter fell on the
+    world for the first time. During months and months, just to punish this
+    great crime, there was no bright sunshine; but often in the long night,
+    while the chief was wearying for summer to come again, he'd be
+    tantalised by these little bits of the broken day that flickered in the
+    sky. Coming, Andrew?" he called back.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The others trooped down-hill, dogs, sleds, and all. There was a great
+    hand-shaking and good-byeing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas whispered:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You come Pymeut?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I should just pretty nearly think I would."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You dance heap good. Buttons no all done." He put four little ivory
+    crows into the Boy's hands. They were rudely but cleverly carved, with
+    eyes outlined in ink, and supplied under the breast with a neat
+    inward-cut shank.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mighty fine!" The Boy examined them by the strange glow that
+    brightened in the sky.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You keep."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh no, can't do that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>Yes!</i>" Nicholas spoke peremptorily. "Yukon men have big feast, must
+    bring present. Me no got reindeer, me got button." He grinned.
+    "Goo'-bye." And the last of the guests went his way.
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    It was only habit that kept the Colonel toasting by the fire before he
+    turned in, for the cabin was as warm to-night as the South in
+    mid-summer.
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+  <i>"Grasshoppah sett'n on a swee' p'tater vine,"</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy droned sleepily as he untied the leathern thongs that kept up
+    his muckluck legs&mdash;
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+  <i>"Swee' p'tater vine, swee' p'ta&mdash;"</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+    "All those othahs"&mdash;the Colonel waved a hand in the direction of
+    Pymeut&mdash;"I think we dreamed 'em, Boy. You and me playing the Big Game
+    with Fohtune. Foolishness! Klondyke? Yoh crazy. Tell me the river's
+    hard as iron and the snow's up to the windah? Don' b'lieve a wo'd of
+    it. We're on some plantation, Boy, down South, in the niggah quawtaws."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy was turning back the covers, and balancing a moment on the side
+    of the bunk.
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+ <i>"Sett'n on a swee' p'tater vine, swee' p'ta&mdash;"</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Great Caesar's ghost!" He jumped up, and stood staring down at the
+    sleeping Kaviak.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah&mdash;a&mdash;didn't you know? He's been left behind for a few days."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, I can see he's left behind. No, Colonel, I reckon we're in the
+    Arctic regions all right when it comes to catchin' Esquimers in your
+    bed!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He pulled the furs over Kaviak and himself, and curled down to sleep.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH6"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER V
+</h2>
+<center>
+    THE SHAMÁN.
+</center>
+<p class="ind">
+    "For my part, I have ever believed and do now know, that there are
+    witches."&mdash;<i>Religio Medici.</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy had hoped to go to Pymeut the next day, but his feet refused to
+    carry him. Mac took a diagram and special directions, and went after
+    the rest of elephas, conveying the few clumsy relics home, bit by bit,
+    with a devotion worthy of a pious pilgrim.
+</p>
+<p>
+    For three days the Boy growled and played games with Kaviak, going
+    about at first chiefly on hands and knees.
+</p>
+<p>
+    On the fifth day after the Blow-Out, "You comin' long to Pymeut this
+    mornin'?" he asked the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's the rush?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>Rush!</i> Good Lord! it's 'most a week since they were here. And it's
+    stopped snowin', and hasn't thought of sleetin' yet or anything else
+    rambunksious. Come on, Colonel."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Father Wills had shown the Colonel the piece of dirty paper the
+    Indian had brought on the night of the Blow-Out.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>Trouble threatened. Pymeuts think old chief dying not of consumption,
+    but of a devil. They've sent a dogteam to bring the Shamán down over
+    the ice. Come quickly.&mdash;</i>PAUL."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Reckon we'd better hold our horses till we hear from Holy Cross."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hear what?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel didn't answer, but the Boy didn't wait to listen. He
+    swallowed his coffee scalding hot, rolled up some food and stuff for
+    trading, in a light reindeer skin blanket, lashed it packwise on his
+    back, shouldered his gun, and made off before the Trio came in to
+    breakfast.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The first sign that he was nearing a settlement, was the appearance of
+    what looked like sections of rude wicker fencing, set up here and there
+    in the river and frozen fast in the ice. High on the bank lay one of
+    the long cornucopia-shaped basket fish-traps, and presently he caught
+    sight of something in the bleak Arctic landscape that made his heart
+    jump, something that to Florida eyes looked familiar.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, if it doesn't make me think of John Fox's cabin on Cypress
+    Creek!" he said to himself, formulating an impression that had vaguely
+    haunted him on the Lower River in September; wondering if the Yukon
+    flooded like the Caloosahatchee, and if the water could reach as far up
+    as all that.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He stopped to have a good look at this first one of the Pymeut caches,
+    for this modest edifice, like a Noah's Ark on four legs, was not a
+    habitation, but a storehouse, and was perched so high, not for fear of
+    floods, but for fear of dogs and mice. This was manifest from the fact
+    that there were fish-racks and even ighloos much nearer the river.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy stopped and hesitated; it was a sore temptation to climb up and
+    see what they had in that cache. There was an inviting plank all ready,
+    with sticks nailed on it transversely to prevent the feet from
+    slipping. But the Boy stopped at the rude ladder's foot, deciding that
+    this particular mark of interest on the part of a stranger might be
+    misinterpreted. It would, perhaps, be prudent to find Nicholas first of
+    all. But where was Nicholas?&mdash;where was anybody?
+</p>
+<p>
+    The scattered, half-buried huts were more like earth-mounds,
+    snow-encrusted, some with drift-logs propped against the front face
+    looking riverwards.
+</p>
+<p>
+    While he was cogitating how to effect an entrance to one of these, or
+    to make his presence known, he saw, to his relief, the back of a
+    solitary Indian going in the direction of an ighloo farther up the
+    river.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hi, hi!" he shouted, and as the figure turned he made signs. It
+    stopped.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How-do?" the Boy called out when he got nearer. "You talk English?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The native laughed. A flash of fine teeth and sparkling eyes lit up a
+    young, good-looking face. This boy seemed promising.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How d'ye do? You know Nicholas?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The laugh was even gayer. It seemed to be a capital joke to know
+    Nicholas.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where is he?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The figure turned and pointed, and then: "Come. I show you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    This was a more highly educated person than Nicholas, thought the
+    visitor, remarking the use of the nominative scorned of the Prince.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They walked on to the biggest of the underground dwellings.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Is this where the King hangs out? Nicholas' father lives here?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No. This is the Kazhga."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, the Kachime. Ain't you comin' in?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh no."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    His guide had a fit of laughter, and then turned to go.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Say, what's your name?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The answer sounded like "Muckluck."
+</p>
+<p>
+    And just then Nicholas crawled out of the tunnel-like opening leading
+    into the council-house. He jumped up, beaming at the sight of his
+    friend.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Say, Nicholas, who's this fella that's always laughing, no matter what
+    you say? Calls himself 'Muckluck.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The individual referred to gave way to another spasm of merriment,
+    which infected Nicholas.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My sister&mdash;this one," he explained.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh-h!" The Boy joined in the laugh, and pulled off his Arctic cap with
+    a bow borrowed straight from the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Princess Muckluck, I'm proud to know you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Name no Muckluck," began Nicholas; "name Mahk&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mac? Nonsense! Mac's a man's name&mdash;she's Princess Muckluck. Only,
+    how's a fella to tell, when you dress her like a man?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Princess still giggled, while her brother explained.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No like man. See?" He showed how the skirt of her deerskin parki,
+    reaching, like her brother's, a little below the knee, was shaped round
+    in front, and Nicholas's own&mdash;all men's parkis were cut straight
+    across.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I see. How's your father?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas looked grave; even Princess Muckluck stopped laughing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come," said Nicholas, and the Boy followed him on all fours into the
+    Kachime.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Entering on his stomach, he found himself in a room about sixteen by
+    twenty feet, two-thirds underground, log-walls chinked with moss, a
+    roof of poles sloping upwards, tent-like, but leaving an opening in the
+    middle for a smoke-hole some three feet square, and covered at present
+    by a piece of thin, translucent skin. With the sole exception of the
+    smoke-hole, the whole thing was so covered with earth, and capped with
+    snow, that, expecting a mere cave, one was surprised at the wood-lining
+    within. The Boy was still more surprised at the concentration, there,
+    of malignant smells.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He gasped, and was for getting out again as fast as possible, when the
+    bearskin flap fell behind him over the Kachime end of the
+    entrance-tunnel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Through the tobacco-smoke and the stifling air he saw, vaguely, a grave
+    gathering of bucks sitting, or, rather, lounging and squatting, on the
+    outer edge of the wide sleeping-bench that ran all round the room,
+    about a foot and a half from the hewn-log floor.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Their solemn, intent faces were lit grotesquely by the uncertain glow
+    of two seal-oil lamps, mounted on two posts, planted one in front of
+    the right sleeping-bench, the other on the left.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy hesitated. Was it possible he could get used to the atmosphere?
+    Certainly it was warm in here, though there was no fire that he could
+    see. Nicholas was talking away very rapidly to the half-dozen grave and
+    reverend signiors, they punctuating his discourse with occasional
+    grunts and a well-nigh continuous coughing. Nicholas wound up in
+    English.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me tell you: he heap good friend. You ketch um tobacco?" he inquired
+    suddenly of his guest. Fortunately, the Boy had remembered to "ketch"
+    that essential, and his little offering was laid before the
+    council-men. More grunts, and room made for the visitor on the
+    sleeping-bench next the post that supported one of the lamps, a clay
+    saucer half-full of seal-oil, in which a burning wick of twisted moss
+    gave forth a powerful odour, a fair amount of smoke, and a faint light.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy sat down, still staring about him, taking note of the well-hewn
+    logs, and of the neat attachment of the timbers by a saddle-joint at
+    the four corners of the roof.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who built this?" he inquired of Nicholas.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ol' father, an' ... heap ol' men gone dead."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Gee! Well, whoever did it was on to his job," he said. "I don't seen a
+    nail in the whole sheebang."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, no nail."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy remembered Nicholas's sled, and, looking again at the
+    disproportionately small hands of the men about him, corrected his
+    first impression that they were too feminine to be good for much.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A dirty old fellow, weak and sickly in appearance, began to talk
+    querulously. All the others listened with respect, smoking and making
+    inarticulate noises now and then. When that discourse was finished, a
+    fresh one was begun by yet another coughing councillor.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's it all about?" the Boy asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ol' Chief heap sick," said the buck on the Boy's right.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ol' Chief, ol' father, b'long me," Nicholas observed with pride.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes; but aren't the Holy Cross people nursing him?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Brother Paul gone; white medicine no good."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They all shook their heads and coughed despairingly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then try s'm' other&mdash;some yella-brown, Esquimaux kind," hazarded the
+    Boy lightly, hardly noticing what he was saying till he found nearly
+    all the eyes of the company fixed intently upon him. Nicholas was
+    translating, and it was clear the Boy had created a sensation.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Father Wills no like," said one buck doubtfully. "He make cross-eyes
+    when Shamán come."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh yes, medicine-man," said the Boy, following the narrative eagerly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Shamán go way," volunteered an old fellow who hitherto had held his
+    peace; "all get sick"&mdash;he coughed painfully&mdash;"heap Pymeuts die."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Father Wills come." Nicholas took up the tale afresh. "Shamán come.
+    Father Wills heap mad. He no let Shamán stay."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No; him say, 'Go! plenty quick, plenty far. Hey, you! <i>Mush!</i>'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    They smoked awhile in silence broken only by coughs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Shamán say, 'Yukon Inua plenty mad.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who is Yukon Inua? Where does he live?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Unner Yukon ice," whispered Nicholas. "Oh, the river spirit?... Of
+    course."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Him heap strong. Long time"&mdash;he motioned back into the ages with one
+    slim brown hand&mdash;"fore Holy Cross here, Yukon Inua take good care
+    Pymeuts."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No tell Father Wills?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then in a low guttural voice: "Shamán come again."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Gracious! When?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To-night."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Jiminny Christmas!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    They sat and smoked and coughed. By-and-by, as if wishing thoroughly to
+    justify their action, Nicholas resumed:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You savvy, ol' father try white medicine&mdash;four winter, four summer. No
+    good. Ol' father say, 'Me well man? Good friend Holy Cross, good friend
+    Russian mission. Me ol'? me sick? Send for Shamán.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The entire company grunted in unison.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You no tell?" Nicholas added with recurrent anxiety.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, no; they shan't hear through me. I'm safe."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Presently they all got up, and began removing and setting back the hewn
+    logs that formed the middle of the floor. It then appeared that,
+    underneath, was an excavation about two feet deep. In the centre,
+    within a circle of stones, were the charred remains of a fire, and here
+    they proceeded to make another.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As soon as it began to blaze, Yagorsha the Story-teller took the cover
+    off the smoke-hole, so the company was not quite stifled.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A further diversion was created by several women crawling in, bringing
+    food for the men-folk, in old lard-cans or native wooden kantaks. These
+    vessels they deposited by the fire, and with an exchange of grunts went
+    out as they had come.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas wouldn't let the Boy undo his pack.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, we come back," he said, adding something in his own tongue to the
+    company, and then crawled out, followed by the Boy. Their progress was
+    slow, for the Boy's "Canadian webfeet" had been left in the Kachime,
+    and he sank in the snow at every step. Twice in the dusk he stumbled
+    over an ighloo, or a sled, or some sign of humanity, and asked of the
+    now silent, preoccupied Nicholas, "Who lives here?" The answer had
+    been, "Nobody; all dead."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy was glad to see approaching, at last, a human figure. It came
+    shambling through the snow, with bent head and swaying, jerking gait,
+    looked up suddenly and sheered off, flitting uncertainly onward, in the
+    dim light, like a frightened ghost.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who is that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Shamán. Him see in dark all same owl. Him know you white man."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy stared after him. The bent figure of the Shamán looked like a
+    huge bat flying low, hovering, disappearing into the night.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Those your dogs howling?" the visitor asked, thinking that for sheer
+    dismalness Pymeut would be hard to beat.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas stopped suddenly and dropped down; the ground seemed to open
+    and swallow him. The Boy stooped and saw his friend's feet disappearing
+    in a hole. He seized one of them. "Hold on; wait for me!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas kicked, but to no purpose; he could make only such progress as
+    his guest permitted.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Presently a gleam. Nicholas had thrust away the flap at the tunnel's
+    end, and they stood in the house of the Chief of the Pymeuts, that
+    native of whom Father Wills had said, "He is the richest and most
+    intelligent man of his tribe."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The single room seemed very small after the spaciousness of the
+    Kachime, but it was the biggest ighloo in the settlement.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A fire burnt brightly in the middle of the earthen floor, and over it
+    was bending Princess Muckluck, cooking the evening meal. She nodded,
+    and her white teeth shone in the blaze. Over in the corner, wrapped in
+    skins, lay a man on the floor groaning faintly. The salmon, toasting on
+    sticks over wood coals, smelt very appetising.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, your fish are whole. Don't you clean 'em first?" asked the
+    visitor, surprised out of his manners.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," said Nicholas; "him better no cut."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They sat down by the fire, and the Princess waited on them. The Boy
+    discovered that it was perfectly true. Yukon salmon broiled in their
+    skins over a birch fire are the finest eating in the world, and any
+    "other way" involves a loss of flavour.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He was introduced for the first time to the delights of reindeer
+    "back-fat," and found even that not so bad.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You are lucky, Nicholas, to have a sister&mdash;such a nice one, too"&mdash;(the
+    Princess giggled)&mdash;"to keep house for you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas understood, at least, that politeness was being offered, and
+    he grinned.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've got a sister myself. I'll show you her picture some day. I care
+    about her a lot. I've come up here to make a pile so that we can buy
+    back our old place in Florida."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He said this chiefly to the Princess, for she evidently had profited
+    more by her schooling, and understood things quite like a Christian.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did you ever eat an orange, Princess?" he continued.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Kind o' fish?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, fruit; a yella ball that grows on a tree."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me know," said Nicholas; "me see him in boxes St. Michael's. Him
+    bully."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes. Well, we had a lot of trees all full of those yella balls, and we
+    used to eat as many as we liked. We don't have much winter down where I
+    live&mdash;summer pretty nearly all the time."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'd like go there," said the girl.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, will you come and see us, Muckluck? When I've found a gold-mine
+    and have bought back the Orange Grove, my sister and me are goin' to
+    live together, like you and Nicholas."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She look like you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No; and it's funny, too, 'cause we're twins."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Twins! What's twins?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Two people born at the same time."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No!" ejaculated Nicholas.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, yes, and they always care a heap about each other when they're
+    twins."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Muckluck stared incredulously.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>Two</i> at the same time!" she exclaimed. "It's like that, then, in your
+    country?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy saw not astonishment alone, but something akin to disgust in
+    the face of the Princess. He felt, vaguely, he must justify his
+    twinship.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Of course; there's nothing strange about it; it happens quite often."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>Often?</i>"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes; people are very much pleased. Once in a while there are even
+    three&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "All at the same time!" Her horror turned into shrieks of laughter.
+    "Why, your women are like our dogs! Human beings and seals never have
+    more than one at a time!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The old man in the corner began to moan and mutter feverishly. Nicholas
+    went to him, bent down, and apparently tried to soothe him. Muckluck
+    gathered up the supper-things and set them aside.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You were at the Holy Cross school?" asked the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Six years&mdash;with Mother Aloysius and the Sisters. They very good."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So you're a Catholic, then?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh yes."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You speak the best English I've heard from a native."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I love Sister Winifred. I want to go back&mdash;unless"&mdash;she regarded the
+    Boy with a speculative eye&mdash;"unless I go your country."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The sick man began to talk deliriously, and lifted up a terrible old
+    face with fever-bright eyes glaring through wisps of straight gray
+    hair. No voice but his was heard for some time in the ighloo, then, "I
+    fraid," said Muckluck, crouching near the fire, but with head turned
+    over shoulder, staring at the sick man.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No wonder," said the Boy, thinking such an apparition enough to
+    frighten anybody.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nicholas 'fraid, too," she whispered, "when the devil talks."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The devil?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes. Sh! You hear?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The delirious chatter went on, rising to a scream. Nicholas came
+    hurrying back to the fire with a look of terror in his face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me go get Shamán."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No; he come soon." Muckluck clung to him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They both crouched down by the fire.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You 'fraid he'll die before the Shamán gets here?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh no," said Muckluck soothingly, but her face belied her words.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The sick man called hoarsely. Nicholas got him some water, and propped
+    him up to drink. He glared over the cup with wild eyes, his teeth
+    chattering against the tin. The Boy, himself, felt a creep go down his
+    spine.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Muckluck moved closer to him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mustn't say he die," she whispered. "If Nicholas think he die, he drag
+    him out&mdash;leave him in the snow." "Never!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sh!" she made him a sign to be quiet. The rambling fever-talk went on,
+    Nicholas listening fascinated. "No Pymeut," she whispered, "like live
+    in ighloo any more if man die there."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You mean, if they know a person's dying they haul him out o'
+    doors&mdash;and <i>leave</i> him a night like this?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If not, how get him out ... after?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, carry him out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>Touch</i> him? Touch <i>dead</i> man?" She shuddered. "Oh, no. Bad, bad! I no
+    think he die," she resumed, raising her voice. But Nicholas rejoined
+    them, silent, looking very grave. Was he contemplating turning the poor
+    old fellow out? The Boy sat devising schemes to prevent the barbarism
+    should it come to that. The wind had risen; it was evidently going to
+    be a rough night.
+</p>
+<p>
+    With imagination full of sick people turned out to perish, the Boy
+    started up as a long wail came, muffled, but keen still with anguish,
+    down through the snow and the earth, by way of the smoke-hole, into the
+    dim little room.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, Nicholas! what was that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Wait! Listen! There, that! Why, it's a child crying."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, him Chèe."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Let's go and bring him in."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Bring dog in here?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Dog! That's no dog."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, him dog; him my Chèe."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Making a human noise like that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas nodded. The only sounds for some time were the doleful
+    lamenting of the Mahlemeut without, and the ravings of the Pymeut Chief
+    within.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy was conscious of a queer, dream-like feeling. All this had been
+    going on up here for ages. It had been like this when Columbus came
+    over the sea. All the world had changed since then, except the
+    steadfast North. The Boy sat up suddenly, and rubbed his eyes. With
+    that faculty on the part of the unlearned that one is tempted to call
+    "American," a faculty for assimilating the grave conclusions of the
+    doctors, and importing them light-heartedly into personal experience,
+    he realised that what met his eyes here in Nicholas' house was one of
+    the oldest pictures humanity has presented. This was what was going on
+    by the Yukon, when King John, beside that other river, was yielding
+    Magna Charta to the barons. While the Caesars were building Rome the
+    Pymeut forefathers were building just such ighloos as this. While
+    Pheidias wrought his marbles, the men up here carved walrus-ivory, and,
+    in lieu of Homer, recited "The Crow's Last Flight" and "The Legend of
+    the Northern Lights."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas had risen again, his mouth set hard, his small hands shaking.
+    He unrolled an old reindeer-skin full of holes, and examined it. At
+    this the girl, who had been about to make up the fire, threw down the
+    bit of driftwood and hid her face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The sick man babbled on.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Faint under the desolate sound another&mdash;sibilant, clearer, uncannily
+    human. Nicholas had heard, too, for he threw down the tattered
+    deerskin, and went to the other side of the fire. Voices in the tunnel.
+    Nicholas held back the flap and gravely waited there, till one Pymeut
+    after another crawled in. They were the men the Boy had seen at the
+    Kachime, with one exception&mdash;a vicious-looking old fellow, thin, wiry,
+    with a face like a smoked chimpanzee and eyes of unearthly brightness.
+    He was given the best place by the fire, and held his brown claws over
+    the red coals while the others were finding their places.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy, feeling he would need an interpreter, signed to Muckluck to
+    come and sit by him. Grave as a judge she got up, and did as she was
+    bid.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That the Shamán?" whispered the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She nodded. It was plain that this apparition, however hideous, had
+    given her great satisfaction.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Any more people coming?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Got no more now in Pymeut."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where is everybody?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Some sick, some dead."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The old Chief rambled on, but not so noisily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "See," whispered Muckluck, "devil 'fraid already. He begin to speak
+    small."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Shamán never once looked towards the sufferer till he himself was
+    thoroughly warm. Even then he withdrew from the genial glow, only to
+    sit back, humped together, blinking, silent. The Boy began to feel
+    that, if he did finally say something it would be as surprising as to
+    hear an aged monkey break into articulate speech.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas edged towards the Shamán, presenting something in a birch-bark
+    dish.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A deer's tongue," whispered Muckluck.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy remembered the Koyukun song, "Thanks for a good meal to
+    Kuskokala, the Shamán."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas seemed to be haranguing the Shamán deferentially, but with
+    spirit. He pulled out from the bottom of his father's bed three fine
+    marten-skins, shook them, and dangled them before the Shamán. They
+    produced no effect. He then took a box of matches and a plug of the
+    Boy's tobacco out of his pocket, and held the lot towards the Shamán,
+    seeming to say that to save his life he couldn't rake up another
+    earthly thing to tempt his Shamánship. Although the Shamán took the
+    offerings his little black eyes glittered none the less rapaciously, as
+    they flew swiftly round the room, falling at last with a vicious snap
+    and gleam upon the Boy. Then it was that for the first time he spoke.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nuh! nuh!" interrupted Muckluck, chattering volubly, and evidently
+    commending the Boy to the Shamán. Several of the old bucks laughed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He say Yukon Inua no like you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He think white men bring plague, bring devils."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Got some money?" whispered Muckluck.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy saw the moment when he would be turned out. He plunged his
+    hands down into his trousers pockets and fished up a knife, his
+    second-best one, fortunately.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tell him I'm all right, and he can give this to Yukon Inua with my
+    respects."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Muckluck explained and held up the shining object, blades open,
+    corkscrew curling attractively before the covetous eyes of the Shamán.
+    When he could endure the temptation no longer his two black claws shot
+    out, but Nicholas intercepted the much-envied object, while, as it
+    seemed, he drove a more advantageous bargain. Terms finally settled,
+    the Shamán seized the knife, shut it, secreted it with a final grunt,
+    and stood up.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Everyone made way for him. He jerked his loosely-jointed body over to
+    the sick man, lifted the seal-oil lamp with his shaky old hands, and
+    looked at the patient long and steadily. When he had set the lamp down
+    again, with a grunt, he put his black thumb on the wick and squeezed
+    out the light. When he came back to the fire, which had burnt low, he
+    pulled open his parki and drew out an ivory wand, and a long eagle's
+    feather with a fluffy white tuft of some sort at the end. He deposited
+    these solemnly, side by side, on the ground, about two feet apart.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Turning round to the dying fire, he took a stick, and with Nicholas's
+    help gathered the ashes up and laid them over the smouldering brands.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The ighloo was practically dark. No one dared speak save the yet
+    unabashed devil in the sick man, who muttered angrily. It was curious
+    to see how the coughing of the others, which in the Kachime had been
+    practically constant, was here almost silenced. Whether this was
+    achieved through awe and respect for the Shamán, or through nervous
+    absorption in the task he had undertaken, who shall say?
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy felt rather than saw that the Shamán had lain down between the
+    ivory wand and the eagle's feather. Each man sat as still as death,
+    listening, staring, waiting.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Presently a little jet of flame sprang up out of the ashes. The Shamán
+    lifted his head angrily, saw it was no human hand that had dared turn
+    on the light, growled, and pulled something else from under his
+    inexhaustible parki. The Boy peered curiously. The Shamán seemed to be
+    shutting out the offensive light by wrapping himself up in something,
+    head and all.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's he doing now?" the Boy ventured to whisper under cover of the
+    devil's sudden loud remonstrance, the sick man at this point breaking
+    into ghastly groans.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He puts on the Kamlayka. Sh!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Shamán, still enveloped head and body, began to beat softly,
+    keeping time with the eagle's feather. You could follow the faint gleam
+    of the ivory wand, but on what it fell with that hollow sound no eye
+    could see. Now, at intervals, he uttered a cry, a deep bass
+    danger-note, singularly unnerving. Someone answered in a higher key,
+    and they kept this up in a kind of rude, sharply-timed duet, till one
+    by one the whole group of natives was gathered into the swing of it,
+    swept along involuntarily, it would seem, by some magnetic attraction
+    of the rhythm.
+</p>
+<p>
+    <i>"Ung hi yah! ah-ha-yah! yah-yah-yah!"</i> was the chorus to that deep,
+    recurrent cry of the Shamán. Its accompanying drum-note was muffled
+    like far-off thunder, conjured out of the earth by the ivory wand.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Presently a scream of terror from the bundle of skins and bones in the
+    corner.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ha!" Muckluck clasped her hands and rocked back and forth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They'll frighten the old man to death if he's conscious," said the
+    Boy, half rising.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She pulled him down.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, no; frighten devil." She was shaking with excitement and with
+    ecstacy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The sick man cried aloud. A frenzy seemed to seize the Shamán. He
+    raised his voice in a series of blood-curdling shrieks, then dropped
+    it, moaning, whining, then bursting suddenly into diabolic laughter,
+    bellowing, whispering, ventriloquising, with quite extraordinary skill.
+    The dim and foetid cave might indeed be full of devils.
+</p>
+<p>
+    If the hideous outcry slackened, but an instant, you heard the sick man
+    raving with the preternatural strength of delirium, or of mad
+    resentment. For some time it seemed a serious question as to who would
+    come out ahead. Just as you began to feel that the old Chief was at the
+    end of his tether, and ready to give up the ghost, the Shamán, rising
+    suddenly with a demoniac yell, flung himself down on the floor in a
+    convulsion. His body writhed horribly; he kicked and snapped and
+    quivered.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy was for shielding Muckluck from the crazy flinging out of legs
+    and arms; but she leaned over, breathless, to catch what words might
+    escape the Shamán during the fit, for these were omens of deep
+    significance.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When at last the convulsive movements quieted, and the Shamán lay like
+    one dead, except for an occasional faint twitch, the Boy realised for
+    the first time that the sick man, too, was dumb. Dead? The only sound
+    now was the wind up in the world above. Even the dog was still.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The silence was more horrible than the hell-let-loose of a few minutes
+    before.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The dim group sat there, motionless, under the spell of the stillness
+    even more than they had been under the spell of the noise. At last a
+    queer, indescribable scratching and scraping came up out of the bowels
+    of the earth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    How does the old devil manage to do that? thought the Boy. But the
+    plain truth was that his heart was in his mouth, for the sound came
+    from the opposite direction, behind the Boy, and not near the Shamán at
+    all. It grew louder, came nearer, more inexplicable, more awful. He
+    felt he could not bear it another minute, sprang up, and stood there,
+    tense, waiting for what might befall. Were <i>all</i> the others dead, then?
+</p>
+<p>
+    Not a sound in the place, only that indescribable stirring of something
+    in the solid earth under his feet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Shamán had his knife. A ghastly sensation of stifling came over the
+    Boy as he thought of a struggle down there under the earth and the
+    snow.
+</p>
+<p>
+    On came the horrible underground thing. Desperately the Boy stirred the
+    almost extinct embers with his foot, and a faint glow fell on the
+    terror-frozen faces of the natives, fell on the bear-skin flap. <i>It
+    moved!</i> A huge hand came stealing round. A hand? The skeleton of a
+    hand&mdash;white, ghastly, with fingers unimaginably long. No mortal in
+    Pymeut had a hand like that&mdash;no mortal in all the world!
+</p>
+<p>
+    A crisp, smart sound, and a match blazed. A tall, lean figure rose up
+    from behind the bear-skin and received the sudden brightness full in
+    his face, pale and beautiful, but angry as an avenging angel's. For an
+    instant the Boy still thought it a spectre, the delusion of a
+    bewildered brain, till the girl cried out, "Brother Paul!" and fell
+    forward on the floor, hiding her face in her hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Light! make a light!" he commanded. Nicholas got up, dazed but
+    obedient, and lit the seal-oil lamp.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The voice of the white man, the call for light, reached the Shamán. He
+    seemed to shiver and shrink under the folds of the Kamlayka. But
+    instead of getting up and looking his enemy in the face, he wriggled
+    along on his belly, still under cover of the Kamlayka, till he got to
+    the bear-skin, pushed it aside with a motion of the hooded head, and
+    crawled out like some snaky symbol of darkness and superstition fleeing
+    before the light.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Brother Paul!" sobbed the girl, "don't, <i>don't</i> tell Sister Winifred."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He took no notice of her, bending down over the motionless bundle in
+    the corner.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You've killed him, I suppose?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Brother Paul&mdash;" began Nicholas, faltering.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I heard the pandemonium." He lifted his thin white face to the
+    smoke-hole. "It's all useless, useless. I might as well go and leave
+    you to your abominations. But instead, go <i>you</i>, all of you&mdash;go!" He
+    flung out his long arms, and the group broke and scuttled, huddling
+    near the bear-skin, fighting like rats to get out faster than the
+    narrow passage permitted.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy turned from watching the instantaneous flight, the scuffle, and
+    the disappearance, to find the burning eyes of the Jesuit fixed
+    fascinated on his face. If Brother Paul had appeared as a spectre in
+    the ighloo, it was plain that he looked upon the white face present at
+    the diabolic rite as dream or devil. The Boy stood up. The lay-brother
+    started, and crossed himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In Christ's name, what&mdash;who are you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I&mdash;a&mdash;I come from the white camp ten miles below."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And you were <i>here</i>&mdash;you allowed this? Ah-h!" He flung up his arms,
+    the pale lips moved convulsively, but no sound came forth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I&mdash;you think I ought to have interfered?" began the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I think&mdash;" the Brother began bitterly, checked himself, knelt down,
+    and felt the old man's pulse.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas at the bear-skin was making the Boy signs to come.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The girl was sobbing with her face on the ground. Again Nicholas
+    beckoned, and then disappeared. There seemed to be nothing to do but to
+    follow his host. When the bear-skin had dropped behind the Boy, and he
+    crawled after Nicholas along the dark passage, he heard the muffled
+    voice of the girl praying: "Oh, Mary, Mother of God, don't let him tell
+    Sister Winifred."
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH7"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER VI
+</h2>
+<center>
+    A PENITENTIAL JOURNEY
+</center>
+<p class="ind">
+  "... Certain London parishes still receive £12 per annum
+   for fagots to burn heretics."&mdash;JOHN RICHARD GREEN.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy slept that night in the Kachime beside a very moody, restless
+    host. Yagorsha dispensed with the formality of going to bed, and seemed
+    bent on doing what he could to keep other people awake. He sat
+    monologuing under the seal lamp till the Boy longed to throw the dish
+    of smouldering oil at his head. But strangely enough, when, through
+    sheer fatigue, his voice failed and his chin fell on his broad chest, a
+    lad of fourteen or so, who had also had difficulty to keep awake, would
+    jog Yagorsha's arm, repeating interrogatively the last phrase used,
+    whereon the old Story-Teller would rouse himself and begin afresh, with
+    an iteration of the previous statement. If the lad failed to keep him
+    going, one or other of the natives would stir uneasily, lift a head
+    from under his deerskin, and remonstrate. Yagorsha, opening his eyes
+    with a guilty start, would go on with the yarn. When morning came, and
+    the others waked, Yagorsha and the lad slept.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas and all the rest who shared the bench at night, and the fire
+    in the morning, seemed desperately depressed and glum. A heavy cloud
+    hung over Pymeut, for Pymeut was in disgrace.
+</p>
+<p>
+    About sunset the women came in with the kantaks and the lard-cans.
+    Yagorsha sat up and rubbed his eyes. He listened eagerly, while the
+    others questioned the women. The old Chief wasn't dead at all. No, he
+    was much better. Brother Paul had been about to all the house-bound
+    sick people, and given everybody medicine, and flour, and a terrible
+    scolding. Oh yes, he was angrier than anybody had ever been before.
+    Some natives from the school at Holy Cross were coming for him
+    tomorrow, and they were all going down river and across the southern
+    portage to the branch mission at Kuskoquim.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Down river? Sure?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Yes, sure. Brother Paul had not waited to come with those others, being
+    so anxious to bring medicine and things to Ol' Chief quick; and this
+    was how he was welcomed back to the scene of his labours. A Devil's
+    Dance was going on! That was what he called it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You savvy?" said Nicholas to his guest. "Brother Paul go plenty soon.
+    You wait."
+</p>
+<p>
+    I'll have company back to camp, was the Boy's first thought, and
+    then&mdash;would there be any fun in that after all? It was plain Brother
+    Paul was no such genial companion as Father Wills.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And so it was that he did not desert Nicholas, although Brother Paul's
+    companions failed to put in an appearance on the following morning.
+    However, on the third day after the incident of the Shamán (who seemed
+    to have vanished into thin air), Brother Paul shook the snow of Pymeut
+    from his feet, and with three Indians from the Holy Cross school and a
+    dog-team, he disappeared from the scene. Not till he had been gone some
+    time did Nicholas venture to return to the parental roof.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They found Muckluck subdued but smiling, and the old man astonishingly
+    better. It looked almost as if he had turned the corner, and was
+    getting well.
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was certainly something very like magic in such a recovery, but
+    it was quickly apparent that this aspect of the case was not what
+    occupied Nicholas, as he sat regarding his parent with a keen and
+    speculative eye. He asked him some question, and they discussed the
+    point volubly, Muckluck following the argument with close attention.
+    Presently it seemed that father and son were taking the guest into
+    consideration. Muckluck also turned to him now and then, and by-and-by
+    she said: "I think he go."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Go where?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Holy Cross," said the old man eagerly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Brother Paul," Nicholas explained. "He go <i>down</i> river. We get Holy
+    Cross&mdash;more quick."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I see. Before he can get back. But why do you want to go?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "See Father Brachet."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sister Winifred say: 'Always tell Father Brachet; then everything all
+    right,'" contributed Muckluck.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You tell Pymeut belly solly," the old Chief said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nicholas know he not able tell all like white man," Muckluck
+    continued. "Nicholas say you good&mdash;hey? you good?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well&mdash;a&mdash;pretty tollable, thank you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You go with Nicholas; you make Father Brachet unnerstan'&mdash;forgive.
+    Tell Sister Winifred&mdash;" She stopped, perplexed, vaguely distrustful at
+    the Boy's chuckling.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You think we can explain it all away, hey?" He made a gesture of happy
+    clearance. "Shamán and everything, hey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me no can," returned Nicholas, with engaging modesty. "<i>You</i>&mdash;" He
+    conveyed a limitless confidence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I'll be jiggered if I don't try. How far is it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Go slow&mdash;one sleep."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, we won't go slow. We've got to do penance. When shall we start?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Too late now. Tomalla," said the Ol' Chief.
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    They got up very early&mdash;it seemed to the Boy like the middle of the
+    night&mdash;stole out of the dark Kachime, and hurried over the hard crust
+    that had formed on the last fall of snow, down the bleak, dim slope to
+    the Ol' Chief's, where they were to breakfast.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Not only Muckluck was up and doing, but the Ol' Chief seemed galvanised
+    into unwonted activity. He was doddering about between his bed and the
+    fire, laying out the most imposing parkis and fox-skins, fur blankets,
+    and a pair of seal-skin mittens, all of which, apparently, he had had
+    secreted under his bed, or between it and the wall.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They made a sumptuous breakfast of tea, the last of the bacon the Boy
+    had brought, and slapjacks.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy kept looking from time to time at the display of furs. Father
+    Wills was right; he ought to buy a parki with a hood, but he had meant
+    to have the priest's advice, or Mac's, at least, before investing. Ol'
+    Chief watching him surreptitiously, and seeing he was no nearer making
+    an offer, felt he should have some encouragement. He picked up the
+    seal-skin mittens and held them out.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Present," said Ol' Chief. "You tell Father Brachet us belly solly."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I'll handle him without gloves," said the Boy, giving back the
+    mittens. But Ol' Chief wouldn't take them. He was holding up the
+    smaller of the two parkis.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You no like?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, very nice."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You no buy?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You go sleep on trail," said Nicholas, rising briskly. "You die, no
+    parki."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy laughed and shook his head, but still Ol' Chief held out the
+    deer-skin shirt, and caressed the wolf-fringe of the hood.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Him cheap."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How cheap?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Twenty-fi' dollah."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't know as I call that cheap."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes," said Nicholas. "St. Michael, him fifty dollah."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy looked doubtful.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I saw a parki there at the A. C. Store about like this for twenty."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A. C. parki, peeluck," Nicholas said contemptuously. Then patting the
+    one his father held out, "You wear <i>him</i> fifty winter."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Lord forbid! Anyhow, I've only got about twenty dollars' worth of
+    tobacco and stuff along with me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me come white camp," Nicholas volunteered. "Me get more fi' dollah."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, will you? Now, that's very kind of you." But Nicholas, impervious
+    to irony, held out the parki. The Boy laughed, and took it. Nicholas
+    stooped, picked up the fur mittens, and, laying them on the Boy's arm,
+    reiterated his father's "Present!" and then departed to the Kachime to
+    bring down the Boy's pack.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Princess meanwhile had withdrawn to her own special corner, where
+    in the daytime appeared only a roll of plaited mats, and a little,
+    cheap, old hat-box, which she evidently prized most of all she had in
+    the world.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You see? Lock!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy expressed surprise and admiration.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No! Really! I call that fine."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I got present for Father Brachet"; and turning over the rags and
+    nondescript rubbish of the hat-box, she produced an object whose use
+    was not immediately manifest. A section of walrus ivory about six
+    inches long had been cut in two. One of these curved halves had been
+    mounted on four ivory legs. In the upper flat side had been stuck, at
+    equal distances from the two ends and from each other, two delicate
+    branches of notched ivory, standing up like horns. Between these sat an
+    ivory mannikin, about three inches long, with a woeful countenance and
+    with arms held out like one beseeching mercy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's fine," said the Boy, "but&mdash;a&mdash;what's it for? Just look pretty?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Wait, I show you." She dived into the hat-box, and fished up a bit of
+    battered pencil. With an air of pride, she placed the pencil across the
+    outstretched hands of the ivory suppliant, asking the Boy in dumb-show,
+    was not this a pen-rest that might be trusted to melt the heart of the
+    Holy Father?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This way, too." She illustrated how anyone embarrassed by the
+    possession of more than one pencil could range them in tiers on the
+    ivory horns above the head of the Woeful One.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I call that scrumptious! And he looks as if he was saying he was sorry
+    all the time."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She nodded, delighted that the Boy comprehended the subtle symbolism.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "One more!" she said, showing her dazzling teeth. Like a child playing
+    a game, she half shut the hat-box and hugged it lovingly. Then with
+    eyes sparkling, slowly the small hand crept in&mdash;was thrust down the
+    side and drew out with a rapturous "Ha!" a gaudy advertisement card,
+    setting forth the advantages of smoking "Kentucky Leaf" She looked at
+    it fondly. Then slowly, regretfully, all the fun gone now, she passed
+    it to the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "For Sister Winifred!" she said, like one who braces herself to make
+    some huge renunciation. "You tell her I send with my love, and I always
+    say my prayers. I very good. Hey? You tell Sister Winifred?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>Sure</i>," said the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Ol' Chief was pulling the other parki over his head. Nicholas
+    reappeared with the visitor's effects. Under the Boy's eyes, he calmly
+    confiscated all the tea and tobacco. But nothing had been touched in
+    the owner's absence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look here: just leave me enough tea to last till I get home. I'll make
+    it up to you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas, after some reflection, agreed. Then he bustled about,
+    gathered together an armful of things, and handed the Boy a tea-kettle
+    and an axe.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You bring&mdash;dogs all ready. Mush!" and he was gone.
+</p>
+<p>
+    To the Boy's surprise, while he and Muckluck were getting the food and
+    presents together, the lively Ol' Chief&mdash;so lately dying&mdash;made off, in
+    a fine new parki, on all fours, curious, no doubt, to watch the
+    preparations without.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But not a bit of it. The Ol' Chief's was a more intimate concern in the
+    expedition. When the Boy joined him, there he was sitting up in
+    Nicholas's sled, appallingly emaciated, but brisk as you please,
+    ordering the disposition of the axe and rifle along either side, the
+    tea-kettle and grub between his feet, showing how the deer-skin
+    blankets should be wrapped, and especially was he dictatorial about the
+    lashing of the mahout.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How far's he comin'?" asked the Boy, astonished.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "All the way," said Muckluck. "He want to be <i>sure</i>."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Several bucks came running down from the Kachime, and stood about,
+    coughed and spat, and offered assistance or advice. When at last Ol'
+    Chief was satisfied with the way the raw walrus-hide was laced and
+    lashed, Nicholas cracked his whip and shouted, "Mush! God-damn! Mush!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good-bye, Princess. We'll take care of your father, though I'm sure he
+    oughtn't to go."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh yes," answered Muckluck confidently; then lower, "Shamán make all
+    well quick. Hey? Goo'-bye."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good-bye."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't forget tell Sister Winifred I say my p&mdash;" But the Boy had to run
+    to keep up with the sled.
+</p>
+<p>
+    For some time he kept watching the Ol' Chief with unabated
+    astonishment, wondering if he'd die on the way. But, after all, the
+    open-air cure was tried for his trouble in various other parts of the
+    world&mdash;why not here?
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was no doubt about it, Nicholas had a capital team of dogs, and
+    knew how to drive them. Two-legged folk often had to trot pretty
+    briskly to keep up. Pymeut was soon out of sight.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nicholas, what'll you take for a couple o' your dogs?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No sell."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pay you a good long price."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No sell."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, will you help me to get a couple?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me try"; but he spoke dubiously.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What do they cost?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good leader cost hunder and fifty in St. Michael."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You don't mean dollahs?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mean dollahs."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come off the roof!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Nicholas seemed to think there was no need.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You mean that if I offer you a hundred and fifty dollahs for your
+    leader, straight off, this minute, you won't take it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, no take," said the Prince, stolidly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And his friend reflected. Nicholas without a dog-team would be
+    practically a prisoner for eight months of the year, and not only that,
+    but a prisoner in danger of starving to death. After all, perhaps a
+    dog-team in such a country <i>was</i> priceless, and the Ol' Chief was
+    travelling in truly royal style.
+</p>
+<p>
+    However, it was stinging cold, and running after those expensive dogs
+    was an occupation that palled. By-and-by, "How much is your sled
+    worth?" he asked Ol' Chief.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Six sables," said the monarch.
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    It was a comfort to sight a settlement off there on the point.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's this place?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Fish-town."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pymeuts there?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, all gone. Come back when salmon run."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Not a creature there, as Nicholas had foretold&mdash;a place built wilfully
+    on the most exposed point possible, bleak beyond belief. If you open
+    your mouth at this place on the Yukon, you have to swallow a hurricane.
+    The Boy choked, turned his back to spit out the throttling blast, and
+    when he could catch his breath inquired:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This a good place for a village?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Bully. Wind come, blow muskeetah&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas signified a remote destination with his whip.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "B'lieve you! This kind o' thing would discourage even a mosquito."
+</p>
+<p>
+    In the teeth of the blast they went past the Pymeut Summer Resort.
+    Unlike Pymeut proper, its cabins were built entirely above ground, of
+    logs unchinked, its roofs of watertight birch-bark.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A couple of hours farther on Nicholas permitted a halt on the edge of a
+    struggling little grove of dwarfed cotton-wood.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The kettle and things being withdrawn from various portions of the Ol'
+    Chief's person, he, once more warmly tucked up and tightly lashed down,
+    drew the edge of the outer coverlid up till it met the wolf-skin fringe
+    of his parki hood, and relapsed into slumber.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas chopped down enough green wood to make a hearth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What! bang on the snow?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas nodded, laid the logs side by side, and on them built a fire
+    of the seasoned wood the Boy had gathered. They boiled the kettle, made
+    tea, and cooked some fish.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Ol' Chief waked up just in time to get his share. The Boy, who had kept
+    hanging about the dogs with unabated interest, had got up from the fire
+    to carry them the scraps, when Nicholas called out quite angrily, "No!
+    no feed dogs," and waved the Boy off.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What! It's only some of my fish. Fish is what they eat, ain't it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No feed now; wait till night."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What for? They're hungry."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You give fish&mdash;dogs no go any more."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Peremptorily he waved the Boy off, and fell to work at packing up. Not
+    understanding Nicholas's wisdom, the Boy was feeling a little sulky and
+    didn't help. He finished up the fish himself, then sat on his heels by
+    the fire, scorching his face while his back froze, or wheeling round
+    and singeing his new parki while his hands grew stiff in spite of
+    seal-skin mittens.
+</p>
+<p>
+    No, it was no fun camping with the temperature at thirty degrees below
+    zero&mdash;better to be trotting after those expensive and dinnerless dogs;
+    and he was glad when they started again.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But once beyond the scant shelter of the cottonwood, it was evident the
+    wind had risen. It was blowing straight out of the north and into their
+    faces. There were times when you could lean your whole weight against
+    the blast.
+</p>
+<p>
+    After sunset the air began to fill with particles of frozen snow. They
+    did not seem to fall, but continually to whirl about, and present
+    stinging points to the travellers' faces. Talking wasn't possible even
+    if you were in the humour, and the dead, blank silence of all nature,
+    unbroken hour after hour, became as nerve-wearing as the cold and
+    stinging wind. The Boy fell behind a little. Those places on his heels
+    that had been so badly galled had begun to be troublesome again. Well,
+    it wouldn't do any good to holla about it&mdash;the only thing to do was to
+    harden one's foolish feet. But in his heart he felt that all the
+    time-honoured conditions of a penitential journey were being complied
+    with, except on the part of the arch sinner. Ol' Chief seemed to be
+    getting on first-rate.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The dogs, hardly yet broken in to the winter's work, were growing
+    discouraged, travelling so long in the eye of the wind. And Nicholas,
+    in the kind of stolid depression that had taken possession of him,
+    seemed to have forgotten even to shout "Mush!" for a very long time.
+</p>
+<p>
+    By-and-by Ol' Chief called out sharply, and Nicholas seemed to wake up.
+    He stopped, looked back, and beckoned to his companion.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy came slowly on.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why you no push?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Push what?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Handle-bar."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He went to the sled and illustrated, laying his hands on the
+    arrangement at the back that stood out like the handle behind a baby's
+    perambulator. The Boy remembered. Of course, there were usually two men
+    with each sled. One ran ahead and broke trail with snow-shoes, but that
+    wasn't necessary today, for the crust bore. But the other man's
+    business was to guide the sled from behind and keep it on the trail.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me gottah drive, you gottah push. Dogs heap tired."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas spoke severely. The Boy stared a moment at what he mentally
+    called "the nerve of the fella," laughed, and took hold, swallowing
+    Nicholas's intimation that he, after all, was far more considerate of
+    the dogs than the person merely sentimental, who had been willing to
+    share his dinner with them.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How much farther?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, pretty quick now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The driver cracked his whip, called out to the dogs, and suddenly
+    turned off from the river course. Unerringly he followed an invisible
+    trail, turning sharply up a slough, and went zig-zagging on without
+    apparent plan. It was better going when they got to a frozen lake, and
+    the dogs seemed not to need so much encouragement. It would appear an
+    impossible task to steer accurately with so little light; but once on
+    the other side of the lake it was found that Nicholas had hit a
+    well-beaten track as neatly as a thread finds the needle's eye.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Far off, out of the dimness, came a sound&mdash;welcome because it was
+    something to break the silence but hardly cheerful in itself.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hear that, Nicholas?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mission dogs."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Their own had already thrown up their noses and bettered the pace.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The barking of the dogs had not only announced the mission to the
+    travellers, but to the mission a stranger at the gates.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Before anything could be seen of the settlement, clumsy, fur-clad
+    figures had come running down the slope and across the ice, greeting
+    Nicholas with hilarity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Indian or Esquimaux boys they seemed to be, who talked some jargon
+    understanded of the Pymeut pilot. The Boy, lifting tired eyes, saw
+    something white glimmering high in the air up on the right river bank.
+    In this light it refused to form part of any conceivable plan, but hung
+    there in the air detached, enigmatic, spectral. Below it, more on
+    humanity's level, could be dimly distinguished, now, the Mission
+    Buildings, apparently in two groups with an open space in the middle.
+    Where are the white people? wondered the Boy, childishly impatient.
+    Won't they come and welcome us? He followed the Esquimaux and Indians
+    from the river up to the left group of buildings. With the heathen
+    jargon beating on his ears, he looked up suddenly, and realized what
+    the white thing was that had shone out so far. In the middle of the
+    open space a wooden cross stood up, encrusted with frost crystals, and
+    lifting gleaming arms out of the gloom twenty feet or so above the
+    heads of the people.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Funny thing for an Agnostic," he admitted to himself, "but I'm right
+    glad to see a Christian sign." And as he knocked at the door of the big
+    two-story log-house on the left he defended himself. "It's the
+    swing-back of the pendulum after a big dose of Pymeut and heathen
+    tricks. I welcome it as a mark of the white man." He looked over his
+    shoulder a little defiantly at the Holy Cross. Recognition of what the
+    high white apparition was had given him a queer jolt, stirring
+    unsuspected things in imagination and in memory. He had been accustomed
+    to see that symbol all his life, and it had never spoken to him before.
+    Up here it cried aloud and dominated the scene. "Humph!" he said to
+    himself, "to look at you a body'd think 'The Origin' had never been
+    written, and Spencer and Huxley had never been born.' He knocked again,
+    and again turned about to scan the cross.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Just as much a superstition, just as much a fetich as Kaviak's
+    seal-plug or the Shamán's eagle feather. With long looking at a couple
+    of crossed sticks men grow as dazed, as hypnotized, as Pymeuts watching
+    a Shamán's ivory wand. All the same, I'm not sure that faith in 'First
+    Principles' would build a house like this in the Arctic Regions, and
+    it's convenient to find it here&mdash;if only they'd open the door."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He gave another thundering knock, and then nearly fell backwards into
+    the snow, for Brother Paul stood on the threshold holding up a lamp.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I&mdash;a&mdash;oh! How do you do? Can I come in?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Brother Paul, still with the look of the Avenging Angel on his pale,
+    young face, held the door open to let the Boy come in. Then, leaning
+    out into the night and lifting the lamp high, "Is that Nicholas?" he
+    said sternly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the Pymeuts and the school-boys had vanished. He came in and set
+    down the lamp.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We&mdash;a&mdash;we heard you were going down river," said the Boy, tamely, for
+    he had not yet recovered himself after such an unexpected blow.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Are you cold? Are you wet?" demanded Brother Paul, standing erect,
+    unwelcoming, by the table that held the lamp.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy pulled himself together.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look here"&mdash;he turned away from the comforting stove and confronted
+    the Jesuit&mdash;"those Pymeuts are not only cold and wet and sick too, but
+    they're sorry. They've come to ask forgiveness."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's easily done."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Such scorn you would hardly expect from a follower of the meek
+    Galilean.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, not easily done, a penance like this. I know, for I've just
+    travelled that thirty miles with 'em over the ice from Pymeut."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You? Yes, it amuses you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The sombre eyes shone with a cold, disconcerting light.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, to tell you the truth, I've been better amused."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy looked down at his weary, wounded feet. And the others&mdash;where
+    were his fellow pilgrims? It struck him as comic that the upshot of the
+    journey should be that he was doing penance for the Pymeuts, but he
+    couldn't smile with that offended archangel in front of him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Thirty miles over the ice, in the face of a norther, hasn't been so
+    'easy' even for me. And I'm not old, nor sick&mdash;no, nor frightened,
+    Brother Paul."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He flung up his head, but his heart failed him even while he made the
+    boast. Silently, for a moment, they confronted each other.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where are you bound for?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I&mdash;a&mdash;" The Boy had a moment of wondering if he was expected to answer
+    "Hell," and he hesitated.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Are you on your way up the river?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No&mdash;I" (was the man not going to let them rest their wicked bones
+    there a single night?)&mdash;"a&mdash;I&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The frozen river and the wind-racked wood were as hospitable as the
+    beautiful face of the brother. Involuntarily the Boy shivered.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I came to see the Father Superior."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He dropped back into a chair.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The Father Superior is busy."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll wait."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And very tired."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So'm I."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "&mdash;worn out with the long raging of the plague. I have waited till he
+    is less harassed to tell him about the Pymeuts' deliberate depravity.
+    Nicholas, too!&mdash;one of our own people, one of the first pupils of the
+    school, a communicant in the church; distinguished by a thousand
+    kindnesses. And this the return!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The return is that he takes his backsliding so to heart, he can't rest
+    without coming to confess and to beg the Father Superior&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I shall tell the Father Superior what I heard and saw. He will agree
+    that, for the sake of others who are trying to resist temptation, an
+    example should be made of Nicholas and of his father."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And yet you nursed the old man and were kind to him, I believe, after
+    the offense."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I&mdash;I thought you had killed him. But even you must see that we cannot
+    have a man received here as Nicholas was&mdash;the most favoured child of
+    the mission&mdash;who helps to perpetuate the degrading blasphemies of his
+    unhappy race. It's nothing to you; you even encourage&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "'Pon my soul&mdash;" But Brother Paul struck in with an impassioned
+    earnestness:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We spend a life-time making Christians of these people; and such as
+    you come here, and in a week undo the work of years."
+</p>
+<center>
+    "I&mdash;<i>I?</i>"
+</center>
+<p>
+    "It's only eighteen months since I myself came, but already I've
+    seen&mdash;" The torrent poured out with never a pause. "Last summer some
+    white prospectors bribed our best native teacher to leave us and become
+    a guide. He's a drunken wreck now somewhere up on the Yukon Flats. You
+    take our boys for pilots, you entice our girls away with trinkets&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Great Caesar! <i>I</i> don't."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But vain was protest. For Brother Paul the visitor was not a particular
+    individual. He stood there for the type of the vicious white
+    adventurer.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The sunken eyes of the lay-brother, burning, impersonal, saw not a
+    particular young man and a case compounded of mixed elements, but&mdash;The
+    Enemy! against whom night and day he waged incessant warfare.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The Fathers and Sisters wear out their lives to save these people. We
+    teach them with incredible pains the fundamental rules of civilization;
+    we teach them how to save their souls alive." The Boy had jumped up and
+    laid his hand on the door-knob. "<i>You</i> come. You teach them to smoke&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy wheeled round.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't smoke."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "... and to gamble."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nicholas taught <i>me</i> to gamble. Brother Paul, I swear&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, and to swear and get drunk, and so find the shortest way to
+    hell."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Father Brachet! Father Wills!" a voice called without.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The door-knob turned under the Boy's hand, and before he could more
+    than draw back, a whiff of winter blew into the room, and a creature
+    stood there such as no man looks to find on his way to an Arctic gold
+    camp. A girl of twenty odd, with the face of a saint, dressed in the
+    black habit of the Order of St. Anne.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, Brother Paul! you are wanted&mdash;wanted quickly. I think Catherine is
+    worse; don't wait, or she'll die without&mdash;" And as suddenly as she came
+    the vision vanished, carrying Brother Paul in the wake of her streaming
+    veil.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy sat down by the stove, cogitating how he should best set about
+    finding Nicholas to explain the failure of their mission.... What was
+    that? Voices from the other side. The opposite door opened and a man
+    appeared, with Nicholas and his father close behind, looking anything
+    but cast down or decently penitential.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How do you do?" The white man's English had a strong French accent. He
+    shook hands with great cordiality. "We have heard of you from Father
+    Wills also. These Pymeut friends of ours say you have something to tell
+    me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He spoke as though this something were expected to be highly
+    gratifying, and, indeed, the cheerfulness of Nicholas and his father
+    would indicate as much.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As the Boy, hesitating, did not accept the chair offered, smiling, the
+    Jesuit went on:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Will you talk of zis matter&mdash;whatever it is&mdash;first, or will you first
+    go up and wash, and have our conference after supper?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, thank you&mdash;a&mdash;Are you the Father Superior?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He bowed a little ceremoniously, but still smiling.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I am Father Brachet."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, well, Nicholas is right. The first thing to do is to explain why
+    we're here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Was it the heat of the stove after the long hours of cold that made him
+    feel a little dizzy? He put up his hand to his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I have told zem to take hot water upstairs," the Father was saying,
+    "and I zink a glass of toddy would be a good sing for you." He slightly
+    emphasised the "you," and turned as if to supplement the original
+    order.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, no!" the Boy called after him, choking a little, half with
+    suppressed merriment, half with nervous fatigue. "Father Brachet, if
+    you're kind to us, Brother Paul will never forgive you. We're all in
+    disgrace."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hein! What?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, we're all desperately wicked."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, no," objected Nicholas, ready to go back on so tactless an
+    advocate.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And Brother Paul has just been saying&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What is it, what is it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Father Superior spoke a little sharply, and himself sat down in the
+    wooden armchair he before had placed for his white guest.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The three culprits stood in front of him on a dead level of iniquity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You see, Father Brachet, Ol' Chief has been very ill&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I know. Much as we needed him here, Paul insisted on hurrying back to
+    Pymeut"&mdash;he interrupted himself as readily as he had interrupted the
+    Boy&mdash;"but ze Ol' Chief looks lively enough."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes; he&mdash;a&mdash;his spirits have been raised by&mdash;a&mdash;what you will think an
+    unwarrantable and wicked means."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas understood, at least, that objectionable word "wicked"
+    cropping up again, and he was not prepared to stand it from the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He grunted with displeasure, and said something low to his father.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Brother Paul found them&mdash;found <i>us</i> having a séance with the Shamán."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Father Brachet turned sharply to the natives.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ha! you go back to zat."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas came a step forward, twisting his mittens and rolling his eye
+    excitedly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Us no wicked. Shamán say he gottah scare off&mdash;" He waved his arm
+    against an invisible army. Then, as it were, stung into plain speaking:
+    "Shamán say <i>white man</i> bring sickness&mdash;bring devils&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Maybe the old Orang Outang's right."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy drew a tired breath, and sat down without bidding in one of the
+    wooden chairs. What an idiot he'd been not to take the hot grog and the
+    hot bath, and leave these people to fight their foolishness out among
+    themselves! It didn't concern him. And here was Nicholas talking away
+    comfortably in his own tongue, and the Father was answering. A native
+    opened the door and peeped in cautiously.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas paused.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hein!" said Father Brachet, "what is it!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Indian came in with two cups of hot tea and a cracker in each
+    saucer. He stopped at the priest's side.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You get sick, too. Please take. Supper little late." He nodded to
+    Nicholas, and gave the white stranger the second cup. As he was going
+    out: "Same man here in July. You know"&mdash;he tapped himself on the left
+    side&mdash;"man with sore heart."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yansey?" said the priest quickly. "Well, what about Yansey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He is here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But no! Wiz zose ozzers?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, I think they took the dogs and deserted him. He's just been
+    brought in by our boys; they are back with the moose-meat. Sore heart
+    worse. He will die."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who's looking after him?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Brother Paul"; and he padded out of the room in his soft native shoes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then Brother Paul has polished off Catherine," thought the Boy, "and
+    he won't waste much time over a sore heart. It behoves us to hurry up
+    with our penitence." This seemed to be Nicholas's view as well. He was
+    beginning again in his own tongue.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You know we like best for you to practise your English," said the
+    priest gently; "I expect you speak very well after working so long on
+    ze John J. Healy."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes," Nicholas straightened himself. "Me talk all same white man now."
+    (He gleamed at the Boy: "Don't suppose I need you and your perfidious
+    tongue.") "No; us Pymeuts no wicked!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Again he turned away from the priest, and challenged the Boy to repeat
+    the slander. Then with an insinuating air, "Shamán no say you wicked,"
+    he reassured the Father. "Shamán say Holy Cross all right. Cheechalko
+    no good; Cheechalko bring devils; Cheechalko all same <i>him</i>," he wound
+    up, flinging subterfuge to the winds, and openly indicating his
+    faithless ambassador.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Strikes me I'm gettin' the worst of this argument all round. Brother
+    Paul's been sailing into me on pretty much the same tack."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," said Nicholas, firmly; "Brother Paul no unnerstan'. <i>You</i>
+    unnerstan'." He came still nearer to the Father, speaking in a
+    friendly, confidential tone. "You savvy! Plague come on steamboat up
+    from St. Michael. One white man, he got coast sickness. Sun shining.
+    Salmon run big. Yukon full o' boats. Two days: no canoe on river. Men
+    all sit in tent like so." He let his mittens fall on the floor,
+    crouched on his heels, and rocked his head in his hands. Springing up,
+    he went on with slow, sorrowful emphasis: "Men begin die&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Zen we come," said the Father, "wiz nurses and proper medicine&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas gave the ghost of a shrug, adding the damaging fact: "Sickness
+    come to Holy Cross."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Father nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We've had to turn ze schools into wards for our patients," he
+    explained to the stranger. "We do little now but nurse ze sick and
+    prepare ze dying. Ze Muzzer Superieure has broken down after heroic
+    labours. Paul, I fear, is sickening too. Yes, it's true: ze disease
+    came to us from Pymeut."
+</p>
+<p>
+    In the Father's mind was the thought of contagion courageously faced in
+    order to succour "the least of these my brethren." In Nicholas's mind
+    was the perplexing fact that these white men could bring sickness, but
+    not stay it. Even the heap good people at Holy Cross were not saved by
+    their deaf and impotent God.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Fathers sick, eight Sisters sick, boy die in school, three girl die.
+    Holy Cross people kind&mdash;" Again he made that almost French motion of
+    the shoulders. "Shamán say, 'Peeluck!' No good be kind to devils; scare
+    'em&mdash;make 'em run."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nicholas," the priest spoke wearily, "I am ashamed of you. I sought
+    you had learned better. Zat old Shamán&mdash;he is a rare old rogue. What
+    did you give him?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas' mental processes may not have been flattering, but their
+    clearness was unmistakable. If Father Brachet was jealous of the rival
+    holy man's revenue, it was time to bring out the presents.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Ol' Chief had a fine lynx-skin over his arm. He advanced at a word from
+    Nicholas, and laid it down before the Father.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No!" said Father Brachet, with startling suddenness; "take it away and
+    try to understand."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas approached trembling, but no doubt remembering how necessary
+    it had been to add to the Shamán's offering before he would consent to
+    listen with favour to Pymeut prayers, he pulled out of their respective
+    hiding&mdash;places about his person a carved ivory spoon and an embroidered
+    bird-skin pouch, advanced boldly under the fire of the Superior's keen
+    eyes and sharp words, and laid the further offering on the lynx-skin at
+    his feet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Take zem away," said the priest, interrupting his brief homily and
+    standing up. "Don't you understand yet zat we are your friends wizzout
+    money and wizzout price? We do not want zese sings. Shamán takes
+    ivories from ze poor, furs from ze shivering, and food from zem zat
+    starve. And he gives nossing in return&mdash;nossing! Take zese sings away;
+    no one wants zem at Holy Cross."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Ol' Chief wiped his eyes pathetically. Nicholas, the picture of
+    despair, turned in a speechless appeal to his despised ambassador.
+    Before anyone could speak, the door-knob rattled rudely, and the big
+    bullet-head of a white man was put in.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pardon, mon Père; cet homme qui vient de Minóok&mdash;faudrait le coucher
+    de suite&mdash;mais où, mon Dieu, où?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    While the Superior cogitated, "How-do, Brother Etienne?" said Nicholas,
+    and they nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Brother Etienne brought the rest of his heavy body half inside the
+    door. He wore aged, weather-beaten breeches, and a black sweater over
+    an old hickory shirt.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ses compagnons l'ont laissé, là, je crois. Mais ça ne durera pas
+    longtemps."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Faudra bien qu'il reste ici&mdash;je ne vois pas d'autre moyen," said the
+    Father. "Enfin&mdash;on verra. Attendez quelques instants."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "C'est bien." Brother Etienne went out.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Ol' Chief was pulling the Boy's sleeve during the little colloquy, and
+    saying, "You tell." But the Boy got up like one who means to make an
+    end.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You haven't any time or strength for this&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh yes," said Father Brachet, smiling, and arresting the impetuous
+    movement. "Ziz is&mdash;part of it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well," said the Boy, still hesitating, "they <i>are</i> sorry, you know,
+    <i>really</i> sorry."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You sink so?" The question rang a little sceptically.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, I do, and I'm in a position to know. You'd forgive them if you'd
+    seen, as I did, how miserable and overwhelmed they were when Brother
+    Paul&mdash;when&mdash;I'm not saying it's the highest kind of religion that
+    they're so almighty afraid of losing your good opinion, but it&mdash;it
+    gives you a hold, doesn't it?" And then, as the Superior said nothing,
+    only kept intent eyes on the young face, the Boy wound up a little
+    angrily: "Unless, of course, you're like Brother Paul, ready to throw
+    away the power you've gained&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Paul serves a great and noble purpose&mdash;but&mdash;zese questions are&mdash;a&mdash;not
+    in his province." Still he bored into the young face with those kind
+    gimlets, his good little eyes, and&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You are&mdash;one of us?" he asked, "of ze Church?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, I&mdash;I'm afraid I'm not of any Church."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And I ought to take back 'afraid.' But I'm telling you the truth when
+    I say there never were honester penitents than the Pymeuts. The whole
+    Kachime's miserable. Even the girl, Ol' Chief's daughter she cried like
+    anything when she thought Sister&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Winifred?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sister Winifred would be disappointed in her."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, yes; Sister Winifred has zem&mdash;" he held out his hand, spread the
+    fingers apart, and slowly, gently closed them. "Comme ça."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But what's the good of it if Brother Paul&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, it is not just zere Paul comes in. But I tell you, my son, Paul
+    does a work here no ozzer man has done so well."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He is a flint&mdash;a fanatic."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Fanatique!" He flung out an expressive hand. "It is a name, my son. It
+    often means no more but zat a man is in earnest. Out of such a 'flint'
+    we strike sparks, and many a generous fire is set alight. We all do
+    what we can here at Holy Cross, but Paul will do what we cannot."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, give <i>me</i>&mdash;" He was on the point of saying "Father Wills," but
+    changed it to "a man who is tolerant."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tolerant? Zere are plenty to be tolerant, my son. Ze world is full.
+    But when you find a man zat can <i>care</i>, zat can be 'fanatique'&mdash;ah! It
+    is"&mdash;he came a little nearer&mdash;"it is but as if I would look at you and
+    say, 'He has earnest eyes! He will go far <i>whatever</i> road he follow.'"
+    He drew off, smiling shrewdly. "You may live, my son, to be yourself
+    called 'fanatique.' Zen you will know how little&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I!" the Boy broke in. "You are pretty wide of the mark this time."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, perhaps! But zere are more trails zan ze Yukon for a fanatique.
+    You have zere somesing to show me?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I promised the girl that cried so&mdash;I promised her to bring the Sister
+    this." He had pulled out the picture. In spite of the careful wrapping,
+    it had got rather crumpled. The Father looked at it, and then a swift
+    glance passed between him and the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You could see it was like pulling out teeth to part with it. Can it go
+    up there till the Sister sends for it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Father Brachet nodded, and the gorgeous worldling, counselling all men
+    to "Smoke Kentucky Leaf!" was set up in the high place of honour on the
+    mantel-shelf, beside a print of the Madonna and the Holy Child.
+    Nicholas cheered up at this, and Ol' Chief stopped wiping his eyes.
+    While the Boy stood at the mantel with his back to Father Brachet,
+    acting on a sudden impulse, he pulled the ivory pen-rest out of his
+    shirt, and stuck its various parts together, saying as he did so, "She
+    sent an offering to you, too. If the Ol' Chief an' I fail to convince
+    you of our penitence, we're all willin' to let this gentleman plead for
+    us." Whereupon he wheeled round and held up the Woeful One before the
+    Father's eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The priest grasped the offering with an almost convulsive joy, and
+    instantly turned his back that the Pymeuts might not see the laugh that
+    twisted up his humorous old features. The penitents looked at each
+    other, and telegraphed in Pymeut that after all the Boy had come up to
+    time. The Father had refused the valuable lynx-skin and Nicholas'
+    superior spoon, but was ready, it appeared, to look with favour on
+    anything the Boy offered.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But very seriously the priest turned round upon the Pymeuts. "I will
+    just say a word to you before we wash and go in to supper." With a
+    kindly gravity he pronounced a few simple sentences about the
+    gentleness of Christ with the ignorant, but how offended the Heavenly
+    Father was when those who knew the true God descended to idolatrous
+    practices, and how entirely He could be depended upon to punish wicked
+    people.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Ol' Chief nodded vigorously and with sudden excitement. "Me jus' like
+    God."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hein?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, yes. Me no stan' wicked people. When me young me kill two ol'
+    squaws&mdash;<i>witches!</i>" With an outward gesture of his lean claws he swept
+    these wicked ones off the face of the earth, like a besom of the Lord.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A sudden change had passed over the tired face of the priest. "Go, go!"
+    he called out, driving the Pymeuts forth as one shoos chickens out of a
+    garden. "Go to ze schoolhouse and get fed, for it's all you seem able
+    to get zere."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the perplexed flight of the Pymeuts was arrested. Brother Paul and
+    Brother Etienne blocked the way with a stretcher. They all stood back
+    to let the little procession come in. Nobody noticed them further, but
+    the Pymeuts scuttled away the instant they could get by. The Boy,
+    equally forgotten, sat down in a corner, while the three priests
+    conferred in low-voiced French over the prostrate figure.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Father Brachet," a weak voice came up from the floor.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Brother Paul hurried out, calling Brother Etienne softly from the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I am here." The Superior came from the foot of the pallet, and knelt
+    down near the head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You&mdash;remember what you said last July?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "About&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "About making restitution."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I can do it now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I am glad."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've brought you the papers. That's why&mdash;I&mdash;<i>had</i> to come. Will
+    you&mdash;take them&mdash;out of my&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The priest unbuckled a travel-stained buckskin miner's belt and laid it
+    on the floor. All the many pockets were empty save the long one in the
+    middle. He unbuttoned the flap and took out some soiled, worn-looking
+    papers. "Are zese in proper form?" he asked, but the man seemed to have
+    dropped into unconsciousness. Hurriedly the priest added: "Zere is no
+    time to read zem. Ah! Mr.&mdash;will you come and witness zis last will and
+    testament?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy got up and stood near. The man from Minóok opened his eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Here!" The priest had got writing materials, and put a pen into the
+    slack hand, with a block of letter-paper under it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I&mdash;I'm no lawyer," said the faint voice, "but I think it's all&mdash;in
+    shape. Anyhow&mdash;you write&mdash;and I'll sign." He half closed his eyes, and
+    the paper slipped from under his hand. The Boy caught it, and set down
+    the faint words:&mdash;"will and bequeath to John M. Berg, Kansas City, my
+    right and title to claim No. 11 Above, Little Minóok, Yukon Ramparts&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    And the voice fell away into silence. They waited a moment, and the
+    Superior whispered:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Can you sign it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The dull eyes opened. "Didn't I&mdash;?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Father Brachet held him up; the Boy gave him the pen and steadied the
+    paper. "Thank you, Father. Obliged to you, too." He turned his dimming
+    eyes upon the Boy, who wrote his name in witness. "You&mdash;going to
+    Minóok?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I hope so."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Father went to the writing-table, where he tied up and sealed the
+    packet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Anybody that's going to Minóok will have to hustle." The slang of
+    everyday energy sounded strangely from dying lips&mdash;almost a whisper,
+    and yet like a far-off bugle calling a captive to battle.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy leaned down to catch the words, yet fainter:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good claims going like hot cakes."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How much," the Boy asked, breathless, "did you get out of yours?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Waiting till summer. Nex' summer&mdash;" The eyelids fell.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So it isn't a fake after all." The Boy stood up. "The camp's all
+    right!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You'll see. It will out-boom the Klondyke."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ha! How long have you been making the trip?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Since August."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The wild flame of enterprise sunk in the heart of the hearer.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Since <i>August</i>?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No cash for steamers; we had a canoe. She went to pieces up by&mdash;" The
+    weak voice fell down into that deep gulf that yawns waiting for man's
+    last word.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But there is gold at Minóok, you're sure? You've seen it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Father Superior locked away the packet and stood up. But the Boy
+    was bending down fascinated, listening at the white lips. "There is
+    gold there?" he repeated.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Out of the gulf came faintly back like an echo:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Plenty o' gold there&mdash;plenty o' gold."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Jee-rusalem!" He stood up and found himself opposite the contemplative
+    face of the priest.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We have neglected you, my son. Come upstairs to my room."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They went out, the old head bent, and full of thought; the young head
+    high, and full of dreams. Oh, to reach this Minóok, where there was
+    "plenty of gold, plenty of gold," before the spring floods brought
+    thousands. What did any risk matter? Think of the Pymeuts doing their
+    sixty miles over the ice just to apologise to Father Brachet for being
+    Pymeuts. This other, this white man's penance might, would involve a
+    greater mortification of the flesh. What then? The reward was
+    proportionate&mdash;"plenty of gold." The faint whisper filled the air.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A little more hardship, and the long process of fortune-building is
+    shortened to a few months. No more office grind. No more anxiety for
+    those one loves.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Gold, plenty of gold, while one is young and can spend it gaily&mdash;gold
+    to buy back the Orange Grove, to buy freedom and power, to buy wings,
+    and to buy happiness!
+</p>
+<p>
+    On the stairs they passed Brother Paul and the native.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Supper in five minutes, Father."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Superior nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There is a great deal to do," the native went on hurriedly to Paul.
+    "We've got to bury Catherine to-morrow&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And this man from Minóok," agreed Paul, pausing with his hand on the
+    door.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH8"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER VII
+</h2>
+<center>
+    KAVIAK'S CRIME
+</center>
+<p class="ind">
+  "My little son, who look'd from thoughtful eyes,<br>
+   And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,<br>
+   Having my law the seventh time disobey'd,<br>
+   I struck him, and dismiss'd<br>
+   With hard words and unkiss'd...."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Even with the plague and Brother Paul raging at the mission&mdash;even with
+    everyone preoccupied by the claims of dead and dying, the Boy would
+    have been glad to prolong his stay had it not been for "nagging"
+    thoughts of the Colonel. As it was, with the mercury rapidly rising and
+    the wind fallen, he got the Pymeuts on the trail next day at noon,
+    spent what was left of the night at the Kachime, and set off for camp
+    early the following day. He arrived something of a wreck, and with an
+    enormous respect for the Yukon trail.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It did him good to sight the big chimney, and still more to see the big
+    Colonel putting on his snow-shoes near the bottom of the hill, where
+    the cabin trail met the river trail. When the Boss o' the camp looked
+    up and saw the prodigal coming along, rather groggy on his legs, he
+    just stood still a moment. Then he kicked off his web-feet, turned back
+    a few paces uphill, and sat down on a spruce stump, folded his arms,
+    and waited. Was it the knapsack on his back that bowed him so?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hello, Kentucky!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the Colonel didn't look up till the Boy got quite near, chanting in
+    his tuneless voice:
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+   "'Grasshoppah sett'n on a swee' p'tater vine,<br>
+     Swee' p'tater vine, swee' p'tater vine&mdash;'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's the matter, hey, Colonel? Sorry as all that to see me back?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Reckon it's the kind o' sorrah I can bear," said the Colonel. "We
+    thought you were dead."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You ought t' known me better. Were you just sendin' out a rescue-party
+    of one?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel nodded. "That party would have started before, but I cut my
+    foot with the axe the day you left. Where have you been, in the name o'
+    the nation?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pymeut an' Holy Cross."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Holy Cross? Holy Moses! <i>You?</i>"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes; and do you know, one thing I saw there gave me a serious nervous
+    shock."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That don't surprise me. What was it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sheets. When I came to go to bed&mdash;a real bed, Colonel, on legs&mdash;I
+    found I was expected to sleep between sheets, and I just about
+    fainted."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That the only shock you had?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, I had several. I saw an angel. I tell you straight, Colonel&mdash;you
+    can bank on what I'm sayin'&mdash;that Jesuit outfit's all right."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, you think so?" The rejoinder came a little sharply.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, sir, I just do. I think I'd be bigoted not to admit it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So, you'll be thick as peas in a pod with the priests now?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I'm the one that can afford to be. They won't convert <i>me!</i> And,
+    from my point o' view, it don't matter what a man is s' long's he's a
+    decent fella."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel's only answer was to plunge obliquely uphill.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Say, Boss, wait for me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel looked back. The Boy was holding on to a scrub willow that
+    put up wiry twigs above the snow.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Feel as if I'd never get up the last rungs o' this darn ice-ladder!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tired? H'm! Something of a walk to Holy Cross even on a nice mild day
+    like this." The Colonel made the reflection with obvious satisfaction,
+    took off his knapsack, and sat down again. The Boy did the same. "The
+    very day you lit out Father Orloff came up from the Russian mission."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's he like?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, little fella in petticoats, with a beard an' a high pot-hat, like
+    a Russian. And that same afternoon we had a half-breed trader fella
+    here, with two white men. Since that day we haven't seen a human
+    creature. We bought some furs of the trader. Where'd you get yours?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pymeut. Any news about the strike?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, the trader fella was sure it was all gammon, and told us stories
+    of men who'd sacrificed everything and joined a stampede, and got
+    sold&mdash;sold badly. But the two crazy whites with him&mdash;miners from
+    Dakotah&mdash;they were on fire about Minóok. Kept on bragging they hadn't
+    cold feet, and swore they'd get near to the diggins as their dogs'd
+    take 'em. The half-breed said they might do a hundred miles more, but
+    probably wouldn't get beyond Anvik."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Crazy fools! I tell you, to travel even thirty miles on the Yukon in
+    winter, even with a bully team and old Nick to drive 'em, and not an
+    extra ounce on your back&mdash;I tell you, Colonel, it's no joke."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "B'lieve you, sonny."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It wasn't thirty seconds before sonny was adding: "Did that half-breed
+    think it was any use our trying to get dogs?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ain't to be had now for love or money."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Lord, Colonel, if we had a team&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, I know. We'll probably owe our lives to the fact that we
+    haven't."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It suddenly occurred to the Boy that, although he had just done a
+    pretty good tramp and felt he'd rather die than go fifty feet further,
+    it was the Colonel who was most tired.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How's everybody?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I s'pose we might all of us be worse off."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's the matter?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He was so long answering that the Boy's eyes turned to follow the
+    serious outward gaze of the older man, even before he lifted one hand
+    and swept it down the hill and out across the dim, grey prospect.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This," said the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Their eyes had dropped down that last stretch of the steep snow slope,
+    across the two miles of frozen river, and ran half round the wide
+    horizon-line, like creatures in a cage. Whether they liked it or
+    whether they didn't, for them there was no way out.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's the awful stillness." The Colonel arraigned the distant
+    ice-plains.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They sat there looking, listening, as if they hoped their protest might
+    bring some signal of relenting. No creature, not even a crystal-coated
+    willow-twig, nothing on all the ice-bound earth stirred by as much as a
+    hair; no mark of man past or present broke the grey monotony; no sound
+    but their two voices disturbed the stillness of the world. It was a
+    quiet that penetrated, that pricked to vague alarm. Already both knew
+    the sting of it well.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's the kind of thing that gets on a fella's nerves," said the
+    Colonel. "I don't know as I ever felt helpless in any part of the world
+    before. But a man counts for precious little up here. Do you notice how
+    you come to listen to the silence?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, yes, I've noticed."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Stop." Again he lifted his hand, and they strained their ears. "I've
+    done that by the hour since you left and the daft gold-diggers went up
+    trail after you. The other fellas feel it, too. Don't know what we'd
+    have done without Kaviak. Think we ought to keep that kid, you know."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I could get on without Kaviak if only we had some light. It's this
+    villainous twilight that gets into my head. All the same, you know"&mdash;he
+    stood up suddenly&mdash;"we came expecting to stand a lot, didn't we?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The elder man nodded. "Big game, big stakes. It's all right."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Eventless enough after this, except for the passing of an Indian or
+    two, the days crawled by.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy would get up first in the morning, rake out the dead ashes, put
+    on a couple of back-logs, bank them with ashes, and then build the fire
+    in front. He broke the ice in the water-bucket, and washed; filled
+    coffee-pot and mush-kettle with water (or ice), and swung them over the
+    fire; then he mixed the corn-bread, put it in the Dutch oven, covered
+    it with coals, and left it to get on with its baking. Sometimes this
+    part of the programme was varied by his mixing a hoe-cake on a board,
+    and setting it up "to do" in front of the fire. Then he would call the
+    Colonel&mdash;
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+  "'Wake up Massa,<br>
+     De day am breakin';<br>
+   Peas in de pot, en de<br>
+   Hoe-cake bakin''"&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    for it was the Colonel's affair to take up proceedings at this
+    point&mdash;make the coffee and the mush and keep it from burning, fry the
+    bacon, and serve up breakfast.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Saturday brought a slight variation in the early morning routine. The
+    others came straggling in, as usual, but once a week Mac was sure to be
+    first, for he had to get Kaviak up. Mac's view of his whole duty to man
+    seemed to centre in the Saturday scrubbing of Kaviak. Vainly had the
+    Esquimer stood out against compliance with this most repulsive of
+    foreign customs. He seemed to be always ready with some deep-laid
+    scheme for turning the edge of Mac's iron resolution. He tried hiding
+    at the bottom of the bed. It didn't work. The next time he crouched far
+    back under the lower bunk. He was dragged out. Another Saturday he
+    embedded himself, like a moth, in a bundle of old clothes. Mac shook
+    him out. He had been very sanguine the day he hid in the library. This
+    was a wooden box nailed to the wall on the right of the door. Most of
+    the bigger books&mdash;Byron, Wordsworth, Dana's "Mineralogy," and two
+    Bibles&mdash;he had taken out and concealed in the lower bunk very
+    skilfully, far back behind the Colonel's feet. Copps's "Mining" and the
+    two works on "Parliamentary Law" piled at the end of the box served as
+    a pillow. After climbing in and folding himself up into an incredibly
+    small space, Kaviak managed with superhuman skill to cover himself
+    neatly with a patchwork quilt of <i>Munsey, Scribner, Century, Strand</i>,
+    and <i>Overland</i> for August, '97. No one would suspect, glancing into
+    that library, that underneath the usual top layer of light reading, was
+    matter less august than Law, Poetry, Science, and Revelation.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was the base Byron, tipping the wink to Mac out of the back of the
+    bunk, that betrayed Kaviak.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It became evident that "Farva" began to take a dour pride in the Kid's
+    perseverance. One morning he even pointed out to the camp the strong
+    likeness between Kaviak and Robert Bruce.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, sah; the Scottish chief had to have an object-lesson, but
+    Kaviak&mdash;Lawd!&mdash;Kaviak could give points to any spider livin'!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    This was on the morning that the Esquimer thought to escape scrubbing,
+    even at the peril of his life, by getting up on to the swing-shelf
+    &mdash;how, no man ever knew. But there he sat in terror, like a
+    very young monkey in a wind-rocked tree, hardly daring to breathe, his
+    arms clasped tight round the demijohn; but having Mac to deal with, the
+    end of it was that he always got washed, and equally always he seemed
+    to register a vow that, s'help him, Heaven! it should never happen
+    again.
+</p>
+<p>
+    After breakfast came the clearing up. It should have been done (under
+    this régime) by the Little Cabin men, but it seldom was. O'Flynn was
+    expected to keep the well-hole in the river chopped open and to bring
+    up water every day. This didn't always happen either, though to drink
+    snow-water was to invite scurvy, Father Wills said. There was also a
+    daily need, if the Colonel could be believed, for everybody to chop
+    firewood.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We got enough," was Potts' invariable opinion.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "For how long? S'pose we get scurvy and can't work; we'd freeze to
+    death in a fortnight."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Never saw a fireplace swalla logs whole an' never blink like this
+    one."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But you got no objection to sittin' by while the log-swallerin' goes
+    on."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel or the Boy cooked the eternal beans, bacon and mush dinner,
+    after whatever desultory work was done; as a matter of fact, there was
+    extraordinarily little to occupy five able-bodied men. The fun of
+    snow-shoeing, mitigated by frostbite, quickly degenerated from a sport
+    into a mere means of locomotion. One or two of the party went hunting,
+    now and then, for the scarce squirrel and the shy ptarmigan. They
+    tried, with signal lack of success, to catch fish, Indian fashion,
+    through a hole in the ice.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But, for the most part, as winter darkened round them, they lounged
+    from morning till night about the big fireplace, and smoked, and
+    growled, and played cards, and lived as men do, finding out a deal
+    about each other's characters, something about each other's opinions,
+    and little or nothing about each other's history.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In the appalling stillness of the long Arctic night, any passer-by was
+    hailed with enthusiasm, and although the food-supply in the Big Cabin
+    was plainly going to run short before spring, no traveller&mdash;white,
+    Indian, or Esquimaux&mdash;was allowed to go by without being warmed and
+    fed, and made to tell where he came from and whither he was
+    bound&mdash;questions to tax the sage. Their unfailing hospitality was not
+    in the least unexpected or unusual, being a virtue practised even by
+    scoundrels in the great North-west; but it strained the resources of
+    the little camp, a fourth of whose outfit lay under the Yukon ice.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In the state of lowered vitality to which the poor, ill-cooked food,
+    the cold and lack of exercise, was slowly reducing them, they talked to
+    one another less and less as time went on, and more and more&mdash;silently
+    and each against his will&mdash;grew hyper-sensitive to the shortcomings and
+    even to the innocent "ways" of the other fellow.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Not Mac's inertia alone, but his trick of sticking out his jaw became
+    an offence, his rasping voice a torture. The Boy's occasional
+    ebullition of spirits was an outrage, the Colonel's mere size
+    intolerable. O'Flynn's brogue, which had amused them, grew to be just
+    part of the hardship and barbarism that had overtaken them like an evil
+    dream, coercing, subduing all the forces of life. Only Kaviak seemed
+    likely to come unscathed through the ordeal of the winter's captivity;
+    only he could take the best place at the fire, the best morsel at
+    dinner, and not stir angry passions; only he dared rouse Mac when the
+    Nova Scotian fell into one of his bear-with-a-sore-head moods. Kaviak
+    put a stop to his staring angrily by the hour into the fire, and set
+    him to whittling out boats and a top, thereby providing occupation for
+    the morrow, since it was one man's work to break Kaviak of spinning the
+    one on the table during mealtime, and sailing the other in the
+    drinking-water bucket at all times when older eyes weren't watching.
+    The Colonel wrote up his journal, and read the midsummer magazines and
+    Byron, in the face of Mac's "I do not like Byron's thought; I do not
+    consider him healthy or instructive." In one of his more energetic
+    moods the Colonel made a four-footed cricket for Kaviak, who preferred
+    it to the high stool, and always sat on it except at meals.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Once in a while, when for hours no word had been spoken except some
+    broken reference to a royal flush or a jack-pot, or O'Flynn had said,
+    "Bedad! I'll go it alone," or Potts had inquired anxiously, "Got the
+    joker? Guess I'm euchred, then," the Boy in desperation would catch up
+    Kaviak, balance the child on his head, or execute some other gymnastic,
+    soothing the solemn little heathen's ruffled feelings, afterwards, by
+    crooning out a monotonous plantation song. It was that kind of addition
+    to the general gloom that, at first, would fire O'Flynn to raise his
+    own spirits, at least, by roaring out an Irish ditty. But this was
+    seldomer as time went on. Even Jimmie's brogue suffered, and grew less
+    robust.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In a depressed sort of way Mac was openly teaching Kaviak his letters,
+    and surreptitiously, down in the Little Cabin, his prayers. He was very
+    angry when Potts and O'Flynn eavesdropped and roared at Kaviak's
+    struggles with "Ow Farva." In fact, Kaviak did not shine as a student
+    of civilisation, though that told less against him with O'Flynn, than
+    the fact that he wasn't "jolly and jump about, like white children."
+    Moreover, Jimmie, swore there was something "bogey" about the boy's
+    intermittent knowledge of English. Often for days he would utter
+    nothing but "Farva" or "Maw" when he wanted his plate replenished, then
+    suddenly he would say something that nobody could remember having
+    taught him or even said in his presence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was not to be denied that Kaviak loved sugar mightily, and stole it
+    when he could. Mac lectured him and slapped his minute yellow hands,
+    and Kaviak stole it all the same. When he was bad&mdash;that is, when he had
+    eaten his daily fill of the camp's scanty store (in such a little place
+    it was not easy to hide from such a hunter as Kaviak)&mdash;he was taken
+    down to the Little Cabin, smacked, and made to say "Ow Farva." Nobody
+    could discover that he minded much, though he learnt to try to shorten
+    the ceremony by saying "I solly" all the way to the cabin.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As a rule he was strangely undemonstrative; but in his own grave little
+    fashion he conducted life with no small intelligence, and learned, with
+    an almost uncanny quickness, each man's uses from the Kaviak point of
+    view. The only person he wasn't sworn friends with was the handy-man,
+    and there came to be a legend current in the camp, that Kaviak's first
+    attempt at spontaneously stringing a sentence under that roof was, "Me
+    got no use for Potts."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The best thing about Kaviak was that his was no craven soul. He was
+    obliged to steal the sugar because he lived with white people who were
+    bigger than he, and who always took it away when they caught him. But
+    once the sugar was safe under his shirt, he owned up without the
+    smallest hesitation, and took his smacking like a man. For the rest, he
+    flourished, filled out, and got as fat as a seal, but never a whit less
+    solemn.
+</p>
+<p>
+    One morning the Colonel announced that now the days had grown so short,
+    and the Trio were so late coming to breakfast, and nobody did any work
+    to speak of, it would be a good plan to have only two meals a day.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The motion was excessively unpopular, but it was carried by a plain,
+    and somewhat alarming, exposition of the state of supplies.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We oughtn't to need as much food when we lazy round the fire all day,"
+    said the Colonel. But Potts retorted that they'd need a lot more if
+    they went on adoptin' the aborigines.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They knocked off supper, and all but the aborigine knew what it meant
+    sometimes to go hungry to bed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Towards the end of dinner one day late in December, when everybody else
+    had finished except for coffee and pipe, the aborigine held up his
+    empty plate.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Haven't you had enough?" asked the Colonel mildly, surprised at
+    Kaviak's bottomless capacity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Maw." Still the plate was extended.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There isn't a drop of syrup left," said Potts, who had drained the
+    can, and even wiped it out carefully with halves of hot biscuit.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He don't really want it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mustn't open a fresh can till to-morrow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, sir<i>ee</i>. We've only got&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Besides, he'll bust."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak meanwhile, during this paltry discussion, had stood up on the
+    high stool "Farva" had made for him, and personally inspected the big
+    mush-pot. Then he turned to Mac, and, pointing a finger like a straw
+    (nothing could fatten those infinitesimal hands), he said gravely and
+    fluently:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Maw in de plenty-bowl."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, maw mush, but no maw syrup."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The round eyes travelled to the store corner.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We'll have to open a fresh can some time&mdash;what's the odds?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac got up, and not only Kaviak watched him&mdash;for syrup was a luxury not
+    expected every day&mdash;every neck had craned, every pair of eyes had
+    followed anxiously to that row of rapidly diminishing tins, all that
+    was left of the things they all liked best, and they still this side of
+    Christmas!
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What you rubber-neckin' about?" Mac snapped at the Boy as he came back
+    with the fresh supply. This unprovoked attack was ample evidence that
+    Mac was uneasy under the eyes of the camp, angry at his own weakness,
+    and therefore the readier to dare anybody to find fault with him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How can I help watchin' you?" said the Boy. Mac lifted his eyes
+    fiercely. "I'm fascinated by your winnin' ways; we're all like that."
+    Kaviak had meanwhile made a prosperous voyage to the plenty-bowl, and
+    returned to Mac's side&mdash;an absurd little figure in a strange
+    priest-like cassock buttoned from top to bottom (a waistcoat of Mac's),
+    and a jacket of the Boy's, which was usually falling off (and trailed
+    on the ground when it wasn't), and whose sleeves were rolled up in
+    inconvenient muffs. Still, with a gravity that did not seem impaired by
+    these details, he stood clutching his plate anxiously with both hands,
+    while down upon the corn-mush descended a slender golden thread,
+    manipulated with a fine skill to make the most of its sweetness. It
+    curled and spiralled, and described the kind of involved and
+    long-looped flourishes which the grave and reverend of a hundred years
+    ago wrote jauntily underneath the most sober names.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Lovingly the dark eyes watched the engrossing process. Even when the
+    attenuated thread was broken, and the golden rain descended in slow,
+    infrequent drops, Kaviak stood waiting, always for just one drop more.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's enough, greedy."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now go away and gobble."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Kaviak daintily skimmed off the syrupy top, and left his mush
+    almost as high a hill as before.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It wasn't long after the dinner, things had been washed up, and the
+    Colonel settled down to the magazines&mdash;he was reading the
+    advertisements now&mdash;that Potts drew out his watch.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Golly! do you fellers know what o'clock it is?" He held the open
+    timepiece up to Mac. "Hardly middle o' the afternoon. All these hours
+    before bedtime, and nothin' to eat till to-morrow!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, you've just finished&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But look at the <i>time!</i>"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel said nothing. Maybe he had been a little previous with
+    dinner today; it was such a relief to get it out of the way. Oppressive
+    as the silence was, the sound of Potts's voice was worse, and as he
+    kept on about how many hours it would be till breakfast, the Colonel
+    said to the Boy:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "'Johnny, get your gun,' and we'll go out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    In these December days, before the watery sun had set, the great,
+    rich-coloured moon arose, having now in her resplendent fulness quite
+    the air of snuffing out the sun. The pale and heavy-eyed day was put to
+    shame by this brilliant night-lamp, that could cast such heavy shadows,
+    and by which men might read.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The instant the Big Cabin door was opened Kaviak darted out between the
+    Colonel's legs, threw up his head like a Siwash dog, sniffed at the
+    frosty air and the big orange moon, flung up his heels, and tore down
+    to the forbidden, the fascinating fish-hole. If he hadn't got snared in
+    his trailing coat he would have won that race. When the two hunters had
+    captured Kaviak, and shut him indoors, they acted on his implied
+    suggestion that the fish-trap ought to be examined. They chopped away
+    the fresh-formed ice. Empty, as usual.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It had been very nice, and neighbourly, of Nicholas, as long ago as the
+    1st of December, to bring the big, new, cornucopia-shaped trap down on
+    his sled on the way to the Ikogimeut festival. It had taken a long time
+    to cut through the thick ice, to drive in the poles, and fasten the
+    slight fencing, in such relation to the mouth of the sunken trap, that
+    all well-conducted fish ought easily to find their way thither. As a
+    matter of fact, they didn't. Potts said it was because the Boy was
+    always hauling out the trap "to see"; but what good would it be to have
+    it full of fish and not know?
+</p>
+<p>
+    They had been out about an hour when the Colonel brought down a
+    ptarmigan, and said he was ready to go home. The Boy hesitated.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Going to give in, and cook that bird for supper?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was a tempting proposition, but the Colonel said, rather sharply:
+    "No, sir. Got to keep him for a Christmas turkey."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I'll just see if I can make it a brace."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel went home, hung his trophy outside to freeze, and found the
+    Trio had decamped to the Little Cabin. He glanced up anxiously to see
+    if the demijohn was on the shelf. Yes, and Kaviak sound asleep in the
+    bottom bunk. The Colonel would climb up and have forty winks in the top
+    one before the Boy got in for their game of chess. He didn't know how
+    long he had slept when a faint scratching pricked through the veil of
+    slumber, and he said to himself, "Kaviak's on a raid again," but he was
+    too sodden with sleep to investigate. Just before he dropped off again,
+    however, opening a heavy eye, he saw Potts go by the bunk, stop at the
+    door and listen. Then he passed the bunk again, and the faint noise
+    recommenced. The Colonel dropped back into the gulf of sleep, never
+    even woke for his chess, and in the morning the incident had passed out
+    of his mind.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Just before dinner the next day the Boy called out:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "See here! who's spilt the syrup?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Spilt it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Syrup?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No; it don't seem to be spilt, either." He patted the ground with his
+    hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You don't mean that new can&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not a drop in it." He turned it upside down.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Every eye went to Kaviak. He was sitting on his cricket by the fire
+    waiting for dinner. He returned the accusing looks of the company with
+    self-possession.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come here." He got up and trotted over to "Farva."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Have you been to the syrup?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You <i>must</i> have been."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You sure?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How did it go&mdash;all away&mdash;Do you know?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Again the silent denial. Kaviak looked over his shoulder at the dinner
+    preparations, and then went back to his cricket. It was the best place
+    from which to keep a strict eye on the cook.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The gintlemin don't feel conversaytional wid a pint o' surrup in his
+    inside."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I tell you he'd be currled up with colic if he&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well," said O'Flynn hopefully, "bide a bit. He ain't lookin' very
+    brash."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak got up a second time, but with less alacrity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Have you got a pain?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He stared.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Does it hurt you there?" Kaviak doubled up suddenly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He's awful ticklish," said the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac frowned with perplexity, and Kaviak retired to the cricket.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Does the can leak anywhere?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That excuse won't hold water 'cause the can will." The Colonel had
+    just applied the test.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Besides, it would have leaked on to something," Mac agreed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, well, let's mosy along with our dinner," said Potts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's gettin' pretty serious," remarked the Colonel. "We can't afford
+    to lose a pint o' syrup."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, <i>Siree</i>, we can't; but there's one thing about Kaviak," said the
+    Boy, "he always owns up. Look here, Kiddie: don't say no; don't shake
+    your head till you've thought. Now, think <i>hard</i>."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak's air of profound meditation seemed to fill every requirement.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did you take the awful good syrup and eat it up?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak was in the middle of a head-shake when he stopped abruptly. The
+    Boy had said he wasn't to do that. Nobody had seemed pleased when he
+    said "No."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I b'lieve we're on the right track. He's remembering. Think again. You
+    are a tip-top man at finding sugar, aren't you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, fin' shugh." Kaviak modestly admitted his prowess in that
+    direction.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And you get hungry in the early morning?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Yes, he would go so far as to admit that he did.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You go skylarkin' about, and you remember&mdash;the syrup can! And you get
+    hold of it&mdash;didn't you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To-malla."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You mean yesterday&mdash;this morning?"
+</p>
+<center>
+    "N&mdash;"
+</center>
+<p>
+    "Sh!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak blinked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Wait and think. Yesterday this was full. You remember Mac opened it
+    for you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And now, you see"&mdash;he turned the can bottom side up&mdash;"all gone!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh-h!" murmured Kaviak with an accent of polite regret. Then, with
+    recovered cheerfulness, he pointed to the store corner: "Maw!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Potts laughed in his irritating way, and Mac's face got red. Things
+    began to look black for Kaviak.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Say, fellas, see here!" The Boy hammered the lid on the can with his
+    fist, and then held it out. "It was put away shut up, for I shut it,
+    and even one of us can't get that lid off without a knife or something
+    to pry it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The company looked at the small hands doubtfully. They were none too
+    little for many a forbidden feat. How had he got on the swing-shelf?
+    How&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ye see, crayther, it must uv been yersilf, becuz there isn't annybuddy
+    else."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look here," said the Colonel, "we'll forgive you this time if you'll
+    own up. Just tell us&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Kaviak!" Again that journey from the cricket to the judgment-seat.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Show us"&mdash;Mac had taken the shut tin, and now held it out&mdash;"show us
+    how you got the lid off."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Kaviak turned away. Mac seized him by the shoulder and jerked him
+    round.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Everyone felt it to be suspicious that Kaviak was unwilling even to try
+    to open the all too attractive can. Was he really cunning, and did he
+    want not to give himself away? Wasn't he said to be much older than he
+    looked? and didn't he sometimes look a hundred, and wise for his years?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "See here: I haven't caught you in a lie yet, but if I do&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak stared, drew a long breath, and seemed to retire within himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You'd better attend to me, for I mean business."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak, recalled from internal communing, studied "Farva" a moment, and
+    then retreated to the cricket, as to a haven now, hastily and with
+    misgiving, tripping over his trailing coat. Mac stood up.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Wait, old man." The Colonel stooped his big body till he was on a
+    level with the staring round eyes. "Yo' see, child, yo' can't have any
+    dinnah till we find out who took the syrup."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The little yellow face was very serious. He turned and looked at the
+    still smoking plenty-bowl.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Are yoh hungry?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He nodded, got up briskly, held up his train, and dragged his high
+    stool to the table, scrambled up, and established himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look at that!" said the Colonel triumphantly. "That youngster hasn't
+    just eaten a pint o' syrup."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac was coming slowly up behind Kaviak with a face that nobody liked
+    looking at.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, let the brat alone, and let's get to our grub!" said Potts, with
+    an extreme nervous irritation.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac swept Kaviak off the stool. "You come with me!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Only one person spoke after that till the meal was nearly done. That
+    one had said, "Yes, Farva," and followed Mac, dinnerless, out to the
+    Little Cabin.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel set aside a plateful for each of the two absent ones, and
+    cleared away the things. Potts stirred the fire in a shower of sparks,
+    picked up a book and flung it down, searched through the sewing-kit for
+    something that wasn't lost, and then went to the door to look at the
+    weather&mdash;so he said. O'Flynn sat dozing by the fire. He was in the way
+    of the washing-up.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Stir your stumps, Jimmie," said the Colonel, "and get us a bucket of
+    water." Sleepily O'Flynn gave it as his opinion that he'd be damned if
+    he did.
+</p>
+<p>
+    With unheard-of alacrity, "I'll go," said Potts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel stared at him, and, by some trick of the brain, he had a
+    vision of Potts listening at the door the night before, and then
+    resuming that clinking, scratching sound in the corner&mdash;the store
+    corner.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hand me over my parki, will you?" Potts said to the Boy. He pulled it
+    over his head, picked up the bucket, and went out.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Seems kind o' restless, don't he?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes. Colonel&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nothin'."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Ten minutes&mdash;a quarter of an hour went by.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Funny Mac don't come for his dinner, isn't it? S'pose I go and look
+    'em up?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "S'pose you do."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Not far from the door he met Mac coming in.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well?" said the Boy, meaning, Where's the kid?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well?" Mac echoed defiantly. "I lammed him, as I'd have lammed Robert
+    Bruce if he'd lied to me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy stared at this sudden incursion into history, but all he said
+    was: "Your dinner's waitin'."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The minute Mac got inside he looked round hungrily for the child. Not
+    seeing him, he went over and scrutinised the tumbled contents of the
+    bunks.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where's Kaviak?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "P'raps you'll tell us."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You mean he isn't here?" Mac wheeled round sharply.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>Here?</i>"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He didn't come back here for his dinner?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Haven't seen him since you took him out." Mac made for the door. The
+    Boy followed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Kaviak!" each called in turn. It was quite light enough to see if he
+    were anywhere about, although the watery sun had sunk full half an hour
+    before. The fantastically huge full-moon hung like a copper shield on a
+    steel-blue wall.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you see anything?" whispered Mac.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who's that yonder?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Potts gettin' water."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy was bending down looking for tracks. Mac looked, too, but
+    ineffectually, feverishly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Isn't Potts calling?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I knew he would if he saw us. He's never carried a bucket uphill yet
+    without help. See, there are the Kid's tracks going. We must find some
+    turned the other way."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They were near the Little Cabin now.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Here!" shouted the Boy; "and ... yes, here again!" And so it was.
+    Clean and neatly printed in the last light snowfall showed the little
+    footprints. "We're on the right trail now. Kaviak!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Through his parki the Boy felt a hand close vise-like on his shoulder,
+    and a voice, not like MacCann's:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Goin' straight down to the fish-trap hole!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The two dashed forward, down the steep hill, the Boy saying breathless
+    as they went: "And Potts&mdash;where's Potts?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He had vanished, but there was no time to consider how or where.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Kaviak!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Kaviak!" And as they got to the river:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Think I hear&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So do I&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Coming! coming! Hold on tight! Coming, Kaviak!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    They made straight for the big open fish-hole. Farther away from the
+    Little Cabin, and nearer the bank, was the small well-hole. Between the
+    two they noticed, as they raced by, the water-bucket hung on that heavy
+    piece of driftwood that had frozen aslant in the river. Mac saw that
+    the bucket-rope was taut, and that it ran along the ice and disappeared
+    behind the big funnel of the fish-trap.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The sound was unmistakable now&mdash;a faint, choked voice calling out of
+    the hole, "Help!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Coming!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hold tight!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Half a minute!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    And how it was done or who did it nobody quite knew, but Potts, still
+    clinging by one hand to the bucket-rope, was hauled out and laid on the
+    ice before it was discovered that he had Kaviak under his arm&mdash;Kaviak,
+    stark and unconscious, with the round eyes rolled back till one saw the
+    whites and nothing more.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac picked the body up and held it head downwards; laid it flat again,
+    and, stripping off the great sodden jacket, already beginning to
+    freeze, fell to putting Kaviak through the action of artificial
+    breathing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We must get them up to the cabin first thing," said the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Mac seemed not to hear.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't you see Kaviak's face is freezing?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Still Mac paid no heed. Potts lifted a stiff, uncertain hand, and, with
+    a groan, let it fall heavily on his own cheek.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come on; I'll help you in, anyhow, Potts."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Can't walk in this damned wet fur."
+</p>
+<p>
+    With some difficulty having dragged off Potts' soaked parki, already
+    stiffening unmanageably, the Boy tried to get him on his feet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Once you're in the cabin you're all right."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the benumbed and miserable Potts kept his eyes on Kaviak, as if
+    hypnotised by the strange new death-look in the little face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I can't carry you up," said the Boy; and after a second he began
+    to rub Potts furiously, glancing over now and then to see if Kaviak was
+    coming to, while Mac, dumb and tense, laboured on without success.
+    Potts, under the Boy's ministering, showed himself restored enough to
+    swear feebly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "H'ray! my man's comin' round. How's yours?" No answer, but he could
+    see that the sweat poured off Mac's face as he worked unceasingly over
+    the child. The Boy pulled Potts into a sitting posture. It was then
+    that Mac, without looking up, said:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Run and get whiskey. Run like hell!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    When he got back with the Colonel and the whiskey, O'Flynn floundering
+    in the distance, Potts was feebly striking his breast with his arms,
+    and Mac still bent above the motionless little body.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They tried to get some of the spirit down the child's throat, but the
+    tight-clenched teeth seemed to let little or nothing pass. The stuff
+    ran down towards his ears and into his neck. But Mac persisted, and
+    went on pouring, drop by drop, whenever he stopped trying to restore
+    the action of the lungs. O'Flynn just barely managed to get "a swig"
+    for Potts in the interval, though they all began to feel that Mac was
+    working to bring back something that had gone for ever. The Boy went
+    and bent his face down close over the rigid mouth to feel for the
+    breath. When he got up he turned away sharply, and stood looking
+    through tears into the fish-hole, saying to himself, "Yukon Inua has
+    taken him."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He was in too long." Potts' teeth were chattering, and he looked
+    unspeakably wretched. "When my arm got numb I couldn't keep his head
+    up;" and he swallowed more whiskey. "You fellers oughtn't to have left
+    that damn trap up!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's that got to do with it?" said the Boy guiltily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Kaviak knew it ought to be catchin' fish. When I came down he was
+    cryin' and pullin' the trap backwards towards the hole. Then he
+    slipped."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come, Mac," said the Colonel quietly, "let's carry the little man to
+    the cabin."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, no, not yet; stuffy heat isn't what he wants;" and he worked on.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They got Potts up on his feet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I called out to you fellers. Didn't you hear me?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Y-yes, but we didn't understand."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, you'd better have come. It's too late now." O'Flynn half
+    dragged, half carried him up to the cabin, for he seemed unable to walk
+    in his frozen trousers. The Colonel and the Boy by a common impulse
+    went a little way in the opposite direction across the ice.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What can we do, Colonel?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nothing. It's not a bit o' use." They turned to go back.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, the duckin' will be good for Potts' parki, anyhow," said the Boy
+    in an angry and unsteady voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What do you mean?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When he asked me to hand it to him I nearly stuck fast to it. It's all
+    over syrup; and we don't wear furs at our meals."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tchah!" The Colonel stopped with a face of loathing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, he was the only one of us that didn't bully the kid to-day."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Couldn't go <i>that</i> far, but couldn't own up."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Potts is a cur."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, sah." Then, after an instant's reflection: "But he's a cur that
+    can risk his life to save a kid he don't care a damn for."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They went back to Mac, and found him pretty well worn out. The Colonel
+    took his place, but was soon pushed away. Mac understood better, he
+    said; had once brought a chap round that everybody said was ... dead.
+    He wasn't dead. The great thing was not to give in.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A few minutes after, Kaviak's eyelids fluttered, and came down over the
+    upturned eyeballs. Mac, with a cry that brought a lump to the Colonel's
+    throat, gathered the child up in his arms and ran with him up the hill
+    to the cabin.
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    Three hours later, when they were all sitting round the fire, Kaviak
+    dosed, and warm, and asleep in the lower bunk, the door opened, and in
+    walked a white man followed by an Indian.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm George Benham." They had all heard of the Anvik trader, a man of
+    some wealth and influence, and they made him welcome.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Indian was his guide, he said, and he had a team outside of seven
+    dogs. He was going to the steamship <i>Oklahoma</i> on some business, and
+    promised Father Wills of Holy Cross that he'd stop on the way, and
+    deliver a letter to Mr. MacCann.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Stop on the way! I should think so."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We were goin' to have supper to-night, anyhow, and you'll stay and
+    sleep here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    All Mac's old suspicions of the Jesuits seemed to return with the
+    advent of that letter.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll read it presently." He laid it on the mantel-shelf, between the
+    sewing-kit and the tobacco-can, and he looked at it, angrily, every now
+    and then, while he helped to skin Mr. Benham. That gentleman had thrown
+    back his hood, pulled off his great moose-skin gauntlets and his
+    beaver-lined cap, and now, with a little help, dragged the drill parki
+    over his head, and after that the fine lynx-bordered deer-skin,
+    standing revealed at last as a well-built fellow, of thirty-eight or
+    so, in a suit of mackinaws, standing six feet two in his heelless
+    salmon-skin snow-boots. "Bring in my traps, will you?" he said to the
+    Indian, and then relapsed into silence. The Indian reappeared with his
+    arms full.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Fine lot o' pelts you have there," said the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Benham didn't answer. He seemed to be a close-mouthed kind of a chap.
+    As the Indian sorted and piled the stuff in the corner, Potts said:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Got any furs you want to sell?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where you takin' 'em?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Down to the <i>Oklahoma</i>."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "All this stuff for Cap'n Rainey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Benham nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I reckon there's a mistake about the name, and he's Cap'n Tom Thumb or
+    Commodore Nutt." The Boy had picked up a little parki made carefully of
+    some very soft dark fur and trimmed with white rabbit, the small hood
+    bordered with white fox.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's a neat piece of work," said the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Benham nodded. "One of the Shageluk squaws can do that sort of thing."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's the fur?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Musk-rat." And they talked of the weather&mdash;how the mercury last week
+    had been solid in the trading-post thermometer, so it was "over forty
+    degrees, anyhow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's the market price of a coat like that?" Mac said suddenly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That isn't a 'market' coat. It's for a kid of Rainey's back in the
+    States."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Still Mac eyed it enviously.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What part of the world are you from, sir?" said the Colonel when they
+    had drawn up to the supper table.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "San Francisco. Used to teach numskulls Latin and mathematics in the
+    Las Palmas High School."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's the value of a coat like that little one?" interrupted Mac.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, about twenty dollars."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The Shageluks ask that much?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Benham laughed. "If <i>you</i> asked the Shageluks, they'd say forty."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You've been some time in this part of the world, I understand," said
+    the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Twelve years."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Without going home?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Been home twice. Only stayed a month. Couldn't stand it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll give you twenty-two dollars for that coat," said Mac.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've only got that one, and as I think I said&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll give you twenty-four."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's an order, you see. Rainey&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll give you twenty-six."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Benham shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sorry. Yes, it's queer about the hold this country gets on you. The
+    first year is hell, the second is purgatory, with glimpses ... of
+    something else. The third&mdash;well, more and more, forever after, you
+    realise the North's taken away any taste you ever had for civilisation.
+    That's when you've got the hang of things up here, when you've learned
+    not to stay in your cabin all the time, and how to take care of
+    yourself on the trail. But as for going back to the boredom of
+    cities&mdash;no, thank you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac couldn't keep his eyes off the little coat. Finally, to enable him
+    to forget it, as it seemed, he got up and opened Father Wills' letter,
+    devoured its contents in silence, and flung it down on the table. The
+    Colonel took it up, and read aloud the Father's thanks for all the
+    white camp's kindness to Kaviak, and now that the sickness was about
+    gone from Holy Cross, how the Fathers felt that they must relieve their
+    neighbours of further trouble with the little native.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've said I'd take him back with me when I come up river about
+    Christmas."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We'd be kind o' lost, now, without the little beggar," said the Boy,
+    glancing sideways at Mac.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There's nothin' to be got by luggin' him off to Holy Cross," answered
+    that gentleman severely.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Unless it's clo'es," said Potts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He's all right in the clo'es he's got," said Mac, with the air of one
+    who closes an argument. He stood up, worn and tired, and looked at his
+    watch.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You ain't goin' to bed this early?" said Potts, quite lively and
+    recovered from his cold bath. That was the worst of sleeping in the
+    Little Cabin. Bedtime broke the circle; you left interesting visitors
+    behind, and sometimes the talk was better as the night wore on.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, someone ought to wood up down yonder. O'Flynn, will you go?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    O'Flynn was in the act of declining the honour. But Benham, who had
+    been saying, "It takes a year in the Yukon for a man to get on to
+    himself," interrupted his favourite theme to ask: "Your other cabin
+    like this?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Whereon, O'Flynn, shameless of the contrast in cabins, jumped up, and
+    said: "Come and see, while I wood up."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You're very well fixed here," said Benham, rising and looking round
+    with condescension; "but men like you oughtn't to try to live without
+    real bread. No one can live and work on baking-powder."
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was a general movement to the door, of which Benham was the
+    centre.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I tell you a lump of sour dough, kept over to raise the next batch, is
+    worth more in this country than a pocket full of gold."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll give you twenty-eight for that musk-rat coat," said Mac.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Benham turned, stared back at him a moment, and then laughed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, well, I suppose I can get another made for Rainey before the first
+    boat goes down."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then is it on account o' the bread," the Colonel was saying, "that the
+    old-timer calls himself a Sour-dough?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "All on account o' the bread."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They crowded out after Benham.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Coming?" The Boy, who was last, held the door open. Mac shook his
+    head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It wasn't one of the bitter nights; they'd get down yonder, and talk by
+    the fire, till he went in and disturbed them. That was all he had
+    wanted. For Mac was the only one who had noticed that Kaviak had waked
+    up. He was lying as still as a mouse.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Alone with him at last, Mac kept his eyes religiously turned away, sat
+    down by the fire, and watched the sparks. By-and-by a head was put up
+    over the board of the lower bunk. Mac saw it, but sat quite still.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Farva."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He meant to answer the appeal, half cleared his throat, but his voice
+    felt rusty; it wouldn't turn out a word.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak climbed timidly, shakily out, and stood in the middle of the
+    floor in his bare feet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Farva!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He came a little nearer till the small feet sank into the rough brown
+    curls of the buffalo. The child stooped to pick up his wooden cricket,
+    wavered, and was about to fall. Mac shot out a hand, steadied him an
+    instant without looking, and then set the cricket in front of the fire.
+    He thereupon averted his face, and sat as before with folded arms. He
+    hadn't deliberately meant to make Kaviak be the first to "show his
+    hand" after all that had happened, but something had taken hold of him
+    and made him behave as he hadn't dreamed of behaving. It was, perhaps,
+    a fear of playing the fool as much as a determination to see how much
+    ground he'd lost with the youngster.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The child was observing him with an almost feverish intensity. With
+    eyes fixed upon the wooden face to find out how far he might venture,
+    shakily he dragged the cricket from where Mac placed it, closer,
+    closer, and as no terrible change in the unmoved face warned him to
+    desist, he pulled it into its usual evening position between Mac's
+    right foot and the fireplace. He sank down with a sigh of relief, as
+    one who finishes a journey long and perilous. The fire crackled and the
+    sparks flew gaily. Kaviak sat there in the red glow, dressed only in a
+    shirt, staring with incredulous, mournful eyes at the Farva who had&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then, as Mac made no sign, he sighed again, and held out two little
+    shaky hands to the blaze.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac gave out a sound between a cough and a snort, and wiped his eyes on
+    the back of his hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak had started nervously.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You cold?" asked Mac.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hungry?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He nodded again, and fell to coughing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac got up and brought the newly purchased coat to the fire.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's for you," he said, as the child's big eyes grew bigger with
+    admiration.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me? Me own coat?" He stood up, and his bare feet fluttered up and down
+    feebly, but with huge delight.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As the parki was held ready the child tumbled dizzily into it, and Mac
+    held him fast an instant.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In less than five minutes Kaviak was once more seated on the cricket,
+    but very magnificent now in his musk-rat coat, so close up to Mac that
+    he could lean against his arm, and eating out of a plenty-bowl on his
+    knees a discreet spoonful of mush drowned in golden syrup&mdash;a supper for
+    a Sultan if only there had been more!
+</p>
+<p>
+    When he had finished, he set the bowl down, and, as a puppy might, he
+    pushed at Mac's arm till he found a way in, laid his head down on
+    "Farva's" knee with a contented sigh, and closed his heavy eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac put his hand on the cropped head and began:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "About that empty syrup-can&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak started up, shaking from head to foot. Was the obscure nightmare
+    coming down to crush him again?
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac tried to soothe him. But Kaviak, casting about for charms to disarm
+    the awful fury of the white man&mdash;able to endure with dignity any
+    reverse save that of having his syrup spilt&mdash;cried out:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I solly&mdash;solly. Our Farva&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm sorry, too, Kaviak," Mac interrupted, gathering the child up to
+    him; "and we won't either of us do it any more."
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH9"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER VIII
+</h2>
+<center>
+    CHRISTMAS
+</center>
+<p class="ind">
+  "Himlen morkner, mens Jordens Trakt<br>
+   Straaler lys som i Stjernedragt.<br>
+   Himlen er bleven Jordens Gjaest<br>
+   Snart er det Julens sode Fest."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It had been moved, seconded, and carried by acclamation that they
+    should celebrate Christmas, not so much by a feast of reason as by a
+    flow of soul and a bang-up dinner, to be followed by speeches and some
+    sort of cheerful entertainment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We're goin' to lay ourselves out on this entertainment," said the Boy,
+    with painful misgivings as to the "bang-up dinner."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Every time the banquet was mentioned somebody was sure to say, "Well,
+    anyhow, there's Potts's cake," and that reflection never failed to
+    raise the tone of expectation, for Potts's cake was a beauty, evidently
+    very rich and fruity, and fitted by Nature to play the noble part of
+    plum-pudding. But, in making out the bill of fare, facts had to be
+    faced. "We've got our everyday little rations of beans and bacon, and
+    we've got Potts's cake, and we've got one skinny ptarmigan to make a
+    banquet for six hungry people!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But we'll have a high old time, and if the bill o' fare is a little
+    ... restricted, there's nothin' to prevent our programme of toasts,
+    songs, and miscellaneous contributions from bein' rich and varied."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And one thing we can get, even up here"&mdash;the Colonel was looking at
+    Kaviak&mdash;"and that's a little Christmas-tree."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Y-yes," said Potts, "you can get a little tree, but you can't get the
+    smallest kind of a little thing to hang on it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sh!" said the Boy, "it must be a surprise."
+</p>
+<p>
+    And he took steps that it should be, for he began stealing away
+    Kaviak's few cherished possessions&mdash;his amulet, his top from under the
+    bunk, his boats from out the water-bucket, wherewith to mitigate the
+    barrenness of the Yukon tree, and to provide a pleasant surprise for
+    the Esquimer who mourned his playthings as gone for ever. Of an evening
+    now, after sleep had settled on Kaviak's watchful eyes, the Boy worked
+    at a pair of little snow-shoes, helped out by a ball of sinew he had
+    got from Nicholas. Mac bethought him of the valuable combination of
+    zoological and biblical instruction that might be conveyed by means of
+    a Noah's Ark. He sat up late the last nights before the 25th,
+    whittling, chipping, pegging in legs, sharpening beaks, and inking
+    eyes, that the more important animals might be ready for the Deluge by
+    Christmas.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel made the ark, and O'Flynn took up a collection to defray
+    the expense of the little new mucklucks he had ordered from Nicholas.
+    They were to come "<i>sure</i> by Christmas Eve," and O'Flynn was in what he
+    called "a froightful fanteeg" as the short day of the 24th wore towards
+    night, and never a sign of the one-eyed Pymeut. Half a dozen times
+    O'Flynn had gone beyond the stockade to find out if he wasn't in sight,
+    and finally came back looking intensely disgusted, bringing a couple of
+    white travellers who had arrived from the opposite direction; very
+    cold, one of them deaf, and with frost-bitten feet, and both so tired
+    they could hardly speak. Of course, they were made as comfortable as
+    was possible, the frozen one rubbed with snow and bandaged, and both
+    given bacon and corn-bread and hot tea.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You oughtn't to let yourself get into a state like this," said Mac,
+    thinking ruefully of these strangers' obvious inability to travel for a
+    day or two, and of the Christmas dinner, to which Benham alone had been
+    bidden, by a great stretch of hospitality.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's all very well," said the stranger, who shouted when he talked
+    at all, "but how's a man to know his feet are going to freeze?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ye see, sorr," O'Flynn explained absent-mindedly, "Misther MacCann
+    didn't know yer pardner was deaf."
+</p>
+<p>
+    This point of view seemed to thaw some of the frost out of the two
+    wayfarers. They confided that they were Salmon P. Hardy and Bill
+    Schiff, fellow-passengers in the <i>Merwin</i>, "locked in the ice down
+    below," and they'd mined side by side back in the States at Cripple
+    Creek. "Yes, sir, and sailed for the Klondyke from Seattle last July."
+    And now at Christmas they were hoping that, with luck, they might reach
+    the new Minóok Diggings, seven hundred miles this side of the Klondyke,
+    before the spring rush. During this recital O'Flynn kept rolling his
+    eyes absently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Theyse a quare noise without."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's the wind knockin' down yer chimbly," says Mr. Hardy
+    encouragingly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It don't sound like Nich'las, annyhow. May the divil burrn him in
+    tarment and ile fur disappoyntin' th' kid."
+</p>
+<p>
+    A rattle at the latch, and the Pymeut opened the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Lorrd love ye! ye're a jool, Nich'las!" screamed O'Flynn; and the
+    mucklucks passed from one to the other so surreptitiously that for all
+    Kaviak's wide-eyed watchfulness he detected nothing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas supped with his white friends, and seemed bent on passing the
+    night with them. He had to be bribed with tobacco and a new half-dollar
+    to go home and keep Christmas in the bosom of his family. And still, at
+    the door, he hesitated, drew back, and laid the silver coin on the
+    table.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No. It nights."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But it isn't really dark."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pretty soon heap dark."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, I thought you natives could find your way day or night?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes. Find way."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then what's the matter?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pymeut no like dark;" and it was not until Mac put on his own
+    snow-shoes and offered to go part of the way with him that Nicholas was
+    at last induced to return home.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The moment Kaviak was ascertained to be asleep, O'Flynn displayed the
+    mucklucks. No mistake, they were dandies! The Boy hung one of them up,
+    by its long leg, near the child's head at the side of the bunk, and
+    then conferred with O'Flynn.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The Colonel's made some little kind o' sweet-cake things for the tree.
+    I could spare you one or two."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Divil a doubt Kaviak'll take it kindly, but furr mesilf I'm thinkin' a
+    pitaty's a dale tastier."
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was just one left in camp. It had rolled behind the flour-sack,
+    and O'Flynn had seized on it with rapture. Where everybody was in such
+    need of vegetable food, nobody under-estimated the magnificence of
+    O'Flynn's offering, as he pushed the pitaty down into the toe of the
+    muckluck.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sure, the little haythen'll have a foine Christian Christmas wid that
+    same to roast in the coals, begorra!" and they all went to bed save
+    Mac, who had not returned, and the Boy, who put on his furs, and went
+    up the hill to the place where he kept the Christmas-tree lodged in a
+    cotton-wood.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He shook the snow off its branches, brought it down to the cabin,
+    decorated it, and carried it back.
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    Mac, Salmon P. Hardy, and the frost-bitten Schiff were waked, bright
+    and early Christmas morning, by the Boy's screaming with laughter.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel looked down over the bunk's side, and the men on the
+    buffalo-skin looked up, and they all saw Kaviak sitting in bed, holding
+    in one hand an empty muckluck by the toe, and in the other a half-eaten
+    raw potato.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Keep the rest of it to roast, anyhow, or O'Flynn's heart will be
+    broken."
+</p>
+<p>
+    So they deprived Kaviak of the gnawed fragment, and consoled him by
+    helping him to put on his new boots.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the Little Cabin contingent came in to breakfast, "Hello! what you
+    got up on the roof?" says Potts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Foot of earth and three feet o' snow!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But what's in the bundle!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Bundle?" echoes the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If you put a bundle on the roof, I s'pose you know what's in it," says
+    the Colonel severely.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The occupants of the two cabins eyed each other with good-humoured
+    suspicion.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Thank you," says the Boy, "but we're not takin' any bundles to-day."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Call next door," advised the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You think we're tryin' to jolly you, but just go out and see for
+    yourself&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, sir, you've waked the wrong passenger!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They're tryin' it on <i>us</i>," said Potts, and subsided into his place at
+    the breakfast-table.
+</p>
+<p>
+    During the later morning, while the Colonel wrestled with the dinner
+    problem, the Boy went through the thick-falling snow to see if the tree
+    was all right, and the dogs had not appropriated the presents. Half-way
+    up to the cotton-wood, he glanced back to make sure Kaviak wasn't
+    following, and there, sure enough, just as the Little Cabin men had
+    said&mdash;there below him on the broad-eaved roof was a bundle packed round
+    and nearly covered over with snow. He went back eyeing it suspiciously.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Whatever it was, it seemed to be done up in sacking, for a bit stuck
+    out at the corner where the wind struck keen. The Boy walked round the
+    cabin looking, listening. Nobody had followed him, or nothing would
+    have induced him to risk the derision of the camp. As it was, he would
+    climb up very softly and lightly, and nobody but himself would be the
+    wiser even if it was a josh. He brushed away the snow, touching the
+    thing with a mittened hand and a creepy feeling at his spine. It was
+    precious heavy, and hard as iron. He tugged at the sacking. "Jee! if I
+    don't b'lieve it's meat." The lid of an old cardboard box was bound
+    round the frozen mass with a string, and on the cardboard was written:
+    "Moose and Christmas Greeting from Kaviak's friends at Holy Cross to
+    Kaviak's friends by the Big Chimney."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "H'ray! h'ray! Come out, you fellas! Hip! hip! hurrah!" and the Boy
+    danced a breakdown on the roof till the others had come out, and then
+    he hurled the moose-meat down over the stockade, and sent the placard
+    flying after. They all gathered round Mac and read it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Be the Siven!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I swan!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't forget, Boy, you're not takin' any."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Just remember, if it hadn't been for me it might have stayed up there
+    till spring."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You run in, Kaviak, or you'll have no ears."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But that gentleman pulled up his hood and stood his ground.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How did it get on the roof, in the name o' the nation?" asked the
+    Colonel, stamping his feet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Never hear of Santa Claus? Didn't I tell you, Kaviak, he drove his
+    reindeer team over the roofs?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did you hear any dogs go by in the night?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I didn't; Nicholas brought it, I s'pose, and was told to cache it up
+    there. Maybe that's why he came late to give us a surprise."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't believe it; we'd have heard him. Somebody from the mission came
+    by in the night and didn't want to wake us, and saw there were dogs&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's froze too hard to cut," interrupted Salmon P. Hardy, who had been
+    trying his jack-knife on one end; "it's too big to go in any mortal
+    pot."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And it'll take a month to thaw!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    They tried chopping it, but you could more easily chop a bolt of linen
+    sheeting. The axe laboriously chewed out little bits and scattered
+    shreds.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Stop! We'll lose a lot that way."
+</p>
+<p>
+    While they were lamenting this fact, and wondering what to do, the dogs
+    set up a racket, and were answered by some others. Benham was coming
+    along at a rattling pace, his dogs very angry to find other dogs there,
+    putting on airs of possession.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We got all this moose-meat," says Potts, when Benham arrived on the
+    scene, "but we can't cut it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Of course not. Where's your hand-saw?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy brought it, and Mr. Benham triumphantly sawed off two fine
+    large steaks. Kaviak scraped up the meat saw-dust and ate it with grave
+    satisfaction. With a huge steak in each hand, the Colonel, beaming, led
+    the procession back to the cabin. The Boy and Mac cached the rest of
+    the moose on the roof and followed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Fine team, that one o' yours," said Salmon P. Hardy to the trader.
+    "<i>You'll</i> get to Minóok, anyhow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm not going that way."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mean to skip the country? Got cold feet?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No. I'm satisfied enough with the country," said the trader quietly,
+    and acknowledged the introduction to Mr. Schiff, sitting in bandages by
+    the fire.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Benham turned back and called out something to his guide.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I thought maybe you'd like some oysters for your Christmas dinner," he
+    said to the Colonel when he came in again, "so I got a couple o' cans
+    from the A. C. man down below;" and a mighty whoop went up.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The great rapture of that moment did not, however, prevent O'Flynn's
+    saying under his breath:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did ye be chanct, now, think of bringin' a dtrop o'&mdash;hey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," says Benham a little shortly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Huh! Ye say that like's if ye wuz a taytotlerr?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not me. But I find it no good to drink whiskey on the trail."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah!" says Salmon P. with interest, "you prefer brandy?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," says Benham, "I prefer tea."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Lorrd, now! look at that!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Drink spirit, and it's all very fine and reviving for a few minutes;
+    but a man can't work on it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's the wan thing, sorr," says O'Flynn with solemnity&mdash;"it's the wan
+    thing on the top o' God's futstool that makes me feel I cud wurruk."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not in this climate; and you're safe to take cold in the reaction."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Cowld is ut? Faith, ye'll be tellin' us Mr. Schiff got his toes froze
+    wid settin' too clost be the foire."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You don't seriously mean you go on the trail without any alcohol?"
+    asks the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, I don't go without, but I keep it on the outside of me, unless I
+    have an accident."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Salmon P. studied the trader with curiosity. A man with seven
+    magnificent dogs and a native servant, and the finest furs he'd ever
+    seen&mdash;here was either a capitalist from the outside or a man who had
+    struck it rich "on the inside."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Been in long?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Crossed the Chilcoot in June, '85."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What! twelve year ago?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Benham nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Gosh! then you've been in the Klondyke?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not since the gold was found."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And got a team like that 'n outside, and not even goin' to Minóok?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Guess not!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    What made the feller so damn satisfied? Only one explanation was
+    possible: he'd found a mine without going even as far as Minóok. He was
+    a man to keep your eye on.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A goodly aroma of steaming oysters and of grilling moose arose in the
+    air. The Boy set up the amended bill of fare, lit the Christmas
+    candles&mdash;one at the top, one at the bottom of the board&mdash;and the
+    Colonel announced the first course, though it wasn't one o'clock, and
+    they usually dined at four.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The soup was too absorbingly delicious to admit of conversation. The
+    moose-steaks had vanished like the "snaw-wreath in the thaw" before
+    anything much was said, save:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nothin' th' matter with moose, hey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nop! Bet your life."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The "Salmi of ptarmigan" appeared as a great wash of gravy in which
+    portions of the much cut-up bird swam in vain for their lives. But the
+    high flat rim of the dish was plentifully garnished by fingers of
+    corn-bread, and the gravy was "galoppshus," so Potts said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Salmon P., having appeased the pangs of hunger, returned to his
+    perplexed study of Benham.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did I understand you to say you came into this country to <i>prospect</i>?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Came down the Never-Know-What and prospected a whole summer at Forty
+    Mile."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What river did you come by?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Same as you go by&mdash;the Yukon. Indians up yonder call it the
+    Never-Know-What, and the more you find out about it, the better you
+    think the name."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did you do any good at Forty Mile?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not enough to turn my head, so I tried the Koyukuk&mdash;and other diggins
+    too."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hear that, Schiff?" he roared at his bandaged friend. "Never say die!
+    This gen'l'man's been at it twelve years&mdash;tried more 'n one camp, but
+    now&mdash;well, he's so well fixed he don't care a cuss about the Klondyke."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Schiff lit up and pulled hard at the cutty.
+</p>
+<p>
+    O'Flynn had taken Kaviak to the fire, and was showing him how to roast
+    half a petaty in wood ashes; but he was listening to the story and
+    putting in "Be the Siven!" at appropriate moments.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Schiff poured out a cloud of rank smoke.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Gen'lemen," he said, "the best Klondyke claims'll be potted. Minóok's
+    the camp o' the future. You'd better come along with us."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Got no dogs," sighed the Boy; but the two strangers looked hard at the
+    man who hadn't that excuse.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Benham sat and idly watched preparations for the next course.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Say, a nabob like you might give us a tip. How did you do the trick?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I'd been playing your game for three years, and no galley slave
+    ever worked half as hard&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's it! work like the devil for a couple o' years and then live
+    like a lord for ever after."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes; well, when the time came for me to go into the Lord business I
+    had just forty-two dollars and sixty cents to set up on."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What had you done with the rest?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'd spent the five thousand dollars my father left me, and I'd cleaned
+    up just forty-two dollars sixty cents in my three years' mining."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The announcement fell chill on the company.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I was dead broke and I had no credit. I went home."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But"&mdash;Mac roused himself&mdash;"you didn't stay&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, you don't stay&mdash;as a rule;"&mdash;Mac remembered Caribou&mdash;"get used to
+    this kind o' thing, and miss it. Miss it so you&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You came back," says Salmon P., impatient of generalities.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And won this time," whispered Schiff.
+</p>
+<p>
+    For that is how every story must end. The popular taste in fiction is
+    universal.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A friend at home grub-staked me, and I came in again&mdash;came down on the
+    high water in June. Prospected as long as my stuff lasted, and
+    then&mdash;well, I didn't care about starving, I became an A. C. Trader."
+</p>
+<p>
+    A long pause. This was no climax; everybody waited.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And now I'm on my own. I often make more money in a day trading with
+    the Indians in furs, fish, and cord-wood, than I made in my whole
+    experience as a prospector and miner."
+</p>
+<p>
+    A frost had fallen on the genial company.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But even if <i>you</i> hadn't any luck," the Boy suggested, "you must have
+    seen others&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I saw some washing gravel that kept body and soul together, and I
+    saw some ... that didn't."
+</p>
+<p>
+    In the pause he added, remorseless:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I helped to bury some of them."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Your experience was unusual, or why do men come back year after year?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did you ever hear of a thing called Hope?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    They moved uneasily on their stools, and some rubbed stubbly chins with
+    perplexed, uncertain fingers, and they all glowered at the speaker. He
+    was uncomfortable, this fellow.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, there mayn't be as much gold up here as men think, but there's
+    more hope than anywhere on earth."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To hell with hope; give me certainty," says Salmon P.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Exactly. So you shuffle the cards, and laugh down the five-cent limit.
+    You'll play one last big game, and it'll be for life this time as well
+    as fortune."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Cheerful cuss, ain't he?" whispered Schiff.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They say we're a nation of gamblers. Well, sir, the biggest game we
+    play is the game that goes on near the Arctic Circle."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's the matter with Wall Street?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "'Tisn't such a pretty game, and they don't play for their lives. I
+    tell you it's love of gambling brings men here, and it's the splendid
+    stiff game they find going on that keeps them. There's nothing like it
+    on earth."
+</p>
+<p>
+    His belated enthusiasm deceived nobody.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It don't seem to have excited you much," said Mac.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I've had my turn at it. And just by luck I found I could play
+    another&mdash;a safer game, and not bad fun either." He sat up straight and
+    shot his hands down deep in the pockets of his mackinaws. "I've got a
+    good thing, and I'm willing to stay with it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The company looked at him coldly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well," drawled Potts, "you can look after the fur trade; give me a
+    modest little claim in the Klondyke."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, Klondyke! Klondyke!" Benham got up and stepped over Kaviak on his
+    way to the fire. He lit a short briarwood with a flaming stick and
+    turned about. "Shall I tell you fellows a little secret about the
+    Klondyke?" He held up the burning brand in the dim room with telling
+    emphasis. The smoke and flame blew black and orange across his face as
+    he said:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>Every dollar that's taken out of the Klondyke in gold-dust will cost
+    three dollars in coin</i>."
+</p>
+<p>
+    A sense of distinct dislike to Benham had spread through the company&mdash;a
+    fellow who called American enterprise love of gambling, for whom
+    heroism was foolhardy, and hope insane. Where was a pioneer so bold he
+    could get up now and toast the Klondyke? Who, now, without grim
+    misgiving, could forecast a rosy future for each man at the board? And
+    that, in brief, had been the programme.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, help the puddin', Colonel," said the Boy like one who starts up
+    from an evil dream.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But they sat chilled and moody, eating plum-pudding as if it had been
+    so much beans and bacon. Mac felt Robert Bruce's expensive education
+    slipping out of reach. Potts saw his girl, tired of waiting, taking up
+    with another fellow. The Boy's Orange Grove was farther off than
+    Florida. Schiff and Hardy wondered, for a moment, who was the gainer
+    for all their killing hardship? Not they, at present, although there
+    was the prospect&mdash;the hope&mdash;oh, damn the Trader!
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel made the punch. O'Flynn drained his cup without waiting for
+    the mockery of that first toast&mdash;<i>To our Enterprise</i>&mdash;although no one
+    had taken more interest in the programme than O'Flynn. Benham talked
+    about the Anvik saw-mill, and the money made in wood camps along the
+    river. Nobody listened, though everyone else sat silent, smoking and
+    sulkily drinking his punch.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak's demand for some of the beverage reminded the Boy of the
+    Christmas-tree. It had been intended as a climax to wind up the
+    entertainment, but to produce it now might save the situation. He got
+    up and pulled on his parki.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Back 'n a minute." But he was gone a long time.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Benham looked down the toast-list and smiled inwardly, for it was
+    Klondyked from top to bottom. The others, too, stole uneasy glances at
+    that programme, staring them in the face, unabashed, covertly
+    ironic&mdash;nay, openly jeering. They actually hadn't noticed the fact
+    before, but every blessed speech was aimed straight at the wonderful
+    gold camp across the line&mdash;not the Klondyke of Benham's croaking, but
+    the Klondyke of their dreams.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Even the death's head at the feast regretted the long postponement of
+    so spirited a programme, interspersed, as it promised to be, with
+    songs, dances, and "tricks," and winding up with an original poem, "He
+    won't be happy till he gets it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Benham's Indian had got up and gone out. Kaviak had tried to go too,
+    but the door was slammed in his face. He stood there with his nose to
+    the crack exactly as a dog does. Suddenly he ran back to Mac and tugged
+    at his arm. Even the dull white men could hear an ominous snarling
+    among the Mahlemeuts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Out of the distance a faint answering howl of derision from some enemy,
+    advancing or at bay. It was often like this when two teams put up at
+    the Big Chimney Camp.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Reckon our dogs are gettin' into trouble," said Salmon P. anxiously to
+    his deaf and crippled partner.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's nothing," says the Trader. "A Siwash dog of any spirit is always
+    trailing his coat"; and Salmon P. subsided.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Not so Kaviak. Back to the door, head up, he listened. They had
+    observed the oddity before. The melancholy note of the Mahlemeut never
+    yet had failed to stir his sombre little soul. He was standing now
+    looking up at the latch, high, and made for white men, eager, breathing
+    fast, listening to that dismal sound that is like nothing else in
+    nature&mdash;listening as might an exiled Scot to the skirl of bagpipes;
+    listening as a Tyrolese who hears yodelling on foreign hills, or as the
+    dweller in a distant land to the sound of the dear home speech.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The noise outside grew louder, the air was rent with howls of rage and
+    defiance.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sounds as if there's 'bout a million mad dogs on your front stoop,"
+    says Schiff, knowing there must be a great deal going on if any of it
+    reached his ears.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You set still." His pardner pushed him down on his stool. "Mr. Benham
+    and I'll see what's up."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Trader leisurely opened the door, Salmon P. keeping modestly
+    behind, while Kaviak darted forward only to be caught back by Mac. An
+    avalanche of sound swept in&mdash;a mighty howling and snarling and cracking
+    of whips, and underneath the higher clamour, human voices&mdash;and in
+    dashes the Boy, powdered with snow, laughing and balancing carefully in
+    his mittened hands a little Yukon spruce, every needle diamond-pointed,
+    every sturdy branch white with frost crystals and soft woolly snow, and
+    bearing its little harvest of curious fruit&mdash;sweet-cake rings and stars
+    and two gingerbread men hanging by pack-thread from the white and green
+    branches, the Noah's Ark lodged in one crotch, the very amateur
+    snow-shoes in another, and the lost toys wrapped up, transfigured in
+    tobacco-foil, dangling merrily before Kaviak's incredulous eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There's your Christmas-tree!" and the bringer, who had carried the
+    tree so that no little puff of snow or delicate crystal should fall
+    off, having made a successful entrance and dazzled the child, gave way
+    to the strong excitement that shot light out of his eyes and brought
+    scarlet into his cheeks. "Here, take it!" He dashed the tree down in
+    front of Kaviak, and a sudden storm agitated its sturdy branches; it
+    snowed about the floor, and the strange fruit whirled and spun in the
+    blast. Kaviak clutched it, far too dazed to do more than stare. The Boy
+    stamped the snow off his mucklucks on the threshold, and dashed his cap
+    against the lintel, calling out:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come in! come in! let the dogs fight it out." Behind him, between the
+    snow-walls at the entrance, had appeared two faces&mdash;weather-beaten men,
+    crowding in the narrow space, craning to see the reception of the
+    Christmas-tree and the inside of the famous Big Chimney Cabin.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "These gentlemen," says the Boy, shaking with excitement as he ushered
+    them in, "are Mr. John Dillon and General Lighter. They've just done
+    the six hundred and twenty-five miles from Minóok with dogs over the
+    ice! They've been forty days on the trail, and they're as fit as
+    fiddles. An' no yonder, for Little Minóok has made big millionaires o'
+    both o' them!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Millionaires or not, they'll never, either of them, create a greater
+    sensation than they did that Christmas Day, in the Big Chimney Cabin,
+    on the bleak hillside, up above the Never-Know-What. Here was Certainty
+    at last! Here was Justification!
+</p>
+<p>
+    Precious symbols of success, they were taken by both hands, they were
+    shaken and wildly welcomed, "peeled," set down by the fire, given
+    punch, asked ten thousand questions all in a breath, rejoiced over, and
+    looked up to as glorious dispellers of doubt, blessed saviours from
+    despair.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Schiff had tottered forward on bandaged feet, hand round ear, mouth
+    open, as if to swallow whole whatever he couldn't hear. The Colonel
+    kept on bowing magnificently at intervals and pressing refreshment,
+    O'Flynn slapping his thigh and reiterating, "Be the Siven!" Potts not
+    only widened his mouth from ear to ear, but, as O'Flynn said after,
+    "stretched it clane round his head and tyed it up furr jy in a nate
+    knot behind." Benham took a back seat, and when anybody remembered him
+    for the next hour it was openly to gloat over his discomfiture.
+</p>
+<p>
+    John Dillon was one of those frontiersmen rightly called typically
+    American. You see him again and again&mdash;as a cowboy in Texas, as a miner
+    or herdsman all through the Far West; you see him cutting lumber along
+    the Columbia, or throwing the diamond hitch as he goes from camp to
+    camp for gold and freedom. He takes risks cheerfully, and he never
+    works for wages when he can go "on his own."
+</p>
+<p>
+    John Dillon was like the majority, tall, lean, muscular, not an ounce
+    of superfluous flesh on his bones, a face almost gaunt in its clearness
+    of cut, a thin straight nose, chin not heavy but well curved out, the
+    eye orbit arched and deep, a frown fixed between thick eyebrows, and
+    few words in his firm, rather grim-looking mouth. He was perhaps
+    thirty-six, had been "in" ten years, and had mined before that in
+    Idaho. Under his striped parki he was dressed in spotted deer-skin,
+    wore white deer-skin mucklucks, Arctic cap, and moose mittens. Pinned
+    on his inner shirt was the badge of the Yukon Order of Pioneers&mdash;a
+    footrule bent like the letter A above a scroll of leaves, and in the
+    angle two linked O's over Y. P.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was the other man&mdash;the western towns are full of General
+    Lighters&mdash;who did the talking. An attorney from Seattle, he had come up
+    in the July rush with very little but boundless assurance, fell in with
+    an old miner who had been grubstaked by Captain Rainey out of the
+    <i>Oklahoma's</i> supplies, and got to Minóok before the river went to
+    sleep.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, we're not pardners exactly," he said, glancing good-humouredly at
+    Dillon; "we've worked separate, but we're going home two by two like
+    animals into the Ark. We've got this in common. We've both 'struck
+    ile'&mdash;haven't we, Dillon?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Dillon nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Little Minóok's as rich a camp as Dawson, and the gold's of higher
+    grade&mdash;isn't it, Dillon?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's right."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "One of the many great advantages of Minóok is that it's the <i>nearest</i>
+    place on the river where they've struck pay dirt." says the General.
+    "And another great advantage is that it's on the American side of the
+    line."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What advantage is that?" Mac grated out.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Just the advantage of not having all your hard earnings taken away by
+    an iniquitous tax."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look out! this fella's a Britisher&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't care if he is, and no disrespect to you, sir. The Canadians in
+    the Klondyke are the first to say the tax is nothing short of highway
+    robbery. You'll see! The minute they hear of gold across the line
+    there'll be a stampede out of Dawson. I can put you in the way of
+    getting a claim for eight thousand dollars that you can take eighty
+    thousand out of next August, with no inspector coming round to check
+    your clean-up, and no Government grabbing at your royalties."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why aren't you taking out that eighty thousand yourself?" asked Mac
+    bluntly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Got more 'n one man can handle," answered the General. "Reckon we've
+    earned a holiday."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Dillon backed him up.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then it isn't shortage in provisions that takes you outside," said the
+    Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not much."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Plenty of food at Rampart City; that's the name o' the town where the
+    Little Minóok meets the Yukon."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Food at gold-craze prices, I suppose."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No. Just about the same they quote you in Seattle."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How is that possible when it's been carried four thousand miles?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Because the A. C. and N. A. T. and T. boats got frozen in this side of
+    Dawson. They know by the time they get there in June a lot of stuff
+    will have come in by the short route through the lakes, and the town
+    will be overstocked. So there's flour and bacon to burn when you get up
+    as far as Minóok. It's only along the Lower River there's any real
+    scarcity."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Big Chimney men exchanged significant looks.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And there are more supply-boats wintering up at Fort Yukon and at
+    Circle City," the General went on. "I tell you on the Upper River
+    there's food to burn."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Again the Big Chimney men looked at one another. The General kept
+    helping himself to punch, and as he tossed it off he would say,
+    "Minóok's the camp for me!" When he had given vent to this conviction
+    three times, Benham, who hadn't spoken since their entrance, said
+    quietly:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And you're going away from it as hard as you can pelt."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The General turned moist eyes upon him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Are you a man of family, sir?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then I cannot expect you to understand." His eyes brimmed at some
+    thought too fine and moving for public utterance.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Each member of the camp sat deeply cogitating. Not only gold at Minóok,
+    but food! In the inner vision of every eye was a ship-load of
+    provisions "frozen in" hard by a placer claim; in every heart a fervid
+    prayer for a dog-team.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy jumped up, and ran his fingers through his long wild hair. He
+    panted softly like a hound straining at a leash. Then, with an obvious
+    effort to throw off the magic of Minóok, he turned suddenly about, and
+    "Poor old Kaviak!" says he, looking round and speaking in quite an
+    everyday sort of voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The child was leaning against the door clasping the forgotten
+    Christmas-tree so tight against the musk-rat coat that the branches hid
+    his face. From time to time with reverent finger he touched silver boat
+    and red-foil top, and watched, fascinated, how they swung. A white
+    child in a tenth of the time would have eaten the cakes, torn off the
+    transfiguring tinfoil, tired of the tree, and forgotten it. The Boy
+    felt some compunction at the sight of Kaviak's steadfast fidelity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look here, we'll set the tree up where you can see it better." He put
+    an empty bucket on the table, and with Mac's help, wedged the spruce in
+    it firmly, between some blocks of wood and books of the law.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The cabin was very crowded. Little Mr. Schiff was sitting on the
+    cricket. Kaviak retired to his old seat on Elephas beyond the bunks,
+    where he still had a good view of the wonderful tree, agreeably lit by
+    what was left of the two candles.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Those things are good to eat, you know," said the Colonel kindly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac cut down a gingerbread man and gave it into the tiny hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What wind blew that thing into your cabin?" asked the General,
+    squinting up his snow-blinded eyes at the dim corner where Kaviak sat.
+</p>
+<p>
+    There wasn't a man in the camp who didn't resent the millionaire's
+    tone.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This is a great friend of ours&mdash;ain't you, Kaviak?" said the Boy.
+    "He's got a soul above gold-mines, haven't you? He sees other fellas
+    helping themselves to his cricket and his high chair&mdash;too polite to
+    object&mdash;just goes and sits like a philosopher on the bones of dead
+    devils and looks on. Other fellas sittin' in his place talkin' about
+    gold and drinkin' punch&mdash;never offerin' him a drop&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Several cups were held out, but Mac motioned them back.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't think," says John Dillon slyly&mdash;"don't think <i>this</i> punch will
+    hurt the gentleman."
+</p>
+<p>
+    And a roar went up at the Colonel's expense. General Lighter pulled
+    himself to his feet, saying there was a little good Old Rye left
+    outside, and he could stock up again when he got to the <i>Oklahoma</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, and it's yersilf that don't shoy off from a dthrop o' the craythur
+    whin yer thravellin' the thrail."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Everybody looked at Benham. He got up and began to put on his furs; his
+    dog-driver, squatting by the door, took the hint, and went out to see
+    after the team.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, well," said the General to O'Flynn, "it's Christmas, you know";
+    and he picked his way among the closely-packed company to the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We ought to be movin', too," said Dillon, straightening up. The
+    General halted, depressed at the reminder. "You know we swore we
+    wouldn't stop again unless&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look here, didn't you hear me saying it was Christmas?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You been sayin' that for twenty-four hours. Been keepin' Christmas
+    right straight along since yesterday mornin." But the General had gone
+    out to unpack the whisky. "He knocked up the mission folks, bright and
+    early yesterday, to tell 'em about the Glad News Tiding's&mdash;Diggin's, I
+    mean."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What did they say?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Weren't as good an audience as the General's used to; that's why we
+    pushed on. We'd heard about your camp, and the General felt a call to
+    preach the Gospel accordin' to Minóok down this way."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He don't seem to be standin' the racket as well as you," said Schiff.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, sir, this is the first time I've found him wantin' to hang round
+    after he's thoroughly rubbed in the news."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Dillon moved away from the fire; the crowded cabin was getting hot.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nevertheless the Colonel put on more wood, explaining to Salmon P. and
+    the others, who also moved back, that it was for illuminating
+    purposes&mdash;those two candles burning down low, each between three nails
+    in a little slab of wood&mdash;those two had been kept for Christmas, and
+    were the last they had.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In the general movement from the fire, Benham, putting on his cap and
+    gloves, had got next to Dillon.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look here," said the Trader, under cover of the talk about candles,
+    "what sort of a trip have you had?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Yukon pioneer looked at him a moment, and then took his pipe out of
+    his mouth to say:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Rank."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No fun, hey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's right." He restored the pipe, and drew gently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And yet to hear the General chirp&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He's got plenty o' grit, the General has."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Has he got gold?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Dillon nodded. "Or will have."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Out of Minóok?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Out of Minóok."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In a sort of a kind of a way. I think I understand." Benham wagged his
+    head. "He's talkin' for a market."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Dillon smoked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Goin' out to stir up a boom, and sell his claim to some sucker."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The General reappeared with the whisky, stamping the snow off his feet
+    before he joined the group at the table, where the Christmas-tree was
+    seasonably cheek by jowl with the punch-bowl between the low-burnt
+    candles. Mixing the new brew did not interrupt the General's ecstatic
+    references to Minóok.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look here!" he shouted across to Mac, "I'll give you a lay on my best
+    claim for two thousand down and a small royalty."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac stuck out his jaw.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'd like to take a look at the country before I deal."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, see here. When will you go?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We got no dogs."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>We</i> have!" exclaimed Salmon P. and Scruff with one voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I <i>can</i> offer you fellows&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How many miles did you travel a day?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sixty," said the General promptly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh Lord!" ejaculated Benham, and hurriedly he made his good-byes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's the matter with <i>you?</i>" demanded the General with dignity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm only surprised to hear Minóok's twenty-four hundred miles away."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "More like six hundred," says the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And you've been forty days coming, and you cover sixty miles a
+    day&mdash;Good-bye," he laughed, and was gone.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well&mdash;a&mdash;" The General looked round.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Travelin' depends on the weather." Dillon helped him out.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Exactly. Depends on the weather," echoed the General. "You don't get
+    an old Sour-dough like Dillon to travel at forty degrees."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How are you to know?" whispered Schiff.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tie a little bottle o' quick to your sled," answered Dillon.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Bottle o' what?" asked the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Quicksilver&mdash;mercury," interpreted the General.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No dog-puncher who knows what he's about travels when his quick goes
+    dead."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If the stuff's like lead in your bottle&mdash;" The General stopped to
+    sample the new brew. In the pause, from the far side of the cabin
+    Dillon spat straight and clean into the heart of the coals.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, what do you do when the mercury freezes?" asked the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Camp," said Dillon impassively, resuming his pipe.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I suppose," the Boy went on wistfully&mdash;"I suppose you met men all the
+    way making straight for Minóok?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Only on this last lap."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They don't get far, most of 'em."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But... but it's worth trying!" the Boy hurried to bridge the chasm.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The General lifted his right arm in the attitude of the orator about to
+    make a telling hit, but he was hampered by having a mug at his lips. In
+    the pause, as he stood commanding attention, at the same time that he
+    swallowed half a pint of liquor, he gave Dillon time leisurely to get
+    up, knock the ashes out of his pipe stick it in his belt, put a slow
+    hand behind him towards his pistol pocket, and bring out his buckskin
+    gold sack. Now, only Mac of the other men had ever seen a miner's purse
+    before, but every one of the four cheechalkos knew instinctively what
+    it was that Dillon held so carelessly. In that long, narrow bag, like
+    the leg of a child's stocking, was the stuff they had all come seeking.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The General smacked his lips, and set down the granite cup.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>That's</i> the argument," he said. "Got a noospaper?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel looked about in a flustered way for the tattered San
+    Francisco <i>Examiner</i>; Potts and the Boy hustled the punch-bowl on to
+    the bucket board, recklessly spilling some of the precious contents.
+    O'Flynn and Salmon P. whisked the Christmas tree into the corner, and
+    not even the Boy remonstrated when a gingerbread man broke his neck,
+    and was trampled under foot.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Quick! the candles are going out!" shouted the Boy, and in truth each
+    wick lay languishing in a little island of grease, now flaring bravely,
+    now flickering to dusk. It took some time to find in the San Francisco
+    <i>Examiner</i> of August 7 a foot square space that was whole. But as
+    quickly as possible the best bit was spread in the middle of the table.
+    Dillon, in the breathless silence having slowly untied the thongs, held
+    his sack aslant between the two lights, and poured out a stream-nuggets
+    and coarse bright gold.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The crowd about the table drew audible breath. Nobody actually spoke at
+    first, except O'Flynn, who said reverently: "Be&mdash;the Siven! Howly
+    Pipers!&mdash;that danced at me&mdash;gran'-mother's weddin'&mdash;when the
+    divvle&mdash;called the chune!" Even the swimming wicks flared up, and
+    seemed to reach out, each a hungry tongue of flame to touch and taste
+    the glittering heap, before they went into the dark. Low exclamations,
+    hands thrust out to feel, and drawn back in a sort of superstitious
+    awe.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Here it was, this wonderful stuff they'd come for! Each one knew by the
+    wild excitement in his own breast, how in secret he had been brought to
+    doubt its being here. But here it was lying in a heap on the Big Cabin
+    table! and&mdash;now it was gone.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The right candle had given out, and O'Flynn, blowing with impatience
+    like a walrus, had simultaneously extinguished the other.
+</p>
+<p>
+    For an instant a group of men with strained and dazzled eyes still bent
+    above the blackness on the boards.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Stir the fire," called the Colonel, and flew to do it himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll light a piece of fat pine," shouted the Boy, catching up a stick,
+    and thrusting it into the coals.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where's your bitch?" said Dillon calmly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Bitch?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Haven't you got a condensed milk can with some bacon grease in it, and
+    a rag wick? Makes a good enough light."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the fire had been poked up, and the cabin was full of dancing
+    lights and shadows. Besides that, the Boy was holding a resinous stick
+    alight over the table, and they all bent down as before.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It was passin' a bank in 'Frisco wid a windy full o' that stuff that
+    brought me up here," said O'Flynn.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It was hearin' about that winder brought <i>me</i>" added Potts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Everyone longed to touch and feel about in the glittering pile, but no
+    one as yet had dared to lay a finger on the smallest grain in the
+    hoard. An electrical shock flashed through the company when the General
+    picked up one of the biggest nuggets and threw it down with a rich,
+    full-bodied thud. "That one is four ounces."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He took up another.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This is worth about sixty dollars."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "More like forty," said Dillon.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They were of every conceivable shape and shapelessness, most of them
+    flattened; some of them, the greenhorn would swear, were fashioned by
+    man into roughly embossed hearts, or shells, or polished discs like
+    rude, defaced coins. One was a perfect staple, another the letter "L,"
+    another like an axe-head, and one like a peasant's sabot. Some were
+    almost black with iron stains, and some were set with "jewels" of
+    quartz, but for the most part they were formless fragments of a rich
+    and brassy yellow.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Lots of the little fellas are like melon-seeds"; and the Boy pointed a
+    shaking finger, longing and still not daring to touch the treasure.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Each man had a dim feeling in the back of his head that, after all, the
+    hillock of gold was an illusion, and his own hand upon the dazzling
+    pile would clutch the empty air.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where's your dust?" asked the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Dillon stared.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This is all nuggets and grains."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, what more do you want?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, it'd do well enough for me, but it ain't dust."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's what we call dust."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "As coarse as this?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Sour-dough nodded, and Lighter laughed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There's a fox's mask," said the Colonel at the bottom of the table,
+    pointing a triangular bit out.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Let me look at it a minute," begged the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hand it round," whispered Schiff.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was real. It was gold. Their fingers tingled under the first
+    contact. This was the beginning.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The rude bit of metal bred a glorious confidence. Under the magic of
+    its touch Robert Bruce's expensive education became a simple certainty.
+    In Potts's hand the nugget gave birth to a mighty progeny. He saw
+    himself pouring out sackfuls before his enraptured girl.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy lifted his flaring torch with a victorious sense of having just
+    bought back the Orange Grove; and Salmon P. passed the nugget to his
+    partner with a blissful sigh.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I'm glad we didn't get cold feet," says he.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes," whispered Schiff; "it looks like we goin' to the right place."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The sheen of the heap of yellow treasure was trying even to the nerves
+    of the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Put it away," he said quite solemnly, laying the nugget on the
+    paper&mdash;"put it all away before the firelight dies down."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Dillon leisurely gathered it up and dropped the nuggets, with an
+    absent-minded air, into the pouch which Lighter held.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the San Francisco <i>Examiner</i> had been worn to the softness of an
+    old rag and the thinness of tissue. Under Dillon's sinewy fingers
+    pinching up the gold the paper gave way.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh!" exclaimed more than one voice, as at some grave mishap.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Dillon improvised a scoop out of a dirty envelope. Nobody spoke and
+    everybody watched, and when, finally, with his hand, he brushed the
+    remaining grains off the torn paper into the envelope, poured them into
+    the gaping sack-mouth, and lazily pulled at the buckskin draw-string,
+    everybody sat wondering how much, if any, of the precious metal had
+    escaped through the tear, and how soon Dillon would come out of his
+    brown study, remember, and recover the loss. But a spell seemed to have
+    fallen on the company. No one spoke, till Dillon, with that lazy
+    motion, hoisting one square shoulder and half turning his body round,
+    was in the act of returning the sack to his hip-pocket.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Wait!" said Mac, with the explosiveness of a firearm, and O'Flynn
+    jumped.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You ain't got it all," whispered Schiff hurriedly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I'm leavin' the fox-face for luck," Dillon nodded at the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Schiff pointed reverently at the tear in the paper, as Dillon only
+    went on pushing his sack deep down in his pocket, while Mac lifted the
+    <i>Examiner</i>. All but the two millionaires bent forward and scrutinised
+    the table. O'Flynn impulsively ran one lone hand over the place where
+    the gold-heap had lain, his other hand held ready at the table's edge
+    to catch any sweepings. None! But the result of O'Flynn's action was
+    that those particles of gold that that fallen through the paper were
+    driven into the cracks and inequalities of the board.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There! See?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now look what you've done!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac pointed out a rough knot-hole, too, that slyly held back a pinch of
+    gold.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, that!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Dillon slapped his hip, and settled into his place. But the men nearest
+    the crack and the knot-hole fell to digging out the renegade grains,
+    and piously offering them to their lawful owner.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That ain't worth botherin' about," laughed Dillon; "you always reckon
+    to lose a little each time, even if you got a China soup-plate."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Plenty more where that came from," said the General, easily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Such indifference was felt to be magnificent indeed. The little
+    incident said more for the richness of Minóok than all the General's
+    blowing; they forgot that what was lost would amount to less than fifty
+    cents. The fact that it was gold&mdash;Minóok gold&mdash;gave it a symbolic value
+    not to be computed in coin.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How do you go?" asked the Colonel, as the two millionaires began
+    putting on their things.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We cut across to Kuskoquim. Take on an Indian guide there to Nushagak,
+    and from there with dogs across the ocean ice to Kadiak."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh! the way the letters go out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When they <i>do</i>," smiled Dillon. "Yes, it's the old Russian Post Trail,
+    I believe. South of Kadiak Island the sea is said to be open as early
+    as the first of March. We'll get a steamer to Sitka, and from Sitka, of
+    course, the boats run regular."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Seattle by the middle of March!" says the General. "Come along,
+    Dillon; the sooner you get to Seattle, and blow in a couple o' hundred
+    thousand, the sooner you'll get back to Minóok."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Dillon went out and roused up the dogs, asleep in the snow, with their
+    bushy tails sheltering their sharp noses.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "See you later?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, 'outside.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Outside? No, sir! <i>Inside</i>."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Dillon swore a blood-curdling string of curses and cracked his whip
+    over the leader.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, you comin' back?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Bet your life!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    And nobody who looked at the face of the Yukon pioneer could doubt he
+    meant what he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They went indoors. The cabin wore an unwonted and a rakish air. The
+    stools seemed to have tried to dance the lancers and have fallen out
+    about the figure. Two were overturned. The unwashed dishes were tossed
+    helter-skelter. A tipsy Christmas tree leaned in drunken fashion
+    against the wall, and under its boughs lay a forgotten child asleep. On
+    the other side of the cabin an empty whisky bottle caught a ray of
+    light from the fire, and glinted feebly back. Among the ashes on the
+    hearth was a screw of paper, charred at one end, and thrown there after
+    lighting someone's pipe. The Boy opened it. The famous programme of the
+    Yukon Symposium!
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's been a different sort of Christmas from what we planned,"
+    observed the Colonel, not quite as gaily as you might expect.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Begob!" says O'Flynn, stretching out his interminable legs; "ye can't
+    say we haven't hearrd Glad Tidings of gr-reat j'y&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Colonel," interrupts the Boy, throwing the Programme in the fire,
+    "let's look at your nugget again."
+</p>
+<p>
+    And they all took turns. Except Potts. He was busy digging the
+    remaining gold-grains out of the crack and the knothole.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH10"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER IX
+</h2>
+<center>
+    A CHRISTIAN AGNOSTIC
+</center>
+<p class="ind">
+  "&mdash;giver mig Rum!<br>
+   Himlen bar Stjerner Natten er stum."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was a good many days before they got the dazzle of that gold out of
+    their eyes. They found their tongues again, and talked "Minóok" from
+    morning till night among themselves and with the rare passer up or down
+    the trail.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac began to think they might get dogs at Anvik, or at one of the
+    Ingalik villages, a little further on. The balance of opinion in the
+    camp was against this view. But he had Potts on his side. When the New
+    Year opened, the trail was in capital condition. On the second of
+    January two lots of Indians passed, one with dogs hauling flour and
+    bacon for Benham, and the other lot without dogs, dragging light
+    hand-sleds. Potts said restlessly:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "After all, <i>they</i> can do it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So can we if we've a mind to," said Mac.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come on, then."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The camp tried hard to dissuade them. Naturally neither listened. They
+    packed the Boy's sled and set off on the morning of the third, to
+    Kaviak's unbounded surprise and disgust, his view of life being that,
+    wherever Mac went, he was bound to follow. And he did follow&mdash;made off
+    as hard as his swift little feet could carry him, straight up the Yukon
+    trail, and Farva lost a good half of that first morning bringing him
+    home.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Just eight days later the two men walked into the Cabin and sat
+    down&mdash;Potts with a heart-rending groan, Mac with his jaw almost
+    dislocated in his cast-iron attempt to set his face against defeat;
+    their lips were cracked with the cold, their faces raw from frostbite,
+    their eyes inflamed. The weather&mdash;they called it the weather&mdash;had been
+    too much for them. It was obvious they hadn't brought back any dogs,
+    but&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What did you think of Anvik?" says the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Anvik? You don't suppose we got to Anvik in weather like this!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How far <i>did</i> you get?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac didn't answer. Potts only groaned. He had frozen his cheek and his
+    right hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They were doctored and put to bed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did you see my friends at Holy Cross?" the Boy asked Potts when he
+    brought him a bowl of hot bean-soup.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You don't suppose we got as far as Holy Cross, with the wind&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, where <i>did</i> you get to? Where you been?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Second native village above."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, that isn't more'n sixteen miles."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sixteen miles too far."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Potts breathed long and deep between hot and comforting swallows.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where's the Boy's sled?" said the Colonel, coming in hurriedly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We cached it," answered Potts feebly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Couldn't even bring his sled home! <i>Where've</i> you cached it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's all right&mdash;only a few miles back."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Potts relinquished the empty soup-bowl, and closed his eyes.
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    When he opened them again late in the evening it was to say:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Found some o' those suckers who were goin' so slick to Minóok; some o'
+    <i>them</i> down at the second village, and the rest are winterin' in Anvik,
+    so the Indians say. Not a single son of a gun will see the diggins till
+    the ice goes out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then, badly off as we are here," says the Colonel to the Boy, "it's
+    lucky for us we didn't join the procession."
+</p>
+<p>
+    When Mac and the Boy brought the sled home a couple of days later, it
+    was found that a portion of its cargo consisted of a toy kyak and two
+    bottles of hootchino, the maddening drink concocted by the natives out
+    of fermented dough and sugar.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Apart from the question of drinking raised again by the "hootch," it is
+    perhaps possible that, having so little else to do, they were ready to
+    eat the more; it is also true that, busy or idle, the human body
+    requires more nourishment in the North than it does in the South.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Certainly the men of the little Yukon camp began to find their rations
+    horribly short commons, and to suffer a continual hunger, never wholly
+    appeased. It is conditions like these that bring out the brute latent
+    in all men. The day came to mean three scant meals. Each meal came to
+    mean a silent struggle in each man's soul not to let his stomach get
+    the better of his head and heart. At first they joked and laughed about
+    their hunger and the scarcity. By-and-by it became too serious, the
+    jest was wry-faced and rang false. They had, in the beginning, each
+    helped himself from common dishes set in the middle of the rough plank
+    table. Later, each found how, without meaning to&mdash;hating himself for
+    it&mdash;he watched food on its way to others' plates with an evil eye. When
+    it came to his turn, he had an ever-recurrent struggle with himself not
+    to take the lion's share. There were ironical comments now and then,
+    and ill-concealed bitterness. No one of the five would have believed he
+    could feel so towards a human being about a morsel of food, but those
+    who think they would be above it, have not wintered in the Arctic
+    regions or fought in the Boer War. The difficulty was frankly faced at
+    last, and it was ordained in council that the Colonel should be
+    dispenser of the food.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Can't say I like the office," quoth he, "but here goes!" and he cut
+    the bacon with an anxious hand, and spooned out the beans solemnly as
+    if he weighed each "go." And the Trio presently retired to the Little
+    Cabin to discuss whether the Colonel didn't show favouritism to the
+    Boy, and, when Mac was asleep, how they could get rid of Kaviak.
+</p>
+<p>
+    So presently another council was called, and the Colonel resigned his
+    office, stipulating that each man in turn should hold it for a week,
+    and learn how ungrateful it was. Moreover, that whoever was, for the
+    nonce, occupying the painful post, should be loyally upheld by all the
+    others, which arrangement was in force to the end.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And still, on grounds political, religious, social, trivial, the
+    disaffection grew. Two of the Trio sided against the odd man, Potts,
+    and turned him out of the Little Cabin one night during a furious
+    snowstorm, that had already lasted two days, had more than half buried
+    the hut, and nearly snowed up the little doorway. The Colonel and the
+    Boy had been shovelling nearly all the day before to keep free the
+    entrance to the Big Cabin and the precious "bottle" window, as well as
+    their half of the path between the two dwellings. O'Flynn and Potts had
+    played poker and quarrelled as usual.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The morning after the ejection of Potts, and his unwilling reception at
+    the Big Cabin, Mac and O'Flynn failed to appear for breakfast.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Guess they're huffy," says Potts, stretching out his feet, very
+    comfortable in their straw-lined mucklucks, before the big blaze.
+    "Bring on the coffee, Kaviak."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," says the Colonel, "we won't begin without the other fellows."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "By the living Jingo, <i>I</i> will then!" says Potts, and helps himself
+    under the Colonel's angry eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The other two conferred a moment, then drew on their parkis and
+    mittens, and with great difficulty, in spite of yesterday's work, got
+    the door open. It was pretty dark, but there was no doubt about it, the
+    Little Cabin had disappeared.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look! isn't that a curl of smoke?" said the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, by George! they're snowed under!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Serve 'em right!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    A heavy sigh from the Colonel. "Yes, but <i>we'll</i> have to dig 'em out!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look here, Colonel"&mdash;the Boy spoke with touching solemnity&mdash;"<i>not
+    before breakfast!</i>"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Right you are!" laughed the Colonel; and they went in.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was that day, after the others had been released and fed, that the
+    Boy fell out with Potts concerning who had lost the hatchet&mdash;and they
+    came to blows. A black eye and a bloody nose might not seem an
+    illuminating contribution to the question, but no more was said about
+    the hatchet after the Colonel had dragged the Boy off the prostrate
+    form of his adversary.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the Colonel himself lost his temper two days later when O'Flynn
+    broached the seal set months before on the nearly empty demijohn. For
+    those famous "temperance punches" the Colonel had drawn on his own
+    small stock. He saw his blunder when O'Flynn, possessing himself of the
+    demijohn, roared out:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's my whisky, I tell you! I bought it and paid furr it, and but for
+    me it would be at the bottom o' the Yukon now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, and you'd be at the bottom of the Yukon yourself if you hadn't
+    been dragged out by the scruff o' your neck. And you'd be in a pretty
+    fix now, if we left you alone with your whisky, which is about all
+    you've got."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We agreed," Potts chipped in, "that it should be kept for medicinal
+    purposes only."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Sullenly O'Flynn sipped at his grog. Potts had "hogged most of the
+    hootch."
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    "Look here, Boy," said Mac at supper, "I said I wouldn't eat off this
+    plate again."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, dry up! One tin plate's like another tin plate."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Are you reflecting on the washer-up, Mr. MacCann?" asked Potts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm saying what I've said before&mdash;that I've scratched my name on my
+    plate, and I won't eat off this rusty, battered kettle-lid."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He held it up as if to shy it at the Boy. The young fellow turned with
+    a flash in his eye and stood taut. Then in the pause he said quite low:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Let her fly, MacCann."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But MacCann thought better of it. He threw the plate down on the table
+    with a clatter. The Colonel jumped up and bent over the mush-pot at the
+    fire, beside the Boy, whispering to him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, all right."
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the Boy turned back to the table, with the smoking kettle, the
+    cloud had gone from his face. MacCann had got up to hang a blanket over
+    the door. While his back was turned the Boy brought a tin plate, still
+    in good condition, set it down at Mac's place, planted a nail on end in
+    the middle, and with three blows from a hammer fastened the plate
+    firmly to the board.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Maybe you can't hand it up for more as often as you like, but you'll
+    always find it there," he said when McCann came back. And the laugh
+    went against the dainty pioneer, who to the end of the chapter ate from
+    a plate nailed fast to the table.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I begin to understand," says the Colonel to the Boy, under cover of
+    the others' talk, "why it's said to be such a devil of a test of a
+    fellow's decency to winter in this infernal country."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They say it's always a man's pardner he comes to hate most," returned
+    the Boy, laughing good-humouredly at the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Naturally. Look at the row in the Little Cabin."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That hasn't been the only row," the Boy went on more thoughtfully. "I
+    say, Colonel"&mdash;he lowered his voice&mdash;"do you know there'll have to be a
+    new system of rations? I've been afraid&mdash;now I'm <i>sure</i>&mdash;the grub won't
+    last till the ice goes out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I know it," said the Colonel very gravely.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Was there a miscalculation?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I hope it was that&mdash;or else," speaking still lower, "the stores have
+    been tampered with, and not by Kaviak either. There'll be a hell of a
+    row." He looked up, and saw Potts watching them suspiciously. It had
+    come to this: if two men talked low the others pricked their ears. "But
+    lack of grub," resumed the Colonel in his usual voice, as though he had
+    not noticed, "is only one of our difficulties. Lack of work is just
+    about as bad. It breeds a thousand devils. We're a pack o' fools. Here
+    we are, all of us, hard hit, some of us pretty well cleaned out o'
+    ready cash, and here's dollars and dollars all round us, and we sit
+    over the fire like a lot of God-forsaken natives."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Dollars! Where?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Growin' on the trees, boys; a forest full."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, timber." Enthusiasm cooled.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look at what they say about those fellows up at Anvik, what they made
+    last year."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They've got a saw-mill."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>Now</i> they have. But they cut and sold cord-wood to the steamers two
+    years before they got a mill, and next summer will be the biggest
+    season yet. We ought to have set to, as soon as the cabins were built,
+    and cut wood for the summer traffic. But since there are five of us, we
+    can make a good thing of it yet."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel finally carried the day. They went at it next morning, and,
+    as the projector of the work had privately predicted, a better spirit
+    prevailed in the camp for some time. But here were five men, only one
+    of whom had had any of the steadying grace of stiff discipline in his
+    life, men of haphazard education, who had "chucked" more or less easy
+    berths in a land of many creature comforts ... for this&mdash;to fell and
+    haul birch and fir trees in an Arctic climate on half-rations! It began
+    to be apparent that the same spirit was invading the forest that had
+    possession of the camp; two, or at most three, did the work, and the
+    rest shirked, got snow-blindness and rheumatism, and let the others do
+    his share, counting securely, nevertheless, on his fifth of the
+    proceeds, just as he counted (no matter what proportion he had
+    contributed) on his full share of the common stock of food.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I came out here a Communist&mdash;" said the Boy one day to the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And an agnostic," smiled the older man.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I'm an agnostic all right, now and for ever. But this winter has
+    cured my faith in Communism."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Early February brought not only lengthening daylight, but a radical
+    change in the weather. The woodsmen worked in their shirt-sleeves,
+    perspired freely, and said in the innocence of their hearts, "If winter
+    comes early up here, spring does the same." The whole hillside was one
+    slush, and the snow melting on the ill-made Little Cabin roof brought a
+    shower-bath into the upper bunk.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Few things in nature so surely stir the pulse of man as the untimely
+    coming of a few spring days, that have lost their way in the calendar,
+    and wandered into winter. No trouble now to get the Big Chimney men
+    away from the fireside. They held up their bloodless faces in the faint
+    sunshine, and their eyes, with the pupils enlarged by the long reign of
+    night, blinked feebly, like an owl's forced to face the morning.
+</p>
+<p>
+    There were none of those signs in the animal world outside, of
+    premature stir and cheerful awaking, that in other lands help the
+    illusion that winter lies behind, but there was that even more
+    stimulating sweet air abroad, that subtle mixture of sun and yielding
+    frost, that softened wind that comes blowing across the snow, still
+    keen to the cheek, but subtly reviving to the sensitive nostril, and
+    caressing to the eyes. The Big Chimney men drew deep breaths, and said
+    in their hearts the battle was over and won.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak, for ever following at Mac's heels "like a rale Irish tarrier,"
+    found his allegiance waver in these stirring, blissful days, if ever
+    Farva so belied character and custom as to swing an axe for any length
+    of time. Plainly out of patience, Kaviak would throw off the musk-rat
+    coat, and run about in wet mucklucks and a single garment&mdash;uphill,
+    downhill, on important errands which he confided to no man.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It is part of the sorcery of such days that men's thoughts, like
+    birds', turn to other places, impatient of the haven that gave them
+    shelter in rough weather overpast. The Big Chimney men leaned on their
+    axes and looked north, south, east, west.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then the Colonel would give a little start, turn about, lift his
+    double-bitter, and swing it frontier fashion, first over one shoulder,
+    then over the other, striking cleanly home each time, working with a
+    kind of splendid rhythm more harmonious, more beautiful to look at,
+    than most of the works of men. This was, perhaps, the view of his
+    comrades, for they did a good deal of looking at the Colonel. He said
+    he was a modest man and didn't like it, and Mac, turning a little rusty
+    under the gibe, answered:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Haven't you got the sense to see we've cut all the good timber just
+    round here?" and again he turned his eyes to the horizon line.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mac's right," said the Boy; and even the Colonel stood still a moment,
+    and they all looked away to that land at the end of the world where the
+    best materials are for the building of castles&mdash;it's the same country
+    so plainly pointed out by the Rainbow's End, and never so much as in
+    the springtime does it lure men with its ancient promise.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come along, Colonel; let's go and look for real timber&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And let's find it nearer water-level&mdash;where the steamers can see it
+    right away."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What about the kid?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me come," said Kaviak, with a highly obliging air.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No; you stay at home."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No; go too."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Go too, thou babbler! Kaviak's a better trail man than some I could
+    mention."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We'll have to carry him home," objected Potts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now don't tell us you'll do any of the carryin', or we'll lose
+    confidence in you, Potts."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The trail was something awful, but on their Canadian snowshoes they got
+    as far as an island, six miles off. One end of it was better wooded
+    than any easily accessible place they had seen.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, this is quite like real spruce," said the Boy, and O'Flynn
+    admitted that even in California "these here would be called 'trees'
+    wid no intintion o' bein' sarcaustic."
+</p>
+<p>
+    So they cut holes in the ice, and sounded for the channel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, sir, the steamers can make a landin' here, and here's where we'll
+    have our wood-rack."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They went home in better spirits than they had been in since that
+    welter of gold had lain on the Big Cabin table.
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    But a few days sufficed to wear the novelty off the new wood camp for
+    most of the party. Potts and O'Flynn set out in the opposite direction
+    one morning with a hand-sled, and provisions to last several days. They
+    were sick of bacon and beans, and were "goin' huntin'." No one could
+    deny that a moose or even a grouse&mdash;anything in the shape of fresh
+    meat&mdash;was sufficiently needed. But Potts and O'Flynn were really sick
+    and sore from their recent slight attack of wood-felling. They were
+    after bigger game, too, as well as grouse, and a few days "off." It had
+    turned just enough colder to glaze the trail and put it in fine
+    condition. They went down the river to the <i>Oklahoma,</i> were generously
+    entertained by Captain Rainey, and learned that, with earlier contracts
+    on his hands, he did not want more wood from them than they had already
+    corded. They returned to the camp without game, but with plenty of
+    whisky, and information that freed them from the yoke of labour, and
+    from the lash of ironic comment. In vain the Colonel urged that the
+    <i>Oklahoma</i> was not the only steamer plying the Yukon, that with the big
+    rush of the coming season the traffic would be enormous, and a
+    wood-pile as good as a gold mine. The cause was lost.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You won't get us to make galley-slaves of ourselves on the off-chance
+    of selling. Rainey says that wood camps have sprung up like mushrooms
+    all along the river. The price of wood will go down to&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "All along the river! There isn't one between us and Andreievsky, nor
+    between here and Holy Cross."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But it was no use. The travellers pledged each other in <i>Oklahoma</i>
+    whisky, and making a common cause once more, the original Trio put in a
+    night of it. The Boy and the Colonel turned into their bunks at eleven
+    o'clock. They were roused in the small hours, by Kaviak's frightened
+    crying, and the noise of angry voices.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You let the kid alone."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, it's mesilf that'll take the liberty o' mintionin' that I ain't
+    goin' to stand furr another minyit an Esquimer's cuttin' down <i>my</i>
+    rations. Sure it's a fool I've been!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You can't help that," Mac chopped out.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Say Mac," said Potts in a drunken voice, "I'm talkin' to you like a
+    friend. You want to get a move on that kid."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Kaviak's goin' won't make any more difference than a fly's."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The other two grumbled incoherently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But I tell you what <i>would</i> make a difference: if you two would quit
+    eatin' on the sly&mdash;out o' meal-times."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Be the Siven!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You lie!" A movement, a stool overturned, and the two men in the bunks
+    were struck broad awake by the smart concussion of a gun-shot. Nobody
+    was hurt, and between them they disarmed Potts, and turned the Irishman
+    out to cool off in his own cabin. It was all over in a minute. Kaviak,
+    reassured, curled down to sleep again. Mac and Potts stretched
+    themselves on the buffalo-robe half under the table, and speedily fell
+    to snoring. The Boy put on some logs. He and the Colonel sat and
+    watched the sparks.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's a bad business."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It can't go on," says the Colonel; "but Mac's right: Kaviak's being
+    here isn't to blame. They&mdash;we, too&mdash;are like a lot of powder-cans."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy nodded. "Any day a spark, and <i>biff!</i> some of us are in a
+    blaze, and wh-tt! bang! and some of us are in Kingdom Come."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I begin to be afraid to open my lips," said the Colonel. "We all are;
+    don't you notice?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes. I wonder why we came."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>You</i> had no excuse," said the elder man almost angrily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Same excuse as you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Exactly," maintained the Boy. "Tired of towns and desk-work,
+    and&mdash;and&mdash;" The Boy shifted about on his wooden stool, and held up his
+    hands to the reviving blaze. "Life owes us steady fellows one year of
+    freedom, anyhow&mdash;one year to make ducks and drakes of. Besides, we've
+    all come to make our fortunes. Doesn't every mother's son of us mean to
+    find a gold-mine in the spring when we get to the Klondyke&mdash;eh?" And he
+    laughed again, and presently he yawned, and tumbled back into his bunk.
+    But he put his head out in a moment. "Aren't you going to bed?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes." The Colonel stood up.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did you know Father Wills went by, last night, when those fellows
+    began to row about getting out the whisky?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He says there's another stampede on."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where to?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Koyukuk this time."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why didn't he come in?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Awful hurry to get to somebody that sent for him. Funny fellas these
+    Jesuits. They <i>believe</i> all those odd things they teach."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So do other men," said the Colonel, curtly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I've lived in a Christian country all my life, but I don't know
+    that I ever saw Christianity <i>practised</i> till I went up the Yukon to
+    Holy Cross."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I must say you're complimentary to the few other Christians scattered
+    about the world."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't get mifft, Colonel. I've known plenty of people straight as a
+    die, and capital good fellows. I've seen them do very decent things now
+    and then. But with these Jesuit missionaries&mdash;Lord! there's no let up
+    to it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    No answer from the Protestant Colonel. Presently the Boy in a sleepy
+    voice added elegantly:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No Siree! The Jesuits go the whole hog!"
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    Winter was down on the camp again. The whole world was hard as iron.
+    The men kept close to the Big Chimney all day long, and sat there far
+    into the small hours of the morning, saying little, heavy-eyed and
+    sullen. The dreaded insomnia of the Arctic had laid hold on all but the
+    Colonel. Even his usually unbroken repose was again disturbed one night
+    about a week later. Some vague sort of sound or movement in the
+    room&mdash;Kaviak on a raid?&mdash;or&mdash;wasn't that the closing of a door?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Kaviak!" He put his hand down and felt the straight hair of the
+    Esquimaux in the under bunk. "Potts! Who's there?" He half sat up.
+    "Boy! Did you hear that, Boy?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He leaned far down over the side and saw distinctly by the fire-light
+    there was nobody but Kaviak in the under bunk.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel was on his legs in a flash, putting his head through his
+    parki and drawing on his mucklucks. He didn't wait to cross and tie the
+    thongs. A presentiment of evil was strong upon him. Outside in the
+    faint star-light he thought a dim shape was passing down towards the
+    river.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who's that? Hi, there! Stop, or I'll shoot!" He hadn't brought his
+    gun, but the ruse worked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't shoot!" came back the voice of the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel stumbled down the bank in the snow, and soon stood by the
+    shape. The Boy was dressed for a journey. His Arctic cap was drawn down
+    over his ears and neck. The wolf-skin fringe of his parki hood stood
+    out fiercely round the defiant young face. Wound about one of his
+    seal-skin mittens was the rope of the new hand-sled he'd been
+    fashioning so busily of nights by the camp fire. His two blankets were
+    strapped on the sled, Indian fashion, along with a gunny sack and his
+    rifle.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The two men stood looking angrily at each other a moment, and then the
+    Colonel politely inquired:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What in hell are you doing?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Goin' to Minóok."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The devil you are!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, the devil I am!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    They stood measuring each other in the dim light, till the Colonel's
+    eyes fell on the loaded sled. The Boy's followed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've only taken short rations for two weeks. I left a statement in the
+    cabin; it's about a fifth of what's my share, so there's no need of a
+    row."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What are you goin' for?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, to be first in the field, and stake a gold-mine, of course."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel laid a rough hand on the Boy's shoulder. He shook it off
+    impatiently, and before the older man could speak:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look here, let's talk sense. Somebody's got to go, or there'll be
+    trouble. Potts says Kaviak. But what difference would Kaviak make? I've
+    been afraid you'd get ahead of me. I've watched you for a week like a
+    hawk watches a chicken. But it's clear I'm the one to go."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He pulled up the rope of the sled, and his little cargo lurched towards
+    him. The Colonel stepped in front of him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Boy&mdash;" he began, but something was the matter with his voice; he got
+    no further.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm the youngest," boasted the other, "and I'm the strongest, and&mdash;I'm
+    the hungriest."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel found a perturbed and husky voice in which to say:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I didn't know you were such a Christian."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nothin' o' the sort."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's this but&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, it's just&mdash;just my little scheme."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You're no fool. You know as well as I do you've got the devil's own
+    job in hand."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Somebody's got to go," he repeated doggedly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look here," said the Colonel, "you haven't impressed me as being tired
+    of life."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tired of life!" The young eyes flashed in that weird aureole of long
+    wolf-hair. "Tired of life! Well, I should just pretty nearly think I
+    wasn't."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "H'm! Then if it isn't Christianity, it must be because you're young."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Golly, man! it's because I'm hungry&mdash;HUNGRY! Great Jehosaphat! I could
+    eat an ox!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And you leave your grub behind, to be eaten by a lot of&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I can't stand here argyfying with the thermometer down to&mdash;" The Boy
+    began to drag the sled over the snow.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come back into the cabin."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come with me, I say; I've got something to propose." Again the Colonel
+    stood in front, barring the way. "Look here," he went on gently, "are
+    you a friend of mine?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, so-so," growled the Boy. But after looking about him for an angry
+    second or two, he flung down the rope of his sled, walked sulkily
+    uphill, and kicked off his snow-shoes at the door of the cabin, all
+    with the air of one who waits, but is not baulked of his purpose. They
+    went in and stripped off their furs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now see here: if you've made up your mind to light out, I'm not going
+    to oppose you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why didn't you say anything as sensible as that out yonder?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Because I won't be ready to go along till to-morrow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yep."
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was a little silence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I wish you wouldn't, Colonel."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's dangerous alone&mdash;not for two."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, it IS dangerous, and you know it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm goin' along, laddie." Seeing the Boy look precious grave and
+    harassed: "What's the matter?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'd hate awfully for anything to happen to you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel laughed. "Much obliged, but it matters uncommon little if I
+    do drop in my tracks."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You be blowed!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You see I've got a pretty bad kind of a complaint, anyhow." The Boy
+    leaned over in the firelight and scanned the Colonel's face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's wrong?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel smiled a queer little one-sided smile. "I've been out o'
+    kelter nearly ten years."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, <i>that's</i> all right. You'll go on for another thirty if you stay
+    where you are till the ice goes out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel bent his head, and stared at the smooth-trodden floor at
+    the edge of the buffalo-skin. "To tell the truth, I'll be glad to go,
+    not only because of&mdash;" He hitched his shoulders towards the corner
+    whence came the hoarse and muffled breathing of the Denver clerk. "I'll
+    be glad to have something to tire me out, so I'll sleep&mdash;sleep too
+    sound to dream. That's what I came for, not to sit idle in a God-damn
+    cabin and think&mdash;think&mdash;" He got up suddenly and strode the tiny space
+    from fire to door, a man transformed, with hands clenching and dark
+    face almost evil. "They say the men who winter up here either take to
+    drink or go mad. I begin to see it is so. It's no place to do any
+    forgetting in." He stopped suddenly before the Boy with glittering
+    eyes. "It's the country where your conscience finds you out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That religion of yours is makin' you morbid, Colonel." The Boy spoke
+    with the detached and soothing air of a sage.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You don't know what you're talking about." He turned sharply away. The
+    Boy relapsed into silence. The Colonel in his renewed prowling brought
+    up against the wooden crane. He stood looking down into the fire. Loud
+    and regular sounded the sleeping man's breathing in the quiet little
+    room.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I did a wrong once to a woman&mdash;ten years ago," said the Colonel,
+    speaking to the back-log&mdash;"although I loved her." He raised a hand to
+    his eyes with a queer choking sound. "I loved her," he repeated, still
+    with his back to the Boy. "By-and-by I could have righted it, but
+    she&mdash;she wasn't the kind to hang about and wait on a man's better
+    nature when once he'd shown himself a coward. She skipped the country."
+    He leaned his head against the end of the shelf over the fire, and said
+    no more.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Go back in the spring, find out where she is, and&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've spent every spring and every summer, every fall and every winter
+    till this one, trying to do just that thing."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You can't find her?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nobody can find her."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She's dead&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She's <i>not</i> dead!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy involuntarily shrank back; the Colonel looked ready to smash
+    him. The action recalled the older man to himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I feel sure she isn't dead," he said more quietly, but still
+    trembling. "No, no; she isn't dead. She had some money of her own, and
+    she went abroad. I followed her. I heard of her in Paris, in Rome. I
+    saw her once in a droschky in Vienna; there I lost the trail. Her
+    people said she'd gone to Japan. <i>I</i> went to Japan. I'm sure she wasn't
+    in the islands. I've spent my life since trying to find her&mdash;writing
+    her letters that always come back&mdash;trying&mdash;" His voice went out like a
+    candle-wick suddenly dying in the socket. Only the sleeper was audible
+    for full five minutes. Then, as though he had paused only a comma's
+    space, the Colonel went on: "I've been trying to put the memory of her
+    behind me, as a sane man should. But some women leave an arrow sticking
+    in your flesh that you can never pull out. You can only jar against it,
+    and cringe under the agony of the reminder all your life long.... Bah!
+    Go out, Boy, and bring in your sled."
+</p>
+<p>
+    And the Boy obeyed without a word.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Two days after, three men with a child stood in front of the larger
+    cabin, saying good-bye to their two comrades who were starting out on
+    snow-shoes to do a little matter of 625 miles of Arctic travelling,
+    with two weeks' scant provisioning, some tea and things for trading,
+    bedding, two rifles, and a kettle, all packed on one little hand-sled.
+</p>
+<p>
+    There had been some unexpected feeling, and even some real generosity
+    shown at the last, on the part of the three who were to profit by the
+    exodus&mdash;falling heir thereby to a bigger, warmer cabin and more food.
+</p>
+<p>
+    O'Flynn was moved to make several touching remonstrances. It was a sign
+    of unwonted emotion on Mac's part that he gave up arguing (sacrificing
+    all the delight of a set debate), and simply begged and prayed them not
+    to be fools, not to fly in the face of Providence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Potts was made of sterner stuff. Besides, the thing was too good to
+    be true. O'Flynn, when he found they were not to be dissuaded, solemnly
+    presented each with a little bottle of whisky. Nobody would have
+    believed O'Flynn would go so far as that. Nor could anyone have
+    anticipated that close-fisted Mac would give the Boy his valuable
+    aneroid barometer and compass, or that Potts would be so generous with
+    his best Virginia straight-cut, filling the Colonel's big pouch without
+    so much as a word.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's a crazy scheme," says he, shaking the giant Kentuckian by the
+    hand, "and you won't get thirty miles before you find it out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Call it an expedition to Anvik," urged Mac. "Load up there with
+    reindeer meat, and come back. If we don't get some fresh meat soon,
+    we'll be having scurvy."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What you're furr doin'," says O'Flynn for the twentieth time, "has
+    niver been done, not ayven be Indians. The prastes ahl say so."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So do the Sour-doughs," said Mac. "It isn't as if you had dogs."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good-bye," said the Colonel, and the men grasped hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Potts shook hands with the Boy as heartily as though that same hand had
+    never half throttled him in the cause of a missing hatchet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good-bye, Kiddie. I bequeath you my share o' syrup."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good-bye; meet you in the Klondyke!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good-bye. Hooray for the Klondyke in June!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Klondyke in June! Hoop-la!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The two travellers looked back, laughing and nodding, as jolly as you
+    please. The Boy stooped, made a snow-ball, and fired it at Kaviak. The
+    child ducked, chuckling, and returned as good as he got. His loosely
+    packed ball broke in a splash on the back of the Boy's parki, and
+    Kaviak was loudly cheered.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Still, as they went forward, they looked back. The Big Chimney wore an
+    air wondrous friendly, and the wide, white world looked coldly at them,
+    with small pretence of welcome or reward.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't believe I ever really knew how awful jolly the Big Chimney
+    was&mdash;till this minute."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel smiled. "Hardly like myself, to think whatever else I see,
+    I'll never see that again."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Better not boast."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel went on in front, breaking trail in the newfallen snow, the
+    Boy pulling the sled behind him as lightly as if its double burden were
+    a feather.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They look as if they thought it'd be a picnic," says Mac, grimly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I wonder be the Siven Howly Pipers! will we iver see ayther of 'em
+    again."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If they only stay a couple o' nights at Anvik," said Potts, with
+    gloomy foreboding, "they could get back here inside a week."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," answered Mac, following the two figures with serious eyes, "they
+    may be dead inside a week, but they won't be back here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    And Potts felt his anxiety eased. A man who had mined at Caribou ought
+    to know.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH11"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER X
+</h2>
+<center>
+    PRINCESS MUCKLUCK
+</center>
+<p class="ind">
+  "We all went to Tibbals to see the Kinge, who used my mother
+   and my aunt very gratiouslie; but we all saw a great chaunge
+   betweene the fashion of the Court as it was now, and of y in ye
+   Queene's, for we were all lowzy by sittinge in Sr Thomas
+   Erskin's chamber." <i>Memoir: Anne Countess of Dorset</i>, 1603.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was the 26th of February, that first day that they "hit the Long
+    Trail."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Temperature only about twenty degrees, the Colonel thought, and so
+    little wind it had the effect of being warmer. Trail in fair condition,
+    weather gray and steady. Never men in better spirits. To have left the
+    wrangling and the smouldering danger of the camp behind, that alone, as
+    the Boy said, was "worth the price of admission." Exhilarating, too, to
+    men of their temperament, to have cut the Gordian knot of the
+    difficulty by risking themselves on this unprecedented quest for peace
+    and food. Gold, too? Oh, yes&mdash;with a smile to see how far that main
+    object had drifted into the background&mdash;they added, "and for gold."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They believed they had hearkened well to the counsel that bade them
+    "travel light." "Remember, every added ounce is against you." "Nobody
+    in the North owns anything that's heavy," had been said in one fashion
+    or another so often that it lost its ironic sound in the ears of men
+    who had come so far to carry away one of the heaviest things under the
+    sun.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel and the Boy took no tent, no stove, not even a miner's pick
+    and pan. These last, General Lighter had said, could be obtained at
+    Minóok; and "there isn't a cabin on the trail," Dillon had added,
+    "without 'em."
+</p>
+<p>
+    For the rest, the carefully-selected pack on the sled contained the
+    marmot-skin, woollen blankets, a change of flannels apiece, a couple of
+    sweaters, a Norfolk jacket, and several changes of foot-gear. This last
+    item was dwelt on earnestly by all. "Keep your feet dry," John Dillon
+    had said, "and leave the rest to God Almighty." They were taking barely
+    two weeks' rations, and a certain amount of stuff to trade with the
+    up-river Indians, when their supplies should be gone. They carried a
+    kettle, an axe, some quinine, a box of the carbolic ointment all miners
+    use for foot-soreness, O'Flynn's whisky, and two rifles and ammunition.
+    In spite of having eliminated many things that most travellers would
+    count essential, they found their load came to a little over two
+    hundred pounds. But every day would lessen it, they told each other
+    with a laugh, and with an inward misgiving, lest the lightening should
+    come all too quickly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They had seen in camp that winter so much of the frailty of human
+    temper that, although full of faith by now in each other's native sense
+    and fairness, they left nothing to a haphazard division of labour. They
+    parcelled out the work of the day with absolute impartiality. To each
+    man so many hours of going ahead to break trail, if the snow was soft,
+    while the other dragged the sled; or else while one pulled in front,
+    the other pushed from behind, in regular shifts by the watch, turn and
+    turn about. The Colonel had cooked all winter, so it was the Boy's turn
+    at that&mdash;the Colonel's to decide the best place to camp, because it was
+    his affair to find seasoned wood for fuel, his to build the fire in the
+    snow on green logs laid close together&mdash;his to chop enough wood to cook
+    breakfast the next morning. All this they had arranged before they left
+    the Big Chimney.
+</p>
+<p>
+    That they did not cover more ground that first day was a pure chance,
+    not likely to recur, due to an unavoidable loss of time at Pymeut.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Knowing the fascination that place exercised over his companion, the
+    Colonel called a halt about seven miles off from the Big Chimney, that
+    they might quickly despatch a little cold luncheon they carried in
+    their pockets, and push on without a break till supper.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We've got no time to waste at Pymeut," observes the Colonel
+    significantly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I ain't achin' to stop at Pymeut," says his pardner with a superior
+    air, standing up, as he swallowed his last mouthful of cold bacon and
+    corn-bread, and cheerfully surveyed the waste. "Who says it's cold,
+    even if the wind is up? And the track's bully. But see here, Colonel,
+    you mustn't go thinkin' it's smooth glare-ice, like this, all the way."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I was figurin' that it would be." But the Boy paid no heed to the
+    irony.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And it's a custom o' the country to get the wind in your face, as a
+    rule, whichever way you go."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I'm not complainin' as yet."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Reckon you needn't if you're blown like dandelion-down all the way to
+    Minóok. Gee! the wind's stronger! Say, Colonel, let's rig a sail."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Foolishness."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, sir. We'll go by Pymeut in an ice-boat, lickety split. And it'll
+    be a good excuse for not stopping, though I think we ought to say
+    good-bye to Nicholas."
+</p>
+<p>
+    This view inclined the Colonel to think better of an ice-boat. He had
+    once crossed the Bay of Toronto in that fashion, and began to wonder if
+    such a mode of progression applied to sleds might not aid largely in
+    solving the Minóok problem.
+</p>
+<p>
+    While he was wondering the Boy unlashed the sled-load, and pulled off
+    the canvas cover as the Colonel came back with his mast. Between them,
+    with no better tools than axe, jack-knives, and a rope, and with
+    fingers freezing in the south wind, they rigged the sail.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The fact that they had this increasingly favourable wind on their very
+    first day showed that they were specially smiled on by the great
+    natural forces. The superstitious feeling that only slumbers in most
+    breasts, that Mother Nature is still a mysterious being, who has her
+    favourites whom she guards, her born enemies whom she baulks, pursues,
+    and finally overwhelms, the age-old childishness stirred pleasantly in
+    both men, and in the younger came forth unabashed in speech:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I tell you the omens are good! This expedition's goin' to get there."
+    Then, with the involuntary misgiving that follows hard upon such
+    boasting, he laughed uneasily and added, "I mean to sacrifice the first
+    deer's tongue I don't want myself, to Yukon Inua; but here's to the
+    south wind!" He turned some corn-bread crumbs out of his pocket, and
+    saw, delighted, how the gale, grown keener, snatched eagerly at them
+    and hurried them up the trail. The ice-boat careened and strained
+    eagerly to sail away. The two gold-seekers, laughing like schoolboys,
+    sat astride the pack; the Colonel shook out the canvas, and they
+    scudded off up the river like mad. The great difficulty was the
+    steering; but it was rip-roaring fun, the Boy said, and very soon there
+    were natives running down to the river, to stare open-mouthed at the
+    astounding apparition, to point and shout something unintelligible that
+    sounded like "Muchtaravik!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, it's the Pymeuts! Pardner, we'll be in Minóok by supper-ti&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The words hadn't left his lips when he saw, a few yards in front of
+    them, a faint cloud of steam rising up from the ice&mdash;that dim
+    danger-signal that flies above an air-hole. The Colonel, never
+    noticing, was heading straight for the ghastly trap.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "God, Colonel! Blow-hole!" gasped the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel simply rolled off the pack turning over and over on the
+    ice, but keeping hold of the rope.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The sled swerved, turned on her side, and slid along with a sound of
+    snapping and tearing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    While they were still headed straight for the hole, the Boy had
+    gathered himself for a clear jump to the right, but the sled's sudden
+    swerve to the left broke his angle sharply. He was flung forward on the
+    new impetus, spun over the smooth surface, swept across the verge and
+    under the cloud, clutching wildly at the ragged edge of ice as he went
+    down.
+</p>
+<p>
+    All Pymeut had come rushing pell-mell.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel was gathering himself up and looking round in a dazed kind
+    of way as Nicholas flashed by. Just beyond, in that yawning hole, fully
+    ten feet wide by fifteen long, the Boy's head appeared an instant, and
+    then was lost like something seen in a dream. Some of the Pymeuts with
+    quick knives were cutting the canvas loose. One end was passed to
+    Nicholas; he knotted it to his belt, and went swiftly, but gingerly,
+    forward nearer the perilous edge. He had flung himself down on his
+    stomach just as the Boy rose again. Nicholas lurched his body over the
+    brink, his arms outstretched, straining farther, farther yet, till it
+    seemed as if only the counterweight of the rest of the population at
+    the other end of the canvas prevented his joining the Boy in the hole.
+    But Nicholas had got a grip of him, and while two of the Pymeuts hung
+    on to the half-stunned Colonel to prevent his adding to the
+    complication, Nicholas, with a good deal of trouble in spite of
+    Yagorsha's help, hauled the Boy out of the hole and dragged him up on
+    the ice-edge. The others applied themselves lustily to their end of the
+    canvas, and soon they were all at a safe distance from the yawning
+    danger.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy's predominant feeling had been one of intense surprise. He
+    looked round, and a hideous misgiving seized him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Anything the matter with you, Colonel?" His tone was so angry that, as
+    they stared at each other, they both fell to laughing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I rather thought that was what <i>I</i> was going to say"; and
+    Kentucky heaved a deep sigh of relief.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy's teeth began to chatter, and his clothes were soon freezing on
+    him. They got him up off the ice, and Nicholas and the sturdy old
+    Pymeut story-teller, Yagorsha, walked him, or ran him rather, the rest
+    of the way to Pymeut, for they were not so near the village as the
+    travellers had supposed on seeing nearly the whole male population. The
+    Colonel was not far behind, and several of the bucks were bringing the
+    disabled sled. Before reaching the Kachime, they were joined by the
+    women and children, Muckluck much concerned at the sight of her friend
+    glazed in ice from head to heel. Nicholas and Yagorsha half dragged,
+    half pulled him into the Kachime. The entire escort followed, even two
+    or three very dirty little boys&mdash;everybody, except the handful of women
+    and girls left at the mouth of the underground entrance and the two men
+    who had run on to make a fire. It was already smoking viciously as
+    though the seal-lamps weren't doing enough in that line, when Yagorsha
+    and Nicholas laid the half-frozen traveller on the sleeping-bench.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Pymeuts knew that the great thing was to get the ice-stiffened
+    clothes off as quickly as might be, and that is to be done
+    expeditiously only by cutting them off. In vain the Boy protested.
+    Recklessly they sawed and cut and stripped him, rubbed him and wrapped
+    him in a rabbit-blanket, the fur turned inside, and a wolverine skin
+    over that. The Colonel at intervals poured small doses of O'Flynn's
+    whisky down the Boy's throat in spite of his unbecoming behaviour, for
+    he was both belligerent and ungrateful, complaining loudly of the ruin
+    of his clothes with only such intermission as the teeth-chattering,
+    swallowing, and rude handling necessitated.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I didn't like&mdash;bein' in&mdash;that blow-hole. (Do you know&mdash;it was so
+    cold&mdash;it burnt!) But I'd rather&mdash;be&mdash;in a blow-hole&mdash;than&mdash;br-r-r!
+    Blow-hole isn't so s-s-melly as these s-s-kins!'
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You better be glad you've got a whole skin of your own and ain't
+    smellin' brimstone," said the Colonel, pouring a little more whisky
+    down the unthankful throat. "Pretty sort o' Klondyker you are&mdash;go and
+    get nearly drowned first day out!" Several Pymeut women came in
+    presently and joined the men at the fire, chattering low and staring at
+    the Colonel and the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I can't go&mdash;to the Klondyke&mdash;naked&mdash;no, nor wrapped in a
+    rabbit-skin&mdash;like Baby Bunting&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas was conferring with the Colonel and offering to take him to
+    Ol' Chief's.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, yes; Ol' Chief got two clo'es. You come. Me show"; and they
+    crawled out one after the other.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You pretty near dead that time," said one of the younger women
+    conversationally.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's right. Who are you, anyway?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me Anna&mdash;Yagorsha's daughter."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, yes, I thought I'd seen you before." She seemed to be only a
+    little older than Muckluck, but less attractive, chiefly on account of
+    her fat and her look of ill-temper. She was on specially bad terms with
+    a buck they called Joe, and they seemed to pass all their time abusing
+    one another.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy craned his neck and looked round. Except just where he was
+    lying, the Pymeut men and women were crowded together, on that side of
+    the Kachime, at his head and at his feet, thick as herrings on a
+    thwart. They all leaned forward and regarded him with a beady-eyed
+    sympathy. He had never been so impressed by the fact before, but all
+    these native people, even in their gentlest moods, frowned in a chronic
+    perplexity and wore their wide mouths open. He reflected that he had
+    never seen one that didn't, except Muckluck.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Here she was, crawling in with a tin can.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Got something there to eat?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The rescued one craned his head as far as he could.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Too soon," she said, showing her brilliant teeth in the fire-light.
+    She set the tin down, looked round, a little embarrassed, and stirred
+    the fire, which didn't need it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well"&mdash;he put his chin down under the rabbit-skin once more&mdash;"how goes
+    the world, Princess?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She flashed her quick smile again and nodded reassuringly. "You stay
+    here now?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No; goin' up river."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What for?" She spoke disapprovingly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Want to get an Orange Grove."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Find him up river?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hope so."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I think I go, too"; and all the grave folk, sitting so close on the
+    sleeping-bench, stretched their wide mouths wider still, smiling
+    good-humouredly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You better wait till summer."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh!" She lifted her head from the fire as one who takes careful note
+    of instructions. "Nex' summer?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, summer's the time for squaws to travel."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I come nex' summer," she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    By-and-by Nicholas returned with a new parki and a pair of wonderful
+    buckskin breeches&mdash;not like anything worn by the Lower River natives,
+    or by the coast-men either: well cut, well made, and handsomely fringed
+    down the outside of the leg where an officer's gold stripe goes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Chaparejos!" screamed the Boy. "Where'd you get 'em?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ol' Chief&mdash;he ketch um."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They're <i>bully!</i>" said the Boy, holding the despised rabbit-skin under
+    his chin with both hands, and craning excitedly over it. He felt that
+    his fortunes were looking up. Talk about a tide in the affairs of men!
+    Why, a tide that washes up to a wayfarer's feet a pair o' chaparejos
+    like that&mdash;well! legs so habited would simply <i>have</i> to carry a fella
+    on to fortune. He lay back on the sleeping-bench with dancing eyes,
+    while the raw whisky hummed in his head. In the dim light of seal-lamps
+    vague visions visited him of stern and noble chiefs out of the Leather
+    Stocking Stories of his childhood&mdash;men of daring, whose legs were
+    invariably cased in buck-skin with dangling fringes. But the dashing
+    race was not all Indian, nor all dead. Famous cowboys reared before him
+    on bucking bronchos, their leg-fringes streaming on the blast, and
+    desperate chaps who held up coaches and potted Wells Fargo guards.
+    Anybody must needs be a devil of a fellow who went about in "shaps," as
+    his California cousins called chaparejos. Even a peaceable fella like
+    himself, not out after gore at all, but after an Orange Grove&mdash;even he,
+    once he put on&mdash;He laughed out loud at his childishness, and then grew
+    grave. "Say, Nicholas, what's the tax?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How much?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, your pardner&mdash;he pay."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Humph! I s'pose I'll know the worst on settlin'-day."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then, after a few moments, making a final clutch at economy before the
+    warmth and the whisky subdued him altogether:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Say, Nicholas, have you got&mdash;hasn't the Ol' Chief got any&mdash;less
+    glorious breeches than those?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Anything little cheaper?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nuh," says Nicholas.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy closed his eyes, relieved on the whole. Fate had a mind to see
+    him in chaparejos. Let her look to the sequel, then!
+</p>
+<p>
+    When consciousness came back it brought the sound of Yagorsha's yarning
+    by the fire, and the occasional laugh or grunt punctuating the eternal
+    "Story."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel was sitting there among them, solacing himself by adding to
+    the smoke that thickened the stifling air.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Presently the Story-teller made some shrewd hit, that shook the Pymeut
+    community into louder grunts of applause and a general chuckling. The
+    Colonel turned his head slowly, and blew out a fresh cloud: "Good
+    joke?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    In the pause that fell thereafter, Yagorsha, imperturbable, the only
+    one who had not laughed, smoothed his lank, iron-gray locks down on
+    either side of his wide face, and went on renewing the sinew open-work
+    in his snow-shoe.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When Ol' Chief's father die&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    All the Pymeuts chuckled afresh. The Boy listened eagerly. Usually
+    Yagorsha's stories were tragic, or, at least, of serious interest,
+    ranging from bereaved parents who turned into wolverines, all the way
+    to the machinations of the Horrid Dwarf and the Cannibal Old Woman.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel looked at Nicholas. He seemed as entertained as the rest,
+    but quite willing to leave his family history in professional hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ol' Chief's father, Glovotsky, him Russian," Yagorsha began again,
+    laying down his sinew-thread a moment and accepting some of the
+    Colonel's tobacco.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I didn't know you had any white blood in you," interrupted the
+    Colonel, offering his pouch to Nicholas. "I might have suspected
+    Muckluck&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Heap got Russian blood," interrupted Joe.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As the Story-teller seemed to be about to repeat the enlivening
+    tradition concerning the almost mythical youth of Ol' Chief's father,
+    that subject of the great Katharine's, whose blood was flowing still in
+    Pymeut veins, just then in came Yagorsha's daughter with some message
+    to her father. He grunted acquiescence, and she turned to go. Joe
+    called something after her, and she snapped back. He jumped up to bar
+    her exit. She gave him a smart cuff across the eyes, which surprised
+    him almost into the fire, and while he was recovering his equilibrium
+    she fled. Yagorsha and all the Pymeuts laughed delightedly at Joe's
+    discomfiture.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy had been obliged to sit up to watch this spirited encounter.
+    The only notice the Colonel took of him was to set the kettle on the
+    fire. While he was dining his pardner gathered up the blankets and
+    crawled out.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Comin' in half a minute," the Boy called after him. The answer was
+    swallowed by the tunnel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Him go say goo'-bye Ol' Chief," said Nicholas, observing how the
+    Colonel's pardner was scalding himself in his haste to despatch a
+    second cup of tea.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the Boy bolted the last of his meal, gathered up the kettle, mug,
+    and frying-pan, which had served him for plate as well, and wormed his
+    way out as fast as he could. There was the sled nearly packed for the
+    journey, and watching over it, keeping the dogs at bay, was an
+    indescribably dirty little boy in a torn and greasy denim parki over
+    rags of reindeer-skin. Nobody else in sight but Yagorsha's daughter
+    down at the water-hole.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where's my pardner gone?" The child only stared, having no English
+    apparently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    While the Boy packed the rest of the things, and made the tattered
+    canvas fast under the lashing, Joe came out of the Kachime. He stood
+    studying the prospect a moment, and his dull eyes suddenly gleamed.
+    Anna was coming up from the river with her dripping pail. He set off
+    with an affectation of leisurely indifference, but he made straight for
+    his enemy. She seemed not to see him till he was quite near, then she
+    sheered off sharply. Joe hardly quickened his pace, but seemed to gain.
+    She set down her bucket, and turned back towards the river.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Idiot!" ejaculated the Boy; "she could have reached her own ighloo."
+    The dirty child grinned, and tore off towards the river to watch the
+    fun. Anna was hidden now by a pile of driftwood. The Boy ran down a few
+    yards to bring her within range again. For all his affectation of
+    leisureliness and her obvious fluster, no doubt about it, Joe was
+    gaining on her. She dropped her hurried walk and frankly took to her
+    heels, Joe doing the same; but as she was nearly as fleet of foot as
+    Muckluck, in spite of her fat, she still kept a lessening distance
+    between herself and her pursuer.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The ragged child had climbed upon the pile of drift-wood, and stood
+    hunched with the cold, his shoulders up to his ears, his hands
+    withdrawn in his parki sleeves, but he was grinning still. The Boy, a
+    little concerned as to possible reprisals upon so impudent a young
+    woman, had gone on and on, watching the race down to the river, and
+    even across the ice a little way. He stood still an instant staring as
+    Joe, going now as hard as he could, caught up with her at last. He took
+    hold of the daughter of the highly-respected Yagorsha, and fell to
+    shaking and cuffing her. The Boy started off full tilt to the rescue.
+    Before he could reach them Joe had thrown her down on the ice. She half
+    got up, but her enemy, advancing upon her again, dealt her a blow that
+    made her howl and sent her flat once more.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Stop that! You hear? <i>Stop</i> it!" the Boy called out.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Joe seemed not to hear. Anna had fallen face downward on the ice
+    this time, and lay there as if stunned. Her enemy caught hold of her,
+    pulled her up, and dragged her along in spite of her struggles and
+    cries.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Let her alone!" the Boy shouted. He was nearly up to them now. But
+    Joe's attention was wholly occupied in hauling Anna back to the
+    village, maltreating her at intervals by the way. Now the girl was
+    putting up one arm piteously to shield her bleeding face from his
+    fists. "Don't you hit her again, or it'll be the worse for you." But
+    again Joe's hand was lifted. The Boy plunged forward, caught the blow
+    as it descended, and flung the arm aside, wrenched the girl free, and
+    as Joe came on again, looking as if he meant business, the Boy planted
+    a sounding lick on his jaw. The Pymeut staggered, and drew off a little
+    way, looking angry enough, but, to the Boy's surprise, showing no
+    fight.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It occurred to him that the girl, her lip bleeding, her parki torn,
+    seemed more surprised than grateful; and when he said, "You come back
+    with me; he shan't touch you," she did not show the pleased alacrity
+    that you would expect. But she was no doubt still dazed. They all stood
+    looking rather sheepish, and like actors "stuck" who cannot think of
+    the next line, till Joe turned on the girl with some mumbled question.
+    She answered angrily. He made another grab at her. She screamed, and
+    got behind the Boy. Very resolutely he widened his bold buck-skin legs,
+    and dared Joe to touch the poor frightened creature cowering behind her
+    protector. Again silence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's the trouble between you two?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    They looked at each other, and then away. Joe turned unexpectedly, and
+    shambled off in the direction of the village. Not a word out of Anna as
+    she returned by the side of her protector, but every now and then she
+    looked at him sideways. The Boy felt her inexpressive gratitude, and
+    was glad his journey had been delayed, or else, poor devil&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    Joe had stopped to speak to&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who on earth's that white woman?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nicholas' sister."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not Muckluck?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's she dressed like that for?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Often like that in summer. Me, too&mdash;me got Holy Cross clo'es."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Muckluck went slowly up towards the Kachime with Joe. When the others
+    got to the water-hole, Anna turned and left the Boy without a word to
+    go and recover her pail. The Boy stood a moment, looking for some sign
+    of the Colonel, and then went along the river bank to Ol' Chief's. No,
+    the Colonel had gone back to the Kachime.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy came out again, and to his almost incredulous astonishment,
+    there was Joe dragging the unfortunate Anna towards an ighloo. As he
+    looked back, to steer straight for the entrance-hole, he caught sight
+    of the Boy, dropped his prey, and disappeared with some precipitancy
+    into the ground. When Anna had gathered herself up, the Boy was
+    standing in front of her.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You don't seem to be able to take very good care o' yourself." She
+    pushed her tousled hair out of her eyes. "I don't wonder your own
+    people give it up if you have to be rescued every half-hour. What's the
+    matter with you and Joe?" She kept looking down. "What have you done to
+    make him like this?" She looked up suddenly and laughed, and then her
+    eyes fell.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Done nothin'."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why should he want to kill you, then?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No <i>kill</i>" she said, smiling, a little rueful and embarrassed again,
+    with her eyes on the ground. Then, as the Boy still stood there
+    waiting, "Joe," she whispered, glancing over her shoulder&mdash;"Joe want me
+    be he squaw."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy fell back an astonished step.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Jee-rusalem! He's got a pretty way o' sayin' so. Why don't you tell
+    your father?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tell&mdash;father?" It seemed never to have occurred to her.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes; can't Yagorsha protect you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She looked about doubtfully and then over her shoulder.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That Joe's ighloo," she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He pictured to himself the horror that must assail her blood at the
+    sight. Yes, he was glad to have saved any woman from so dreadful a
+    fate. Did it happen often? and did nobody interfere? Muckluck was
+    coming down from the direction of the Kachime. The Boy went to meet
+    her, throwing over his shoulder, "You'd better stick to me, Anna, as
+    long as I'm here. I don't know, I'm sure, <i>what'll</i> happen to you when
+    I'm gone." Anna followed a few paces, and then sat down on the snow to
+    pull up and tie her disorganized leg-gear.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Muckluck was standing still, looking at the Boy with none of the
+    kindness a woman ought to show to one who had just befriended her sex.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did you see that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She nodded. "See that any day."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy stopped, appalled at the thought of woman in a perpetual state
+    of siege.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Brute! hound!" he flung out towards Joe's ighloo.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," says Muckluck firmly; "Joe all right."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You say that, after what's happened this morning?" Muckluck declined
+    to take the verdict back. "Did you see him strike her?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No <i>hurt</i>."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, didn't it? He threw her down, as hard as he could, on the ice."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She get up again."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He despised Muckluck in that moment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You weren't sorry to see another girl treated so?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She smiled.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What if it had been you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, he not do that to <i>me</i>."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why not? You can't tell."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, yes." She spoke with unruffled serenity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It will very likely be you the next time." The Boy took a brutal
+    pleasure in presenting the hideous probability.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," she returned unmoved. "Joe savvy I no marry Pymeut."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy stared, mystified by the lack of sequence. "Poor Anna doesn't
+    want to marry <i>that</i> Pymeut."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Muckluck nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy gave her up. Perversity was not confined to the civilized of
+    her sex. He walked on to find the Colonel. Muckluck followed, but the
+    Boy wouldn't speak to her, wouldn't look at her.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You like my Holy Cross clo'es?" she inquired. "Me&mdash;I look like your
+    kind of girls now, huh?" No answer, but she kept up with him. "See?"
+    She held up proudly a medallion, or coin of some sort, hung on a narrow
+    strip of raw-hide.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He meant not to look at it at all, and he jerked his head away after
+    the merest glance that showed him the ornament was tarnished silver, a
+    little bigger than an American dollar, and bore no device familiar to
+    his eyes. He quickened his pace, and walked on with face averted. The
+    Colonel appeared just below the Kachime.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, aren't you <i>ever</i> comin'?" he called out.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've been ready this half-hour&mdash;hangin' about waitin' for you. That
+    devil Joe," he went on, lowering his voice as he came up and speaking
+    hurriedly, "has been trying to drag Yagorsha's girl into his ighloo.
+    They've just had a fight out yonder on the ice. I got her away, but not
+    before he'd thrown her down and given her a bloody face. We ought to
+    tell old Yagorsha, hey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Muckluck chuckled. The Boy turned on her angrily, and saw her staring
+    back at Joe's ighloo. There, sauntering calmly past the abhorred trap,
+    was the story-teller's daughter. Past it? No. She actually halted and
+    busied herself with her legging thong.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That girl must be an imbecile!" Or was it the apparition of her
+    father, up at the Kachime entrance, that inspired such temerity?
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy had gone a few paces towards her, and then turned. "Yagorsha!"
+    he called up the slope. Yagorsha stood stock-still, although the Boy
+    waved unmistakable danger-signals towards Joe's ighloo. Suddenly an arm
+    flashed out of the tunnel, caught Anna by the ankle, and in a twinkling
+    she lay sprawling on her back. Two hands shot out, seized her by the
+    heels, and dragged the wretched girl into the brute's lair. It was all
+    over in a flash. A moment's paralysis of astonishment, and the
+    involuntary rush forward was arrested by Muckluck, who fastened herself
+    on to the rescuer's parki-tail and refused to be detached. "Yagorsha!"
+    shouted the Boy. But it was only the Colonel who hastened towards them
+    at the summons. The poor girl's own father stood calmly smoking, up
+    there, by the Kachime, one foot propped comfortably on the travellers'
+    loaded sled. "Yagorsha!" he shouted again, and then, with a jerk to
+    free himself from Muckluck, the Boy turned sharply towards the ighloo,
+    seeming in a bewildered way to be, himself, about to transact this
+    paternal business for the cowardly old loafer. But Muckluck clung to
+    his arm, laughing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yagorsha know. Joe give him nice mitts&mdash;sealskin&mdash;<i>new</i> mitts."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hear that, Colonel? For a pair of mitts he sells his daughter to that
+    ruffian."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Without definite plan, quite vaguely and instinctively, he shook
+    himself free from Muckluck, and rushed down to the scene of the
+    tragedy. Muffled screams and yells issued with the smoke. Muckluck
+    turned sharply to the Colonel, who was following, and said something
+    that sent him headlong after the Boy. He seized the doughty champion by
+    the feet just as he was disappearing in the tunnel, and hauled him out.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What in thunder&mdash;All right, you go first, then. <i>Quick</i>! as more
+    screams rent the still air.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't be a fool. You've been interruptin' the weddin' ceremonies."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Muckluck had caught up with them, and Yagorsha was advancing leisurely
+    across the snow.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She no want <i>you</i>," whispered Muckluck to the Boy. "She <i>like</i>
+    Joe&mdash;like him best of all." Then, as the Boy gaped incredulously: "She
+    tell me heap long time ago she want Joe."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's just part of the weddin' festivity," says the Colonel, as
+    renewed shrieks issued from under the snow. "You've been an officious
+    interferer, and I think the sooner I get you out o' Pymeut the
+    healthier it'll be for you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy was too flabbergasted to reply, but he was far from convinced.
+    The Colonel turned back to apologise to Yagorsha.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No like this in your country?" inquired Muckluck of the crestfallen
+    champion.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "N-no&mdash;not exactly."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When you like girl&mdash;what you do?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tell her so," muttered the Boy mechanically.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well&mdash;Joe been tellin' Anna&mdash;all winter."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And she hated him."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No. She like Joe&mdash;best of any."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What did she go on like that for, then?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh-h! She know Joe savvy."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy felt painfully small at his own lack of <i>savoir</i>, but no less
+    angry.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When you marry"&mdash;he turned to her incredulously&mdash;"will it be"&mdash;again
+    the shrieks&mdash;"like this?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I no marry Pymeut."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Glancing riverwards, he saw the dirty imp, who had been so wildly
+    entertained by the encounter on the ice, still huddled on his
+    drift-wood observatory, presenting as little surface to the cold as
+    possible, but grinning still with rapture at the spirited last act of
+    the winter-long drama. As the Boy, with an exclamation of "Well, I give
+    it up," walked slowly across the slope after the Colonel and Yagorsha,
+    Muckluck lingered at his side.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In your country when girl marry&mdash;she no scream?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, no; not usually, I believe."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She go quiet? Like&mdash;like she <i>want</i>&mdash;" Muckluck stood still with
+    astonishment and outraged modesty.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They agree," he answered irritably. "They don't go on like wild
+    beasts."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Muckluck pondered deeply this matter of supreme importance.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When you&mdash;get you squaw, you no <i>make</i> her come?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy shook his head, and turned away to cut short these excursions
+    into comparative ethnology.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Muckluck was athirst for the strange new knowledge.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What you do?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He declined to betray his plan of action.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When you&mdash;all same Joe? Hey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Still no answer.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When you <i>know</i>&mdash;girl like you best&mdash;you no drag her home?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No. Be quiet."
+</p>
+<p>
+    <i>"No?</i> How you marry you self, then?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The conversation would be still more embarrassing before the Colonel,
+    so he stopped, and said shortly: "In our country nobody beats a woman
+    because he likes her."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How she know, then?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They <i>agree</i>, I tell you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh&mdash;an' girl&mdash;just come&mdash;when he call? Oh-h!" She dropped her jaw, and
+    stared. "No fight a <i>little?"</i> she gasped. "No scream quite <i>small?"</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+    <i>"No</i>, I tell you." He ran on and joined the Colonel. Muckluck stood
+    several moments rooted in amazement.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Yagorsha had called the rest of the Pymeuts out, for these queer guests
+    of theirs were evidently going at last.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They all said "Goo'-bye" with great goodwill. Only Muckluck in her
+    chilly "Holy Cross clo'es" stood sorrowful and silent, swinging her
+    medal slowly back and forth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas warned them that the Pymeut air-hole was not the only one.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," Yagorsha called down the slope; "better no play tricks with
+    <i>him</i>." He nodded towards the river as the travellers looked back. "Him
+    no like. Him got heap plenty mouths&mdash;chew you up." And all Pymeut
+    chuckled, delighted at their story-teller's wit.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Suddenly Muckluck broke away from the group, and ran briskly down to
+    the river trail.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I will pray for you&mdash;hard." She caught hold of the Boy's hand, and
+    shook it warmly. "Sister Winifred says the Good Father&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Fact is, Muckluck," answered the Boy, disengaging himself with
+    embarrassment, "my pardner here can hold up that end. Don't you think
+    you'd better square Yukon Inua? Don't b'lieve he likes me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    And they left her, shivering in her "Holy Cross clo'es," staring after
+    them, and sadly swinging her medal on its walrus-string.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't mind sayin' I'm glad to leave Pymeut behind," said the
+    Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Same here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You're safe to get into a muss if you mix up with anything that has to
+    do with women. That Muckluck o' yours is a minx."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She ain't my Muckluck, and I don't believe she's a minx, not a little
+    bit."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Not wishing to be too hard on his pardner, the Colonel added:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I lay it all to the chaparejos myself." Then, observing his friend's
+    marked absence of hilarity, "You're very gay in your fine fringes."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Been a little too gay the last two or three hours."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, now, I'm glad to hear you say that. I think myself we've had
+    adventures enough right here at the start."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I b'lieve you. But there's something in that idea o' yours. Other
+    fellas have noticed the same tendency in chaparejos."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, if the worst comes to the worst," drawled the Colonel, "we'll
+    change breeches."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The suggestion roused no enthusiasm.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "B'lieve I'd have a cammin' influence. Yes, sir, I reckon I could keep
+    those fringes out o' kinks."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I think they'll go straight enough after this"; and the Boy's good
+    spirits returned before they passed the summer village.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It came on to snow again, about six o'clock, that second day out, and
+    continued steadily all the night. What did it matter? They were used to
+    snow, and they were as jolly as clams at high-tide.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel called a halt in the shelter of a frozen slough, between
+    two banks, sparsely timbered, but promising all the wood they needed,
+    old as well as new. He made his camp fire on the snow, and the Boy soon
+    had the beef-tea ready&mdash;always the first course so long as Liebig
+    lasted.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Thereafter, while the bacon was frying and the tea brewing, the Colonel
+    stuck up in the snow behind the fire some sticks on which to dry their
+    foot-gear. When he pulled off his mucklucks his stockinged feet smoked
+    in the frosty air. The hint was all that was needed, that first night
+    on the trail, for the Boy to follow suit and make the change into dry
+    things. The smoky background was presently ornamented with German
+    socks, and Arctic socks (a kind of felt slipper), and mucklucks, each
+    with a stick run through them to the toe, all neatly planted in a row,
+    like monstrous products of a snow-garden. With dry feet, burning faces
+    and chilly backs, they hugged the fire, ate supper, laughed and talked,
+    and said that life on the trail wasn't half bad. Afterwards they rolled
+    themselves in their blankets, and went to sleep on their spruce-bough
+    spring mattresses spread near the fire on the snow.
+</p>
+<p>
+    After about half an hour of oblivion the Boy started up with the drowsy
+    impression that a flying spark from the dying fire had set their stuff
+    ablaze. No. But surely the fire had been made up again&mdash;and&mdash;he rubbed
+    the sleep out of his incredulous eyes&mdash;yes, Muckluck was standing
+    there!
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What in thunder!" he began. "Wh-what is it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I can see that much. But what brings you here?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Shivering with cold, she crouched close to the fire, dressed, as he
+    could see now, in her native clothes again, and it was her parki that
+    had scorched&mdash;was scorching still.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me&mdash;I&mdash;" Smiling, she drew a stiff hand out of its mitten and held it
+    over the reviving blaze, glancing towards the Colonel. He seemed to be
+    sleeping very sound, powdered over already with soft wet snow; but she
+    whispered her next remark.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I think I come help you find that Onge Grove."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I think you'll do nothing of the kind." He also spoke with a
+    deliberate lowering of the note. His great desire not to wake the
+    Colonel gave an unintentional softness to his tone.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You think winter bad time for squaws to travel?" She shook her head,
+    and showed her beautiful teeth an instant in the faint light. Then,
+    rising, half shy, but very firm, "I no wait till summer."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He was so appalled for the moment, at the thought of having her on
+    their hands, all this way from Pymeut, on a snowy night, that words
+    failed him. As she watched him she, too, grew grave.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You say me nice girl."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When did I say that?" He clutched his head in despair.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When you first come. When Shamán make Ol' Chief all well."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't remember it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I think you misunderstood me, Muckluck."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Heh?" Her countenance fell, but more puzzled than wounded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That is&mdash;oh, yes&mdash;of course&mdash;you're a nice girl."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I think&mdash;Anna, too&mdash;you like me best." She helped out the white man's
+    bashfulness. But as her interlocutor, appalled, laid no claim to the
+    sentiment, she lifted the mittened hand to her eyes, and from under it
+    scanned the white face through the lightly falling snow. The other
+    hand, still held out to the comfort of the smoke, was trembling a
+    little, perhaps not altogether with the cold.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The Colonel'll have to take over the breeches," said the Boy, with the
+    air of one wandering in his head. Then, desperately: "What <i>am</i> I to
+    do? What am I to <i>say?</i>"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Say? You say you no like girl scream, no like her fight like Anna.
+    Heh? So, me&mdash;I come like your girls&mdash;quite, quite good.... Heh?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You don't understand, Muckluck. I&mdash;you see, I could never find that
+    Orange Grove if you came along."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well&mdash;a&mdash;no woman ever goes to help to find an Orange Grove.
+    Th-there's a law against it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Heh? Law?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Alas! she knew too little to be impressed by the Majesty invoked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You see, women, they&mdash;they come by-and-by&mdash;when the Orange Grove's
+    all&mdash;all ready for 'em. No man <i>ever</i> takes a woman on that kind of
+    hunt."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Her saddened face was very grave. The Boy took heart.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now, the Pymeuts are going in a week or two, Nicholas said, to hunt
+    caribou in the hills."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But they won't take you to hunt caribou. No; they leave you at home.
+    It's exactly the same with Orange Groves. No nice girl <i>ever</i> goes
+    hunting."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Her lip trembled.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me&mdash;I can fish."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Course you can." His spirits were reviving. "You can do
+    anything&mdash;except hunt." As she lifted her head with an air of sudden
+    protest he quashed her. "From the beginning there's been a law against
+    that. Squaws must stay at home and let the men do the huntin'."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me ... I can cook"&mdash;she was crying now&mdash;"while you hunt. Good supper
+    all ready when you come home."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He shook his head solemnly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Perhaps you don't know"&mdash;she flashed a moment's hope through her
+    tears&mdash;"me learn sew up at Holy Cross. Sew up your socks for you when
+    they open their mouths." But she could see that not even this grand new
+    accomplishment availed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Can help pull sled," she suggested, looking round a little wildly as
+    if instantly to illustrate. "Never tired," she added, sobbing, and
+    putting her hands up to her face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sh! sh! Don't wake the Colonel." He got up hastily and stood beside
+    her at the smouldering fire. He patted her on the shoulder. "Of course
+    you're a nice girl. The nicest girl in the Yukon"&mdash;he caught himself up
+    as she dropped her hands from her face&mdash;"that is, you will be, if you
+    go home quietly."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Again she hid her eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Go home? How could he send her home all that way at this time of night?
+    It was a bothering business!
+</p>
+<p>
+    Again her hands fell from the wet unhappy face. She shivered a little
+    when she met his frowning looks, and turned away. He stooped and picked
+    up her mitten. Why, you couldn't turn a dog away on a night like this&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    Plague take the Pymeuts, root and branch! She had shuffled her feet
+    into her snow-shoe straps, and moved off in the dimness. But for the
+    sound of sobbing, he could not have told just where, in the
+    softly-falling snow, Muckluck's figure was fading into the dusk. He
+    hurried after her, conscience-stricken, but most unwilling.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look here," he said, when he had caught up with her, "I'm sorry you
+    came all this way in the cold&mdash;very sorry." Her sobs burst out afresh,
+    and louder now, away from the Colonel's restraining presence. "But, see
+    here: I can't send you off like this. You might die on the trail."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, I think me die," she agreed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, don't do that. Come back, and we'll tell the Colonel you're going
+    to stay by the fire till morning, and then go home."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She walked steadily on. "No, I go now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But you can't, Muckluck. You can't find the trail."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I tell you before, I not like your girls. I can go in winter as good
+    as summer. I <i>can</i> hunt!" She turned on him fiercely. "Once I hunt a
+    owel. Ketch him, too!" She sniffed back her tears. "I can do all
+    kinds."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, you can't hunt Orange Groves," he said, with a severity that might
+    seem excessive. "But I can't let you go off in this snowstorm&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He soon stop. Goo'-bye."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Never word of sweeter import in his ears than that. But he was far from
+    satisfied with his conduct all the same. It was quite possible that the
+    Pymeuts, discovering her absence, would think he had lured her away,
+    and there might be complications. So it was with small fervour that he
+    said: "Muckluck, I wish you'd come back and wait till morning."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, I go now." She was in the act of darting forward on those
+    snow-shoes, that she used so skillfully, when some sudden thought cried
+    halt. She even stopped crying. "I no like go near blow-hole by night. I
+    keep to trail&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But how the devil do you do it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She paid no heed to the interruption, seeming busy in taking something
+    over her head from round her neck.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To-morrow," she said, lowering her tear-harshened voice, "you find
+    blow-hole. You give this to Yukon Inua&mdash;say I send it. He will not hate
+    you any more." She burst into a fresh flood of tears. In a moment the
+    dim sight of her, the faint trail of crying left in her wake, had so
+    wholly vanished that, but for the bit of string, as it seemed to be,
+    left in his half-frozen hands, he could almost have convinced himself
+    he had dreamt the unwelcome visit.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The half-shut eye of the camp fire gleamed cheerfully, as he ran back,
+    and crouched down where poor little Muckluck had knelt, so sure of a
+    welcome. Muckluck, cogitated the Boy, will believe more firmly than
+    ever that, if a man doesn't beat a girl, he doesn't mean business. What
+    was it he had wound round one hand? What was it dangling in the acrid
+    smoke? <i>That</i>, then&mdash;her trinket, the crowning ornament of her Holy
+    Cross holiday attire, that was what she was offering the old ogre of
+    the Yukon&mdash;for his unworthy sake. He stirred up the dying fire to see
+    it better. A woman's face&mdash;some Catholic saint? He held the medal lower
+    to catch the fitful blaze. "<i>D. G. Autocratrix Russorum</i>." The Great
+    Katharine! Only a little crown on her high-rolled hair, and her
+    splendid chest all uncovered to the Arctic cold.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Her Yukon subjects must have wondered that she wore no parki&mdash;this lady
+    who had claimed sole right to all the finest sables found in her new
+    American dominions. On the other side of the medal, Minerva, with a
+    Gorgon-furnished shield and a beautiful bone-tipped harpoon, as it
+    looked, with a throwing-stick and all complete. But she, too, would
+    strike the Yukon eye as lamentably chilly about the legs. How had these
+    ladies out of Russia and Olympus come to lodge in Ol' Chief's ighloo?
+    Had Glovotsky won this guerdon at Great Katharine's hands? Had he
+    brought it on that last long journey of his to Russian America, and
+    left it to his Pymeut children with his bones? Well, Yukon Inua should
+    not have it yet. The Boy thrust the medal into a pocket of his
+    chaparejos, and crawled into his snow-covered bed.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH12"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XI
+</h2>
+<center>
+    HOLY CROSS
+</center>
+<p class="ind">
+    "Raise the stone, and ye shall find me; cleave the wood, and there am
+    I."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The stars were shining frostily, in a clear sky, when the Boy crawled
+    out from under his snow-drift in the morning. He built up the fire,
+    quaking in the bitter air, and bustled the breakfast.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You seem to be in something of a hurry," said the Colonel, with a yawn
+    stifled in a shiver.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We haven't come on this trip to lie abed in the morning," his pardner
+    returned with some solemnity. "I don't care how soon I begin caperin'
+    ahead with that load again."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, it'll be warmin', anyway," returned the Colonel, "and I can't
+    say as much for your fire."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was luck that the first forty miles of the trail had already been
+    traversed by the Boy. He kept recognising this and that in the
+    landscape, with an effect of good cheer on both of them. It postponed a
+    little the realization of their daring in launching themselves upon the
+    Arctic waste, without a guide or even a map that was of the smallest
+    use.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Half an hour after setting off, they struck into the portage. Even with
+    a snow-blurred trail, the Boy's vivid remembrance of the other journey
+    gave them the sustaining sense that they were going right. The Colonel
+    was working off the surprising stiffness with which he had wakened, and
+    they were both warm now; but the Colonel's footsoreness was
+    considerable, an affliction, besides, bound to be worse before it was
+    better.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy spoke with the old-timer's superiority, of his own experience,
+    and was so puffed up, at the bare thought of having hardened his feet,
+    that he concealed without a qualm the fact of a brand-new blister on
+    his heel. A mere nothing that, not worth mentioning to anyone who
+    remembered the state he was in at the end of that awful journey of
+    penitence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was well on in the afternoon before it began to snow again, and they
+    had reached the frozen lake. The days were lengthening, and they still
+    had good light by which to find the well-beaten trail on the other
+    side.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now in a minute we'll hear the mission dogs. What did I tell you?" Out
+    of the little wood, a couple of teams were coming, at a good round
+    pace. They were pulled up at the waterhole, and the mission natives ran
+    on to meet the new arrivals. They recognised the Boy, and insisted on
+    making the Colonel, who was walking very lame, ride to the mission in
+    the strongest sled, and they took turns helping the dogs by pushing
+    from behind. The snow was falling heavily again, and one of the
+    Indians, Henry, looking up with squinted eyes, said, "There'll be
+    nothing left of that walrus-tusk."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hey?" inquired the Boy, straining at his sled-rope and bending before
+    the blast. "What's that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't you know what makes snow?" said Henry.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No. What does?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ivory whittlings. When they get to their carving up yonder then we
+    have snow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    What was happening to the Colonel?
+</p>
+<p>
+    The mere physical comfort of riding, instead of serving as packhorse,
+    great as it was, not even that could so instantly spirit away the
+    weariness, and light up the curious, solemn radiance that shone on the
+    Colonel's face. It struck the Boy that good old Kentucky would look
+    like that when he met his dearest at the Gate of Heaven&mdash;if there was
+    such a place.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel was aware of the sidelong wonder of his comrade's glance,
+    for the sleds, abreast, had come to a momentary halt. But still he
+    stared in front of him, just as a sailor in a storm dares not look away
+    from the beacon-light an instant, knowing all the waste about him
+    abounds in rocks and eddies and in death, and all the world of hope and
+    safe returning is narrowed to that little point of light.
+</p>
+<p>
+    After the moment's speculation the Boy turned his eyes to follow the
+    Colonel's gaze into space.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The Cross! the Cross!" said the man on the sled. "Don't you see it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, that? Yes."
+</p>
+<p>
+    At the Boy's tone the Colonel, for the first time, turned his eyes away
+    from the Great White Symbol.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't know what you're made of, if, seeing that... you needn't be a
+    Church member, but only a man, I should think, to&mdash;to&mdash;" He blew out
+    his breath in impotent clouds, and then went on. "We Americans think a
+    good deal o' the Stars and Stripes, but that up yonder&mdash;that's the
+    mightier symbol."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Huh!" says the Boy. "Stars and Stripes tell of an ideal of united
+    states. That up there tells of an ideal of United Mankind. It's the
+    great Brotherhood Mark. There isn't any other standard that men would
+    follow just to build a hospice in a place like this."
+</p>
+<p>
+    At an upper window, in a building on the far side of the white symbol,
+    the travellers caught a glimpse, through the slanting snow, of one of
+    the Sisters of St. Ann shutting in the bright light with thick
+    curtains.
+</p>
+<p>
+    <i>"Glass!"</i> ejaculated the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    One of the Indians had run on to announce them, and as they drew up at
+    the door&mdash;that the Boy remembered as a frame for Brother Paul, with his
+    lamp, to search out iniquity, and his face of denunciation&mdash;out came
+    Father Brachet, brisk, almost running, his two hands outstretched, his
+    face a network of welcoming wrinkles. No long waiting, this time, in
+    the reception-room. Straight upstairs to hot baths and mild, reviving
+    drinks, and then, refreshed and already rested, down to supper.
+</p>
+<p>
+    With a shade of anxiety the Boy looked about for Brother Paul. But
+    Father Wills was here anyhow, and the Boy greeted him, joyfully, as a
+    tried friend and a man to be depended on. There was Brother Etienne,
+    and there were two strange faces.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Father Brachet put the Colonel on his right and the Boy on his left,
+    introducing: "Fazzer Richmond, my predecessor as ze head of all ze
+    Alaskan missions," calmly eliminating Greek, Episcopalian, and other
+    heretic establishments. "Fazzer Richmond you must have heard much of.
+    He is ze great ausority up here. He is now ze Travelling Priest. You
+    can ask him all. He knows everysing."
+</p>
+<p>
+    In no wise abashed by this flourish, Father Richmond shook hands with
+    the Big Chimney men, smiling, and with a pleasant ease that
+    communicated itself to the entire company.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was instantly manifest that the scene of this Jesuit's labours had
+    not been chiefly, or long, beyond the borders of civilization. In the
+    plain bare room where, for all its hospitality and good cheer, reigned
+    an air of rude simplicity and austerity of life&mdash;into this somewhat
+    rarefied atmosphere Father Richmond brought a whiff from another world.
+    As he greeted the two strangers, and said simply that he had just
+    arrived, himself, by way of the Anvik portage, the Colonel felt that he
+    must have meant from New York or from Paris instead of the words he
+    added, "from St. Michael's."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He claimed instant kinship with the Colonel on the strength of their
+    both being Southerners.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm a Baltimore man," he said, with an accent no Marylander can purge
+    of pride.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How long since you've been home?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I go back every year."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He goes all over ze world, to tell ze people&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "&mdash;something of the work being done here by Father Brachet&mdash;and all of
+    them." He included the other priests and lay-brothers in a slight
+    circular movement of the grizzled head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And to collect funds! the Colonel rightly divined, little guessing how
+    triumphantly he achieved that end.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Alaska is so remote," said the Travelling Priest, as if in apology for
+    popular ignorance, "and people think of it so... inadequately, shall we
+    say? In trying to explain the conditions up here, I have my chief
+    difficulty in making them realise the great distances we have to cover.
+    You tell them that in the Indian tongue Alaska means "the great
+    country," they smile, and think condescendingly of savage imagery. It
+    is vain to say we have an area of six hundred thousand square miles. We
+    talk much in these days of education; but few men and no women can
+    count! Our Eastern friends get some idea of what we mean, when we tell
+    them Alaska is bigger than all the Atlantic States from Maine to
+    Louisiana with half of great Texas thrown in. With a coast-line of
+    twenty six thousand miles, this Alaska of ours turns to the sea a
+    greater frontage than all the shores of all the United States combined.
+    It extends so far out towards Asia that it carries the dominions of the
+    Great Republic as far west of San Francisco as New York is east of it,
+    making California a central state. I try to give Europeans some idea of
+    it by saying that if you add England, Ireland, and Scotland together,
+    and to that add France, and to that add Italy, you still lack enough to
+    make a country the size of Alaska. I do not speak of our mountains,
+    seventeen, eighteen, nineteen thousand feet high, and our Yukon,
+    flowing for more than two thousand miles through a country almost
+    virgin still."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You travel about up here a good deal?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He travels <i>all</i> ze time. He will not rest," said Father Brachet as
+    one airing an ancient grievance.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, I will rest now&mdash;a little. I have been eight hundred miles over
+    the ice, with dogs, since January 1."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy looked at him with something very like reverence. Here was a
+    man who could give you tips!
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You have travelled abroad, too," the Colonel rather stated than asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I spent a good deal of my youth in France and Germany."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Educated over there?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I am a Johns Hopkins man, but I may say I found my education in
+    Rome. Speaking of education"&mdash;he turned to the other priests&mdash;"I have
+    greatly advanced my grammar since we parted." Father Brachet answered
+    with animation in French, and the conversation went forward for some
+    minutes in that tongue. The discussion was interrupted to introduce the
+    other new face, at the bottom of the table, to the Big Chimney men:
+    "Resident Fazzer Roget of ze Kuskoquim mission."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That is the best man on snow-shoes in Central Alaska," said Father
+    Richmond low to the Colonel, nodding at the Kuskoquim priest.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And he knows more of two of ze native dialects here zan anyone else,"
+    added the Father Superior.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You must forgive our speaking much of the Indian tongues," said Father
+    Richmond. "We are all making dictionaries and grammars; we have still
+    to translate much of our religious instruction, and the great variety
+    in dialect of the scattered tribes keeps us busy with linguistic
+    studies."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tomorrow you must see our schools," said Father Brachet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the Boy answered quickly that they could not afford the time. He
+    was surprised at the Colonel's silence; but the Boy didn't know what
+    the Colonel's feet felt like.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kentucky ain't sorry, he said to himself, to have a back to his chair,
+    and to eat off china again. Kentucky's a voluptuary! I'll have to drag
+    him away by main force; and the Boy allowed Father Richmond to help him
+    yet more abundantly to the potatoes and cabbage grown last summer in
+    the mission garden!
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was especially the vegetables that lent an element of luxury to the
+    simple meal. The warm room, the excellent food, better cooked than any
+    they had had for seven months, produced a gentle somnolence. The
+    thought of the inviting look of the white-covered bed upstairs lay like
+    a balm on the spirits of men not born to roughing it. As the travellers
+    said an early and grateful good-night, the Boy added sleepily something
+    about the start at dawn.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Father Brachet answered, "Morning will bring counsel, my son. I sink ze
+    bleezzar-r will not let us lose you so soon."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They overslept themselves, and they knew it, in that way the would-be
+    early riser does, before ever he looks into the accusing face of his
+    watch. The Boy leapt out of bed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hear that?" The wind was booming among the settlement buildings.
+    "Sounds as if there was weather outside." A glance between the curtains
+    showed the great gale at its height. The snow blew level in sheets and
+    darkened the air.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well," said the Colonel, splashing mightily in the ice-cold water, "I
+    don't know as I mind giving my feet twenty-four hours' time to come to
+    their senses."
+</p>
+<p>
+    A hurried toilet and they went downstairs, sharp-set for breakfast
+    after the long, refreshing sleep.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Father Richmond was writing on his knee by the stove in the
+    reception-room.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good-morning&mdash;good-morning." He rang the bell.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, what did we tell you? I don't think you'll get far today. Let
+    these gentlemen know when breakfast is ready," he said, as Christopher
+    put his head in. He looked at his watch. "I hope you will find
+    everything you need," he said; and, continuing to talk about the gale
+    and some damage it had done to one of the outbuildings, he went into
+    the entry, just beyond the reception-room door, and began to put on his
+    furs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>You are</i> not going out in such weather!" the Colonel called after him
+    incredulously.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Only as far as the church."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, is there church today?" inquired the Boy more cheerfully than one
+    might expect.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel started and made a signal for discretion.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Blest if it isn't Sunday!" he said under his breath.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He doesn't seem dead-set on our observing it," whispered the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel warmed himself luxuriously at the stove, and seemed to
+    listen for that summons from the entry that never came. Was Father
+    Richmond out there still, or had he gone?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do they think we are heathens because we are not Jesuits?" he said
+    under his breath, suddenly throwing out his great chest.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Perhaps we ought to... Hey? They've been awfully considerate of
+    <i>us&mdash;</i>"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel went to the door. Father Richmond was struggling with his
+    snow-boots.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "With your permission, sir," says the Colonel in his most magnificent
+    manner, "we will accompany you, or follow if you are in haste."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "With all my heart. Come," said the priest, "if you will wait and
+    breakfast with us after Mass."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was agreed, and the immediate order was countermanded. The sound of
+    a bell came, muffled, through the storm.
+</p>
+<p>
+    With thoughts turning reluctantly from breakfast, "What's that?" asked
+    the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That is our church bell." The Father had helped the Colonel to find
+    his parki.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh&mdash;a&mdash;of course&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A fine tone, don't you think? But you can't tell so well in this
+    storm. We are fond of our bell. It is the first that ever rang out in
+    the Yukon valley. Listen!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    They stood still a moment before opening the front door. The Boy,
+    seeing the very look of a certain high-shouldered gray stone "St.
+    Andrew's" far away, and himself trotting along beside that figure,
+    inseparable from first memories, was dimly aware again, as he stood at
+    the Jesuit's door, in these different days, of the old Sunday feeling
+    invading, permeating his consciousness, half reluctant, half amused.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel sat in a rural church and looked at the averted face of a
+    woman.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Only to the priest was the sound all music.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That language," he said, "speaks to men whatever tongue they call
+    their own. The natives hear it for miles up the river, and down the
+    river, and over the white hills, and far across the tundra. They come
+    many miles to Mass&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He opened the door, and the gale rushed in.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I do not mean on days like this," he wound up, smiling, and out they
+    went into the whirling snow.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The church was a building of logs like the others, except that it was
+    of one story. Father Brachet was already there, with Father Wills and
+    Brother Etienne; and, after a moment, in came Brother Paul, looking
+    more waxen and aloof than ever, at the head of the school, the rear
+    brought up by Brother Vincent and Henry.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In a moment the little Mother Superior appeared, followed by two nuns,
+    heading a procession of native women and girls. They took their places
+    on the other side of the church and bowed their heads.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Beautiful creature!" ejaculated the Colonel under his breath, glancing
+    back.
+</p>
+<p>
+    His companion turned his head sharply just in time to see Sister
+    Winifred come last into the church, holding by either hand a little
+    child. Both men watched her as she knelt down. Between the children's
+    sallow, screwed-up, squinting little visages the calm, unconscious face
+    of the nun shone white like a flower.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The strangers glanced discreetly about the rude little church, with its
+    pictures and its modest attempt at stained glass.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No wonder all this impresses the ignorant native," whispered the
+    Colonel, catching himself up suddenly from sharing in that weakness.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Without, the wild March storm swept the white world; within another
+    climate reigned&mdash;something of summer and the far-off South, of Italy
+    herself, transplanted to this little island of civilisation anchored in
+    the Northern waste.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "S'pose you've seen all the big cathedrals, eh?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good many."
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was still a subdued rustling in the church, and outside, still
+    the clanging bell contended with the storm.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And this&mdash;makes you smile?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "N&mdash;no," returned the older man with a kind of reluctance. "I've seen
+    many a worse church; America's full of 'em."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So far as&mdash;dignity goes&mdash;" The Colonel was wrestling with some vague
+    impression difficult for him to formulate. "You see, you can't build
+    anything with wood that's better than a log-cabin. For looks&mdash;just
+    <i>looks</i>&mdash;it beats all your fancy gimcracks, even brick; beats
+    everything else hollow, except stone. Then they've got candles. We went
+    on last night about the luxury of oil-lamps. They don't bring 'em in
+    here!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>We</i> do in our prairie and Southern country churches."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I know. But look at those altar lights." The Boy was too busy looking
+    at Sister Winifred. "I tell you, sir, a man never made a finer thing
+    than a tall wax candle."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sh! Mustn't talk in church."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel stared a moment at the Boy's presumption, drew himself up a
+    little pompously, and crossed his arms over his huge chest.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, they've got an organ!" The Boy forgot his strict views on church
+    etiquette as the sudden sweetness swelled in the air. Brother Paul,
+    with head thrown back and white face lifted, was playing, slowly,
+    absently, like one who listens to some great choir invisible, and keeps
+    their time with a few obedient but unnecessary chords. And yet&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The fella can play," the Colonel admitted.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The native choir, composed entirely of little dark-faced boys, sang
+    their way truly through the service, Father Brachet celebrating Mass.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Brother Paul's ill, isn't he? Look!" The lay-brother had swayed, and
+    drooped forward over the keyboard, but his choir sang steadily on. He
+    recovered himself, and beckoned one of the boys to his side. When he
+    rose, the child nodded and took the organist's place, playing quite
+    creditably to the end. Brother Paul sat in the corner with bowed head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Coming out, they were in time to confront Sister Winifred, holding back
+    the youngest children, eager to anticipate their proper places in the
+    procession.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy looked fixedly at her, wondering. Suddenly meeting The clear
+    eyes, he smiled, and then shrank inwardly at his forwardness. He could
+    not tell if she remembered him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel, finding himself next her at the door, bowed, and stood
+    back for her to pass.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," she said gently; "my little children must wait for the older
+    ones."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You have them under good discipline, madam." He laid his hand on the
+    furry shoulder of the smallest.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy stood behind the Colonel, unaccountably shy in the presence of
+    the only white woman he had seen in nearly seven months. She couldn't
+    be any older than he, and yet she was a nun. What a gulf opened at the
+    word! Sister Winifred and her charges fell into rank at the tail of the
+    little procession, and vanished in the falling snow. At breakfast the
+    Colonel would not sit down till he was presented to Brother Paul.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sir," he said in his florid but entirely sincere fashion, "I should
+    like to thank you for the pleasure of hearing that music to-day. We
+    were much impressed, sir, by the singing. How old is the boy who played
+    the organ?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ten," said Brother Paul, and for the first time the Boy saw him smile.
+    "Yes, I think he has music in him, our little Jerome."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And how well <i>all</i> your choir has the service by heart! Their unison
+    is perfect."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes," said Father Brachet from the head of the table, "our music has
+    never been so good as since Paul came among us." He lifted his hand,
+    and every one bowed his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    After grace Father Richmond took the floor, conversationally, as seemed
+    to be his wont, and breakfast went on, as supper had the night before,
+    to the accompaniment of his shrewd observations and lively anecdotes.
+    In the midst of all the laughter and good cheer Brother Paul sat at the
+    end of the board, eating absently, saying nothing, and no one speaking
+    to him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Father Richmond especially, but, indeed, all of them, seemed arrant
+    worldlings beside the youngest of the lay-brethren. The Colonel could
+    more easily imagine Father Richmond walking the streets of Paris or of
+    Rome, than "hitting the Yukon trail." He marvelled afresh at the
+    devotion that brought such a man to wear out his fine attainments, his
+    scholarship, his energy, his wide and Catholic knowledge, in travelling
+    winter after winter, hundreds of miles over the ice from one Indian
+    village to another. You could not divorce Father Richmond in your mind
+    from the larger world outside; he spoke with its accent, he looked with
+    his humourous, experienced eyes. You found it natural to think of him
+    in very human relations. You wondered about his people, and what
+    brought him to this.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Not so with Brother Paul. He was one of those who suggest no country
+    upon any printed map. You have to be reminded that you do not know his
+    birthplace or his history. It was this same Brother Paul who, after
+    breakfast and despite the Pymeut incident, offered to show the
+    gold-seekers over the school. The big recitation-room was full of
+    natives and decidedly stuffy. They did not stay long. Upstairs, "I
+    sleep here in the dormitory," said the Brother, "and I live with the
+    pupils&mdash;as much as I can. I often eat with them," he added as one who
+    mounts a climax. "They have to be taught <i>everything</i>, and they have to
+    be taught it over again every day."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Except music, apparently."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Except music&mdash;and games. Brother Vincent teaches them football and
+    baseball, and plays with them and works with them. Part of each day is
+    devoted to manual training and to sport."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He led the way to the workshop.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "One of our brothers is a carpenter and master mechanic."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He called to a pupil passing the door, and told him the strangers would
+    like to inspect the school work. Very proudly the lad obeyed. He
+    himself was a carpenter, and showed his half-finished table. The Boy's
+    eye fell on a sled.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes," said the lad, "that kind better. Your kind no good." He had
+    evidently made intimate acquaintance with the Boy's masterpiece.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yours is splendid," admitted the unskilled workman.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Will you sell it?" the Colonel asked Brother Paul.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They make them to sell," was the answer, and the transaction was soon
+    effected.
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    "It has stopped snowing and ze wind is fallen," said Father Brachet,
+    going to the reception-room window an hour or so after they had come in
+    from dinner.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel exchanged looks with the Boy, and drew out his watch.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Later than I thought."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Much," the Colonel agreed, and sat considering, watch in hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I sink our friends must see now ze girls' school, and ze laundry,
+    hein?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To be sure," agreed Father Richmond. "I will take you over and give
+    you into the hands of our Mother Superior."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, it's much warmer," said the Boy as they went by the cross; and
+    Father Richmond greeted the half-dozen native boys, who were packing
+    down the fresh snow under their broad shoes, laughing and shouting to
+    one another as they made anew the familiar mission trails.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The door of the two-story house, on the opposite side of the
+    settlement, was opened by Sister Winifred.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Friends of ours from the White Camp below."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She acknowledged the nameless introduction, smiling; but at the request
+    that followed, "Ah, it is too bad that just to-day&mdash;the Mother
+    Superior&mdash;she is too faint and weak to go about. Will you see her,
+    Father?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, if you will show these strangers the school and laundry and&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, yes, I will show them."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She led the way into the cheerful schoolroom, where big girls and
+    little girls were sitting about, amusing themselves in the quiet of a
+    long Sunday afternoon. Several of the younger children ran to her as
+    she came in, and stood holding fast to the folds of her black habit,
+    staring up at the strangers, while she explained the kind of
+    instruction given, the system, and the order reigning in each
+    department. Finally, she persuaded a little girl, only six years old,
+    to take her dusky face out of the long flowing veil of the nun, and
+    show how quickly she could read a sentence that Sister Winifred wrote
+    on the blackboard. Then others were called on, and gave examples of
+    their accomplishments in easy arithmetic and spelling. The children
+    must have been very much bored with themselves that stormy Sunday, for
+    they entered into the examination with a quite unnatural zest.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Two of the elder girls recited, and some specimens of penmanship and
+    composition were shown. The delicate complexion of the little nun
+    flushed to a pretty wild-rose pink as these pupils of hers won the
+    Colonel's old fashioned compliments.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And they are taught most particularly of all," she hastened to say,
+    "cooking, housekeeping, and sewing."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Whereupon specimens of needlework were brought out and cast like pearls
+    before the swine's eyes of the ignorant men. But they were impressed in
+    their benighted way, and said so.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And we teach them laundry-work." She led the way, with the children
+    trooping after, to the washhouse. "No, run back. You'll take cold. Run
+    back, and you shall sing for the strangers before they go."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She smiled them away&mdash;a happy-faced, clean little throng, striking
+    contrast to the neglected, filthy children seen in the native villages.
+    As they were going into the laundry, Father Richmond came out of the
+    house, and stopped to point out to the Colonel a snow-covered
+    enclosure&mdash;"the Sisters' garden"&mdash;and he told how marvellously, in the
+    brief summer, some of the hardier vegetables flourished there.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They spring up like magic at the edge of the snow-drifts, and they do
+    not rest from their growing all night. If the time is short, they have
+    twice as much sunlight as with you. They drink it in the whole summer
+    night as well as all the day. And over here is the Fathers' garden."
+    Talking still, he led the way towards a larger enclosure on the other
+    side of the Cross.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Sister Winifred paused a moment, and then, as they did not turn back,
+    and the Boy stood waiting, she took him into the drying-room and into
+    the ironing-room, and then returned to the betubbed apartment first
+    invaded. There was only one blot on the fairness of that model
+    laundry&mdash;a heap of torn and dirty canvas in the middle of the floor.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy vaguely thought it looked familiar, before the Sister, blushing
+    faintly, said: "We hope you won't go before we have time to repair it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, it's our old sled-cover!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes; it is very much cut and torn. But you do not go at once?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, to-morrow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh! Father Brachet thought you would stay for a few days, at least."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We have no time."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You go, like the rest, for gold?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Like the rest."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But you came before to help poor Nicholas out of his trouble."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He was quite able to help himself, as it turned out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why will you go so far, and at such risk?" she said, with a suddenness
+    that startled them both.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I&mdash;I&mdash;well, I think I go chiefly because I want to get my home back. I
+    lost my home when I was a little chap. Where is your home?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How long have you been here?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nearly two years."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then how can you call it home?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I do that only that I may&mdash;speak your language. Of course, it is not
+    my real home."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where is the real home?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I hope it is in heaven," she said, with a simplicity that took away
+    all taint of cant or mere phrase-making.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But where do you come from?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I come from Montreal."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh! and don't you ever go back to visit your people?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, I never go back."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But you will some time?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No; I shall never go back."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't you <i>want</i> to?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She dropped her eyes, but very steadfastly she said:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My work is here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But you are young, and you may live a great, great many years."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She nodded, and looked out of the open door. The Colonel and the
+    Travelling Priest were walking in Indian file the new-made, hard-packed
+    path.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes," she said in a level voice, "I shall grow old here, and here I
+    shall be buried."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I shall never understand it. I have such a longing for my home. I came
+    here ready to bear anything that I might be able to get it back."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She looked at him steadily and gravely.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I may be wrong, but I doubt if you would be satisfied even if you got
+    it back&mdash;now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What makes you think that?" he said sharply.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Because"&mdash;and she checked herself as if on the verge of something too
+    personal&mdash;"you can never get back a thing you've lost. When the old
+    thing is there again, you are not as you were when you lost it, and the
+    change in you makes the old thing new&mdash;and strange."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, it's plain I am very different from you," but he said it with a
+    kind of uneasy defiance. "Besides, in any case, I shall do it for my
+    sister's sake."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, you have a sister?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How long since you left her?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's a good while now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Perhaps your sister won't want that particular home any more than you
+    when you two meet again." Then, seeming not to notice the shade on her
+    companion's face: "I promised my children they should sing for you. Do
+    you mind? Will your friend come in, too?" And, looking from the door
+    after the Colonel and the Father as they turned to rejoin them: "He is
+    odd, that big friend of yours," she said&mdash;quite like a human being, as
+    the Boy thought instantly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He's not odd, I assure you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He called me 'madam.'" She spoke with a charming piqued childishness.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You see, he didn't know your name. What is your name?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sister Winifred."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But your real name?" he said, with the American's insistence on his
+    own point of view.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That is my only name," she answered with dignity, and led the way back
+    into the schoolroom. Another, older, nun was there, and when the others
+    rejoined them they made the girls sing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now we have shown you enough," said Father Richmond, rising; "boasted
+    to you enough of the very little we are able to accomplish here. We
+    must save something for to-morrow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, to-morrow we take to the trail again," said the Colonel, and added
+    his "Good-bye, madam."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Sister Winifred, seeing he expected it, gave him her hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good-bye, and thank you for coming."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "For your poor," he said shyly, as he turned away and left a gift in
+    her palm.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Thank you for showing us all this," the Boy said, lingering, but not
+    daring to shake hands. "It&mdash;it seems very wonderful. I had no idea a
+    mission meant all this."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, it means more&mdash;more than anything you can <i>see</i>."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good-bye."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good-bye."
+</p>
+<p>
+    In the early evening the reception-room was invaded by the lads' school
+    for their usual Sunday night entertainment. Very proudly these boys and
+    young men sang their glees and choruses, played the fiddle, recited,
+    even danced.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pity Mac isn't here!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Awful pity. Sunday, too."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Brother Etienne sang some French military songs, and it came out that
+    he had served in the French army. Father Roget sang, also in French,
+    explaining himself with a humourous skill in pantomime that set the
+    room in a roar.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well," said the Colonel when he stood up to say good-night, "I haven't
+    enjoyed an evening so much for years."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is very early still," said Father Brachet, wrinkling up his face in
+    a smile.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, but we have to make such an early start."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel went up to bed, leaving the Boy to go to Father Richmond's
+    room to look at his Grammar of the Indian language.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The instant the door was shut, the priest set down the lamp, and laid
+    his hands on the young man's shoulders.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My son, you must not go on this mad journey."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I must, you know."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You must <i>not</i>. Sit there." He pushed him into a chair. "Let me tell
+    you. I do not speak as the ignorant. I have in my day travelled many
+    hundreds of miles on the ice; but I've done it in the season when the
+    trail's at its best, with dogs, my son, and with tried native
+    servants."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I know it is pleasanter that way, but&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pleasanter? It is the way to keep alive."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But the Indians travel with hand-sleds."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "For short distances, yes, and they are inured to the climate. You? You
+    know nothing of what lies before you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But we'll find out as other people have." The Boy smiled confidently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I assure you, my son, it is madness, this thing you are trying to do.
+    The chances of either of you coming out alive, are one in fifty. In
+    fifty, did I say? In five hundred."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't think so, Father. We don't mean to travel when&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But you'll have to travel. To stay in such places as you'll find
+    yourself in will be to starve. Or if by any miracle you escape the
+    worst effects of cold and hunger, you'll get caught in the ice in the
+    spring break-up, and go down to destruction on a floe. You've no
+    conception what it's like. If you were six weeks earlier, or six weeks
+    later, I would hold my peace."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy looked at the priest and then away. <i>Was</i> it going to be so
+    bad? Would they leave their bones on the ice? Would they go washing by
+    the mission in the great spring flood, that all men spoke of with the
+    same grave look? He had a sudden vision of the torrent as it would be
+    in June. Among the whirling ice-masses that swept by&mdash;two bodies,
+    swollen, unrecognisable. One gigantic, one dressed gaily in chaparejos.
+    And neither would lift his head, but, like men bent grimly upon some
+    great errand, they would hurry on, past the tall white cross with never
+    a sign&mdash;on, on to the sea.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Be persuaded, my son."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Dimly the Boy knew he was even now borne along upon a current equally
+    irresistible, this one setting northward, as that other back to the
+    south. He found himself shaking his head under the Jesuit's remonstrant
+    eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We've lost so much time already. We couldn't possibly turn back&mdash;now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then here's my Grammar." With an almost comic change of tone and
+    manner the priest turned to the table where the lamp stood, among piles
+    of neatly tied-up and docketed papers.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He undid one of the packets, with an ear on the sudden sounds outside
+    in the passage.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Brother Paul's got it in the schoolhouse."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Brother Paul! He hadn't been at the entertainment, and no one seemed to
+    have missed him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How did Sister Winifred know?" asked another voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Old Maria told her."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Father Richmond got up and opened the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What is it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's a new-born Indian baby." The Father looked down as if it might be
+    on the threshold. "Brother Paul found it below at the village all done
+    up ready to be abandoned."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tell Sister Winifred I'll see about it in the morning."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She says&mdash;pardon me, Father&mdash;she says that is like a man. If I do not
+    bring the little Indian in twenty minutes she will come herself and get
+    it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Father Richmond laughed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good-night, my son"; and he went downstairs with the others.
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    "Colonel, you asleep?" the Boy asked softly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He struggled in silence with his mucklucks. Presently, "Isn't it
+    frightfully strange," he mused aloud. "Doesn't it pull a fella up by
+    the roots, somehow, to see Americans on this old track?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel had the bedclothes drawn up to his eyes. Under the white
+    quilt he made some undistinguishable sound, but he kept his eyes
+    fastened on his pardner.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Everything that we Americans have done, everything that we are, is
+    achieved by the grace of goin' bang the other way." The Boy pulled off
+    a muckluck and threw it half across the room. "And yet, and yet&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He sat with one stocking-foot in his hand and stared at the candle.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I wonder, Colonel, if it <i>satisfies</i> anybody to be a hustler and a
+    millionaire."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Satisfies?" echoed the Colonel, pushing his chin over the bed-clothes.
+    "Who expects to be satisfied?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, every man, woman and child on the top o' the earth; and it just
+    strikes me I've never, personally, known anybody get there but these
+    fellas at Holy Cross."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel pushed back the bedclothes a little farther with his chin.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Haven't you got the gumption to see why it is this place and these men
+    take such a hold on you? It's because you've eaten, slept, and lived
+    for half a year in a space the size of this bedroom. We've got so used
+    to narrowing life down, that the first result of a little larger
+    outlook is to make us dizzy. Now, you hurry up and get to bed. You'll
+    sleep it off."
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    The Boy woke at four o'clock, and after the match-light, by which he
+    consulted his watch, had flickered out, he lay a long time staring at
+    the dark.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Silence still reigned supreme, when at last he got up, washed and
+    dressed, and went downstairs. An irresistible restlessness had seized
+    hold of him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He pulled on his furs, cautiously opened the door, and went out&mdash;down,
+    over the crisp new crust, to the river and back in the dimness, past
+    the Fathers' House to the settlement behind, then to the right towards
+    the hillside. As he stumbled up the slope he came to a little
+    burial-ground. Half hidden in the snow, white wooden crosses marked the
+    graves. "And here I shall be buried," she had said&mdash;"here." He came
+    down the hill and round by the Sisters' House.
+</p>
+<p>
+    That window! That was where a light had shone the evening they arrived,
+    and a nun&mdash;Sister Winifred&mdash;had stood drawing the thick curtains,
+    shutting out the world.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He thought, in the intense stillness, that he heard sounds from that
+    upper room. Yes, surely an infant's cry.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A curious, heavy-hearted feeling came upon him, as he turned away, and
+    went slowly back towards the other house.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He halted a moment under the Cross, and stared up at it. The door of
+    the Fathers' House opened, and the Travelling Priest stood on the
+    threshold. The Boy went over to him, nodding good-morning.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So you are all ready&mdash;eager to go from us?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No; but, you see&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I see."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He held the door open, and the Boy went in.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't believe the Colonel's awake yet," he said, as he took off his
+    furs. "I'll just run up and rouse him."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is very early"&mdash;the priest laid his hand on the young man's
+    arm&mdash;"and he will not sleep so well for many a night to come. It is an
+    hour till breakfast."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Henry had lit the fire, and now left it roaring. The priest took a
+    chair, and pushed one forward for his guest.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy sat down, stretched his legs out straight towards the fire, and
+    lifting his hands, clasped them behind his head. The priest read the
+    homesick face like a book.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why are you up here?" Before there was time for reply he added:
+    "Surely a young man like you could find, nearer home, many a gate ajar.
+    And you must have had glimpses through of&mdash;things many and fair."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, yes, I've had glimpses of those things."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What I wanted most I never saw."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You wanted&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To be&mdash;<i>sure</i>."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah! it is one of the results of agnosticism."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy never saw the smile.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've said&mdash;and I was not lying&mdash;that I came away to shorten the
+    business of fortune-making&mdash;to buy back an old place we love, my sister
+    and I; but&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Which does she love best, the old place or the young brother?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, she cares about me&mdash;no doubt o' that." He smiled the smile of
+    faith.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Has she ... an understanding heart?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The most I know."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then she would be glad to know you had found a home for the spirit. A
+    home for the body, what does it matter?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    In the pause, Father Brachet opened the door, but seemed suddenly to
+    remember some imperative call elsewhere. The Boy jumped up, but the
+    Superior had vanished without even "Good-morning." The Boy sat down
+    again.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Of course," he went on, with that touch of pedantry so common in
+    American youth, "the difficulty in my case is an intellectual one. I
+    think I appreciate the splendid work you do, and I see as I never saw
+    before&mdash;&mdash;" He stopped.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You strike your foot against the same stone of stumbling over which
+    the Pharisees fell, when the man whom Jesus healed by the way replied
+    to their questioning: 'Whether He be a sinner or no, I know not. One
+    thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't deny that the life here has been a revelation to me. I'm not
+    talkin' about creeds (for I don't know much about them, and I don't
+    think it's in me to care much); but so far as the work here is
+    concerned&mdash;" He paused.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We can take little credit for that; it is the outcome of our Order."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy failed to catch the effect of the capital letter.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, it's just that&mdash;the order, the good government! A fella would be
+    a bigot if he couldn't see that the system is as nearly perfect as a
+    human institution can be."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That has been said before of the Society of Jesus." But he spoke with
+    the wise man's tolerance for the discoveries of the young. Still, it
+    was not to discuss the merits of his Order that he had got up an hour
+    before his time. "I understand, maybe better than yourself, something
+    of the restlessness that drove you here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You understand?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The priest nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You had the excuse of the old plantation and the sister&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy sat up suddenly, a little annoyed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The priest kept on: "But you felt a great longing to make a breach in
+    the high walls that shut you in. You wanted to fare away on some voyage
+    of discovery. Wasn't that it?". He paused now in his turn, but the Boy
+    looked straight before him, saying nothing. The priest leaned forward
+    with a deeper gravity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It will be a fortunate expedition, this, my son, <i>if thou discover
+    thyself</i>&mdash;and in time!" Still the Boy said nothing. The other resumed
+    more lightly: "In America we combine our travels with business. But it
+    is no new idea in the world that a young man should have his Wanderjahr
+    before he finds what he wants, or even finds acquiescence. It did not
+    need Wilhelm Meister to set the feet of youth on that trail; it did not
+    need the Crusades. It's as old as the idea of a Golden Fleece or a
+    Promised Land. It was the first man's first inkling of heaven."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy pricked his ears. Wasn't this heresy?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The old idea of the strenuous, to leave home and comfort and security,
+    and go out to search for wisdom, or holiness, or happiness&mdash;whether it
+    is gold or the San Grael, the instinct of Search is deep planted in the
+    race. It is this that the handful of men who live in what they call
+    'the world'&mdash;it is this they forget. Every hour in the greater world
+    outside, someone, somewhere, is starting out upon this journey. He may
+    go only as far as Germany to study philosophy, or to the nearest
+    mountain-top, and find there the thing he seeks; or he may go to the
+    ends of the earth, and still not find it. He may travel in a Hindu gown
+    or a Mongolian tunic, or he comes, like Father Brachet, out of his
+    vineyards in 'the pleasant land of France,' or, like you, out of a
+    country where all problems are to be solved by machinery. But my point
+    is, <i>they come</i>! When all the other armies of the world are disbanded,
+    that army, my son, will be still upon the march."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They were silent awhile, and still the young face gave no sign.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To many," the Travelling Priest went on, "the impulse is a blind one
+    or a shy one, shrinking from calling itself by the old names. But none
+    the less this instinct for the Quest is still the gallant way of youth,
+    confronted by a sense of the homelessness they cannot think will last."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's it, Father! That's it!" the Boy burst out. "Homelessness! To
+    feel that is to feel something urging you&mdash;&mdash;" He stopped, frowning.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "&mdash;&mdash;urging you to take up your staff," said the priest.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They were silent a moment, and then the same musical voice tolled out
+    the words like a low bell: "But with all your journeying, my son, you
+    will come to no Continuing City."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's no use to say this to me. You see, I am&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll tell you why I say it." The priest laid a hand on his arm. "I see
+    men going up and down all their lives upon this Quest. Once in a great
+    while I see one for whom I think the journey may be shortened."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How shortened?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    A heavy step on the stair, and the Boy seemed to wake from a dream.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good-morning," said the Colonel, coming in cheerily, rubbing his
+    hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I am very jealous!" He glanced at the Boy's furs on the floor. "You
+    have been out, seeing the rest of the mission without me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No&mdash;no, we will show you the rest&mdash;as much as you care for, after
+    breakfast."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm afraid we oughtn't to delay&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    But they did&mdash;"for a few minutes while zey are putting a little fresh
+    meat on your sled," as Father Brachet said. They went first to see the
+    dogs fed. For they got breakfast when they were at home, those pampered
+    mission dogs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And now we will show you our store-house, our caches&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    While Father Brachet looked in the bunch for the key he wanted, a
+    native came by with a pail. He entered the low building on the left,
+    leaving wide the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What? No! Is it really? No, not <i>really!</i>" The Colonel was more
+    excited than the Boy had ever seen him. Without the smallest ceremony
+    he left the side of his obliging host, strode to the open door, and
+    disappeared inside.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What on earth's the matter?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I cannot tell. It is but our cow-house."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They followed, and, looking in at the door, the Boy saw a picture that
+    for many a day painted itself on his memory. For inside the dim,
+    straw-strewn place stood the big Kentuckian, with one arm round the
+    cow, talking to her and rubbing her nose, while down his own a tear
+    trickled.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hey? Well, yes! Just my view, Sukey. Yes, old girl, Alaska's a funny
+    kind o' place for you and me to be in, isn't it? Hey? Ye-e-yes." And he
+    stroked the cow and sniffed back the salt water, and called out, seeing
+    the Boy, "Look! They've got a thoroughbred bull, too, an' a heifer.
+    Lord, I haven't been in any place so like home for a coon's age! You go
+    and look at the caches. I'll stay here while Sambo milks her."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My name is Sebastian."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, all right; reckon you can milk her under that name, too."
+</p>
+<p>
+    When they came back, the Colonel was still there exchanging views about
+    Alaska with Sukey, and with Sebastian about the bull. Sister Winifred
+    came hurrying over the snow to the cow-house with a little tin pail in
+    her hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, but you are slow, Sebastian!" she called out almost petulantly.
+    "Good-morning," she said to the others, and with a quick clutch at a
+    respectful and submissive demeanour, she added, half aside: "What do
+    you think, Father Brachet? They forgot that baby because he is good and
+    sleeps late. They drink up all the milk."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, there is very little now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Very little, Father," said Sebastian, returning to the task from which
+    the Colonel's conversation had diverted him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I put aside some last night, and they used it. I send you to bring me
+    only a little drop"&mdash;she was by Sebastian now, holding out the small
+    pail, unmindful of the others, who were talking stock&mdash;"and you stay,
+    and stay&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Give me your can." The Boy took it from her, and held it inside the
+    big milk-pail, so that the thin stream struck it sharply.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There; it is enough."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Her shawl had fallen. The Colonel gathered it up.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I will carry the milk back for you," said the Boy, noticing how red
+    and cold the slim hands were. "Your fingers will be frostbitten if you
+    don't wrap them up." She pulled the old shawl closely round her, and
+    set a brisk pace back to the Sisters' House.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I must go carefully or I might slip, and if I spilt the milk&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, you mustn't do that!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She paused suddenly, and then went on, but more slowly than before. A
+    glaze had formed on the hard-trodden path, and one must needs walk
+    warily. Once she looked back with anxiety, and, seeing that the
+    precious milk was being carried with due caution, her glance went
+    gratefully to the Boy's face. He felt her eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm being careful," he laughed, a little embarrassed and not at first
+    lifting his bent head. When, after an instant, he did so, he found the
+    beautiful calm eyes full upon him. But no self-consciousness there. She
+    turned away, gentle and reflective, and was walking on when some quick
+    summons seemed to reach her. She stopped quite still again, as if
+    seized suddenly by a detaining hand. Her own hands dropped straight at
+    her sides, and the rusty shawl hung free. A second time she turned, the
+    Boy thought to him again; but as he glanced up, wondering, he saw that
+    the fixed yet serene look went past him like a homing-dove. A
+    neglected, slighted feeling came over him. She wasn't thinking of him
+    the least in the world, nor even of the milk he was at such pains to
+    carry for her. What was she staring at? He turned his head over his
+    right shoulder. Nothing. No one. As he came slowly on, he kept glancing
+    at her. She, still with upturned face, stood there in the attitude of
+    an obedient child receiving admonition. One cold little hand fluttered
+    up to her silver cross. Ah! He turned again, understanding now the
+    drift, if not the inner meaning, of that summons that had come.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Your friend said something&mdash;" She nodded faintly, riverwards, towards
+    the mission sign. "Did you feel like that about it&mdash;when you saw it
+    first?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh&mdash;a&mdash;I'm not religious like the Colonel."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She smiled, and walked on.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At the door, as she took the milk, instead of "Thank you," "Wait a
+    moment."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She was back again directly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You are going far beyond the mission ... so carry this with you. I
+    hope it will guide you as it guides us."
+</p>
+<p>
+    On his way back to the Fathers' House, he kept looking at what Sister
+    Winifred had given him&mdash;a Latin cross of silver scarce three inches
+    long. At the intersection of the arms it bore a chased lozenge on which
+    was a mitre; above it, the word "Alaska," and beneath, the crossed keys
+    of St. Peter and the letters, "P.T.R."
+</p>
+<p>
+    As he came near to where the Colonel and his hosts were, he slipped the
+    cross into his pocket. His fingers encountered Muckluck's medal. Upon
+    some wholly involuntary impulse, he withdrew Sister Winifred's gift,
+    and transferred it to another pocket. But he laughed to himself. "Both
+    sort o' charms, after all." And again he looked at the big cross and
+    the heaven above it, and down at the domain of the Inua, the jealous
+    god of the Yukon.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Twenty minutes later the two travellers were saying good-bye to the men
+    of Holy Cross, and making their surprised and delighted acknowledgments
+    for the brand-new canvas cover they found upon the Colonel's new sled.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, it is not we," said Father Brachet; "it is made by ze Sisters. Zey
+    shall know zat you were pleased."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Father Richmond held the Boy's hand a moment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I see you go, my son, but I shall see you return."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, Father, I shall hardly come this way again."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Father Brachet, smiling, watched them start up the long trail.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I sink we shall meet again," were his last words.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What does he mean?" asked the Colonel, a little high and mightily.
+    "What plan has he got for a meeting?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Same plan as you've got, I s'pose. I believe you both call it
+    'Heaven.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Holy Cross thermometer had registered twenty degrees below zero,
+    but the keen wind blowing down the river made it seem more like forty
+    below. When they stopped to lunch, they had to crouch down behind the
+    sled to stand the cold, and the Boy found that his face and ears were
+    badly frost-bitten. The Colonel discovered that the same thing had
+    befallen the toes of his left foot. They rubbed the afflicted members,
+    and tried not to let their thoughts stray backwards. The Jesuits had
+    told them of an inhabited cabin twenty-three miles up the river, and
+    they tried to fix their minds on that. In a desultory way, when the
+    wind allowed it, they spoke of Minóok, and of odds and ends they'd
+    heard about the trail. They spoke of the Big Chimney Cabin, and of how
+    at Anvik they would have their last shave. The one subject neither
+    seemed anxious to mention was Holy Cross. It was a little "marked," the
+    Colonel felt; but he wasn't going to say the first word, since he meant
+    to say the last.
+</p>
+<p>
+    About five o'clock the gale went down, but it came on to snow. At seven
+    the Colonel said decidedly: "We can't make that cabin to-night."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why not?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Because I'm not going any further, with this foot&mdash;" He threw down the
+    sled-rope, and limped after wood for the fire.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy tilted the sled up by an ice-hummock, and spread the new canvas
+    so that it gave some scant shelter from the snow. Luckily, for once,
+    the wind how grown quite lamb-like&mdash;for the Yukon. It would be thought
+    a good stiff breeze almost anywhere else.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Directly they had swallowed supper the Colonel remarked: "I feel as
+    ready for my bed as I did Saturday night."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Ah! Saturday night&mdash;that was different. They looked at each other with
+    the same thought.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, that bed at Holy Cross isn't any whiter than this," laughed the
+    Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the Colonel was not to be deceived by this light and airy
+    reference. His own unwilling sentiments were a guide to the Boy's, and
+    he felt it incumbent upon him to restore the Holy Cross incident to its
+    proper proportions. Those last words of Father Brachet's bothered him.
+    Had they been "gettin' at" the Boy?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You think all that mission business mighty wonderful&mdash;just because you
+    run across it in Alaska."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And isn't it wonderful at all?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy spoke dreamily, and, from force of old habit, held out his
+    mittened hands to the unavailing fire.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel gave a prefatory grunt of depreciation, but he was pulling
+    his blankets out from under the stuff on the sled.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy turned his head, and watched him with a little smile. "I'll
+    admit that I always <i>used</i> to think the Jesuits were a shady lot&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So they are&mdash;most of 'em."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I don't know about 'most of 'em.' You and Mac used to talk a lot
+    about the 'motives' of the few I do know. But as far as I can see,
+    every creature who comes up to this country comes to take something out
+    of it&mdash;except those Holy Cross fellas. They came to bring something."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel had got the blankets out now, but where was the rubber
+    sheet? He wouldn't sleep on it in this weather, again, for a kingdom,
+    but when the thaws came, if those explorer fellas were right&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    In his sense of irritation at a conscientious duty to perform and no
+    clear notion of how to discharge it, he made believe it was the
+    difficulty in finding the rubber sheet he didn't want that made him out
+    of sorts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's bitter work, anyhow, this making beds with your fingers stiff and
+    raw," he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Is it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Dignity looked at Impudence sitting in the shelter, smiling.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Humph! Just try it," growled the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I s'pose the man over the fire cookin' supper does <i>look</i> better off
+    than the 'pore pardner' cuttin' down trees and makin' beds in the snow.
+    But he isn't."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, isn't he?" It was all right, but the Big Chimney boss felt he had
+    chosen the lion's share of the work in electing to be woodman; still,
+    it wasn't <i>that</i> that troubled him. Now, what was it he had been going
+    to say about the Jesuits? Something very telling.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If you mean that you'd rather go back to the cookin'," the Boy was
+    saying, "<i>I'm</i> agreeable."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, you start in to-morrow, and see if you're so agreeable."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "All right. I think I dote on one job just about as much as I do on
+    t'other."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But still the Colonel frowned. He couldn't remember that excellent
+    thing he had been going to say about Romanists. But he sniffed
+    derisively, and flung over his shoulder:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To hear you goin' on, anybody'd think the Jesuits were the only
+    Christians. As if there weren't others, who&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, yes, Christians with gold shovels and Winchester rifles. I know
+    'em. But if gold hadn't been found, how many of the army that's invaded
+    the North&mdash;how many would be here, if it hadn't been for the gold? But
+    all this Holy Cross business would be goin' on just the same, as it has
+    done for years and years."
+</p>
+<p>
+    With a mighty tug the Colonel dragged out the rubber blanket, flung it
+    down on the snow, and squared himself, back to the fire, to make short
+    work of such views.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'd no notion you were such a sucker. You can bet," he said darkly,
+    "those fellas aren't making a bad thing out of that 'Holy Cross
+    business,' as you call it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I didn't mean business in that sense."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What else could they do if they didn't do this?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ask the same of any parson."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the Colonel didn't care to.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I suppose," he said severely, "you could even make a hero out of that
+    hang-dog Brother Etienne."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, but he <i>could</i> do something else, for he's served in the French
+    army."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then there's that mad Brother Paul. What good would he be at anything
+    else?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I don't know."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Brachet and Wills are decent enough men, but where else would they
+    have the power and the freedom they have at Holy Cross? Why, they live
+    there like feudal barons."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Father Richmond could have done anything he chose."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, Father Richmond&mdash;" The Colonel shut his mouth suddenly, turned
+    about, and proceeded to crawl under his blankets, feet to the fire.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    No answer.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well?" insisted the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, Father Richmond must have seen a ghost."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>What!</i>"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Take my word for it. <i>He</i> got frightened somehow. A man like Father
+    Richmond has to be scared into a cassock."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy's sudden laughter deepened the Colonel's own impression that
+    the instance chosen had not been fortunate. One man of courage knows
+    another man of courage when he sees him, and the Colonel knew he had
+    damned his own argument.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Wouldn't care for the job myself," the Boy was saying.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What job?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Scarin' Father Richmond."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy sat watching the slow wet snow-flakes fall and die in the fire.
+    His clothes were pretty damp, but he was warm after a chilly fashion,
+    as warmth goes on the trail.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel suddenly put his head out from under the marmot-skin to say
+    discontentedly, "What you sittin' up for?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh ... for instance!" But aside from the pertness of the answer,
+    already it was dimly recognised as an offence for one to stay up longer
+    than the other.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Can't think how it is," the Colonel growled, "that you don't see that
+    their principle is wrong. Through and through mediaeval, through and
+    through despotic. They make a virtue of weakness, a fetich of vested
+    authority. And it isn't American authority, either."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy waited for him to quiet down. "What's the first rule," demanded
+    the Colonel, half sitting up, "of the most powerful Catholic Order?
+    Blind obedience to an old gentleman over in Italy."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I said last night, you know," the Boy put in quite meekly, "that it
+    all seemed very un-American."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Huh! Glad you can see that much." The Colonel drove his huge fist at
+    the provision-bag, as though to beat the stiffnecked beans into a
+    feathery yielding. "Blind submission don't come easy to most Americans.
+    The Great Republic was built upon revolt;" and he pulled the covers
+    over his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I know, I know. We jaw an awful lot about freedom and about what's
+    American. There's plenty o' free speech in America and plenty o'
+    machinery, but there's a great deal o' human nature, too, I guess." The
+    Boy looked out of the corner of his eye at the blanketed back of his
+    big friend. "And maybe there'll always be some people who&mdash;who think
+    there's something in the New Testament notion o' sacrifice and
+    service."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel rolled like an angry leviathan, and came to the surface to
+    blow. But the Boy dashed on, with a fearful joy in his own temerity.
+    "The difference between us, Colonel, is that I'm an unbeliever, and I
+    know it, and you're a cantankerous old heathen, and you <i>don't</i> know
+    it." The Colonel sat suddenly bolt upright. "Needn't look at me like
+    that. You're as bad as anybody&mdash;rather worse. Why are you <i>here?</i>
+    Dazzled and lured by the great gold craze. An' you're not even poor.
+    You want <i>more</i> gold. You've got a home to stay in; but you weren't
+    satisfied, not even in the fat lands down below."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well," said the Colonel solemnly, blinking at the fire, "I hope I'm a
+    Christian, but as to bein' satisfied&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Church of England can't manage it, hey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Church of England's got nothing to do with it. It's a question o'
+    character. Satisfied! We're little enough, God knows, but we're too big
+    for that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy stood up, back to the fire, eyes on the hilltops whitening in
+    the starlight.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Perhaps&mdash;not&mdash;all of us."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, sah, all of us." The Colonel lifted his head with a fierce look
+    of most un-Christian pride. Behind him the hills, leaving the
+    struggling little wood far down the slope, went up and up into dimness,
+    reaching to the near-by stars, and looking down to the far-off camp
+    fire by the great ice-river's edge.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, sah," the Colonel thundered again, "all that have got good
+    fightin' blood in 'em, like you and me. 'Tisn't as if we came of any
+    worn-out, frightened, servile old stock. You and I belong to the
+    free-livin', hard-ridin', straight-shootin' Southerners. The people
+    before us fought bears, and fought Indians, and beat the British, and
+    when there wasn't anything else left to beat, turned round and began to
+    beat one another. It was the one battle we found didn't pay. We
+    finished that job up in '65, and since then we've been lookin' round
+    for something else to beat. We've got down now to beatin' records, and
+    foreign markets, and breedin' prize bulls; but we don't breed
+    cowards&mdash;yet; and we ain't lookin' round for any asylums. The Catholic
+    Church is an asylum. It's for people who never had any nerve, or who
+    have lost it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel turned about, wagged his head defiantly at the icy hills
+    and the night, and in the after-stillness fell sound asleep in the
+    snow.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH13"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XII
+</h2>
+<center>
+    THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE
+</center>
+<p class="ind">
+  "&mdash;paa dit Firmament<br>
+    Den klare Nordlyslampe taendt...."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Innocently thinking that they had seen Arctic travelling at its worst,
+    and secretly looking upon themselves as highly accomplished trailmen,
+    they had covered the forty-one miles from Holy Cross to Anvik in less
+    than three days.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel made much of the pleasant and excellent man at the head of
+    the Episcopal mission there, and the Boy haunted Benham's store,
+    picking up a little Ingalik and the A. C. method of trading with the
+    Indians, who, day and night, with a number of stranded Klondykers,
+    congregated about the grateful warmth of the big iron stove.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The travellers themselves did some business with the A. C. agent,
+    laying in supplies of fresh meat, and even augmenting their hitherto
+    carefully restricted outfit, for they were going far beyond the reach
+    of stores, or even of missions. Anvik was the last white settlement
+    below Nulato; Nulato was said to be over two hundred miles to the
+    northward.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And yet after all their further preparation and expense, each man kept
+    saying in his heart, during those first days out from Anvik, that the
+    journey would be easy enough but for their "comforts"&mdash;the burden on
+    the sled. By all the rules of arithmetic, the daily subtraction of
+    three meals from the store should have lightened the load. It seemed to
+    have the opposite effect. By some process of evil enchantment every
+    ounce grew to weigh a pound, every pound a hundredweight. The sled
+    itself was bewitched. Recall how lightsomely it ran down the snowy
+    slope, from the Big Chimney Cabin to the river trail, that morning they
+    set forth. The Boy took its pretty impetuosity for a happy augury&mdash;the
+    very sled was eager for the mighty undertaking.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But never in all that weary march did it manifest again any such modest
+    alacrity. If, thereafter, in the long going "up river" there came an
+    interval of downhill, the sled turned summersaults in the air, wound
+    its forward or backward rope round willow scrub or alder, or else
+    advanced precipitately with an evil, low-comedy air, bottom side up, to
+    attack its master in the shins. It either held back with a power
+    superhuman, or it lunged forward with a momentum that capsized its
+    weary conductor. Its manners grew steadily worse as the travellers
+    pushed farther and farther into the wilderness, beyond the exorcising
+    power of Holy Cross, beyond the softening influences of Christian
+    hospitality at Episcopal Anvik, even beyond Tischsocket, the last of
+    the Indian villages for a hundred miles.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The two who had been scornful of the frailty of temper they had seen
+    common in men's dealings up here in the North, began to realize that
+    all other trials of brotherhood pale before the strain of life on the
+    Arctic trail. Beyond any question, after a while something goes wrong
+    with the nerves. The huge drafts on muscular endurance have, no doubt,
+    something to do with it. They worked hard for fourteen, sometimes
+    seventeen, hours at a stretch; they were ill-fed, suffering from
+    exposure, intense cold, and a haunting uncertainty of the end of the
+    undertaking. They were reasonable fellows as men go, with a respect for
+    each other, but when hardship has got on the nerves, when you are
+    suffering the agonies of snow-blindness, sore feet, and the pangs of
+    hunger, you are not, to put it mildly, at your best as a member of the
+    social order. They sometimes said things they were ashamed to remember,
+    but both men grew carefuller at crucial moments, and the talkative one
+    more silent as time went on.
+</p>
+<p>
+    By the rule of the day the hard shift before dinner usually fell to the
+    Boy. It was the worst time in the twenty-four hours, and equally
+    dreaded by both men. It was only the first night out from Anvik, after
+    an unusually trying day, the Boy was tramping heavily ahead, bent like
+    an old man before the cutting sleet, fettered like a criminal, hands
+    behind back, rope-wound, stiff, straining at the burden of the slow and
+    sullen sled. On a sudden he stopped, straightened his back, and
+    remonstrated with the Colonel in unprintable terms, for putting off the
+    halt later than ever they had yet, "after such a day."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Can't make fire with green cotton-wood," was the Colonel's rejoiner.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then let's stop and rest, anyhow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nuh! We know where that would land us. Men who stop to rest, go to
+    sleep in the snow, and men who go to sleep in the snow on empty
+    stomachs don't wake up."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They pushed on another mile. When the Colonel at last called the halt,
+    the Boy sank down on the sled too exhausted to speak. But it had grown
+    to be a practice with them not to trust themselves to talk at this
+    hour. The Colonel would give the signal to stop, simply by ceasing to
+    push the sled that the boy was wearily dragging. The Boy had invariably
+    been feeling (just as the Colonel had before, during his shift in
+    front) that the man behind wasn't helping all he might, whereupon
+    followed a vague, consciously unreasonable, but wholly irresistible
+    rage against the partner of his toil. But however much the man at the
+    back was supposed to spare himself, the man in front had never yet
+    failed to know when the impetus from behind was really removed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy sat now on the sled, silent, motionless, while the Colonel
+    felled and chopped and brought the wood. Then the Boy dragged himself
+    up, made the fire and the beef-tea. But still no word even after that
+    reviving cup&mdash;the usual signal for a few remarks and more social
+    relations to be established. Tonight no sound out of either. The
+    Colonel changed his footgear and the melted snow in the pot began to
+    boil noisily. But the Boy, who had again betaken himself to the sled,
+    didn't budge. No man who really knows the trail would have dared, under
+    the circumstances, to remind his pardner that it was now his business
+    to get up and fry the bacon. But presently, without looking up, the
+    hungry Colonel ventured:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Get your dry things!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Feet aren't wet."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't talk foolishness; here are your things." The Colonel flung in
+    the Boy's direction the usual change, two pairs of heavy socks, the
+    "German knitted" and "the felt."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not wet," repeated the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You know you are."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Could go through water in these mucklucks."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm not saying the wet has come in from outside; but you know as well
+    as I do a man sweats like a horse on the trail."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Still the Boy sat there, with his head sunk between his shoulders.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "First rule o' this country is to keep your feet dry, or else
+    pneumonia, rheumatism&mdash;God knows what!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "First rule o' this country is mind your own business, or else&mdash;God
+    knows what!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel looked at the Boy a moment, and then turned his back. The
+    Boy glanced up conscience-stricken, but still only half alive, dulled
+    by the weight of a crushing weariness. The Colonel presently bent over
+    the fire and was about to lift off the turbulently boiling pot. The Boy
+    sprang to his feet, ready to shout, "You do your work, and keep your
+    hands off mine," but the Colonel turned just in time to say with
+    unusual gentleness:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If you <i>like</i>, I'll make supper to-night;" and the Boy, catching his
+    breath, ran forward, swaying a little, half blind, but with a different
+    look in his tired eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, no, old man. It isn't as bad as that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    And again it was two friends who slept side by side in the snow.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The next morning the Colonel, who had been kept awake half the night by
+    what he had been thinking was neuralgia in his eyes, woke late, hearing
+    the Boy calling:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I say, Kentucky, aren't you <i>ever</i> goin' to get up?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Get up?" said the Colonel. "Why should I, when it's pitch-dark?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>What?</i>"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Fire clean out, eh?" But he smelt the tea and bacon, and sat up
+    bewildered, with a hand over his smarting eyes. The Boy went over and
+    knelt down by him, looking at him curiously.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Guess you're a little snow-blind, Colonel; but it won't last, you
+    know."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Blind!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, no, only <i>snow</i>-blind. Big difference;" and he took out his rag of
+    a handkerchief, got some water in a tin cup, and the eyes were bathed
+    and bandaged.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It won't last, you know. You'll just have to take it easy for a few
+    days."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel groaned.
+</p>
+<p>
+    For the first time he seemed to lose heart. He sat during breakfast
+    with bandaged eyes, and a droop of the shoulders, that seemed to say
+    old age had come upon him in a single night. The day that followed was
+    pretty dark to both men. The Boy had to do all the work, except the
+    monotonous, blind, pushing from behind, in whatever direction the Boy
+    dragged the sled.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Now, snow-blindness is not usually dangerous, but it is horribly
+    painful while it lasts. Your eyes swell up and are stabbed continually
+    by cutting pains; your head seems full of acute neuralgia, and often
+    there is fever and other complications. The Colonel's was a bad case.
+    But he was a giant for strength and "sound as a dollar," as the Boy
+    reminded him, "except for this little bother with your eyes, and you're
+    a whole heap better already."
+</p>
+<p>
+    At a very slow rate they plodded along.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They had got into a region where there was no timber; but, as they
+    couldn't camp without a fire, they took an extra rest that day at four
+    o'clock, and regaled themselves on some cold grub. Then they took up
+    the line of march again. But they had been going only about half an
+    hour when the Colonel suddenly, without warning, stopped pushing the
+    sled, and stood stock-still on the trail. The Boy, feeling the removal
+    of the pressure, looked round, went back to him, and found nothing in
+    particular was the matter, but he just thought he wouldn't go any
+    further.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We can camp here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, we can't," says the Boy; "there isn't a tree in sight."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the Colonel seemed dazed. He thought he'd stop anyhow&mdash;"right where
+    he was."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, no," says the Boy, a little frightened; "we'll camp the minute we
+    come to wood." But the Colonel stood as if rooted. The Boy took his arm
+    and led him on a few paces to the sled. "You needn't push hard, you
+    know. Just keep your hand there so, without looking, you'll know where
+    I'm going." This was very subtle of the Boy. For he knew the Colonel
+    was blind as a bat and as sensitive as a woman. "We'll get through all
+    right yet," he called back, as he stooped to take up the sledrope. "I
+    bet on Kentucky."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Like a man walking in his sleep, the Colonel followed, now holding on
+    to the sled and unconsciously pulling a little, and when the Boy, very
+    nearly on his last legs, remonstrated, leaning against it, and so
+    urging it a little forward.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Oh, but the wood was far to seek that night!
+</p>
+<p>
+    Concentrated on the two main things&mdash;to carry forward his almost
+    intolerable load, and to go the shortest way to the nearest wood&mdash;the
+    Boy, by-and-by, forgot to tell his tired nerves to take account of the
+    unequal pressure from behind. If he felt it&mdash;well, the Colonel was a
+    corker; if he didn't feel it&mdash;well, the Colonel was just about tuckered
+    out. It was very late when at last the Boy raised a shout. Behind the
+    cliff overhanging the river-bed that they were just rounding, there,
+    spread out in the sparkling starlight, as far as he could see, a vast
+    primeval forest. The Boy bettered his lagging pace.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ha! you haven't seen a wood like this since we left 'Frisco. It's all
+    right now, Kentucky;" and he bent to his work with a will.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When he got to the edge of the wood, he flung down the rope and
+    turned&mdash;to find himself alone.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Colonel! Colonel! Where are you? <i>Colonel!</i>"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He stood in the silence, shivering with a sudden sense of desolation.
+    He took his bearings, propped a fallen fir sapling aslant by the sled,
+    and, forgetting he was ready to drop, he ran swiftly hack along the way
+    he came. They had travelled all that afternoon and evening on the river
+    ice, hard as iron, retaining no trace of footprint or of runner
+    possible to verify even in daylight. The Yukon here was fully three
+    miles wide. They had meant to hug the right bank, but snow and ice
+    refashion the world and laugh at the trustful geography of men. A
+    traveller on this trail is not always sure whether he is following the
+    mighty Yukon or some slough equally mighty for a few miles, or whether,
+    in the protracted twilight, he has not wandered off upon some frozen
+    swamp.
+</p>
+<p>
+    On the Boy went in the ghostly starlight, running, stumbling, calling
+    at regular intervals, his voice falling into a melancholy monotony that
+    sounded foreign to himself. It occurred to him that were he the Colonel
+    he wouldn't recognise it, and he began instead to call "Kentucky!
+    Ken-tuck-kee!" sounding those fine barbaric syllables for the first
+    time, most like, in that world of ice and silence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He stood an instant after his voice died, and listened to the quiet.
+    Yes, the people were right who said nothing was so hard to bear in this
+    country of hardship&mdash;nothing ends by being so ghastly&mdash;as the silence.
+    No bird stirs. The swift-flashing fish are sealed under ice, the wood
+    creatures gone to their underground sleep. No whispering of the pointed
+    firs, stiff, snowclotted; no swaying of the scant herbage sheathed in
+    ice or muffled under winter's wide white blanket. No greater hush can
+    reign in the interstellar spaces than in winter on the Yukon.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Colonel!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Silence&mdash;like a negation of all puny things, friendship, human life&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Colonel!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Silence. No wonder men went mad up here, when they didn't drown this
+    silence in strong drink.
+</p>
+<p>
+    On and on he ran, till he felt sure he must have passed the Colonel,
+    unless&mdash;yes, there were those air-holes in the river ice ... He felt
+    choked and stopped to breathe. Should he go back? It was horrible to
+    turn. It was like admitting that the man was not to be found&mdash;that this
+    was the end.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Colonel!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He said to himself that he would go back, and build a fire for a
+    signal, and return; but he ran on farther and farther away from the
+    sled and from the forest. Was it growing faintly light? He looked up.
+    Oh, yes; presently it would be brighter still. Those streamers of pale
+    light dancing in the North; they would be green and scarlet and orange
+    and purple, and the terrible white world would be illumined as by
+    conflagration. He stopped again. That the Colonel should have dropped
+    so far back as this, and the man in front not know&mdash;it was incredible.
+    What was that? A shadow on the ice. A frozen hummock? No, a man. Was it
+    really....? Glory hallelujah&mdash;it <i>was!</i> But the shadow lay there
+    ghastly still and the Boy's greeting died in his throat. He had found
+    the Colonel, but he had found him delivered over to that treacherous
+    sleep that seldom knows a waking. The Boy dropped down beside his
+    friend, and wasn't far off crying. But it was a tonic to young nerves
+    to see how, like one dead, the man lay there, for all the calling and
+    tugging by the arm. The Boy rolled the body over, pulled open the
+    things at the neck, and thrust his hand down, till he could feel the
+    heart beating. He jumped up, got a handful of snow, and rubbed the
+    man's face with it. At last a feeble protest&mdash;an effort to get away
+    from the Boy's rude succour.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Thank God! Colonel! Colonel! wake up!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He shook him hard. But the big man only growled sullenly, and let his
+    leaden weight drop back heavily on the ice. The Boy got hold of the
+    neck of the Colonel's parki and pulled him frantically along the ice a
+    few yards, and then realised that only the terror of the moment gave
+    him the strength to do that much. To drag a man of the Colonel's weight
+    all the way to the wood was stark impossibility. He couldn't get him
+    eighty yards. If he left him and went for the sled and fuel, the man
+    would be dead by the time he got back. If he stayed, they would both be
+    frozen in a few hours. It was pretty horrible.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He felt faint and dizzy. It occurred to him that he would pray. He was
+    an agnostic all right, but the Colonel was past praying for himself;
+    and here was his friend&mdash;an agnostic&mdash;here he was on his knees. He
+    hadn't prayed since he was a little chap down in the South. How did the
+    prayers go? "Our Father"&mdash;he looked up at the reddening aurora&mdash;"Our
+    Father, who art in heaven&mdash;" His eyes fell again on his friend. He
+    leapt to his feet like a wild animal, and began to go at the Colonel
+    with his fists. The blows rained thick on the chest of the prostrate
+    man, but he was too well protected to feel more than the shock. But now
+    they came battering down, under the ear&mdash;right, left, as the man turned
+    blindly to avoid them&mdash;on the jaw, even on the suffering eyes, and that
+    at last stung the sleeper into something like consciousness.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He struggled to his feet with a roar like a wounded bull, lunging
+    heavily forward as the Boy eluded him, and he would have pounded the
+    young fellow out of existence in no time had he stood his ground. That
+    was exactly what the Boy didn't mean to do&mdash;he was always just a little
+    way on in front; but as the Colonel's half-insane rage cooled, and he
+    slowed down a bit, the Boy was at him again like some imp of Satan.
+    Sound and lithe and quick-handed as he was, he was no match for the
+    Colonel at his best. But the Colonel couldn't see well, and his brain
+    was on fire. He'd kill that young devil, and then he'd lie down and
+    sleep again.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Meanwhile Aurora mounted the high heavens; from a great corona in the
+    zenith all the sky was hung with banners, and the snow was stained as
+    if with blood. The Boy looked over his shoulder, and saw the huge
+    figure of his friend, bearing down upon him, with his discoloured face
+    rage-distorted, and murder in his tortured eyes. A moment's sense of
+    the monstrous spectacle fell so poignant upon the Boy, that he felt
+    dimly he must have been full half his life running this race with
+    death, followed by a maniac bent on murder, in a world whose winter was
+    strangely lit with the leaping fires of hell.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At last, on there in front, the cliff! Below it, the sharp bend in the
+    river, and although he couldn't see it yet, behind the cliff the
+    forest, and a little hand-sled bearing the means of life.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel was down again, but it wasn't safe to go near him just yet.
+    The Boy ran on, unpacked the sled, and went, axe in hand, along the
+    margin of the wood. Never before was a fire made so quickly. Then, with
+    the flask, back to the Colonel, almost as sound asleep as before.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy never could recall much about the hours that followed. There
+    was nobody to help, so it must have been he who somehow got the Colonel
+    to the fire, got him to swallow some food, plastered his wounded face
+    over with the carbolic ointment, and got him into bed, for in the
+    morning all this was seen to have been done.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They stayed in camp that day to "rest up," and the Boy shot a rabbit.
+    The Colonel was coming round; the rest, or the ointment, or the
+    tea-leaf poultice, had been good for snowblindness. The generous
+    reserve of strength in his magnificent physique was quick to announce
+    itself. He was still "frightfully bunged up," but "I think we'll push
+    on to-morrow," he said that night, as he sat by the fire smoking before
+    turning in.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Right you are!" said the Boy, who was mending the sled-runner. Neither
+    had referred to that encounter on the river-ice, that had ended in
+    bringing the Colonel where there was succour. Nothing was said, then or
+    for long after, in the way of deliberate recognition that the Boy had
+    saved his life. It wasn't necessary; they understood each other.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But in the evening, after the Boy had finished mending the sled, it
+    occurred to him he must also mend the Colonel before they went to bed.
+    He got out the box of ointment and bespread the strips of torn
+    handkerchief.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't know as I need that to-night," says the Colonel. "Musn't waste
+    ointment." But the Boy brought the bandages round to the Colonel's
+    side of the fire. For an instant they looked at each other by the
+    flickering light, and the Colonel laid his hand on the Boy's arm. His
+    eyes looked worse for the moment, and began to water. He turned away
+    brusquely, and knocked the ashes out of his pipe on a log.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What in hell made you think of it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ask me an easy one," says the Boy. "But I know what the Jesuit Fathers
+    would say."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Jesuits and George Warren! Humph! precious little we'd agree about."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You would about this. It flashed over me when I looked back and saw
+    you peltin' after me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Small wonder I made for you! I'm not findin' fault, but what on earth
+    put it into your head to go at me with your fists like that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You'll never prove it by me. But when I saw you comin' at me like a
+    mad bull, I thought to myself, thinks I, the Colonel and the Jesuits,
+    they'd both of 'em say this was a direct answer to prayer."
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH14"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XIII
+</h2>
+<center>
+    THE PIT
+</center>
+<p class="ind">
+    "L'humanité a commencé tout entière par le crime .... C'était le vieux
+    nourricier des hommes des cavernes."&mdash;ANATOLE FRANCE.
+</p>
+<p>
+    An old story now, these days of silent plodding through the driving
+    snow.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But if outward conditions lacked variety, not so their cumulative
+    effect upon poor human nature. A change was going on in the travellers
+    that will little commend them to the sentimentalist.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've come to think a snow-storm's all right to travel in, all right to
+    sleep in," said the Colonel one morning; "but to cook in, eat in, make
+    or break camp in&mdash;it's the devil's champion invention." For three days
+    they had worked like galley-slaves, and yet covered less than ten miles
+    a day. "And you never get rested," the Colonel went on; "I get up as
+    tired as I go to bed." Again the Boy only nodded. His body, if not his
+    temper, had got broken into the trail, but for a talkative person he
+    had in these days strangely little to say. It became manifest that, in
+    the long run, the Colonel would suffer the most physically; but his
+    young companion, having less patience and more ambition, more sheer
+    untamed vitality in him, would suffer the most in spirit. Every sense
+    in him was becoming numbed, save the gnawing in his stomach, and that
+    other, even more acute ache, queer compound of fatigue and anger. These
+    two sensations swallowed up all else, and seemed to grow by what they
+    fed on.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The loaded sled was a nightmare. It weighed a thousand tons. The very
+    first afternoon out from Anvik, when in the desperate hauling and
+    tugging that rescued it from a bottomless snow-drift, the lashing
+    slipped, the load loosened, tumbled off, and rolled open, the Colonel
+    stood quite still and swore till his half-frozen blood circulated
+    freely again. When it came to repacking, he considered in detail the
+    items that made up the intolerable weight, and fell to wondering which
+    of them they could do without.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The second day out from Anvik they had decided that it was absurd,
+    after all, to lug about so much tinware. They left a little saucepan
+    and the extra kettle at that camp. The idea, so potent at Anvik, of
+    having a tea-kettle in reserve&mdash;well, the notion lost weight, and the
+    kettle seemed to gain.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Two pairs of boots and some flannels marked the next stopping-place.
+</p>
+<p>
+    On the following day, when the Boy's rifle kept slipping and making a
+    brake to hold back the sled, "I reckon you'll have to plant that rifle
+    o' yours in the next big drift," said the Colonel; "one's all we need,
+    anyway."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "One's all you need, and one's all I need," answered the Boy stiffly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But it wasn't easy to see immediate need for either. Never was country
+    so bare of game, they thought, not considering how little they hunted,
+    and how more and more every faculty, every sense, was absorbed in the
+    bare going forward.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The next time the Colonel said something about the uselessness of
+    carrying two guns, the Boy flared up: "If you object to guns, leave
+    yours."
+</p>
+<p>
+    This was a new tone for the Boy to use to the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't you think we'd better hold on to the best one?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Now the Boy couldn't deny that the Colonel's was the better, but none
+    the less he had a great affection for his own old 44 Marlin, and the
+    Colonel shouldn't assume that he had the right to dictate. This
+    attitude of the "wise elder" seemed out of place on the trail.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A gun's a necessity. I haven't brought along any whim-whams."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who has?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, it wasn't me that went loadin' up at Anvik with fool
+    thermometers and things."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Thermometer! Why, it doesn't weigh&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Weighs something, and it's something to pack; frozen half the time,
+    too. And when it isn't, what's the good of havin' it hammered into us
+    how near we are to freezin' to death." But it annoyed him to think how
+    very little in argument a thermometer weighed against a rifle.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They said no more that day about lightening the load, but with a double
+    motive they made enormous inroads upon their provisions.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A morning came when the Colonel, packing hurriedly in the biting cold,
+    forgot to shove his pardner's gun into its accustomed place.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy, returning from trail-breaking to the river, kicked at the butt
+    to draw attention to the omission. The Colonel flung down the end of
+    the ice-coated rope he had lashed the load with, and, "Pack it
+    yourself," says he.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy let the rifle lie. But all day long he felt the loss of it
+    heavy on his heart, and no reconciling lightness in the sled.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel began to have qualms about the double rations they were
+    using. It was only the seventeenth night after turning their backs on
+    the Big Chimney, as the Colonel tipped the pan, pouring out half the
+    boiled beans into his pardner's plate, "That's the last o' the
+    strawberries! Don't go expectin' any more," says he.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What!" ejaculated the Boy, aghast; then quickly, to keep a good face:
+    "You take my life when you do take the beans, whereby I live."
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the Colonel had disposed of his strawberries, "Lord!" he sighed,
+    trying to rub the stiffness out of his hands over the smoke, "the
+    appetite a fella can raise up here is something terrible. You eat and
+    eat, and it doesn't seem to make any impression. You're just as hungry
+    as ever."
+</p>
+<p>
+    <i>"And the stuff a fella can eat!"</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel recalled that speech of the Boy's the very next night,
+    when, after "a hell of a time" getting the fire alight, he was bending
+    forward in that attitude most trying to maintain, holding the
+    frying-pan at long range over the feebly-smoking sticks. He had to
+    cook, to live on snow-shoes nowadays, for the heavy Colonel had
+    illustrated oftener than the Boy, that going without meant breaking in,
+    floundering, and, finally, having to call for your pardner to haul you
+    out. This was one of the many uses of a pardner on the trail. The last
+    time the Colonel had trusted to the treacherous crust he had gone in
+    head foremost, and the Boy, happening to look round, saw only two
+    snow-shoes, bottom side up, moving spasmodically on the surface of the
+    drift. The Colonel was nearly suffocated by the time he was pulled out,
+    and after that object-lesson he stuck to snow-shoes every hour of the
+    twenty-four, except those spent in the sleeping-bag.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But few things on earth are more exasperating than trying to work
+    mounted on clumsy, long web-feet that keep jarring against, yet holding
+    you off from, the tree you are felling, or the fire you are cooking
+    over. You are constrained to stand wholly out of natural relation to
+    the thing you are trying to do&mdash;the thing you've got to do, if you mean
+    to come out alive.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel had been through all this time and time again. But as he
+    squatted on his heels to-night, cursing the foot and a half of
+    snow-shoe that held him away from the sullen fire, straining every
+    muscle to keep the outstretched frying-pan over the best of the blaze,
+    he said to himself that what had got him on the raw was that speech of
+    the Boy's yesterday about the stuff he had to eat. If the Boy objected
+    to having his rice parboiled in smoked water he was damned
+    unreasonable, that was all.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The culprit reappeared at the edge of the darkening wood. He came up
+    eagerly, and flung down an armful of fuel for the morning, hoping to
+    find supper ready. Since it wasn't, he knew that he mustn't stand about
+    and watch the preparations. By this time he had learned a good deal of
+    the trail-man's unwritten law. On no account must you hint that the
+    cook is incompetent, or even slow, any more than he may find fault with
+    your moment for calling halt, or with your choice of timber. So the
+    woodman turned wearily away from the sole spot of brightness in the
+    waste, and went back up the hill in the dark and the cold, to busy
+    himself about his own work, even to spin it out, if necessary, till he
+    should hear the gruff "Grub's ready!" And when that dinner-gong sounds,
+    don't you dally! Don't you wait a second. You may feel uncomfortable if
+    you find yourself twenty minutes late for a dinner in London or New
+    York, but to be five minutes late for dinner on the Winter Trail is to
+    lay up lasting trouble.
+</p>
+<p>
+    By the time the rice and bacon were done, and the flap-jack, still raw
+    in the middle, was burnt to charcoal on both sides, the Colonel's eyes
+    were smarting, in the acrid smoke, and the tears were running down his
+    cheeks.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Grub's ready!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy came up and dropped on his heels in the usual attitude. The
+    Colonel tore a piece off the half-charred, half-raw pancake.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Maybe you'll think the fire isn't thoroughly distributed, but <i>that's</i> got to do for bread," he remarked severely, as if in reply to some
+    objection.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy saw that something he had said or looked had been
+    misinterpreted.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hey? Too much fire outside, and not enough in? Well, sir, I'll trust
+    <i>my</i> stomach to strike a balance. Guess the heat'll get distributed all
+    right once I've swallowed it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the Colonel, mollified, said something about cinders in the rice,
+    the Boy, with his mouth full of grit, answered: "I'm pretendin' it's
+    sugar."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Not since the episode of the abandoned rifle had he shown himself so
+    genial.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Never in all my bohn life," says the Colonel after eating steadily for
+    some time&mdash;"never in a year, sah, have I thought as much about food as
+    I do in a day on this&mdash;&mdash;trail."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Same here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And it's quantity, not quality."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ditto."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy turned his head sharply away from the fire. "Hear that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    No need to ask. The Colonel had risen upright on his cramped legs, red
+    eyes starting out of his head. The Boy got up, turned about in the
+    direction of the hollow sound, and made one step away from the fire.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You stay right where you are!" ordered the Colonel, quite in the old
+    way.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's a bird-song."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Thought so."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mr. Wolf smelt the cookin'; want's the rest of the pack to know
+    there's something queer up here on the hill." Then, as the Boy moved to
+    one side in the dark: "What you lookin' for?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My gun."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mine's here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Oh yes! His own old 44 Marlin was lying far down the river under
+    eight-and-fifty hours of snow. It angered him newly and more than ever
+    to remember that if he had a shot at anything now it must needs be by
+    favour of the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They listened for that sound again, the first since leaving Anvik not
+    made by themselves.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Seems a lot quieter than it did," observed the Colonel by-and-bye.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Without preface the Colonel observed: "It's five days since I washed my
+    face and hands."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's the good o' rememberin'?" returned the Boy sharply. Then more
+    mildly: "People talk about the bare necessaries o' life. Well, sir,
+    when they're really bare you find there ain't but three&mdash;food, warmth,
+    sleep."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Again in the distance that hollow baying.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Food, warmth, sleep," repeated the Colonel. "We've about got down to
+    the wolf basis."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He said it half in defiance of the trail's fierce lessoning; but it was
+    truer than he knew.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They built up the fire to frighten off the wolves, but the Colonel had
+    his rifle along when they went over and crawled into their
+    sleeping-bag. Half in, half out, he laid the gun carefully along the
+    right on his snow-shoes. As the Boy buttoned the fur-lined flap down
+    over their heads he felt angrier with the Colonel than he had ever been
+    before.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Took good care to hang on to his own shootin'-iron. Suppose anything
+    should happen"; and he said it over and over.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Exactly what could happen he did not make clear; the real danger was
+    not from wolves, but it was <i>something</i>. And he would need a rifle....
+    And he wouldn't have one.... And it was the Colonel's fault.
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    Now, it had long been understood that the woodman is lord of the wood.
+    When it came to the Colonel's giving unasked advice about the lumber
+    business, the Boy turned a deaf ear, and thought well of himself for
+    not openly resenting the interference.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The Colonel talks an awful lot, anyway. He has more hot air to offer
+    than muscle."
+</p>
+<p>
+    When they sighted timber that commended itself to the woodman, if <i>he</i>
+    thought well of it, why, he just dropped the sled-rope without a word,
+    pulled the axe out of the lashing, trudged up the hillside, holding the
+    axe against his shirt underneath his parki, till he reached whatever
+    tree his eye had marked for his own. Off with the fur mitt, and bare
+    hand protected by the inner mitt of wool, he would feel the axe-head,
+    for there was always the danger of using it so cold that the steel
+    would chip and fly. As soon as he could be sure the proper molecular
+    change had been effected, he would take up his awkward attitude before
+    the selected spruce, leaning far forward on his snow-shoes, and seeming
+    to deliver the blows on tip-toe.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the real trouble came when, after felling the dead tree, splitting
+    an armful of fuel and carrying it to the Colonel, he returned to the
+    task of cutting down the tough green spruce for their bedding. Many
+    strained blows must be delivered before he could effect the chopping of
+    even a little notch. Then he would shift his position and cut a
+    corresponding notch further round, so making painful circuit of the
+    bole. To-night, what with being held off by his snow-shoes, what with
+    utter weariness and a dulled axe, he growled to himself that he was
+    "only gnawin' a ring round the tree like a beaver!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Damn the whole&mdash;Wait!" Perhaps the cursed snow was packed enough now
+    to bear. He slipped off the web-feet, and standing gingerly, but
+    blessedly near, made effectual attack. Hooray! One more good 'un and
+    the thing was down. Hah! ugh! Woof-ff! The tree was down, but so was
+    he, floundering breast high, and at every effort to get out only
+    breaking down more of the crust and sinking deeper.
+</p>
+<p>
+    This was not the first time such a thing had happened. Why did he feel
+    as if it was for him the end of the world? He lay still an instant. It
+    would be happiness just to rest here and go to sleep. The Colonel! Oh,
+    well, the Colonel had taken his rifle. Funny there should be
+    orange-trees up here. He could smell them. He shut his eyes. Something
+    shone red and glowing. Why, that was the sun making an effect of
+    stained glass as it shone through the fat pine weather-boarding of his
+    little bedroom on the old place down in Florida. Suddenly a face. <i>Ah,
+    that face!</i> He must be up and doing. He knew perfectly well how to get
+    out of this damn hole. You lie on your side and roll. Gradually you
+    pack the softness tight till it bears&mdash;not if you stand up on your
+    feet, but bears the length of your body, while you worm your way
+    obliquely to the top, and feel gingerly in the dimness after your
+    snow-shoes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But if it happens on a pitch-dark night, and your pardner has chosen
+    camp out of earshot, you feel that you have looked close at the end of
+    the Long Trail.
+</p>
+<p>
+    On getting back to the fire, he found the Colonel annoyed at having
+    called "Grub!" three times&mdash;"yes, sah! three times, sah!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    And they ate in silence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now I'm going to bed," said the Boy, rising stiffly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You just wait a minute."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Now, the Colonel himself had enunciated the law that whenever one of
+    them was ready to sleep the other must come too. He didn't know it, but
+    it is one of the iron rules of the Winter Trail. In absence of its
+    enforcement, the later comer brings into the warmed up sleeping-bag not
+    only the chill of his own body, he lets in the bitter wind, and brings
+    along whatever snow and ice is clinging to his boots and clothes. The
+    melting and warming-up is all to be done again.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the Colonel was angry.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Most unreasonable," he muttered&mdash;"damned unreasonable!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Worse than the ice and the wet in the sleeping-bag, was this lying in
+    such close proximity to a young jackanapes who wouldn't come when you
+    called "Grub!" and wouldn't wait a second till you'd felt about in the
+    dimness for your gun. Hideous to lie so close to a man who snored, and
+    who'd deprived you of your 44 Marlin. Although it meant life, the Boy
+    grudged the mere animal heat that he gave and that he took. Full of
+    grudging, he dropped asleep. But the waking spirit followed him into
+    his dreams. An ugly picture painted itself upon the dark, and
+    struggling against the vision, he half awoke. With the first returning
+    consciousness came the oppression of the yoke, the impulse to match the
+    mental alienation with that of the body&mdash;strong need to move away.
+</p>
+<p>
+    You can't move away in a sleeping-bag.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In a city you may be alone, free.
+</p>
+<p>
+    On the trail, you walk in bonds with your yoke-fellow, make your bed
+    with him, with him rise up, and with him face the lash the livelong
+    day.
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    "Well," sighed the Colonel, after toiling onward for a couple of hours
+    the next morning, "this is the worst yet."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But by the middle of the afternoon, "What did I say? Why, this
+    morning&mdash;<i>everything</i> up till now has been child's play." He kept
+    looking at the Boy to see if he could read any sign of halt in the
+    tense, scarred face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Certainly the wind was worse, the going was worse. The sled kept
+    breaking through and sinking to the level of the load. There it went!
+    in again. They tugged and hauled, and only dragged the lashing loose,
+    while the sled seemed soldered to the hard-packed middle of the drift.
+    As they reloaded, the thermometer came to light. The Colonel threw it
+    out, with never a word. They had no clothes now but what they stood in,
+    and only one thing on the sled they could have lived without&mdash;their
+    money, a packet of trading stores. But they had thrown away more than
+    they knew. Day by day, not flannels and boots alone, not merely extra
+    kettle, thermometer and gun went overboard, but some grace of courtesy,
+    some decency of life had been left behind.
+</p>
+<p>
+    About three o'clock of this same day, dim with snow, and dizzy in a
+    hurricane of wind, "We can't go on like this," said the Boy suddenly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Wish I knew the way we <i>could</i> go on," returned the Colonel, stopping
+    with an air of utter helplessness, and forcing his rigid hands into his
+    pockets. The Boy looked at him. The man of dignity and resource, who
+    had been the boss of the Big Chimney Camp&mdash;what had become of him? Here
+    was only a big, slouching creature, with ragged beard, smoke-blackened
+    countenance, and eyes that wept continually.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come on," said his equally ruffianly-looking pardner, "we'll both go
+    ahead."
+</p>
+<p>
+    So they abandoned their sled for awhile, and when they had forged a
+    way, came back, and one pulling, the other pushing, lifting, guiding,
+    between them, with infinite pains they got their burden to the end of
+    the beaten track, left it, and went ahead again&mdash;travelling three miles
+    to make one.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's the matter now?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy was too tired to turn his head round and look back, but he knew
+    that the other man wasn't doing his share. He remembered that other
+    time when the Colonel had fallen behind. It seemed years ago, and even
+    further away was the vague recollection of how he'd cared. How horribly
+    frightened he'd been! Wasn't he frightened now? No. It was only a dull
+    curiosity that turned him round at last to see what it was that made
+    the Colonel peg out this time. He was always peggin' out. Yes, there he
+    was, stoppin' to stroke himself. Trail-man? An old woman! Fit only for
+    the chimney-corner. And even when they went on again he kept saying to
+    himself as he bent to the galling strain, "An old woman&mdash;just an old
+    woman!" till he made a refrain of the words, and in the level places
+    marched to the tune. After that, whatever else his vague thought went
+    off upon, it came back to "An old woman&mdash;just an old woman!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was at a bad place towards the end of that forced march that the
+    Colonel, instead of lifting the back of the sled, bore hard on the
+    handle-bar. With a vicious sound it snapped. The Boy turned heavily at
+    the noise. When he saw the Colonel standing, dazed, with the splintered
+    bar in his hand, his dull eyes flashed. With sudden vigour he ran back
+    to see the extent of the damage.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, it's pretty discouragin'," says the Colonel very low.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy gritted his teeth with suppressed rage. It was only a chance
+    that it hadn't happened when he himself was behind, but he couldn't see
+    that. No; it was the Colonel's bungling&mdash;tryin' to spare himself;
+    leanin' on the bar instead o' liftin' the sled, as he, the Boy, would
+    have done.
+</p>
+<p>
+    With stiff hands they tried to improvise a makeshift with a stick of
+    birch and some string.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't know what you think," says the Colonel presently, "but I call
+    this a desperate business we've undertaken."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy didn't trust himself to call it anything. With a bungled job
+    they went lamely on. The loose snow was whirling about so, it was
+    impossible to say whether it was still falling, or only
+    hurricane-driven.
+</p>
+<p>
+    To the Colonel's great indignation it was later than usual before they
+    camped.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Not a word was spoken by either till they had finished their first
+    meal, and the Colonel had melted a frying-pan full of snow preparatory
+    to the second. He took up the rice-bag, held it by the top, and ran his
+    mittened hand down the gathered sack till he had outlined the contents
+    at the bottom.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Lord! That's all there is."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The boy only blinked his half-shut eyes. The change in him, from
+    talkativeness to utter silence, had grown horribly oppressive to the
+    Colonel. He often felt he'd like to shake him till he shook some words
+    out. "I told you days ago," he went on, "that we ought to go on
+    rations."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Silence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But no! you knew so much better."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy shut his eyes, and suddenly, like one struggling against sleep
+    or swooning, he roused himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I thought I knew the more we took off the damn sled the lighter it'd
+    be. 'Tisn't so."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And we didn't either of us think we'd come down from eighteen miles a
+    day to six," returned the Colonel, a little mollified by any sort of
+    answer. "I don't believe we're going to put this job through."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Now this was treason.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Any trail-man may think that twenty times a day, but no one ought to
+    say it. The Boy set his teeth, and his eyes closed. The whole thing was
+    suddenly harder&mdash;doubt of the issue had been born into the world. But
+    he opened his eyes again. The Colonel had carefully poured some of the
+    rice into the smoky water of the pan. What was the fool doing? Such a
+    little left, and making a second supper?
+</p>
+<p>
+    Only that morning the Boy had gone a long way when mentally he called
+    the boss of the Big Chimney Camp "an old woman." By night he was saying
+    in his heart, "The Colonel's a fool." His pardner caught the look that
+    matched the thought.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No more second helpin's," he said in self-defence; "this'll freeze
+    into cakes for luncheon."
+</p>
+<p>
+    No answer. No implied apology for that look. In the tone his pardner
+    had come to dread the Colonel began: "If we don't strike a settlement
+    to-morrow&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't <i>talk!"</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy's tired arm fell on the handle of the frying-pan. Over it
+    Went&mdash;rice, water, and all in the fire. The culprit sprang up
+    speechless with dismay, enraged at the loss of the food he was hungry
+    for&mdash;enraged at "the fool fry-pan"&mdash;enraged at the fool Colonel for
+    balancing it so badly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A column of steam and smoke rose into the frosty air between the two
+    men. As it cleared away a little the Boy could see the Colonel's
+    bloodshot eyes. The expression was ill to meet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When they crouched down again, with the damped-out fire between them, a
+    sense of utter loneliness fell upon each man's heart.
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    The next morning, when they came to digging the sled out of the last
+    night's snow-drift, the Boy found to his horror that he was
+    weaker&mdash;yes, a good deal. As they went on he kept stumbling. The
+    Colonel fell every now and then. Sometimes he would lie still before he
+    could pull himself on his legs again.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In these hours they saw nothing of the grim and splendid waste; nothing
+    of the ranks of snow-laden trees; nothing of sun course or of stars,
+    only the half-yard of dazzling trail in front of them, and
+    &mdash;clairvoyant&mdash;the little store of flour and bacon that seemed to
+    shrink in the pack while they dragged it on.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Apart from partial snow-blindness, which fell at intervals upon the
+    Colonel, the tiredness of the eyes was like a special sickness upon
+    them both. For many hours together they never raised their lids,
+    looking out through slits, cat-like, on the world.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They had not spoken to each other for many days&mdash;or was it only
+    hours?&mdash;when the Colonel, looking at the Boy, said:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You've got to have a face-guard. Those frostbites are eating in."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "'Xpect so."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You ought to stop it. Make a guard."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Out of a snow-ball, or chunk o' ice?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Cut a piece out o' the canvas o' the bag." But he didn't.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The big sores seemed such small matters beside the vast overshadowing
+    doubt, Shall we come out of this alive?&mdash;doubt never to be openly
+    admitted by him, but always knocking, knocking&mdash;&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You can't see your own face," the Colonel persisted.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "One piece o' luck, anyhow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The old habit of looking after the Boy died hard. The Colonel
+    hesitated. For the last time he would remonstrate. "I used to think
+    frost<i>bite</i> was a figure o' speech," said he, "but the teeth were set
+    in <i>your</i> face, sonny, and they've bitten deep; they'll leave awful
+    scars."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Battles do, I b'lieve." And it was with an effort that he remembered
+    there had been a time when they had been uncomfortable because they
+    hadn't washed their faces. Now, one man was content to let the very
+    skin go if he could keep the flesh on his face, and one was little
+    concerned even for that. Life&mdash;life! To push on and come out alive.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel had come to that point where he resented the Boy's staying
+    power, terrified at the indomitable young life in him. Yes, the Colonel
+    began to feel old, and to think with vague wrath of the insolence of
+    youth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Each man fell to considering what he would do, how he would manage if
+    he were alone. And there ceased to be any terror in the thought.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If it wasn't for him"&mdash;so and so; till in the gradual deadening of
+    judgment all the hardship was somehow your pardner's fault. Your nerves
+    made him responsible even for the snow and the wind. By-and-by he was
+    The Enemy. Not but what each had occasional moments of lucidity, and
+    drew back from the pit they were bending over. But the realisation
+    would fade. No longer did even the wiser of the two remember that this
+    is that same abyss out of which slowly, painfully, the race has
+    climbed. With the lessened power to keep from falling in, the terror of
+    it lessened. Many strange things grew natural. It was no longer
+    difficult or even shocking to conceive one's partner giving out and
+    falling by the way. Although playing about the thought, the one thing
+    that not even the Colonel was able actually to realise, was the
+    imminent probability of death for himself. Imagination always pictured
+    the other fellow down, one's self somehow forging ahead.
+</p>
+<p>
+    This obsession ended on the late afternoon when the Colonel broke
+    silence by saying suddenly:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We must camp; I'm done." He flung himself down under a bare birch, and
+    hid his face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy remonstrated, grew angry; then, with a huge effort at
+    self-control, pointed out that since it had stopped snowing this was
+    the very moment to go on.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, you can see the sun. Three of 'em! Look, Colonel!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Arctic meteorological phenomena had long since ceased to interest
+    the Kentuckian. Parhelia were less to him than covered eyes, and the
+    perilous peace of the snow. It seemed a long time before he sat up, and
+    began to beat the stiffness out of his hands against his breast. But
+    when he spoke, it was only to say:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I mean to camp."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "For how long?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Till a team comes by&mdash;or something."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy got up abruptly, slipped on his snow-shoes, and went round the
+    shoulder of the hill, and up on to the promontory, to get out of
+    earshot of that voice, and determine which of the two ice-roads,
+    stretching out before them, was main channel and which was tributary.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He found on the height only a cutting wind, and little enlightenment as
+    to the true course. North and east all nimbus still. A brace of
+    sun-dogs following the pale God of Day across the narrow field of
+    primrose that bordered the dun-coloured west. There would be more snow
+    to-morrow, and meanwhile the wind was rising again. Yes, sir, it was a
+    mean outlook.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As he took Mac's aneroid barometer out of his pocket, a sudden gust cut
+    across his raw and bleeding cheek. He turned abruptly; the barometer
+    slipped out of his numb fingers. He made a lunge to recover it,
+    clutched the air, and, sliding suddenly forward, over he went, flying
+    headlong down the steep escarpment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He struck a jutting rock, only half snowed under, that broke the sheer
+    face of the promontory, and he bounded once like a rubber ball, struck
+    a second time, caught desperately at a solitary clump of ice-sheathed
+    alders, crashed through the snow-crust just below them, and was held
+    there like a mudlark in its cliff nest, halfway between bluff and
+    river.
+</p>
+<p>
+    His last clear thought had been an intense anxiety about his snow-shoes
+    as they sailed away, two liberated kites, but as he went on falling,
+    clutching at the air&mdash;falling&mdash;and felt the alder twigs snap under his
+    hands, he said to himself, "This is death," but calmly, as if it were a
+    small matter compared to losing one's snow-shoes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was only when he landed in the snow, that he was conscious of any of
+    the supposed natural excitement of a man meeting a violent end. It was
+    then, before he even got his breath back, that he began to struggle
+    frantically to get a foothold; but he only broke down more of the thin
+    ice-wall that kept him from the sheer drop to the river, sixty or
+    seventy feet below. He lay quite still. Would the Colonel come after
+    him? If he did come, would he risk his life to&mdash;&mdash;If he did risk his
+    life, was it any use to try to&mdash;&mdash;He craned his neck and looked up,
+    blinked, shut his eyes, and lay back in the snow with a sound of
+    far-off singing in his head. "Any use?" No, sir; it just about wasn't.
+    That bluff face would be easier to climb up than to climb down, and
+    either was impossible.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then it was, that a great tide of longing swept over him&mdash;a flood of
+    passionate desire for more of this doubtful blessing, life. All the
+    bitter hardship&mdash;why, how sweet it was, after all, to battle and to
+    overcome! It was only this lying helpless, trapped, that was evil. The
+    endless Trail? Why, it was only the coming to the end that a man
+    minded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Suddenly the beauty that for days had been veiled shone out. Nothing in
+    all the earth was glorious with the glory of the terrible white North.
+    And he had only just been wakened to it. Here, now, lying in his grave,
+    had come this special revelation of the rapture of living, and the
+    splendour of the visible universe.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The sky over his head&mdash;he had called it "a mean outlook," and turned
+    away. It was the same sky that bent over him now with a tenderness that
+    made him lift his cramped arms with tears, as a sick child might to its
+    mother. The haloed sun with his attendant dogs&mdash;how little the wonder
+    had touched him! Never had he seen them so dim and sad as to-night ...
+    saying good-bye to one who loved the sun.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The great frozen road out of sight below, road that came winding,
+    winding down out of the Arctic Circle&mdash;what other highway so majestic,
+    mysterious?&mdash;shining and beckoning on. An earthly Milky Way, leading to
+    the golden paradise he had been travelling towards since summer.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And he was to go no further?&mdash;not till the June rains and thaws and
+    winds and floods should carry him back, as he had foreseen, far below
+    there at Holy Cross.
+</p>
+<p>
+    With a sharp contraction of the heart he shut his eyes again. When he
+    opened them they rested on the alder-twig, a couple of yards above,
+    holding out mocking finger-tips, and he turned his head in the snow
+    till again he could see the mock-suns looking down.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "As well try to reach the sky as reach the alder-bush. What did that
+    mean? That he was really going to lie there till he died? <i>He</i> die, and
+    the Colonel and everybody else go on living?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He half rose on his elbow at the monstrous absurdity of the idea. "I
+    won't die!" he said out loud.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Crack, crack! warned the ice-crust between him and that long fall to
+    the river. With horror at his heart he shrank away and hugged the face
+    of the precipice. Presently he put out his hand and broke the ice-crust
+    above. With mittened fists and palms he pounded firm a little ledge of
+    snow. Reaching out further, he broke the crust obliquely just above,
+    and having packed the snow as well as he could immediately about, and
+    moving lengthwise with an infinite caution, he crawled up the few
+    inches to the narrow ledge, balancing his stiff body with a nicety
+    possible only to acrobat or sleep-walker.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was in no normal state of ordinary waking senses that the work went
+    on&mdash;with never a downward look, nor even up, eyes riveted to the patch
+    of snow on which the mittened hands fell as steady and untrembling as
+    steel hammers. In the seconds of actual consciousness of his situation
+    that twice visited him, he crouched on the ledge with closed eyes, in
+    the clutch of an overmastering horror, absolutely still, like a bird in
+    the talons of a hawk. Each time when he opened his eyes he would stare
+    at the snow-ledge till hypnotised into disregard of danger, balance his
+    slight body, lift one hand, and go on pounding firm another shallow
+    step. When he reached the alder-bush his heart gave a great leap of
+    triumph. Then, for the first time since starting, he looked up. His
+    heart fell down. It seemed farther than ever, and the light waning.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the twilight would be long, he told himself, and in that other,
+    beneficent inner twilight he worked on, packing the snow, and crawling
+    gingerly up the perilous stair a half-inch at a time.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At last he was on the jutting rock, and could stand secure. But here he
+    could see that the top of the bluff really did shelve over. To think so
+    is so common an illusion to the climber that the Boy had heartened
+    himself by saying, when he got there he would find it like the rest,
+    horribly steep, but not impossible. Well, it <i>was</i> impossible. After
+    all his labour, he was no better off on the rock than in the snow-hole
+    below the alder, down there where he dared not look. The sun and his
+    dogs had travelled down, down. They touched the horizon while he sat
+    there; they slipped below the world's wide rim. He said in his heart,
+    "I'm freezing to death." Unexpectedly to himself his despair found
+    voice:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Colonel!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hello!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He started violently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Had he really heard that, or was imagination playing tricks with echo?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Colonel!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where the devil&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    A man's head appeared out of the sky.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Got the rope?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Words indistinguishable floated down&mdash;the head withdrawn&mdash;silence. The
+    Boy waited a very long time, but he stamped his feet, and kept his
+    blood in motion. The light was very grey when the head showed again at
+    the sky-line. He couldn't hear what was shouted down, and it occurred
+    to him, even in his huge predicament, that the Colonel was "giving him
+    hot air" as usual, instead of a life-line. Down the rope came, nearer,
+    and stopped about fifteen feet over his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Got the axe? Let her down."
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    The night was bright with moonlight when the Boy stood again on the top
+    of the bluff.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Humph!" says the Colonel, with agreeable anticipation; "you'll be glad
+    to camp for a few days after this, I reckon."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Reckon I won't."
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    In their colossal fatigue they slept the clock round; their watches run
+    down, their sense of the very date blurred. Since the Colonel had made
+    the last laconic entry in the journal&mdash;was it three days or two&mdash;or
+    twenty?
+</p>
+<p>
+    In spite of a sensation as of many broken bones, the Boy put on the
+    Colonel's snow-shoes, and went off looking along the foot of the cliff
+    for his own. No luck, but he brought back some birch-bark and a handful
+    of willow-withes, and set about making a rude substitute.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Before they had despatched breakfast the great red moon arose, so it
+    was not morning, but evening. So much the better. The crust would be
+    firmer. The moon was full; it was bright enough to travel, and travel
+    they must.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No!" said the Colonel, with a touch of his old pompous authority,
+    "we'll wait awhile."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy simply pointed to the flour-bag. There wasn't a good handful
+    left.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They ate supper, studiously avoiding each other's eyes. In the
+    background of the Boy's mind: "He saved my life, but he ran no risk....
+    And I saved his. We're quits." In the Colonel's, vague, insistent,
+    stirred the thought, "I might have left him there to rot, half-way up
+    the precipice. Oh, he'd go! <i>And he'd take the sled</i>! No!" His vanished
+    strength flowed back upon a tide of rage. Only one sleeping-bag, one
+    kettle, one axe, one pair of snow-shoes ... <i>one gun</i>! No, by the
+    living Lord! not while I have a gun. Where's my gun? He looked about
+    guiltily, under his lowered lids. What? No! Yes! It was gone! Who
+    packed at the last camp? Why, he&mdash;himself, and he'd left it behind.
+    "Then it was because I didn't see it; the Boy took care I shouldn't see
+    it! Very likely he buried it so that I shouldn't see it! He&mdash;yes&mdash;if I
+    refuse to go on, he&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    And the Boy, seeing without looking, taking in every move, every shade
+    in the mood of the broken-spirited man, ready to die here, like a dog,
+    in the snow, instead of pressing on as long as he could crawl&mdash;the Boy,
+    in a fever of silent rage, called him that "meanest word in the
+    language&mdash;a quitter." And as, surreptitiously, he took in the vast
+    discouragement of the older man, there was nothing in the Boy's changed
+    heart to say, "Poor fellow! if he can't go on, I'll stay and die with
+    him"; but only, "He's <i>got</i> to go on! ... and if he refuses ...
+    well&mdash;&mdash;" He felt about in his deadened brain, and the best he could
+    bring forth was: "I won't leave him&mdash;<i>yet</i>."
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    A mighty river-jam had forced them up on the low range of hills. It was
+    about midnight to judge by the moon&mdash;clear of snow and the wind down.
+    The Boy straightened up at a curious sight just below them. Something
+    black in the moonlight. The Colonel paused, looked down, and passed his
+    hand over his eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy had seen the thing first, and had said to himself, "Looks like
+    a sled, but it's a vision. It's come to seeing things now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    When he saw the Colonel stop and stare, he threw down his rope and
+    began to laugh, for there below were the blackened remains of a big
+    fire, silhouetted sharply on the snow.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Looks like we've come to a camp, Boss!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He hadn't called the Colonel by the old nickname for many a day. He
+    stood there laughing in an idiotic kind of way, wrapping his stiff
+    hands in his parki, Indian fashion, and looking down to the level of
+    the ancient river terrace, where the weather-stained old Indian sled
+    was sharply etched on the moonlit whiteness.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Just a sled lying in the moonlight. But the change that can be wrought
+    in a man's heart upon sight of a human sign! it may be idle to speak of
+    that to any but those who have travelled the desolate ways of the
+    North.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Side by side the two went down the slope, slid and slipped and couldn't
+    stop themselves, till they were below the landmark. Looking up, they
+    saw that a piece of soiled canvas or a skin, held down with a
+    drift-log, fell from under the sled, portière-wise from the top of the
+    terrace, straight down to the sheltered level, where the camp fire had
+    been. Coming closer, they saw the curtain was not canvas, but dressed
+    deerskin.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Indians!" said the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But with the rubbing out of other distinctions this, too, was curiously
+    faint. Just so there were human beings it seemed enough. Within four
+    feet of the deerskin door the Colonel stopped, shot through by a sharp
+    misgiving. What was behind? A living man's camp, or a dead man's tomb?
+    Succour, or some stark picture of defeat, and of their own oncoming
+    doom?
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel stood stock-still waiting for the Boy. For the first time
+    in many days even he hung back. He seemed to lack the courage to be the
+    one to extinguish hope by the mere drawing of a curtain from a
+    snow-drift's face. The Kentuckian pulled himself together and went
+    forward. He lifted his hand to the deerskin, but his fingers shook so
+    he couldn't take hold:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hello!" he called. No sound. Again: "Hello!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who's there?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The two outside turned and looked into each other's faces&mdash;but if you
+    want to know all the moment meant, you must travel the Winter Trail.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH15"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XIV
+</h2>
+<center>
+    KURILLA
+</center>
+<p class="ind">
+    "And I swear to you Athenians&mdash;by the dog I swear!&mdash;for I must tell you
+    the truth&mdash;&mdash;."&mdash;SOCRATES.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The voice that had asked the question belonged to one of two stranded
+    Klondykers, as it turned out, who had burrowed a hole in the snow and
+    faced it with drift-wood. They had plenty of provisions, enough to
+    spare, and meant to stay here till the steamers ran, for the younger of
+    the pair had frosted his feet and was crippled.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The last of their dogs had been frozen to death a few miles back on the
+    trail, and they had no idea, apparently, how near they were to that
+    "first Indian settlement this side of Kaltag" reached by the Colonel
+    and the Boy after two days of rest and one day of travel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    No one ever sailed more joyfully into the Bay of Naples, or saw with
+    keener rapture Constantinople's mosques and minarets arise, than did
+    these ice-armoured travellers, rounding the sharp bend in the river,
+    sight the huts and hear the dogs howl on the farther shore.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "First thing I do, sah, is to speculate in a dog-team," said the
+    Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Most of the bucks were gone off hunting, and most of the dogs were with
+    them. Only three left in the village&mdash;but they were wonderful fellows
+    those three! Where were they? Well, the old man you see before you,
+    "<i>me</i>&mdash;got two."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He led the way behind a little shack, a troop of children following,
+    and there were two wolf-dogs, not in the best condition, one reddish,
+    with a white face and white forelegs, the other grey with a black
+    splotch on his chest and a white one on his back.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How much?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Fiftee dolla."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And this one?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Fiftee dolla." As the Colonel hesitated, the old fellow added: "Bohf
+    eightee dolla."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, eightee for the two?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, where's the other?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hein?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The other&mdash;the third dog. Two are no good."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes. Yes," he said angrily, "heap good dog."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I'll give you eighty dollars for these" (the Ingalik, taking a
+    pipe out of his parki, held out one empty hand); "but who's got the
+    other?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    For answer, a head-shake, the outstretched hand, and the words,
+    "Eightee dolla&mdash;tabak&mdash;tea."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Wait," interrupted the Boy, turning to the group of children; "where's
+    the other dog?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nobody answered. The Boy pantomimed. "We want <i>three</i> dogs." He held up
+    as many fingers. "We got two&mdash;see?&mdash;must have one more." A lad of about
+    thirteen turned and began pointing with animation towards a slowly
+    approaching figure.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Peetka&mdash;him got."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The old man began to chatter angrily, and abuse the lad for introducing
+    a rival on the scene. The strangers hailed the new-comer.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How much is your dog?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Peetka stopped, considered, studied the scene immediately before him,
+    and then the distant prospect.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You got dog?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, how much?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sixty dolla."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>One</i> dog, sixty?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But this man says the price is eighty for two."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My dog&mdash;him Leader."
+</p>
+<p>
+    After some further conversation, "Where is your dog?" demanded the
+    Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The new-comer whistled and called. After some waiting, and
+    well-simulated anger on the part of the owner, along comes a dusky
+    Siwash, thin, but keen-looking, and none too mild-tempered.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The children all brightened and craned, as if a friend, or at least a
+    highly interesting member of the community, had appeared on the scene.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The Nigger's the best!" whispered the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Him bully," said the lad, and seemed about to pat him, but the Siwash
+    snarled softly, raising his lip and showing his Gleaming fangs. The lad
+    stepped back respectfully, but grinned, reiterating, "Bully dog."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I'll give you fifty for him," said the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sixty."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, all right, since he's a leader. Sixty."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The owner watched the dog as it walked round its master smelling the
+    snow, then turning up its pointed nose interrogatively and waving its
+    magnificent feathery tail. The oblique eyes, acute angle of his short
+    ears, the thick neck, broad chest, and heavy forelegs, gave an
+    impression of mingled alertness and strength you will not see surpassed
+    in any animal that walks the world. Jet-black, except for his grey
+    muzzle and broad chest, he looks at you with the face of his near
+    ancestor, the grizzled wolf. If on short acquaintance you offer any
+    familiarity, as the Colonel ventured to do, and he shows his double row
+    of murderous-looking fangs, the reminder of his fierce forefathers is
+    even more insistent. Indeed, to this day your Siwash of this sort will
+    have his moments of nostalgia, in which he turns back to his wild
+    kinsfolk, and mates again with the wolf.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the Leader looked at the Colonel with that indescribably horrid
+    smile, the owner's approval of the proud beast seemed to overcome his
+    avarice.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me no sell," he decided abruptly, and walked off in lordly fashion
+    with his dusky companion at his side, the Leader curling his feathery
+    tail arc-like over his back, and walking with an air princes might
+    envy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel stood staring. Vainly the Boy called, "Come back. Look
+    here! Hi!" Neither Siwash nor Ingalik took the smallest notice. The Boy
+    went after them, eliciting only airs of surly indifference and repeated
+    "Me no sell." It was a bitter disappointment, especially to the Boy. He
+    liked the looks of that Nigger dog. When, plunged in gloom, he returned
+    to the group about the Colonel, he found his pardner asking about
+    "feed." No, the old man hadn't enough fish to spare even a few days'
+    supply. Would anybody here sell fish? No, he didn't think so. All the
+    men who had teams were gone to the hills for caribou; there was nobody
+    to send to the Summer Caches. He held out his hand again for the first
+    instalment of the "eightee dolla," in kind, that he might put it in his
+    pipe.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But dogs are no good to us without something to feed 'em."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Ingalik looked round as one seeking counsel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Get fish tomalla."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, sir. To-day's the only day in my calendar. No buy dogs till we get
+    fish."
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the negotiations fell through the Indian took the failure far more
+    philosophically than the white men, as was natural. The old fellow
+    could quite well get on without "eightee dolla"&mdash;could even get on
+    without the tobacco, tea, sugar, and matches represented by that sum,
+    but the travellers could not without dogs get to Minóok. It had been
+    very well to feel set up because they had done the thing that everybody
+    said was impossible. It had been a costly victory. Yes, it had come
+    high. "And, after all, if we don't get dogs we're beaten."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, beaten be blowed! We'll toddle along somehow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, we'll toddle along <i>if</i> we get dogs."
+</p>
+<p>
+    And the Boy knew the Colonel was right.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They inquired about Kaltag.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I reckon we'd better push ahead while we can," said the Colonel. So
+    they left the camp that same evening intending to "travel with the
+    moon." The settlement was barely out of sight when they met a squaw
+    dragging a sled-load of salmon. Here was luck! "And now we'll go back
+    and get those two dogs."
+</p>
+<p>
+    As it was late, and trading with the natives, even for a fish, was a
+    matter of much time and patience, they decided not to hurry the dog
+    deal. It was bound to take a good part of the evening, at any rate.
+    Well, another night's resting up was welcome enough.
+</p>
+<p>
+    While the Colonel was re-establishing himself in the best cabin, the
+    Boy cached the sled and then went prowling about. As he fully intended,
+    he fell in with the Leader&mdash;that "bully Nigger dog." His master not in
+    sight&mdash;nobody but some dirty children and the stranger there to see how
+    the Red Dog, in a moment of aberration, dared offer insolence to the
+    Leader. It all happened through the Boy's producing a fish, and
+    presenting it on bended knee at a respectful distance. The Leader
+    bestowed a contemptuous stare upon the stranger and pointedly turned
+    his back. The Red Dog came "loping" across the snow. As he made for the
+    fish the Leader quietly headed him off, pointed his sharp ears, and
+    just looked the other fellow out of countenance. Red said things under
+    his breath as he turned away. The more he thought the situation over
+    the more he felt himself outraged. He looked round over his shoulder.
+    There they still were, the stranger holding out the fish, the Leader
+    turning his back on it, but telegraphing Red at the same time <i>not to
+    dare!</i> It was more than dog-flesh could bear; Red bounded back,
+    exploding in snarls. No sound out of the Leader. Whether this unnatural
+    calm misled Red, he came up closer, braced his forelegs, and thrust his
+    tawny muzzle almost into the other dog's face, drew back his lips from
+    all those shining wicked teeth, and uttered a muffled hiss.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Well, it was magnificently done, and it certainly looked as if the
+    Leader was going to have a troubled evening. But he didn't seem to
+    think so. He "fixed" the Red Dog as one knowing the power of the
+    master's eye to quell. Red's reply, unimaginably bold, was, as the Boy
+    described it to the Colonel, "to give the other fella the curse." The
+    Boy was proud of Red's pluck&mdash;already looking upon him as his own&mdash;but
+    he jumped up from his ingratiating attitude, still grasping the dried
+    fish. It would be a shame if that Leader got chewed up! And there was
+    Red, every tooth bared, gasping for gore, and with each passing second
+    seeming to throw a deeper damnation into his threat, and to brace
+    himself more firmly for the hurling of the final doom.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At that instant, the stranger breathing quick and hard, the elder
+    children leaning forward, some of the younger drawing back in
+    terror&mdash;if you'll believe it, the Leader blinked in a bored way, and
+    sat down on the snow. A question only of last moments now, poor brute!
+    and the bystanders held their breath. But no! Red, to be sure, broke
+    into the most awful demonstrations, and nearly burst himself with fury;
+    but he backed away, as though the spectacle offered by the Leader were
+    too disgusting for a decent dog to look at. He went behind the shack
+    and told the Spotty One. In no time they were back, approaching the Boy
+    and the fish discreetly from behind. Such mean tactics roused the
+    Leader's ire. He got up and flew at them. They made it hot for him, but
+    still the Leader seemed to be doing pretty well for himself, when the
+    old Ingalik (whom the Boy had sent a child to summon) hobbled up with a
+    raw-hide whip, and laid it on with a practised hand, separating the
+    combatants, kicking them impartially all round, and speaking injurious
+    words.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Are your two hurt?" inquired the future owner anxiously.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The old fellow shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Fur thick," was the reassuring answer; and once more the Boy realised
+    that these canine encounters, though frequently ending in death, often
+    look and sound much more awful than they are.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As the Leader feigned to be going home, he made a dash in passing at
+    the stranger's fish. It was held tight, and the pirate got off with
+    only a fragment. Leader gave one swallow and looked back to see how the
+    theft was being taken. That surprising stranger simply stood there
+    laughing, and holding out the rest of a fine fat fish! Leader
+    considered a moment, looked the alien up and down, came back, all on
+    guard for sudden rushes, sly kicks, and thwackings, to pay him out. But
+    nothing of the kind. The Nigger dog said as plain as speech could make
+    it:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You cheechalko person, you look as if you're actually offering me that
+    fish in good faith. But I'd be a fool to think so."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The stranger spoke low and quietly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They talked for some time.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The owner of the two had shuffled off home again, with Spotty and Red
+    at his heels.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Leader came quite near, looking almost docile; but he snapped
+    suddenly at the fish with an ugly gleam of eye and fang. The Boy nearly
+    made the fatal mistake of jumping, but he controlled the impulse, and
+    merely held tight to what was left of the salmon. He stood quite still,
+    offering it with fair words. The Leader walked all round him, and
+    seemed with difficulty to recover from his surprise. The Boy felt that
+    they were just coming to an understanding, when up hurries Peetka,
+    suspicious and out of sorts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    <i>"My dog!"</i> he shouted. "No sell white man my dog. Huh! ho&mdash;<i>oh</i> no!"
+    He kicked the Leader viciously, and drove him home, abusing him all the
+    way. The wonder was that the wolfish creature didn't fly at his
+    master's throat and finish him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Certainly the stranger's sympathies were all with the four-legged one
+    of the two brutes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "&mdash;something about the Leader&mdash;" the Boy said sadly, telling the
+    Colonel what had happened. "Well, sir, I'd give a hundred dollars to
+    own that dog."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So would I," was the dry rejoinder, "if I were a millionaire like
+    you."
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    After supper, their host, who had been sent out to bring in the owner
+    of Red and Spotty, came back saying, "He come. All come. Me tell&mdash;you
+    from below Holy Cross!" He laughed and shook his head in a
+    well-pantomimed incredulity, representing popular opinion outside. Some
+    of the bucks, he added, who had not gone far, had got back with small
+    game.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And dogs?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No. Dogs in the mountains. Hunt moose&mdash;caribou."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The old Ingalik came in, followed by others. "Some" of the bucks? There
+    seemed no end to the throng.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Opposite the white men the Indians sat in a semicircle, with the sole
+    intent, you might think, of staring all night at the strangers. Yet
+    they had brought in Arctic hares and grouse, and even a haunch of
+    venison. But they laid these things on the floor beside them, and sat
+    with grave unbroken silence till the strangers should declare
+    themselves. They had also brought, or permitted to follow, not only
+    their wives and daughters, but their children, big and little.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Behind the semicircle of men, three or four deep, were ranged the ranks
+    of youth&mdash;boys and girls from six to fourteen&mdash;standing as silent as
+    their elders, but eager, watchful, carrying king salmon, dried
+    deer-meat, boot-soles, thongs for snow-shoes, rabbits, grouse. A little
+    fellow of ten or eleven had brought in the Red Dog, and was trying to
+    reconcile him to his close quarters. The owner of Red and Spotty sat
+    with empty hands at the semicircle's farthest end. But he was the
+    capitalist of the village, and held himself worthily, yet not quite
+    with the high and mighty unconcern of the owner of the Leader.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Peetka came in late, bringing in the Nigger dog against the Nigger
+    dog's will, just to tantalise the white men with the sight of something
+    they couldn't buy from the poor Indian. Everybody made way for Peetka
+    and his dog, except the other dog. Several people had to go to the
+    assistance of the little boy to help him to hold Red.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Just as well, perhaps," said the Colonel, "that we aren't likely to
+    get all three."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, if they worked together they'd be all right," answered the Boy.
+    "I've noticed that before." But the Leader, meanwhile, was flatly
+    refusing to stay in the same room with Red. He howled and snapped and
+    raged. So poor Red was turned out, and the little boy mourned loudly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Behind the children, a row of squaws against the wall, with and without
+    babies strapped at their backs. Occasionally a young girl would push
+    aside those in front of her, craning and staring to take in the
+    astonishing spectacle of the two white men who had come so far without
+    dogs&mdash;pulling a hand-sled a greater distance than any Indian had ever
+    done&mdash;if they could be believed!
+</p>
+<p>
+    Anyhow, these men with their sack of tea and magnificent bundle of
+    matches, above all with their tobacco&mdash;they could buy out the
+    town&mdash;everything except Peetka's dog.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel and the Boy opened the ball by renewing their joint offer
+    of eighty dollars for Red and Spotty. Although this had been the old
+    Ingalik's own price, it was discussed fully an hour by all present
+    before the matter could be considered finally settled, even then the
+    Colonel knew it was safest not to pay till just upon leaving. But he
+    made a little present of tobacco in token of satisfactory arrangement.
+    The old man's hands trembled excitedly as he pulled out his pipe and
+    filled it. The bucks round him, and even a couple of the women at the
+    back, begged him for some. He seemed to say, "Do your own deal; the
+    strangers have plenty more."
+</p>
+<p>
+    By-and-by, in spite of the limited English of the community, certain
+    facts stood out: that Peetka held the white man in avowed detestation,
+    that he was the leading spirit of the place, that they had all been
+    suffering from a tobacco famine, and that much might be done by a
+    judicious use of Black Jack and Long Green. The Colonel set forth the
+    magnificent generosity of which he would be capable, could he secure a
+    good Leader. But Peetka, although he looked at his empty pipe with
+    bitterness, shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Everybody in the village would profit, the Colonel went on; everybody
+    should have a present if&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    Peetka interrupted with a snarl, and flung out low words of
+    contemptuous refusal.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Leader waked from a brief nap cramped and uneasy, and began to howl
+    in sympathy. His master stood up, the better to deliver a brutal kick.
+    This seemed to help the Leader to put up with cramp and confinement,
+    just as one great discomfort will help his betters to forget several
+    little ones. But the Boy had risen with angry eyes. Very well, he said
+    impulsively; if he and his pardner couldn't get a third dog (two were
+    very little good) they would not stock fresh meat here. In vain the
+    Colonel whispered admonition. No, sir, they would wait till they got to
+    the next village.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Belly far," said a young hunter, placing ostentatiously in front his
+    brace of grouse.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We're used to going belly far. Take all your game away, and go home."
+</p>
+<p>
+    A sorrowful silence fell upon the room. They sat for some time like
+    that, no one so much as moving, till a voice said, "We want tobacco,"
+    and a general murmur of assent arose. Peetka roused himself, pulled out
+    of his shirt a concave stone and a little woody-looking knot. The Boy
+    leaned forward to see what it was. A piece of dried fungus&mdash;the kind
+    you sometimes see on the birches up here. Peetka was hammering a
+    fragment of it into powder, with his heavy clasp-knife, on the concave
+    stone. He swept the particles into his pipe and applied to one of the
+    fish-selling women for a match, lit up, and lounged back against the
+    Leader, smiling disagreeably at the strangers. A little laugh at their
+    expense went round the room. Oh, it wasn't easy to get ahead of Peetka!
+    But even if he chose to pretend that he didn't want cheechalko tobacco,
+    it was very serious&mdash;it was desperate&mdash;to see all that Black Jack going
+    on to the next village. Several of the hitherto silent bucks
+    remonstrated with Peetka&mdash;even one of the women dared raise her voice.
+    She had not been able to go for fish: where was <i>her</i> tobacco and tea?
+</p>
+<p>
+    Peetka burst into voluble defence of his position. Casting occasional
+    looks of disdain upon the strangers, he addressed most of his remarks
+    to the owner of Red and Spotty. Although the Colonel could not
+    understand a word, he saw the moment approaching when that person would
+    go back on his bargain. With uncommon pleasure he could have throttled
+    Peetka.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy, to create a diversion, had begun talking to a young hunter in
+    the front row about "the Long Trail," and, seeing that several others
+    craned and listened, he spoke louder, more slowly, dropping out all
+    unnecessary or unusual words. Very soon he had gained an audience and
+    Peetka had lost one. As the stranger went on describing their
+    experiences the whole room listened with an attentiveness that would
+    have been flattering had it been less strongly dashed with unbelief.
+    From beyond Anvik they had come? Like that&mdash;with no dogs? What! From
+    below Koserefsky? Not really? Peetka grunted and shook his head. Did
+    they think the Ingaliks were children? Without dogs that journey was
+    impossible. Low whispers and gruff exclamations filled the room. White
+    men were great liars. They pretended that in their country the bacon
+    had legs, and could run about, and one had been heard to say he had
+    travelled in a thing like a steamboat, only it could go without water
+    under it&mdash;ran over the dry land on strips of iron&mdash;ran quicker than any
+    steamer! Oh, they were awful liars. But these two, who pretended they'd
+    dragged a sled all the way from Holy Cross, they were the biggest liars
+    of all. Just let them tell that yarn to Unookuk. They all laughed at
+    this, and the name ran round the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who is Unookuk?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Him guide."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Him know."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where is him?" asked the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Him sick."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But there was whispering and consultation. This was evidently a case
+    for the expert. Two boys ran out, and the native talk went on,
+    unintelligible save for the fact that it centred round Unookuk. In a
+    few minutes the boys came back with a tall, fine-looking native, about
+    sixty years old, walking lame, and leaning on a stick. The semicircle
+    opened to admit him. He limped over to the strangers, and stood looking
+    at them gravely, modestly, but with careful scrutiny.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy held out his hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How do you do?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How do you do?" echoed the new-comer, and he also shook hands with the
+    Colonel before he sat down.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Are you Unookuk?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes. How far you come?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Peetka said something rude, before the strangers had time to answer,
+    and all the room went into titters. But Unookuk listened with dignity
+    while the Colonel repeated briefly the story already told. Plainly it
+    stumped Unookuk.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come from Anvik?" he repeated.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes; stayed with Mr. Benham."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, Benham!" The trader's familiar name ran round the room with
+    obvious effect. "It is good to have A. C. Agent for friend," said
+    Unookuk guardedly. "Everybody know Benham."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He is not A. C. Agent much longer," volunteered the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That so?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No; he will go 'on his own' after the new agent gets in this spring."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is true," answered Unookuk gravely, for the first time a little
+    impressed, for this news was not yet common property. Still, they could
+    have heard it from some passer with a dog-team. The Boy spoke of Holy
+    Cross, and Unookuk's grave unbelief was painted on every feature.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It was good you get to Holy Cross before the big storm," he said, with
+    a faint smile of tolerance for the white man's tall story. But Peetka
+    laughed aloud.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What good English you speak!" said the Boy, determined to make friends
+    with the most intelligent-appearing native he had seen.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me; I am Kurilla!" said Unookuk, with a quiet magnificence. Then,
+    seeing no electric recognition of the name, he added: "You savvy
+    Kurilla!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel with much regret admitted that he did not.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But I am Dall's guide&mdash;Kurilla."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, Dall's guide, are you," said the Boy, without a glimmer of who
+    Dall was, or for what, or to what, he was "guided." "Well, Kurilla,
+    we're pleased and proud to meet you," adding with some presence of
+    mind, "And how's Dall?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is long I have not hear. We both old now. I hurt my knee on the ice
+    when I come down from Nulato for caribou."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why do you have two names?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Unookuk, Nulato name. My father big Nulato Shamán. Him killed, mother
+    killed, everybody killed in Koyukuk massacre. They forget kill me. Me
+    kid. Russians find Unookuk in big wood. Russians give food. I stay with
+    Russians&mdash;them call Unookuk 'Kurilla.' Dall call Unookuk 'Kurilla.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Dall&mdash;Dall," said the Colonel to the Boy; "was that the name of the
+    explorer fella&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Fortunately the Boy was saved from need to answer.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "First white man go down Yukon to the sea," said Kurilla with pride.
+    "Me Dall's guide."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, wrote a book, didn't he? Name's familiar somehow," said the
+    Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kurilla bore him out.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mr. Dall great man. Thirty year he first come up here with Survey
+    people. Make big overland tel-ee-grab."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Of course. I've heard about that." The Colonel turned to the Boy. "It
+    was just before the Russians sold out. And when a lot of exploring and
+    surveying and pole-planting was done here and in Siberia, the Atlantic
+    cable was laid and knocked the overland scheme sky-high."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kurilla gravely verified these facts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And me, Dall's chief guide. Me with Dall when he make portage from
+    Unalaklik to Kaltag. He see the Yukon first time. He run down to be
+    first on the ice. Dall and the coast natives stare, like so"&mdash;Kurilla
+    made a wild-eyed, ludicrous face&mdash;"and they say: 'It is not a river&mdash;it
+    is another sea!'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No wonder. I hear it's ten miles wide up by the flats, and even a
+    little below where we wintered, at Ikogimeut, it's four miles across
+    from bank to bank."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kurilla looked at the Colonel with dignified reproach. Why did he go on
+    lying about his journey like that to an expert?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Even at Holy Cross&mdash;" the Boy began, but Kurilla struck in:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When you there?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, about three weeks ago."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Peetka made remarks in Ingalik.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Father MacManus, him all right?" asked Kurilla, politely cloaking his
+    cross-examination.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "MacManus? Do you mean Wills, or the Superior, Father Brachet?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh yes! MacManus at Tanana." He spoke as though inadvertently he had
+    confused the names. As the strangers gave him the winter's news from
+    Holy Cross, his wonder and astonishment grew.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Presently, "Do you know my friend Nicholas of Pymeut?" asked the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kurilla took his empty pipe out of his mouth and smiled in broad
+    surprise. "Nicholas!" repeated several others. It was plain the Pymeut
+    pilot enjoyed a wide repute.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy spoke of the famine and Ol' Chief's illness.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is true," said Unookuk gravely, and turning, he added something in
+    Ingalik to the company. Peetka answered back as surly as ever. But the
+    Boy went on, telling how the Shaman had cured Ol' Chief, and that
+    turned out to be a surprisingly popular story. Peetka wouldn't
+    interrupt it, even to curse the Leader for getting up and stretching
+    himself. When the dog&mdash;feeling that for some reason discipline was
+    relaxed&mdash;dared to leave his cramped quarters, and come out into the
+    little open space between the white men and the close-packed assembly,
+    the Boy forced himself to go straight on with his story as if he had
+    not observed the liberty the Leader was taking. When, after standing
+    there an instant, the dog came over and threw himself down at the
+    stranger's feet as if publicly adopting him, the white story-teller
+    dared not meet Peetka's eye. He was privately most uneasy at the Nigger
+    dog's tactless move, and he hurried on about how Brother Paul caught
+    the Shamán, and about the Penitential Journey&mdash;told how, long before
+    that, early in the Fall, Nicholas had got lost, making the portage from
+    St. Michael's, and how the white camp had saved him from starvation;
+    how in turn the Pymeuts had pulled the speaker out of a blow-hole; what
+    tremendous friends the Pymeuts were with these particular, very good
+    sort of white men. Here he seemed to allow by implication for Peetka's
+    prejudice&mdash;there were two kinds of pale-face strangers&mdash;and on an
+    impulse he drew out Muckluck's medal. He would have them to know, so
+    highly were these present specimens of the doubtful race regarded by
+    the Pymeuts&mdash;such friends were they, that Nicholas' sister had given
+    him this for an offering to Yukon Inua, that the Great Spirit might
+    help them on their way. He owned himself wrong to have delayed this
+    sacrifice. He must to-morrow throw it into the first blow-hole he came
+    to&mdash;unless indeed... his eye caught Kurilla's. With the help of his
+    stick the old Guide pulled his big body up on his one stout leg,
+    hobbled nearer and gravely eyed Muckluck's offering as it swung to and
+    fro on its walrus-string over the Leader's head. The Boy, quite
+    conscious of some subtle change in the hitherto immobile face of the
+    Indian, laid the token in his hand. Standing there in the centre of the
+    semicircle between the assembly and the dog, Kurilla turned the Great
+    Katharine's medal over, examining it closely, every eye in the room
+    upon him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When he lifted his head there was a rustle of expectation and a craning
+    forward.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is the same." Kurilla spoke slowly like one half in a dream. "When
+    I go down river, thirty winter back, with the Great Dall, he try buy
+    this off Nicholas's mother. She wear it on string red Russian beads.
+    Oh, it is a thing to remember!" He nodded his grey head significantly,
+    but he went on with the bare evidence: "When <i>John J. Healy</i> make last
+    trip down this fall&mdash;Nicholas pilot you savvy&mdash;they let him take his
+    sister, Holy Cross to Pymeut. I see she wear this round neck."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The weight of the medal carried the raw-hide necklace slipping through
+    his fingers. Slowly now, with even impulse, the silver disc swung
+    right, swung left, like the pendulum of a clock. Even the Nigger dog
+    seemed hypnotised, following the dim shine of the tarnished token.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I say Nicholas's sister: 'It is thirty winters I see that silver
+    picture first; I give you two dolla for him.' She say 'No.' I say, 'Gi'
+    fi' dolla.' 'No.' I sit and think far back&mdash;thirty winters back. 'I gi'
+    ten dolla,' I say. She say, 'I no sell; no&mdash;not for a hunner'&mdash;but she
+    <i>give</i> it him! for to make Yukon Inua to let him go safe. Hein? Savvy?"
+    And lapsing into Ingalik, he endorsed this credential not to be denied.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is true," he wound up in English. The "Autocratrix Russorum" was
+    solemnly handed back. "You have make a brave journey. It is I who
+    unnerstan'&mdash;I, too, when I am young, I go with Dall on the Long Trail.
+    <i>We had dogs.</i>" All the while, from all about the Leader's owner, and
+    out of every corner of the crowded room, had come a spirited
+    punctuation of Kurilla's speech&mdash;nods and grunts. "Yes, perhaps <i>these</i>
+    white men deserved dogs&mdash;even Peetka's!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kurilla limped back to his place, but turned to the Ingaliks before he
+    sat down, and bending painfully over his stick, "Not Kurilla," he said,
+    as though speaking of one absent&mdash;"not <i>Dall</i> make so great journey, no
+    dogs. Kurilla? Best guide in Yukon forty year. Kurilla say: 'Must have
+    dogs&mdash;men like that!'" He limped back again and solemnly offered his
+    hand to each of the travellers in turn. "Shake!" says he. Then, as
+    though fascinated by the silver picture, he dropped down by the Boy,
+    staring absently at the Great Katharine's effigy. The general murmur
+    was arrested by a movement from Peetka&mdash;he took his pipe out of his
+    mouth and says he, handsomely:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No liars. Sell dog," adding, with regretful eye on the apostate
+    Leader, "Him bully dog!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    And that was how the tobacco famine ended, and how the white men got
+    their team.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH16"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XV
+</h2>
+<center>
+    THE ESQUIMAUX HORSE
+</center>
+<p class="ind">
+  "Plus je connais les hommes, plus j'aime les chiens."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It doesn't look hard to drive a dog-team, but just you try it. In
+    moments of passion, the first few days after their acquisition, the
+    Colonel and the Boy wondered why they had complicated a sufficiently
+    difficult journey by adding to other cares a load of fish and three
+    fiends.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Think how well they went for Peetka."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh yes; part o' their cussedness. They know we're green hands, and
+    they mean to make it lively."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Well, they did. They sat on their haunches in the snow, and grinned at
+    the whip-crackings and futile "Mush, mush!" of the Colonel. They
+    snapped at the Boy and made sharp turns, tying him up in the traces and
+    tumbling him into the snow. They howled all night long, except during a
+    blessed interval of quiet while they ate their seal-skin harness. But
+    man is the wiliest of the animals, and the one who profits by
+    experience. In the end, the Boy became a capital driver; the dogs came
+    to know he "meant business," and settled into submission. "Nig," as he
+    called the bully dog for short, turned out "the best leader in the
+    Yukon."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They were much nearer Kaltag than they had realised, arriving after
+    only two hours' struggle with the dogs at the big Indian village on the
+    left bank of the river. But their first appearance here was clouded by
+    Nig's proposal to slay all the dogs in sight. He was no sooner
+    unharnessed than he undertook the congenial job. It looked for a few
+    minutes as if Peetka's bully dog would chew up the entire canine
+    population, and then lie down and die of his own wounds. But the
+    Kaltags understood the genus Siwash better than the white man, and took
+    the tumult calmly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It turned out that Nig was not so much bloodthirsty as
+    "bloody-proud"&mdash;one of those high souls for ever concerned about
+    supremacy. His first social act, on catching sight of his fellow, was
+    to howl defiance at him. And even after they have fought it out and
+    come to some sort of understanding, the first happy thought of your
+    born Leader on awakening is to proclaim himself boss of the camp.
+</p>
+<p>
+    No sooner has he published this conviction of high calling than he is
+    set upon by the others, punishes them soundly, or is himself vanquished
+    and driven off. Whereupon he sits on his haunches in the snow, and,
+    with his pointed nose turned skyward, howls uninterruptedly for an hour
+    or two, when all is forgiven and forgotten&mdash;till the next time.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Order being restored, the travellers got new harness for the dogs, new
+    boots for themselves, and set out for the white trading post, thirty
+    miles above.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Here, having at last come into the region of settlements, they agreed
+    never again to overtax the dogs. They "travelled light" out of Nulato
+    towards the Koyukuk.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The dogs simply flew over those last miles. It was glorious going on a
+    trail like glass.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They had broken the back of the journey now, and could well afford,
+    they thought, to halt an hour or two on the island at the junction of
+    the two great rivers, stake out a trading post, and treat themselves to
+    town lots. Why town lots, in Heaven's name! when they were bound for
+    Minóok, and after that the Klondyke, hundreds of miles away? Well,
+    partly out of mere gaiety of heart, and partly, the Colonel would have
+    told you gravely, that in this country you never know when you have a
+    good thing. They had left the one white layman at Nulato seething with
+    excitement over an Indian's report of still another rich strike up
+    yonder on the Koyukuk, and this point, where they were solemnly staking
+    out a new post, the Nulato Agent had said, was "dead sure to be a great
+    centre." That almost unknown region bordering the great tributary of
+    the Yukon, haunt of the fiercest of all the Indians of the North, was
+    to be finally conquered by the white man. It had been left practically
+    unexplored ever since the days when the bloodthirsty Koyukons came down
+    out of their fastnesses and perpetrated the great Nulato massacre,
+    doing to death with ghastly barbarity every man, woman, and child at
+    the post, Russian or Indian, except Kurilla, not sparing the unlucky
+    Captain Barnard or his English escort, newly arrived here in their
+    search for the lost Sir John Franklin. But the tables were turned now,
+    and the white man was on the trail of the Indian.
+</p>
+<p>
+    While the Colonel and the Boy were staking out this future stronghold
+    of trade and civilisation it came on to snow; but "Can't last this time
+    o' year," the Colonel consoled himself, and thanked God "the big,
+    unending snows are over for this season."
+</p>
+<p>
+    So they pushed on. But the Colonel seemed to have thanked God
+    prematurely. Down the snow drifted, soft, sticky, unending. The evening
+    was cloudy, and the snow increased the dimness overhead as well as the
+    heaviness under foot. They never knew just where it was in the hours
+    between dusk and dark that they lost the trail. The Boy believed it was
+    at a certain steep incline that Nig did his best to rush down.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I thought he was at his tricks," said the Boy ruefully some hours
+    after. "I believe I'm an ass, and Nig is a gentleman and a scholar. He
+    knew perfectly what he was about."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Reckon we'll camp, pardner."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Reckon we might as well."
+</p>
+<p>
+    After unharnessing the dogs, the Boy stood an instant looking enviously
+    at them as he thawed out his stiff hands under his parki. Exhausted and
+    smoking hot, the dogs had curled down in the snow as contented-looking
+    as though on a hearth-rug before a fire, sheltering their sharp noses
+    with their tails.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Wish I had a tail to shelter my face," said the Boy, as if a tail were
+    the one thing lacking to complete his bliss.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You don't need any shelter <i>now</i>," answered the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Your face is gettin' well&mdash;" And he stopped suddenly, carried back to
+    those black days when he had vainly urged a face-guard. He unpacked
+    their few possessions, and watched the Boy take the axe and go off for
+    wood, stopping on his way, tired as he was, to pull Nig's pointed ears.
+    The odd thing about the Boy was that it was only with these Indian
+    curs&mdash;Nig in particular, who wasn't the Boy's dog at all&mdash;only with
+    these brute-beasts had he seemed to recover something of that buoyancy
+    and ridiculous youngness that had first drawn the Colonel to him on the
+    voyage up from 'Frisco. It was also clear that if the Boy now drew away
+    from his pardner ever so little, by so much did he draw nearer to the
+    dogs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He might be too tired to answer the Colonel; he was seldom too tired to
+    talk nonsense to Nig, never too tired to say, "Well, old boy," or even
+    "Well, <i>pardner</i>," to the dumb brute. It was, perhaps, this that the
+    Colonel disliked most of all.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Whether the U.S. Agent at Nulato was justified or not in saying all the
+    region hereabouts was populous in the summer with Indian camps, the
+    native winter settlements, the half-buried ighloo, or the rude log-hut,
+    where, for a little tea, tobacco, or sugar, you could get as much fish
+    as you could carry, these welcome, if malodorous, places seemed, since
+    they lost the trail, to have vanished off the face of the earth. No
+    question of the men sharing the dogs' fish, but of the dogs sharing the
+    men's bacon and meal. That night the meagre supper was more meagre
+    still that the "horses" might have something, too. The next afternoon
+    it stopped snowing and cleared, intensely cold, and that was the
+    evening the Boy nearly cried for joy when, lifting up his eyes, he saw,
+    a good way off, perched on the river bank, the huts and high caches of
+    an Indian village etched black against a wintry sunset&mdash;a fine picture
+    in any eye, but meaning more than beauty to the driver of hungry dogs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Fish, Nig!" called out the Boy to his Leader. "You hear me, you Nig?
+    <i>Fish</i>, old fellow! Now, look at that, Colonel! you tell me that Indian
+    dog doesn't understand English. I tell you what: we had a mean time
+    with these dogs just at first, but that was only because we didn't
+    understand one another."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel preserved a reticent air.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You'll come to my way of thinking yet. The Indian dog&mdash;he's a daisy."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Glad you think so." The Colonel, with some display of temper, had
+    given up trying to drive the team only half an hour before, and was
+    still rather sore about it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When you get to <i>understand</i> him," persisted the Boy, "he's the most
+    marvellous little horse ever hitched in harness. He pulls, pulls, pulls
+    all day long in any kind o' weather&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, pulls you off your legs or pulls you the way you don't want to
+    go."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, that's when you rile him! He's just like any other American
+    gentleman: he's got his feelin's. Ain't you got feelin's, Nig? Huh!
+    rather. I tell you what, Colonel, many a time when I'm pretty well beat
+    and ready to snap at anybody, I've looked at Nig peggin' away like a
+    little man, on a rotten trail, with a blizzard in his eyes, and it's
+    just made me sick after that to hear myself grumblin'. Yes, sir, the
+    Indian dog is an example to any white man on the trail." The Boy seemed
+    not to relinquish the hope of stirring the tired Colonel to enthusiasm.
+    "Don't you like the way, after the worst sort of day, when you stop, he
+    just drops down in the snow and rolls about a little to rest his
+    muscles, and then lies there as patient as anything till you are ready
+    to unharness him and feed him?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "&mdash;and if you don't hurry up, he saves you the trouble of unharnessing
+    by eating the traces and things."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Humph! So would you if that village weren't in sight, if you were sure
+    the harness wouldn't stick in your gizzard. And think of what a dog
+    gets to reward him for his plucky day: one dried salmon or a little
+    meal-soup when he's off on a holiday like this. Works without a let-up,
+    and keeps in good flesh on one fish a day. Doesn't even get anything to
+    drink; eats a little snow after dinner, digs his bed, and sleeps in a
+    drift till morning."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When he doesn't howl all night."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, that's when he meets his friends, and they talk about old times
+    before they came down in the world."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes; when they were wolves and made us run instead of our making them.
+    Make any fellow howl. Instead of carrying our food about we used to
+    carry theirs, and run hard to keep from giving it up, too."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nig's at it again," said the Colonel. "Give us your whip."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," said the Boy; "I begin to see now why he stops and goes for Red
+    like that. Hah! Spot's gettin it, too, this time. They haven't been
+    pullin' properly. You just notice: if they aren't doin' their share
+    Nig'll turn to every time and give 'em 'Hail, Columbia!' You'll see,
+    when he's freshened 'em up a bit we'll have 'em on a dead run." The Boy
+    laughed and cracked his whip.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They've got keen noses. <i>I</i> don't smell the village this time. Come
+    on, Nig, Spot's had enough; he's sorry, good and plenty. Cheer up,
+    Spot! Fish, old man! You hear me talkin' to you, Red? <i>Fish!</i> Caches
+    full of it. Whoop!" and down they rushed, pell-mell, men and dogs
+    tearing along like mad across the frozen river, and never slowing till
+    it came to the stiff pull up the opposite bank.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Funny I don't hear any dogs," panted the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They came out upon a place silent as the dead&mdash;a big deserted village,
+    emptied by the plague, or, maybe, only by the winter; caches emptied,
+    too; not a salmon, not a pike, not a lusk, not even a whitefish left
+    behind.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was a bitter blow. They didn't say anything; it was too bad to talk
+    about. The Colonel made the fire, and fried a little bacon and made
+    some mush: that was their dinner. The bacon-rinds were boiled in the
+    mush-pot with a great deal of snow and a little meal, and the "soup" so
+    concocted was set out to cool for the dogs. They were afraid to sleep
+    in one of the cabins; it might be plague-infected. The Indians had cut
+    all the spruce for a wide radius round about&mdash;no boughs to make a bed.
+    They hoisted some tent-poles up into one of the empty caches, laid them
+    side by side, and on this bed, dry, if hard, they found oblivion.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The next morning a thin, powdery snow was driving about. Had they lost
+    their way in the calendar as well as on the trail, and was it December
+    instead of the 29th of March? The Colonel sat on the packed sled,
+    undoing with stiff fingers the twisted, frozen rope. He knew the axe
+    that he used the night before on the little end of bacon was lying,
+    pressed into the snow, under one runner. But that was the last thing to
+    go on the pack before the lashing, and it wouldn't get lost pinned down
+    under the sled. Nig caught sight of it, and came over with a cheerful
+    air of interest, sniffed bacon on the steel, and it occurred to him it
+    would be a good plan to lick it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A bitter howling broke the stillness. The Boy came tearing up with a
+    look that lifted the Colonel off the sled, and there was Nig trying to
+    get away from the axe-head, his tongue frozen fast to the steel, and
+    pulled horribly long out of his mouth like a little pink rope. The Boy
+    had fallen upon the agonized beast, and forced him down close to the
+    steel. Holding him there between his knees, he pulled off his outer
+    mits and with hands and breath warmed the surface of the axe, speaking
+    now and then to the dog, who howled wretchedly, but seemed to
+    understand something was being done for him, since he gave up
+    struggling. When at last the Boy got him free, the little horse pressed
+    against his friend's legs with a strange new shuddering noise very
+    pitiful to hear.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy, blinking hard, said: "Yes, old man, I know, that was a mean
+    breakfast; and he patted the shaggy chest. Nig bent his proud head and
+    licked the rescuing hand with his bleeding tongue.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "An' you say that dog hasn't got feelin's!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    They hitched the team and pushed on. In the absence of a trail, the
+    best they could do was to keep to the river ice. By-and-bye:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Can you see the river bank?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm not sure," said the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I thought you were going it blind."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I believe I'd better let Nig have his head," said the Boy, stopping;
+    "he's the dandy trail-finder. Nig, old man, I takes off my hat to you!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    They pushed ahead till the half-famished dogs gave out. They camped
+    under the lee of the propped sled, and slept the sleep of exhaustion.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The next morning dawned clear and warm. The Colonel managed to get a
+    little wood and started a fire. There were a few spoonfuls of meal in
+    the bottom of the bag and a little end of bacon, mostly rind. The sort
+    of soup the dogs had had yesterday was good enough for men to-day. The
+    hot and watery brew gave them strength enough to strike camp and move
+    on. The elder man began to say to himself that he would sell his life
+    dearly. He looked at the dogs a good deal, and then would look at the
+    Boy, but he could never catch his eye. At last: "They say, you know,
+    that men in our fix have sometimes had to sacrifice a dog."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ugh!" The Boy's face expressed nausea at the thought.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, it is pretty revolting."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We could never do it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "N-no," said the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The three little Esquimaux horses were not only very hungry, their feet
+    were in a bad condition, and were bleeding. The Boy had shut his eyes
+    at first at the sight of their red tracks in the snow. He hardly
+    noticed them now.
+</p>
+<p>
+    An hour or so later: "Better men than we," says the Colonel
+    significantly, "have had to put their feelings in their pockets." As if
+    he found the observation distinctly discouraging, Nig at this moment
+    sat down in the melting snow, and no amount of "mushing" moved him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Let's give him half an hour's rest, Colonel. Valuable beast, you
+    know&mdash;altogether best team on the river," said the Boy, as if to show
+    that his suggestion was not inspired by mere pity for the bleeding
+    dogs. "And you look rather faded yourself, Colonel. Sit down and rest."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nothing more was said for a full half-hour, till the Colonel, taking
+    off his fur hat, and wiping his beaded forehead on the back of his
+    hand, remarked: "Think of the Siege of Paris."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Eh? What?" The Boy stared as if afraid his partner's brain had given
+    way.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When the horses gave out they had to eat dogs, cats, rats even. Think
+    of it&mdash;rats!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The French are a dirty lot. Let's mush, Colonel. I'm as fit as a
+    fiddle." The Boy got up and called the dogs. In ten minutes they were
+    following the blind trail again. But the sled kept clogging, sticking
+    fast and breaking down. After a desperate bout of ineffectual pulling,
+    the dogs with one mind stopped again, and lay down in their bloody
+    tracks.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The men stood silent for a moment; then the Colonel remarked:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Red is the least valuable"&mdash;a long pause&mdash;"but Nig's feet are in the
+    worst condition. That dog won't travel a mile further. Well," added the
+    Colonel after a bit, as the Boy stood speechless studying the team,
+    "what do you say?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me?" He looked up like a man who has been dreaming and is just awake.
+    "Oh, I should say our friend Nig here has had to stand more than his
+    share of the racket."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Poor old Nig!" said the Colonel, with a somewhat guilty air. "Look
+    here: what do you say to seeing whether they can go if we help 'em with
+    that load?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good for you, Colonel!" said the Boy, with confidence wonderfully
+    restored. "I was just thinking the same."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They unlashed the pack, and the Colonel wanted to make two bundles of
+    the bedding and things; but whether the Boy really thought the Colonel
+    was giving out, or whether down in some corner of his mind he
+    recognised the fact that if the Colonel were not galled by this extra
+    burden he might feel his hunger less, and so be less prone to thoughts
+    of poor Nig in the pot&mdash;however it was, he said the bundle was his
+    business for the first hour. So the Colonel did the driving, and the
+    Boy tramped on ahead, breaking trail with thirty-five pounds on his
+    back. And he didn't give it up, either, though he admitted long after
+    it was the toughest time he had ever put in in all his life.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Haven't you had about enough of this?" the Colonel sang out at dusk.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pretty nearly," said the Boy in a rather weak voice. He flung off the
+    pack, and sat on it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Get up," says the Colonel; "give us the sleepin'-bag." When it was
+    undone, the Norfolk jacket dropped out. He rolled it up against the
+    sled, flung himself down, and heavily dropped his head on the rough
+    pillow. But he sprang up.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What? Yes. By the Lord!" He thrust his hand into the capacious pocket
+    of the jacket, and pulled out some broken ship's biscuit. "Hard tack,
+    by the living Jingo!" He was up, had a few sticks alight, and the
+    kettle on, and was melting snow to pour on the broken biscuit. "It
+    swells, you know, like thunder!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy was still sitting on the bundle of "trade" tea and tobacco. He
+    seemed not to hear; he seemed not to see the Colonel, shakily hovering
+    about the fire, pushing aside the green wood and adding a few sticks of
+    dry.
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was a mist before the Colonel's eyes. Reaching after a bit of
+    seasoned spruce, he stumbled, and unconsciously set his foot on Nig's
+    bleeding paw. The dog let out a yell and flew at him. The Colonel fell
+    back with an oath, picked up a stick, and laid it on. The Boy was on
+    his feet in a flash.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Here! stop that!" He jumped in between the infuriated man and the
+    infuriated dog.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Stand back!" roared the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It was your fault; you trod&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Stand back, damn you! or you'll get hurt."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The stick would have fallen on the Boy; he dodged it, calling
+    excitedly, "Come here, Nig! Here!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He's my dog, and I'll lamm him if I like. You&mdash;" The Colonel couldn't
+    see just where the Boy and the culprit were. Stumbling a few paces away
+    from the glare of the fire, he called out, "I'll kill that brute if he
+    snaps at me again!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh yes," the Boy's voice rang passionately out of the gloom, "I know
+    you want him killed."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel sat down heavily on the rolled-up bag. Presently the
+    bubbling of boiling snow-water roused him. He got up, divided the
+    biscuit, and poured the hot water over the fragments. Then he sat down
+    again, and waited for them to "swell like thunder." He couldn't see
+    where, a little way up the hillside, the Boy sat on a fallen tree with
+    Nig's head under his arm. The Boy felt pretty low in his mind. He sat
+    crouched together, with his head sunk almost to his knees. It was a
+    lonely kind of a world after all. Doing your level best didn't seem to
+    get you any forrader. What was the use? He started. Something warm,
+    caressing, touched his cold face just under one eye. Nig's tongue.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good old Nig! You feel lonesome, too?" He gathered the rough beast up
+    closer to him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Just then the Colonel called, "Nig!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sh! sh! Lie quiet!" whispered the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nig! Nig!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good old boy! Stay here! He doesn't mean well by you. <i>Sh!</i> quiet!
+    <i>Quiet</i>, I say!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nig!" and the treacherous Colonel gave the peculiar whistle both men
+    used to call the dogs to supper. The dog struggled to get away, the
+    Boy's stiff fingers lost their grip, and "the best leader in the Yukon"
+    was running down the bank as hard as he could pelt, to the camp
+    fire&mdash;to the cooking-pot.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy got up and floundered away in the opposite direction. He must
+    get out of hearing. He toiled on, listening for the expected
+    gunshot&mdash;hearing it, too, and the yawp of a wounded dog, in spite of a
+    mitten clapped at each ear.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's the kind of world it is! Do your level best, drag other fellas'
+    packs hundreds o' miles over the ice with a hungry belly and bloody
+    feet, and then&mdash;Poor old Nig!&mdash;'cause you're lame&mdash;poor old Nig!" With
+    a tightened throat and hot water in his eyes, he kept on repeating the
+    dog's name as he stumbled forward in the snow. "Nev' mind, old boy;
+    it's a lonely kind o' world, and the right trail's hard to find."
+    Suddenly he stood still. His stumbling feet were on a track. He had
+    reached the dip in the saddle-back of the hill, and&mdash;yes! this was the
+    <i>right</i> trail; for down on the other side below him were faint
+    lights&mdash;huts&mdash;an Indian village! with fish and food for everybody. And
+    Nig&mdash;Nig was being&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy turned as if a hurricane had struck him, and tore back down the
+    incline&mdash;stumbling, floundering in the snow, calling hoarsely:
+    "Colonel, Colonel! don't do it! There's a village here, Colonel! Nig!
+    Colonel, don't do it!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He dashed into the circle of firelight, and beheld Nig standing with a
+    bandaged paw, placidly eating softened biscuit out of the family
+    frying-pan.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was short work getting down to the village. They had one king salmon
+    and two white fish from the first Indian they saw, who wanted hootch
+    for them, and got only tabak.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In the biggest of the huts, nearly full of men, women, and children,
+    coughing, sickly-looking, dejected, the natives made room for the
+    strangers. When the white men had supped they handed over the remains
+    of their meal (as is expected) to the head of the house. This and a few
+    matches or a little tobacco on parting, is all he looks for in return
+    for shelter, room for beds on the floor, snow-water laboriously melted,
+    use of the fire, and as much wood as they like to burn, even if it is a
+    barren place, and fuel is the precious far-travelled "drift."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It is curious to see how soon travellers get past that first cheeckalko
+    feeling that it is a little "nervy," as the Boy had said, to walk into
+    another man's house uninvited, an absolute stranger, and take
+    possession of everything you want without so much as "by your leave."
+    You soon learn it is the Siwash[*] custom.
+</p>
+<p>
+    [Footnote: Siwash, corruption of French-Canadian <i>sauvage</i>, applied all
+    over the North to the natives, their possessions and their customs.]
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nothing would have seemed stranger now, or more inhuman, than the
+    civilized point of view.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Indians trailed out one by one, all except the old buck to whom the
+    hut belonged. He hung about for a bit till he was satisfied the
+    travellers had no hootch, not even a little for the head of the house,
+    and yet they seemed to be fairly decent fellows. Then he rolls up his
+    blankets, for there is a premium on sleeping-space, and goes out, with
+    never a notion that he is doing more than any man would, anywhere in
+    the world, to find a place in some neighbour's hut to pass the night.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He leaves the two strangers, as Indian hospitality ordains, to the
+    warmest places in the best hut, with two young squaws, one old one, and
+    five children, all sleeping together on the floor, as a matter of
+    course.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel and the Boy had flung themselves down on top of their
+    sleeping-bag, fed and warmed and comforted. Only the old squaw was
+    still up. She had been looking over the travellers' boots and "mitts,"
+    and now, without a word or even a look being exchanged upon the
+    subject, she sat there in the corner, by the dim, seal-oil light,
+    sewing on new thongs, patching up holes, and making the strange men
+    tidy&mdash;men she had never seen before and would never see again. And
+    this, no tribute to the Colonel's generosity or the youth and friendly
+    manners of the Boy. They knew the old squaw would have done just the
+    same had the mucklucks and the mitts belonged to "the tramp of the
+    Yukon," with nothing to barter and not a cent in his pocket. This,
+    again, is a Siwash custom.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The old squaw coughed and wiped her eyes. The children coughed in their
+    sleep.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The dogs outside were howling like human beings put to torture. But the
+    sound no longer had power to freeze the blood of the trail-men.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel merely damned them. The Boy lifted his head, and listened
+    for Nig's note. The battle raged nearer; a great scampering went by the
+    tent.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nig!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    A scuffling and snuffing round the bottom of the tent. The Boy, on a
+    sudden impulse, reached out and lifted the flap.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Got your bandage on? Come here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nig brisked in with the air of one having very little time to waste.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Lord! I should think you'd be glad to lie down. <i>I</i> am. Let's see your
+    paw. Here, come over to the light." He stepped very carefully over the
+    feet of the other inhabitants till he reached the old woman's corner.
+    Nig, following calmly, walked on prostrate bodies till he reached his
+    friend.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now, your paw, pardner. F-ith! Bad, ain't it?" he appealed to the
+    toothless squaw. Her best friend could not have said her wizened regard
+    was exactly sympathetic, but it was attentive. She seemed intelligent
+    as well as kind.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look here," whispered the Boy, "let that muckluck string o' mine
+    alone." He drew it away, and dropped it between his knees. "Haven't you
+    got something or other to make some shoes for Nig? Hein?" He
+    pantomimed, but she only stared. "Like this." He pulled out his knife,
+    and cut off the end of one leg of his "shaps," and gathered it gently
+    round Nig's nearest foot. "Little dog-boots. See? Give you some bully
+    tabak if you'll do that for Nig. Hein?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She nodded at last, and made a queer wheezy sound, whether friendly
+    laughing or pure scorn, the Boy wasn't sure. But she set about the
+    task.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come 'long, Nig," he whispered. "You just see if I don't shoe my
+    little horse." And he sneaked back to bed, comfortable in the assurance
+    that the Colonel was asleep. Nig came walking after his friend straight
+    over people's heads.
+</p>
+<p>
+    One of the children sat up and whimpered. The Colonel growled sleepily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You black devil!" admonished the Boy under his breath. "Look what
+    you're about. Come here, sir." He pushed the devil down between the
+    sleeping-bag and the nearest baby.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel gave a distinct grunt of disapproval, and then, "Keepin'
+    that brute in here?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He's a lot cleaner than our two-legged friends," said the Boy sharply,
+    as if answering an insult.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Right," said the Colonel with conviction.
+</p>
+<p>
+    His pardner was instantly mollified. "If you wake another baby, you'll
+    get a lickin'," he said genially to the dog; and then he stretched out
+    his feet till they reached Nig's back, and a feeling of great comfort
+    came over the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Say, Colonel," he yawned luxuriously, "did you know
+    that&mdash;a&mdash;to-night&mdash;when Nig flared up, did you know you'd trodden on
+    his paw?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Didn't know it till you told me," growled the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I thought you didn't. Makes a difference, doesn't it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You needn't think," says the Colonel a little defiantly, "that I've
+    weakened on the main point just because I choose to give Nig a few
+    cracker crumbs. If it's a question between a man's life and a dog's
+    life, only a sentimental fool would hesitate."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm not talking about that; we can get fish now. What I'm pointin' out
+    is that Nig didn't fly at you for nothin'."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He's got a devil of a temper, that dog."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's just like Nicholas of Pymeut said." The Boy sat up, eager in his
+    advocacy and earnest as a judge. "Nicholas of Pymeut said: 'You treat a
+    Siwash like a heathen, and he'll show you what a hell of a heathen he
+    can be.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, go to sleep."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm goin', Colonel."
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH17"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XVI
+</h2>
+<center>
+    MINÓOK
+</center>
+<p class="ind">
+    "For whatever... may come to pass, it lies with me to have it serve
+    me."&mdash;EPICTETUS.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Indians guided them back to the trail. The Colonel and the Boy made
+    good speed to Novikakat, laid in supplies at Korkorines, heard the
+    first doubtful account of Minóok at Tanana, and pushed on. Past camps
+    Stoneman and Woodworth, where the great Klondyke Expeditions lay fast
+    in the ice; along the white strip of the narrowing river, pent in now
+    between mountains black with scant, subarctic timber, or gray with
+    fantastic weather-worn rock&mdash;on and on, till they reached the bluffs of
+    the Lower Ramparts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Here, at last, between the ranks of the many-gabled heights, Big Minóok
+    Creek meets Father Yukon. Just below the junction, perched jauntily on
+    a long terrace, up above the frozen riverbed, high and dry, and out of
+    the coming trouble when river and creek should wake&mdash;here was the long,
+    log-built mining town, Minóok, or Rampart, for the name was still
+    undetermined in the spring of 1898.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was a great moment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Shake, pardner," said the Boy. The Colonel and he grasped hands. Only
+    towering good spirits prevented their being haughty, for they felt like
+    conquerors, and cared not a jot that they looked like gaol-birds.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was two o'clock in the morning. The Gold Nugget Saloon was flaring
+    with light, and a pianola was perforating a tune. The travellers pushed
+    open a frosted door, and looked into a long, low, smoke-veiled room,
+    hung with many kerosene lamps, and heated by a great red-hot iron
+    stove.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hello!" said a middle-aged man in mackinaws, smoking near the door-end
+    of the bar.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hello! Is Blandford Keith here? There are some letters for him."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Say, boys!" the man in mackinaws shouted above the pianola, "Windy
+    Jim's got in with the mail."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The miners lounging at the bar and sitting at the faro-tables looked up
+    laughing, and seeing the strangers through the smoke-haze, stopped
+    laughing to stare.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Down from Dawson?" asked the bartender hurrying forward, a magnificent
+    creature in a check waistcoat, shirt-sleeves, four-in-hand tie, and a
+    diamond pin.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, t'other way about. Up from the Lower River."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh! May West or Muckluck crew? Anyhow, I guess you got a thirst on
+    you," said the man in the mackinaws. "Come and licker up."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The bartender mixed the drinks in style, shooting the liquor from a
+    height into the small gin-sling glasses with the dexterity that had
+    made him famous.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When their tired eyes had got accustomed to the mingled smoke and
+    glare, the travellers could see that in the space beyond the card
+    tables, in those back regions where the pianola reigned, there were
+    several couples twirling about&mdash;the clumsily-dressed miners pirouetting
+    with an astonishing lightness on their moccasined feet. And women!
+    White women!
+</p>
+<p>
+    They stopped dancing and came forward to see the new arrivals.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The mackinaw man was congratulating the Colonel on "gettin' back to
+    civilization."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "See that plate-glass mirror?" He pointed behind the bar, below the
+    moose antlers. "See them ladies? You've got to a place where you can
+    rake in the dust all day, and dance all night, and go buckin' the tiger
+    between whiles. Great place, Minóok. Here's luck!" He took up the last
+    of the gin slings set in a row before the party.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Have you got some property here?" asked the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The man, without putting down his glass, simply closed one eye over the
+    rim.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We've heard some bad accounts of these diggin's," said the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I ain't sayin' there's millions for <i>every</i>body. You've got to get the
+    inside track. See that feller talkin' to the girl? Billy Nebrasky
+    tipped him the wink in time to git the inside track, just before the
+    Fall Stampede up the gulch."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Which gulch?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He only motioned with his head. "Through havin' that tip, he got there
+    in time to stake number three Below Discovery. He's had to hang up
+    drinks all winter, but he's a millionaire all right. He's got a hundred
+    thousand dollars <i>in sight,</i> only waitin' for runnin' water to wash it
+    out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then there <i>is</i> gold about here?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There is gold? Say, Maudie," he remarked in a humourous half-aside to
+    the young woman who was passing with No&mdash;thumb-Jack, "this fellow wants
+    to know if there is gold here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She laughed. "Guess he ain't been here long."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Now it is not to be denied that this rejoinder was susceptible of more
+    than one interpretation, but the mackinaw man seemed satisfied, so much
+    so that he offered Maudie the second gin-sling which the Colonel had
+    ordered "all round." She eyed the strangers over the glass. On the hand
+    that held it a fine diamond sparkled. You would say she was twenty-six,
+    but you wouldn't have been sure. She had seemed at least that at a
+    distance. Now she looked rather younger. The face wore an impudent
+    look, yet it was delicate, too. Her skin showed very white and fine
+    under the dabs of rouge. The blueness was not yet faded out of her
+    restless eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Minóok's all right. No josh about that," she said, setting down her
+    glass. Then to the Boy, "Have a dance?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not much," he replied rather roughly, and turned away to talk about
+    the diggin's to two men on the other side.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Maudie laid her hand on the Colonel's arm, and the diamond twitched the
+    light. "<i>You</i> will," she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, you see, ma'am"&mdash;the Colonel's smile was charming in spite of
+    his wild beard&mdash;"we've done such a lot o' dancin' lately&mdash;done nothin'
+    else for forty days; and after seven hundred miles of it we're just a
+    trifle tired, ma'am."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She laughed good-naturedly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pity you're tired," said the mackinaw man. "There's a pretty good
+    thing goin' just now, but it won't be goin' long."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy turned his head round again with reviving interest in his own
+    group.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look here, Si," Maudie was saying: "if you want to let a lay on your
+    new claim to <i>anybody</i>, mind it's got to be me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the mackinaw man was glancing speculatively over at another group.
+    In haste to forestall desertion, the Boy inquired:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you know of anything good that isn't staked yet?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, mebbe I don't&mdash;and mebbe I do." Then, as if to prove that he
+    wasn't overanxious to pursue the subject: "Say, Maudie, ain't that
+    French Charlie over there?" Maudie put her small nose in the air.
+    "Ain't you made it up with Charlie yet?'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, I ain't."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then we'll have another drink all round."
+</p>
+<p>
+    While he was untying the drawstring of his gold sack, Maudie said,
+    half-aside, but whether to the Colonel or the Boy neither could tell:
+    "Might do worse than keep your eye on Si McGinty." She nodded briskly
+    at the violet checks on the mackinaw back. "Si's got a cinch up there
+    on Glory Hallelujah, and nobody's on to it yet."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The pianola picked out a polka. The man Si McGinty had called French
+    Charlie came up behind the girl and said something. She shook her head,
+    turned on her heel, and began circling about in the narrow space till
+    she found another partner, French Charlie scowling after them, as they
+    whirled away between the faro-tables back into the smoke and music at
+    the rear. McGinty was watching Jimmie, the man at the gold scales,
+    pinch up some of the excess dust in the scale-pan and toss it back into
+    the brass blower.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where did that gold come from?" asked the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Off a claim o' mine"; and he lapsed into silence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    You are always told these fellows are so anxious to rope in strangers.
+    This man didn't seem to be. It made him very interesting. The Boy acted
+    strictly on the woman's hint, and kept an eye on the person who had a
+    sure thing up on Glory Hallelujah. But when the lucky man next opened
+    his mouth it was to say:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, there's Butts down from Circle City."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Butts?" repeated the Boy, with little affectation of interest.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yep. Wonder what the son of a gun is after here." But he spoke
+    genially, even with respect.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who's Butts?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Butts? Ah&mdash;well&mdash;a&mdash;Butts is the smartest fellow with his fingers in
+    all 'laska"; and McGinty showed his big yellow teeth in an appreciative
+    smile.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Smart at washin' gold out?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Smarter at pickin' it out." The bartender joined in Si's laugh as that
+    gentleman repeated, "Yes, sir! handiest feller with his fingers I ever
+    seen."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What does he do with his fingers?" asked the Boy, with impatient
+    suspicion.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, he don't dare do much with 'em up here. 'Tain't popular."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What ain't?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Butts's little game. But Lord! he is good at it." Butts had been
+    introduced as a stalking-horse, but there was no doubt about Si's
+    admiration of his "handiness." "Butts is wasted up here," he sighed.
+    "There's some chance for a murderer in Alaska, but a thief's a goner."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, well; you were sayin' that gold o' yours came from&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Poor old Butts! Bright feller, too."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How far off is your&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I tell you, sir, Butts is brains to his boots. Course you know Jack
+    McQuestion?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, but I'd like to hear a little about your&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Y' don' know Jack McQuestion? Well, sir, Jack's the biggest man in the
+    Yukon. Why, he built Fort Reliance six miles below the mouth of the
+    Klondyke in '73; he discovered gold on the Stewart in '85, and
+    established a post there. <i>Everybody</i> knows Jack McQuestion;
+    an"&mdash;quickly, as he saw he was about to be interrupted&mdash;"you heard
+    about that swell watch we all clubbed together and give him? No? Well,
+    sir, there ain't an eleganter watch in the world. Is there?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Guess not," said the bartender.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Repeater, you know. Got twenty-seven di'mon's in the case. One of
+    'em's this size." He presented the end of a gnarled and muscular thumb.
+    "And inside, the case is all wrote in&mdash;a lot of soft sawder; but Jack
+    ain't got <i>any</i>thing he cares for so much. You can see he's always
+    tickled to death when anybody asks him the time. But do you think he
+    ever lets that watch out'n his own hands? Not <i>much</i>. Let's anybody
+    <i>look</i> at it, and keeps a holt o' the stem-winder. Well, sir, we was
+    all in a saloon up at Circle, and that feller over there&mdash;Butts&mdash;he bet
+    me fifty dollars that he'd git McQuestion's watch away from him before
+    he left the saloon. An' it was late. McQuestion was thinkin' a'ready
+    about goin' home to that squaw wife that keeps him so straight. Well,
+    sir, Butts went over and began to gas about outfittin', and McQuestion
+    answers and figures up the estimates on the counter, and, by Gawd! in
+    less 'n quarter of an hour Butts, just standin' there and listenin', as
+    you'd think&mdash;he'd got that di'mon' watch off'n the chain an' had it in
+    his pocket. I knew he done it, though I ain't exactly seen <i>how</i> he
+    done it. The others who were in the game, they swore he hadn't got it
+    yet, but, by Gawd, Butts says he'll think over McQuestion's terms, and
+    wonders what time it is. He takes that di'mon' watch out of his pocket,
+    glances at it, and goes off smooth as cream, sayin' 'Good-night.' Then
+    he come a grinnin' over to us. 'Jest you go an' ask the Father o' the
+    Yukon Pioneers what time it is, will yer?' An' I done it. Well, sir,
+    when he put his hand in his pocket, by Gawd! I wish y' could a' saw
+    McQuestion's face. Yes, sir, Butts is brains to his boots."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How far out are the diggin's?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What diggin's?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yours."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh&mdash;a&mdash;my gulch ain't fur."
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was a noise about the door. Someone bustled in with a torrent of
+    talk, and the pianola was drowned in a pandemonium of shouts and
+    laughter.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Windy Jim's reely got back!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Everybody crowded forward. Maudie was at the Colonel's elbow explaining
+    that the little yellow-bearded man with the red nose was the
+    letter-carrier. He had made a contract early in the winter to go to
+    Dawson and bring down the mail for Minóok. His agreement was to make
+    the round trip and be back by the middle of February. Since early March
+    the standing gag in the camp had been: "Well, Windy Jim got in last
+    night."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The mild jest had grown stale, and the denizens of Minóok had given up
+    the hope of ever laying eyes on Windy again, when lo! here he was with
+    twenty-two hundred letters in his sack. The patrons of the Gold Nugget
+    crowded round him like flies round a lump of sugar, glad to pay a
+    dollar apiece on each letter he handed out. "And you take <i>all</i> that's
+    addressed to yer at that price or you get none." Every letter there had
+    come over the terrible Pass. Every one had travelled twelve hundred
+    miles by dog-team, and some had been on the trail seven months.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Here, Maudie, me dear." The postman handed her two letters. "See how
+    he dotes on yer."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Got anything fur&mdash;what's yer names?" says the mackinaw man, who seemed
+    to have adopted the Colonel and the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He presented them without embarrassment to "Windy Jim Wilson, of Hog'em
+    Junction, the best trail mail-carrier in the 'nited States."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Those who had already got letters were gathered in groups under the
+    bracket-lights reading eagerly. In the midst of the lull of
+    satisfaction or expectancy someone cried out in disgust, and another
+    threw down a letter with a shower of objurgation.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Guess you got the mate to mine, Bonsor," said a bystander with a
+    laugh, slowly tearing up the communication he had opened with fingers
+    so eager that they shook.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You pay a dollar apiece for letters from folks you never heard of,
+    asking you what you think of the country, and whether you'd advise 'em
+    to come out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Huh! don't I wish they would!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's all right. <i>They will.</i>"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And then trust Bonsor to git even."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Salaman, "the luckiest man in camp," who had come in from his valuable
+    Little Minóok property for the night only, had to pay fifteen dollars
+    for his mail. When he opened it, he found he had one home letter,
+    written seven months before, eight notes of inquiry, and six
+    advertisements.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Maudie had put her letters unopened in her pocket, and told the man at
+    the scales to weigh out two dollars to Windy, and charge to her. Then
+    she began to talk to the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy observed with scant patience that his pardner treated Maudie
+    with a consideration he could hardly have bettered had she been the
+    first lady in the land. "Must be because she's little and cute-lookin'.
+    The Colonel's a sentimental ol' goslin'."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What makes you so polite to that dance-hall girl?" muttered the Boy
+    aside. "She's no good."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Reckon it won't make her any better for me to be impolite to her,"
+    returned the Colonel calmly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But finding she could not detach the Kentuckian from his pardner,
+    Maudie bestowed her attention elsewhere. French Charlie was leaning
+    back against the wall, his hands jammed in his pockets, and his big
+    slouch-hat pulled over his brows. Under the shadow of the wide brim
+    furtively he watched the girl. Another woman came up and asked him to
+    dance. He shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Reckon we'd better go and knock up Blandford Keith and get a bed,"
+    suggested the Boy regretfully, looking round for the man who had a
+    cinch up on Glory Hallelujah, and wouldn't tell you how to get there.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Reckon we'd better," agreed the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But they halted near Windy Jim, who was refreshing himself, and at the
+    same time telling Dawson news, or Dawson lies, as the company evidently
+    thought. And still the men crowded round, listening greedily, just as
+    everybody devours certain public prints without ceasing to impeach
+    their veracity. Lacking newspapers at which to pish! and pshaw! they
+    listened to Windy Jim, disbelieving the only unvarnished tale that
+    gentleman had ever told. For Windy, with the story-teller's instinct,
+    knew marvellous enough would sound the bare recital of those awful
+    Dawson days when the unprecedented early winter stopped the provision
+    boats at Circle, and starvation stared the over-populated Klondyke in
+    the face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Having disposed of their letters, the miners crowded round the courier
+    to hear how the black business ended&mdash;matter of special interest to
+    Minóok, for the population here was composed chiefly of men who, by the
+    Canadian route, had managed to get to Dawson in the autumn, in the
+    early days of the famine scare, and who, after someone's panic-proposal
+    to raid the great Stores, were given free passage down the river on the
+    last two steamers to run.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the ice stopped them (one party at Circle, the other at Fort
+    Yukon), they had held up the supply boats and helped themselves under
+    the noses of Captain Ray and Lieutenant Richardson, U. S. A.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, sir," McGinty had explained, "we Minóok boys was all in that
+    picnic. But we give our bond to pay up at mid-summer, and after the fun
+    was over we dropped down here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He pushed nearer to Windy to hear how it had fared with the men who had
+    stayed behind in the Klondyke&mdash;how the excitement flamed and menaced;
+    how Agent Hansen of the Alaska Commercial Company, greatest of the
+    importers of provisions and Arctic equipment, rushed about, half crazy,
+    making speeches all along the Dawson River front, urging the men to fly
+    for their lives, back to the States or up to Circle, before the ice
+    stopped moving!
+</p>
+<p>
+    But too many of these men had put everything they had on earth into
+    getting here; too many had abandoned costly outfits on the awful Pass,
+    or in the boiling eddies of the White Horse Rapids, paying any price in
+    money or in pain to get to the goldfields before navigation closed. And
+    now! here was Hansen, with all the authority of the A. C., shouting
+    wildly: "Quick, quick! go up or down. It's a race for life!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Windy went on to tell how the horror of the thing dulled the men, how
+    they stood about the Dawson streets helpless as cattle, paralysed by
+    the misery that had overtaken them. All very well for Hansen to try to
+    relieve the congestion at the Klondyke&mdash;the poor devils knew that to go
+    either way, up or down, as late as this meant death. Then it was
+    whispered how Captain Constantine of the Mounted Police was getting
+    ready to drive every man out of the Klondyke, at the point of the
+    bayonet, who couldn't show a thousand pounds of provisions. Yet most of
+    the Klondykers still stood about dazed, silent, waiting for the final
+    stroke.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A few went up, over the way they had come, to die after all on the
+    Pass, and some went down, their white, despairing faces disappearing
+    round the Klondyke bend as they drifted with the grinding ice towards
+    the Arctic Circle, where the food was caught in the floes. And how one
+    came back, going by without ever turning his head, caring not a jot for
+    Golden Dawson, serene as a king in his capital, solitary, stark on a
+    little island of ice.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Lord! it was better, after all, at the Big Chimney."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, it wasn't so bad," said Windy cheerfully. "About the time one o'
+    the big companies announced they was sold out o' everything but sugar
+    and axe-handles, a couple o' steamers pushed their way in through the
+    ice. After all, just as old J. J. Healy said, it was only a question of
+    rations and proper distribution. Why, flour's fell from one hundred and
+    twenty dollars a sack to fifty! And there's a big new strike on the
+    island opposite Ensley Creek. They call it Monte Cristo; pay runs eight
+    dollars to the pan. Lord! Dawson's the greatest gold camp on the
+    globe."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But no matter what befell at Dawson, business must be kept brisk at
+    Minóok. The pianola started up, and Buckin' Billy, who called the
+    dances, began to bawl invitations to the company to come and waltz.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Windy interrupted his own music for further refreshment, pausing an
+    instant, with his mouth full of dried-apple pie to say:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Congress has sent out a relief expedition to Dawson."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Fact! Reindeer."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ye mean peacocks."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mean reindeer! It's all in the last paper come over the Pass. A
+    Reindeer Relief Expedition to save them poor starvin' Klondykers."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Haw, haw! Good old Congress!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, did you find any o' them reindeer doin' any relievin' round
+    Dawson?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Naw! What do <i>you</i> think? Takes more'n Congress to git over the Dalton
+    Trail"; and Windy returned to his pie.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Talking earnestly with Mr. Butts, French Charlie pushed heavily past
+    the Boy on his way to the bar. From his gait it was clear that he had
+    made many similar visits that evening. In his thick Canadian accent
+    Charlie was saying:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I blowed out a lot o' dust for dat girl. She's wearin' my di'mon' now,
+    and won't look at me. Say, Butts, I'll give you twenty dollars if you
+    sneak dat ring."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Done with you," says Butts, as calm as a summer's day. In two minutes
+    Maudie was twirling about with the handy gentleman, who seemed as
+    accomplished with his toes as he was reputed to be with his fingers.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He came up with her presently and ordered some wine.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Wine, b-gosh!" muttered Charlie in drunken appreciation, propping
+    himself against the wall again, and always slipping sideways. "Y' tink
+    he's d' fines' sor' fella, don't you? Hein? Wai' 'n see!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The wine disappears and the two go off for another dance. Inside of ten
+    minutes up comes Butts and passes something to French Charlie. That
+    gentleman laughs tipsily, and, leaning on Butts's arm, makes his way to
+    the scales.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Weigh out twen' dollars dis gen'man," he ordered.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Butts pulled up the string of his poke and slipped to one side, as
+    noise reached the group at the bar of a commotion at the other end of
+    the saloon.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My ring! it's gone! My diamond ring! Now, you've got it"; and Maudie
+    came running out from the dancers after one of the Woodworth gentlemen.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Charlie straightened up and grinned, almost sobered in excess of joy
+    and satisfied revenge. The Woodworth gentleman is searched and
+    presently exonerated. Everybody is told of the loss, every nook and
+    corner investigated. Maudie goes down on hands and knees, even creeping
+    behind the bar.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I know'd she go on somethin' awful," said Charlie, so gleefully that
+    Bonsor, the proprietor of the Gold Nugget, began to look upon him with
+    suspicion.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When Maudie reappeared, flushed, and with disordered hair, after her
+    excursion under the counter, French Charlie confronted her.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Looky here. You treated me blame mean, Maudie; but wha'd' you say if
+    I's to off' a rewar' for dat ring?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Reward! A healthy lot o' good that would do."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, very well; 'f you don' wan' de ring back&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I <i>do,</i> Charlie."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He hammered on the bar.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ev'body gottah look fur ring. I give a hunner 'n fifty dollah rewar'."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Maudie stared at the princely offer. But instantly the commotion was
+    greater than ever. "Ev'body" did what was expected of them, especially
+    Mr. Butts. They flew about, looking in possible and impossible places,
+    laughing, screaming, tumbling over one another. In the midst of the
+    uproar French Charlie lurches up to Maudie.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Dat look anyt'in' like it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, <i>Charlie!"</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+    She looked the gratitude she could not on the instant speak.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In the midst of the noise and movement the mackinaw man said to the
+    Boy:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't know as you'd care to see my new prospect hole?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Course I'd like to see it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, come along tomorrow afternoon. Meet me here 'bout two. Don't
+    <i>say</i> nothin' to nobody," he added still lower. "We don't want to get
+    overrun before we've recorded."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy could have hugged that mackinaw man.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Outside it was broad day, but still the Gold Nugget lights were flaring
+    and the pianola played.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They had learned from the bartender where to find Blandford Keith&mdash;"In
+    the worst-looking shack in the camp." But "It looks good to me," said
+    the Boy, as they went in and startled Keith out of his first sleep. The
+    man that brings you letters before the ice goes out is your friend.
+    Keith helped them to bring in their stuff, and was distinctly troubled
+    because the travellers wouldn't take his bunk. They borrowed some dry
+    blankets and went to sleep on the floor.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was after two when they woke in a panic, lest the mackinaw man
+    should have gone without them. While the Colonel got breakfast the Boy
+    dashed round to the Gold Nugget, found Si McGinty playing craps, and
+    would have brought him back in triumph to breakfast&mdash;but no, he would
+    "wait down yonder below the Gold Nugget, and don't you say nothin' yit
+    about where we're goin', or we'll have the hull town at our heels."
+</p>
+<p>
+    About twelve miles "back in the mountains" is a little gulch that makes
+    into a big one at right angles.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's the pup where my claim is."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The what?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Little creek; call 'em pups here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Down in the desolate hollow a ragged A tent, sagged away from the
+    prevailing wind. Inside, they found that the canvas was a mere shelter
+    over a prospect hole. A rusty stove was almost buried by the heap of
+    earth and gravel thrown up from a pit several feet deep.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This is a winter diggins y' see," observed the mackinaw man with
+    pride. "It's only while the ground is froze solid you can do this kind
+    o' minin'. I've had to burn the ground clean down to bed-rock. Yes,
+    sir, thawed my way inch by inch to the old channel."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, and what have you found?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "S'pose we pan some o' this dirt and see."
+</p>
+<p>
+    His slow caution impressed his hearers. They made up a fire, melted
+    snow, and half filled a rusty pan with gravel and soil from the bottom
+    of the pit.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Know how to pan?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel and the Boy took turns. They were much longer at it than
+    they ever were again, but the mackinaw man seemed not in the least
+    hurry. The impatience was all theirs. When they had got down to fine
+    sand, "Look!" screamed the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "By the Lord!" said the Colonel softly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Is that&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Looks like you got some colours there. Gosh! Then I ain't been
+    dreamin' after all."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hey? Dreamin'? What? Look! Look!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's why I brought you gen'l'men out," says the mackinaw man. "I was
+    afraid to trust my senses&mdash;thought I was gettin' wheels in my head."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Lord! look at the gold!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    They took about a dollar and twenty cents out of that pan.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now see here, you gen'l'men jest lay low about this strike." His
+    anxiety seemed intense. They reassured him. "I don't suppose you mind
+    our taking up a claim apiece next you," pleaded the Boy, "since the law
+    don't allow you to stake more'n one."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, that's all right," said the mackinaw man, with an air of princely
+    generosity. "And I don't mind if you like to let in a few of your
+    particular pals, if you'll agree to help me organise a district. An'
+    I'll do the recordin' fur ye."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Really, this mackinaw man was a trump. The Colonel took twenty-five
+    dollars out of a roll of bills and handed it to him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's this fur?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "For bringing us out&mdash;for giving us the tip. I'd make it more, but till
+    I get to Dawson&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh!" laughed the mackinaw man, "<i>that's</i> all right," and indifferently
+    he tucked the bills into his baggy trousers.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel felt keenly the inadequacy of giving a man twenty-five
+    dollars who had just introduced him to hundreds of thousands&mdash;and who
+    sat on the edge of his own gold-mine&mdash;but it was only "on account."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel staked No. 1 Above the Discovery, and the Boy was in the
+    act of staking No. 1 Below when&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, no," says that kind mackinaw man, "the heavier gold will be found
+    further up the gulch&mdash;stake No. 2 Above"; and he told them natural
+    facts about placer-mining that no after expert knowledge could ever
+    better. But he was not as happy as a man should be who has just struck
+    pay.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Fact is, it's kind of upsettin' to find it so rich here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Give you leave to upset me that way all day."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Y' see, I bought another claim over yonder where I done a lot o' work
+    last summer and fall. Built a cabin and put up a sluice. I <i>got</i> to be
+    up there soon as the ice goes out. Don't see how I got time to do my
+    assessment here too. Wish I was twins."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why don't you sell this?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Guess I'll have to part with a share in it." He sighed and looked
+    lovingly into the hole. "Minin's an awful gamble," he said, as though
+    admonishing Si McGinty; "but we <i>know</i> there's gold just there."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel and the Boy looked at their claims and felt the pinch of
+    uncertainty. "What do you want for a share in your claim, Mr.
+    McGinty?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, well, as I say, I'll let it go reasonable to a feller who'd do the
+    assessment, on account o' my having that other property. Say three
+    thousand dollars."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel shook his head. "Why, it's dirt-cheap! Two men can take a
+    hundred and fifty dollars a day out of that claim without outside help.
+    And properly worked, the summer ought to show forty thousand dollars."
+</p>
+<p>
+    On the way home McGinty found he could let the thing go for "two
+    thousand spot cash."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Make it quarter shares," suggested the Boy, thrilled at such a chance,
+    "and the Colonel and I together'll raise five hundred and do the rest
+    of the assessment work for you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But they were nearly back at Minóok before McGinty said, "Well, I ain't
+    twins, and I can't personally work two gold-mines, so we'll call it a
+    deal." And the money passed that night.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And the word passed, too, to an ex-Governor of a Western State and his
+    satellites, newly arrived from Woodworth, and to a party of men just
+    down from Circle City. McGinty seemed more inclined to share his luck
+    with strangers than with the men he had wintered amongst. "Mean lot,
+    these Minóok fellers." But the return of the ex-Governor and so large a
+    party from quietly staking their claims, roused Minóok to a sense that
+    "somethin' was goin' on."
+</p>
+<p>
+    By McGinty's advice, the strangers called a secret meeting, and elected
+    McGinty recorder. All the claim-holders registered their properties and
+    the dates of location. The Recorder gave everybody his receipt, and
+    everybody felt it was cheap at five dollars. Then the meeting proceeded
+    to frame a code of Laws for the new district, stipulating the number of
+    feet permitted each claim (being rigidly kept by McGinty within the
+    limits provided by the United States Laws on the subject), and
+    decreeing the amount of work necessary to hold a claim a year, settling
+    questions of water rights, etc., etc.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Not until Glory Hallelujah Gulch was a full-fledged mining district did
+    Minóok in general know what was in the wind. The next day the news was
+    all over camp.
+</p>
+<p>
+    If McGinty's name inspired suspicion, the Colonel's and the
+    ex-Governor's reassured, the Colonel in particular (he had already
+    established that credit that came so easy to him) being triumphantly
+    quoted as saying, "Glory Hallelujah Gulch was the richest placer he'd
+    ever struck." Nobody added that it was also the only one. But this
+    matter of a stampede is not controlled by reason; it is a thing of the
+    nerves; while you are ridiculing someone else your legs are carrying
+    you off on the same errand.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In a mining-camp the saloon is the community's heart. However little a
+    man cares to drink, or to dance, or to play cards, he goes to the
+    saloon as to the one place where he may meet his fellows, do business,
+    and hear the news. The saloon is the Market Place. It is also the Café,
+    the Theatre, the Club, the Stock Exchange, the Barber's Shop, the
+    Bank&mdash;in short, you might as well be dead as not be a patron of the
+    Gold Nugget.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Yet neither the Colonel nor the Boy had been there since the night of
+    their arrival. On returning from that first triumphant inspection of
+    McGinty's diggings, the Colonel had been handed a sealed envelope
+    without address.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How do you know it's for me?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She said it was for the Big Chap," answered Blandford Keith.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel read:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>Come to the Gold Nugget as soon as you get this, and hear something
+    to your advantage</i>.&mdash;MAUDIE."
+</p>
+<p>
+    So he had stayed away, having plenty to occupy him in helping to
+    organise the new district. He was strolling past the saloon the morning
+    after the Secret Meeting, when down into the street, like a kingfisher
+    into a stream, Maudie darted, and held up the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ain't you had my letter?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh&mdash;a&mdash;yes&mdash;but I've been busy."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Guess so!" she said with undisguised scorn. "Where's Si McGinty?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Reckon he's out at the gulch. I've got to go down to the A. C. now and
+    buy some grub to take out." He was moving on.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Take where?" She followed him up.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To McGinty's gulch."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What for?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, to live on, while my pardner and I do the assessment work."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then it's true! McGinty's been fillin' you full o' guff." The Colonel
+    looked at her a little haughtily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "See here: I ain't busy, as a rule, about other folks' funerals, but&mdash;"
+    She looked at him curiously. "It's cold here; come in a minute." There
+    was no hint of vulgar nonsense, but something very earnest in the pert
+    little face that had been so pretty. They went in. "Order drinks," she
+    said aside, "and don't talk before Jimmie."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She chaffed the bartender, and leaned idly against the counter. When a
+    group of returned stampeders came in, she sat down at a rough little
+    faro-table, leaned her elbows on it, sipped the rest of the stuff in
+    her tumbler through a straw, and in the shelter of her arms set the
+    straw in a knot-hole near the table-leg, and spirited the bad liquor
+    down under the board. "Don't give me away," she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel knew she got a commission on the drinks, and was there to
+    bring custom. He nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I hoped I'd see you in time," she went on hurriedly&mdash;"in time to warn
+    you that McGinty was givin' you a song and dance."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tellin" you a ghost story."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You mean&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Can't you understand plain English?" she said, irritated at such
+    obtuseness. "I got worried thinkin' it over, for it was me told that
+    pardner o' yours&mdash;" She smiled wickedly. "I expected McGinty'd have
+    some fun with the young feller, but I didn't expect you'd be such a
+    Hatter." She wound up with the popular reference to lunacy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel pulled up his great figure with some pomposity. "I don't
+    understand."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Any feller can see that. You're just the kind the McGintys are layin'
+    for." She looked round to see that nobody was within earshot. "Si's
+    been layin' round all winter waitin' for the spring crop o' suckers."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If you mean there isn't gold out at McGinty's gulch, you're wrong;
+    I've seen it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Course you have."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He paused. She, sweeping the Gold Nugget with vigilant eye, went on in
+    a voice of indulgent contempt.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Some of 'em load up an old shot-gun with a little charge o' powder and
+    a quarter of an ounce of gold-dust on top, fire that into the prospect
+    hole a dozen times or so, and then take a sucker out to pan the stuff.
+    But I bet Si didn't take any more trouble with you than to have some
+    colours in his mouth, to spit in the shovel or the pan, when you wasn't
+    lookin'&mdash;just enough to drive you crazy, and get you to boost him into
+    a Recordership. Why, he's cleaned up a tub o' money in fees since you
+    struck the town."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel moved uneasily, but faith with him died hard.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "McGinty strikes me as a very decent sort of man, with a knowledge of
+    practical mining and of mining law&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Maudie made a low sound of impatience, and pushed her empty glass
+    aside.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, very well, go your own way! Waste the whole spring doin' Si's
+    assessment for him. And when the bottom drops out o' recordin', you'll
+    see Si gettin' some cheechalko to buy an interest in that rottin' hole
+    o' his&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Her jaw fell as she saw the Colonel's expression.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He's got you too!" she exclaimed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, didn't you say yourself that night you'd be glad if McGinty'd
+    let you a lay?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pshaw! I was only givin' you a song and dance. Not you neither, but
+    that pardner o' yours. I thought I'd learn that young man a lesson. But
+    I didn't know you'd get flim-flammed out o' your boots. Thought you
+    looked like you got some sense."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Unmoved by the Colonel's aspect of offended dignity, faintly dashed
+    with doubt, she hurried on:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Before you go shellin' out any more cash, or haulin' stuff to Glory
+    Hallelujah, just you go down that prospect hole o' McGinty's when
+    McGinty ain't there, and see how many colours you can ketch."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel looked at her.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I'll do it," he said slowly, "and if you're right&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I'm all right," she laughed; "an' I know my McGinty backwards.
+    But"&mdash;she frowned with sudden anger&mdash;"it ain't Maudie's pretty way to
+    interfere with cheechalkos gettin' fooled. I ain't proud o' the trouble
+    I've taken, and I'll thank you not to mention it. Not to that pardner
+    o' yours&mdash;not to nobody."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She stuck her nose in the air, and waved her hand to French Charlie,
+    who had just then opened the door and put his head in. He came straight
+    over to her, and she made room for him on the bench.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel went out full of thought. He listened attentively when the
+    ex-Governor, that evening at Keith's, said something about the woman up
+    at the Gold Nugget&mdash;"Maudie&mdash;what's the rest of her name?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't believe anybody knows. Oh, yes, they must, too; it'll be on her
+    deeds. She's got the best hundred by fifty foot lot in the place. Held
+    it down last fall herself with a six-shooter, and she owns that cabin
+    on the corner. Isn't a better business head in Minóok than Maudie's.
+    She got a lay on a good property o' Salaman's last fall, and I guess
+    she's got more ready dust even now, before the washin' begins, than
+    anybody here except Salaman and the A.C. There ain't a man in Minóok
+    who wouldn't listen respectfully to Maudie's views on any business
+    proposition&mdash;once he was sure she wasn't fooling."
+</p>
+<p>
+    And Keith told a string of stories to show how the Minóok miners
+    admired her astuteness, and helped her unblushingly to get the better
+    of one another.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel stayed in Minóok till the recording was all done, and
+    McGinty got tired of living on flap-jacks at the gulch.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The night McGinty arrived in town the Colonel, not even taking the Boy
+    into his confidence, hitched up and departed for the new district.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He came back the next day a sadder and a wiser man. They had been sold.
+</p>
+<p>
+    McGinty was quick to gather that someone must have given him away. It
+    had only been a question of time, after all. He had lined his pockets,
+    and could take the new turn in his affairs with equanimity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Wait till the steamers begin to run," Maudie said; "McGinty'll play
+    that game with every new boat-load. Oh, McGinty'll make another
+    fortune. Then he'll go to Dawson and blow it in. Well, Colonel, sorry
+    you ain't cultivatin' rheumatism in a damp hole up at Glory
+    Hallelujah?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I&mdash;I am very much obliged to you for saving me from&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She cut him short. "You see you've got time now to look about you for
+    something really good, if there <i>is</i> anything outside of Little
+    Minóok."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It was very kind of you to&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No it wasn't," she said shortly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel took out a roll of bank bills and selected one, folded it
+    small, and passed it towards her under the ledge of the table. She
+    glanced down.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I don't want that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, please."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tell you I don't."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You've done me a very good turn; saved me a lot of time and expense."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Slowly she took the money, as one thinking out something.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where do you come from?" he asked suddenly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "'Frisco. I was in the chorus at the Alcazar."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What made you go into the chorus?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Got tired o' life on a sheep-ranch. All work and no play. Never saw a
+    soul. Seen plenty since."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Got any people belonging to you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Got a kind of a husband."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A kind of a husband?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes&mdash;the kind you'd give away with a pound o' tea."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The little face, full of humourous contempt and shrewd scorn, sobered;
+    she flung a black look round the saloon, and her eyes came back to the
+    Colonel's face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've got a girl," she said, and a sudden light flashed across her
+    frowning as swiftly as a meteor cuts down along a darkened sky. "Four
+    years old in June. <i>She</i> ain't goin' into no chorus, bet your life!
+    <i>She's</i> going to have money, and scads o' things I ain't never had."
+</p>
+<p>
+    That night the Colonel and the Boy agreed that, although they had
+    wasted some valuable time and five hundred and twenty-five dollars on
+    McGinty, they still had a chance of making their fortunes before the
+    spring rush.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The next day they went eight miles out in slush and in alternate rain
+    and sunshine, to Little Minóok Creek, where the biggest paying claims
+    were universally agreed to be. They found a place even more ragged and
+    desolate than McGinty's, where smoke was rising sullenly from
+    underground fires and the smell of burning wood filled the air, the
+    ground turned up and dotted at intervals with piles of frozen gravel
+    that had been hoisted from the shafts by windlass, forlorn little
+    cabins and tents scattered indiscriminately, a vast number of empty
+    bottles and cans sown broadcast, and, early as it was, a line of
+    sluices upon Salaman's claim.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They had heard a great deal about the dark, keen-looking young Oregon
+    lawyer, for Salaman was the most envied man in Minóok. "Come over to my
+    dump and get some nuggets," says Mr. Salaman, as in other parts of the
+    world a man will say, "Come into the smoking-room and have a cigar."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The snow was melted from the top of Salaman's dump, and his guests had
+    no difficulty in picking several rough little bits of gold out of the
+    thawing gravel. It was an exhilarating occupation.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come down my shaft and see my cross-cuts"; and they followed him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He pointed out how the frozen gravel made solid wall, or pillar, and no
+    curbing was necessary. With the aid of a candle and their host's
+    urging, they picked out several dollars' worth of coarse gold from the
+    gravel "in place" at the edge of the bed-rock. When he had got his
+    guests thoroughly warmed up:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, I took out several thousand last fall, and I'll have twenty
+    thousand more out of my first summer clean-up."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And after that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "After that I'm going home. I wouldn't stay here and work this way and
+    live this way another winter, not for twenty millions."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm surprised to hear <i>you</i> talking like that, sah."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, you won't be once you have tried it yourself. Mining up here's
+    an awful gamble. Colours pretty well everywhere, and a few flakes of
+    flour gold, just enough to send the average cheechalko crazy, but no
+    real 'pay' outside of this little gulch. And even here, every inch has
+    been scrambled for&mdash;and staked, too&mdash;and lots of it fought over. Men
+    died here in the fall defending their ground from the jumpers&mdash;ground
+    that hadn't a dollar in it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, your ground was worth looking after, and John Dillon's. Which is
+    his claim?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Salaman led the way over the heaps of gravel and round a windlass to
+    No. 6, admitting:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, yes, Dillon and I, and a few others, have come out of it all
+    right, but Lord! it's a gamble."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Dillon's pardner, Kennedy, did the honours, showing the Big Chimney men
+    the very shaft out of which their Christmas heap of gold had been
+    hoisted. It was true after all. For the favoured there <i>was</i> "plenty o'
+    gold&mdash;plenty o' gold."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But," said Salaman, "there are few things more mysterious than its
+    whereabouts or why it should be where it is. Don't talk to me about
+    mining experts&mdash;we've had 'em here. But who can explain the mystery of
+    Minóok? There are six claims in all this country that pay to work. The
+    pay begins in No. 5; before that, nothing. Just up yonder, above No.
+    10, the pay-streak pinches out. No mortal knows why. A whole winter's
+    toiling and moiling, and thousands of dollars put into the ground,
+    haven't produced an ounce of gold above that claim or below No. 5. I
+    tell you it's an awful gamble. Hunter Creek, Hoosier, Bear, Big Minóok,
+    I You, Quail, Alder, Mike Hess, Little Nell&mdash;the whole blessed country,
+    rivers, creeks, pups, and all, staked for a radius of forty miles just
+    because there's gold here, where we're standing."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You don't mean there's <i>nothing</i> left!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nothing within forty miles that somebody hasn't either staked or made
+    money by abandoning."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Made money?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Salaman laughed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's money in your pocket pretty nearly every time you don't take up a
+    claim. Why, on Hunter alone they've spent twenty thousand dollars this
+    winter."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And how much have they taken out?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    With index-finger and thumb Salaman made an "O," and looked shrewdly
+    through it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's an awful gamble," he repeated solemnly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It doesn't seem possible there's <i>nothing</i> left," reiterated the Boy,
+    incredulous of such evil luck.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I'm not saying you may not make something by getting on some other
+    fellow's property, if you've a mind to pay for it. But you'd better not
+    take anything on trust. I wouldn't trust my own mother in Alaska.
+    Something in the air here that breeds lies. You can't believe anybody,
+    yourself included." He laughed, stooped, and picked a little nugget out
+    of the dump. "You'll have the same man tell you an entirely different
+    story about the same matter within an hour. Exaggeration is in the air.
+    The best man becomes infected. You lie, he lies, they all lie. Lots of
+    people go crazy in Alaska every year&mdash;various causes, but it's chiefly
+    from believing their own lies."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They returned to Rampart.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was decidedly inconvenient, considering the state of their finances,
+    to have thrown away that five hundred dollars on McGinty. They messed
+    with Keith, and paid their two-thirds of the household expenses; but
+    Dawson prices reigned, and it was plain there were no Dawson prizes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well," said the Colonel in the morning, "we've got to live somehow
+    till the ice goes out." The Boy sat thinking. The Colonel went on: "And
+    we can't go to Dawson cleaned out. No tellin' whether there are any
+    proper banks there or whether my Louisville instructions got through.
+    Of course, we've got the dogs yet."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't care how soon we sell Red and Spot."
+</p>
+<p>
+    After breakfast the Boy tied Nig up securely behind Keith's shack, and
+    followed the Colonel about with a harassed and watchful air.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No market for dogs now," seemed to be the general opinion, and one
+    person bore up well under the news.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the next day a man, very splashed and muddy, and obviously just in
+    from the gulches, stopped, in going by Keith's, and looked at Nig.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Dog market's down," quoted the Boy internally to hearten himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That mahlemeut's for sale," observed the Colonel to the stranger.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "These are." The Boy hastily dragged Red and Spot upon the scene.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How much?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Seventy-five dollars apiece."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The man laughed. "Ain't you heard the dog season's over?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, don't you count on livin' to the next?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The man pushed his slouch over his eyes and scratched the back of his
+    head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Unless I can git 'em reasonable, dogs ain't worth feedin' till next
+    winter."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I suppose not," said the Boy sympathetically; "and you can't get fish
+    here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Right. Feedin' yourn on bacon, I s'pose, at forty cents a pound?'
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Bacon and meal."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Guess you'll get tired o' that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, we'd sell you the red dog for sixty dollars," admitted the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The man stared. "Give you thirty for that black brute over there."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Thirty dollars for Nig!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And not a&mdash;cent more. Dogs is down." He could get a dozen as good for
+    twenty-five dollars.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Just you try." But the Colonel, grumbling, said thirty dollars was
+    thirty dollars, and he reckoned he'd call it a deal. The Boy stared,
+    opened his mouth to protest, and shut it without a sound.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel had untied Nig, and the Leader, unmindful of the impending
+    change in his fortunes, dashed past the muddy man from the gulch with
+    such impetuosity that he knocked that gentleman off his legs. He picked
+    himself up scowling, and was feeling for his gold sack.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Got scales here?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No need of scales." The Boy whipped out a little roll of money,
+    counted out thirty dollars, and held it towards the Colonel. "I can
+    afford to keep Nig awhile if that's his figure."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The stranger was very angry at this new turn in the dog deal. He had
+    seen that Siwash out at the gulch, heard he was for sale, and came in
+    "a purpose to git him."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The dog season's over," said the Boy, pulling Nig's ears and smiling.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, <i>is</i> it? Well, the season for eatin' meals ain't over. How'm I to
+    git grub out to my claim without a dog?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We are offerin' you a couple o' capital draught dogs."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I bought that there Siwash, and I'd a paid fur him if he hadn't a
+    knocked me down." He advanced threateningly. "An' if you ain't huntin'
+    trouble&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The big Colonel stepped in and tried to soothe the stranger, as well as
+    to convince him that this was not the party to try bullying on.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll give you forty dollars for the dog," said the muddy man sulkily
+    to the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Give you fifty, and that's my last word."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I ain't sellin' dogs."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He cursed, and offered five dollars more.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Can't you see I <i>mean</i> it? I'm goin' to keep that dog&mdash;awhile."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "S'pose you think you'll make a good thing o' hirin' him out?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He hadn't thought of it, but he said: "Why not? Best dog in the Yukon."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, how much?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How much'll you give?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Dollar a day."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Done."
+</p>
+<p>
+    So Nig was hired out, Spot was sold for twenty dollars, and Red later
+    for fifteen.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well," said the Colonel when they went in, "I didn't know you were so
+    smart. But you can't live <i>here</i> on Nig's seven dollars a week."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy shook his head. Their miserable canned and salted fare cost
+    about four dollars a day per man.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm goin' to take Nig's tip," he said&mdash;"goin' to work."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Easier said than done. In their high rubber boots they splashed about
+    Rampart in the mild, thawing weather, "tryin' to scare up a job," as
+    one of them stopped to explain to every likely person: "Yes, sah,
+    lookin' for any sort of honourable employment till the ice goes out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nothin' doin'."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Everything's at a standstill."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Just keepin' body and soul together myself till the boats come in."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They splashed out to the gulch on the same errand.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Yes, wages were fifteen dollars a day when they were busy. Just now
+    they were waiting for the thorough thaw.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Should think it was pretty thorough without any waitin'."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Salaman shook his head. "Only in the town and tundra. The frost holds
+    on to the deep gulch gravel like grim death. And the diggin's were
+    already full of men ready to work for their keep-at least, they say
+    so," Salaman added.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Not only in the great cities is human flesh and blood held cheaper than
+    that of the brutes. Even in the off season, when dogs was down, Nig
+    could get his dollar a day, but his masters couldn't get fifty cents.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH18"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XVII
+</h2>
+<center>
+    THE GREAT STAMPEDE
+</center>
+<p class="ind">
+    "Die Menchen suchen und suchen, wollen immer was Besseres finden....
+    Gott geb' ihnen nur Geduld!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Men in the Gold Nugget were talking about some claims, staked and
+    recorded in due form, but on which the statutory work had not been
+    done.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What about 'em?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They're jumpable at midnight."
+</p>
+<p>
+    French Charlie invited the Boy to go along, but neither he nor the
+    Colonel felt enthusiastic.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They're no good, those claims, except to sell to some sucker, and
+    we're not in that business <i>yet</i>, sah."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They had just done twenty miles in slush and mire, and their hearts
+    were heavier than their heels. No, they would go to bed while the
+    others did the jumpin', and next day they would fill Keith's wood-bin.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So if work does turn up we won't have to worry about usin' up his
+    firin'." In the chill of the next evening they were cording the results
+    of the day's chopping, when Maudie, in fur coat, skirts to the knee,
+    and high rubber boots, appeared behind Keith's shack. Without deigning
+    to notice the Boy, "Ain't seen you all day," says she to the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Busy," he replied, scarcely looking up.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did you do any jumpin' last night?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>That's</i> all right."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She seated herself with satisfaction on a log. She looked at the Boy
+    impudently, as much as to say, "When that blot on the landscape is
+    removed, I'll tell you something." The Boy had not the smallest
+    intention of removing the blot.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Grudgingly he admitted to himself that, away from the unsavory
+    atmosphere of the Gold Nugget, there was nothing in Maudie positively
+    offensive. At this moment, with her shrewd little face peering pertly
+    out from her parki-hood, she looked more than ever like an audacious
+    child, or like some strange, new little Arctic animal with a whimsical
+    human air.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look here, Colonel," she said presently, either despairing of getting
+    rid of the Boy or ceasing to care about it: "you got to get a wiggle on
+    to-morrow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What for?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She looked round, first over one shoulder, then over the other. "Well,
+    it's on the quiet."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Kentuckian nodded. But she winked her blue eyes suspiciously at the
+    Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, <i>he's</i> all right."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, you been down to Little Minóok, ain't you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And you seen how the pay pinches out above No. 10?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, now, if it ain't above No. 10, where is it?" No answer. "Where
+    does it <i>go</i>?" she repeated severely, like a schoolmarm to a class of
+    backward boys.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's what everybody'd like to know."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then let 'em ask Pitcairn."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's Pitcairn say?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She got up briskly, moved to another log almost at the Colonel's feet,
+    and sat looking at him a moment as if making up her mind about
+    something serious. The Colonel stood, fists at his sides, arrested by
+    that name Pitcairn.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You know Pitcairn's the best all-round man we got here," she asserted
+    rather than asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He's an Idaho miner, Pitcairn is!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I know."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, he's been out lookin' at the place where the gold gives out on
+    Little Minóok. There's a pup just there above No. 10&mdash;remember?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Perfectly."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And above the pup, on the right, there's a bed of gravel."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Couldn't see much of that for the snow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, sir, that bed o' gravel's an old channel."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She nodded. "Pitcairn's sunk a prospect, and found colours in his first
+    pan."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, colours!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But the deeper he went, the better prospects he got." She stood up
+    now, close to the Colonel. The Boy stopped work and leaned on the wood
+    pile, listening. "Pitcairn told Charlie and me (on the strict q. t.)
+    that the gold channel crossed the divide at No. 10, and the only gold
+    on Little Minóokust what spilt down on those six claims as the gold
+    went crossin' the gulch. The real placer is that old channel above the
+    pup, and boys"&mdash;in her enthusiasm she even included the Colonel's
+    objectionable pardner&mdash;"boys, it's rich as blazes!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I wonder&mdash;&mdash;" drawled the Colonel, recovering a little from his first
+    thrill.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I wouldn't advise you to waste much time wonderin'," she said with
+    fire. "What I'm tellin' you is scientific. Pitcairn is straight as a
+    string. You won't get any hymns out o' Pitcairn, but you'll get fair
+    and square. His news is worth a lot. If you got any natchral gumption
+    anywhere about you, you can have a claim worth anything from ten to
+    fifty thousand dollars this time to-morrow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, well! Good Lord! Hey, Boy, what we goin' to do?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, you don't want to get excited," admonished the queer little
+    Arctic animal, jumping up suddenly; "but you can bunk early and get a
+    four a.m. wiggle on. Charlie and me'll meet you on the Minóokl. Ta-ta!"
+    tad she whisked away as suddenly as a chipmunk.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They couldn't sleep. Some minutes before the time named they were
+    quietly leaving Keith's shack. Out on the trail there were two or three
+    men already disappearing towards Little Minóok here was Maudie, all by
+    herself, sprinting along like a good fellow, on the thin surface of the
+    last night's frost. She walked in native water-boots, but her
+    snow-shoes stuck out above the small pack neatly lashed on her straight
+    little shoulders. They waited for her.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She came up very brisk and businesslike. To their good-mornings she
+    only nodded in a funny, preoccupied way, never opening her lips.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Charlie gone on?" inquired the Colonel presently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She shook her head. "Knocked out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Been fightin'?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No; ran a race to Hunter."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To jump that claim?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did he beat?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She laughed. "Butts had the start. They got there together at nine
+    o'clock!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Three hours before jumpin' time?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Again she nodded. "And found four more waitin' on the same fool
+    errand."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What did they do?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Called a meetin'. Couldn't agree. It looked like there'd be a fight,
+    and a fast race to the Recorder among the survivors. But before the
+    meetin' was adjourned, those four that had got there first (they were
+    pretty gay a'ready), they opened some hootch, so Butts and Charlie knew
+    they'd nothing to fear except from one another."
+</p>
+<p>
+    On the top of the divide that gave them their last glimpse of Rampart
+    she stopped an instant and looked back. The quick flash of anxiety
+    deepening to defiance made the others turn. The bit they could see of
+    the water-front thoroughfare was alive. The inhabitants were rushing
+    about like a swarm of agitated ants.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's happening?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's got out," she exploded indignantly. "They're comin', too!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She turned, flew down the steep incline, and then settled into a
+    steady, determined gait, that made her gain on the men who had got so
+    long a start. Her late companions stood looking back in sheer
+    amazement, for the town end of the trail was black with figures. The
+    Boy began to laugh.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look! if there isn't old Jansen and his squaw wife."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The rheumatic cripple, huddled on a sled, was drawn by a native man and
+    pushed by a native woman. They could hear him swearing at both
+    impartially in broken English and Chinook.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel and the Boy hurried after Maudie. It was some minutes
+    before they caught up. The Boy, feeling that he couldn't be
+    stand-offish in the very act of profiting by her acquaintance, began to
+    tell her about the crippled but undaunted Swede. She made no answer,
+    just trotted steadily on. The Boy hazarded another remark&mdash;an opinion
+    that she was making uncommon good time for a woman.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You'll want all the wind you got before you get back," she said
+    shortly, and silence fell on the stampeders.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Some of the young men behind were catching up. Maudie set
+    her mouth very firm and quickened her pace. This spectacle touched
+    up those that followed; they broke into a canter, floundered in a
+    drift, recovered, and passed on. Maudie pulled up.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's all right! Let 'em get good and tired, half-way. We got to save
+    all the run we got in us for the last lap."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The sun was hotter, the surface less good.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She loosened her shoulder-straps, released her snow-shoes, and put them
+    on. As she tightened her little pack the ex-Governor came puffing up
+    with apoplectic face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, she can throw the diamond hitch!" he gasped with admiration.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "S'pose you thought the squaw hitch would be good enough for me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, it is for me," he laughed breathlessly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's 'cause you're an ex-Governor"; and steadily she tramped along.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In twenty minutes Maudie's party came upon those same young men who had
+    passed running. They sat in a row on a fallen spruce. One had no rubber
+    boots, the other had come off in such a hurry he had forgotten his
+    snow-shoes. Already they were wet to the waist.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Step out, Maudie," said one with short-breathed hilarity; "we'll be
+    treadin' on your heels in a minute;" but they were badly blown.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Maudie wasted not a syllable. Her mouth began to look drawn. There were
+    violet shadows under the straight-looking eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel glanced at her now and then. Is she thinking about that
+    four-year-old? Is Maudie stampedin' through the snow so that other
+    little woman need never dance at the Alcazar? No, the Colonel knew well
+    enough that Maudie rather liked this stampedin' business.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She had passed one of those men who had got the long start of her. He
+    carried a pack. Once in a while she would turn her strained-looking
+    face over her shoulder, glancing back, with the frank eyes of an enemy,
+    at her fellow-citizens labouring along the trail.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come on, Colonel!" she commanded, with a new sharpness. "Keep up your
+    lick."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the Colonel had had about enough of this gait. From now on he fell
+    more and more behind. But the Boy was with her neck and neck.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Guess you're goin' to get there."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Guess I am."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Some men behind them began to run. They passed. They had pulled off
+    their parkis, and left them where they fell. They threw off their caps
+    now, and the sweat rolled down their faces. Not a countenance but wore
+    that immobile look, the fixed, unseeing eye of the spent runner, who is
+    overtaxing heart and lungs. Not only Maudie now, but everyone was
+    silent. Occasionally a man would rouse himself out of a walk, as if out
+    of sleep, and run a few yards, going the more weakly after. Several of
+    the men who had been behind caught up.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Where was Kentucky?
+</p>
+<p>
+    If Maudie wondered, she wasted no time over the speculation. For his
+    own good she had admonished him to keep up his lick, but of course the
+    main thing was that Maudie should keep up hers.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What if this is the great day of my life!" thought the Boy. "Shall I
+    always look back to this? Why, it's Sunday. Wonder if Kentucky
+    remembers?" Never pausing, the Boy glanced back, vaguely amused, and
+    saw the Colonel plunging heavily along in front of half a dozen, who
+    were obviously out of condition for such an expedition&mdash;eyes bloodshot,
+    lumbering on with nervous "whisky gait," now whipped into a breathless
+    gallop, now half falling by the way. Another of the Gold Nugget women
+    with two groggy-looking men, and somewhere down the trail, the crippled
+    Swede swearing at his squaw. A dreamy feeling came over the Boy. Where
+    in the gold basins of the North was this kind of thing not
+    happening&mdash;finished yesterday, or planned for to-morrow? Yes, it was
+    typical. Between patches of ragged black spruce, wide stretches of
+    snow-covered moss, under a lowering sky, and a mob of men floundering
+    through the drifts to find a fortune. "See how they run!"&mdash;mad mice.
+    They'd been going on stampedes all winter, and would go year in, year
+    out, until they died. The prizes were not for such as they. As for
+    himself&mdash;ah, it was a great day for him! He was going at last to claim
+    that gold-mine he had come so far to find. This was the decisive moment
+    of his life. At the thought he straightened up, and passed Maudie. She
+    gave him a single sidelong look, unfriendly, even fierce. That was
+    because he could run like sixty, and keep it up. "When I'm a
+    millionaire I shall always remember that I'm rich because I won the
+    race." A dizzy feeling came over him. He seemed to be running through
+    some softly resisting medium like water&mdash;no, like wine jelly. His heart
+    was pounding up in his throat. "What if something's wrong, and I drop
+    dead on the way to my mine? Well, Kentucky'll look after things."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Maudie had caught up again, and here was Little Minóok at last! A
+    couple of men, who from the beginning had been well in advance of
+    everyone else, and often out of sight, had seemed for the last five
+    minutes to be losing ground. But now they put on steam, Maudie too. She
+    stepped out of her snowshoes, and flung them up on the low roof of the
+    first cabin. Then she ducked her head, crooked her arms at the elbow,
+    and, with fists uplifted, she broke into a run, jumping from pile to
+    pile of frozen pay, gliding under sluice-boxes, scrambling up the bank,
+    slipping on the rotting ice, recovering, dashing on over fallen timber
+    and through waist-deep drifts, on beyond No. 10 up to the bench above.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the Boy got to Pitcairn's prospect hole, there were already six
+    claims gone. He proceeded to stake the seventh, next to Maudie's. That
+    person, with flaming cheeks, was driving her last location-post into a
+    snow-drift with a piece of water-worn obsidian.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel came along in time to stake No. 14 Below, under Maudie's
+    personal supervision.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Not much use, in her opinion, "except that with gold, it's where you
+    find it, and that's all any man can tell you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    As she was returning alone to her own claim, behold two brawny Circle
+    City miners pulling out her stakes and putting in their own. She flew
+    at them with remarks unprintable.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You keep your head shut," advised one of the men, a big, evil-looking
+    fellow. "This was our claim first. We was here with Pitcairn yesterday.
+    Somebody's took away our location-posts."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You take me for a cheechalko?" she screamed, and her blue eyes flashed
+    like smitten steel. She pulled up her sweater and felt in her belt.
+    "You&mdash;take your stakes out! Put mine back, unless you want&mdash;&mdash;" A
+    murderous-looking revolver gleamed in her hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hold on!" said the spokesman hurriedly. "Can't you take a joke?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No; this ain't my day for jokin'. You want to put them stakes o' mine
+    back." She stood on guard till it was done. "And now I'd advise you,
+    like a mother, to back-track home. You'll find this climate very tryin'
+    to your health."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They went farther up the slope and marked out a claim on the incline
+    above the bench.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In a few hours the mountain-side was staked to the very top, and still
+    the stream of people struggled out from Rampart to the scene of the new
+    strike. All day long, and all the night, the trail was alive with the
+    coming or the going of the five hundred and odd souls that made up the
+    population. In the town itself the excitement grew rather than waned.
+    Men talked themselves into a fever, others took fire, and the epidemic
+    spread like some obscure nervous disease. Nobody slept, everybody drank
+    and hurrahed, and said it was the greatest night in the history of
+    Minóok. In the Gold Nugget saloon, crowded to suffocation, Pitcairn
+    organized the new mining district, and named it the Idaho Bar. French
+    Charlie and Keith had gone out late in the day. On their return, Keith
+    sold his stake to a woman for twenty-five dollars, and Charlie
+    advertised a half-interest in his for five thousand. Between these two
+    extremes you could hear Idaho Bar quoted at any figure you liked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Maudie was in towering spirits. She drank several cocktails, and in her
+    knee-length "stampedin' skirt" and her scarlet sweater she danced the
+    most audacious jig even Maudie had ever presented to the Gold Nugget
+    patrons. The miners yelled with delight. One of them caught her up and
+    put her on the counter of the bar, where, no whit at a loss, she
+    curveted and spun among the bottles and the glasses as lightly as a
+    dragonfly dips and whirls along a summer brook. The enthusiasm grew
+    delirious. The men began to throw nuggets at her, and Maudie, never
+    pausing in the dance, caught them on the fly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Suddenly she saw the Big Chap turn away, and, with his back to her,
+    pretend to read the notice on the wall, written in charcoal on a great
+    sheet of brown wrapping-paper:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "MINÓOK, April 30.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To who it may concern:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Know all men by these presents that I, James McGinty, now of Minóok
+    (or Rampart City), Alaska, do hereby give notice of my intention to
+    hold and claim a lien by virtue of the statue in such case&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He had read so far when Maudie, having jumped down off the bar with her
+    fists full of nuggets, and dodging her admirers, wormed her way to the
+    Colonel. She thrust her small person in between the notice and the
+    reader, and scrutinised the tanned face, on which the Rochester burners
+    shed a flood of light. "You lookin' mighty serious," she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Am I?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "M-hm! Thinkin' 'bout home sweet home?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "N-no&mdash;not just then."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Say, I told you 'bout&mdash;a&mdash;'bout me. You ain't never told me nothin'."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He seemed not to know the answer to that, and pulled at his ragged
+    beard. She leaned back against McGinty's notice, and blurred still more
+    the smudged intention "by virtue of the statue."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Married, o' course," she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Widder?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Never hitched up yet?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Never goin' to, I s'pose."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I don't know," he laughed, and turned his head over his shoulder
+    to the curious scene between them and the bar. It was suddenly as if he
+    had never seen it before; then, while Maudie waited, a little scornful,
+    a little kind, his eyes went through the window to the pink and orange
+    sunrise. As some change came over the Colonel's face, "She died!" said
+    Maudie.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No&mdash;no&mdash;she didn't die;" then half to himself, half to forestall
+    Maudie's crude probing, "but I lost her," he finished.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, you lost her!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He stood, looking past the ugliness within to the morning majesty
+    without. But it was not either that he saw. Maudie studied him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Guess you ain't give up expectin' to find her some day?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No&mdash;no, not quite."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Humph! Did you guess you'd find her here?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," and his absent smile seemed to remove him leagues away. "No, not
+    here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I could a' told you&mdash;&mdash;" she began savagely. "I don't know for certain
+    whether any&mdash;what you call good women come up here, but I'm dead sure
+    none stay."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When do you leave for home, Maudie?" he said gently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But at the flattering implication the oddest thing happened. As she
+    stood there, with her fists full of gold, Maudie's eyes filled. She
+    turned abruptly and went out. The crowd began to melt away. In half an
+    hour only those remained who had more hootch than they could carry off
+    the premises. They made themselves comfortable on the floor, near the
+    stove, and the greatest night Minóok had known was ended.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH19"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XVIII
+</h2>
+<center>
+    A MINERS' MEETING
+</center>
+<p class="ind">
+    "Leiden oder triumphiren Hammer oder Amboss sein."&mdash;Goethe.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In a good-sized cabin, owned by Bonsor, down near the A. C., Judge
+    Corey was administering Miners' Law. The chief magistrate was already a
+    familiar figure, standing on his dump at Little Minóok, speculatively
+    chewing and discussing "glayshal action," but most of the time at the
+    Gold Nugget, chewing still, and discussing more guardedly the action
+    some Minóok man was threatening to bring against another. You may treat
+    a glacier cavalierly, but Miners' Law is a serious matter. Corey was
+    sitting before a deal table, littered with papers strewn round a
+    central bottle of ink, in which a steel pen stuck upright. The Judge
+    wore his usual dilapidated business suit of brown cheviot that had once
+    been snuff-coloured and was now a streaky drab. On his feet, stretched
+    out under the magisterial table till they joined the jury, a pair of
+    moccasins; on his grizzled head a cowboy hat, set well back. He could
+    spit farther than any man in Minóok, and by the same token was a better
+    shot. They had unanimously elected him Judge.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The first-comers had taken possession of the chairs and wooden stools
+    round the stove. All the later arrivals, including Keith and his
+    friends, sat on the floor.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There's a good many here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They'll keep comin' as long as a lean man can scrouge in."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes," said Keith, "everybody's got to come, even if it's only the
+    usual row between pardners, who want to part and can't agree about
+    dividing the outfit."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Got to come?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Keith laughed. "That's the way everybody feels. There'll be a debate
+    and a chance to cast a vote. Isn't your true-born American always
+    itching to hold a meeting about something?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't know about that," said McGinty, "but I do know there's more
+    things happens in a minute to make a man mad in Alaska, than happens in
+    a year anywhere else." And his sentiment was loudly applauded. The
+    plaintiff had scored a hit.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't know but two partnerships," the ex-Governor was saying, "of
+    all those on my ship and on the Muckluck and the May West&mdash;just two,
+    that have stood the Alaska strain. Everyone that didn't break on the
+    boats, or in camp, went to smash on the trail."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They all admitted that the trail was the final test. While they smoked
+    and spat into or at the stove, and told trail yarns, the chief
+    magistrate arranged papers, conferred with the clerk and another man,
+    wrinkled deeply his leathery forehead, consulted his Waterbury, and
+    shot tobacco-juice under the table.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Another reason everybody comes," whispered Keith, "is because the side
+    that wins always takes the town up to the Nugget and treats to hootch.
+    Whenever you see eighty or ninety more drunks than usual, you know
+    there's either been a stampede or else justice has been administered."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ain't Bonsor late?" asked someone.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, it's a quarter of."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why do they want Bonsor?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "His case on the docket&mdash;McGinty v. Burt Bonsor, proprietor of the Gold
+    Nugget."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If they got a row on&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If they got a row? Course they got a row. Weren't they pardners?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But McGinty spends all his time at the Gold Nugget."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, where would he spend it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A Miners' Meetin's a pretty poor machine," McGinty was saying to the
+    ex-Governor, "but it's the best we got."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "&mdash;&mdash;in a country bigger than several of the nations of Europe put
+    together," responded that gentleman, with much public spirit.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A Great Country!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Right!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You bet!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "&mdash;&mdash;a country that's paid for its purchase over and over again, even
+    before we discovered gold here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did she? Good old 'laska."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "&mdash;&mdash;and the worst treated part o' the Union."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's so."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "After this, when I read about Russian corruption and Chinese cruelty,
+    I'll remember the way Uncle Sam treats the natives up&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "&mdash;&mdash;and us, b'gosh! White men that are openin' up this great, rich
+    country fur Uncle Sam&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "&mdash;&mdash;with no proper courts&mdash;no Government protection&mdash;no help&mdash;no
+    justice&mdash;no nothin'."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yer forgittin' them reindeer!" And the court-room rang with derisive
+    laughter.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Congress started that there Relief Expedition all right," the josher
+    went on, "only them blamed reindeer had got the feed habit, and when
+    they'd et up everything in sight they set down on the Dalton Trail&mdash;and
+    there they're settin' yit, just like they was Congress. But I don't
+    like to hear no feller talkin' agin' the Gover'ment."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, it's all very funny," said McGinty gloomily, "but think o' the
+    fix a feller's in wot's had a wrong done him in the fall, and knows
+    justice is thousands o' miles away, and he can't even go after her for
+    eight months; and in them eight months the feller wot robbed him has et
+    up the money, or worked out the claim, and gone dead-broke."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, sir! we don't wait, and we don't go trav'lin'. We stay at home and
+    call a meetin'."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The door opened, and Bonsor and the bar-tender, with great difficulty,
+    forced their way in. They stood flattened against the wall. During the
+    diversion McGinty was growling disdainfully, "Rubbidge!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Rubbidge? Reckon it's pretty serious rubbidge."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did you ever know a Miners' Meetin' to make a decision that didn't
+    become law, with the whole community ready to enforce it if necessary?
+    Rubbidge!
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, we'll hang a man if we don't like his looks," grumbled McGinty;
+    but he was overborne. There were a dozen ready to uphold the majesty of
+    the Miners' Meetin'.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, sir! No funny business about our law! This tribunal's final."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I ain't disputin' that it's final. I ain't talkin' about law. I was
+    mentionin' Justice."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The feller that loses is always gassin' 'bout Justice. When you win
+    you don't think there's any flies on the Justice."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ain't had much experience with winnin'. We all knows who wins in these
+    yere Meetin's."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who?" But they turned their eyes on Mr. Bonsor, over by the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who wins?" repeated a Circle City man.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The feller that's got the most friends."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's so," whispered Keith.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "&mdash;&mdash;same at Circle," returned the up-river man.
+</p>
+<p>
+    McGinty looked at him. Was this a possible adherent?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You got a Push at Circle?" he inquired, but without genuine interest
+    in the civil administration up the river. "Why, 'fore this yere town
+    was organised, when we hadn't got no Court of Arbitration to fix a
+    boundary, or even to hang a thief, we had our 'main Push,' just like we
+    was 'Frisco." He lowered his voice, and leaned towards his Circle
+    friend. "With Bonsor's help they 'lected Corey Judge o' the P'lice
+    Court, and Bonsor ain't never let Corey forgit it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What about the other?" inquired a Bonsorite, "the shifty Push that got
+    you in for City Marshal?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's the row on to-night?" inquired the Circle City man.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, Bonsor, over there, he lit out on a stampede 'bout Christmas, and
+    while he was gone a feller by the name o' Lawrence quit the game.
+    Fanned out one night at the Gold Nugget. I seen for days he was wantin'
+    to be a angil, and I kep' a eye on 'im. Well, when he went to the
+    boneyard, course it was my business, bein' City Marshal, to take
+    possession of his property fur his heirs!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was unseemly laughter behind the stove-pipe.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Among his deeds and traps," McGinty went on, unheeding, "there was
+    fifteen hundred dollars in money. Well, sir, when Bonsor gits back he
+    decides he'd like to be the custodian o' that cash. Mentions his idee
+    to me. I jest natchrally tell him to go to hell. No, sir, he goes to
+    Corey over there, and gits an order o' the Court makin' Bonsor
+    administrator o' the estate o' James Lawrence o' Noo Orleens, lately
+    deceased. Then Bonsor comes to me, shows me the order, and demands that
+    fifteen hundred."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Didn't he tell you you could keep all the rest o' Lawrence's stuff?"
+    asked the Bonsorite.
+</p>
+<p>
+    McGinty disdained to answer this thrust.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But I knows my dooty as City Marshal, and I says, 'No,' and Bonsor
+    says, says he, 'If you can't git the idee o' that fifteen hundred
+    dollars out o' your head, I'll git it out fur ye with a bullet,' an' he
+    draws on me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "An' McGinty weakens," laughed the mocker behind the stove-pipe.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Bonsor jest pockets the pore dead man's cash," says McGinty, with
+    righteous indignation, "and I've called this yer meetin' t' arbitrate
+    the matter."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Minoók doesn't mind arbitrating," says Keith low to the Colonel, "but
+    there isn't a man in camp that would give five cents for the interest
+    of the heirs of Lawrence in that fifteen hundred dollars."
+</p>
+<p>
+    A hammering on the clerk's little table announced that it was seven
+    p.m.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Court then called for the complaint filed by McGinty v. Bonsor, the
+    first case on the docket. The clerk had just risen when the door was
+    flung open, and hatless, coatless, face aflame, Maudie stood among the
+    miners.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Boys!" said she, on the top of a scream, "I been robbed."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Robbed?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Golly!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Maudie robbed?" They spoke all together. Everybody had jumped up.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "While we was on that stampede yesterday, somebody found my&mdash;all
+    my&mdash;&mdash;" She choked, and her eyes filled. "Boys! my nuggets, my dust, my
+    dollars&mdash;they're gone!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where did you have 'em?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In a little place under&mdash;in a hole." Her face twitched, and she put
+    her hand up to hide it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mean shame."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Dirt mean."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We'll find him, Maudie."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "An' when we do, we'll hang him on the cottonwood."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did anybody know where you kept your&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I didn't think so, unless it was&mdash;&mdash;No!" she screamed hysterically,
+    and then fell into weak crying. "Can't think who could have been such a
+    skunk."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But who do you suspect?" persisted the Judge.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How do I know?" she retorted angrily. "I suspect everybody till&mdash;till
+    I know." She clenched her hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+    That a thief should be "operating" in Minoók on somebody who wasn't
+    dead yet, was a matter that came home to the business and the bosoms of
+    all the men in the camp. In the midst of the babel of speculation and
+    excitement, Maudie, still crying and talking incoherently about skunks,
+    opened the door. The men crowded after her. Nobody suggested it, but
+    the entire Miners' Meeting with one accord adjourned to the scene of
+    the crime. Only a portion could be accommodated under Maudie's roof,
+    but the rest crowded in front of her door or went and examined the
+    window. Maudie's log-cabin was a cheerful place, its one room, neatly
+    kept, lined throughout with red and white drill, hung with marten and
+    fox, carpeted with wolf and caribou. The single sign of disorder was
+    that the bed was pulled out a little from its place in the angle of the
+    wall above the patent condenser stove. Behind the oil-tank, where the
+    patent condensation of oil into gas went on, tiers of shelves,
+    enamelled pots and pans ranged below, dishes and glasses above. On the
+    very top, like a frieze, gaily labelled ranks of "tinned goods." On the
+    table under the window a pair of gold scales. A fire burned in the
+    stove. The long-lingering sunlight poured through the "turkey-red" that
+    she had tacked up for a half-curtain, and over this, one saw the
+    slouch-hats and fur caps of the outside crowd.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Clutching Judge Corey by the arm, Maudie pulled him after her into the
+    narrow space behind the head-board and the wall.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It was here&mdash;see?" She stooped down.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Some of the men pulled the bed farther out, so that they, too, could
+    pass round and see.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This piece o' board goes down so slick you'd never know it lifted
+    out." She fitted it in with shaking hands, and then with her nails and
+    a hairpin got it out. "And way in, underneath, I had this box. I always
+    set it on a flat stone." She spoke as if this oversight were the
+    thief's chief crime. "See? Like that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She fitted the cigar-box into unseen depths of space and then brought
+    it out again, wet and muddy. The ground was full of springs hereabouts,
+    and the thaw had loosed them.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Boys!" She stood up and held out the box. "Boys! it was full."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Eloquently she turned it upside down.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How much do you reckon you had?" She handed the muddy box to the
+    nearest sympathiser, sat down on the fur-covered bed, and wiped her
+    eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Any idea?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I weighed it all over again after I got in from the Gold Nugget the
+    night we went on the stampede."
+</p>
+<p>
+    As she sobbed out the list of her former possessions, Judge Corey took
+    it down on the back of a dirty envelope. So many ounces of dust, so
+    many in nuggets, so much in bills and coin, gold and silver. Each item
+    was a stab.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, all that&mdash;all that!" she jumped up wildly, "and it's gone! But we
+    got to find it. What you hangin' round here for? Why, if you boys had
+    any natchral spunk you'd have the thief strung up by now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We got to find him fust."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You won't find him standin' here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They conferred afresh.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It must have been somebody who knowed where you kept the stuff."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "N-no." Her red eyes wandered miserably, restlessly, to the window.
+    Over the red half-curtain French Charlie and Butts looked in. They had
+    not been to the meeting.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Maudie's face darkened as she caught sight of the Canadian.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, yes, you can crow over me now," she shouted shrilly above the buzz
+    of comment and suggestion. The Canadian led the way round to the door,
+    and the two men crowded in.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You just get out," Maudie cried in a fury. "Didn't I turn you out o'
+    this and tell you never&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hol' on," said French Charlie in a conciliatory tone. "This true 'bout
+    your losin'&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, it's true; but I ain't askin' your sympathy!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He stopped short and frowned.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Course not, when you can get his." Under his slouch-hat he glowered at
+    the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Maudie broke into a volley of abuse. The very air smelt of brimstone.
+    When finally, through sheer exhaustion, she dropped on the side of the
+    bed, the devil prompted French Charlie to respond in kind. She jumped
+    up and turned suddenly round upon Corey, speaking in a voice quite
+    different, low and hoarse: "You asked me, Judge, if anybody knew where
+    I kept my stuff. Charlie did."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Canadian stopped in the middle of a lurid remark and stared
+    stupidly. The buzz died away. The cabin was strangely still.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Wasn't you along with the rest up to Idaho Bar?" inquired the Judge in
+    a friendly voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Y-yes."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not when we all were! No!" Maudie's tear-washed eyes were regaining a
+    dangerous brightness. "I wanted him to come with me. He wouldn't, and
+    we quarrelled."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We didn't."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You didn't quarrel?" put in the Judge.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We did," said Maudie, breathless.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not about that. It was because she wanted another feller to come,
+    too." Again he shot an angry glance at the Kentuckian.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And Charlie said if I gave the other feller the tip, he wouldn't come.
+    And he'd get even with me, if it took a leg!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, it looks like he done it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Can't you prove an alibi? Thought you said you was along with the rest
+    to Idaho Bar?" suggested Windy Jim.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So I was."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I didn't see you," Maudie flashed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When were you there?" asked the Judge.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Last night."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, yes! When everybody else was comin' home. You all know if that's
+    the time Charlie usually goes on a stampede!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    If words could slay, Maudie would have dropped dead, riddled with a
+    dozen mortal wounds. But she lived to reply in kind. Charlie's
+    abandonment of coherent defence was against him. While he wallowed
+    blindly in a mire of offensive epithet, his fellow-citizens came to
+    dark conclusions. He had an old score to pay off against Maudie, they
+    all knew that. Had he chosen this way? What other so effectual? He
+    might even say most of that dust was his, anyway. But it was an
+    alarming precedent. The fire of Maudie's excitement had caught and
+    spread. Eve the less inflammable muttered darkly that it was all up
+    with Minoók, if a person couldn't go on a stampede without havin' his
+    dust took out of his cabin. The crowd was pressing Charlie, and twenty
+    cross-questions were asked him in a minute. He, beside himself with
+    rage, or fear, or both, lost all power except to curse.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Judge seemed to be taking down damning evidence on the dirty
+    envelope. Some were suggesting:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Bring him over to the court."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, try him straight away."
+</p>
+<p>
+    No-Thumb-Jack was heard above the din, saying it was all gammon wasting
+    time over a trial, or even&mdash;in a plain case like this&mdash;for the Judge to
+    require the usual complaint made in writing and signed by three
+    citizens.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Two men laid hold of the Canadian, and he turned ghastly white under
+    his tan.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me? Me tief? You&mdash;let me alone!" He began to struggle. His terrified
+    eyes rolling round the little cabin, fell on Butts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don' know but one tief in Minóok," he said wildly, like a man
+    wandering in a fever, and unconscious of having spoken, till he noticed
+    there was a diversion of some sort. People were looking at Butts. A
+    sudden inspiration pierced the Canadian's fog of terror.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You know what Butts done to Jack McQuestion. You ain't forgot how he
+    sneaked Jack's watch!" The incident was historic.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Every eye on Butts. Charlie caught up breath and courage.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "An' t'odder night w'en Maudie treat me like she done"&mdash;he shot a
+    blazing glance at the double-dyed traitor&mdash;"I fixed it up with Butts.
+    Got him to go soft on 'er and nab 'er ring."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You didn't!" shouted Maudie.
+</p>
+<p>
+    With a shaking finger Charlie pointed out Jimmie, the cashier.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Didn't I tell you to weigh me out twenty dollars for Butts that
+    night?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Right," says Jimmie.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It was to square Butts fur gittin' that ring away from Maudie."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You put up a job like that on me?" To be fooled publicly was worse
+    than being robbed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Charlie paid no heed to her quivering wrath. The menace of the
+    cotton-wood gallows outrivalled even Maudie and her moods.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why should I pay Butts twenty dollars if I could work dat racket
+    m'self? If I want expert work, I go to a man like Butts, who knows his
+    business. I'm a miner&mdash;like the rest o' yer!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The centre of gravity had shifted. It was very grave indeed in the
+    neighbourhood of Mr. Butts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hold on," said the Judge, forcing his way nearer to the man whose
+    fingers had a renown so perilous. "'Cause a man plays a trick about a
+    girl's ring don't prove he stole her money. This thing happened while
+    the town was emptied out on the Little Minóok trail. Didn't you go off
+    with the rest yesterday morning?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ha!" gasped Maudie, as though this were conclusive&mdash;"had business in
+    town, did you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mr. Butts declined to answer.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You thought the gold-mine out on the gulch could wait&mdash;and the
+    gold-mine in my cabin couldn't."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You lie!" remarked Mr. Butts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What time did you get to Idaho Bar?" asked Corey.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Didn't get there at all."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where were you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Here in Rampart."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Wait! Wait!" commanded the Judge, as the crowd rocked towards Butts:
+    "P'raps you'll tell us what kept you at home?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Butts shut his mouth angrily, but a glance at the faces nearest him
+    made him think an answer prudent.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I was tired."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The men, many of them ailing, who had nearly killed themselves to get
+    to Idaho Bar, sneered openly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'd been jumpin' a claim up at Hunter."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So had Charlie. But he joined the new stampede in the afternoon."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I didn't."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, even the old cripple Jansen went on this stampede."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Can't help that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mr. Butts, you're the only able-bodied white man in the district that
+    stayed at home." Corey spoke in his, most judicial style.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mr. Butts must have felt the full significance of so suspicious a fact,
+    but all he said was:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Y' ought to fix up a notice. Anybody that don't join a stampede will
+    be held guilty o' grand larceny." Saying this Butts had backed a step
+    behind the stove-pipe, and with incredible quickness had pulled out a
+    revolver. But before he had brought it into range, No-Thumb-Jack had
+    struck his arm down, and two or three had sprung at the weapon and
+    wrested it away.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Search him!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No tellin' what else he's got!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "&mdash;&mdash;and he's so damned handy!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Search him!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Maudie pressed forward as the pinioned man's pockets were turned out.
+    Only tobacco, a small buckskin bag with less than four ounces of dust,
+    a pipe, and a knife.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Likely he'd be carrying my stuff about on him!" said she, contemptuous
+    of her own keen interest.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Get out a warrant to search Butts' premises," said a voice in the
+    crowd.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "McGinty and Johnson are down there now!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Think he'd leave anything layin' round?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Maudie pressed still closer to the beleaguered Butts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Say, if I make the boys let you go back to Circle, will you tell me
+    where you've hid my money?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ain't got your money!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look at 'im," whispered Charlie, still so terrified he could hardly
+    stand.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Butts ain't borrowin' no trouble."
+</p>
+<p>
+    And this formulating of the general impression did Butts no good. As
+    they had watched the calm demeanour of the man, under suspicion of what
+    was worse, in their eyes, than murder, there had come over the
+    bystanders a wave of that primitive cruelty that to this hour will wake
+    in modern men and cry as loud as in Judean days, or in the Saga times
+    of Iceland, "Retribution! Let him suffer! Let him pay in blood!" And
+    here again, on the Yukon, that need of visible atonement to right the
+    crazy injustice of the earth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Even the women&mdash;the others had crowded in&mdash;were eager for Butts'
+    instant expiation of the worst crime such a community knows. They told
+    one another excitedly how they'd realised all along it was only a
+    question of time before Butts would be tryin' his game up here. Nobody
+    was safe. Luckily they were on to him. But look! He didn't care a
+    curse. It would be a good night's job to make him care.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Three men had hold of him, and everybody talked at once. Minnie Bryan
+    was sure she had seen him skulking round Maudie's after that lady had
+    gone up the trail, but everybody had been too excited about the
+    stampede to notice particularly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Judge and Bonsor were shouting and gesticulating, Butts answering
+    bitterly but quietly still. His face was pretty grim, but it looked as
+    if he were the one person in the place who hadn't lost his head. Maudie
+    was still crying at intervals, and advertising to the newcomers that
+    wealth she had hitherto kept so dark, and between whiles she stared
+    fixedly at Butts, as conviction of his guilt deepened to a rage to see
+    him suffer for his crime.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She would rather have her nuggets back, but, failing that&mdash;let Butts
+    pay! He owed her six thousand dollars. Let him pay!
+</p>
+<p>
+    The miners were hustling him to the door&mdash;to the Court House or to the
+    cotton-wood&mdash;a toss-up which.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look here!" cried out the Colonel; "McGinty and Johnson haven't got
+    back!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nobody listened. Justice had been sufficiently served in sending them.
+    They had forced Butts out across the threshold, the crowd packed close
+    behind. The only men who had not pressed forward were Keith, the
+    Colonel, and the Boy, and No-Thumb-Jack, still standing by the
+    oil-tank.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What are they going to do with him?" The Colonel turned to Keith with
+    horror in his face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Keith's eyes were on the Boy, who had stooped and picked up the block
+    of wood that had fitted over the treasure-hole. He was staring at it
+    with dilated eyes. Sharply he turned his head in the direction where
+    No-Thumb-Jack had stood. Jack was just making for the door on the heels
+    of the last of those pressing to get out.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy's low cry was drowned in the din. He lunged forward, but the
+    Colonel gripped him. Looking up, he saw that Kentucky understood, and
+    meant somehow to manage the business quietly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jack was trying, now right, now left, to force his way through the
+    congestion at the door, like a harried rabbit at a wattled fence. A
+    touch on the shoulder simultaneously with the click of a trigger at his
+    ear brought his face round over his shoulder. He made the instinctive
+    pioneer motion to his hip, looked into the bore of the Colonel's
+    pistol, and under Keith's grip dropped his "gun-hand" with a smothered
+    oath.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Or was it that other weapon in the Colonel's left that bleached the
+    ruddy face? Simply the block of wood. On the under side, dried in, like
+    a faint stain, four muddy finger-prints, index joint lacking. Without a
+    word the Colonel turned the upper side out. A smudge?&mdash;no&mdash;the grain of
+    human skin clean printed&mdash;a distorted palm without a thumb. Only one
+    man in Minóok could make that sign manual!
+</p>
+<p>
+    The last of the crowd were over the threshold now, and still no word
+    was spoken by those who stayed behind, till the Colonel said to the
+    Boy:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Go with 'em, and look after Butts. Give us five minutes; more if you
+    can!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He laid the block on a cracker-box, and, keeping pistol and eye still
+    on the thief, took his watch in his left hand, as the Boy shot through
+    the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Butts was making a good fight for his life, but he was becoming
+    exhausted. The leading spirits were running him down the bank to where
+    a crooked cotton-wood leaned cautiously over the Never-Know-What, as if
+    to spy out the river's secret.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But after arriving there, they were a little delayed for lack of what
+    they called tackle. They sent a man off for it, and then sent another
+    to hurry up the man. The Boy stood at the edge of the crowd, a little
+    above them, watching Maudie's door, and with feverish anxiety turning
+    every few seconds to see how it was with Butts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Up in the cabin No-Thumb-Jack had pulled out of the usual capacious
+    pockets of the miner's brown-duck-pockets that fasten with a patent
+    snap&mdash;a tattered pocket-book, fat with bills. He plunged deeper and
+    brought up Pacific Coast eagles and five-dollar pieces, Canadian and
+    American gold that went rolling out of his maimed and nervous hand
+    across the tablet to the scales and set the brass pans sawing up and
+    down.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Keith, his revolver still at full cock, had picked up a trampled bit of
+    paper near the stove. Corey's list. Left-handedly he piled up the
+    money, counting, comparing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Quick! the dust!" ordered the Colonel. Out of a left hip-pocket a
+    long, tight-packed buckskin bag. Another from a side-pocket, half the
+    size and a quarter as full.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's mine," said Jack, and made a motion to recover.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Let it alone. Turn out everything. Nuggets!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    A miner's chamois belt unbuckled and flung heavily down. The scales
+    jingled and rocked; every pocket in the belt was stuffed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where's the rest?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There ain't any rest. That's every damned pennyweight."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Maybe we ought to weigh it, and see if he's lying?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "'Fore God it's all! Let me go!" He had kept looking through the crack
+    of the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Reckon it's about right," said Keith.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "'Tain't right! There's more there'n I took. My stuff's there too. For
+    Christ's sake, let me go!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look here, Jack, is the little bag yours?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jack wet his dry lips and nodded "Yes."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel snatched up the smaller bag and thrust it into the man's
+    hands. Jack made for the door. The Colonel stopped him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Better take to the woods," he said, with a motion back towards the
+    window. The Colonel opened the half-closed door and looked out, as Jack
+    pushed aside the table, tore away the red curtain, hammered at the
+    sash, then, desperate, set his shoulder at it and forced the whole
+    thing out. He put his maimed hand on the sill and vaulted after the
+    shattered glass.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They could see him going like the wind up towards his own shack at the
+    edge of the wood, looking back once or twice, doubling and tacking to
+    keep himself screened by the haphazard, hillside cabins, out of sight
+    of the lynchers down at the river.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Will you stay with this?" the Colonel had asked Keith hurriedly,
+    nodding at the treasure-covered table, and catching up the
+    finger-marked block before Jack was a yard from the window.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes," Keith had said, revolver still in hand and eyes on the man
+    Minóok was to see no more. The Colonel met the Boy running breathless
+    up the bank.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Can't hold 'em any longer," he shouted; "you're takin' it pretty easy
+    while a man's gettin' killed down here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Stop! Wait!" The Colonel floundered madly through the slush and mud,
+    calling and gesticulating, "I've got the thief!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Presto all the backs of heads became faces.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Got the money?" screamed Maudie, uncovering her eyes. She had gone to
+    the execution, but after the rope was brought, her nerve failed her,
+    and she was sobbing hysterically into her two palms held right over her
+    eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, you had it, did you?" called out McGinty with easy insolence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look here!" The Colonel held up the bit of flooring with rapid
+    explanation.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where is he?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Got him locked up?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Everybody talked at once. The Colonel managed to keep them going for
+    some moments before he admitted.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Reckon he's lit out." And then the Colonel got it hot and strong for
+    his clumsiness.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Which way'd he go?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel turned his back to the North Pole, and made a fine large
+    gesture in the general direction of the Equator.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where's my money?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Up in your cabin. Better go and count it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    A good many were willing to help since they'd been cheated out of a
+    hanging, and even defrauded of a shot at a thief on the wing. Nobody
+    seemed to care to remain in the neighbourhood of the crooked
+    cotton-wood. The crowd was dispersing somewhat sheepishly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nobody looked at Butts, and yet he was a sight to see. His face and his
+    clothes were badly mauled. He was covered with mud and blood. When the
+    men were interrupted in trying to get the noose over his head, he had
+    stood quite still in the midst of the crowd till it broke and melted
+    away from him. He looked round, passed his hand over his eyes, threw
+    open his torn coat, and felt in his pockets.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who's got my tobacco?" says he.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Several men turned back suddenly, and several pouches were held out,
+    but nobody met Butts' eyes. He filled his pipe, nor did his hand shake
+    any more than those that held the tobacco-bags. When he had lit up,
+    "Who's got my Smith and Wesson?" he called out to the backs of the
+    retiring citizens. Windy Jim stood and delivered. Butts walked away to
+    his cabin, swaying a little, as if he'd had more hootch than he could
+    carry.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What would you have said," demanded the Boy, "if you'd hung the wrong
+    man?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Said?" echoed McGinty. "Why, we'd 'a' said that time the corpse had
+    the laugh on us." A couple of hours later Keith put an excited face
+    into his shack, where the Colonel and the Boy were just crawling under
+    their blankets.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Thought you might like to know, that Miners' Meeting that was
+    interrupted is having an extra session."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They followed him down to the Court through a fine rain. The night was
+    heavy and thick. As they splashed along Keith explained:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Of course, Charlie knew there wasn't room enough in Alaska now for
+    Butts and him; and he thought he'd better send Butts home. So he took
+    his gun and went to call."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't tell me that poor devil's killed after all."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not a bit. Butts is a little bunged up, but he's the handier man, even
+    so. He drew the first bead."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Charlie hurt?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, he isn't hurt. He's dead. Three or four fellows had just looked
+    in, on the quiet, to kind of apologise to Butts. They're down at
+    Corey's now givin' evidence against him."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So Butts'll have to swing after all. Is he in Court?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes&mdash;been a busy day for Butts."
+</p>
+<p>
+    A confused noise came suddenly out of the big cabin they were nearing.
+    They opened the door with difficulty, and forced their way into the
+    reeking, crowded room for the second time that night. Everybody seemed
+    to be talking&mdash;nobody listening. Dimly through dense clouds of
+    tobacco-smoke "the prisoner at the Bar" was seen to be&mdash;what&mdash;no!
+    Yes&mdash;shaking hands with the Judge.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Verdict already?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, that kind o' case don't take a feller like Corey long."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's the decision?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Prisoner discharged. Charlie Le Gros committed suicide."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Suicide!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "&mdash;by goin' with his gun to Butts' shack lookin' f trouble."
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH20"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XIX
+</h2>
+<center>
+    THE ICE GOES OUT
+</center>
+<p class="ind">
+    "I am apart of all that I have seen."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It had been thawing and freezing, freezing and thawing, for so long
+    that men lost account of the advance of a summer coming, with such
+    balked, uncertain steps. Indeed, the weather variations had for several
+    weeks been so great that no journey, not the smallest, could be
+    calculated with any assurance. The last men to reach Minoók were two
+    who had made a hunting and prospecting trip to an outlying district.
+    They had gone there in six days, and were nineteen in returning.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The slush was waist-deep in the gulches. On the benches, in the snow,
+    holes appeared, as though red-hot stones had been thrown upon the
+    surface. The little settlement by the mouth of the Minoók sat
+    insecurely on the boggy hillside, and its inhabitants waded knee-deep
+    in soaking tundra moss and mire.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And now, down on the Never-Know-What, water was beginning to run on the
+    marginal ice. Up on the mountains the drifted snow was honey-combed.
+    Whole fields of it gave way and sunk a foot under any adventurous shoe.
+    But although these changes had been wrought slowly, with backsets of
+    bitter nights, when everything was frozen hard as flint, the illusion
+    was general that summer came in with a bound. On the 9th of May, Minoók
+    went to bed in winter, and woke to find the snow almost gone under the
+    last nineteen hours of hot, unwinking sunshine, and the first geese
+    winging their way up the valley&mdash;sight to stir men's hearts. Stranger
+    still, the eight months' Arctic silence broken suddenly by a thousand
+    voices. Under every snow-bank a summer murmur, very faint at first, but
+    hourly louder&mdash;the sound of falling water softly singing over all the
+    land.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As silence had been the distinguishing feature of the winter, so was
+    noise the sign of the spring. No ear so dull but now was full of it.
+    All the brooks on all the hills, tinkling, tumbling, babbling of some
+    great and universal joy, all the streams of all the gulches joining
+    with every little rill to find the old way, or to carve a new, back to
+    the Father of Waters.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And the strange thing had happened on the Yukon. The shore-edges of the
+    ice seemed sunken, and the water ran yet deeper there. But of a
+    certainty the middle part had risen! The cheechalkos thought it an
+    optical illusion. But old Brandt from Forty-Mile had seen the ice go
+    out for two-and-twenty years, and he said it went out always so&mdash;"humps
+    his back, an' gits up gits, and when he's a gitten', jest look out!"
+    Those who, in spite of warning, ventured in hip-boots down on the
+    Never-Know-What, found that, in places, the under side of the ice was
+    worn nearly through. If you bent your head and listened, you could
+    plainly hear that greater music of the river running underneath, low as
+    yet, but deep, and strangely stirring&mdash;dominating in the hearer's ears
+    all the clear, high clamour from gulch and hill.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In some men's hearts the ice "went out" at the sound, and the melting
+    welled up in their eyes. Summer and liberty were very near.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, hurry, Yukon Inua; let the ice go out and let the boats come in."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the next few days hung heavily. The river-ice humped its back still
+    higher, but showed no disposition to "git." The wonder was it did not
+    crack under the strain; but Northern ice ahs the air of being strangely
+    flexile. Several feet in depth, the water ran now along the margin.
+</p>
+<p>
+    More geese and ducks appeared, and flocks of little birds&mdash;Canada jays,
+    robins, joined the swelling chorus of the waters.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Oh, hurry, hurry Inua, and open the great highway! Not at Minóok alone:
+    at every wood camp, mining town and mission, at every white post and
+    Indian village, all along the Yukon, groups were gathered waiting the
+    great moment of the year. No one had ever heard of the ice breaking up
+    before the 11th of May or later than the 28th. And yet men had begun to
+    keep a hopeful eye on the river from the 10th of April, when a white
+    ptarmigan was reported wearing a collar of dark-brown feathers, and his
+    wings tipped brown. That was a month ago, and the great moment could
+    not possibly be far now.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The first thing everybody did on getting up, and the last thing
+    everybody did on going to bed, was to look at the river. It was not
+    easy to go to bed; and even if you got so far it was not easy to sleep.
+    The sun poured into the cabins by night as well as by day, and there
+    was nothing to divide one part of the twenty-four hours from another.
+    You slept when you were too tired to watch the river. You breakfasted,
+    like as not, at six in the evening; you dined at midnight. Through all
+    your waking hours you kept an eye on the window overlooking the river.
+    In your bed you listened for that ancient Yukon cry, "The ice is going
+    out!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    For ages it had meant to the timid: Beware the fury of the shattered
+    ice-fields; beware the caprice of the flood. Watch! lest many lives go
+    out with the ice as aforetime. And for ages to the stout-hearted it had
+    meant: Make ready the kyaks and the birch canoes; see that tackle and
+    traps are strong&mdash;for plenty or famine wait upon the hour. As the white
+    men waited for boats to-day, the men of the older time had waited for
+    the salmon&mdash;for those first impatient adventurers that would force
+    their way under the very ice-jam, tenderest and best of the season's
+    catch, as eager to prosecute that journey from the ocean to the
+    Klondyke as if they had been men marching after the gold boom.
+</p>
+<p>
+    No one could settle to anything. It was by fits and starts that the
+    steadier hands indulged even in target practice, with a feverish
+    subconsciousness that events were on the way that might make it
+    inconvenient to have lost the art of sending a bullet straight. After a
+    diminutive tin can, hung on a tree, had been made to jump at a hundred
+    paces, the marksman would glance at the river and forget to fire. It
+    was by fits and starts that they even drank deeper or played for higher
+    stakes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Wheel of Fortune, in the Gold Nugget, was in special demand. It was
+    a means of trying your luck with satisfactory despatch "between drinks"
+    or between long bouts of staring at the river. Men stood in
+    shirt-sleeves at their cabin doors in the unwinking sunshine, looking
+    up the valley or down, betting that the "first boat in" would be one of
+    those nearest neighbours, May West or Muckluck, coming up from
+    Woodworth; others as ready to back heavily their opinion that the first
+    blast of the steam whistle would come down on the flood from Circle or
+    from Dawson.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel had bought and donned a new suit of "store clothes," and
+    urged on his companion the necessity of at least a whole pair of
+    breeches in honour of his entrance into the Klondyke. But the Boy's
+    funds were low and his vanity chastened. Besides, he had other business
+    on his mind.
+</p>
+<p>
+    After sending several requests for the immediate return of his dog,
+    requests that received no attention, the Boy went out to the gulch to
+    recover him. Nig's new master paid up all arrears of wages readily
+    enough, but declined to surrender the dog. "Oh, no, the ice wasn't
+    thinkin' o' goin' out yit."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I want my dog."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You'll git him sure."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm glad you understand that much."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll bring him up to Rampart in time for the first boat."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where's my dog?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    No answer. The Boy whistled. No Nig. Dread masked itself in choler. He
+    jumped on the fellow, forced him down, and hammered him till he cried
+    for mercy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where's my dog, then?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He&mdash;he's up to Idyho Bar," whimpered the prostrate one. And there the
+    Boy found him, staggering under a pair of saddle-bags, hired out to
+    Mike O'Reilly for a dollar and a half a day. Together they returned to
+    Rampart to watch for the boat.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Certainly the ice was very late breaking up this year. The men of
+    Rampart stood about in groups in the small hours of the morning of the
+    16th of May; as usual, smoking, yarning, speculating, inventing
+    elaborate joshes. Somebody remembered that certain cheechalkos had gone
+    to bed at midnight. Now this was unprecedented, even impertinent. If
+    the river is not open by the middle of May, your Sour-dough may go to
+    bed&mdash;only he doesn't. Still, he may do as he lists. But your
+    cheechalko&mdash;why, this is the hour of his initiation. It was as if a man
+    should yawn at his marriage or refuse to sleep at his funeral. The
+    offenders were some of those Woodworth fellows, who, with a dozen or so
+    others, had built shacks below "the street" yet well above the river.
+    At two in the morning Sour-dough Saunders knocked them up.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The ice is goin' out!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    In a flash the sleepers stood at the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Only a josh." One showed fight.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, it's true what I'm tellin' yer," persisted Saunders seriously:
+    "the ice is goin' out, and it's goin' soon, and when you're washed out
+    o' yer bunks ye needn't blame me, fur I warned yer."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You don't mean the flood'll come up here?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mebbe you've arranged so she won't this year."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The cheechalkos consulted. In the end, four of them occupied the next
+    two hours (to the infinite but masked amusement of the town) in
+    floundering about in the mud, setting up tents in the boggy wood above
+    the settlement, and with much pains transporting thither as many of
+    their possessions as they did not lose in the bottomless pit of the
+    mire.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the business was ended, Minóok self-control gave way. The
+    cheechalkos found themselves the laughing-stock of the town. The
+    others, who had dared to build down on the bank, but who "hadn't scared
+    worth a cent," sauntered up to the Gold Nugget to enjoy the increased
+    esteem of the Sour-doughs, and the humiliation of the men who had
+    thought "the Yukon was goin' over the Ramparts this year&mdash;haw, haw!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    It surprises the average mind to discover that one of civilization's
+    most delicate weapons is in such use and is so potently dreaded among
+    the roughest frontier spirits. No fine gentleman in a drawing-room, no
+    sensitive girl, shrinks more from what Meredith calls "the comic
+    laugh," none feels irony more keenly than your ordinary American
+    pioneer. The men who had moved up into the soaking wood saw they had
+    run a risk as great to them as the fabled danger of the river&mdash;the risk
+    of the josher's irony, the dire humiliation of the laugh. If a man up
+    here does you an injury, and you kill him, you haven't after all taken
+    the ultimate revenge. You might have "got the laugh on him," and let
+    him live to hear it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    While all Minóok was "jollying" the Woodworth men, Maudie made one of
+    her sudden raids out of the Gold Nugget. She stood nearly up to the
+    knees of her high rubber boots in the bog of "Main Street," talking
+    earnestly with the Colonel. Keith and the Boy, sitting on a store box
+    outside of the saloon, had looked on at the fun over the timid
+    cheechalkos, and looked on now at Maudie and the Colonel. It crossed
+    the Boy's mind that they'd be putting up a josh on his pardner pretty
+    soon, and at the thought he frowned.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Keith had been saying that the old miners had nearly all got "squawed."
+    He had spoken almost superstitiously of the queer, lasting effect of
+    the supposedly temporary arrangement.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, they don't leave their wives as often as you'd expect, but in most
+    cases it seems to kill the pride of the man. He gives up all idea of
+    ever going home, and even if he makes a fortune, they say, he stays on
+    here. And year by year he sinks lower and lower, till he's farther down
+    in the scale of things human than his savage wife."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, it's awful to think how the life up here can take the stiffening
+    out of a fella."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He looked darkly at the two out there in the mud. Keith nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Strong men have lain down on the trail this winter and cried." But it
+    wasn't that sort of thing the other meant. Keith followed his new
+    friend's glowering looks.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes. That's just the kind of man that gets taken in."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What?" said the Boy brusquely.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Just the sort that goes and marries some flighty creature."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well," said his pardner haughtily, "he could afford to marry 'a
+    flighty creature.' The Colonel's got both feet on the ground." And
+    Keith felt properly snubbed. But what Maudie was saying to the Colonel
+    was:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You're goin' up in the first boat, I s'pose?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Looks like I'll be the only person left in Minóok."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't imagine you'll be quite alone."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No? Why, there's only between five and six hundred expectin' to board
+    a boat that'll be crowded before she gets here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Does everybody want to go to Dawson?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Everybody except a few boomers who mean to stay long enough to play
+    off their misery on someone else before they move on."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel looked a trifle anxious.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I hadn't thought of that. I suppose there will be a race for the
+    boat."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There'll be a race all the way up the river for all the early boats.
+    Ain't half enough to carry the people. But you look to me like you'll
+    stand as good a chance as most, and anyhow, you're the one man I know,
+    I'll trust my dough to."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel stared.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You see, I want to get some money to my kiddie, an' besides, I got
+    m'self kind o' scared about keepin' dust in my cabin. I want it in a
+    bank, so's if I should kick the bucket (there'll be some pretty high
+    rollin' here when there's been a few boats in, and my life's no better
+    than any other feller's), I'd feel a lot easier if I knew the kiddie'd
+    have six thousand clear, even if I did turn up my toes. See?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A&mdash;yes&mdash;I see. But&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The door of the cabin next the saloon opened suddenly. A graybeard with
+    a young face came out rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He stared
+    interrogatively at the river, and then to the world in general:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What time is it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Half-past four."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mornin' or evenin'?" and no one thought the question strange.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Maudie lowered her voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No need to mention it to pardners and people. You don't want every
+    feller to know you're goin' about loaded; but will you take my dust up
+    to Dawson and get it sent to 'Frisco on the first boat?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The ice! the ice! It's moving!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The ice is going out!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look! the ice!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    From end to end of the settlement the cry was taken up. People darted
+    out of cabins like beavers out of their burrows. Three little
+    half-breed Indian boys, yelling with excitement, tore past the Gold
+    Nugget, crying now in their mother's Minóok, now in their father's
+    English, "The ice is going out!" From the depths of the store-box
+    whereon his master had sat, Nig darted, howling excitedly and waving a
+    muddy tail like a draggled banner, saying in Mahlemeut: "The ice is
+    going out! The fish are coming in." All the other dogs waked and gave
+    tongue, running in and out among the huddled rows of people gathered on
+    the Ramparts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Every ear full of the rubbing, grinding noise that came up out of the
+    Yukon&mdash;noise not loud, but deep&mdash;an undercurrent of heavy sound. As
+    they stood there, wide-eyed, gaping, their solid winter world began to
+    move. A compact mass of ice, three-quarters of a mile wide and four
+    miles long, with a great grinding and crushing went down the valley.
+    Some distance below the town it jammed, building with incredible
+    quickness a barrier twenty feet high.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The people waited breathless. Again the ice-mass trembled. But the
+    watchers lifted their eyes to the heights above. Was that thunder in
+    the hills? No, the ice again; again crushing, grinding, to the low
+    accompaniment of thunder that seemed to come from far away.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Sections a mile long and half a mile wide were forced up, carried over
+    the first ice-pack, and summarily stopped below the barrier. Huge
+    pieces, broken off from the sides, came crunching their way angrily up
+    the bank, as if acting on some independent impulse. There they sat,
+    great fragments, glistening in the sunlight, as big as cabins. It was
+    something to see them come walking up the shelving bank! The
+    cheechalkos who laughed before are contented now with running, leaving
+    their goods behind. Sour-dough Saunders himself never dreamed the ice
+    would push its way so far.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In mid-channel a still unbroken sheet is bent yet more in the centre.
+    Every now and then a wide crack opens near the margin, and the water
+    rushes out with a roar. Once more the mass is nearly still, and now
+    all's silent. Not till the water, dammed and thrown back by the ice,
+    not until it rises many feet and comes down with a volume and momentum
+    irresistible, will the final conflict come.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Hour after hour the people stand there on the bank, waiting to see the
+    barrier go down. Unwillingly, as the time goes on, this one, that one,
+    hurries away for a few minutes to prepare and devour a meal, back
+    again, breathless, upon rumour of that preparatory trembling, that
+    strange thrilling of the ice. The grinding and the crushing had begun
+    again.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The long tension, the mysterious sounds, the sense of some great
+    unbridled power at work, wrought on the steadiest nerves. People did
+    the oddest things. Down at the lower end of the town a couple of
+    miners, sick of the scurvy, had painfully clambered on their
+    roof&mdash;whether to see the sights or be out of harm's way, no one knew.
+    The stingiest man in Minóok, who had refused to help them in their
+    cabin, carried them food on the roof. A woman made and took them the
+    Yukon remedy for their disease. They sat in state in sight of all men,
+    and drank spruce tea.
+</p>
+<p>
+    By one o'clock in the afternoon the river had risen eight feet, but the
+    ice barrier still held. The people, worn out, went away to sleep. All
+    that night the barrier held, though more ice came down and still the
+    water rose. Twelve feet now. The ranks of shattered ice along the shore
+    are claimed again as the flood widens and licks them in. The
+    cheechalkos' cabins are flooded to the caves. Stout fellows in
+    hip-boots take a boat and rescue the scurvy-stricken from the roof. And
+    still the barrier held.
+</p>
+<p>
+    People began to go about their usual avocations. The empty Gold Nugget
+    filled again. Men sat, as they had done all the winter, drinking, and
+    reading the news of eight months before, out of soiled and tattered
+    papers.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Late the following day everyone started up at a new sound. Again
+    miners, Indians, and dogs lined the bank, saw the piled ice masses
+    tremble, heard a crashing and grinding as of mountains of glass hurled
+    together, saw the barrier give way, and the frozen wastes move down on
+    the bosom of the flood. Higher yet the water rose&mdash;the current ran
+    eight miles an hour. And now the ice masses were less enormous, more
+    broken. Somewhere far below another jam. Another long bout of waiting.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Birds are singing everywhere. Between the white snowdrifts the Arctic
+    moss shows green and yellow, white flowers star the hills.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Half the town is packed, ready to catch the boat at five minutes'
+    notice. With door barred and red curtain down, Maudie is doing up her
+    gold-dust for the Colonel to take to Dawson. The man who had washed it
+    out of a Birch Creek placer, and "blowed it in fur the girl"&mdash;up on the
+    hillside he sleeps sound.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The two who had broken the record for winter travel on the Yukon, side
+    by side in the sunshine, on a plank laid across two mackerel firkins,
+    sit and watch the brimming flood. They speak of the Big Chimney men,
+    picture them, packed and waiting for the Oklahoma, wonder what they
+    have done with Kaviak, and what the three months have brought them.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When we started out that day from the Big Chimney, we thought we'd be
+    made if only we managed to reach Minóok."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, we've got what we came for&mdash;each got a claim."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, yes."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A good claim, too."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Guess so."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't you know the gold's there?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes; but where are the miners? You and I don't propose to spend the
+    next ten years in gettin' that gold out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No; but there are plenty who would if we gave 'em the chance. All we
+    have to do is to give the right ones the chance."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel wore an air of reflection.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The district will be opened up," the Boy went on cheerfully, "and
+    we'll have people beggin' us to let 'em get out our gold, and givin' us
+    the lion's share for the privilege."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you altogether like the sound o' that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I expect, like other people, I'll like the result."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We ought to see some things clearer than other people. We had our
+    lesson on the trail," said the Colonel quietly. "Nobody ought ever to
+    be able to fool us about the power and the value of the individual
+    apart from society. Seems as if association did make value. In the
+    absence of men and markets a pit full of gold is worth no more than a
+    pit full of clay."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, yes; I admit, till the boats come in, we're poor men."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nobody will stop here this summer&mdash;they'll all be racing on to
+    Dawson."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Dawson's 'It,' beyond a doubt."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel laughed a little ruefully.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We used to say Minóok."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I said Minóok, just to sound reasonable, but, of course, I meant
+    Dawson."
+</p>
+<p>
+    And they sat there thinking, watching the ice-blocks meet, crash, go
+    down in foam, and come up again on the lower reaches, the Boy idly
+    swinging the great Katharine's medal to and fro. In his buckskin pocket
+    it has worn so bright it catches at the light like a coin fresh from
+    the mint.
+</p>
+<p>
+    No doubt Muckluck is on the river-bank at Pymeut; the one-eyed Prince,
+    the story-teller Yagorsha, even Ol' Chief&mdash;no one will be indoors
+    to-day.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Sitting there together, they saw the last stand made by the ice, and
+    shared that moment when the final barrier, somewhere far below, gave
+    way with boom and thunder. The mighty flood ran free, tearing up trees
+    by their roots as it ran, detaching masses of rock, dissolving islands
+    into swirling sand and drift, carving new channels, making and unmaking
+    the land. The water began to fall. It had been a great time: it was
+    ended.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pardner," says the Colonel, "we've seen the ice go out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No fella can call you and me cheechalkos after to-day."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, sah. We've travelled the Long Trail, we've seen the ice go out,
+    and we're friends yet."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Kentuckian took his pardner's brown hand with a gentle solemnity,
+    seemed about to say something, but stopped, and turned his bronzed face
+    to the flood, carried back upon some sudden tide within himself to
+    those black days on the trail, that he wanted most in the world to
+    forget. But in his heart he knew that all dear things, all things kind
+    and precious&mdash;his home, a woman's face&mdash;all, all would fade before he
+    forgot those last days on the trail. The record of that journey was
+    burnt into the brain of the men who had made it. On that stretch of the
+    Long Trail the elder had grown old, and the younger had forever lost
+    his youth. Not only had the roundness gone out of his face, not only
+    was it scarred, but such lines were graven there as commonly takes the
+    antique pencil half a score of years to trace.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Something has happened," the Colonel said quite low. "We aren't the
+    same men who left the Big Chimney."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Right!" said the Boy, with a laugh, unwilling as yet to accept his own
+    personal revelation, preferring to put a superficial interpretation on
+    his companion's words. He glanced at the Colonel, and his face changed
+    a little. But still he would not understand. Looking down at the
+    chaparejos that he had been so proud of, sadly abbreviated to make
+    boots for Nig, jagged here and there, and with fringes now not all
+    intentional, it suited him to pretend that the "shaps" had suffered
+    most.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, the ice takes the kinks out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Whether the thing that's happened is good or evil, I don't pretend to
+    say," the other went on gravely, staring at the river. "I only know
+    something's happened. There were possibilities&mdash;in me, anyhow&mdash;that
+    have been frozen to death. Yes, we're different."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy roused himself, but only to persist in his misinterpretation.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You ain't different to hurt. If I started out again tomorrow&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The Lord forbid!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Amen. But if I had to, you're the only man in Alaska&mdash;in the
+    world&mdash;I'd want for my pardner."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Boy&mdash;&mdash;!" he wrestled with a slight bronchial huskiness, cleared his
+    throat, tried again, and gave it up, contenting himself with, "Beg your
+    pardon for callin' you 'Boy.' You're a seasoned old-timer, sah." And
+    the Boy felt as if some Sovereign had dubbed him Knight.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In a day or two now, from north or south, the first boat must appear.
+    The willows were unfolding their silver leaves. The alder-buds were
+    bursting; geese and teal and mallard swarmed about the river margin.
+    Especially where the equisetae showed the tips of their feathery green
+    tails above the mud, ducks flocked and feasted. People were too
+    excited, "too busy," they said, looking for the boats, to do much
+    shooting. The shy birds waxed daring. Keith, standing by his shack,
+    knocked over a mallard within forty paces of his door.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was eight days after that first cry, "The ice is going out!" four
+    since the final jam gave way and let the floes run free, that at one
+    o'clock in the afternoon the shout went up, "A boat! a boat!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Only a lumberman's bateau, but two men were poling her down the current
+    with a skill that matched the speed. They swung her in. A dozen hands
+    caught at the painter and made fast. A young man stepped ashore and
+    introduced himself as Van Alen, Benham's "Upper River pardner, on the
+    way to Anvik."
+</p>
+<p>
+    His companion, Donovan, was from Circle City, and brought appalling
+    news. The boats depended on for the early summer traffic, Bella, and
+    three other N.A.T. and T. steamers, as well as the A.C.'s Victoria and
+    the St. Michael, had been lifted up by the ice "like so many feathers,"
+    forced clean out of the channel, and left high and dry on a sandy
+    ridge, with an ice wall eighty feet wide and fifteen high between them
+    and open water.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "All the crews hard at work with jackscrews," said Donovan; "and if
+    they can get skids under, and a channel blasted through the ice, they
+    may get the boats down here in fifteen or twenty days."
+</p>
+<p>
+    A heavy blow. But instantly everyone began to talk of the May West and
+    the Muckluck as though all along they had looked for succour to come
+    up-stream rather than down. But as the precious hours passed, a deep
+    dejection fastened on the camp. There had been a year when, through one
+    disaster after another, no boats had got to the Upper River. Not even
+    the arrival from Dawson of the Montana Kid, pugilist and gambler, could
+    raise spirits so cast down, not even though he was said to bring
+    strange news from outside.
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was war in the world down yonder&mdash;war had been formally declared
+    between America and Spain.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Windy slapped his thigh in humourous despair.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why hadn't he thought o' gettin' off a josh like that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    To those who listened to the Montana Kid, to the fretted spirits of men
+    eight months imprisoned, the States and her foreign affairs were far
+    away indeed, and as for the other party to the rumoured war&mdash;Spain?
+    They clutched at school memories of Columbus, Americans finding through
+    him the way to Spain, as through him Spaniards had found the way to
+    America. So Spain was not merely a State historic! She was still in the
+    active world. But what did these things matter? Boats mattered: the
+    place where the Klondykers were caught, this Minóok, mattered. And so
+    did the place they wanted to reach&mdash;Dawson mattered most of all. By the
+    narrowed habit of long months, Dawson was the centre of the universe.
+</p>
+<p>
+    More little boats going down, and still nothing going up. Men said
+    gloomily:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We're done for! The fellows who go by the Canadian route will get
+    everything. The Dawson season will be half over before we're in the
+    field&mdash;if we ever are!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The 28th of May! Still no steamer had come, but the mosquitoes
+    had&mdash;bloodthirsty beyond any the temperate climates know. It was clear
+    that some catastrophe had befallen the Woodworth boats. And Nig had
+    been lured away by his quondam master! No, they had not gone back to
+    the gulch&mdash;that was too easy. The man had a mind to keep the dog, and,
+    since he was not allowed to buy him, he would do the other thing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He had not been gone an hour, rumour said&mdash;had taken a scow and
+    provisions, and dropped down the river. Utterly desperate, the Boy
+    seized his new Nulato gun and somebody else's canoe. Without so much as
+    inquiring whose, he shot down the swift current after the dog-thief. He
+    roared back to the remonstrating Colonel that he didn't care if an
+    up-river steamer did come while he was gone&mdash;he was goin' gunnin'.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At the same time he shared the now general opinion that a Lower River
+    boat would reach them first, and he was only going to meet her, meting
+    justice by the way.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He had gone safely more than ten miles down, when suddenly, as he was
+    passing an island, he stood up in his boat, balanced himself, and
+    cocked his gun.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Down there, on the left, a man was standing knee-deep in the water,
+    trying to free his boat from a fallen tree; a Siwash dog watched him
+    from the bank.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy whistled. The dog threw up his nose, yapped and whined. The man
+    had turned sharply, saw his enemy and the levelled gun. He jumped into
+    the boat, but she was filling while he bailed; the dog ran along the
+    island, howling fit to raise the dead. When he was a little above the
+    Boy's boat he plunged into the river. Nig was a good swimmer, but the
+    current here would tax the best. The Boy found himself so occupied with
+    saving Nig from a watery grave, while he kept the canoe from capsizing,
+    that he forgot all about the thief till a turn in the river shut him
+    out of sight.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The canoe was moored, and while trying to restrain Nig's dripping
+    caresses, his master looked up, and saw something queer off there,
+    above the tops of the cottonwoods. As he looked he forgot the
+    dog&mdash;forgot everything in earth or heaven except that narrow cloud
+    wavering along the sky. He sat immovable in the round-shouldered
+    attitude learned in pulling a hand-sled against a gale from the Pole.
+    If you are moderately excited you may start, but there is an excitement
+    that "nails you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nig shook his wolf's coat and sprayed the water far and wide, made
+    little joyful noises, and licked the face that was so still. But his
+    master, like a man of stone, stared at that long gray pennon in the
+    sky. If it isn't a steamer, what is it? Like an echo out of some lesson
+    he had learned and long forgot, "Up-bound boats don't run the channel:
+    they have to hunt for easy water." Suddenly he leaped up. The canoe
+    tipped, and Nig went a second time into the water. Well for him that
+    they were near the shore; he could jump in without help this time. No
+    hand held out, no eye for him. His master had dragged the painter free,
+    seized the oars, and, saying harshly, "Lie down, you black devil!" he
+    pulled back against the current with every ounce he had in him. For the
+    gray pennon was going round the other side of the island, and the Boy
+    was losing the boat to Dawson.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nig sat perkily in the bow, never budging till his master, running into
+    the head of the island, caught up a handful of tough root fringes, and,
+    holding fast by them, waved his cap, and shouted like one possessed,
+    let go the fringes, caught up his gun, and fired. Then Nig, realising
+    that for once in a way noise seemed to be popular, pointed his nose at
+    the big object hugging the farther shore, and howled with a right
+    goodwill.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They see! They see! Hooray!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy waved his arms, embraced Nig, then snatched up the oars. The
+    steamer's engines were reversed; now she was still. The Boy pulled
+    lustily. A crowded ship. Crew and passengers pressed to the rails. The
+    steamer canted, and the Captain's orders rang out clear. Several
+    cheechalkos laid their hands on their guns as the wild fellow in the
+    ragged buckskins shot round the motionless wheel, and brought his canoe
+    'long-side, while his savage-looking dog still kept the echoes of the
+    Lower Ramparts calling.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Three cheers for the Oklahoma!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    At the sound of the Boy's voice a red face hanging over the stern broke
+    into a broad grin.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Be the Siven! Air ye the little divvle himself, or air ye the divvle's
+    gran'fatherr?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The apparition in the canoe was making fast and preparing to board the
+    ship.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Can't take another passenger. Full up!" said the Captain. He couldn't
+    hear what was said in reply, but he shook his head. "Been refusin' 'em
+    right along." Then, as if reproached by the look in the wild young
+    face, "We thought you were in trouble."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So I am if you won't&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I tell you we got every ounce we can carry."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, take me back to Minóok, anyway!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He said a few words about fare to the Captain's back. As that magnate
+    did not distinctly say "No"&mdash;indeed, walked off making conversation
+    with the engineer&mdash;twenty hands helped the new passenger to get Nig and
+    the canoe on board.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, got a gold-mine?" asked Potts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where's the Colonel?" Mac rasped out, with his square jaw set for
+    judgment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Colonel's all right&mdash;at Minóok. We've got a gold-mine apiece."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Anny gowld in 'em?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, sir, and no salt, neither."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sorry to see success has gone to your head," drawled Potts, eyeing the
+    Boy's long hair. "I don't see any undue signs of it elsewhere."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Faith! I do, thin. He's turned wan o' thim hungry, grabbin'
+    millionaires."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What makes you think that?" laughed the Boy, poking his brown fingers
+    through the knee-hole of his breeches.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Arre ye contint wid that gowld-mine at Minóok? No, be the Siven!
+    What's wan gowld-mine to a millionaire? What forr wud ye be prospectin
+    that desert oiland, you and yer faithful man Froyday, if ye wasn't
+    rooned intoirely be riches?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy tore himself away from his old friends, and followed the
+    arbiter of his fate. The engines had started up again, and they were
+    going on.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm told," said the Captain rather severely, "that Minóok's a busted
+    camp."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, is it?" returned the ragged one cheerfully. Then he remembered
+    that this Captain Rainey had grub-staked a man in the autumn&mdash;a man who
+    was reported to know where to look for the Mother Lode, the mighty
+    parent of the Yukon placers. "I can tell you the facts about Minóok."
+    He followed the Captain up on the hurricane-deck, giving him details
+    about the new strike, and the wonderful richness of Idaho Bar. "Nobody
+    would know about it to-day, but that the right man went prospecting
+    there." (One in the eye for whoever said Minóok was "busted," and
+    another for the prospector Rainey had sent to look for&mdash;&mdash;) "You see,
+    men like Pitcairn have given up lookin' for the Mother Lode. They say
+    you might as well look for Mother Eve; you got to make out with her
+    descendants. Yukon gold, Pitcairn says, comes from an older rock series
+    than this"&mdash;he stood in the shower of sparks constantly spraying from
+    the smoke-stack to the fireproof deck, and he waved his hand airily at
+    the red rock of the Ramparts&mdash;"far older than any of these. The gold up
+    here has all come out o' rock that went out o' the rock business
+    millions o' years ago. Most o' that Mother Lode the miners are lookin'
+    for is sand now, thirteen hundred miles away in Norton Sound."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Just my luck," said the Captain gloomily, going a little for'ard, as
+    though definitely giving up mining and returning to his own proper
+    business.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But the rest o' the Mother Lode, the gold and magnetic iron, was too
+    heavy to travel. That's what's linin' the gold basins o' the
+    North&mdash;linin' Idaho Bar thick."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Captain sighed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Twelve," a voice sang out on the lower deck.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Twelve," repeated the Captain.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Twelve," echoed the pilot at the wheel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Twelve and a half," from the man below, a tall, lean fellow, casting
+    the sounding-pole. With a rhythmic nonchalance he plants the long black
+    and white staff at the ship's side, draws it up dripping, plunges it
+    down again, draws it up, and sends it down hour after hour. He never
+    seems to tire; he never seems to see anything but the water-mark, never
+    to say anything but what he is chanting now, "Twelve and a half," or
+    some variation merely numerical. You come to think him as little human
+    as the calendar, only that his numbers are told off with the
+    significance of sound, the suggested menace of a cry. If the "sounding"
+    comes too near the steamer's draught, or the pilot fails to hear the
+    reading, the Captain repeats it. He often does so when there is no
+    need; it is a form of conversation, noncommittal, yet smacking of
+    authority.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ten."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ten," echoed the pilot, while the Captain was admitting that he had
+    been mining vicariously "for twenty years, and never made a cent.
+    Always keep thinkin' I'll soon be able to give up steamboatin' and buy
+    a farm."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He shook his head as one who sees his last hope fade.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But his ragged companion turned suddenly, and while the sparks fell in
+    a fresh shower, "Well, Captain," says he, "you've got the chance of
+    your life right now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ten and a half."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Just what they've all said. Wish I had the money I've wasted on
+    grub-stakin'."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The ragged one thrust his hands in the pockets of his chaparejos.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I grub-staked myself, and I'm very glad I did."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nobody in with you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nine."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Echo, "Nine."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ten."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pitcairn says, somehow or other, there's been gold-washin' goin' on up
+    here pretty well ever since the world began."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Indians?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No; seems to have been a bigger job than even white men could manage.
+    Instead o' stamp-mills, glaciers grindin' up the Mother Lode; instead
+    o' little sluice-boxes, rivers; instead o' riffles, gravel bottoms.
+    Work, work, wash, wash, day and night, every summer for a million
+    years. Never a clean-up since the foundation of the world. No, sir,
+    waitin' for us to do that&mdash;waitin' now up on Idaho Bar."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Captain looked at him, trying to conceal the envy in his soul. They
+    were sounding low water, but he never heard. He looked round sharply as
+    the course changed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've done my assessment," the ragged man went on joyously, "and I'm
+    going to Dawson."
+</p>
+<p>
+    This was bad navigation. He felt instantly he had struck a snag. The
+    Captain smiled, and passed on sounding: "Nine and a half."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But I've got a fortune on the Bar. I'm not a boomer, but I believe in
+    the Bar."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Six."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Six. Gettin' into low water."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Again the steamer swung out, hunting a new channel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pitcairn's opinion is thought a lot of. The Geologic Survey men listen
+    to Pitcairn. He helped them one year. He's one of those extraordinary
+    old miners who can tell from the look of things, without even panning.
+    When he saw that pyrites on Idaho Bar he stopped dead. 'This looks good
+    to me!' he said, and, Jee-rusalem! it was good!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    They stared at the Ramparts growing bolder, the river hurrying like a
+    mill-race, the steamer feeling its way slow and cautiously like a blind
+    man with a stick.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Seven."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Seven."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Seven."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Six and a half."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pitcairn says gold is always thickest on the inside of an elbow or
+    turn in the stream. It's in a place like that my claim is."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The steamer swerved still further out from the course indicated on the
+    chart. The pilot was still hunting a new channel, but still the Captain
+    stood and listened, and it was not to the sounding of the Yukon Bar.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They say there's no doubt about the whole country being glaciated."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Signs of glacial erosion everywhere."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Captain looked sharply about as if his ship might be in some new
+    danger.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No doubt the gold is all concentrates."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, is that so?" He seemed relieved on the whole.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Eight and a half," from below.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Eight and a half," from the Captain.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Eight and a half," from the pilot-house.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Concentrates, eh?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Something arresting, rich-sounding, in the news&mdash;a triple essence of
+    the perfume of riches.
+</p>
+<p>
+    With the incantation of technical phrase over the witch-brew of
+    adventure, gambling, and romance, that simmers in the mind when men
+    tell of finding gold in the ground, with the addition of this salt of
+    science comes a savour of homely virtue, an aroma promising sustenance
+    and strength. It confounds suspicion and sees unbelief, first weaken,
+    and at last do reverence. There is something hypnotic in the
+    terminology. Enthusiasm, even backed by fact, will scare off your
+    practical man, who yet will turn to listen to the theory of "the
+    mechanics of erosion" and one of its proofs&mdash;"up there before our eyes,
+    the striation of the Ramparts."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Rainey was what he called "an old bird." His squinted pilot-eye
+    came back from the glacier track and fell on the outlandish figure of
+    his passenger. And with an inward admiration of his quality of extreme
+    old-birdness, the Captain struggled against the trance.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Didn't I hear you say something about going to Dawson?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Y-yes. I think Dawson'll be worth seeing."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Holy Moses, yes! There's never been anything like Dawson before."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And I want to talk to the big business men there. I'm not a miner
+    myself. I mean to put my property on the market." As he said the words
+    it occurred to him unpleasantly how very like McGinty they sounded. But
+    he went on: "I didn't dream of spending so much time up here as I've
+    put in already. I've got to get back to the States."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You had any proposition yet?" The Captain led the way to his private
+    room.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "About my claim? Not yet; but once I get it on the market&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    So full was he of a scheme of his own he failed to see that he had no
+    need to go to Dawson for a buyer.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Captain set out drinks, and still the talk was of the Bar. It had
+    come now to seem impossible, even to an old bird, that, given those
+    exact conditions, gold should not be gathered thick along that Bar.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I regard it as a sure thing. Anyhow, it's recorded, and the
+    assessment's done. All the district wants now is capital to develop
+    it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Districts like that all over the map," said the old bird, with a final
+    flutter of caution. "Even if the capital's found&mdash;if everything's ready
+    for work, the summer's damn short. But if it's a question of goin'
+    huntin' for the means of workin'&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There's time," returned the other quietly, "but there's none to waste.
+    You take me and my pardner&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Thought you didn't have a pardner," snapped the other, hot over such
+    duplicity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not in ownership; he's got another claim. But you take my pardner and
+    me to Dawson&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Captain stood on his legs and roared:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I can't, I tell you!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You can if you will&mdash;you will if you want that farm!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Rainey gaped.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Take us to Dawson, and I'll get a deed drawn up in Minóok turning over
+    one-third of my Idaho Bar property to John R. Rainey."
+</p>
+<p>
+    John R. Rainey gaped the more, and then finding his tongue:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, no. I'd just as soon come in on the Bar, but it's true what I'm
+    tellin' you. There simply ain't an unoccupied inch on the Oklahoma this
+    trip. It's been somethin' awful, the way I've been waylaid and prayed
+    at for a passage. People starvin' with bags o' money waitin' for 'em at
+    the Dawson Bank! Settlements under water&mdash;men up in trees callin' to us
+    to stop for the love of God&mdash;men in boats crossin' our channel, headin'
+    us off, thinkin' nothin' o' the risk o' bein' run down. 'Take us to
+    Dawson!' it's the cry for fifteen hundred miles."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, come! you stopped for me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Captain smiled shrewdly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I didn't think it necessary at the time to explain. We'd struck bottom
+    just then&mdash;new channel, you know; it changes a lot every time the ice
+    goes out and the floods come down. I reversed our engines and went up
+    to talk to the pilot. We backed off just after you boarded us. I must
+    have been rattled to take you even to Minóok."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No. It was the best turn you've done yourself in a long while."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Captain shook his head. It was true: the passengers of the Oklahoma
+    were crowded like cattle on a Kansas stock-car. He knew he ought to
+    unload and let a good portion wait at Minóok for that unknown quantity
+    the next boat. He would issue the order, but that he knew it would mean
+    a mutiny.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll get into trouble for overloading as it is."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You probably won't; people are too busy up here. If you do, I'm
+    offerin' you a good many thousand dollars for the risk."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "God bless my soul! where'd I put you? There ain't a bunk."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've slept by the week on the ice."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There ain't room to lie down."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then we'll stand up."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Lord, Lord! what could you do with such a man? Owner of Idaho Bar, too.
+    "Mechanics of erosion," "Concentrates," "a third interest"&mdash;it all rang
+    in his head. "I've got nine fellers sleepin' in here," he said
+    helplessly, "in my room."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Can we come if we find our own place, and don't trouble you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I won't have any pardner&mdash;but perhaps you&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, pardner's got to come too."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Whatever the Captain said the nerve-tearing shriek of the whistle
+    drowned. It was promptly replied to by the most horrible howls.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Reckon that's Nig! He's got to come too," said this dreadful ragged
+    man.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "God bless me, this must be Minóok!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The harassed Captain hustled out.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You must wait long enough here to get that deed drawn, Captain!"
+    called out the other, as he flew down the companionway.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nearly six hundred people on the bank. Suddenly controlling his
+    eagerness, the Boy contented himself with standing back and staring
+    across strange shoulders at the place he knew so well. There was "the
+    worst-lookin' shack in the town," that had been his home, the A. C.
+    store looming importantly, the Gold Nugget, and hardly a face to which
+    he could not give a name and a history: Windy Jim and the crippled
+    Swede; Bonsor, cheek by jowl with his enemy, McGinty; Judge Corey
+    spitting straight and far; the gorgeous bartender, all checks and
+    diamonds, in front of a pitiful group of the scurvy-stricken (thirty of
+    them in the town waiting for rescue by the steamer); Butts, quite
+    bland, under the crooked cottonwood, with never a thought of how near
+    he had come, on that very spot, to missing the first boat of the year,
+    and all the boats of all the years to follow.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Maudie, Keith and the Colonel stood with the A. C. agent at the end of
+    the baggage-bordered plank-walk that led to the landing. Behind them,
+    at least four hundred people packed and waiting with their possessions
+    at their feet, ready to be put aboard the instant the Oklahoma made
+    fast. The Captain had called out "Howdy" to the A. C. Agent, and
+    several greetings were shouted back and forth. Maudie mounted a huge
+    pile of baggage and sat there as on a throne, the Colonel and Keith
+    perching on a heap of gunny-sacks at her feet. That woman almost the
+    only person in sight who did not expect, by means of the Oklahoma, to
+    leave misery behind! The Boy stood thinking "How will they bear it when
+    they know?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Oklahoma was late, but she was not only the first boat&mdash;she might
+    conceivably be the last.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Potts and O'Flynn had spotted the man they were looking for, and called
+    out "Hello! Hello!" as the big fellow on the pile of gunnies got up and
+    waved his hat.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac leaned over the rail, saying gruffly, "That you, Colonel?" trying,
+    as the Boss of the Big Chimney saw&mdash;"tryin' his darndest not to look
+    pleased," and all the while O'Flynn was waving his hat and howling with
+    excitement:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How's the gowld? How's yersilf?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The gangway began its slow swing round preparatory to lowering into
+    place. The mob on shore caught up boxes, bundles, bags, and pressed
+    forward.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, no! Stand back!" ordered the Captain.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Take your time!" said people trembling with excitement. "There's no
+    rush."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There's no room!" called out the purser to a friend.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No room?" went from mouth to mouth, incredulous that the information
+    could concern the speaker. He was only one. There was certainly room
+    for him; and every man pushed the harder to be the sole exception to
+    the dreadful verdict.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Stand back there! Can't take even a pound of freight. Loaded to the
+    guards!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    A whirlwind of protest and appeal died away in curses. Women wept, and
+    sick men turned away their faces. The dogs still howled, for nothing is
+    so lacerating to the feelings of your Siwash as a steam-whistle blast.
+    The memory of it troubles him long after the echo of it dies. Suddenly
+    above the din Maudie's shrill voice:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I thought that was Nig!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Before the gangway had dropped with a bang her sharp eyes had picked
+    out the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well I'll be&mdash;&mdash;See who that is behind Nig? Trust him to get in on the
+    ground-floor. He ain't worryin' for fear his pardner'll lose the boat,"
+    she called to the Colonel, who was pressing forward as Rainey came down
+    the gangway.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How do you do, Captain?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The man addressed never turned his head. He was forcing his way through
+    the jam up to the A. C. Store.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You may recall me, sah; I am&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If you are a man wantin' to go to Dawson, it doesn't matter who you
+    are. I can't take you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But, sah&mdash;&mdash;" It was no use.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A dozen more were pushing their claims, every one in vain. The Oklahoma
+    passengers, bent on having a look at Minóok, crowded after the Captain.
+    Among those who first left the ship, the Boy, talking to the purser,
+    hard upon Rainey's heels. The Colonel stood there as they passed, the
+    Captain turning back to say something to the Boy, and then they
+    disappeared together through the door of the A. C.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Never a word for his pardner, not so much as a look. Bitterness fell
+    upon the Colonel's heart. Maudie called to him, and he went back to his
+    seat on the gunny-sacks.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He's in with the Captain now," she said; "he's got no more use for
+    us."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But there was less disgust than triumph in her face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    O'Flynn was walking over people in his frantic haste to reach the
+    Colonel. Before he could accomplish his design he had three separate
+    quarrels on his hands, and was threatening with fury to "settle the
+    hash" of several of his dearest new friends.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Potts meanwhile was shaking the Big Chimney boss by the hand and
+    saying, "Awfully sorry we can't take you on with us;" adding lower: "We
+    had a mighty mean time after you lit out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then Mac thrust his hand in between the two, and gave the Colonel a
+    monkey-wrench grip that made the Kentuckian's eyes water.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Kaviak? Well, I'll tell you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He shouldered Potts out of his way, and while the talk and movement
+    went on all round Maudie's throne, Mac, ignoring her, set forth grimly
+    how, after an awful row with Potts, he had adventured with Kaviak to
+    Holy Cross. "An awful row, indeed," thought the Colonel, "to bring Mac
+    to that;" but the circumstances had little interest for him, beside the
+    fact that his pardner would be off to Dawson in a few minutes, leaving
+    him behind and caring "not a sou markee."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac was still at Holy Cross. He had seen a woman there&mdash;"calls herself
+    a nun&mdash;evidently swallows those priests whole. Kind of mad, believes it
+    all. Except for that, good sort of girl. The kind to keep her
+    word"&mdash;and she had promised to look after Kaviak, and never let him
+    away from her till Mac came back to fetch him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Fetch him?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Fetch him!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Fetch him where?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Home!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When will that be?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Just as soon as I've put through the job up yonder." He jerked his
+    head up the river, indicating the common goal.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And now O'Flynn, roaring as usual, had broken away from those who had
+    obstructed his progress, and had flung himself upon the Colonel. When
+    the excitement had calmed down a little, "Well," said the Colonel to
+    the three ranged in front of him, Maudie looking on from above, "what
+    you been doin' all these three months?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Doin'?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well&mdash;a&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, we done a lot."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They looked at one another out of the corners of their eyes and then
+    they looked away. "Since the birds came," began Mac in the tone of one
+    who wishes to let bygones be bygones.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Och, yes; them burruds was foine!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Potts pulled something out of his trousers pocket&mdash;&mdash;a strange
+    collapsed object. He took another of the same description out of
+    another pocket. Mac's hands and O'Flynn's performed the same action.
+    Each man seemed to have his pockets full of these&mdash;&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What are they?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Money-bags, me bhoy! Made out o' the fut o' the 'Lasky swan, God bless
+    'em! Mac cahls 'em some haythen name, but everybuddy else cahls 'em
+    illegant money-bags!"
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    In less than twenty minutes the steamer whistle shrieked. Nig bounded
+    out of the A. C., frantic at the repetition of the insult; other dogs
+    took the quarrel up, and the Ramparts rang.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy followed the Captain out of the A. C. store. All the motley
+    crew that had swarmed off to inspect Minóok, swarmed back upon the
+    Oklahoma. The Boy left the Captain this time, and came briskly over to
+    his friends, who were taking leave of the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So you're all goin' on but me!" said the Colonel very sadly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel's pardner stopped short, and looked at the pile of baggage.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Got your stuff all ready!" he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes." The answer was not free from bitterness. "I'll have the pleasure
+    of packin' it back to the shack after you're gone."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So you were all ready to go off and leave me," said the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel could not stoop to the obvious retort. His pardner came
+    round the pile and his eyes fell on their common sleeping-bag, the two
+    Nulato rifles, and other "traps," that meant more to him than any
+    objects inanimate in all the world.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What? you were goin' to carry off my things too?" exclaimed the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's all you get," Maudie burst out indignantly&mdash;"all you get for
+    packin' his stuff down to the landin', to have it all ready for him,
+    and worryin' yourself into shoe-strings for fear he'd miss the boat."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac, O'Flynn, and Potts condoled with the Colonel, while the fire of
+    the old feud flamed and died.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes," the Colonel admitted, "I'd give five hundred dollars for a
+    ticket on that steamer."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He looked in each of the three faces, and knew the vague hope behind
+    his words was vain. But the Boy had only laughed, and caught up the
+    baggage as the last whistle set the Rampart echoes flying, piping, like
+    a lot of frightened birds.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come along, then."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look here!" the Colonel burst out. "That's my stuff."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's all the same. You bring mine. I've got the tickets. You and me
+    and Nig's goin' to the Klondyke."
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH21"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XX
+</h2>
+<center>
+    THE KLONDYKE
+</center>
+<p class="ind">
+    "Poverty is an odious calling."&mdash;Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    On Monday morning, the 6th of June, they crossed the British line; but
+    it was not till Wednesday, the 8th, at four in the afternoon, just ten
+    months after leaving San Francisco, that the Oklahoma's passengers saw
+    between the volcanic hills on the right bank of the Yukon a stretch of
+    boggy tundra, whereon hundreds of tents gleamed, pink and saffron. Just
+    beyond the bold wooded height, wearing the deep scar of a landslide on
+    its breast, just round that bend, the Klondyke river joins the
+    Yukon&mdash;for this is Dawson, headquarters of the richest Placer Diggings
+    the world has seen, yet wearing more the air of a great army
+    encampment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    For two miles the river-bank shines with sunlit canvas&mdash;tents, tents
+    everywhere, as far as eye can see, a mushroom growth masking the older
+    cabins. The water-front swarms with craft, scows and canoes, birch,
+    canvas, peterboro; the great bateaux of the northern lumberman, neat
+    little skiffs, clumsy rafts; heavy "double-enders," whip-sawed from
+    green timber, with capacity of two to five tons; lighters and barges
+    carrying as much as forty tons&mdash;all having come through the perils of
+    the upper lakes and shot the canon rapids.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As the Oklahoma steams nearer, the town blossoms into flags; a great
+    murmur increases to a clamour; people come swarming down to the
+    water-front, waving Union Jacks and Stars and Stripes as well&mdash;&mdash;What
+    does it all mean? A cannon booms, guns are fired, and as the Oklahoma
+    swings into the bank a band begins to play; a cheer goes up from
+    fifteen thousand throats: "Hurrah for the first steamer!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Oklahoma has opened the Klondyke season of 1898!
+</p>
+<p>
+    They got their effects off the boat, and pitched the old tent up on the
+    Moosehide; then followed days full to overflowing, breathless, fevered,
+    yet without result beyond a general stringing up of nerves. The special
+    spell of Dawson was upon them all&mdash;the surface aliveness, the inner
+    deadness, the sense of being cut off from all the rest of the world, as
+    isolated as a man is in a dream, with no past, no future, only a
+    fantastic, intensely vivid Now. This was the summer climate of the
+    Klondyke. The Colonel, the Boy, and Captain Rainey maintained the
+    illusion of prosecuting their affairs by frequenting the offices,
+    stores, and particularly saloons, where buyers and sellers most did
+    congregate. Frequent mention was made of a certain valuable piece of
+    property.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Where was it?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Down yonder at Minóok;" and then nobody cared a straw.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was true there was widespread dissatisfaction with the Klondyke.
+    Everyone agreed it had been overdone. It would support one-quarter of
+    the people already here, and tens of thousands on their way! "Say
+    Klondyke, and instantly your soberest man goes mad; say anything else,
+    and he goes deaf."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Minóok was a good camp, but it had the disadvantage of lying outside
+    the magic district. The madness would, of course, not last, but
+    meanwhile the time went by, and the people poured in day and night. Six
+    great steamers full came up from the Lower River, and still the small
+    craft kept on flocking like coveys of sea-fowl through the Upper Lakes,
+    each party saying, "The crowd is behind."
+</p>
+<p>
+    On the 14th of June a toy whistle sounded shrill above the town, and in
+    puffed a Liliputian "steel-hull" steamer that had actually come "on her
+    own" through the canon and shot the White Horse Rapids. A steamer from
+    the Upper River! after that, others. Two were wrecked, but who minded?
+    And still the people pouring in, and still that cry, "The crowd's
+    behind!" and still the clamour for quicker, ampler means of transport
+    to the North, no matter what it cost. The one consideration "to get
+    there," and to get there "quickly," brought most of the horde by the
+    Canadian route; yet, as against the two ocean steamers&mdash;all-sufficient
+    the year before to meet the five river boats at St. Michael's&mdash;now, by
+    the All-American route alone, twenty ocean steamers and forty-seven
+    river boats, double-deckers, some two hundred and twenty-five feet
+    long, and every one crowded to the guards with people coming to the
+    Klondyke.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Meanwhile, many of those already there were wondering why they came and
+    how they could get home. In the tons of "mail matter" for Dawson,
+    stranded at Skaguay, must be those "instructions" from the Colonel's
+    bank, at home, to the Canadian Bank of Commerce, Dawson City. He agreed
+    with the Boy that if&mdash;very soon now&mdash;they had not disposed of the
+    Minóok property, they would go to the mines.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's the good?" rasped Mac. "Every foot staked for seventy miles."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "For my part," admitted the Boy, "I'm less grand than I was. I meant to
+    make some poor devil dig out my Minóok gold for me. It'll be the other
+    way about: I'll dig gold for any man on Bonanza that'll pay me wages."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They sat slapping at the mosquitoes till a whistle screamed on the
+    Lower River. The Boy called to Nig, and went down to the town to hear
+    the news. By-and-by Mac came out with a pack, and said he'd be back in
+    a day or two. After he had disappeared among the tents&mdash;a conquering
+    army that had forced its way far up the hill by now&mdash;the Colonel got up
+    and went to the spring for a drink. He stood there a long time looking
+    out wistfully, not towards the common magnet across the Klondyke, but
+    quite in the other direction towards the nearer gate of exit&mdash;towards
+    home.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What special brand of fool am I to be here?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Down below, Nig, with hot tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth,
+    now followed, now led, his master, coming briskly up the slope.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That was the Weare we heard whistlin'," said the Boy, breathless. "And
+    who d'you think's aboard?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nicholas a' Pymeut, pilot. An' he's got Princess Muckluck along."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," laughed the Colonel, following the Boy to the tent. "What's the
+    Princess come for?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How should I know?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Didn't she say?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Didn't stop to hear."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Reckon she was right glad to see you," chaffed the Colonel. "Hey?
+    Wasn't she?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I&mdash;don't think she noticed I was there."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What! you bolted?" No reply. "See here, what you doin'?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Packin' up."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where you goin'?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Been thinkin' for some time I ain't wealthy enough to live in this
+    metropolis. There may be a place for a poor man, but Dawson isn't It."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I didn't think you were that much of a coward&mdash;turnin' tail like
+    this just because a poor little Esquimaux&mdash;Besides, she may have got
+    over it. Even the higher races do." And he went on poking his fun till
+    suddenly the Boy said:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You're in such high spirits, I suppose you must have heard Maudie's up
+    from Minóok.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You're jokin'!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It ain't my idea of a joke. She's comin' up here soon's she's landed
+    her stuff."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She's not comin' up here!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why not? Anybody can come up on the Moosehide, and everybody's doin'
+    it. I'm goin' to make way for some of 'em."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did she see you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, she's seen Potts, anyhow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You're right about Dawson," said the Colonel suddenly; "it's too rich
+    for my blood."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They pinned a piece of paper on the tent-flap to say they were "Gone
+    prospecting: future movements uncertain."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Each with a small pack, and sticking out above it the Klondyke shovel
+    that had come all the way from San Francisco, Nig behind with
+    provisions in his little saddle-bags, and tongue farther out than ever,
+    they turned their backs on Dawson, crossed the lower corner of Lot 6,
+    behind the Government Reserve, stared with fresh surprise at the young
+    market-garden flourishing there, down to the many-islanded Klondyke,
+    across in the scow-ferry, over the Corduroy, that cheers and deceives
+    the new-comer for that first mile of the Bonanza Trail, on through pool
+    and morass to the thicket of white birches, where the Colonel thought
+    it well to rest awhile.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, he felt the heat," he said, as he passed the time of day with
+    other men going by with packs, pack-horses, or draught-dogs, cursing at
+    the trail and at the Government that taxed the miners so cruelly and
+    then did nothing for them, not even making a decent highway to the
+    Dominion's source of revenue. But out of the direct rays of the sun the
+    traveller found refreshment, and the mosquitoes were blown away by the
+    keen breeze that seemed to come from off some glacier. And the birds
+    sang loud, and the wild-flowers starred the birch-grove, and the
+    briar-roses wove a tangle on either side the swampy trail.
+</p>
+<p>
+    On again, dipping to a little valley&mdash;Bonanza Creek! They stood and
+    looked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, here we are."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, this is what we came for."
+</p>
+<p>
+    And it was because of "this" that so vast a machinery of ships,
+    engines, and complicated human lives had been set in motion. What was
+    it? A dip in the hills where a little stream was caught up into
+    sluices. On either side of every line of boxes, heaps and windrows of
+    gravel. Above, high on log-cabin staging, windlasses. Stretching away
+    on either side, gentle slopes, mossed and flower starred. Here and
+    there upon this ancient moose pasture, tents and cabins set at random.
+    In the bed of the creek, up and down in every direction, squads of men
+    sweating in the sun&mdash;here, where for untold centuries herds of
+    leisurely and majestic moose had come to quench their thirst. In the
+    older cabins their horns still lorded it. Their bones were bleaching in
+    the fire-weed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    On from claim to claim the new-comers to these rich pastures went, till
+    they came to the junction of the El Dorado, where huddles the haphazard
+    settlement of the Grand Forks, only twelve miles from Dawson. And now
+    they were at the heart of "the richest Placer Mining District the world
+    has seen." But they knew well enough that every inch was owned, and
+    that the best they could look for was work as unskilled labourers, day
+    shift or night, on the claims of luckier men.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They had brought a letter from Ryan, of the North-West Mounted Police,
+    to the Superintendent of No. 10, Above Discovery, a claim a little this
+    side of the Forks. Ryan had warned them to keep out of the way of the
+    part-owner, Scoville Austin, a surly person naturally, so exasperated
+    at the tax, and so enraged at the rumour of Government spies
+    masquerading as workmen, checking his reports, that he was "a
+    first-rate man to avoid." But Seymour, the Superintendent, was, in the
+    words of the soothing motto of the whole American people, "All right."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They left their packs just inside the door of the log-cabin, indicated
+    as "Bunk House for the men on No. 6, Above"&mdash;a fearsome place, where,
+    on shelf above shelf, among long unwashed bedclothes, the unwashed
+    workmen of a prosperous company lay in the stupor of sore fatigue and
+    semi-asphyxiation. Someone stirred as the door opened, and out of the
+    fetid dusk of the unventilated, closely-shuttered cabin came a voice:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Night shift on?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then, damn you! shut the door."
+</p>
+<p>
+    As the never-resting sun "forced" the Dawson market-garden and the
+    wild-roses of the trail, so here on the creek men must follow the
+    strenuous example. No pause in the growing or the toiling of this
+    Northern world. The day-gang on No. 0 was hard at it down there where
+    lengthwise in the channel was propped a line of sluice-boxes, steadied
+    by regularly spaced poles laid from box to bank on gravel ridge.
+    Looking down from above, the whole was like a huge fish-bone lying
+    along the bed of the creek. A little group of men with picks, shovels,
+    and wheelbarrows were reducing the "dump" of winter pay, piled beside a
+    windlass, conveying it to the sluices. Other men in line, four or five
+    feet below the level of the boxes, were "stripping," picking, and
+    shovelling the gravel off the bed-rock&mdash;no easy business, for even this
+    summer temperature thawed but a few inches a day, and below, the frost
+    of ten thousand years cemented the rubble into iron.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where is the Superintendent?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's Seymour in the straw hat."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was felt that even the broken and dilapidated article mentioned was
+    a distinction and a luxury.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Yes, it was too hot up here in the Klondyke.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They made their way to the man in authority, a dark, quiet-mannered
+    person, with big, gentle eyes, not the sort of Superintendent they had
+    expected to find representing such a man as the owner of No. 0.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Having read Ryan's letter and slowly scanned the applicants: "What do
+    you know about it?" He nodded at the sluice.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "All of nothing," said the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Does it call for any particular knowing?" asked the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Calls for muscle and plenty of keep-at-it." His voice was soft, but as
+    the Colonel looked at him he realized why a hard fellow like Scoville
+    Austin had made this Southerner Superintendent.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Better just try us."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I can use one more man on the night shift, a dollar and a half an
+    hour."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "All right," said the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel looked at him. "Is this job yours or mine?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Superintendent had gone up towards the dam.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Whichever you say."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy did not like to suggest that the Colonel seemed little fit for
+    this kind of exercise. They had been in the Klondyke long enough to
+    know that to be in work was to be in luck.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll tell you," the younger man said quickly, answering something
+    unspoken, but plain in the Colonel's face; "I'll go up the gulch and
+    see what else there is."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It crossed his mind that there might be something less arduous than
+    this shovelling in the wet thaw or picking at frozen gravel in the hot
+    sun. If so, the Colonel might be induced to exchange. It was obvious
+    that, like so many Southerners, he stood the sun very ill. While they
+    were agreeing upon a rendezvous the Superintendent came back.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Our bunk-house is yonder," he said, pointing. A kind of sickness came
+    over the Kentuckian as he recalled the place. He turned to his pardner.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Wish we'd got a pack-mule and brought our tent out from Dawson." Then,
+    apologetically, to the Superintendent: "You see, sah, there are men who
+    take to bunk-houses just as there are women who want to live in hotels;
+    and there are others who want a place to call home, even if it's a
+    tent."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Superintendent smiled. "That's the way we feel about it in
+    Alabama." He reflected an instant. "There's that big new tent up there
+    on the hill, next to the Buckeyes' cabin. Good tent; belongs to a
+    couple o' rich Englishmen, third owners in No. 0. Gone to Atlin. Told
+    me to do what I liked with that tent. You might bunk there while
+    they're away."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now, that's mighty good of you, sah. Next whose cabin did you say?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I don't know their names. They have a lay on seventeen. Ohio men.
+    They're called Buck One and Buck Two. Anybody'll show you to the
+    Buckeyes';" and he turned away to shout "Gate!" for the head of water
+    was too strong, and he strode off towards the lock.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As the Boy tramped about looking for work he met a great many on the
+    same quest. It seemed as if the Colonel had secured the sole job on the
+    creek. Still, vacancies might occur any hour.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In the big new tent the Colonel lay asleep on a little camp-bed,
+    (mercifully left there by the rich Englishmen), "gettin' ready for the
+    night-shift." As he stood looking down upon him, a sudden wave of pity
+    came over the Boy. He knew the Colonel didn't "really and truly have to
+    do this kind of thing; he just didn't like givin' in." But behind all
+    that there was a sense in the younger mind that here was a life unlike
+    his own, which dimly he foresaw was to find its legitimate expression
+    in battle and in striving. Here, in the person of the Colonel, no
+    soldier fore-ordained, but a serene and equable soul wrenched out of
+    its proper sphere by a chance hurt to a woman, forsooth! an imagination
+    so stirred that, if it slept at all, it dreamed and moaned in its
+    sleep, as now; a conscience wounded and refusing to heal. Had he not
+    said himself that he had come up here to forget? It was best to let him
+    have the job that was too heavy for him&mdash;yes, it was best, after all.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And so they lived for a few days, the Boy chafing and wanting to move
+    on, the Colonel very earnest to have him stay.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Something sure to turn up, and, anyhow, letters&mdash;my instruction&mdash;&mdash;"
+    And he encouraged the acquaintance the Boy had struck up with the
+    Buckeyes, hoping against hope that to go over and smoke a pipe, and
+    exchange experiences with such mighty good fellows would lighten the
+    tedium of the long day spent looking for a job.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I call it a very pleasant cabin," the Colonel would say as he lit up
+    and looked about. Anything dismaller it would be hard to find. Not
+    clean and shipshape as the Boy kept the tent. But with double army
+    blankets nailed over the single window it was blessedly dark, if
+    stuffy, and in crying need of cleaning. Still, they were mighty good
+    fellows, and they had a right to be cheerful. Up there, on the rude
+    shelf above the stove, was a row of old tomato-cans brimful of Bonanza
+    gold. There they stood, not even covered. Dim as the light was, you
+    could see the little top nuggets peering out at you over the ragged
+    tin-rims, in a never locked shanty, never molested, never bothered
+    about. Nearly every cabin on the creek had similar chimney ornaments,
+    but not everyone boasted an old coat, kept under the bunk, full of the
+    bigger sort of nuggets.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel was always ready with pretended admiration of such
+    bric-à-brac, but the truth was he cared very little about this gold he
+    had come so far to find. His own wages, paid in dust, were kept in a
+    jam-pot the Boy had found "lyin' round."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The growing store shone cheerfully through the glass, but its value in
+    the Colonel's eyes seemed to be simply as an argument to prove that
+    they had enough, and "needn't worry." When the Boy said there was no
+    doubt this was the district in all the world the most overdone, the
+    Colonel looked at him with sun-tired, reproachful eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You want to dissolve the pardnership&mdash;I see."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the Colonel, after any such interchange, would go off and smoke by
+    himself, not even caring for Buckeyes'. The work was plainly overtaxing
+    him. He slept badly, was growing moody and quick to take offence. One
+    day when he had been distinctly uncivil he apologized for himself by
+    saying that, standing with feet always in the wet, head always in the
+    scorching sun, he had taken a hell of a cold. Certain it was that,
+    without sullenness, he would give in to long fits of silence; and his
+    wide, honest eyes were heavy again, as if the snow-blindness of the
+    winter had its analogue in a summer torment from the sun. And his
+    sometimes unusual gentleness to his companion was sharply alternated
+    with unusual choler, excited by a mere nothing. Enough if the Boy were
+    not in the tent when the Colonel came and went. Of course, the Boy did
+    the cooking. The Colonel ate almost nothing, but he made a great point
+    of his pardner's service in doing the cooking. He would starve, he
+    said, if he had to cook for himself as well as swing a shovel; and the
+    Boy, acting on pure instinct, pretended that he believed this was so.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then came the evening when the Boy was so late the Colonel got his own
+    breakfast; and when the recreant did get home, it was to announce that
+    a man over at the Buckeyes' had just offered him a job out on Indian
+    River. The Colonel set down his tea-cup and stared. His face took on
+    an odd, rigid look. But almost indifferently he said:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So you're goin'?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Of course, you know I must. I started with an outfit and fifteen
+    hundred dollars, now I haven't a cent."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Kentuckian raised his heavy eyes to the jam-jar. "Oh, help
+    yourself."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy laughed, and shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I wish you wouldn't go," the other said very low.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You see, I've got to. Why, Nig and I owe you for a week's grub
+    already."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then the Colonel stood up and swore&mdash;swore till he was scarlet and
+    shaking with excitement.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If the life up here has brought us to 'Scowl' Austin's point of view,
+    we are poorly off." And he spoke of the way men lived in his part of
+    Kentucky, where the old fashion of keeping open house survived. And
+    didn't he know it was the same thing in Florida? "Wouldn't you do as
+    much for me?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, only I can't&mdash;and&mdash;I'm restless. The summer's half gone. Up here
+    that means the whole year's half gone."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel had stumbled back into his seat, and now across the deal
+    table he put out his hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't go, Boy. I don't know how I'd get on without&mdash;&mdash;" He stopped,
+    and his big hand was raised as if to brush away some cloud between him
+    and his pardner. "If you go, you won't come back."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, yes, I will. You'll see."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I know the kind," the other went on, as if there had been no
+    interruption. "They never come back. I don't know as I ever cared quite
+    as much for my brother&mdash;little fella that died, you know." Then, seeing
+    that his companion did not instantly iterate his determination to go,
+    "That's right," he said, getting up suddenly, and leaving his breakfast
+    barely touched. "We've been through such a lot together, let's see it
+    out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Without waiting for an answer, he went off to his favourite seat under
+    the little birch-tree. But the incident had left him nervous. He would
+    come up from his work almost on the run, and if he failed to find his
+    pardner in the tent there was the devil to pay. The Boy would laugh to
+    himself to think what a lot he seemed able to stand from the Colonel;
+    and then he would grow grave, remembering what he had to make up for.
+    Still, his sense of obligation did not extend to giving up this
+    splendid chance down on Indian River. On Wednesday, when the fellow
+    over at the Buckeyes' was for going back, the Boy would go along.
+</p>
+<p>
+    On Sunday morning he ran a crooked, rusty nail into his foot. Clumsily
+    extracted, it left an ugly wound. Walking became a torture, and the
+    pain a banisher of sleep. It was during the next few days that he found
+    out how much the Colonel lay awake. Who could sleep in this blazing
+    sun? Black tents were not invented then, so they lay awake and talked
+    of many things.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The man from Indian River went back alone. The Boy would limp after the
+    Colonel down to the sluice, and sit on a dump heap with Nig. Few people
+    not there strictly on business were tolerated on No. 0, but Nig and his
+    master had been on good terms with Seymour from the first. Now they
+    struck up acquaintance with several of the night-gang, especially with
+    the men who worked on either side of the Colonel. An Irish gentleman,
+    who did the shovelling just below, said he had graduated from Dublin
+    University. He certainly had been educated somewhere, and if the
+    discussion were theologic, would take out of his linen-coat pocket a
+    little testament in the Vulgate to verify a bit of Gospel. He could
+    even pelt the man next but one in his native tongue, calling the
+    Silesian "Uebermensch." There existed some doubt whether this were the
+    gentleman's real name, but none at all as to his talking philosophy
+    with greater fervour than he bestowed on the puddling box.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The others were men more accustomed to work with their hands, but, in
+    spite of the conscious superiority of your experienced miner, a very
+    good feeling prevailed in the gang&mdash;a general friendliness that
+    presently centred about the Colonel, for even in his present mood he
+    was far from disagreeable, except now and then, to the man he cared the
+    most for.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Seymour admitted that he had placed the Southerner where he thought
+    he'd feel most at home. "Anyhow, the company is less mixed," he said,
+    "than it was all winter up at twenty-three, where they had a
+    Presbyterian missionary down the shaft, a Salvation Army captain
+    turnin' the windlass, a nigger thief dumpin' the becket, and a
+    dignitary of the Church of England doin' the cookin', with the help of
+    a Chinese chore-boy. They're all there now (except one) washin' out
+    gold for the couple of San Francisco card-sharpers that own the claim."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Vich von is gone?" asked the Silesian, who heard the end of the
+    conversation.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, the Chinese chore-boy is the one who's bettered himself," said the
+    Superintendent&mdash;"makin' more than all the others put together ever made
+    in their lives; runnin' a laundry up at Dawson."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy, since this trouble with his foot, had fallen into the way of
+    turning night into day. The Colonel liked to have him down there at the
+    sluice, and when he thought about it, the Boy marvelled at the hours he
+    spent looking on while others worked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At first he said he came down only to make Scowl Austin mad. And it did
+    make him mad at first, but the odd thing was he got over it, and used
+    to stop and say something now and then. This attention on the part of
+    the owner was distinctly perilous to the Boy's good standing with the
+    gang. Not because Austin was the owner; there was the millionaire
+    Swede, Ole Olsen&mdash;any man might talk to him. He was on the square,
+    treated his workmen mighty fair, and when the other owners tried to
+    reduce wages, and did, Ole wouldn't join them&mdash;went right along paying
+    the highest rate on the creek.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Various stories were afloat about Austin. Oh, yes, Scowl Austin was a
+    hard man&mdash;the only owner on the creek who wouldn't even pay the little
+    subscription every poor miner contributed to keep the Dawson Catholic
+    Hospital going.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The women, too, had grievances against Austin, not only "the usual lot"
+    up at the Gold Belt, who sneered at his close fist, but some of the
+    other sort&mdash;those few hard-working wives or "women on their own," or
+    those who washed and cooked for this claim or that. They had stories
+    about Austin that shed a lurid light. And so by degrees the gathered
+    experience, good and ill, of "the greatest of all placer diggin's"
+    flowed by the idler on the bank.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You seem to have a lot to do," Seymour would now and then say with a
+    laugh.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So I have."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What do you call it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Takin' stock."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Of us?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Of things in general."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What did you mean by that?" demanded the Colonel suspiciously when the
+    Superintendent had passed up the line.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The shovelling in was done for the time being. The water was to be
+    regulated, and then the clean-up as soon as the owner came down.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Better not let Austin hear you say you're takin' stock. He'll run you
+    out o' the creek."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy only smiled, and went on fillipping little stones at Nig.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What did you mean?" the Colonel persisted, with a look as suspicious
+    as Scowl Austin's own.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, nothin'. I'm only thinkin' out things."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Your future, I suppose?" he said testily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mine and other men's. The Klondyke's a great place to get things clear
+    in your head."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't find it so." The Colonel put up his hand with that now familiar
+    action as if to clear away a cloud. "It's days since I had anything
+    clear in my head, except the lesson we learned on the trail."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy stopped throwing stones, and fixed his eyes on his friend, as
+    the Colonel went on:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We had that hammered into us, didn't we?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, that&mdash;you know&mdash;that&mdash;I don't know quite how to put it so it'll
+    sound as orthodox as it might be, bein' true; but it looks pretty clear
+    even to me"&mdash;again the big hand brushing at the unmoted sunshine&mdash;"that
+    the only reason men got over bein' beasts was because they began to be
+    brothers."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't," said the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't what?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've always known I should have to tell you some time. I won't be able
+    to put it off if I stay ... and I hate tellin' you now. See here: I
+    b'lieve I'll get a pack-mule and go over to Indian River."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel looked round angrily. Standing high against the sky,
+    Seymour, with the gateman up at the lock, was moderating the strong
+    head of water. It began to flow sluggishly over the gravel-clogged
+    riffles, and Scowl Austin was coming down the hill.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't know what you're drivin' at, about somethin' to tell. I know
+    one thing, though, and I learned it up here in the North: men were
+    meant to stick to one another."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't, I say."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Here's Austin," whispered the Colonel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Silesian philosopher stood in his "gum-boots" in the puddling-box
+    as on a rostrum; but silent now, as ever, when Scowl Austin was in
+    sight. With the great sluice-fork, the philosopher took up, washed, and
+    threw out the few remaining big stones that they might not clog the
+    narrow boxes below.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Seymour had so regulated the stream that, in place of the gush and foam
+    of a few minutes before, there was now only a scant and gently falling
+    veil of water playing over the bright gravel caught in the riffle-lined
+    bottoms of the boxes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As the Boy got up and reached for his stick, Austin stood there saying,
+    to nobody in particular, that he'd just been over to No. 29, where they
+    were trying a new-fangled riffle.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't your riffles do the trick all right?" asked the Boy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If you're in any doubt, come and see," he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They stood together, leaning over the sluice, looking in at one of the
+    things human industry has failed to disfigure, nearly as beautiful
+    to-day as long ago on Pactolus' banks when Lydian shepherds, with great
+    stones, fastened fleeces in the river that they might catch and gather
+    for King Croesus the golden sands of Tmolus. Improving, not in beauty,
+    but economy, quite in the modern spirit, the Greeks themselves
+    discovered that they lost less gold if they led the stream through
+    fleece-lined water-troughs&mdash;and beyond this device of those early
+    placer-miners we have not progressed so far but that, in every long,
+    narrow sluice-box in the world to-day, you may see a Lydian
+    water-trough with a riffle in the bottom for a golden fleece.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The rich Klondyker and the poor one stood together looking in at the
+    water, still low, still slipping softly over polished pebbles, catching
+    at the sunlight, winking, dimpling, glorifying flint and jasper, agate
+    and obsidian, dazzling the uncommercial eye to blind forgetfulness of
+    the magic substance underneath.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Austin gathered up, one by one, a handful of the shining stones, and
+    tossed them out. Then, bending down, "See?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    There, under where the stones had been, neatly caught in the lattice of
+    the riffle, lying thick and packed by the water action, a heavy ridge
+    of black and yellow&mdash;magnetic sand and gold.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Riffles out!" called Seymour, and the men, who had been extracting the
+    rusty nails that held them firm, lifted out from the bottom of each box
+    a wooden lattice, soused it gently in the water, and laid it on the
+    bank.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy had turned away again, but stood an instant noticing how the
+    sun caught at the countless particles of gold still clinging to the
+    wood; for this was one of the old riffles, frayed by the action of much
+    water and the fret of many stones. Soon it would have to be burned, and
+    out of its ashes the careful Austin would gather up with mercury all
+    those million points of light.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Meanwhile, Seymour had called to the gateman for more water, and
+    himself joining the gang, armed now with flat metal scoops, they all
+    began to turn over and throw back against the stream the debris in the
+    bottom of the boxes, giving the water another chance to wash out the
+    lighter stuff and clean the gold from all impurity. Away went the last
+    of the sand, and away went the pebbles, dark or bright, away went much
+    of the heavy magnetic iron. Scowl Austin, at the end of the line, had a
+    corn-whisk with which he swept the floor of the box, always upstream,
+    gathering the contents in a heap, now on this side, now on that,
+    letting the water play and sort and carry away, condensing, hastening
+    the process that for ages had been concentrating gold in the Arctic
+    placers.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Say, look here!" shouted Austin to the Boy, already limping up the
+    hill.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When he had reached the sluice again he found that all Scowl Austin
+    wanted, apparently, was to show him how, when he held the water back
+    with the whisk, it eddied softly at each side of the broad little
+    broom, leaving exposed the swept-up pile.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "See?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's all that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What do you think?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Looks like a heap o' sawdust."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Austin actually laughed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "See if it feels like sawdust. Take it up like this," he ordered.
+</p>
+<p>
+    His visitor obeyed, lifting a double handful out of the water and
+    holding it over the box, dripping, gleaming, the most beautiful thing
+    that comes out of the earth, save only life, and the assertion may
+    stand, even if the distinction is without difference, if the crystal is
+    born, grows old, and dies as undeniably as the rose.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy held the double handful of well-washed gold up to the sunshine,
+    feeling to the full the immemorial spell cast by the King of Metals.
+    Nothing that men had ever made out of gold was so entirely beautiful as
+    this.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Scowl Austin's grim gratification was openly heightened with the rich
+    man's sense of superiority, but his visitor seemed to have forgotten
+    him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Colonel! here a minute. We thought it looked wonderful enough on the
+    Big Chimney table&mdash;but Lord! to see it like this, out o' doors, mixed
+    with sunshine and water!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Still he stood there fascinated, leaning heavily against the
+    sluice-box, still with his dripping hands full, when, after a hurried
+    glance, the Colonel returned to his own box. None of the gang ever
+    talked in the presence of the owner.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Guess that looks good to you." Austin slightly stressed the pronoun.
+    He had taken a reasonless liking for the young man, who from the first
+    had smiled into his frowning face, and treated him as he treated
+    others. Or perhaps Austin liked him because, although the Boy did a
+    good deal of "gassin' with the gang," he had never hung about at
+    clean-ups. At all events, he should stay to-night, partly because when
+    the blue devils were down on Scowl Austin nothing cheered him like
+    showing his "luck" off to someone. And it was so seldom safe in these
+    days. People talked. The authorities conceived unjust suspicions of a
+    man's returns. And then, far back in his head, that vague need men
+    feel, when a good thing has lost its early zest, to see its dimmed
+    value shine again in an envious eye. Here was a young fellow, who,
+    before he went lame, had been all up and down the creek for days
+    looking for a job&mdash;probably hadn't a penny&mdash;livin' off his friend, who
+    himself would starve but for the privilege Austin gave him of washing
+    out Austin's gold. Let the young man stop and see the richest clean-up
+    at the Forks.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And so it was with the acrid pleasure he had promised himself that he
+    said to the visitor, bending over the double handful of gold, "Guess it
+    looks good to you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, it looks good!" But he had lifted his eyes, and seemed to be
+    studying the man more than the metal.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A couple of newcomers, going by, halted.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Christ!" said the younger, "look at that!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy remembered them; they had been to Seymour only a couple of
+    hours before asking for work. One was old for that country&mdash;nearly
+    sixty&mdash;and looked, as one of the gang had said, "as if, instid o'
+    findin' the pot o' gold, he had got the end of the rainbow slam in his
+    face&mdash;kind o' blinded."
+</p>
+<p>
+    At sound of the strange voice Austin had wheeled about with a fierce
+    look, and heavily the strangers plodded by. The owner turned again to
+    the gold. "Yes," he said curtly, "there's something about that that
+    looks good to most men."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What I was thinkin'," replied the Boy slowly, "was that it was the
+    only clean gold I'd ever seen&mdash;but it isn't so clean as it was."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What do you mean?" Austin bent and looked sharply into the full hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I was thinkin' it was good to look at because it hadn't got into dirty
+    pockets yet." Austin stared at him an instant. "Never been passed
+    round&mdash;never bought anybody. No one had ever envied it, or refused it
+    to help someone out of a hole. That was why I thought it looked
+    good&mdash;because it was clean gold ... a little while ago." And he plunged
+    his hands in the water and washed the clinging particles off his
+    fingers.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Austin had stared, and then turned his back with a blacker look than
+    even "Scowl" had ever worn before.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Gosh! guess there's goin' to be trouble," said one of the gang.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH22"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XXI
+</h2>
+<center>
+    PARDNERS
+</center>
+<p class="ind">
+    "He saw, and first of brotherhood had sight...."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was morning, and the night-shift might go to bed; but in the absent
+    Englishmen's tent there was little sleep and less talk that day. The
+    Boy, in an agony, with a foot on fire, heard the Colonel turning,
+    tossing, growling incoherently about "the light."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It seemed unreasonable, for a frame had been built round his bed, and
+    on it thick gray army blankets were nailed&mdash;a rectangular tent. Had he
+    cursed the heat now? But no: "light," "God! the light, the light!" just
+    as if he were lying as the Boy was, in the strong white glare of the
+    tent. But hour after hour within the stifling fortress the giant tossed
+    and muttered at the swords of sunshine that pierced his semi-dusk
+    through little spark-burnt hole or nail-tear, torturing sensitive eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Near three hours before he needed, the Colonel got up and splashed his
+    way through a toilet at the tin basin. The Boy made breakfast without
+    waiting for the usual hour. They had nearly finished when it occurred
+    to the Colonel that neither had spoken since they went to bed. He
+    glanced across at the absorbed face of his friend.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You'll come down to the sluice to-night, won't you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why shouldn't I?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No reason on earth, only I was afraid you were broodin' over what you
+    said to Austin."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Austin? Oh, I'm not thinkin' about Austin."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What, then? What makes you so quiet?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I'm thinkin' I'd be better satisfied to stay here a little
+    longer if&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If what?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If there was truth between us two."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I thought there was."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No. What's the reason you want me to stay here?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Reason? Why"&mdash;he laughed in his old way&mdash;"I don't defend my taste, but
+    I kind o' like to have you round."
+</p>
+<p>
+    His companion's grave face showed no lightening. "Why do you want me
+    round more than someone else?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Haven't got anyone else."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, yes, you have! Every man on Bonanza's a friend o' yours, or would
+    be."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It isn't just that; we understand each other."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, we don't."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's wrong?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    No answer. The Boy looked through the door across Bonanza to the hills.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I thought we understood each other if two men ever did. Haven't we
+    travelled the Long Trail together and seen the ice go out?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's just it, Colonel. We know such a lot more than men do who
+    haven't travelled the Trail, and some of the knowledge isn't
+    oversweet."
+</p>
+<p>
+    A shadow crossed the kind face opposite.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You're thinkin' about the times I pegged out&mdash;didn't do my share."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Lord, no!" The tears sprang up in the young eyes. "I'm thinkin' o' the
+    times&mdash;I&mdash;" He laid his head down on the rude table, and sat so for an
+    instant with hidden face; then he straightened up. "Seems as if it's
+    only lately there's been time to think it out. And before, as long as I
+    could work I could get on with myself.... Seemed as if I stood a chance
+    to ... a little to make up."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Make up?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But it's always just as it was that day on the Oklahoma, when the
+    captain swore he wouldn't take on another pound. I was awfully happy
+    thinkin' if I made him bring you it might kind o' make up, but it
+    didn't."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Made a big difference to me," the Colonel said, still not able to see
+    the drift, but patiently brushing now and then at the dazzling mist and
+    waiting for enlightenment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's always the same," the other went on. "Whenever I've come up
+    against something I'd hoped was goin' to make up, it's turned out to be
+    a thing I'd have to do anyway, and there was no make up about it. For
+    all that, I shouldn't mind stayin' on awhile since you want me to&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel interrupted him, "That's right!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Only if I do, you've got to know&mdash;what I'd never have guessed myself,
+    but for the Trail. After I've told you, if you can bear to see me
+    round&mdash;&mdash;" He hesitated and suddenly stood up, his eyes still wet, but
+    his head so high an onlooker who did not understand English would have
+    called the governing impulse pride, defiance even. "It seems I'm the
+    kind of man, Colonel&mdash;the kind of man who could leave his pardner to
+    die like a dog in the snow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If any other fella said so, I'd knock him down."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That night before we got to Snow Camp, when you wouldn't&mdash;couldn't go
+    any farther, I meant to go and leave you&mdash;take the sled, and take&mdash;I
+    guess I meant to take everything and leave you to starve."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They looked into each other's faces, and years seemed to go by. The
+    Colonel was the first to drop his eyes; but the other, pitilessly, like
+    a judge arraigning a felon, his steady scrutiny never flinching: "Do
+    you want that kind of a man round, Colonel?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Kentuckian turned quickly as if to avoid the stab of the other's
+    eye, and sat hunched together, elbows on knees, head in hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I knew you didn't." The Boy answered his own question. He limped over
+    to his side of the tent, picked up some clothes, his blanket and few
+    belongings, and made a pack. Not a word, not a sound, but some birds
+    twittering outside in the sun and a locust making that frying sound in
+    the fire-weed. The pack was slung on the Boy's back, and he was
+    throwing the diamond hitch to fasten it when the Colonel at last looked
+    round.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Lord, what you doin'?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Guess I'm goin' on."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll write you when I know; maybe I'll even send you what I owe you,
+    but I don't feel like boastin' at the moment. Nig!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You can't walk."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did you never happen to notice that one-legged fella pluggin' about
+    Dawson?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He had gone down on his hands and knees to see if Nig was asleep under
+    the camp-bed. The Colonel got up, went to the door, and let down the
+    flap. When he turned, the traveller and the dog were at his elbow. He
+    squared his big frame at the entrance, looking down at the two, tried
+    to speak, but the Boy broke in: "Don't let's get sentimental, Colonel;
+    just stand aside."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Never stirring, he found a voice to say, "I'm not askin' you to
+    stay"&mdash;the other turned and whistled, for Nig had retired again to the
+    seclusion of the gray blanket screen&mdash;"I only want to tell you
+    something before you go."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy frowned a little, but rested his pack against the table in that
+    way in which the Klondyker learns to make a chair-back of his burden.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You seem to think you've been tellin' me news," said the Colonel.
+    "When you said that about goin' on, the night before we got to Snow
+    Camp, I knew you simply meant you still intended to come out alive. I
+    had thrown up my hands&mdash;at least, I thought I had. The only difference
+    between us&mdash;I had given in and you hadn't."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The other shook his head. "There was a lot more in it than that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You meant to take the only means there were&mdash;to carry off the sled
+    that I couldn't pull any farther&mdash;&mdash;" The Boy looked up quickly.
+    Something stern and truth-compelling in the dark face forced the
+    Colonel to add: "And along with the sled you meant to carry
+    off&mdash;the&mdash;the things that meant life to us."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Just that&mdash;&mdash;" The Boy knotted his brown fingers in Nig's hair as if
+    to keep tight hold of one friend in the wreck.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We couldn't divide," the Colonel hurried on. "It was a case of
+    crawlin' on together, and, maybe, come out alive, or part and one die
+    sure."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy nodded, tightening his lips.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I knew well enough you'd fight for the off-chance. But"&mdash;the Colonel
+    came away from the door and stood in front of his companion&mdash;"so would
+    I. I hadn't really given up the struggle."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You were past strugglin', and I would have left you sick&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You wouldn't have left me&mdash;if I'd had my gun."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy remembered that he had more than suspected that at the time,
+    but the impression had by-and-by waxed dim. It was too utterly unlike
+    the Colonel&mdash;a thing dreamed. He had grown as ashamed of the dream as
+    of the thing he knew was true. The egotism of memory absorbed itself in
+    the part he himself had played&mdash;that other, an evil fancy born of an
+    evil time. And here was the Colonel saying it was true. The Boy dropped
+    his eyes. It had all happened in the night. There was something in the
+    naked truth too ghastly for the day. But the Colonel went on in a harsh
+    whisper:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I looked round for my gun; if I'd found it I'd have left you behind."
+</p>
+<p>
+    And the Boy kept looking down at Nig, and the birds sang, and the
+    locust whirred, and the hot sun filled the tent as high-tide flushes a
+    sea-cave.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You've been a little hard on me, Boy, bringin' it up like
+    this&mdash;remindin' me&mdash;I wouldn't have gone on myself, and makin' me
+    admit&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, no, Colonel."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Makin' me admit that before I would have let you go on I'd have shot
+    you!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Colonel!" He loosed his hold of Nig.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I rather reckon I owe you my life&mdash;and something else besides"&mdash;the
+    Colonel laid one hand on the thin shoulder where the pack-strap
+    pressed, and closed the other hand tight over his pardner's right&mdash;"and
+    I hadn't meant even to thank you neither."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't, for the Lord's sake, don't!" said the younger, and neither
+    dared look at the other.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A scratching on the canvas, the Northern knock at the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You fellers sound awake?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    A woman's voice. Under his breath, "Who the devil's that?" inquired the
+    Colonel, brushing his hand over his eyes. Before he got across the tent
+    Maudie had pushed the flap aside and put in her head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hello!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hell-o! How d'e do?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He shook hands, and the younger man nodded, "Hello."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When did you come to town?" asked the Colonel mendaciously.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, nearly three weeks ago, on the Weare. Heard you had skipped out
+    to Sulphur with MacCann. I had some business out that way, so that's
+    where I been."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Have some breakfast, won't you&mdash;dinner, I mean?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I put that job through at the Road House. Got to rustle around now and
+    get my tent up. Where's a good place?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I&mdash;I hardly know. Goin' to stay some time?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Depends."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy slipped off his pack.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They've got rooms at the Gold Belt," he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You mean that Dance Hall up at the Forks?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, it ain't so far. I remember you can walk."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I can do one or two other things. Take care you don't hurt yourself
+    worryin' about me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hurt myself?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes. Bein' so hospittable. The way you're pressin' me to settle right
+    down here, near's possible&mdash;why, it's real touchin'."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He laughed, and went to the entrance to tic back the door-flap, which
+    was whipping and snapping in the breeze. Heaven be praised! the night
+    was cooler. Nig had been perplexed when he saw the pack pushed under
+    the table. He followed his master to the door, and stood looking at the
+    flap-tying, ears very pointed, critical eye cocked, asking as plain as
+    could be, "You wake me up and drag me out here into the heat and
+    mosquitoes just to watch you doin' that? Well, I've my opinion of you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Colonel gone down?" inquired the Silesian, passing by.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not yet."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Anything I can do?" the gentleman inside was saying with a sound of
+    effort in his voice. The lady was not even at the pains to notice the
+    perfunctory civility.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, Colonel, now you're here, what do you think o' the Klondyke?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Think? Well, there's no doubt they've taken a lot o' gold out o'
+    here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Reg'lar old Has Been, hey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I don't say it hasn't got a future."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What! Don't you know the boom's busted?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, no."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Has. Tax begun it. Too many cheechalkos are finishing it. Klondyke?"
+    She laughed. "The Klondyke's goin' to hell down-grade in a hand-car."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Scowl Austin was up, ready, as usual, to relieve Seymour of half the
+    superintending, but never letting him off duty till he had seen the new
+    shift at work. As the Boy limped by with the German, Austin turned his
+    scowl significantly towards the Colonel's tent.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good-mornin'&mdash;good-night, I mean," laughed the lame man, just as if
+    his tongue had not run away with him the last time the two had met. It
+    was not often that anyone spoke so pleasantly to the owner of No. 0.
+    Perhaps the circumstance weighed with him; at all events, he stopped
+    short. When the German had gone on, "Foot's better," Austin asserted.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Perhaps it is a little," though the lame man had no reason to think
+    so.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Lucky you heal quick. Most people don't up here&mdash;livin' on the stale
+    stuff we get in this&mdash;&mdash;country. Seymour said anything to you about a
+    job?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, since you're on time, you better come on the night shift,
+    instead o' that lazy friend o' yours."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, he ain't lazy&mdash;been up hours. An old acquaintance dropped in;
+    he'll be down in a minute."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "'Tisn't only his bein' late. You better come on the shift."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't think I could do that. What's the matter?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't say there's anything very much the matter yet. But he's sick,
+    ain't he?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sick? No, except as we all are&mdash;sick o' the eternal glare."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel was coming slowly down the hill. Of course, a man doesn't
+    look his best if he hasn't slept. The Boy limped a little way back to
+    meet him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Anything the matter with you, Colonel?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, my Bonanza headache ain't improved."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I suppose you wouldn' like me to take over the job for two or three
+    days?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You? Crippled! Look here&mdash;" The Colonel flushed suddenly. "Austin been
+    sayin' anything?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I was just thinkin' about the sun."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, when I want to go in out of the sun, I'll say so." And, walking
+    more quickly than he had done for long, he left his companion, marched
+    down to the creek, and took his place near the puddling-box.
+</p>
+<p>
+    By the time the Boy got to the little patch of shade, offered by the
+    staging, Austin had turned his back on the gang, and was going to speak
+    to the gateman at the locks. He had evidently left the Colonel very
+    much enraged at some curt comment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He meant it for us all," the Dublin gentleman was saying soothingly.
+    By-and-by, as they worked undisturbed, serenity returned. Oh, the
+    Colonel was all right&mdash;even more chipper than usual. What a
+    good-looking fella he was, with that clear skin and splendid colour!
+</p>
+<p>
+    A couple of hours later the Colonel set his long shovel against the
+    nearest of the poles steadying the sluice, and went over to the staging
+    for a drink. He lifted the can of weak tea to his lips and took a long
+    draught, handed the can back to the Boy, and leant against the staging.
+    They talked a minute or two in undertones.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A curt voice behind said: "Looks like you've got a deal to attend to
+    to-day, beside your work."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They looked round, and there was Austin. As the Colonel saw who it was
+    had spoken, the clear colour in the tan deepened; he threw back his
+    shoulders, hesitated, and then, without a word, went and took up his
+    shovel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Austin walked on. The Boy kept looking at his friend. What was the
+    matter with the Colonel? It was not only that his eyes were queer&mdash;most
+    of the men complained of their eyes, unless they slept in cabins. But
+    whether through sun-blindness or shaken by anger, the Colonel was
+    handling his shovel uncertainly, fumbling at the gravel, content with
+    half a shovelful, and sometimes gauging the distance to the box so
+    badly that some of the pay fell down again in the creek. As Austin came
+    back on the other side of the line, he stopped opposite to where the
+    Colonel worked, and suddenly called: "Seymour!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Like so many on Bonanza, the Superintendent could not always sleep when
+    the time came. He was walking about "showing things" to a stranger, "a
+    newspaper woman," it was whispered&mdash;at all events, a lady who, armed
+    with letters from the highest British officials, had come to "write up
+    the Klondyke."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Seymour had left her at his employer's call. The lady, thin, neat,
+    alert, with crisply curling iron-gray hair, and pleasant but
+    unmistakably dignified expression, stood waiting for him a moment on
+    the heap of tailings, then innocently followed her guide.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Although Austin lowered his voice, she drew nearer, prepared to take an
+    intelligent interest in the "new riffles up on Skookum."
+</p>
+<p>
+    When Austin had first called Seymour, the Colonel started, looked up,
+    and watched the little scene with suspicion and growing anger. Seeing
+    Seymour's eyes turn his way, the Kentuckian stopped shovelling, and, on
+    a sudden impulse, called out:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "See here, Austin: if you've any complaints to make, sah, you'd better
+    make them to my face, sah."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The conversation about riffles thus further interrupted, a little
+    silence fell. The Superintendent stood in evident fear of his employer,
+    but he hastened to speak conciliatory words.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No complaint at all&mdash;one of the best hands."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "May be so when he ain't sick," said Austin contemptuously.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sick!" the Boy called out. "Why, you're dreamin'. He's our strong
+    man&mdash;able to knock spots out of anyone on the creek, ain't he?"
+    appealing to the gang.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I shall be able to spare him from my part of the creek after
+    to-night."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do I understand you are dismissing me?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, go to hell!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel dropped his shovel and clenched his hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Get the woman out o' the way," said the owner; "there's goin' to be
+    trouble with this fire-eating Southerner."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The woman turned quickly. The Colonel, diving under the sluice-box for
+    a plunge at Austin, came up face to face with her.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The lady," said the Colonel, catching his breath, shaking with rage,
+    but pulling off his hat&mdash;"the lady is quite safe, but I'm not so sure
+    about you." He swerved as if to get by.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Safe? I should think so!" she said steadily, comprehending all at
+    once, and not unwilling to create a diversion.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This is no place for a woman, not if she's got twenty letters from the
+    Gold Commissioner."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Misunderstanding Austin's jibe at the official, the lady stood her
+    ground, smiling into the face of the excited Kentuckian.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Several people have asked me if I was not afraid to be alone here, and
+    I've said no. It's quite true. I've travelled so much that I came to
+    know years ago, it's not among men like you a woman has anything to
+    fear."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was funny and pathetic to see the infuriate Colonel clutching at his
+    grand manner, bowing one instant to the lady, shooting death and
+    damnation the next out of heavy eyes at Austin. But the wiry little
+    woman had the floor, and meant, for peace sake, to keep it a few
+    moments.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "At home, in the streets of London, I have been rudely spoken to; I
+    have been greatly annoyed in Paris; in New York I have been subject to
+    humorous impertinence; but in the great North-West every man has seemed
+    to be my friend. In fact, wherever our English tongue is spoken," she
+    wound up calmly, putting the great Austin in his place, "a woman may go
+    alone."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Austin seemed absorbed in filling his pipe. The lady tripped on to the
+    next claim with a sedate "Good-night" to the men on No. 0. She thought
+    the momentary trouble past, and never turned to see how the Kentuckian,
+    waiting till she should be out of earshot, came round in front of
+    Austin with a low question.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The gang watched the Boy dodge under the sluice and hobble hurriedly
+    over the chaos of stones towards the owner. Before he reached him he
+    called breathless, but trying to laugh:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You think the Colonel's played out, but, take my word for it, he ain't
+    a man to fool with."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The gang knew from Austin's sneering look as he turned to strike a
+    match on a boulder&mdash;they knew as well as if they'd been within a yard
+    of him that Scowl had said something "pretty mean." They saw the
+    Colonel make a plunge, and they saw him reel and fall among the stones.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The owner stood there smoking while the night gang knocked off work
+    under his nose and helped the Boy to get the Colonel on his feet. It
+    was no use. Either he had struck his head or he was dazed&mdash;unable, at
+    all events, to stand. They lifted him up and started for the big tent.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Three Indians accosted the cripple leading the procession. He started,
+    and raised his eyes. "Nicholas! Muckluck!" They shook hands, and all
+    went on together, the Boy saying the Colonel had a little sunstroke.
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    The next day Scowl Austin was found lying face down among the
+    cotton-woods above the benches on Skookum, a bullet-wound in his back.
+    He had fainted from loss of blood, when he was picked up by the two
+    Vermonters, the men who had twice gone by No. 0 the night before the
+    quarrel, and who had enraged Austin by stopping an instant during the
+    clean-up to look at his gold. They carried him back to Bonanza.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Superintendent and several of the day gang got the wounded man into
+    bed. He revived sufficiently to say he had not seen the man that shot
+    him, but he guessed he knew him all the same. Then he turned on his
+    side, swore feebly at the lawlessness of the South, and gave up the
+    ghost.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Not a man on the creek but understood who Scowl Austin meant.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Them hot-headed Kentuckians, y' know, they'd dowse a feller's glim for
+    less 'n that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Little doubt the Colonel done it all right. Why, his own pardner says
+    to Austin's face, says he, 'The Colonel's a bad man to fool with,' and
+    just then the big chap plunged at Austin like a mad bull."
+</p>
+<p>
+    But they were sorry to a man, and said among themselves that they'd see
+    he was defended proper even if he hadn't nothin' but a little dust in a
+    jam-pot.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Grand Forks constable had put a watch on the big tent, despatched a
+    man to inform the Dawson Chief of Police, and set himself to learn the
+    details of the quarrel. Meanwhile the utter absence of life in the
+    guarded tent roused suspicion. It was recalled now that since the
+    Indians had left a little while after the Colonel was carried home,
+    sixteen hours ago, no one had seen either of the Southerners. The
+    constable, taking alarm at this, left the crowd at Scowl Austin's, and
+    went hurriedly across the meadow to the new centre of interest. Just as
+    he reached the tent the flap was turned back, and Maudie put her head
+    out.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hah!" said the constable, with some relief, "they both in there?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The Colonel is."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Now, it was the Colonel he had wanted till he heard he was there. As
+    the woman came out he looked in to make certain. Yes, there he was,
+    calmly sleeping, with the gray blanket of the screen thrown up for air.
+    It didn't look much like&mdash;&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where's the other feller?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Gone to Dawson."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "With that lame leg?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Went on horseback."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It had as grand a sound as it would have in the States to say a man had
+    departed in a glass coach drawn by six cream-coloured horses. But he
+    had been "in a hell of a hurry," evidently. Men were exchanging
+    glances.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Funny nobody saw him."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When'd he light out?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "About five this morning."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Oh, that explained it. The people who were up at five were abed now.
+    And the group round the tent whispered that Austin had done the unheard
+    of&mdash;had gone off and left the night gang at three o'clock in the
+    morning. They had said so as the day shift turned out.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But how'd the young feller get such a thing as a horse?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hired it off a stranger out from Dawson yesterday," Maudie answered
+    shortly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, that Frenchman&mdash;Count&mdash;a&mdash;Whirligig?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Maudie was tired of giving information and getting none. The answer
+    came from one in the group.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, that French feller came in with a couple o' fusst-class horses.
+    He's camped away over there beyond Muskeeter." He pointed down Bonanza.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "P'raps you won't mind just mentionin'," said Maudie with growing
+    irritation, "why you're makin' yourself so busy about my friends?"
+    (Only strong resentment could have induced the plural.)
+</p>
+<p>
+    When she heard what had happened and what was suspected she uttered a
+    contemptuous "Tschah!" and made for the tent. The constable followed.
+    She wheeled fiercely round.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The man in there hasn't been out o' this tent since he was carried up
+    from the creek last night. I can swear to it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Can you swear the other was here all the time?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    No answer.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did he say what he went to Dawson for?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The doctor."
+</p>
+<p>
+    One or two laughed. "Who's sick enough to send for a Dawson doctor?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So you think he's gone for a&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I know he is."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And do you know what it costs to have a doctor come all the way out
+    here?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, beasts! won't budge till you've handed over five hundred dollars.
+    Skunks!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did your friend mention how he meant to raise the dust?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He's got it," she said curtly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, he was livin' off his pardner. Hadn't a red cent."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She's shieldin' him," the men about the door agreed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Lord! he done it well&mdash;got away with five hundred and a horse!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He had words with Austin, himself, the night o' the clean-up. Sassed
+    Scowl Austin! Right quiet, but, oh my! Told him to his face his gold
+    was dirty, and washed it off his hands with a look&mdash;&mdash;Gawd! you could
+    see Austin was mad clear through, from his shirt-buttons to his spine.
+    You bet Scowl said something back that got the young feller's monkey
+    up."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They all agreed that the only wonder was that Austin had lived as
+    long&mdash;"On the other side o' the line&mdash;Gee!"
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    That evening the Boy, riding hard, came into camp with a doctor,
+    followed discreetly in the rear by an N. W. M. P., really mounted this
+    time. It had occurred to the Boy that people looked at him hard, and
+    when he saw the groups gathered about the tent his heart contracted
+    sharply. Had the Colonel died? He flung himself off the horse, winced
+    as his foot cried out, told Joey Bludsoe to look after both beasts a
+    minute, and led the Dawson doctor towards the tent.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The constable followed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Maudie, at the door, looked at her old enemy queerly, and just as,
+    without greeting, he pushed by, "S'pose you've heard Scowl Austin's
+    dead?" she said in a low voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No! Dead, eh? Well, there's one rattlesnake less in the woods."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The constable stopped him with a touch on the shoulder: "We have a
+    warrant for you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel lifted his head and stared about, in a dazed way, as the
+    Boy stopped short and stammered, "Warr&mdash;what for?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "For the murder of Scoville&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look here," he whispered: "I&mdash;I don't know what you mean, but I'll go
+    along with you, of course, only don't talk before this man. He's
+    sick&mdash;&mdash;" He beckoned the doctor. "This is the man I brought you to
+    see." Then he turned his back on the wide, horrified eyes of his
+    friend, saying, "Back in a minute, Kentucky." Outside: "Give me a
+    second, boys, will you?" he said to the N. W. M. P.'s, "just till I
+    hear what that doctor fella says about my pardner."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He stood there with the Buckeyes, the police, and the various day gangs
+    that were too excited to go to bed. And he asked them where Austin was
+    found, and other details of the murder, wearily conscious that the
+    friendliest there felt sure that the man who questioned could best fill
+    in the gaps in the story. When the doctor came out, Maudie at his heels
+    firing off quick questions, the Boy hobbled forward.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Temperature a hundred and four," said the Dawson doctor.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, is&mdash;is that much or little?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, it's more than most of us go in for."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Can you tell what's the matter with him?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, typhoid, of course."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy pulled his hat over his eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Guess you won't mind my stayin' now?" said Maudie at his elbow,
+    speaking low.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He looked up. "You goin' to take care of him? Good care?" he asked
+    harshly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Maudie seemed not to mind. The tears went down her cheeks, as, with
+    never a word, she nodded, and turned towards the tent.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Say," he hobbled after her, "that doctor's all right&mdash;only wanted
+    fifty." He laid four hundred-dollar bills in her hand. She seemed about
+    to speak, when he interrupted hoarsely, "And look here: pull the
+    Colonel through, Maudie&mdash;pull him through!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll do my darnedest."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He held out his hand. He had never given it to her before, and he
+    forgot that few people would care now to take it. But she gave him hers
+    with no grudging. Then, on a sudden, impulse, "You ain't takin' him to
+    Dawson to-night?" she said to the constable.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, he's done the trip twice already."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I can do it again well enough."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then you got to wait a minute." She spoke to the constable as if she
+    had been Captain Constantine himself. "Better just go in and see the
+    Colonel," she said to the Boy. "He's been askin' for you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "N-no, Maudie; I can go to Dawson all right, but I don't feel up to
+    goin' in there again."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You'll be sorry if you don't." And then he knew what a temperature at a
+    hundred and four foreboded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He went back into the tent, dreading to face the Colonel more than he
+    had ever dreaded anything in his life.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the sick man lay, looking out drowsily, peacefully, through
+    half-shut eyes, not greatly concerned, one would say, about anything.
+    The Boy went over and stood under the gray blanket canopy, looking down
+    with a choking sensation that delayed his question: "How you feelin'
+    now, Kentucky?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "All right."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, that's good news. Then you&mdash;you won't mind my goin' off to&mdash;to do
+    a little prospectin'?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The sick man frowned: "You stay right where you are. There's plenty in
+    that jampot."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, yes! jampot's fillin' up fine."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Besides," the low voice wavered on, "didn't we agree we'd learned the
+    lesson o' the North?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The lesson o' the North?" repeated the other with filling eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, sah. A man alone's a man lost. We got to stick together, Boy."
+    The eyelids fell heavily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, yes, Colonel." He pressed the big hand. His mouth made the
+    motion, not the sound, "Good-bye, pardner."
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH23"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XXII
+</h2>
+<center>
+    THE GOING HOME
+</center>
+<p class="ind">
+  "Despair lies down and grovels, grapples not<br>
+  With evil, casts the burden of its lot.<br>
+  This Age climbs earth.<br>
+  &mdash;To challenge heaven.<br>
+  &mdash;Not less The lower deeps.<br>
+  It laughs at Happiness."<br>
+    &mdash;George Meredith
+</p>
+<p>
+    Everybody on Bonanza knew that the Colonel had left off struggling to
+    get out of his bed to go to work, had left off calling for his pardner.
+    Quite in his right senses again, he could take in Maudie's explanation
+    that the Boy was gone to Dawson, probably to get something for the
+    Colonel to eat. For the Doctor was a crank and wouldn't let the sick
+    man have his beans and bacon, forbade him even such a delicacy as fresh
+    pork, though the Buckeyes nobly offered to slaughter one of their
+    newly-acquired pigs, the first that ever rooted in Bonanza refuse, and
+    more a terror to the passing Indian than any bear or wolf.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But the Boy's a long time," the Colonel would say wistfully.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Before this quieter phase set in, Maudie had sent into Dawson for
+    Potts, O'Flynn and Mac, that they might distract the Colonel's mind
+    from the pardner she knew could not return. But O'Flynn, having married
+    the girl at the Moosehorn Café, had excuse of ancient validity for not
+    coming; Potts was busy breaking the faro bank, and Mac was waiting till
+    an overdue Lower River steamer should arrive.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nicholas of Pymeut had gone back as pilot of the Weare, but Princess
+    Muckluck was still about, now with Skookum Bill, son of the local
+    chief, now alone, trudging up and down Bonanza like one looking for
+    something lost. The Colonel heard her voice outside the tent and had
+    her in.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You goin' to marry Skookum Bill, as they say?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Muckluck only laughed, but the Indian hung about waiting the Princess's
+    pleasure.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When your pardner come back?" she would indiscreetly ask the Colonel.
+    "Why he goes to Dawson?" And every few hours she would return: "Why he
+    stay so long?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    At last Maudie took her outside and told her.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Muckluck gaped, sat down a minute, and rocked her body back and forth
+    with hidden face, got up and called sharply: "Skookum!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    They took the trail for town. Potts said, when he passed them, they
+    were going as if the devil were at their heels&mdash;wouldn't even stop to
+    say how the Colonel was. So Potts had come to see for himself&mdash;and to
+    bring the Colonel some letters just arrived.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac was close behind ... but the Boy? No-no. They wouldn't let anybody
+    see him; and Potts shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, you can come in," said Maudie, "if you keep your head shut about
+    the Boy."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel was lying flat, with that unfaltering ceiling-gaze of the
+    sick. Now his vision dropped to the level of faces at the door.
+    "Hello!" But as they advanced he looked behind them anxiously. Only
+    Mac&mdash;no, Kaviak at his heels! and the sick man's disappointment
+    lightened to a smile. He would have held out a hand, but Maudie stopped
+    him. She took the little fellow's fingers and laid them on the
+    Colonel's.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now sit down and be quiet," she said nervously.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Potts and Mac obeyed, but Kaviak had fastened his fine little hand on
+    the weak one, and anchored so, stared about taking his bearings.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How did you get to the Klondyke, Kaviak?" said the Colonel in a thin,
+    breathy voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Came up with Sister Winifred," Farva answered for him. "She was sent
+    for to help with the epidemic. Dyin' like flies in Dawson&mdash;h'm&mdash;ahem!"
+    (Apologetic glance at Maudie.) "Sister Winifred promised to keep Kaviak
+    with her. Woman of her word."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, what you think o' Dawson?" the low voice asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak understood the look at least, and smiled back, grew suddenly
+    grave, intent, looked sharply round, loosed his hold of the Colonel,
+    bent down, and retired behind the bed. That was where Nig was. Their
+    foregathering added nothing to the tranquility of the occasion, and
+    both were driven forth by Maudie.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Potts read the Colonel his letters, and helped him to sign a couple of
+    cheques. The "Louisville instructions" had come through at last.
+</p>
+<p>
+    After that the Colonel slept, and when he woke it was only to wander
+    away into that world where Maudie was lost utterly, and where the
+    Colonel was at home. There was chastening in such hours for Maudie of
+    Minóok. "Now he's found the Other One," she would say to herself&mdash;"the
+    One he was looking for."
+</p>
+<p>
+    That same evening, as they sat in the tent in an interval of relief
+    from the Colonel's muttering monotone, they heard Nig making some sort
+    of unusual manifestation outside; heard the grunting of those pioneer
+    pigs; heard sounds of a whispered "Sh! Kaviak. Shut up, Nig!" Then a
+    low, tuneless crooning:
+</p>
+<p class="ind">
+  "Wen yo' see a pig a-goin' along<br>
+    Widder straw in de sider 'is mouf,<br>
+  It'll be er tuhble wintuh,<br>
+    En yo' bettah move down Souf."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, the Boy's back!" said the Colonel suddenly in a clear, collected
+    voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Maudie had jumped up, but the Boy put his head in the tent, smiling,
+    and calling out:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They told me he was getting on all right, but I just thought maybe he
+    was asleep." He came in and bent over his pardner. "Hello, everybody!
+    Why, you got it so fine and dark in here, I can hardly see how well
+    you're lookin', Colonel!" And he dropped into the nurse's place by the
+    bedside.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Maudie's lined the tent with black drill," said the Colonel. "You
+    brought home anything to eat?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, no&mdash;&mdash;" (Maudie telegraphed); "found it all I could do to bring
+    myself back."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, well, that's the main thing," said the Colonel, battling with
+    disappointment. Pricked by some quickened memory of the Boy's last
+    home-coming: "I've had pretty queer dreams about you: been givin'
+    Maudie the meanest kind of a time."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't go gassin', Colonel," admonished the nurse.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's pretty tough, I can tell you," he said irritably, "to be as weak
+    as a day-old baby, and to have to let other people&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mustn't talk!" ordered Mac. The Colonel raised his head with sudden
+    anger. It did not mend matters that Maudie was there to hold him down
+    before a lot of men.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You go to Halifax," said the Boy to Mac, blustering a trifle. "The
+    Colonel may stand a little orderin' about from Maudie&mdash;don't blame him
+    m'self. But Kentucky ain't going to be bossed by any of us."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel lay quite still again, and when he spoke it was quietly
+    enough.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Reckon I'm in the kind of a fix when a man's got to take orders."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Foolishness! Don't let him jolly you, boys. The Colonel's always
+    sayin' he ain't a soldier, but I reckon you better look out how you
+    rile Kentucky!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The sick man ignored the trifling. "The worst of it is bein' so
+    useless."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Useless! You just wait till you see what a lot o' use we mean to make
+    of you. No crawlin' out of it like that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's quite true," said Mac harshly; "we all kind of look to you
+    still."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Course we do!" The Boy turned to the others. "The O'Flynns comin' all
+    the way out from Dawson to-morrow to get Kentucky's opinion on a big
+    scheme o' theirs. Did you ever hear what that long-headed Lincoln said
+    when the Civil War broke out? 'I would like to have God on my side, but
+    I must have Kentucky.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've been so out o' my head, I thought you were arrested."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No 'out of your head' about it&mdash;was arrested. They thought I'd cleared
+    Scowl Austin off the earth."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do they know who did?" Potts and Maudie asked in a breath.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That Klondyke Indian that's sweet on Princess Muckluck."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What had Austin done to him?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nothin'. Reckon Skookum Bill was about the only man on Bonanza who had
+    no objection to the owner of o. Said so in Court."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What did he kill him for?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well," said the Boy, "it's just one o' those topsy-turvy things that
+    happen up here. You saw that Indian that came in with Nicholas? Some
+    years ago he killed a drunken white man who was after him with a knife.
+    There was no means of tryin' the Indian where the thing happened, so he
+    was taken outside.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The Court found he'd done the killin' in self-defence, and sent him
+    back. Well, sir, that native had the time of his life bein' tried for
+    murder. He'd travelled on a railroad, seen a white man's city, lived
+    like a lord, and came home to be the most famous man of his tribe. Got
+    a taste for travel, too. Comes to the Klondyke, and his fame fires
+    Skookum Bill. All you got to do is to kill one o' these white men, and
+    they take you and show you all the wonders o' the earth. So he puts a
+    bullet into Austin."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why didn't he own up, then, and get his reward?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Muckluck knew better&mdash;made him hold his tongue about it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And then made him own up when she saw&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The boy nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's goin' to happen?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, he'll swing to-morrow instead o' me. By the way, Colonel, a fella
+    hunted me up this mornin' who'd been to Minóok. Looked good to him.
+    I've sold out Idaho Bar."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "'Nough to buy back your Orange Grove?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He shook his head. "'Nough to pay my debts and start over again."
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the Dawson doctor left that night Maudie, as usual, followed him
+    out. They waited a long time for her to come back.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Perhaps she's gone to her own tent;" and the Boy went to see. He
+    found her where the Colonel used to go to smoke, sitting, staring out
+    to nowhere.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As the boy looked closer he saw she had been crying, for even in the
+    midst of honest service Maudie, like many a fine lady before her, could
+    not forego the use of cosmetic. Her cheeks were streaked and stained.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Five dollars a box here, too," she said mechanically, as she wiped
+    some of the rouge off with a handkerchief. Her hand shook.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What's the matter?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's all up," she answered.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not with him?" He motioned towards the tent.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Doctor says so?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "&mdash;&mdash;and I knew it before, only I wouldn't believe it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She had spoken with little agitation, but now she flung her arms out
+    with a sudden anguish that oddly took the air of tossing into space
+    Bonanza and its treasure. It was the motion of one who renounces the
+    thing that means the most&mdash;a final fling in the face of the gods. The
+    Boy stood quite still, submitting his heart to that first quick rending
+    and tearing asunder which is only the initial agony of parting.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How soon?" he said, without raising his eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, he holds on&mdash;it may be a day or two."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy walked slowly away towards the ridge of the low hill. Maudie
+    turned and watched him. On the top of the divide he stopped, looking
+    over. Whatever it was he saw off there, he could not meet it yet. He
+    flung himself down with his face in the fire-weed, and lay there all
+    night long.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Kaviak was sent after him in the morning, but only to say, "Breakfast,
+    Maudie's tent."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy saw that Mac and Potts knew. For the first time the Big Chimney
+    men felt a barrier between them and that one who had been the common
+    bond, keeping the incongruous allied and friendly. Only Nig ran in and
+    out, unchilled by the imminence of the Colonel's withdrawal from his
+    kind.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Towards noon the O'Flynns came up the creek, and were stopped near the
+    tent by the others. They all stood talking low till a noise of
+    scuffling broke the silence within. They drew nearer, and heard the
+    Colonel telling Maudie not to turn out Nig and Kaviak.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I like seein' my friends. Where's the Boy?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    So they went in.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Did he know? He must know, or he would have asked O'Flynn what the
+    devil made him look like that! All he said was: "Hello! How do you do,
+    madam?" and he made a weak motion of one hand towards Mrs. O'Flynn to
+    do duty for that splendid bow of his. Then, as no one spoke, "You're
+    too late, O'Flynn."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Too late?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Had a job in your line...." Then suddenly: "Maudie's worth the whole
+    lot of you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They knew it was his way of saying "She's told me." They all sat and
+    looked at the floor. Nothing happened for a long time. At last: "Well,
+    you all know what my next move is; what's yours?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was another silence, but not nearly so long.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What prospects, pardners?" he repeated.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy looked at Maudie. She made a little gesture of "I've done all
+    the fightin' I'm good for." The Colonel's eyes, clear again and
+    tranquil, travelled from face to face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    O'Flynn cleared his throat, but it was Mac who spoke.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes&mdash;a&mdash;we would like to hold a last&mdash;hold a counsel o' war. We've
+    always kind o' followed your notions&mdash;at least"&mdash;veracity pared down
+    the compliment&mdash;"at least, you can't say but what we've always listened
+    to you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, you might just&mdash;a&mdash;start us as well as you can," says Potts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel smiled a little. Each man still "starting"&mdash;forever
+    starting for somewhere or something, until he should come to this place
+    where the Colonel was. Even he, why, he was "starting" too. For him
+    this was no end other than a chapter's ending. But these men he had
+    lived and suffered with, they all wanted to talk the next move
+    over&mdash;not his, theirs&mdash;all except the Boy, it seemed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac was in the act of changing his place to be nearer the Colonel, when
+    Potts adroitly forestalled him. The others drew off a little and made
+    desultory talk, while Potts in an undertone told how he'd had a run of
+    bad luck. No doubt it would turn, but if ever he got enough again to
+    pay his passage home, he'd put it in the bank and never risk it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I swear I wouldn't! I've got to go out in the fall&mdash;goin' to get
+    myself married Christmas; and, if she's willing, we'll come up here on
+    the first boat in the spring&mdash;with backing this time."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He showed a picture. The Colonel studied it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I believe she'll come," he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And Potts was so far from clairvoyance that he laughed, awkwardly
+    flattered; then anxiously: "Wish I was sure o' my passage money."
+</p>
+<p>
+    When Potts, before he meant to, had yielded place to O'Flynn, the
+    Colonel was sworn to secrecy, and listened to excited whispers of gold
+    in the sand off yonder on the coast of the Behring Sea. The world in
+    general wouldn't know the authenticity of the new strike till next
+    season. He and Mrs. O'Flynn would take the first boat sailing out of
+    San Francisco in the spring.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, you're going outside too?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In the fahll&mdash;yes, yes. Ye see, I ain't like the rest. I've got Mrs.
+    O'Flynn to consider. Dawson's great, but it ain't the place to start a
+    famully."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where you goin', Mac?" said the Colonel to the irate one, who was
+    making for the door. "I want a little talk with you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac turned back, and consented to express his opinion of the money
+    there was to be made out of tailings by means of a new hydraulic
+    process. He was going to lend Kaviak to Sister Winifred again on the
+    old terms. She'd take him along when she returned to Holy Cross, and
+    Mac would go outside, raise a little capital, return, and make a
+    fortune. For the moment he was broke&mdash;hadn't even passage money. Did
+    the Colonel think he could&mdash;&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel seemed absorbed in that eternal interrogation of the
+    tent-top.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mine, you know"&mdash;Mac drew nearer still, and went on in the lowered
+    voice&mdash;"mine's a special case. A man's bound to do all he can for his
+    boys."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I didn't know you had boys."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac jerked "Yes" with his square head. "Bobbie's goin' on six now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The others older?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Others?" Mac stared an instant. "Oh, there's only one more." He
+    grinned with embarrassment, and hitched his head towards Kaviak.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I guess you've jawed enough," said Maudie, leaving the others and
+    coming to the foot of the bed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And Maudie's goin' back, too," said the sick man.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And you're never goin' to leave her again?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Maudie's a little bit of All Right," said the patient. The Big Chimney
+    men assented, but with sudden misgiving.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What was that job ye said ye were wantin' me forr?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, Maudie's got a friend of hers to fix it up."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Fix what up?" demanded Potts.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Little postscript to my will."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mac jerked his head at the nurse. With that clear sight of dying eyes
+    the Colonel understood. A meaner spirit would have been galled at the
+    part those "Louisville Instructions" had been playing, but cheap
+    cynicism was not in the Colonel's line. He knew the awful pinch of life
+    up here, and he thought no less of his comrades for asking that last
+    service of getting them home. But it was the day of the final
+    "clean-up" for the Colonel; he must not leave misapprehension behind.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I wanted Maudie to have my Minóok claim&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Got a Minóok claim o' my own."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So I've left it to be divided&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    They all looked up.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "One-half to go to a little girl in 'Frisco, and the other half&mdash;well,
+    I've left the other half to Kaviak. Strikes me he ought to have a
+    little piece o' the North."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Y-yes!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, yes!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good idea!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mac thought he'd go over to the other tent and cook some dinner. There
+    was a general movement. As they were going out:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Boy!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes?" He came back, Nig followed, and the two stood by the camp-bed
+    waiting their Colonel's orders.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't you go wastin' any more time huntin' gold-mines."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't mean to."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Go back to your own work; go back to your own people."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy listened and looked away.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's good to go pioneering, but it's good to go home. Oh-h&mdash;!" the
+    face on the pillow was convulsed for that swift passing moment&mdash;"best
+    of all to go home. And if you leave your home too long, your home
+    leaves you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Home doesn't seem so important as it did when I came up here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel fastened one hand feverishly on his pardner's arm.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've been afraid of that. It's magic; break away. Promise me you'll go
+    back and stay. Lord, Lord!" he laughed feebly, "to think a fella should
+    have to be urged to leave the North alone. Wonderful place, but there's
+    Black Magic in it. Or who'd ever come&mdash;who'd ever stay?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He looked anxiously into the Boy's set face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm not saying the time was wasted," he went on; "I reckon it was a
+    good thing you came."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, it was a good thing I came."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You've learned a thing or two."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Several."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Specially on the Long Trail."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Most of all on the Long Trail."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Colonel shut his eyes. Maudie came and held a cup to his lips.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Thank you. I begin to feel a little foggy. What was it we learned on
+    the Trail, pardner?" But the Boy had turned away. "Wasn't it&mdash;didn't we
+    learn how near a tolerable decent man is to bein' a villain?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We learned that a man can't be quite a brute as long as he sticks to
+    another man."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, was that it?"
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    In the night Maudie went away to sleep. The Boy watched.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you know what I'm thinking about?" the sick man said suddenly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "About&mdash;that lady down at home?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Guess again."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "About&mdash;those fellas at Holy Cross?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, I never was as taken up with the Jesuits as you were. No, Sah, I'm
+    thinkin' about the Czar." (Poor old Colonel! he was wandering again.)
+    "Did I ever tell you I saw him once?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did&mdash;had a good look at him. Knew a fella in Petersburg, too, that&mdash;"
+    He rested a moment. "That Czar's all right. Only he sends the wrong
+    people to Siberia. Ought to go himself, and take his Ministers, for a
+    winter on the Trail." On his face suddenly the old half-smiling,
+    half-shrewd look. "But, Lord bless you! 'tisn't only the Czar. We all
+    have times o' thinkin' we're some punkins. Specially Kentuckians. I
+    reckon most men have their days when they're twelve feet high, and
+    wouldn't stoop to say 'Thank ye' to a King. Let 'em go on the Winter
+    Trail."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes," agreed the Boy, "they'd find out&mdash;" And he stopped.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Plenty o' use for Head Men, though." The faint voice rang with an echo
+    of the old authority. "No foolishness, but just plain: 'I'm the one
+    that's doin' the leadin'&mdash;like Nig here&mdash;and it's my business to lick
+    the hind dog if he shirks.'" He held out his hand and closed it over
+    his friend's. "I was Boss o' the Big Chimney, Boy, but you were Boss o'
+    the Trail."
+</p>
+<hr>
+<p>
+    The Colonel was buried in the old moose pasture, with people standing
+    by who knew that the world had worn a friendlier face because he had
+    been in it. That much was clear, even before it was found that he had
+    left to each of the Big Chimney men five hundred dollars, not to be
+    drawn except for the purpose of going home.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They thought it was the sense of that security that made them put off
+    the day. They would "play the game up to the last moment, and see&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    September's end brought no great change in fortune, but a change withal
+    of deep significance. The ice had begun to run in the Yukon. No man
+    needed telling it would "be a tuhble wintah, and dey'd better move down
+    Souf." All the late boats by both routes had been packed. Those men who
+    had failed, and yet, most tenacious, were hanging on for some last
+    lucky turn of the wheel, knew the risk they ran. And now to-day the
+    final boat of the year was going down the long way to the Behring Sea,
+    and by the Canadian route, open a little longer, the Big Chimney men,
+    by grace of that one left behind, would be on the last ship to shoot
+    the rapids in '98.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Not only to the thousands who were going, to those who stayed behind
+    there was something in the leaving of the last boat&mdash;something that
+    knocked upon the heart. They, too, could still go home. They gathered
+    at the docks and told one another they wouldn't leave Dawson for fifty
+    thousand dollars, then looked at the "failures" with home-sick eyes,
+    remembering those months before the luckiest Klondyker could hear from
+    the world outside. Between now and then, what would have come to pass
+    up here, and what down there below!
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy had got a place for Muckluck in the A. C. Store. She was handy
+    at repairing and working in fur, and said she was "all right" on this
+    bright autumn morning when the Boy went in to say good-bye. With a
+    white woman and an Indian boy, in a little room overlooking the
+    water-front, Muckluck was working in the intervals of watching the
+    crowds on the wharf. Eyes more experienced than hers might well stare.
+    Probably in no other place upon the globe was gathered as motley a
+    crew: English, Indian, Scandinavian, French, German, Negroes, Chinese,
+    Poles, Japs, Finns. All the fine gentlemen had escaped by earlier
+    boats. All the smart young women with their gold-nugget buttons as big
+    as your thumb, lucky miners from the creeks with heavy consignments of
+    dust to take home, had been too wary to run any risk of the
+    Never-Know-What closing inopportunely. The great majority here, on the
+    wharf, dazed or excited, lugging miscellaneous possessions&mdash;things they
+    had clung to in straits so desperate they knew no more how to relax
+    their hold than dead fingers do&mdash;these were men whose last chance had
+    been the Klondyke, and who here, as elsewhere, had failed. Many who
+    came in young were going out old; but the odd thing was that those
+    worst off went out game&mdash;no whining, none of the ostentatious pathos of
+    those broken on the wheel of a great city.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A man under Muckluck's window, dressed in a moose-skin shirt, straw
+    hat, broadcloth trousers, and carpet slippers, in one hand a tin pail,
+    in the other something tied in a handkerchief, called out lustily to a
+    ragged individual, cleaving a way through the throng, "Got your stuff
+    aboard?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, goin' to get it off. I ain't goin' home till next year."
+</p>
+<p>
+    And the face above the moose-skin shirt was stricken with a sudden
+    envy. Without any telling, he knew just how his pardner's heart had
+    failed him, when it came to turning his tattered back on the
+    possibilities of the Klondyke.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I'm comin' back soon's I get a grub-stake."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I ain't," said another with a dazed expression&mdash;a Klondyker carrying
+    home his frying-pan, the one thing, apparently, saved out of the wreck.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You think you ain't comin' back? Just wait! Once you've lived up here,
+    the Outside ain't good enough fur yer."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Right!" said an old Forty-miler, "you can try it; but Lord! how you'll
+    miss this goll-darn Yukon."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Among the hundreds running about, talking, bustling, hauling
+    heterogeneous luggage, sending last letters, doing last deals, a score
+    of women either going by this boat or saying good-bye to those who
+    were; and Potts, the O'Flynns, and Mac waiting to hand over Kaviak to
+    Sister Winifred.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy at the open window above, staring down on the tatterdemalion
+    throng, remembered his first meeting with the Big Chimney men as the
+    Washington City steamed out of San Francisco's Golden Gate a year and a
+    month before.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Of course, even in default of finding millions, something stirring
+    might have happened, something heroic, rewarding to the spirit, if no
+    other how; but (his own special revelation blurred, swamped for the
+    moment in the common wreck) he said to himself that nothing of the sort
+    had befallen the Big Chimney men any more than to the whipped and
+    bankrupt crew struggling down there on the wharf. They simply had
+    failed&mdash;all alike. And yet there was between them and the common
+    failures of the world one abiding difference: these had greatly dared.
+    As long as the meanest in that crowd drew breath and held to memory, so
+    long might he remember the brave and terrible days of the Klondyke
+    Rush, and that he had borne in it his heavy share. No share in any mine
+    save that&mdash;the knowledge that he was not among the vast majority who
+    sit dully to the end beside what things they were born to&mdash;the earnings
+    of other men, the savings of other women, afraid to go seeking after
+    better lest they lose the good they have. They had failed, but it could
+    never be said of a Klondyker that he had not tried. He might, in truth,
+    look down upon the smug majority that smiles at unusual endeavour,
+    unless success excuses, crowns it. No one there, after all, so poor but
+    he had one possession treasured among kings. And he had risked it. What
+    could a man do more?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good-bye, Muckluck."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Goo'-bye? Boat Canada way no go till Thursday."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Thursday, yes," he said absently, eyes still on the American ship.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then why you say goo'-bye to-day?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Lot to do. I just wanted to make sure you were all right."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Her creamy face was suddenly alight, but not with gratitude.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, yes, all right here," she said haughtily. "I not like much the
+    Boston men&mdash;King George men best." It was so her sore heart abjured her
+    country. For among the natives of the Klondyke white history stops
+    where it began when George the Third was King. "I think"&mdash;she shot
+    sideways a shrewd look&mdash;"I think I marry a King George man."
+</p>
+<p>
+    And at the prospect her head drooped heavily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then you'll want to wear this at your wedding."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy drew his hand out of his pocket, threw a walrus-string over her
+    bent head, and when she could see clear again, her Katharine medal was
+    swinging below her waist, and "the Boston man" was gone.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She stared with blinded eyes out of the window, till suddenly in the
+    mist one face was clear. The Boy! Standing still down there in the
+    hurly-burly, hands in pockets, staring at the ship.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Suddenly Sister Winifred, her black veil swirling in the wind. An
+    orderly from St. Mary's Hospital following with a little trunk. At the
+    gangway she is stopped by the purser, asked some questions, smiles at
+    first and shakes her head, and then in dismay clasps her hands, seeming
+    to plead, while the whistle shrieks.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Muckluck turned and flew down the dark little stair, threaded her way
+    in and out among the bystanders on the wharf till she reached the
+    Sister's side. The nun was saying that she not only had no money, but
+    that a Yukon purser must surely know the Sisters were forbidden to
+    carry it. He could not doubt but the passage money would be made good
+    when they got to Holy Cross. But the purser was a new man, and when Mac
+    and others who knew the Yukon custom expostulated, he hustled them
+    aside and told Sister Winifred to stand back, the gangway was going up.
+    It was then the Boy came and spoke to the man, finally drew out some
+    money and paid the fare. The nun, not recognising him, too bewildered
+    by this rough passage with the world even to thank the stranger, stood
+    motionless, grasping Kaviak's hand&mdash;two children, you would say&mdash;her
+    long veil blowing, hurrying on before her to that haven in the waste,
+    the mission at Holy Cross.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Again the Boy was delaying the upward swing of the gangway: the nun's
+    trunk must come on board. Two men rushed for it while he held down the
+    gang.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mustn't cry," he said to Muckluck. "You'll see Sister Winifred again."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not for that I cry. Ah, I never shall have happiness!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, that trunk!" he called.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In the babel of voices shouting from ship and shore, the Boy heard
+    Princess Muckluck saying, with catches in her breath:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I always knew I would get no luck!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah! I was a bad child. The baddest of all the Pymeut children."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, yes, they've got it now!" the Boy shouted up to the Captain. Then
+    low, and smiling absently: "What did you do that was so bad. Princess?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me? I&mdash;I mocked at the geese. It was the summer they were so late; and
+    as they flew past Pymeut I&mdash;yes, I mocked at them."
+</p>
+<p>
+    A swaying and breaking of the crowd, the little trunk flung on board,
+    the men rushing back to the wharf, the gang lifted, and the last Lower
+    River boat swung out into the ice-flecked stream.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Keen to piercing a cry rang out&mdash;Muckluck's:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Stop! They carry him off! It is meestake! Oh! Oh!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Boy was standing for'ard, Nig beside him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    O'Flynn rushed to the wharf's edge and screamed at the Captain to
+    "Stop, be the Siven!" Mac issued orders most peremptory. Muckluck wept
+    as excitedly as though there had never been question of the Boy's going
+    away. But while the noise rose and fell, Potts drawled a "Guess he
+    means to go that way!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, he don't!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Stop, you&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, Captain!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Stop your&mdash;&mdash;boat!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well," said a bystander, "I never seen any feller as calm as that who
+    was bein' took the way he didn't want to go."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "D'ye mean there's a new strike?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The suggestion flashed electric through the crowd. It was the only
+    possible explanation.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He knows what he's about."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Lord! I wish I'd 'a' froze to him!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yep," said Buck One, "never seen that young feller when he looked more
+    like he wouldn't give a whoop in hell to change places with anybody."
+</p>
+<p>
+    As O'Flynn, back from his chase, hoarse and puffing, stopped suddenly:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Be the Siven! Father Brachet said the little divil 'd be coming back
+    to Howly Cross!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where's that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Lower River camp."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Gold there?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then you're talking through your hat!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Say, Potts, where in hell is he goin'?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Damfino!"
+</p>
+<h2>
+    THE END
+</h2>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg's The Magnetic North, by Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Magnetic North
+
+Author: Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
+
+Release Date: November 10, 2003 [EBook #10038]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAGNETIC NORTH ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Anita Paque, Shawn Wheeler,
+David Schaal, Anuradha Valsa Raj and PG Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+THE MAGNETIC NORTH
+
+By ELIZABETH ROBINS
+
+(C. E. Raimond) Author of "The Open Question," "Below the Salt," etc.
+_With a Map_
+
+1904
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER
+
+I. WINTER CAMP IN THE YUKON
+
+II. HOUSE-WARMING
+
+III. TWO NEW SPISSIMENS
+
+IV. THE BLOW-OUT
+
+V. THE SHAMAN
+
+VI. A PENITENTIAL JOURNEY
+
+VII. KAVIAK'S CRIME
+
+VIII. CHRISTMAS
+
+IX. A CHRISTIAN AGNOSTIC
+
+X. PRINCESS MUCKLUCK
+
+XI. HOLY CROSS
+
+XII. THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE
+
+XIII. THE PIT
+
+XIV. KURILLA
+
+XV. THE ESQUIMAUX HORSE
+
+XVI. MINOOK
+
+XVII. THE GREAT STAMPEDE
+
+XVIII. A MINERS' MEETING
+
+XIX. THE ICE GOES OUT
+
+XX. THE KLONDYKE
+
+XXI. PARDNERS
+
+XXII. THE GOING HOME
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MAGNETIC NORTH
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+WINTER CAMP ON THE YUKON
+
+"To labour and to be content with that a man hath is a sweet life; but
+he that findeth a treasure is above them both."--_Ecclesiasticus_.
+
+
+Of course they were bound for the Klondyke. Every creature in the
+North-west was bound for the Klondyke. Men from the South too, and men
+from the East, had left their ploughs and their pens, their factories,
+pulpits, and easy-chairs, each man like a magnetic needle suddenly set
+free and turning sharply to the North; all set pointing the self-same
+way since that July day in '97, when the _Excelsior_ sailed into San
+Francisco harbour, bringing from the uttermost regions at the top of
+the map close upon a million dollars in nuggets and in gold-dust.
+
+Some distance this side of the Arctic Circle, on the right bank of the
+Yukon, a little detachment of that great army pressing northward, had
+been wrecked early in the month of September.
+
+They had realised, on leaving the ocean-going ship that landed them at
+St. Michael's Island (near the mouth of the great river), that they
+could not hope to reach Dawson that year. But instead of "getting cold
+feet," as the phrase for discouragement ran, and turning back as
+thousands did, or putting in the winter on the coast, they determined,
+with an eye to the spring rush, to cover as many as possible of the
+seventeen hundred miles of waterway before navigation closed.
+
+They knew, in a vague way, that winter would come early, but they had
+not counted on the big September storm that dashed their heavy-laden
+boats against the floe-ice, ultimately drove them ashore, and nearly
+cost the little party their lives. On that last day of the long
+struggle up the stream, a stiff north-easter was cutting the middle
+reach of the mighty river, two miles wide here, into a choppy and
+dangerous sea.
+
+Day by day, five men in the two little boats, had kept serious eyes on
+the shore. Then came the morning when, out of the monotonous cold and
+snow-flurries, something new appeared, a narrow white rim forming on
+the river margin--the first ice!
+
+"Winter beginning to show his teeth," said one man, with an effort at
+jocosity.
+
+Day by day, nearer came the menace; narrower and swifter still ran the
+deep black water strip between the encroaching ice-lines. But the
+thought that each day's sailing or rowing meant many days nearer the
+Klondyke, seemed to inspire a superhuman energy. Day by day each man
+had felt, and no man yet had said, "We must camp to-night for eight
+months." They had looked landward, shivered, and held on their way.
+
+But on this particular morning, when they took in sail, they realised
+it was to be that abomination of desolation on the shore or death. And
+one or other speedily.
+
+Nearer the white teeth gleamed, fiercer the gale, swifter the current,
+sweeping back the boats. The _Mary C._ was left behind, fighting for
+life, while it seemed as if no human power could keep the _Tulare_ from
+being hurled against the western shore. Twice, in spite of all they
+could do, she was driven within a few feet of what looked like certain
+death. With a huge effort, that last time, her little crew had just got
+her well in mid-stream, when a heavy roller breaking on the starboard
+side drenched the men and half filled the cockpit. Each rower, still
+pulling for dear life with one hand, bailed the boat with the other;
+but for all their promptness a certain amount of the water froze solid
+before they could get it out.
+
+"Great luck, if we're going to take in water like this," said the
+cheerful Kentuckian, shipping his oar and knocking off the ice--"great
+luck that all the stores are so well protected."
+
+"Protected!" snapped out an anxious, cast-iron-looking man at the
+rudder.
+
+"Yes, protected. How's water to get through the ice-coat that's over
+everything?"
+
+The cast-iron steersman set his jaw grimly. They seemed to be
+comparatively safe now, with half a mile of open water between them and
+the western shore.
+
+But they sat as before, stiff, alert, each man in his ice jacket that
+cracked and crunched as he bent to his oar. Now right, now left, again
+they eyed the shore.
+
+Would it be--could it be there they would have to land? And if they
+did...?
+
+Lord, how it blew!
+
+"Hard a-port!" called out the steersman. There, just ahead, was a great
+white-capped "roller" coming--coming, the biggest wave they had
+encountered since leaving open sea.
+
+But MacCann, the steersman, swung the boat straight into the crested
+roller, and the _Tulare_ took it gamely, "bow on." All was going well
+when, just in the boiling middle of what they had thought was foaming
+"white-cap," the boat struck something solid, shivered, and went
+shooting down, half under water; recovered, up again, and seemed to
+pause in a second's doubt on the very top of the great wave. In that
+second that seemed an eternity one man's courage snapped.
+
+Potts threw down his oar and swore by----and by----he wouldn't pull
+another----stroke on the----Yukon.
+
+While he was pouring out the words, the steersman sprang from the
+tiller, and seized Potts' oar just in time to save the boat from
+capsizing. Then he and the big Kentuckian both turned on the distracted
+Potts.
+
+"You infernal quitter!" shouted the steersman, and choked with fury.
+But even under the insult of that "meanest word in the language," Potts
+sat glaring defiantly, with his half-frozen hands in his pockets.
+
+"It ain't a river, anyhow, this ain't," he said. "It's plain, simple
+Hell and water."
+
+The others had no time to realise that Potts was clean out of his
+senses for the moment, and the Kentuckian, still pulling like mad,
+faced the "quitter" with a determination born of terror.
+
+"If you can't row, take the rudder! Damnation! Take that rudder! Quick,
+_or we'll kill you_!" And he half rose up, never dropping his oar.
+
+Blindly, Potts obeyed.
+
+The _Tulare_ was free now from the clinging mass at the bow, but they
+knew they had struck their first floe.
+
+Farther on they could see other white-caps bringing other ice masses
+down. But there was no time for terrors ahead. The gale was steadily
+driving them in shore again. Boat and oars alike were growing unwieldy
+with their coating of ever-increasing ice, and human strength was no
+match for the storm that was sweeping down from the Pole.
+
+Lord, how it blew!
+
+"There's a cove!" called out the Kentuckian. "Throw her in!" he shouted
+to Potts. Sullenly the new steersman obeyed.
+
+Rolling in on a great surge, the boat suddenly turned in a boiling
+eddy, and the first thing anybody knew was that the _Tulare_ was on her
+side and her crew in the water. Potts was hanging on to the gunwale and
+damning the others for not helping him to save the boat.
+
+She wasn't much of a boat when finally they got her into quiet water;
+but the main thing was they had escaped with their lives and rescued a
+good proportion of their winter provisions. All the while they were
+doing this last, the Kentuckian kept turning to look anxiously for any
+sign of the others, in his heart bitterly blaming himself for having
+agreed to Potts' coming into the _Tulare_ that day in place of the
+Kentuckian's own "pardner." When they had piled the rescued provisions
+up on the bank, and just as they were covering the heap of bacon,
+flour, and bean-bags, boxes, tools, and utensils with a tarpaulin, up
+went a shout, and the two missing men appeared tramping along the
+ice-encrusted shore.
+
+Where was the _Mary C._? Well, she was at the bottom of the Yukon, and
+her crew would like some supper.
+
+They set up a tent, and went to bed that first night extremely well
+pleased at being alive on any terms.
+
+But people get over being glad about almost anything, unless misfortune
+again puts an edge on the circumstance. The next day, not being in any
+immediate danger, the boon of mere life seemed less satisfying.
+
+In detachments they went up the river several miles, and down about as
+far. They looked in vain for any sign of the _Mary C._. They prospected
+the hills. From the heights behind the camp they got a pretty fair idea
+of the surrounding country. It was not reassuring.
+
+"As to products, there seems to be plenty of undersized timber, plenty
+of snow and plenty of river, and, as far as I can see, just nothing
+else."
+
+"Well, there's oodles o' blueberries," said the Boy, his inky-looking
+mouth bearing witness to veracity; "and there are black and red
+currants in the snow, and rose-apples--"
+
+"Oh, yes," returned the other, "it's a sort of garden of Eden!"
+
+A little below here it was four miles from bank to bank of the main
+channel, but at this point the river was only about two miles wide, and
+white already with floating masses of floe-ice going on a swift current
+down towards the sea, four hundred miles away.
+
+The right bank presented to the mighty river a low chain of hills,
+fringed at the base with a scattered growth of scrubby spruce, birch,
+willow, and cotton-wood. Timber line was only two hundred feet above
+the river brink; beyond that height, rocks and moss covered with
+new-fallen snow.
+
+But if their side seemed cheerless, what of the land on the left bank?
+A swamp stretching endlessly on either hand, and back from the icy
+flood as far as eye could see, broken only by sloughs and an occasional
+ice-rimmed tarn.
+
+"We've been travelling just eight weeks to arrive at this," said the
+Kentuckian, looking at the desolate scene with a homesick eye.
+
+"We're not only pretty far from home," grumbled another, "we're still
+thirteen hundred miles away from the Klondyke."
+
+These unenlivening calculations were catching.
+
+"We're just about twenty-five hundred miles from the nearest railroad
+or telegraph, and, now that winter's down on us, exactly eight months
+from anywhere in the civilised world."
+
+They had seen no sign of even savage life, no white trader, nothing to
+show that any human foot had ever passed that way before.
+
+In that stillness that was like the stillness of death, they went up
+the hillside, with footsteps muffled in the clinging snow; and sixty
+feet above the great river, in a part of the wood where the timber was
+least unpromising, they marked out a site for their winter quarters.
+
+Then this queer little company--a Denver bank-clerk, an ex-schoolmaster
+from Nova Scotia, an Irish-American lawyer from San Francisco, a
+Kentucky "Colonel" who had never smelt powder, and "the Boy" (who was
+no boy at all, but a man of twenty-two)--these five set to work felling
+trees, clearing away the snow, and digging foundations for a couple of
+log-cabins--one for the Trio, as they called themselves, the other for
+the Colonel and the Boy.
+
+These two had chummed from the hour they met on the steamer that
+carried them through the Golden Gate of the Pacific till--well, till
+the end of my story.
+
+The Colonel was a big tanned fellow, nearly forty--eldest of the
+party--whom the others used to guy discreetly, because you couldn't
+mention a place anywhere on the known globe, except the far north,
+which he had not personally inspected. But for this foible, as the
+untravelled considered it, he was well liked and a little
+feared--except by the Boy, who liked him "first-rate," and feared him
+not at all. They had promptly adopted each other before they discovered
+that it was necessary to have one or more "pardners." It seemed, from
+all accounts, to be true, that up there at the top of the world a man
+alone is a man lost, and ultimately the party was added to as
+aforesaid.
+
+Only two of them knew anything about roughing it. Jimmie O'Flynn of
+'Frisco, the Irish-American lawyer, had seen something of frontier
+life, and fled it, and MacCann, the Nova Scotian schoolmaster, had
+spent a month in one of the Caribou camps, and on the strength of that,
+proudly accepted the nickname of "the Miner."
+
+Colonel George Warren and Morris Burnet, the Boy, had the best outfits;
+but this fact was held to be more than counter-balanced by the value of
+the schoolmaster's experience at Caribou, and by the extraordinary
+handiness of Potts, the Denver clerk, who had helped to build the
+shelter on deck for the disabled sick on the voyage up. This young man
+with the big mouth and lazy air had been in the office of a bank ever
+since he left school, and yet, under pressure, he discovered a natural
+neat-handedness and a manual dexterity justly envied by some of his
+fellow-pioneers. His outfit was not more conspicuously meagre than
+O'Flynn's, yet the Irishman was held to be the moneyed man of his
+party. Just why was never fully developed, but it was always said,
+"O'Flynn represents capital"; and O'Flynn, whether on that account, or
+for a subtler and more efficient reason, always got the best of
+everything that was going without money and without price.
+
+On board ship O'Flynn, with his ready tongue and his golden
+background--"representing capital"--was a leading spirit. Potts the
+handy-man was a talker, too, and a good second. But, once in camp, Mac
+the Miner was cock of the walk, in those first days, quoted "Caribou,"
+and ordered everybody about to everybody's satisfaction.
+
+In a situation like this, the strongest lean on the man who has ever
+seen "anything like it" before. It was a comfort that anybody even
+_thought_ he knew what to do under such new conditions. So the others
+looked on with admiration and a pleasant confidence, while Mac boldly
+cut a hole in the brand-new tent, and instructed Potts how to make a
+flange out of a tin plate, with which to protect the canvas from the
+heat of the stove-pipe. No more cooking now in the bitter open.
+Everyone admired Mac's foresight when he said:
+
+"We must build rock fireplaces in our cabins, or we'll find our one
+little Yukon stove burnt out before the winter is over--before we have
+a chance to use it out prospecting." And when Mac said they must pool
+their stores, the Colonel and the Boy agreed as readily as O'Flynn,
+whose stores consisted of a little bacon, some navy beans, and a
+demijohn of whisky. O'Flynn, however, urged that probably every man had
+a little "mite o' somethin'" that he had brought specially for
+himself--somethin' his friends had given him, for instance. There was
+Potts, now. They all knew how the future Mrs. Potts had brought a
+plum-cake down to the steamer, when she came to say good-bye, and made
+Potts promise he wouldn't unseal the packet till Christmas. It wouldn't
+do to pool Potts' cake--never! There was the Colonel, the only man that
+had a sack of coffee. He wouldn't listen when they had told him tea was
+the stuff up here, and--well, perhaps other fellows didn't miss coffee
+as much as a Kentuckian, though he _had_ heard--Never mind; they
+wouldn't pool the coffee. The Boy had some preserved fruit that he
+seemed inclined to be a hog about--
+
+"Oh, look here. I haven't touched it!" "Just what I'm sayin'. You're
+hoardin' that fruit."
+
+It was known that Mac had a very dacint little medicine-chest. Of
+course, if any fellow was ill, Mac wasn't the man to refuse him a
+little cold pizen; but he must be allowed to keep his own medicine
+chest--and that little pot o' Dundee marmalade. As for O'Flynn, he
+would look after the "dimmi-john."
+
+But Mac was dead against the whisky clause. Alcohol had been the curse
+of Caribou, and in _this_ camp spirits were to be for medicinal
+purposes only. Whereon a cloud descended on Mr. O'Flynn, and his health
+began to suffer; but the precious demi-john was put away "in stock"
+along with the single bottles belonging to the others. Mac had taken an
+inventory, and no one in those early days dared touch anything without
+his permission.
+
+They had cut into the mountain-side for a level foundation, and were
+hard at it now hauling logs.
+
+"I wonder," said the Boy, stopping a moment in his work, and looking at
+the bleak prospect round him--"I wonder if we're going to see anybody
+all winter."
+
+"Oh, sure to," Mac thought; "Indians, anyhow."
+
+"Well, I begin to wish they'd mosy along," said Potts; and the sociable
+O'Flynn backed him up.
+
+It was towards noon on the sixth day after landing (they had come to
+speak of this now as a voluntary affair), when they were electrified by
+hearing strange voices; looked up from their work, and saw two white
+men seated on a big cake of ice going down the river with the current.
+When they recovered sufficiently from their astonishment at the
+spectacle, they ran down the hillside, and proposed to help the
+"castaways" to land. Not a bit of it.
+
+"_Land_ in that place! What you take us for? Not much! We're going to
+St. Michael's."
+
+They had a small boat drawn up by them on the ice, and one man was
+dressed in magnificent furs, a long sable overcoat and cap, and wearing
+quite the air of a North Pole Nabob.
+
+"Got any grub?" Mac called out.
+
+"Yes; want some?"
+
+"Oh no; I thought you--"
+
+"You're not going to try to live through the winter _there?_"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Lord! you _are_ in a fix!"
+
+"That's we thought about you."
+
+But the travellers on the ice-raft went by laughing and joking at the
+men safe on shore with their tents and provisions. It made some of them
+visibly uneasy. _Would_ they win through? Were they crazy to try it?
+They had looked forward eagerly to the first encounter with their kind,
+but this vision floating by on the treacherous ice, of men who rather
+dared the current and the crash of contending floes than land where
+_they_ were, seemed of evil augury. The little incident left a
+curiously sinister impression on the camp.
+
+Even Mac was found agreeing with the others of his Trio that, since
+they had a grand, tough time in front of them, it was advisable to get
+through the black months ahead with as little wear and tear as
+possible. In spite of the Trio's superior talents, they built a small
+ramshackle cabin with a tumble-down fireplace, which served them so ill
+that they ultimately spent all their waking hours in the more
+comfortable quarters of the Colonel and the Boy. It had been agreed
+that these two, with the help, or, at all events, the advice, of the
+others, should build the bigger, better cabin, where the stores should
+be kept and the whole party should mess--a cabin with a solid outside
+chimney of stone and an open fireplace, generous of proportion and
+ancient of design, "just like down South."
+
+The weather was growing steadily colder; the ice was solid now many
+feet out from each bank of the river. In the middle of the flood the
+clotted current still ran with floe-ice, but it was plain the river was
+settling down for its long sleep.
+
+Not silently, not without stress and thunder. The handful of dwellers
+on the shore would be waked in the night by the shock and crash of
+colliding floes, the sound of the great winds rushing by, and--"Hush!
+What's that?" Tired men would start up out of sleep and sit straight to
+listen. Down below, among the ice-packs, the noise as of an old-time
+battle going on--tumult and crashing and a boom! boom! like
+cannonading.
+
+Then one morning they woke to find all still, the conflict over, the
+Yukon frozen from bank to bank. No sound from that day on; no more
+running water for a good seven months.
+
+Winter had come.
+
+While the work went forward they often spoke of the only two people
+they had thus far seen. Both Potts and O'Flynn had been heard to envy
+them.
+
+Mac had happened to say that he believed the fellow in furs was an
+Englishman--a Canadian, at the very least. The Americans chaffed him,
+and said, "That accounts for it," in a tone not intended to flatter.
+Mac hadn't thought of it before, but he was prepared to swear now that
+if an Englishman--they were the hardiest pioneers on earth--or a
+Canadian was in favour of lighting out, "it must be for some good
+reason."
+
+"Oh yes; we all know that reason."
+
+The Americans laughed, and Mac, growing hot, was goaded into vaunting
+the Britisher and running down the Yankee.
+
+"Yankee!" echoed the Kentuckian. "And up in Nova Scotia they let this
+man teach school! Doesn't know the difference yet between the little
+corner they call New England and all the rest of America."
+
+"All the rest of America!" shouted Mac. "The cheeky way you people of
+the States have of gobbling the Continent (in _talk_), just as though
+the British part of it wasn't the bigger half!"
+
+"Yes; but when you think _which_ half, you ought to be obliged to any
+fellow for forgetting it." And then they referred to effete monarchical
+institutions, and by the time they reached the question of the kind of
+king the Prince of Wales would make, Mac was hardly a safe man to argue
+with.
+
+There was one bond between him and the Kentucky Colonel: they were both
+religious men; and although Mac was blue Presbyterian and an inveterate
+theologian, somehow, out here in the wilderness, it was more possible
+to forgive a man for illusions about the Apostolic Succession and
+mistaken views upon Church government. The Colonel, at all events, was
+not so lax but what he was ready to back up the Calvinist in an
+endeavour to keep the Sabbath (with a careful compromise between church
+and chapel) and help him to conduct a Saturday-night Bible-class.
+
+But if the Boy attended the Bible-class with fervour and aired his
+heresies with uncommon gusto, if he took with equal geniality Colonel
+Warren's staid remonstrance and Mac's fiery objurgation, Sunday morning
+invariably found him more "agnostic" than ever, stoutly declining to
+recognise the necessity for "service." For this was an occasion when
+you couldn't argue or floor anybody, or hope to make Mac "hoppin' mad,"
+or have the smallest kind of a shindy. The Colonel read the lessons,
+Mac prayed, and they all sang, particularly O'Flynn. Now, the Boy
+couldn't sing a note, so there was no fair division of entertainment,
+wherefore he would go off into the woods with his gun for company, and
+the Catholic O'Flynn, and even Potts, were in better odour than he
+"down in camp" on Sundays. So far you may travel, and yet not escape
+the tyranny of the "outworn creeds."
+
+The Boy came back a full hour before service on the second Sunday with
+a couple of grouse and a beaming countenance. Mac, who was cook that
+week, was the only man left in the tent. He looked agreeably surprised
+at the apparition.
+
+"Hello!" says he more pleasantly than his Sunday gloom usually
+permitted. "Back in time for service?"
+
+"I've found a native," says the Boy, speaking as proudly as any
+Columbus. "He's hurt his foot, and he's only got one eye, but he's
+splendid. Told me no end of things. He's coming here as fast as his
+foot will let him--he and three other Indians--Esquimaux, I mean. They
+haven't had anything to eat but berries and roots for seven days."
+
+The Boy was feverishly overhauling the provisions behind the stove.
+
+"Look here," says Mac, "hold on there. I don't know that we've come all
+this way to feed a lot o' dirty savages."
+
+"But they're starving." Then, seeing that that fact did not produce the
+desired impression: "My savage is an awfully good fellow. He--he's a
+converted savage, seems to be quite a Christian." Then, hastily
+following up his advantage: "He's been taught English by the Jesuits at
+the mission forty miles above us, on the river. He can give us a whole
+heap o' tips."
+
+Mac was slowly bringing out a small panful of cold boiled beans.
+
+"There are four of them," said the Boy--"big fellows, almost as big as
+our Colonel, and _awful_ hungry."
+
+Mac looked at the handful of beans and then at the small sheet-iron
+stove.
+
+"There are more cooking," says he not over-cordially.
+
+"The one that talks good English is the son of the chief. You can see
+he's different from the others. Knows a frightful lot. He's taught me
+some of his language already. The men with him said 'Kaiomi' to
+everything I asked, and that means 'No savvy.' Says he'll teach
+me--he'll teach all of us--how to snow-shoe."
+
+"We know how to snow-shoe."
+
+"Oh, I mean on those long narrow snow-shoes that make you go so fast
+you always trip up! He'll show us how to steer with a pole, and how to
+make fish-traps and--and everything."
+
+Mac began measuring out some tea.
+
+"He's got a team of Esquimaux dogs--calls 'em Mahlemeuts, and he's got
+a birch-bark canoe, and a skin kyak from the coast." Then with an
+inspiration: "His people are the sort of Royal Family down there,"
+added the Boy, thinking to appeal to the Britisher's monarchical
+instincts.
+
+Mac had meditatively laid his hand on a side of bacon, the Boy's eyes
+following.
+
+"He's asked us--_all_ of us, and we're five--up to visit him at Pymeut,
+the first village above us here." Mac took up a knife to cut the bacon.
+"And--good gracious! why, I forgot the grouse; they can have the
+grouse!"
+
+"No, they can't," said Mac firmly; "they're lucky to get bacon."
+
+The Boy's face darkened ominously. When he looked like that the elder
+men found it was "healthiest to give him his head." But the young face
+cleared as quickly as it had clouded. After all, the point wasn't worth
+fighting for, since grouse would take time to cook, and--here were the
+natives coming painfully along the shore.
+
+The Boy ran out and shouted and waved his cap. The other men of the
+camp, who had gone in the opposite direction, across the river ice to
+look at an air-hole, came hurrying back and reached camp about the same
+time as the visitors.
+
+"Thought you said they were big fellows!" commented Mac, who had come
+to the door for a glimpse of the Indians as they toiled up the slope.
+
+"Well, so they are!"
+
+"Why, the Colonel would make two of any one of them."
+
+"The Colonel! Oh well, you can't expect anybody else to be quite as big
+as that. I was in a hurry, but I suppose what I meant was, they could
+eat as much as the Colonel."
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"Well, just look how broad they are. It doesn't matter to your stomach
+whether you're big up and down, or big to and fro."
+
+"It's their furs make 'em look like that. They're the most awful little
+runts I ever saw!"
+
+"Well, I reckon _you'd_ think they were big, too--big as Nova
+Scotia--if _you'd_ found 'em--come on 'em suddenly like that in the
+woods--"
+
+"Which is the...?"
+
+"Oh, the son of the chief is in the middle, the one who is taking off
+his civilised fur-coat. He says his father's got a heap of pelts (you
+could get things for your collection, Mac), and he's got two
+reindeer-skin shirts with hoods--'parkis,' you know, like the others
+are wearing--"
+
+They were quite near now.
+
+"How do," said the foremost native affably.
+
+"How do." The Boy came forward and shook hands as though he hadn't seen
+him for a month. "This," says he, turning first to Mac and then to the
+other white men, "this is Prince Nicholas of Pymeut. Walk right in, all
+of you, and have something to eat."
+
+The visitors sat on the ground round the stove, as close as they could
+get without scorching, and the atmosphere was quickly heavy with their
+presence. When they slipped back their hoods it was seen that two of
+the men wore the "tartar tonsure," after the fashion of the coast.
+
+"Where do you come from?" inquired the Colonel of the man nearest him,
+who simply blinked and was dumb.
+
+"This is the one that talks English," said the Boy, indicating Nicholas,
+"and he lives at Pymeut, and he's been converted."
+
+"How far is Pymeut?"
+
+"We sleep Pymeut to-night," says Nicholas.
+
+"Which way?"
+
+The native jerked his head up the river.
+
+"Many people there?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"White men, too?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"How far to the nearest white men?"
+
+Nicholas's mind wandered from the white man's catechism and fixed
+itself on his race's immemorial problem: how far it was to the nearest
+thing to eat.
+
+"I thought you said he could speak English."
+
+"So he can, first rate. He and I had a great pow-wow, didn't we,
+Nicholas?"
+
+Nicholas smiled absently, and fixed his one eye on the bacon that Mac
+was cutting on the deal box into such delicate slices.
+
+"He'll talk all right," said the Boy, "when he's had some breakfast."
+
+Mac had finished the cutting, and now put the frying-pan on an open
+hole in the little stove.
+
+"Cook him?" inquired Nicholas.
+
+"Yes. Don't you cook him?"
+
+"Take heap time, cook him."
+
+"You couldn't eat it raw!"
+
+Nicholas nodded emphatically.
+
+Mac said "No," but the Boy was curious to see if they would really eat
+it uncooked.
+
+"Let them have _some_ of it raw while the rest is frying"; and he
+beckoned the visitors to the deal box. They made a dart forward,
+gathered up the fat bacon several slices at a time, and pushed it into
+their mouths.
+
+"Ugh!" said the Colonel under his breath.
+
+Mac quickly swept what was left into the frying-pan, and began to cut a
+fresh lot.
+
+The Boy divided the cold beans, got out biscuits, and poured the tea,
+while silence and a strong smell of ancient fish and rancid seal
+pervaded the little tent.
+
+O'Flynn put a question or two, but Nicholas had gone stone-deaf. There
+was no doubt about it, they had been starving.
+
+After a good feed they sat stolidly by the fire, with no sign of
+consciousness, save the blinking of beady eyes, till the Colonel
+suggested a smoke. Then they all grinned broadly, and nodded with great
+vigour. Even those who had no other English understood "tobacco."
+
+When he had puffed awhile, Nicholas took his pipe out of his mouth,
+and, looking at the Boy, said:
+
+"You no savvy catch fish in winter?"
+
+"Through the ice? No. How you do it?"
+
+"Make hole--put down trap--heap fish all winter."
+
+"You get enough to live on?" asked the Colonel.
+
+"They must have dried fish, too, left over from the summer," said Mac.
+
+Nicholas agreed. "And berries and flour. When snow begin get soft,
+Pymeuts all go off--" He motioned with his big head towards the hills.
+
+"What do you get there?" Mac was becoming interested.
+
+"Caribou, moose--"
+
+"Any furs?"
+
+"Yes; trap ermun, marten--"
+
+"Lynx, too, I suppose, and fox?"
+
+Nicholas nodded. "All kinds. Wolf--muskrat, otter--wolverine--all
+kinds."
+
+"You got some skins now?" asked the Nova Scotian.
+
+"Y--yes. More when snow get soft. You come Pymeut--me show."
+
+"Where have ye been just now?" asked O'Flynn.
+
+"St. Michael."
+
+"How long since ye left there?"
+
+"Twelve sleeps."
+
+"He means thirteen days."
+
+Nicholas nodded.
+
+"They couldn't possibly walk that far in--"
+
+"Oh yes," says the Boy; "they don't follow the windings of the river,
+they cut across the portage, you know."
+
+"Snow come--no trail--big mountains--all get lost."
+
+"What did you go to St. Michael's for?"
+
+"Oh, me pilot. Me go all over. Me leave N. A. T. and T. boat St.
+Michael's last trip."
+
+"Then you're in the employ of the great North American Trading and
+Transportation Company?"
+
+Nicholas gave that funny little duck of the head that meant yes.
+
+"That's how you learnt English," says the Colonel.
+
+"No; me learn English at Holy Cross. Me been baptize."
+
+"At that Jesuit mission up yonder?"
+
+"Forty mile."
+
+"Well," says Potts, "I guess you've had enough walking for one winter."
+
+Nicholas seemed not to follow this observation. The Boy interpreted:
+
+"You heap tired, eh? You no go any more long walk till ice go out, eh?"
+
+Nicholas grinned.
+
+"Me go Ikogimeut--all Pymeut go."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Big feast."
+
+"Oh, the Russian mission there gives a feast?"
+
+"No. Big Innuit feast."
+
+"When?"
+
+"Pretty quick. Every year big feast down to Ikogimeut when Yukon ice
+get hard, so man go safe with dog-team."
+
+"Do many people go?"
+
+"All Innuit go, plenty Ingalik go."
+
+"How far do they come?"
+
+"All over; come from Koserefsky, come from Anvik--sometime Nulato."
+
+"Why, Nulato's an awful distance from Ikogimeut."
+
+"Three hundred and twenty miles," said the pilot, proud of his general
+information, and quite ready, since he had got a pipe between his
+teeth, to be friendly and communicative.
+
+"What do you do at Ikogimeut when you have these--" "Big fire--big
+feed--tell heap stories--big dance. Oh, heap big time!"
+
+"Once every year, eh, down at Ikogimeut?"
+
+"Three times ev' year. Ev' village, and"--he lowered his voice, not
+with any hit of reverence or awe, but with an air of making a sly and
+cheerful confidence--"and when man die."
+
+"You make a feast and have a dance when a friend dies?"
+
+"If no priests. Priests no like. Priests say, 'Man no dead; man gone
+up.'" Nicholas pondered the strange saying, and slowly shook his head.
+
+"In that the priests are right," said Mac grudgingly.
+
+It was anything but politic, but for the life of him the Boy couldn't
+help chipping in:
+
+"You think when man dead he stay dead, eh, and you might as well make a
+feast?"
+
+Nicholas gave his quick nod. "We got heap muskeetah, we cold, we
+hungry. We here heap long time. Dead man, he done. Why no big feast? Oh
+yes, heap big feast."
+
+The Boy was enraptured. He would gladly have encouraged these pagan
+deliverances on the part of the converted Prince, but the Colonel was
+scandalised, and Mac, although in his heart of hearts not ill-satisfied
+at the evidence of the skin-deep Christianity of a man delivered over
+to the corrupt teaching of the Jesuits, found in this last fact all the
+stronger reason for the instant organisation of a good Protestant
+prayer-meeting. Nicholas of Pymeut must not be allowed to think it was
+only Jesuits who remembered the Sabbath day to keep it holy.
+
+And the three "pore benighted heathen" along with him, if they didn't
+understand English words, they should have an object-lesson, and Mac
+would himself pray the prayers they couldn't utter for themselves. He
+jumped up, motioned the Boy to put on more wood, cleared away the
+granite-ware dishes, filled the bean-pot and set it back to simmer,
+while the Colonel got out Mac's Bible and his own Prayer-Book.
+
+The Boy did his stoking gloomily, reading aright these portents. Almost
+eclipsed was joy in this "find" of his (for he regarded the precious
+Nicholas as his own special property). It was all going to end in
+his--the Boy's--being hooked in for service. As long as the Esquimaux
+were there _he_ couldn't, of course, tear himself away. And here was
+the chance they'd all been waiting for. Here was a native chock-full of
+knowledge of the natural law and the immemorial gospel of the North,
+who would be gone soon--oh, very soon, if Mac and the Colonel went on
+like this--and they were going to choke off Nicholas's communicativeness
+with--a service!
+
+"It's Sunday, you know," says the Colonel to the Prince, laying open
+his book, "and we were just going to have church. You are accustomed to
+going to church at Holy Cross, aren't you?"
+
+"When me kid me go church."
+
+"You haven't gone since you grew up? They still have church there,
+don't they?"
+
+"Oh, Father Brachet, him have church."
+
+"Why don't you go?"
+
+Nicholas was vaguely conscious of threatened disapproval.
+
+"Me ... me must take up fish-traps."
+
+"Can't you do that another day?"
+
+It seemed not to have occurred to Nicholas before. He sat and
+considered the matter.
+
+"Isn't Father Brachet," began the Colonel gravely--"he doesn't like it,
+does he, when you don't come to church?"
+
+"He take care him church; him know me take care me fish-trap."
+
+But Nicholas saw plainly out of his one eye that he was not growing in
+popularity. Suddenly that solitary organ gleamed with self-justification.
+
+"Me bring fish to Father Brachet and to Mother Aloysius and the
+Sisters."
+
+Mac and the Colonel exchanged dark glances.
+
+"Do Mother Aloysius and the Sisters live where Father Brachet does?"
+
+"Father Brachet, and Father Wills, and Brother Paul, and Brother
+Etienne, all here." The native put two fingers on the floor. "Big white
+cross in middle"--he laid down his pipe to personate the
+cross--"here"--indicating the other side--"here Mother Aloysius and the
+Sisters."
+
+"I thought," says Mac, "we'd be hearing of a convent convenient."
+
+"Me help Father Brachet," observed Nicholas proudly. "Me show him boys
+how make traps, show him girls how make mucklucks." "_What_!" gasps the
+horrified Mac, "Father Brachet has got a family?"
+
+"Famly?" inquired Nicholas. "Kaiomi"; and he shook his head
+uncertainly.
+
+"You say Father Brachet has got boys, and"--as though this were a yet
+deeper brand of iniquity--"_girls_?"
+
+Nicholas, though greatly mystified, nodded firmly.
+
+"I suppose he thinks away off up here nobody will ever know. Oh, these
+Jesuits!"
+
+"How many children has this shameless priest?"
+
+"Father Brachet, him got seventeen boys, and--me no savvy how much
+girl--twelve girl ... twenty girl ..."
+
+The Boy, who had been splitting with inward laughter, exploded at this
+juncture.
+
+"He keeps a native school, Mac."
+
+"Yes," says Nicholas, "teach boy make table, chair, potatoes grow--all
+kinds. Sisters teach girl make dinner, wash--all kinds. Heap good
+people up at Holy Cross."
+
+"Divil a doubt of it," says O'Flynn.
+
+But this blind belauding of the children of Loyola only fired Mac the
+more to give the heathen a glimpse of the true light. In what darkness
+must they grope when a sly, intriguing Jesuit (it was well known they
+were all like that) was for them a type of the "heap good man"--a
+priest, forsooth, who winked at Sabbath-breaking because he and his
+neighbouring nuns shared in the spoil!
+
+Well, they must try to have a truly impressive service. Mac and the
+Colonel telegraphed agreement on this head. Savages were said to be
+specially touched by music.
+
+"I suppose when you were a kid the Jesuits taught you chants and so
+on," said the Colonel, kindly.
+
+"Kaiomi," answered Nicholas after reflection.
+
+"You can sing, can't you?" asks O'Flynn.
+
+"Sing? No, me dance!"
+
+The Boy roared with delight.
+
+"Why, yes, I never thought of that. You fellows do the songs, and
+Nicholas and I'll do the dances."
+
+Mac glowered angrily. "Look here: if you don't mind being blasphemous
+for yourself, don't demoralise the natives."
+
+"Well, I like that! Didn't Miriam dance before the Lord? Why shouldn't
+Nicholas and me?"
+
+The Colonel cleared his throat, and began to read the lessons for the
+day. The natives sat and watched him closely. They really behaved very
+well, and the Boy was enormously proud of his new friends. There was a
+great deal at stake. The Boy felt he must walk warily, and he already
+regretted those light expressions about dancing before the Lord. All
+the fun of the winter might depend on a friendly relation between
+Pymeut and the camp. It was essential that the Esquimaux should not
+only receive, but make, a good impression.
+
+The singing "From Greenland's icy mountains to India's coral strand"
+seemed to please them; but when, after the Colonel's "Here endeth the
+second lesson," Mac said, in sepulchral tones, "Let us pray," the
+visitors seemed to think it was time to go home.
+
+"No," said Mac sternly, "they mustn't go in the middle of the meeting";
+and he proceeded to kneel down.
+
+But Nicholas was putting on his fur coat, and the others only waited to
+follow him out. The Boy, greatly concerned lest, after all, the visit
+should end badly, dropped on his knees to add the force of his own
+example, and through the opening phrases of Mac's prayer the agnostic
+was heard saying, in a loud stage-whisper, "Do like me--down! Look
+here! Suppose you ask us come big feast, and in the middle of your
+dance we all go home--.
+
+"Oh no," remonstrated Nicholas.
+
+"Very well. These friends o' mine no like man go home in the middle.
+They heap mad at me when I no stay. You savvy?"
+
+"Me savvy," says Nicholas slowly and rather depressed.
+
+"Kneel down, then," says the Boy. And first Nicholas, and then the
+others, went on their knees.
+
+Alternately they looked in the Boy's corner where the grub was, and
+then over their shoulders at the droning Mac and back, catching the
+Boy's eye, and returning his reassuring nods and grins.
+
+Mac, who had had no innings up to this point, was now embarked upon a
+most congenial occupation. Wrestling with the Lord on behalf of the
+heathen, he lost count of time. On and on the prayer wound its slow
+way; involution after involution, coil after coil, like a snake, the
+Boy thought, lazing in the sun. Unaccustomed knees grew sore.
+
+"Hearken to the cry of them that walk in darkness, misled by wolves in
+sheep's clothing--_wolves_, Lord, wearing the sign of the Holy Cross--"
+
+O'Flynn shuffled, and Mac pulled himself up. No light task this of
+conveying to the Creator, in covert terms, a due sense of the iniquity
+of the Jesuits, without, at the same time, stirring O'Flynn's bile, and
+seeing him get up and stalk out of meeting, as had happened once
+before.
+
+O'Flynn was not deeply concerned about religious questions, but "there
+were limits." The problem was how to rouse the Lord without rousing
+O'Flynn--a piece of negotiation so delicate, calling for a skill in
+pious invective so infinitely absorbing to Mac's particular cast of
+mind, that he was quickly stone-blind and deaf to all things else.
+
+"Not all the heathen are sunk in iniquity; but they are weak, tempted,
+and they weary, Lord!"
+
+"Amen," said the Boy, discreetly. "How long?" groaned Mac--"Oh Lord,
+how long?" But it was much longer than he realised. The Boy saw the
+visitors shifting from one knee to another, and feared the worst. But
+he sympathised deeply with their predicament. To ease his own legs, he
+changed his position, and dragged a corner of the sailcloth down off
+the little pile of provisions, and doubled it under his knees.
+
+The movement revealed the bag of dried apples within arm's length.
+Nicholas was surreptitiously reaching for his coat. No doubt about it,
+he had come to the conclusion that this was the fitting moment to
+depart. A look over his shoulder showed Mac absorbed, and taking fresh
+breath at "Sixthly, Oh Lord." The Boy put out a hand, and dragged the
+apple-bag slowly, softly towards him. The Prince dropped the sleeve of
+his coat, and fixed his one eye on his friend. The Boy undid the neck
+of the sack, thrust in his hand, and brought out a fistfull. Another
+look at Mac--still hard at it, trying to spare O'Flynn's feelings
+without mincing matters with the Almighty.
+
+The Boy winked at Nicholas, made a gesture, "Catch!" and fired a bit of
+dried apple at him, at the same time putting a piece in his own mouth
+to show him it was all right.
+
+Nicholas followed suit, and seemed pleased with the result. He showed
+all his strong, white teeth, and ecstatically winked his one eye back
+at the Boy, who threw him another bit and then a piece to each of the
+others.
+
+The Colonel had "caught on," and was making horrible frowns at the Boy.
+Potts and O'Flynn looked up, and in dumbshow demanded a share. No? Very
+well, they'd tell Mac. So the Boy had to feed them, too, to keep them
+quiet. And still Mac prayed the Lord to catch up this slip he had made
+here on the Yukon with reference to the natives. In the midst of a
+powerful peroration, he happened to open his eyes a little, and they
+fell on the magnificent great sable collar of Prince Nicholas's coat.
+
+Without any of the usual slowing down, without the accustomed warning
+of a gradual descent from the high themes of heaven to the things of
+common earth, Mac came down out of the clouds with a bump, and the
+sudden, business-like "Amen" startled all the apple-chewing
+congregation.
+
+Mac stood up, and says he to Nicholas:
+
+"Where did you get that coat?"
+
+Nicholas, still on his knees, stared, and seemed in doubt if this were
+a part of the service.
+
+"Where did you get that coat?" repeated Mac.
+
+The Boy had jumped up nimbly. "I told you his father has a lot of
+furs."
+
+"Like this?"
+
+"No," says Nicholas; "this belong white man."
+
+"Ha," says Mac excitedly, "I thought I'd seen it before. Tell us how
+you got it."
+
+"Me leave St. Michael; me got ducks, reindeer meat--oh, _plenty_
+kow-kow! [Footnote: Food] Two sleeps away St. Michael me meet Indian.
+Heap hungry. Him got bully coat." Nicholas picked it up off the floor.
+"Him got no kow-kow. Him say, 'Give me duck, give me back-fat. You take
+coat, him too heavy.' Me say, 'Yes.'"
+
+"But how did he get the coat?"
+
+"Him say two white men came down river on big ice."
+
+"Yes, yes--"
+
+"Men sick." He tapped his forehead. "Man no sick, he no go down with
+the ice"; and Nicholas shuddered. "Before Ikogimeut, ice jam. Indian
+see men jump one big ice here, more big ice here, and one... go down.
+Indian"--Nicholas imitated throwing out a line--"man tie mahout
+round--but--big ice come--" Nicholas dashed his hands together, and
+then paused significantly. "Indian sleep there. Next day ice hard.
+Indian go little way out to see. Man dead. Him heap good coat," he
+wound up unemotionally, and proceeded to put it on.
+
+"And the other white man--what became of him?"
+
+Nicholas shrugged: "Kaiomi," though it was plain he knew well enough
+the other lay under the Yukon ice.
+
+"And that--_that_ was the end of the fellows who went by jeering at
+us!"
+
+"We'd better not crow yet," said Mac. And they bade Prince Nicholas and
+his heathen retinue good-bye in a mood chastened not by prayer alone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+HOUSE-WARMING
+
+"There is a sort of moral climate in a household."--JOHN MORLEY.
+
+
+No idle ceremony this, but the great problem of the dwellers in the
+country of the Yukon.
+
+The Colonel and the Boy made up their minds that, whatever else they
+had or had not, they would have a warm house to live in. And when they
+had got it, they would have a "Blow-out" to celebrate the achievement.
+
+"We'll invite Nicholas," says the Boy. "I'll go to Pymeut myself, and
+let him know we are going to have 'big fire, big feed. Oh, heap big
+time!'"
+
+If the truth were told, it had been a difficult enough matter to keep
+away from Pymeut since the hour Nicholas had vanished in that
+direction; but until winter quarters were made, and until they were
+proved to be warm, there was no time for the amenities of life.
+
+The Big Cabin (as it was quite seriously called, in contradistinction
+to the hut of the Trio) consisted of a single room, measuring on the
+outside sixteen feet by eighteen feet.
+
+The walls of cotton-wood logs soared upward to a level of six feet, and
+this height was magnificently increased in the middle by the angle of
+the mildly gable roof. But before the cabin was breast-high the Boy had
+begun to long for a window.
+
+"Sorry we forgot the plate-glass," says Mac.
+
+"Wudn't ye like a grrand-piana?" asks O'Flynn.
+
+"What's the use of goin' all the way from Nova Scotia to Caribou," says
+the Boy to the Schoolmaster-Miner, "if you haven't learned the way to
+make a window like the Indians, out of transparent skin?"
+
+Mac assumed an air of elevated contempt.
+
+"I went to mine, not to learn Indian tricks."
+
+"When the door's shut it'll be dark as the inside of a cocoa-nut."
+
+"You ought to have thought of that before you left the sunny South,"
+said Potts.
+
+"It'll be dark all winter, window or no window," Mac reminded them.
+
+"Never mind," said the Colonel, "when the candles give out we'll have
+the fire-light. Keep all the spruce knots, boys!"
+
+But one of the boys was not pleased. The next day, looking for a
+monkey-wrench under the tarpaulin, he came across the wooden box a
+California friend had given him at parting, containing a dozen tall
+glass jars of preserved fruit. The others had growled at the extra bulk
+and weight, when the Boy put the box into the boat at St. Michael's,
+but they had now begun to look kindly on it and ask when it was to be
+opened. He had answered firmly:
+
+"Not before Christmas," modifying this since Nicholas's visit to "Not
+before the House-Warming." But one morning the Boy was found pouring
+the fruit out of the jars into some empty cans.
+
+"What you up to?"
+
+"Wait an' see." He went to O'Flynn, who was dish-washer that week, got
+him to melt a couple of buckets of snow over the open-air campfire and
+wash the fruit-jars clean.
+
+"Now, Colonel," says the Boy, "bring along that buck-saw o' yours and
+lend a hand."
+
+They took off the top log from the south wall of the cabin, measured a
+two-foot space in the middle, and the Colonel sawed out the superfluous
+spruce intervening. While he went on doing the same for the other logs
+on that side, the Boy roughly chiselled a moderately flat sill. Then
+one after another he set up six of the tall glass jars in a row, and
+showed how, alternating with the other six bottles turned upside down,
+the thick belly of one accommodating itself to the thin neck of the
+other, the twelve made a very decent rectangle of glass. When they had
+hoisted up, and fixed in place, the logs on each side, and the big
+fellow that went all across on top; when they had filled the
+inconsiderable cracks between the bottles with some of the mud-mortar
+with which the logs were to be chinked, behold a double glass window
+fit for a king!
+
+The Boy was immensely pleased.
+
+"Oh, that's an old dodge," said Mac depreciatingly. "Why, they did that
+at Caribou!"
+
+"Then, why in--Why didn't you suggest it?"
+
+"You wait till you know more about this kind o' life, and you won't go
+in for fancy touches."
+
+Nevertheless, the man who had mined at Caribou seemed to feel that some
+contribution from him was necessary to offset the huge success of that
+window. He did not feel called upon to help to split logs for the roof
+of the Big Cabin, but he sat cutting and whittling away at a little
+shelf which he said was to be nailed up at the right of the Big Cabin
+door. Its use was not apparent, but no one dared call it a "fancy
+touch," for Mac was a miner, and had been to Caribou.
+
+When the shelf was nailed up, its maker brought forth out of his
+medicine-chest a bottle of Perry Davis's Pain-killer.
+
+"Now at Caribou," says he, "they haven't got any more thermometers
+kicking round than we have here, but they discovered that when Perry
+Davis congeals you must keep a sharp look-out for frost-bite, and when
+Perry Davis freezes solid, you'd better mind your eye and stay in your
+cabin, if you don't want to die on the trail." With which he tied a
+string round Perry Davis's neck, set the bottle up on the shelf, and
+secured it firmly in place. They all agreed it was a grand advantage to
+have been to Caribou!
+
+But Mac knew things that he had probably not learned there, about
+trees, and rocks, and beasts, and their manners and customs and family
+names. If there were more than a half-truth in the significant lament
+of a very different man, "I should be a poet if only I knew the names
+of things," then, indeed, Samuel MacCann was equipped to make a mark in
+literature.
+
+From the time he set foot on the volcanic shore of St Michael's Island,
+Mac had begun his "collection."
+
+Nowadays, when he would spend over "that truck of his" hours that might
+profitably (considering his talents) be employed in helping to fortify
+the camp against the Arctic winter, his companions felt it little use
+to remonstrate.
+
+By themselves they got on rapidly with work on the roof, very much
+helped by three days' unexpectedly mild weather. When the split logs
+had been marshalled together on each side of the comb, they covered
+them with dried moss and spruce boughs.
+
+Over all they laid a thick blanket of the earth which had been dug out
+to make a level foundation. The cracks in the walls were chinked with
+moss and mud-mortar. The floor was the naked ground, "to be carpeted
+with skins by-and-by," so Mac said; but nobody believed Mac would put a
+skin to any such sensible use.
+
+The unreasonable mildness of three or four days and the little surface
+thaw, came to an abrupt end in a cold rain that turned to sleet as it
+fell. Nobody felt like going far afield just then, even after game, but
+they had set the snare that Nicholas told the Boy about on that first
+encounter in the wood. Nicholas, it seemed, had given him a noose made
+of twisted sinew, and showed how it worked in a running loop. He had
+illustrated the virtue of this noose when attached to a pole balanced
+in the crotch of a tree, caught over a horizontal stick by means of a
+small wooden pin tied to the snare. A touch at the light end of the
+suspended pole (where the baited loop dangles) loosens the pin, and the
+heavy end of the pole falls, hanging ptarmigan or partridge in the air.
+
+For some time after rigging this contrivance, whenever anyone reported
+"tracks," Mac and the Boy would hasten to the scene of action, and set
+a new snare, piling brush on each side of the track that the game had
+run in, so barring other ways, and presenting a line of least
+resistance straight through the loop.
+
+In the early days Mac would come away from these preparations saying
+with dry pleasure:
+
+"Now, with luck, we may get a _Xema Sabinii_," or some such fearful
+wildfowl.
+
+"Good to eat?" the Boy would ask, having had his disappointments ere
+now in moments of hunger for fresh meat, when Mac, with the nearest
+approach to enthusiasm he permitted himself, had brought in some
+miserable little hawk-owl or a three-toed woodpecker to add, not to the
+larder, but to the "collection."
+
+"No, you don't _eat_ Sabine gulls," Mac would answer pityingly.
+
+But those snares never seemed to know what they were there for. The
+first one was set expressly to catch one of the commonest birds that
+fly--Mac's _Lagopus albus_, the beautiful white Arctic grouse, or at
+the very least a _Bonasa umbellus_, which, being interpreted, is ruffed
+ptarmigan. The tracks had been bird tracks, but the creature that swung
+in the air next day was a baby hare. The Schoolmaster looked upon the
+incident as being in the nature of a practical joke, and resented it.
+But the others were enchanted, and professed thereafter a rooted
+suspicion of the soundness of the Schoolmaster's Natural History, which
+nobody actually felt. For he had never yet pretended to know anything
+that he didn't know well; and when Potts would say something
+disparaging of Mac's learning behind his back (which was against the
+unwritten rules of the game) the Colonel invariably sat on Potts.
+
+"Knows a darned sight too much? No, he _don't_, sir; that's just the
+remarkable thing about Mac. He isn't trying to carry any more than he
+can swing."
+
+At the same time it is to be feared that none of his companions really
+appreciated the pedagogue's learning. Nor had anyone but the Boy
+sympathised with his resolution to make a Collection. What they wanted
+was eatable game, and they affected no intelligent interest in knowing
+the manners and customs of the particular species that was sending up
+appetising odours from the pot.
+
+They even applauded the rudeness of the Boy, who one day responded to
+Mac's gravely jubilant "Look here! I've got the _Parus Hudsonicus_!"--
+
+"Poor old man! What do you do for it?"
+
+And when anybody after that was indisposed, they said he might be
+sickening for an attack of Parus Hudsonicus, and in that case it was a
+bad look-out.
+
+Well for Mac that he wouldn't have cared a red cent to impress the
+greatest naturalist alive, let alone a lot of fellows who didn't know a
+titmouse from a disease.
+
+Meanwhile work on the Big Cabin had gone steadily forward. From the
+outside it looked finished now, and distinctly imposing. From what were
+left of the precious planks out of the bottom of the best boat they had
+made the door--two by four, and opening directly in front of that
+masterpiece, the rock fireplace. The great stone chimney was the pride
+of the camp and the talk before the winter was done of all "the Lower
+River."
+
+Spurred on partly by the increased intensity of the cold, partly by the
+Colonel's nonsense about the way they did it "down South," Mac roused
+himself, and turned out a better piece of masonry for the Big Cabin
+than he had thought necessary for his own. But everybody had a share in
+the glory of that fireplace. The Colonel, Potts, and the Boy selected
+the stone, and brought it on a rude litter out of a natural quarry from
+a place a mile or more away up on the bare mountain-side. O'Flynn mixed
+and handed up the mud-mortar, while Mac put in some brisk work with it
+before it stiffened in the increasing cold.
+
+Everybody was looking forward to getting out of the tent and into the
+warm cabin, and the building of the fireplace stirred enthusiasm. It
+was two and a half feet deep, three and a half feet high, and four feet
+wide, and when furnished with ten-inch hack logs, packed in glowing
+ashes and laid one above another, with a roaring good blaze in front of
+birch and spruce, that fire would take a lot of beating, as the Boy
+admitted, "even in the tat-pine Florida country."
+
+But no fire on earth could prevent the cabin from being swept through,
+the moment the door was opened, by a fierce and icy air-current. The
+late autumnal gales revealed the fact that the sole means of
+ventilation had been so nicely contrived that whoever came in or went
+out admitted a hurricane of draught that nearly knocked him down. Potts
+said it took a good half-hour, after anyone had opened the door, to
+heat the place up again.
+
+"What! You cold?" inquired the usual culprit. The Boy had come in to
+put an edge on his chopper. "It's stopped snowin', an' you better come
+along with me, Potts. Swing an axe for a couple of hours--that'll warm
+you."
+
+"I've got rheumatism in my shoulder to-day," says Potts, hugging the
+huge fire closer.
+
+"And you've got something wrong with your eyes, eh, Mac?"
+
+Potts narrowed his and widened the great mouth; but he had turned his
+head so Mac couldn't see him.
+
+The Nova Scotian only growled and refilled his pipe. Up in the woods
+the Boy repeated the conversation to the Colonel, who looked across at
+O'Flynn several yards away, and said: "Hush!"
+
+"Why must I shut up? Mac's _eyes_ do look rather queer and bloodshot. I
+should think he'd rather feel we lay it to his eyes than know we're
+afraid he's peterin' out altogether."
+
+"I never said I was afraid--"
+
+"No, you haven't _said_ much." "I haven't opened my head about it."
+
+"No, but you've tried hard enough for five or six days to get Mac to
+the point where he would come out and show us how to whip-saw. You
+haven't _said_ anything, but you've--you've got pretty dignified each
+time you failed, and we all know what that means."
+
+"We ought to have begun sawing boards for our bunks and swing-shelf a
+week back, before this heavy snowfall. Besides, there's enough
+fire-wood now; we're only marking time until--"
+
+"Until Mac's eyes get all right. I understand."
+
+Again the Colonel had made a sound like "Sh!" and went on swinging his
+axe.
+
+They worked without words till the Boy's tree came down. Then he
+stopped a moment, and wiped his face.
+
+"It isn't so cold to-day, not by a long shot, for all Potts's howling
+about his rheumatics."
+
+"It isn't cold that starts that kind of pain."
+
+"No, siree. I'm not much of a doctor, but I can see Potts's rheumatism
+doesn't depend on the weather."
+
+"Never you mind Potts."
+
+"I don't mind Potts. I only mind Mac. What's the matter with Mac,
+anyway?"
+
+"Oh, he's just got cold feet. Maybe he'll thaw out by-and-by."
+
+"Did you ever think what Mac's like? With that square-cut jaw and
+sawed-off nose, everything about him goin' like this"--the Boy
+described a few quick blunt angles in the air--"well, sir, he's the
+livin' image of a monkey-wrench. I'm comin' to think he's as much like
+it inside as he is out. He can screw up for a prayer-meetin', or he can
+screw down for business--when he's a mind, but, as Jimmie over there
+says, 'the divil a different pace can you put him through.' I _like_
+monkey-wrenches! I'm only sayin' they aren't as limber as willa-trees."
+
+No response from the Colonel, who was making the chips fly. It had cost
+his great body a good many aches and bruises, but he was a capital
+axeman now, and not such a bad carpenter, though when the Boy said as
+much he had answered:
+
+"Carpenter! I'm just a sort of a well-meanin' wood-butcher"; and deeply
+he regretted that in all his young years on a big place in the country
+he had learnt so little about anything but horses and cattle.
+
+On the way back to dinner they spoke again of this difficulty of the
+boards. O'Flynn whistled "Rory O'More" with his pleasant air of
+detachment.
+
+"You and the others would take more interest in the subject," said the
+Boy a little hotly, "if we hadn't let you fellows use nearly all the
+boat-planks for _your_ bunks, and now we haven't got any for our own."
+
+"_Let_ us use 'em! Faith! we had a right to'm."
+
+"To boards out of _our_ boat!"
+
+"And ye can have the loan o' the whip-saw to make more, whenever the
+fancy takes ye."
+
+"Loan o' the whip-saw! Why, it's mine," says the Colonel.
+
+"Divil a bit of it, man!" says O'Flynn serenely. "Everything we've got
+belongs to all of us, except a sack o' coffee, a medicine-chest, and a
+dimmi-john. And it's mesilf that's afraid the dimmi-john--"
+
+"What's the use of my having bought a whip-saw?" interrupted the
+Colonel, hurriedly. "What's the good of it, if the only man that knows
+how to use it--"
+
+"Is more taken up wid bein' a guardjin angel to his pardner's
+dimmi-john--"
+
+The Colonel turned and frowned at the proprietor of the dimmi-john. The
+Boy had dropped behind to look at some marten tracks in the
+fresh-fallen snow.
+
+"I'll follow that trail after dinner," says he, catching up the others
+in time to hear O'Flynn say:
+
+"If it wusn't that ye think only a feller that's been to Caribou can
+teach ye annything it's Jimmie O'Flynn that 'ud show ye how to play a
+chune on that same whip-saw."
+
+"Will you show us after dinner?"
+
+"Sure I will."
+
+And he was as good as his word.
+
+This business of turning a tree into boards without the aid of a
+saw-mill is a thing many placer-miners have to learn; for, even if they
+are disposed to sleep on the floor, and to do without shelves, they
+can't do sluicing without sluice-boxes, and they can't make those long,
+narrow boxes without boards.
+
+So every party that is well fitted out has a whip-saw.
+
+"Furrst ye dig a pit," O'Flynn had said airily, stretched out before
+the fire after dinner. "Make it about four feet deep, and as long as
+ye'd like yer boards. When ye've done that I'll come and take a hand."
+
+The little job was not half finished when the light tailed. Two days
+more of soil-burning and shovelling saw it done.
+
+"Now ye sling a couple o' saplings acrost the durrt ye've chucked out.
+R-right! Now ye roll yer saw-timber inter the middle. R-right! An' on
+each side ye want a log to stand on. See? Wid yer 'guide-man' on top
+sthradlin' yer timberr, watchin' the chalk-line and doin' the pull-up,
+and the otherr fellerr in the pit lookin' afther the haul-down, ye'll
+be able to play a chune wid that there whip-saw that'll make the
+serryphims sick o' plain harps." O'Flynn superintended it all, and even
+Potts had the curiosity to come out and see what they were up to. Mac
+was "kind o' dozin'" by the fire.
+
+When the frame was finished O'Flynn helped to put the trial-log in
+place, having marked it off with charcoal to indicate inch and a
+quarter planks. Then the Colonel, down in the pit, and O'Flynn on top
+of the frame, took the great two-handled saw between them, and began
+laboriously, one drawing the big blade up, and the other down,
+vertically through the log along the charcoal line.
+
+"An' _that's_ how it's done, wid bits of yer arrums and yer back that
+have niver been called on to wurruk befure. An' whin ye've been at it
+an hour ye'll find it goes betther wid a little blasphemin';" and he
+gave his end of the saw to the reluctant Potts.
+
+Potts was about this time as much of a problem to his pardners as was
+the ex-schoolmaster. If the bank clerk had surprised them all by his
+handiness on board ship, and by making a crane to swing the pots over
+the fire, he surprised them all still more in these days by an apparent
+eclipse of his talents. It was unaccountable. Potts's carpentering,
+Potts's all-round cleverness, was, like "payrock in a pocket," as the
+miners say, speedily worked out, and not a trace of it afterwards to be
+found.
+
+But less and less was the defection of the Trio felt. The burly
+Kentucky stock-farmer was getting his hand in at "frontier" work,
+though he still couldn't get on without his "nigger," as the Boy said,
+slyly indicating that it was he who occupied this exalted post. These
+two soon had the bunks made out of the rough planks they had sawed with
+all a green-horn's pains. They put in a fragrant mattress of spring
+moss, and on that made up a bed of blankets and furs.
+
+More boards were laboriously turned out to make the great swing-shelf
+to hang up high in the angle of the roof, where the provisions might be
+stored out of reach of possible marauders.
+
+The days were very short now, bringing only about five hours of pallid
+light, so little of which struggled through the famous bottle-window
+that at all hours they depended chiefly on the blaze from the great
+fireplace. There was still a good deal of work to be done indoors,
+shelves to be put up on the left as you entered (whereon the
+granite-ware tea-service, etc., was kept), a dinner-table to be made,
+and three-legged stools. While these additions--"fancy touches," as the
+Trio called them--were being made, Potts and O'Flynn, although
+occasionally they went out for an hour or two, shot-gun on shoulder,
+seldom brought home anything, and for the most part were content with
+doing what they modestly considered their share of the cooking and
+washing. For the rest, they sat by the fire playing endless games of
+euchre, seven-up and bean poker, while Mac, more silent than ever,
+smoked and read Copps's "Mining Laws" and the magazines of the previous
+August.
+
+Nobody heard much in those days of Caribou. The Colonel had gradually
+slipped into the position of Boss of the camp. The Trio were still just
+a trifle afraid of him, and he, on his side, never pressed a dangerous
+issue too far.
+
+But this is a little to anticipate.
+
+One bitter gray morning, that had reduced Perry Davis to a solid lump
+of ice, O'Flynn, the Colonel, and the Boy were bringing into the cabin
+the last of the whip-sawed boards. The Colonel halted and looked
+steadily up the river.
+
+"Is that a beast or a human?" said he.
+
+"It's a man," the Boy decided after a moment--"no, two men, single
+file, and--yes--Colonel, it's dogs. Hooray! a dog-team at last!"
+
+They had simultaneously dropped the lumber. The Boy ran on to tell the
+cook to prepare more grub, and then pelted after O'Flynn and the
+Colonel, who had gone down to meet the newcomers--an Indian driving
+five dogs, which were hitched tandem to a low Esquimaux sled, with a
+pack and two pairs of web-foot snow-shoes lashed on it, and followed by
+a white man. The Indian was a fine fellow, younger than Prince
+Nicholas, and better off in the matter of eyes. The white man was a
+good deal older than either, with grizzled hair, a worn face, bright
+dark eyes, and a pleasant smile.
+
+"I had heard some white men had camped hereabouts," says he. "I am glad
+to see we have such substantial neighbours." He was looking up at the
+stone chimney, conspicuous a long way off.
+
+"We didn't know we had any white neighbours," said the Colonel in his
+most grand and gracious manner. "How far away are you, sir?"
+
+"About forty miles above."
+
+As he answered he happened to be glancing at the Boy, and observed his
+eagerness cloud slightly. Hadn't Nicholas said it was "about forty
+miles above" that the missionaries lived?
+
+"But to be only forty miles away," the stranger went on,
+misinterpreting the fading gladness, "is to be near neighbours in this
+country."
+
+"We aren't quite fixed yet," said the Colonel, "but you must come in
+and have some dinner with us. We can promise you a good fire, anyhow."
+
+"Thank you. You have chosen a fine site." And the bright eyes with the
+deep crow's-feet raying out from the corners scanned the country in so
+keen and knowing a fashion that the Boy, with hope reviving, ventured:
+
+"Are--are you a prospector?"
+
+"No. I am Father Wills from Holy Cross."
+
+"Oh!" And the Boy presently caught up with the Indian, and walked on
+beside him, looking back every now and then to watch the dogs or
+examine the harness. The driver spoke English, and answered questions
+with a tolerable intelligence. "Are dogs often driven without reins?"
+
+The Indian nodded.
+
+The Colonel, after the stranger had introduced himself, was just a
+shade more reserved, but seemed determined not to be lacking in
+hospitality. O'Flynn was overflowing, or would have been had the Jesuit
+encouraged him. He told their story, or, more properly, his own, and
+how they had been wrecked.
+
+"And so ye're the Father Superior up there?" says the Irishman, pausing
+to take breath.
+
+"No. Our Superior is Father Brachet. That's a well-built cabin!"
+
+The dogs halted, though they had at least five hundred yards still to
+travel before they would reach the well-built cabin.
+
+"_Mush!_" shouted the Indian.
+
+The dogs cleared the ice-reef, and went spinning along so briskly over
+the low hummocks that the driver had to run to keep up with them.
+
+The Boy was flying after when the priest, having caught sight of his
+face, called out: "Here! Wait! Stop a moment!" and hurried forward.
+
+He kicked through the ice-crust, gathered up a handful of snow, and
+began to rub it on the Boy's right cheek.
+
+"What in the name of--" The Boy was drawing back angrily.
+
+"Keep still," ordered the priest; "your cheek is frozen"; and he
+applied more snow and more friction. "You ought to watch one another in
+such weather as this. When a man turns dead-white like that, he's
+touched with frost-bite." After he had restored the circulation: "There
+now, don't go near the fire, or it will begin to hurt."
+
+"Thank you," said the Boy, a little shame-faced. "It's all right now, I
+suppose?"
+
+"I think so," said the priest. "You'll lose the skin, and you may be a
+little sore--nothing to speak of," with which he fell back to the
+Colonel's side.
+
+The dogs had settled down into a jog-trot now, but were still well on
+in front.
+
+"Is 'mush' their food?" asked the Boy.
+
+"_Mush?_ No, fish."
+
+"Why does your Indian go on like that about mush, then?"
+
+"Oh, that's the only word the dogs know, except--a--certain expressions
+we try to discourage the Indians from using. In the old days the
+dog-drivers used to say 'mahsh.' Now you never hear anything but
+swearing and 'mush,' a corruption of the French-Canadian _marche_." He
+turned to the Colonel: "You'll get over trying to wear cheechalko boots
+here--nothing like mucklucks with a wisp of straw inside for this
+country."
+
+"I agree wid ye. I got me a pair in St. Michael's," says O'Flynn
+proudly, turning out his enormous feet. "Never wore anything so
+comf'table in me life."
+
+"You ought to have drill parkis too, like this of mine, to keep out the
+wind."
+
+They were going up the slope now, obliquely to the cabin, close behind
+the dogs, who were pulling spasmodically between their little rests.
+
+Father Wills stooped and gathered up some moss that the wind had swept
+almost bare of snow. "You see that?" he said to O'Flynn, while the Boy
+stopped, and the Colonel hurried on. "Wherever you find that growing no
+man need starve."
+
+The Colonel looked back before entering the cabin and saw that the Boy
+seemed to have forgotten not alone the Indian, but the dogs, and was
+walking behind with the Jesuit, face upturned, smiling, as friendly as
+you please.
+
+Within a different picture.
+
+Potts and Mac were having a row about something, and the Colonel struck
+in sharply on their growling comments upon each other's character and
+probable destination.
+
+"Got plenty to eat? Two hungry men coming in. One's an Indian, and you
+know what that means, and the other's a Catholic priest." It was this
+bomb that he had hurried on to get exploded and done with before the
+said priest should appear on the scene.
+
+"A _what_?" Mac raised his heavy eyes with fight in every wooden
+feature.
+
+"A Jesuit priest is what I said."
+
+"He won't eat his dinner here."
+
+"That is exactly what he will do."
+
+"Not by--" Whether it was the monstrous proposition that had unstrung
+Mac, he was obliged to steady himself against the table with a shaking
+hand. But he set those square features of his like iron, and, says he,
+"No Jesuit sits down to the same table with me."
+
+"That means, then, that you'll eat alone."
+
+"Not if I know it."
+
+The Colonel slid in place the heavy wooden bar that had never before
+been requisitioned to secure the door, and he came and stood in the
+middle of the cabin, where he could let out all his inches. Just
+clearing the swing-shelf, he pulled his great figure up to its full
+height, and standing there like a second Goliath, he said quite softly
+in that lingo of his childhood that always came back to his tongue's
+tip in times of excitement: "Just as shuah as yo' bohn that priest will
+eat his dinner to-day in my cabin, sah; and if yo' going t' make any
+trouble, just say so now, and we'll get it ovah, and the place cleaned
+up again befoh our visitors arrive."
+
+"Mind what you're about, Mac," growled Potts. "You know he could lick
+the stuffin' out o' you."
+
+The ex-schoolmaster produced some sort of indignant sound in his throat
+and turned, as if he meant to go out. The Colonel came a little nearer.
+Mac flung up his head and squared for battle.
+
+Potts, in a cold sweat, dropped a lot of tinware with a rattle, while
+the Colonel said, "No, no. We'll settle this after the people go, Mac."
+Then in a whisper: "Look here: I've been trying to shield you for ten
+days. Don't give yourself away now--before the first white neighbour
+that comes to see us. You call yourself a Christian. Just see if you
+can't behave like one, for an hour or two, to a fellow-creature that's
+cold and hungry. Come, _you're_ the man we've always counted on! Do the
+honours, and take it out of me after our guests are gone."
+
+Mac seemed in a haze. He sat down heavily on some beanbags in the
+corner; and when the newcomers were brought in and introduced, he "did
+the honours" by glowering at them with red eyes, never breaking his
+surly silence.
+
+"Well!" says Father Wills, looking about, "I must say you're very
+comfortable here. If more people made homes like this, there'd be fewer
+failures." They gave him the best place by the fire, and Potts dished
+up dinner. There were only two stools made yet. The Boy rolled his
+section of sawed spruce over near the priest, and prepared to dine at
+his side.
+
+"No, no," said Father Wills firmly. "You shall sit as far away from
+this splendid blaze as you can get, or you will have trouble with that
+cheek." So the Boy had to yield his place to O'Flynn, and join Mac over
+on the bean-bags.
+
+"Why didn't you get a parki when you were at St. Michael's?" said the
+priest as this change was being effected.
+
+"We had just as much--more than we could carry. Besides, I thought we
+could buy furs up river; anyway, I'm warm enough."
+
+"No you are not," returned the priest smiling. "You must get a parki
+with a hood."
+
+"I've got an Arctic cap; it rolls down over my ears and goes all round
+my neck--just leaves a little place in front for my eyes."
+
+"Yes; wear that if you go on the trail; but the good of the parki hood
+is, that it is trimmed all round with long wolf-hair. You see"--he
+picked his parki up off the floor and showed it to the company--"those
+long hairs standing out all round the face break the force of the wind.
+It is wonderful how the Esquimaux hood lessens the chance of
+frost-bite."
+
+While the only object in the room that he didn't seem to see was Mac,
+he was most taken up with the fireplace.
+
+The Colonel laid great stress on the enormous services of the
+delightful, accomplished master-mason over there on the beanbags, who
+sat looking more than ever like a monkey-wrench incarnate.
+
+But whether that Jesuit was as wily as the Calvinist thought, he had
+quite wit enough to overlook the great chimney-builder's wrathful
+silence.
+
+He was not the least "professional," talked about the country and how
+to live here, saying incidentally that he had spent twelve years at the
+mission of the Holy Cross. The Yukon wasn't a bad place to live in, he
+told them, if men only took the trouble to learn how to live here.
+While teaching the Indians, there was a great deal to learn from them
+as well.
+
+"You must all come and see our schools," he wound up.
+
+"We'd like to awfully," said the Boy, and all but Mac echoed him. "We
+were so afraid," he went on, "that we mightn't see anybody all winter
+long."
+
+"Oh, you'll have more visitors than you want."
+
+"_Shall_ we, though?" Then, with a modified rapture: "Indians, I
+suppose, and--and missionaries."
+
+"Traders, too, and miners, and this year cheechalkos as well. You are
+directly on the great highway of winter travel. Now that there's a good
+hard crust on the snow you will have dog-trains passing every week, and
+sometimes two or three."
+
+It was good news!
+
+"We've already had one visitor before you," said the Boy, looking
+wonderfully pleased at the prospect the priest had opened out. "You
+must know Nicholas of Pymeut, don't you?"
+
+"Oh yes; we all know Nicholas"; and the priest smiled.
+
+"We _like_ him," returned the Boy as if some slighting criticism had
+been passed upon his friend.
+
+"Of course you do; so do we all"; and still that look of quiet
+amusement on the worn face and a keener twinkle glinting in the eyes.
+
+"We're afraid he's sick," the Boy began.
+
+Before the priest could answer, "He was educated at Howly Cross, he
+_says_," contributed O'Flynn.
+
+"Oh, he's been to Holy Cross, among other places."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Well, Nicholas is a most impartial person. He was born at Pymeut, but
+his father, who is the richest and most intelligent man in his tribe,
+took Nicholas to Ikogimeut when the boy was only six. He was brought up
+in the Russian mission there, as the father had been before him, and
+was a Greek--in religion--till he was fourteen. There was a famine that
+year down yonder, so Nicholas turned Catholic and came up to us. He was
+at Holy Cross some years, when business called him to Anvik, where he
+turned Episcopalian. At Eagle City, I believe, he is regarded as a
+pattern Presbyterian. There are those that say, since he has been a
+pilot, Nicholas makes six changes a trip in his religious convictions."
+
+Father Wills saw that the Colonel, to whom he most frequently addressed
+himself, took his pleasantry gravely. "Nicholas is not a bad fellow,"
+he added. "He told me you had been kind to him."
+
+"If you believe that about his insincerity," said the Colonel, "are you
+not afraid the others you spend your life teaching may turn out as
+little credit to you--to Christianity?"
+
+The priest glanced at the listening Indian. "No," said he gravely; "I
+do not think _all_ the natives are like Nicholas. Andrew here is a true
+son of the Church. But even if it were otherwise, _we_, you know"--the
+Jesuit rose from the table with that calm smile of his--"we simply do
+the work without question. The issue is not in our hands." He made the
+sign of the cross and set back his stool.
+
+"Come, Andrew," he said; "we must push on."
+
+The Indian repeated the priest's action, and went out to see to the
+dogs.
+
+"Oh, are you going right away?" said the Colonel politely, and O'Flynn
+volubly protested.
+
+"We thought," said the Boy, "you'd sit awhile and smoke and--at least,
+of course, I don't mean smoke exactly--but--"
+
+The Father smiled and shook his head.
+
+"Another time I would stay gladly."
+
+"Where are you going now?"
+
+"Andrew and I are on our way to the _Oklahoma_, the steamship frozen in
+the ice below here."
+
+"How far?" asked the Boy.
+
+"About seven miles below the Russian mission, and a mile or so up the
+Kuskoquim Slough."
+
+"Wrecked there?"
+
+"Oh no. Gone into winter quarters."
+
+"In a slew?" for it was so Father Wills pronounced s-l-o-u-g-h.
+
+"Oh, that's what they call a blind river up in this country. They come
+into the big streams every here and there, and cheechalkos are always
+mistaking them for the main channel. Sometimes they're wider and deeper
+for a mile or so than the river proper, but before you know it they
+land you in a marsh. This place I'm going to, a little way up the
+Kuskoquim, out of danger when the ice breaks up, has been chosen for a
+new station by the N. A. T. and T. Company--rival, you know, to the
+old-established Alaska Commercial, that inherited the Russian fur
+monopoly and controlled the seal and salmon trade so long. Well, the
+younger company runs the old one hard, and they've sent this steamer
+into winter quarters loaded with provisions, ready to start for Dawson
+the instant the ice goes out."
+
+"Why, then, it's the very boat that'll be takin' us to the Klondyke."
+
+"You just goin' down to have a look at her?" asked Potts enviously.
+
+"No. I go to get relief for the Pymeuts."
+
+"What's the matter with 'em?"
+
+"Epidemic all summer, starvation now."
+
+"Guess you won't find _any_body's got such a lot he wants to give it
+away to the Indians."
+
+"Our Father Superior has given much," said the priest gently; "but we
+are not inexhaustible at Holy Cross. And the long winter is before us.
+Many of the supply steamers have failed to get in, and the country is
+flooded with gold-seekers. There'll be wide-spread want this
+year--terrible suffering all up and down the river."
+
+"The more reason for people to hold on to what they've got. A white
+man's worth more 'n an Indian."
+
+The priest's face showed no anger, not even coldness.
+
+"White men have got a great deal out of Alaska and as yet done little
+but harm here. The government ought to help the natives, and we believe
+the Government will. All we ask of the captain of the _Oklahoma_ is to
+sell us, on fair terms, a certain supply, we assuming part of the risk,
+and both of us looking to the Government to make it good."
+
+"Reckon you'll find that steamer-load down in the ice is worth its
+weight in gold," said Potts.
+
+"One must always try," replied the Father.
+
+He left the doorpost, straightened his bowed back, and laid a hand on
+the wooden latch.
+
+"But Nicholas--when you left Pymeut was he--" began the Boy.
+
+"Oh, he is all right," the Father smiled and nodded. "Brother Paul has
+been looking after Nicholas's father. The old chief has enough food,
+but he has been very ill. By the way, have you any letters you want to
+send out?"
+
+"Oh, if we'd only known!" was the general chorus; and Potts flew to
+close and stamp one he had hardly more than begun to the future Mrs.
+Potts.
+
+The Boy had thoughtlessly opened the door to have a look at the dogs.
+
+"Shut that da--Don't keep the door open!" howled Potts, trying to hold
+his precious letter down on the table while he added "only two words."
+The Boy slammed the door behind him.
+
+"With all our trouble, the cabin isn't really warm," said the Colonel
+apologetically. "In a wind like this, if the door is open, we have to
+hold fast to things to keep them from running down the Yukon. It's a
+trial to anybody's temper."
+
+"Why don't you build a false wall?"
+
+"Well, I don't know; we hadn't thought of it."
+
+"You'd find it correct this draught"; and the priest explained his
+views on the subject while Potts's letter was being addressed. Andrew
+put his head in.
+
+"Ready, Father!"
+
+As the priest was pocketing the letter the Boy dashed in, put on the
+Arctic cap he set such store by, and a fur coat and mittens.
+
+"Do you mind if I go a little way with you?" he said.
+
+"Of course not," answered the priest. "I will send him back in half an
+hour," he said low to the Colonel. "It's a hitter day."
+
+It was curious how already he had divined the relation of the elder man
+to the youngest of that odd household.
+
+The moment they had gone Mac, with an obvious effort, pulled himself up
+out of his corner, and, coming towards the Colonel at the fireplace, he
+said thickly:
+
+"You've put an insult upon me, Warren, and that's what I stand from no
+man. Come outside."
+
+The Colonel looked at him.
+
+"All right, Mac; but we've just eaten a rousing big dinner. Even
+Sullivan wouldn't accept that as the moment for a round. We'll both
+have forty winks, hey? and Potts shall call us, and O'Flynn shall be
+umpire. You can have the Boy's bunk."
+
+Mac was in a haze again, and allowed himself to be insinuated into bed.
+
+The others got rid of the dinner things, and "sat round" for an hour.
+
+"Doubt if he sleeps long," says Potts a little before two; "that's what
+he's been doing all morning."
+
+"We haven't had any fresh meat for a week," returns the Colonel
+significantly. "Why don't you and O'Flynn go down to meet the Boy, and
+come round by the woods? There'll be full moon up by four o'clock; you
+might get a brace of grouse or a rabbit or two."
+
+O'Flynn was not very keen about it; but the Jesuit's visit had stirred
+him up, and he offered less opposition to the unusual call to activity
+than the Colonel expected.
+
+When at last he was left alone with the sleeping man, the Kentuckian
+put on a couple more logs, and sat down to wait. At three he got up,
+swung the crane round so that the darting tongues of flame could lick
+the hot-water pot, and then he measured out some coffee. In a quarter
+of an hour the cabin was full of the fragrance of good Mocha.
+
+The Colonel sat and waited. Presently he poured out a little coffee,
+and drank it slowly, blissfully, with half-closed eyes. But when he had
+set the granite cup down again, he stood up alert, like a man ready for
+business. Mac had been asleep nearly three hours. The others wouldn't
+be long now.
+
+Well, if they came prematurely, they must go to the Little Cabin for
+awhile. The Colonel shot the bar across door and jamb for the second
+time that day. Mac stirred and lifted himself on his elbow, but he
+wasn't really awake.
+
+"Potts," he said huskily.
+
+The Colonel made no sound. "Potts, measure me out two fingers, will
+you? Cabin's damn cold."
+
+No answer.
+
+Mac roused himself, muttering compliments for Potts. When he had
+bundled himself out over the side of the bunk, he saw the Colonel
+seemingly dozing by the fire.
+
+He waited a moment. Then, very softly, he made his way to the farther
+end of the swing-shelf.
+
+The Colonel opened one eye, shut it, and shuffled in a sleepy sort of
+way. Mac turned sharply back to the fire.
+
+The Colonel opened his eyes and yawned.
+
+"I made some cawfee a little while back. Have some?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Better; it's A 1."
+
+"Where's Potts?"
+
+"Gone out for a little. Back soon." He poured out some of the strong,
+black decoction, and presented it to his companion. "Just try it.
+Finest cawfee in the world, sir."
+
+Mac poured it down without seeming to bother about tasting it.
+
+They sat quite still after that, till the Colonel said meditatively:
+
+"You and I had a little account to settle, didn't we?"
+
+"I'm ready."
+
+But neither moved for several moments.
+
+"See here, Mac: you haven't been ill or anything like that, have you?"
+
+"No." There was no uncertain note in the answer; if anything, there was
+in it more than the usual toneless decision. Mac's voice was
+machine-made--as innocent of modulation as a buzz-saw, and with the
+same uncompromising finality as the shooting of a bolt. "I'm ready to
+stand up against any man."
+
+"Good!" interrupted the Colonel. "Glad o' that, for I'm just longing to
+see you stand up--"
+
+Mac was on his feet in a flash.
+
+"You had only to say so, if you wanted to see me stand up against any
+man alive. And when I sit down again it's my opinion one of us two
+won't be good-lookin' any more."
+
+He pushed back the stools.
+
+"I thought maybe it was only necessary to mention it," said the Colonel
+slowly. "I've been wanting for a fortnight to see you stand up"--Mac
+turned fiercely--"against Samuel David MacCann."
+
+"Come on! I'm in no mood for monkeyin'!"
+
+"Nor I. I realise, MacCann, we've come to a kind of a crisis. Things in
+this camp are either going a lot better, or a lot worse, after to-day."
+
+"There's nothing wrong, if you quit asking dirty Jesuits to sit down
+with honest men."
+
+"Yes; there's something worse out o' shape than that."
+
+Mac waited warily.
+
+"When we were stranded here, and saw what we'd let ourselves in for,
+there wasn't one of us that didn't think things looked pretty much like
+the last o' pea time. There was just one circumstance that kept us from
+throwing up the sponge; _we had a man in camp."_
+
+The Colonel paused.
+
+Mac stood as expressionless as the wooden crane.
+
+"A man we all believed in, who was going to help us pull through."
+"That was you, I s'pose." Mac's hard voice chopped out the sarcasm.
+
+"You know mighty well who it was. The Boy's all right, but he's young
+for this kind o' thing--young and heady. There isn't much wrong with me
+that I'm aware of, except that I don't know shucks. Potts's petering
+out wasn't altogether a surprise, and nobody expected anything from
+O'Flynn till we got to Dawson, when a lawyer and a fella with capital
+behind him may come in handy. But there was one man--who had a head on
+him, who had experience, and who"--he leaned over to emphasise the
+climax--"who had _character_. It was on that man's account that I
+joined this party."
+
+Mac put his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall. His face
+began to look a little more natural. The long sleep or the coffee had
+cleared his eyes.
+
+"Shall I tell you what I heard about that man last night?" asked the
+Colonel gravely.
+
+Mac looked up, but never opened his lips.
+
+"You remember you wouldn't sit here--"
+
+"The Boy was always in and out. The cabin was cold."
+
+"I left the Boy and O'Flynn at supper-time and went down to the Little
+Cabin to--"
+
+"To see what I was doin'--to spy on me."
+
+"Well, all right--maybe I was spying, too. Incidentally I wanted to
+tell you the cabin was hot as blazes, and get you to come to supper. I
+met Potts hurrying up for his grub, and I said, 'Where's Mac? Isn't he
+coming?' and your pardner's answer was: 'Oh, let him alone. He's got a
+flask in his bunk, swillin' and gruntin'; he's just in hog-heaven.'"
+
+"Damn that sneak!"
+
+"The man he was talkin' about, Mac, was the man we had all built our
+hopes on."
+
+"I'll teach Potts--"
+
+"You can't, Mac. Potts has got to die and go to heaven--perhaps to
+hell, before he'll learn any good. But you're a different breed. Teach
+MacCann."
+
+Mac suddenly sat down on the stool with his head in his hands.
+
+"The Boy hasn't caught on," said the Colonel presently, "but he said
+something this morning to show he was wondering about the change that's
+come over you."
+
+"That I don't split wood all day, I suppose, when we've got enough for
+a month. Potts doesn't either. Why don't you go for Potts?"
+
+"As the Boy said, I don't care about Potts. It's Mac that matters."
+
+"Did the Boy say that?" He looked up.
+
+The Colonel nodded.
+
+"After you had made that chimney, you know, you were a kind of hero in
+his eyes."
+
+Mac looked away. "The cabin's been cold," he muttered.
+
+"We are going to remedy that."
+
+"I didn't bring any liquor into camp. You must admit that I didn't
+intend--"
+
+"I do admit it."
+
+"And when O'Flynn said that about keeping his big demijohn out of the
+inventory and apart from the common stores, I sat on him."
+
+"So you did."
+
+"I knew it was safest to act on the 'medicinal purposes' principle."
+
+"So it is."
+
+"But I wasn't thinking so much of O'Flynn. I was thinking of ... things
+that had happened before ... for ... I'd had experience. Drink was the
+curse of Caribou. It's something of a scourge up in Nova Scotia ... I'd
+had experience."
+
+"You did the very best thing possible under the circumstances." Mac was
+feeling about after his self-respect, and must be helped to get hold of
+it. "I realise, too, that the temptation is much greater in cold
+countries," said the Kentuckian unblushingly. "Italians and Greeks
+don't want fiery drinks half as much as Russians and
+Scandinavians--haven't the same craving as Nova Scotians and
+cold-country people generally, I suppose. But that only shows,
+temperance is of more vital importance in the North."
+
+"That's right! It's not much in my line to shift blame, even when I
+don't deserve it; but you know so much you might as well know ... it
+wasn't I who opened that demijohn first."
+
+"But you don't mind being the one to shut it up--do you?"
+
+"Shut it up?"
+
+"Yes; let's get it down and--" The Colonel swung it off the shelf. It
+was nearly empty, and only the Boy's and the Colonel's single bottles
+stood unbroached. Even so, Mac's prolonged spree was something of a
+mystery to the Kentuckian. It must be that a very little was too much
+for Mac. The Colonel handed the demijohn to his companion, and lit the
+solitary candle standing on its little block of wood, held in place
+between three half-driven nails.
+
+"What's that for?"
+
+"Don't you want to seal it up?"
+
+"I haven't got any wax."
+
+"I have an inch or so." The Colonel produced out of his pocket the only
+piece in camp.
+
+Mac picked up a billet of wood, and drove the cork in flush with the
+neck. Then, placing upright on the cork the helve of the hammer, he
+drove the cork down a quarter of an inch farther.
+
+"Give me your wax. What's for a seal?" They looked about. Mac's eye
+fell on a metal button that hung by a thread from the old militia
+jacket he was wearing. He put his hand up to it, paused, glanced
+hurriedly at the Colonel, and let his fingers fall.
+
+"Yes, yes," said the Kentuckian, "that'll make a capital seal."
+
+"No; something of yours, I think, Colonel. The top of that tony
+pencil-case, hey?"
+
+The Colonel produced his gold pencil, watched Mac heat the wax, drop it
+into the neck of the demijohn, and apply the initialled end of the
+Colonel's property. While Mac, without any further waste of words, was
+swinging the wicker-bound temptation up on the shelf again, they heard
+voices.
+
+"They're coming back," says the Kentuckian hurriedly. "But we've
+settled our little account, haven't we, old man?"
+
+Mac jerked his head in that automatic fashion that with him meant
+genial and whole-hearted agreement.
+
+"And if Potts or O'Flynn want to break that seal--"
+
+"I'll call 'em down," says Mac. And the Colonel knew the seal was safe.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+"By-the-by, Colonel," said the Boy, just as he was turning in that
+night, "I--a--I've asked that Jesuit chap to the House-Warming."
+
+"Oh, you did, did you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, you'd just better have a talk with Mac about it."
+
+"Yes. I've been tryin' to think how I'd square Mac. Of course, I know
+I'll have to go easy on the raw."
+
+"I reckon you just will."
+
+"If Monkey-wrench screws down hard on me, you'll come to the rescue,
+won't you, Colonel?"
+
+"No I'll side with Mac on that subject. Whatever he says, goes!"
+
+"Humph! _that_ Jesuit's all right."
+
+Not a word out of the Colonel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+TWO NEW SPISSIMENS
+
+Medwjedew (zu Luka). Tag' mal--wer bist du? Ich
+kenne dich nicht.
+
+Luka. Kennst du denn sonst alle Leute?
+
+Medwjedew. In meinem Revier muss ich jeden kennen und dich kenn'ich
+nicht....
+
+Luka. Das kommt wohl daher Onkelchen, dass dein Revier nicht die ganze
+Erde umfasst ... 's ist da noch ein Endchen draussen geblieben....
+
+
+One of the curious results of what is called wild life, is a blessed
+release from many of the timidities that assail the easy liver in the
+centres of civilisation. Potts was the only one in the white camp who
+had doubts about the wisdom of having to do with the natives.
+
+However, the agreeable necessity of going to Pymeut to invite Nicholas
+to the Blow-out was not forced upon the Boy. They were still hard at
+it, four days after the Jesuit had gone his way, surrounding the Big
+Cabin with a false wall, that final and effectual barrier against
+Boreas--finishing touch warranted to convert a cabin, so cold that it
+drove its inmates to drink, into a dwelling where practical people,
+without cracking a dreary joke, might fitly celebrate a House-Warming.
+
+In spite of the shortness of the days, Father Wills's suggestion was
+being carried out with a gratifying success. Already manifest were the
+advantages of the stockade, running at a foot's distance round the
+cabin to the height of the eaves, made of spruce saplings not even
+lopped of their short bushy branches, but planted close together, after
+burning the ground cleared of snow. A second visitation of mild
+weather, and a further two days' thaw, made the Colonel determine to
+fill in the space between the spruce stockade and the cabin with
+"burnt-out" soil closely packed down and well tramped in. It was
+generally conceded, as the winter wore on, that to this contrivance of
+the "earthwork" belonged a good half of the credit of the Big Cabin,
+and its renown as being the warmest spot on the lower river that
+terrible memorable year of the Klondyke Rush.
+
+The evergreen wall with the big stone chimney shouldering itself up to
+look out upon the frozen highway, became a conspicuous feature in the
+landscape, welcome as the weeks went on to many an eye wearied with
+long looking for shelter, and blinded by the snow-whitened waste.
+
+An exception to what became a rule was, of all men, Nicholas. When the
+stockade was half done, the Prince and an equerry appeared on the
+horizon, with the second team the camp had seen, the driver much
+concerned to steer clear of the softened snow and keep to that part of
+the river ice windswept and firm, if roughest of all. Nicholas regarded
+the stockade with a cold and beady eye.
+
+No, he hadn't time to look at it. He had promised to "mush." He wasn't
+even hungry.
+
+It did little credit to his heart, but he seemed more in haste to leave
+his new friends than the least friendly of them would have expected.
+
+"Oh, wait a sec.," urged the deeply disappointed Boy. "I wanted awf'ly
+to see how your sled is made. It's better 'n Father Wills'."
+
+"Humph!" grunted Nicholas scornfully; "him no got Innuit sled."
+
+"Mac and I are goin' to try soon's the stockade's done--"
+
+"Goo'-bye," interrupted Nicholas.
+
+But the Boy paid no attention to the word of farewell. He knelt down in
+the snow and examined the sled carefully.
+
+"Spruce runners," he called out to Mac, "and--jee! they're shod with
+ivory! _Jee!_ fastened with sinew and wooden pegs. Hey?"--looking up
+incredulously at Nicholas--"not a nail in the whole shebang, eh?"
+
+"Nail?" says Nicholas. "Huh, no _nail!_" as contemptuously as though
+the Boy had said "bread-crumbs."
+
+"Well, she's a daisy! When you comin' back?"
+
+"Comin' pretty quick; goin' pretty quick. Goo'-bye! _Mush!_" shouted
+Nicholas to his companion, and the dogs got up off their haunches.
+
+But the Boy only laughed at Nicholas's struggles to get started. He
+hung on to the loaded sled, examining, praising, while the dogs, after
+the merest affectation of trying to make a start, looked round at him
+over their loose collars and grinned contentedly.
+
+"Me got to mush. Show nex' time. Mush!"
+
+"What's here?" the Boy shouted through the "mushing"; and he tugged at
+the goodly load, so neatly disposed under an old reindeer-skin
+sleeping-bag, and lashed down with raw hide.
+
+That? Oh, that was fish. _"Fish!_ Got so much fish at starving Pymeut
+you can go hauling it down river? Well, sir, _we_ want fish. We _must_
+have fish. Hey?" The Boy appealed to the others.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"R-right y'arre!"
+
+"I reckon we just do!"
+
+But Nicholas had other views.
+
+"No, me take him--" He hitched his body in the direction of Ikogimeut.
+
+"Bless my soul! you've got enough there for a regiment. You goin' to
+sell him? Hey?"
+
+Nicholas shook his head.
+
+"Oh, come off the roof!" advised the Boy genially.
+
+"You ain't carryin' it about for your health, I suppose?" said Potts.
+
+"The people down at Ikogimeut don't need it like us. We're white
+duffers, and can't get fish through the ice. You sell _some_ of it to
+us." But Nicholas shook his head and shuffled along on his snow-shoes,
+beckoning the dog-driver to follow.
+
+"Or trade some fur--fur tay," suggested O'Flynn.
+
+"Or for sugar," said Mac.
+
+"Or for tobacco," tempted the Colonel.
+
+And before that last word Nicholas's resolve went down. Up at the cabin
+he unlashed the load, and it quickly became manifest that Nicholas was
+a dandy at driving a bargain. He kept on saying shamelessly:
+
+"More--more shuhg. Hey? Oh yes, me give heap fish. No nuff shuhg."
+
+If it hadn't been for Mac (his own clear-headed self again, and by no
+means to be humbugged by any Prince alive) the purchase of a portion of
+that load of frozen fish, corded up like so much wood, would have laid
+waste the commissariat.
+
+But if the white men after this passage did not feel an absolute
+confidence in Nicholas's fairness of mind, no such unworthy suspicion
+of them found lodgment in the bosom of the Prince. With the exception
+of some tobacco, he left all his ill-gotten store to be kept for him by
+his new friends till he should return. When was that to be? In five
+sleeps he would be back.
+
+"Good! We'll have the stockade done by then. What do you say to our big
+chimney, Nicholas?"
+
+He emitted a scornful "Peeluck!"
+
+"What! Our chimney no good?"
+
+He shrugged: "Why you have so tall hole your house? How you cover him
+up?"
+
+"We don't want to cover him up."
+
+"Humph! winter fin' you tall hole. Winter come down--bring in
+snow--drive fire out." He shivered in anticipation of what was to
+happen. "Peeluck!"
+
+The white men laughed.
+
+"What you up to now? Where you going?"
+
+Well, the fact was, Nicholas had been sent by his great ally, the
+Father Superior of Holy Cross, on a mission, very important, demanding
+despatch.
+
+"Father Brachet--him know him heap better send Nicholas when him want
+man go God-damn quick. Me no stop--no--no stop."
+
+He drew on his mittens proudly, unjarred by remembrance of how his good
+resolution had come to grief.
+
+"Where you off to now?"
+
+"Me ketchum Father Wills--me give letter." He tapped his
+deerskin-covered chest. "Ketchum _sure_ 'fore him leave Ikogimeut."
+
+"You come back with Father Wills?"
+
+Nicholas nodded.
+
+"Hooray! we'll all work like sixty!" shouted the Boy, "and by Saturday
+(that's five sleeps) we'll have the wall done and the house warm, and
+you and"--he caught himself up; not thus in public would he break the
+news to Mac--"you'll be back in time for the big Blow-Out." To clinch
+matters, he accompanied Nicholas from the cabin to the river trail,
+explaining: "You savvy? Big feast--all same Indian. Heap good grub. No
+prayer-meetin'--you savvy?--no church this time. Big fire, big feed.
+All kinds--apples, shuhg, bacon--no cook him, you no like," he added,
+basely truckling to the Prince's peculiar taste.
+
+Nicholas rolled his single eye in joyful anticipation, and promised
+faithfully to grace the scene.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+This was all very fine ... but Father Wills! The last thing at night
+and the first thing in the morning the Boy looked the problem in the
+face, and devised now this, now that, adroit and disarming fashion of
+breaking the news to Mac.
+
+But it was only when the daring giver of invitations was safely in bed,
+and Mac equally safe down in the Little Cabin, that it seemed possible
+to broach the subject. He devised scenes in which, airily and
+triumphantly, he introduced Father Wills, and brought Mac to the point
+of pining for Jesuit society; but these scenes were actable only under
+conditions of darkness and of solitude. The Colonel refused to have
+anything to do with the matter.
+
+"Our first business, as I see it, is to keep peace in the camp, and
+hold fast to a good understanding with one another. It's just over
+little things like this that trouble begins. Mac's one of us; Father
+Wills is an outsider. I won't rile Mac for the sake of any Jesuit
+alive. No, sir; this is _your_ funeral, and you're obliged to attend."
+
+Before three of Nicholas's five sleeps were accomplished, the Boy began
+to curse the hour he had laid eyes on Father Wills. He began even to
+speculate desperately on the good priest's chances of tumbling into an
+air-hole, or being devoured by a timely wolf. But no, life was never so
+considerate as that. Yet he could neither face being the cause of the
+first serious row in camp, nor endure the thought of having his
+particular guest--drat him!--flouted, and the whole House-Warming
+turned to failure and humiliation.
+
+Indeed, the case looked desperate. Only one day more now before he
+would appear--be flouted, insulted, and go off wounded, angry, leaving
+the Boy with an irreconciliable quarrel against Mac, and the
+House-Warming turned to chill recrimination and to wretchedness.
+
+But until the last phantasmal hope went down before the logic of events
+it was impossible not to cling to the idea of melting Mac's Arctic
+heart. There was still one course untried.
+
+Since there was so little left to do to the stockade, the Boy announced
+that he thought he'd go up over the hill for a tramp. Gun in hand and
+grub in pocket, he marched off to play his last trump-card. If he could
+bring home a queer enough bird or beast for the collection, there was
+still hope. To what lengths might Mac not go if one dangled before him
+the priceless bait of a golden-tipped emperor goose, dressed in
+imperial robes of rose-flecked snow? Or who, knowing Mac, would not
+trust a _Xema Sabinii_ to play the part of a white-winged angel of
+peace? Failing some such heavenly messenger, there was nothing for it
+but that the Boy should face the ignominy of going forth to meet the
+Father on the morrow, and confess the humiliating truth. It wasn't fair
+to let him come expecting hospitality, and find--. Visions arose of Mac
+receiving the bent and wayworn missionary with the greeting: "There is
+no corner by the fire, no place in the camp for a pander to the Scarlet
+Woman." The thought lent impassioned fervour to the quest for goose or
+gull.
+
+It was pretty late when he got back to camp, and the men were at
+supper. No, he hadn't shot anything.
+
+"What's that bulging in your pocket?"
+
+"Sort o' stone."
+
+"Struck it rich?"
+
+"Don't give me any chin-music, boys; give me tea. I'm dog-tired."
+
+But when Mac got up first, as usual, to go down to the Little Cabin to
+"wood up" for the night, "I'll walk down with you," says the Boy,
+though it was plain he was dead-beat.
+
+He helped to revive the failing fire, and then, dropping on the section
+of sawed wood that did duty for a chair, with some difficulty and a
+deal of tugging he pulled "the sort o' stone" out of the pocket of his
+duck shooting-jacket.
+
+"See that?" He held the thing tightly clasped in his two red, chapped
+hands.
+
+Mac bent down, shading his eyes from the faint flame flicker.
+
+"What is it?" "Piece o' tooth."
+
+"By the Lord Harry! so it is." He took the thing nearer the faint
+light. "Fossil! Where'd you get it?"
+
+"Over yonder--by a little frozen river."
+
+"How far? Any more? Only this?"
+
+The Boy didn't answer. He went outside, and returned instantly, lugging
+in something brown and whitish, weather-stained, unwieldy.
+
+"I dropped this at the door as I came along home. Thought it might do
+for the collection."
+
+Mac stared with all his eyes, and hurriedly lit a candle. The Boy
+dropped exhausted on a ragged bit of burlap by the bunks. Mac knelt
+down opposite, pouring liberal libation of candle-grease on the
+uncouth, bony mass between them.
+
+"Part of the skull!" he rasped out, masking his ecstasy as well as he
+could.
+
+"Mastodon?" inquired the Boy.
+
+Mac shook his head.
+
+"I'll bet my boots," says Mac, "it's an _Elephas primigenius;_ and if
+I'm right, it's 'a find,' young man. Where'd you stumble on him?"
+
+"Over yonder." The Boy leaned his head against the lower bunk.
+
+"Where?" "Across the divide. The bones have been dragged up on to some
+rocks. I saw the end of a tusk stickin' up out of the snow, and I
+scratched down till I found--" He indicated the trophy between them on
+the floor.
+
+"Tusk? How long?"
+
+"'Bout nine feet." "We'll go and get it to-morrow."
+
+No answer from the Boy.
+
+"Early, hey?"
+
+"Well--a--it's a good ways."
+
+"What if it is?"
+
+"Oh, I don't mind. I'd do more 'n that for you, Mac."
+
+There was something unnatural in such devotion. Mac looked up. But the
+Boy was too tired to play the big fish any longer. "I wonder if you'll
+do something for me." He watched with a sinking heart Mac's sharp
+uprising from the worshipful attitude. It was not like any other
+mortal's gradual, many-jointed getting-up; it was more like the sudden
+springing out of the big blade of a clasp-knife.
+
+"What's your game?"
+
+"Oh, I ain't got any game," said the Boy desperately; "or, if I have,
+there's mighty little fun in it. However, I don't know as I want to
+walk ten hours again in this kind o' weather with an elephant on my
+back just for--for the poetry o' the thing." He laid his chapped hands
+on the side board of the bunk and pulled himself up on his legs.
+
+"What's your game?" repeated Mac sternly, as the Boy reached the door.
+
+"What's the good o' talkin'?" he answered; but he paused, turned, and
+leaned heavily against the rude lintel.
+
+"Course, I know you'd be shot before you'd do it, but what I'd _like_,
+would be to hear you say you wouldn't kick up a hell of a row if Father
+Wills happens in to the House-Warmin'."
+
+Mac jerked his set face, fire-reddened, towards the fossil-finder; and
+he, without waiting for more, simply opened the door, and heavily
+footed it back to the Big Cabin.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next morning when Mac came to breakfast he heard that the Boy had had
+his grub half an hour before the usual time, and was gone off on some
+tramp again. Mac sat and mused.
+
+O'Flynn came in with a dripping bucket, and sat down to breakfast
+shivering.
+
+"Which way'd he go?"
+
+"The Boy? Down river."
+
+"Sure he didn't go over the divide?"
+
+O'Flynn was sure. He'd just been down to the water-hole, and in the
+faint light he'd seen the Boy far down on the river-trail "leppin" like
+a hare in the direction of the Roosian mission."
+
+"Goin' to meet ... a ... Nicholas?"
+
+"Reckon so," said the Colonel, a bit ruffled. "Don't believe he'll run
+like a hare very far with his feet all blistered."
+
+"Did you know he'd discovered a fossil elephant?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, he has. I must light out, too, and have a look at it."
+
+"Do; it'll be a cheerful sort of House-Warming with one of you off
+scouring the country for more blisters and chilblains, and another
+huntin' antediluvian elephants." The Colonel spoke with uncommon
+irascibility. The great feast-day had certainly not dawned
+propitiously.
+
+When breakfast was done Mac left the Big Cabin without a word; but,
+instead of going over the divide across the treeless snow-waste to the
+little frozen river, where, turned up to the pale northern dawn, were
+lying the bones of a beast that had trampled tropic forests, in that
+other dawn of the Prime, the naturalist, turning his back on _Elephas
+primigenius,_ followed in the track of the Boy down the great river
+towards Ikogimeut.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the low left bank of the Yukon a little camp. On one side, a big
+rock hooded with snow. At right angles, drawn up one on top of the
+other, two sleds covered with reindeer-skins held down by stones. In
+the corner formed by the angle of rocks and sleds, a small A-tent, very
+stained and old. Burning before it on a hearth of greenwood, a little
+fire struggling with a veering wind.
+
+Mac had seen from far off the faint blue banners of smoke blowing now
+right, now left, then tossed aloft in the pallid sunshine. He looked
+about sharply for the Boy, as he had been doing this two hours. There
+was the Jesuit bending over the fire, bettering the precarious position
+of a saucepan that insisted on sitting lop-sided, looking down into the
+heart of coals. Nicholas was holding up the tent-flap.
+
+"Hello! How do!" he sang out, recognising Mac. The priest glanced up
+and nodded pleasantly. Two Indians, squatting on the other side of the
+fire, scrambled away as the shifting wind brought a cloud of stifling
+smoke into their faces. "Where's the Boy?" demanded Mac, arresting the
+stampede.
+
+Nicholas's dog-driver stared, winked, and wiped his weeping,
+smoke-reddened eyes.
+
+"Is he in there?" Mac looked towards the tent.
+
+Andrew nodded between coughs.
+
+"What's he doing in there? Call him out," ordered Mac.
+
+"He no walk."
+
+Mac's hard face took on a look of cast-iron tragedy.
+
+The wind, veering round again, had brought the last words to the priest
+on the other side of the fire.
+
+"Oh, it'll be all right by-and-by," he said cheerfully.
+
+"But knocking up like that just for blisters?"
+
+"Blisters? No; cold and general weakness. That's why we delayed--"
+
+Without waiting to hear more Mac strode over to the tent, and as he
+went in, Nicholas came out. No sign of the Boy--nobody, nothing. What?
+Down in the corner a small, yellow face lying in a nest of fur. Bright,
+dark eyes stared roundly, and as Mac glowered astonished at the
+apparition, a mouth full of gleaming teeth opened, smiling, to say in a
+very small voice:
+
+"Farva!"
+
+Astonished as Mac was, disappointed and relieved all at once, there was
+something arresting in the appeal.
+
+"I'm not your father," he said stiffly. "Who're you? Hey? You speak
+English?"
+
+The child stared at him fixedly, but suddenly, for no reason on earth,
+it smiled again. Mac stood looking down at it, seeming lost in thought.
+Presently the small object stirred, struggled about feebly under the
+encompassing furs, and, freeing itself, held out its arms. The mites of
+hands fluttered at his sleeve and made ineffectual clutches.
+
+"What do you want?" To his own vast astonishment Mac lifted the little
+thing out of its warm nest. It was woefully thin, and seemed, even to
+his inexperience, to be insufficiently clothed, though the beaded
+moccasins on its tiny feet were new and good.
+
+"Why, you're only about as big as a minute," he said gruffly. "What's
+the matter--sick?" It suddenly struck him as very extraordinary that he
+should have taken up the child, and how extremely embarrassing it would
+be if anyone came in and caught him. Clutching the small morsel
+awkwardly, he fumbled with the furs preparatory to getting rid, without
+delay, of the unusual burden. While he was straightening the things,
+Father Wills appeared at the flap, smoking saucepan in hand. The
+instant the cold air struck the child it began to cough.
+
+"Oh, you mustn't do that!" said the priest to Mac with unexpected
+severity. "Kaviak must lie in bed and keep warm." Down on the floor
+went the saucepan. The child was caught away from the surprised Mac,
+and the furs so closely gathered round the small shrunken body that
+there was once more nothing visible but the wistful yellow face and
+gleaming eyes, still turned searchingly on its most recent
+acquaintance.
+
+But the priest, without so much as a glance at the new-comer, proceeded
+to feed Kaviak out of the saucepan, blowing vigorously at each spoonful
+before administering.
+
+"He's pretty hungry," commented Mac. "Where'd you find him?"
+
+"In a little village up on the Kuskoquim. Kaviak's an Esquimaux from
+Norton Sound, aren't you, Kaviak?" But the child was wholly absorbed,
+it seemed, in swallowing and staring at Mac. "His family came up there
+from the coast in a bidarra only last summer--all dead now. Everybody
+else in the village--and there isn't but a handful--all ailing and all
+hungry. I was tramping across an igloo there a couple of days ago, and
+I heard a strange little muffled sound, more like a snared rabbit than
+anything else. But the Indian with me said no, everybody who had lived
+there was dead, and he was for hurrying on. They're superstitious, you
+know, about a place where people have died. But I crawled in, and found
+this little thing lying in a bundle of rags with its hands bound and
+dried grass stuffed in its mouth. It was too weak to stir or do more
+than occasionally to make that muffled noise that I'd heard coming up
+through the smoke-hole."
+
+"What you goin' to do with him?"
+
+"Well, I hardly know. The Sisters will look after him for a while, if I
+get him there alive."
+
+"Why shouldn't you?"
+
+Kaviak supplied the answer straightway by choking and falling into an
+appalling fit of coughing.
+
+"I've got some stuff that'll be good for that," said Mac, thinking of
+his medicine-chest. "I'll give you some when we get back to camp."
+
+The priest nodded, taking Mac's unheard of civility as a matter of
+course.
+
+"The ice is very rough; the jolting makes him cough awfully."
+
+The Jesuit had fastened his eyes on Mac's woollen muffler, which had
+been loosened during the ministering to Kaviak and had dropped on the
+ground. "Do you need that scarf?" he asked, as though he suspected Mac
+of wearing it for show. "Because if you didn't you could wrap it round
+Kaviak while I help the men strike camp." And without waiting to see
+how his suggestion was received, he caught up the saucepan, lifted the
+flap, and vanished.
+
+"Farva," remarked Kaviak, fixing melancholy eyes on Mac.
+
+"I ain't your father," muttered the gentleman so addressed. He picked
+up his scarf and hung it round his own neck.
+
+"Farva!" insisted Kaviak. They looked at each other.
+
+"You cold? That it, hey?" Mac knelt down and pulled away the furs. "God
+bless me! you only got this one rag on? God bless me!" He pulled off
+his muffler and wound the child in it mummy-wise, round and round,
+muttering the while in a surly way. When it was half done he
+stopped--thought profoundly with a furrow cutting deep into his square
+forehead between the straight brows. Slowly he pulled his gloves out of
+his pocket, and turned out from each beaver gauntlet an inner mitten of
+knitted wool. "Here," he said, and put both little moccasined feet into
+one of the capacious mittens. Much pleased with his ingenuity, he went
+on winding the long scarf until the yellow little Esquimaux bore a
+certain whimsical resemblance to one of the adorable Delia Robbia
+infants. But Mac's sinewy hands were exerting a greater pressure than
+he realized. The morsel made a remonstrant squeaking, and squirmed
+feebly.
+
+"Oh, oh! Too tight? Beg your pardon," said Mac hastily, as though not
+only English, but punctilious manners were understanded of Kaviak. He
+relaxed the woollen bandage till the morsel lay contented again within
+its folds.
+
+Nicholas came in for Kaviak, and for the furs, that he might pack them
+both in the Father's sled. Already the true son of the Church was
+undoing the ropes that lashed firm the canvas of the tent.
+
+"Where's the Boy?" said Mac suddenly. "The young fellow that's with us.
+You know, the one that found you that first Sunday and brought you to
+camp. Where is he?"
+
+Nicholas paused an instant with Kaviak on his shoulder.
+
+"Kaiomi--no savvy."
+
+"You not seen him to-day?"
+
+"No. He no up--?" With the swaddled child he made a gesture up the
+river towards the white camp.
+
+"No, he came down this morning to meet you."
+
+Nicholas shook his head, and went on gathering up the furs. As he and
+Mac came out, Andrew was undoing the last fastening that held the
+canvas to the stakes. In ten minutes they were on the trail, Andrew
+leading, with Father Wills' dogs, Kaviak lying in the sled muffled to
+the eyes, still looking round out of the corners--no, strangely enough,
+the Kaviak eye had no corners, but fixedly he stared sideways at Mac.
+"Farva," seeming not to take the smallest notice, trudged along on one
+side of him, the priest on the other, and behind came Nicholas and the
+other Indians with the second sled. It was too windy to talk much even
+had they been inclined.
+
+The only sounds were the _Mush! Mush!_ of the drivers, the grate and
+swish of the runners over the ice, and Kaviak's coughing.
+
+Mac turned once and frowned at him. It was curious that the child
+seemed not to mind these menacing looks, not in the smallest degree.
+
+By-and-by the order of march was disturbed.
+
+Kaviak's right runner, catching at some obstacle, swerved and sent the
+sled bumping along on its side, the small head of the passenger
+narrowly escaping the ice. Mac caught hold of the single-tree and
+brought the racing dogs to an abrupt halt. The priest and he righted
+the sled, and Mac straddling it, tucked in a loosened end of fur. When
+all was again in running order, Mac was on the same side as Father
+Wills. He still wore that look of dour ill-temper, and especially did
+he glower at the unfortunate Kaviak, seized with a fresh fit of
+coughing that filled the round eyes with tears.
+
+"Don't you get kind o' tired listenin' to that noise? Suppose I was to
+carry--just for a bit--. This is the roughest place on the trail. Hi!
+Stop!" he called to Andrew. The priest had said nothing; but divining
+what Mac would be at, he helped him to undo the raw-hide lashing, and
+when Kaviak was withdrawn he wrapped one of the lighter fur things
+round him.
+
+It was only when Mac had marched off, glowering still, and sternly
+refusing to meet Kaviak's tearful but grateful eyes--it was only then,
+bending over the sled and making fast the furs, that Father Wills, all
+to himself, smiled a little.
+
+It wasn't until they were in sight of the smoke from the Little Cabin
+that Mac slackened his pace. He had never for a moment found the trail
+so smooth that he could return his burden to the sled. Now, however, he
+allowed Nicholas and the priest to catch up with him.
+
+"You carry him the rest of the way," he commanded, and set his burden
+in Nicholas's arms. Kaviak was ill-pleased, but Mac, falling behind
+with the priest, stalked on with eyes upon the ground.
+
+"I've got a boy of my own," he jerked out presently, with the air of a
+man who accounts confidentially for some weakness.
+
+"Really!" returned the priest; "they didn't tell me."
+
+"I haven't told them yet."
+
+"Oh, all right."
+
+"Why is he called that heathen name?"
+
+"Kaviak? Oh, it's the name of his tribe. His people belong to that
+branch of the Innuits known as Kaviaks."
+
+"Humph! Then he's only Kaviak as I'm MacCann. I suppose you've
+christened him?"
+
+"Well, not yet--no. What shall we call him? What's your boy's name?"
+"Robert Bruce." They went on in silence till Mac said, "It's on account
+of my boy I came up here."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"It didn't use to matter if a man _was_ poor and self-taught, but in
+these days of competition it's different. A boy must have chances if
+he's going to fight the battle on equal terms. Of course, some boys
+ain't worth botherin' about. But my boy--well, he seems to have
+something in him."
+
+The priest listened silently, but with that look of brotherliness on
+his face that made it so easy to talk to him.
+
+"It doesn't really matter to those other fellows." Mac jerked his hand
+towards the camp. "It's never so important to men--who stand alone--but
+I've _got_ to strike it rich over yonder." He lifted his head, and
+frowned defiantly in the general direction of the Klondyke, thirteen
+hundred miles away. "It's my one chance," he added half to himself. "It
+means everything to Bob and me. Education, scientific education, costs
+like thunder."
+
+"In the United States?"
+
+"Oh, I mean to send my boy to the old country. I want Bob to be
+thorough."
+
+The priest smiled, but almost imperceptibly.
+
+"How old is he?"
+
+"Oh, 'bout as old as this youngster." Mac spoke with calculated
+indifference.
+
+"Six or thereabouts?"
+
+"No; four and a half. But he's bigger--"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"And you can see already--he's got a lot in him."
+
+Father Wills nodded with a conviction that brought Mac nearer
+confession than he had ever been in his life.
+
+"You see," he said quite low, and as if the words were dragged out with
+pincers, "the fact is--my married life--didn't pan out very well. And
+I--ran away from home as a little chap--after a lickin'--and never went
+back. But there's one thing I mean to make a success of--that's my
+boy."
+
+"Well, I believe you will, if you feel like that."
+
+"Why, they've gone clean past the camp trail," said Mac sharply, "all
+but Nicholas--and what in thunder?--he's put the kid back on the
+sled--"
+
+"Yes, I told my men we'd be getting on. But they were told to leave you
+the venison--"
+
+"What! You goin' straight on? Nonsense!" Mac interrupted, and began to
+shout to the Indians.
+
+"No; I _meant_ to stop; just tell your friends so," said the
+unsuspecting Father; "but with a sick child--"
+
+"What can you do for him that we can't? And to break the journey may
+make a big difference. We've got some condensed milk left--and--"
+
+"Ah yes, but we are more accustomed to--it's hardly fair to burden a
+neighbour. No, we'll be getting on."
+
+"If those fellers up there make a row about your bringing in a
+youngster"--he thrust out his jaw--"they can settle the account with
+me. I've got to do something for that cough before the kid goes on."
+
+"Well," said the priest; and so wily are these Jesuits that he never
+once mentioned that he was himself a qualified doctor in full and
+regular practice. He kept his eyes on the finished stockade and the
+great chimney, wearing majestically its floating plume of smoke.
+
+"Hi!" Mac called between his hands to the Indians, who had gone some
+distance ahead. "Hi!" He motioned them back up the hill trail.
+
+O'Flynn had come out of the Little Cabin, and seemed to be laboriously
+trundling something along the footpath. He got so excited when he heard
+the noise and saw the party that, inadvertently, he let his burden
+slide down the icy slope, bumping and bouncing clumsily from one
+impediment to another.
+
+"Faith, look at 'im! Sure, that fossle can't resthrain his j'y at
+seein' ye back. Mac, it's yer elephunt. I was takin' him in to the sate
+of honour be the foir. We thought it 'ud be a pleasant surprise fur ye.
+Sure, ye'r more surprised to see 'im leppin' down the hill to meet ye,
+like a rale Irish tarrier."
+
+Mac was angry, and didn't conceal the fact. As he ran to stop the thing
+before it should be dashed to pieces, the priest happened to glance
+back, and saw coming slowly along the river trail a solitary figure
+that seemed to make its way with difficulty.
+
+"It looks as though you'd have more than you bargained for at the
+House-Warming," he said.
+
+O'Flynn came down the hill babbling like a brook.
+
+"Good-day to ye, Father. The blessin's o' Heaven on ye fur not kapin'
+us starvin' anny longer. There's Potts been swearin', be this and be
+that, that yourself and the little divvle wudn't be at the Blow-Out at
+ahl, at ahl."
+
+"You mean the Boy hasn't come back?" called out Mac. He leaned _Elephas
+primigenius_ against a tuft of willow banked round with snow, and
+turned gloomily as if to go back down the river again.
+
+"Who's this?" They all stood and watched the limping traveller.
+
+"Why it's--of course. I didn't know him with that thing tied over his
+cap"; and Mac went to meet him.
+
+The Boy bettered his pace.
+
+"How did I miss you?" demanded Mac.
+
+"Well," said the Boy, looking rather mischievous, "I can't think how it
+happened on the way down, unless you passed when I 'd gone uphill a
+piece after some tracks. I was lyin' under the Muff a few miles down
+when you came back, and you--well, I kind o' thought you seemed to have
+your hands full." Mac looked rigid and don't-you-try-to-chaff-me-sir.
+"Besides," the Boy went on, "I couldn't cover the ground like you and
+Father Wills."
+
+"What's the matter with you?"
+
+"Oh, nothin' to howl about. But see here, Mac."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Soon's I can walk I'll go and get you the rest o' that elephant."
+
+There was no more said till they got up to the others, who had waited
+for the Indians to come back, and had unpacked Kaviak to spare him the
+jolting uphill.
+
+O'Flynn was screaming with excitement as he saw that the bundle
+Nicholas was carrying had a head and two round eyes.
+
+"The saints in glory be among us! What's that? Man alive, what _is_ it,
+be the Siven?"
+
+"That," answered Mac with a proprietary air, "is a little Esquimaux
+boy, and I'm bringing him in to doctor his cold."
+
+"Glory be! An Esquimer! And wid a cowld! Sure, he can have some o' my
+linnyeemint. Well, y'arre a boss collector, Mac! Faith, ye bang the
+Jews! And me thinkin' ye'd be satisfied wid yer elephunt. Not him, be
+the Siven! It's an Esquimer he must have to finish off his collection,
+wan wid the rale Arctic cowld in his head, and two eyes that goes
+snappin' through ye like black torpeders. Two spissimens in wan day!
+Yer growin' exthravagant, Mac. Why, musha, child, if I don't think yer
+the dandy Spissimen o' the lot!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE BLOW-OUT
+
+"How good it is to invite men to the pleasant feast."
+
+
+Comfortable as rock fireplace and stockade made the cabin now, the
+Colonel had been feeling all that morning that the official
+House-Warming was fore-doomed to failure. Nevertheless, as he was cook
+that week, he could not bring himself to treat altogether lightly his
+office of Master of the Feast. There would probably be no guests. Even
+their own little company would likely be incomplete, but t here was to
+be a spread that afternoon, "anyways."
+
+Even had the Colonel needed any keeping up to the mark, the office
+would have been cheerfully undertaken by O'Flynn or by Potts, for whom
+interest in the gustatory aspect of the occasion was wholly undimmed by
+the threatened absence of Mac and the "little divvle."
+
+"There'll be the more for us," said Potts enthusiastically.
+
+O'Flynn's argument seemed to halt upon a reservation. He looked over
+the various contributions to the feast, set out on a board in front of
+the water-bucket, and, "It's mate I'm wishin' fur," says he.
+
+"We've got fish."
+
+"That's only mate on Fridays. We've had fish fur five days stiddy, an'
+befure that, bacon three times a day wid sivin days to the week, an'
+not enough bacon ayther, begob, whin all's said and done! Not enough to
+be fillin', and plenty to give us the scurrvy. May the divil dance on
+shorrt rations!"
+
+"No scurvy in this camp for a while yet," said the Colonel, throwing
+some heavy objects into a pan and washing them vigorously round and
+round.
+
+"Pitaties!" O'Flynn's eyes dwelt lovingly on the rare food. "Ye've
+hoarded 'em too long, man, they've sprouted."
+
+"That won't prevent you hoggin' more'n your share, I'll bet," said
+Potts pleasantly.
+
+"I don't somehow like wasting the sprouts," observed the Colonel
+anxiously. "It's such a wonderful sight--something growing." He had cut
+one pallid slip, and held it tenderly between knife and thumb.
+
+"Waste 'em with scurvy staring us in the face? Should think not. Mix
+'em with cold potaters in a salad."
+
+"No. Make slumgullion," commanded O'Flynn.
+
+"What's that?" quoth the Colonel.
+
+"Be the Siven! I only wonder I didn't think of it befure. Arre ye
+listening, Kentucky? Ye take lots o' wathur, an' if ye want it rich, ye
+take the wathur ye've boiled pitaties or cabbage in--a vegetable stock,
+ye mind--and ye add a little flour, salt, and pepper, an' a tomater if
+ye're in New York or 'Frisco, and ye boil all that together with a few
+fish-bones or bacon-rin's to make it rale tasty."
+
+"Yes--well?"
+
+"Well, an' that's slumgullion."
+
+"Don't sound heady enough for a 'Blow-Out,'" said the Colonel. "We'll
+sober up on slumgullion to-morrow."
+
+"Anyhow, it's mate I'm wishin' fur," sighed O'Flynn, subsiding among
+the tin-ware. "What's the good o' the little divvle and his thramps, if
+he can't bring home a burrud, or so much as the scut iv a rabbit furr
+the soup?"
+
+"Well, he's contributed a bottle of California apricots, and we'll have
+boiled rice."
+
+"An' punch, glory be!"
+
+"Y-yes," answered the Colonel. "I've been thinkin' a good deal about
+the punch."
+
+"So's myself," said O'Flynn frankly; but Potts looked at the Colonel
+suspiciously through narrowed eyes.
+
+"There's very little whiskey left, and I propose to brew a mild bowl--"
+
+"To hell with your mild bowls!"
+
+"A good enough punch, sah, but one that--that--a--well, that the whole
+kit and boodle of us can drink. Indians and everybody, you know ...
+Nicholas and Andrew may turn up. I want you two fellas to suppoht me
+about this. There are reasons foh it, sah"--he had laid a hand on
+Potts' shoulder and fixed O'Flynn with his eye--"and"--speaking very
+solemnly--"yoh neither o' yoh gentlemen that need mo' said on the
+subject."
+
+Whereupon, having cut the ground from under their feet, he turned
+decisively, and stirred the mush-pot with a magnificent air and a
+newly-whittled birch stick.
+
+To give the Big Cabin an aspect of solid luxury, they had spread the
+Boy's old buffalo "robe" on the floor, and as the morning wore on Potts
+and O'Flynn made one or two expeditions to the Little Cabin, bringing
+back selections out of Mac's hoard "to decorate the banquet-hall," as
+they said. On the last trip Potts refused to accompany his pardner--no,
+it was no good. Mac evidently wouldn't be back to see, and the laugh
+would be on them "takin' so much trouble for nothin'." And O'Flynn
+wasn't to be long either, for dinner had been absurdly postponed
+already.
+
+When the door opened the next time, it was to admit Mac, Nicholas with
+Kaviak in his arms, O'Flynn gesticulating like a windmill, and, last of
+all, the Boy.
+
+Kaviak was formally introduced, but instead of responding to his hosts'
+attentions, the only thing he seemed to care about, or even see, was
+something that in the hurly-burly everybody else overlooked--the
+decorations. Mac's stuffed birds and things made a remarkably good
+show, but the colossal success was reserved for the minute shrunken
+skin of the baby white hare set down in front of the great fire for a
+hearthrug. If the others failed to appreciate that joke, not so Kaviak.
+He gave a gurgling cry, struggled down out of Nicholas's arms, and
+folded the white hare to his breast.
+
+"Where are the other Indians?" said Mac.
+
+"Looking after the dogs," said Father Wills; and as the door opened,
+"Oh yes, give us that," he said to Andrew. "I thought"--he turned to
+the Colonel--"maybe you'd like to try some Yukon reindeer."
+
+"Hooray!"
+
+"Mate? Arre ye sayin' mate, or is an angel singin'?"
+
+"Now I _know_ that man's a Christian," soliloquised Potts.
+
+"Look here: it'll take a little time to cook," said Mac, "and it's
+worth waitin' for. Can you let us have a pail o' hot water in the
+meantime?"
+
+"Y-yes," said the Colonel, looking as if he had enough to think about
+already.
+
+"Yes, we always wash them first of all," said Father Wills, noticing
+how Mac held the little heathen off at arm's length. "Nicholas used to
+help with that at Holy Cross." He gave the new order with the old
+authoritative gesture.
+
+"And where's the liniment I lent you that you're so generous with?" Mac
+arraigned O'Flynn. "Go and get it."
+
+Under Nicholas's hands Kaviak was forced to relinquish not only the
+baby hare, but his own elf locks. He was closely sheared, his moccasins
+put off, and his single garment dragged unceremoniously wrong side out
+over his head and bundled out of doors.
+
+"Be the Siven! he's got as manny bones as a skeleton!"
+
+"Poor little codger!" The Colonel stood an instant, skillet in hand
+staring.
+
+"What's that he's got round his neck?" said the Boy, moving nearer.
+
+Kaviak, seeing the keen look menacing his treasure, lifted a shrunken
+yellow hand and clasped tight the dirty shapeless object suspended from
+a raw-hide necklace.
+
+Nicholas seemed to hesitate to divest him of this sole remaining
+possession.
+
+"You must get him to give it up," said Father Wills, "and burn it."
+
+Kaviak flatly declined to fall in with as much as he understood of this
+arrangement.
+
+"What is it, anyway?" the Boy pursued.
+
+"His amulet, I suppose." As Father Wills proceeded to enforce his
+order, and pulled the leather string over the child's head, Kaviak rent
+the air with shrieks and coughs. He seemed to say as well as he could,
+"I can do without my parki and my mucklucks, but I'll take my death
+without my amulet."
+
+Mac insinuated himself brusquely between the victim and his
+persecutors. He took the dirty object away from the priest with scant
+ceremony, in spite of the whisper, "Infection!" and gave it back to the
+wrathful owner.
+
+"You talk his language, don't you?" Mac demanded of Nicholas.
+
+The Pymeut pilot nodded.
+
+"Tell him, if he'll lend the thing to me to wash, he shall have it
+back."
+
+Nicholas explained.
+
+Kaviak, with streaming eyes and quivering lips, reluctantly handed it
+over, and watched Mac anxiously till overwhelmed by a yet greater
+misfortune in the shape of a bath for himself.
+
+"How shall I clean this thing thoroughly?" Mac condescended to ask
+Father Wills. The priest shrugged.
+
+"He'll have forgotten it to-morrow."
+
+"He shall have it to-morrow," said Mac.
+
+With his back to Kaviak, the Boy, O'Flynn, and Potts crowding round
+him, Mac ripped open the little bird-skin pouch, and took out three
+objects--an ivory mannikin, a crow's feather, and a thing that Father
+Wills said was a seal-blood plug.
+
+"What's it for?" "Same as the rest. It's an amulet; only as it's used
+to stop the flow of blood from the wound of a captive seal, it is
+supposed to be the best of all charms for anyone who spits blood."
+
+"I'll clean 'em all after the Blow-Out," said Mac, and he went out,
+buried the charms in the snow, and stuck up a spruce twig to mark the
+spot.
+
+Meanwhile, to poor Kaviak it was being plainly demonstrated what an
+awful fate descended on a person so unlucky as to part with his amulet.
+He stood straight up in the bucket like a champagne-bottle in a cooler,
+and he could not have resented his predicament more if he had been set
+in crushed ice instead of warm water. Under the remorseless hands of
+Nicholas he began to splutter and choke, to fizz, and finally explode
+with astonishment and wrath. It was quite clear Nicholas was trying to
+drown him. He took the treatment so to heart, that he kept on howling
+dismally for some time after he was taken out, and dried, and
+linimented and dosed by Mac, whose treachery about the amulet he seemed
+to forgive, since "Farva" had had the air of rescuing him from the
+horrors he had endured in that water-bucket, where, for all Kaviak
+knew, he might have stayed till he succumbed to death. The Boy
+contributed a shirt of his own, and helped Mac to put it on the
+incredibly thin little figure. The shirt came down to Kaviak's heels,
+and had to have the sleeves rolled up every two minutes. But by the
+time the reindeer-steak was nearly done Kaviak was done, too, and
+O'Flynn had said, "That Spissimen does ye credit, Mac."
+
+Said Spissimen was now staring hungrily out of the Colonel's bunk,
+holding towards Mac an appealing hand, with half a yard of shirt-sleeve
+falling over it.
+
+Mac pretended not to see, and drew up to the table the one remaining
+available thing to sit on, his back to his patient.
+
+When the dogs had been fed, and the other Indians had come in, and
+squatted on the buffalo-skin with Nicholas, the first course was sent
+round in tin cups, a nondescript, but warming, "camp soup."
+
+"Sorry we've got so few dishes, gentlemen," the Colonel had said.
+"We'll have to ask some of you to wait till others have finished."
+
+"Farva," remarked Kaviak, leaning out of the bunk and sniffing the
+savoury steam.
+
+"He takes you for a priest," said Potts, with the cheerful intention of
+stirring Mac's bile. But not even so damning a suspicion as that could
+cool the collector's kindness for his new Spissimen.
+
+"You come here," he said. Kaviak didn't understand. The Boy got up,
+limped over to the bunk, lifted the child out, and brought him to Mac's
+side.
+
+"Since there ain't enough cups," said Mac, in self-justification, and
+he put his own, half empty, to Kaviak's lips. The Spissimen imbibed
+greedily, audibly, and beamed. Mac, with unimpaired gravity, took no
+notice of the huge satisfaction this particular remedy was giving his
+patient, except to say solemnly, "Don't bubble in it."
+
+The next course was fish a la Pymeut.
+
+"You're lucky to be able to get it," said the Father, whether with
+suspicion or not no man could tell. "I had to send back for some by a
+trader and couldn't get enough."
+
+"We didn't see any trader," said the Boy to divert the current.
+
+"He may have gone by in the dusk; he was travelling hotfoot."
+
+"Thought that steamship was chockful o' grub. What did you want o'
+fish?"
+
+"Yes; they've got plenty of food, but--"
+
+"They don't relish parting with it," suggested Potts.
+
+"They haven't much to think about except what they eat; they wanted to
+try our fish, and were ready to exchange. I promised I would send a
+load back from Ikogimeut if they'd--" He seemed not to care to finish
+the sentence.
+
+"So you didn't do much for the Pymeuts after all?"
+
+"I did something," he said almost shortly. Then, with recovered
+serenity, he turned to the Boy: "I promised I'd bring back any news."
+"Yes."
+
+"Well?"
+
+Everybody stopped eating and hung on the priest's words.
+
+"Captain Rainey's heard there's a big new strike--"
+
+"In the Klondyke?"
+
+"On the American side this time."
+
+"Hail Columbia!"
+
+"Whereabouts?"
+
+"At a place called Minook."
+
+"Where's that?"
+
+"Up the river by the Ramparts."
+
+"How far?"
+
+"Oh, a little matter of six or seven hundred miles from here."
+
+"Glory to God!"
+
+"Might as well be six or seven thousand."
+
+"And very probably isn't a bona-fide strike at all," said the priest,
+"but just a stampede--a very different matter."
+
+"Well, I tell you straight: I got no use for a gold-mine in Minook at
+this time o' year."
+
+"Nop! Venison steak's more in my line than grub-stake just about now."
+
+Potts had to bestir himself and wash dishes before he could indulge in
+his "line." When the grilled reindeer did appear, flanked by
+really-truly potatoes and the Colonel's hot Kentucky biscuit, there was
+no longer doubt in any man's mind but what this Blow-Out was being a
+success.
+
+"Colonel's a daisy cook, ain't he?" the Boy appealed to Father Wills.
+
+The Jesuit assented cordially.
+
+"My family meant _me_ for the army," he said. "Seen much service,
+Colonel?"
+
+The Kentuckian laughed.
+
+"Never wasted a day soldiering in my life."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"Maybe you're wonderin'," said Potts, "why he's a Colonel!"
+
+The Jesuit made a deprecatory gesture, politely disclaiming any such
+rude curiosity.
+
+"He's from Kentucky, you see;" and the smile went round. "Beyond that,
+we can't tell you why he's a Colonel unless it's because he ain't a
+Judge;" and the boss of the camp laughed with the rest, for the Denver
+man had scored.
+
+By the time they got to the California apricots and boiled rice
+everybody was feeling pretty comfortable. When, at last, the table was
+cleared, except for the granite-ware basin full of punch, and when all
+available cups were mustered and tobacco-pouches came out, a remarkably
+genial spirit pervaded the company--with three exceptions.
+
+Potts and O'Flynn waited anxiously to sample the punch before giving
+way to complete satisfaction, and Kaviak was impervious to
+considerations either of punch or conviviality, being wrapped in
+slumber on a corner of the buffalo-skin, between Mac's stool and the
+natives, who also occupied places on the floor.
+
+Upon O'Flynn's first draught he turned to his next neighbour:
+
+"Potts, me bhoy, 'tain't s' bad."
+
+"I'll bet five dollars it won't make yer any happier."
+
+"Begob, I'm happy enough! Gentlemen, wud ye like I should sing ye a
+song?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Yes," and the Colonel thumped the table for order, infinitely relieved
+that the dinner was done, and the punch not likely to turn into a
+_casus belli_. O'Flynn began a ditty about the Widdy Malone that woke
+up Kaviak and made him rub his round eyes with astonishment. He sat up,
+and hung on to the back of Mac's coat to make sure he had some
+anchorage in the strange new waters he had so suddenly been called on
+to navigate.
+
+The song ended, the Colonel, as toast-master, proposed the health
+of--he was going to say Father Wills, but felt it discreeter to name no
+names. Standing up in the middle of the cabin, where he didn't have to
+stoop, he lifted his cup till it knocked against the swing-shelf, and
+called out, "Here's to Our Visitors, Neighbours, and Friends!"
+Whereupon he made a stately circular bow, which ended by his offering
+Kaviak his hand, in the manner of one who executes a figure in an
+old-fashioned dance. The smallest of "Our Visitors," still keeping hold
+of Mac, presented the Colonel with the disengaged half-yard of flannel
+undershirt on the other side, and the speech went on, very flowery,
+very hospitable, very Kentuckian.
+
+When the Colonel sat down there was much applause, and O'Flynn, who had
+lent his cup to Nicholas, and didn't feel he could wait till it came
+back, began to drink punch out of the dipper between shouts of:
+
+"Hooray! Brayvo! Here's to the Kurrnul! God bless him! That's rale
+oratry, Kurrnul! Here's to Kentucky--and ould Ireland."
+
+Father Wills stood up, smiling, to reply.
+
+_"Friends"_ (the Boy thought the keen eyes rested a fraction of a
+moment longer on Mac than on the rest),--_"I think in some ways this is
+the pleasantest House-Warming I ever went to. I won't take up time
+thanking the Colonel for the friendly sentiments he's expressed, though
+I return them heartily. I must use these moments you are good enough to
+give me in telling you something of what I feel is implied in the
+founding of this camp of yours.
+
+"Gentlemen, the few white dwellers in the Yukon country have not looked
+forward"_ (his eyes twinkled almost wickedly) _"with that pleasure you
+might expect in exiles, to the influx of people brought up here by the
+great Gold Discovery. We knew what that sort of craze leads to. We knew
+that in a barren land like this, more and more denuded of wild game
+every year, more and more the prey of epidemic disease--we knew that
+into this sorely tried and hungry world would come a horde of men, all
+of them ignorant of the conditions up here, most of them ill-provided
+with proper food and clothing, many of them (I can say it without
+offence in this company)--many of them men whom the older, richer
+communities were glad to get rid of. Gentlemen, I have ventured to take
+you into our confidence so far, because I want to take you still
+farther--to tell you a little of the intense satisfaction with which we
+recognise that good fortune has sent us in you just the sort of
+neighbours we had not dared to hope for. It means more to us than you
+realise. When I heard a few weeks ago that, in addition to the
+boat-loads that had already got some distance up the river beyond Holy
+Cross--"_
+
+"Going to Dawson?"
+
+"Oh, yes, Klondyke mad--"
+
+"They'll be there before us, boys!"
+
+"Anyways, they'll get to Minook."
+
+The Jesuit shook his head. "It isn't so certain. They probably made
+only a couple of hundred miles or so before the Yukon went to sleep."
+
+"Then if grub gives out they'll be comin' back here?" suggested Potts.
+
+_"Small doubt of it,"_ agreed the priest. _"And when I heard there were
+parties of the same sort stranded at intervals all along the Lower
+River--"_
+
+"You sure?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+_"And when Father Orloff of the Russian mission told us that he was
+already having trouble with the two big rival parties frozen in the ice
+below Ikogimeut--"_
+
+"Gosh! Wonder if any of 'em were on our ship?"
+
+_"Well, gentlemen, I do not disguise from you that, when I heard of the
+large amount of whiskey, the small amount of food, and the low type of
+manners brought in by these gold-seekers, I felt my fears justified.
+Such men don't work, don't contribute anything to the decent social
+life of the community, don't build cabins like this. When I came down
+on the ice the first time after you'd camped, and I looked up and saw
+your solid stone chimney"_ (he glanced at Mac), _"I didn't know what a
+House-Warming it would make; but already, from far off across the ice
+and snow, that chimney warmed my heart. Gentlemen, the fame of it has
+gone up the river and down the river. Father Orloff is coming to see it
+next week, and so are the white traders from Anvik and Andreiefsky, for
+they've heard there's nothing like it in the Yukon. Of course, I know
+that you gentlemen have not come to settle permanently. I know that
+when the Great White Silence, as they call the long winter up here, is
+broken by the thunder of the ice rushing down to the sea, you, like the
+rest, will exchange the snow-fields for the gold-fields, and pass out
+of our ken. Now, I'm not usually prone to try my hand at prophecy; but
+I am tempted to say, even on our short acquaintance, that I am
+tolerably sure that, while we shall be willing enough to spare most of
+the new-comers to the Klondyke, we shall grudge to the gold-fields the
+men who built this camp and warmed this cabin."_ (His eye rested
+reflectively on Mac.) _"I don't wish to sit down leaving an impression
+of speaking with entire lack of sympathy of the impulse that brings men
+up here for gold. I believe that, even with the sort in the two camps
+below Ikogimeut--drinking, quarrelling, and making trouble with the
+natives at the Russian mission--I believe that even with them, the gold
+they came up here for is a symbol--a fetich, some of us may think. When
+such men have it in their hands, they feel dimly that they are laying
+tangible hold at last on some elusive vision of happiness that has
+hitherto escaped them. Behind each man braving the Arctic winter up
+here, is some hope, not all ignoble; some devotion, not all
+unsanctified. Behind most of these men I seem to see a wife or child, a
+parent, or some dear dream that gives that man his share in the Eternal
+Hope. Friends, we call that thing we look for by different names; but
+we are all seekers after treasure, all here have turned our backs on
+home and comfort, hunting for the Great Reward--each man a new Columbus
+looking for the New World. Some of us looking north, some south,
+some"_--he hesitated the briefest moment, and then with a faint smile,
+half sad, half triumphant, made a little motion of his head--_"some of
+us ... looking upwards."_
+
+But quickly, as though conscious that, if he had raised the moral tone
+of the company, he had not raised its spirits, he hurried on:
+
+_"Before I sit down, gentlemen, just one word more. I must congratulate
+you on having found out so soon, not only the wisdom, but the pleasure
+of looking at this Arctic world with intelligent eyes, and learning
+some of her wonderful lessons. It is so that, now the hardest work is
+finished, you will keep up your spirits and avoid the disease that
+attacks all new-comers who simply eat, sleep, and wait for the ice to
+go out. When I hear cheechalkos complaining of boredom up here in this
+world of daily miracles, I think of the native boy in the
+history-class, who, called on to describe the progress of civilisation,
+said: 'In those days men had as many wives as they liked, and that was
+called polygamy. Now they have only one wife, and that's called
+monotony.'"_
+
+While O'Flynn howled with delight, the priest wound up:
+
+_"Gentlemen, if we find monotony up here, it's not the country's fault,
+but a defect in our own civilisation."_ Wherewith he sat down amid
+cheers.
+
+"Now, Colonel, is Mac goin' to recite some Border ballads?" inquired
+the Boy, "or will he make a speech, or do a Highland fling?"
+
+The Colonel called formally upon Mr. MacCann.
+
+Mac was no sooner on his legs than Kaviak, determined not to lose his
+grasp of the situation, climbed upon the three-legged stool just
+vacated, and resumed his former relations with the friendly coat-tail.
+
+Everybody laughed but Mac, who pretended not to know what was going on
+behind his back.
+
+"Gentlemen," he began harshly, with the air of one about to launch a
+heavy indictment, "there's one element largely represented here by
+numbers and by interests"--he turned round suddenly toward the natives,
+and almost swung Kaviak off into space--"one element not explicitly
+referred to in the speeches, either of welcome or of thanks. But,
+gentlemen, I submit that these hitherto unrecognised Natives are our
+real hosts, and a word about them won't be out of place. I've been told
+to-day that, whether in Alaska, Greenland, or British America, they
+call themselves _Innuits,_ which means human beings. They believed, no
+doubt, that they were the only ones in the world. I've been thinking a
+great deal about these Esquimaux of late--"
+
+"Hear, hear!"
+
+"About their origin and their destiny." (Mac was beginning to enjoy
+himself. The Boy was beginning to be bored and to drum softly with his
+fingers.) "Now, gentlemen, Buffon says that the poles were the first
+portions of the earth's crust to cool. While the equator, and even the
+tropics of Cancer and of Capricorn, were still too boiling hot to
+support life, up here in the Arctic regions there was a carboniferous
+era goin' on--"
+
+"Where's the coal, then?" sneered Potts.
+
+"It's bein' discovered ... all over ... ask him" (indicating Father
+Wills, who smiled assent). "Tropical forests grew where there are
+glayshers now, and elephants and mastodons began life here."
+
+"Jimminy Christmas!" interrupted the Boy, sitting up very straight. "Is
+that Buffer you quoted a good authority?"
+
+"First-rate," Mac snapped out defiantly.
+
+"Good Lord! then the Garden o' Eden was up here."
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"Course! _This_ was the cradle o' the human race. Blow the Ganges! Blow
+the Nile! It was our Yukon that saw the first people, 'cause of course
+the first people lived in the first place got ready for 'em."
+
+"That don't follow. Read your Bible."
+
+"If I'm not right, how did it happen there were men here when the North
+was first discovered?"
+
+"Sh!"
+
+"Mac's got the floor."
+
+"Shut up!"
+
+But the Boy thumped the table with one hand and arraigned the
+schoolmaster with the other.
+
+"Now, Mac, I put it to you as a man o' science: if the race had got a
+foothold in any other part o' the world, what in Sam Hill could make
+'em come up here?"
+
+"_We're_ here."
+
+"Yes, tomfools after gold. They never dreamed there was gold. No,
+Sir_ee!_ the only thing on earth that could make men stay here, would
+be that they were born here, and didn't know any better. Don't the
+primitive man cling to his home, no matter what kind o' hole it is?
+He's _afraid_ to leave it. And these first men up here, why, it's plain
+as day--they just hung on, things gettin' worse and worse, and colder
+and colder, and some said, as the old men we laugh at say at home, 'The
+climate ain't what it was when I was a boy,' and nobody believed 'em,
+but everybody began to dress warmer and eat fat, and--"
+
+"All that Buffon says is--"
+
+"Yes--and they invented one thing after another to meet the new
+conditions--kaiaks and bidarras and ivory-tipped harpoons"--he was
+pouring out his new notions at the fastest express rate--"and the
+animals that couldn't stand it emigrated, and those that stayed behind
+got changed--"
+
+"Dry up."
+
+"One at a time."
+
+"Buffon--"
+
+"Yes, yes, Mac, and the hares got white, and the men, playin' a losin'
+game for centuries, got dull in their heads and stunted in their
+legs--always cramped up in a kaiak like those fellas at St. Michael's.
+And, why, it's clear as crystal--they're survivals! The Esquimaux are
+the oldest race in the world."
+
+"Who's makin' this speech?"
+
+"Order!"
+
+"Order!"
+
+"Well, see here: _do_ you admit it, Mac? Don't you see there were just
+a few enterprisin' ones who cleared out, or, maybe, got carried away in
+a current, and found better countries and got rich and civilised, and
+became our forefathers? Hey, boys, ain't I right?"
+
+"You sit down."
+
+"You'll get chucked out."
+
+"Buffon--"
+
+Everybody was talking at once.
+
+"Why, it goes on still," the Boy roared above the din. "People who
+stick at home, and are patient, and put up with things, they're doomed.
+But look at the fellas that come out o' starvin' attics and stinkin'
+pigsties to America. They live like lords, and they look at life like
+men."
+
+Mac was saying a great deal about the Ice Age and the first and second
+periods of glaciation, but nobody could hear what.
+
+_"Prince_ Nicholas? Well, I should smile. He belongs to the oldest
+family in the world. Hoop-la!" The Boy jumped up on his stool and
+cracked his head against the roof; but he only ducked, rubbed his wild,
+long hair till it stood out wilder than ever, and went on: "Nicholas's
+forefathers were kings before Caesar; they were here before the
+Pyramids--"
+
+The Colonel came round and hauled the Boy down. Potts was egging the
+miscreant on. O'Flynn, poorly disguising his delight in a scrimmage,
+had been shouting: "Ye'll spoil the Blow-Out, ye meddlin' jackass!
+Can't ye let Mac make his spache? No; ye must ahlways be huntin' round
+fur harrum to be doin' or throuble to make."
+
+In the turmoil and the contending of many voices Nicholas began to
+explain to his friends that it wasn't a real fight, as it had every
+appearance of being, and the visitors were in no immediate danger of
+their lives. But Kaviak feared the worst, and began to weep forlornly.
+
+"The world is dyin' at top and bottom!" screamed the Boy, writhing
+under the Colonel's clutch. "The ice will spread, the beasts will turn
+white, and we'll turn yella, and we'll all dress in skins and eat fat
+and be exactly like Kaviak, and the last man'll be found tryin' to warm
+his hands at the Equator, his feet on an iceberg and his nose in a
+snowstorm. Your old Buffer's got a long head, Mac. Here's to Buffer!"
+Whereupon he subsided and drank freely of punch.
+
+"Well," said the Colonel, severely, "you've had a Blow-Out if nobody
+else has!"
+
+"Feel better?" inquired Potts, tenderly.
+
+"Now, Mac, you shall have a fair field," said the Colonel, "and if the
+Boy opens his trap again--"
+
+"I'll punch 'im," promised O'Flynn, replenishing the disturber's cup.
+
+But Mac wouldn't be drawn. Besides, he was feeding Kaviak. So the
+Colonel filled in the breach with "My old Kentucky Home," which he sang
+with much feeling, if not great art.
+
+This performance restored harmony and a gentle reflectiveness.
+
+Father Wills told about his journey up here ten years before and of a
+further expedition he'd once made far north to the Koyukuk.
+
+"But Nicholas knows more about the native life and legends than anyone
+I ever met, except, of course, Yagorsha."
+
+"Who's Yag----?" began the Boy.
+
+"Oh, that's the Village Story-teller." He was about to speak of
+something else, but, lifting his eyes, he caught Mac's sudden glance of
+grudging attention. The priest looked away, and went on: "There's a
+story-teller in every settlement. He has always been a great figure in
+the native life, I believe, but now more than ever."
+
+"Why's that?"
+
+"Oh, battles are over and blood-feuds are done, but the need for a
+story-teller abides. In most villages he is a bigger man than the
+chief--they're all 'ol' chiefs,' the few that are left--and when they
+die there will be no more. So the tribal story-teller comes to be the
+most important character"--the Jesuit smiled in that shrewd and gentle
+way of his--"that is, of course, after the Shaman, as the Russians call
+him, the medicine-man, who is a teller of stories, too, in his more
+circumscribed fashion. But it's the Story-teller who helps his people
+through the long winter--helps them to face the terrible new enemies,
+epidemic disease and famine. He has always been their best defence
+against that age-old dread they all have of the dark. Yes, no one
+better able to send such foes flying than Yagorsha of Pymeut. Still,
+Nicholas is a good second." The Prince of Pymeut shook his head.
+
+"Tell them 'The White Crow's Last Flight,'" urged the priest.
+
+But Nicholas was not in the vein, and when they all urged him overmuch,
+he, in self-defence, pulled a knife out of his pocket and a bit of
+walrus ivory about the size of his thumb, and fell to carving.
+
+"What you makin'?"
+
+"Button," says Nicholas; "me heap hurry get him done."
+
+"It looks more like a bird than a button," remarked the Boy.
+
+"Him bird--him button," replied the imperturbable one.
+
+"Half the folk-lore of the North has to do with the crow (or raven),"
+the priest went on. "Seeing Kaviak's feather reminded me of a native
+cradle-song that's a kind of a story, too. It's been roughly
+translated."
+
+"Can you say it?"
+
+"I used to know how it went."
+
+He began in a deep voice:
+
+  "'The wind blows over the Yukon.
+  My husband hunts deer on the Koyukun mountains.
+  Ahmi, ahmi, sleep, little one.
+
+  There is no wood for the fire,
+  The stone-axe is broken, my husband carries the other.
+  Where is the soul of the sun? Hid in the dam of the beaver, waiting the
+  spring-time.
+  Ahmi, ahmi, sleep little one, wake not!
+
+  Look not for ukali, old woman.
+  Long since the cache was emptied, the crow lights no more on the ridge
+  pole.
+  Long since, my husband departed. Why does he wait in the mountains?
+  Ahmi, ahmi, sleep little one, softly.
+
+  Where, where, where is my own?
+  Does he lie starving on the hillside? Why does he linger?
+  Comes he not soon I must seek him among the mountains.
+  Ahmi, ahmi, little one, sleep sound.
+
+  Hush! hush! hush! The crow cometh laughing.
+  Red is his beak, his eyes glisten, the false one!
+  "Thanks for a good meal to Kuskokala the Shaman--
+  On the far mountain quietly lieth your husband."
+  Ahmi, ahmi, sleep little one, wake not.
+
+  "Twenty deers' tongues tied to the pack on his shoulders;
+  Not a tongue in his mouth to call to his wife with.
+  Wolves, foxes, and ravens are tearing and fighting for morsels.
+  Tough and hard are the sinews; not so the child in your bosom."
+  Ahmi, ahmi, sleep little one, wake not!
+
+  Over the mountain slowly staggers the hunter.
+  Two bucks' thighs on his shoulders.
+  Twenty deers' tongues in his belt.
+  "Go, gather wood, kindle a fire, old woman!"
+  Off flew the crow--liar, cheat and deceiver.
+  Wake, oh sleeper, awake! welcome your father!
+
+  He brings you back fat, marrow, venison fresh from the mountain
+  Tired and worn, yet he's carved you a toy of the deer's horn,
+  While he was sitting and waiting long for the deer on the hillside.
+  Wake! see the crow! hiding himself from the arrow;
+  Wake, little one, wake! here is your father safe home.'"
+
+"Who's 'Kuskokala the Shaman'?" the Boy inquired.
+
+"Ah, better ask Nicholas," answered the priest.
+
+But Nicholas was absorbed in his carving.
+
+Again Mr. O'Flynn obliged, roaring with great satisfaction:
+
+  "'I'm a stout rovin' blade, and what matther my name,
+  For I ahlways was wild, an' I'll niver be tame;
+  An' I'll kiss putty gurrls wheriver I go,
+  An' what's that to annyone whether or no.
+
+    _Chorus._
+
+  "'Ogedashin, den thashin, come, boys! let us drink;
+  'Tis madness to sorra, 'tis folly to think.
+  For we're ahl jolly fellows wheriver we go--
+  Ogedashin, den thashin, na boneen sheen lo!'"
+
+Potts was called on. No, he couldn't sing, but he could show them a
+trick or two. And with his grimy euchre-deck he kept his word, showing
+that he was not the mere handy-man, but the magician of the party. The
+natives, who know the cards as we know our A B C's, were enthralled,
+and began to look upon Potts as a creature of more than mortal skill.
+
+Again the Boy pressed Nicholas to dance. "No, no;" and under his
+breath: "You come Pymeut."
+
+Meanwhile, O'Flynn, hugging the pleasant consciousness that he had
+distinguished himself--his pardner, too--complained that the only
+contribution Mac or the Boy had made was to kick up a row. What steps
+were they going to take to retrieve their characters and minister to
+the public entertainment?
+
+"I've supplied the decorations," said Mac in a final tone.
+
+"Well, and the Bhoy? What good arre ye, annyway?"
+
+"Hard to say," said the person addressed; but, thinking hard: "Would
+you like to see me wag my ears?" Some languid interest was manifested
+in this accomplishment, but it fell rather flat after Potts' splendid
+achievements with the euchre-deck.
+
+"No, ye ain't good fur much as an enthertainer," said O'Flynn frankly.
+
+Kaviak had begun to cry for more punch, and Mac was evidently growing a
+good deal perplexed as to the further treatment for his patient.
+
+"Did ye be tellin' some wan, Father, that when ye found that Esquimer
+he had grass stuffed in his mouth? Sure, he'll be missin' that grass.
+Ram somethin' down his throat."
+
+"Was it done to shorten his sufferings?" the Colonel asked in an
+undertone.
+
+"No," answered the priest in the same low voice; "if they listen long
+to the dying, the cry gets fixed in their imagination, and they hear it
+after the death, and think the spirit haunts the place. Their fear and
+horror of the dead is beyond belief. They'll turn a dying man out of
+his own house, and not by the door, but through a hole in the roof. Or
+they pull out a log to make an opening, closing it up quick, so the
+spirit won't find his way back."
+
+Kaviak continued to lament.
+
+"Sorry we can't offer you some blubber, Kaviak."
+
+"'Tain't that he's missin'; he's got an inexhaustible store of his own.
+His mistake is offerin' it to us."
+
+"I know what's the matter with that little shaver," said the Boy. "He
+hasn't got any stool, and you keep him standin' on those legs of his
+like matches."
+
+"Let him sit on the buffalo-skin there," said Mac gruffly.
+
+"Don't you s'pose he's thought o' the buffalo-skin? But he'd hate it. A
+little fella likes to be up where he can see what's goin' on. He'd feel
+as lost 'way down there on the buffalo as a puppy in a corn-brake."
+
+The Boy was standing up, looking round.
+
+"I know. Elephas! come along, Jimmie!" In spite of remonstrance, they
+rushed to the door and dragged in the "fossle." When Nicholas and his
+friends realised what was happening, they got up grunting and
+protesting. "Lend a hand, Andrew," the Boy called to the man nearest.
+
+"No--no!" objected the true son of the Church, with uncommon fervour.
+
+"You, then, Nicholas."
+
+_"Oo,_ ha, _oo!_ No touch! No touch!"
+
+"What's up? You don't know what this is."
+
+"Huh! Nicholas know plenty well. Nicholas no touch bones of dead
+devils." This view of the "fossle" so delighted the company that,
+acting on a sudden impulse, they pushed the punch-bowl out of the way,
+and, with a whoop, hoisted the huge thing on the table. Then the Boy
+seized the whimpering Kaviak, and set him high on the throne. So
+surprised was the topmost Spissimen that he was as quiet for a moment
+as the one underneath him, staring about, blinking. Then, looking down
+at Mac's punch-cup, he remembered his grievance, and took up the wail
+where he had left it off.
+
+"Nuh, nuh! don't you do that," said the Boy with startling suddenness.
+"If you make that noise, I'll have to make a worse one. If you cry,
+Kaviak, I'll have to sing. Hmt, hmt! don't you do it." And as Kaviak,
+in spite of instructions, began to bawl, the Boy began to do a
+plantation jig, crooning monotonously:
+
+  "'Grashoppah sett'n on de swee' p'tater vine,
+  Swee' p'tater vine, swee' p'tater vine;
+  Grasshoppah--'"
+
+He stopped as suddenly as he'd begun. "_Now_, will you be good?"
+
+Kaviak drew a breath with a catch in it, looked round, and began as
+firmly as ever:
+
+"Weh!--eh!--eh!"
+
+"Sh--sh!" The Boy clapped his hands, and lugubriously intoned:
+
+  "'Dey's de badger and de bah,
+  En de funny lil hah,
+  En de active lil flea,
+  En de lil armadillah
+  Dat sleeps widouter pillah,
+  An dey all gottah mate but me--ee--ee!'
+
+"Farva!" Kaviak gasped.
+
+"Say, do a nigger breakdown," solicited Potts.
+
+"Ain't room; besides, I can't do it with blisters."
+
+They did the impossible--they made room, and turned back the
+buffalo-skin. Only the big Colonel, who was most in the way of all,
+sat, not stirring, staring in the fire. Such a look on the absent,
+tender face as the great masters, the divinest poets cannot often
+summon, but which comes at the call of some foolish old nursery jingle,
+some fragment of half-forgotten folk-lore, heard when the world was
+young--when all hearing was music, when all sight was "pictures," when
+every sense brought marvels that seemed the everyday way of the
+wonderful, wonderful world.
+
+For an obvious reason it is not through the utterances of the greatest
+that the child receives his first intimations of the beauty and the
+mystery of things. These come in lowly guise with familiar everyday
+voices, but their eloquence has the incommunicable grace of infancy,
+the promise of the first dawn, the menace of the first night.
+
+"Do you remember the thing about the screech-owl and the weather
+signs?" said the Colonel, roused at last by the jig on his toes and the
+rattle of improvised "bones" almost in his face.
+
+"Reckon I do, honey," said the Boy, his feet still flying and flapping
+on the hard earthen floor.
+
+  "_'Wen de screech-owl light on de gable en'
+  En holler, Who--ool oh--oh!'_"
+
+He danced up and hooted in Kaviak's face.
+
+  "_'Den yo' bettah keep yo eyeball peel,
+  Kase 'e bring bad luck t' yo'.
+  Oh--oh! oh-oh!'_"
+
+Then, sinking his voice, dancing slowly, and glancing anxiously under the
+table:
+
+  "_'Wen de ole black cat widdee yalla eyes
+  Slink round like she atterah mouse,
+  Den yo' bettah take keer yo'self en frien's,
+  Kase deys sholy a witch en de house.'_"
+
+An awful pause, a shiver, and a quick change of scene, indicated by a
+gurgling whoop, ending in a quacking:
+
+  "_'Wen de puddle-duck'e leave de pon',
+  En start t' comb e fedder,
+  Den yo' bettah take yo' omberel,
+  Kase deys gwine tubbee wet wedder.'_"
+
+"Now comes the speckly rooster," the Colonel prompted.
+
+The Boy crowed long and loud:
+
+  "_'Effer ole wile rooster widder speckly tail
+  Commer crowin' befoh de do',
+  En yo got some comp'ny a'ready,
+  Yo's gwinter have some mo'.'_"
+
+Then he grunted, and went on all fours. "Kaviak!" he called, "you take
+warnin'----
+
+  "_'Wen yo' see a pig agoin' along--'_"
+
+Look here: Kaviak's never seen a pig! I call it a shame.
+
+  _"'Wen yo' see a pig agoin' along
+  Widder straw en de sider 'is mouf,
+  It'll be a tuhble winter,
+  En yo' bettuh move down Souf.'"_
+
+He jumped up and dashed into a breakdown, clattering the bones, and
+screeching:
+
+  _"'Squirl he got a bushy tail,
+  Possum's tail am bah,
+  Raccoon's tail am ringed all roun'--
+  Touch him ef yo dah!
+  Rabbit got no tail at all,
+  Cep a little bit o' bunch o' hah.'"_
+
+The group on the floor, undoubtedly, liked that part of the
+entertainment that involved the breakdown, infinitely the best of all,
+but simultaneously, at its wildest moment, they all turned their heads
+to the door. Mac noticed the movement, listened, and then got up,
+lifted the latch, and cautiously looked out. The Boy caught a glimpse
+of the sky over Mac's shoulder.
+
+"Jimminy Christmas!" He stopped, nearly breathless. "It can't be a
+fire. Say, boys! they're havin' a Blow-Out up in heaven."
+
+The company crowded out. The sky was full of a palpitant light. An
+Indian appeared from round the stockade; he was still staring up at the
+stone chimney.
+
+"Are we on fire?"
+
+"How-do." He handed Father Wills a piece of dirty paper.
+
+"Hah! Yes. All right. Andrew!"
+
+Andrew needed no more. He bustled away to harness the dogs. The white
+men were staring up at the sky. "What's goin' on in heaven, Father?
+S'pose you call this the Aurora Borealis--hey?"
+
+"Yes," said the priest; "and finer than we often get it. We are not far
+enough north for the great displays."
+
+He went in to put on his parki.
+
+Mac, after looking out, had shut the door and stayed behind with
+Kaviak.
+
+On Father Will's return Farva, speaking apparently less to the priest
+than to the floor, muttered: "Better let him stop where he is till his
+cold's better."
+
+The Colonel came in.
+
+"Leave the child here!" ejaculated the priest.
+
+"--till he's better able to travel."
+
+"Why not?" said the Colonel promptly.
+
+"Well, it would be a kindness to keep him a few days. I'll _have_ to
+travel fast tonight."
+
+"Then it's settled." Mac bundled Kaviak into the Boy's bunk.
+
+When the others were ready to go out again, Farva caught up his fur
+coat and went along with them.
+
+The dogs were not quite ready. The priest was standing a little
+absentmindedly, looking up. The pale green streamers were fringed with
+the tenderest rose colour, and from the corona uniting them at the
+zenith, they shot out across the heavens, with a rapid circular and
+lateral motion, paling one moment, flaring up again the next.
+
+"Wonder what makes it," said the Colonel.
+
+"Electricity," Mac snapped out promptly.
+
+The priest smiled.
+
+"One mystery for another."
+
+He turned to the Boy, and they went on together, preceding the others,
+a little, on the way down the trail towards the river.
+
+"I think you must come and see us at Holy Cross--eh? Come soon;" and
+then, without waiting for an answer: "The Indians think these flitting
+lights are the souls of the dead at play. But Yagorsha says that long
+ago a great chief lived in the North who was a mighty hunter. It was
+always summer up here then, and the big chief chased the big game from
+one end of the year to another, from mountain to mountain and from
+river to sea. He killed the biggest moose with a blow of his fist, and
+caught whales with his crooked thumb for a hook. One long day in summer
+he'd had a tremendous chase after a wonderful bird, and he came home
+without it, deadbeat and out of temper. He lay down to rest, but the
+sunlight never winked, and the unending glare maddened him. He rolled,
+and tossed, and roared, as only the Yukon roars when the ice rushes
+down to the sea. But he couldn't sleep. Then in an awful fury he got
+up, seized the day in his great hands, tore it into little bits, and
+tossed them high in the air. So it was dark. And winter fell on the
+world for the first time. During months and months, just to punish this
+great crime, there was no bright sunshine; but often in the long night,
+while the chief was wearying for summer to come again, he'd be
+tantalised by these little bits of the broken day that flickered in the
+sky. Coming, Andrew?" he called back.
+
+The others trooped down-hill, dogs, sleds, and all. There was a great
+hand-shaking and good-byeing.
+
+Nicholas whispered:
+
+"You come Pymeut?"
+
+"I should just pretty nearly think I would."
+
+"You dance heap good. Buttons no all done." He put four little ivory
+crows into the Boy's hands. They were rudely but cleverly carved, with
+eyes outlined in ink, and supplied under the breast with a neat
+inward-cut shank.
+
+"Mighty fine!" The Boy examined them by the strange glow that
+brightened in the sky.
+
+"You keep."
+
+"Oh no, can't do that."
+
+"_Yes!_" Nicholas spoke peremptorily. "Yukon men have big feast, must
+bring present. Me no got reindeer, me got button." He grinned.
+"Goo'-bye." And the last of the guests went his way.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was only habit that kept the Colonel toasting by the fire before he
+turned in, for the cabin was as warm to-night as the South in
+mid-summer.
+
+  _"Grasshoppah sett'n on a swee' p'tater vine,"_
+
+The Boy droned sleepily as he untied the leathern thongs that kept up
+his muckluck legs--
+
+  _"Swee' p'tater vine, swee' p'ta--"_
+
+"All those othahs"--the Colonel waved a hand in the direction of
+Pymeut--"I think we dreamed 'em, Boy. You and me playing the Big Game
+with Fohtune. Foolishness! Klondyke? Yoh crazy. Tell me the river's
+hard as iron and the snow's up to the windah? Don' b'lieve a wo'd of
+it. We're on some plantation, Boy, down South, in the niggah quawtaws."
+
+The Boy was turning back the covers, and balancing a moment on the side
+of the bunk.
+
+
+ _"Sett'n on a swee' p'tater vine, swee' p'ta--"_
+
+"Great Caesar's ghost!" He jumped up, and stood staring down at the
+sleeping Kaviak.
+
+"Ah--a--didn't you know? He's been left behind for a few days."
+
+"Yes, I can see he's left behind. No, Colonel, I reckon we're in the
+Arctic regions all right when it comes to catchin' Esquimers in your
+bed!"
+
+He pulled the furs over Kaviak and himself, and curled down to sleep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE SHAMAN.
+
+"For my part, I have ever believed and do now know, that there are
+witches."--_Religio Medici._
+
+
+The Boy had hoped to go to Pymeut the next day, but his feet refused to
+carry him. Mac took a diagram and special directions, and went after
+the rest of elephas, conveying the few clumsy relics home, bit by bit,
+with a devotion worthy of a pious pilgrim.
+
+For three days the Boy growled and played games with Kaviak, going
+about at first chiefly on hands and knees.
+
+On the fifth day after the Blow-Out, "You comin' long to Pymeut this
+mornin'?" he asked the Colonel.
+
+"What's the rush?"
+
+"_Rush!_ Good Lord! it's 'most a week since they were here. And it's
+stopped snowin', and hasn't thought of sleetin' yet or anything else
+rambunksious. Come on, Colonel."
+
+But Father Wills had shown the Colonel the piece of dirty paper the
+Indian had brought on the night of the Blow-Out.
+
+"_Trouble threatened. Pymeuts think old chief dying not of consumption,
+but of a devil. They've sent a dogteam to bring the Shaman down over
+the ice. Come quickly.--_PAUL."
+
+"Reckon we'd better hold our horses till we hear from Holy Cross."
+
+"Hear what?"
+
+The Colonel didn't answer, but the Boy didn't wait to listen. He
+swallowed his coffee scalding hot, rolled up some food and stuff for
+trading, in a light reindeer skin blanket, lashed it packwise on his
+back, shouldered his gun, and made off before the Trio came in to
+breakfast.
+
+The first sign that he was nearing a settlement, was the appearance of
+what looked like sections of rude wicker fencing, set up here and there
+in the river and frozen fast in the ice. High on the bank lay one of
+the long cornucopia-shaped basket fish-traps, and presently he caught
+sight of something in the bleak Arctic landscape that made his heart
+jump, something that to Florida eyes looked familiar.
+
+"Why, if it doesn't make me think of John Fox's cabin on Cypress
+Creek!" he said to himself, formulating an impression that had vaguely
+haunted him on the Lower River in September; wondering if the Yukon
+flooded like the Caloosahatchee, and if the water could reach as far up
+as all that.
+
+He stopped to have a good look at this first one of the Pymeut caches,
+for this modest edifice, like a Noah's Ark on four legs, was not a
+habitation, but a storehouse, and was perched so high, not for fear of
+floods, but for fear of dogs and mice. This was manifest from the fact
+that there were fish-racks and even ighloos much nearer the river.
+
+The Boy stopped and hesitated; it was a sore temptation to climb up and
+see what they had in that cache. There was an inviting plank all ready,
+with sticks nailed on it transversely to prevent the feet from
+slipping. But the Boy stopped at the rude ladder's foot, deciding that
+this particular mark of interest on the part of a stranger might be
+misinterpreted. It would, perhaps, be prudent to find Nicholas first of
+all. But where was Nicholas?--where was anybody?
+
+The scattered, half-buried huts were more like earth-mounds,
+snow-encrusted, some with drift-logs propped against the front face
+looking riverwards.
+
+While he was cogitating how to effect an entrance to one of these, or
+to make his presence known, he saw, to his relief, the back of a
+solitary Indian going in the direction of an ighloo farther up the
+river.
+
+"Hi, hi!" he shouted, and as the figure turned he made signs. It
+stopped.
+
+"How-do?" the Boy called out when he got nearer. "You talk English?"
+
+The native laughed. A flash of fine teeth and sparkling eyes lit up a
+young, good-looking face. This boy seemed promising.
+
+"How d'ye do? You know Nicholas?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+The laugh was even gayer. It seemed to be a capital joke to know
+Nicholas.
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+The figure turned and pointed, and then: "Come. I show you."
+
+This was a more highly educated person than Nicholas, thought the
+visitor, remarking the use of the nominative scorned of the Prince.
+
+They walked on to the biggest of the underground dwellings.
+
+"Is this where the King hangs out? Nicholas' father lives here?"
+
+"No. This is the Kazhga."
+
+"Oh, the Kachime. Ain't you comin' in?"
+
+"Oh no."
+
+"Why?"
+
+His guide had a fit of laughter, and then turned to go.
+
+"Say, what's your name?"
+
+The answer sounded like "Muckluck."
+
+And just then Nicholas crawled out of the tunnel-like opening leading
+into the council-house. He jumped up, beaming at the sight of his
+friend.
+
+"Say, Nicholas, who's this fella that's always laughing, no matter what
+you say? Calls himself 'Muckluck.'"
+
+The individual referred to gave way to another spasm of merriment,
+which infected Nicholas.
+
+"My sister--this one," he explained.
+
+"Oh-h!" The Boy joined in the laugh, and pulled off his Arctic cap with
+a bow borrowed straight from the Colonel.
+
+"Princess Muckluck, I'm proud to know you."
+
+"Name no Muckluck," began Nicholas; "name Mahk----"
+
+"Mac? Nonsense! Mac's a man's name--she's Princess Muckluck. Only,
+how's a fella to tell, when you dress her like a man?"
+
+The Princess still giggled, while her brother explained.
+
+"No like man. See?" He showed how the skirt of her deerskin parki,
+reaching, like her brother's, a little below the knee, was shaped round
+in front, and Nicholas's own--all men's parkis were cut straight
+across.
+
+"I see. How's your father?"
+
+Nicholas looked grave; even Princess Muckluck stopped laughing.
+
+"Come," said Nicholas, and the Boy followed him on all fours into the
+Kachime.
+
+Entering on his stomach, he found himself in a room about sixteen by
+twenty feet, two-thirds underground, log-walls chinked with moss, a
+roof of poles sloping upwards, tent-like, but leaving an opening in the
+middle for a smoke-hole some three feet square, and covered at present
+by a piece of thin, translucent skin. With the sole exception of the
+smoke-hole, the whole thing was so covered with earth, and capped with
+snow, that, expecting a mere cave, one was surprised at the wood-lining
+within. The Boy was still more surprised at the concentration, there,
+of malignant smells.
+
+He gasped, and was for getting out again as fast as possible, when the
+bearskin flap fell behind him over the Kachime end of the
+entrance-tunnel.
+
+Through the tobacco-smoke and the stifling air he saw, vaguely, a grave
+gathering of bucks sitting, or, rather, lounging and squatting, on the
+outer edge of the wide sleeping-bench that ran all round the room,
+about a foot and a half from the hewn-log floor.
+
+Their solemn, intent faces were lit grotesquely by the uncertain glow
+of two seal-oil lamps, mounted on two posts, planted one in front of
+the right sleeping-bench, the other on the left.
+
+The Boy hesitated. Was it possible he could get used to the atmosphere?
+Certainly it was warm in here, though there was no fire that he could
+see. Nicholas was talking away very rapidly to the half-dozen grave and
+reverend signiors, they punctuating his discourse with occasional
+grunts and a well-nigh continuous coughing. Nicholas wound up in
+English.
+
+"Me tell you: he heap good friend. You ketch um tobacco?" he inquired
+suddenly of his guest. Fortunately, the Boy had remembered to "ketch"
+that essential, and his little offering was laid before the
+council-men. More grunts, and room made for the visitor on the
+sleeping-bench next the post that supported one of the lamps, a clay
+saucer half-full of seal-oil, in which a burning wick of twisted moss
+gave forth a powerful odour, a fair amount of smoke, and a faint light.
+
+The Boy sat down, still staring about him, taking note of the well-hewn
+logs, and of the neat attachment of the timbers by a saddle-joint at
+the four corners of the roof.
+
+"Who built this?" he inquired of Nicholas.
+
+"Ol' father, an' ... heap ol' men gone dead."
+
+"Gee! Well, whoever did it was on to his job," he said. "I don't seen a
+nail in the whole sheebang."
+
+"No, no nail."
+
+The Boy remembered Nicholas's sled, and, looking again at the
+disproportionately small hands of the men about him, corrected his
+first impression that they were too feminine to be good for much.
+
+A dirty old fellow, weak and sickly in appearance, began to talk
+querulously. All the others listened with respect, smoking and making
+inarticulate noises now and then. When that discourse was finished, a
+fresh one was begun by yet another coughing councillor.
+
+"What's it all about?" the Boy asked.
+
+"Ol' Chief heap sick," said the buck on the Boy's right.
+
+"Ol' Chief, ol' father, b'long me," Nicholas observed with pride.
+
+"Yes; but aren't the Holy Cross people nursing him?"
+
+"Brother Paul gone; white medicine no good."
+
+They all shook their heads and coughed despairingly.
+
+"Then try s'm' other--some yella-brown, Esquimaux kind," hazarded the
+Boy lightly, hardly noticing what he was saying till he found nearly
+all the eyes of the company fixed intently upon him. Nicholas was
+translating, and it was clear the Boy had created a sensation.
+
+"Father Wills no like," said one buck doubtfully. "He make cross-eyes
+when Shaman come."
+
+"Oh yes, medicine-man," said the Boy, following the narrative eagerly.
+
+"Shaman go way," volunteered an old fellow who hitherto had held his
+peace; "all get sick"--he coughed painfully--"heap Pymeuts die."
+
+"Father Wills come." Nicholas took up the tale afresh. "Shaman come.
+Father Wills heap mad. He no let Shaman stay."
+
+"No; him say, 'Go! plenty quick, plenty far. Hey, you! _Mush!_'"
+
+They smoked awhile in silence broken only by coughs.
+
+"Shaman say, 'Yukon Inua plenty mad.'"
+
+"Who is Yukon Inua? Where does he live?"
+
+"Unner Yukon ice," whispered Nicholas. "Oh, the river spirit?... Of
+course."
+
+"Him heap strong. Long time"--he motioned back into the ages with one
+slim brown hand--"fore Holy Cross here, Yukon Inua take good care
+Pymeuts."
+
+"No tell Father Wills?"
+
+"No."
+
+Then in a low guttural voice: "Shaman come again."
+
+"Gracious! When?"
+
+"To-night."
+
+"Jiminny Christmas!"
+
+They sat and smoked and coughed. By-and-by, as if wishing thoroughly to
+justify their action, Nicholas resumed:
+
+"You savvy, ol' father try white medicine--four winter, four summer. No
+good. Ol' father say, 'Me well man? Good friend Holy Cross, good friend
+Russian mission. Me ol'? me sick? Send for Shaman.'"
+
+The entire company grunted in unison.
+
+"You no tell?" Nicholas added with recurrent anxiety.
+
+"No, no; they shan't hear through me. I'm safe."
+
+Presently they all got up, and began removing and setting back the hewn
+logs that formed the middle of the floor. It then appeared that,
+underneath, was an excavation about two feet deep. In the centre,
+within a circle of stones, were the charred remains of a fire, and here
+they proceeded to make another.
+
+As soon as it began to blaze, Yagorsha the Story-teller took the cover
+off the smoke-hole, so the company was not quite stifled.
+
+A further diversion was created by several women crawling in, bringing
+food for the men-folk, in old lard-cans or native wooden kantaks. These
+vessels they deposited by the fire, and with an exchange of grunts went
+out as they had come.
+
+Nicholas wouldn't let the Boy undo his pack.
+
+"No, we come back," he said, adding something in his own tongue to the
+company, and then crawled out, followed by the Boy. Their progress was
+slow, for the Boy's "Canadian webfeet" had been left in the Kachime,
+and he sank in the snow at every step. Twice in the dusk he stumbled
+over an ighloo, or a sled, or some sign of humanity, and asked of the
+now silent, preoccupied Nicholas, "Who lives here?" The answer had
+been, "Nobody; all dead."
+
+The Boy was glad to see approaching, at last, a human figure. It came
+shambling through the snow, with bent head and swaying, jerking gait,
+looked up suddenly and sheered off, flitting uncertainly onward, in the
+dim light, like a frightened ghost.
+
+"Who is that?"
+
+"Shaman. Him see in dark all same owl. Him know you white man."
+
+The Boy stared after him. The bent figure of the Shaman looked like a
+huge bat flying low, hovering, disappearing into the night.
+
+"Those your dogs howling?" the visitor asked, thinking that for sheer
+dismalness Pymeut would be hard to beat.
+
+Nicholas stopped suddenly and dropped down; the ground seemed to open
+and swallow him. The Boy stooped and saw his friend's feet disappearing
+in a hole. He seized one of them. "Hold on; wait for me!"
+
+Nicholas kicked, but to no purpose; he could make only such progress as
+his guest permitted.
+
+Presently a gleam. Nicholas had thrust away the flap at the tunnel's
+end, and they stood in the house of the Chief of the Pymeuts, that
+native of whom Father Wills had said, "He is the richest and most
+intelligent man of his tribe."
+
+The single room seemed very small after the spaciousness of the
+Kachime, but it was the biggest ighloo in the settlement.
+
+A fire burnt brightly in the middle of the earthen floor, and over it
+was bending Princess Muckluck, cooking the evening meal. She nodded,
+and her white teeth shone in the blaze. Over in the corner, wrapped in
+skins, lay a man on the floor groaning faintly. The salmon, toasting on
+sticks over wood coals, smelt very appetising.
+
+"Why, your fish are whole. Don't you clean 'em first?" asked the
+visitor, surprised out of his manners.
+
+"No," said Nicholas; "him better no cut."
+
+They sat down by the fire, and the Princess waited on them. The Boy
+discovered that it was perfectly true. Yukon salmon broiled in their
+skins over a birch fire are the finest eating in the world, and any
+"other way" involves a loss of flavour.
+
+He was introduced for the first time to the delights of reindeer
+"back-fat," and found even that not so bad.
+
+"You are lucky, Nicholas, to have a sister--such a nice one, too"--(the
+Princess giggled)--"to keep house for you."
+
+Nicholas understood, at least, that politeness was being offered, and
+he grinned.
+
+"I've got a sister myself. I'll show you her picture some day. I care
+about her a lot. I've come up here to make a pile so that we can buy
+back our old place in Florida."
+
+He said this chiefly to the Princess, for she evidently had profited
+more by her schooling, and understood things quite like a Christian.
+
+"Did you ever eat an orange, Princess?" he continued.
+
+"Kind o' fish?"
+
+"No, fruit; a yella ball that grows on a tree."
+
+"Me know," said Nicholas; "me see him in boxes St. Michael's. Him
+bully."
+
+"Yes. Well, we had a lot of trees all full of those yella balls, and we
+used to eat as many as we liked. We don't have much winter down where I
+live--summer pretty nearly all the time."
+
+"I'd like go there," said the girl.
+
+"Well, will you come and see us, Muckluck? When I've found a gold-mine
+and have bought back the Orange Grove, my sister and me are goin' to
+live together, like you and Nicholas."
+
+"She look like you?"
+
+"No; and it's funny, too, 'cause we're twins."
+
+"Twins! What's twins?"
+
+"Two people born at the same time."
+
+"No!" ejaculated Nicholas.
+
+"Why, yes, and they always care a heap about each other when they're
+twins."
+
+But Muckluck stared incredulously.
+
+"_Two_ at the same time!" she exclaimed. "It's like that, then, in your
+country?"
+
+The Boy saw not astonishment alone, but something akin to disgust in
+the face of the Princess. He felt, vaguely, he must justify his
+twinship.
+
+"Of course; there's nothing strange about it; it happens quite often."
+
+"_Often?_"
+
+"Yes; people are very much pleased. Once in a while there are even
+three--"
+
+"All at the same time!" Her horror turned into shrieks of laughter.
+"Why, your women are like our dogs! Human beings and seals never have
+more than one at a time!"
+
+The old man in the corner began to moan and mutter feverishly. Nicholas
+went to him, bent down, and apparently tried to soothe him. Muckluck
+gathered up the supper-things and set them aside.
+
+"You were at the Holy Cross school?" asked the Boy.
+
+"Six years--with Mother Aloysius and the Sisters. They very good."
+
+"So you're a Catholic, then?"
+
+"Oh yes."
+
+"You speak the best English I've heard from a native."
+
+"I love Sister Winifred. I want to go back--unless"--she regarded the
+Boy with a speculative eye--"unless I go your country."
+
+The sick man began to talk deliriously, and lifted up a terrible old
+face with fever-bright eyes glaring through wisps of straight gray
+hair. No voice but his was heard for some time in the ighloo, then, "I
+fraid," said Muckluck, crouching near the fire, but with head turned
+over shoulder, staring at the sick man.
+
+"No wonder," said the Boy, thinking such an apparition enough to
+frighten anybody.
+
+"Nicholas 'fraid, too," she whispered, "when the devil talks."
+
+"The devil?"
+
+"Yes. Sh! You hear?"
+
+The delirious chatter went on, rising to a scream. Nicholas came
+hurrying back to the fire with a look of terror in his face.
+
+"Me go get Shaman."
+
+"No; he come soon." Muckluck clung to him.
+
+They both crouched down by the fire.
+
+"You 'fraid he'll die before the Shaman gets here?"
+
+"Oh no," said Muckluck soothingly, but her face belied her words.
+
+The sick man called hoarsely. Nicholas got him some water, and propped
+him up to drink. He glared over the cup with wild eyes, his teeth
+chattering against the tin. The Boy, himself, felt a creep go down his
+spine.
+
+Muckluck moved closer to him.
+
+"Mustn't say he die," she whispered. "If Nicholas think he die, he drag
+him out--leave him in the snow." "Never!"
+
+"Sh!" she made him a sign to be quiet. The rambling fever-talk went on,
+Nicholas listening fascinated. "No Pymeut," she whispered, "like live
+in ighloo any more if man die there."
+
+"You mean, if they know a person's dying they haul him out o'
+doors--and _leave_ him a night like this?"
+
+"If not, how get him out ... after?"
+
+"Why, carry him out."
+
+"_Touch_ him? Touch _dead_ man?" She shuddered. "Oh, no. Bad, bad! I no
+think he die," she resumed, raising her voice. But Nicholas rejoined
+them, silent, looking very grave. Was he contemplating turning the poor
+old fellow out? The Boy sat devising schemes to prevent the barbarism
+should it come to that. The wind had risen; it was evidently going to
+be a rough night.
+
+With imagination full of sick people turned out to perish, the Boy
+started up as a long wail came, muffled, but keen still with anguish,
+down through the snow and the earth, by way of the smoke-hole, into the
+dim little room.
+
+"Oh, Nicholas! what was that?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Wait! Listen! There, that! Why, it's a child crying."
+
+"No, him Chee."
+
+"Let's go and bring him in."
+
+"Bring dog in here?"
+
+"Dog! That's no dog."
+
+"Yes, him dog; him my Chee."
+
+"Making a human noise like that?"
+
+Nicholas nodded. The only sounds for some time were the doleful
+lamenting of the Mahlemeut without, and the ravings of the Pymeut Chief
+within.
+
+The Boy was conscious of a queer, dream-like feeling. All this had been
+going on up here for ages. It had been like this when Columbus came
+over the sea. All the world had changed since then, except the
+steadfast North. The Boy sat up suddenly, and rubbed his eyes. With
+that faculty on the part of the unlearned that one is tempted to call
+"American," a faculty for assimilating the grave conclusions of the
+doctors, and importing them light-heartedly into personal experience,
+he realised that what met his eyes here in Nicholas' house was one of
+the oldest pictures humanity has presented. This was what was going on
+by the Yukon, when King John, beside that other river, was yielding
+Magna Charta to the barons. While the Caesars were building Rome the
+Pymeut forefathers were building just such ighloos as this. While
+Pheidias wrought his marbles, the men up here carved walrus-ivory, and,
+in lieu of Homer, recited "The Crow's Last Flight" and "The Legend of
+the Northern Lights."
+
+Nicholas had risen again, his mouth set hard, his small hands shaking.
+He unrolled an old reindeer-skin full of holes, and examined it. At
+this the girl, who had been about to make up the fire, threw down the
+bit of driftwood and hid her face.
+
+The sick man babbled on.
+
+Faint under the desolate sound another--sibilant, clearer, uncannily
+human. Nicholas had heard, too, for he threw down the tattered
+deerskin, and went to the other side of the fire. Voices in the tunnel.
+Nicholas held back the flap and gravely waited there, till one Pymeut
+after another crawled in. They were the men the Boy had seen at the
+Kachime, with one exception--a vicious-looking old fellow, thin, wiry,
+with a face like a smoked chimpanzee and eyes of unearthly brightness.
+He was given the best place by the fire, and held his brown claws over
+the red coals while the others were finding their places.
+
+The Boy, feeling he would need an interpreter, signed to Muckluck to
+come and sit by him. Grave as a judge she got up, and did as she was
+bid.
+
+"That the Shaman?" whispered the Boy.
+
+She nodded. It was plain that this apparition, however hideous, had
+given her great satisfaction.
+
+"Any more people coming?"
+
+"Got no more now in Pymeut."
+
+"Where is everybody?"
+
+"Some sick, some dead."
+
+The old Chief rambled on, but not so noisily.
+
+"See," whispered Muckluck, "devil 'fraid already. He begin to speak
+small."
+
+The Shaman never once looked towards the sufferer till he himself was
+thoroughly warm. Even then he withdrew from the genial glow, only to
+sit back, humped together, blinking, silent. The Boy began to feel
+that, if he did finally say something it would be as surprising as to
+hear an aged monkey break into articulate speech.
+
+Nicholas edged towards the Shaman, presenting something in a birch-bark
+dish.
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"A deer's tongue," whispered Muckluck.
+
+The Boy remembered the Koyukun song, "Thanks for a good meal to
+Kuskokala, the Shaman."
+
+Nicholas seemed to be haranguing the Shaman deferentially, but with
+spirit. He pulled out from the bottom of his father's bed three fine
+marten-skins, shook them, and dangled them before the Shaman. They
+produced no effect. He then took a box of matches and a plug of the
+Boy's tobacco out of his pocket, and held the lot towards the Shaman,
+seeming to say that to save his life he couldn't rake up another
+earthly thing to tempt his Shamanship. Although the Shaman took the
+offerings his little black eyes glittered none the less rapaciously, as
+they flew swiftly round the room, falling at last with a vicious snap
+and gleam upon the Boy. Then it was that for the first time he spoke.
+
+"Nuh! nuh!" interrupted Muckluck, chattering volubly, and evidently
+commending the Boy to the Shaman. Several of the old bucks laughed.
+
+"He say Yukon Inua no like you."
+
+"He think white men bring plague, bring devils."
+
+"Got some money?" whispered Muckluck.
+
+"Not here."
+
+The Boy saw the moment when he would be turned out. He plunged his
+hands down into his trousers pockets and fished up a knife, his
+second-best one, fortunately.
+
+"Tell him I'm all right, and he can give this to Yukon Inua with my
+respects."
+
+Muckluck explained and held up the shining object, blades open,
+corkscrew curling attractively before the covetous eyes of the Shaman.
+When he could endure the temptation no longer his two black claws shot
+out, but Nicholas intercepted the much-envied object, while, as it
+seemed, he drove a more advantageous bargain. Terms finally settled,
+the Shaman seized the knife, shut it, secreted it with a final grunt,
+and stood up.
+
+Everyone made way for him. He jerked his loosely-jointed body over to
+the sick man, lifted the seal-oil lamp with his shaky old hands, and
+looked at the patient long and steadily. When he had set the lamp down
+again, with a grunt, he put his black thumb on the wick and squeezed
+out the light. When he came back to the fire, which had burnt low, he
+pulled open his parki and drew out an ivory wand, and a long eagle's
+feather with a fluffy white tuft of some sort at the end. He deposited
+these solemnly, side by side, on the ground, about two feet apart.
+
+Turning round to the dying fire, he took a stick, and with Nicholas's
+help gathered the ashes up and laid them over the smouldering brands.
+
+The ighloo was practically dark. No one dared speak save the yet
+unabashed devil in the sick man, who muttered angrily. It was curious
+to see how the coughing of the others, which in the Kachime had been
+practically constant, was here almost silenced. Whether this was
+achieved through awe and respect for the Shaman, or through nervous
+absorption in the task he had undertaken, who shall say?
+
+The Boy felt rather than saw that the Shaman had lain down between the
+ivory wand and the eagle's feather. Each man sat as still as death,
+listening, staring, waiting.
+
+Presently a little jet of flame sprang up out of the ashes. The Shaman
+lifted his head angrily, saw it was no human hand that had dared turn
+on the light, growled, and pulled something else from under his
+inexhaustible parki. The Boy peered curiously. The Shaman seemed to be
+shutting out the offensive light by wrapping himself up in something,
+head and all.
+
+"What's he doing now?" the Boy ventured to whisper under cover of the
+devil's sudden loud remonstrance, the sick man at this point breaking
+into ghastly groans.
+
+"He puts on the Kamlayka. Sh!"
+
+The Shaman, still enveloped head and body, began to beat softly,
+keeping time with the eagle's feather. You could follow the faint gleam
+of the ivory wand, but on what it fell with that hollow sound no eye
+could see. Now, at intervals, he uttered a cry, a deep bass
+danger-note, singularly unnerving. Someone answered in a higher key,
+and they kept this up in a kind of rude, sharply-timed duet, till one
+by one the whole group of natives was gathered into the swing of it,
+swept along involuntarily, it would seem, by some magnetic attraction
+of the rhythm.
+
+_"Ung hi yah! ah-ha-yah! yah-yah-yah!"_ was the chorus to that deep,
+recurrent cry of the Shaman. Its accompanying drum-note was muffled
+like far-off thunder, conjured out of the earth by the ivory wand.
+
+Presently a scream of terror from the bundle of skins and bones in the
+corner.
+
+"Ha!" Muckluck clasped her hands and rocked back and forth.
+
+"They'll frighten the old man to death if he's conscious," said the
+Boy, half rising.
+
+She pulled him down.
+
+"No, no; frighten devil." She was shaking with excitement and with
+ecstacy.
+
+The sick man cried aloud. A frenzy seemed to seize the Shaman. He
+raised his voice in a series of blood-curdling shrieks, then dropped
+it, moaning, whining, then bursting suddenly into diabolic laughter,
+bellowing, whispering, ventriloquising, with quite extraordinary skill.
+The dim and foetid cave might indeed be full of devils.
+
+If the hideous outcry slackened, but an instant, you heard the sick man
+raving with the preternatural strength of delirium, or of mad
+resentment. For some time it seemed a serious question as to who would
+come out ahead. Just as you began to feel that the old Chief was at the
+end of his tether, and ready to give up the ghost, the Shaman, rising
+suddenly with a demoniac yell, flung himself down on the floor in a
+convulsion. His body writhed horribly; he kicked and snapped and
+quivered.
+
+The Boy was for shielding Muckluck from the crazy flinging out of legs
+and arms; but she leaned over, breathless, to catch what words might
+escape the Shaman during the fit, for these were omens of deep
+significance.
+
+When at last the convulsive movements quieted, and the Shaman lay like
+one dead, except for an occasional faint twitch, the Boy realised for
+the first time that the sick man, too, was dumb. Dead? The only sound
+now was the wind up in the world above. Even the dog was still.
+
+The silence was more horrible than the hell-let-loose of a few minutes
+before.
+
+The dim group sat there, motionless, under the spell of the stillness
+even more than they had been under the spell of the noise. At last a
+queer, indescribable scratching and scraping came up out of the bowels
+of the earth.
+
+How does the old devil manage to do that? thought the Boy. But the
+plain truth was that his heart was in his mouth, for the sound came
+from the opposite direction, behind the Boy, and not near the Shaman at
+all. It grew louder, came nearer, more inexplicable, more awful. He
+felt he could not bear it another minute, sprang up, and stood there,
+tense, waiting for what might befall. Were _all_ the others dead, then?
+
+Not a sound in the place, only that indescribable stirring of something
+in the solid earth under his feet.
+
+The Shaman had his knife. A ghastly sensation of stifling came over the
+Boy as he thought of a struggle down there under the earth and the
+snow.
+
+On came the horrible underground thing. Desperately the Boy stirred the
+almost extinct embers with his foot, and a faint glow fell on the
+terror-frozen faces of the natives, fell on the bear-skin flap. _It
+moved!_ A huge hand came stealing round. A hand? The skeleton of a
+hand--white, ghastly, with fingers unimaginably long. No mortal in
+Pymeut had a hand like that--no mortal in all the world!
+
+A crisp, smart sound, and a match blazed. A tall, lean figure rose up
+from behind the bear-skin and received the sudden brightness full in
+his face, pale and beautiful, but angry as an avenging angel's. For an
+instant the Boy still thought it a spectre, the delusion of a
+bewildered brain, till the girl cried out, "Brother Paul!" and fell
+forward on the floor, hiding her face in her hands.
+
+"Light! make a light!" he commanded. Nicholas got up, dazed but
+obedient, and lit the seal-oil lamp.
+
+The voice of the white man, the call for light, reached the Shaman. He
+seemed to shiver and shrink under the folds of the Kamlayka. But
+instead of getting up and looking his enemy in the face, he wriggled
+along on his belly, still under cover of the Kamlayka, till he got to
+the bear-skin, pushed it aside with a motion of the hooded head, and
+crawled out like some snaky symbol of darkness and superstition fleeing
+before the light.
+
+"Brother Paul!" sobbed the girl, "don't, _don't_ tell Sister Winifred."
+
+He took no notice of her, bending down over the motionless bundle in
+the corner.
+
+"You've killed him, I suppose?"
+
+"Brother Paul--" began Nicholas, faltering.
+
+"Oh, I heard the pandemonium." He lifted his thin white face to the
+smoke-hole. "It's all useless, useless. I might as well go and leave
+you to your abominations. But instead, go _you_, all of you--go!" He
+flung out his long arms, and the group broke and scuttled, huddling
+near the bear-skin, fighting like rats to get out faster than the
+narrow passage permitted.
+
+The Boy turned from watching the instantaneous flight, the scuffle, and
+the disappearance, to find the burning eyes of the Jesuit fixed
+fascinated on his face. If Brother Paul had appeared as a spectre in
+the ighloo, it was plain that he looked upon the white face present at
+the diabolic rite as dream or devil. The Boy stood up. The lay-brother
+started, and crossed himself.
+
+"In Christ's name, what--who are you?"
+
+"I--a--I come from the white camp ten miles below."
+
+"And you were _here_--you allowed this? Ah-h!" He flung up his arms,
+the pale lips moved convulsively, but no sound came forth.
+
+"I--you think I ought to have interfered?" began the Boy.
+
+"I think--" the Brother began bitterly, checked himself, knelt down,
+and felt the old man's pulse.
+
+Nicholas at the bear-skin was making the Boy signs to come.
+
+The girl was sobbing with her face on the ground. Again Nicholas
+beckoned, and then disappeared. There seemed to be nothing to do but to
+follow his host. When the bear-skin had dropped behind the Boy, and he
+crawled after Nicholas along the dark passage, he heard the muffled
+voice of the girl praying: "Oh, Mary, Mother of God, don't let him tell
+Sister Winifred."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+A PENITENTIAL JOURNEY
+
+  "... Certain London parishes still receive L12 per annum
+   for fagots to burn heretics."--JOHN RICHARD GREEN.
+
+
+The Boy slept that night in the Kachime beside a very moody, restless
+host. Yagorsha dispensed with the formality of going to bed, and seemed
+bent on doing what he could to keep other people awake. He sat
+monologuing under the seal lamp till the Boy longed to throw the dish
+of smouldering oil at his head. But strangely enough, when, through
+sheer fatigue, his voice failed and his chin fell on his broad chest, a
+lad of fourteen or so, who had also had difficulty to keep awake, would
+jog Yagorsha's arm, repeating interrogatively the last phrase used,
+whereon the old Story-Teller would rouse himself and begin afresh, with
+an iteration of the previous statement. If the lad failed to keep him
+going, one or other of the natives would stir uneasily, lift a head
+from under his deerskin, and remonstrate. Yagorsha, opening his eyes
+with a guilty start, would go on with the yarn. When morning came, and
+the others waked, Yagorsha and the lad slept.
+
+Nicholas and all the rest who shared the bench at night, and the fire
+in the morning, seemed desperately depressed and glum. A heavy cloud
+hung over Pymeut, for Pymeut was in disgrace.
+
+About sunset the women came in with the kantaks and the lard-cans.
+Yagorsha sat up and rubbed his eyes. He listened eagerly, while the
+others questioned the women. The old Chief wasn't dead at all. No, he
+was much better. Brother Paul had been about to all the house-bound
+sick people, and given everybody medicine, and flour, and a terrible
+scolding. Oh yes, he was angrier than anybody had ever been before.
+Some natives from the school at Holy Cross were coming for him
+tomorrow, and they were all going down river and across the southern
+portage to the branch mission at Kuskoquim.
+
+"Down river? Sure?"
+
+Yes, sure. Brother Paul had not waited to come with those others, being
+so anxious to bring medicine and things to Ol' Chief quick; and this
+was how he was welcomed back to the scene of his labours. A Devil's
+Dance was going on! That was what he called it.
+
+"You savvy?" said Nicholas to his guest. "Brother Paul go plenty soon.
+You wait."
+
+I'll have company back to camp, was the Boy's first thought, and
+then--would there be any fun in that after all? It was plain Brother
+Paul was no such genial companion as Father Wills.
+
+And so it was that he did not desert Nicholas, although Brother Paul's
+companions failed to put in an appearance on the following morning.
+However, on the third day after the incident of the Shaman (who seemed
+to have vanished into thin air), Brother Paul shook the snow of Pymeut
+from his feet, and with three Indians from the Holy Cross school and a
+dog-team, he disappeared from the scene. Not till he had been gone some
+time did Nicholas venture to return to the parental roof.
+
+They found Muckluck subdued but smiling, and the old man astonishingly
+better. It looked almost as if he had turned the corner, and was
+getting well.
+
+There was certainly something very like magic in such a recovery, but
+it was quickly apparent that this aspect of the case was not what
+occupied Nicholas, as he sat regarding his parent with a keen and
+speculative eye. He asked him some question, and they discussed the
+point volubly, Muckluck following the argument with close attention.
+Presently it seemed that father and son were taking the guest into
+consideration. Muckluck also turned to him now and then, and by-and-by
+she said: "I think he go."
+
+"Go where?"
+
+"Holy Cross," said the old man eagerly.
+
+"Brother Paul," Nicholas explained. "He go _down_ river. We get Holy
+Cross--more quick."
+
+"I see. Before he can get back. But why do you want to go?"
+
+"See Father Brachet."
+
+"Sister Winifred say: 'Always tell Father Brachet; then everything all
+right,'" contributed Muckluck.
+
+"You tell Pymeut belly solly," the old Chief said.
+
+"Nicholas know he not able tell all like white man," Muckluck
+continued. "Nicholas say you good--hey? you good?"
+
+"Well--a--pretty tollable, thank you."
+
+"You go with Nicholas; you make Father Brachet unnerstan'--forgive.
+Tell Sister Winifred--" She stopped, perplexed, vaguely distrustful at
+the Boy's chuckling.
+
+"You think we can explain it all away, hey?" He made a gesture of happy
+clearance. "Shaman and everything, hey?"
+
+"Me no can," returned Nicholas, with engaging modesty. "_You_--" He
+conveyed a limitless confidence.
+
+"Well, I'll be jiggered if I don't try. How far is it?"
+
+"Go slow--one sleep."
+
+"Well, we won't go slow. We've got to do penance. When shall we start?"
+
+"Too late now. Tomalla," said the Ol' Chief.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+They got up very early--it seemed to the Boy like the middle of the
+night--stole out of the dark Kachime, and hurried over the hard crust
+that had formed on the last fall of snow, down the bleak, dim slope to
+the Ol' Chief's, where they were to breakfast.
+
+Not only Muckluck was up and doing, but the Ol' Chief seemed galvanised
+into unwonted activity. He was doddering about between his bed and the
+fire, laying out the most imposing parkis and fox-skins, fur blankets,
+and a pair of seal-skin mittens, all of which, apparently, he had had
+secreted under his bed, or between it and the wall.
+
+They made a sumptuous breakfast of tea, the last of the bacon the Boy
+had brought, and slapjacks.
+
+The Boy kept looking from time to time at the display of furs. Father
+Wills was right; he ought to buy a parki with a hood, but he had meant
+to have the priest's advice, or Mac's, at least, before investing. Ol'
+Chief watching him surreptitiously, and seeing he was no nearer making
+an offer, felt he should have some encouragement. He picked up the
+seal-skin mittens and held them out.
+
+"Present," said Ol' Chief. "You tell Father Brachet us belly solly."
+
+"Oh, I'll handle him without gloves," said the Boy, giving back the
+mittens. But Ol' Chief wouldn't take them. He was holding up the
+smaller of the two parkis.
+
+"You no like?"
+
+"Oh, very nice."
+
+"You no buy?"
+
+"You go sleep on trail," said Nicholas, rising briskly. "You die, no
+parki."
+
+The Boy laughed and shook his head, but still Ol' Chief held out the
+deer-skin shirt, and caressed the wolf-fringe of the hood.
+
+"Him cheap."
+
+"How cheap?"
+
+"Twenty-fi' dollah."
+
+"Don't know as I call that cheap."
+
+"Yes," said Nicholas. "St. Michael, him fifty dollah."
+
+The Boy looked doubtful.
+
+"I saw a parki there at the A. C. Store about like this for twenty."
+
+"A. C. parki, peeluck," Nicholas said contemptuously. Then patting the
+one his father held out, "You wear _him_ fifty winter."
+
+"Lord forbid! Anyhow, I've only got about twenty dollars' worth of
+tobacco and stuff along with me."
+
+"Me come white camp," Nicholas volunteered. "Me get more fi' dollah."
+
+"Oh, will you? Now, that's very kind of you." But Nicholas, impervious
+to irony, held out the parki. The Boy laughed, and took it. Nicholas
+stooped, picked up the fur mittens, and, laying them on the Boy's arm,
+reiterated his father's "Present!" and then departed to the Kachime to
+bring down the Boy's pack.
+
+The Princess meanwhile had withdrawn to her own special corner, where
+in the daytime appeared only a roll of plaited mats, and a little,
+cheap, old hat-box, which she evidently prized most of all she had in
+the world.
+
+"You see? Lock!"
+
+The Boy expressed surprise and admiration.
+
+"No! Really! I call that fine."
+
+"I got present for Father Brachet"; and turning over the rags and
+nondescript rubbish of the hat-box, she produced an object whose use
+was not immediately manifest. A section of walrus ivory about six
+inches long had been cut in two. One of these curved halves had been
+mounted on four ivory legs. In the upper flat side had been stuck, at
+equal distances from the two ends and from each other, two delicate
+branches of notched ivory, standing up like horns. Between these sat an
+ivory mannikin, about three inches long, with a woeful countenance and
+with arms held out like one beseeching mercy.
+
+"It's fine," said the Boy, "but--a--what's it for? Just look pretty?"
+
+"Wait, I show you." She dived into the hat-box, and fished up a bit of
+battered pencil. With an air of pride, she placed the pencil across the
+outstretched hands of the ivory suppliant, asking the Boy in dumb-show,
+was not this a pen-rest that might be trusted to melt the heart of the
+Holy Father?
+
+"This way, too." She illustrated how anyone embarrassed by the
+possession of more than one pencil could range them in tiers on the
+ivory horns above the head of the Woeful One.
+
+"I call that scrumptious! And he looks as if he was saying he was sorry
+all the time."
+
+She nodded, delighted that the Boy comprehended the subtle symbolism.
+
+"One more!" she said, showing her dazzling teeth. Like a child playing
+a game, she half shut the hat-box and hugged it lovingly. Then with
+eyes sparkling, slowly the small hand crept in--was thrust down the
+side and drew out with a rapturous "Ha!" a gaudy advertisement card,
+setting forth the advantages of smoking "Kentucky Leaf" She looked at
+it fondly. Then slowly, regretfully, all the fun gone now, she passed
+it to the Boy.
+
+"For Sister Winifred!" she said, like one who braces herself to make
+some huge renunciation. "You tell her I send with my love, and I always
+say my prayers. I very good. Hey? You tell Sister Winifred?"
+
+"_Sure_," said the Boy.
+
+The Ol' Chief was pulling the other parki over his head. Nicholas
+reappeared with the visitor's effects. Under the Boy's eyes, he calmly
+confiscated all the tea and tobacco. But nothing had been touched in
+the owner's absence.
+
+"Look here: just leave me enough tea to last till I get home. I'll make
+it up to you."
+
+Nicholas, after some reflection, agreed. Then he bustled about,
+gathered together an armful of things, and handed the Boy a tea-kettle
+and an axe.
+
+"You bring--dogs all ready. Mush!" and he was gone.
+
+To the Boy's surprise, while he and Muckluck were getting the food and
+presents together, the lively Ol' Chief--so lately dying--made off, in
+a fine new parki, on all fours, curious, no doubt, to watch the
+preparations without.
+
+But not a bit of it. The Ol' Chief's was a more intimate concern in the
+expedition. When the Boy joined him, there he was sitting up in
+Nicholas's sled, appallingly emaciated, but brisk as you please,
+ordering the disposition of the axe and rifle along either side, the
+tea-kettle and grub between his feet, showing how the deer-skin
+blankets should be wrapped, and especially was he dictatorial about the
+lashing of the mahout.
+
+"How far's he comin'?" asked the Boy, astonished.
+
+"All the way," said Muckluck. "He want to be _sure_."
+
+Several bucks came running down from the Kachime, and stood about,
+coughed and spat, and offered assistance or advice. When at last Ol'
+Chief was satisfied with the way the raw walrus-hide was laced and
+lashed, Nicholas cracked his whip and shouted, "Mush! God-damn! Mush!"
+
+"Good-bye, Princess. We'll take care of your father, though I'm sure he
+oughtn't to go."
+
+"Oh yes," answered Muckluck confidently; then lower, "Shaman make all
+well quick. Hey? Goo'-bye."
+
+"Good-bye."
+
+"Don't forget tell Sister Winifred I say my p--" But the Boy had to run
+to keep up with the sled.
+
+For some time he kept watching the Ol' Chief with unabated
+astonishment, wondering if he'd die on the way. But, after all, the
+open-air cure was tried for his trouble in various other parts of the
+world--why not here?
+
+There was no doubt about it, Nicholas had a capital team of dogs, and
+knew how to drive them. Two-legged folk often had to trot pretty
+briskly to keep up. Pymeut was soon out of sight.
+
+"Nicholas, what'll you take for a couple o' your dogs?"
+
+"No sell."
+
+"Pay you a good long price."
+
+"No sell."
+
+"Well, will you help me to get a couple?"
+
+"Me try"; but he spoke dubiously.
+
+"What do they cost?"
+
+"Good leader cost hunder and fifty in St. Michael."
+
+"You don't mean dollahs?"
+
+"Mean dollahs."
+
+"Come off the roof!"
+
+But Nicholas seemed to think there was no need.
+
+"You mean that if I offer you a hundred and fifty dollahs for your
+leader, straight off, this minute, you won't take it?"
+
+"No, no take," said the Prince, stolidly.
+
+And his friend reflected. Nicholas without a dog-team would be
+practically a prisoner for eight months of the year, and not only that,
+but a prisoner in danger of starving to death. After all, perhaps a
+dog-team in such a country _was_ priceless, and the Ol' Chief was
+travelling in truly royal style.
+
+However, it was stinging cold, and running after those expensive dogs
+was an occupation that palled. By-and-by, "How much is your sled
+worth?" he asked Ol' Chief.
+
+"Six sables," said the monarch.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a comfort to sight a settlement off there on the point.
+
+"What's this place?"
+
+"Fish-town."
+
+"Pymeuts there?"
+
+"No, all gone. Come back when salmon run."
+
+Not a creature there, as Nicholas had foretold--a place built wilfully
+on the most exposed point possible, bleak beyond belief. If you open
+your mouth at this place on the Yukon, you have to swallow a hurricane.
+The Boy choked, turned his back to spit out the throttling blast, and
+when he could catch his breath inquired:
+
+"This a good place for a village?"
+
+"Bully. Wind come, blow muskeetah--"
+
+Nicholas signified a remote destination with his whip.
+
+"B'lieve you! This kind o' thing would discourage even a mosquito."
+
+In the teeth of the blast they went past the Pymeut Summer Resort.
+Unlike Pymeut proper, its cabins were built entirely above ground, of
+logs unchinked, its roofs of watertight birch-bark.
+
+A couple of hours farther on Nicholas permitted a halt on the edge of a
+struggling little grove of dwarfed cotton-wood.
+
+The kettle and things being withdrawn from various portions of the Ol'
+Chief's person, he, once more warmly tucked up and tightly lashed down,
+drew the edge of the outer coverlid up till it met the wolf-skin fringe
+of his parki hood, and relapsed into slumber.
+
+Nicholas chopped down enough green wood to make a hearth.
+
+"What! bang on the snow?"
+
+Nicholas nodded, laid the logs side by side, and on them built a fire
+of the seasoned wood the Boy had gathered. They boiled the kettle, made
+tea, and cooked some fish.
+
+Ol' Chief waked up just in time to get his share. The Boy, who had kept
+hanging about the dogs with unabated interest, had got up from the fire
+to carry them the scraps, when Nicholas called out quite angrily, "No!
+no feed dogs," and waved the Boy off.
+
+"What! It's only some of my fish. Fish is what they eat, ain't it?"
+
+"No feed now; wait till night."
+
+"What for? They're hungry."
+
+"You give fish--dogs no go any more."
+
+Peremptorily he waved the Boy off, and fell to work at packing up. Not
+understanding Nicholas's wisdom, the Boy was feeling a little sulky and
+didn't help. He finished up the fish himself, then sat on his heels by
+the fire, scorching his face while his back froze, or wheeling round
+and singeing his new parki while his hands grew stiff in spite of
+seal-skin mittens.
+
+No, it was no fun camping with the temperature at thirty degrees below
+zero--better to be trotting after those expensive and dinnerless dogs;
+and he was glad when they started again.
+
+But once beyond the scant shelter of the cottonwood, it was evident the
+wind had risen. It was blowing straight out of the north and into their
+faces. There were times when you could lean your whole weight against
+the blast.
+
+After sunset the air began to fill with particles of frozen snow. They
+did not seem to fall, but continually to whirl about, and present
+stinging points to the travellers' faces. Talking wasn't possible even
+if you were in the humour, and the dead, blank silence of all nature,
+unbroken hour after hour, became as nerve-wearing as the cold and
+stinging wind. The Boy fell behind a little. Those places on his heels
+that had been so badly galled had begun to be troublesome again. Well,
+it wouldn't do any good to holla about it--the only thing to do was to
+harden one's foolish feet. But in his heart he felt that all the
+time-honoured conditions of a penitential journey were being complied
+with, except on the part of the arch sinner. Ol' Chief seemed to be
+getting on first-rate.
+
+The dogs, hardly yet broken in to the winter's work, were growing
+discouraged, travelling so long in the eye of the wind. And Nicholas,
+in the kind of stolid depression that had taken possession of him,
+seemed to have forgotten even to shout "Mush!" for a very long time.
+
+By-and-by Ol' Chief called out sharply, and Nicholas seemed to wake up.
+He stopped, looked back, and beckoned to his companion.
+
+The Boy came slowly on.
+
+"Why you no push?"
+
+"Push what?"
+
+"Handle-bar."
+
+He went to the sled and illustrated, laying his hands on the
+arrangement at the back that stood out like the handle behind a baby's
+perambulator. The Boy remembered. Of course, there were usually two men
+with each sled. One ran ahead and broke trail with snow-shoes, but that
+wasn't necessary today, for the crust bore. But the other man's
+business was to guide the sled from behind and keep it on the trail.
+
+"Me gottah drive, you gottah push. Dogs heap tired."
+
+Nicholas spoke severely. The Boy stared a moment at what he mentally
+called "the nerve of the fella," laughed, and took hold, swallowing
+Nicholas's intimation that he, after all, was far more considerate of
+the dogs than the person merely sentimental, who had been willing to
+share his dinner with them.
+
+"How much farther?"
+
+"Oh, pretty quick now."
+
+The driver cracked his whip, called out to the dogs, and suddenly
+turned off from the river course. Unerringly he followed an invisible
+trail, turning sharply up a slough, and went zig-zagging on without
+apparent plan. It was better going when they got to a frozen lake, and
+the dogs seemed not to need so much encouragement. It would appear an
+impossible task to steer accurately with so little light; but once on
+the other side of the lake it was found that Nicholas had hit a
+well-beaten track as neatly as a thread finds the needle's eye.
+
+Far off, out of the dimness, came a sound--welcome because it was
+something to break the silence but hardly cheerful in itself.
+
+"Hear that, Nicholas?"
+
+"Mission dogs."
+
+Their own had already thrown up their noses and bettered the pace.
+
+The barking of the dogs had not only announced the mission to the
+travellers, but to the mission a stranger at the gates.
+
+Before anything could be seen of the settlement, clumsy, fur-clad
+figures had come running down the slope and across the ice, greeting
+Nicholas with hilarity.
+
+Indian or Esquimaux boys they seemed to be, who talked some jargon
+understanded of the Pymeut pilot. The Boy, lifting tired eyes, saw
+something white glimmering high in the air up on the right river bank.
+In this light it refused to form part of any conceivable plan, but hung
+there in the air detached, enigmatic, spectral. Below it, more on
+humanity's level, could be dimly distinguished, now, the Mission
+Buildings, apparently in two groups with an open space in the middle.
+Where are the white people? wondered the Boy, childishly impatient.
+Won't they come and welcome us? He followed the Esquimaux and Indians
+from the river up to the left group of buildings. With the heathen
+jargon beating on his ears, he looked up suddenly, and realized what
+the white thing was that had shone out so far. In the middle of the
+open space a wooden cross stood up, encrusted with frost crystals, and
+lifting gleaming arms out of the gloom twenty feet or so above the
+heads of the people.
+
+"Funny thing for an Agnostic," he admitted to himself, "but I'm right
+glad to see a Christian sign." And as he knocked at the door of the big
+two-story log-house on the left he defended himself. "It's the
+swing-back of the pendulum after a big dose of Pymeut and heathen
+tricks. I welcome it as a mark of the white man." He looked over his
+shoulder a little defiantly at the Holy Cross. Recognition of what the
+high white apparition was had given him a queer jolt, stirring
+unsuspected things in imagination and in memory. He had been accustomed
+to see that symbol all his life, and it had never spoken to him before.
+Up here it cried aloud and dominated the scene. "Humph!" he said to
+himself, "to look at you a body'd think 'The Origin' had never been
+written, and Spencer and Huxley had never been born.' He knocked again,
+and again turned about to scan the cross.
+
+"Just as much a superstition, just as much a fetich as Kaviak's
+seal-plug or the Shaman's eagle feather. With long looking at a couple
+of crossed sticks men grow as dazed, as hypnotized, as Pymeuts watching
+a Shaman's ivory wand. All the same, I'm not sure that faith in 'First
+Principles' would build a house like this in the Arctic Regions, and
+it's convenient to find it here--if only they'd open the door."
+
+He gave another thundering knock, and then nearly fell backwards into
+the snow, for Brother Paul stood on the threshold holding up a lamp.
+
+"I--a--oh! How do you do? Can I come in?"
+
+Brother Paul, still with the look of the Avenging Angel on his pale,
+young face, held the door open to let the Boy come in. Then, leaning
+out into the night and lifting the lamp high, "Is that Nicholas?" he
+said sternly.
+
+But the Pymeuts and the school-boys had vanished. He came in and set
+down the lamp.
+
+"We--a--we heard you were going down river," said the Boy, tamely, for
+he had not yet recovered himself after such an unexpected blow.
+
+"Are you cold? Are you wet?" demanded Brother Paul, standing erect,
+unwelcoming, by the table that held the lamp.
+
+The Boy pulled himself together.
+
+"Look here"--he turned away from the comforting stove and confronted
+the Jesuit--"those Pymeuts are not only cold and wet and sick too, but
+they're sorry. They've come to ask forgiveness."
+
+"It's easily done."
+
+Such scorn you would hardly expect from a follower of the meek
+Galilean.
+
+"No, not easily done, a penance like this. I know, for I've just
+travelled that thirty miles with 'em over the ice from Pymeut."
+
+"You? Yes, it amuses you."
+
+The sombre eyes shone with a cold, disconcerting light.
+
+"Well, to tell you the truth, I've been better amused."
+
+The Boy looked down at his weary, wounded feet. And the others--where
+were his fellow pilgrims? It struck him as comic that the upshot of the
+journey should be that he was doing penance for the Pymeuts, but he
+couldn't smile with that offended archangel in front of him.
+
+"Thirty miles over the ice, in the face of a norther, hasn't been so
+'easy' even for me. And I'm not old, nor sick--no, nor frightened,
+Brother Paul."
+
+He flung up his head, but his heart failed him even while he made the
+boast. Silently, for a moment, they confronted each other.
+
+"Where are you bound for?"
+
+"I--a--" The Boy had a moment of wondering if he was expected to answer
+"Hell," and he hesitated.
+
+"Are you on your way up the river?"
+
+"No--I" (was the man not going to let them rest their wicked bones
+there a single night?)--"a--I--"
+
+The frozen river and the wind-racked wood were as hospitable as the
+beautiful face of the brother. Involuntarily the Boy shivered.
+
+"I came to see the Father Superior."
+
+He dropped back into a chair.
+
+"The Father Superior is busy."
+
+"I'll wait."
+
+"And very tired."
+
+"So'm I."
+
+"--worn out with the long raging of the plague. I have waited till he
+is less harassed to tell him about the Pymeuts' deliberate depravity.
+Nicholas, too!--one of our own people, one of the first pupils of the
+school, a communicant in the church; distinguished by a thousand
+kindnesses. And this the return!"
+
+"The return is that he takes his backsliding so to heart, he can't rest
+without coming to confess and to beg the Father Superior--"
+
+"I shall tell the Father Superior what I heard and saw. He will agree
+that, for the sake of others who are trying to resist temptation, an
+example should be made of Nicholas and of his father."
+
+"And yet you nursed the old man and were kind to him, I believe, after
+the offense."
+
+"I--I thought you had killed him. But even you must see that we cannot
+have a man received here as Nicholas was--the most favoured child of
+the mission--who helps to perpetuate the degrading blasphemies of his
+unhappy race. It's nothing to you; you even encourage--"
+
+"'Pon my soul--" But Brother Paul struck in with an impassioned
+earnestness:
+
+"We spend a life-time making Christians of these people; and such as
+you come here, and in a week undo the work of years."
+
+"I--_I?_"
+
+"It's only eighteen months since I myself came, but already I've
+seen--" The torrent poured out with never a pause. "Last summer some
+white prospectors bribed our best native teacher to leave us and become
+a guide. He's a drunken wreck now somewhere up on the Yukon Flats. You
+take our boys for pilots, you entice our girls away with trinkets--"
+
+"Great Caesar! _I_ don't."
+
+But vain was protest. For Brother Paul the visitor was not a particular
+individual. He stood there for the type of the vicious white
+adventurer.
+
+The sunken eyes of the lay-brother, burning, impersonal, saw not a
+particular young man and a case compounded of mixed elements, but--The
+Enemy! against whom night and day he waged incessant warfare.
+
+"The Fathers and Sisters wear out their lives to save these people. We
+teach them with incredible pains the fundamental rules of civilization;
+we teach them how to save their souls alive." The Boy had jumped up and
+laid his hand on the door-knob. "_You_ come. You teach them to smoke--"
+
+The Boy wheeled round.
+
+"I don't smoke."
+
+"... and to gamble."
+
+"Nicholas taught _me_ to gamble. Brother Paul, I swear--"
+
+"Yes, and to swear and get drunk, and so find the shortest way to
+hell."
+
+"Father Brachet! Father Wills!" a voice called without.
+
+The door-knob turned under the Boy's hand, and before he could more
+than draw back, a whiff of winter blew into the room, and a creature
+stood there such as no man looks to find on his way to an Arctic gold
+camp. A girl of twenty odd, with the face of a saint, dressed in the
+black habit of the Order of St. Anne.
+
+"Oh, Brother Paul! you are wanted--wanted quickly. I think Catherine is
+worse; don't wait, or she'll die without--" And as suddenly as she came
+the vision vanished, carrying Brother Paul in the wake of her streaming
+veil.
+
+The Boy sat down by the stove, cogitating how he should best set about
+finding Nicholas to explain the failure of their mission.... What was
+that? Voices from the other side. The opposite door opened and a man
+appeared, with Nicholas and his father close behind, looking anything
+but cast down or decently penitential.
+
+"How do you do?" The white man's English had a strong French accent. He
+shook hands with great cordiality. "We have heard of you from Father
+Wills also. These Pymeut friends of ours say you have something to tell
+me."
+
+He spoke as though this something were expected to be highly
+gratifying, and, indeed, the cheerfulness of Nicholas and his father
+would indicate as much.
+
+As the Boy, hesitating, did not accept the chair offered, smiling, the
+Jesuit went on:
+
+"Will you talk of zis matter--whatever it is--first, or will you first
+go up and wash, and have our conference after supper?"
+
+"No, thank you--a--Are you the Father Superior?"
+
+He bowed a little ceremoniously, but still smiling.
+
+"I am Father Brachet."
+
+"Oh, well, Nicholas is right. The first thing to do is to explain why
+we're here."
+
+Was it the heat of the stove after the long hours of cold that made him
+feel a little dizzy? He put up his hand to his head.
+
+"I have told zem to take hot water upstairs," the Father was saying,
+"and I zink a glass of toddy would be a good sing for you." He slightly
+emphasised the "you," and turned as if to supplement the original
+order.
+
+"No, no!" the Boy called after him, choking a little, half with
+suppressed merriment, half with nervous fatigue. "Father Brachet, if
+you're kind to us, Brother Paul will never forgive you. We're all in
+disgrace."
+
+"Hein! What?"
+
+"Yes, we're all desperately wicked."
+
+"No, no," objected Nicholas, ready to go back on so tactless an
+advocate.
+
+"And Brother Paul has just been saying--"
+
+"What is it, what is it?"
+
+The Father Superior spoke a little sharply, and himself sat down in the
+wooden armchair he before had placed for his white guest.
+
+The three culprits stood in front of him on a dead level of iniquity.
+
+"You see, Father Brachet, Ol' Chief has been very ill--"
+
+"I know. Much as we needed him here, Paul insisted on hurrying back to
+Pymeut"--he interrupted himself as readily as he had interrupted the
+Boy--"but ze Ol' Chief looks lively enough."
+
+"Yes; he--a--his spirits have been raised by--a--what you will think an
+unwarrantable and wicked means."
+
+Nicholas understood, at least, that objectionable word "wicked"
+cropping up again, and he was not prepared to stand it from the Boy.
+
+He grunted with displeasure, and said something low to his father.
+
+"Brother Paul found them--found _us_ having a seance with the Shaman."
+
+Father Brachet turned sharply to the natives.
+
+"Ha! you go back to zat."
+
+Nicholas came a step forward, twisting his mittens and rolling his eye
+excitedly.
+
+"Us no wicked. Shaman say he gottah scare off--" He waved his arm
+against an invisible army. Then, as it were, stung into plain speaking:
+"Shaman say _white man_ bring sickness--bring devils--"
+
+"Maybe the old Orang Outang's right."
+
+The Boy drew a tired breath, and sat down without bidding in one of the
+wooden chairs. What an idiot he'd been not to take the hot grog and the
+hot bath, and leave these people to fight their foolishness out among
+themselves! It didn't concern him. And here was Nicholas talking away
+comfortably in his own tongue, and the Father was answering. A native
+opened the door and peeped in cautiously.
+
+Nicholas paused.
+
+"Hein!" said Father Brachet, "what is it!"
+
+The Indian came in with two cups of hot tea and a cracker in each
+saucer. He stopped at the priest's side.
+
+"You get sick, too. Please take. Supper little late." He nodded to
+Nicholas, and gave the white stranger the second cup. As he was going
+out: "Same man here in July. You know"--he tapped himself on the left
+side--"man with sore heart."
+
+"Yansey?" said the priest quickly. "Well, what about Yansey?"
+
+"He is here."
+
+"But no! Wiz zose ozzers?"
+
+"No, I think they took the dogs and deserted him. He's just been
+brought in by our boys; they are back with the moose-meat. Sore heart
+worse. He will die."
+
+"Who's looking after him?"
+
+"Brother Paul"; and he padded out of the room in his soft native shoes.
+
+"Then Brother Paul has polished off Catherine," thought the Boy, "and
+he won't waste much time over a sore heart. It behoves us to hurry up
+with our penitence." This seemed to be Nicholas's view as well. He was
+beginning again in his own tongue.
+
+"You know we like best for you to practise your English," said the
+priest gently; "I expect you speak very well after working so long on
+ze John J. Healy."
+
+"Yes," Nicholas straightened himself. "Me talk all same white man now."
+(He gleamed at the Boy: "Don't suppose I need you and your perfidious
+tongue.") "No; us Pymeuts no wicked!"
+
+Again he turned away from the priest, and challenged the Boy to repeat
+the slander. Then with an insinuating air, "Shaman no say you wicked,"
+he reassured the Father. "Shaman say Holy Cross all right. Cheechalko
+no good; Cheechalko bring devils; Cheechalko all same _him_," he wound
+up, flinging subterfuge to the winds, and openly indicating his
+faithless ambassador.
+
+"Strikes me I'm gettin' the worst of this argument all round. Brother
+Paul's been sailing into me on pretty much the same tack."
+
+"No," said Nicholas, firmly; "Brother Paul no unnerstan'. _You_
+unnerstan'." He came still nearer to the Father, speaking in a
+friendly, confidential tone. "You savvy! Plague come on steamboat up
+from St. Michael. One white man, he got coast sickness. Sun shining.
+Salmon run big. Yukon full o' boats. Two days: no canoe on river. Men
+all sit in tent like so." He let his mittens fall on the floor,
+crouched on his heels, and rocked his head in his hands. Springing up,
+he went on with slow, sorrowful emphasis: "Men begin die--"
+
+"Zen we come," said the Father, "wiz nurses and proper medicine--"
+
+Nicholas gave the ghost of a shrug, adding the damaging fact: "Sickness
+come to Holy Cross."
+
+The Father nodded.
+
+"We've had to turn ze schools into wards for our patients," he
+explained to the stranger. "We do little now but nurse ze sick and
+prepare ze dying. Ze Muzzer Superieure has broken down after heroic
+labours. Paul, I fear, is sickening too. Yes, it's true: ze disease
+came to us from Pymeut."
+
+In the Father's mind was the thought of contagion courageously faced in
+order to succour "the least of these my brethren." In Nicholas's mind
+was the perplexing fact that these white men could bring sickness, but
+not stay it. Even the heap good people at Holy Cross were not saved by
+their deaf and impotent God.
+
+"Fathers sick, eight Sisters sick, boy die in school, three girl die.
+Holy Cross people kind--" Again he made that almost French motion of
+the shoulders. "Shaman say, 'Peeluck!' No good be kind to devils; scare
+'em--make 'em run."
+
+"Nicholas," the priest spoke wearily, "I am ashamed of you. I sought
+you had learned better. Zat old Shaman--he is a rare old rogue. What
+did you give him?"
+
+Nicholas' mental processes may not have been flattering, but their
+clearness was unmistakable. If Father Brachet was jealous of the rival
+holy man's revenue, it was time to bring out the presents.
+
+Ol' Chief had a fine lynx-skin over his arm. He advanced at a word from
+Nicholas, and laid it down before the Father.
+
+"No!" said Father Brachet, with startling suddenness; "take it away and
+try to understand."
+
+Nicholas approached trembling, but no doubt remembering how necessary
+it had been to add to the Shaman's offering before he would consent to
+listen with favour to Pymeut prayers, he pulled out of their respective
+hiding--places about his person a carved ivory spoon and an embroidered
+bird-skin pouch, advanced boldly under the fire of the Superior's keen
+eyes and sharp words, and laid the further offering on the lynx-skin at
+his feet.
+
+"Take zem away," said the priest, interrupting his brief homily and
+standing up. "Don't you understand yet zat we are your friends wizzout
+money and wizzout price? We do not want zese sings. Shaman takes
+ivories from ze poor, furs from ze shivering, and food from zem zat
+starve. And he gives nossing in return--nossing! Take zese sings away;
+no one wants zem at Holy Cross."
+
+Ol' Chief wiped his eyes pathetically. Nicholas, the picture of
+despair, turned in a speechless appeal to his despised ambassador.
+Before anyone could speak, the door-knob rattled rudely, and the big
+bullet-head of a white man was put in.
+
+"Pardon, mon Pere; cet homme qui vient de Minook--faudrait le coucher
+de suite--mais ou, mon Dieu, ou?"
+
+While the Superior cogitated, "How-do, Brother Etienne?" said Nicholas,
+and they nodded.
+
+Brother Etienne brought the rest of his heavy body half inside the
+door. He wore aged, weather-beaten breeches, and a black sweater over
+an old hickory shirt.
+
+"Ses compagnons l'ont laisse, la, je crois. Mais ca ne durera pas
+longtemps."
+
+"Faudra bien qu'il reste ici--je ne vois pas d'autre moyen," said the
+Father. "Enfin--on verra. Attendez quelques instants."
+
+"C'est bien." Brother Etienne went out.
+
+Ol' Chief was pulling the Boy's sleeve during the little colloquy, and
+saying, "You tell." But the Boy got up like one who means to make an
+end.
+
+"You haven't any time or strength for this--"
+
+"Oh yes," said Father Brachet, smiling, and arresting the impetuous
+movement. "Ziz is--part of it."
+
+"Well," said the Boy, still hesitating, "they _are_ sorry, you know,
+_really_ sorry."
+
+"You sink so?" The question rang a little sceptically.
+
+"Yes, I do, and I'm in a position to know. You'd forgive them if you'd
+seen, as I did, how miserable and overwhelmed they were when Brother
+Paul--when--I'm not saying it's the highest kind of religion that
+they're so almighty afraid of losing your good opinion, but it--it
+gives you a hold, doesn't it?" And then, as the Superior said nothing,
+only kept intent eyes on the young face, the Boy wound up a little
+angrily: "Unless, of course, you're like Brother Paul, ready to throw
+away the power you've gained--"
+
+"Paul serves a great and noble purpose--but--zese questions are--a--not
+in his province." Still he bored into the young face with those kind
+gimlets, his good little eyes, and--
+
+"You are--one of us?" he asked, "of ze Church?"
+
+"No, I--I'm afraid I'm not of any Church."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"And I ought to take back 'afraid.' But I'm telling you the truth when
+I say there never were honester penitents than the Pymeuts. The whole
+Kachime's miserable. Even the girl, Ol' Chief's daughter she cried like
+anything when she thought Sister--"
+
+"Winifred?"
+
+"Sister Winifred would be disappointed in her."
+
+"Ah, yes; Sister Winifred has zem--" he held out his hand, spread the
+fingers apart, and slowly, gently closed them. "Comme ca."
+
+"But what's the good of it if Brother Paul--"
+
+"Ah, it is not just zere Paul comes in. But I tell you, my son, Paul
+does a work here no ozzer man has done so well."
+
+"He is a flint--a fanatic."
+
+"Fanatique!" He flung out an expressive hand. "It is a name, my son. It
+often means no more but zat a man is in earnest. Out of such a 'flint'
+we strike sparks, and many a generous fire is set alight. We all do
+what we can here at Holy Cross, but Paul will do what we cannot."
+
+"Well, give _me_--" He was on the point of saying "Father Wills," but
+changed it to "a man who is tolerant."
+
+"Tolerant? Zere are plenty to be tolerant, my son. Ze world is full.
+But when you find a man zat can _care_, zat can be 'fanatique'--ah! It
+is"--he came a little nearer--"it is but as if I would look at you and
+say, 'He has earnest eyes! He will go far _whatever_ road he follow.'"
+He drew off, smiling shrewdly. "You may live, my son, to be yourself
+called 'fanatique.' Zen you will know how little--"
+
+"I!" the Boy broke in. "You are pretty wide of the mark this time."
+
+"Ah, perhaps! But zere are more trails zan ze Yukon for a fanatique.
+You have zere somesing to show me?"
+
+"I promised the girl that cried so--I promised her to bring the Sister
+this." He had pulled out the picture. In spite of the careful wrapping,
+it had got rather crumpled. The Father looked at it, and then a swift
+glance passed between him and the Boy.
+
+"You could see it was like pulling out teeth to part with it. Can it go
+up there till the Sister sends for it?"
+
+Father Brachet nodded, and the gorgeous worldling, counselling all men
+to "Smoke Kentucky Leaf!" was set up in the high place of honour on the
+mantel-shelf, beside a print of the Madonna and the Holy Child.
+Nicholas cheered up at this, and Ol' Chief stopped wiping his eyes.
+While the Boy stood at the mantel with his back to Father Brachet,
+acting on a sudden impulse, he pulled the ivory pen-rest out of his
+shirt, and stuck its various parts together, saying as he did so, "She
+sent an offering to you, too. If the Ol' Chief an' I fail to convince
+you of our penitence, we're all willin' to let this gentleman plead for
+us." Whereupon he wheeled round and held up the Woeful One before the
+Father's eyes.
+
+The priest grasped the offering with an almost convulsive joy, and
+instantly turned his back that the Pymeuts might not see the laugh that
+twisted up his humorous old features. The penitents looked at each
+other, and telegraphed in Pymeut that after all the Boy had come up to
+time. The Father had refused the valuable lynx-skin and Nicholas'
+superior spoon, but was ready, it appeared, to look with favour on
+anything the Boy offered.
+
+But very seriously the priest turned round upon the Pymeuts. "I will
+just say a word to you before we wash and go in to supper." With a
+kindly gravity he pronounced a few simple sentences about the
+gentleness of Christ with the ignorant, but how offended the Heavenly
+Father was when those who knew the true God descended to idolatrous
+practices, and how entirely He could be depended upon to punish wicked
+people.
+
+Ol' Chief nodded vigorously and with sudden excitement. "Me jus' like
+God."
+
+"Hein?"
+
+"Oh, yes. Me no stan' wicked people. When me young me kill two ol'
+squaws--_witches!_" With an outward gesture of his lean claws he swept
+these wicked ones off the face of the earth, like a besom of the Lord.
+
+A sudden change had passed over the tired face of the priest. "Go, go!"
+he called out, driving the Pymeuts forth as one shoos chickens out of a
+garden. "Go to ze schoolhouse and get fed, for it's all you seem able
+to get zere."
+
+But the perplexed flight of the Pymeuts was arrested. Brother Paul and
+Brother Etienne blocked the way with a stretcher. They all stood back
+to let the little procession come in. Nobody noticed them further, but
+the Pymeuts scuttled away the instant they could get by. The Boy,
+equally forgotten, sat down in a corner, while the three priests
+conferred in low-voiced French over the prostrate figure.
+
+"Father Brachet," a weak voice came up from the floor.
+
+Brother Paul hurried out, calling Brother Etienne softly from the door.
+
+"I am here." The Superior came from the foot of the pallet, and knelt
+down near the head.
+
+"You--remember what you said last July?"
+
+"About--"
+
+"About making restitution."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, I can do it now."
+
+"I am glad."
+
+"I've brought you the papers. That's why--I--_had_ to come. Will
+you--take them--out of my--"
+
+The priest unbuckled a travel-stained buckskin miner's belt and laid it
+on the floor. All the many pockets were empty save the long one in the
+middle. He unbuttoned the flap and took out some soiled, worn-looking
+papers. "Are zese in proper form?" he asked, but the man seemed to have
+dropped into unconsciousness. Hurriedly the priest added: "Zere is no
+time to read zem. Ah! Mr.--will you come and witness zis last will and
+testament?"
+
+The Boy got up and stood near. The man from Minook opened his eyes.
+
+"Here!" The priest had got writing materials, and put a pen into the
+slack hand, with a block of letter-paper under it.
+
+"I--I'm no lawyer," said the faint voice, "but I think it's all--in
+shape. Anyhow--you write--and I'll sign." He half closed his eyes, and
+the paper slipped from under his hand. The Boy caught it, and set down
+the faint words:--"will and bequeath to John M. Berg, Kansas City, my
+right and title to claim No. 11 Above, Little Minook, Yukon Ramparts--"
+
+And the voice fell away into silence. They waited a moment, and the
+Superior whispered:
+
+"Can you sign it?"
+
+The dull eyes opened. "Didn't I--?"
+
+Father Brachet held him up; the Boy gave him the pen and steadied the
+paper. "Thank you, Father. Obliged to you, too." He turned his dimming
+eyes upon the Boy, who wrote his name in witness. "You--going to
+Minook?"
+
+"I hope so."
+
+The Father went to the writing-table, where he tied up and sealed the
+packet.
+
+"Anybody that's going to Minook will have to hustle." The slang of
+everyday energy sounded strangely from dying lips--almost a whisper,
+and yet like a far-off bugle calling a captive to battle.
+
+The Boy leaned down to catch the words, yet fainter:
+
+"Good claims going like hot cakes."
+
+"How much," the Boy asked, breathless, "did you get out of yours?"
+
+"Waiting till summer. Nex' summer--" The eyelids fell.
+
+"So it isn't a fake after all." The Boy stood up. "The camp's all
+right!"
+
+"You'll see. It will out-boom the Klondyke."
+
+"Ha! How long have you been making the trip?"
+
+"Since August."
+
+The wild flame of enterprise sunk in the heart of the hearer.
+
+"Since _August_?"
+
+"No cash for steamers; we had a canoe. She went to pieces up by--" The
+weak voice fell down into that deep gulf that yawns waiting for man's
+last word.
+
+"But there is gold at Minook, you're sure? You've seen it?"
+
+The Father Superior locked away the packet and stood up. But the Boy
+was bending down fascinated, listening at the white lips. "There is
+gold there?" he repeated.
+
+Out of the gulf came faintly back like an echo:
+
+"Plenty o' gold there--plenty o' gold."
+
+"Jee-rusalem!" He stood up and found himself opposite the contemplative
+face of the priest.
+
+"We have neglected you, my son. Come upstairs to my room."
+
+They went out, the old head bent, and full of thought; the young head
+high, and full of dreams. Oh, to reach this Minook, where there was
+"plenty of gold, plenty of gold," before the spring floods brought
+thousands. What did any risk matter? Think of the Pymeuts doing their
+sixty miles over the ice just to apologise to Father Brachet for being
+Pymeuts. This other, this white man's penance might, would involve a
+greater mortification of the flesh. What then? The reward was
+proportionate--"plenty of gold." The faint whisper filled the air.
+
+A little more hardship, and the long process of fortune-building is
+shortened to a few months. No more office grind. No more anxiety for
+those one loves.
+
+Gold, plenty of gold, while one is young and can spend it gaily--gold
+to buy back the Orange Grove, to buy freedom and power, to buy wings,
+and to buy happiness!
+
+On the stairs they passed Brother Paul and the native.
+
+"Supper in five minutes, Father."
+
+The Superior nodded.
+
+"There is a great deal to do," the native went on hurriedly to Paul.
+"We've got to bury Catherine to-morrow--"
+
+"And this man from Minook," agreed Paul, pausing with his hand on the
+door.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+KAVIAK'S CRIME
+
+  "My little son, who look'd from thoughtful eyes,
+   And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
+   Having my law the seventh time disobey'd,
+   I struck him, and dismiss'd
+   With hard words and unkiss'd...."
+
+
+Even with the plague and Brother Paul raging at the mission--even with
+everyone preoccupied by the claims of dead and dying, the Boy would
+have been glad to prolong his stay had it not been for "nagging"
+thoughts of the Colonel. As it was, with the mercury rapidly rising and
+the wind fallen, he got the Pymeuts on the trail next day at noon,
+spent what was left of the night at the Kachime, and set off for camp
+early the following day. He arrived something of a wreck, and with an
+enormous respect for the Yukon trail.
+
+It did him good to sight the big chimney, and still more to see the big
+Colonel putting on his snow-shoes near the bottom of the hill, where
+the cabin trail met the river trail. When the Boss o' the camp looked
+up and saw the prodigal coming along, rather groggy on his legs, he
+just stood still a moment. Then he kicked off his web-feet, turned back
+a few paces uphill, and sat down on a spruce stump, folded his arms,
+and waited. Was it the knapsack on his back that bowed him so?
+
+"Hello, Kentucky!"
+
+But the Colonel didn't look up till the Boy got quite near, chanting in
+his tuneless voice:
+
+   "'Grasshoppah sett'n on a swee' p'tater vine,
+     Swee' p'tater vine, swee' p'tater vine--'"
+
+"What's the matter, hey, Colonel? Sorry as all that to see me back?"
+
+"Reckon it's the kind o' sorrah I can bear," said the Colonel. "We
+thought you were dead."
+
+"You ought t' known me better. Were you just sendin' out a rescue-party
+of one?"
+
+The Colonel nodded. "That party would have started before, but I cut my
+foot with the axe the day you left. Where have you been, in the name o'
+the nation?"
+
+"Pymeut an' Holy Cross."
+
+"Holy Cross? Holy Moses! _You?_"
+
+"Yes; and do you know, one thing I saw there gave me a serious nervous
+shock."
+
+"That don't surprise me. What was it?"
+
+"Sheets. When I came to go to bed--a real bed, Colonel, on legs--I
+found I was expected to sleep between sheets, and I just about
+fainted."
+
+"That the only shock you had?"
+
+"No, I had several. I saw an angel. I tell you straight, Colonel--you
+can bank on what I'm sayin'--that Jesuit outfit's all right."
+
+"Oh, you think so?" The rejoinder came a little sharply.
+
+"Yes, sir, I just do. I think I'd be bigoted not to admit it."
+
+"So, you'll be thick as peas in a pod with the priests now?"
+
+"Well, I'm the one that can afford to be. They won't convert _me!_ And,
+from my point o' view, it don't matter what a man is s' long's he's a
+decent fella."
+
+The Colonel's only answer was to plunge obliquely uphill.
+
+"Say, Boss, wait for me."
+
+The Colonel looked back. The Boy was holding on to a scrub willow that
+put up wiry twigs above the snow.
+
+"Feel as if I'd never get up the last rungs o' this darn ice-ladder!"
+
+"Tired? H'm! Something of a walk to Holy Cross even on a nice mild day
+like this." The Colonel made the reflection with obvious satisfaction,
+took off his knapsack, and sat down again. The Boy did the same. "The
+very day you lit out Father Orloff came up from the Russian mission."
+
+"What's he like?"
+
+"Oh, little fella in petticoats, with a beard an' a high pot-hat, like
+a Russian. And that same afternoon we had a half-breed trader fella
+here, with two white men. Since that day we haven't seen a human
+creature. We bought some furs of the trader. Where'd you get yours?"
+
+"Pymeut. Any news about the strike?"
+
+"Well, the trader fella was sure it was all gammon, and told us stories
+of men who'd sacrificed everything and joined a stampede, and got
+sold--sold badly. But the two crazy whites with him--miners from
+Dakotah--they were on fire about Minook. Kept on bragging they hadn't
+cold feet, and swore they'd get near to the diggins as their dogs'd
+take 'em. The half-breed said they might do a hundred miles more, but
+probably wouldn't get beyond Anvik."
+
+"Crazy fools! I tell you, to travel even thirty miles on the Yukon in
+winter, even with a bully team and old Nick to drive 'em, and not an
+extra ounce on your back--I tell you, Colonel, it's no joke."
+
+"B'lieve you, sonny."
+
+It wasn't thirty seconds before sonny was adding: "Did that half-breed
+think it was any use our trying to get dogs?"
+
+"Ain't to be had now for love or money."
+
+"Lord, Colonel, if we had a team--"
+
+"Yes, I know. We'll probably owe our lives to the fact that we
+haven't."
+
+It suddenly occurred to the Boy that, although he had just done a
+pretty good tramp and felt he'd rather die than go fifty feet further,
+it was the Colonel who was most tired.
+
+"How's everybody?"
+
+"Oh, I s'pose we might all of us be worse off."
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+He was so long answering that the Boy's eyes turned to follow the
+serious outward gaze of the older man, even before he lifted one hand
+and swept it down the hill and out across the dim, grey prospect.
+
+"This," said the Colonel.
+
+Their eyes had dropped down that last stretch of the steep snow slope,
+across the two miles of frozen river, and ran half round the wide
+horizon-line, like creatures in a cage. Whether they liked it or
+whether they didn't, for them there was no way out.
+
+"It's the awful stillness." The Colonel arraigned the distant
+ice-plains.
+
+They sat there looking, listening, as if they hoped their protest might
+bring some signal of relenting. No creature, not even a crystal-coated
+willow-twig, nothing on all the ice-bound earth stirred by as much as a
+hair; no mark of man past or present broke the grey monotony; no sound
+but their two voices disturbed the stillness of the world. It was a
+quiet that penetrated, that pricked to vague alarm. Already both knew
+the sting of it well.
+
+"It's the kind of thing that gets on a fella's nerves," said the
+Colonel. "I don't know as I ever felt helpless in any part of the world
+before. But a man counts for precious little up here. Do you notice how
+you come to listen to the silence?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I've noticed."
+
+"Stop." Again he lifted his hand, and they strained their ears. "I've
+done that by the hour since you left and the daft gold-diggers went up
+trail after you. The other fellas feel it, too. Don't know what we'd
+have done without Kaviak. Think we ought to keep that kid, you know."
+
+"I could get on without Kaviak if only we had some light. It's this
+villainous twilight that gets into my head. All the same, you know"--he
+stood up suddenly--"we came expecting to stand a lot, didn't we?"
+
+The elder man nodded. "Big game, big stakes. It's all right."
+
+Eventless enough after this, except for the passing of an Indian or
+two, the days crawled by.
+
+The Boy would get up first in the morning, rake out the dead ashes, put
+on a couple of back-logs, bank them with ashes, and then build the fire
+in front. He broke the ice in the water-bucket, and washed; filled
+coffee-pot and mush-kettle with water (or ice), and swung them over the
+fire; then he mixed the corn-bread, put it in the Dutch oven, covered
+it with coals, and left it to get on with its baking. Sometimes this
+part of the programme was varied by his mixing a hoe-cake on a board,
+and setting it up "to do" in front of the fire. Then he would call the
+Colonel--
+
+  "'Wake up Massa,
+     De day am breakin';
+   Peas in de pot, en de
+   Hoe-cake bakin''"--
+
+for it was the Colonel's affair to take up proceedings at this
+point--make the coffee and the mush and keep it from burning, fry the
+bacon, and serve up breakfast.
+
+Saturday brought a slight variation in the early morning routine. The
+others came straggling in, as usual, but once a week Mac was sure to be
+first, for he had to get Kaviak up. Mac's view of his whole duty to man
+seemed to centre in the Saturday scrubbing of Kaviak. Vainly had the
+Esquimer stood out against compliance with this most repulsive of
+foreign customs. He seemed to be always ready with some deep-laid
+scheme for turning the edge of Mac's iron resolution. He tried hiding
+at the bottom of the bed. It didn't work. The next time he crouched far
+back under the lower bunk. He was dragged out. Another Saturday he
+embedded himself, like a moth, in a bundle of old clothes. Mac shook
+him out. He had been very sanguine the day he hid in the library. This
+was a wooden box nailed to the wall on the right of the door. Most of
+the bigger books--Byron, Wordsworth, Dana's "Mineralogy," and two
+Bibles--he had taken out and concealed in the lower bunk very
+skilfully, far back behind the Colonel's feet. Copps's "Mining" and the
+two works on "Parliamentary Law" piled at the end of the box served as
+a pillow. After climbing in and folding himself up into an incredibly
+small space, Kaviak managed with superhuman skill to cover himself
+neatly with a patchwork quilt of _Munsey, Scribner, Century, Strand_,
+and _Overland_ for August, '97. No one would suspect, glancing into
+that library, that underneath the usual top layer of light reading, was
+matter less august than Law, Poetry, Science, and Revelation.
+
+It was the base Byron, tipping the wink to Mac out of the back of the
+bunk, that betrayed Kaviak.
+
+It became evident that "Farva" began to take a dour pride in the Kid's
+perseverance. One morning he even pointed out to the camp the strong
+likeness between Kaviak and Robert Bruce.
+
+"No, sah; the Scottish chief had to have an object-lesson, but
+Kaviak--Lawd!--Kaviak could give points to any spider livin'!"
+
+This was on the morning that the Esquimer thought to escape scrubbing,
+even at the peril of his life, by getting up on to the swing-shelf
+--how, no man ever knew. But there he sat in terror, like a
+very young monkey in a wind-rocked tree, hardly daring to breathe, his
+arms clasped tight round the demijohn; but having Mac to deal with, the
+end of it was that he always got washed, and equally always he seemed
+to register a vow that, s'help him, Heaven! it should never happen
+again.
+
+After breakfast came the clearing up. It should have been done (under
+this regime) by the Little Cabin men, but it seldom was. O'Flynn was
+expected to keep the well-hole in the river chopped open and to bring
+up water every day. This didn't always happen either, though to drink
+snow-water was to invite scurvy, Father Wills said. There was also a
+daily need, if the Colonel could be believed, for everybody to chop
+firewood.
+
+"We got enough," was Potts' invariable opinion.
+
+"For how long? S'pose we get scurvy and can't work; we'd freeze to
+death in a fortnight."
+
+"Never saw a fireplace swalla logs whole an' never blink like this
+one."
+
+"But you got no objection to sittin' by while the log-swallerin' goes
+on."
+
+The Colonel or the Boy cooked the eternal beans, bacon and mush dinner,
+after whatever desultory work was done; as a matter of fact, there was
+extraordinarily little to occupy five able-bodied men. The fun of
+snow-shoeing, mitigated by frostbite, quickly degenerated from a sport
+into a mere means of locomotion. One or two of the party went hunting,
+now and then, for the scarce squirrel and the shy ptarmigan. They
+tried, with signal lack of success, to catch fish, Indian fashion,
+through a hole in the ice.
+
+But, for the most part, as winter darkened round them, they lounged
+from morning till night about the big fireplace, and smoked, and
+growled, and played cards, and lived as men do, finding out a deal
+about each other's characters, something about each other's opinions,
+and little or nothing about each other's history.
+
+In the appalling stillness of the long Arctic night, any passer-by was
+hailed with enthusiasm, and although the food-supply in the Big Cabin
+was plainly going to run short before spring, no traveller--white,
+Indian, or Esquimaux--was allowed to go by without being warmed and
+fed, and made to tell where he came from and whither he was
+bound--questions to tax the sage. Their unfailing hospitality was not
+in the least unexpected or unusual, being a virtue practised even by
+scoundrels in the great North-west; but it strained the resources of
+the little camp, a fourth of whose outfit lay under the Yukon ice.
+
+In the state of lowered vitality to which the poor, ill-cooked food,
+the cold and lack of exercise, was slowly reducing them, they talked to
+one another less and less as time went on, and more and more--silently
+and each against his will--grew hyper-sensitive to the shortcomings and
+even to the innocent "ways" of the other fellow.
+
+Not Mac's inertia alone, but his trick of sticking out his jaw became
+an offence, his rasping voice a torture. The Boy's occasional
+ebullition of spirits was an outrage, the Colonel's mere size
+intolerable. O'Flynn's brogue, which had amused them, grew to be just
+part of the hardship and barbarism that had overtaken them like an evil
+dream, coercing, subduing all the forces of life. Only Kaviak seemed
+likely to come unscathed through the ordeal of the winter's captivity;
+only he could take the best place at the fire, the best morsel at
+dinner, and not stir angry passions; only he dared rouse Mac when the
+Nova Scotian fell into one of his bear-with-a-sore-head moods. Kaviak
+put a stop to his staring angrily by the hour into the fire, and set
+him to whittling out boats and a top, thereby providing occupation for
+the morrow, since it was one man's work to break Kaviak of spinning the
+one on the table during mealtime, and sailing the other in the
+drinking-water bucket at all times when older eyes weren't watching.
+The Colonel wrote up his journal, and read the midsummer magazines and
+Byron, in the face of Mac's "I do not like Byron's thought; I do not
+consider him healthy or instructive." In one of his more energetic
+moods the Colonel made a four-footed cricket for Kaviak, who preferred
+it to the high stool, and always sat on it except at meals.
+
+Once in a while, when for hours no word had been spoken except some
+broken reference to a royal flush or a jack-pot, or O'Flynn had said,
+"Bedad! I'll go it alone," or Potts had inquired anxiously, "Got the
+joker? Guess I'm euchred, then," the Boy in desperation would catch up
+Kaviak, balance the child on his head, or execute some other gymnastic,
+soothing the solemn little heathen's ruffled feelings, afterwards, by
+crooning out a monotonous plantation song. It was that kind of addition
+to the general gloom that, at first, would fire O'Flynn to raise his
+own spirits, at least, by roaring out an Irish ditty. But this was
+seldomer as time went on. Even Jimmie's brogue suffered, and grew less
+robust.
+
+In a depressed sort of way Mac was openly teaching Kaviak his letters,
+and surreptitiously, down in the Little Cabin, his prayers. He was very
+angry when Potts and O'Flynn eavesdropped and roared at Kaviak's
+struggles with "Ow Farva." In fact, Kaviak did not shine as a student
+of civilisation, though that told less against him with O'Flynn, than
+the fact that he wasn't "jolly and jump about, like white children."
+Moreover, Jimmie, swore there was something "bogey" about the boy's
+intermittent knowledge of English. Often for days he would utter
+nothing but "Farva" or "Maw" when he wanted his plate replenished, then
+suddenly he would say something that nobody could remember having
+taught him or even said in his presence.
+
+It was not to be denied that Kaviak loved sugar mightily, and stole it
+when he could. Mac lectured him and slapped his minute yellow hands,
+and Kaviak stole it all the same. When he was bad--that is, when he had
+eaten his daily fill of the camp's scanty store (in such a little place
+it was not easy to hide from such a hunter as Kaviak)--he was taken
+down to the Little Cabin, smacked, and made to say "Ow Farva." Nobody
+could discover that he minded much, though he learnt to try to shorten
+the ceremony by saying "I solly" all the way to the cabin.
+
+As a rule he was strangely undemonstrative; but in his own grave little
+fashion he conducted life with no small intelligence, and learned, with
+an almost uncanny quickness, each man's uses from the Kaviak point of
+view. The only person he wasn't sworn friends with was the handy-man,
+and there came to be a legend current in the camp, that Kaviak's first
+attempt at spontaneously stringing a sentence under that roof was, "Me
+got no use for Potts."
+
+The best thing about Kaviak was that his was no craven soul. He was
+obliged to steal the sugar because he lived with white people who were
+bigger than he, and who always took it away when they caught him. But
+once the sugar was safe under his shirt, he owned up without the
+smallest hesitation, and took his smacking like a man. For the rest, he
+flourished, filled out, and got as fat as a seal, but never a whit less
+solemn.
+
+One morning the Colonel announced that now the days had grown so short,
+and the Trio were so late coming to breakfast, and nobody did any work
+to speak of, it would be a good plan to have only two meals a day.
+
+The motion was excessively unpopular, but it was carried by a plain,
+and somewhat alarming, exposition of the state of supplies.
+
+"We oughtn't to need as much food when we lazy round the fire all day,"
+said the Colonel. But Potts retorted that they'd need a lot more if
+they went on adoptin' the aborigines.
+
+They knocked off supper, and all but the aborigine knew what it meant
+sometimes to go hungry to bed.
+
+Towards the end of dinner one day late in December, when everybody else
+had finished except for coffee and pipe, the aborigine held up his
+empty plate.
+
+"Haven't you had enough?" asked the Colonel mildly, surprised at
+Kaviak's bottomless capacity.
+
+"Maw." Still the plate was extended.
+
+"There isn't a drop of syrup left," said Potts, who had drained the
+can, and even wiped it out carefully with halves of hot biscuit.
+
+"He don't really want it."
+
+"Mustn't open a fresh can till to-morrow."
+
+"No, sir_ee_. We've only got--"
+
+"Besides, he'll bust."
+
+Kaviak meanwhile, during this paltry discussion, had stood up on the
+high stool "Farva" had made for him, and personally inspected the big
+mush-pot. Then he turned to Mac, and, pointing a finger like a straw
+(nothing could fatten those infinitesimal hands), he said gravely and
+fluently:
+
+"Maw in de plenty-bowl."
+
+"Yes, maw mush, but no maw syrup."
+
+The round eyes travelled to the store corner.
+
+"We'll have to open a fresh can some time--what's the odds?"
+
+Mac got up, and not only Kaviak watched him--for syrup was a luxury not
+expected every day--every neck had craned, every pair of eyes had
+followed anxiously to that row of rapidly diminishing tins, all that
+was left of the things they all liked best, and they still this side of
+Christmas!
+
+"What you rubber-neckin' about?" Mac snapped at the Boy as he came back
+with the fresh supply. This unprovoked attack was ample evidence that
+Mac was uneasy under the eyes of the camp, angry at his own weakness,
+and therefore the readier to dare anybody to find fault with him.
+
+"How can I help watchin' you?" said the Boy. Mac lifted his eyes
+fiercely. "I'm fascinated by your winnin' ways; we're all like that."
+Kaviak had meanwhile made a prosperous voyage to the plenty-bowl, and
+returned to Mac's side--an absurd little figure in a strange
+priest-like cassock buttoned from top to bottom (a waistcoat of Mac's),
+and a jacket of the Boy's, which was usually falling off (and trailed
+on the ground when it wasn't), and whose sleeves were rolled up in
+inconvenient muffs. Still, with a gravity that did not seem impaired by
+these details, he stood clutching his plate anxiously with both hands,
+while down upon the corn-mush descended a slender golden thread,
+manipulated with a fine skill to make the most of its sweetness. It
+curled and spiralled, and described the kind of involved and
+long-looped flourishes which the grave and reverend of a hundred years
+ago wrote jauntily underneath the most sober names.
+
+Lovingly the dark eyes watched the engrossing process. Even when the
+attenuated thread was broken, and the golden rain descended in slow,
+infrequent drops, Kaviak stood waiting, always for just one drop more.
+
+"That's enough, greedy."
+
+"Now go away and gobble."
+
+But Kaviak daintily skimmed off the syrupy top, and left his mush
+almost as high a hill as before.
+
+It wasn't long after the dinner, things had been washed up, and the
+Colonel settled down to the magazines--he was reading the
+advertisements now--that Potts drew out his watch.
+
+"Golly! do you fellers know what o'clock it is?" He held the open
+timepiece up to Mac. "Hardly middle o' the afternoon. All these hours
+before bedtime, and nothin' to eat till to-morrow!"
+
+"Why, you've just finished--"
+
+"But look at the _time!_"
+
+The Colonel said nothing. Maybe he had been a little previous with
+dinner today; it was such a relief to get it out of the way. Oppressive
+as the silence was, the sound of Potts's voice was worse, and as he
+kept on about how many hours it would be till breakfast, the Colonel
+said to the Boy:
+
+"'Johnny, get your gun,' and we'll go out."
+
+In these December days, before the watery sun had set, the great,
+rich-coloured moon arose, having now in her resplendent fulness quite
+the air of snuffing out the sun. The pale and heavy-eyed day was put to
+shame by this brilliant night-lamp, that could cast such heavy shadows,
+and by which men might read.
+
+The instant the Big Cabin door was opened Kaviak darted out between the
+Colonel's legs, threw up his head like a Siwash dog, sniffed at the
+frosty air and the big orange moon, flung up his heels, and tore down
+to the forbidden, the fascinating fish-hole. If he hadn't got snared in
+his trailing coat he would have won that race. When the two hunters had
+captured Kaviak, and shut him indoors, they acted on his implied
+suggestion that the fish-trap ought to be examined. They chopped away
+the fresh-formed ice. Empty, as usual.
+
+It had been very nice, and neighbourly, of Nicholas, as long ago as the
+1st of December, to bring the big, new, cornucopia-shaped trap down on
+his sled on the way to the Ikogimeut festival. It had taken a long time
+to cut through the thick ice, to drive in the poles, and fasten the
+slight fencing, in such relation to the mouth of the sunken trap, that
+all well-conducted fish ought easily to find their way thither. As a
+matter of fact, they didn't. Potts said it was because the Boy was
+always hauling out the trap "to see"; but what good would it be to have
+it full of fish and not know?
+
+They had been out about an hour when the Colonel brought down a
+ptarmigan, and said he was ready to go home. The Boy hesitated.
+
+"Going to give in, and cook that bird for supper?"
+
+It was a tempting proposition, but the Colonel said, rather sharply:
+"No, sir. Got to keep him for a Christmas turkey."
+
+"Well, I'll just see if I can make it a brace."
+
+The Colonel went home, hung his trophy outside to freeze, and found the
+Trio had decamped to the Little Cabin. He glanced up anxiously to see
+if the demijohn was on the shelf. Yes, and Kaviak sound asleep in the
+bottom bunk. The Colonel would climb up and have forty winks in the top
+one before the Boy got in for their game of chess. He didn't know how
+long he had slept when a faint scratching pricked through the veil of
+slumber, and he said to himself, "Kaviak's on a raid again," but he was
+too sodden with sleep to investigate. Just before he dropped off again,
+however, opening a heavy eye, he saw Potts go by the bunk, stop at the
+door and listen. Then he passed the bunk again, and the faint noise
+recommenced. The Colonel dropped back into the gulf of sleep, never
+even woke for his chess, and in the morning the incident had passed out
+of his mind.
+
+Just before dinner the next day the Boy called out:
+
+"See here! who's spilt the syrup?"
+
+"Spilt it?"
+
+"Syrup?"
+
+"No; it don't seem to be spilt, either." He patted the ground with his
+hand.
+
+"You don't mean that new can--"
+
+"Not a drop in it." He turned it upside down.
+
+Every eye went to Kaviak. He was sitting on his cricket by the fire
+waiting for dinner. He returned the accusing looks of the company with
+self-possession.
+
+"Come here." He got up and trotted over to "Farva."
+
+"Have you been to the syrup?"
+
+Kaviak shook his head.
+
+"You _must_ have been."
+
+"No."
+
+"You sure?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"How did it go--all away--Do you know?"
+
+Again the silent denial. Kaviak looked over his shoulder at the dinner
+preparations, and then went back to his cricket. It was the best place
+from which to keep a strict eye on the cook.
+
+"The gintlemin don't feel conversaytional wid a pint o' surrup in his
+inside."
+
+"I tell you he'd be currled up with colic if he--"
+
+"Well," said O'Flynn hopefully, "bide a bit. He ain't lookin' very
+brash."
+
+"Come here."
+
+Kaviak got up a second time, but with less alacrity.
+
+"Have you got a pain?"
+
+He stared.
+
+"Does it hurt you there?" Kaviak doubled up suddenly.
+
+"He's awful ticklish," said the Boy.
+
+Mac frowned with perplexity, and Kaviak retired to the cricket.
+
+"Does the can leak anywhere?"
+
+"That excuse won't hold water 'cause the can will." The Colonel had
+just applied the test.
+
+"Besides, it would have leaked on to something," Mac agreed.
+
+"Oh, well, let's mosy along with our dinner," said Potts.
+
+"It's gettin' pretty serious," remarked the Colonel. "We can't afford
+to lose a pint o' syrup."
+
+"No, _Siree_, we can't; but there's one thing about Kaviak," said the
+Boy, "he always owns up. Look here, Kiddie: don't say no; don't shake
+your head till you've thought. Now, think _hard_."
+
+Kaviak's air of profound meditation seemed to fill every requirement.
+
+"Did you take the awful good syrup and eat it up?"
+
+Kaviak was in the middle of a head-shake when he stopped abruptly. The
+Boy had said he wasn't to do that. Nobody had seemed pleased when he
+said "No."
+
+"I b'lieve we're on the right track. He's remembering. Think again. You
+are a tip-top man at finding sugar, aren't you?"
+
+"Yes, fin' shugh." Kaviak modestly admitted his prowess in that
+direction.
+
+"And you get hungry in the early morning?"
+
+Yes, he would go so far as to admit that he did.
+
+"You go skylarkin' about, and you remember--the syrup can! And you get
+hold of it--didn't you?"
+
+"To-malla."
+
+"You mean yesterday--this morning?"
+
+"N--"
+
+"Sh!"
+
+Kaviak blinked.
+
+"Wait and think. Yesterday this was full. You remember Mac opened it
+for you?"
+
+Kaviak nodded.
+
+"And now, you see"--he turned the can bottom side up--"all gone!"
+
+"Oh-h!" murmured Kaviak with an accent of polite regret. Then, with
+recovered cheerfulness, he pointed to the store corner: "Maw!"
+
+Potts laughed in his irritating way, and Mac's face got red. Things
+began to look black for Kaviak.
+
+"Say, fellas, see here!" The Boy hammered the lid on the can with his
+fist, and then held it out. "It was put away shut up, for I shut it,
+and even one of us can't get that lid off without a knife or something
+to pry it."
+
+The company looked at the small hands doubtfully. They were none too
+little for many a forbidden feat. How had he got on the swing-shelf?
+How--
+
+"Ye see, crayther, it must uv been yersilf, becuz there isn't annybuddy
+else."
+
+"Look here," said the Colonel, "we'll forgive you this time if you'll
+own up. Just tell us--"
+
+"Kaviak!" Again that journey from the cricket to the judgment-seat.
+
+"Show us"--Mac had taken the shut tin, and now held it out--"show us
+how you got the lid off."
+
+But Kaviak turned away. Mac seized him by the shoulder and jerked him
+round.
+
+Everyone felt it to be suspicious that Kaviak was unwilling even to try
+to open the all too attractive can. Was he really cunning, and did he
+want not to give himself away? Wasn't he said to be much older than he
+looked? and didn't he sometimes look a hundred, and wise for his years?
+
+"See here: I haven't caught you in a lie yet, but if I do--"
+
+Kaviak stared, drew a long breath, and seemed to retire within himself.
+
+"You'd better attend to me, for I mean business."
+
+Kaviak, recalled from internal communing, studied "Farva" a moment, and
+then retreated to the cricket, as to a haven now, hastily and with
+misgiving, tripping over his trailing coat. Mac stood up.
+
+"Wait, old man." The Colonel stooped his big body till he was on a
+level with the staring round eyes. "Yo' see, child, yo' can't have any
+dinnah till we find out who took the syrup."
+
+The little yellow face was very serious. He turned and looked at the
+still smoking plenty-bowl.
+
+"Are yoh hungry?"
+
+He nodded, got up briskly, held up his train, and dragged his high
+stool to the table, scrambled up, and established himself.
+
+"Look at that!" said the Colonel triumphantly. "That youngster hasn't
+just eaten a pint o' syrup."
+
+Mac was coming slowly up behind Kaviak with a face that nobody liked
+looking at.
+
+"Oh, let the brat alone, and let's get to our grub!" said Potts, with
+an extreme nervous irritation.
+
+Mac swept Kaviak off the stool. "You come with me!"
+
+Only one person spoke after that till the meal was nearly done. That
+one had said, "Yes, Farva," and followed Mac, dinnerless, out to the
+Little Cabin.
+
+The Colonel set aside a plateful for each of the two absent ones, and
+cleared away the things. Potts stirred the fire in a shower of sparks,
+picked up a book and flung it down, searched through the sewing-kit for
+something that wasn't lost, and then went to the door to look at the
+weather--so he said. O'Flynn sat dozing by the fire. He was in the way
+of the washing-up.
+
+"Stir your stumps, Jimmie," said the Colonel, "and get us a bucket of
+water." Sleepily O'Flynn gave it as his opinion that he'd be damned if
+he did.
+
+With unheard-of alacrity, "I'll go," said Potts.
+
+The Colonel stared at him, and, by some trick of the brain, he had a
+vision of Potts listening at the door the night before, and then
+resuming that clinking, scratching sound in the corner--the store
+corner.
+
+"Hand me over my parki, will you?" Potts said to the Boy. He pulled it
+over his head, picked up the bucket, and went out.
+
+"Seems kind o' restless, don't he?"
+
+"Yes. Colonel--"
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"Nothin'."
+
+Ten minutes--a quarter of an hour went by.
+
+"Funny Mac don't come for his dinner, isn't it? S'pose I go and look
+'em up?"
+
+"S'pose you do."
+
+Not far from the door he met Mac coming in.
+
+"Well?" said the Boy, meaning, Where's the kid?
+
+"Well?" Mac echoed defiantly. "I lammed him, as I'd have lammed Robert
+Bruce if he'd lied to me."
+
+The Boy stared at this sudden incursion into history, but all he said
+was: "Your dinner's waitin'."
+
+The minute Mac got inside he looked round hungrily for the child. Not
+seeing him, he went over and scrutinised the tumbled contents of the
+bunks.
+
+"Where's Kaviak?"
+
+"P'raps you'll tell us."
+
+"You mean he isn't here?" Mac wheeled round sharply.
+
+"_Here?_"
+
+"He didn't come back here for his dinner?"
+
+"Haven't seen him since you took him out." Mac made for the door. The
+Boy followed.
+
+"Kaviak!" each called in turn. It was quite light enough to see if he
+were anywhere about, although the watery sun had sunk full half an hour
+before. The fantastically huge full-moon hung like a copper shield on a
+steel-blue wall.
+
+"Do you see anything?" whispered Mac.
+
+"No."
+
+"Who's that yonder?"
+
+"Potts gettin' water."
+
+The Boy was bending down looking for tracks. Mac looked, too, but
+ineffectually, feverishly.
+
+"Isn't Potts calling?"
+
+"I knew he would if he saw us. He's never carried a bucket uphill yet
+without help. See, there are the Kid's tracks going. We must find some
+turned the other way."
+
+They were near the Little Cabin now.
+
+"Here!" shouted the Boy; "and ... yes, here again!" And so it was.
+Clean and neatly printed in the last light snowfall showed the little
+footprints. "We're on the right trail now. Kaviak!"
+
+Through his parki the Boy felt a hand close vise-like on his shoulder,
+and a voice, not like MacCann's:
+
+"Goin' straight down to the fish-trap hole!"
+
+The two dashed forward, down the steep hill, the Boy saying breathless
+as they went: "And Potts--where's Potts?"
+
+He had vanished, but there was no time to consider how or where.
+
+"Kaviak!"
+
+"Kaviak!" And as they got to the river:
+
+"Think I hear--"
+
+"So do I--"
+
+"Coming! coming! Hold on tight! Coming, Kaviak!"
+
+They made straight for the big open fish-hole. Farther away from the
+Little Cabin, and nearer the bank, was the small well-hole. Between the
+two they noticed, as they raced by, the water-bucket hung on that heavy
+piece of driftwood that had frozen aslant in the river. Mac saw that
+the bucket-rope was taut, and that it ran along the ice and disappeared
+behind the big funnel of the fish-trap.
+
+The sound was unmistakable now--a faint, choked voice calling out of
+the hole, "Help!"
+
+"Coming!"
+
+"Hold tight!"
+
+"Half a minute!"
+
+And how it was done or who did it nobody quite knew, but Potts, still
+clinging by one hand to the bucket-rope, was hauled out and laid on the
+ice before it was discovered that he had Kaviak under his arm--Kaviak,
+stark and unconscious, with the round eyes rolled back till one saw the
+whites and nothing more.
+
+Mac picked the body up and held it head downwards; laid it flat again,
+and, stripping off the great sodden jacket, already beginning to
+freeze, fell to putting Kaviak through the action of artificial
+breathing.
+
+"We must get them up to the cabin first thing," said the Boy.
+
+But Mac seemed not to hear.
+
+"Don't you see Kaviak's face is freezing?"
+
+Still Mac paid no heed. Potts lifted a stiff, uncertain hand, and, with
+a groan, let it fall heavily on his own cheek.
+
+"Come on; I'll help you in, anyhow, Potts."
+
+"Can't walk in this damned wet fur."
+
+With some difficulty having dragged off Potts' soaked parki, already
+stiffening unmanageably, the Boy tried to get him on his feet.
+
+"Once you're in the cabin you're all right."
+
+But the benumbed and miserable Potts kept his eyes on Kaviak, as if
+hypnotised by the strange new death-look in the little face.
+
+"Well, I can't carry you up," said the Boy; and after a second he began
+to rub Potts furiously, glancing over now and then to see if Kaviak was
+coming to, while Mac, dumb and tense, laboured on without success.
+Potts, under the Boy's ministering, showed himself restored enough to
+swear feebly.
+
+"H'ray! my man's comin' round. How's yours?" No answer, but he could
+see that the sweat poured off Mac's face as he worked unceasingly over
+the child. The Boy pulled Potts into a sitting posture. It was then
+that Mac, without looking up, said:
+
+"Run and get whiskey. Run like hell!"
+
+When he got back with the Colonel and the whiskey, O'Flynn floundering
+in the distance, Potts was feebly striking his breast with his arms,
+and Mac still bent above the motionless little body.
+
+They tried to get some of the spirit down the child's throat, but the
+tight-clenched teeth seemed to let little or nothing pass. The stuff
+ran down towards his ears and into his neck. But Mac persisted, and
+went on pouring, drop by drop, whenever he stopped trying to restore
+the action of the lungs. O'Flynn just barely managed to get "a swig"
+for Potts in the interval, though they all began to feel that Mac was
+working to bring back something that had gone for ever. The Boy went
+and bent his face down close over the rigid mouth to feel for the
+breath. When he got up he turned away sharply, and stood looking
+through tears into the fish-hole, saying to himself, "Yukon Inua has
+taken him."
+
+"He was in too long." Potts' teeth were chattering, and he looked
+unspeakably wretched. "When my arm got numb I couldn't keep his head
+up;" and he swallowed more whiskey. "You fellers oughtn't to have left
+that damn trap up!"
+
+"What's that got to do with it?" said the Boy guiltily.
+
+"Kaviak knew it ought to be catchin' fish. When I came down he was
+cryin' and pullin' the trap backwards towards the hole. Then he
+slipped."
+
+"Come, Mac," said the Colonel quietly, "let's carry the little man to
+the cabin."
+
+"No, no, not yet; stuffy heat isn't what he wants;" and he worked on.
+
+They got Potts up on his feet.
+
+"I called out to you fellers. Didn't you hear me?"
+
+"Y-yes, but we didn't understand."
+
+"Well, you'd better have come. It's too late now." O'Flynn half
+dragged, half carried him up to the cabin, for he seemed unable to walk
+in his frozen trousers. The Colonel and the Boy by a common impulse
+went a little way in the opposite direction across the ice.
+
+"What can we do, Colonel?"
+
+"Nothing. It's not a bit o' use." They turned to go back.
+
+"Well, the duckin' will be good for Potts' parki, anyhow," said the Boy
+in an angry and unsteady voice.
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"When he asked me to hand it to him I nearly stuck fast to it. It's all
+over syrup; and we don't wear furs at our meals."
+
+"Tchah!" The Colonel stopped with a face of loathing.
+
+"Yes, he was the only one of us that didn't bully the kid to-day."
+
+"Couldn't go _that_ far, but couldn't own up."
+
+"Potts is a cur."
+
+"Yes, sah." Then, after an instant's reflection: "But he's a cur that
+can risk his life to save a kid he don't care a damn for."
+
+They went back to Mac, and found him pretty well worn out. The Colonel
+took his place, but was soon pushed away. Mac understood better, he
+said; had once brought a chap round that everybody said was ... dead.
+He wasn't dead. The great thing was not to give in.
+
+A few minutes after, Kaviak's eyelids fluttered, and came down over the
+upturned eyeballs. Mac, with a cry that brought a lump to the Colonel's
+throat, gathered the child up in his arms and ran with him up the hill
+to the cabin.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three hours later, when they were all sitting round the fire, Kaviak
+dosed, and warm, and asleep in the lower bunk, the door opened, and in
+walked a white man followed by an Indian.
+
+"I'm George Benham." They had all heard of the Anvik trader, a man of
+some wealth and influence, and they made him welcome.
+
+The Indian was his guide, he said, and he had a team outside of seven
+dogs. He was going to the steamship _Oklahoma_ on some business, and
+promised Father Wills of Holy Cross that he'd stop on the way, and
+deliver a letter to Mr. MacCann.
+
+"Stop on the way! I should think so."
+
+"We were goin' to have supper to-night, anyhow, and you'll stay and
+sleep here."
+
+All Mac's old suspicions of the Jesuits seemed to return with the
+advent of that letter.
+
+"I'll read it presently." He laid it on the mantel-shelf, between the
+sewing-kit and the tobacco-can, and he looked at it, angrily, every now
+and then, while he helped to skin Mr. Benham. That gentleman had thrown
+back his hood, pulled off his great moose-skin gauntlets and his
+beaver-lined cap, and now, with a little help, dragged the drill parki
+over his head, and after that the fine lynx-bordered deer-skin,
+standing revealed at last as a well-built fellow, of thirty-eight or
+so, in a suit of mackinaws, standing six feet two in his heelless
+salmon-skin snow-boots. "Bring in my traps, will you?" he said to the
+Indian, and then relapsed into silence. The Indian reappeared with his
+arms full.
+
+"Fine lot o' pelts you have there," said the Colonel.
+
+Benham didn't answer. He seemed to be a close-mouthed kind of a chap.
+As the Indian sorted and piled the stuff in the corner, Potts said:
+
+"Got any furs you want to sell?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Where you takin' 'em?"
+
+"Down to the _Oklahoma_."
+
+"All this stuff for Cap'n Rainey?"
+
+Benham nodded.
+
+"I reckon there's a mistake about the name, and he's Cap'n Tom Thumb or
+Commodore Nutt." The Boy had picked up a little parki made carefully of
+some very soft dark fur and trimmed with white rabbit, the small hood
+bordered with white fox.
+
+"That's a neat piece of work," said the Colonel.
+
+Benham nodded. "One of the Shageluk squaws can do that sort of thing."
+
+"What's the fur?"
+
+"Musk-rat." And they talked of the weather--how the mercury last week
+had been solid in the trading-post thermometer, so it was "over forty
+degrees, anyhow."
+
+"What's the market price of a coat like that?" Mac said suddenly.
+
+"That isn't a 'market' coat. It's for a kid of Rainey's back in the
+States."
+
+Still Mac eyed it enviously.
+
+"What part of the world are you from, sir?" said the Colonel when they
+had drawn up to the supper table.
+
+"San Francisco. Used to teach numskulls Latin and mathematics in the
+Las Palmas High School."
+
+"What's the value of a coat like that little one?" interrupted Mac.
+
+"Oh, about twenty dollars."
+
+"The Shageluks ask that much?"
+
+Benham laughed. "If _you_ asked the Shageluks, they'd say forty."
+
+"You've been some time in this part of the world, I understand," said
+the Colonel.
+
+"Twelve years."
+
+"Without going home?"
+
+"Been home twice. Only stayed a month. Couldn't stand it."
+
+"I'll give you twenty-two dollars for that coat," said Mac.
+
+"I've only got that one, and as I think I said--"
+
+"I'll give you twenty-four."
+
+"It's an order, you see. Rainey--"
+
+"I'll give you twenty-six."
+
+Benham shook his head.
+
+"Sorry. Yes, it's queer about the hold this country gets on you. The
+first year is hell, the second is purgatory, with glimpses ... of
+something else. The third--well, more and more, forever after, you
+realise the North's taken away any taste you ever had for civilisation.
+That's when you've got the hang of things up here, when you've learned
+not to stay in your cabin all the time, and how to take care of
+yourself on the trail. But as for going back to the boredom of
+cities--no, thank you."
+
+Mac couldn't keep his eyes off the little coat. Finally, to enable him
+to forget it, as it seemed, he got up and opened Father Wills' letter,
+devoured its contents in silence, and flung it down on the table. The
+Colonel took it up, and read aloud the Father's thanks for all the
+white camp's kindness to Kaviak, and now that the sickness was about
+gone from Holy Cross, how the Fathers felt that they must relieve their
+neighbours of further trouble with the little native.
+
+"I've said I'd take him back with me when I come up river about
+Christmas."
+
+"We'd be kind o' lost, now, without the little beggar," said the Boy,
+glancing sideways at Mac.
+
+"There's nothin' to be got by luggin' him off to Holy Cross," answered
+that gentleman severely.
+
+"Unless it's clo'es," said Potts.
+
+"He's all right in the clo'es he's got," said Mac, with the air of one
+who closes an argument. He stood up, worn and tired, and looked at his
+watch.
+
+"You ain't goin' to bed this early?" said Potts, quite lively and
+recovered from his cold bath. That was the worst of sleeping in the
+Little Cabin. Bedtime broke the circle; you left interesting visitors
+behind, and sometimes the talk was better as the night wore on.
+
+"Well, someone ought to wood up down yonder. O'Flynn, will you go?"
+
+O'Flynn was in the act of declining the honour. But Benham, who had
+been saying, "It takes a year in the Yukon for a man to get on to
+himself," interrupted his favourite theme to ask: "Your other cabin
+like this?"
+
+Whereon, O'Flynn, shameless of the contrast in cabins, jumped up, and
+said: "Come and see, while I wood up."
+
+"You're very well fixed here," said Benham, rising and looking round
+with condescension; "but men like you oughtn't to try to live without
+real bread. No one can live and work on baking-powder."
+
+There was a general movement to the door, of which Benham was the
+centre.
+
+"I tell you a lump of sour dough, kept over to raise the next batch, is
+worth more in this country than a pocket full of gold."
+
+"I'll give you twenty-eight for that musk-rat coat," said Mac.
+
+Benham turned, stared back at him a moment, and then laughed.
+
+"Oh, well, I suppose I can get another made for Rainey before the first
+boat goes down."
+
+"Then is it on account o' the bread," the Colonel was saying, "that the
+old-timer calls himself a Sour-dough?"
+
+"All on account o' the bread."
+
+They crowded out after Benham.
+
+"Coming?" The Boy, who was last, held the door open. Mac shook his
+head.
+
+It wasn't one of the bitter nights; they'd get down yonder, and talk by
+the fire, till he went in and disturbed them. That was all he had
+wanted. For Mac was the only one who had noticed that Kaviak had waked
+up. He was lying as still as a mouse.
+
+Alone with him at last, Mac kept his eyes religiously turned away, sat
+down by the fire, and watched the sparks. By-and-by a head was put up
+over the board of the lower bunk. Mac saw it, but sat quite still.
+
+"Farva."
+
+He meant to answer the appeal, half cleared his throat, but his voice
+felt rusty; it wouldn't turn out a word.
+
+Kaviak climbed timidly, shakily out, and stood in the middle of the
+floor in his bare feet.
+
+"Farva!"
+
+He came a little nearer till the small feet sank into the rough brown
+curls of the buffalo. The child stooped to pick up his wooden cricket,
+wavered, and was about to fall. Mac shot out a hand, steadied him an
+instant without looking, and then set the cricket in front of the fire.
+He thereupon averted his face, and sat as before with folded arms. He
+hadn't deliberately meant to make Kaviak be the first to "show his
+hand" after all that had happened, but something had taken hold of him
+and made him behave as he hadn't dreamed of behaving. It was, perhaps,
+a fear of playing the fool as much as a determination to see how much
+ground he'd lost with the youngster.
+
+The child was observing him with an almost feverish intensity. With
+eyes fixed upon the wooden face to find out how far he might venture,
+shakily he dragged the cricket from where Mac placed it, closer,
+closer, and as no terrible change in the unmoved face warned him to
+desist, he pulled it into its usual evening position between Mac's
+right foot and the fireplace. He sank down with a sigh of relief, as
+one who finishes a journey long and perilous. The fire crackled and the
+sparks flew gaily. Kaviak sat there in the red glow, dressed only in a
+shirt, staring with incredulous, mournful eyes at the Farva who had--
+
+Then, as Mac made no sign, he sighed again, and held out two little
+shaky hands to the blaze.
+
+Mac gave out a sound between a cough and a snort, and wiped his eyes on
+the back of his hand.
+
+Kaviak had started nervously.
+
+"You cold?" asked Mac.
+
+Kaviak nodded.
+
+"Hungry?"
+
+He nodded again, and fell to coughing.
+
+Mac got up and brought the newly purchased coat to the fire.
+
+"It's for you," he said, as the child's big eyes grew bigger with
+admiration.
+
+"Me? Me own coat?" He stood up, and his bare feet fluttered up and down
+feebly, but with huge delight.
+
+As the parki was held ready the child tumbled dizzily into it, and Mac
+held him fast an instant.
+
+In less than five minutes Kaviak was once more seated on the cricket,
+but very magnificent now in his musk-rat coat, so close up to Mac that
+he could lean against his arm, and eating out of a plenty-bowl on his
+knees a discreet spoonful of mush drowned in golden syrup--a supper for
+a Sultan if only there had been more!
+
+When he had finished, he set the bowl down, and, as a puppy might, he
+pushed at Mac's arm till he found a way in, laid his head down on
+"Farva's" knee with a contented sigh, and closed his heavy eyes.
+
+Mac put his hand on the cropped head and began:
+
+"About that empty syrup-can--"
+
+Kaviak started up, shaking from head to foot. Was the obscure nightmare
+coming down to crush him again?
+
+Mac tried to soothe him. But Kaviak, casting about for charms to disarm
+the awful fury of the white man--able to endure with dignity any
+reverse save that of having his syrup spilt--cried out:
+
+"I solly--solly. Our Farva--"
+
+"I'm sorry, too, Kaviak," Mac interrupted, gathering the child up to
+him; "and we won't either of us do it any more."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+CHRISTMAS
+
+  "Himlen morkner, mens Jordens Trakt
+   Straaler lys som i Stjernedragt.
+   Himlen er bleven Jordens Gjaest
+   Snart er det Julens sode Fest."
+
+
+It had been moved, seconded, and carried by acclamation that they
+should celebrate Christmas, not so much by a feast of reason as by a
+flow of soul and a bang-up dinner, to be followed by speeches and some
+sort of cheerful entertainment.
+
+"We're goin' to lay ourselves out on this entertainment," said the Boy,
+with painful misgivings as to the "bang-up dinner."
+
+Every time the banquet was mentioned somebody was sure to say, "Well,
+anyhow, there's Potts's cake," and that reflection never failed to
+raise the tone of expectation, for Potts's cake was a beauty, evidently
+very rich and fruity, and fitted by Nature to play the noble part of
+plum-pudding. But, in making out the bill of fare, facts had to be
+faced. "We've got our everyday little rations of beans and bacon, and
+we've got Potts's cake, and we've got one skinny ptarmigan to make a
+banquet for six hungry people!"
+
+"But we'll have a high old time, and if the bill o' fare is a little
+... restricted, there's nothin' to prevent our programme of toasts,
+songs, and miscellaneous contributions from bein' rich and varied."
+
+"And one thing we can get, even up here"--the Colonel was looking at
+Kaviak--"and that's a little Christmas-tree."
+
+"Y-yes," said Potts, "you can get a little tree, but you can't get the
+smallest kind of a little thing to hang on it."
+
+"Sh!" said the Boy, "it must be a surprise."
+
+And he took steps that it should be, for he began stealing away
+Kaviak's few cherished possessions--his amulet, his top from under the
+bunk, his boats from out the water-bucket, wherewith to mitigate the
+barrenness of the Yukon tree, and to provide a pleasant surprise for
+the Esquimer who mourned his playthings as gone for ever. Of an evening
+now, after sleep had settled on Kaviak's watchful eyes, the Boy worked
+at a pair of little snow-shoes, helped out by a ball of sinew he had
+got from Nicholas. Mac bethought him of the valuable combination of
+zoological and biblical instruction that might be conveyed by means of
+a Noah's Ark. He sat up late the last nights before the 25th,
+whittling, chipping, pegging in legs, sharpening beaks, and inking
+eyes, that the more important animals might be ready for the Deluge by
+Christmas.
+
+The Colonel made the ark, and O'Flynn took up a collection to defray
+the expense of the little new mucklucks he had ordered from Nicholas.
+They were to come "_sure_ by Christmas Eve," and O'Flynn was in what he
+called "a froightful fanteeg" as the short day of the 24th wore towards
+night, and never a sign of the one-eyed Pymeut. Half a dozen times
+O'Flynn had gone beyond the stockade to find out if he wasn't in sight,
+and finally came back looking intensely disgusted, bringing a couple of
+white travellers who had arrived from the opposite direction; very
+cold, one of them deaf, and with frost-bitten feet, and both so tired
+they could hardly speak. Of course, they were made as comfortable as
+was possible, the frozen one rubbed with snow and bandaged, and both
+given bacon and corn-bread and hot tea.
+
+"You oughtn't to let yourself get into a state like this," said Mac,
+thinking ruefully of these strangers' obvious inability to travel for a
+day or two, and of the Christmas dinner, to which Benham alone had been
+bidden, by a great stretch of hospitality.
+
+"That's all very well," said the stranger, who shouted when he talked
+at all, "but how's a man to know his feet are going to freeze?"
+
+"Ye see, sorr," O'Flynn explained absent-mindedly, "Misther MacCann
+didn't know yer pardner was deaf."
+
+This point of view seemed to thaw some of the frost out of the two
+wayfarers. They confided that they were Salmon P. Hardy and Bill
+Schiff, fellow-passengers in the _Merwin_, "locked in the ice down
+below," and they'd mined side by side back in the States at Cripple
+Creek. "Yes, sir, and sailed for the Klondyke from Seattle last July."
+And now at Christmas they were hoping that, with luck, they might reach
+the new Minook Diggings, seven hundred miles this side of the Klondyke,
+before the spring rush. During this recital O'Flynn kept rolling his
+eyes absently.
+
+"Theyse a quare noise without."
+
+"It's the wind knockin' down yer chimbly," says Mr. Hardy
+encouragingly.
+
+"It don't sound like Nich'las, annyhow. May the divil burrn him in
+tarment and ile fur disappoyntin' th' kid."
+
+A rattle at the latch, and the Pymeut opened the door.
+
+"Lorrd love ye! ye're a jool, Nich'las!" screamed O'Flynn; and the
+mucklucks passed from one to the other so surreptitiously that for all
+Kaviak's wide-eyed watchfulness he detected nothing.
+
+Nicholas supped with his white friends, and seemed bent on passing the
+night with them. He had to be bribed with tobacco and a new half-dollar
+to go home and keep Christmas in the bosom of his family. And still, at
+the door, he hesitated, drew back, and laid the silver coin on the
+table.
+
+"No. It nights."
+
+"But it isn't really dark."
+
+"Pretty soon heap dark."
+
+"Why, I thought you natives could find your way day or night?"
+
+"Yes. Find way."
+
+"Then what's the matter?"
+
+"Pymeut no like dark;" and it was not until Mac put on his own
+snow-shoes and offered to go part of the way with him that Nicholas was
+at last induced to return home.
+
+The moment Kaviak was ascertained to be asleep, O'Flynn displayed the
+mucklucks. No mistake, they were dandies! The Boy hung one of them up,
+by its long leg, near the child's head at the side of the bunk, and
+then conferred with O'Flynn.
+
+"The Colonel's made some little kind o' sweet-cake things for the tree.
+I could spare you one or two."
+
+"Divil a doubt Kaviak'll take it kindly, but furr mesilf I'm thinkin' a
+pitaty's a dale tastier."
+
+There was just one left in camp. It had rolled behind the flour-sack,
+and O'Flynn had seized on it with rapture. Where everybody was in such
+need of vegetable food, nobody under-estimated the magnificence of
+O'Flynn's offering, as he pushed the pitaty down into the toe of the
+muckluck.
+
+"Sure, the little haythen'll have a foine Christian Christmas wid that
+same to roast in the coals, begorra!" and they all went to bed save
+Mac, who had not returned, and the Boy, who put on his furs, and went
+up the hill to the place where he kept the Christmas-tree lodged in a
+cotton-wood.
+
+He shook the snow off its branches, brought it down to the cabin,
+decorated it, and carried it back.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mac, Salmon P. Hardy, and the frost-bitten Schiff were waked, bright
+and early Christmas morning, by the Boy's screaming with laughter.
+
+The Colonel looked down over the bunk's side, and the men on the
+buffalo-skin looked up, and they all saw Kaviak sitting in bed, holding
+in one hand an empty muckluck by the toe, and in the other a half-eaten
+raw potato.
+
+"Keep the rest of it to roast, anyhow, or O'Flynn's heart will be
+broken."
+
+So they deprived Kaviak of the gnawed fragment, and consoled him by
+helping him to put on his new boots.
+
+When the Little Cabin contingent came in to breakfast, "Hello! what you
+got up on the roof?" says Potts.
+
+"Foot of earth and three feet o' snow!"
+
+"But what's in the bundle!"
+
+"Bundle?" echoes the Boy.
+
+"If you put a bundle on the roof, I s'pose you know what's in it," says
+the Colonel severely.
+
+The occupants of the two cabins eyed each other with good-humoured
+suspicion.
+
+"Thank you," says the Boy, "but we're not takin' any bundles to-day."
+
+"Call next door," advised the Colonel.
+
+"You think we're tryin' to jolly you, but just go out and see for
+yourself--"
+
+"No, sir, you've waked the wrong passenger!"
+
+"They're tryin' it on _us_," said Potts, and subsided into his place at
+the breakfast-table.
+
+During the later morning, while the Colonel wrestled with the dinner
+problem, the Boy went through the thick-falling snow to see if the tree
+was all right, and the dogs had not appropriated the presents. Half-way
+up to the cotton-wood, he glanced back to make sure Kaviak wasn't
+following, and there, sure enough, just as the Little Cabin men had
+said--there below him on the broad-eaved roof was a bundle packed round
+and nearly covered over with snow. He went back eyeing it suspiciously.
+
+Whatever it was, it seemed to be done up in sacking, for a bit stuck
+out at the corner where the wind struck keen. The Boy walked round the
+cabin looking, listening. Nobody had followed him, or nothing would
+have induced him to risk the derision of the camp. As it was, he would
+climb up very softly and lightly, and nobody but himself would be the
+wiser even if it was a josh. He brushed away the snow, touching the
+thing with a mittened hand and a creepy feeling at his spine. It was
+precious heavy, and hard as iron. He tugged at the sacking. "Jee! if I
+don't b'lieve it's meat." The lid of an old cardboard box was bound
+round the frozen mass with a string, and on the cardboard was written:
+"Moose and Christmas Greeting from Kaviak's friends at Holy Cross to
+Kaviak's friends by the Big Chimney."
+
+"H'ray! h'ray! Come out, you fellas! Hip! hip! hurrah!" and the Boy
+danced a breakdown on the roof till the others had come out, and then
+he hurled the moose-meat down over the stockade, and sent the placard
+flying after. They all gathered round Mac and read it.
+
+"Be the Siven!"
+
+"Well, I swan!"
+
+"Don't forget, Boy, you're not takin' any."
+
+"Just remember, if it hadn't been for me it might have stayed up there
+till spring."
+
+"You run in, Kaviak, or you'll have no ears."
+
+But that gentleman pulled up his hood and stood his ground.
+
+"How did it get on the roof, in the name o' the nation?" asked the
+Colonel, stamping his feet.
+
+"Never hear of Santa Claus? Didn't I tell you, Kaviak, he drove his
+reindeer team over the roofs?"
+
+"Did you hear any dogs go by in the night?"
+
+"I didn't; Nicholas brought it, I s'pose, and was told to cache it up
+there. Maybe that's why he came late to give us a surprise."
+
+"Don't believe it; we'd have heard him. Somebody from the mission came
+by in the night and didn't want to wake us, and saw there were dogs--"
+
+"It's froze too hard to cut," interrupted Salmon P. Hardy, who had been
+trying his jack-knife on one end; "it's too big to go in any mortal
+pot."
+
+"And it'll take a month to thaw!"
+
+They tried chopping it, but you could more easily chop a bolt of linen
+sheeting. The axe laboriously chewed out little bits and scattered
+shreds.
+
+"Stop! We'll lose a lot that way."
+
+While they were lamenting this fact, and wondering what to do, the dogs
+set up a racket, and were answered by some others. Benham was coming
+along at a rattling pace, his dogs very angry to find other dogs there,
+putting on airs of possession.
+
+"We got all this moose-meat," says Potts, when Benham arrived on the
+scene, "but we can't cut it."
+
+"Of course not. Where's your hand-saw?"
+
+The Boy brought it, and Mr. Benham triumphantly sawed off two fine
+large steaks. Kaviak scraped up the meat saw-dust and ate it with grave
+satisfaction. With a huge steak in each hand, the Colonel, beaming, led
+the procession back to the cabin. The Boy and Mac cached the rest of
+the moose on the roof and followed.
+
+"Fine team, that one o' yours," said Salmon P. Hardy to the trader.
+"_You'll_ get to Minook, anyhow."
+
+"Not me."
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"I'm not going that way."
+
+"Mean to skip the country? Got cold feet?"
+
+"No. I'm satisfied enough with the country," said the trader quietly,
+and acknowledged the introduction to Mr. Schiff, sitting in bandages by
+the fire.
+
+Benham turned back and called out something to his guide.
+
+"I thought maybe you'd like some oysters for your Christmas dinner," he
+said to the Colonel when he came in again, "so I got a couple o' cans
+from the A. C. man down below;" and a mighty whoop went up.
+
+The great rapture of that moment did not, however, prevent O'Flynn's
+saying under his breath:
+
+"Did ye be chanct, now, think of bringin' a dtrop o'--hey?"
+
+"No," says Benham a little shortly.
+
+"Huh! Ye say that like's if ye wuz a taytotlerr?"
+
+"Not me. But I find it no good to drink whiskey on the trail."
+
+"Ah!" says Salmon P. with interest, "you prefer brandy?"
+
+"No," says Benham, "I prefer tea."
+
+"Lorrd, now! look at that!"
+
+"Drink spirit, and it's all very fine and reviving for a few minutes;
+but a man can't work on it."
+
+"It's the wan thing, sorr," says O'Flynn with solemnity--"it's the wan
+thing on the top o' God's futstool that makes me feel I cud wurruk."
+
+"Not in this climate; and you're safe to take cold in the reaction."
+
+"Cowld is ut? Faith, ye'll be tellin' us Mr. Schiff got his toes froze
+wid settin' too clost be the foire."
+
+"You don't seriously mean you go on the trail without any alcohol?"
+asks the Colonel.
+
+"No, I don't go without, but I keep it on the outside of me, unless I
+have an accident."
+
+Salmon P. studied the trader with curiosity. A man with seven
+magnificent dogs and a native servant, and the finest furs he'd ever
+seen--here was either a capitalist from the outside or a man who had
+struck it rich "on the inside."
+
+"Been in long?"
+
+"Crossed the Chilcoot in June, '85."
+
+"What! twelve year ago?"
+
+Benham nodded.
+
+"Gosh! then you've been in the Klondyke?"
+
+"Not since the gold was found."
+
+"And got a team like that 'n outside, and not even goin' to Minook?"
+
+"Guess not!"
+
+What made the feller so damn satisfied? Only one explanation was
+possible: he'd found a mine without going even as far as Minook. He was
+a man to keep your eye on.
+
+A goodly aroma of steaming oysters and of grilling moose arose in the
+air. The Boy set up the amended bill of fare, lit the Christmas
+candles--one at the top, one at the bottom of the board--and the
+Colonel announced the first course, though it wasn't one o'clock, and
+they usually dined at four.
+
+The soup was too absorbingly delicious to admit of conversation. The
+moose-steaks had vanished like the "snaw-wreath in the thaw" before
+anything much was said, save:
+
+"Nothin' th' matter with moose, hey?"
+
+"Nop! Bet your life."
+
+The "Salmi of ptarmigan" appeared as a great wash of gravy in which
+portions of the much cut-up bird swam in vain for their lives. But the
+high flat rim of the dish was plentifully garnished by fingers of
+corn-bread, and the gravy was "galoppshus," so Potts said.
+
+Salmon P., having appeased the pangs of hunger, returned to his
+perplexed study of Benham.
+
+"Did I understand you to say you came into this country to _prospect_?"
+
+"Came down the Never-Know-What and prospected a whole summer at Forty
+Mile."
+
+"What river did you come by?"
+
+"Same as you go by--the Yukon. Indians up yonder call it the
+Never-Know-What, and the more you find out about it, the better you
+think the name."
+
+"Did you do any good at Forty Mile?"
+
+"Not enough to turn my head, so I tried the Koyukuk--and other diggins
+too."
+
+"Hear that, Schiff?" he roared at his bandaged friend. "Never say die!
+This gen'l'man's been at it twelve years--tried more 'n one camp, but
+now--well, he's so well fixed he don't care a cuss about the Klondyke."
+
+Schiff lit up and pulled hard at the cutty.
+
+O'Flynn had taken Kaviak to the fire, and was showing him how to roast
+half a petaty in wood ashes; but he was listening to the story and
+putting in "Be the Siven!" at appropriate moments.
+
+Schiff poured out a cloud of rank smoke.
+
+"Gen'lemen," he said, "the best Klondyke claims'll be potted. Minook's
+the camp o' the future. You'd better come along with us."
+
+"Got no dogs," sighed the Boy; but the two strangers looked hard at the
+man who hadn't that excuse.
+
+Benham sat and idly watched preparations for the next course.
+
+"Say, a nabob like you might give us a tip. How did you do the trick?"
+
+"Well, I'd been playing your game for three years, and no galley slave
+ever worked half as hard--"
+
+"That's it! work like the devil for a couple o' years and then live
+like a lord for ever after."
+
+"Yes; well, when the time came for me to go into the Lord business I
+had just forty-two dollars and sixty cents to set up on."
+
+"What had you done with the rest?"
+
+"I'd spent the five thousand dollars my father left me, and I'd cleaned
+up just forty-two dollars sixty cents in my three years' mining."
+
+The announcement fell chill on the company.
+
+"I was dead broke and I had no credit. I went home."
+
+"But"--Mac roused himself--"you didn't stay--"
+
+"No, you don't stay--as a rule;"--Mac remembered Caribou--"get used to
+this kind o' thing, and miss it. Miss it so you--"
+
+"You came back," says Salmon P., impatient of generalities.
+
+"And won this time," whispered Schiff.
+
+For that is how every story must end. The popular taste in fiction is
+universal.
+
+"A friend at home grub-staked me, and I came in again--came down on the
+high water in June. Prospected as long as my stuff lasted, and
+then--well, I didn't care about starving, I became an A. C. Trader."
+
+A long pause. This was no climax; everybody waited.
+
+"And now I'm on my own. I often make more money in a day trading with
+the Indians in furs, fish, and cord-wood, than I made in my whole
+experience as a prospector and miner."
+
+A frost had fallen on the genial company.
+
+"But even if _you_ hadn't any luck," the Boy suggested, "you must have
+seen others--"
+
+"Oh, I saw some washing gravel that kept body and soul together, and I
+saw some ... that didn't."
+
+In the pause he added, remorseless:
+
+"I helped to bury some of them."
+
+"Your experience was unusual, or why do men come back year after year?"
+
+"Did you ever hear of a thing called Hope?"
+
+They moved uneasily on their stools, and some rubbed stubbly chins with
+perplexed, uncertain fingers, and they all glowered at the speaker. He
+was uncomfortable, this fellow.
+
+"Well, there mayn't be as much gold up here as men think, but there's
+more hope than anywhere on earth."
+
+"To hell with hope; give me certainty," says Salmon P.
+
+"Exactly. So you shuffle the cards, and laugh down the five-cent limit.
+You'll play one last big game, and it'll be for life this time as well
+as fortune."
+
+"Cheerful cuss, ain't he?" whispered Schiff.
+
+"They say we're a nation of gamblers. Well, sir, the biggest game we
+play is the game that goes on near the Arctic Circle."
+
+"What's the matter with Wall Street?"
+
+"'Tisn't such a pretty game, and they don't play for their lives. I
+tell you it's love of gambling brings men here, and it's the splendid
+stiff game they find going on that keeps them. There's nothing like it
+on earth."
+
+His belated enthusiasm deceived nobody.
+
+"It don't seem to have excited you much," said Mac.
+
+"Oh, I've had my turn at it. And just by luck I found I could play
+another--a safer game, and not bad fun either." He sat up straight and
+shot his hands down deep in the pockets of his mackinaws. "I've got a
+good thing, and I'm willing to stay with it."
+
+The company looked at him coldly.
+
+"Well," drawled Potts, "you can look after the fur trade; give me a
+modest little claim in the Klondyke."
+
+"Oh, Klondyke! Klondyke!" Benham got up and stepped over Kaviak on his
+way to the fire. He lit a short briarwood with a flaming stick and
+turned about. "Shall I tell you fellows a little secret about the
+Klondyke?" He held up the burning brand in the dim room with telling
+emphasis. The smoke and flame blew black and orange across his face as
+he said:
+
+"_Every dollar that's taken out of the Klondyke in gold-dust will cost
+three dollars in coin_."
+
+A sense of distinct dislike to Benham had spread through the company--a
+fellow who called American enterprise love of gambling, for whom
+heroism was foolhardy, and hope insane. Where was a pioneer so bold he
+could get up now and toast the Klondyke? Who, now, without grim
+misgiving, could forecast a rosy future for each man at the board? And
+that, in brief, had been the programme.
+
+"Oh, help the puddin', Colonel," said the Boy like one who starts up
+from an evil dream.
+
+But they sat chilled and moody, eating plum-pudding as if it had been
+so much beans and bacon. Mac felt Robert Bruce's expensive education
+slipping out of reach. Potts saw his girl, tired of waiting, taking up
+with another fellow. The Boy's Orange Grove was farther off than
+Florida. Schiff and Hardy wondered, for a moment, who was the gainer
+for all their killing hardship? Not they, at present, although there
+was the prospect--the hope--oh, damn the Trader!
+
+The Colonel made the punch. O'Flynn drained his cup without waiting for
+the mockery of that first toast--_To our Enterprise_--although no one
+had taken more interest in the programme than O'Flynn. Benham talked
+about the Anvik saw-mill, and the money made in wood camps along the
+river. Nobody listened, though everyone else sat silent, smoking and
+sulkily drinking his punch.
+
+Kaviak's demand for some of the beverage reminded the Boy of the
+Christmas-tree. It had been intended as a climax to wind up the
+entertainment, but to produce it now might save the situation. He got
+up and pulled on his parki.
+
+"Back 'n a minute." But he was gone a long time.
+
+Benham looked down the toast-list and smiled inwardly, for it was
+Klondyked from top to bottom. The others, too, stole uneasy glances at
+that programme, staring them in the face, unabashed, covertly
+ironic--nay, openly jeering. They actually hadn't noticed the fact
+before, but every blessed speech was aimed straight at the wonderful
+gold camp across the line--not the Klondyke of Benham's croaking, but
+the Klondyke of their dreams.
+
+Even the death's head at the feast regretted the long postponement of
+so spirited a programme, interspersed, as it promised to be, with
+songs, dances, and "tricks," and winding up with an original poem, "He
+won't be happy till he gets it."
+
+Benham's Indian had got up and gone out. Kaviak had tried to go too,
+but the door was slammed in his face. He stood there with his nose to
+the crack exactly as a dog does. Suddenly he ran back to Mac and tugged
+at his arm. Even the dull white men could hear an ominous snarling
+among the Mahlemeuts.
+
+Out of the distance a faint answering howl of derision from some enemy,
+advancing or at bay. It was often like this when two teams put up at
+the Big Chimney Camp.
+
+"Reckon our dogs are gettin' into trouble," said Salmon P. anxiously to
+his deaf and crippled partner.
+
+"It's nothing," says the Trader. "A Siwash dog of any spirit is always
+trailing his coat"; and Salmon P. subsided.
+
+Not so Kaviak. Back to the door, head up, he listened. They had
+observed the oddity before. The melancholy note of the Mahlemeut never
+yet had failed to stir his sombre little soul. He was standing now
+looking up at the latch, high, and made for white men, eager, breathing
+fast, listening to that dismal sound that is like nothing else in
+nature--listening as might an exiled Scot to the skirl of bagpipes;
+listening as a Tyrolese who hears yodelling on foreign hills, or as the
+dweller in a distant land to the sound of the dear home speech.
+
+The noise outside grew louder, the air was rent with howls of rage and
+defiance.
+
+"Sounds as if there's 'bout a million mad dogs on your front stoop,"
+says Schiff, knowing there must be a great deal going on if any of it
+reached his ears.
+
+"You set still." His pardner pushed him down on his stool. "Mr. Benham
+and I'll see what's up."
+
+The Trader leisurely opened the door, Salmon P. keeping modestly
+behind, while Kaviak darted forward only to be caught back by Mac. An
+avalanche of sound swept in--a mighty howling and snarling and cracking
+of whips, and underneath the higher clamour, human voices--and in
+dashes the Boy, powdered with snow, laughing and balancing carefully in
+his mittened hands a little Yukon spruce, every needle diamond-pointed,
+every sturdy branch white with frost crystals and soft woolly snow, and
+bearing its little harvest of curious fruit--sweet-cake rings and stars
+and two gingerbread men hanging by pack-thread from the white and green
+branches, the Noah's Ark lodged in one crotch, the very amateur
+snow-shoes in another, and the lost toys wrapped up, transfigured in
+tobacco-foil, dangling merrily before Kaviak's incredulous eyes.
+
+"There's your Christmas-tree!" and the bringer, who had carried the
+tree so that no little puff of snow or delicate crystal should fall
+off, having made a successful entrance and dazzled the child, gave way
+to the strong excitement that shot light out of his eyes and brought
+scarlet into his cheeks. "Here, take it!" He dashed the tree down in
+front of Kaviak, and a sudden storm agitated its sturdy branches; it
+snowed about the floor, and the strange fruit whirled and spun in the
+blast. Kaviak clutched it, far too dazed to do more than stare. The Boy
+stamped the snow off his mucklucks on the threshold, and dashed his cap
+against the lintel, calling out:
+
+"Come in! come in! let the dogs fight it out." Behind him, between the
+snow-walls at the entrance, had appeared two faces--weather-beaten men,
+crowding in the narrow space, craning to see the reception of the
+Christmas-tree and the inside of the famous Big Chimney Cabin.
+
+"These gentlemen," says the Boy, shaking with excitement as he ushered
+them in, "are Mr. John Dillon and General Lighter. They've just done
+the six hundred and twenty-five miles from Minook with dogs over the
+ice! They've been forty days on the trail, and they're as fit as
+fiddles. An' no yonder, for Little Minook has made big millionaires o'
+both o' them!"
+
+Millionaires or not, they'll never, either of them, create a greater
+sensation than they did that Christmas Day, in the Big Chimney Cabin,
+on the bleak hillside, up above the Never-Know-What. Here was Certainty
+at last! Here was Justification!
+
+Precious symbols of success, they were taken by both hands, they were
+shaken and wildly welcomed, "peeled," set down by the fire, given
+punch, asked ten thousand questions all in a breath, rejoiced over, and
+looked up to as glorious dispellers of doubt, blessed saviours from
+despair.
+
+Schiff had tottered forward on bandaged feet, hand round ear, mouth
+open, as if to swallow whole whatever he couldn't hear. The Colonel
+kept on bowing magnificently at intervals and pressing refreshment,
+O'Flynn slapping his thigh and reiterating, "Be the Siven!" Potts not
+only widened his mouth from ear to ear, but, as O'Flynn said after,
+"stretched it clane round his head and tyed it up furr jy in a nate
+knot behind." Benham took a back seat, and when anybody remembered him
+for the next hour it was openly to gloat over his discomfiture.
+
+John Dillon was one of those frontiersmen rightly called typically
+American. You see him again and again--as a cowboy in Texas, as a miner
+or herdsman all through the Far West; you see him cutting lumber along
+the Columbia, or throwing the diamond hitch as he goes from camp to
+camp for gold and freedom. He takes risks cheerfully, and he never
+works for wages when he can go "on his own."
+
+John Dillon was like the majority, tall, lean, muscular, not an ounce
+of superfluous flesh on his bones, a face almost gaunt in its clearness
+of cut, a thin straight nose, chin not heavy but well curved out, the
+eye orbit arched and deep, a frown fixed between thick eyebrows, and
+few words in his firm, rather grim-looking mouth. He was perhaps
+thirty-six, had been "in" ten years, and had mined before that in
+Idaho. Under his striped parki he was dressed in spotted deer-skin,
+wore white deer-skin mucklucks, Arctic cap, and moose mittens. Pinned
+on his inner shirt was the badge of the Yukon Order of Pioneers--a
+footrule bent like the letter A above a scroll of leaves, and in the
+angle two linked O's over Y. P.
+
+It was the other man--the western towns are full of General
+Lighters--who did the talking. An attorney from Seattle, he had come up
+in the July rush with very little but boundless assurance, fell in with
+an old miner who had been grubstaked by Captain Rainey out of the
+_Oklahoma's_ supplies, and got to Minook before the river went to
+sleep.
+
+"No, we're not pardners exactly," he said, glancing good-humouredly at
+Dillon; "we've worked separate, but we're going home two by two like
+animals into the Ark. We've got this in common. We've both 'struck
+ile'--haven't we, Dillon?"
+
+Dillon nodded.
+
+"Little Minook's as rich a camp as Dawson, and the gold's of higher
+grade--isn't it, Dillon?"
+
+"That's right."
+
+"One of the many great advantages of Minook is that it's the _nearest_
+place on the river where they've struck pay dirt." says the General.
+"And another great advantage is that it's on the American side of the
+line."
+
+"What advantage is that?" Mac grated out.
+
+"Just the advantage of not having all your hard earnings taken away by
+an iniquitous tax."
+
+"Look out! this fella's a Britisher--"
+
+"Don't care if he is, and no disrespect to you, sir. The Canadians in
+the Klondyke are the first to say the tax is nothing short of highway
+robbery. You'll see! The minute they hear of gold across the line
+there'll be a stampede out of Dawson. I can put you in the way of
+getting a claim for eight thousand dollars that you can take eighty
+thousand out of next August, with no inspector coming round to check
+your clean-up, and no Government grabbing at your royalties."
+
+"Why aren't you taking out that eighty thousand yourself?" asked Mac
+bluntly.
+
+"Got more 'n one man can handle," answered the General. "Reckon we've
+earned a holiday."
+
+Dillon backed him up.
+
+"Then it isn't shortage in provisions that takes you outside," said the
+Boy.
+
+"Not much."
+
+"Plenty of food at Rampart City; that's the name o' the town where the
+Little Minook meets the Yukon."
+
+"Food at gold-craze prices, I suppose."
+
+"No. Just about the same they quote you in Seattle."
+
+"How is that possible when it's been carried four thousand miles?"
+
+"Because the A. C. and N. A. T. and T. boats got frozen in this side of
+Dawson. They know by the time they get there in June a lot of stuff
+will have come in by the short route through the lakes, and the town
+will be overstocked. So there's flour and bacon to burn when you get up
+as far as Minook. It's only along the Lower River there's any real
+scarcity."
+
+The Big Chimney men exchanged significant looks.
+
+"And there are more supply-boats wintering up at Fort Yukon and at
+Circle City," the General went on. "I tell you on the Upper River
+there's food to burn."
+
+Again the Big Chimney men looked at one another. The General kept
+helping himself to punch, and as he tossed it off he would say,
+"Minook's the camp for me!" When he had given vent to this conviction
+three times, Benham, who hadn't spoken since their entrance, said
+quietly:
+
+"And you're going away from it as hard as you can pelt."
+
+The General turned moist eyes upon him.
+
+"Are you a man of family, sir?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then I cannot expect you to understand." His eyes brimmed at some
+thought too fine and moving for public utterance.
+
+Each member of the camp sat deeply cogitating. Not only gold at Minook,
+but food! In the inner vision of every eye was a ship-load of
+provisions "frozen in" hard by a placer claim; in every heart a fervid
+prayer for a dog-team.
+
+The Boy jumped up, and ran his fingers through his long wild hair. He
+panted softly like a hound straining at a leash. Then, with an obvious
+effort to throw off the magic of Minook, he turned suddenly about, and
+"Poor old Kaviak!" says he, looking round and speaking in quite an
+everyday sort of voice.
+
+The child was leaning against the door clasping the forgotten
+Christmas-tree so tight against the musk-rat coat that the branches hid
+his face. From time to time with reverent finger he touched silver boat
+and red-foil top, and watched, fascinated, how they swung. A white
+child in a tenth of the time would have eaten the cakes, torn off the
+transfiguring tinfoil, tired of the tree, and forgotten it. The Boy
+felt some compunction at the sight of Kaviak's steadfast fidelity.
+
+"Look here, we'll set the tree up where you can see it better." He put
+an empty bucket on the table, and with Mac's help, wedged the spruce in
+it firmly, between some blocks of wood and books of the law.
+
+The cabin was very crowded. Little Mr. Schiff was sitting on the
+cricket. Kaviak retired to his old seat on Elephas beyond the bunks,
+where he still had a good view of the wonderful tree, agreeably lit by
+what was left of the two candles.
+
+"Those things are good to eat, you know," said the Colonel kindly.
+
+Mac cut down a gingerbread man and gave it into the tiny hands.
+
+"What wind blew that thing into your cabin?" asked the General,
+squinting up his snow-blinded eyes at the dim corner where Kaviak sat.
+
+There wasn't a man in the camp who didn't resent the millionaire's
+tone.
+
+"This is a great friend of ours--ain't you, Kaviak?" said the Boy.
+"He's got a soul above gold-mines, haven't you? He sees other fellas
+helping themselves to his cricket and his high chair--too polite to
+object--just goes and sits like a philosopher on the bones of dead
+devils and looks on. Other fellas sittin' in his place talkin' about
+gold and drinkin' punch--never offerin' him a drop--"
+
+Several cups were held out, but Mac motioned them back.
+
+"I don't think," says John Dillon slyly--"don't think _this_ punch will
+hurt the gentleman."
+
+And a roar went up at the Colonel's expense. General Lighter pulled
+himself to his feet, saying there was a little good Old Rye left
+outside, and he could stock up again when he got to the _Oklahoma_.
+
+"Oh, and it's yersilf that don't shoy off from a dthrop o' the craythur
+whin yer thravellin' the thrail."
+
+Everybody looked at Benham. He got up and began to put on his furs; his
+dog-driver, squatting by the door, took the hint, and went out to see
+after the team.
+
+"Oh, well," said the General to O'Flynn, "it's Christmas, you know";
+and he picked his way among the closely-packed company to the door.
+
+"We ought to be movin', too," said Dillon, straightening up. The
+General halted, depressed at the reminder. "You know we swore we
+wouldn't stop again unless--"
+
+"Look here, didn't you hear me saying it was Christmas?"
+
+"You been sayin' that for twenty-four hours. Been keepin' Christmas
+right straight along since yesterday mornin." But the General had gone
+out to unpack the whisky. "He knocked up the mission folks, bright and
+early yesterday, to tell 'em about the Glad News Tiding's--Diggin's, I
+mean."
+
+"What did they say?"
+
+"Weren't as good an audience as the General's used to; that's why we
+pushed on. We'd heard about your camp, and the General felt a call to
+preach the Gospel accordin' to Minook down this way."
+
+"He don't seem to be standin' the racket as well as you," said Schiff.
+
+"Well, sir, this is the first time I've found him wantin' to hang round
+after he's thoroughly rubbed in the news."
+
+Dillon moved away from the fire; the crowded cabin was getting hot.
+
+Nevertheless the Colonel put on more wood, explaining to Salmon P. and
+the others, who also moved back, that it was for illuminating
+purposes--those two candles burning down low, each between three nails
+in a little slab of wood--those two had been kept for Christmas, and
+were the last they had.
+
+In the general movement from the fire, Benham, putting on his cap and
+gloves, had got next to Dillon.
+
+"Look here," said the Trader, under cover of the talk about candles,
+"what sort of a trip have you had?"
+
+The Yukon pioneer looked at him a moment, and then took his pipe out of
+his mouth to say:
+
+"Rank."
+
+"No fun, hey?"
+
+"That's right." He restored the pipe, and drew gently.
+
+"And yet to hear the General chirp--"
+
+"He's got plenty o' grit, the General has."
+
+"Has he got gold?"
+
+Dillon nodded. "Or will have."
+
+"Out of Minook?"
+
+"Out of Minook."
+
+"In a sort of a kind of a way. I think I understand." Benham wagged his
+head. "He's talkin' for a market."
+
+Dillon smoked.
+
+"Goin' out to stir up a boom, and sell his claim to some sucker."
+
+The General reappeared with the whisky, stamping the snow off his feet
+before he joined the group at the table, where the Christmas-tree was
+seasonably cheek by jowl with the punch-bowl between the low-burnt
+candles. Mixing the new brew did not interrupt the General's ecstatic
+references to Minook.
+
+"Look here!" he shouted across to Mac, "I'll give you a lay on my best
+claim for two thousand down and a small royalty."
+
+Mac stuck out his jaw.
+
+"I'd like to take a look at the country before I deal."
+
+"Well, see here. When will you go?"
+
+"We got no dogs."
+
+"_We_ have!" exclaimed Salmon P. and Scruff with one voice.
+
+"Well, I _can_ offer you fellows--"
+
+"How many miles did you travel a day?"
+
+"Sixty," said the General promptly.
+
+"Oh Lord!" ejaculated Benham, and hurriedly he made his good-byes.
+
+"What's the matter with _you?_" demanded the General with dignity.
+
+"I'm only surprised to hear Minook's twenty-four hundred miles away."
+
+"More like six hundred," says the Colonel.
+
+"And you've been forty days coming, and you cover sixty miles a
+day--Good-bye," he laughed, and was gone.
+
+"Well--a--" The General looked round.
+
+"Travelin' depends on the weather." Dillon helped him out.
+
+"Exactly. Depends on the weather," echoed the General. "You don't get
+an old Sour-dough like Dillon to travel at forty degrees."
+
+"How are you to know?" whispered Schiff.
+
+"Tie a little bottle o' quick to your sled," answered Dillon.
+
+"Bottle o' what?" asked the Boy.
+
+"Quicksilver--mercury," interpreted the General.
+
+"No dog-puncher who knows what he's about travels when his quick goes
+dead."
+
+"If the stuff's like lead in your bottle--" The General stopped to
+sample the new brew. In the pause, from the far side of the cabin
+Dillon spat straight and clean into the heart of the coals.
+
+"Well, what do you do when the mercury freezes?" asked the Boy.
+
+"Camp," said Dillon impassively, resuming his pipe.
+
+"I suppose," the Boy went on wistfully--"I suppose you met men all the
+way making straight for Minook?"
+
+"Only on this last lap."
+
+"They don't get far, most of 'em."
+
+"But... but it's worth trying!" the Boy hurried to bridge the chasm.
+
+The General lifted his right arm in the attitude of the orator about to
+make a telling hit, but he was hampered by having a mug at his lips. In
+the pause, as he stood commanding attention, at the same time that he
+swallowed half a pint of liquor, he gave Dillon time leisurely to get
+up, knock the ashes out of his pipe stick it in his belt, put a slow
+hand behind him towards his pistol pocket, and bring out his buckskin
+gold sack. Now, only Mac of the other men had ever seen a miner's purse
+before, but every one of the four cheechalkos knew instinctively what
+it was that Dillon held so carelessly. In that long, narrow bag, like
+the leg of a child's stocking, was the stuff they had all come seeking.
+
+The General smacked his lips, and set down the granite cup.
+
+"_That's_ the argument," he said. "Got a noospaper?"
+
+The Colonel looked about in a flustered way for the tattered San
+Francisco _Examiner_; Potts and the Boy hustled the punch-bowl on to
+the bucket board, recklessly spilling some of the precious contents.
+O'Flynn and Salmon P. whisked the Christmas tree into the corner, and
+not even the Boy remonstrated when a gingerbread man broke his neck,
+and was trampled under foot.
+
+"Quick! the candles are going out!" shouted the Boy, and in truth each
+wick lay languishing in a little island of grease, now flaring bravely,
+now flickering to dusk. It took some time to find in the San Francisco
+_Examiner_ of August 7 a foot square space that was whole. But as
+quickly as possible the best bit was spread in the middle of the table.
+Dillon, in the breathless silence having slowly untied the thongs, held
+his sack aslant between the two lights, and poured out a stream-nuggets
+and coarse bright gold.
+
+The crowd about the table drew audible breath. Nobody actually spoke at
+first, except O'Flynn, who said reverently: "Be--the Siven! Howly
+Pipers!--that danced at me--gran'-mother's weddin'--when the
+divvle--called the chune!" Even the swimming wicks flared up, and
+seemed to reach out, each a hungry tongue of flame to touch and taste
+the glittering heap, before they went into the dark. Low exclamations,
+hands thrust out to feel, and drawn back in a sort of superstitious
+awe.
+
+Here it was, this wonderful stuff they'd come for! Each one knew by the
+wild excitement in his own breast, how in secret he had been brought to
+doubt its being here. But here it was lying in a heap on the Big Cabin
+table! and--now it was gone.
+
+The right candle had given out, and O'Flynn, blowing with impatience
+like a walrus, had simultaneously extinguished the other.
+
+For an instant a group of men with strained and dazzled eyes still bent
+above the blackness on the boards.
+
+"Stir the fire," called the Colonel, and flew to do it himself.
+
+"I'll light a piece of fat pine," shouted the Boy, catching up a stick,
+and thrusting it into the coals.
+
+"Where's your bitch?" said Dillon calmly.
+
+"Bitch?"
+
+"Haven't you got a condensed milk can with some bacon grease in it, and
+a rag wick? Makes a good enough light."
+
+But the fire had been poked up, and the cabin was full of dancing
+lights and shadows. Besides that, the Boy was holding a resinous stick
+alight over the table, and they all bent down as before.
+
+"It was passin' a bank in 'Frisco wid a windy full o' that stuff that
+brought me up here," said O'Flynn.
+
+"It was hearin' about that winder brought _me_" added Potts.
+
+Everyone longed to touch and feel about in the glittering pile, but no
+one as yet had dared to lay a finger on the smallest grain in the
+hoard. An electrical shock flashed through the company when the General
+picked up one of the biggest nuggets and threw it down with a rich,
+full-bodied thud. "That one is four ounces."
+
+He took up another.
+
+"This is worth about sixty dollars."
+
+"More like forty," said Dillon.
+
+They were of every conceivable shape and shapelessness, most of them
+flattened; some of them, the greenhorn would swear, were fashioned by
+man into roughly embossed hearts, or shells, or polished discs like
+rude, defaced coins. One was a perfect staple, another the letter "L,"
+another like an axe-head, and one like a peasant's sabot. Some were
+almost black with iron stains, and some were set with "jewels" of
+quartz, but for the most part they were formless fragments of a rich
+and brassy yellow.
+
+"Lots of the little fellas are like melon-seeds"; and the Boy pointed a
+shaking finger, longing and still not daring to touch the treasure.
+
+Each man had a dim feeling in the back of his head that, after all, the
+hillock of gold was an illusion, and his own hand upon the dazzling
+pile would clutch the empty air.
+
+"Where's your dust?" asked the Boy.
+
+Dillon stared.
+
+"Why, here."
+
+"This is all nuggets and grains."
+
+"Well, what more do you want?"
+
+"Oh, it'd do well enough for me, but it ain't dust."
+
+"It's what we call dust."
+
+"As coarse as this?"
+
+The Sour-dough nodded, and Lighter laughed.
+
+"There's a fox's mask," said the Colonel at the bottom of the table,
+pointing a triangular bit out.
+
+"Let me look at it a minute," begged the Boy.
+
+"Hand it round," whispered Schiff.
+
+It was real. It was gold. Their fingers tingled under the first
+contact. This was the beginning.
+
+The rude bit of metal bred a glorious confidence. Under the magic of
+its touch Robert Bruce's expensive education became a simple certainty.
+In Potts's hand the nugget gave birth to a mighty progeny. He saw
+himself pouring out sackfuls before his enraptured girl.
+
+The Boy lifted his flaring torch with a victorious sense of having just
+bought back the Orange Grove; and Salmon P. passed the nugget to his
+partner with a blissful sigh.
+
+"Well, I'm glad we didn't get cold feet," says he.
+
+"Yes," whispered Schiff; "it looks like we goin' to the right place."
+
+The sheen of the heap of yellow treasure was trying even to the nerves
+of the Colonel.
+
+"Put it away," he said quite solemnly, laying the nugget on the
+paper--"put it all away before the firelight dies down."
+
+Dillon leisurely gathered it up and dropped the nuggets, with an
+absent-minded air, into the pouch which Lighter held.
+
+But the San Francisco _Examiner_ had been worn to the softness of an
+old rag and the thinness of tissue. Under Dillon's sinewy fingers
+pinching up the gold the paper gave way.
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed more than one voice, as at some grave mishap.
+
+Dillon improvised a scoop out of a dirty envelope. Nobody spoke and
+everybody watched, and when, finally, with his hand, he brushed the
+remaining grains off the torn paper into the envelope, poured them into
+the gaping sack-mouth, and lazily pulled at the buckskin draw-string,
+everybody sat wondering how much, if any, of the precious metal had
+escaped through the tear, and how soon Dillon would come out of his
+brown study, remember, and recover the loss. But a spell seemed to have
+fallen on the company. No one spoke, till Dillon, with that lazy
+motion, hoisting one square shoulder and half turning his body round,
+was in the act of returning the sack to his hip-pocket.
+
+"Wait!" said Mac, with the explosiveness of a firearm, and O'Flynn
+jumped.
+
+"You ain't got it all," whispered Schiff hurriedly.
+
+"Oh, I'm leavin' the fox-face for luck," Dillon nodded at the Colonel.
+
+But Schiff pointed reverently at the tear in the paper, as Dillon only
+went on pushing his sack deep down in his pocket, while Mac lifted the
+_Examiner_. All but the two millionaires bent forward and scrutinised
+the table. O'Flynn impulsively ran one lone hand over the place where
+the gold-heap had lain, his other hand held ready at the table's edge
+to catch any sweepings. None! But the result of O'Flynn's action was
+that those particles of gold that that fallen through the paper were
+driven into the cracks and inequalities of the board.
+
+"There! See?"
+
+"Now look what you've done!"
+
+Mac pointed out a rough knot-hole, too, that slyly held back a pinch of
+gold.
+
+"Oh, that!"
+
+Dillon slapped his hip, and settled into his place. But the men nearest
+the crack and the knot-hole fell to digging out the renegade grains,
+and piously offering them to their lawful owner.
+
+"That ain't worth botherin' about," laughed Dillon; "you always reckon
+to lose a little each time, even if you got a China soup-plate."
+
+"Plenty more where that came from," said the General, easily.
+
+Such indifference was felt to be magnificent indeed. The little
+incident said more for the richness of Minook than all the General's
+blowing; they forgot that what was lost would amount to less than fifty
+cents. The fact that it was gold--Minook gold--gave it a symbolic value
+not to be computed in coin.
+
+"How do you go?" asked the Colonel, as the two millionaires began
+putting on their things.
+
+"We cut across to Kuskoquim. Take on an Indian guide there to Nushagak,
+and from there with dogs across the ocean ice to Kadiak."
+
+"Oh! the way the letters go out."
+
+"When they _do_," smiled Dillon. "Yes, it's the old Russian Post Trail,
+I believe. South of Kadiak Island the sea is said to be open as early
+as the first of March. We'll get a steamer to Sitka, and from Sitka, of
+course, the boats run regular."
+
+"Seattle by the middle of March!" says the General. "Come along,
+Dillon; the sooner you get to Seattle, and blow in a couple o' hundred
+thousand, the sooner you'll get back to Minook."
+
+Dillon went out and roused up the dogs, asleep in the snow, with their
+bushy tails sheltering their sharp noses.
+
+"See you later?"
+
+"Yes, 'outside.'"
+
+"Outside? No, sir! _Inside_."
+
+Dillon swore a blood-curdling string of curses and cracked his whip
+over the leader.
+
+"Why, you comin' back?"
+
+"Bet your life!"
+
+And nobody who looked at the face of the Yukon pioneer could doubt he
+meant what he said.
+
+They went indoors. The cabin wore an unwonted and a rakish air. The
+stools seemed to have tried to dance the lancers and have fallen out
+about the figure. Two were overturned. The unwashed dishes were tossed
+helter-skelter. A tipsy Christmas tree leaned in drunken fashion
+against the wall, and under its boughs lay a forgotten child asleep. On
+the other side of the cabin an empty whisky bottle caught a ray of
+light from the fire, and glinted feebly back. Among the ashes on the
+hearth was a screw of paper, charred at one end, and thrown there after
+lighting someone's pipe. The Boy opened it. The famous programme of the
+Yukon Symposium!
+
+"It's been a different sort of Christmas from what we planned,"
+observed the Colonel, not quite as gaily as you might expect.
+
+"Begob!" says O'Flynn, stretching out his interminable legs; "ye can't
+say we haven't hearrd Glad Tidings of gr-reat j'y--"
+
+"Colonel," interrupts the Boy, throwing the Programme in the fire,
+"let's look at your nugget again."
+
+And they all took turns. Except Potts. He was busy digging the
+remaining gold-grains out of the crack and the knothole.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+A CHRISTIAN AGNOSTIC
+
+  "--giver mig Rum!
+   Himlen bar Stjerner Natten er stum."
+
+
+It was a good many days before they got the dazzle of that gold out of
+their eyes. They found their tongues again, and talked "Minook" from
+morning till night among themselves and with the rare passer up or down
+the trail.
+
+Mac began to think they might get dogs at Anvik, or at one of the
+Ingalik villages, a little further on. The balance of opinion in the
+camp was against this view. But he had Potts on his side. When the New
+Year opened, the trail was in capital condition. On the second of
+January two lots of Indians passed, one with dogs hauling flour and
+bacon for Benham, and the other lot without dogs, dragging light
+hand-sleds. Potts said restlessly:
+
+"After all, _they_ can do it."
+
+"So can we if we've a mind to," said Mac.
+
+"Come on, then."
+
+The camp tried hard to dissuade them. Naturally neither listened. They
+packed the Boy's sled and set off on the morning of the third, to
+Kaviak's unbounded surprise and disgust, his view of life being that,
+wherever Mac went, he was bound to follow. And he did follow--made off
+as hard as his swift little feet could carry him, straight up the Yukon
+trail, and Farva lost a good half of that first morning bringing him
+home.
+
+Just eight days later the two men walked into the Cabin and sat
+down--Potts with a heart-rending groan, Mac with his jaw almost
+dislocated in his cast-iron attempt to set his face against defeat;
+their lips were cracked with the cold, their faces raw from frostbite,
+their eyes inflamed. The weather--they called it the weather--had been
+too much for them. It was obvious they hadn't brought back any dogs,
+but--
+
+"What did you think of Anvik?" says the Boy.
+
+"Anvik? You don't suppose we got to Anvik in weather like this!"
+
+"How far _did_ you get?"
+
+Mac didn't answer. Potts only groaned. He had frozen his cheek and his
+right hand.
+
+They were doctored and put to bed.
+
+"Did you see my friends at Holy Cross?" the Boy asked Potts when he
+brought him a bowl of hot bean-soup.
+
+"You don't suppose we got as far as Holy Cross, with the wind--"
+
+"Well, where _did_ you get to? Where you been?"
+
+"Second native village above."
+
+"Why, that isn't more'n sixteen miles."
+
+"Sixteen miles too far."
+
+Potts breathed long and deep between hot and comforting swallows.
+
+"Where's the Boy's sled?" said the Colonel, coming in hurriedly.
+
+"We cached it," answered Potts feebly.
+
+"Couldn't even bring his sled home! _Where've_ you cached it?"
+
+"It's all right--only a few miles back."
+
+Potts relinquished the empty soup-bowl, and closed his eyes.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+When he opened them again late in the evening it was to say:
+
+"Found some o' those suckers who were goin' so slick to Minook; some o'
+_them_ down at the second village, and the rest are winterin' in Anvik,
+so the Indians say. Not a single son of a gun will see the diggins till
+the ice goes out."
+
+"Then, badly off as we are here," says the Colonel to the Boy, "it's
+lucky for us we didn't join the procession."
+
+When Mac and the Boy brought the sled home a couple of days later, it
+was found that a portion of its cargo consisted of a toy kyak and two
+bottles of hootchino, the maddening drink concocted by the natives out
+of fermented dough and sugar.
+
+Apart from the question of drinking raised again by the "hootch," it is
+perhaps possible that, having so little else to do, they were ready to
+eat the more; it is also true that, busy or idle, the human body
+requires more nourishment in the North than it does in the South.
+
+Certainly the men of the little Yukon camp began to find their rations
+horribly short commons, and to suffer a continual hunger, never wholly
+appeased. It is conditions like these that bring out the brute latent
+in all men. The day came to mean three scant meals. Each meal came to
+mean a silent struggle in each man's soul not to let his stomach get
+the better of his head and heart. At first they joked and laughed about
+their hunger and the scarcity. By-and-by it became too serious, the
+jest was wry-faced and rang false. They had, in the beginning, each
+helped himself from common dishes set in the middle of the rough plank
+table. Later, each found how, without meaning to--hating himself for
+it--he watched food on its way to others' plates with an evil eye. When
+it came to his turn, he had an ever-recurrent struggle with himself not
+to take the lion's share. There were ironical comments now and then,
+and ill-concealed bitterness. No one of the five would have believed he
+could feel so towards a human being about a morsel of food, but those
+who think they would be above it, have not wintered in the Arctic
+regions or fought in the Boer War. The difficulty was frankly faced at
+last, and it was ordained in council that the Colonel should be
+dispenser of the food.
+
+"Can't say I like the office," quoth he, "but here goes!" and he cut
+the bacon with an anxious hand, and spooned out the beans solemnly as
+if he weighed each "go." And the Trio presently retired to the Little
+Cabin to discuss whether the Colonel didn't show favouritism to the
+Boy, and, when Mac was asleep, how they could get rid of Kaviak.
+
+So presently another council was called, and the Colonel resigned his
+office, stipulating that each man in turn should hold it for a week,
+and learn how ungrateful it was. Moreover, that whoever was, for the
+nonce, occupying the painful post, should be loyally upheld by all the
+others, which arrangement was in force to the end.
+
+And still, on grounds political, religious, social, trivial, the
+disaffection grew. Two of the Trio sided against the odd man, Potts,
+and turned him out of the Little Cabin one night during a furious
+snowstorm, that had already lasted two days, had more than half buried
+the hut, and nearly snowed up the little doorway. The Colonel and the
+Boy had been shovelling nearly all the day before to keep free the
+entrance to the Big Cabin and the precious "bottle" window, as well as
+their half of the path between the two dwellings. O'Flynn and Potts had
+played poker and quarrelled as usual.
+
+The morning after the ejection of Potts, and his unwilling reception at
+the Big Cabin, Mac and O'Flynn failed to appear for breakfast.
+
+"Guess they're huffy," says Potts, stretching out his feet, very
+comfortable in their straw-lined mucklucks, before the big blaze.
+"Bring on the coffee, Kaviak."
+
+"No," says the Colonel, "we won't begin without the other fellows."
+
+"By the living Jingo, _I_ will then!" says Potts, and helps himself
+under the Colonel's angry eyes.
+
+The other two conferred a moment, then drew on their parkis and
+mittens, and with great difficulty, in spite of yesterday's work, got
+the door open. It was pretty dark, but there was no doubt about it, the
+Little Cabin had disappeared.
+
+"Look! isn't that a curl of smoke?" said the Boy.
+
+"Yes, by George! they're snowed under!"
+
+"Serve 'em right!"
+
+A heavy sigh from the Colonel. "Yes, but _we'll_ have to dig 'em out!"
+
+"Look here, Colonel"--the Boy spoke with touching solemnity--"_not
+before breakfast!_"
+
+"Right you are!" laughed the Colonel; and they went in.
+
+It was that day, after the others had been released and fed, that the
+Boy fell out with Potts concerning who had lost the hatchet--and they
+came to blows. A black eye and a bloody nose might not seem an
+illuminating contribution to the question, but no more was said about
+the hatchet after the Colonel had dragged the Boy off the prostrate
+form of his adversary.
+
+But the Colonel himself lost his temper two days later when O'Flynn
+broached the seal set months before on the nearly empty demijohn. For
+those famous "temperance punches" the Colonel had drawn on his own
+small stock. He saw his blunder when O'Flynn, possessing himself of the
+demijohn, roared out:
+
+"It's my whisky, I tell you! I bought it and paid furr it, and but for
+me it would be at the bottom o' the Yukon now."
+
+"Yes, and you'd be at the bottom of the Yukon yourself if you hadn't
+been dragged out by the scruff o' your neck. And you'd be in a pretty
+fix now, if we left you alone with your whisky, which is about all
+you've got."
+
+"We agreed," Potts chipped in, "that it should be kept for medicinal
+purposes only."
+
+Sullenly O'Flynn sipped at his grog. Potts had "hogged most of the
+hootch."
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Look here, Boy," said Mac at supper, "I said I wouldn't eat off this
+plate again."
+
+"Oh, dry up! One tin plate's like another tin plate."
+
+"Are you reflecting on the washer-up, Mr. MacCann?" asked Potts.
+
+"I'm saying what I've said before--that I've scratched my name on my
+plate, and I won't eat off this rusty, battered kettle-lid."
+
+He held it up as if to shy it at the Boy. The young fellow turned with
+a flash in his eye and stood taut. Then in the pause he said quite low:
+
+"Let her fly, MacCann."
+
+But MacCann thought better of it. He threw the plate down on the table
+with a clatter. The Colonel jumped up and bent over the mush-pot at the
+fire, beside the Boy, whispering to him.
+
+"Oh, all right."
+
+When the Boy turned back to the table, with the smoking kettle, the
+cloud had gone from his face. MacCann had got up to hang a blanket over
+the door. While his back was turned the Boy brought a tin plate, still
+in good condition, set it down at Mac's place, planted a nail on end in
+the middle, and with three blows from a hammer fastened the plate
+firmly to the board.
+
+"Maybe you can't hand it up for more as often as you like, but you'll
+always find it there," he said when McCann came back. And the laugh
+went against the dainty pioneer, who to the end of the chapter ate from
+a plate nailed fast to the table.
+
+"I begin to understand," says the Colonel to the Boy, under cover of
+the others' talk, "why it's said to be such a devil of a test of a
+fellow's decency to winter in this infernal country."
+
+"They say it's always a man's pardner he comes to hate most," returned
+the Boy, laughing good-humouredly at the Colonel.
+
+"Naturally. Look at the row in the Little Cabin."
+
+"That hasn't been the only row," the Boy went on more thoughtfully. "I
+say, Colonel"--he lowered his voice--"do you know there'll have to be a
+new system of rations? I've been afraid--now I'm _sure_--the grub won't
+last till the ice goes out."
+
+"I know it," said the Colonel very gravely.
+
+"Was there a miscalculation?"
+
+"I hope it was that--or else," speaking still lower, "the stores have
+been tampered with, and not by Kaviak either. There'll be a hell of a
+row." He looked up, and saw Potts watching them suspiciously. It had
+come to this: if two men talked low the others pricked their ears. "But
+lack of grub," resumed the Colonel in his usual voice, as though he had
+not noticed, "is only one of our difficulties. Lack of work is just
+about as bad. It breeds a thousand devils. We're a pack o' fools. Here
+we are, all of us, hard hit, some of us pretty well cleaned out o'
+ready cash, and here's dollars and dollars all round us, and we sit
+over the fire like a lot of God-forsaken natives."
+
+"Dollars! Where?"
+
+"Growin' on the trees, boys; a forest full."
+
+"Oh, timber." Enthusiasm cooled.
+
+"Look at what they say about those fellows up at Anvik, what they made
+last year."
+
+"They've got a saw-mill."
+
+"_Now_ they have. But they cut and sold cord-wood to the steamers two
+years before they got a mill, and next summer will be the biggest
+season yet. We ought to have set to, as soon as the cabins were built,
+and cut wood for the summer traffic. But since there are five of us, we
+can make a good thing of it yet."
+
+The Colonel finally carried the day. They went at it next morning, and,
+as the projector of the work had privately predicted, a better spirit
+prevailed in the camp for some time. But here were five men, only one
+of whom had had any of the steadying grace of stiff discipline in his
+life, men of haphazard education, who had "chucked" more or less easy
+berths in a land of many creature comforts ... for this--to fell and
+haul birch and fir trees in an Arctic climate on half-rations! It began
+to be apparent that the same spirit was invading the forest that had
+possession of the camp; two, or at most three, did the work, and the
+rest shirked, got snow-blindness and rheumatism, and let the others do
+his share, counting securely, nevertheless, on his fifth of the
+proceeds, just as he counted (no matter what proportion he had
+contributed) on his full share of the common stock of food.
+
+"I came out here a Communist--" said the Boy one day to the Colonel.
+
+"And an agnostic," smiled the older man.
+
+"Oh, I'm an agnostic all right, now and for ever. But this winter has
+cured my faith in Communism."
+
+Early February brought not only lengthening daylight, but a radical
+change in the weather. The woodsmen worked in their shirt-sleeves,
+perspired freely, and said in the innocence of their hearts, "If winter
+comes early up here, spring does the same." The whole hillside was one
+slush, and the snow melting on the ill-made Little Cabin roof brought a
+shower-bath into the upper bunk.
+
+Few things in nature so surely stir the pulse of man as the untimely
+coming of a few spring days, that have lost their way in the calendar,
+and wandered into winter. No trouble now to get the Big Chimney men
+away from the fireside. They held up their bloodless faces in the faint
+sunshine, and their eyes, with the pupils enlarged by the long reign of
+night, blinked feebly, like an owl's forced to face the morning.
+
+There were none of those signs in the animal world outside, of
+premature stir and cheerful awaking, that in other lands help the
+illusion that winter lies behind, but there was that even more
+stimulating sweet air abroad, that subtle mixture of sun and yielding
+frost, that softened wind that comes blowing across the snow, still
+keen to the cheek, but subtly reviving to the sensitive nostril, and
+caressing to the eyes. The Big Chimney men drew deep breaths, and said
+in their hearts the battle was over and won.
+
+Kaviak, for ever following at Mac's heels "like a rale Irish tarrier,"
+found his allegiance waver in these stirring, blissful days, if ever
+Farva so belied character and custom as to swing an axe for any length
+of time. Plainly out of patience, Kaviak would throw off the musk-rat
+coat, and run about in wet mucklucks and a single garment--uphill,
+downhill, on important errands which he confided to no man.
+
+It is part of the sorcery of such days that men's thoughts, like
+birds', turn to other places, impatient of the haven that gave them
+shelter in rough weather overpast. The Big Chimney men leaned on their
+axes and looked north, south, east, west.
+
+Then the Colonel would give a little start, turn about, lift his
+double-bitter, and swing it frontier fashion, first over one shoulder,
+then over the other, striking cleanly home each time, working with a
+kind of splendid rhythm more harmonious, more beautiful to look at,
+than most of the works of men. This was, perhaps, the view of his
+comrades, for they did a good deal of looking at the Colonel. He said
+he was a modest man and didn't like it, and Mac, turning a little rusty
+under the gibe, answered:
+
+"Haven't you got the sense to see we've cut all the good timber just
+round here?" and again he turned his eyes to the horizon line.
+
+"Mac's right," said the Boy; and even the Colonel stood still a moment,
+and they all looked away to that land at the end of the world where the
+best materials are for the building of castles--it's the same country
+so plainly pointed out by the Rainbow's End, and never so much as in
+the springtime does it lure men with its ancient promise.
+
+"Come along, Colonel; let's go and look for real timber--"
+
+"And let's find it nearer water-level--where the steamers can see it
+right away."
+
+"What about the kid?"
+
+"Me come," said Kaviak, with a highly obliging air.
+
+"No; you stay at home."
+
+"No; go too."
+
+"Go too, thou babbler! Kaviak's a better trail man than some I could
+mention."
+
+"We'll have to carry him home," objected Potts.
+
+"Now don't tell us you'll do any of the carryin', or we'll lose
+confidence in you, Potts."
+
+The trail was something awful, but on their Canadian snowshoes they got
+as far as an island, six miles off. One end of it was better wooded
+than any easily accessible place they had seen.
+
+"Why, this is quite like real spruce," said the Boy, and O'Flynn
+admitted that even in California "these here would be called 'trees'
+wid no intintion o' bein' sarcaustic."
+
+So they cut holes in the ice, and sounded for the channel.
+
+"Yes, sir, the steamers can make a landin' here, and here's where we'll
+have our wood-rack."
+
+They went home in better spirits than they had been in since that
+welter of gold had lain on the Big Cabin table.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+But a few days sufficed to wear the novelty off the new wood camp for
+most of the party. Potts and O'Flynn set out in the opposite direction
+one morning with a hand-sled, and provisions to last several days. They
+were sick of bacon and beans, and were "goin' huntin'." No one could
+deny that a moose or even a grouse--anything in the shape of fresh
+meat--was sufficiently needed. But Potts and O'Flynn were really sick
+and sore from their recent slight attack of wood-felling. They were
+after bigger game, too, as well as grouse, and a few days "off." It had
+turned just enough colder to glaze the trail and put it in fine
+condition. They went down the river to the _Oklahoma,_ were generously
+entertained by Captain Rainey, and learned that, with earlier contracts
+on his hands, he did not want more wood from them than they had already
+corded. They returned to the camp without game, but with plenty of
+whisky, and information that freed them from the yoke of labour, and
+from the lash of ironic comment. In vain the Colonel urged that the
+_Oklahoma_ was not the only steamer plying the Yukon, that with the big
+rush of the coming season the traffic would be enormous, and a
+wood-pile as good as a gold mine. The cause was lost.
+
+"You won't get us to make galley-slaves of ourselves on the off-chance
+of selling. Rainey says that wood camps have sprung up like mushrooms
+all along the river. The price of wood will go down to--"
+
+"All along the river! There isn't one between us and Andreievsky, nor
+between here and Holy Cross."
+
+But it was no use. The travellers pledged each other in _Oklahoma_
+whisky, and making a common cause once more, the original Trio put in a
+night of it. The Boy and the Colonel turned into their bunks at eleven
+o'clock. They were roused in the small hours, by Kaviak's frightened
+crying, and the noise of angry voices.
+
+"You let the kid alone."
+
+"Well, it's mesilf that'll take the liberty o' mintionin' that I ain't
+goin' to stand furr another minyit an Esquimer's cuttin' down _my_
+rations. Sure it's a fool I've been!"
+
+"You can't help that," Mac chopped out.
+
+"Say Mac," said Potts in a drunken voice, "I'm talkin' to you like a
+friend. You want to get a move on that kid."
+
+"Kaviak's goin' won't make any more difference than a fly's."
+
+The other two grumbled incoherently.
+
+"But I tell you what _would_ make a difference: if you two would quit
+eatin' on the sly--out o' meal-times."
+
+"Be the Siven!"
+
+"You lie!" A movement, a stool overturned, and the two men in the bunks
+were struck broad awake by the smart concussion of a gun-shot. Nobody
+was hurt, and between them they disarmed Potts, and turned the Irishman
+out to cool off in his own cabin. It was all over in a minute. Kaviak,
+reassured, curled down to sleep again. Mac and Potts stretched
+themselves on the buffalo-robe half under the table, and speedily fell
+to snoring. The Boy put on some logs. He and the Colonel sat and
+watched the sparks.
+
+"It's a bad business."
+
+"It can't go on," says the Colonel; "but Mac's right: Kaviak's being
+here isn't to blame. They--we, too--are like a lot of powder-cans."
+
+The Boy nodded. "Any day a spark, and _biff!_ some of us are in a
+blaze, and wh-tt! bang! and some of us are in Kingdom Come."
+
+"I begin to be afraid to open my lips," said the Colonel. "We all are;
+don't you notice?"
+
+"Yes. I wonder why we came."
+
+"_You_ had no excuse," said the elder man almost angrily.
+
+"Same excuse as you."
+
+The Colonel shook his head.
+
+"Exactly," maintained the Boy. "Tired of towns and desk-work,
+and--and--" The Boy shifted about on his wooden stool, and held up his
+hands to the reviving blaze. "Life owes us steady fellows one year of
+freedom, anyhow--one year to make ducks and drakes of. Besides, we've
+all come to make our fortunes. Doesn't every mother's son of us mean to
+find a gold-mine in the spring when we get to the Klondyke--eh?" And he
+laughed again, and presently he yawned, and tumbled back into his bunk.
+But he put his head out in a moment. "Aren't you going to bed?"
+
+"Yes." The Colonel stood up.
+
+"Did you know Father Wills went by, last night, when those fellows
+began to row about getting out the whisky?"
+
+"No."
+
+"He says there's another stampede on."
+
+"Where to?"
+
+"Koyukuk this time."
+
+"Why didn't he come in?"
+
+"Awful hurry to get to somebody that sent for him. Funny fellas these
+Jesuits. They _believe_ all those odd things they teach."
+
+"So do other men," said the Colonel, curtly.
+
+"Well, I've lived in a Christian country all my life, but I don't know
+that I ever saw Christianity _practised_ till I went up the Yukon to
+Holy Cross."
+
+"I must say you're complimentary to the few other Christians scattered
+about the world."
+
+"Don't get mifft, Colonel. I've known plenty of people straight as a
+die, and capital good fellows. I've seen them do very decent things now
+and then. But with these Jesuit missionaries--Lord! there's no let up
+to it."
+
+No answer from the Protestant Colonel. Presently the Boy in a sleepy
+voice added elegantly:
+
+"No Siree! The Jesuits go the whole hog!"
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+Winter was down on the camp again. The whole world was hard as iron.
+The men kept close to the Big Chimney all day long, and sat there far
+into the small hours of the morning, saying little, heavy-eyed and
+sullen. The dreaded insomnia of the Arctic had laid hold on all but the
+Colonel. Even his usually unbroken repose was again disturbed one night
+about a week later. Some vague sort of sound or movement in the
+room--Kaviak on a raid?--or--wasn't that the closing of a door?
+
+"Kaviak!" He put his hand down and felt the straight hair of the
+Esquimaux in the under bunk. "Potts! Who's there?" He half sat up.
+"Boy! Did you hear that, Boy?"
+
+He leaned far down over the side and saw distinctly by the fire-light
+there was nobody but Kaviak in the under bunk.
+
+The Colonel was on his legs in a flash, putting his head through his
+parki and drawing on his mucklucks. He didn't wait to cross and tie the
+thongs. A presentiment of evil was strong upon him. Outside in the
+faint star-light he thought a dim shape was passing down towards the
+river.
+
+"Who's that? Hi, there! Stop, or I'll shoot!" He hadn't brought his
+gun, but the ruse worked.
+
+"Don't shoot!" came back the voice of the Boy.
+
+The Colonel stumbled down the bank in the snow, and soon stood by the
+shape. The Boy was dressed for a journey. His Arctic cap was drawn down
+over his ears and neck. The wolf-skin fringe of his parki hood stood
+out fiercely round the defiant young face. Wound about one of his
+seal-skin mittens was the rope of the new hand-sled he'd been
+fashioning so busily of nights by the camp fire. His two blankets were
+strapped on the sled, Indian fashion, along with a gunny sack and his
+rifle.
+
+The two men stood looking angrily at each other a moment, and then the
+Colonel politely inquired:
+
+"What in hell are you doing?"
+
+"Goin' to Minook."
+
+"The devil you are!"
+
+"Yes, the devil I am!"
+
+They stood measuring each other in the dim light, till the Colonel's
+eyes fell on the loaded sled. The Boy's followed.
+
+"I've only taken short rations for two weeks. I left a statement in the
+cabin; it's about a fifth of what's my share, so there's no need of a
+row."
+
+"What are you goin' for?"
+
+"Why, to be first in the field, and stake a gold-mine, of course."
+
+The Colonel laid a rough hand on the Boy's shoulder. He shook it off
+impatiently, and before the older man could speak:
+
+"Look here, let's talk sense. Somebody's got to go, or there'll be
+trouble. Potts says Kaviak. But what difference would Kaviak make? I've
+been afraid you'd get ahead of me. I've watched you for a week like a
+hawk watches a chicken. But it's clear I'm the one to go."
+
+He pulled up the rope of the sled, and his little cargo lurched towards
+him. The Colonel stepped in front of him.
+
+"Boy--" he began, but something was the matter with his voice; he got
+no further.
+
+"I'm the youngest," boasted the other, "and I'm the strongest, and--I'm
+the hungriest."
+
+The Colonel found a perturbed and husky voice in which to say:
+
+"I didn't know you were such a Christian."
+
+"Nothin' o' the sort."
+
+"What's this but--"
+
+"Why, it's just--just my little scheme."
+
+"You're no fool. You know as well as I do you've got the devil's own
+job in hand."
+
+"Somebody's got to go," he repeated doggedly.
+
+"Look here," said the Colonel, "you haven't impressed me as being tired
+of life."
+
+"Tired of life!" The young eyes flashed in that weird aureole of long
+wolf-hair. "Tired of life! Well, I should just pretty nearly think I
+wasn't."
+
+"H'm! Then if it isn't Christianity, it must be because you're young."
+
+"Golly, man! it's because I'm hungry--HUNGRY! Great Jehosaphat! I could
+eat an ox!"
+
+"And you leave your grub behind, to be eaten by a lot of--"
+
+"I can't stand here argyfying with the thermometer down to--" The Boy
+began to drag the sled over the snow.
+
+"Come back into the cabin."
+
+"No."
+
+"Come with me, I say; I've got something to propose." Again the Colonel
+stood in front, barring the way. "Look here," he went on gently, "are
+you a friend of mine?"
+
+"Oh, so-so," growled the Boy. But after looking about him for an angry
+second or two, he flung down the rope of his sled, walked sulkily
+uphill, and kicked off his snow-shoes at the door of the cabin, all
+with the air of one who waits, but is not baulked of his purpose. They
+went in and stripped off their furs.
+
+"Now see here: if you've made up your mind to light out, I'm not going
+to oppose you."
+
+"Why didn't you say anything as sensible as that out yonder?"
+
+"Because I won't be ready to go along till to-morrow."
+
+"You?"
+
+"Yep."
+
+There was a little silence.
+
+"I wish you wouldn't, Colonel."
+
+"It's dangerous alone--not for two."
+
+"Yes, it IS dangerous, and you know it."
+
+"I'm goin' along, laddie." Seeing the Boy look precious grave and
+harassed: "What's the matter?"
+
+"I'd hate awfully for anything to happen to you."
+
+The Colonel laughed. "Much obliged, but it matters uncommon little if I
+do drop in my tracks."
+
+"You be blowed!"
+
+"You see I've got a pretty bad kind of a complaint, anyhow." The Boy
+leaned over in the firelight and scanned the Colonel's face.
+
+"What's wrong?"
+
+The Colonel smiled a queer little one-sided smile. "I've been out o'
+kelter nearly ten years."
+
+"Oh, _that's_ all right. You'll go on for another thirty if you stay
+where you are till the ice goes out."
+
+The Colonel bent his head, and stared at the smooth-trodden floor at
+the edge of the buffalo-skin. "To tell the truth, I'll be glad to go,
+not only because of--" He hitched his shoulders towards the corner
+whence came the hoarse and muffled breathing of the Denver clerk. "I'll
+be glad to have something to tire me out, so I'll sleep--sleep too
+sound to dream. That's what I came for, not to sit idle in a God-damn
+cabin and think--think--" He got up suddenly and strode the tiny space
+from fire to door, a man transformed, with hands clenching and dark
+face almost evil. "They say the men who winter up here either take to
+drink or go mad. I begin to see it is so. It's no place to do any
+forgetting in." He stopped suddenly before the Boy with glittering
+eyes. "It's the country where your conscience finds you out."
+
+"That religion of yours is makin' you morbid, Colonel." The Boy spoke
+with the detached and soothing air of a sage.
+
+"You don't know what you're talking about." He turned sharply away. The
+Boy relapsed into silence. The Colonel in his renewed prowling brought
+up against the wooden crane. He stood looking down into the fire. Loud
+and regular sounded the sleeping man's breathing in the quiet little
+room.
+
+"I did a wrong once to a woman--ten years ago," said the Colonel,
+speaking to the back-log--"although I loved her." He raised a hand to
+his eyes with a queer choking sound. "I loved her," he repeated, still
+with his back to the Boy. "By-and-by I could have righted it, but
+she--she wasn't the kind to hang about and wait on a man's better
+nature when once he'd shown himself a coward. She skipped the country."
+He leaned his head against the end of the shelf over the fire, and said
+no more.
+
+"Go back in the spring, find out where she is, and--"
+
+"I've spent every spring and every summer, every fall and every winter
+till this one, trying to do just that thing."
+
+"You can't find her?"
+
+"Nobody can find her."
+
+"She's dead--"
+
+"She's _not_ dead!"
+
+The Boy involuntarily shrank back; the Colonel looked ready to smash
+him. The action recalled the older man to himself.
+
+"I feel sure she isn't dead," he said more quietly, but still
+trembling. "No, no; she isn't dead. She had some money of her own, and
+she went abroad. I followed her. I heard of her in Paris, in Rome. I
+saw her once in a droschky in Vienna; there I lost the trail. Her
+people said she'd gone to Japan. _I_ went to Japan. I'm sure she wasn't
+in the islands. I've spent my life since trying to find her--writing
+her letters that always come back--trying--" His voice went out like a
+candle-wick suddenly dying in the socket. Only the sleeper was audible
+for full five minutes. Then, as though he had paused only a comma's
+space, the Colonel went on: "I've been trying to put the memory of her
+behind me, as a sane man should. But some women leave an arrow sticking
+in your flesh that you can never pull out. You can only jar against it,
+and cringe under the agony of the reminder all your life long.... Bah!
+Go out, Boy, and bring in your sled."
+
+And the Boy obeyed without a word.
+
+Two days after, three men with a child stood in front of the larger
+cabin, saying good-bye to their two comrades who were starting out on
+snow-shoes to do a little matter of 625 miles of Arctic travelling,
+with two weeks' scant provisioning, some tea and things for trading,
+bedding, two rifles, and a kettle, all packed on one little hand-sled.
+
+There had been some unexpected feeling, and even some real generosity
+shown at the last, on the part of the three who were to profit by the
+exodus--falling heir thereby to a bigger, warmer cabin and more food.
+
+O'Flynn was moved to make several touching remonstrances. It was a sign
+of unwonted emotion on Mac's part that he gave up arguing (sacrificing
+all the delight of a set debate), and simply begged and prayed them not
+to be fools, not to fly in the face of Providence.
+
+But Potts was made of sterner stuff. Besides, the thing was too good to
+be true. O'Flynn, when he found they were not to be dissuaded, solemnly
+presented each with a little bottle of whisky. Nobody would have
+believed O'Flynn would go so far as that. Nor could anyone have
+anticipated that close-fisted Mac would give the Boy his valuable
+aneroid barometer and compass, or that Potts would be so generous with
+his best Virginia straight-cut, filling the Colonel's big pouch without
+so much as a word.
+
+"It's a crazy scheme," says he, shaking the giant Kentuckian by the
+hand, "and you won't get thirty miles before you find it out."
+
+"Call it an expedition to Anvik," urged Mac. "Load up there with
+reindeer meat, and come back. If we don't get some fresh meat soon,
+we'll be having scurvy."
+
+"What you're furr doin'," says O'Flynn for the twentieth time, "has
+niver been done, not ayven be Indians. The prastes ahl say so."
+
+"So do the Sour-doughs," said Mac. "It isn't as if you had dogs."
+
+"Good-bye," said the Colonel, and the men grasped hands.
+
+Potts shook hands with the Boy as heartily as though that same hand had
+never half throttled him in the cause of a missing hatchet.
+
+"Good-bye, Kiddie. I bequeath you my share o' syrup."
+
+"Good-bye; meet you in the Klondyke!"
+
+"Good-bye. Hooray for the Klondyke in June!"
+
+"Klondyke in June! Hoop-la!"
+
+The two travellers looked back, laughing and nodding, as jolly as you
+please. The Boy stooped, made a snow-ball, and fired it at Kaviak. The
+child ducked, chuckling, and returned as good as he got. His loosely
+packed ball broke in a splash on the back of the Boy's parki, and
+Kaviak was loudly cheered.
+
+Still, as they went forward, they looked back. The Big Chimney wore an
+air wondrous friendly, and the wide, white world looked coldly at them,
+with small pretence of welcome or reward.
+
+"I don't believe I ever really knew how awful jolly the Big Chimney
+was--till this minute."
+
+The Colonel smiled. "Hardly like myself, to think whatever else I see,
+I'll never see that again."
+
+"Better not boast."
+
+The Colonel went on in front, breaking trail in the newfallen snow, the
+Boy pulling the sled behind him as lightly as if its double burden were
+a feather.
+
+"They look as if they thought it'd be a picnic," says Mac, grimly.
+
+"I wonder be the Siven Howly Pipers! will we iver see ayther of 'em
+again."
+
+"If they only stay a couple o' nights at Anvik," said Potts, with
+gloomy foreboding, "they could get back here inside a week."
+
+"No," answered Mac, following the two figures with serious eyes, "they
+may be dead inside a week, but they won't be back here."
+
+And Potts felt his anxiety eased. A man who had mined at Caribou ought
+to know.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+PRINCESS MUCKLUCK
+
+  "We all went to Tibbals to see the Kinge, who used my mother
+   and my aunt very gratiouslie; but we all saw a great chaunge
+   betweene the fashion of the Court as it was now, and of y in ye
+   Queene's, for we were all lowzy by sittinge in Sr Thomas
+   Erskin's chamber." _Memoir: Anne Countess of Dorset_, 1603.
+
+
+It was the 26th of February, that first day that they "hit the Long
+Trail."
+
+Temperature only about twenty degrees, the Colonel thought, and so
+little wind it had the effect of being warmer. Trail in fair condition,
+weather gray and steady. Never men in better spirits. To have left the
+wrangling and the smouldering danger of the camp behind, that alone, as
+the Boy said, was "worth the price of admission." Exhilarating, too, to
+men of their temperament, to have cut the Gordian knot of the
+difficulty by risking themselves on this unprecedented quest for peace
+and food. Gold, too? Oh, yes--with a smile to see how far that main
+object had drifted into the background--they added, "and for gold."
+
+They believed they had hearkened well to the counsel that bade them
+"travel light." "Remember, every added ounce is against you." "Nobody
+in the North owns anything that's heavy," had been said in one fashion
+or another so often that it lost its ironic sound in the ears of men
+who had come so far to carry away one of the heaviest things under the
+sun.
+
+The Colonel and the Boy took no tent, no stove, not even a miner's pick
+and pan. These last, General Lighter had said, could be obtained at
+Minook; and "there isn't a cabin on the trail," Dillon had added,
+"without 'em."
+
+For the rest, the carefully-selected pack on the sled contained the
+marmot-skin, woollen blankets, a change of flannels apiece, a couple of
+sweaters, a Norfolk jacket, and several changes of foot-gear. This last
+item was dwelt on earnestly by all. "Keep your feet dry," John Dillon
+had said, "and leave the rest to God Almighty." They were taking barely
+two weeks' rations, and a certain amount of stuff to trade with the
+up-river Indians, when their supplies should be gone. They carried a
+kettle, an axe, some quinine, a box of the carbolic ointment all miners
+use for foot-soreness, O'Flynn's whisky, and two rifles and ammunition.
+In spite of having eliminated many things that most travellers would
+count essential, they found their load came to a little over two
+hundred pounds. But every day would lessen it, they told each other
+with a laugh, and with an inward misgiving, lest the lightening should
+come all too quickly.
+
+They had seen in camp that winter so much of the frailty of human
+temper that, although full of faith by now in each other's native sense
+and fairness, they left nothing to a haphazard division of labour. They
+parcelled out the work of the day with absolute impartiality. To each
+man so many hours of going ahead to break trail, if the snow was soft,
+while the other dragged the sled; or else while one pulled in front,
+the other pushed from behind, in regular shifts by the watch, turn and
+turn about. The Colonel had cooked all winter, so it was the Boy's turn
+at that--the Colonel's to decide the best place to camp, because it was
+his affair to find seasoned wood for fuel, his to build the fire in the
+snow on green logs laid close together--his to chop enough wood to cook
+breakfast the next morning. All this they had arranged before they left
+the Big Chimney.
+
+That they did not cover more ground that first day was a pure chance,
+not likely to recur, due to an unavoidable loss of time at Pymeut.
+
+Knowing the fascination that place exercised over his companion, the
+Colonel called a halt about seven miles off from the Big Chimney, that
+they might quickly despatch a little cold luncheon they carried in
+their pockets, and push on without a break till supper.
+
+"We've got no time to waste at Pymeut," observes the Colonel
+significantly.
+
+"I ain't achin' to stop at Pymeut," says his pardner with a superior
+air, standing up, as he swallowed his last mouthful of cold bacon and
+corn-bread, and cheerfully surveyed the waste. "Who says it's cold,
+even if the wind is up? And the track's bully. But see here, Colonel,
+you mustn't go thinkin' it's smooth glare-ice, like this, all the way."
+
+"Oh, I was figurin' that it would be." But the Boy paid no heed to the
+irony.
+
+"And it's a custom o' the country to get the wind in your face, as a
+rule, whichever way you go."
+
+"Well, I'm not complainin' as yet."
+
+"Reckon you needn't if you're blown like dandelion-down all the way to
+Minook. Gee! the wind's stronger! Say, Colonel, let's rig a sail."
+
+"Foolishness."
+
+"No, sir. We'll go by Pymeut in an ice-boat, lickety split. And it'll
+be a good excuse for not stopping, though I think we ought to say
+good-bye to Nicholas."
+
+This view inclined the Colonel to think better of an ice-boat. He had
+once crossed the Bay of Toronto in that fashion, and began to wonder if
+such a mode of progression applied to sleds might not aid largely in
+solving the Minook problem.
+
+While he was wondering the Boy unlashed the sled-load, and pulled off
+the canvas cover as the Colonel came back with his mast. Between them,
+with no better tools than axe, jack-knives, and a rope, and with
+fingers freezing in the south wind, they rigged the sail.
+
+The fact that they had this increasingly favourable wind on their very
+first day showed that they were specially smiled on by the great
+natural forces. The superstitious feeling that only slumbers in most
+breasts, that Mother Nature is still a mysterious being, who has her
+favourites whom she guards, her born enemies whom she baulks, pursues,
+and finally overwhelms, the age-old childishness stirred pleasantly in
+both men, and in the younger came forth unabashed in speech:
+
+"I tell you the omens are good! This expedition's goin' to get there."
+Then, with the involuntary misgiving that follows hard upon such
+boasting, he laughed uneasily and added, "I mean to sacrifice the first
+deer's tongue I don't want myself, to Yukon Inua; but here's to the
+south wind!" He turned some corn-bread crumbs out of his pocket, and
+saw, delighted, how the gale, grown keener, snatched eagerly at them
+and hurried them up the trail. The ice-boat careened and strained
+eagerly to sail away. The two gold-seekers, laughing like schoolboys,
+sat astride the pack; the Colonel shook out the canvas, and they
+scudded off up the river like mad. The great difficulty was the
+steering; but it was rip-roaring fun, the Boy said, and very soon there
+were natives running down to the river, to stare open-mouthed at the
+astounding apparition, to point and shout something unintelligible that
+sounded like "Muchtaravik!"
+
+"Why, it's the Pymeuts! Pardner, we'll be in Minook by supper-ti--"
+
+The words hadn't left his lips when he saw, a few yards in front of
+them, a faint cloud of steam rising up from the ice--that dim
+danger-signal that flies above an air-hole. The Colonel, never
+noticing, was heading straight for the ghastly trap.
+
+"God, Colonel! Blow-hole!" gasped the Boy.
+
+The Colonel simply rolled off the pack turning over and over on the
+ice, but keeping hold of the rope.
+
+The sled swerved, turned on her side, and slid along with a sound of
+snapping and tearing.
+
+While they were still headed straight for the hole, the Boy had
+gathered himself for a clear jump to the right, but the sled's sudden
+swerve to the left broke his angle sharply. He was flung forward on the
+new impetus, spun over the smooth surface, swept across the verge and
+under the cloud, clutching wildly at the ragged edge of ice as he went
+down.
+
+All Pymeut had come rushing pell-mell.
+
+The Colonel was gathering himself up and looking round in a dazed kind
+of way as Nicholas flashed by. Just beyond, in that yawning hole, fully
+ten feet wide by fifteen long, the Boy's head appeared an instant, and
+then was lost like something seen in a dream. Some of the Pymeuts with
+quick knives were cutting the canvas loose. One end was passed to
+Nicholas; he knotted it to his belt, and went swiftly, but gingerly,
+forward nearer the perilous edge. He had flung himself down on his
+stomach just as the Boy rose again. Nicholas lurched his body over the
+brink, his arms outstretched, straining farther, farther yet, till it
+seemed as if only the counterweight of the rest of the population at
+the other end of the canvas prevented his joining the Boy in the hole.
+But Nicholas had got a grip of him, and while two of the Pymeuts hung
+on to the half-stunned Colonel to prevent his adding to the
+complication, Nicholas, with a good deal of trouble in spite of
+Yagorsha's help, hauled the Boy out of the hole and dragged him up on
+the ice-edge. The others applied themselves lustily to their end of the
+canvas, and soon they were all at a safe distance from the yawning
+danger.
+
+The Boy's predominant feeling had been one of intense surprise. He
+looked round, and a hideous misgiving seized him.
+
+"Anything the matter with you, Colonel?" His tone was so angry that, as
+they stared at each other, they both fell to laughing.
+
+"Well, I rather thought that was what _I_ was going to say"; and
+Kentucky heaved a deep sigh of relief.
+
+The Boy's teeth began to chatter, and his clothes were soon freezing on
+him. They got him up off the ice, and Nicholas and the sturdy old
+Pymeut story-teller, Yagorsha, walked him, or ran him rather, the rest
+of the way to Pymeut, for they were not so near the village as the
+travellers had supposed on seeing nearly the whole male population. The
+Colonel was not far behind, and several of the bucks were bringing the
+disabled sled. Before reaching the Kachime, they were joined by the
+women and children, Muckluck much concerned at the sight of her friend
+glazed in ice from head to heel. Nicholas and Yagorsha half dragged,
+half pulled him into the Kachime. The entire escort followed, even two
+or three very dirty little boys--everybody, except the handful of women
+and girls left at the mouth of the underground entrance and the two men
+who had run on to make a fire. It was already smoking viciously as
+though the seal-lamps weren't doing enough in that line, when Yagorsha
+and Nicholas laid the half-frozen traveller on the sleeping-bench.
+
+The Pymeuts knew that the great thing was to get the ice-stiffened
+clothes off as quickly as might be, and that is to be done
+expeditiously only by cutting them off. In vain the Boy protested.
+Recklessly they sawed and cut and stripped him, rubbed him and wrapped
+him in a rabbit-blanket, the fur turned inside, and a wolverine skin
+over that. The Colonel at intervals poured small doses of O'Flynn's
+whisky down the Boy's throat in spite of his unbecoming behaviour, for
+he was both belligerent and ungrateful, complaining loudly of the ruin
+of his clothes with only such intermission as the teeth-chattering,
+swallowing, and rude handling necessitated.
+
+"I didn't like--bein' in--that blow-hole. (Do you know--it was so
+cold--it burnt!) But I'd rather--be--in a blow-hole--than--br-r-r!
+Blow-hole isn't so s-s-melly as these s-s-kins!'
+
+"You better be glad you've got a whole skin of your own and ain't
+smellin' brimstone," said the Colonel, pouring a little more whisky
+down the unthankful throat. "Pretty sort o' Klondyker you are--go and
+get nearly drowned first day out!" Several Pymeut women came in
+presently and joined the men at the fire, chattering low and staring at
+the Colonel and the Boy.
+
+"I can't go--to the Klondyke--naked--no, nor wrapped in a
+rabbit-skin--like Baby Bunting--"
+
+Nicholas was conferring with the Colonel and offering to take him to
+Ol' Chief's.
+
+"Oh, yes; Ol' Chief got two clo'es. You come. Me show"; and they
+crawled out one after the other.
+
+"You pretty near dead that time," said one of the younger women
+conversationally.
+
+"That's right. Who are you, anyway?"
+
+"Me Anna--Yagorsha's daughter."
+
+"Oh, yes, I thought I'd seen you before." She seemed to be only a
+little older than Muckluck, but less attractive, chiefly on account of
+her fat and her look of ill-temper. She was on specially bad terms with
+a buck they called Joe, and they seemed to pass all their time abusing
+one another.
+
+The Boy craned his neck and looked round. Except just where he was
+lying, the Pymeut men and women were crowded together, on that side of
+the Kachime, at his head and at his feet, thick as herrings on a
+thwart. They all leaned forward and regarded him with a beady-eyed
+sympathy. He had never been so impressed by the fact before, but all
+these native people, even in their gentlest moods, frowned in a chronic
+perplexity and wore their wide mouths open. He reflected that he had
+never seen one that didn't, except Muckluck.
+
+Here she was, crawling in with a tin can.
+
+"Got something there to eat?"
+
+The rescued one craned his head as far as he could.
+
+"Too soon," she said, showing her brilliant teeth in the fire-light.
+She set the tin down, looked round, a little embarrassed, and stirred
+the fire, which didn't need it.
+
+"Well"--he put his chin down under the rabbit-skin once more--"how goes
+the world, Princess?"
+
+She flashed her quick smile again and nodded reassuringly. "You stay
+here now?"
+
+"No; goin' up river."
+
+"What for?" She spoke disapprovingly.
+
+"Want to get an Orange Grove."
+
+"Find him up river?"
+
+"Hope so."
+
+"I think I go, too"; and all the grave folk, sitting so close on the
+sleeping-bench, stretched their wide mouths wider still, smiling
+good-humouredly.
+
+"You better wait till summer."
+
+"Oh!" She lifted her head from the fire as one who takes careful note
+of instructions. "Nex' summer?"
+
+"Well, summer's the time for squaws to travel."
+
+"I come nex' summer," she said.
+
+By-and-by Nicholas returned with a new parki and a pair of wonderful
+buckskin breeches--not like anything worn by the Lower River natives,
+or by the coast-men either: well cut, well made, and handsomely fringed
+down the outside of the leg where an officer's gold stripe goes.
+
+"Chaparejos!" screamed the Boy. "Where'd you get 'em?"
+
+"Ol' Chief--he ketch um."
+
+"They're _bully!_" said the Boy, holding the despised rabbit-skin under
+his chin with both hands, and craning excitedly over it. He felt that
+his fortunes were looking up. Talk about a tide in the affairs of men!
+Why, a tide that washes up to a wayfarer's feet a pair o' chaparejos
+like that--well! legs so habited would simply _have_ to carry a fella
+on to fortune. He lay back on the sleeping-bench with dancing eyes,
+while the raw whisky hummed in his head. In the dim light of seal-lamps
+vague visions visited him of stern and noble chiefs out of the Leather
+Stocking Stories of his childhood--men of daring, whose legs were
+invariably cased in buck-skin with dangling fringes. But the dashing
+race was not all Indian, nor all dead. Famous cowboys reared before him
+on bucking bronchos, their leg-fringes streaming on the blast, and
+desperate chaps who held up coaches and potted Wells Fargo guards.
+Anybody must needs be a devil of a fellow who went about in "shaps," as
+his California cousins called chaparejos. Even a peaceable fella like
+himself, not out after gore at all, but after an Orange Grove--even he,
+once he put on--He laughed out loud at his childishness, and then grew
+grave. "Say, Nicholas, what's the tax?"
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"How much?"
+
+"Oh, your pardner--he pay."
+
+"Humph! I s'pose I'll know the worst on settlin'-day."
+
+Then, after a few moments, making a final clutch at economy before the
+warmth and the whisky subdued him altogether:
+
+"Say, Nicholas, have you got--hasn't the Ol' Chief got any--less
+glorious breeches than those?"
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"Anything little cheaper?"
+
+"Nuh," says Nicholas.
+
+The Boy closed his eyes, relieved on the whole. Fate had a mind to see
+him in chaparejos. Let her look to the sequel, then!
+
+When consciousness came back it brought the sound of Yagorsha's yarning
+by the fire, and the occasional laugh or grunt punctuating the eternal
+"Story."
+
+The Colonel was sitting there among them, solacing himself by adding to
+the smoke that thickened the stifling air.
+
+Presently the Story-teller made some shrewd hit, that shook the Pymeut
+community into louder grunts of applause and a general chuckling. The
+Colonel turned his head slowly, and blew out a fresh cloud: "Good
+joke?"
+
+In the pause that fell thereafter, Yagorsha, imperturbable, the only
+one who had not laughed, smoothed his lank, iron-gray locks down on
+either side of his wide face, and went on renewing the sinew open-work
+in his snow-shoe.
+
+"When Ol' Chief's father die--"
+
+All the Pymeuts chuckled afresh. The Boy listened eagerly. Usually
+Yagorsha's stories were tragic, or, at least, of serious interest,
+ranging from bereaved parents who turned into wolverines, all the way
+to the machinations of the Horrid Dwarf and the Cannibal Old Woman.
+
+The Colonel looked at Nicholas. He seemed as entertained as the rest,
+but quite willing to leave his family history in professional hands.
+
+"Ol' Chief's father, Glovotsky, him Russian," Yagorsha began again,
+laying down his sinew-thread a moment and accepting some of the
+Colonel's tobacco.
+
+"I didn't know you had any white blood in you," interrupted the
+Colonel, offering his pouch to Nicholas. "I might have suspected
+Muckluck--"
+
+"Heap got Russian blood," interrupted Joe.
+
+As the Story-teller seemed to be about to repeat the enlivening
+tradition concerning the almost mythical youth of Ol' Chief's father,
+that subject of the great Katharine's, whose blood was flowing still in
+Pymeut veins, just then in came Yagorsha's daughter with some message
+to her father. He grunted acquiescence, and she turned to go. Joe
+called something after her, and she snapped back. He jumped up to bar
+her exit. She gave him a smart cuff across the eyes, which surprised
+him almost into the fire, and while he was recovering his equilibrium
+she fled. Yagorsha and all the Pymeuts laughed delightedly at Joe's
+discomfiture.
+
+The Boy had been obliged to sit up to watch this spirited encounter.
+The only notice the Colonel took of him was to set the kettle on the
+fire. While he was dining his pardner gathered up the blankets and
+crawled out.
+
+"Comin' in half a minute," the Boy called after him. The answer was
+swallowed by the tunnel.
+
+"Him go say goo'-bye Ol' Chief," said Nicholas, observing how the
+Colonel's pardner was scalding himself in his haste to despatch a
+second cup of tea.
+
+But the Boy bolted the last of his meal, gathered up the kettle, mug,
+and frying-pan, which had served him for plate as well, and wormed his
+way out as fast as he could. There was the sled nearly packed for the
+journey, and watching over it, keeping the dogs at bay, was an
+indescribably dirty little boy in a torn and greasy denim parki over
+rags of reindeer-skin. Nobody else in sight but Yagorsha's daughter
+down at the water-hole.
+
+"Where's my pardner gone?" The child only stared, having no English
+apparently.
+
+While the Boy packed the rest of the things, and made the tattered
+canvas fast under the lashing, Joe came out of the Kachime. He stood
+studying the prospect a moment, and his dull eyes suddenly gleamed.
+Anna was coming up from the river with her dripping pail. He set off
+with an affectation of leisurely indifference, but he made straight for
+his enemy. She seemed not to see him till he was quite near, then she
+sheered off sharply. Joe hardly quickened his pace, but seemed to gain.
+She set down her bucket, and turned back towards the river.
+
+"Idiot!" ejaculated the Boy; "she could have reached her own ighloo."
+The dirty child grinned, and tore off towards the river to watch the
+fun. Anna was hidden now by a pile of driftwood. The Boy ran down a few
+yards to bring her within range again. For all his affectation of
+leisureliness and her obvious fluster, no doubt about it, Joe was
+gaining on her. She dropped her hurried walk and frankly took to her
+heels, Joe doing the same; but as she was nearly as fleet of foot as
+Muckluck, in spite of her fat, she still kept a lessening distance
+between herself and her pursuer.
+
+The ragged child had climbed upon the pile of drift-wood, and stood
+hunched with the cold, his shoulders up to his ears, his hands
+withdrawn in his parki sleeves, but he was grinning still. The Boy, a
+little concerned as to possible reprisals upon so impudent a young
+woman, had gone on and on, watching the race down to the river, and
+even across the ice a little way. He stood still an instant staring as
+Joe, going now as hard as he could, caught up with her at last. He took
+hold of the daughter of the highly-respected Yagorsha, and fell to
+shaking and cuffing her. The Boy started off full tilt to the rescue.
+Before he could reach them Joe had thrown her down on the ice. She half
+got up, but her enemy, advancing upon her again, dealt her a blow that
+made her howl and sent her flat once more.
+
+"Stop that! You hear? _Stop_ it!" the Boy called out.
+
+But Joe seemed not to hear. Anna had fallen face downward on the ice
+this time, and lay there as if stunned. Her enemy caught hold of her,
+pulled her up, and dragged her along in spite of her struggles and
+cries.
+
+"Let her alone!" the Boy shouted. He was nearly up to them now. But
+Joe's attention was wholly occupied in hauling Anna back to the
+village, maltreating her at intervals by the way. Now the girl was
+putting up one arm piteously to shield her bleeding face from his
+fists. "Don't you hit her again, or it'll be the worse for you." But
+again Joe's hand was lifted. The Boy plunged forward, caught the blow
+as it descended, and flung the arm aside, wrenched the girl free, and
+as Joe came on again, looking as if he meant business, the Boy planted
+a sounding lick on his jaw. The Pymeut staggered, and drew off a little
+way, looking angry enough, but, to the Boy's surprise, showing no
+fight.
+
+It occurred to him that the girl, her lip bleeding, her parki torn,
+seemed more surprised than grateful; and when he said, "You come back
+with me; he shan't touch you," she did not show the pleased alacrity
+that you would expect. But she was no doubt still dazed. They all stood
+looking rather sheepish, and like actors "stuck" who cannot think of
+the next line, till Joe turned on the girl with some mumbled question.
+She answered angrily. He made another grab at her. She screamed, and
+got behind the Boy. Very resolutely he widened his bold buck-skin legs,
+and dared Joe to touch the poor frightened creature cowering behind her
+protector. Again silence.
+
+"What's the trouble between you two?"
+
+They looked at each other, and then away. Joe turned unexpectedly, and
+shambled off in the direction of the village. Not a word out of Anna as
+she returned by the side of her protector, but every now and then she
+looked at him sideways. The Boy felt her inexpressive gratitude, and
+was glad his journey had been delayed, or else, poor devil--
+
+Joe had stopped to speak to--
+
+"Who on earth's that white woman?"
+
+"Nicholas' sister."
+
+"Not Muckluck?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"What's she dressed like that for?"
+
+"Often like that in summer. Me, too--me got Holy Cross clo'es."
+
+Muckluck went slowly up towards the Kachime with Joe. When the others
+got to the water-hole, Anna turned and left the Boy without a word to
+go and recover her pail. The Boy stood a moment, looking for some sign
+of the Colonel, and then went along the river bank to Ol' Chief's. No,
+the Colonel had gone back to the Kachime.
+
+The Boy came out again, and to his almost incredulous astonishment,
+there was Joe dragging the unfortunate Anna towards an ighloo. As he
+looked back, to steer straight for the entrance-hole, he caught sight
+of the Boy, dropped his prey, and disappeared with some precipitancy
+into the ground. When Anna had gathered herself up, the Boy was
+standing in front of her.
+
+"You don't seem to be able to take very good care o' yourself." She
+pushed her tousled hair out of her eyes. "I don't wonder your own
+people give it up if you have to be rescued every half-hour. What's the
+matter with you and Joe?" She kept looking down. "What have you done to
+make him like this?" She looked up suddenly and laughed, and then her
+eyes fell.
+
+"Done nothin'."
+
+"Why should he want to kill you, then?"
+
+"No _kill_" she said, smiling, a little rueful and embarrassed again,
+with her eyes on the ground. Then, as the Boy still stood there
+waiting, "Joe," she whispered, glancing over her shoulder--"Joe want me
+be he squaw."
+
+The Boy fell back an astonished step.
+
+"Jee-rusalem! He's got a pretty way o' sayin' so. Why don't you tell
+your father?"
+
+"Tell--father?" It seemed never to have occurred to her.
+
+"Yes; can't Yagorsha protect you?"
+
+She looked about doubtfully and then over her shoulder.
+
+"That Joe's ighloo," she said.
+
+He pictured to himself the horror that must assail her blood at the
+sight. Yes, he was glad to have saved any woman from so dreadful a
+fate. Did it happen often? and did nobody interfere? Muckluck was
+coming down from the direction of the Kachime. The Boy went to meet
+her, throwing over his shoulder, "You'd better stick to me, Anna, as
+long as I'm here. I don't know, I'm sure, _what'll_ happen to you when
+I'm gone." Anna followed a few paces, and then sat down on the snow to
+pull up and tie her disorganized leg-gear.
+
+Muckluck was standing still, looking at the Boy with none of the
+kindness a woman ought to show to one who had just befriended her sex.
+
+"Did you see that?"
+
+She nodded. "See that any day."
+
+The Boy stopped, appalled at the thought of woman in a perpetual state
+of siege.
+
+"Brute! hound!" he flung out towards Joe's ighloo.
+
+"No," says Muckluck firmly; "Joe all right."
+
+"You say that, after what's happened this morning?" Muckluck declined
+to take the verdict back. "Did you see him strike her?"
+
+"No _hurt_."
+
+"Oh, didn't it? He threw her down, as hard as he could, on the ice."
+
+"She get up again."
+
+He despised Muckluck in that moment.
+
+"You weren't sorry to see another girl treated so?"
+
+She smiled.
+
+"What if it had been you?"
+
+"Oh, he not do that to _me_."
+
+"Why not? You can't tell."
+
+"Oh, yes." She spoke with unruffled serenity.
+
+"It will very likely be you the next time." The Boy took a brutal
+pleasure in presenting the hideous probability.
+
+"No," she returned unmoved. "Joe savvy I no marry Pymeut."
+
+The Boy stared, mystified by the lack of sequence. "Poor Anna doesn't
+want to marry _that_ Pymeut."
+
+Muckluck nodded.
+
+The Boy gave her up. Perversity was not confined to the civilized of
+her sex. He walked on to find the Colonel. Muckluck followed, but the
+Boy wouldn't speak to her, wouldn't look at her.
+
+"You like my Holy Cross clo'es?" she inquired. "Me--I look like your
+kind of girls now, huh?" No answer, but she kept up with him. "See?"
+She held up proudly a medallion, or coin of some sort, hung on a narrow
+strip of raw-hide.
+
+He meant not to look at it at all, and he jerked his head away after
+the merest glance that showed him the ornament was tarnished silver, a
+little bigger than an American dollar, and bore no device familiar to
+his eyes. He quickened his pace, and walked on with face averted. The
+Colonel appeared just below the Kachime.
+
+"Well, aren't you _ever_ comin'?" he called out.
+
+"I've been ready this half-hour--hangin' about waitin' for you. That
+devil Joe," he went on, lowering his voice as he came up and speaking
+hurriedly, "has been trying to drag Yagorsha's girl into his ighloo.
+They've just had a fight out yonder on the ice. I got her away, but not
+before he'd thrown her down and given her a bloody face. We ought to
+tell old Yagorsha, hey?"
+
+Muckluck chuckled. The Boy turned on her angrily, and saw her staring
+back at Joe's ighloo. There, sauntering calmly past the abhorred trap,
+was the story-teller's daughter. Past it? No. She actually halted and
+busied herself with her legging thong.
+
+"That girl must be an imbecile!" Or was it the apparition of her
+father, up at the Kachime entrance, that inspired such temerity?
+
+The Boy had gone a few paces towards her, and then turned. "Yagorsha!"
+he called up the slope. Yagorsha stood stock-still, although the Boy
+waved unmistakable danger-signals towards Joe's ighloo. Suddenly an arm
+flashed out of the tunnel, caught Anna by the ankle, and in a twinkling
+she lay sprawling on her back. Two hands shot out, seized her by the
+heels, and dragged the wretched girl into the brute's lair. It was all
+over in a flash. A moment's paralysis of astonishment, and the
+involuntary rush forward was arrested by Muckluck, who fastened herself
+on to the rescuer's parki-tail and refused to be detached. "Yagorsha!"
+shouted the Boy. But it was only the Colonel who hastened towards them
+at the summons. The poor girl's own father stood calmly smoking, up
+there, by the Kachime, one foot propped comfortably on the travellers'
+loaded sled. "Yagorsha!" he shouted again, and then, with a jerk to
+free himself from Muckluck, the Boy turned sharply towards the ighloo,
+seeming in a bewildered way to be, himself, about to transact this
+paternal business for the cowardly old loafer. But Muckluck clung to
+his arm, laughing.
+
+"Yagorsha know. Joe give him nice mitts--sealskin--_new_ mitts."
+
+"Hear that, Colonel? For a pair of mitts he sells his daughter to that
+ruffian."
+
+Without definite plan, quite vaguely and instinctively, he shook
+himself free from Muckluck, and rushed down to the scene of the
+tragedy. Muffled screams and yells issued with the smoke. Muckluck
+turned sharply to the Colonel, who was following, and said something
+that sent him headlong after the Boy. He seized the doughty champion by
+the feet just as he was disappearing in the tunnel, and hauled him out.
+
+"What in thunder--All right, you go first, then. _Quick_! as more
+screams rent the still air.
+
+"Don't be a fool. You've been interruptin' the weddin' ceremonies."
+
+Muckluck had caught up with them, and Yagorsha was advancing leisurely
+across the snow.
+
+"She no want _you_," whispered Muckluck to the Boy. "She _like_
+Joe--like him best of all." Then, as the Boy gaped incredulously: "She
+tell me heap long time ago she want Joe."
+
+"That's just part of the weddin' festivity," says the Colonel, as
+renewed shrieks issued from under the snow. "You've been an officious
+interferer, and I think the sooner I get you out o' Pymeut the
+healthier it'll be for you."
+
+The Boy was too flabbergasted to reply, but he was far from convinced.
+The Colonel turned back to apologise to Yagorsha.
+
+"No like this in your country?" inquired Muckluck of the crestfallen
+champion.
+
+"N-no--not exactly."
+
+"When you like girl--what you do?"
+
+"Tell her so," muttered the Boy mechanically.
+
+"Well--Joe been tellin' Anna--all winter."
+
+"And she hated him."
+
+"No. She like Joe--best of any."
+
+"What did she go on like that for, then?"
+
+"Oh-h! She know Joe savvy."
+
+The Boy felt painfully small at his own lack of _savoir_, but no less
+angry.
+
+"When you marry"--he turned to her incredulously--"will it be"--again
+the shrieks--"like this?"
+
+"I no marry Pymeut."
+
+Glancing riverwards, he saw the dirty imp, who had been so wildly
+entertained by the encounter on the ice, still huddled on his
+drift-wood observatory, presenting as little surface to the cold as
+possible, but grinning still with rapture at the spirited last act of
+the winter-long drama. As the Boy, with an exclamation of "Well, I give
+it up," walked slowly across the slope after the Colonel and Yagorsha,
+Muckluck lingered at his side.
+
+"In your country when girl marry--she no scream?"
+
+"Well, no; not usually, I believe."
+
+"She go quiet? Like--like she _want_--" Muckluck stood still with
+astonishment and outraged modesty.
+
+"They agree," he answered irritably. "They don't go on like wild
+beasts."
+
+Muckluck pondered deeply this matter of supreme importance.
+
+"When you--get you squaw, you no _make_ her come?"
+
+The Boy shook his head, and turned away to cut short these excursions
+into comparative ethnology.
+
+But Muckluck was athirst for the strange new knowledge.
+
+"What you do?"
+
+He declined to betray his plan of action.
+
+"When you--all same Joe? Hey?"
+
+Still no answer.
+
+"When you _know_--girl like you best--you no drag her home?"
+
+"No. Be quiet."
+
+_"No?_ How you marry you self, then?"
+
+The conversation would be still more embarrassing before the Colonel,
+so he stopped, and said shortly: "In our country nobody beats a woman
+because he likes her."
+
+"How she know, then?"
+
+"They _agree_, I tell you."
+
+"Oh--an' girl--just come--when he call? Oh-h!" She dropped her jaw, and
+stared. "No fight a _little?"_ she gasped. "No scream quite _small?"_
+
+_"No_, I tell you." He ran on and joined the Colonel. Muckluck stood
+several moments rooted in amazement.
+
+Yagorsha had called the rest of the Pymeuts out, for these queer guests
+of theirs were evidently going at last.
+
+They all said "Goo'-bye" with great goodwill. Only Muckluck in her
+chilly "Holy Cross clo'es" stood sorrowful and silent, swinging her
+medal slowly back and forth.
+
+Nicholas warned them that the Pymeut air-hole was not the only one.
+
+"No," Yagorsha called down the slope; "better no play tricks with
+_him_." He nodded towards the river as the travellers looked back. "Him
+no like. Him got heap plenty mouths--chew you up." And all Pymeut
+chuckled, delighted at their story-teller's wit.
+
+Suddenly Muckluck broke away from the group, and ran briskly down to
+the river trail.
+
+"I will pray for you--hard." She caught hold of the Boy's hand, and
+shook it warmly. "Sister Winifred says the Good Father--"
+
+"Fact is, Muckluck," answered the Boy, disengaging himself with
+embarrassment, "my pardner here can hold up that end. Don't you think
+you'd better square Yukon Inua? Don't b'lieve he likes me."
+
+And they left her, shivering in her "Holy Cross clo'es," staring after
+them, and sadly swinging her medal on its walrus-string.
+
+"I don't mind sayin' I'm glad to leave Pymeut behind," said the
+Colonel.
+
+"Same here."
+
+"You're safe to get into a muss if you mix up with anything that has to
+do with women. That Muckluck o' yours is a minx."
+
+"She ain't my Muckluck, and I don't believe she's a minx, not a little
+bit."
+
+Not wishing to be too hard on his pardner, the Colonel added:
+
+"I lay it all to the chaparejos myself." Then, observing his friend's
+marked absence of hilarity, "You're very gay in your fine fringes."
+
+"Been a little too gay the last two or three hours."
+
+"Well, now, I'm glad to hear you say that. I think myself we've had
+adventures enough right here at the start."
+
+"I b'lieve you. But there's something in that idea o' yours. Other
+fellas have noticed the same tendency in chaparejos."
+
+"Well, if the worst comes to the worst," drawled the Colonel, "we'll
+change breeches."
+
+The suggestion roused no enthusiasm.
+
+"B'lieve I'd have a cammin' influence. Yes, sir, I reckon I could keep
+those fringes out o' kinks."
+
+"Oh, I think they'll go straight enough after this"; and the Boy's good
+spirits returned before they passed the summer village.
+
+It came on to snow again, about six o'clock, that second day out, and
+continued steadily all the night. What did it matter? They were used to
+snow, and they were as jolly as clams at high-tide.
+
+The Colonel called a halt in the shelter of a frozen slough, between
+two banks, sparsely timbered, but promising all the wood they needed,
+old as well as new. He made his camp fire on the snow, and the Boy soon
+had the beef-tea ready--always the first course so long as Liebig
+lasted.
+
+Thereafter, while the bacon was frying and the tea brewing, the Colonel
+stuck up in the snow behind the fire some sticks on which to dry their
+foot-gear. When he pulled off his mucklucks his stockinged feet smoked
+in the frosty air. The hint was all that was needed, that first night
+on the trail, for the Boy to follow suit and make the change into dry
+things. The smoky background was presently ornamented with German
+socks, and Arctic socks (a kind of felt slipper), and mucklucks, each
+with a stick run through them to the toe, all neatly planted in a row,
+like monstrous products of a snow-garden. With dry feet, burning faces
+and chilly backs, they hugged the fire, ate supper, laughed and talked,
+and said that life on the trail wasn't half bad. Afterwards they rolled
+themselves in their blankets, and went to sleep on their spruce-bough
+spring mattresses spread near the fire on the snow.
+
+After about half an hour of oblivion the Boy started up with the drowsy
+impression that a flying spark from the dying fire had set their stuff
+ablaze. No. But surely the fire had been made up again--and--he rubbed
+the sleep out of his incredulous eyes--yes, Muckluck was standing
+there!
+
+"What in thunder!" he began. "Wh-what is it?"
+
+"It is me."
+
+"I can see that much. But what brings you here?"
+
+Shivering with cold, she crouched close to the fire, dressed, as he
+could see now, in her native clothes again, and it was her parki that
+had scorched--was scorching still.
+
+"Me--I--" Smiling, she drew a stiff hand out of its mitten and held it
+over the reviving blaze, glancing towards the Colonel. He seemed to be
+sleeping very sound, powdered over already with soft wet snow; but she
+whispered her next remark.
+
+"I think I come help you find that Onge Grove."
+
+"I think you'll do nothing of the kind." He also spoke with a
+deliberate lowering of the note. His great desire not to wake the
+Colonel gave an unintentional softness to his tone.
+
+"You think winter bad time for squaws to travel?" She shook her head,
+and showed her beautiful teeth an instant in the faint light. Then,
+rising, half shy, but very firm, "I no wait till summer."
+
+He was so appalled for the moment, at the thought of having her on
+their hands, all this way from Pymeut, on a snowy night, that words
+failed him. As she watched him she, too, grew grave.
+
+"You say me nice girl."
+
+"When did I say that?" He clutched his head in despair.
+
+"When you first come. When Shaman make Ol' Chief all well."
+
+"I don't remember it."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I think you misunderstood me, Muckluck."
+
+"Heh?" Her countenance fell, but more puzzled than wounded.
+
+"That is--oh, yes--of course--you're a nice girl."
+
+"I think--Anna, too--you like me best." She helped out the white man's
+bashfulness. But as her interlocutor, appalled, laid no claim to the
+sentiment, she lifted the mittened hand to her eyes, and from under it
+scanned the white face through the lightly falling snow. The other
+hand, still held out to the comfort of the smoke, was trembling a
+little, perhaps not altogether with the cold.
+
+"The Colonel'll have to take over the breeches," said the Boy, with the
+air of one wandering in his head. Then, desperately: "What _am_ I to
+do? What am I to _say?_"
+
+"Say? You say you no like girl scream, no like her fight like Anna.
+Heh? So, me--I come like your girls--quite, quite good.... Heh?"
+
+"You don't understand, Muckluck. I--you see, I could never find that
+Orange Grove if you came along."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Well--a--no woman ever goes to help to find an Orange Grove.
+Th-there's a law against it."
+
+"Heh? Law?"
+
+Alas! she knew too little to be impressed by the Majesty invoked.
+
+"You see, women, they--they come by-and-by--when the Orange Grove's
+all--all ready for 'em. No man _ever_ takes a woman on that kind of
+hunt."
+
+Her saddened face was very grave. The Boy took heart.
+
+"Now, the Pymeuts are going in a week or two, Nicholas said, to hunt
+caribou in the hills."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"But they won't take you to hunt caribou. No; they leave you at home.
+It's exactly the same with Orange Groves. No nice girl _ever_ goes
+hunting."
+
+Her lip trembled.
+
+"Me--I can fish."
+
+"Course you can." His spirits were reviving. "You can do
+anything--except hunt." As she lifted her head with an air of sudden
+protest he quashed her. "From the beginning there's been a law against
+that. Squaws must stay at home and let the men do the huntin'."
+
+"Me ... I can cook"--she was crying now--"while you hunt. Good supper
+all ready when you come home."
+
+He shook his head solemnly.
+
+"Perhaps you don't know"--she flashed a moment's hope through her
+tears--"me learn sew up at Holy Cross. Sew up your socks for you when
+they open their mouths." But she could see that not even this grand new
+accomplishment availed.
+
+"Can help pull sled," she suggested, looking round a little wildly as
+if instantly to illustrate. "Never tired," she added, sobbing, and
+putting her hands up to her face.
+
+"Sh! sh! Don't wake the Colonel." He got up hastily and stood beside
+her at the smouldering fire. He patted her on the shoulder. "Of course
+you're a nice girl. The nicest girl in the Yukon"--he caught himself up
+as she dropped her hands from her face--"that is, you will be, if you
+go home quietly."
+
+Again she hid her eyes.
+
+Go home? How could he send her home all that way at this time of night?
+It was a bothering business!
+
+Again her hands fell from the wet unhappy face. She shivered a little
+when she met his frowning looks, and turned away. He stooped and picked
+up her mitten. Why, you couldn't turn a dog away on a night like this--
+
+Plague take the Pymeuts, root and branch! She had shuffled her feet
+into her snow-shoe straps, and moved off in the dimness. But for the
+sound of sobbing, he could not have told just where, in the
+softly-falling snow, Muckluck's figure was fading into the dusk. He
+hurried after her, conscience-stricken, but most unwilling.
+
+"Look here," he said, when he had caught up with her, "I'm sorry you
+came all this way in the cold--very sorry." Her sobs burst out afresh,
+and louder now, away from the Colonel's restraining presence. "But, see
+here: I can't send you off like this. You might die on the trail."
+
+"Yes, I think me die," she agreed.
+
+"No, don't do that. Come back, and we'll tell the Colonel you're going
+to stay by the fire till morning, and then go home."
+
+She walked steadily on. "No, I go now."
+
+"But you can't, Muckluck. You can't find the trail."
+
+"I tell you before, I not like your girls. I can go in winter as good
+as summer. I _can_ hunt!" She turned on him fiercely. "Once I hunt a
+owel. Ketch him, too!" She sniffed back her tears. "I can do all
+kinds."
+
+"No, you can't hunt Orange Groves," he said, with a severity that might
+seem excessive. "But I can't let you go off in this snowstorm--"
+
+"He soon stop. Goo'-bye."
+
+Never word of sweeter import in his ears than that. But he was far from
+satisfied with his conduct all the same. It was quite possible that the
+Pymeuts, discovering her absence, would think he had lured her away,
+and there might be complications. So it was with small fervour that he
+said: "Muckluck, I wish you'd come back and wait till morning."
+
+"No, I go now." She was in the act of darting forward on those
+snow-shoes, that she used so skillfully, when some sudden thought cried
+halt. She even stopped crying. "I no like go near blow-hole by night. I
+keep to trail--"
+
+"But how the devil do you do it?"
+
+She paid no heed to the interruption, seeming busy in taking something
+over her head from round her neck.
+
+"To-morrow," she said, lowering her tear-harshened voice, "you find
+blow-hole. You give this to Yukon Inua--say I send it. He will not hate
+you any more." She burst into a fresh flood of tears. In a moment the
+dim sight of her, the faint trail of crying left in her wake, had so
+wholly vanished that, but for the bit of string, as it seemed to be,
+left in his half-frozen hands, he could almost have convinced himself
+he had dreamt the unwelcome visit.
+
+The half-shut eye of the camp fire gleamed cheerfully, as he ran back,
+and crouched down where poor little Muckluck had knelt, so sure of a
+welcome. Muckluck, cogitated the Boy, will believe more firmly than
+ever that, if a man doesn't beat a girl, he doesn't mean business. What
+was it he had wound round one hand? What was it dangling in the acrid
+smoke? _That_, then--her trinket, the crowning ornament of her Holy
+Cross holiday attire, that was what she was offering the old ogre of
+the Yukon--for his unworthy sake. He stirred up the dying fire to see
+it better. A woman's face--some Catholic saint? He held the medal lower
+to catch the fitful blaze. "_D. G. Autocratrix Russorum_." The Great
+Katharine! Only a little crown on her high-rolled hair, and her
+splendid chest all uncovered to the Arctic cold.
+
+Her Yukon subjects must have wondered that she wore no parki--this lady
+who had claimed sole right to all the finest sables found in her new
+American dominions. On the other side of the medal, Minerva, with a
+Gorgon-furnished shield and a beautiful bone-tipped harpoon, as it
+looked, with a throwing-stick and all complete. But she, too, would
+strike the Yukon eye as lamentably chilly about the legs. How had these
+ladies out of Russia and Olympus come to lodge in Ol' Chief's ighloo?
+Had Glovotsky won this guerdon at Great Katharine's hands? Had he
+brought it on that last long journey of his to Russian America, and
+left it to his Pymeut children with his bones? Well, Yukon Inua should
+not have it yet. The Boy thrust the medal into a pocket of his
+chaparejos, and crawled into his snow-covered bed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+HOLY CROSS
+
+"Raise the stone, and ye shall find me; cleave the wood, and there am
+I."
+
+
+The stars were shining frostily, in a clear sky, when the Boy crawled
+out from under his snow-drift in the morning. He built up the fire,
+quaking in the bitter air, and bustled the breakfast.
+
+"You seem to be in something of a hurry," said the Colonel, with a yawn
+stifled in a shiver.
+
+"We haven't come on this trip to lie abed in the morning," his pardner
+returned with some solemnity. "I don't care how soon I begin caperin'
+ahead with that load again."
+
+"Well, it'll be warmin', anyway," returned the Colonel, "and I can't
+say as much for your fire."
+
+It was luck that the first forty miles of the trail had already been
+traversed by the Boy. He kept recognising this and that in the
+landscape, with an effect of good cheer on both of them. It postponed a
+little the realization of their daring in launching themselves upon the
+Arctic waste, without a guide or even a map that was of the smallest
+use.
+
+Half an hour after setting off, they struck into the portage. Even with
+a snow-blurred trail, the Boy's vivid remembrance of the other journey
+gave them the sustaining sense that they were going right. The Colonel
+was working off the surprising stiffness with which he had wakened, and
+they were both warm now; but the Colonel's footsoreness was
+considerable, an affliction, besides, bound to be worse before it was
+better.
+
+The Boy spoke with the old-timer's superiority, of his own experience,
+and was so puffed up, at the bare thought of having hardened his feet,
+that he concealed without a qualm the fact of a brand-new blister on
+his heel. A mere nothing that, not worth mentioning to anyone who
+remembered the state he was in at the end of that awful journey of
+penitence.
+
+It was well on in the afternoon before it began to snow again, and they
+had reached the frozen lake. The days were lengthening, and they still
+had good light by which to find the well-beaten trail on the other
+side.
+
+"Now in a minute we'll hear the mission dogs. What did I tell you?" Out
+of the little wood, a couple of teams were coming, at a good round
+pace. They were pulled up at the waterhole, and the mission natives ran
+on to meet the new arrivals. They recognised the Boy, and insisted on
+making the Colonel, who was walking very lame, ride to the mission in
+the strongest sled, and they took turns helping the dogs by pushing
+from behind. The snow was falling heavily again, and one of the
+Indians, Henry, looking up with squinted eyes, said, "There'll be
+nothing left of that walrus-tusk."
+
+"Hey?" inquired the Boy, straining at his sled-rope and bending before
+the blast. "What's that?"
+
+"Don't you know what makes snow?" said Henry.
+
+"No. What does?"
+
+"Ivory whittlings. When they get to their carving up yonder then we
+have snow."
+
+What was happening to the Colonel?
+
+The mere physical comfort of riding, instead of serving as packhorse,
+great as it was, not even that could so instantly spirit away the
+weariness, and light up the curious, solemn radiance that shone on the
+Colonel's face. It struck the Boy that good old Kentucky would look
+like that when he met his dearest at the Gate of Heaven--if there was
+such a place.
+
+The Colonel was aware of the sidelong wonder of his comrade's glance,
+for the sleds, abreast, had come to a momentary halt. But still he
+stared in front of him, just as a sailor in a storm dares not look away
+from the beacon-light an instant, knowing all the waste about him
+abounds in rocks and eddies and in death, and all the world of hope and
+safe returning is narrowed to that little point of light.
+
+After the moment's speculation the Boy turned his eyes to follow the
+Colonel's gaze into space.
+
+"The Cross! the Cross!" said the man on the sled. "Don't you see it?"
+
+"Oh, that? Yes."
+
+At the Boy's tone the Colonel, for the first time, turned his eyes away
+from the Great White Symbol.
+
+"Don't know what you're made of, if, seeing that... you needn't be a
+Church member, but only a man, I should think, to--to--" He blew out
+his breath in impotent clouds, and then went on. "We Americans think a
+good deal o' the Stars and Stripes, but that up yonder--that's the
+mightier symbol."
+
+"Huh!" says the Boy. "Stars and Stripes tell of an ideal of united
+states. That up there tells of an ideal of United Mankind. It's the
+great Brotherhood Mark. There isn't any other standard that men would
+follow just to build a hospice in a place like this."
+
+At an upper window, in a building on the far side of the white symbol,
+the travellers caught a glimpse, through the slanting snow, of one of
+the Sisters of St. Ann shutting in the bright light with thick
+curtains.
+
+_"Glass!"_ ejaculated the Colonel.
+
+One of the Indians had run on to announce them, and as they drew up at
+the door--that the Boy remembered as a frame for Brother Paul, with his
+lamp, to search out iniquity, and his face of denunciation--out came
+Father Brachet, brisk, almost running, his two hands outstretched, his
+face a network of welcoming wrinkles. No long waiting, this time, in
+the reception-room. Straight upstairs to hot baths and mild, reviving
+drinks, and then, refreshed and already rested, down to supper.
+
+With a shade of anxiety the Boy looked about for Brother Paul. But
+Father Wills was here anyhow, and the Boy greeted him, joyfully, as a
+tried friend and a man to be depended on. There was Brother Etienne,
+and there were two strange faces.
+
+Father Brachet put the Colonel on his right and the Boy on his left,
+introducing: "Fazzer Richmond, my predecessor as ze head of all ze
+Alaskan missions," calmly eliminating Greek, Episcopalian, and other
+heretic establishments. "Fazzer Richmond you must have heard much of.
+He is ze great ausority up here. He is now ze Travelling Priest. You
+can ask him all. He knows everysing."
+
+In no wise abashed by this flourish, Father Richmond shook hands with
+the Big Chimney men, smiling, and with a pleasant ease that
+communicated itself to the entire company.
+
+It was instantly manifest that the scene of this Jesuit's labours had
+not been chiefly, or long, beyond the borders of civilization. In the
+plain bare room where, for all its hospitality and good cheer, reigned
+an air of rude simplicity and austerity of life--into this somewhat
+rarefied atmosphere Father Richmond brought a whiff from another world.
+As he greeted the two strangers, and said simply that he had just
+arrived, himself, by way of the Anvik portage, the Colonel felt that he
+must have meant from New York or from Paris instead of the words he
+added, "from St. Michael's."
+
+He claimed instant kinship with the Colonel on the strength of their
+both being Southerners.
+
+"I'm a Baltimore man," he said, with an accent no Marylander can purge
+of pride.
+
+"How long since you've been home?"
+
+"Oh, I go back every year."
+
+"He goes all over ze world, to tell ze people--"
+
+"--something of the work being done here by Father Brachet--and all of
+them." He included the other priests and lay-brothers in a slight
+circular movement of the grizzled head.
+
+And to collect funds! the Colonel rightly divined, little guessing how
+triumphantly he achieved that end.
+
+"Alaska is so remote," said the Travelling Priest, as if in apology for
+popular ignorance, "and people think of it so... inadequately, shall we
+say? In trying to explain the conditions up here, I have my chief
+difficulty in making them realise the great distances we have to cover.
+You tell them that in the Indian tongue Alaska means "the great
+country," they smile, and think condescendingly of savage imagery. It
+is vain to say we have an area of six hundred thousand square miles. We
+talk much in these days of education; but few men and no women can
+count! Our Eastern friends get some idea of what we mean, when we tell
+them Alaska is bigger than all the Atlantic States from Maine to
+Louisiana with half of great Texas thrown in. With a coast-line of
+twenty six thousand miles, this Alaska of ours turns to the sea a
+greater frontage than all the shores of all the United States combined.
+It extends so far out towards Asia that it carries the dominions of the
+Great Republic as far west of San Francisco as New York is east of it,
+making California a central state. I try to give Europeans some idea of
+it by saying that if you add England, Ireland, and Scotland together,
+and to that add France, and to that add Italy, you still lack enough to
+make a country the size of Alaska. I do not speak of our mountains,
+seventeen, eighteen, nineteen thousand feet high, and our Yukon,
+flowing for more than two thousand miles through a country almost
+virgin still."
+
+"You travel about up here a good deal?"
+
+"He travels _all_ ze time. He will not rest," said Father Brachet as
+one airing an ancient grievance.
+
+"Yes, I will rest now--a little. I have been eight hundred miles over
+the ice, with dogs, since January 1."
+
+The Boy looked at him with something very like reverence. Here was a
+man who could give you tips!
+
+"You have travelled abroad, too," the Colonel rather stated than asked.
+
+"I spent a good deal of my youth in France and Germany."
+
+"Educated over there?"
+
+"Well, I am a Johns Hopkins man, but I may say I found my education in
+Rome. Speaking of education"--he turned to the other priests--"I have
+greatly advanced my grammar since we parted." Father Brachet answered
+with animation in French, and the conversation went forward for some
+minutes in that tongue. The discussion was interrupted to introduce the
+other new face, at the bottom of the table, to the Big Chimney men:
+"Resident Fazzer Roget of ze Kuskoquim mission."
+
+"That is the best man on snow-shoes in Central Alaska," said Father
+Richmond low to the Colonel, nodding at the Kuskoquim priest.
+
+"And he knows more of two of ze native dialects here zan anyone else,"
+added the Father Superior.
+
+"You must forgive our speaking much of the Indian tongues," said Father
+Richmond. "We are all making dictionaries and grammars; we have still
+to translate much of our religious instruction, and the great variety
+in dialect of the scattered tribes keeps us busy with linguistic
+studies."
+
+"Tomorrow you must see our schools," said Father Brachet.
+
+But the Boy answered quickly that they could not afford the time. He
+was surprised at the Colonel's silence; but the Boy didn't know what
+the Colonel's feet felt like.
+
+Kentucky ain't sorry, he said to himself, to have a back to his chair,
+and to eat off china again. Kentucky's a voluptuary! I'll have to drag
+him away by main force; and the Boy allowed Father Richmond to help him
+yet more abundantly to the potatoes and cabbage grown last summer in
+the mission garden!
+
+It was especially the vegetables that lent an element of luxury to the
+simple meal. The warm room, the excellent food, better cooked than any
+they had had for seven months, produced a gentle somnolence. The
+thought of the inviting look of the white-covered bed upstairs lay like
+a balm on the spirits of men not born to roughing it. As the travellers
+said an early and grateful good-night, the Boy added sleepily something
+about the start at dawn.
+
+Father Brachet answered, "Morning will bring counsel, my son. I sink ze
+bleezzar-r will not let us lose you so soon."
+
+They overslept themselves, and they knew it, in that way the would-be
+early riser does, before ever he looks into the accusing face of his
+watch. The Boy leapt out of bed.
+
+"Hear that?" The wind was booming among the settlement buildings.
+"Sounds as if there was weather outside." A glance between the curtains
+showed the great gale at its height. The snow blew level in sheets and
+darkened the air.
+
+"Well," said the Colonel, splashing mightily in the ice-cold water, "I
+don't know as I mind giving my feet twenty-four hours' time to come to
+their senses."
+
+A hurried toilet and they went downstairs, sharp-set for breakfast
+after the long, refreshing sleep.
+
+Father Richmond was writing on his knee by the stove in the
+reception-room.
+
+"Good-morning--good-morning." He rang the bell.
+
+"Well, what did we tell you? I don't think you'll get far today. Let
+these gentlemen know when breakfast is ready," he said, as Christopher
+put his head in. He looked at his watch. "I hope you will find
+everything you need," he said; and, continuing to talk about the gale
+and some damage it had done to one of the outbuildings, he went into
+the entry, just beyond the reception-room door, and began to put on his
+furs.
+
+"_You are_ not going out in such weather!" the Colonel called after him
+incredulously.
+
+"Only as far as the church."
+
+"Oh, is there church today?" inquired the Boy more cheerfully than one
+might expect.
+
+The Colonel started and made a signal for discretion.
+
+"Blest if it isn't Sunday!" he said under his breath.
+
+"He doesn't seem dead-set on our observing it," whispered the Boy.
+
+The Colonel warmed himself luxuriously at the stove, and seemed to
+listen for that summons from the entry that never came. Was Father
+Richmond out there still, or had he gone?
+
+"Do they think we are heathens because we are not Jesuits?" he said
+under his breath, suddenly throwing out his great chest.
+
+"Perhaps we ought to... Hey? They've been awfully considerate of
+_us--_"
+
+The Colonel went to the door. Father Richmond was struggling with his
+snow-boots.
+
+"With your permission, sir," says the Colonel in his most magnificent
+manner, "we will accompany you, or follow if you are in haste."
+
+"With all my heart. Come," said the priest, "if you will wait and
+breakfast with us after Mass."
+
+It was agreed, and the immediate order was countermanded. The sound of
+a bell came, muffled, through the storm.
+
+With thoughts turning reluctantly from breakfast, "What's that?" asked
+the Boy.
+
+"That is our church bell." The Father had helped the Colonel to find
+his parki.
+
+"Oh--a--of course--"
+
+"A fine tone, don't you think? But you can't tell so well in this
+storm. We are fond of our bell. It is the first that ever rang out in
+the Yukon valley. Listen!"
+
+They stood still a moment before opening the front door. The Boy,
+seeing the very look of a certain high-shouldered gray stone "St.
+Andrew's" far away, and himself trotting along beside that figure,
+inseparable from first memories, was dimly aware again, as he stood at
+the Jesuit's door, in these different days, of the old Sunday feeling
+invading, permeating his consciousness, half reluctant, half amused.
+
+The Colonel sat in a rural church and looked at the averted face of a
+woman.
+
+Only to the priest was the sound all music.
+
+"That language," he said, "speaks to men whatever tongue they call
+their own. The natives hear it for miles up the river, and down the
+river, and over the white hills, and far across the tundra. They come
+many miles to Mass--"
+
+He opened the door, and the gale rushed in.
+
+"I do not mean on days like this," he wound up, smiling, and out they
+went into the whirling snow.
+
+The church was a building of logs like the others, except that it was
+of one story. Father Brachet was already there, with Father Wills and
+Brother Etienne; and, after a moment, in came Brother Paul, looking
+more waxen and aloof than ever, at the head of the school, the rear
+brought up by Brother Vincent and Henry.
+
+In a moment the little Mother Superior appeared, followed by two nuns,
+heading a procession of native women and girls. They took their places
+on the other side of the church and bowed their heads.
+
+"Beautiful creature!" ejaculated the Colonel under his breath, glancing
+back.
+
+His companion turned his head sharply just in time to see Sister
+Winifred come last into the church, holding by either hand a little
+child. Both men watched her as she knelt down. Between the children's
+sallow, screwed-up, squinting little visages the calm, unconscious face
+of the nun shone white like a flower.
+
+The strangers glanced discreetly about the rude little church, with its
+pictures and its modest attempt at stained glass.
+
+"No wonder all this impresses the ignorant native," whispered the
+Colonel, catching himself up suddenly from sharing in that weakness.
+
+Without, the wild March storm swept the white world; within another
+climate reigned--something of summer and the far-off South, of Italy
+herself, transplanted to this little island of civilisation anchored in
+the Northern waste.
+
+"S'pose you've seen all the big cathedrals, eh?"
+
+"Good many."
+
+There was still a subdued rustling in the church, and outside, still
+the clanging bell contended with the storm.
+
+"And this--makes you smile?"
+
+"N--no," returned the older man with a kind of reluctance. "I've seen
+many a worse church; America's full of 'em."
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"So far as--dignity goes--" The Colonel was wrestling with some vague
+impression difficult for him to formulate. "You see, you can't build
+anything with wood that's better than a log-cabin. For looks--just
+_looks_--it beats all your fancy gimcracks, even brick; beats
+everything else hollow, except stone. Then they've got candles. We went
+on last night about the luxury of oil-lamps. They don't bring 'em in
+here!"
+
+"_We_ do in our prairie and Southern country churches."
+
+"I know. But look at those altar lights." The Boy was too busy looking
+at Sister Winifred. "I tell you, sir, a man never made a finer thing
+than a tall wax candle."
+
+"Sh! Mustn't talk in church."
+
+The Colonel stared a moment at the Boy's presumption, drew himself up a
+little pompously, and crossed his arms over his huge chest.
+
+"Why, they've got an organ!" The Boy forgot his strict views on church
+etiquette as the sudden sweetness swelled in the air. Brother Paul,
+with head thrown back and white face lifted, was playing, slowly,
+absently, like one who listens to some great choir invisible, and keeps
+their time with a few obedient but unnecessary chords. And yet--
+
+"The fella can play," the Colonel admitted.
+
+The native choir, composed entirely of little dark-faced boys, sang
+their way truly through the service, Father Brachet celebrating Mass.
+
+"Brother Paul's ill, isn't he? Look!" The lay-brother had swayed, and
+drooped forward over the keyboard, but his choir sang steadily on. He
+recovered himself, and beckoned one of the boys to his side. When he
+rose, the child nodded and took the organist's place, playing quite
+creditably to the end. Brother Paul sat in the corner with bowed head.
+
+Coming out, they were in time to confront Sister Winifred, holding back
+the youngest children, eager to anticipate their proper places in the
+procession.
+
+The Boy looked fixedly at her, wondering. Suddenly meeting The clear
+eyes, he smiled, and then shrank inwardly at his forwardness. He could
+not tell if she remembered him.
+
+The Colonel, finding himself next her at the door, bowed, and stood
+back for her to pass.
+
+"No," she said gently; "my little children must wait for the older
+ones."
+
+"You have them under good discipline, madam." He laid his hand on the
+furry shoulder of the smallest.
+
+The Boy stood behind the Colonel, unaccountably shy in the presence of
+the only white woman he had seen in nearly seven months. She couldn't
+be any older than he, and yet she was a nun. What a gulf opened at the
+word! Sister Winifred and her charges fell into rank at the tail of the
+little procession, and vanished in the falling snow. At breakfast the
+Colonel would not sit down till he was presented to Brother Paul.
+
+"Sir," he said in his florid but entirely sincere fashion, "I should
+like to thank you for the pleasure of hearing that music to-day. We
+were much impressed, sir, by the singing. How old is the boy who played
+the organ?"
+
+"Ten," said Brother Paul, and for the first time the Boy saw him smile.
+"Yes, I think he has music in him, our little Jerome."
+
+"And how well _all_ your choir has the service by heart! Their unison
+is perfect."
+
+"Yes," said Father Brachet from the head of the table, "our music has
+never been so good as since Paul came among us." He lifted his hand,
+and every one bowed his head.
+
+After grace Father Richmond took the floor, conversationally, as seemed
+to be his wont, and breakfast went on, as supper had the night before,
+to the accompaniment of his shrewd observations and lively anecdotes.
+In the midst of all the laughter and good cheer Brother Paul sat at the
+end of the board, eating absently, saying nothing, and no one speaking
+to him.
+
+Father Richmond especially, but, indeed, all of them, seemed arrant
+worldlings beside the youngest of the lay-brethren. The Colonel could
+more easily imagine Father Richmond walking the streets of Paris or of
+Rome, than "hitting the Yukon trail." He marvelled afresh at the
+devotion that brought such a man to wear out his fine attainments, his
+scholarship, his energy, his wide and Catholic knowledge, in travelling
+winter after winter, hundreds of miles over the ice from one Indian
+village to another. You could not divorce Father Richmond in your mind
+from the larger world outside; he spoke with its accent, he looked with
+his humourous, experienced eyes. You found it natural to think of him
+in very human relations. You wondered about his people, and what
+brought him to this.
+
+Not so with Brother Paul. He was one of those who suggest no country
+upon any printed map. You have to be reminded that you do not know his
+birthplace or his history. It was this same Brother Paul who, after
+breakfast and despite the Pymeut incident, offered to show the
+gold-seekers over the school. The big recitation-room was full of
+natives and decidedly stuffy. They did not stay long. Upstairs, "I
+sleep here in the dormitory," said the Brother, "and I live with the
+pupils--as much as I can. I often eat with them," he added as one who
+mounts a climax. "They have to be taught _everything_, and they have to
+be taught it over again every day."
+
+"Except music, apparently."
+
+"Except music--and games. Brother Vincent teaches them football and
+baseball, and plays with them and works with them. Part of each day is
+devoted to manual training and to sport."
+
+He led the way to the workshop.
+
+"One of our brothers is a carpenter and master mechanic."
+
+He called to a pupil passing the door, and told him the strangers would
+like to inspect the school work. Very proudly the lad obeyed. He
+himself was a carpenter, and showed his half-finished table. The Boy's
+eye fell on a sled.
+
+"Yes," said the lad, "that kind better. Your kind no good." He had
+evidently made intimate acquaintance with the Boy's masterpiece.
+
+"Yours is splendid," admitted the unskilled workman.
+
+"Will you sell it?" the Colonel asked Brother Paul.
+
+"They make them to sell," was the answer, and the transaction was soon
+effected.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+"It has stopped snowing and ze wind is fallen," said Father Brachet,
+going to the reception-room window an hour or so after they had come in
+from dinner.
+
+The Colonel exchanged looks with the Boy, and drew out his watch.
+
+"Later than I thought."
+
+"Much," the Colonel agreed, and sat considering, watch in hand.
+
+"I sink our friends must see now ze girls' school, and ze laundry,
+hein?"
+
+"To be sure," agreed Father Richmond. "I will take you over and give
+you into the hands of our Mother Superior."
+
+"Why, it's much warmer," said the Boy as they went by the cross; and
+Father Richmond greeted the half-dozen native boys, who were packing
+down the fresh snow under their broad shoes, laughing and shouting to
+one another as they made anew the familiar mission trails.
+
+The door of the two-story house, on the opposite side of the
+settlement, was opened by Sister Winifred.
+
+"Friends of ours from the White Camp below."
+
+She acknowledged the nameless introduction, smiling; but at the request
+that followed, "Ah, it is too bad that just to-day--the Mother
+Superior--she is too faint and weak to go about. Will you see her,
+Father?"
+
+"Yes, if you will show these strangers the school and laundry and--"
+
+"Oh, yes, I will show them."
+
+She led the way into the cheerful schoolroom, where big girls and
+little girls were sitting about, amusing themselves in the quiet of a
+long Sunday afternoon. Several of the younger children ran to her as
+she came in, and stood holding fast to the folds of her black habit,
+staring up at the strangers, while she explained the kind of
+instruction given, the system, and the order reigning in each
+department. Finally, she persuaded a little girl, only six years old,
+to take her dusky face out of the long flowing veil of the nun, and
+show how quickly she could read a sentence that Sister Winifred wrote
+on the blackboard. Then others were called on, and gave examples of
+their accomplishments in easy arithmetic and spelling. The children
+must have been very much bored with themselves that stormy Sunday, for
+they entered into the examination with a quite unnatural zest.
+
+Two of the elder girls recited, and some specimens of penmanship and
+composition were shown. The delicate complexion of the little nun
+flushed to a pretty wild-rose pink as these pupils of hers won the
+Colonel's old fashioned compliments.
+
+"And they are taught most particularly of all," she hastened to say,
+"cooking, housekeeping, and sewing."
+
+Whereupon specimens of needlework were brought out and cast like pearls
+before the swine's eyes of the ignorant men. But they were impressed in
+their benighted way, and said so.
+
+"And we teach them laundry-work." She led the way, with the children
+trooping after, to the washhouse. "No, run back. You'll take cold. Run
+back, and you shall sing for the strangers before they go."
+
+She smiled them away--a happy-faced, clean little throng, striking
+contrast to the neglected, filthy children seen in the native villages.
+As they were going into the laundry, Father Richmond came out of the
+house, and stopped to point out to the Colonel a snow-covered
+enclosure--"the Sisters' garden"--and he told how marvellously, in the
+brief summer, some of the hardier vegetables flourished there.
+
+"They spring up like magic at the edge of the snow-drifts, and they do
+not rest from their growing all night. If the time is short, they have
+twice as much sunlight as with you. They drink it in the whole summer
+night as well as all the day. And over here is the Fathers' garden."
+Talking still, he led the way towards a larger enclosure on the other
+side of the Cross.
+
+Sister Winifred paused a moment, and then, as they did not turn back,
+and the Boy stood waiting, she took him into the drying-room and into
+the ironing-room, and then returned to the betubbed apartment first
+invaded. There was only one blot on the fairness of that model
+laundry--a heap of torn and dirty canvas in the middle of the floor.
+
+The Boy vaguely thought it looked familiar, before the Sister, blushing
+faintly, said: "We hope you won't go before we have time to repair it."
+
+"Why, it's our old sled-cover!"
+
+"Yes; it is very much cut and torn. But you do not go at once?"
+
+"Yes, to-morrow."
+
+"Oh! Father Brachet thought you would stay for a few days, at least."
+
+"We have no time."
+
+"You go, like the rest, for gold?"
+
+"Like the rest."
+
+"But you came before to help poor Nicholas out of his trouble."
+
+"He was quite able to help himself, as it turned out."
+
+"Why will you go so far, and at such risk?" she said, with a suddenness
+that startled them both.
+
+"I--I--well, I think I go chiefly because I want to get my home back. I
+lost my home when I was a little chap. Where is your home?"
+
+"Here."
+
+"How long have you been here?"
+
+"Nearly two years."
+
+"Then how can you call it home?"
+
+"I do that only that I may--speak your language. Of course, it is not
+my real home."
+
+"Where is the real home?"
+
+"I hope it is in heaven," she said, with a simplicity that took away
+all taint of cant or mere phrase-making.
+
+"But where do you come from?"
+
+"I come from Montreal."
+
+"Oh! and don't you ever go back to visit your people?"
+
+"No, I never go back."
+
+"But you will some time?"
+
+"No; I shall never go back."
+
+"Don't you _want_ to?"
+
+She dropped her eyes, but very steadfastly she said:
+
+"My work is here."
+
+"But you are young, and you may live a great, great many years."
+
+She nodded, and looked out of the open door. The Colonel and the
+Travelling Priest were walking in Indian file the new-made, hard-packed
+path.
+
+"Yes," she said in a level voice, "I shall grow old here, and here I
+shall be buried."
+
+"I shall never understand it. I have such a longing for my home. I came
+here ready to bear anything that I might be able to get it back."
+
+She looked at him steadily and gravely.
+
+"I may be wrong, but I doubt if you would be satisfied even if you got
+it back--now."
+
+"What makes you think that?" he said sharply.
+
+"Because"--and she checked herself as if on the verge of something too
+personal--"you can never get back a thing you've lost. When the old
+thing is there again, you are not as you were when you lost it, and the
+change in you makes the old thing new--and strange."
+
+"Oh, it's plain I am very different from you," but he said it with a
+kind of uneasy defiance. "Besides, in any case, I shall do it for my
+sister's sake."
+
+"Oh, you have a sister?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"How long since you left her?"
+
+"It's a good while now."
+
+"Perhaps your sister won't want that particular home any more than you
+when you two meet again." Then, seeming not to notice the shade on her
+companion's face: "I promised my children they should sing for you. Do
+you mind? Will your friend come in, too?" And, looking from the door
+after the Colonel and the Father as they turned to rejoin them: "He is
+odd, that big friend of yours," she said--quite like a human being, as
+the Boy thought instantly.
+
+"He's not odd, I assure you."
+
+"He called me 'madam.'" She spoke with a charming piqued childishness.
+
+"You see, he didn't know your name. What is your name?"
+
+"Sister Winifred."
+
+"But your real name?" he said, with the American's insistence on his
+own point of view.
+
+"That is my only name," she answered with dignity, and led the way back
+into the schoolroom. Another, older, nun was there, and when the others
+rejoined them they made the girls sing.
+
+"Now we have shown you enough," said Father Richmond, rising; "boasted
+to you enough of the very little we are able to accomplish here. We
+must save something for to-morrow."
+
+"Ah, to-morrow we take to the trail again," said the Colonel, and added
+his "Good-bye, madam."
+
+Sister Winifred, seeing he expected it, gave him her hand.
+
+"Good-bye, and thank you for coming."
+
+"For your poor," he said shyly, as he turned away and left a gift in
+her palm.
+
+"Thank you for showing us all this," the Boy said, lingering, but not
+daring to shake hands. "It--it seems very wonderful. I had no idea a
+mission meant all this."
+
+"Oh, it means more--more than anything you can _see_."
+
+"Good-bye."
+
+"Good-bye."
+
+In the early evening the reception-room was invaded by the lads' school
+for their usual Sunday night entertainment. Very proudly these boys and
+young men sang their glees and choruses, played the fiddle, recited,
+even danced.
+
+"Pity Mac isn't here!"
+
+"Awful pity. Sunday, too."
+
+Brother Etienne sang some French military songs, and it came out that
+he had served in the French army. Father Roget sang, also in French,
+explaining himself with a humourous skill in pantomime that set the
+room in a roar.
+
+"Well," said the Colonel when he stood up to say good-night, "I haven't
+enjoyed an evening so much for years."
+
+"It is very early still," said Father Brachet, wrinkling up his face in
+a smile.
+
+"Ah, but we have to make such an early start."
+
+The Colonel went up to bed, leaving the Boy to go to Father Richmond's
+room to look at his Grammar of the Indian language.
+
+The instant the door was shut, the priest set down the lamp, and laid
+his hands on the young man's shoulders.
+
+"My son, you must not go on this mad journey."
+
+"I must, you know."
+
+"You must _not_. Sit there." He pushed him into a chair. "Let me tell
+you. I do not speak as the ignorant. I have in my day travelled many
+hundreds of miles on the ice; but I've done it in the season when the
+trail's at its best, with dogs, my son, and with tried native
+servants."
+
+"I know it is pleasanter that way, but--"
+
+"Pleasanter? It is the way to keep alive."
+
+"But the Indians travel with hand-sleds."
+
+"For short distances, yes, and they are inured to the climate. You? You
+know nothing of what lies before you."
+
+"But we'll find out as other people have." The Boy smiled confidently.
+
+"I assure you, my son, it is madness, this thing you are trying to do.
+The chances of either of you coming out alive, are one in fifty. In
+fifty, did I say? In five hundred."
+
+"I don't think so, Father. We don't mean to travel when--"
+
+"But you'll have to travel. To stay in such places as you'll find
+yourself in will be to starve. Or if by any miracle you escape the
+worst effects of cold and hunger, you'll get caught in the ice in the
+spring break-up, and go down to destruction on a floe. You've no
+conception what it's like. If you were six weeks earlier, or six weeks
+later, I would hold my peace."
+
+The Boy looked at the priest and then away. _Was_ it going to be so
+bad? Would they leave their bones on the ice? Would they go washing by
+the mission in the great spring flood, that all men spoke of with the
+same grave look? He had a sudden vision of the torrent as it would be
+in June. Among the whirling ice-masses that swept by--two bodies,
+swollen, unrecognisable. One gigantic, one dressed gaily in chaparejos.
+And neither would lift his head, but, like men bent grimly upon some
+great errand, they would hurry on, past the tall white cross with never
+a sign--on, on to the sea.
+
+"Be persuaded, my son."
+
+Dimly the Boy knew he was even now borne along upon a current equally
+irresistible, this one setting northward, as that other back to the
+south. He found himself shaking his head under the Jesuit's remonstrant
+eyes.
+
+"We've lost so much time already. We couldn't possibly turn back--now."
+
+"Then here's my Grammar." With an almost comic change of tone and
+manner the priest turned to the table where the lamp stood, among piles
+of neatly tied-up and docketed papers.
+
+He undid one of the packets, with an ear on the sudden sounds outside
+in the passage.
+
+"Brother Paul's got it in the schoolhouse."
+
+Brother Paul! He hadn't been at the entertainment, and no one seemed to
+have missed him.
+
+"How did Sister Winifred know?" asked another voice.
+
+"Old Maria told her."
+
+Father Richmond got up and opened the door.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"It's a new-born Indian baby." The Father looked down as if it might be
+on the threshold. "Brother Paul found it below at the village all done
+up ready to be abandoned."
+
+"Tell Sister Winifred I'll see about it in the morning."
+
+"She says--pardon me, Father--she says that is like a man. If I do not
+bring the little Indian in twenty minutes she will come herself and get
+it."
+
+Father Richmond laughed.
+
+"Good-night, my son"; and he went downstairs with the others.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Colonel, you asleep?" the Boy asked softly.
+
+"No."
+
+He struggled in silence with his mucklucks. Presently, "Isn't it
+frightfully strange," he mused aloud. "Doesn't it pull a fella up by
+the roots, somehow, to see Americans on this old track?"
+
+The Colonel had the bedclothes drawn up to his eyes. Under the white
+quilt he made some undistinguishable sound, but he kept his eyes
+fastened on his pardner.
+
+"Everything that we Americans have done, everything that we are, is
+achieved by the grace of goin' bang the other way." The Boy pulled off
+a muckluck and threw it half across the room. "And yet, and yet--"
+
+He sat with one stocking-foot in his hand and stared at the candle.
+
+"I wonder, Colonel, if it _satisfies_ anybody to be a hustler and a
+millionaire."
+
+"Satisfies?" echoed the Colonel, pushing his chin over the bed-clothes.
+"Who expects to be satisfied?"
+
+"Why, every man, woman and child on the top o' the earth; and it just
+strikes me I've never, personally, known anybody get there but these
+fellas at Holy Cross."
+
+The Colonel pushed back the bedclothes a little farther with his chin.
+
+"Haven't you got the gumption to see why it is this place and these men
+take such a hold on you? It's because you've eaten, slept, and lived
+for half a year in a space the size of this bedroom. We've got so used
+to narrowing life down, that the first result of a little larger
+outlook is to make us dizzy. Now, you hurry up and get to bed. You'll
+sleep it off."
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Boy woke at four o'clock, and after the match-light, by which he
+consulted his watch, had flickered out, he lay a long time staring at
+the dark.
+
+Silence still reigned supreme, when at last he got up, washed and
+dressed, and went downstairs. An irresistible restlessness had seized
+hold of him.
+
+He pulled on his furs, cautiously opened the door, and went out--down,
+over the crisp new crust, to the river and back in the dimness, past
+the Fathers' House to the settlement behind, then to the right towards
+the hillside. As he stumbled up the slope he came to a little
+burial-ground. Half hidden in the snow, white wooden crosses marked the
+graves. "And here I shall be buried," she had said--"here." He came
+down the hill and round by the Sisters' House.
+
+That window! That was where a light had shone the evening they arrived,
+and a nun--Sister Winifred--had stood drawing the thick curtains,
+shutting out the world.
+
+He thought, in the intense stillness, that he heard sounds from that
+upper room. Yes, surely an infant's cry.
+
+A curious, heavy-hearted feeling came upon him, as he turned away, and
+went slowly back towards the other house.
+
+He halted a moment under the Cross, and stared up at it. The door of
+the Fathers' House opened, and the Travelling Priest stood on the
+threshold. The Boy went over to him, nodding good-morning.
+
+"So you are all ready--eager to go from us?"
+
+"No; but, you see--"
+
+"I see."
+
+He held the door open, and the Boy went in.
+
+"I don't believe the Colonel's awake yet," he said, as he took off his
+furs. "I'll just run up and rouse him."
+
+"It is very early"--the priest laid his hand on the young man's
+arm--"and he will not sleep so well for many a night to come. It is an
+hour till breakfast."
+
+Henry had lit the fire, and now left it roaring. The priest took a
+chair, and pushed one forward for his guest.
+
+The Boy sat down, stretched his legs out straight towards the fire, and
+lifting his hands, clasped them behind his head. The priest read the
+homesick face like a book.
+
+"Why are you up here?" Before there was time for reply he added:
+"Surely a young man like you could find, nearer home, many a gate ajar.
+And you must have had glimpses through of--things many and fair."
+
+"Oh, yes, I've had glimpses of those things."
+
+"Well----"
+
+"What I wanted most I never saw."
+
+"You wanted----"
+
+"To be--_sure_."
+
+"Ah! it is one of the results of agnosticism."
+
+The Boy never saw the smile.
+
+"I've said--and I was not lying--that I came away to shorten the
+business of fortune-making--to buy back an old place we love, my sister
+and I; but----"
+
+"Which does she love best, the old place or the young brother?"
+
+"Oh, she cares about me--no doubt o' that." He smiled the smile of
+faith.
+
+"Has she ... an understanding heart?"
+
+"The most I know."
+
+"Then she would be glad to know you had found a home for the spirit. A
+home for the body, what does it matter?"
+
+In the pause, Father Brachet opened the door, but seemed suddenly to
+remember some imperative call elsewhere. The Boy jumped up, but the
+Superior had vanished without even "Good-morning." The Boy sat down
+again.
+
+"Of course," he went on, with that touch of pedantry so common in
+American youth, "the difficulty in my case is an intellectual one. I
+think I appreciate the splendid work you do, and I see as I never saw
+before----" He stopped.
+
+"You strike your foot against the same stone of stumbling over which
+the Pharisees fell, when the man whom Jesus healed by the way replied
+to their questioning: 'Whether He be a sinner or no, I know not. One
+thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see.'"
+
+"I don't deny that the life here has been a revelation to me. I'm not
+talkin' about creeds (for I don't know much about them, and I don't
+think it's in me to care much); but so far as the work here is
+concerned--" He paused.
+
+"We can take little credit for that; it is the outcome of our Order."
+
+The Boy failed to catch the effect of the capital letter.
+
+"Yes, it's just that--the order, the good government! A fella would be
+a bigot if he couldn't see that the system is as nearly perfect as a
+human institution can be."
+
+"That has been said before of the Society of Jesus." But he spoke with
+the wise man's tolerance for the discoveries of the young. Still, it
+was not to discuss the merits of his Order that he had got up an hour
+before his time. "I understand, maybe better than yourself, something
+of the restlessness that drove you here."
+
+"You understand?"
+
+The priest nodded.
+
+"You had the excuse of the old plantation and the sister--"
+
+The Boy sat up suddenly, a little annoyed.
+
+The priest kept on: "But you felt a great longing to make a breach in
+the high walls that shut you in. You wanted to fare away on some voyage
+of discovery. Wasn't that it?". He paused now in his turn, but the Boy
+looked straight before him, saying nothing. The priest leaned forward
+with a deeper gravity.
+
+"It will be a fortunate expedition, this, my son, _if thou discover
+thyself_--and in time!" Still the Boy said nothing. The other resumed
+more lightly: "In America we combine our travels with business. But it
+is no new idea in the world that a young man should have his Wanderjahr
+before he finds what he wants, or even finds acquiescence. It did not
+need Wilhelm Meister to set the feet of youth on that trail; it did not
+need the Crusades. It's as old as the idea of a Golden Fleece or a
+Promised Land. It was the first man's first inkling of heaven."
+
+The Boy pricked his ears. Wasn't this heresy?
+
+"The old idea of the strenuous, to leave home and comfort and security,
+and go out to search for wisdom, or holiness, or happiness--whether it
+is gold or the San Grael, the instinct of Search is deep planted in the
+race. It is this that the handful of men who live in what they call
+'the world'--it is this they forget. Every hour in the greater world
+outside, someone, somewhere, is starting out upon this journey. He may
+go only as far as Germany to study philosophy, or to the nearest
+mountain-top, and find there the thing he seeks; or he may go to the
+ends of the earth, and still not find it. He may travel in a Hindu gown
+or a Mongolian tunic, or he comes, like Father Brachet, out of his
+vineyards in 'the pleasant land of France,' or, like you, out of a
+country where all problems are to be solved by machinery. But my point
+is, _they come_! When all the other armies of the world are disbanded,
+that army, my son, will be still upon the march."
+
+They were silent awhile, and still the young face gave no sign.
+
+"To many," the Travelling Priest went on, "the impulse is a blind one
+or a shy one, shrinking from calling itself by the old names. But none
+the less this instinct for the Quest is still the gallant way of youth,
+confronted by a sense of the homelessness they cannot think will last."
+
+"That's it, Father! That's it!" the Boy burst out. "Homelessness! To
+feel that is to feel something urging you----" He stopped, frowning.
+
+"----urging you to take up your staff," said the priest.
+
+They were silent a moment, and then the same musical voice tolled out
+the words like a low bell: "But with all your journeying, my son, you
+will come to no Continuing City."
+
+"It's no use to say this to me. You see, I am----"
+
+"I'll tell you why I say it." The priest laid a hand on his arm. "I see
+men going up and down all their lives upon this Quest. Once in a great
+while I see one for whom I think the journey may be shortened."
+
+"How shortened?"
+
+A heavy step on the stair, and the Boy seemed to wake from a dream.
+
+"Good-morning," said the Colonel, coming in cheerily, rubbing his
+hands.
+
+"I am very jealous!" He glanced at the Boy's furs on the floor. "You
+have been out, seeing the rest of the mission without me."
+
+"No--no, we will show you the rest--as much as you care for, after
+breakfast."
+
+"I'm afraid we oughtn't to delay--"
+
+But they did--"for a few minutes while zey are putting a little fresh
+meat on your sled," as Father Brachet said. They went first to see the
+dogs fed. For they got breakfast when they were at home, those pampered
+mission dogs.
+
+"And now we will show you our store-house, our caches--"
+
+While Father Brachet looked in the bunch for the key he wanted, a
+native came by with a pail. He entered the low building on the left,
+leaving wide the door.
+
+"What? No! Is it really? No, not _really!_" The Colonel was more
+excited than the Boy had ever seen him. Without the smallest ceremony
+he left the side of his obliging host, strode to the open door, and
+disappeared inside.
+
+"What on earth's the matter?"
+
+"I cannot tell. It is but our cow-house."
+
+They followed, and, looking in at the door, the Boy saw a picture that
+for many a day painted itself on his memory. For inside the dim,
+straw-strewn place stood the big Kentuckian, with one arm round the
+cow, talking to her and rubbing her nose, while down his own a tear
+trickled.
+
+"Hey? Well, yes! Just my view, Sukey. Yes, old girl, Alaska's a funny
+kind o' place for you and me to be in, isn't it? Hey? Ye-e-yes." And he
+stroked the cow and sniffed back the salt water, and called out, seeing
+the Boy, "Look! They've got a thoroughbred bull, too, an' a heifer.
+Lord, I haven't been in any place so like home for a coon's age! You go
+and look at the caches. I'll stay here while Sambo milks her."
+
+"My name is Sebastian."
+
+"Oh, all right; reckon you can milk her under that name, too."
+
+When they came back, the Colonel was still there exchanging views about
+Alaska with Sukey, and with Sebastian about the bull. Sister Winifred
+came hurrying over the snow to the cow-house with a little tin pail in
+her hand.
+
+"Ah, but you are slow, Sebastian!" she called out almost petulantly.
+"Good-morning," she said to the others, and with a quick clutch at a
+respectful and submissive demeanour, she added, half aside: "What do
+you think, Father Brachet? They forgot that baby because he is good and
+sleeps late. They drink up all the milk."
+
+"Ah, there is very little now."
+
+"Very little, Father," said Sebastian, returning to the task from which
+the Colonel's conversation had diverted him.
+
+"I put aside some last night, and they used it. I send you to bring me
+only a little drop"--she was by Sebastian now, holding out the small
+pail, unmindful of the others, who were talking stock--"and you stay,
+and stay--"
+
+"Give me your can." The Boy took it from her, and held it inside the
+big milk-pail, so that the thin stream struck it sharply.
+
+"There; it is enough."
+
+Her shawl had fallen. The Colonel gathered it up.
+
+"I will carry the milk back for you," said the Boy, noticing how red
+and cold the slim hands were. "Your fingers will be frostbitten if you
+don't wrap them up." She pulled the old shawl closely round her, and
+set a brisk pace back to the Sisters' House.
+
+"I must go carefully or I might slip, and if I spilt the milk--"
+
+"Oh, you mustn't do that!"
+
+She paused suddenly, and then went on, but more slowly than before. A
+glaze had formed on the hard-trodden path, and one must needs walk
+warily. Once she looked back with anxiety, and, seeing that the
+precious milk was being carried with due caution, her glance went
+gratefully to the Boy's face. He felt her eyes.
+
+"I'm being careful," he laughed, a little embarrassed and not at first
+lifting his bent head. When, after an instant, he did so, he found the
+beautiful calm eyes full upon him. But no self-consciousness there. She
+turned away, gentle and reflective, and was walking on when some quick
+summons seemed to reach her. She stopped quite still again, as if
+seized suddenly by a detaining hand. Her own hands dropped straight at
+her sides, and the rusty shawl hung free. A second time she turned, the
+Boy thought to him again; but as he glanced up, wondering, he saw that
+the fixed yet serene look went past him like a homing-dove. A
+neglected, slighted feeling came over him. She wasn't thinking of him
+the least in the world, nor even of the milk he was at such pains to
+carry for her. What was she staring at? He turned his head over his
+right shoulder. Nothing. No one. As he came slowly on, he kept glancing
+at her. She, still with upturned face, stood there in the attitude of
+an obedient child receiving admonition. One cold little hand fluttered
+up to her silver cross. Ah! He turned again, understanding now the
+drift, if not the inner meaning, of that summons that had come.
+
+"Your friend said something--" She nodded faintly, riverwards, towards
+the mission sign. "Did you feel like that about it--when you saw it
+first?"
+
+"Oh--a--I'm not religious like the Colonel."
+
+She smiled, and walked on.
+
+At the door, as she took the milk, instead of "Thank you," "Wait a
+moment."
+
+She was back again directly.
+
+"You are going far beyond the mission ... so carry this with you. I
+hope it will guide you as it guides us."
+
+On his way back to the Fathers' House, he kept looking at what Sister
+Winifred had given him--a Latin cross of silver scarce three inches
+long. At the intersection of the arms it bore a chased lozenge on which
+was a mitre; above it, the word "Alaska," and beneath, the crossed keys
+of St. Peter and the letters, "P.T.R."
+
+As he came near to where the Colonel and his hosts were, he slipped the
+cross into his pocket. His fingers encountered Muckluck's medal. Upon
+some wholly involuntary impulse, he withdrew Sister Winifred's gift,
+and transferred it to another pocket. But he laughed to himself. "Both
+sort o' charms, after all." And again he looked at the big cross and
+the heaven above it, and down at the domain of the Inua, the jealous
+god of the Yukon.
+
+Twenty minutes later the two travellers were saying good-bye to the men
+of Holy Cross, and making their surprised and delighted acknowledgments
+for the brand-new canvas cover they found upon the Colonel's new sled.
+
+"Oh, it is not we," said Father Brachet; "it is made by ze Sisters. Zey
+shall know zat you were pleased."
+
+Father Richmond held the Boy's hand a moment.
+
+"I see you go, my son, but I shall see you return."
+
+"No, Father, I shall hardly come this way again."
+
+Father Brachet, smiling, watched them start up the long trail.
+
+"I sink we shall meet again," were his last words.
+
+"What does he mean?" asked the Colonel, a little high and mightily.
+"What plan has he got for a meeting?"
+
+"Same plan as you've got, I s'pose. I believe you both call it
+'Heaven.'"
+
+The Holy Cross thermometer had registered twenty degrees below zero,
+but the keen wind blowing down the river made it seem more like forty
+below. When they stopped to lunch, they had to crouch down behind the
+sled to stand the cold, and the Boy found that his face and ears were
+badly frost-bitten. The Colonel discovered that the same thing had
+befallen the toes of his left foot. They rubbed the afflicted members,
+and tried not to let their thoughts stray backwards. The Jesuits had
+told them of an inhabited cabin twenty-three miles up the river, and
+they tried to fix their minds on that. In a desultory way, when the
+wind allowed it, they spoke of Minook, and of odds and ends they'd
+heard about the trail. They spoke of the Big Chimney Cabin, and of how
+at Anvik they would have their last shave. The one subject neither
+seemed anxious to mention was Holy Cross. It was a little "marked," the
+Colonel felt; but he wasn't going to say the first word, since he meant
+to say the last.
+
+About five o'clock the gale went down, but it came on to snow. At seven
+the Colonel said decidedly: "We can't make that cabin to-night."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because I'm not going any further, with this foot--" He threw down the
+sled-rope, and limped after wood for the fire.
+
+The Boy tilted the sled up by an ice-hummock, and spread the new canvas
+so that it gave some scant shelter from the snow. Luckily, for once,
+the wind how grown quite lamb-like--for the Yukon. It would be thought
+a good stiff breeze almost anywhere else.
+
+Directly they had swallowed supper the Colonel remarked: "I feel as
+ready for my bed as I did Saturday night."
+
+Ah! Saturday night--that was different. They looked at each other with
+the same thought.
+
+"Well, that bed at Holy Cross isn't any whiter than this," laughed the
+Boy.
+
+But the Colonel was not to be deceived by this light and airy
+reference. His own unwilling sentiments were a guide to the Boy's, and
+he felt it incumbent upon him to restore the Holy Cross incident to its
+proper proportions. Those last words of Father Brachet's bothered him.
+Had they been "gettin' at" the Boy?
+
+"You think all that mission business mighty wonderful--just because you
+run across it in Alaska."
+
+"And isn't it wonderful at all?"
+
+The Boy spoke dreamily, and, from force of old habit, held out his
+mittened hands to the unavailing fire.
+
+The Colonel gave a prefatory grunt of depreciation, but he was pulling
+his blankets out from under the stuff on the sled.
+
+The Boy turned his head, and watched him with a little smile. "I'll
+admit that I always _used_ to think the Jesuits were a shady lot--"
+
+"So they are--most of 'em."
+
+"Well, I don't know about 'most of 'em.' You and Mac used to talk a lot
+about the 'motives' of the few I do know. But as far as I can see,
+every creature who comes up to this country comes to take something out
+of it--except those Holy Cross fellas. They came to bring something."
+
+The Colonel had got the blankets out now, but where was the rubber
+sheet? He wouldn't sleep on it in this weather, again, for a kingdom,
+but when the thaws came, if those explorer fellas were right--
+
+In his sense of irritation at a conscientious duty to perform and no
+clear notion of how to discharge it, he made believe it was the
+difficulty in finding the rubber sheet he didn't want that made him out
+of sorts.
+
+"It's bitter work, anyhow, this making beds with your fingers stiff and
+raw," he said.
+
+"Is it?"
+
+Dignity looked at Impudence sitting in the shelter, smiling.
+
+"Humph! Just try it," growled the Colonel.
+
+"I s'pose the man over the fire cookin' supper does _look_ better off
+than the 'pore pardner' cuttin' down trees and makin' beds in the snow.
+But he isn't."
+
+"Oh, isn't he?" It was all right, but the Big Chimney boss felt he had
+chosen the lion's share of the work in electing to be woodman; still,
+it wasn't _that_ that troubled him. Now, what was it he had been going
+to say about the Jesuits? Something very telling.
+
+"If you mean that you'd rather go back to the cookin'," the Boy was
+saying, "_I'm_ agreeable."
+
+"Well, you start in to-morrow, and see if you're so agreeable."
+
+"All right. I think I dote on one job just about as much as I do on
+t'other."
+
+But still the Colonel frowned. He couldn't remember that excellent
+thing he had been going to say about Romanists. But he sniffed
+derisively, and flung over his shoulder:
+
+"To hear you goin' on, anybody'd think the Jesuits were the only
+Christians. As if there weren't others, who--"
+
+"Oh, yes, Christians with gold shovels and Winchester rifles. I know
+'em. But if gold hadn't been found, how many of the army that's invaded
+the North--how many would be here, if it hadn't been for the gold? But
+all this Holy Cross business would be goin' on just the same, as it has
+done for years and years."
+
+With a mighty tug the Colonel dragged out the rubber blanket, flung it
+down on the snow, and squared himself, back to the fire, to make short
+work of such views.
+
+"I'd no notion you were such a sucker. You can bet," he said darkly,
+"those fellas aren't making a bad thing out of that 'Holy Cross
+business,' as you call it."
+
+"I didn't mean business in that sense."
+
+"What else could they do if they didn't do this?"
+
+"Ask the same of any parson."
+
+But the Colonel didn't care to.
+
+"I suppose," he said severely, "you could even make a hero out of that
+hang-dog Brother Etienne."
+
+"No, but he _could_ do something else, for he's served in the French
+army."
+
+"Then there's that mad Brother Paul. What good would he be at anything
+else?"
+
+"Well, I don't know."
+
+"Brachet and Wills are decent enough men, but where else would they
+have the power and the freedom they have at Holy Cross? Why, they live
+there like feudal barons."
+
+"Father Richmond could have done anything he chose."
+
+"Ah, Father Richmond--" The Colonel shut his mouth suddenly, turned
+about, and proceeded to crawl under his blankets, feet to the fire.
+
+"Well?"
+
+No answer.
+
+"Well?" insisted the Boy.
+
+"Oh, Father Richmond must have seen a ghost."
+
+"_What!_"
+
+"Take my word for it. _He_ got frightened somehow. A man like Father
+Richmond has to be scared into a cassock."
+
+The Boy's sudden laughter deepened the Colonel's own impression that
+the instance chosen had not been fortunate. One man of courage knows
+another man of courage when he sees him, and the Colonel knew he had
+damned his own argument.
+
+"Wouldn't care for the job myself," the Boy was saying.
+
+"What job?"
+
+"Scarin' Father Richmond."
+
+The Boy sat watching the slow wet snow-flakes fall and die in the fire.
+His clothes were pretty damp, but he was warm after a chilly fashion,
+as warmth goes on the trail.
+
+The Colonel suddenly put his head out from under the marmot-skin to say
+discontentedly, "What you sittin' up for?"
+
+"Oh ... for instance!" But aside from the pertness of the answer,
+already it was dimly recognised as an offence for one to stay up longer
+than the other.
+
+"Can't think how it is," the Colonel growled, "that you don't see that
+their principle is wrong. Through and through mediaeval, through and
+through despotic. They make a virtue of weakness, a fetich of vested
+authority. And it isn't American authority, either."
+
+The Boy waited for him to quiet down. "What's the first rule," demanded
+the Colonel, half sitting up, "of the most powerful Catholic Order?
+Blind obedience to an old gentleman over in Italy."
+
+"I said last night, you know," the Boy put in quite meekly, "that it
+all seemed very un-American."
+
+"Huh! Glad you can see that much." The Colonel drove his huge fist at
+the provision-bag, as though to beat the stiffnecked beans into a
+feathery yielding. "Blind submission don't come easy to most Americans.
+The Great Republic was built upon revolt;" and he pulled the covers
+over his head.
+
+"I know, I know. We jaw an awful lot about freedom and about what's
+American. There's plenty o' free speech in America and plenty o'
+machinery, but there's a great deal o' human nature, too, I guess." The
+Boy looked out of the corner of his eye at the blanketed back of his
+big friend. "And maybe there'll always be some people who--who think
+there's something in the New Testament notion o' sacrifice and
+service."
+
+The Colonel rolled like an angry leviathan, and came to the surface to
+blow. But the Boy dashed on, with a fearful joy in his own temerity.
+"The difference between us, Colonel, is that I'm an unbeliever, and I
+know it, and you're a cantankerous old heathen, and you _don't_ know
+it." The Colonel sat suddenly bolt upright. "Needn't look at me like
+that. You're as bad as anybody--rather worse. Why are you _here?_
+Dazzled and lured by the great gold craze. An' you're not even poor.
+You want _more_ gold. You've got a home to stay in; but you weren't
+satisfied, not even in the fat lands down below."
+
+"Well," said the Colonel solemnly, blinking at the fire, "I hope I'm a
+Christian, but as to bein' satisfied--"
+
+"Church of England can't manage it, hey?"
+
+"Church of England's got nothing to do with it. It's a question o'
+character. Satisfied! We're little enough, God knows, but we're too big
+for that."
+
+The Boy stood up, back to the fire, eyes on the hilltops whitening in
+the starlight.
+
+"Perhaps--not--all of us."
+
+"Yes, sah, all of us." The Colonel lifted his head with a fierce look
+of most un-Christian pride. Behind him the hills, leaving the
+struggling little wood far down the slope, went up and up into dimness,
+reaching to the near-by stars, and looking down to the far-off camp
+fire by the great ice-river's edge.
+
+"Yes, sah," the Colonel thundered again, "all that have got good
+fightin' blood in 'em, like you and me. 'Tisn't as if we came of any
+worn-out, frightened, servile old stock. You and I belong to the
+free-livin', hard-ridin', straight-shootin' Southerners. The people
+before us fought bears, and fought Indians, and beat the British, and
+when there wasn't anything else left to beat, turned round and began to
+beat one another. It was the one battle we found didn't pay. We
+finished that job up in '65, and since then we've been lookin' round
+for something else to beat. We've got down now to beatin' records, and
+foreign markets, and breedin' prize bulls; but we don't breed
+cowards--yet; and we ain't lookin' round for any asylums. The Catholic
+Church is an asylum. It's for people who never had any nerve, or who
+have lost it."
+
+The Colonel turned about, wagged his head defiantly at the icy hills
+and the night, and in the after-stillness fell sound asleep in the
+snow.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE
+
+  "--paa dit Firmament
+    Den klare Nordlyslampe taendt...."
+
+
+Innocently thinking that they had seen Arctic travelling at its worst,
+and secretly looking upon themselves as highly accomplished trailmen,
+they had covered the forty-one miles from Holy Cross to Anvik in less
+than three days.
+
+The Colonel made much of the pleasant and excellent man at the head of
+the Episcopal mission there, and the Boy haunted Benham's store,
+picking up a little Ingalik and the A. C. method of trading with the
+Indians, who, day and night, with a number of stranded Klondykers,
+congregated about the grateful warmth of the big iron stove.
+
+The travellers themselves did some business with the A. C. agent,
+laying in supplies of fresh meat, and even augmenting their hitherto
+carefully restricted outfit, for they were going far beyond the reach
+of stores, or even of missions. Anvik was the last white settlement
+below Nulato; Nulato was said to be over two hundred miles to the
+northward.
+
+And yet after all their further preparation and expense, each man kept
+saying in his heart, during those first days out from Anvik, that the
+journey would be easy enough but for their "comforts"--the burden on
+the sled. By all the rules of arithmetic, the daily subtraction of
+three meals from the store should have lightened the load. It seemed to
+have the opposite effect. By some process of evil enchantment every
+ounce grew to weigh a pound, every pound a hundredweight. The sled
+itself was bewitched. Recall how lightsomely it ran down the snowy
+slope, from the Big Chimney Cabin to the river trail, that morning they
+set forth. The Boy took its pretty impetuosity for a happy augury--the
+very sled was eager for the mighty undertaking.
+
+But never in all that weary march did it manifest again any such modest
+alacrity. If, thereafter, in the long going "up river" there came an
+interval of downhill, the sled turned summersaults in the air, wound
+its forward or backward rope round willow scrub or alder, or else
+advanced precipitately with an evil, low-comedy air, bottom side up, to
+attack its master in the shins. It either held back with a power
+superhuman, or it lunged forward with a momentum that capsized its
+weary conductor. Its manners grew steadily worse as the travellers
+pushed farther and farther into the wilderness, beyond the exorcising
+power of Holy Cross, beyond the softening influences of Christian
+hospitality at Episcopal Anvik, even beyond Tischsocket, the last of
+the Indian villages for a hundred miles.
+
+The two who had been scornful of the frailty of temper they had seen
+common in men's dealings up here in the North, began to realize that
+all other trials of brotherhood pale before the strain of life on the
+Arctic trail. Beyond any question, after a while something goes wrong
+with the nerves. The huge drafts on muscular endurance have, no doubt,
+something to do with it. They worked hard for fourteen, sometimes
+seventeen, hours at a stretch; they were ill-fed, suffering from
+exposure, intense cold, and a haunting uncertainty of the end of the
+undertaking. They were reasonable fellows as men go, with a respect for
+each other, but when hardship has got on the nerves, when you are
+suffering the agonies of snow-blindness, sore feet, and the pangs of
+hunger, you are not, to put it mildly, at your best as a member of the
+social order. They sometimes said things they were ashamed to remember,
+but both men grew carefuller at crucial moments, and the talkative one
+more silent as time went on.
+
+By the rule of the day the hard shift before dinner usually fell to the
+Boy. It was the worst time in the twenty-four hours, and equally
+dreaded by both men. It was only the first night out from Anvik, after
+an unusually trying day, the Boy was tramping heavily ahead, bent like
+an old man before the cutting sleet, fettered like a criminal, hands
+behind back, rope-wound, stiff, straining at the burden of the slow and
+sullen sled. On a sudden he stopped, straightened his back, and
+remonstrated with the Colonel in unprintable terms, for putting off the
+halt later than ever they had yet, "after such a day."
+
+"Can't make fire with green cotton-wood," was the Colonel's rejoiner.
+
+"Then let's stop and rest, anyhow."
+
+"Nuh! We know where that would land us. Men who stop to rest, go to
+sleep in the snow, and men who go to sleep in the snow on empty
+stomachs don't wake up."
+
+They pushed on another mile. When the Colonel at last called the halt,
+the Boy sank down on the sled too exhausted to speak. But it had grown
+to be a practice with them not to trust themselves to talk at this
+hour. The Colonel would give the signal to stop, simply by ceasing to
+push the sled that the boy was wearily dragging. The Boy had invariably
+been feeling (just as the Colonel had before, during his shift in
+front) that the man behind wasn't helping all he might, whereupon
+followed a vague, consciously unreasonable, but wholly irresistible
+rage against the partner of his toil. But however much the man at the
+back was supposed to spare himself, the man in front had never yet
+failed to know when the impetus from behind was really removed.
+
+The Boy sat now on the sled, silent, motionless, while the Colonel
+felled and chopped and brought the wood. Then the Boy dragged himself
+up, made the fire and the beef-tea. But still no word even after that
+reviving cup--the usual signal for a few remarks and more social
+relations to be established. Tonight no sound out of either. The
+Colonel changed his footgear and the melted snow in the pot began to
+boil noisily. But the Boy, who had again betaken himself to the sled,
+didn't budge. No man who really knows the trail would have dared, under
+the circumstances, to remind his pardner that it was now his business
+to get up and fry the bacon. But presently, without looking up, the
+hungry Colonel ventured:
+
+"Get your dry things!"
+
+"Feet aren't wet."
+
+"Don't talk foolishness; here are your things." The Colonel flung in
+the Boy's direction the usual change, two pairs of heavy socks, the
+"German knitted" and "the felt."
+
+"Not wet," repeated the Boy.
+
+"You know you are."
+
+"Could go through water in these mucklucks."
+
+"I'm not saying the wet has come in from outside; but you know as well
+as I do a man sweats like a horse on the trail."
+
+Still the Boy sat there, with his head sunk between his shoulders.
+
+"First rule o' this country is to keep your feet dry, or else
+pneumonia, rheumatism--God knows what!"
+
+"First rule o' this country is mind your own business, or else--God
+knows what!"
+
+The Colonel looked at the Boy a moment, and then turned his back. The
+Boy glanced up conscience-stricken, but still only half alive, dulled
+by the weight of a crushing weariness. The Colonel presently bent over
+the fire and was about to lift off the turbulently boiling pot. The Boy
+sprang to his feet, ready to shout, "You do your work, and keep your
+hands off mine," but the Colonel turned just in time to say with
+unusual gentleness:
+
+"If you _like_, I'll make supper to-night;" and the Boy, catching his
+breath, ran forward, swaying a little, half blind, but with a different
+look in his tired eyes.
+
+"No, no, old man. It isn't as bad as that."
+
+And again it was two friends who slept side by side in the snow.
+
+The next morning the Colonel, who had been kept awake half the night by
+what he had been thinking was neuralgia in his eyes, woke late, hearing
+the Boy calling:
+
+"I say, Kentucky, aren't you _ever_ goin' to get up?"
+
+"Get up?" said the Colonel. "Why should I, when it's pitch-dark?"
+
+"_What?_"
+
+"Fire clean out, eh?" But he smelt the tea and bacon, and sat up
+bewildered, with a hand over his smarting eyes. The Boy went over and
+knelt down by him, looking at him curiously.
+
+"Guess you're a little snow-blind, Colonel; but it won't last, you
+know."
+
+"Blind!"
+
+"No, no, only _snow_-blind. Big difference;" and he took out his rag of
+a handkerchief, got some water in a tin cup, and the eyes were bathed
+and bandaged.
+
+"It won't last, you know. You'll just have to take it easy for a few
+days."
+
+The Colonel groaned.
+
+For the first time he seemed to lose heart. He sat during breakfast
+with bandaged eyes, and a droop of the shoulders, that seemed to say
+old age had come upon him in a single night. The day that followed was
+pretty dark to both men. The Boy had to do all the work, except the
+monotonous, blind, pushing from behind, in whatever direction the Boy
+dragged the sled.
+
+Now, snow-blindness is not usually dangerous, but it is horribly
+painful while it lasts. Your eyes swell up and are stabbed continually
+by cutting pains; your head seems full of acute neuralgia, and often
+there is fever and other complications. The Colonel's was a bad case.
+But he was a giant for strength and "sound as a dollar," as the Boy
+reminded him, "except for this little bother with your eyes, and you're
+a whole heap better already."
+
+At a very slow rate they plodded along.
+
+They had got into a region where there was no timber; but, as they
+couldn't camp without a fire, they took an extra rest that day at four
+o'clock, and regaled themselves on some cold grub. Then they took up
+the line of march again. But they had been going only about half an
+hour when the Colonel suddenly, without warning, stopped pushing the
+sled, and stood stock-still on the trail. The Boy, feeling the removal
+of the pressure, looked round, went back to him, and found nothing in
+particular was the matter, but he just thought he wouldn't go any
+further.
+
+"We can camp here."
+
+"No, we can't," says the Boy; "there isn't a tree in sight."
+
+But the Colonel seemed dazed. He thought he'd stop anyhow--"right where
+he was."
+
+"Oh, no," says the Boy, a little frightened; "we'll camp the minute we
+come to wood." But the Colonel stood as if rooted. The Boy took his arm
+and led him on a few paces to the sled. "You needn't push hard, you
+know. Just keep your hand there so, without looking, you'll know where
+I'm going." This was very subtle of the Boy. For he knew the Colonel
+was blind as a bat and as sensitive as a woman. "We'll get through all
+right yet," he called back, as he stooped to take up the sledrope. "I
+bet on Kentucky."
+
+Like a man walking in his sleep, the Colonel followed, now holding on
+to the sled and unconsciously pulling a little, and when the Boy, very
+nearly on his last legs, remonstrated, leaning against it, and so
+urging it a little forward.
+
+Oh, but the wood was far to seek that night!
+
+Concentrated on the two main things--to carry forward his almost
+intolerable load, and to go the shortest way to the nearest wood--the
+Boy, by-and-by, forgot to tell his tired nerves to take account of the
+unequal pressure from behind. If he felt it--well, the Colonel was a
+corker; if he didn't feel it--well, the Colonel was just about tuckered
+out. It was very late when at last the Boy raised a shout. Behind the
+cliff overhanging the river-bed that they were just rounding, there,
+spread out in the sparkling starlight, as far as he could see, a vast
+primeval forest. The Boy bettered his lagging pace.
+
+"Ha! you haven't seen a wood like this since we left 'Frisco. It's all
+right now, Kentucky;" and he bent to his work with a will.
+
+When he got to the edge of the wood, he flung down the rope and
+turned--to find himself alone.
+
+"Colonel! Colonel! Where are you? _Colonel!_"
+
+He stood in the silence, shivering with a sudden sense of desolation.
+He took his bearings, propped a fallen fir sapling aslant by the sled,
+and, forgetting he was ready to drop, he ran swiftly hack along the way
+he came. They had travelled all that afternoon and evening on the river
+ice, hard as iron, retaining no trace of footprint or of runner
+possible to verify even in daylight. The Yukon here was fully three
+miles wide. They had meant to hug the right bank, but snow and ice
+refashion the world and laugh at the trustful geography of men. A
+traveller on this trail is not always sure whether he is following the
+mighty Yukon or some slough equally mighty for a few miles, or whether,
+in the protracted twilight, he has not wandered off upon some frozen
+swamp.
+
+On the Boy went in the ghostly starlight, running, stumbling, calling
+at regular intervals, his voice falling into a melancholy monotony that
+sounded foreign to himself. It occurred to him that were he the Colonel
+he wouldn't recognise it, and he began instead to call "Kentucky!
+Ken-tuck-kee!" sounding those fine barbaric syllables for the first
+time, most like, in that world of ice and silence.
+
+He stood an instant after his voice died, and listened to the quiet.
+Yes, the people were right who said nothing was so hard to bear in this
+country of hardship--nothing ends by being so ghastly--as the silence.
+No bird stirs. The swift-flashing fish are sealed under ice, the wood
+creatures gone to their underground sleep. No whispering of the pointed
+firs, stiff, snowclotted; no swaying of the scant herbage sheathed in
+ice or muffled under winter's wide white blanket. No greater hush can
+reign in the interstellar spaces than in winter on the Yukon.
+
+"Colonel!"
+
+Silence--like a negation of all puny things, friendship, human life--
+
+"Colonel!"
+
+Silence. No wonder men went mad up here, when they didn't drown this
+silence in strong drink.
+
+On and on he ran, till he felt sure he must have passed the Colonel,
+unless--yes, there were those air-holes in the river ice ... He felt
+choked and stopped to breathe. Should he go back? It was horrible to
+turn. It was like admitting that the man was not to be found--that this
+was the end.
+
+"Colonel!"
+
+He said to himself that he would go back, and build a fire for a
+signal, and return; but he ran on farther and farther away from the
+sled and from the forest. Was it growing faintly light? He looked up.
+Oh, yes; presently it would be brighter still. Those streamers of pale
+light dancing in the North; they would be green and scarlet and orange
+and purple, and the terrible white world would be illumined as by
+conflagration. He stopped again. That the Colonel should have dropped
+so far back as this, and the man in front not know--it was incredible.
+What was that? A shadow on the ice. A frozen hummock? No, a man. Was it
+really....? Glory hallelujah--it _was!_ But the shadow lay there
+ghastly still and the Boy's greeting died in his throat. He had found
+the Colonel, but he had found him delivered over to that treacherous
+sleep that seldom knows a waking. The Boy dropped down beside his
+friend, and wasn't far off crying. But it was a tonic to young nerves
+to see how, like one dead, the man lay there, for all the calling and
+tugging by the arm. The Boy rolled the body over, pulled open the
+things at the neck, and thrust his hand down, till he could feel the
+heart beating. He jumped up, got a handful of snow, and rubbed the
+man's face with it. At last a feeble protest--an effort to get away
+from the Boy's rude succour.
+
+"Thank God! Colonel! Colonel! wake up!"
+
+He shook him hard. But the big man only growled sullenly, and let his
+leaden weight drop back heavily on the ice. The Boy got hold of the
+neck of the Colonel's parki and pulled him frantically along the ice a
+few yards, and then realised that only the terror of the moment gave
+him the strength to do that much. To drag a man of the Colonel's weight
+all the way to the wood was stark impossibility. He couldn't get him
+eighty yards. If he left him and went for the sled and fuel, the man
+would be dead by the time he got back. If he stayed, they would both be
+frozen in a few hours. It was pretty horrible.
+
+He felt faint and dizzy. It occurred to him that he would pray. He was
+an agnostic all right, but the Colonel was past praying for himself;
+and here was his friend--an agnostic--here he was on his knees. He
+hadn't prayed since he was a little chap down in the South. How did the
+prayers go? "Our Father"--he looked up at the reddening aurora--"Our
+Father, who art in heaven--" His eyes fell again on his friend. He
+leapt to his feet like a wild animal, and began to go at the Colonel
+with his fists. The blows rained thick on the chest of the prostrate
+man, but he was too well protected to feel more than the shock. But now
+they came battering down, under the ear--right, left, as the man turned
+blindly to avoid them--on the jaw, even on the suffering eyes, and that
+at last stung the sleeper into something like consciousness.
+
+He struggled to his feet with a roar like a wounded bull, lunging
+heavily forward as the Boy eluded him, and he would have pounded the
+young fellow out of existence in no time had he stood his ground. That
+was exactly what the Boy didn't mean to do--he was always just a little
+way on in front; but as the Colonel's half-insane rage cooled, and he
+slowed down a bit, the Boy was at him again like some imp of Satan.
+Sound and lithe and quick-handed as he was, he was no match for the
+Colonel at his best. But the Colonel couldn't see well, and his brain
+was on fire. He'd kill that young devil, and then he'd lie down and
+sleep again.
+
+Meanwhile Aurora mounted the high heavens; from a great corona in the
+zenith all the sky was hung with banners, and the snow was stained as
+if with blood. The Boy looked over his shoulder, and saw the huge
+figure of his friend, bearing down upon him, with his discoloured face
+rage-distorted, and murder in his tortured eyes. A moment's sense of
+the monstrous spectacle fell so poignant upon the Boy, that he felt
+dimly he must have been full half his life running this race with
+death, followed by a maniac bent on murder, in a world whose winter was
+strangely lit with the leaping fires of hell.
+
+At last, on there in front, the cliff! Below it, the sharp bend in the
+river, and although he couldn't see it yet, behind the cliff the
+forest, and a little hand-sled bearing the means of life.
+
+The Colonel was down again, but it wasn't safe to go near him just yet.
+The Boy ran on, unpacked the sled, and went, axe in hand, along the
+margin of the wood. Never before was a fire made so quickly. Then, with
+the flask, back to the Colonel, almost as sound asleep as before.
+
+The Boy never could recall much about the hours that followed. There
+was nobody to help, so it must have been he who somehow got the Colonel
+to the fire, got him to swallow some food, plastered his wounded face
+over with the carbolic ointment, and got him into bed, for in the
+morning all this was seen to have been done.
+
+They stayed in camp that day to "rest up," and the Boy shot a rabbit.
+The Colonel was coming round; the rest, or the ointment, or the
+tea-leaf poultice, had been good for snowblindness. The generous
+reserve of strength in his magnificent physique was quick to announce
+itself. He was still "frightfully bunged up," but "I think we'll push
+on to-morrow," he said that night, as he sat by the fire smoking before
+turning in.
+
+"Right you are!" said the Boy, who was mending the sled-runner. Neither
+had referred to that encounter on the river-ice, that had ended in
+bringing the Colonel where there was succour. Nothing was said, then or
+for long after, in the way of deliberate recognition that the Boy had
+saved his life. It wasn't necessary; they understood each other.
+
+But in the evening, after the Boy had finished mending the sled, it
+occurred to him he must also mend the Colonel before they went to bed.
+He got out the box of ointment and bespread the strips of torn
+handkerchief.
+
+"Don't know as I need that to-night," says the Colonel. "Musn't waste
+ointment." But the Boy brought the bandages round to the Colonel's
+side of the fire. For an instant they looked at each other by the
+flickering light, and the Colonel laid his hand on the Boy's arm. His
+eyes looked worse for the moment, and began to water. He turned away
+brusquely, and knocked the ashes out of his pipe on a log.
+
+"What in hell made you think of it?"
+
+"Ask me an easy one," says the Boy. "But I know what the Jesuit Fathers
+would say."
+
+"Jesuits and George Warren! Humph! precious little we'd agree about."
+
+"You would about this. It flashed over me when I looked back and saw
+you peltin' after me."
+
+"Small wonder I made for you! I'm not findin' fault, but what on earth
+put it into your head to go at me with your fists like that?"
+
+"You'll never prove it by me. But when I saw you comin' at me like a
+mad bull, I thought to myself, thinks I, the Colonel and the Jesuits,
+they'd both of 'em say this was a direct answer to prayer."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE PIT
+
+"L'humanite a commence tout entiere par le crime .... C'etait le vieux
+nourricier des hommes des cavernes."--ANATOLE FRANCE.
+
+
+An old story now, these days of silent plodding through the driving
+snow.
+
+But if outward conditions lacked variety, not so their cumulative
+effect upon poor human nature. A change was going on in the travellers
+that will little commend them to the sentimentalist.
+
+"I've come to think a snow-storm's all right to travel in, all right to
+sleep in," said the Colonel one morning; "but to cook in, eat in, make
+or break camp in--it's the devil's champion invention." For three days
+they had worked like galley-slaves, and yet covered less than ten miles
+a day. "And you never get rested," the Colonel went on; "I get up as
+tired as I go to bed." Again the Boy only nodded. His body, if not his
+temper, had got broken into the trail, but for a talkative person he
+had in these days strangely little to say. It became manifest that, in
+the long run, the Colonel would suffer the most physically; but his
+young companion, having less patience and more ambition, more sheer
+untamed vitality in him, would suffer the most in spirit. Every sense
+in him was becoming numbed, save the gnawing in his stomach, and that
+other, even more acute ache, queer compound of fatigue and anger. These
+two sensations swallowed up all else, and seemed to grow by what they
+fed on.
+
+The loaded sled was a nightmare. It weighed a thousand tons. The very
+first afternoon out from Anvik, when in the desperate hauling and
+tugging that rescued it from a bottomless snow-drift, the lashing
+slipped, the load loosened, tumbled off, and rolled open, the Colonel
+stood quite still and swore till his half-frozen blood circulated
+freely again. When it came to repacking, he considered in detail the
+items that made up the intolerable weight, and fell to wondering which
+of them they could do without.
+
+The second day out from Anvik they had decided that it was absurd,
+after all, to lug about so much tinware. They left a little saucepan
+and the extra kettle at that camp. The idea, so potent at Anvik, of
+having a tea-kettle in reserve--well, the notion lost weight, and the
+kettle seemed to gain.
+
+Two pairs of boots and some flannels marked the next stopping-place.
+
+On the following day, when the Boy's rifle kept slipping and making a
+brake to hold back the sled, "I reckon you'll have to plant that rifle
+o' yours in the next big drift," said the Colonel; "one's all we need,
+anyway."
+
+"One's all you need, and one's all I need," answered the Boy stiffly.
+
+But it wasn't easy to see immediate need for either. Never was country
+so bare of game, they thought, not considering how little they hunted,
+and how more and more every faculty, every sense, was absorbed in the
+bare going forward.
+
+The next time the Colonel said something about the uselessness of
+carrying two guns, the Boy flared up: "If you object to guns, leave
+yours."
+
+This was a new tone for the Boy to use to the Colonel.
+
+"Don't you think we'd better hold on to the best one?"
+
+Now the Boy couldn't deny that the Colonel's was the better, but none
+the less he had a great affection for his own old 44 Marlin, and the
+Colonel shouldn't assume that he had the right to dictate. This
+attitude of the "wise elder" seemed out of place on the trail.
+
+"A gun's a necessity. I haven't brought along any whim-whams."
+
+"Who has?"
+
+"Well, it wasn't me that went loadin' up at Anvik with fool
+thermometers and things."
+
+"Thermometer! Why, it doesn't weigh--"
+
+"Weighs something, and it's something to pack; frozen half the time,
+too. And when it isn't, what's the good of havin' it hammered into us
+how near we are to freezin' to death." But it annoyed him to think how
+very little in argument a thermometer weighed against a rifle.
+
+They said no more that day about lightening the load, but with a double
+motive they made enormous inroads upon their provisions.
+
+A morning came when the Colonel, packing hurriedly in the biting cold,
+forgot to shove his pardner's gun into its accustomed place.
+
+The Boy, returning from trail-breaking to the river, kicked at the butt
+to draw attention to the omission. The Colonel flung down the end of
+the ice-coated rope he had lashed the load with, and, "Pack it
+yourself," says he.
+
+The Boy let the rifle lie. But all day long he felt the loss of it
+heavy on his heart, and no reconciling lightness in the sled.
+
+The Colonel began to have qualms about the double rations they were
+using. It was only the seventeenth night after turning their backs on
+the Big Chimney, as the Colonel tipped the pan, pouring out half the
+boiled beans into his pardner's plate, "That's the last o' the
+strawberries! Don't go expectin' any more," says he.
+
+"What!" ejaculated the Boy, aghast; then quickly, to keep a good face:
+"You take my life when you do take the beans, whereby I live."
+
+When the Colonel had disposed of his strawberries, "Lord!" he sighed,
+trying to rub the stiffness out of his hands over the smoke, "the
+appetite a fella can raise up here is something terrible. You eat and
+eat, and it doesn't seem to make any impression. You're just as hungry
+as ever."
+
+_"And the stuff a fella can eat!"_
+
+The Colonel recalled that speech of the Boy's the very next night,
+when, after "a hell of a time" getting the fire alight, he was bending
+forward in that attitude most trying to maintain, holding the
+frying-pan at long range over the feebly-smoking sticks. He had to
+cook, to live on snow-shoes nowadays, for the heavy Colonel had
+illustrated oftener than the Boy, that going without meant breaking in,
+floundering, and, finally, having to call for your pardner to haul you
+out. This was one of the many uses of a pardner on the trail. The last
+time the Colonel had trusted to the treacherous crust he had gone in
+head foremost, and the Boy, happening to look round, saw only two
+snow-shoes, bottom side up, moving spasmodically on the surface of the
+drift. The Colonel was nearly suffocated by the time he was pulled out,
+and after that object-lesson he stuck to snow-shoes every hour of the
+twenty-four, except those spent in the sleeping-bag.
+
+But few things on earth are more exasperating than trying to work
+mounted on clumsy, long web-feet that keep jarring against, yet holding
+you off from, the tree you are felling, or the fire you are cooking
+over. You are constrained to stand wholly out of natural relation to
+the thing you are trying to do--the thing you've got to do, if you mean
+to come out alive.
+
+The Colonel had been through all this time and time again. But as he
+squatted on his heels to-night, cursing the foot and a half of
+snow-shoe that held him away from the sullen fire, straining every
+muscle to keep the outstretched frying-pan over the best of the blaze,
+he said to himself that what had got him on the raw was that speech of
+the Boy's yesterday about the stuff he had to eat. If the Boy objected
+to having his rice parboiled in smoked water he was damned
+unreasonable, that was all.
+
+The culprit reappeared at the edge of the darkening wood. He came up
+eagerly, and flung down an armful of fuel for the morning, hoping to
+find supper ready. Since it wasn't, he knew that he mustn't stand about
+and watch the preparations. By this time he had learned a good deal of
+the trail-man's unwritten law. On no account must you hint that the
+cook is incompetent, or even slow, any more than he may find fault with
+your moment for calling halt, or with your choice of timber. So the
+woodman turned wearily away from the sole spot of brightness in the
+waste, and went back up the hill in the dark and the cold, to busy
+himself about his own work, even to spin it out, if necessary, till he
+should hear the gruff "Grub's ready!" And when that dinner-gong sounds,
+don't you dally! Don't you wait a second. You may feel uncomfortable if
+you find yourself twenty minutes late for a dinner in London or New
+York, but to be five minutes late for dinner on the Winter Trail is to
+lay up lasting trouble.
+
+By the time the rice and bacon were done, and the flap-jack, still raw
+in the middle, was burnt to charcoal on both sides, the Colonel's eyes
+were smarting, in the acrid smoke, and the tears were running down his
+cheeks.
+
+"Grub's ready!"
+
+The Boy came up and dropped on his heels in the usual attitude. The
+Colonel tore a piece off the half-charred, half-raw pancake.
+
+"Maybe you'll think the fire isn't thoroughly distributed, but _that's
+_got to do for bread," he remarked severely, as if in reply to some
+objection.
+
+The Boy saw that something he had said or looked had been
+misinterpreted.
+
+"Hey? Too much fire outside, and not enough in? Well, sir, I'll trust
+_my_ stomach to strike a balance. Guess the heat'll get distributed all
+right once I've swallowed it."
+
+When the Colonel, mollified, said something about cinders in the rice,
+the Boy, with his mouth full of grit, answered: "I'm pretendin' it's
+sugar."
+
+Not since the episode of the abandoned rifle had he shown himself so
+genial.
+
+"Never in all my bohn life," says the Colonel after eating steadily for
+some time--"never in a year, sah, have I thought as much about food as
+I do in a day on this----trail."
+
+"Same here."
+
+"And it's quantity, not quality."
+
+"Ditto."
+
+The Boy turned his head sharply away from the fire. "Hear that?"
+
+No need to ask. The Colonel had risen upright on his cramped legs, red
+eyes starting out of his head. The Boy got up, turned about in the
+direction of the hollow sound, and made one step away from the fire.
+
+"You stay right where you are!" ordered the Colonel, quite in the old
+way.
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"That's a bird-song."
+
+"Thought so."
+
+"Mr. Wolf smelt the cookin'; want's the rest of the pack to know
+there's something queer up here on the hill." Then, as the Boy moved to
+one side in the dark: "What you lookin' for?"
+
+"My gun."
+
+"Mine's here."
+
+Oh yes! His own old 44 Marlin was lying far down the river under
+eight-and-fifty hours of snow. It angered him newly and more than ever
+to remember that if he had a shot at anything now it must needs be by
+favour of the Colonel.
+
+They listened for that sound again, the first since leaving Anvik not
+made by themselves.
+
+"Seems a lot quieter than it did," observed the Colonel by-and-bye.
+
+The Boy nodded.
+
+Without preface the Colonel observed: "It's five days since I washed my
+face and hands."
+
+"What's the good o' rememberin'?" returned the Boy sharply. Then more
+mildly: "People talk about the bare necessaries o' life. Well, sir,
+when they're really bare you find there ain't but three--food, warmth,
+sleep."
+
+Again in the distance that hollow baying.
+
+"Food, warmth, sleep," repeated the Colonel. "We've about got down to
+the wolf basis."
+
+He said it half in defiance of the trail's fierce lessoning; but it was
+truer than he knew.
+
+They built up the fire to frighten off the wolves, but the Colonel had
+his rifle along when they went over and crawled into their
+sleeping-bag. Half in, half out, he laid the gun carefully along the
+right on his snow-shoes. As the Boy buttoned the fur-lined flap down
+over their heads he felt angrier with the Colonel than he had ever been
+before.
+
+"Took good care to hang on to his own shootin'-iron. Suppose anything
+should happen"; and he said it over and over.
+
+Exactly what could happen he did not make clear; the real danger was
+not from wolves, but it was _something_. And he would need a rifle....
+And he wouldn't have one.... And it was the Colonel's fault.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now, it had long been understood that the woodman is lord of the wood.
+When it came to the Colonel's giving unasked advice about the lumber
+business, the Boy turned a deaf ear, and thought well of himself for
+not openly resenting the interference.
+
+"The Colonel talks an awful lot, anyway. He has more hot air to offer
+than muscle."
+
+When they sighted timber that commended itself to the woodman, if _he_
+thought well of it, why, he just dropped the sled-rope without a word,
+pulled the axe out of the lashing, trudged up the hillside, holding the
+axe against his shirt underneath his parki, till he reached whatever
+tree his eye had marked for his own. Off with the fur mitt, and bare
+hand protected by the inner mitt of wool, he would feel the axe-head,
+for there was always the danger of using it so cold that the steel
+would chip and fly. As soon as he could be sure the proper molecular
+change had been effected, he would take up his awkward attitude before
+the selected spruce, leaning far forward on his snow-shoes, and seeming
+to deliver the blows on tip-toe.
+
+But the real trouble came when, after felling the dead tree, splitting
+an armful of fuel and carrying it to the Colonel, he returned to the
+task of cutting down the tough green spruce for their bedding. Many
+strained blows must be delivered before he could effect the chopping of
+even a little notch. Then he would shift his position and cut a
+corresponding notch further round, so making painful circuit of the
+bole. To-night, what with being held off by his snow-shoes, what with
+utter weariness and a dulled axe, he growled to himself that he was
+"only gnawin' a ring round the tree like a beaver!"
+
+"Damn the whole--Wait!" Perhaps the cursed snow was packed enough now
+to bear. He slipped off the web-feet, and standing gingerly, but
+blessedly near, made effectual attack. Hooray! One more good 'un and
+the thing was down. Hah! ugh! Woof-ff! The tree was down, but so was
+he, floundering breast high, and at every effort to get out only
+breaking down more of the crust and sinking deeper.
+
+This was not the first time such a thing had happened. Why did he feel
+as if it was for him the end of the world? He lay still an instant. It
+would be happiness just to rest here and go to sleep. The Colonel! Oh,
+well, the Colonel had taken his rifle. Funny there should be
+orange-trees up here. He could smell them. He shut his eyes. Something
+shone red and glowing. Why, that was the sun making an effect of
+stained glass as it shone through the fat pine weather-boarding of his
+little bedroom on the old place down in Florida. Suddenly a face. _Ah,
+that face!_ He must be up and doing. He knew perfectly well how to get
+out of this damn hole. You lie on your side and roll. Gradually you
+pack the softness tight till it bears--not if you stand up on your
+feet, but bears the length of your body, while you worm your way
+obliquely to the top, and feel gingerly in the dimness after your
+snow-shoes.
+
+But if it happens on a pitch-dark night, and your pardner has chosen
+camp out of earshot, you feel that you have looked close at the end of
+the Long Trail.
+
+On getting back to the fire, he found the Colonel annoyed at having
+called "Grub!" three times--"yes, sah! three times, sah!"
+
+And they ate in silence.
+
+"Now I'm going to bed," said the Boy, rising stiffly.
+
+"You just wait a minute."
+
+"No."
+
+Now, the Colonel himself had enunciated the law that whenever one of
+them was ready to sleep the other must come too. He didn't know it, but
+it is one of the iron rules of the Winter Trail. In absence of its
+enforcement, the later comer brings into the warmed up sleeping-bag not
+only the chill of his own body, he lets in the bitter wind, and brings
+along whatever snow and ice is clinging to his boots and clothes. The
+melting and warming-up is all to be done again.
+
+But the Colonel was angry.
+
+"Most unreasonable," he muttered--"damned unreasonable!"
+
+Worse than the ice and the wet in the sleeping-bag, was this lying in
+such close proximity to a young jackanapes who wouldn't come when you
+called "Grub!" and wouldn't wait a second till you'd felt about in the
+dimness for your gun. Hideous to lie so close to a man who snored, and
+who'd deprived you of your 44 Marlin. Although it meant life, the Boy
+grudged the mere animal heat that he gave and that he took. Full of
+grudging, he dropped asleep. But the waking spirit followed him into
+his dreams. An ugly picture painted itself upon the dark, and
+struggling against the vision, he half awoke. With the first returning
+consciousness came the oppression of the yoke, the impulse to match the
+mental alienation with that of the body--strong need to move away.
+
+You can't move away in a sleeping-bag.
+
+In a city you may be alone, free.
+
+On the trail, you walk in bonds with your yoke-fellow, make your bed
+with him, with him rise up, and with him face the lash the livelong
+day.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Well," sighed the Colonel, after toiling onward for a couple of hours
+the next morning, "this is the worst yet."
+
+But by the middle of the afternoon, "What did I say? Why, this
+morning--_everything_ up till now has been child's play." He kept
+looking at the Boy to see if he could read any sign of halt in the
+tense, scarred face.
+
+Certainly the wind was worse, the going was worse. The sled kept
+breaking through and sinking to the level of the load. There it went!
+in again. They tugged and hauled, and only dragged the lashing loose,
+while the sled seemed soldered to the hard-packed middle of the drift.
+As they reloaded, the thermometer came to light. The Colonel threw it
+out, with never a word. They had no clothes now but what they stood in,
+and only one thing on the sled they could have lived without--their
+money, a packet of trading stores. But they had thrown away more than
+they knew. Day by day, not flannels and boots alone, not merely extra
+kettle, thermometer and gun went overboard, but some grace of courtesy,
+some decency of life had been left behind.
+
+About three o'clock of this same day, dim with snow, and dizzy in a
+hurricane of wind, "We can't go on like this," said the Boy suddenly.
+
+"Wish I knew the way we _could_ go on," returned the Colonel, stopping
+with an air of utter helplessness, and forcing his rigid hands into his
+pockets. The Boy looked at him. The man of dignity and resource, who
+had been the boss of the Big Chimney Camp--what had become of him? Here
+was only a big, slouching creature, with ragged beard, smoke-blackened
+countenance, and eyes that wept continually.
+
+"Come on," said his equally ruffianly-looking pardner, "we'll both go
+ahead."
+
+So they abandoned their sled for awhile, and when they had forged a
+way, came back, and one pulling, the other pushing, lifting, guiding,
+between them, with infinite pains they got their burden to the end of
+the beaten track, left it, and went ahead again--travelling three miles
+to make one.
+
+"What's the matter now?"
+
+The Boy was too tired to turn his head round and look back, but he knew
+that the other man wasn't doing his share. He remembered that other
+time when the Colonel had fallen behind. It seemed years ago, and even
+further away was the vague recollection of how he'd cared. How horribly
+frightened he'd been! Wasn't he frightened now? No. It was only a dull
+curiosity that turned him round at last to see what it was that made
+the Colonel peg out this time. He was always peggin' out. Yes, there he
+was, stoppin' to stroke himself. Trail-man? An old woman! Fit only for
+the chimney-corner. And even when they went on again he kept saying to
+himself as he bent to the galling strain, "An old woman--just an old
+woman!" till he made a refrain of the words, and in the level places
+marched to the tune. After that, whatever else his vague thought went
+off upon, it came back to "An old woman--just an old woman!"
+
+It was at a bad place towards the end of that forced march that the
+Colonel, instead of lifting the back of the sled, bore hard on the
+handle-bar. With a vicious sound it snapped. The Boy turned heavily at
+the noise. When he saw the Colonel standing, dazed, with the splintered
+bar in his hand, his dull eyes flashed. With sudden vigour he ran back
+to see the extent of the damage.
+
+"Well, it's pretty discouragin'," says the Colonel very low.
+
+The Boy gritted his teeth with suppressed rage. It was only a chance
+that it hadn't happened when he himself was behind, but he couldn't see
+that. No; it was the Colonel's bungling--tryin' to spare himself;
+leanin' on the bar instead o' liftin' the sled, as he, the Boy, would
+have done.
+
+With stiff hands they tried to improvise a makeshift with a stick of
+birch and some string.
+
+"Don't know what you think," says the Colonel presently, "but I call
+this a desperate business we've undertaken."
+
+The Boy didn't trust himself to call it anything. With a bungled job
+they went lamely on. The loose snow was whirling about so, it was
+impossible to say whether it was still falling, or only
+hurricane-driven.
+
+To the Colonel's great indignation it was later than usual before they
+camped.
+
+Not a word was spoken by either till they had finished their first
+meal, and the Colonel had melted a frying-pan full of snow preparatory
+to the second. He took up the rice-bag, held it by the top, and ran his
+mittened hand down the gathered sack till he had outlined the contents
+at the bottom.
+
+"Lord! That's all there is."
+
+The boy only blinked his half-shut eyes. The change in him, from
+talkativeness to utter silence, had grown horribly oppressive to the
+Colonel. He often felt he'd like to shake him till he shook some words
+out. "I told you days ago," he went on, "that we ought to go on
+rations."
+
+Silence.
+
+"But no! you knew so much better."
+
+The Boy shut his eyes, and suddenly, like one struggling against sleep
+or swooning, he roused himself.
+
+"I thought I knew the more we took off the damn sled the lighter it'd
+be. 'Tisn't so."
+
+"And we didn't either of us think we'd come down from eighteen miles a
+day to six," returned the Colonel, a little mollified by any sort of
+answer. "I don't believe we're going to put this job through."
+
+Now this was treason.
+
+Any trail-man may think that twenty times a day, but no one ought to
+say it. The Boy set his teeth, and his eyes closed. The whole thing was
+suddenly harder--doubt of the issue had been born into the world. But
+he opened his eyes again. The Colonel had carefully poured some of the
+rice into the smoky water of the pan. What was the fool doing? Such a
+little left, and making a second supper?
+
+Only that morning the Boy had gone a long way when mentally he called
+the boss of the Big Chimney Camp "an old woman." By night he was saying
+in his heart, "The Colonel's a fool." His pardner caught the look that
+matched the thought.
+
+"No more second helpin's," he said in self-defence; "this'll freeze
+into cakes for luncheon."
+
+No answer. No implied apology for that look. In the tone his pardner
+had come to dread the Colonel began: "If we don't strike a settlement
+to-morrow----"
+
+"Don't _talk!"_
+
+The Boy's tired arm fell on the handle of the frying-pan. Over it
+went--rice, water, and all in the fire. The culprit sprang up
+speechless with dismay, enraged at the loss of the food he was hungry
+for--enraged at "the fool fry-pan"--enraged at the fool Colonel for
+balancing it so badly.
+
+A column of steam and smoke rose into the frosty air between the two
+men. As it cleared away a little the Boy could see the Colonel's
+bloodshot eyes. The expression was ill to meet.
+
+When they crouched down again, with the damped-out fire between them, a
+sense of utter loneliness fell upon each man's heart.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next morning, when they came to digging the sled out of the last
+night's snow-drift, the Boy found to his horror that he was
+weaker--yes, a good deal. As they went on he kept stumbling. The
+Colonel fell every now and then. Sometimes he would lie still before he
+could pull himself on his legs again.
+
+In these hours they saw nothing of the grim and splendid waste; nothing
+of the ranks of snow-laden trees; nothing of sun course or of stars,
+only the half-yard of dazzling trail in front of them, and
+--clairvoyant--the little store of flour and bacon that seemed to
+shrink in the pack while they dragged it on.
+
+Apart from partial snow-blindness, which fell at intervals upon the
+Colonel, the tiredness of the eyes was like a special sickness upon
+them both. For many hours together they never raised their lids,
+looking out through slits, cat-like, on the world.
+
+They had not spoken to each other for many days--or was it only
+hours?--when the Colonel, looking at the Boy, said:
+
+"You've got to have a face-guard. Those frostbites are eating in."
+
+"'Xpect so."
+
+"You ought to stop it. Make a guard."
+
+"Out of a snow-ball, or chunk o' ice?"
+
+"Cut a piece out o' the canvas o' the bag." But he didn't.
+
+The big sores seemed such small matters beside the vast overshadowing
+doubt, Shall we come out of this alive?--doubt never to be openly
+admitted by him, but always knocking, knocking----
+
+"You can't see your own face," the Colonel persisted.
+
+"One piece o' luck, anyhow."
+
+The old habit of looking after the Boy died hard. The Colonel
+hesitated. For the last time he would remonstrate. "I used to think
+frost_bite_ was a figure o' speech," said he, "but the teeth were set
+in _your_ face, sonny, and they've bitten deep; they'll leave awful
+scars."
+
+"Battles do, I b'lieve." And it was with an effort that he remembered
+there had been a time when they had been uncomfortable because they
+hadn't washed their faces. Now, one man was content to let the very
+skin go if he could keep the flesh on his face, and one was little
+concerned even for that. Life--life! To push on and come out alive.
+
+The Colonel had come to that point where he resented the Boy's staying
+power, terrified at the indomitable young life in him. Yes, the Colonel
+began to feel old, and to think with vague wrath of the insolence of
+youth.
+
+Each man fell to considering what he would do, how he would manage if
+he were alone. And there ceased to be any terror in the thought.
+
+"If it wasn't for him"--so and so; till in the gradual deadening of
+judgment all the hardship was somehow your pardner's fault. Your nerves
+made him responsible even for the snow and the wind. By-and-by he was
+The Enemy. Not but what each had occasional moments of lucidity, and
+drew back from the pit they were bending over. But the realisation
+would fade. No longer did even the wiser of the two remember that this
+is that same abyss out of which slowly, painfully, the race has
+climbed. With the lessened power to keep from falling in, the terror of
+it lessened. Many strange things grew natural. It was no longer
+difficult or even shocking to conceive one's partner giving out and
+falling by the way. Although playing about the thought, the one thing
+that not even the Colonel was able actually to realise, was the
+imminent probability of death for himself. Imagination always pictured
+the other fellow down, one's self somehow forging ahead.
+
+This obsession ended on the late afternoon when the Colonel broke
+silence by saying suddenly:
+
+"We must camp; I'm done." He flung himself down under a bare birch, and
+hid his face.
+
+The Boy remonstrated, grew angry; then, with a huge effort at
+self-control, pointed out that since it had stopped snowing this was
+the very moment to go on.
+
+"Why, you can see the sun. Three of 'em! Look, Colonel!"
+
+But Arctic meteorological phenomena had long since ceased to interest
+the Kentuckian. Parhelia were less to him than covered eyes, and the
+perilous peace of the snow. It seemed a long time before he sat up, and
+began to beat the stiffness out of his hands against his breast. But
+when he spoke, it was only to say:
+
+"I mean to camp."
+
+"For how long?"
+
+"Till a team comes by--or something."
+
+The Boy got up abruptly, slipped on his snow-shoes, and went round the
+shoulder of the hill, and up on to the promontory, to get out of
+earshot of that voice, and determine which of the two ice-roads,
+stretching out before them, was main channel and which was tributary.
+
+He found on the height only a cutting wind, and little enlightenment as
+to the true course. North and east all nimbus still. A brace of
+sun-dogs following the pale God of Day across the narrow field of
+primrose that bordered the dun-coloured west. There would be more snow
+to-morrow, and meanwhile the wind was rising again. Yes, sir, it was a
+mean outlook.
+
+As he took Mac's aneroid barometer out of his pocket, a sudden gust cut
+across his raw and bleeding cheek. He turned abruptly; the barometer
+slipped out of his numb fingers. He made a lunge to recover it,
+clutched the air, and, sliding suddenly forward, over he went, flying
+headlong down the steep escarpment.
+
+He struck a jutting rock, only half snowed under, that broke the sheer
+face of the promontory, and he bounded once like a rubber ball, struck
+a second time, caught desperately at a solitary clump of ice-sheathed
+alders, crashed through the snow-crust just below them, and was held
+there like a mudlark in its cliff nest, halfway between bluff and
+river.
+
+His last clear thought had been an intense anxiety about his snow-shoes
+as they sailed away, two liberated kites, but as he went on falling,
+clutching at the air--falling--and felt the alder twigs snap under his
+hands, he said to himself, "This is death," but calmly, as if it were a
+small matter compared to losing one's snow-shoes.
+
+It was only when he landed in the snow, that he was conscious of any of
+the supposed natural excitement of a man meeting a violent end. It was
+then, before he even got his breath back, that he began to struggle
+frantically to get a foothold; but he only broke down more of the thin
+ice-wall that kept him from the sheer drop to the river, sixty or
+seventy feet below. He lay quite still. Would the Colonel come after
+him? If he did come, would he risk his life to----If he did risk his
+life, was it any use to try to----He craned his neck and looked up,
+blinked, shut his eyes, and lay back in the snow with a sound of
+far-off singing in his head. "Any use?" No, sir; it just about wasn't.
+That bluff face would be easier to climb up than to climb down, and
+either was impossible.
+
+Then it was, that a great tide of longing swept over him--a flood of
+passionate desire for more of this doubtful blessing, life. All the
+bitter hardship--why, how sweet it was, after all, to battle and to
+overcome! It was only this lying helpless, trapped, that was evil. The
+endless Trail? Why, it was only the coming to the end that a man
+minded.
+
+Suddenly the beauty that for days had been veiled shone out. Nothing in
+all the earth was glorious with the glory of the terrible white North.
+And he had only just been wakened to it. Here, now, lying in his grave,
+had come this special revelation of the rapture of living, and the
+splendour of the visible universe.
+
+The sky over his head--he had called it "a mean outlook," and turned
+away. It was the same sky that bent over him now with a tenderness that
+made him lift his cramped arms with tears, as a sick child might to its
+mother. The haloed sun with his attendant dogs--how little the wonder
+had touched him! Never had he seen them so dim and sad as to-night ...
+saying good-bye to one who loved the sun.
+
+The great frozen road out of sight below, road that came winding,
+winding down out of the Arctic Circle--what other highway so majestic,
+mysterious?--shining and beckoning on. An earthly Milky Way, leading to
+the golden paradise he had been travelling towards since summer.
+
+And he was to go no further?--not till the June rains and thaws and
+winds and floods should carry him back, as he had foreseen, far below
+there at Holy Cross.
+
+With a sharp contraction of the heart he shut his eyes again. When he
+opened them they rested on the alder-twig, a couple of yards above,
+holding out mocking finger-tips, and he turned his head in the snow
+till again he could see the mock-suns looking down.
+
+"As well try to reach the sky as reach the alder-bush. What did that
+mean? That he was really going to lie there till he died? _He_ die, and
+the Colonel and everybody else go on living?"
+
+He half rose on his elbow at the monstrous absurdity of the idea. "I
+won't die!" he said out loud.
+
+Crack, crack! warned the ice-crust between him and that long fall to
+the river. With horror at his heart he shrank away and hugged the face
+of the precipice. Presently he put out his hand and broke the ice-crust
+above. With mittened fists and palms he pounded firm a little ledge of
+snow. Reaching out further, he broke the crust obliquely just above,
+and having packed the snow as well as he could immediately about, and
+moving lengthwise with an infinite caution, he crawled up the few
+inches to the narrow ledge, balancing his stiff body with a nicety
+possible only to acrobat or sleep-walker.
+
+It was in no normal state of ordinary waking senses that the work went
+on--with never a downward look, nor even up, eyes riveted to the patch
+of snow on which the mittened hands fell as steady and untrembling as
+steel hammers. In the seconds of actual consciousness of his situation
+that twice visited him, he crouched on the ledge with closed eyes, in
+the clutch of an overmastering horror, absolutely still, like a bird in
+the talons of a hawk. Each time when he opened his eyes he would stare
+at the snow-ledge till hypnotised into disregard of danger, balance his
+slight body, lift one hand, and go on pounding firm another shallow
+step. When he reached the alder-bush his heart gave a great leap of
+triumph. Then, for the first time since starting, he looked up. His
+heart fell down. It seemed farther than ever, and the light waning.
+
+But the twilight would be long, he told himself, and in that other,
+beneficent inner twilight he worked on, packing the snow, and crawling
+gingerly up the perilous stair a half-inch at a time.
+
+At last he was on the jutting rock, and could stand secure. But here he
+could see that the top of the bluff really did shelve over. To think so
+is so common an illusion to the climber that the Boy had heartened
+himself by saying, when he got there he would find it like the rest,
+horribly steep, but not impossible. Well, it _was_ impossible. After
+all his labour, he was no better off on the rock than in the snow-hole
+below the alder, down there where he dared not look. The sun and his
+dogs had travelled down, down. They touched the horizon while he sat
+there; they slipped below the world's wide rim. He said in his heart,
+"I'm freezing to death." Unexpectedly to himself his despair found
+voice:
+
+"Colonel!"
+
+"Hello!"
+
+He started violently.
+
+Had he really heard that, or was imagination playing tricks with echo?
+
+"Colonel!"
+
+"Where the devil----"
+
+A man's head appeared out of the sky.
+
+"Got the rope?"
+
+Words indistinguishable floated down--the head withdrawn--silence. The
+Boy waited a very long time, but he stamped his feet, and kept his
+blood in motion. The light was very grey when the head showed again at
+the sky-line. He couldn't hear what was shouted down, and it occurred
+to him, even in his huge predicament, that the Colonel was "giving him
+hot air" as usual, instead of a life-line. Down the rope came, nearer,
+and stopped about fifteen feet over his head.
+
+"Got the axe? Let her down."
+
+      *        *        *        *        *
+
+The night was bright with moonlight when the Boy stood again on the top
+of the bluff.
+
+"Humph!" says the Colonel, with agreeable anticipation; "you'll be glad
+to camp for a few days after this, I reckon."
+
+"Reckon I won't."
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+In their colossal fatigue they slept the clock round; their watches run
+down, their sense of the very date blurred. Since the Colonel had made
+the last laconic entry in the journal--was it three days or two--or
+twenty?
+
+In spite of a sensation as of many broken bones, the Boy put on the
+Colonel's snow-shoes, and went off looking along the foot of the cliff
+for his own. No luck, but he brought back some birch-bark and a handful
+of willow-withes, and set about making a rude substitute.
+
+Before they had despatched breakfast the great red moon arose, so it
+was not morning, but evening. So much the better. The crust would be
+firmer. The moon was full; it was bright enough to travel, and travel
+they must.
+
+"No!" said the Colonel, with a touch of his old pompous authority,
+"we'll wait awhile."
+
+The Boy simply pointed to the flour-bag. There wasn't a good handful
+left.
+
+They ate supper, studiously avoiding each other's eyes. In the
+background of the Boy's mind: "He saved my life, but he ran no risk....
+And I saved his. We're quits." In the Colonel's, vague, insistent,
+stirred the thought, "I might have left him there to rot, half-way up
+the precipice. Oh, he'd go! _And he'd take the sled_! No!" His vanished
+strength flowed back upon a tide of rage. Only one sleeping-bag, one
+kettle, one axe, one pair of snow-shoes ... _one gun_! No, by the
+living Lord! not while I have a gun. Where's my gun? He looked about
+guiltily, under his lowered lids. What? No! Yes! It was gone! Who
+packed at the last camp? Why, he--himself, and he'd left it behind.
+"Then it was because I didn't see it; the Boy took care I shouldn't see
+it! Very likely he buried it so that I shouldn't see it! He--yes--if I
+refuse to go on, he----"
+
+And the Boy, seeing without looking, taking in every move, every shade
+in the mood of the broken-spirited man, ready to die here, like a dog,
+in the snow, instead of pressing on as long as he could crawl--the Boy,
+in a fever of silent rage, called him that "meanest word in the
+language--a quitter." And as, surreptitiously, he took in the vast
+discouragement of the older man, there was nothing in the Boy's changed
+heart to say, "Poor fellow! if he can't go on, I'll stay and die with
+him"; but only, "He's _got_ to go on! ... and if he refuses ...
+well----" He felt about in his deadened brain, and the best he could
+bring forth was: "I won't leave him--_yet_."
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+A mighty river-jam had forced them up on the low range of hills. It was
+about midnight to judge by the moon--clear of snow and the wind down.
+The Boy straightened up at a curious sight just below them. Something
+black in the moonlight. The Colonel paused, looked down, and passed his
+hand over his eyes.
+
+The Boy had seen the thing first, and had said to himself, "Looks like
+a sled, but it's a vision. It's come to seeing things now."
+
+When he saw the Colonel stop and stare, he threw down his rope and
+began to laugh, for there below were the blackened remains of a big
+fire, silhouetted sharply on the snow.
+
+"Looks like we've come to a camp, Boss!"
+
+He hadn't called the Colonel by the old nickname for many a day. He
+stood there laughing in an idiotic kind of way, wrapping his stiff
+hands in his parki, Indian fashion, and looking down to the level of
+the ancient river terrace, where the weather-stained old Indian sled
+was sharply etched on the moonlit whiteness.
+
+Just a sled lying in the moonlight. But the change that can be wrought
+in a man's heart upon sight of a human sign! it may be idle to speak of
+that to any but those who have travelled the desolate ways of the
+North.
+
+Side by side the two went down the slope, slid and slipped and couldn't
+stop themselves, till they were below the landmark. Looking up, they
+saw that a piece of soiled canvas or a skin, held down with a
+drift-log, fell from under the sled, portiere-wise from the top of the
+terrace, straight down to the sheltered level, where the camp fire had
+been. Coming closer, they saw the curtain was not canvas, but dressed
+deerskin.
+
+"Indians!" said the Colonel.
+
+But with the rubbing out of other distinctions this, too, was curiously
+faint. Just so there were human beings it seemed enough. Within four
+feet of the deerskin door the Colonel stopped, shot through by a sharp
+misgiving. What was behind? A living man's camp, or a dead man's tomb?
+Succour, or some stark picture of defeat, and of their own oncoming
+doom?
+
+The Colonel stood stock-still waiting for the Boy. For the first time
+in many days even he hung back. He seemed to lack the courage to be the
+one to extinguish hope by the mere drawing of a curtain from a
+snow-drift's face. The Kentuckian pulled himself together and went
+forward. He lifted his hand to the deerskin, but his fingers shook so
+he couldn't take hold:
+
+"Hello!" he called. No sound. Again: "Hello!"
+
+"Who's there?"
+
+The two outside turned and looked into each other's faces--but if you
+want to know all the moment meant, you must travel the Winter Trail.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+KURILLA
+
+"And I swear to you Athenians--by the dog I swear!--for I must tell you
+the truth----."--SOCRATES.
+
+
+The voice that had asked the question belonged to one of two stranded
+Klondykers, as it turned out, who had burrowed a hole in the snow and
+faced it with drift-wood. They had plenty of provisions, enough to
+spare, and meant to stay here till the steamers ran, for the younger of
+the pair had frosted his feet and was crippled.
+
+The last of their dogs had been frozen to death a few miles back on the
+trail, and they had no idea, apparently, how near they were to that
+"first Indian settlement this side of Kaltag" reached by the Colonel
+and the Boy after two days of rest and one day of travel.
+
+No one ever sailed more joyfully into the Bay of Naples, or saw with
+keener rapture Constantinople's mosques and minarets arise, than did
+these ice-armoured travellers, rounding the sharp bend in the river,
+sight the huts and hear the dogs howl on the farther shore.
+
+"First thing I do, sah, is to speculate in a dog-team," said the
+Colonel.
+
+Most of the bucks were gone off hunting, and most of the dogs were with
+them. Only three left in the village--but they were wonderful fellows
+those three! Where were they? Well, the old man you see before you,
+"_me_--got two."
+
+He led the way behind a little shack, a troop of children following,
+and there were two wolf-dogs, not in the best condition, one reddish,
+with a white face and white forelegs, the other grey with a black
+splotch on his chest and a white one on his back.
+
+"How much?"
+
+"Fiftee dolla."
+
+"And this one?"
+
+"Fiftee dolla." As the Colonel hesitated, the old fellow added: "Bohf
+eightee dolla."
+
+"Oh, eightee for the two?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Well, where's the other?"
+
+"Hein?"
+
+"The other--the third dog. Two are no good."
+
+"Yes. Yes," he said angrily, "heap good dog."
+
+"Well, I'll give you eighty dollars for these" (the Ingalik, taking a
+pipe out of his parki, held out one empty hand); "but who's got the
+other?"
+
+For answer, a head-shake, the outstretched hand, and the words,
+"Eightee dolla--tabak--tea."
+
+"Wait," interrupted the Boy, turning to the group of children; "where's
+the other dog?"
+
+Nobody answered. The Boy pantomimed. "We want _three_ dogs." He held up
+as many fingers. "We got two--see?--must have one more." A lad of about
+thirteen turned and began pointing with animation towards a slowly
+approaching figure.
+
+"Peetka--him got."
+
+The old man began to chatter angrily, and abuse the lad for introducing
+a rival on the scene. The strangers hailed the new-comer.
+
+"How much is your dog?"
+
+Peetka stopped, considered, studied the scene immediately before him,
+and then the distant prospect.
+
+"You got dog?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Well, how much?"
+
+"Sixty dolla."
+
+"_One_ dog, sixty?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"But this man says the price is eighty for two."
+
+"My dog--him Leader."
+
+After some further conversation, "Where is your dog?" demanded the
+Colonel.
+
+The new-comer whistled and called. After some waiting, and
+well-simulated anger on the part of the owner, along comes a dusky
+Siwash, thin, but keen-looking, and none too mild-tempered.
+
+The children all brightened and craned, as if a friend, or at least a
+highly interesting member of the community, had appeared on the scene.
+
+"The Nigger's the best!" whispered the Boy.
+
+"Him bully," said the lad, and seemed about to pat him, but the Siwash
+snarled softly, raising his lip and showing his Gleaming fangs. The lad
+stepped back respectfully, but grinned, reiterating, "Bully dog."
+
+"Well, I'll give you fifty for him," said the Colonel.
+
+"Sixty."
+
+"Well, all right, since he's a leader. Sixty."
+
+The owner watched the dog as it walked round its master smelling the
+snow, then turning up its pointed nose interrogatively and waving its
+magnificent feathery tail. The oblique eyes, acute angle of his short
+ears, the thick neck, broad chest, and heavy forelegs, gave an
+impression of mingled alertness and strength you will not see surpassed
+in any animal that walks the world. Jet-black, except for his grey
+muzzle and broad chest, he looks at you with the face of his near
+ancestor, the grizzled wolf. If on short acquaintance you offer any
+familiarity, as the Colonel ventured to do, and he shows his double row
+of murderous-looking fangs, the reminder of his fierce forefathers is
+even more insistent. Indeed, to this day your Siwash of this sort will
+have his moments of nostalgia, in which he turns back to his wild
+kinsfolk, and mates again with the wolf.
+
+When the Leader looked at the Colonel with that indescribably horrid
+smile, the owner's approval of the proud beast seemed to overcome his
+avarice.
+
+"Me no sell," he decided abruptly, and walked off in lordly fashion
+with his dusky companion at his side, the Leader curling his feathery
+tail arc-like over his back, and walking with an air princes might
+envy.
+
+The Colonel stood staring. Vainly the Boy called, "Come back. Look
+here! Hi!" Neither Siwash nor Ingalik took the smallest notice. The Boy
+went after them, eliciting only airs of surly indifference and repeated
+"Me no sell." It was a bitter disappointment, especially to the Boy. He
+liked the looks of that Nigger dog. When, plunged in gloom, he returned
+to the group about the Colonel, he found his pardner asking about
+"feed." No, the old man hadn't enough fish to spare even a few days'
+supply. Would anybody here sell fish? No, he didn't think so. All the
+men who had teams were gone to the hills for caribou; there was nobody
+to send to the Summer Caches. He held out his hand again for the first
+instalment of the "eightee dolla," in kind, that he might put it in his
+pipe.
+
+"But dogs are no good to us without something to feed 'em."
+
+The Ingalik looked round as one seeking counsel.
+
+"Get fish tomalla."
+
+"No, sir. To-day's the only day in my calendar. No buy dogs till we get
+fish."
+
+When the negotiations fell through the Indian took the failure far more
+philosophically than the white men, as was natural. The old fellow
+could quite well get on without "eightee dolla"--could even get on
+without the tobacco, tea, sugar, and matches represented by that sum,
+but the travellers could not without dogs get to Minook. It had been
+very well to feel set up because they had done the thing that everybody
+said was impossible. It had been a costly victory. Yes, it had come
+high. "And, after all, if we don't get dogs we're beaten."
+
+"Oh, beaten be blowed! We'll toddle along somehow."
+
+"Yes, we'll toddle along _if_ we get dogs."
+
+And the Boy knew the Colonel was right.
+
+They inquired about Kaltag.
+
+"I reckon we'd better push ahead while we can," said the Colonel. So
+they left the camp that same evening intending to "travel with the
+moon." The settlement was barely out of sight when they met a squaw
+dragging a sled-load of salmon. Here was luck! "And now we'll go back
+and get those two dogs."
+
+As it was late, and trading with the natives, even for a fish, was a
+matter of much time and patience, they decided not to hurry the dog
+deal. It was bound to take a good part of the evening, at any rate.
+Well, another night's resting up was welcome enough.
+
+While the Colonel was re-establishing himself in the best cabin, the
+Boy cached the sled and then went prowling about. As he fully intended,
+he fell in with the Leader--that "bully Nigger dog." His master not in
+sight--nobody but some dirty children and the stranger there to see how
+the Red Dog, in a moment of aberration, dared offer insolence to the
+Leader. It all happened through the Boy's producing a fish, and
+presenting it on bended knee at a respectful distance. The Leader
+bestowed a contemptuous stare upon the stranger and pointedly turned
+his back. The Red Dog came "loping" across the snow. As he made for the
+fish the Leader quietly headed him off, pointed his sharp ears, and
+just looked the other fellow out of countenance. Red said things under
+his breath as he turned away. The more he thought the situation over
+the more he felt himself outraged. He looked round over his shoulder.
+There they still were, the stranger holding out the fish, the Leader
+turning his back on it, but telegraphing Red at the same time _not to
+dare!_ It was more than dog-flesh could bear; Red bounded back,
+exploding in snarls. No sound out of the Leader. Whether this unnatural
+calm misled Red, he came up closer, braced his forelegs, and thrust his
+tawny muzzle almost into the other dog's face, drew back his lips from
+all those shining wicked teeth, and uttered a muffled hiss.
+
+Well, it was magnificently done, and it certainly looked as if the
+Leader was going to have a troubled evening. But he didn't seem to
+think so. He "fixed" the Red Dog as one knowing the power of the
+master's eye to quell. Red's reply, unimaginably bold, was, as the Boy
+described it to the Colonel, "to give the other fella the curse." The
+Boy was proud of Red's pluck--already looking upon him as his own--but
+he jumped up from his ingratiating attitude, still grasping the dried
+fish. It would be a shame if that Leader got chewed up! And there was
+Red, every tooth bared, gasping for gore, and with each passing second
+seeming to throw a deeper damnation into his threat, and to brace
+himself more firmly for the hurling of the final doom.
+
+At that instant, the stranger breathing quick and hard, the elder
+children leaning forward, some of the younger drawing back in
+terror--if you'll believe it, the Leader blinked in a bored way, and
+sat down on the snow. A question only of last moments now, poor brute!
+and the bystanders held their breath. But no! Red, to be sure, broke
+into the most awful demonstrations, and nearly burst himself with fury;
+but he backed away, as though the spectacle offered by the Leader were
+too disgusting for a decent dog to look at. He went behind the shack
+and told the Spotty One. In no time they were back, approaching the Boy
+and the fish discreetly from behind. Such mean tactics roused the
+Leader's ire. He got up and flew at them. They made it hot for him, but
+still the Leader seemed to be doing pretty well for himself, when the
+old Ingalik (whom the Boy had sent a child to summon) hobbled up with a
+raw-hide whip, and laid it on with a practised hand, separating the
+combatants, kicking them impartially all round, and speaking injurious
+words.
+
+"Are your two hurt?" inquired the future owner anxiously.
+
+The old fellow shook his head.
+
+"Fur thick," was the reassuring answer; and once more the Boy realised
+that these canine encounters, though frequently ending in death, often
+look and sound much more awful than they are.
+
+As the Leader feigned to be going home, he made a dash in passing at
+the stranger's fish. It was held tight, and the pirate got off with
+only a fragment. Leader gave one swallow and looked back to see how the
+theft was being taken. That surprising stranger simply stood there
+laughing, and holding out the rest of a fine fat fish! Leader
+considered a moment, looked the alien up and down, came back, all on
+guard for sudden rushes, sly kicks, and thwackings, to pay him out. But
+nothing of the kind. The Nigger dog said as plain as speech could make
+it:
+
+"You cheechalko person, you look as if you're actually offering me that
+fish in good faith. But I'd be a fool to think so."
+
+The stranger spoke low and quietly.
+
+They talked for some time.
+
+The owner of the two had shuffled off home again, with Spotty and Red
+at his heels.
+
+The Leader came quite near, looking almost docile; but he snapped
+suddenly at the fish with an ugly gleam of eye and fang. The Boy nearly
+made the fatal mistake of jumping, but he controlled the impulse, and
+merely held tight to what was left of the salmon. He stood quite still,
+offering it with fair words. The Leader walked all round him, and
+seemed with difficulty to recover from his surprise. The Boy felt that
+they were just coming to an understanding, when up hurries Peetka,
+suspicious and out of sorts.
+
+_"My dog!"_ he shouted. "No sell white man my dog. Huh! ho--_oh_ no!"
+He kicked the Leader viciously, and drove him home, abusing him all the
+way. The wonder was that the wolfish creature didn't fly at his
+master's throat and finish him.
+
+Certainly the stranger's sympathies were all with the four-legged one
+of the two brutes.
+
+"--something about the Leader--" the Boy said sadly, telling the
+Colonel what had happened. "Well, sir, I'd give a hundred dollars to
+own that dog."
+
+"So would I," was the dry rejoinder, "if I were a millionaire like
+you."
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+After supper, their host, who had been sent out to bring in the owner
+of Red and Spotty, came back saying, "He come. All come. Me tell--you
+from below Holy Cross!" He laughed and shook his head in a
+well-pantomimed incredulity, representing popular opinion outside. Some
+of the bucks, he added, who had not gone far, had got back with small
+game.
+
+"And dogs?"
+
+"No. Dogs in the mountains. Hunt moose--caribou."
+
+The old Ingalik came in, followed by others. "Some" of the bucks? There
+seemed no end to the throng.
+
+Opposite the white men the Indians sat in a semicircle, with the sole
+intent, you might think, of staring all night at the strangers. Yet
+they had brought in Arctic hares and grouse, and even a haunch of
+venison. But they laid these things on the floor beside them, and sat
+with grave unbroken silence till the strangers should declare
+themselves. They had also brought, or permitted to follow, not only
+their wives and daughters, but their children, big and little.
+
+Behind the semicircle of men, three or four deep, were ranged the ranks
+of youth--boys and girls from six to fourteen--standing as silent as
+their elders, but eager, watchful, carrying king salmon, dried
+deer-meat, boot-soles, thongs for snow-shoes, rabbits, grouse. A little
+fellow of ten or eleven had brought in the Red Dog, and was trying to
+reconcile him to his close quarters. The owner of Red and Spotty sat
+with empty hands at the semicircle's farthest end. But he was the
+capitalist of the village, and held himself worthily, yet not quite
+with the high and mighty unconcern of the owner of the Leader.
+
+Peetka came in late, bringing in the Nigger dog against the Nigger
+dog's will, just to tantalise the white men with the sight of something
+they couldn't buy from the poor Indian. Everybody made way for Peetka
+and his dog, except the other dog. Several people had to go to the
+assistance of the little boy to help him to hold Red.
+
+"Just as well, perhaps," said the Colonel, "that we aren't likely to
+get all three."
+
+"Oh, if they worked together they'd be all right," answered the Boy.
+"I've noticed that before." But the Leader, meanwhile, was flatly
+refusing to stay in the same room with Red. He howled and snapped and
+raged. So poor Red was turned out, and the little boy mourned loudly.
+
+Behind the children, a row of squaws against the wall, with and without
+babies strapped at their backs. Occasionally a young girl would push
+aside those in front of her, craning and staring to take in the
+astonishing spectacle of the two white men who had come so far without
+dogs--pulling a hand-sled a greater distance than any Indian had ever
+done--if they could be believed!
+
+Anyhow, these men with their sack of tea and magnificent bundle of
+matches, above all with their tobacco--they could buy out the
+town--everything except Peetka's dog.
+
+The Colonel and the Boy opened the ball by renewing their joint offer
+of eighty dollars for Red and Spotty. Although this had been the old
+Ingalik's own price, it was discussed fully an hour by all present
+before the matter could be considered finally settled, even then the
+Colonel knew it was safest not to pay till just upon leaving. But he
+made a little present of tobacco in token of satisfactory arrangement.
+The old man's hands trembled excitedly as he pulled out his pipe and
+filled it. The bucks round him, and even a couple of the women at the
+back, begged him for some. He seemed to say, "Do your own deal; the
+strangers have plenty more."
+
+By-and-by, in spite of the limited English of the community, certain
+facts stood out: that Peetka held the white man in avowed detestation,
+that he was the leading spirit of the place, that they had all been
+suffering from a tobacco famine, and that much might be done by a
+judicious use of Black Jack and Long Green. The Colonel set forth the
+magnificent generosity of which he would be capable, could he secure a
+good Leader. But Peetka, although he looked at his empty pipe with
+bitterness, shook his head.
+
+Everybody in the village would profit, the Colonel went on; everybody
+should have a present if--
+
+Peetka interrupted with a snarl, and flung out low words of
+contemptuous refusal.
+
+The Leader waked from a brief nap cramped and uneasy, and began to howl
+in sympathy. His master stood up, the better to deliver a brutal kick.
+This seemed to help the Leader to put up with cramp and confinement,
+just as one great discomfort will help his betters to forget several
+little ones. But the Boy had risen with angry eyes. Very well, he said
+impulsively; if he and his pardner couldn't get a third dog (two were
+very little good) they would not stock fresh meat here. In vain the
+Colonel whispered admonition. No, sir, they would wait till they got to
+the next village.
+
+"Belly far," said a young hunter, placing ostentatiously in front his
+brace of grouse.
+
+"We're used to going belly far. Take all your game away, and go home."
+
+A sorrowful silence fell upon the room. They sat for some time like
+that, no one so much as moving, till a voice said, "We want tobacco,"
+and a general murmur of assent arose. Peetka roused himself, pulled out
+of his shirt a concave stone and a little woody-looking knot. The Boy
+leaned forward to see what it was. A piece of dried fungus--the kind
+you sometimes see on the birches up here. Peetka was hammering a
+fragment of it into powder, with his heavy clasp-knife, on the concave
+stone. He swept the particles into his pipe and applied to one of the
+fish-selling women for a match, lit up, and lounged back against the
+Leader, smiling disagreeably at the strangers. A little laugh at their
+expense went round the room. Oh, it wasn't easy to get ahead of Peetka!
+But even if he chose to pretend that he didn't want cheechalko tobacco,
+it was very serious--it was desperate--to see all that Black Jack going
+on to the next village. Several of the hitherto silent bucks
+remonstrated with Peetka--even one of the women dared raise her voice.
+She had not been able to go for fish: where was _her_ tobacco and tea?
+
+Peetka burst into voluble defence of his position. Casting occasional
+looks of disdain upon the strangers, he addressed most of his remarks
+to the owner of Red and Spotty. Although the Colonel could not
+understand a word, he saw the moment approaching when that person would
+go back on his bargain. With uncommon pleasure he could have throttled
+Peetka.
+
+The Boy, to create a diversion, had begun talking to a young hunter in
+the front row about "the Long Trail," and, seeing that several others
+craned and listened, he spoke louder, more slowly, dropping out all
+unnecessary or unusual words. Very soon he had gained an audience and
+Peetka had lost one. As the stranger went on describing their
+experiences the whole room listened with an attentiveness that would
+have been flattering had it been less strongly dashed with unbelief.
+From beyond Anvik they had come? Like that--with no dogs? What! From
+below Koserefsky? Not really? Peetka grunted and shook his head. Did
+they think the Ingaliks were children? Without dogs that journey was
+impossible. Low whispers and gruff exclamations filled the room. White
+men were great liars. They pretended that in their country the bacon
+had legs, and could run about, and one had been heard to say he had
+travelled in a thing like a steamboat, only it could go without water
+under it--ran over the dry land on strips of iron--ran quicker than any
+steamer! Oh, they were awful liars. But these two, who pretended they'd
+dragged a sled all the way from Holy Cross, they were the biggest liars
+of all. Just let them tell that yarn to Unookuk. They all laughed at
+this, and the name ran round the room.
+
+"Who is Unookuk?"
+
+"Him guide."
+
+"Him know."
+
+"Where is him?" asked the Boy.
+
+"Him sick."
+
+But there was whispering and consultation. This was evidently a case
+for the expert. Two boys ran out, and the native talk went on,
+unintelligible save for the fact that it centred round Unookuk. In a
+few minutes the boys came back with a tall, fine-looking native, about
+sixty years old, walking lame, and leaning on a stick. The semicircle
+opened to admit him. He limped over to the strangers, and stood looking
+at them gravely, modestly, but with careful scrutiny.
+
+The Boy held out his hand.
+
+"How do you do?"
+
+"How do you do?" echoed the new-comer, and he also shook hands with the
+Colonel before he sat down.
+
+"Are you Unookuk?"
+
+"Yes. How far you come?"
+
+Peetka said something rude, before the strangers had time to answer,
+and all the room went into titters. But Unookuk listened with dignity
+while the Colonel repeated briefly the story already told. Plainly it
+stumped Unookuk.
+
+"Come from Anvik?" he repeated.
+
+"Yes; stayed with Mr. Benham."
+
+"Oh, Benham!" The trader's familiar name ran round the room with
+obvious effect. "It is good to have A. C. Agent for friend," said
+Unookuk guardedly. "Everybody know Benham."
+
+"He is not A. C. Agent much longer," volunteered the Boy.
+
+"That so?"
+
+"No; he will go 'on his own' after the new agent gets in this spring."
+
+"It is true," answered Unookuk gravely, for the first time a little
+impressed, for this news was not yet common property. Still, they could
+have heard it from some passer with a dog-team. The Boy spoke of Holy
+Cross, and Unookuk's grave unbelief was painted on every feature.
+
+"It was good you get to Holy Cross before the big storm," he said, with
+a faint smile of tolerance for the white man's tall story. But Peetka
+laughed aloud.
+
+"What good English you speak!" said the Boy, determined to make friends
+with the most intelligent-appearing native he had seen.
+
+"Me; I am Kurilla!" said Unookuk, with a quiet magnificence. Then,
+seeing no electric recognition of the name, he added: "You savvy
+Kurilla!"
+
+The Colonel with much regret admitted that he did not.
+
+"But I am Dall's guide--Kurilla."
+
+"Oh, Dall's guide, are you," said the Boy, without a glimmer of who
+Dall was, or for what, or to what, he was "guided." "Well, Kurilla,
+we're pleased and proud to meet you," adding with some presence of
+mind, "And how's Dall?"
+
+"It is long I have not hear. We both old now. I hurt my knee on the ice
+when I come down from Nulato for caribou."
+
+"Why do you have two names?"
+
+"Unookuk, Nulato name. My father big Nulato Shaman. Him killed, mother
+killed, everybody killed in Koyukuk massacre. They forget kill me. Me
+kid. Russians find Unookuk in big wood. Russians give food. I stay with
+Russians--them call Unookuk 'Kurilla.' Dall call Unookuk 'Kurilla.'"
+
+"Dall--Dall," said the Colonel to the Boy; "was that the name of the
+explorer fella--"
+
+Fortunately the Boy was saved from need to answer.
+
+"First white man go down Yukon to the sea," said Kurilla with pride.
+"Me Dall's guide."
+
+"Oh, wrote a book, didn't he? Name's familiar somehow," said the
+Colonel.
+
+Kurilla bore him out.
+
+"Mr. Dall great man. Thirty year he first come up here with Survey
+people. Make big overland tel-ee-grab."
+
+"Of course. I've heard about that." The Colonel turned to the Boy. "It
+was just before the Russians sold out. And when a lot of exploring and
+surveying and pole-planting was done here and in Siberia, the Atlantic
+cable was laid and knocked the overland scheme sky-high."
+
+Kurilla gravely verified these facts.
+
+"And me, Dall's chief guide. Me with Dall when he make portage from
+Unalaklik to Kaltag. He see the Yukon first time. He run down to be
+first on the ice. Dall and the coast natives stare, like so"--Kurilla
+made a wild-eyed, ludicrous face--"and they say: 'It is not a river--it
+is another sea!'"
+
+"No wonder. I hear it's ten miles wide up by the flats, and even a
+little below where we wintered, at Ikogimeut, it's four miles across
+from bank to bank."
+
+Kurilla looked at the Colonel with dignified reproach. Why did he go on
+lying about his journey like that to an expert?
+
+"Even at Holy Cross--" the Boy began, but Kurilla struck in:
+
+"When you there?"
+
+"Oh, about three weeks ago."
+
+Peetka made remarks in Ingalik.
+
+"Father MacManus, him all right?" asked Kurilla, politely cloaking his
+cross-examination.
+
+"MacManus? Do you mean Wills, or the Superior, Father Brachet?"
+
+"Oh yes! MacManus at Tanana." He spoke as though inadvertently he had
+confused the names. As the strangers gave him the winter's news from
+Holy Cross, his wonder and astonishment grew.
+
+Presently, "Do you know my friend Nicholas of Pymeut?" asked the Boy.
+
+Kurilla took his empty pipe out of his mouth and smiled in broad
+surprise. "Nicholas!" repeated several others. It was plain the Pymeut
+pilot enjoyed a wide repute.
+
+The Boy spoke of the famine and Ol' Chief's illness.
+
+"It is true," said Unookuk gravely, and turning, he added something in
+Ingalik to the company. Peetka answered back as surly as ever. But the
+Boy went on, telling how the Shaman had cured Ol' Chief, and that
+turned out to be a surprisingly popular story. Peetka wouldn't
+interrupt it, even to curse the Leader for getting up and stretching
+himself. When the dog--feeling that for some reason discipline was
+relaxed--dared to leave his cramped quarters, and come out into the
+little open space between the white men and the close-packed assembly,
+the Boy forced himself to go straight on with his story as if he had
+not observed the liberty the Leader was taking. When, after standing
+there an instant, the dog came over and threw himself down at the
+stranger's feet as if publicly adopting him, the white story-teller
+dared not meet Peetka's eye. He was privately most uneasy at the Nigger
+dog's tactless move, and he hurried on about how Brother Paul caught
+the Shaman, and about the Penitential Journey--told how, long before
+that, early in the Fall, Nicholas had got lost, making the portage from
+St. Michael's, and how the white camp had saved him from starvation;
+how in turn the Pymeuts had pulled the speaker out of a blow-hole; what
+tremendous friends the Pymeuts were with these particular, very good
+sort of white men. Here he seemed to allow by implication for Peetka's
+prejudice--there were two kinds of pale-face strangers--and on an
+impulse he drew out Muckluck's medal. He would have them to know, so
+highly were these present specimens of the doubtful race regarded by
+the Pymeuts--such friends were they, that Nicholas' sister had given
+him this for an offering to Yukon Inua, that the Great Spirit might
+help them on their way. He owned himself wrong to have delayed this
+sacrifice. He must to-morrow throw it into the first blow-hole he came
+to--unless indeed... his eye caught Kurilla's. With the help of his
+stick the old Guide pulled his big body up on his one stout leg,
+hobbled nearer and gravely eyed Muckluck's offering as it swung to and
+fro on its walrus-string over the Leader's head. The Boy, quite
+conscious of some subtle change in the hitherto immobile face of the
+Indian, laid the token in his hand. Standing there in the centre of the
+semicircle between the assembly and the dog, Kurilla turned the Great
+Katharine's medal over, examining it closely, every eye in the room
+upon him.
+
+When he lifted his head there was a rustle of expectation and a craning
+forward.
+
+"It is the same." Kurilla spoke slowly like one half in a dream. "When
+I go down river, thirty winter back, with the Great Dall, he try buy
+this off Nicholas's mother. She wear it on string red Russian beads.
+Oh, it is a thing to remember!" He nodded his grey head significantly,
+but he went on with the bare evidence: "When _John J. Healy_ make last
+trip down this fall--Nicholas pilot you savvy--they let him take his
+sister, Holy Cross to Pymeut. I see she wear this round neck."
+
+The weight of the medal carried the raw-hide necklace slipping through
+his fingers. Slowly now, with even impulse, the silver disc swung
+right, swung left, like the pendulum of a clock. Even the Nigger dog
+seemed hypnotised, following the dim shine of the tarnished token.
+
+"I say Nicholas's sister: 'It is thirty winters I see that silver
+picture first; I give you two dolla for him.' She say 'No.' I say, 'Gi'
+fi' dolla.' 'No.' I sit and think far back--thirty winters back. 'I gi'
+ten dolla,' I say. She say, 'I no sell; no--not for a hunner'--but she
+_give_ it him! for to make Yukon Inua to let him go safe. Hein? Savvy?"
+And lapsing into Ingalik, he endorsed this credential not to be denied.
+
+"It is true," he wound up in English. The "Autocratrix Russorum" was
+solemnly handed back. "You have make a brave journey. It is I who
+unnerstan'--I, too, when I am young, I go with Dall on the Long Trail.
+_We had dogs._" All the while, from all about the Leader's owner, and
+out of every corner of the crowded room, had come a spirited
+punctuation of Kurilla's speech--nods and grunts. "Yes, perhaps _these_
+white men deserved dogs--even Peetka's!"
+
+Kurilla limped back to his place, but turned to the Ingaliks before he
+sat down, and bending painfully over his stick, "Not Kurilla," he said,
+as though speaking of one absent--"not _Dall_ make so great journey, no
+dogs. Kurilla? Best guide in Yukon forty year. Kurilla say: 'Must have
+dogs--men like that!'" He limped back again and solemnly offered his
+hand to each of the travellers in turn. "Shake!" says he. Then, as
+though fascinated by the silver picture, he dropped down by the Boy,
+staring absently at the Great Katharine's effigy. The general murmur
+was arrested by a movement from Peetka--he took his pipe out of his
+mouth and says he, handsomely:
+
+"No liars. Sell dog," adding, with regretful eye on the apostate
+Leader, "Him bully dog!"
+
+And that was how the tobacco famine ended, and how the white men got
+their team.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE ESQUIMAUX HORSE
+
+  "Plus je connais les hommes, plus j'aime les chiens."
+
+
+It doesn't look hard to drive a dog-team, but just you try it. In
+moments of passion, the first few days after their acquisition, the
+Colonel and the Boy wondered why they had complicated a sufficiently
+difficult journey by adding to other cares a load of fish and three
+fiends.
+
+"Think how well they went for Peetka."
+
+"Oh yes; part o' their cussedness. They know we're green hands, and
+they mean to make it lively."
+
+Well, they did. They sat on their haunches in the snow, and grinned at
+the whip-crackings and futile "Mush, mush!" of the Colonel. They
+snapped at the Boy and made sharp turns, tying him up in the traces and
+tumbling him into the snow. They howled all night long, except during a
+blessed interval of quiet while they ate their seal-skin harness. But
+man is the wiliest of the animals, and the one who profits by
+experience. In the end, the Boy became a capital driver; the dogs came
+to know he "meant business," and settled into submission. "Nig," as he
+called the bully dog for short, turned out "the best leader in the
+Yukon."
+
+They were much nearer Kaltag than they had realised, arriving after
+only two hours' struggle with the dogs at the big Indian village on the
+left bank of the river. But their first appearance here was clouded by
+Nig's proposal to slay all the dogs in sight. He was no sooner
+unharnessed than he undertook the congenial job. It looked for a few
+minutes as if Peetka's bully dog would chew up the entire canine
+population, and then lie down and die of his own wounds. But the
+Kaltags understood the genus Siwash better than the white man, and took
+the tumult calmly.
+
+It turned out that Nig was not so much bloodthirsty as
+"bloody-proud"--one of those high souls for ever concerned about
+supremacy. His first social act, on catching sight of his fellow, was
+to howl defiance at him. And even after they have fought it out and
+come to some sort of understanding, the first happy thought of your
+born Leader on awakening is to proclaim himself boss of the camp.
+
+No sooner has he published this conviction of high calling than he is
+set upon by the others, punishes them soundly, or is himself vanquished
+and driven off. Whereupon he sits on his haunches in the snow, and,
+with his pointed nose turned skyward, howls uninterruptedly for an hour
+or two, when all is forgiven and forgotten--till the next time.
+
+Order being restored, the travellers got new harness for the dogs, new
+boots for themselves, and set out for the white trading post, thirty
+miles above.
+
+Here, having at last come into the region of settlements, they agreed
+never again to overtax the dogs. They "travelled light" out of Nulato
+towards the Koyukuk.
+
+The dogs simply flew over those last miles. It was glorious going on a
+trail like glass.
+
+They had broken the back of the journey now, and could well afford,
+they thought, to halt an hour or two on the island at the junction of
+the two great rivers, stake out a trading post, and treat themselves to
+town lots. Why town lots, in Heaven's name! when they were bound for
+Minook, and after that the Klondyke, hundreds of miles away? Well,
+partly out of mere gaiety of heart, and partly, the Colonel would have
+told you gravely, that in this country you never know when you have a
+good thing. They had left the one white layman at Nulato seething with
+excitement over an Indian's report of still another rich strike up
+yonder on the Koyukuk, and this point, where they were solemnly staking
+out a new post, the Nulato Agent had said, was "dead sure to be a great
+centre." That almost unknown region bordering the great tributary of
+the Yukon, haunt of the fiercest of all the Indians of the North, was
+to be finally conquered by the white man. It had been left practically
+unexplored ever since the days when the bloodthirsty Koyukons came down
+out of their fastnesses and perpetrated the great Nulato massacre,
+doing to death with ghastly barbarity every man, woman, and child at
+the post, Russian or Indian, except Kurilla, not sparing the unlucky
+Captain Barnard or his English escort, newly arrived here in their
+search for the lost Sir John Franklin. But the tables were turned now,
+and the white man was on the trail of the Indian.
+
+While the Colonel and the Boy were staking out this future stronghold
+of trade and civilisation it came on to snow; but "Can't last this time
+o' year," the Colonel consoled himself, and thanked God "the big,
+unending snows are over for this season."
+
+So they pushed on. But the Colonel seemed to have thanked God
+prematurely. Down the snow drifted, soft, sticky, unending. The evening
+was cloudy, and the snow increased the dimness overhead as well as the
+heaviness under foot. They never knew just where it was in the hours
+between dusk and dark that they lost the trail. The Boy believed it was
+at a certain steep incline that Nig did his best to rush down.
+
+"I thought he was at his tricks," said the Boy ruefully some hours
+after. "I believe I'm an ass, and Nig is a gentleman and a scholar. He
+knew perfectly what he was about."
+
+"Reckon we'll camp, pardner."
+
+"Reckon we might as well."
+
+After unharnessing the dogs, the Boy stood an instant looking enviously
+at them as he thawed out his stiff hands under his parki. Exhausted and
+smoking hot, the dogs had curled down in the snow as contented-looking
+as though on a hearth-rug before a fire, sheltering their sharp noses
+with their tails.
+
+"Wish I had a tail to shelter my face," said the Boy, as if a tail were
+the one thing lacking to complete his bliss.
+
+"You don't need any shelter _now_," answered the Colonel.
+
+"Your face is gettin' well--" And he stopped suddenly, carried back to
+those black days when he had vainly urged a face-guard. He unpacked
+their few possessions, and watched the Boy take the axe and go off for
+wood, stopping on his way, tired as he was, to pull Nig's pointed ears.
+The odd thing about the Boy was that it was only with these Indian
+curs--Nig in particular, who wasn't the Boy's dog at all--only with
+these brute-beasts had he seemed to recover something of that buoyancy
+and ridiculous youngness that had first drawn the Colonel to him on the
+voyage up from 'Frisco. It was also clear that if the Boy now drew away
+from his pardner ever so little, by so much did he draw nearer to the
+dogs.
+
+He might be too tired to answer the Colonel; he was seldom too tired to
+talk nonsense to Nig, never too tired to say, "Well, old boy," or even
+"Well, _pardner_," to the dumb brute. It was, perhaps, this that the
+Colonel disliked most of all.
+
+Whether the U.S. Agent at Nulato was justified or not in saying all the
+region hereabouts was populous in the summer with Indian camps, the
+native winter settlements, the half-buried ighloo, or the rude log-hut,
+where, for a little tea, tobacco, or sugar, you could get as much fish
+as you could carry, these welcome, if malodorous, places seemed, since
+they lost the trail, to have vanished off the face of the earth. No
+question of the men sharing the dogs' fish, but of the dogs sharing the
+men's bacon and meal. That night the meagre supper was more meagre
+still that the "horses" might have something, too. The next afternoon
+it stopped snowing and cleared, intensely cold, and that was the
+evening the Boy nearly cried for joy when, lifting up his eyes, he saw,
+a good way off, perched on the river bank, the huts and high caches of
+an Indian village etched black against a wintry sunset--a fine picture
+in any eye, but meaning more than beauty to the driver of hungry dogs.
+
+"Fish, Nig!" called out the Boy to his Leader. "You hear me, you Nig?
+_Fish_, old fellow! Now, look at that, Colonel! you tell me that Indian
+dog doesn't understand English. I tell you what: we had a mean time
+with these dogs just at first, but that was only because we didn't
+understand one another."
+
+The Colonel preserved a reticent air.
+
+"You'll come to my way of thinking yet. The Indian dog--he's a daisy."
+
+"Glad you think so." The Colonel, with some display of temper, had
+given up trying to drive the team only half an hour before, and was
+still rather sore about it.
+
+"When you get to _understand_ him," persisted the Boy, "he's the most
+marvellous little horse ever hitched in harness. He pulls, pulls, pulls
+all day long in any kind o' weather--"
+
+"Yes, pulls you off your legs or pulls you the way you don't want to
+go."
+
+"Oh, that's when you rile him! He's just like any other American
+gentleman: he's got his feelin's. Ain't you got feelin's, Nig? Huh!
+rather. I tell you what, Colonel, many a time when I'm pretty well beat
+and ready to snap at anybody, I've looked at Nig peggin' away like a
+little man, on a rotten trail, with a blizzard in his eyes, and it's
+just made me sick after that to hear myself grumblin'. Yes, sir, the
+Indian dog is an example to any white man on the trail." The Boy seemed
+not to relinquish the hope of stirring the tired Colonel to enthusiasm.
+"Don't you like the way, after the worst sort of day, when you stop, he
+just drops down in the snow and rolls about a little to rest his
+muscles, and then lies there as patient as anything till you are ready
+to unharness him and feed him?"
+
+"--and if you don't hurry up, he saves you the trouble of unharnessing
+by eating the traces and things."
+
+"Humph! So would you if that village weren't in sight, if you were sure
+the harness wouldn't stick in your gizzard. And think of what a dog
+gets to reward him for his plucky day: one dried salmon or a little
+meal-soup when he's off on a holiday like this. Works without a let-up,
+and keeps in good flesh on one fish a day. Doesn't even get anything to
+drink; eats a little snow after dinner, digs his bed, and sleeps in a
+drift till morning."
+
+"When he doesn't howl all night."
+
+"Oh, that's when he meets his friends, and they talk about old times
+before they came down in the world."
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"Yes; when they were wolves and made us run instead of our making them.
+Make any fellow howl. Instead of carrying our food about we used to
+carry theirs, and run hard to keep from giving it up, too."
+
+"Nig's at it again," said the Colonel. "Give us your whip."
+
+"No," said the Boy; "I begin to see now why he stops and goes for Red
+like that. Hah! Spot's gettin it, too, this time. They haven't been
+pullin' properly. You just notice: if they aren't doin' their share
+Nig'll turn to every time and give 'em 'Hail, Columbia!' You'll see,
+when he's freshened 'em up a bit we'll have 'em on a dead run." The Boy
+laughed and cracked his whip.
+
+"They've got keen noses. _I_ don't smell the village this time. Come
+on, Nig, Spot's had enough; he's sorry, good and plenty. Cheer up,
+Spot! Fish, old man! You hear me talkin' to you, Red? _Fish!_ Caches
+full of it. Whoop!" and down they rushed, pell-mell, men and dogs
+tearing along like mad across the frozen river, and never slowing till
+it came to the stiff pull up the opposite bank.
+
+"Funny I don't hear any dogs," panted the Boy.
+
+They came out upon a place silent as the dead--a big deserted village,
+emptied by the plague, or, maybe, only by the winter; caches emptied,
+too; not a salmon, not a pike, not a lusk, not even a whitefish left
+behind.
+
+It was a bitter blow. They didn't say anything; it was too bad to talk
+about. The Colonel made the fire, and fried a little bacon and made
+some mush: that was their dinner. The bacon-rinds were boiled in the
+mush-pot with a great deal of snow and a little meal, and the "soup" so
+concocted was set out to cool for the dogs. They were afraid to sleep
+in one of the cabins; it might be plague-infected. The Indians had cut
+all the spruce for a wide radius round about--no boughs to make a bed.
+They hoisted some tent-poles up into one of the empty caches, laid them
+side by side, and on this bed, dry, if hard, they found oblivion.
+
+The next morning a thin, powdery snow was driving about. Had they lost
+their way in the calendar as well as on the trail, and was it December
+instead of the 29th of March? The Colonel sat on the packed sled,
+undoing with stiff fingers the twisted, frozen rope. He knew the axe
+that he used the night before on the little end of bacon was lying,
+pressed into the snow, under one runner. But that was the last thing to
+go on the pack before the lashing, and it wouldn't get lost pinned down
+under the sled. Nig caught sight of it, and came over with a cheerful
+air of interest, sniffed bacon on the steel, and it occurred to him it
+would be a good plan to lick it.
+
+A bitter howling broke the stillness. The Boy came tearing up with a
+look that lifted the Colonel off the sled, and there was Nig trying to
+get away from the axe-head, his tongue frozen fast to the steel, and
+pulled horribly long out of his mouth like a little pink rope. The Boy
+had fallen upon the agonized beast, and forced him down close to the
+steel. Holding him there between his knees, he pulled off his outer
+mits and with hands and breath warmed the surface of the axe, speaking
+now and then to the dog, who howled wretchedly, but seemed to
+understand something was being done for him, since he gave up
+struggling. When at last the Boy got him free, the little horse pressed
+against his friend's legs with a strange new shuddering noise very
+pitiful to hear.
+
+The Boy, blinking hard, said: "Yes, old man, I know, that was a mean
+breakfast; and he patted the shaggy chest. Nig bent his proud head and
+licked the rescuing hand with his bleeding tongue.
+
+"An' you say that dog hasn't got feelin's!"
+
+They hitched the team and pushed on. In the absence of a trail, the
+best they could do was to keep to the river ice. By-and-bye:
+
+"Can you see the river bank?"
+
+"I'm not sure," said the Boy.
+
+"I thought you were going it blind."
+
+"I believe I'd better let Nig have his head," said the Boy, stopping;
+"he's the dandy trail-finder. Nig, old man, I takes off my hat to you!"
+
+They pushed ahead till the half-famished dogs gave out. They camped
+under the lee of the propped sled, and slept the sleep of exhaustion.
+
+The next morning dawned clear and warm. The Colonel managed to get a
+little wood and started a fire. There were a few spoonfuls of meal in
+the bottom of the bag and a little end of bacon, mostly rind. The sort
+of soup the dogs had had yesterday was good enough for men to-day. The
+hot and watery brew gave them strength enough to strike camp and move
+on. The elder man began to say to himself that he would sell his life
+dearly. He looked at the dogs a good deal, and then would look at the
+Boy, but he could never catch his eye. At last: "They say, you know,
+that men in our fix have sometimes had to sacrifice a dog."
+
+"Ugh!" The Boy's face expressed nausea at the thought.
+
+"Yes, it is pretty revolting."
+
+"We could never do it."
+
+"N-no," said the Colonel.
+
+The three little Esquimaux horses were not only very hungry, their feet
+were in a bad condition, and were bleeding. The Boy had shut his eyes
+at first at the sight of their red tracks in the snow. He hardly
+noticed them now.
+
+An hour or so later: "Better men than we," says the Colonel
+significantly, "have had to put their feelings in their pockets." As if
+he found the observation distinctly discouraging, Nig at this moment
+sat down in the melting snow, and no amount of "mushing" moved him.
+
+"Let's give him half an hour's rest, Colonel. Valuable beast, you
+know--altogether best team on the river," said the Boy, as if to show
+that his suggestion was not inspired by mere pity for the bleeding
+dogs. "And you look rather faded yourself, Colonel. Sit down and rest."
+
+Nothing more was said for a full half-hour, till the Colonel, taking
+off his fur hat, and wiping his beaded forehead on the back of his
+hand, remarked: "Think of the Siege of Paris."
+
+"Eh? What?" The Boy stared as if afraid his partner's brain had given
+way.
+
+"When the horses gave out they had to eat dogs, cats, rats even. Think
+of it--rats!"
+
+"The French are a dirty lot. Let's mush, Colonel. I'm as fit as a
+fiddle." The Boy got up and called the dogs. In ten minutes they were
+following the blind trail again. But the sled kept clogging, sticking
+fast and breaking down. After a desperate bout of ineffectual pulling,
+the dogs with one mind stopped again, and lay down in their bloody
+tracks.
+
+The men stood silent for a moment; then the Colonel remarked:
+
+"Red is the least valuable"--a long pause--"but Nig's feet are in the
+worst condition. That dog won't travel a mile further. Well," added the
+Colonel after a bit, as the Boy stood speechless studying the team,
+"what do you say?"
+
+"Me?" He looked up like a man who has been dreaming and is just awake.
+"Oh, I should say our friend Nig here has had to stand more than his
+share of the racket."
+
+"Poor old Nig!" said the Colonel, with a somewhat guilty air. "Look
+here: what do you say to seeing whether they can go if we help 'em with
+that load?"
+
+"Good for you, Colonel!" said the Boy, with confidence wonderfully
+restored. "I was just thinking the same."
+
+They unlashed the pack, and the Colonel wanted to make two bundles of
+the bedding and things; but whether the Boy really thought the Colonel
+was giving out, or whether down in some corner of his mind he
+recognised the fact that if the Colonel were not galled by this extra
+burden he might feel his hunger less, and so be less prone to thoughts
+of poor Nig in the pot--however it was, he said the bundle was his
+business for the first hour. So the Colonel did the driving, and the
+Boy tramped on ahead, breaking trail with thirty-five pounds on his
+back. And he didn't give it up, either, though he admitted long after
+it was the toughest time he had ever put in in all his life.
+
+"Haven't you had about enough of this?" the Colonel sang out at dusk.
+
+"Pretty nearly," said the Boy in a rather weak voice. He flung off the
+pack, and sat on it.
+
+"Get up," says the Colonel; "give us the sleepin'-bag." When it was
+undone, the Norfolk jacket dropped out. He rolled it up against the
+sled, flung himself down, and heavily dropped his head on the rough
+pillow. But he sprang up.
+
+"What? Yes. By the Lord!" He thrust his hand into the capacious pocket
+of the jacket, and pulled out some broken ship's biscuit. "Hard tack,
+by the living Jingo!" He was up, had a few sticks alight, and the
+kettle on, and was melting snow to pour on the broken biscuit. "It
+swells, you know, like thunder!"
+
+The Boy was still sitting on the bundle of "trade" tea and tobacco. He
+seemed not to hear; he seemed not to see the Colonel, shakily hovering
+about the fire, pushing aside the green wood and adding a few sticks of
+dry.
+
+There was a mist before the Colonel's eyes. Reaching after a bit of
+seasoned spruce, he stumbled, and unconsciously set his foot on Nig's
+bleeding paw. The dog let out a yell and flew at him. The Colonel fell
+back with an oath, picked up a stick, and laid it on. The Boy was on
+his feet in a flash.
+
+"Here! stop that!" He jumped in between the infuriated man and the
+infuriated dog.
+
+"Stand back!" roared the Colonel.
+
+"It was your fault; you trod--"
+
+"Stand back, damn you! or you'll get hurt."
+
+The stick would have fallen on the Boy; he dodged it, calling
+excitedly, "Come here, Nig! Here!"
+
+"He's my dog, and I'll lamm him if I like. You--" The Colonel couldn't
+see just where the Boy and the culprit were. Stumbling a few paces away
+from the glare of the fire, he called out, "I'll kill that brute if he
+snaps at me again!"
+
+"Oh yes," the Boy's voice rang passionately out of the gloom, "I know
+you want him killed."
+
+The Colonel sat down heavily on the rolled-up bag. Presently the
+bubbling of boiling snow-water roused him. He got up, divided the
+biscuit, and poured the hot water over the fragments. Then he sat down
+again, and waited for them to "swell like thunder." He couldn't see
+where, a little way up the hillside, the Boy sat on a fallen tree with
+Nig's head under his arm. The Boy felt pretty low in his mind. He sat
+crouched together, with his head sunk almost to his knees. It was a
+lonely kind of a world after all. Doing your level best didn't seem to
+get you any forrader. What was the use? He started. Something warm,
+caressing, touched his cold face just under one eye. Nig's tongue.
+
+"Good old Nig! You feel lonesome, too?" He gathered the rough beast up
+closer to him.
+
+Just then the Colonel called, "Nig!"
+
+"Sh! sh! Lie quiet!" whispered the Boy.
+
+"Nig! Nig!"
+
+"Good old boy! Stay here! He doesn't mean well by you. _Sh!_ quiet!
+_Quiet_, I say!"
+
+"Nig!" and the treacherous Colonel gave the peculiar whistle both men
+used to call the dogs to supper. The dog struggled to get away, the
+Boy's stiff fingers lost their grip, and "the best leader in the Yukon"
+was running down the bank as hard as he could pelt, to the camp
+fire--to the cooking-pot.
+
+The Boy got up and floundered away in the opposite direction. He must
+get out of hearing. He toiled on, listening for the expected
+gunshot--hearing it, too, and the yawp of a wounded dog, in spite of a
+mitten clapped at each ear.
+
+"That's the kind of world it is! Do your level best, drag other fellas'
+packs hundreds o' miles over the ice with a hungry belly and bloody
+feet, and then--Poor old Nig!--'cause you're lame--poor old Nig!" With
+a tightened throat and hot water in his eyes, he kept on repeating the
+dog's name as he stumbled forward in the snow. "Nev' mind, old boy;
+it's a lonely kind o' world, and the right trail's hard to find."
+Suddenly he stood still. His stumbling feet were on a track. He had
+reached the dip in the saddle-back of the hill, and--yes! this was the
+_right_ trail; for down on the other side below him were faint
+lights--huts--an Indian village! with fish and food for everybody. And
+Nig--Nig was being--
+
+The Boy turned as if a hurricane had struck him, and tore back down the
+incline--stumbling, floundering in the snow, calling hoarsely:
+"Colonel, Colonel! don't do it! There's a village here, Colonel! Nig!
+Colonel, don't do it!"
+
+He dashed into the circle of firelight, and beheld Nig standing with a
+bandaged paw, placidly eating softened biscuit out of the family
+frying-pan.
+
+It was short work getting down to the village. They had one king salmon
+and two white fish from the first Indian they saw, who wanted hootch
+for them, and got only tabak.
+
+In the biggest of the huts, nearly full of men, women, and children,
+coughing, sickly-looking, dejected, the natives made room for the
+strangers. When the white men had supped they handed over the remains
+of their meal (as is expected) to the head of the house. This and a few
+matches or a little tobacco on parting, is all he looks for in return
+for shelter, room for beds on the floor, snow-water laboriously melted,
+use of the fire, and as much wood as they like to burn, even if it is a
+barren place, and fuel is the precious far-travelled "drift."
+
+It is curious to see how soon travellers get past that first cheeckalko
+feeling that it is a little "nervy," as the Boy had said, to walk into
+another man's house uninvited, an absolute stranger, and take
+possession of everything you want without so much as "by your leave."
+You soon learn it is the Siwash[*] custom.
+
+[Footnote: Siwash, corruption of French-Canadian _sauvage_, applied all
+over the North to the natives, their possessions and their customs.]
+
+Nothing would have seemed stranger now, or more inhuman, than the
+civilized point of view.
+
+The Indians trailed out one by one, all except the old buck to whom the
+hut belonged. He hung about for a bit till he was satisfied the
+travellers had no hootch, not even a little for the head of the house,
+and yet they seemed to be fairly decent fellows. Then he rolls up his
+blankets, for there is a premium on sleeping-space, and goes out, with
+never a notion that he is doing more than any man would, anywhere in
+the world, to find a place in some neighbour's hut to pass the night.
+
+He leaves the two strangers, as Indian hospitality ordains, to the
+warmest places in the best hut, with two young squaws, one old one, and
+five children, all sleeping together on the floor, as a matter of
+course.
+
+The Colonel and the Boy had flung themselves down on top of their
+sleeping-bag, fed and warmed and comforted. Only the old squaw was
+still up. She had been looking over the travellers' boots and "mitts,"
+and now, without a word or even a look being exchanged upon the
+subject, she sat there in the corner, by the dim, seal-oil light,
+sewing on new thongs, patching up holes, and making the strange men
+tidy--men she had never seen before and would never see again. And
+this, no tribute to the Colonel's generosity or the youth and friendly
+manners of the Boy. They knew the old squaw would have done just the
+same had the mucklucks and the mitts belonged to "the tramp of the
+Yukon," with nothing to barter and not a cent in his pocket. This,
+again, is a Siwash custom.
+
+The old squaw coughed and wiped her eyes. The children coughed in their
+sleep.
+
+The dogs outside were howling like human beings put to torture. But the
+sound no longer had power to freeze the blood of the trail-men.
+
+The Colonel merely damned them. The Boy lifted his head, and listened
+for Nig's note. The battle raged nearer; a great scampering went by the
+tent.
+
+"Nig!"
+
+A scuffling and snuffing round the bottom of the tent. The Boy, on a
+sudden impulse, reached out and lifted the flap.
+
+"Got your bandage on? Come here."
+
+Nig brisked in with the air of one having very little time to waste.
+
+"Lord! I should think you'd be glad to lie down. _I_ am. Let's see your
+paw. Here, come over to the light." He stepped very carefully over the
+feet of the other inhabitants till he reached the old woman's corner.
+Nig, following calmly, walked on prostrate bodies till he reached his
+friend.
+
+"Now, your paw, pardner. F-ith! Bad, ain't it?" he appealed to the
+toothless squaw. Her best friend could not have said her wizened regard
+was exactly sympathetic, but it was attentive. She seemed intelligent
+as well as kind.
+
+"Look here," whispered the Boy, "let that muckluck string o' mine
+alone." He drew it away, and dropped it between his knees. "Haven't you
+got something or other to make some shoes for Nig? Hein?" He
+pantomimed, but she only stared. "Like this." He pulled out his knife,
+and cut off the end of one leg of his "shaps," and gathered it gently
+round Nig's nearest foot. "Little dog-boots. See? Give you some bully
+tabak if you'll do that for Nig. Hein?"
+
+She nodded at last, and made a queer wheezy sound, whether friendly
+laughing or pure scorn, the Boy wasn't sure. But she set about the
+task.
+
+"Come 'long, Nig," he whispered. "You just see if I don't shoe my
+little horse." And he sneaked back to bed, comfortable in the assurance
+that the Colonel was asleep. Nig came walking after his friend straight
+over people's heads.
+
+One of the children sat up and whimpered. The Colonel growled sleepily.
+
+"You black devil!" admonished the Boy under his breath. "Look what
+you're about. Come here, sir." He pushed the devil down between the
+sleeping-bag and the nearest baby.
+
+The Colonel gave a distinct grunt of disapproval, and then, "Keepin'
+that brute in here?"
+
+"He's a lot cleaner than our two-legged friends," said the Boy sharply,
+as if answering an insult.
+
+"Right," said the Colonel with conviction.
+
+His pardner was instantly mollified. "If you wake another baby, you'll
+get a lickin'," he said genially to the dog; and then he stretched out
+his feet till they reached Nig's back, and a feeling of great comfort
+came over the Boy.
+
+"Say, Colonel," he yawned luxuriously, "did you know
+that--a--to-night--when Nig flared up, did you know you'd trodden on
+his paw?"
+
+"Didn't know it till you told me," growled the Colonel.
+
+"I thought you didn't. Makes a difference, doesn't it?"
+
+"You needn't think," says the Colonel a little defiantly, "that I've
+weakened on the main point just because I choose to give Nig a few
+cracker crumbs. If it's a question between a man's life and a dog's
+life, only a sentimental fool would hesitate."
+
+"I'm not talking about that; we can get fish now. What I'm pointin' out
+is that Nig didn't fly at you for nothin'."
+
+"He's got a devil of a temper, that dog."
+
+"It's just like Nicholas of Pymeut said." The Boy sat up, eager in his
+advocacy and earnest as a judge. "Nicholas of Pymeut said: 'You treat a
+Siwash like a heathen, and he'll show you what a hell of a heathen he
+can be.'"
+
+"Oh, go to sleep."
+
+"I'm goin', Colonel."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+MINOOK
+
+"For whatever... may come to pass, it lies with me to have it serve
+me."--EPICTETUS.
+
+
+The Indians guided them back to the trail. The Colonel and the Boy made
+good speed to Novikakat, laid in supplies at Korkorines, heard the
+first doubtful account of Minook at Tanana, and pushed on. Past camps
+Stoneman and Woodworth, where the great Klondyke Expeditions lay fast
+in the ice; along the white strip of the narrowing river, pent in now
+between mountains black with scant, subarctic timber, or gray with
+fantastic weather-worn rock--on and on, till they reached the bluffs of
+the Lower Ramparts.
+
+Here, at last, between the ranks of the many-gabled heights, Big Minook
+Creek meets Father Yukon. Just below the junction, perched jauntily on
+a long terrace, up above the frozen riverbed, high and dry, and out of
+the coming trouble when river and creek should wake--here was the long,
+log-built mining town, Minook, or Rampart, for the name was still
+undetermined in the spring of 1898.
+
+It was a great moment.
+
+"Shake, pardner," said the Boy. The Colonel and he grasped hands. Only
+towering good spirits prevented their being haughty, for they felt like
+conquerors, and cared not a jot that they looked like gaol-birds.
+
+It was two o'clock in the morning. The Gold Nugget Saloon was flaring
+with light, and a pianola was perforating a tune. The travellers pushed
+open a frosted door, and looked into a long, low, smoke-veiled room,
+hung with many kerosene lamps, and heated by a great red-hot iron
+stove.
+
+"Hello!" said a middle-aged man in mackinaws, smoking near the door-end
+of the bar.
+
+"Hello! Is Blandford Keith here? There are some letters for him."
+
+"Say, boys!" the man in mackinaws shouted above the pianola, "Windy
+Jim's got in with the mail."
+
+The miners lounging at the bar and sitting at the faro-tables looked up
+laughing, and seeing the strangers through the smoke-haze, stopped
+laughing to stare.
+
+"Down from Dawson?" asked the bartender hurrying forward, a magnificent
+creature in a check waistcoat, shirt-sleeves, four-in-hand tie, and a
+diamond pin.
+
+"No, t'other way about. Up from the Lower River."
+
+"Oh! May West or Muckluck crew? Anyhow, I guess you got a thirst on
+you," said the man in the mackinaws. "Come and licker up."
+
+The bartender mixed the drinks in style, shooting the liquor from a
+height into the small gin-sling glasses with the dexterity that had
+made him famous.
+
+When their tired eyes had got accustomed to the mingled smoke and
+glare, the travellers could see that in the space beyond the card
+tables, in those back regions where the pianola reigned, there were
+several couples twirling about--the clumsily-dressed miners pirouetting
+with an astonishing lightness on their moccasined feet. And women!
+White women!
+
+They stopped dancing and came forward to see the new arrivals.
+
+The mackinaw man was congratulating the Colonel on "gettin' back to
+civilization."
+
+"See that plate-glass mirror?" He pointed behind the bar, below the
+moose antlers. "See them ladies? You've got to a place where you can
+rake in the dust all day, and dance all night, and go buckin' the tiger
+between whiles. Great place, Minook. Here's luck!" He took up the last
+of the gin slings set in a row before the party.
+
+"Have you got some property here?" asked the Boy.
+
+The man, without putting down his glass, simply closed one eye over the
+rim.
+
+"We've heard some bad accounts of these diggin's," said the Colonel.
+
+"I ain't sayin' there's millions for _every_body. You've got to get the
+inside track. See that feller talkin' to the girl? Billy Nebrasky
+tipped him the wink in time to git the inside track, just before the
+Fall Stampede up the gulch."
+
+"Which gulch?"
+
+He only motioned with his head. "Through havin' that tip, he got there
+in time to stake number three Below Discovery. He's had to hang up
+drinks all winter, but he's a millionaire all right. He's got a hundred
+thousand dollars _in sight,_ only waitin' for runnin' water to wash it
+out."
+
+"Then there _is_ gold about here?"
+
+"There is gold? Say, Maudie," he remarked in a humourous half-aside to
+the young woman who was passing with No--thumb-Jack, "this fellow wants
+to know if there is gold here."
+
+She laughed. "Guess he ain't been here long."
+
+Now it is not to be denied that this rejoinder was susceptible of more
+than one interpretation, but the mackinaw man seemed satisfied, so much
+so that he offered Maudie the second gin-sling which the Colonel had
+ordered "all round." She eyed the strangers over the glass. On the hand
+that held it a fine diamond sparkled. You would say she was twenty-six,
+but you wouldn't have been sure. She had seemed at least that at a
+distance. Now she looked rather younger. The face wore an impudent
+look, yet it was delicate, too. Her skin showed very white and fine
+under the dabs of rouge. The blueness was not yet faded out of her
+restless eyes.
+
+"Minook's all right. No josh about that," she said, setting down her
+glass. Then to the Boy, "Have a dance?"
+
+"Not much," he replied rather roughly, and turned away to talk about
+the diggin's to two men on the other side.
+
+Maudie laid her hand on the Colonel's arm, and the diamond twitched the
+light. "_You_ will," she said.
+
+"Well, you see, ma'am"--the Colonel's smile was charming in spite of
+his wild beard--"we've done such a lot o' dancin' lately--done nothin'
+else for forty days; and after seven hundred miles of it we're just a
+trifle tired, ma'am."
+
+She laughed good-naturedly.
+
+"Pity you're tired," said the mackinaw man. "There's a pretty good
+thing goin' just now, but it won't be goin' long."
+
+The Boy turned his head round again with reviving interest in his own
+group.
+
+"Look here, Si," Maudie was saying: "if you want to let a lay on your
+new claim to _anybody_, mind it's got to be me."
+
+But the mackinaw man was glancing speculatively over at another group.
+In haste to forestall desertion, the Boy inquired:
+
+"Do you know of anything good that isn't staked yet?"
+
+"Well, mebbe I don't--and mebbe I do." Then, as if to prove that he
+wasn't overanxious to pursue the subject: "Say, Maudie, ain't that
+French Charlie over there?" Maudie put her small nose in the air.
+"Ain't you made it up with Charlie yet?'"
+
+"No, I ain't."
+
+"Then we'll have another drink all round."
+
+While he was untying the drawstring of his gold sack, Maudie said,
+half-aside, but whether to the Colonel or the Boy neither could tell:
+"Might do worse than keep your eye on Si McGinty." She nodded briskly
+at the violet checks on the mackinaw back. "Si's got a cinch up there
+on Glory Hallelujah, and nobody's on to it yet."
+
+The pianola picked out a polka. The man Si McGinty had called French
+Charlie came up behind the girl and said something. She shook her head,
+turned on her heel, and began circling about in the narrow space till
+she found another partner, French Charlie scowling after them, as they
+whirled away between the faro-tables back into the smoke and music at
+the rear. McGinty was watching Jimmie, the man at the gold scales,
+pinch up some of the excess dust in the scale-pan and toss it back into
+the brass blower.
+
+"Where did that gold come from?" asked the Colonel.
+
+"Off a claim o' mine"; and he lapsed into silence.
+
+You are always told these fellows are so anxious to rope in strangers.
+This man didn't seem to be. It made him very interesting. The Boy acted
+strictly on the woman's hint, and kept an eye on the person who had a
+sure thing up on Glory Hallelujah. But when the lucky man next opened
+his mouth it was to say:
+
+"Why, there's Butts down from Circle City."
+
+"Butts?" repeated the Boy, with little affectation of interest.
+
+"Yep. Wonder what the son of a gun is after here." But he spoke
+genially, even with respect.
+
+"Who's Butts?"
+
+"Butts? Ah--well--a--Butts is the smartest fellow with his fingers in
+all 'laska"; and McGinty showed his big yellow teeth in an appreciative
+smile.
+
+"Smart at washin' gold out?"
+
+"Smarter at pickin' it out." The bartender joined in Si's laugh as that
+gentleman repeated, "Yes, sir! handiest feller with his fingers I ever
+seen."
+
+"What does he do with his fingers?" asked the Boy, with impatient
+suspicion.
+
+"Well, he don't dare do much with 'em up here. 'Tain't popular."
+
+"What ain't?"
+
+"Butts's little game. But Lord! he is good at it." Butts had been
+introduced as a stalking-horse, but there was no doubt about Si's
+admiration of his "handiness." "Butts is wasted up here," he sighed.
+"There's some chance for a murderer in Alaska, but a thief's a goner."
+
+"Oh, well; you were sayin' that gold o' yours came from--"
+
+"Poor old Butts! Bright feller, too."
+
+"How far off is your--"
+
+"I tell you, sir, Butts is brains to his boots. Course you know Jack
+McQuestion?"
+
+"No, but I'd like to hear a little about your--"
+
+"Y' don' know Jack McQuestion? Well, sir, Jack's the biggest man in the
+Yukon. Why, he built Fort Reliance six miles below the mouth of the
+Klondyke in '73; he discovered gold on the Stewart in '85, and
+established a post there. _Everybody_ knows Jack McQuestion;
+an"--quickly, as he saw he was about to be interrupted--"you heard
+about that swell watch we all clubbed together and give him? No? Well,
+sir, there ain't an eleganter watch in the world. Is there?"
+
+"Guess not," said the bartender.
+
+"Repeater, you know. Got twenty-seven di'mon's in the case. One of
+'em's this size." He presented the end of a gnarled and muscular thumb.
+"And inside, the case is all wrote in--a lot of soft sawder; but Jack
+ain't got _any_thing he cares for so much. You can see he's always
+tickled to death when anybody asks him the time. But do you think he
+ever lets that watch out'n his own hands? Not _much_. Let's anybody
+_look_ at it, and keeps a holt o' the stem-winder. Well, sir, we was
+all in a saloon up at Circle, and that feller over there--Butts--he bet
+me fifty dollars that he'd git McQuestion's watch away from him before
+he left the saloon. An' it was late. McQuestion was thinkin' a'ready
+about goin' home to that squaw wife that keeps him so straight. Well,
+sir, Butts went over and began to gas about outfittin', and McQuestion
+answers and figures up the estimates on the counter, and, by Gawd! in
+less 'n quarter of an hour Butts, just standin' there and listenin', as
+you'd think--he'd got that di'mon' watch off'n the chain an' had it in
+his pocket. I knew he done it, though I ain't exactly seen _how_ he
+done it. The others who were in the game, they swore he hadn't got it
+yet, but, by Gawd, Butts says he'll think over McQuestion's terms, and
+wonders what time it is. He takes that di'mon' watch out of his pocket,
+glances at it, and goes off smooth as cream, sayin' 'Good-night.' Then
+he come a grinnin' over to us. 'Jest you go an' ask the Father o' the
+Yukon Pioneers what time it is, will yer?' An' I done it. Well, sir,
+when he put his hand in his pocket, by Gawd! I wish y' could a' saw
+McQuestion's face. Yes, sir, Butts is brains to his boots."
+
+"How far out are the diggin's?"
+
+"What diggin's?"
+
+"Yours."
+
+"Oh--a--my gulch ain't fur."
+
+There was a noise about the door. Someone bustled in with a torrent of
+talk, and the pianola was drowned in a pandemonium of shouts and
+laughter.
+
+"Windy Jim's reely got back!"
+
+Everybody crowded forward. Maudie was at the Colonel's elbow explaining
+that the little yellow-bearded man with the red nose was the
+letter-carrier. He had made a contract early in the winter to go to
+Dawson and bring down the mail for Minook. His agreement was to make
+the round trip and be back by the middle of February. Since early March
+the standing gag in the camp had been: "Well, Windy Jim got in last
+night."
+
+The mild jest had grown stale, and the denizens of Minook had given up
+the hope of ever laying eyes on Windy again, when lo! here he was with
+twenty-two hundred letters in his sack. The patrons of the Gold Nugget
+crowded round him like flies round a lump of sugar, glad to pay a
+dollar apiece on each letter he handed out. "And you take _all_ that's
+addressed to yer at that price or you get none." Every letter there had
+come over the terrible Pass. Every one had travelled twelve hundred
+miles by dog-team, and some had been on the trail seven months.
+
+"Here, Maudie, me dear." The postman handed her two letters. "See how
+he dotes on yer."
+
+"Got anything fur--what's yer names?" says the mackinaw man, who seemed
+to have adopted the Colonel and the Boy.
+
+He presented them without embarrassment to "Windy Jim Wilson, of Hog'em
+Junction, the best trail mail-carrier in the 'nited States."
+
+Those who had already got letters were gathered in groups under the
+bracket-lights reading eagerly. In the midst of the lull of
+satisfaction or expectancy someone cried out in disgust, and another
+threw down a letter with a shower of objurgation.
+
+"Guess you got the mate to mine, Bonsor," said a bystander with a
+laugh, slowly tearing up the communication he had opened with fingers
+so eager that they shook.
+
+"You pay a dollar apiece for letters from folks you never heard of,
+asking you what you think of the country, and whether you'd advise 'em
+to come out."
+
+"Huh! don't I wish they would!"
+
+"It's all right. _They will._"
+
+"And then trust Bonsor to git even."
+
+Salaman, "the luckiest man in camp," who had come in from his valuable
+Little Minook property for the night only, had to pay fifteen dollars
+for his mail. When he opened it, he found he had one home letter,
+written seven months before, eight notes of inquiry, and six
+advertisements.
+
+Maudie had put her letters unopened in her pocket, and told the man at
+the scales to weigh out two dollars to Windy, and charge to her. Then
+she began to talk to the Colonel.
+
+The Boy observed with scant patience that his pardner treated Maudie
+with a consideration he could hardly have bettered had she been the
+first lady in the land. "Must be because she's little and cute-lookin'.
+The Colonel's a sentimental ol' goslin'."
+
+"What makes you so polite to that dance-hall girl?" muttered the Boy
+aside. "She's no good."
+
+"Reckon it won't make her any better for me to be impolite to her,"
+returned the Colonel calmly.
+
+But finding she could not detach the Kentuckian from his pardner,
+Maudie bestowed her attention elsewhere. French Charlie was leaning
+back against the wall, his hands jammed in his pockets, and his big
+slouch-hat pulled over his brows. Under the shadow of the wide brim
+furtively he watched the girl. Another woman came up and asked him to
+dance. He shook his head.
+
+"Reckon we'd better go and knock up Blandford Keith and get a bed,"
+suggested the Boy regretfully, looking round for the man who had a
+cinch up on Glory Hallelujah, and wouldn't tell you how to get there.
+
+"Reckon we'd better," agreed the Colonel.
+
+But they halted near Windy Jim, who was refreshing himself, and at the
+same time telling Dawson news, or Dawson lies, as the company evidently
+thought. And still the men crowded round, listening greedily, just as
+everybody devours certain public prints without ceasing to impeach
+their veracity. Lacking newspapers at which to pish! and pshaw! they
+listened to Windy Jim, disbelieving the only unvarnished tale that
+gentleman had ever told. For Windy, with the story-teller's instinct,
+knew marvellous enough would sound the bare recital of those awful
+Dawson days when the unprecedented early winter stopped the provision
+boats at Circle, and starvation stared the over-populated Klondyke in
+the face.
+
+Having disposed of their letters, the miners crowded round the courier
+to hear how the black business ended--matter of special interest to
+Minook, for the population here was composed chiefly of men who, by the
+Canadian route, had managed to get to Dawson in the autumn, in the
+early days of the famine scare, and who, after someone's panic-proposal
+to raid the great Stores, were given free passage down the river on the
+last two steamers to run.
+
+When the ice stopped them (one party at Circle, the other at Fort
+Yukon), they had held up the supply boats and helped themselves under
+the noses of Captain Ray and Lieutenant Richardson, U. S. A.
+
+"Yes, sir," McGinty had explained, "we Minook boys was all in that
+picnic. But we give our bond to pay up at mid-summer, and after the fun
+was over we dropped down here."
+
+He pushed nearer to Windy to hear how it had fared with the men who had
+stayed behind in the Klondyke--how the excitement flamed and menaced;
+how Agent Hansen of the Alaska Commercial Company, greatest of the
+importers of provisions and Arctic equipment, rushed about, half crazy,
+making speeches all along the Dawson River front, urging the men to fly
+for their lives, back to the States or up to Circle, before the ice
+stopped moving!
+
+But too many of these men had put everything they had on earth into
+getting here; too many had abandoned costly outfits on the awful Pass,
+or in the boiling eddies of the White Horse Rapids, paying any price in
+money or in pain to get to the goldfields before navigation closed. And
+now! here was Hansen, with all the authority of the A. C., shouting
+wildly: "Quick, quick! go up or down. It's a race for life!"
+
+Windy went on to tell how the horror of the thing dulled the men, how
+they stood about the Dawson streets helpless as cattle, paralysed by
+the misery that had overtaken them. All very well for Hansen to try to
+relieve the congestion at the Klondyke--the poor devils knew that to go
+either way, up or down, as late as this meant death. Then it was
+whispered how Captain Constantine of the Mounted Police was getting
+ready to drive every man out of the Klondyke, at the point of the
+bayonet, who couldn't show a thousand pounds of provisions. Yet most of
+the Klondykers still stood about dazed, silent, waiting for the final
+stroke.
+
+A few went up, over the way they had come, to die after all on the
+Pass, and some went down, their white, despairing faces disappearing
+round the Klondyke bend as they drifted with the grinding ice towards
+the Arctic Circle, where the food was caught in the floes. And how one
+came back, going by without ever turning his head, caring not a jot for
+Golden Dawson, serene as a king in his capital, solitary, stark on a
+little island of ice.
+
+"Lord! it was better, after all, at the Big Chimney."
+
+"Oh, it wasn't so bad," said Windy cheerfully. "About the time one o'
+the big companies announced they was sold out o' everything but sugar
+and axe-handles, a couple o' steamers pushed their way in through the
+ice. After all, just as old J. J. Healy said, it was only a question of
+rations and proper distribution. Why, flour's fell from one hundred and
+twenty dollars a sack to fifty! And there's a big new strike on the
+island opposite Ensley Creek. They call it Monte Cristo; pay runs eight
+dollars to the pan. Lord! Dawson's the greatest gold camp on the
+globe."
+
+But no matter what befell at Dawson, business must be kept brisk at
+Minook. The pianola started up, and Buckin' Billy, who called the
+dances, began to bawl invitations to the company to come and waltz.
+
+Windy interrupted his own music for further refreshment, pausing an
+instant, with his mouth full of dried-apple pie to say:
+
+"Congress has sent out a relief expedition to Dawson."
+
+"No!"
+
+"Fact! Reindeer."
+
+"Ye mean peacocks."
+
+"Mean reindeer! It's all in the last paper come over the Pass. A
+Reindeer Relief Expedition to save them poor starvin' Klondykers."
+
+"Haw, haw! Good old Congress!"
+
+"Well, did you find any o' them reindeer doin' any relievin' round
+Dawson?"
+
+"Naw! What do _you_ think? Takes more'n Congress to git over the Dalton
+Trail"; and Windy returned to his pie.
+
+Talking earnestly with Mr. Butts, French Charlie pushed heavily past
+the Boy on his way to the bar. From his gait it was clear that he had
+made many similar visits that evening. In his thick Canadian accent
+Charlie was saying:
+
+"I blowed out a lot o' dust for dat girl. She's wearin' my di'mon' now,
+and won't look at me. Say, Butts, I'll give you twenty dollars if you
+sneak dat ring."
+
+"Done with you," says Butts, as calm as a summer's day. In two minutes
+Maudie was twirling about with the handy gentleman, who seemed as
+accomplished with his toes as he was reputed to be with his fingers.
+
+He came up with her presently and ordered some wine.
+
+"Wine, b-gosh!" muttered Charlie in drunken appreciation, propping
+himself against the wall again, and always slipping sideways. "Y' tink
+he's d' fines' sor' fella, don't you? Hein? Wai' 'n see!"
+
+The wine disappears and the two go off for another dance. Inside of ten
+minutes up comes Butts and passes something to French Charlie. That
+gentleman laughs tipsily, and, leaning on Butts's arm, makes his way to
+the scales.
+
+"Weigh out twen' dollars dis gen'man," he ordered.
+
+Butts pulled up the string of his poke and slipped to one side, as
+noise reached the group at the bar of a commotion at the other end of
+the saloon.
+
+"My ring! it's gone! My diamond ring! Now, you've got it"; and Maudie
+came running out from the dancers after one of the Woodworth gentlemen.
+
+Charlie straightened up and grinned, almost sobered in excess of joy
+and satisfied revenge. The Woodworth gentleman is searched and
+presently exonerated. Everybody is told of the loss, every nook and
+corner investigated. Maudie goes down on hands and knees, even creeping
+behind the bar.
+
+"I know'd she go on somethin' awful," said Charlie, so gleefully that
+Bonsor, the proprietor of the Gold Nugget, began to look upon him with
+suspicion.
+
+When Maudie reappeared, flushed, and with disordered hair, after her
+excursion under the counter, French Charlie confronted her.
+
+"Looky here. You treated me blame mean, Maudie; but wha'd' you say if
+I's to off' a rewar' for dat ring?"
+
+"Reward! A healthy lot o' good that would do."
+
+"Oh, very well; 'f you don' wan' de ring back--"
+
+"I _do,_ Charlie."
+
+He hammered on the bar.
+
+"Ev'body gottah look fur ring. I give a hunner 'n fifty dollah rewar'."
+
+Maudie stared at the princely offer. But instantly the commotion was
+greater than ever. "Ev'body" did what was expected of them, especially
+Mr. Butts. They flew about, looking in possible and impossible places,
+laughing, screaming, tumbling over one another. In the midst of the
+uproar French Charlie lurches up to Maudie.
+
+"Dat look anyt'in' like it?"
+
+"Oh, _Charlie!"_
+
+She looked the gratitude she could not on the instant speak.
+
+In the midst of the noise and movement the mackinaw man said to the
+Boy:
+
+"Don't know as you'd care to see my new prospect hole?"
+
+"Course I'd like to see it."
+
+"Well, come along tomorrow afternoon. Meet me here 'bout two. Don't
+_say_ nothin' to nobody," he added still lower. "We don't want to get
+overrun before we've recorded."
+
+The Boy could have hugged that mackinaw man.
+
+Outside it was broad day, but still the Gold Nugget lights were flaring
+and the pianola played.
+
+They had learned from the bartender where to find Blandford Keith--"In
+the worst-looking shack in the camp." But "It looks good to me," said
+the Boy, as they went in and startled Keith out of his first sleep. The
+man that brings you letters before the ice goes out is your friend.
+Keith helped them to bring in their stuff, and was distinctly troubled
+because the travellers wouldn't take his bunk. They borrowed some dry
+blankets and went to sleep on the floor.
+
+It was after two when they woke in a panic, lest the mackinaw man
+should have gone without them. While the Colonel got breakfast the Boy
+dashed round to the Gold Nugget, found Si McGinty playing craps, and
+would have brought him back in triumph to breakfast--but no, he would
+"wait down yonder below the Gold Nugget, and don't you say nothin' yit
+about where we're goin', or we'll have the hull town at our heels."
+
+About twelve miles "back in the mountains" is a little gulch that makes
+into a big one at right angles.
+
+"That's the pup where my claim is."
+
+"The what?"
+
+"Little creek; call 'em pups here."
+
+Down in the desolate hollow a ragged A tent, sagged away from the
+prevailing wind. Inside, they found that the canvas was a mere shelter
+over a prospect hole. A rusty stove was almost buried by the heap of
+earth and gravel thrown up from a pit several feet deep.
+
+"This is a winter diggins y' see," observed the mackinaw man with
+pride. "It's only while the ground is froze solid you can do this kind
+o' minin'. I've had to burn the ground clean down to bed-rock. Yes,
+sir, thawed my way inch by inch to the old channel."
+
+"Well, and what have you found?"
+
+"S'pose we pan some o' this dirt and see."
+
+His slow caution impressed his hearers. They made up a fire, melted
+snow, and half filled a rusty pan with gravel and soil from the bottom
+of the pit.
+
+"Know how to pan?"
+
+The Colonel and the Boy took turns. They were much longer at it than
+they ever were again, but the mackinaw man seemed not in the least
+hurry. The impatience was all theirs. When they had got down to fine
+sand, "Look!" screamed the Boy.
+
+"By the Lord!" said the Colonel softly.
+
+"Is that--"
+
+"Looks like you got some colours there. Gosh! Then I ain't been
+dreamin' after all."
+
+"Hey? Dreamin'? What? Look! Look!"
+
+"That's why I brought you gen'l'men out," says the mackinaw man. "I was
+afraid to trust my senses--thought I was gettin' wheels in my head."
+
+"Lord! look at the gold!"
+
+They took about a dollar and twenty cents out of that pan.
+
+"Now see here, you gen'l'men jest lay low about this strike." His
+anxiety seemed intense. They reassured him. "I don't suppose you mind
+our taking up a claim apiece next you," pleaded the Boy, "since the law
+don't allow you to stake more'n one."
+
+"Oh, that's all right," said the mackinaw man, with an air of princely
+generosity. "And I don't mind if you like to let in a few of your
+particular pals, if you'll agree to help me organise a district. An'
+I'll do the recordin' fur ye."
+
+Really, this mackinaw man was a trump. The Colonel took twenty-five
+dollars out of a roll of bills and handed it to him.
+
+"What's this fur?"
+
+"For bringing us out--for giving us the tip. I'd make it more, but till
+I get to Dawson--"
+
+"Oh!" laughed the mackinaw man, "_that's_ all right," and indifferently
+he tucked the bills into his baggy trousers.
+
+The Colonel felt keenly the inadequacy of giving a man twenty-five
+dollars who had just introduced him to hundreds of thousands--and who
+sat on the edge of his own gold-mine--but it was only "on account."
+
+The Colonel staked No. 1 Above the Discovery, and the Boy was in the
+act of staking No. 1 Below when--
+
+"No, no," says that kind mackinaw man, "the heavier gold will be found
+further up the gulch--stake No. 2 Above"; and he told them natural
+facts about placer-mining that no after expert knowledge could ever
+better. But he was not as happy as a man should be who has just struck
+pay.
+
+"Fact is, it's kind of upsettin' to find it so rich here."
+
+"Give you leave to upset me that way all day."
+
+"Y' see, I bought another claim over yonder where I done a lot o' work
+last summer and fall. Built a cabin and put up a sluice. I _got_ to be
+up there soon as the ice goes out. Don't see how I got time to do my
+assessment here too. Wish I was twins."
+
+"Why don't you sell this?"
+
+"Guess I'll have to part with a share in it." He sighed and looked
+lovingly into the hole. "Minin's an awful gamble," he said, as though
+admonishing Si McGinty; "but we _know_ there's gold just there."
+
+The Colonel and the Boy looked at their claims and felt the pinch of
+uncertainty. "What do you want for a share in your claim, Mr.
+McGinty?"
+
+"Oh, well, as I say, I'll let it go reasonable to a feller who'd do the
+assessment, on account o' my having that other property. Say three
+thousand dollars."
+
+The Colonel shook his head. "Why, it's dirt-cheap! Two men can take a
+hundred and fifty dollars a day out of that claim without outside help.
+And properly worked, the summer ought to show forty thousand dollars."
+
+On the way home McGinty found he could let the thing go for "two
+thousand spot cash."
+
+"Make it quarter shares," suggested the Boy, thrilled at such a chance,
+"and the Colonel and I together'll raise five hundred and do the rest
+of the assessment work for you."
+
+But they were nearly back at Minook before McGinty said, "Well, I ain't
+twins, and I can't personally work two gold-mines, so we'll call it a
+deal." And the money passed that night.
+
+And the word passed, too, to an ex-Governor of a Western State and his
+satellites, newly arrived from Woodworth, and to a party of men just
+down from Circle City. McGinty seemed more inclined to share his luck
+with strangers than with the men he had wintered amongst. "Mean lot,
+these Minook fellers." But the return of the ex-Governor and so large a
+party from quietly staking their claims, roused Minook to a sense that
+"somethin' was goin' on."
+
+By McGinty's advice, the strangers called a secret meeting, and elected
+McGinty recorder. All the claim-holders registered their properties and
+the dates of location. The Recorder gave everybody his receipt, and
+everybody felt it was cheap at five dollars. Then the meeting proceeded
+to frame a code of Laws for the new district, stipulating the number of
+feet permitted each claim (being rigidly kept by McGinty within the
+limits provided by the United States Laws on the subject), and
+decreeing the amount of work necessary to hold a claim a year, settling
+questions of water rights, etc., etc.
+
+Not until Glory Hallelujah Gulch was a full-fledged mining district did
+Minook in general know what was in the wind. The next day the news was
+all over camp.
+
+If McGinty's name inspired suspicion, the Colonel's and the
+ex-Governor's reassured, the Colonel in particular (he had already
+established that credit that came so easy to him) being triumphantly
+quoted as saying, "Glory Hallelujah Gulch was the richest placer he'd
+ever struck." Nobody added that it was also the only one. But this
+matter of a stampede is not controlled by reason; it is a thing of the
+nerves; while you are ridiculing someone else your legs are carrying
+you off on the same errand.
+
+In a mining-camp the saloon is the community's heart. However little a
+man cares to drink, or to dance, or to play cards, he goes to the
+saloon as to the one place where he may meet his fellows, do business,
+and hear the news. The saloon is the Market Place. It is also the Cafe,
+the Theatre, the Club, the Stock Exchange, the Barber's Shop, the
+Bank--in short, you might as well be dead as not be a patron of the
+Gold Nugget.
+
+Yet neither the Colonel nor the Boy had been there since the night of
+their arrival. On returning from that first triumphant inspection of
+McGinty's diggings, the Colonel had been handed a sealed envelope
+without address.
+
+"How do you know it's for me?"
+
+"She said it was for the Big Chap," answered Blandford Keith.
+
+The Colonel read:
+
+"_Come to the Gold Nugget as soon as you get this, and hear something
+to your advantage_.--MAUDIE."
+
+So he had stayed away, having plenty to occupy him in helping to
+organise the new district. He was strolling past the saloon the morning
+after the Secret Meeting, when down into the street, like a kingfisher
+into a stream, Maudie darted, and held up the Colonel.
+
+"Ain't you had my letter?"
+
+"Oh--a--yes--but I've been busy."
+
+"Guess so!" she said with undisguised scorn. "Where's Si McGinty?"
+
+"Reckon he's out at the gulch. I've got to go down to the A. C. now and
+buy some grub to take out." He was moving on.
+
+"Take where?" She followed him up.
+
+"To McGinty's gulch."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Why, to live on, while my pardner and I do the assessment work."
+
+"Then it's true! McGinty's been fillin' you full o' guff." The Colonel
+looked at her a little haughtily.
+
+"See here: I ain't busy, as a rule, about other folks' funerals, but--"
+She looked at him curiously. "It's cold here; come in a minute." There
+was no hint of vulgar nonsense, but something very earnest in the pert
+little face that had been so pretty. They went in. "Order drinks," she
+said aside, "and don't talk before Jimmie."
+
+She chaffed the bartender, and leaned idly against the counter. When a
+group of returned stampeders came in, she sat down at a rough little
+faro-table, leaned her elbows on it, sipped the rest of the stuff in
+her tumbler through a straw, and in the shelter of her arms set the
+straw in a knot-hole near the table-leg, and spirited the bad liquor
+down under the board. "Don't give me away," she said.
+
+The Colonel knew she got a commission on the drinks, and was there to
+bring custom. He nodded.
+
+"I hoped I'd see you in time," she went on hurriedly--"in time to warn
+you that McGinty was givin' you a song and dance."
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"Tellin" you a ghost story."
+
+"You mean--"
+
+"Can't you understand plain English?" she said, irritated at such
+obtuseness. "I got worried thinkin' it over, for it was me told that
+pardner o' yours--" She smiled wickedly. "I expected McGinty'd have
+some fun with the young feller, but I didn't expect you'd be such a
+Hatter." She wound up with the popular reference to lunacy.
+
+The Colonel pulled up his great figure with some pomposity. "I don't
+understand."
+
+"Any feller can see that. You're just the kind the McGintys are layin'
+for." She looked round to see that nobody was within earshot. "Si's
+been layin' round all winter waitin' for the spring crop o' suckers."
+
+"If you mean there isn't gold out at McGinty's gulch, you're wrong;
+I've seen it."
+
+"Course you have."
+
+He paused. She, sweeping the Gold Nugget with vigilant eye, went on in
+a voice of indulgent contempt.
+
+"Some of 'em load up an old shot-gun with a little charge o' powder and
+a quarter of an ounce of gold-dust on top, fire that into the prospect
+hole a dozen times or so, and then take a sucker out to pan the stuff.
+But I bet Si didn't take any more trouble with you than to have some
+colours in his mouth, to spit in the shovel or the pan, when you wasn't
+lookin'--just enough to drive you crazy, and get you to boost him into
+a Recordership. Why, he's cleaned up a tub o' money in fees since you
+struck the town."
+
+The Colonel moved uneasily, but faith with him died hard.
+
+"McGinty strikes me as a very decent sort of man, with a knowledge of
+practical mining and of mining law--"
+
+Maudie made a low sound of impatience, and pushed her empty glass
+aside.
+
+"Oh, very well, go your own way! Waste the whole spring doin' Si's
+assessment for him. And when the bottom drops out o' recordin', you'll
+see Si gettin' some cheechalko to buy an interest in that rottin' hole
+o' his--"
+
+Her jaw fell as she saw the Colonel's expression.
+
+"He's got you too!" she exclaimed.
+
+"Well, didn't you say yourself that night you'd be glad if McGinty'd
+let you a lay?"
+
+"Pshaw! I was only givin' you a song and dance. Not you neither, but
+that pardner o' yours. I thought I'd learn that young man a lesson. But
+I didn't know you'd get flim-flammed out o' your boots. Thought you
+looked like you got some sense."
+
+Unmoved by the Colonel's aspect of offended dignity, faintly dashed
+with doubt, she hurried on:
+
+"Before you go shellin' out any more cash, or haulin' stuff to Glory
+Hallelujah, just you go down that prospect hole o' McGinty's when
+McGinty ain't there, and see how many colours you can ketch."
+
+The Colonel looked at her.
+
+"Well, I'll do it," he said slowly, "and if you're right--"
+
+"Oh, I'm all right," she laughed; "an' I know my McGinty backwards.
+But"--she frowned with sudden anger--"it ain't Maudie's pretty way to
+interfere with cheechalkos gettin' fooled. I ain't proud o' the trouble
+I've taken, and I'll thank you not to mention it. Not to that pardner
+o' yours--not to nobody."
+
+She stuck her nose in the air, and waved her hand to French Charlie,
+who had just then opened the door and put his head in. He came straight
+over to her, and she made room for him on the bench.
+
+The Colonel went out full of thought. He listened attentively when the
+ex-Governor, that evening at Keith's, said something about the woman up
+at the Gold Nugget--"Maudie--what's the rest of her name?"
+
+"Don't believe anybody knows. Oh, yes, they must, too; it'll be on her
+deeds. She's got the best hundred by fifty foot lot in the place. Held
+it down last fall herself with a six-shooter, and she owns that cabin
+on the corner. Isn't a better business head in Minook than Maudie's.
+She got a lay on a good property o' Salaman's last fall, and I guess
+she's got more ready dust even now, before the washin' begins, than
+anybody here except Salaman and the A.C. There ain't a man in Minook
+who wouldn't listen respectfully to Maudie's views on any business
+proposition--once he was sure she wasn't fooling."
+
+And Keith told a string of stories to show how the Minook miners
+admired her astuteness, and helped her unblushingly to get the better
+of one another.
+
+The Colonel stayed in Minook till the recording was all done, and
+McGinty got tired of living on flap-jacks at the gulch.
+
+The night McGinty arrived in town the Colonel, not even taking the Boy
+into his confidence, hitched up and departed for the new district.
+
+He came back the next day a sadder and a wiser man. They had been sold.
+
+McGinty was quick to gather that someone must have given him away. It
+had only been a question of time, after all. He had lined his pockets,
+and could take the new turn in his affairs with equanimity.
+
+"Wait till the steamers begin to run," Maudie said; "McGinty'll play
+that game with every new boat-load. Oh, McGinty'll make another
+fortune. Then he'll go to Dawson and blow it in. Well, Colonel, sorry
+you ain't cultivatin' rheumatism in a damp hole up at Glory
+Hallelujah?"
+
+"I--I am very much obliged to you for saving me from--"
+
+She cut him short. "You see you've got time now to look about you for
+something really good, if there _is_ anything outside of Little
+Minook."
+
+"It was very kind of you to--"
+
+"No it wasn't," she said shortly.
+
+The Colonel took out a roll of bank bills and selected one, folded it
+small, and passed it towards her under the ledge of the table. She
+glanced down.
+
+"Oh, I don't want that."
+
+"Yes, please."
+
+"Tell you I don't."
+
+"You've done me a very good turn; saved me a lot of time and expense."
+
+Slowly she took the money, as one thinking out something.
+
+"Where do you come from?" he asked suddenly.
+
+"'Frisco. I was in the chorus at the Alcazar."
+
+"What made you go into the chorus?"
+
+"Got tired o' life on a sheep-ranch. All work and no play. Never saw a
+soul. Seen plenty since."
+
+"Got any people belonging to you?"
+
+"Got a kind of a husband."
+
+"A kind of a husband?"
+
+"Yes--the kind you'd give away with a pound o' tea."
+
+The little face, full of humourous contempt and shrewd scorn, sobered;
+she flung a black look round the saloon, and her eyes came back to the
+Colonel's face.
+
+"I've got a girl," she said, and a sudden light flashed across her
+frowning as swiftly as a meteor cuts down along a darkened sky. "Four
+years old in June. _She_ ain't goin' into no chorus, bet your life!
+_She's_ going to have money, and scads o' things I ain't never had."
+
+That night the Colonel and the Boy agreed that, although they had
+wasted some valuable time and five hundred and twenty-five dollars on
+McGinty, they still had a chance of making their fortunes before the
+spring rush.
+
+The next day they went eight miles out in slush and in alternate rain
+and sunshine, to Little Minook Creek, where the biggest paying claims
+were universally agreed to be. They found a place even more ragged and
+desolate than McGinty's, where smoke was rising sullenly from
+underground fires and the smell of burning wood filled the air, the
+ground turned up and dotted at intervals with piles of frozen gravel
+that had been hoisted from the shafts by windlass, forlorn little
+cabins and tents scattered indiscriminately, a vast number of empty
+bottles and cans sown broadcast, and, early as it was, a line of
+sluices upon Salaman's claim.
+
+They had heard a great deal about the dark, keen-looking young Oregon
+lawyer, for Salaman was the most envied man in Minook. "Come over to my
+dump and get some nuggets," says Mr. Salaman, as in other parts of the
+world a man will say, "Come into the smoking-room and have a cigar."
+
+The snow was melted from the top of Salaman's dump, and his guests had
+no difficulty in picking several rough little bits of gold out of the
+thawing gravel. It was an exhilarating occupation.
+
+"Come down my shaft and see my cross-cuts"; and they followed him.
+
+He pointed out how the frozen gravel made solid wall, or pillar, and no
+curbing was necessary. With the aid of a candle and their host's
+urging, they picked out several dollars' worth of coarse gold from the
+gravel "in place" at the edge of the bed-rock. When he had got his
+guests thoroughly warmed up:
+
+"Yes, I took out several thousand last fall, and I'll have twenty
+thousand more out of my first summer clean-up."
+
+"And after that?"
+
+"After that I'm going home. I wouldn't stay here and work this way and
+live this way another winter, not for twenty millions."
+
+"I'm surprised to hear _you_ talking like that, sah."
+
+"Well, you won't be once you have tried it yourself. Mining up here's
+an awful gamble. Colours pretty well everywhere, and a few flakes of
+flour gold, just enough to send the average cheechalko crazy, but no
+real 'pay' outside of this little gulch. And even here, every inch has
+been scrambled for--and staked, too--and lots of it fought over. Men
+died here in the fall defending their ground from the jumpers--ground
+that hadn't a dollar in it."
+
+"Well, your ground was worth looking after, and John Dillon's. Which is
+his claim?"
+
+Salaman led the way over the heaps of gravel and round a windlass to
+No. 6, admitting:
+
+"Oh, yes, Dillon and I, and a few others, have come out of it all
+right, but Lord! it's a gamble."
+
+Dillon's pardner, Kennedy, did the honours, showing the Big Chimney men
+the very shaft out of which their Christmas heap of gold had been
+hoisted. It was true after all. For the favoured there _was_ "plenty o'
+gold--plenty o' gold."
+
+"But," said Salaman, "there are few things more mysterious than its
+whereabouts or why it should be where it is. Don't talk to me about
+mining experts--we've had 'em here. But who can explain the mystery of
+Minook? There are six claims in all this country that pay to work. The
+pay begins in No. 5; before that, nothing. Just up yonder, above No.
+10, the pay-streak pinches out. No mortal knows why. A whole winter's
+toiling and moiling, and thousands of dollars put into the ground,
+haven't produced an ounce of gold above that claim or below No. 5. I
+tell you it's an awful gamble. Hunter Creek, Hoosier, Bear, Big Minook,
+I You, Quail, Alder, Mike Hess, Little Nell--the whole blessed country,
+rivers, creeks, pups, and all, staked for a radius of forty miles just
+because there's gold here, where we're standing."
+
+"You don't mean there's _nothing_ left!"
+
+"Nothing within forty miles that somebody hasn't either staked or made
+money by abandoning."
+
+"Made money?"
+
+Salaman laughed.
+
+"It's money in your pocket pretty nearly every time you don't take up a
+claim. Why, on Hunter alone they've spent twenty thousand dollars this
+winter."
+
+"And how much have they taken out?"
+
+With index-finger and thumb Salaman made an "O," and looked shrewdly
+through it.
+
+"It's an awful gamble," he repeated solemnly.
+
+"It doesn't seem possible there's _nothing_ left," reiterated the Boy,
+incredulous of such evil luck.
+
+"Oh, I'm not saying you may not make something by getting on some other
+fellow's property, if you've a mind to pay for it. But you'd better not
+take anything on trust. I wouldn't trust my own mother in Alaska.
+Something in the air here that breeds lies. You can't believe anybody,
+yourself included." He laughed, stooped, and picked a little nugget out
+of the dump. "You'll have the same man tell you an entirely different
+story about the same matter within an hour. Exaggeration is in the air.
+The best man becomes infected. You lie, he lies, they all lie. Lots of
+people go crazy in Alaska every year--various causes, but it's chiefly
+from believing their own lies."
+
+They returned to Rampart.
+
+It was decidedly inconvenient, considering the state of their finances,
+to have thrown away that five hundred dollars on McGinty. They messed
+with Keith, and paid their two-thirds of the household expenses; but
+Dawson prices reigned, and it was plain there were no Dawson prizes.
+
+"Well," said the Colonel in the morning, "we've got to live somehow
+till the ice goes out." The Boy sat thinking. The Colonel went on: "And
+we can't go to Dawson cleaned out. No tellin' whether there are any
+proper banks there or whether my Louisville instructions got through.
+Of course, we've got the dogs yet."
+
+"Don't care how soon we sell Red and Spot."
+
+After breakfast the Boy tied Nig up securely behind Keith's shack, and
+followed the Colonel about with a harassed and watchful air.
+
+"No market for dogs now," seemed to be the general opinion, and one
+person bore up well under the news.
+
+But the next day a man, very splashed and muddy, and obviously just in
+from the gulches, stopped, in going by Keith's, and looked at Nig.
+
+"Dog market's down," quoted the Boy internally to hearten himself.
+
+"That mahlemeut's for sale," observed the Colonel to the stranger.
+
+"These are." The Boy hastily dragged Red and Spot upon the scene.
+
+"How much?"
+
+"Seventy-five dollars apiece."
+
+The man laughed. "Ain't you heard the dog season's over?"
+
+"Well, don't you count on livin' to the next?"
+
+The man pushed his slouch over his eyes and scratched the back of his
+head.
+
+"Unless I can git 'em reasonable, dogs ain't worth feedin' till next
+winter."
+
+"I suppose not," said the Boy sympathetically; "and you can't get fish
+here."
+
+"Right. Feedin' yourn on bacon, I s'pose, at forty cents a pound?'
+
+"Bacon and meal."
+
+"Guess you'll get tired o' that."
+
+"Well, we'd sell you the red dog for sixty dollars," admitted the Boy.
+
+The man stared. "Give you thirty for that black brute over there."
+
+"Thirty dollars for Nig!"
+
+"And not a--cent more. Dogs is down." He could get a dozen as good for
+twenty-five dollars.
+
+"Just you try." But the Colonel, grumbling, said thirty dollars was
+thirty dollars, and he reckoned he'd call it a deal. The Boy stared,
+opened his mouth to protest, and shut it without a sound.
+
+The Colonel had untied Nig, and the Leader, unmindful of the impending
+change in his fortunes, dashed past the muddy man from the gulch with
+such impetuosity that he knocked that gentleman off his legs. He picked
+himself up scowling, and was feeling for his gold sack.
+
+"Got scales here?"
+
+"No need of scales." The Boy whipped out a little roll of money,
+counted out thirty dollars, and held it towards the Colonel. "I can
+afford to keep Nig awhile if that's his figure."
+
+The stranger was very angry at this new turn in the dog deal. He had
+seen that Siwash out at the gulch, heard he was for sale, and came in
+"a purpose to git him."
+
+"The dog season's over," said the Boy, pulling Nig's ears and smiling.
+
+"Oh, _is_ it? Well, the season for eatin' meals ain't over. How'm I to
+git grub out to my claim without a dog?"
+
+"We are offerin' you a couple o' capital draught dogs."
+
+"I bought that there Siwash, and I'd a paid fur him if he hadn't a
+knocked me down." He advanced threateningly. "An' if you ain't huntin'
+trouble--"
+
+The big Colonel stepped in and tried to soothe the stranger, as well as
+to convince him that this was not the party to try bullying on.
+
+"I'll give you forty dollars for the dog," said the muddy man sulkily
+to the Boy.
+
+"No."
+
+"Give you fifty, and that's my last word."
+
+"I ain't sellin' dogs."
+
+He cursed, and offered five dollars more.
+
+"Can't you see I _mean_ it? I'm goin' to keep that dog--awhile."
+
+"S'pose you think you'll make a good thing o' hirin' him out?"
+
+He hadn't thought of it, but he said: "Why not? Best dog in the Yukon."
+
+"Well, how much?"
+
+"How much'll you give?"
+
+"Dollar a day."
+
+"Done."
+
+So Nig was hired out, Spot was sold for twenty dollars, and Red later
+for fifteen.
+
+"Well," said the Colonel when they went in, "I didn't know you were so
+smart. But you can't live _here_ on Nig's seven dollars a week."
+
+The Boy shook his head. Their miserable canned and salted fare cost
+about four dollars a day per man.
+
+"I'm goin' to take Nig's tip," he said--"goin' to work."
+
+Easier said than done. In their high rubber boots they splashed about
+Rampart in the mild, thawing weather, "tryin' to scare up a job," as
+one of them stopped to explain to every likely person: "Yes, sah,
+lookin' for any sort of honourable employment till the ice goes out."
+
+"Nothin' doin'."
+
+"Everything's at a standstill."
+
+"Just keepin' body and soul together myself till the boats come in."
+
+They splashed out to the gulch on the same errand.
+
+Yes, wages were fifteen dollars a day when they were busy. Just now
+they were waiting for the thorough thaw.
+
+"Should think it was pretty thorough without any waitin'."
+
+Salaman shook his head. "Only in the town and tundra. The frost holds
+on to the deep gulch gravel like grim death. And the diggin's were
+already full of men ready to work for their keep-at least, they say
+so," Salaman added.
+
+Not only in the great cities is human flesh and blood held cheaper than
+that of the brutes. Even in the off season, when dogs was down, Nig
+could get his dollar a day, but his masters couldn't get fifty cents.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE GREAT STAMPEDE
+
+"Die Menchen suchen und suchen, wollen immer was Besseres finden....
+Gott geb' ihnen nur Geduld!"
+
+
+Men in the Gold Nugget were talking about some claims, staked and
+recorded in due form, but on which the statutory work had not been
+done.
+
+"What about 'em?"
+
+"They're jumpable at midnight."
+
+French Charlie invited the Boy to go along, but neither he nor the
+Colonel felt enthusiastic.
+
+"They're no good, those claims, except to sell to some sucker, and
+we're not in that business _yet_, sah."
+
+They had just done twenty miles in slush and mire, and their hearts
+were heavier than their heels. No, they would go to bed while the
+others did the jumpin', and next day they would fill Keith's wood-bin.
+
+"So if work does turn up we won't have to worry about usin' up his
+firin'." In the chill of the next evening they were cording the results
+of the day's chopping, when Maudie, in fur coat, skirts to the knee,
+and high rubber boots, appeared behind Keith's shack. Without deigning
+to notice the Boy, "Ain't seen you all day," says she to the Colonel.
+
+"Busy," he replied, scarcely looking up.
+
+"Did you do any jumpin' last night?"
+
+"No."
+
+"_That's_ all right."
+
+She seated herself with satisfaction on a log. She looked at the Boy
+impudently, as much as to say, "When that blot on the landscape is
+removed, I'll tell you something." The Boy had not the smallest
+intention of removing the blot.
+
+Grudgingly he admitted to himself that, away from the unsavory
+atmosphere of the Gold Nugget, there was nothing in Maudie positively
+offensive. At this moment, with her shrewd little face peering pertly
+out from her parki-hood, she looked more than ever like an audacious
+child, or like some strange, new little Arctic animal with a whimsical
+human air.
+
+"Look here, Colonel," she said presently, either despairing of getting
+rid of the Boy or ceasing to care about it: "you got to get a wiggle on
+to-morrow."
+
+"What for?"
+
+She looked round, first over one shoulder, then over the other. "Well,
+it's on the quiet."
+
+The Kentuckian nodded. But she winked her blue eyes suspiciously at the
+Boy.
+
+"Oh, _he's_ all right."
+
+"Well, you been down to Little Minook, ain't you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And you seen how the pay pinches out above No. 10?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, now, if it ain't above No. 10, where is it?" No answer. "Where
+does it _go_?" she repeated severely, like a schoolmarm to a class of
+backward boys.
+
+"That's what everybody'd like to know."
+
+"Then let 'em ask Pitcairn."
+
+"What's Pitcairn say?"
+
+She got up briskly, moved to another log almost at the Colonel's feet,
+and sat looking at him a moment as if making up her mind about
+something serious. The Colonel stood, fists at his sides, arrested by
+that name Pitcairn.
+
+"You know Pitcairn's the best all-round man we got here," she asserted
+rather than asked.
+
+The Colonel nodded.
+
+"He's an Idaho miner, Pitcairn is!"
+
+"I know."
+
+"Well, he's been out lookin' at the place where the gold gives out on
+Little Minook. There's a pup just there above No. 10--remember?"
+
+"Perfectly."
+
+"And above the pup, on the right, there's a bed of gravel."
+
+"Couldn't see much of that for the snow."
+
+"Well, sir, that bed o' gravel's an old channel."
+
+"No!"
+
+She nodded. "Pitcairn's sunk a prospect, and found colours in his first
+pan."
+
+"Oh, colours!"
+
+"But the deeper he went, the better prospects he got." She stood up
+now, close to the Colonel. The Boy stopped work and leaned on the wood
+pile, listening. "Pitcairn told Charlie and me (on the strict q. t.)
+that the gold channel crossed the divide at No. 10, and the only gold
+on Little Minookust what spilt down on those six claims as the gold
+went crossin' the gulch. The real placer is that old channel above the
+pup, and boys"--in her enthusiasm she even included the Colonel's
+objectionable pardner--"boys, it's rich as blazes!"
+
+"I wonder----" drawled the Colonel, recovering a little from his first
+thrill.
+
+"I wouldn't advise you to waste much time wonderin'," she said with
+fire. "What I'm tellin' you is scientific. Pitcairn is straight as a
+string. You won't get any hymns out o' Pitcairn, but you'll get fair
+and square. His news is worth a lot. If you got any natchral gumption
+anywhere about you, you can have a claim worth anything from ten to
+fifty thousand dollars this time to-morrow."
+
+"Well, well! Good Lord! Hey, Boy, what we goin' to do?"
+
+"Well, you don't want to get excited," admonished the queer little
+Arctic animal, jumping up suddenly; "but you can bunk early and get a
+four a.m. wiggle on. Charlie and me'll meet you on the Minookl. Ta-ta!"
+tad she whisked away as suddenly as a chipmunk.
+
+They couldn't sleep. Some minutes before the time named they were
+quietly leaving Keith's shack. Out on the trail there were two or three
+men already disappearing towards Little Minook here was Maudie, all by
+herself, sprinting along like a good fellow, on the thin surface of the
+last night's frost. She walked in native water-boots, but her
+snow-shoes stuck out above the small pack neatly lashed on her straight
+little shoulders. They waited for her.
+
+She came up very brisk and businesslike. To their good-mornings she
+only nodded in a funny, preoccupied way, never opening her lips.
+
+"Charlie gone on?" inquired the Colonel presently.
+
+She shook her head. "Knocked out."
+
+"Been fightin'?"
+
+"No; ran a race to Hunter."
+
+"To jump that claim?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"Did he beat?"
+
+She laughed. "Butts had the start. They got there together at nine
+o'clock!"
+
+"Three hours before jumpin' time?"
+
+Again she nodded. "And found four more waitin' on the same fool
+errand."
+
+"What did they do?"
+
+"Called a meetin'. Couldn't agree. It looked like there'd be a fight,
+and a fast race to the Recorder among the survivors. But before the
+meetin' was adjourned, those four that had got there first (they were
+pretty gay a'ready), they opened some hootch, so Butts and Charlie knew
+they'd nothing to fear except from one another."
+
+On the top of the divide that gave them their last glimpse of Rampart
+she stopped an instant and looked back. The quick flash of anxiety
+deepening to defiance made the others turn. The bit they could see of
+the water-front thoroughfare was alive. The inhabitants were rushing
+about like a swarm of agitated ants.
+
+"What's happening?"
+
+"It's got out," she exploded indignantly. "They're comin', too!"
+
+She turned, flew down the steep incline, and then settled into a
+steady, determined gait, that made her gain on the men who had got so
+long a start. Her late companions stood looking back in sheer
+amazement, for the town end of the trail was black with figures. The
+Boy began to laugh.
+
+"Look! if there isn't old Jansen and his squaw wife."
+
+The rheumatic cripple, huddled on a sled, was drawn by a native man and
+pushed by a native woman. They could hear him swearing at both
+impartially in broken English and Chinook.
+
+The Colonel and the Boy hurried after Maudie. It was some minutes
+before they caught up. The Boy, feeling that he couldn't be
+stand-offish in the very act of profiting by her acquaintance, began to
+tell her about the crippled but undaunted Swede. She made no answer,
+just trotted steadily on. The Boy hazarded another remark--an opinion
+that she was making uncommon good time for a woman.
+
+"You'll want all the wind you got before you get back," she said
+shortly, and silence fell on the stampeders.
+
+Some of the young men behind were catching up. Maudie set
+her mouth very firm and quickened her pace. This spectacle touched
+up those that followed; they broke into a canter, floundered in a
+drift, recovered, and passed on. Maudie pulled up.
+
+"That's all right! Let 'em get good and tired, half-way. We got to save
+all the run we got in us for the last lap."
+
+The sun was hotter, the surface less good.
+
+She loosened her shoulder-straps, released her snow-shoes, and put them
+on. As she tightened her little pack the ex-Governor came puffing up
+with apoplectic face.
+
+"Why, she can throw the diamond hitch!" he gasped with admiration.
+
+"S'pose you thought the squaw hitch would be good enough for me."
+
+"Well, it is for me," he laughed breathlessly.
+
+"That's 'cause you're an ex-Governor"; and steadily she tramped along.
+
+In twenty minutes Maudie's party came upon those same young men who had
+passed running. They sat in a row on a fallen spruce. One had no rubber
+boots, the other had come off in such a hurry he had forgotten his
+snow-shoes. Already they were wet to the waist.
+
+"Step out, Maudie," said one with short-breathed hilarity; "we'll be
+treadin' on your heels in a minute;" but they were badly blown.
+
+Maudie wasted not a syllable. Her mouth began to look drawn. There were
+violet shadows under the straight-looking eyes.
+
+The Colonel glanced at her now and then. Is she thinking about that
+four-year-old? Is Maudie stampedin' through the snow so that other
+little woman need never dance at the Alcazar? No, the Colonel knew well
+enough that Maudie rather liked this stampedin' business.
+
+She had passed one of those men who had got the long start of her. He
+carried a pack. Once in a while she would turn her strained-looking
+face over her shoulder, glancing back, with the frank eyes of an enemy,
+at her fellow-citizens labouring along the trail.
+
+"Come on, Colonel!" she commanded, with a new sharpness. "Keep up your
+lick."
+
+But the Colonel had had about enough of this gait. From now on he fell
+more and more behind. But the Boy was with her neck and neck.
+
+"Guess you're goin' to get there."
+
+"Guess I am."
+
+Some men behind them began to run. They passed. They had pulled off
+their parkis, and left them where they fell. They threw off their caps
+now, and the sweat rolled down their faces. Not a countenance but wore
+that immobile look, the fixed, unseeing eye of the spent runner, who is
+overtaxing heart and lungs. Not only Maudie now, but everyone was
+silent. Occasionally a man would rouse himself out of a walk, as if out
+of sleep, and run a few yards, going the more weakly after. Several of
+the men who had been behind caught up.
+
+Where was Kentucky?
+
+If Maudie wondered, she wasted no time over the speculation. For his
+own good she had admonished him to keep up his lick, but of course the
+main thing was that Maudie should keep up hers.
+
+"What if this is the great day of my life!" thought the Boy. "Shall I
+always look back to this? Why, it's Sunday. Wonder if Kentucky
+remembers?" Never pausing, the Boy glanced back, vaguely amused, and
+saw the Colonel plunging heavily along in front of half a dozen, who
+were obviously out of condition for such an expedition--eyes bloodshot,
+lumbering on with nervous "whisky gait," now whipped into a breathless
+gallop, now half falling by the way. Another of the Gold Nugget women
+with two groggy-looking men, and somewhere down the trail, the crippled
+Swede swearing at his squaw. A dreamy feeling came over the Boy. Where
+in the gold basins of the North was this kind of thing not
+happening--finished yesterday, or planned for to-morrow? Yes, it was
+typical. Between patches of ragged black spruce, wide stretches of
+snow-covered moss, under a lowering sky, and a mob of men floundering
+through the drifts to find a fortune. "See how they run!"--mad mice.
+They'd been going on stampedes all winter, and would go year in, year
+out, until they died. The prizes were not for such as they. As for
+himself--ah, it was a great day for him! He was going at last to claim
+that gold-mine he had come so far to find. This was the decisive moment
+of his life. At the thought he straightened up, and passed Maudie. She
+gave him a single sidelong look, unfriendly, even fierce. That was
+because he could run like sixty, and keep it up. "When I'm a
+millionaire I shall always remember that I'm rich because I won the
+race." A dizzy feeling came over him. He seemed to be running through
+some softly resisting medium like water--no, like wine jelly. His heart
+was pounding up in his throat. "What if something's wrong, and I drop
+dead on the way to my mine? Well, Kentucky'll look after things."
+
+Maudie had caught up again, and here was Little Minook at last! A
+couple of men, who from the beginning had been well in advance of
+everyone else, and often out of sight, had seemed for the last five
+minutes to be losing ground. But now they put on steam, Maudie too. She
+stepped out of her snowshoes, and flung them up on the low roof of the
+first cabin. Then she ducked her head, crooked her arms at the elbow,
+and, with fists uplifted, she broke into a run, jumping from pile to
+pile of frozen pay, gliding under sluice-boxes, scrambling up the bank,
+slipping on the rotting ice, recovering, dashing on over fallen timber
+and through waist-deep drifts, on beyond No. 10 up to the bench above.
+
+When the Boy got to Pitcairn's prospect hole, there were already six
+claims gone. He proceeded to stake the seventh, next to Maudie's. That
+person, with flaming cheeks, was driving her last location-post into a
+snow-drift with a piece of water-worn obsidian.
+
+The Colonel came along in time to stake No. 14 Below, under Maudie's
+personal supervision.
+
+Not much use, in her opinion, "except that with gold, it's where you
+find it, and that's all any man can tell you."
+
+As she was returning alone to her own claim, behold two brawny Circle
+City miners pulling out her stakes and putting in their own. She flew
+at them with remarks unprintable.
+
+"You keep your head shut," advised one of the men, a big, evil-looking
+fellow. "This was our claim first. We was here with Pitcairn yesterday.
+Somebody's took away our location-posts."
+
+"You take me for a cheechalko?" she screamed, and her blue eyes flashed
+like smitten steel. She pulled up her sweater and felt in her belt.
+"You--take your stakes out! Put mine back, unless you want----" A
+murderous-looking revolver gleamed in her hand.
+
+"Hold on!" said the spokesman hurriedly. "Can't you take a joke?"
+
+"No; this ain't my day for jokin'. You want to put them stakes o' mine
+back." She stood on guard till it was done. "And now I'd advise you,
+like a mother, to back-track home. You'll find this climate very tryin'
+to your health."
+
+They went farther up the slope and marked out a claim on the incline
+above the bench.
+
+In a few hours the mountain-side was staked to the very top, and still
+the stream of people struggled out from Rampart to the scene of the new
+strike. All day long, and all the night, the trail was alive with the
+coming or the going of the five hundred and odd souls that made up the
+population. In the town itself the excitement grew rather than waned.
+Men talked themselves into a fever, others took fire, and the epidemic
+spread like some obscure nervous disease. Nobody slept, everybody drank
+and hurrahed, and said it was the greatest night in the history of
+Minook. In the Gold Nugget saloon, crowded to suffocation, Pitcairn
+organized the new mining district, and named it the Idaho Bar. French
+Charlie and Keith had gone out late in the day. On their return, Keith
+sold his stake to a woman for twenty-five dollars, and Charlie
+advertised a half-interest in his for five thousand. Between these two
+extremes you could hear Idaho Bar quoted at any figure you liked.
+
+Maudie was in towering spirits. She drank several cocktails, and in her
+knee-length "stampedin' skirt" and her scarlet sweater she danced the
+most audacious jig even Maudie had ever presented to the Gold Nugget
+patrons. The miners yelled with delight. One of them caught her up and
+put her on the counter of the bar, where, no whit at a loss, she
+curveted and spun among the bottles and the glasses as lightly as a
+dragonfly dips and whirls along a summer brook. The enthusiasm grew
+delirious. The men began to throw nuggets at her, and Maudie, never
+pausing in the dance, caught them on the fly.
+
+Suddenly she saw the Big Chap turn away, and, with his back to her,
+pretend to read the notice on the wall, written in charcoal on a great
+sheet of brown wrapping-paper:
+
+"MINOOK, April 30.
+
+"To who it may concern:
+
+"Know all men by these presents that I, James McGinty, now of Minook
+(or Rampart City), Alaska, do hereby give notice of my intention to
+hold and claim a lien by virtue of the statue in such case----"
+
+He had read so far when Maudie, having jumped down off the bar with her
+fists full of nuggets, and dodging her admirers, wormed her way to the
+Colonel. She thrust her small person in between the notice and the
+reader, and scrutinised the tanned face, on which the Rochester burners
+shed a flood of light. "You lookin' mighty serious," she said.
+
+"Am I?"
+
+"M-hm! Thinkin' 'bout home sweet home?"
+
+"N-no--not just then."
+
+"Say, I told you 'bout--a--'bout me. You ain't never told me nothin'."
+
+He seemed not to know the answer to that, and pulled at his ragged
+beard. She leaned back against McGinty's notice, and blurred still more
+the smudged intention "by virtue of the statue."
+
+"Married, o' course," she said.
+
+"No."
+
+"Widder?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Never hitched up yet?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Never goin' to, I s'pose."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," he laughed, and turned his head over his shoulder
+to the curious scene between them and the bar. It was suddenly as if he
+had never seen it before; then, while Maudie waited, a little scornful,
+a little kind, his eyes went through the window to the pink and orange
+sunrise. As some change came over the Colonel's face, "She died!" said
+Maudie.
+
+"No--no--she didn't die;" then half to himself, half to forestall
+Maudie's crude probing, "but I lost her," he finished.
+
+"Oh, you lost her!"
+
+He stood, looking past the ugliness within to the morning majesty
+without. But it was not either that he saw. Maudie studied him.
+
+"Guess you ain't give up expectin' to find her some day?"
+
+"No--no, not quite."
+
+"Humph! Did you guess you'd find her here?"
+
+"No," and his absent smile seemed to remove him leagues away. "No, not
+here."
+
+"I could a' told you----" she began savagely. "I don't know for certain
+whether any--what you call good women come up here, but I'm dead sure
+none stay."
+
+"When do you leave for home, Maudie?" he said gently.
+
+But at the flattering implication the oddest thing happened. As she
+stood there, with her fists full of gold, Maudie's eyes filled. She
+turned abruptly and went out. The crowd began to melt away. In half an
+hour only those remained who had more hootch than they could carry off
+the premises. They made themselves comfortable on the floor, near the
+stove, and the greatest night Minook had known was ended.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+A MINERS' MEETING
+
+"Leiden oder triumphiren Hammer oder Amboss sein."--Goethe.
+
+
+In a good-sized cabin, owned by Bonsor, down near the A. C., Judge
+Corey was administering Miners' Law. The chief magistrate was already a
+familiar figure, standing on his dump at Little Minook, speculatively
+chewing and discussing "glayshal action," but most of the time at the
+Gold Nugget, chewing still, and discussing more guardedly the action
+some Minook man was threatening to bring against another. You may treat
+a glacier cavalierly, but Miners' Law is a serious matter. Corey was
+sitting before a deal table, littered with papers strewn round a
+central bottle of ink, in which a steel pen stuck upright. The Judge
+wore his usual dilapidated business suit of brown cheviot that had once
+been snuff-coloured and was now a streaky drab. On his feet, stretched
+out under the magisterial table till they joined the jury, a pair of
+moccasins; on his grizzled head a cowboy hat, set well back. He could
+spit farther than any man in Minook, and by the same token was a better
+shot. They had unanimously elected him Judge.
+
+The first-comers had taken possession of the chairs and wooden stools
+round the stove. All the later arrivals, including Keith and his
+friends, sat on the floor.
+
+"There's a good many here."
+
+"They'll keep comin' as long as a lean man can scrouge in."
+
+"Yes," said Keith, "everybody's got to come, even if it's only the
+usual row between pardners, who want to part and can't agree about
+dividing the outfit."
+
+"Got to come?"
+
+Keith laughed. "That's the way everybody feels. There'll be a debate
+and a chance to cast a vote. Isn't your true-born American always
+itching to hold a meeting about something?"
+
+"Don't know about that," said McGinty, "but I do know there's more
+things happens in a minute to make a man mad in Alaska, than happens in
+a year anywhere else." And his sentiment was loudly applauded. The
+plaintiff had scored a hit.
+
+"I don't know but two partnerships," the ex-Governor was saying, "of
+all those on my ship and on the Muckluck and the May West--just two,
+that have stood the Alaska strain. Everyone that didn't break on the
+boats, or in camp, went to smash on the trail."
+
+They all admitted that the trail was the final test. While they smoked
+and spat into or at the stove, and told trail yarns, the chief
+magistrate arranged papers, conferred with the clerk and another man,
+wrinkled deeply his leathery forehead, consulted his Waterbury, and
+shot tobacco-juice under the table.
+
+"Another reason everybody comes," whispered Keith, "is because the side
+that wins always takes the town up to the Nugget and treats to hootch.
+Whenever you see eighty or ninety more drunks than usual, you know
+there's either been a stampede or else justice has been administered."
+
+"Ain't Bonsor late?" asked someone.
+
+"No, it's a quarter of."
+
+"Why do they want Bonsor?"
+
+"His case on the docket--McGinty v. Burt Bonsor, proprietor of the Gold
+Nugget."
+
+"If they got a row on----"
+
+"If they got a row? Course they got a row. Weren't they pardners?"
+
+"But McGinty spends all his time at the Gold Nugget."
+
+"Well, where would he spend it?"
+
+"A Miners' Meetin's a pretty poor machine," McGinty was saying to the
+ex-Governor, "but it's the best we got."
+
+"----in a country bigger than several of the nations of Europe put
+together," responded that gentleman, with much public spirit.
+
+"A Great Country!"
+
+"Right!"
+
+"You bet!"
+
+"----a country that's paid for its purchase over and over again, even
+before we discovered gold here."
+
+"Did she? Good old 'laska."
+
+"----and the worst treated part o' the Union."
+
+"That's so."
+
+"After this, when I read about Russian corruption and Chinese cruelty,
+I'll remember the way Uncle Sam treats the natives up----"
+
+"----and us, b'gosh! White men that are openin' up this great, rich
+country fur Uncle Sam----"
+
+"----with no proper courts--no Government protection--no help--no
+justice--no nothin'."
+
+"Yer forgittin' them reindeer!" And the court-room rang with derisive
+laughter.
+
+"Congress started that there Relief Expedition all right," the josher
+went on, "only them blamed reindeer had got the feed habit, and when
+they'd et up everything in sight they set down on the Dalton Trail--and
+there they're settin' yit, just like they was Congress. But I don't
+like to hear no feller talkin' agin' the Gover'ment."
+
+"Yes, it's all very funny," said McGinty gloomily, "but think o' the
+fix a feller's in wot's had a wrong done him in the fall, and knows
+justice is thousands o' miles away, and he can't even go after her for
+eight months; and in them eight months the feller wot robbed him has et
+up the money, or worked out the claim, and gone dead-broke."
+
+"No, sir! we don't wait, and we don't go trav'lin'. We stay at home and
+call a meetin'."
+
+The door opened, and Bonsor and the bar-tender, with great difficulty,
+forced their way in. They stood flattened against the wall. During the
+diversion McGinty was growling disdainfully, "Rubbidge!"
+
+"Rubbidge? Reckon it's pretty serious rubbidge."
+
+"Did you ever know a Miners' Meetin' to make a decision that didn't
+become law, with the whole community ready to enforce it if necessary?
+Rubbidge!
+
+"Oh, we'll hang a man if we don't like his looks," grumbled McGinty;
+but he was overborne. There were a dozen ready to uphold the majesty of
+the Miners' Meetin'.
+
+"No, sir! No funny business about our law! This tribunal's final."
+
+"I ain't disputin' that it's final. I ain't talkin' about law. I was
+mentionin' Justice."
+
+"The feller that loses is always gassin' 'bout Justice. When you win
+you don't think there's any flies on the Justice."
+
+"Ain't had much experience with winnin'. We all knows who wins in these
+yere Meetin's."
+
+"Who?" But they turned their eyes on Mr. Bonsor, over by the door.
+
+"Who wins?" repeated a Circle City man.
+
+"The feller that's got the most friends."
+
+"It's so," whispered Keith.
+
+"----same at Circle," returned the up-river man.
+
+McGinty looked at him. Was this a possible adherent?
+
+"You got a Push at Circle?" he inquired, but without genuine interest
+in the civil administration up the river. "Why, 'fore this yere town
+was organised, when we hadn't got no Court of Arbitration to fix a
+boundary, or even to hang a thief, we had our 'main Push,' just like we
+was 'Frisco." He lowered his voice, and leaned towards his Circle
+friend. "With Bonsor's help they 'lected Corey Judge o' the P'lice
+Court, and Bonsor ain't never let Corey forgit it."
+
+"What about the other?" inquired a Bonsorite, "the shifty Push that got
+you in for City Marshal?"
+
+"What's the row on to-night?" inquired the Circle City man.
+
+"Oh, Bonsor, over there, he lit out on a stampede 'bout Christmas, and
+while he was gone a feller by the name o' Lawrence quit the game.
+Fanned out one night at the Gold Nugget. I seen for days he was wantin'
+to be a angil, and I kep' a eye on 'im. Well, when he went to the
+boneyard, course it was my business, bein' City Marshal, to take
+possession of his property fur his heirs!"
+
+There was unseemly laughter behind the stove-pipe.
+
+"Among his deeds and traps," McGinty went on, unheeding, "there was
+fifteen hundred dollars in money. Well, sir, when Bonsor gits back he
+decides he'd like to be the custodian o' that cash. Mentions his idee
+to me. I jest natchrally tell him to go to hell. No, sir, he goes to
+Corey over there, and gits an order o' the Court makin' Bonsor
+administrator o' the estate o' James Lawrence o' Noo Orleens, lately
+deceased. Then Bonsor comes to me, shows me the order, and demands that
+fifteen hundred."
+
+"Didn't he tell you you could keep all the rest o' Lawrence's stuff?"
+asked the Bonsorite.
+
+McGinty disdained to answer this thrust.
+
+"But I knows my dooty as City Marshal, and I says, 'No,' and Bonsor
+says, says he, 'If you can't git the idee o' that fifteen hundred
+dollars out o' your head, I'll git it out fur ye with a bullet,' an' he
+draws on me."
+
+"An' McGinty weakens," laughed the mocker behind the stove-pipe.
+
+"Bonsor jest pockets the pore dead man's cash," says McGinty, with
+righteous indignation, "and I've called this yer meetin' t' arbitrate
+the matter."
+
+"Minook doesn't mind arbitrating," says Keith low to the Colonel, "but
+there isn't a man in camp that would give five cents for the interest
+of the heirs of Lawrence in that fifteen hundred dollars."
+
+A hammering on the clerk's little table announced that it was seven
+p.m.
+
+The Court then called for the complaint filed by McGinty v. Bonsor, the
+first case on the docket. The clerk had just risen when the door was
+flung open, and hatless, coatless, face aflame, Maudie stood among the
+miners.
+
+"Boys!" said she, on the top of a scream, "I been robbed."
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"Robbed?"
+
+"Golly!"
+
+"Maudie robbed?" They spoke all together. Everybody had jumped up.
+
+"While we was on that stampede yesterday, somebody found my--all
+my----" She choked, and her eyes filled. "Boys! my nuggets, my dust, my
+dollars--they're gone!"
+
+"Where did you have 'em?"
+
+"In a little place under--in a hole." Her face twitched, and she put
+her hand up to hide it.
+
+"Mean shame."
+
+"Dirt mean."
+
+"We'll find him, Maudie."
+
+"An' when we do, we'll hang him on the cottonwood."
+
+"Did anybody know where you kept your----"
+
+"I didn't think so, unless it was----No!" she screamed hysterically,
+and then fell into weak crying. "Can't think who could have been such a
+skunk."
+
+"But who do you suspect?" persisted the Judge.
+
+"How do I know?" she retorted angrily. "I suspect everybody till--till
+I know." She clenched her hands.
+
+That a thief should be "operating" in Minook on somebody who wasn't
+dead yet, was a matter that came home to the business and the bosoms of
+all the men in the camp. In the midst of the babel of speculation and
+excitement, Maudie, still crying and talking incoherently about skunks,
+opened the door. The men crowded after her. Nobody suggested it, but
+the entire Miners' Meeting with one accord adjourned to the scene of
+the crime. Only a portion could be accommodated under Maudie's roof,
+but the rest crowded in front of her door or went and examined the
+window. Maudie's log-cabin was a cheerful place, its one room, neatly
+kept, lined throughout with red and white drill, hung with marten and
+fox, carpeted with wolf and caribou. The single sign of disorder was
+that the bed was pulled out a little from its place in the angle of the
+wall above the patent condenser stove. Behind the oil-tank, where the
+patent condensation of oil into gas went on, tiers of shelves,
+enamelled pots and pans ranged below, dishes and glasses above. On the
+very top, like a frieze, gaily labelled ranks of "tinned goods." On the
+table under the window a pair of gold scales. A fire burned in the
+stove. The long-lingering sunlight poured through the "turkey-red" that
+she had tacked up for a half-curtain, and over this, one saw the
+slouch-hats and fur caps of the outside crowd.
+
+Clutching Judge Corey by the arm, Maudie pulled him after her into the
+narrow space behind the head-board and the wall.
+
+"It was here--see?" She stooped down.
+
+Some of the men pulled the bed farther out, so that they, too, could
+pass round and see.
+
+"This piece o' board goes down so slick you'd never know it lifted
+out." She fitted it in with shaking hands, and then with her nails and
+a hairpin got it out. "And way in, underneath, I had this box. I always
+set it on a flat stone." She spoke as if this oversight were the
+thief's chief crime. "See? Like that."
+
+She fitted the cigar-box into unseen depths of space and then brought
+it out again, wet and muddy. The ground was full of springs hereabouts,
+and the thaw had loosed them.
+
+"Boys!" She stood up and held out the box. "Boys! it was full."
+
+Eloquently she turned it upside down.
+
+"How much do you reckon you had?" She handed the muddy box to the
+nearest sympathiser, sat down on the fur-covered bed, and wiped her
+eyes.
+
+"Any idea?"
+
+"I weighed it all over again after I got in from the Gold Nugget the
+night we went on the stampede."
+
+As she sobbed out the list of her former possessions, Judge Corey took
+it down on the back of a dirty envelope. So many ounces of dust, so
+many in nuggets, so much in bills and coin, gold and silver. Each item
+was a stab.
+
+"Yes, all that--all that!" she jumped up wildly, "and it's gone! But we
+got to find it. What you hangin' round here for? Why, if you boys had
+any natchral spunk you'd have the thief strung up by now."
+
+"We got to find him fust."
+
+"You won't find him standin' here."
+
+They conferred afresh.
+
+"It must have been somebody who knowed where you kept the stuff."
+
+"N-no." Her red eyes wandered miserably, restlessly, to the window.
+Over the red half-curtain French Charlie and Butts looked in. They had
+not been to the meeting.
+
+Maudie's face darkened as she caught sight of the Canadian.
+
+"Oh, yes, you can crow over me now," she shouted shrilly above the buzz
+of comment and suggestion. The Canadian led the way round to the door,
+and the two men crowded in.
+
+"You just get out," Maudie cried in a fury. "Didn't I turn you out o'
+this and tell you never----"
+
+"Hol' on," said French Charlie in a conciliatory tone. "This true 'bout
+your losin'----"
+
+"Yes, it's true; but I ain't askin' your sympathy!"
+
+He stopped short and frowned.
+
+"Course not, when you can get his." Under his slouch-hat he glowered at
+the Colonel.
+
+Maudie broke into a volley of abuse. The very air smelt of brimstone.
+When finally, through sheer exhaustion, she dropped on the side of the
+bed, the devil prompted French Charlie to respond in kind. She jumped
+up and turned suddenly round upon Corey, speaking in a voice quite
+different, low and hoarse: "You asked me, Judge, if anybody knew where
+I kept my stuff. Charlie did."
+
+The Canadian stopped in the middle of a lurid remark and stared
+stupidly. The buzz died away. The cabin was strangely still.
+
+"Wasn't you along with the rest up to Idaho Bar?" inquired the Judge in
+a friendly voice.
+
+"Y-yes."
+
+"Not when we all were! No!" Maudie's tear-washed eyes were regaining a
+dangerous brightness. "I wanted him to come with me. He wouldn't, and
+we quarrelled."
+
+"We didn't."
+
+"You didn't quarrel?" put in the Judge.
+
+"We did," said Maudie, breathless.
+
+"Not about that. It was because she wanted another feller to come,
+too." Again he shot an angry glance at the Kentuckian.
+
+"And Charlie said if I gave the other feller the tip, he wouldn't come.
+And he'd get even with me, if it took a leg!"
+
+"Well, it looks like he done it."
+
+"Can't you prove an alibi? Thought you said you was along with the rest
+to Idaho Bar?" suggested Windy Jim.
+
+"So I was."
+
+"I didn't see you," Maudie flashed.
+
+"When were you there?" asked the Judge.
+
+"Last night."
+
+"Oh, yes! When everybody else was comin' home. You all know if that's
+the time Charlie usually goes on a stampede!"
+
+"You----"
+
+If words could slay, Maudie would have dropped dead, riddled with a
+dozen mortal wounds. But she lived to reply in kind. Charlie's
+abandonment of coherent defence was against him. While he wallowed
+blindly in a mire of offensive epithet, his fellow-citizens came to
+dark conclusions. He had an old score to pay off against Maudie, they
+all knew that. Had he chosen this way? What other so effectual? He
+might even say most of that dust was his, anyway. But it was an
+alarming precedent. The fire of Maudie's excitement had caught and
+spread. Eve the less inflammable muttered darkly that it was all up
+with Minook, if a person couldn't go on a stampede without havin' his
+dust took out of his cabin. The crowd was pressing Charlie, and twenty
+cross-questions were asked him in a minute. He, beside himself with
+rage, or fear, or both, lost all power except to curse.
+
+The Judge seemed to be taking down damning evidence on the dirty
+envelope. Some were suggesting:
+
+"Bring him over to the court."
+
+"Yes, try him straight away."
+
+No-Thumb-Jack was heard above the din, saying it was all gammon wasting
+time over a trial, or even--in a plain case like this--for the Judge to
+require the usual complaint made in writing and signed by three
+citizens.
+
+Two men laid hold of the Canadian, and he turned ghastly white under
+his tan.
+
+"Me? Me tief? You--let me alone!" He began to struggle. His terrified
+eyes rolling round the little cabin, fell on Butts.
+
+"I don' know but one tief in Minook," he said wildly, like a man
+wandering in a fever, and unconscious of having spoken, till he noticed
+there was a diversion of some sort. People were looking at Butts. A
+sudden inspiration pierced the Canadian's fog of terror.
+
+"You know what Butts done to Jack McQuestion. You ain't forgot how he
+sneaked Jack's watch!" The incident was historic.
+
+Every eye on Butts. Charlie caught up breath and courage.
+
+"An' t'odder night w'en Maudie treat me like she done"--he shot a
+blazing glance at the double-dyed traitor--"I fixed it up with Butts.
+Got him to go soft on 'er and nab 'er ring."
+
+"You didn't!" shouted Maudie.
+
+With a shaking finger Charlie pointed out Jimmie, the cashier.
+
+"Didn't I tell you to weigh me out twenty dollars for Butts that
+night?"
+
+"Right," says Jimmie.
+
+"It was to square Butts fur gittin' that ring away from Maudie."
+
+"You put up a job like that on me?" To be fooled publicly was worse
+than being robbed.
+
+Charlie paid no heed to her quivering wrath. The menace of the
+cotton-wood gallows outrivalled even Maudie and her moods.
+
+"Why should I pay Butts twenty dollars if I could work dat racket
+m'self? If I want expert work, I go to a man like Butts, who knows his
+business. I'm a miner--like the rest o' yer!"
+
+The centre of gravity had shifted. It was very grave indeed in the
+neighbourhood of Mr. Butts.
+
+"Hold on," said the Judge, forcing his way nearer to the man whose
+fingers had a renown so perilous. "'Cause a man plays a trick about a
+girl's ring don't prove he stole her money. This thing happened while
+the town was emptied out on the Little Minook trail. Didn't you go off
+with the rest yesterday morning?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Ha!" gasped Maudie, as though this were conclusive--"had business in
+town, did you?"
+
+Mr. Butts declined to answer.
+
+"You thought the gold-mine out on the gulch could wait--and the
+gold-mine in my cabin couldn't."
+
+"You lie!" remarked Mr. Butts.
+
+"What time did you get to Idaho Bar?" asked Corey.
+
+"Didn't get there at all."
+
+"Where were you?"
+
+"Here in Rampart."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Wait! Wait!" commanded the Judge, as the crowd rocked towards Butts:
+"P'raps you'll tell us what kept you at home?"
+
+Butts shut his mouth angrily, but a glance at the faces nearest him
+made him think an answer prudent.
+
+"I was tired."
+
+The men, many of them ailing, who had nearly killed themselves to get
+to Idaho Bar, sneered openly.
+
+"I'd been jumpin' a claim up at Hunter."
+
+"So had Charlie. But he joined the new stampede in the afternoon."
+
+"Well, I didn't."
+
+"Why, even the old cripple Jansen went on this stampede."
+
+"Can't help that."
+
+"Mr. Butts, you're the only able-bodied white man in the district that
+stayed at home." Corey spoke in his, most judicial style.
+
+Mr. Butts must have felt the full significance of so suspicious a fact,
+but all he said was:
+
+"Y' ought to fix up a notice. Anybody that don't join a stampede will
+be held guilty o' grand larceny." Saying this Butts had backed a step
+behind the stove-pipe, and with incredible quickness had pulled out a
+revolver. But before he had brought it into range, No-Thumb-Jack had
+struck his arm down, and two or three had sprung at the weapon and
+wrested it away.
+
+"Search him!"
+
+"No tellin' what else he's got!"
+
+"----and he's so damned handy!"
+
+"Search him!"
+
+Maudie pressed forward as the pinioned man's pockets were turned out.
+Only tobacco, a small buckskin bag with less than four ounces of dust,
+a pipe, and a knife.
+
+"Likely he'd be carrying my stuff about on him!" said she, contemptuous
+of her own keen interest.
+
+"Get out a warrant to search Butts' premises," said a voice in the
+crowd.
+
+"McGinty and Johnson are down there now!"
+
+"Think he'd leave anything layin' round?"
+
+Maudie pressed still closer to the beleaguered Butts.
+
+"Say, if I make the boys let you go back to Circle, will you tell me
+where you've hid my money?"
+
+"Ain't got your money!"
+
+"Look at 'im," whispered Charlie, still so terrified he could hardly
+stand.
+
+"Butts ain't borrowin' no trouble."
+
+And this formulating of the general impression did Butts no good. As
+they had watched the calm demeanour of the man, under suspicion of what
+was worse, in their eyes, than murder, there had come over the
+bystanders a wave of that primitive cruelty that to this hour will wake
+in modern men and cry as loud as in Judean days, or in the Saga times
+of Iceland, "Retribution! Let him suffer! Let him pay in blood!" And
+here again, on the Yukon, that need of visible atonement to right the
+crazy injustice of the earth.
+
+Even the women--the others had crowded in--were eager for Butts'
+instant expiation of the worst crime such a community knows. They told
+one another excitedly how they'd realised all along it was only a
+question of time before Butts would be tryin' his game up here. Nobody
+was safe. Luckily they were on to him. But look! He didn't care a
+curse. It would be a good night's job to make him care.
+
+Three men had hold of him, and everybody talked at once. Minnie Bryan
+was sure she had seen him skulking round Maudie's after that lady had
+gone up the trail, but everybody had been too excited about the
+stampede to notice particularly.
+
+The Judge and Bonsor were shouting and gesticulating, Butts answering
+bitterly but quietly still. His face was pretty grim, but it looked as
+if he were the one person in the place who hadn't lost his head. Maudie
+was still crying at intervals, and advertising to the newcomers that
+wealth she had hitherto kept so dark, and between whiles she stared
+fixedly at Butts, as conviction of his guilt deepened to a rage to see
+him suffer for his crime.
+
+She would rather have her nuggets back, but, failing that--let Butts
+pay! He owed her six thousand dollars. Let him pay!
+
+The miners were hustling him to the door--to the Court House or to the
+cotton-wood--a toss-up which.
+
+"Look here!" cried out the Colonel; "McGinty and Johnson haven't got
+back!"
+
+Nobody listened. Justice had been sufficiently served in sending them.
+They had forced Butts out across the threshold, the crowd packed close
+behind. The only men who had not pressed forward were Keith, the
+Colonel, and the Boy, and No-Thumb-Jack, still standing by the
+oil-tank.
+
+"What are they going to do with him?" The Colonel turned to Keith with
+horror in his face.
+
+Keith's eyes were on the Boy, who had stooped and picked up the block
+of wood that had fitted over the treasure-hole. He was staring at it
+with dilated eyes. Sharply he turned his head in the direction where
+No-Thumb-Jack had stood. Jack was just making for the door on the heels
+of the last of those pressing to get out.
+
+The Boy's low cry was drowned in the din. He lunged forward, but the
+Colonel gripped him. Looking up, he saw that Kentucky understood, and
+meant somehow to manage the business quietly.
+
+Jack was trying, now right, now left, to force his way through the
+congestion at the door, like a harried rabbit at a wattled fence. A
+touch on the shoulder simultaneously with the click of a trigger at his
+ear brought his face round over his shoulder. He made the instinctive
+pioneer motion to his hip, looked into the bore of the Colonel's
+pistol, and under Keith's grip dropped his "gun-hand" with a smothered
+oath.
+
+Or was it that other weapon in the Colonel's left that bleached the
+ruddy face? Simply the block of wood. On the under side, dried in, like
+a faint stain, four muddy finger-prints, index joint lacking. Without a
+word the Colonel turned the upper side out. A smudge?--no--the grain of
+human skin clean printed--a distorted palm without a thumb. Only one
+man in Minook could make that sign manual!
+
+The last of the crowd were over the threshold now, and still no word
+was spoken by those who stayed behind, till the Colonel said to the
+Boy:
+
+"Go with 'em, and look after Butts. Give us five minutes; more if you
+can!"
+
+He laid the block on a cracker-box, and, keeping pistol and eye still
+on the thief, took his watch in his left hand, as the Boy shot through
+the door.
+
+Butts was making a good fight for his life, but he was becoming
+exhausted. The leading spirits were running him down the bank to where
+a crooked cotton-wood leaned cautiously over the Never-Know-What, as if
+to spy out the river's secret.
+
+But after arriving there, they were a little delayed for lack of what
+they called tackle. They sent a man off for it, and then sent another
+to hurry up the man. The Boy stood at the edge of the crowd, a little
+above them, watching Maudie's door, and with feverish anxiety turning
+every few seconds to see how it was with Butts.
+
+Up in the cabin No-Thumb-Jack had pulled out of the usual capacious
+pockets of the miner's brown-duck-pockets that fasten with a patent
+snap--a tattered pocket-book, fat with bills. He plunged deeper and
+brought up Pacific Coast eagles and five-dollar pieces, Canadian and
+American gold that went rolling out of his maimed and nervous hand
+across the tablet to the scales and set the brass pans sawing up and
+down.
+
+Keith, his revolver still at full cock, had picked up a trampled bit of
+paper near the stove. Corey's list. Left-handedly he piled up the
+money, counting, comparing.
+
+"Quick! the dust!" ordered the Colonel. Out of a left hip-pocket a
+long, tight-packed buckskin bag. Another from a side-pocket, half the
+size and a quarter as full.
+
+"That's mine," said Jack, and made a motion to recover.
+
+"Let it alone. Turn out everything. Nuggets!"
+
+A miner's chamois belt unbuckled and flung heavily down. The scales
+jingled and rocked; every pocket in the belt was stuffed.
+
+"Where's the rest?"
+
+"There ain't any rest. That's every damned pennyweight."
+
+"Maybe we ought to weigh it, and see if he's lying?"
+
+"'Fore God it's all! Let me go!" He had kept looking through the crack
+of the door.
+
+"Reckon it's about right," said Keith.
+
+"'Tain't right! There's more there'n I took. My stuff's there too. For
+Christ's sake, let me go!"
+
+"Look here, Jack, is the little bag yours?"
+
+Jack wet his dry lips and nodded "Yes."
+
+The Colonel snatched up the smaller bag and thrust it into the man's
+hands. Jack made for the door. The Colonel stopped him.
+
+"Better take to the woods," he said, with a motion back towards the
+window. The Colonel opened the half-closed door and looked out, as Jack
+pushed aside the table, tore away the red curtain, hammered at the
+sash, then, desperate, set his shoulder at it and forced the whole
+thing out. He put his maimed hand on the sill and vaulted after the
+shattered glass.
+
+They could see him going like the wind up towards his own shack at the
+edge of the wood, looking back once or twice, doubling and tacking to
+keep himself screened by the haphazard, hillside cabins, out of sight
+of the lynchers down at the river.
+
+"Will you stay with this?" the Colonel had asked Keith hurriedly,
+nodding at the treasure-covered table, and catching up the
+finger-marked block before Jack was a yard from the window.
+
+"Yes," Keith had said, revolver still in hand and eyes on the man
+Minook was to see no more. The Colonel met the Boy running breathless
+up the bank.
+
+"Can't hold 'em any longer," he shouted; "you're takin' it pretty easy
+while a man's gettin' killed down here."
+
+"Stop! Wait!" The Colonel floundered madly through the slush and mud,
+calling and gesticulating, "I've got the thief!"
+
+Presto all the backs of heads became faces.
+
+"Got the money?" screamed Maudie, uncovering her eyes. She had gone to
+the execution, but after the rope was brought, her nerve failed her,
+and she was sobbing hysterically into her two palms held right over her
+eyes.
+
+"Oh, you had it, did you?" called out McGinty with easy insolence.
+
+"Look here!" The Colonel held up the bit of flooring with rapid
+explanation.
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"Got him locked up?"
+
+Everybody talked at once. The Colonel managed to keep them going for
+some moments before he admitted.
+
+"Reckon he's lit out." And then the Colonel got it hot and strong for
+his clumsiness.
+
+"Which way'd he go?"
+
+The Colonel turned his back to the North Pole, and made a fine large
+gesture in the general direction of the Equator.
+
+"Where's my money?"
+
+"Up in your cabin. Better go and count it."
+
+A good many were willing to help since they'd been cheated out of a
+hanging, and even defrauded of a shot at a thief on the wing. Nobody
+seemed to care to remain in the neighbourhood of the crooked
+cotton-wood. The crowd was dispersing somewhat sheepishly.
+
+Nobody looked at Butts, and yet he was a sight to see. His face and his
+clothes were badly mauled. He was covered with mud and blood. When the
+men were interrupted in trying to get the noose over his head, he had
+stood quite still in the midst of the crowd till it broke and melted
+away from him. He looked round, passed his hand over his eyes, threw
+open his torn coat, and felt in his pockets.
+
+"Who's got my tobacco?" says he.
+
+Several men turned back suddenly, and several pouches were held out,
+but nobody met Butts' eyes. He filled his pipe, nor did his hand shake
+any more than those that held the tobacco-bags. When he had lit up,
+"Who's got my Smith and Wesson?" he called out to the backs of the
+retiring citizens. Windy Jim stood and delivered. Butts walked away to
+his cabin, swaying a little, as if he'd had more hootch than he could
+carry.
+
+"What would you have said," demanded the Boy, "if you'd hung the wrong
+man?"
+
+"Said?" echoed McGinty. "Why, we'd 'a' said that time the corpse had
+the laugh on us." A couple of hours later Keith put an excited face
+into his shack, where the Colonel and the Boy were just crawling under
+their blankets.
+
+"Thought you might like to know, that Miners' Meeting that was
+interrupted is having an extra session."
+
+They followed him down to the Court through a fine rain. The night was
+heavy and thick. As they splashed along Keith explained:
+
+"Of course, Charlie knew there wasn't room enough in Alaska now for
+Butts and him; and he thought he'd better send Butts home. So he took
+his gun and went to call."
+
+"Don't tell me that poor devil's killed after all."
+
+"Not a bit. Butts is a little bunged up, but he's the handier man, even
+so. He drew the first bead."
+
+"Charlie hurt?"
+
+"No, he isn't hurt. He's dead. Three or four fellows had just looked
+in, on the quiet, to kind of apologise to Butts. They're down at
+Corey's now givin' evidence against him."
+
+"So Butts'll have to swing after all. Is he in Court?"
+
+"Yes--been a busy day for Butts."
+
+A confused noise came suddenly out of the big cabin they were nearing.
+They opened the door with difficulty, and forced their way into the
+reeking, crowded room for the second time that night. Everybody seemed
+to be talking--nobody listening. Dimly through dense clouds of
+tobacco-smoke "the prisoner at the Bar" was seen to be--what--no!
+Yes--shaking hands with the Judge.
+
+"Verdict already?"
+
+"Oh, that kind o' case don't take a feller like Corey long."
+
+"What's the decision?"
+
+"Prisoner discharged. Charlie Le Gros committed suicide."
+
+"Suicide!"
+
+"--by goin' with his gun to Butts' shack lookin' f trouble."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+THE ICE GOES OUT
+
+"I am apart of all that I have seen."
+
+
+It had been thawing and freezing, freezing and thawing, for so long
+that men lost account of the advance of a summer coming, with such
+balked, uncertain steps. Indeed, the weather variations had for several
+weeks been so great that no journey, not the smallest, could be
+calculated with any assurance. The last men to reach Minook were two
+who had made a hunting and prospecting trip to an outlying district.
+They had gone there in six days, and were nineteen in returning.
+
+The slush was waist-deep in the gulches. On the benches, in the snow,
+holes appeared, as though red-hot stones had been thrown upon the
+surface. The little settlement by the mouth of the Minook sat
+insecurely on the boggy hillside, and its inhabitants waded knee-deep
+in soaking tundra moss and mire.
+
+And now, down on the Never-Know-What, water was beginning to run on the
+marginal ice. Up on the mountains the drifted snow was honey-combed.
+Whole fields of it gave way and sunk a foot under any adventurous shoe.
+But although these changes had been wrought slowly, with backsets of
+bitter nights, when everything was frozen hard as flint, the illusion
+was general that summer came in with a bound. On the 9th of May, Minook
+went to bed in winter, and woke to find the snow almost gone under the
+last nineteen hours of hot, unwinking sunshine, and the first geese
+winging their way up the valley--sight to stir men's hearts. Stranger
+still, the eight months' Arctic silence broken suddenly by a thousand
+voices. Under every snow-bank a summer murmur, very faint at first, but
+hourly louder--the sound of falling water softly singing over all the
+land.
+
+As silence had been the distinguishing feature of the winter, so was
+noise the sign of the spring. No ear so dull but now was full of it.
+All the brooks on all the hills, tinkling, tumbling, babbling of some
+great and universal joy, all the streams of all the gulches joining
+with every little rill to find the old way, or to carve a new, back to
+the Father of Waters.
+
+And the strange thing had happened on the Yukon. The shore-edges of the
+ice seemed sunken, and the water ran yet deeper there. But of a
+certainty the middle part had risen! The cheechalkos thought it an
+optical illusion. But old Brandt from Forty-Mile had seen the ice go
+out for two-and-twenty years, and he said it went out always so--"humps
+his back, an' gits up gits, and when he's a gitten', jest look out!"
+Those who, in spite of warning, ventured in hip-boots down on the
+Never-Know-What, found that, in places, the under side of the ice was
+worn nearly through. If you bent your head and listened, you could
+plainly hear that greater music of the river running underneath, low as
+yet, but deep, and strangely stirring--dominating in the hearer's ears
+all the clear, high clamour from gulch and hill.
+
+In some men's hearts the ice "went out" at the sound, and the melting
+welled up in their eyes. Summer and liberty were very near.
+
+"Oh, hurry, Yukon Inua; let the ice go out and let the boats come in."
+
+But the next few days hung heavily. The river-ice humped its back still
+higher, but showed no disposition to "git." The wonder was it did not
+crack under the strain; but Northern ice ahs the air of being strangely
+flexile. Several feet in depth, the water ran now along the margin.
+
+More geese and ducks appeared, and flocks of little birds--Canada jays,
+robins, joined the swelling chorus of the waters.
+
+Oh, hurry, hurry Inua, and open the great highway! Not at Minook alone:
+at every wood camp, mining town and mission, at every white post and
+Indian village, all along the Yukon, groups were gathered waiting the
+great moment of the year. No one had ever heard of the ice breaking up
+before the 11th of May or later than the 28th. And yet men had begun to
+keep a hopeful eye on the river from the 10th of April, when a white
+ptarmigan was reported wearing a collar of dark-brown feathers, and his
+wings tipped brown. That was a month ago, and the great moment could
+not possibly be far now.
+
+The first thing everybody did on getting up, and the last thing
+everybody did on going to bed, was to look at the river. It was not
+easy to go to bed; and even if you got so far it was not easy to sleep.
+The sun poured into the cabins by night as well as by day, and there
+was nothing to divide one part of the twenty-four hours from another.
+You slept when you were too tired to watch the river. You breakfasted,
+like as not, at six in the evening; you dined at midnight. Through all
+your waking hours you kept an eye on the window overlooking the river.
+In your bed you listened for that ancient Yukon cry, "The ice is going
+out!"
+
+For ages it had meant to the timid: Beware the fury of the shattered
+ice-fields; beware the caprice of the flood. Watch! lest many lives go
+out with the ice as aforetime. And for ages to the stout-hearted it had
+meant: Make ready the kyaks and the birch canoes; see that tackle and
+traps are strong--for plenty or famine wait upon the hour. As the white
+men waited for boats to-day, the men of the older time had waited for
+the salmon--for those first impatient adventurers that would force
+their way under the very ice-jam, tenderest and best of the season's
+catch, as eager to prosecute that journey from the ocean to the
+Klondyke as if they had been men marching after the gold boom.
+
+No one could settle to anything. It was by fits and starts that the
+steadier hands indulged even in target practice, with a feverish
+subconsciousness that events were on the way that might make it
+inconvenient to have lost the art of sending a bullet straight. After a
+diminutive tin can, hung on a tree, had been made to jump at a hundred
+paces, the marksman would glance at the river and forget to fire. It
+was by fits and starts that they even drank deeper or played for higher
+stakes.
+
+The Wheel of Fortune, in the Gold Nugget, was in special demand. It was
+a means of trying your luck with satisfactory despatch "between drinks"
+or between long bouts of staring at the river. Men stood in
+shirt-sleeves at their cabin doors in the unwinking sunshine, looking
+up the valley or down, betting that the "first boat in" would be one of
+those nearest neighbours, May West or Muckluck, coming up from
+Woodworth; others as ready to back heavily their opinion that the first
+blast of the steam whistle would come down on the flood from Circle or
+from Dawson.
+
+The Colonel had bought and donned a new suit of "store clothes," and
+urged on his companion the necessity of at least a whole pair of
+breeches in honour of his entrance into the Klondyke. But the Boy's
+funds were low and his vanity chastened. Besides, he had other business
+on his mind.
+
+After sending several requests for the immediate return of his dog,
+requests that received no attention, the Boy went out to the gulch to
+recover him. Nig's new master paid up all arrears of wages readily
+enough, but declined to surrender the dog. "Oh, no, the ice wasn't
+thinkin' o' goin' out yit."
+
+"I want my dog."
+
+"You'll git him sure."
+
+"I'm glad you understand that much."
+
+"I'll bring him up to Rampart in time for the first boat."
+
+"Where's my dog?"
+
+No answer. The Boy whistled. No Nig. Dread masked itself in choler. He
+jumped on the fellow, forced him down, and hammered him till he cried
+for mercy.
+
+"Where's my dog, then?"
+
+"He--he's up to Idyho Bar," whimpered the prostrate one. And there the
+Boy found him, staggering under a pair of saddle-bags, hired out to
+Mike O'Reilly for a dollar and a half a day. Together they returned to
+Rampart to watch for the boat.
+
+Certainly the ice was very late breaking up this year. The men of
+Rampart stood about in groups in the small hours of the morning of the
+16th of May; as usual, smoking, yarning, speculating, inventing
+elaborate joshes. Somebody remembered that certain cheechalkos had gone
+to bed at midnight. Now this was unprecedented, even impertinent. If
+the river is not open by the middle of May, your Sour-dough may go to
+bed--only he doesn't. Still, he may do as he lists. But your
+cheechalko--why, this is the hour of his initiation. It was as if a man
+should yawn at his marriage or refuse to sleep at his funeral. The
+offenders were some of those Woodworth fellows, who, with a dozen or so
+others, had built shacks below "the street" yet well above the river.
+At two in the morning Sour-dough Saunders knocked them up.
+
+"The ice is goin' out!"
+
+In a flash the sleepers stood at the door.
+
+"Only a josh." One showed fight.
+
+"Well, it's true what I'm tellin' yer," persisted Saunders seriously:
+"the ice is goin' out, and it's goin' soon, and when you're washed out
+o' yer bunks ye needn't blame me, fur I warned yer."
+
+"You don't mean the flood'll come up here?"
+
+"Mebbe you've arranged so she won't this year."
+
+The cheechalkos consulted. In the end, four of them occupied the next
+two hours (to the infinite but masked amusement of the town) in
+floundering about in the mud, setting up tents in the boggy wood above
+the settlement, and with much pains transporting thither as many of
+their possessions as they did not lose in the bottomless pit of the
+mire.
+
+When the business was ended, Minook self-control gave way. The
+cheechalkos found themselves the laughing-stock of the town. The
+others, who had dared to build down on the bank, but who "hadn't scared
+worth a cent," sauntered up to the Gold Nugget to enjoy the increased
+esteem of the Sour-doughs, and the humiliation of the men who had
+thought "the Yukon was goin' over the Ramparts this year--haw, haw!"
+
+It surprises the average mind to discover that one of civilization's
+most delicate weapons is in such use and is so potently dreaded among
+the roughest frontier spirits. No fine gentleman in a drawing-room, no
+sensitive girl, shrinks more from what Meredith calls "the comic
+laugh," none feels irony more keenly than your ordinary American
+pioneer. The men who had moved up into the soaking wood saw they had
+run a risk as great to them as the fabled danger of the river--the risk
+of the josher's irony, the dire humiliation of the laugh. If a man up
+here does you an injury, and you kill him, you haven't after all taken
+the ultimate revenge. You might have "got the laugh on him," and let
+him live to hear it.
+
+While all Minook was "jollying" the Woodworth men, Maudie made one of
+her sudden raids out of the Gold Nugget. She stood nearly up to the
+knees of her high rubber boots in the bog of "Main Street," talking
+earnestly with the Colonel. Keith and the Boy, sitting on a store box
+outside of the saloon, had looked on at the fun over the timid
+cheechalkos, and looked on now at Maudie and the Colonel. It crossed
+the Boy's mind that they'd be putting up a josh on his pardner pretty
+soon, and at the thought he frowned.
+
+Keith had been saying that the old miners had nearly all got "squawed."
+He had spoken almost superstitiously of the queer, lasting effect of
+the supposedly temporary arrangement.
+
+"No, they don't leave their wives as often as you'd expect, but in most
+cases it seems to kill the pride of the man. He gives up all idea of
+ever going home, and even if he makes a fortune, they say, he stays on
+here. And year by year he sinks lower and lower, till he's farther down
+in the scale of things human than his savage wife."
+
+"Yes, it's awful to think how the life up here can take the stiffening
+out of a fella."
+
+He looked darkly at the two out there in the mud. Keith nodded.
+
+"Strong men have lain down on the trail this winter and cried." But it
+wasn't that sort of thing the other meant. Keith followed his new
+friend's glowering looks.
+
+"Yes. That's just the kind of man that gets taken in."
+
+"What?" said the Boy brusquely.
+
+"Just the sort that goes and marries some flighty creature."
+
+"Well," said his pardner haughtily, "he could afford to marry 'a
+flighty creature.' The Colonel's got both feet on the ground." And
+Keith felt properly snubbed. But what Maudie was saying to the Colonel
+was:
+
+"You're goin' up in the first boat, I s'pose?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Looks like I'll be the only person left in Minook."
+
+"I don't imagine you'll be quite alone."
+
+"No? Why, there's only between five and six hundred expectin' to board
+a boat that'll be crowded before she gets here."
+
+"Does everybody want to go to Dawson?"
+
+"Everybody except a few boomers who mean to stay long enough to play
+off their misery on someone else before they move on."
+
+The Colonel looked a trifle anxious.
+
+"I hadn't thought of that. I suppose there will be a race for the
+boat."
+
+"There'll be a race all the way up the river for all the early boats.
+Ain't half enough to carry the people. But you look to me like you'll
+stand as good a chance as most, and anyhow, you're the one man I know,
+I'll trust my dough to."
+
+The Colonel stared.
+
+"You see, I want to get some money to my kiddie, an' besides, I got
+m'self kind o' scared about keepin' dust in my cabin. I want it in a
+bank, so's if I should kick the bucket (there'll be some pretty high
+rollin' here when there's been a few boats in, and my life's no better
+than any other feller's), I'd feel a lot easier if I knew the kiddie'd
+have six thousand clear, even if I did turn up my toes. See?"
+
+"A--yes--I see. But----"
+
+The door of the cabin next the saloon opened suddenly. A graybeard with
+a young face came out rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He stared
+interrogatively at the river, and then to the world in general:
+
+"What time is it?"
+
+"Half-past four."
+
+"Mornin' or evenin'?" and no one thought the question strange.
+
+Maudie lowered her voice.
+
+"No need to mention it to pardners and people. You don't want every
+feller to know you're goin' about loaded; but will you take my dust up
+to Dawson and get it sent to 'Frisco on the first boat?"
+
+"The ice! the ice! It's moving!"
+
+"The ice is going out!"
+
+"Look! the ice!"
+
+From end to end of the settlement the cry was taken up. People darted
+out of cabins like beavers out of their burrows. Three little
+half-breed Indian boys, yelling with excitement, tore past the Gold
+Nugget, crying now in their mother's Minook, now in their father's
+English, "The ice is going out!" From the depths of the store-box
+whereon his master had sat, Nig darted, howling excitedly and waving a
+muddy tail like a draggled banner, saying in Mahlemeut: "The ice is
+going out! The fish are coming in." All the other dogs waked and gave
+tongue, running in and out among the huddled rows of people gathered on
+the Ramparts.
+
+Every ear full of the rubbing, grinding noise that came up out of the
+Yukon--noise not loud, but deep--an undercurrent of heavy sound. As
+they stood there, wide-eyed, gaping, their solid winter world began to
+move. A compact mass of ice, three-quarters of a mile wide and four
+miles long, with a great grinding and crushing went down the valley.
+Some distance below the town it jammed, building with incredible
+quickness a barrier twenty feet high.
+
+The people waited breathless. Again the ice-mass trembled. But the
+watchers lifted their eyes to the heights above. Was that thunder in
+the hills? No, the ice again; again crushing, grinding, to the low
+accompaniment of thunder that seemed to come from far away.
+
+Sections a mile long and half a mile wide were forced up, carried over
+the first ice-pack, and summarily stopped below the barrier. Huge
+pieces, broken off from the sides, came crunching their way angrily up
+the bank, as if acting on some independent impulse. There they sat,
+great fragments, glistening in the sunlight, as big as cabins. It was
+something to see them come walking up the shelving bank! The
+cheechalkos who laughed before are contented now with running, leaving
+their goods behind. Sour-dough Saunders himself never dreamed the ice
+would push its way so far.
+
+In mid-channel a still unbroken sheet is bent yet more in the centre.
+Every now and then a wide crack opens near the margin, and the water
+rushes out with a roar. Once more the mass is nearly still, and now
+all's silent. Not till the water, dammed and thrown back by the ice,
+not until it rises many feet and comes down with a volume and momentum
+irresistible, will the final conflict come.
+
+Hour after hour the people stand there on the bank, waiting to see the
+barrier go down. Unwillingly, as the time goes on, this one, that one,
+hurries away for a few minutes to prepare and devour a meal, back
+again, breathless, upon rumour of that preparatory trembling, that
+strange thrilling of the ice. The grinding and the crushing had begun
+again.
+
+The long tension, the mysterious sounds, the sense of some great
+unbridled power at work, wrought on the steadiest nerves. People did
+the oddest things. Down at the lower end of the town a couple of
+miners, sick of the scurvy, had painfully clambered on their
+roof--whether to see the sights or be out of harm's way, no one knew.
+The stingiest man in Minook, who had refused to help them in their
+cabin, carried them food on the roof. A woman made and took them the
+Yukon remedy for their disease. They sat in state in sight of all men,
+and drank spruce tea.
+
+By one o'clock in the afternoon the river had risen eight feet, but the
+ice barrier still held. The people, worn out, went away to sleep. All
+that night the barrier held, though more ice came down and still the
+water rose. Twelve feet now. The ranks of shattered ice along the shore
+are claimed again as the flood widens and licks them in. The
+cheechalkos' cabins are flooded to the caves. Stout fellows in
+hip-boots take a boat and rescue the scurvy-stricken from the roof. And
+still the barrier held.
+
+People began to go about their usual avocations. The empty Gold Nugget
+filled again. Men sat, as they had done all the winter, drinking, and
+reading the news of eight months before, out of soiled and tattered
+papers.
+
+Late the following day everyone started up at a new sound. Again
+miners, Indians, and dogs lined the bank, saw the piled ice masses
+tremble, heard a crashing and grinding as of mountains of glass hurled
+together, saw the barrier give way, and the frozen wastes move down on
+the bosom of the flood. Higher yet the water rose--the current ran
+eight miles an hour. And now the ice masses were less enormous, more
+broken. Somewhere far below another jam. Another long bout of waiting.
+
+Birds are singing everywhere. Between the white snowdrifts the Arctic
+moss shows green and yellow, white flowers star the hills.
+
+Half the town is packed, ready to catch the boat at five minutes'
+notice. With door barred and red curtain down, Maudie is doing up her
+gold-dust for the Colonel to take to Dawson. The man who had washed it
+out of a Birch Creek placer, and "blowed it in fur the girl"--up on the
+hillside he sleeps sound.
+
+The two who had broken the record for winter travel on the Yukon, side
+by side in the sunshine, on a plank laid across two mackerel firkins,
+sit and watch the brimming flood. They speak of the Big Chimney men,
+picture them, packed and waiting for the Oklahoma, wonder what they
+have done with Kaviak, and what the three months have brought them.
+
+"When we started out that day from the Big Chimney, we thought we'd be
+made if only we managed to reach Minook."
+
+"Well, we've got what we came for--each got a claim."
+
+"Oh, yes."
+
+"A good claim, too."
+
+"Guess so."
+
+"Don't you know the gold's there?"
+
+"Yes; but where are the miners? You and I don't propose to spend the
+next ten years in gettin' that gold out."
+
+"No; but there are plenty who would if we gave 'em the chance. All we
+have to do is to give the right ones the chance."
+
+The Colonel wore an air of reflection.
+
+"The district will be opened up," the Boy went on cheerfully, "and
+we'll have people beggin' us to let 'em get out our gold, and givin' us
+the lion's share for the privilege."
+
+"Do you altogether like the sound o' that?"
+
+"I expect, like other people, I'll like the result."
+
+"We ought to see some things clearer than other people. We had our
+lesson on the trail," said the Colonel quietly. "Nobody ought ever to
+be able to fool us about the power and the value of the individual
+apart from society. Seems as if association did make value. In the
+absence of men and markets a pit full of gold is worth no more than a
+pit full of clay."
+
+"Oh, yes; I admit, till the boats come in, we're poor men."
+
+"Nobody will stop here this summer--they'll all be racing on to
+Dawson."
+
+"Dawson's 'It,' beyond a doubt."
+
+The Colonel laughed a little ruefully.
+
+"We used to say Minook."
+
+"I said Minook, just to sound reasonable, but, of course, I meant
+Dawson."
+
+And they sat there thinking, watching the ice-blocks meet, crash, go
+down in foam, and come up again on the lower reaches, the Boy idly
+swinging the great Katharine's medal to and fro. In his buckskin pocket
+it has worn so bright it catches at the light like a coin fresh from
+the mint.
+
+No doubt Muckluck is on the river-bank at Pymeut; the one-eyed Prince,
+the story-teller Yagorsha, even Ol' Chief--no one will be indoors
+to-day.
+
+Sitting there together, they saw the last stand made by the ice, and
+shared that moment when the final barrier, somewhere far below, gave
+way with boom and thunder. The mighty flood ran free, tearing up trees
+by their roots as it ran, detaching masses of rock, dissolving islands
+into swirling sand and drift, carving new channels, making and unmaking
+the land. The water began to fall. It had been a great time: it was
+ended.
+
+"Pardner," says the Colonel, "we've seen the ice go out."
+
+"No fella can call you and me cheechalkos after to-day."
+
+"No, sah. We've travelled the Long Trail, we've seen the ice go out,
+and we're friends yet."
+
+The Kentuckian took his pardner's brown hand with a gentle solemnity,
+seemed about to say something, but stopped, and turned his bronzed face
+to the flood, carried back upon some sudden tide within himself to
+those black days on the trail, that he wanted most in the world to
+forget. But in his heart he knew that all dear things, all things kind
+and precious--his home, a woman's face--all, all would fade before he
+forgot those last days on the trail. The record of that journey was
+burnt into the brain of the men who had made it. On that stretch of the
+Long Trail the elder had grown old, and the younger had forever lost
+his youth. Not only had the roundness gone out of his face, not only
+was it scarred, but such lines were graven there as commonly takes the
+antique pencil half a score of years to trace.
+
+"Something has happened," the Colonel said quite low. "We aren't the
+same men who left the Big Chimney."
+
+"Right!" said the Boy, with a laugh, unwilling as yet to accept his own
+personal revelation, preferring to put a superficial interpretation on
+his companion's words. He glanced at the Colonel, and his face changed
+a little. But still he would not understand. Looking down at the
+chaparejos that he had been so proud of, sadly abbreviated to make
+boots for Nig, jagged here and there, and with fringes now not all
+intentional, it suited him to pretend that the "shaps" had suffered
+most.
+
+"Yes, the ice takes the kinks out."
+
+"Whether the thing that's happened is good or evil, I don't pretend to
+say," the other went on gravely, staring at the river. "I only know
+something's happened. There were possibilities--in me, anyhow--that
+have been frozen to death. Yes, we're different."
+
+The Boy roused himself, but only to persist in his misinterpretation.
+
+"You ain't different to hurt. If I started out again tomorrow----"
+
+"The Lord forbid!"
+
+"Amen. But if I had to, you're the only man in Alaska--in the
+world--I'd want for my pardner."
+
+"Boy----!" he wrestled with a slight bronchial huskiness, cleared his
+throat, tried again, and gave it up, contenting himself with, "Beg your
+pardon for callin' you 'Boy.' You're a seasoned old-timer, sah." And
+the Boy felt as if some Sovereign had dubbed him Knight.
+
+In a day or two now, from north or south, the first boat must appear.
+The willows were unfolding their silver leaves. The alder-buds were
+bursting; geese and teal and mallard swarmed about the river margin.
+Especially where the equisetae showed the tips of their feathery green
+tails above the mud, ducks flocked and feasted. People were too
+excited, "too busy," they said, looking for the boats, to do much
+shooting. The shy birds waxed daring. Keith, standing by his shack,
+knocked over a mallard within forty paces of his door.
+
+It was eight days after that first cry, "The ice is going out!" four
+since the final jam gave way and let the floes run free, that at one
+o'clock in the afternoon the shout went up, "A boat! a boat!"
+
+Only a lumberman's bateau, but two men were poling her down the current
+with a skill that matched the speed. They swung her in. A dozen hands
+caught at the painter and made fast. A young man stepped ashore and
+introduced himself as Van Alen, Benham's "Upper River pardner, on the
+way to Anvik."
+
+His companion, Donovan, was from Circle City, and brought appalling
+news. The boats depended on for the early summer traffic, Bella, and
+three other N.A.T. and T. steamers, as well as the A.C.'s Victoria and
+the St. Michael, had been lifted up by the ice "like so many feathers,"
+forced clean out of the channel, and left high and dry on a sandy
+ridge, with an ice wall eighty feet wide and fifteen high between them
+and open water.
+
+"All the crews hard at work with jackscrews," said Donovan; "and if
+they can get skids under, and a channel blasted through the ice, they
+may get the boats down here in fifteen or twenty days."
+
+A heavy blow. But instantly everyone began to talk of the May West and
+the Muckluck as though all along they had looked for succour to come
+up-stream rather than down. But as the precious hours passed, a deep
+dejection fastened on the camp. There had been a year when, through one
+disaster after another, no boats had got to the Upper River. Not even
+the arrival from Dawson of the Montana Kid, pugilist and gambler, could
+raise spirits so cast down, not even though he was said to bring
+strange news from outside.
+
+There was war in the world down yonder--war had been formally declared
+between America and Spain.
+
+Windy slapped his thigh in humourous despair.
+
+"Why hadn't he thought o' gettin' off a josh like that?"
+
+To those who listened to the Montana Kid, to the fretted spirits of men
+eight months imprisoned, the States and her foreign affairs were far
+away indeed, and as for the other party to the rumoured war--Spain?
+They clutched at school memories of Columbus, Americans finding through
+him the way to Spain, as through him Spaniards had found the way to
+America. So Spain was not merely a State historic! She was still in the
+active world. But what did these things matter? Boats mattered: the
+place where the Klondykers were caught, this Minook, mattered. And so
+did the place they wanted to reach--Dawson mattered most of all. By the
+narrowed habit of long months, Dawson was the centre of the universe.
+
+More little boats going down, and still nothing going up. Men said
+gloomily:
+
+"We're done for! The fellows who go by the Canadian route will get
+everything. The Dawson season will be half over before we're in the
+field--if we ever are!"
+
+The 28th of May! Still no steamer had come, but the mosquitoes
+had--bloodthirsty beyond any the temperate climates know. It was clear
+that some catastrophe had befallen the Woodworth boats. And Nig had
+been lured away by his quondam master! No, they had not gone back to
+the gulch--that was too easy. The man had a mind to keep the dog, and,
+since he was not allowed to buy him, he would do the other thing.
+
+He had not been gone an hour, rumour said--had taken a scow and
+provisions, and dropped down the river. Utterly desperate, the Boy
+seized his new Nulato gun and somebody else's canoe. Without so much as
+inquiring whose, he shot down the swift current after the dog-thief. He
+roared back to the remonstrating Colonel that he didn't care if an
+up-river steamer did come while he was gone--he was goin' gunnin'.
+
+At the same time he shared the now general opinion that a Lower River
+boat would reach them first, and he was only going to meet her, meting
+justice by the way.
+
+He had gone safely more than ten miles down, when suddenly, as he was
+passing an island, he stood up in his boat, balanced himself, and
+cocked his gun.
+
+Down there, on the left, a man was standing knee-deep in the water,
+trying to free his boat from a fallen tree; a Siwash dog watched him
+from the bank.
+
+The Boy whistled. The dog threw up his nose, yapped and whined. The man
+had turned sharply, saw his enemy and the levelled gun. He jumped into
+the boat, but she was filling while he bailed; the dog ran along the
+island, howling fit to raise the dead. When he was a little above the
+Boy's boat he plunged into the river. Nig was a good swimmer, but the
+current here would tax the best. The Boy found himself so occupied with
+saving Nig from a watery grave, while he kept the canoe from capsizing,
+that he forgot all about the thief till a turn in the river shut him
+out of sight.
+
+The canoe was moored, and while trying to restrain Nig's dripping
+caresses, his master looked up, and saw something queer off there,
+above the tops of the cottonwoods. As he looked he forgot the
+dog--forgot everything in earth or heaven except that narrow cloud
+wavering along the sky. He sat immovable in the round-shouldered
+attitude learned in pulling a hand-sled against a gale from the Pole.
+If you are moderately excited you may start, but there is an excitement
+that "nails you."
+
+Nig shook his wolf's coat and sprayed the water far and wide, made
+little joyful noises, and licked the face that was so still. But his
+master, like a man of stone, stared at that long gray pennon in the
+sky. If it isn't a steamer, what is it? Like an echo out of some lesson
+he had learned and long forgot, "Up-bound boats don't run the channel:
+they have to hunt for easy water." Suddenly he leaped up. The canoe
+tipped, and Nig went a second time into the water. Well for him that
+they were near the shore; he could jump in without help this time. No
+hand held out, no eye for him. His master had dragged the painter free,
+seized the oars, and, saying harshly, "Lie down, you black devil!" he
+pulled back against the current with every ounce he had in him. For the
+gray pennon was going round the other side of the island, and the Boy
+was losing the boat to Dawson.
+
+Nig sat perkily in the bow, never budging till his master, running into
+the head of the island, caught up a handful of tough root fringes, and,
+holding fast by them, waved his cap, and shouted like one possessed,
+let go the fringes, caught up his gun, and fired. Then Nig, realising
+that for once in a way noise seemed to be popular, pointed his nose at
+the big object hugging the farther shore, and howled with a right
+goodwill.
+
+"They see! They see! Hooray!"
+
+The Boy waved his arms, embraced Nig, then snatched up the oars. The
+steamer's engines were reversed; now she was still. The Boy pulled
+lustily. A crowded ship. Crew and passengers pressed to the rails. The
+steamer canted, and the Captain's orders rang out clear. Several
+cheechalkos laid their hands on their guns as the wild fellow in the
+ragged buckskins shot round the motionless wheel, and brought his canoe
+'long-side, while his savage-looking dog still kept the echoes of the
+Lower Ramparts calling.
+
+"Three cheers for the Oklahoma!"
+
+At the sound of the Boy's voice a red face hanging over the stern broke
+into a broad grin.
+
+"Be the Siven! Air ye the little divvle himself, or air ye the divvle's
+gran'fatherr?"
+
+The apparition in the canoe was making fast and preparing to board the
+ship.
+
+"Can't take another passenger. Full up!" said the Captain. He couldn't
+hear what was said in reply, but he shook his head. "Been refusin' 'em
+right along." Then, as if reproached by the look in the wild young
+face, "We thought you were in trouble."
+
+"So I am if you won't----"
+
+"I tell you we got every ounce we can carry."
+
+"Oh, take me back to Minook, anyway!"
+
+He said a few words about fare to the Captain's back. As that magnate
+did not distinctly say "No"--indeed, walked off making conversation
+with the engineer--twenty hands helped the new passenger to get Nig and
+the canoe on board.
+
+"Well, got a gold-mine?" asked Potts.
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Where's the Colonel?" Mac rasped out, with his square jaw set for
+judgment.
+
+"Colonel's all right--at Minook. We've got a gold-mine apiece."
+
+"Anny gowld in 'em?"
+
+"Yes, sir, and no salt, neither."
+
+"Sorry to see success has gone to your head," drawled Potts, eyeing the
+Boy's long hair. "I don't see any undue signs of it elsewhere."
+
+"Faith! I do, thin. He's turned wan o' thim hungry, grabbin'
+millionaires."
+
+"What makes you think that?" laughed the Boy, poking his brown fingers
+through the knee-hole of his breeches.
+
+"Arre ye contint wid that gowld-mine at Minook? No, be the Siven!
+What's wan gowld-mine to a millionaire? What forr wud ye be prospectin
+that desert oiland, you and yer faithful man Froyday, if ye wasn't
+rooned intoirely be riches?"
+
+The Boy tore himself away from his old friends, and followed the
+arbiter of his fate. The engines had started up again, and they were
+going on.
+
+"I'm told," said the Captain rather severely, "that Minook's a busted
+camp."
+
+"Oh, is it?" returned the ragged one cheerfully. Then he remembered
+that this Captain Rainey had grub-staked a man in the autumn--a man who
+was reported to know where to look for the Mother Lode, the mighty
+parent of the Yukon placers. "I can tell you the facts about Minook."
+He followed the Captain up on the hurricane-deck, giving him details
+about the new strike, and the wonderful richness of Idaho Bar. "Nobody
+would know about it to-day, but that the right man went prospecting
+there." (One in the eye for whoever said Minook was "busted," and
+another for the prospector Rainey had sent to look for----) "You see,
+men like Pitcairn have given up lookin' for the Mother Lode. They say
+you might as well look for Mother Eve; you got to make out with her
+descendants. Yukon gold, Pitcairn says, comes from an older rock series
+than this"--he stood in the shower of sparks constantly spraying from
+the smoke-stack to the fireproof deck, and he waved his hand airily at
+the red rock of the Ramparts--"far older than any of these. The gold up
+here has all come out o' rock that went out o' the rock business
+millions o' years ago. Most o' that Mother Lode the miners are lookin'
+for is sand now, thirteen hundred miles away in Norton Sound."
+
+"Just my luck," said the Captain gloomily, going a little for'ard, as
+though definitely giving up mining and returning to his own proper
+business.
+
+"But the rest o' the Mother Lode, the gold and magnetic iron, was too
+heavy to travel. That's what's linin' the gold basins o' the
+North--linin' Idaho Bar thick."
+
+The Captain sighed.
+
+"Twelve," a voice sang out on the lower deck.
+
+"Twelve," repeated the Captain.
+
+"Twelve," echoed the pilot at the wheel.
+
+"Twelve and a half," from the man below, a tall, lean fellow, casting
+the sounding-pole. With a rhythmic nonchalance he plants the long black
+and white staff at the ship's side, draws it up dripping, plunges it
+down again, draws it up, and sends it down hour after hour. He never
+seems to tire; he never seems to see anything but the water-mark, never
+to say anything but what he is chanting now, "Twelve and a half," or
+some variation merely numerical. You come to think him as little human
+as the calendar, only that his numbers are told off with the
+significance of sound, the suggested menace of a cry. If the "sounding"
+comes too near the steamer's draught, or the pilot fails to hear the
+reading, the Captain repeats it. He often does so when there is no
+need; it is a form of conversation, noncommittal, yet smacking of
+authority.
+
+"Ten."
+
+"Ten," echoed the pilot, while the Captain was admitting that he had
+been mining vicariously "for twenty years, and never made a cent.
+Always keep thinkin' I'll soon be able to give up steamboatin' and buy
+a farm."
+
+He shook his head as one who sees his last hope fade.
+
+But his ragged companion turned suddenly, and while the sparks fell in
+a fresh shower, "Well, Captain," says he, "you've got the chance of
+your life right now."
+
+"Ten and a half."
+
+"Just what they've all said. Wish I had the money I've wasted on
+grub-stakin'."
+
+The ragged one thrust his hands in the pockets of his chaparejos.
+
+"I grub-staked myself, and I'm very glad I did."
+
+"Nobody in with you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Nine."
+
+Echo, "Nine."
+
+"Ten."
+
+"Pitcairn says, somehow or other, there's been gold-washin' goin' on up
+here pretty well ever since the world began."
+
+"Indians?"
+
+"No; seems to have been a bigger job than even white men could manage.
+Instead o' stamp-mills, glaciers grindin' up the Mother Lode; instead
+o' little sluice-boxes, rivers; instead o' riffles, gravel bottoms.
+Work, work, wash, wash, day and night, every summer for a million
+years. Never a clean-up since the foundation of the world. No, sir,
+waitin' for us to do that--waitin' now up on Idaho Bar."
+
+The Captain looked at him, trying to conceal the envy in his soul. They
+were sounding low water, but he never heard. He looked round sharply as
+the course changed.
+
+"I've done my assessment," the ragged man went on joyously, "and I'm
+going to Dawson."
+
+This was bad navigation. He felt instantly he had struck a snag. The
+Captain smiled, and passed on sounding: "Nine and a half."
+
+"But I've got a fortune on the Bar. I'm not a boomer, but I believe in
+the Bar."
+
+"Six."
+
+"Six. Gettin' into low water."
+
+Again the steamer swung out, hunting a new channel.
+
+"Pitcairn's opinion is thought a lot of. The Geologic Survey men listen
+to Pitcairn. He helped them one year. He's one of those extraordinary
+old miners who can tell from the look of things, without even panning.
+When he saw that pyrites on Idaho Bar he stopped dead. 'This looks good
+to me!' he said, and, Jee-rusalem! it was good!"
+
+They stared at the Ramparts growing bolder, the river hurrying like a
+mill-race, the steamer feeling its way slow and cautiously like a blind
+man with a stick.
+
+"Seven."
+
+"Seven."
+
+"Seven."
+
+"Six and a half."
+
+"Pitcairn says gold is always thickest on the inside of an elbow or
+turn in the stream. It's in a place like that my claim is."
+
+The steamer swerved still further out from the course indicated on the
+chart. The pilot was still hunting a new channel, but still the Captain
+stood and listened, and it was not to the sounding of the Yukon Bar.
+
+"They say there's no doubt about the whole country being glaciated."
+
+"Hey?"
+
+"Signs of glacial erosion everywhere."
+
+The Captain looked sharply about as if his ship might be in some new
+danger.
+
+"No doubt the gold is all concentrates."
+
+"Oh, is that so?" He seemed relieved on the whole.
+
+"Eight and a half," from below.
+
+"Eight and a half," from the Captain.
+
+"Eight and a half," from the pilot-house.
+
+"Concentrates, eh?"
+
+Something arresting, rich-sounding, in the news--a triple essence of
+the perfume of riches.
+
+With the incantation of technical phrase over the witch-brew of
+adventure, gambling, and romance, that simmers in the mind when men
+tell of finding gold in the ground, with the addition of this salt of
+science comes a savour of homely virtue, an aroma promising sustenance
+and strength. It confounds suspicion and sees unbelief, first weaken,
+and at last do reverence. There is something hypnotic in the
+terminology. Enthusiasm, even backed by fact, will scare off your
+practical man, who yet will turn to listen to the theory of "the
+mechanics of erosion" and one of its proofs--"up there before our eyes,
+the striation of the Ramparts."
+
+But Rainey was what he called "an old bird." His squinted pilot-eye
+came back from the glacier track and fell on the outlandish figure of
+his passenger. And with an inward admiration of his quality of extreme
+old-birdness, the Captain struggled against the trance.
+
+"Didn't I hear you say something about going to Dawson?"
+
+"Y-yes. I think Dawson'll be worth seeing."
+
+"Holy Moses, yes! There's never been anything like Dawson before."
+
+"And I want to talk to the big business men there. I'm not a miner
+myself. I mean to put my property on the market." As he said the words
+it occurred to him unpleasantly how very like McGinty they sounded. But
+he went on: "I didn't dream of spending so much time up here as I've
+put in already. I've got to get back to the States."
+
+"You had any proposition yet?" The Captain led the way to his private
+room.
+
+"About my claim? Not yet; but once I get it on the market----"
+
+So full was he of a scheme of his own he failed to see that he had no
+need to go to Dawson for a buyer.
+
+The Captain set out drinks, and still the talk was of the Bar. It had
+come now to seem impossible, even to an old bird, that, given those
+exact conditions, gold should not be gathered thick along that Bar.
+
+"I regard it as a sure thing. Anyhow, it's recorded, and the
+assessment's done. All the district wants now is capital to develop
+it."
+
+"Districts like that all over the map," said the old bird, with a final
+flutter of caution. "Even if the capital's found--if everything's ready
+for work, the summer's damn short. But if it's a question of goin'
+huntin' for the means of workin'----"
+
+"There's time," returned the other quietly, "but there's none to waste.
+You take me and my pardner----"
+
+"Thought you didn't have a pardner," snapped the other, hot over such
+duplicity.
+
+"Not in ownership; he's got another claim. But you take my pardner and
+me to Dawson----"
+
+The Captain stood on his legs and roared:
+
+"I can't, I tell you!"
+
+"You can if you will--you will if you want that farm!"
+
+Rainey gaped.
+
+"Take us to Dawson, and I'll get a deed drawn up in Minook turning over
+one-third of my Idaho Bar property to John R. Rainey."
+
+John R. Rainey gaped the more, and then finding his tongue:
+
+"No, no. I'd just as soon come in on the Bar, but it's true what I'm
+tellin' you. There simply ain't an unoccupied inch on the Oklahoma this
+trip. It's been somethin' awful, the way I've been waylaid and prayed
+at for a passage. People starvin' with bags o' money waitin' for 'em at
+the Dawson Bank! Settlements under water--men up in trees callin' to us
+to stop for the love of God--men in boats crossin' our channel, headin'
+us off, thinkin' nothin' o' the risk o' bein' run down. 'Take us to
+Dawson!' it's the cry for fifteen hundred miles."
+
+"Oh, come! you stopped for me."
+
+The Captain smiled shrewdly.
+
+"I didn't think it necessary at the time to explain. We'd struck bottom
+just then--new channel, you know; it changes a lot every time the ice
+goes out and the floods come down. I reversed our engines and went up
+to talk to the pilot. We backed off just after you boarded us. I must
+have been rattled to take you even to Minook."
+
+"No. It was the best turn you've done yourself in a long while."
+
+The Captain shook his head. It was true: the passengers of the Oklahoma
+were crowded like cattle on a Kansas stock-car. He knew he ought to
+unload and let a good portion wait at Minook for that unknown quantity
+the next boat. He would issue the order, but that he knew it would mean
+a mutiny.
+
+"I'll get into trouble for overloading as it is."
+
+"You probably won't; people are too busy up here. If you do, I'm
+offerin' you a good many thousand dollars for the risk."
+
+"God bless my soul! where'd I put you? There ain't a bunk."
+
+"I've slept by the week on the ice."
+
+"There ain't room to lie down."
+
+"Then we'll stand up."
+
+Lord, Lord! what could you do with such a man? Owner of Idaho Bar, too.
+"Mechanics of erosion," "Concentrates," "a third interest"--it all rang
+in his head. "I've got nine fellers sleepin' in here," he said
+helplessly, "in my room."
+
+"Can we come if we find our own place, and don't trouble you?"
+
+"Well, I won't have any pardner--but perhaps you----"
+
+"Oh, pardner's got to come too."
+
+Whatever the Captain said the nerve-tearing shriek of the whistle
+drowned. It was promptly replied to by the most horrible howls.
+
+"Reckon that's Nig! He's got to come too," said this dreadful ragged
+man.
+
+"God bless me, this must be Minook!"
+
+The harassed Captain hustled out.
+
+"You must wait long enough here to get that deed drawn, Captain!"
+called out the other, as he flew down the companionway.
+
+Nearly six hundred people on the bank. Suddenly controlling his
+eagerness, the Boy contented himself with standing back and staring
+across strange shoulders at the place he knew so well. There was "the
+worst-lookin' shack in the town," that had been his home, the A. C.
+store looming importantly, the Gold Nugget, and hardly a face to which
+he could not give a name and a history: Windy Jim and the crippled
+Swede; Bonsor, cheek by jowl with his enemy, McGinty; Judge Corey
+spitting straight and far; the gorgeous bartender, all checks and
+diamonds, in front of a pitiful group of the scurvy-stricken (thirty of
+them in the town waiting for rescue by the steamer); Butts, quite
+bland, under the crooked cottonwood, with never a thought of how near
+he had come, on that very spot, to missing the first boat of the year,
+and all the boats of all the years to follow.
+
+Maudie, Keith and the Colonel stood with the A. C. agent at the end of
+the baggage-bordered plank-walk that led to the landing. Behind them,
+at least four hundred people packed and waiting with their possessions
+at their feet, ready to be put aboard the instant the Oklahoma made
+fast. The Captain had called out "Howdy" to the A. C. Agent, and
+several greetings were shouted back and forth. Maudie mounted a huge
+pile of baggage and sat there as on a throne, the Colonel and Keith
+perching on a heap of gunny-sacks at her feet. That woman almost the
+only person in sight who did not expect, by means of the Oklahoma, to
+leave misery behind! The Boy stood thinking "How will they bear it when
+they know?"
+
+The Oklahoma was late, but she was not only the first boat--she might
+conceivably be the last.
+
+Potts and O'Flynn had spotted the man they were looking for, and called
+out "Hello! Hello!" as the big fellow on the pile of gunnies got up and
+waved his hat.
+
+Mac leaned over the rail, saying gruffly, "That you, Colonel?" trying,
+as the Boss of the Big Chimney saw--"tryin' his darndest not to look
+pleased," and all the while O'Flynn was waving his hat and howling with
+excitement:
+
+"How's the gowld? How's yersilf?"
+
+The gangway began its slow swing round preparatory to lowering into
+place. The mob on shore caught up boxes, bundles, bags, and pressed
+forward.
+
+"No, no! Stand back!" ordered the Captain.
+
+"Take your time!" said people trembling with excitement. "There's no
+rush."
+
+"There's no room!" called out the purser to a friend.
+
+"No room?" went from mouth to mouth, incredulous that the information
+could concern the speaker. He was only one. There was certainly room
+for him; and every man pushed the harder to be the sole exception to
+the dreadful verdict.
+
+"Stand back there! Can't take even a pound of freight. Loaded to the
+guards!"
+
+A whirlwind of protest and appeal died away in curses. Women wept, and
+sick men turned away their faces. The dogs still howled, for nothing is
+so lacerating to the feelings of your Siwash as a steam-whistle blast.
+The memory of it troubles him long after the echo of it dies. Suddenly
+above the din Maudie's shrill voice:
+
+"I thought that was Nig!"
+
+Before the gangway had dropped with a bang her sharp eyes had picked
+out the Boy.
+
+"Well I'll be----See who that is behind Nig? Trust him to get in on the
+ground-floor. He ain't worryin' for fear his pardner'll lose the boat,"
+she called to the Colonel, who was pressing forward as Rainey came down
+the gangway.
+
+"How do you do, Captain?"
+
+The man addressed never turned his head. He was forcing his way through
+the jam up to the A. C. Store.
+
+"You may recall me, sah; I am----"
+
+"If you are a man wantin' to go to Dawson, it doesn't matter who you
+are. I can't take you."
+
+"But, sah----" It was no use.
+
+A dozen more were pushing their claims, every one in vain. The Oklahoma
+passengers, bent on having a look at Minook, crowded after the Captain.
+Among those who first left the ship, the Boy, talking to the purser,
+hard upon Rainey's heels. The Colonel stood there as they passed, the
+Captain turning back to say something to the Boy, and then they
+disappeared together through the door of the A. C.
+
+Never a word for his pardner, not so much as a look. Bitterness fell
+upon the Colonel's heart. Maudie called to him, and he went back to his
+seat on the gunny-sacks.
+
+"He's in with the Captain now," she said; "he's got no more use for
+us."
+
+But there was less disgust than triumph in her face.
+
+O'Flynn was walking over people in his frantic haste to reach the
+Colonel. Before he could accomplish his design he had three separate
+quarrels on his hands, and was threatening with fury to "settle the
+hash" of several of his dearest new friends.
+
+Potts meanwhile was shaking the Big Chimney boss by the hand and
+saying, "Awfully sorry we can't take you on with us;" adding lower: "We
+had a mighty mean time after you lit out."
+
+Then Mac thrust his hand in between the two, and gave the Colonel a
+monkey-wrench grip that made the Kentuckian's eyes water.
+
+"Kaviak? Well, I'll tell you."
+
+He shouldered Potts out of his way, and while the talk and movement
+went on all round Maudie's throne, Mac, ignoring her, set forth grimly
+how, after an awful row with Potts, he had adventured with Kaviak to
+Holy Cross. "An awful row, indeed," thought the Colonel, "to bring Mac
+to that;" but the circumstances had little interest for him, beside the
+fact that his pardner would be off to Dawson in a few minutes, leaving
+him behind and caring "not a sou markee."
+
+Mac was still at Holy Cross. He had seen a woman there--"calls herself
+a nun--evidently swallows those priests whole. Kind of mad, believes it
+all. Except for that, good sort of girl. The kind to keep her
+word"--and she had promised to look after Kaviak, and never let him
+away from her till Mac came back to fetch him.
+
+"Fetch him?"
+
+"Fetch him!"
+
+"Fetch him where?"
+
+"Home!"
+
+"When will that be?"
+
+"Just as soon as I've put through the job up yonder." He jerked his
+head up the river, indicating the common goal.
+
+And now O'Flynn, roaring as usual, had broken away from those who had
+obstructed his progress, and had flung himself upon the Colonel. When
+the excitement had calmed down a little, "Well," said the Colonel to
+the three ranged in front of him, Maudie looking on from above, "what
+you been doin' all these three months?"
+
+"Doin'?"
+
+"Well--a----"
+
+"Oh, we done a lot."
+
+They looked at one another out of the corners of their eyes and then
+they looked away. "Since the birds came," began Mac in the tone of one
+who wishes to let bygones be bygones.
+
+"Och, yes; them burruds was foine!"
+
+Potts pulled something out of his trousers pocket----a strange
+collapsed object. He took another of the same description out of
+another pocket. Mac's hands and O'Flynn's performed the same action.
+Each man seemed to have his pockets full of these----
+
+"What are they?"
+
+"Money-bags, me bhoy! Made out o' the fut o' the 'Lasky swan, God bless
+'em! Mac cahls 'em some haythen name, but everybuddy else cahls 'em
+illegant money-bags!"
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+In less than twenty minutes the steamer whistle shrieked. Nig bounded
+out of the A. C., frantic at the repetition of the insult; other dogs
+took the quarrel up, and the Ramparts rang.
+
+The Boy followed the Captain out of the A. C. store. All the motley
+crew that had swarmed off to inspect Minook, swarmed back upon the
+Oklahoma. The Boy left the Captain this time, and came briskly over to
+his friends, who were taking leave of the Colonel.
+
+"So you're all goin' on but me!" said the Colonel very sadly.
+
+The Colonel's pardner stopped short, and looked at the pile of baggage.
+
+"Got your stuff all ready!" he said.
+
+"Yes." The answer was not free from bitterness. "I'll have the pleasure
+of packin' it back to the shack after you're gone."
+
+"So you were all ready to go off and leave me," said the Boy.
+
+The Colonel could not stoop to the obvious retort. His pardner came
+round the pile and his eyes fell on their common sleeping-bag, the two
+Nulato rifles, and other "traps," that meant more to him than any
+objects inanimate in all the world.
+
+"What? you were goin' to carry off my things too?" exclaimed the Boy.
+
+"That's all you get," Maudie burst out indignantly--"all you get for
+packin' his stuff down to the landin', to have it all ready for him,
+and worryin' yourself into shoe-strings for fear he'd miss the boat."
+
+Mac, O'Flynn, and Potts condoled with the Colonel, while the fire of
+the old feud flamed and died.
+
+"Yes," the Colonel admitted, "I'd give five hundred dollars for a
+ticket on that steamer."
+
+He looked in each of the three faces, and knew the vague hope behind
+his words was vain. But the Boy had only laughed, and caught up the
+baggage as the last whistle set the Rampart echoes flying, piping, like
+a lot of frightened birds.
+
+"Come along, then."
+
+"Look here!" the Colonel burst out. "That's my stuff."
+
+"It's all the same. You bring mine. I've got the tickets. You and me
+and Nig's goin' to the Klondyke."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+THE KLONDYKE
+
+"Poverty is an odious calling."--Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.
+
+
+On Monday morning, the 6th of June, they crossed the British line; but
+it was not till Wednesday, the 8th, at four in the afternoon, just ten
+months after leaving San Francisco, that the Oklahoma's passengers saw
+between the volcanic hills on the right bank of the Yukon a stretch of
+boggy tundra, whereon hundreds of tents gleamed, pink and saffron. Just
+beyond the bold wooded height, wearing the deep scar of a landslide on
+its breast, just round that bend, the Klondyke river joins the
+Yukon--for this is Dawson, headquarters of the richest Placer Diggings
+the world has seen, yet wearing more the air of a great army
+encampment.
+
+For two miles the river-bank shines with sunlit canvas--tents, tents
+everywhere, as far as eye can see, a mushroom growth masking the older
+cabins. The water-front swarms with craft, scows and canoes, birch,
+canvas, peterboro; the great bateaux of the northern lumberman, neat
+little skiffs, clumsy rafts; heavy "double-enders," whip-sawed from
+green timber, with capacity of two to five tons; lighters and barges
+carrying as much as forty tons--all having come through the perils of
+the upper lakes and shot the canon rapids.
+
+As the Oklahoma steams nearer, the town blossoms into flags; a great
+murmur increases to a clamour; people come swarming down to the
+water-front, waving Union Jacks and Stars and Stripes as well----What
+does it all mean? A cannon booms, guns are fired, and as the Oklahoma
+swings into the bank a band begins to play; a cheer goes up from
+fifteen thousand throats: "Hurrah for the first steamer!"
+
+The Oklahoma has opened the Klondyke season of 1898!
+
+They got their effects off the boat, and pitched the old tent up on the
+Moosehide; then followed days full to overflowing, breathless, fevered,
+yet without result beyond a general stringing up of nerves. The special
+spell of Dawson was upon them all--the surface aliveness, the inner
+deadness, the sense of being cut off from all the rest of the world, as
+isolated as a man is in a dream, with no past, no future, only a
+fantastic, intensely vivid Now. This was the summer climate of the
+Klondyke. The Colonel, the Boy, and Captain Rainey maintained the
+illusion of prosecuting their affairs by frequenting the offices,
+stores, and particularly saloons, where buyers and sellers most did
+congregate. Frequent mention was made of a certain valuable piece of
+property.
+
+Where was it?
+
+"Down yonder at Minook;" and then nobody cared a straw.
+
+It was true there was widespread dissatisfaction with the Klondyke.
+Everyone agreed it had been overdone. It would support one-quarter of
+the people already here, and tens of thousands on their way! "Say
+Klondyke, and instantly your soberest man goes mad; say anything else,
+and he goes deaf."
+
+Minook was a good camp, but it had the disadvantage of lying outside
+the magic district. The madness would, of course, not last, but
+meanwhile the time went by, and the people poured in day and night. Six
+great steamers full came up from the Lower River, and still the small
+craft kept on flocking like coveys of sea-fowl through the Upper Lakes,
+each party saying, "The crowd is behind."
+
+On the 14th of June a toy whistle sounded shrill above the town, and in
+puffed a Liliputian "steel-hull" steamer that had actually come "on her
+own" through the canon and shot the White Horse Rapids. A steamer from
+the Upper River! after that, others. Two were wrecked, but who minded?
+And still the people pouring in, and still that cry, "The crowd's
+behind!" and still the clamour for quicker, ampler means of transport
+to the North, no matter what it cost. The one consideration "to get
+there," and to get there "quickly," brought most of the horde by the
+Canadian route; yet, as against the two ocean steamers--all-sufficient
+the year before to meet the five river boats at St. Michael's--now, by
+the All-American route alone, twenty ocean steamers and forty-seven
+river boats, double-deckers, some two hundred and twenty-five feet
+long, and every one crowded to the guards with people coming to the
+Klondyke.
+
+Meanwhile, many of those already there were wondering why they came and
+how they could get home. In the tons of "mail matter" for Dawson,
+stranded at Skaguay, must be those "instructions" from the Colonel's
+bank, at home, to the Canadian Bank of Commerce, Dawson City. He agreed
+with the Boy that if--very soon now--they had not disposed of the
+Minook property, they would go to the mines.
+
+"What's the good?" rasped Mac. "Every foot staked for seventy miles."
+
+"For my part," admitted the Boy, "I'm less grand than I was. I meant to
+make some poor devil dig out my Minook gold for me. It'll be the other
+way about: I'll dig gold for any man on Bonanza that'll pay me wages."
+
+They sat slapping at the mosquitoes till a whistle screamed on the
+Lower River. The Boy called to Nig, and went down to the town to hear
+the news. By-and-by Mac came out with a pack, and said he'd be back in
+a day or two. After he had disappeared among the tents--a conquering
+army that had forced its way far up the hill by now--the Colonel got up
+and went to the spring for a drink. He stood there a long time looking
+out wistfully, not towards the common magnet across the Klondyke, but
+quite in the other direction towards the nearer gate of exit--towards
+home.
+
+"What special brand of fool am I to be here?"
+
+Down below, Nig, with hot tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth,
+now followed, now led, his master, coming briskly up the slope.
+
+"That was the Weare we heard whistlin'," said the Boy, breathless. "And
+who d'you think's aboard?"
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Nicholas a' Pymeut, pilot. An' he's got Princess Muckluck along."
+
+"No," laughed the Colonel, following the Boy to the tent. "What's the
+Princess come for?"
+
+"How should I know?"
+
+"Didn't she say?"
+
+"Didn't stop to hear."
+
+"Reckon she was right glad to see you," chaffed the Colonel. "Hey?
+Wasn't she?"
+
+"I--don't think she noticed I was there."
+
+"What! you bolted?" No reply. "See here, what you doin'?"
+
+"Packin' up."
+
+"Where you goin'?"
+
+"Been thinkin' for some time I ain't wealthy enough to live in this
+metropolis. There may be a place for a poor man, but Dawson isn't It."
+
+"Well, I didn't think you were that much of a coward--turnin' tail like
+this just because a poor little Esquimaux--Besides, she may have got
+over it. Even the higher races do." And he went on poking his fun till
+suddenly the Boy said:
+
+"You're in such high spirits, I suppose you must have heard Maudie's up
+from Minook.
+
+"You're jokin'!"
+
+"It ain't my idea of a joke. She's comin' up here soon's she's landed
+her stuff."
+
+"She's not comin' up here!"
+
+"Why not? Anybody can come up on the Moosehide, and everybody's doin'
+it. I'm goin' to make way for some of 'em."
+
+"Did she see you?"
+
+"Well, she's seen Potts, anyhow."
+
+"You're right about Dawson," said the Colonel suddenly; "it's too rich
+for my blood."
+
+They pinned a piece of paper on the tent-flap to say they were "Gone
+prospecting: future movements uncertain."
+
+Each with a small pack, and sticking out above it the Klondyke shovel
+that had come all the way from San Francisco, Nig behind with
+provisions in his little saddle-bags, and tongue farther out than ever,
+they turned their backs on Dawson, crossed the lower corner of Lot 6,
+behind the Government Reserve, stared with fresh surprise at the young
+market-garden flourishing there, down to the many-islanded Klondyke,
+across in the scow-ferry, over the Corduroy, that cheers and deceives
+the new-comer for that first mile of the Bonanza Trail, on through pool
+and morass to the thicket of white birches, where the Colonel thought
+it well to rest awhile.
+
+"Yes, he felt the heat," he said, as he passed the time of day with
+other men going by with packs, pack-horses, or draught-dogs, cursing at
+the trail and at the Government that taxed the miners so cruelly and
+then did nothing for them, not even making a decent highway to the
+Dominion's source of revenue. But out of the direct rays of the sun the
+traveller found refreshment, and the mosquitoes were blown away by the
+keen breeze that seemed to come from off some glacier. And the birds
+sang loud, and the wild-flowers starred the birch-grove, and the
+briar-roses wove a tangle on either side the swampy trail.
+
+On again, dipping to a little valley--Bonanza Creek! They stood and
+looked.
+
+"Well, here we are."
+
+"Yes, this is what we came for."
+
+And it was because of "this" that so vast a machinery of ships,
+engines, and complicated human lives had been set in motion. What was
+it? A dip in the hills where a little stream was caught up into
+sluices. On either side of every line of boxes, heaps and windrows of
+gravel. Above, high on log-cabin staging, windlasses. Stretching away
+on either side, gentle slopes, mossed and flower starred. Here and
+there upon this ancient moose pasture, tents and cabins set at random.
+In the bed of the creek, up and down in every direction, squads of men
+sweating in the sun--here, where for untold centuries herds of
+leisurely and majestic moose had come to quench their thirst. In the
+older cabins their horns still lorded it. Their bones were bleaching in
+the fire-weed.
+
+On from claim to claim the new-comers to these rich pastures went, till
+they came to the junction of the El Dorado, where huddles the haphazard
+settlement of the Grand Forks, only twelve miles from Dawson. And now
+they were at the heart of "the richest Placer Mining District the world
+has seen." But they knew well enough that every inch was owned, and
+that the best they could look for was work as unskilled labourers, day
+shift or night, on the claims of luckier men.
+
+They had brought a letter from Ryan, of the North-West Mounted Police,
+to the Superintendent of No. 10, Above Discovery, a claim a little this
+side of the Forks. Ryan had warned them to keep out of the way of the
+part-owner, Scoville Austin, a surly person naturally, so exasperated
+at the tax, and so enraged at the rumour of Government spies
+masquerading as workmen, checking his reports, that he was "a
+first-rate man to avoid." But Seymour, the Superintendent, was, in the
+words of the soothing motto of the whole American people, "All right."
+
+They left their packs just inside the door of the log-cabin, indicated
+as "Bunk House for the men on No. 6, Above"--a fearsome place, where,
+on shelf above shelf, among long unwashed bedclothes, the unwashed
+workmen of a prosperous company lay in the stupor of sore fatigue and
+semi-asphyxiation. Someone stirred as the door opened, and out of the
+fetid dusk of the unventilated, closely-shuttered cabin came a voice:
+
+"Night shift on?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then, damn you! shut the door."
+
+As the never-resting sun "forced" the Dawson market-garden and the
+wild-roses of the trail, so here on the creek men must follow the
+strenuous example. No pause in the growing or the toiling of this
+Northern world. The day-gang on No. 0 was hard at it down there where
+lengthwise in the channel was propped a line of sluice-boxes, steadied
+by regularly spaced poles laid from box to bank on gravel ridge.
+Looking down from above, the whole was like a huge fish-bone lying
+along the bed of the creek. A little group of men with picks, shovels,
+and wheelbarrows were reducing the "dump" of winter pay, piled beside a
+windlass, conveying it to the sluices. Other men in line, four or five
+feet below the level of the boxes, were "stripping," picking, and
+shovelling the gravel off the bed-rock--no easy business, for even this
+summer temperature thawed but a few inches a day, and below, the frost
+of ten thousand years cemented the rubble into iron.
+
+"Where is the Superintendent?"
+
+"That's Seymour in the straw hat."
+
+It was felt that even the broken and dilapidated article mentioned was
+a distinction and a luxury.
+
+Yes, it was too hot up here in the Klondyke.
+
+They made their way to the man in authority, a dark, quiet-mannered
+person, with big, gentle eyes, not the sort of Superintendent they had
+expected to find representing such a man as the owner of No. 0.
+
+Having read Ryan's letter and slowly scanned the applicants: "What do
+you know about it?" He nodded at the sluice.
+
+"All of nothing," said the Boy.
+
+"Does it call for any particular knowing?" asked the Colonel.
+
+"Calls for muscle and plenty of keep-at-it." His voice was soft, but as
+the Colonel looked at him he realized why a hard fellow like Scoville
+Austin had made this Southerner Superintendent.
+
+"Better just try us."
+
+"I can use one more man on the night shift, a dollar and a half an
+hour."
+
+"All right," said the Boy.
+
+The Colonel looked at him. "Is this job yours or mine?"
+
+The Superintendent had gone up towards the dam.
+
+"Whichever you say."
+
+The Boy did not like to suggest that the Colonel seemed little fit for
+this kind of exercise. They had been in the Klondyke long enough to
+know that to be in work was to be in luck.
+
+"I'll tell you," the younger man said quickly, answering something
+unspoken, but plain in the Colonel's face; "I'll go up the gulch and
+see what else there is."
+
+It crossed his mind that there might be something less arduous than
+this shovelling in the wet thaw or picking at frozen gravel in the hot
+sun. If so, the Colonel might be induced to exchange. It was obvious
+that, like so many Southerners, he stood the sun very ill. While they
+were agreeing upon a rendezvous the Superintendent came back.
+
+"Our bunk-house is yonder," he said, pointing. A kind of sickness came
+over the Kentuckian as he recalled the place. He turned to his pardner.
+
+"Wish we'd got a pack-mule and brought our tent out from Dawson." Then,
+apologetically, to the Superintendent: "You see, sah, there are men who
+take to bunk-houses just as there are women who want to live in hotels;
+and there are others who want a place to call home, even if it's a
+tent."
+
+The Superintendent smiled. "That's the way we feel about it in
+Alabama." He reflected an instant. "There's that big new tent up there
+on the hill, next to the Buckeyes' cabin. Good tent; belongs to a
+couple o' rich Englishmen, third owners in No. 0. Gone to Atlin. Told
+me to do what I liked with that tent. You might bunk there while
+they're away."
+
+"Now, that's mighty good of you, sah. Next whose cabin did you say?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know their names. They have a lay on seventeen. Ohio men.
+They're called Buck One and Buck Two. Anybody'll show you to the
+Buckeyes';" and he turned away to shout "Gate!" for the head of water
+was too strong, and he strode off towards the lock.
+
+As the Boy tramped about looking for work he met a great many on the
+same quest. It seemed as if the Colonel had secured the sole job on the
+creek. Still, vacancies might occur any hour.
+
+In the big new tent the Colonel lay asleep on a little camp-bed,
+(mercifully left there by the rich Englishmen), "gettin' ready for the
+night-shift." As he stood looking down upon him, a sudden wave of pity
+came over the Boy. He knew the Colonel didn't "really and truly have to
+do this kind of thing; he just didn't like givin' in." But behind all
+that there was a sense in the younger mind that here was a life unlike
+his own, which dimly he foresaw was to find its legitimate expression
+in battle and in striving. Here, in the person of the Colonel, no
+soldier fore-ordained, but a serene and equable soul wrenched out of
+its proper sphere by a chance hurt to a woman, forsooth! an imagination
+so stirred that, if it slept at all, it dreamed and moaned in its
+sleep, as now; a conscience wounded and refusing to heal. Had he not
+said himself that he had come up here to forget? It was best to let him
+have the job that was too heavy for him--yes, it was best, after all.
+
+And so they lived for a few days, the Boy chafing and wanting to move
+on, the Colonel very earnest to have him stay.
+
+"Something sure to turn up, and, anyhow, letters--my instruction----"
+And he encouraged the acquaintance the Boy had struck up with the
+Buckeyes, hoping against hope that to go over and smoke a pipe, and
+exchange experiences with such mighty good fellows would lighten the
+tedium of the long day spent looking for a job.
+
+"I call it a very pleasant cabin," the Colonel would say as he lit up
+and looked about. Anything dismaller it would be hard to find. Not
+clean and shipshape as the Boy kept the tent. But with double army
+blankets nailed over the single window it was blessedly dark, if
+stuffy, and in crying need of cleaning. Still, they were mighty good
+fellows, and they had a right to be cheerful. Up there, on the rude
+shelf above the stove, was a row of old tomato-cans brimful of Bonanza
+gold. There they stood, not even covered. Dim as the light was, you
+could see the little top nuggets peering out at you over the ragged
+tin-rims, in a never locked shanty, never molested, never bothered
+about. Nearly every cabin on the creek had similar chimney ornaments,
+but not everyone boasted an old coat, kept under the bunk, full of the
+bigger sort of nuggets.
+
+The Colonel was always ready with pretended admiration of such
+bric-a-brac, but the truth was he cared very little about this gold he
+had come so far to find. His own wages, paid in dust, were kept in a
+jam-pot the Boy had found "lyin' round."
+
+The growing store shone cheerfully through the glass, but its value in
+the Colonel's eyes seemed to be simply as an argument to prove that
+they had enough, and "needn't worry." When the Boy said there was no
+doubt this was the district in all the world the most overdone, the
+Colonel looked at him with sun-tired, reproachful eyes.
+
+"You want to dissolve the pardnership--I see."
+
+"I don't."
+
+But the Colonel, after any such interchange, would go off and smoke by
+himself, not even caring for Buckeyes'. The work was plainly overtaxing
+him. He slept badly, was growing moody and quick to take offence. One
+day when he had been distinctly uncivil he apologized for himself by
+saying that, standing with feet always in the wet, head always in the
+scorching sun, he had taken a hell of a cold. Certain it was that,
+without sullenness, he would give in to long fits of silence; and his
+wide, honest eyes were heavy again, as if the snow-blindness of the
+winter had its analogue in a summer torment from the sun. And his
+sometimes unusual gentleness to his companion was sharply alternated
+with unusual choler, excited by a mere nothing. Enough if the Boy were
+not in the tent when the Colonel came and went. Of course, the Boy did
+the cooking. The Colonel ate almost nothing, but he made a great point
+of his pardner's service in doing the cooking. He would starve, he
+said, if he had to cook for himself as well as swing a shovel; and the
+Boy, acting on pure instinct, pretended that he believed this was so.
+
+Then came the evening when the Boy was so late the Colonel got his own
+breakfast; and when the recreant did get home, it was to announce that
+a man over at the Buckeyes' had just offered him a job out on Indian
+River. The Colonel set down his tea-cup and stared. His face took on
+an odd, rigid look. But almost indifferently he said:
+
+"So you're goin'?"
+
+"Of course, you know I must. I started with an outfit and fifteen
+hundred dollars, now I haven't a cent."
+
+The Kentuckian raised his heavy eyes to the jam-jar. "Oh, help
+yourself."
+
+The Boy laughed, and shook his head.
+
+"I wish you wouldn't go," the other said very low.
+
+"You see, I've got to. Why, Nig and I owe you for a week's grub
+already."
+
+Then the Colonel stood up and swore--swore till he was scarlet and
+shaking with excitement.
+
+"If the life up here has brought us to 'Scowl' Austin's point of view,
+we are poorly off." And he spoke of the way men lived in his part of
+Kentucky, where the old fashion of keeping open house survived. And
+didn't he know it was the same thing in Florida? "Wouldn't you do as
+much for me?"
+
+"Yes, only I can't--and--I'm restless. The summer's half gone. Up here
+that means the whole year's half gone."
+
+The Colonel had stumbled back into his seat, and now across the deal
+table he put out his hand.
+
+"Don't go, Boy. I don't know how I'd get on without----" He stopped,
+and his big hand was raised as if to brush away some cloud between him
+and his pardner. "If you go, you won't come back."
+
+"Oh, yes, I will. You'll see."
+
+"I know the kind," the other went on, as if there had been no
+interruption. "They never come back. I don't know as I ever cared quite
+as much for my brother--little fella that died, you know." Then, seeing
+that his companion did not instantly iterate his determination to go,
+"That's right," he said, getting up suddenly, and leaving his breakfast
+barely touched. "We've been through such a lot together, let's see it
+out."
+
+Without waiting for an answer, he went off to his favourite seat under
+the little birch-tree. But the incident had left him nervous. He would
+come up from his work almost on the run, and if he failed to find his
+pardner in the tent there was the devil to pay. The Boy would laugh to
+himself to think what a lot he seemed able to stand from the Colonel;
+and then he would grow grave, remembering what he had to make up for.
+Still, his sense of obligation did not extend to giving up this
+splendid chance down on Indian River. On Wednesday, when the fellow
+over at the Buckeyes' was for going back, the Boy would go along.
+
+On Sunday morning he ran a crooked, rusty nail into his foot. Clumsily
+extracted, it left an ugly wound. Walking became a torture, and the
+pain a banisher of sleep. It was during the next few days that he found
+out how much the Colonel lay awake. Who could sleep in this blazing
+sun? Black tents were not invented then, so they lay awake and talked
+of many things.
+
+The man from Indian River went back alone. The Boy would limp after the
+Colonel down to the sluice, and sit on a dump heap with Nig. Few people
+not there strictly on business were tolerated on No. 0, but Nig and his
+master had been on good terms with Seymour from the first. Now they
+struck up acquaintance with several of the night-gang, especially with
+the men who worked on either side of the Colonel. An Irish gentleman,
+who did the shovelling just below, said he had graduated from Dublin
+University. He certainly had been educated somewhere, and if the
+discussion were theologic, would take out of his linen-coat pocket a
+little testament in the Vulgate to verify a bit of Gospel. He could
+even pelt the man next but one in his native tongue, calling the
+Silesian "Uebermensch." There existed some doubt whether this were the
+gentleman's real name, but none at all as to his talking philosophy
+with greater fervour than he bestowed on the puddling box.
+
+The others were men more accustomed to work with their hands, but, in
+spite of the conscious superiority of your experienced miner, a very
+good feeling prevailed in the gang--a general friendliness that
+presently centred about the Colonel, for even in his present mood he
+was far from disagreeable, except now and then, to the man he cared the
+most for.
+
+Seymour admitted that he had placed the Southerner where he thought
+he'd feel most at home. "Anyhow, the company is less mixed," he said,
+"than it was all winter up at twenty-three, where they had a
+Presbyterian missionary down the shaft, a Salvation Army captain
+turnin' the windlass, a nigger thief dumpin' the becket, and a
+dignitary of the Church of England doin' the cookin', with the help of
+a Chinese chore-boy. They're all there now (except one) washin' out
+gold for the couple of San Francisco card-sharpers that own the claim."
+
+"Vich von is gone?" asked the Silesian, who heard the end of the
+conversation.
+
+"Oh, the Chinese chore-boy is the one who's bettered himself," said the
+Superintendent--"makin' more than all the others put together ever made
+in their lives; runnin' a laundry up at Dawson."
+
+The Boy, since this trouble with his foot, had fallen into the way of
+turning night into day. The Colonel liked to have him down there at the
+sluice, and when he thought about it, the Boy marvelled at the hours he
+spent looking on while others worked.
+
+At first he said he came down only to make Scowl Austin mad. And it did
+make him mad at first, but the odd thing was he got over it, and used
+to stop and say something now and then. This attention on the part of
+the owner was distinctly perilous to the Boy's good standing with the
+gang. Not because Austin was the owner; there was the millionaire
+Swede, Ole Olsen--any man might talk to him. He was on the square,
+treated his workmen mighty fair, and when the other owners tried to
+reduce wages, and did, Ole wouldn't join them--went right along paying
+the highest rate on the creek.
+
+Various stories were afloat about Austin. Oh, yes, Scowl Austin was a
+hard man--the only owner on the creek who wouldn't even pay the little
+subscription every poor miner contributed to keep the Dawson Catholic
+Hospital going.
+
+The women, too, had grievances against Austin, not only "the usual lot"
+up at the Gold Belt, who sneered at his close fist, but some of the
+other sort--those few hard-working wives or "women on their own," or
+those who washed and cooked for this claim or that. They had stories
+about Austin that shed a lurid light. And so by degrees the gathered
+experience, good and ill, of "the greatest of all placer diggin's"
+flowed by the idler on the bank.
+
+"You seem to have a lot to do," Seymour would now and then say with a
+laugh.
+
+"So I have."
+
+"What do you call it?"
+
+"Takin' stock."
+
+"Of us?"
+
+"Of things in general."
+
+"What did you mean by that?" demanded the Colonel suspiciously when the
+Superintendent had passed up the line.
+
+The shovelling in was done for the time being. The water was to be
+regulated, and then the clean-up as soon as the owner came down.
+
+"Better not let Austin hear you say you're takin' stock. He'll run you
+out o' the creek."
+
+The Boy only smiled, and went on fillipping little stones at Nig.
+
+"What did you mean?" the Colonel persisted, with a look as suspicious
+as Scowl Austin's own.
+
+"Oh, nothin'. I'm only thinkin' out things."
+
+"Your future, I suppose?" he said testily.
+
+"Mine and other men's. The Klondyke's a great place to get things clear
+in your head."
+
+"Don't find it so." The Colonel put up his hand with that now familiar
+action as if to clear away a cloud. "It's days since I had anything
+clear in my head, except the lesson we learned on the trail."
+
+The Boy stopped throwing stones, and fixed his eyes on his friend, as
+the Colonel went on:
+
+"We had that hammered into us, didn't we?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Oh, that--you know--that--I don't know quite how to put it so it'll
+sound as orthodox as it might be, bein' true; but it looks pretty clear
+even to me"--again the big hand brushing at the unmoted sunshine--"that
+the only reason men got over bein' beasts was because they began to be
+brothers."
+
+"Don't," said the Boy.
+
+"Don't what?"
+
+"I've always known I should have to tell you some time. I won't be able
+to put it off if I stay ... and I hate tellin' you now. See here: I
+b'lieve I'll get a pack-mule and go over to Indian River."
+
+The Colonel looked round angrily. Standing high against the sky,
+Seymour, with the gateman up at the lock, was moderating the strong
+head of water. It began to flow sluggishly over the gravel-clogged
+riffles, and Scowl Austin was coming down the hill.
+
+"I don't know what you're drivin' at, about somethin' to tell. I know
+one thing, though, and I learned it up here in the North: men were
+meant to stick to one another."
+
+"Don't, I say."
+
+"Here's Austin," whispered the Colonel.
+
+The Silesian philosopher stood in his "gum-boots" in the puddling-box
+as on a rostrum; but silent now, as ever, when Scowl Austin was in
+sight. With the great sluice-fork, the philosopher took up, washed, and
+threw out the few remaining big stones that they might not clog the
+narrow boxes below.
+
+Seymour had so regulated the stream that, in place of the gush and foam
+of a few minutes before, there was now only a scant and gently falling
+veil of water playing over the bright gravel caught in the riffle-lined
+bottoms of the boxes.
+
+As the Boy got up and reached for his stick, Austin stood there saying,
+to nobody in particular, that he'd just been over to No. 29, where they
+were trying a new-fangled riffle.
+
+"Don't your riffles do the trick all right?" asked the Boy.
+
+"If you're in any doubt, come and see," he said.
+
+They stood together, leaning over the sluice, looking in at one of the
+things human industry has failed to disfigure, nearly as beautiful
+to-day as long ago on Pactolus' banks when Lydian shepherds, with great
+stones, fastened fleeces in the river that they might catch and gather
+for King Croesus the golden sands of Tmolus. Improving, not in beauty,
+but economy, quite in the modern spirit, the Greeks themselves
+discovered that they lost less gold if they led the stream through
+fleece-lined water-troughs--and beyond this device of those early
+placer-miners we have not progressed so far but that, in every long,
+narrow sluice-box in the world to-day, you may see a Lydian
+water-trough with a riffle in the bottom for a golden fleece.
+
+The rich Klondyker and the poor one stood together looking in at the
+water, still low, still slipping softly over polished pebbles, catching
+at the sunlight, winking, dimpling, glorifying flint and jasper, agate
+and obsidian, dazzling the uncommercial eye to blind forgetfulness of
+the magic substance underneath.
+
+Austin gathered up, one by one, a handful of the shining stones, and
+tossed them out. Then, bending down, "See?"
+
+There, under where the stones had been, neatly caught in the lattice of
+the riffle, lying thick and packed by the water action, a heavy ridge
+of black and yellow--magnetic sand and gold.
+
+"Riffles out!" called Seymour, and the men, who had been extracting the
+rusty nails that held them firm, lifted out from the bottom of each box
+a wooden lattice, soused it gently in the water, and laid it on the
+bank.
+
+The Boy had turned away again, but stood an instant noticing how the
+sun caught at the countless particles of gold still clinging to the
+wood; for this was one of the old riffles, frayed by the action of much
+water and the fret of many stones. Soon it would have to be burned, and
+out of its ashes the careful Austin would gather up with mercury all
+those million points of light.
+
+Meanwhile, Seymour had called to the gateman for more water, and
+himself joining the gang, armed now with flat metal scoops, they all
+began to turn over and throw back against the stream the debris in the
+bottom of the boxes, giving the water another chance to wash out the
+lighter stuff and clean the gold from all impurity. Away went the last
+of the sand, and away went the pebbles, dark or bright, away went much
+of the heavy magnetic iron. Scowl Austin, at the end of the line, had a
+corn-whisk with which he swept the floor of the box, always upstream,
+gathering the contents in a heap, now on this side, now on that,
+letting the water play and sort and carry away, condensing, hastening
+the process that for ages had been concentrating gold in the Arctic
+placers.
+
+"Say, look here!" shouted Austin to the Boy, already limping up the
+hill.
+
+When he had reached the sluice again he found that all Scowl Austin
+wanted, apparently, was to show him how, when he held the water back
+with the whisk, it eddied softly at each side of the broad little
+broom, leaving exposed the swept-up pile.
+
+"See?"
+
+"What's all that?"
+
+"What do you think?"
+
+"Looks like a heap o' sawdust."
+
+Austin actually laughed.
+
+"See if it feels like sawdust. Take it up like this," he ordered.
+
+His visitor obeyed, lifting a double handful out of the water and
+holding it over the box, dripping, gleaming, the most beautiful thing
+that comes out of the earth, save only life, and the assertion may
+stand, even if the distinction is without difference, if the crystal is
+born, grows old, and dies as undeniably as the rose.
+
+The Boy held the double handful of well-washed gold up to the sunshine,
+feeling to the full the immemorial spell cast by the King of Metals.
+Nothing that men had ever made out of gold was so entirely beautiful as
+this.
+
+Scowl Austin's grim gratification was openly heightened with the rich
+man's sense of superiority, but his visitor seemed to have forgotten
+him.
+
+"Colonel! here a minute. We thought it looked wonderful enough on the
+Big Chimney table--but Lord! to see it like this, out o' doors, mixed
+with sunshine and water!"
+
+Still he stood there fascinated, leaning heavily against the
+sluice-box, still with his dripping hands full, when, after a hurried
+glance, the Colonel returned to his own box. None of the gang ever
+talked in the presence of the owner.
+
+"Guess that looks good to you." Austin slightly stressed the pronoun.
+He had taken a reasonless liking for the young man, who from the first
+had smiled into his frowning face, and treated him as he treated
+others. Or perhaps Austin liked him because, although the Boy did a
+good deal of "gassin' with the gang," he had never hung about at
+clean-ups. At all events, he should stay to-night, partly because when
+the blue devils were down on Scowl Austin nothing cheered him like
+showing his "luck" off to someone. And it was so seldom safe in these
+days. People talked. The authorities conceived unjust suspicions of a
+man's returns. And then, far back in his head, that vague need men
+feel, when a good thing has lost its early zest, to see its dimmed
+value shine again in an envious eye. Here was a young fellow, who,
+before he went lame, had been all up and down the creek for days
+looking for a job--probably hadn't a penny--livin' off his friend, who
+himself would starve but for the privilege Austin gave him of washing
+out Austin's gold. Let the young man stop and see the richest clean-up
+at the Forks.
+
+And so it was with the acrid pleasure he had promised himself that he
+said to the visitor, bending over the double handful of gold, "Guess it
+looks good to you."
+
+"Yes, it looks good!" But he had lifted his eyes, and seemed to be
+studying the man more than the metal.
+
+A couple of newcomers, going by, halted.
+
+"Christ!" said the younger, "look at that!"
+
+The Boy remembered them; they had been to Seymour only a couple of
+hours before asking for work. One was old for that country--nearly
+sixty--and looked, as one of the gang had said, "as if, instid o'
+findin' the pot o' gold, he had got the end of the rainbow slam in his
+face--kind o' blinded."
+
+At sound of the strange voice Austin had wheeled about with a fierce
+look, and heavily the strangers plodded by. The owner turned again to
+the gold. "Yes," he said curtly, "there's something about that that
+looks good to most men."
+
+"What I was thinkin'," replied the Boy slowly, "was that it was the
+only clean gold I'd ever seen--but it isn't so clean as it was."
+
+"What do you mean?" Austin bent and looked sharply into the full hands.
+
+"I was thinkin' it was good to look at because it hadn't got into dirty
+pockets yet." Austin stared at him an instant. "Never been passed
+round--never bought anybody. No one had ever envied it, or refused it
+to help someone out of a hole. That was why I thought it looked
+good--because it was clean gold ... a little while ago." And he plunged
+his hands in the water and washed the clinging particles off his
+fingers.
+
+Austin had stared, and then turned his back with a blacker look than
+even "Scowl" had ever worn before.
+
+"Gosh! guess there's goin' to be trouble," said one of the gang.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+PARDNERS
+
+"He saw, and first of brotherhood had sight...."
+
+
+It was morning, and the night-shift might go to bed; but in the absent
+Englishmen's tent there was little sleep and less talk that day. The
+Boy, in an agony, with a foot on fire, heard the Colonel turning,
+tossing, growling incoherently about "the light."
+
+It seemed unreasonable, for a frame had been built round his bed, and
+on it thick gray army blankets were nailed--a rectangular tent. Had he
+cursed the heat now? But no: "light," "God! the light, the light!" just
+as if he were lying as the Boy was, in the strong white glare of the
+tent. But hour after hour within the stifling fortress the giant tossed
+and muttered at the swords of sunshine that pierced his semi-dusk
+through little spark-burnt hole or nail-tear, torturing sensitive eyes.
+
+Near three hours before he needed, the Colonel got up and splashed his
+way through a toilet at the tin basin. The Boy made breakfast without
+waiting for the usual hour. They had nearly finished when it occurred
+to the Colonel that neither had spoken since they went to bed. He
+glanced across at the absorbed face of his friend.
+
+"You'll come down to the sluice to-night, won't you?"
+
+"Why shouldn't I?"
+
+"No reason on earth, only I was afraid you were broodin' over what you
+said to Austin."
+
+"Austin? Oh, I'm not thinkin' about Austin."
+
+"What, then? What makes you so quiet?"
+
+"Well, I'm thinkin' I'd be better satisfied to stay here a little
+longer if----"
+
+"If what?"
+
+"If there was truth between us two."
+
+"I thought there was."
+
+"No. What's the reason you want me to stay here?"
+
+"Reason? Why"--he laughed in his old way--"I don't defend my taste, but
+I kind o' like to have you round."
+
+His companion's grave face showed no lightening. "Why do you want me
+round more than someone else?"
+
+"Haven't got anyone else."
+
+"Oh, yes, you have! Every man on Bonanza's a friend o' yours, or would
+be."
+
+"It isn't just that; we understand each other."
+
+"No, we don't."
+
+"What's wrong?"
+
+No answer. The Boy looked through the door across Bonanza to the hills.
+
+"I thought we understood each other if two men ever did. Haven't we
+travelled the Long Trail together and seen the ice go out?"
+
+"That's just it, Colonel. We know such a lot more than men do who
+haven't travelled the Trail, and some of the knowledge isn't
+oversweet."
+
+A shadow crossed the kind face opposite.
+
+"You're thinkin' about the times I pegged out--didn't do my share."
+
+"Lord, no!" The tears sprang up in the young eyes. "I'm thinkin' o' the
+times--I--" He laid his head down on the rude table, and sat so for an
+instant with hidden face; then he straightened up. "Seems as if it's
+only lately there's been time to think it out. And before, as long as I
+could work I could get on with myself.... Seemed as if I stood a chance
+to ... a little to make up."
+
+"Make up?"
+
+"But it's always just as it was that day on the Oklahoma, when the
+captain swore he wouldn't take on another pound. I was awfully happy
+thinkin' if I made him bring you it might kind o' make up, but it
+didn't."
+
+"Made a big difference to me," the Colonel said, still not able to see
+the drift, but patiently brushing now and then at the dazzling mist and
+waiting for enlightenment.
+
+"It's always the same," the other went on. "Whenever I've come up
+against something I'd hoped was goin' to make up, it's turned out to be
+a thing I'd have to do anyway, and there was no make up about it. For
+all that, I shouldn't mind stayin' on awhile since you want me to----"
+
+The Colonel interrupted him, "That's right!"
+
+"Only if I do, you've got to know--what I'd never have guessed myself,
+but for the Trail. After I've told you, if you can bear to see me
+round----" He hesitated and suddenly stood up, his eyes still wet, but
+his head so high an onlooker who did not understand English would have
+called the governing impulse pride, defiance even. "It seems I'm the
+kind of man, Colonel--the kind of man who could leave his pardner to
+die like a dog in the snow."
+
+"If any other fella said so, I'd knock him down."
+
+"That night before we got to Snow Camp, when you wouldn't--couldn't go
+any farther, I meant to go and leave you--take the sled, and take--I
+guess I meant to take everything and leave you to starve."
+
+They looked into each other's faces, and years seemed to go by. The
+Colonel was the first to drop his eyes; but the other, pitilessly, like
+a judge arraigning a felon, his steady scrutiny never flinching: "Do
+you want that kind of a man round, Colonel?"
+
+The Kentuckian turned quickly as if to avoid the stab of the other's
+eye, and sat hunched together, elbows on knees, head in hands.
+
+"I knew you didn't." The Boy answered his own question. He limped over
+to his side of the tent, picked up some clothes, his blanket and few
+belongings, and made a pack. Not a word, not a sound, but some birds
+twittering outside in the sun and a locust making that frying sound in
+the fire-weed. The pack was slung on the Boy's back, and he was
+throwing the diamond hitch to fasten it when the Colonel at last looked
+round.
+
+"Lord, what you doin'?"
+
+"Guess I'm goin' on."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"I'll write you when I know; maybe I'll even send you what I owe you,
+but I don't feel like boastin' at the moment. Nig!"
+
+"You can't walk."
+
+"Did you never happen to notice that one-legged fella pluggin' about
+Dawson?"
+
+He had gone down on his hands and knees to see if Nig was asleep under
+the camp-bed. The Colonel got up, went to the door, and let down the
+flap. When he turned, the traveller and the dog were at his elbow. He
+squared his big frame at the entrance, looking down at the two, tried
+to speak, but the Boy broke in: "Don't let's get sentimental, Colonel;
+just stand aside."
+
+Never stirring, he found a voice to say, "I'm not askin' you to
+stay"--the other turned and whistled, for Nig had retired again to the
+seclusion of the gray blanket screen--"I only want to tell you
+something before you go."
+
+The Boy frowned a little, but rested his pack against the table in that
+way in which the Klondyker learns to make a chair-back of his burden.
+
+"You seem to think you've been tellin' me news," said the Colonel.
+"When you said that about goin' on, the night before we got to Snow
+Camp, I knew you simply meant you still intended to come out alive. I
+had thrown up my hands--at least, I thought I had. The only difference
+between us--I had given in and you hadn't."
+
+The other shook his head. "There was a lot more in it than that."
+
+"You meant to take the only means there were--to carry off the sled
+that I couldn't pull any farther----" The Boy looked up quickly.
+Something stern and truth-compelling in the dark face forced the
+Colonel to add: "And along with the sled you meant to carry
+off--the--the things that meant life to us."
+
+"Just that----" The Boy knotted his brown fingers in Nig's hair as if
+to keep tight hold of one friend in the wreck.
+
+"We couldn't divide," the Colonel hurried on. "It was a case of
+crawlin' on together, and, maybe, come out alive, or part and one die
+sure."
+
+The Boy nodded, tightening his lips.
+
+"I knew well enough you'd fight for the off-chance. But"--the Colonel
+came away from the door and stood in front of his companion--"so would
+I. I hadn't really given up the struggle."
+
+"You were past strugglin', and I would have left you sick----"
+
+"You wouldn't have left me--if I'd had my gun."
+
+The Boy remembered that he had more than suspected that at the time,
+but the impression had by-and-by waxed dim. It was too utterly unlike
+the Colonel--a thing dreamed. He had grown as ashamed of the dream as
+of the thing he knew was true. The egotism of memory absorbed itself in
+the part he himself had played--that other, an evil fancy born of an
+evil time. And here was the Colonel saying it was true. The Boy dropped
+his eyes. It had all happened in the night. There was something in the
+naked truth too ghastly for the day. But the Colonel went on in a harsh
+whisper:
+
+"I looked round for my gun; if I'd found it I'd have left you behind."
+
+And the Boy kept looking down at Nig, and the birds sang, and the
+locust whirred, and the hot sun filled the tent as high-tide flushes a
+sea-cave.
+
+"You've been a little hard on me, Boy, bringin' it up like
+this--remindin' me--I wouldn't have gone on myself, and makin' me
+admit----"
+
+"No, no, Colonel."
+
+"Makin' me admit that before I would have let you go on I'd have shot
+you!"
+
+"Colonel!" He loosed his hold of Nig.
+
+"I rather reckon I owe you my life--and something else besides"--the
+Colonel laid one hand on the thin shoulder where the pack-strap
+pressed, and closed the other hand tight over his pardner's right--"and
+I hadn't meant even to thank you neither."
+
+"Don't, for the Lord's sake, don't!" said the younger, and neither
+dared look at the other.
+
+A scratching on the canvas, the Northern knock at the door.
+
+"You fellers sound awake?"
+
+A woman's voice. Under his breath, "Who the devil's that?" inquired the
+Colonel, brushing his hand over his eyes. Before he got across the tent
+Maudie had pushed the flap aside and put in her head.
+
+"Hello!"
+
+"Hell-o! How d'e do?"
+
+He shook hands, and the younger man nodded, "Hello."
+
+"When did you come to town?" asked the Colonel mendaciously.
+
+"Why, nearly three weeks ago, on the Weare. Heard you had skipped out
+to Sulphur with MacCann. I had some business out that way, so that's
+where I been."
+
+"Have some breakfast, won't you--dinner, I mean?"
+
+"I put that job through at the Road House. Got to rustle around now and
+get my tent up. Where's a good place?"
+
+"Well, I--I hardly know. Goin' to stay some time?"
+
+"Depends."
+
+The Boy slipped off his pack.
+
+"They've got rooms at the Gold Belt," he said.
+
+"You mean that Dance Hall up at the Forks?"
+
+"Oh, it ain't so far. I remember you can walk."
+
+"I can do one or two other things. Take care you don't hurt yourself
+worryin' about me."
+
+"Hurt myself?"
+
+"Yes. Bein' so hospittable. The way you're pressin' me to settle right
+down here, near's possible--why, it's real touchin'."
+
+He laughed, and went to the entrance to tic back the door-flap, which
+was whipping and snapping in the breeze. Heaven be praised! the night
+was cooler. Nig had been perplexed when he saw the pack pushed under
+the table. He followed his master to the door, and stood looking at the
+flap-tying, ears very pointed, critical eye cocked, asking as plain as
+could be, "You wake me up and drag me out here into the heat and
+mosquitoes just to watch you doin' that? Well, I've my opinion of you."
+
+"Colonel gone down?" inquired the Silesian, passing by.
+
+"Not yet."
+
+"Anything I can do?" the gentleman inside was saying with a sound of
+effort in his voice. The lady was not even at the pains to notice the
+perfunctory civility.
+
+"Well, Colonel, now you're here, what do you think o' the Klondyke?"
+
+"Think? Well, there's no doubt they've taken a lot o' gold out o'
+here."
+
+"Reg'lar old Has Been, hey?"
+
+"Oh, I don't say it hasn't got a future."
+
+"What! Don't you know the boom's busted?"
+
+"Well, no."
+
+"Has. Tax begun it. Too many cheechalkos are finishing it. Klondyke?"
+She laughed. "The Klondyke's goin' to hell down-grade in a hand-car."
+
+Scowl Austin was up, ready, as usual, to relieve Seymour of half the
+superintending, but never letting him off duty till he had seen the new
+shift at work. As the Boy limped by with the German, Austin turned his
+scowl significantly towards the Colonel's tent.
+
+"Good-mornin'--good-night, I mean," laughed the lame man, just as if
+his tongue had not run away with him the last time the two had met. It
+was not often that anyone spoke so pleasantly to the owner of No. 0.
+Perhaps the circumstance weighed with him; at all events, he stopped
+short. When the German had gone on, "Foot's better," Austin asserted.
+
+"Perhaps it is a little," though the lame man had no reason to think
+so.
+
+"Lucky you heal quick. Most people don't up here--livin' on the stale
+stuff we get in this----country. Seymour said anything to you about a
+job?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, since you're on time, you better come on the night shift,
+instead o' that lazy friend o' yours."
+
+"Oh, he ain't lazy--been up hours. An old acquaintance dropped in;
+he'll be down in a minute."
+
+"'Tisn't only his bein' late. You better come on the shift."
+
+"Don't think I could do that. What's the matter?"
+
+"Don't say there's anything very much the matter yet. But he's sick,
+ain't he?"
+
+"Sick? No, except as we all are--sick o' the eternal glare."
+
+The Colonel was coming slowly down the hill. Of course, a man doesn't
+look his best if he hasn't slept. The Boy limped a little way back to
+meet him.
+
+"Anything the matter with you, Colonel?"
+
+"Well, my Bonanza headache ain't improved."
+
+"I suppose you wouldn' like me to take over the job for two or three
+days?"
+
+"You? Crippled! Look here--" The Colonel flushed suddenly. "Austin been
+sayin' anything?"
+
+"Oh, I was just thinkin' about the sun."
+
+"Well, when I want to go in out of the sun, I'll say so." And, walking
+more quickly than he had done for long, he left his companion, marched
+down to the creek, and took his place near the puddling-box.
+
+By the time the Boy got to the little patch of shade, offered by the
+staging, Austin had turned his back on the gang, and was going to speak
+to the gateman at the locks. He had evidently left the Colonel very
+much enraged at some curt comment.
+
+"He meant it for us all," the Dublin gentleman was saying soothingly.
+By-and-by, as they worked undisturbed, serenity returned. Oh, the
+Colonel was all right--even more chipper than usual. What a
+good-looking fella he was, with that clear skin and splendid colour!
+
+A couple of hours later the Colonel set his long shovel against the
+nearest of the poles steadying the sluice, and went over to the staging
+for a drink. He lifted the can of weak tea to his lips and took a long
+draught, handed the can back to the Boy, and leant against the staging.
+They talked a minute or two in undertones.
+
+A curt voice behind said: "Looks like you've got a deal to attend to
+to-day, beside your work."
+
+They looked round, and there was Austin. As the Colonel saw who it was
+had spoken, the clear colour in the tan deepened; he threw back his
+shoulders, hesitated, and then, without a word, went and took up his
+shovel.
+
+Austin walked on. The Boy kept looking at his friend. What was the
+matter with the Colonel? It was not only that his eyes were queer--most
+of the men complained of their eyes, unless they slept in cabins. But
+whether through sun-blindness or shaken by anger, the Colonel was
+handling his shovel uncertainly, fumbling at the gravel, content with
+half a shovelful, and sometimes gauging the distance to the box so
+badly that some of the pay fell down again in the creek. As Austin came
+back on the other side of the line, he stopped opposite to where the
+Colonel worked, and suddenly called: "Seymour!"
+
+Like so many on Bonanza, the Superintendent could not always sleep when
+the time came. He was walking about "showing things" to a stranger, "a
+newspaper woman," it was whispered--at all events, a lady who, armed
+with letters from the highest British officials, had come to "write up
+the Klondyke."
+
+Seymour had left her at his employer's call. The lady, thin, neat,
+alert, with crisply curling iron-gray hair, and pleasant but
+unmistakably dignified expression, stood waiting for him a moment on
+the heap of tailings, then innocently followed her guide.
+
+Although Austin lowered his voice, she drew nearer, prepared to take an
+intelligent interest in the "new riffles up on Skookum."
+
+When Austin had first called Seymour, the Colonel started, looked up,
+and watched the little scene with suspicion and growing anger. Seeing
+Seymour's eyes turn his way, the Kentuckian stopped shovelling, and, on
+a sudden impulse, called out:
+
+"See here, Austin: if you've any complaints to make, sah, you'd better
+make them to my face, sah."
+
+The conversation about riffles thus further interrupted, a little
+silence fell. The Superintendent stood in evident fear of his employer,
+but he hastened to speak conciliatory words.
+
+"No complaint at all--one of the best hands."
+
+"May be so when he ain't sick," said Austin contemptuously.
+
+"Sick!" the Boy called out. "Why, you're dreamin'. He's our strong
+man--able to knock spots out of anyone on the creek, ain't he?"
+appealing to the gang.
+
+"I shall be able to spare him from my part of the creek after
+to-night."
+
+"Do I understand you are dismissing me?"
+
+"Oh, go to hell!"
+
+The Colonel dropped his shovel and clenched his hands.
+
+"Get the woman out o' the way," said the owner; "there's goin' to be
+trouble with this fire-eating Southerner."
+
+The woman turned quickly. The Colonel, diving under the sluice-box for
+a plunge at Austin, came up face to face with her.
+
+"The lady," said the Colonel, catching his breath, shaking with rage,
+but pulling off his hat--"the lady is quite safe, but I'm not so sure
+about you." He swerved as if to get by.
+
+"Safe? I should think so!" she said steadily, comprehending all at
+once, and not unwilling to create a diversion.
+
+"This is no place for a woman, not if she's got twenty letters from the
+Gold Commissioner."
+
+Misunderstanding Austin's jibe at the official, the lady stood her
+ground, smiling into the face of the excited Kentuckian.
+
+"Several people have asked me if I was not afraid to be alone here, and
+I've said no. It's quite true. I've travelled so much that I came to
+know years ago, it's not among men like you a woman has anything to
+fear."
+
+It was funny and pathetic to see the infuriate Colonel clutching at his
+grand manner, bowing one instant to the lady, shooting death and
+damnation the next out of heavy eyes at Austin. But the wiry little
+woman had the floor, and meant, for peace sake, to keep it a few
+moments.
+
+"At home, in the streets of London, I have been rudely spoken to; I
+have been greatly annoyed in Paris; in New York I have been subject to
+humorous impertinence; but in the great North-West every man has seemed
+to be my friend. In fact, wherever our English tongue is spoken," she
+wound up calmly, putting the great Austin in his place, "a woman may go
+alone."
+
+Austin seemed absorbed in filling his pipe. The lady tripped on to the
+next claim with a sedate "Good-night" to the men on No. 0. She thought
+the momentary trouble past, and never turned to see how the Kentuckian,
+waiting till she should be out of earshot, came round in front of
+Austin with a low question.
+
+The gang watched the Boy dodge under the sluice and hobble hurriedly
+over the chaos of stones towards the owner. Before he reached him he
+called breathless, but trying to laugh:
+
+"You think the Colonel's played out, but, take my word for it, he ain't
+a man to fool with."
+
+The gang knew from Austin's sneering look as he turned to strike a
+match on a boulder--they knew as well as if they'd been within a yard
+of him that Scowl had said something "pretty mean." They saw the
+Colonel make a plunge, and they saw him reel and fall among the stones.
+
+The owner stood there smoking while the night gang knocked off work
+under his nose and helped the Boy to get the Colonel on his feet. It
+was no use. Either he had struck his head or he was dazed--unable, at
+all events, to stand. They lifted him up and started for the big tent.
+
+Three Indians accosted the cripple leading the procession. He started,
+and raised his eyes. "Nicholas! Muckluck!" They shook hands, and all
+went on together, the Boy saying the Colonel had a little sunstroke.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day Scowl Austin was found lying face down among the
+cotton-woods above the benches on Skookum, a bullet-wound in his back.
+He had fainted from loss of blood, when he was picked up by the two
+Vermonters, the men who had twice gone by No. 0 the night before the
+quarrel, and who had enraged Austin by stopping an instant during the
+clean-up to look at his gold. They carried him back to Bonanza.
+
+The Superintendent and several of the day gang got the wounded man into
+bed. He revived sufficiently to say he had not seen the man that shot
+him, but he guessed he knew him all the same. Then he turned on his
+side, swore feebly at the lawlessness of the South, and gave up the
+ghost.
+
+Not a man on the creek but understood who Scowl Austin meant.
+
+"Them hot-headed Kentuckians, y' know, they'd dowse a feller's glim for
+less 'n that."
+
+"Little doubt the Colonel done it all right. Why, his own pardner says
+to Austin's face, says he, 'The Colonel's a bad man to fool with,' and
+just then the big chap plunged at Austin like a mad bull."
+
+But they were sorry to a man, and said among themselves that they'd see
+he was defended proper even if he hadn't nothin' but a little dust in a
+jam-pot.
+
+The Grand Forks constable had put a watch on the big tent, despatched a
+man to inform the Dawson Chief of Police, and set himself to learn the
+details of the quarrel. Meanwhile the utter absence of life in the
+guarded tent roused suspicion. It was recalled now that since the
+Indians had left a little while after the Colonel was carried home,
+sixteen hours ago, no one had seen either of the Southerners. The
+constable, taking alarm at this, left the crowd at Scowl Austin's, and
+went hurriedly across the meadow to the new centre of interest. Just as
+he reached the tent the flap was turned back, and Maudie put her head
+out.
+
+"Hah!" said the constable, with some relief, "they both in there?"
+
+"The Colonel is."
+
+Now, it was the Colonel he had wanted till he heard he was there. As
+the woman came out he looked in to make certain. Yes, there he was,
+calmly sleeping, with the gray blanket of the screen thrown up for air.
+It didn't look much like----
+
+"Where's the other feller?"
+
+"Gone to Dawson."
+
+"With that lame leg?"
+
+"Went on horseback."
+
+It had as grand a sound as it would have in the States to say a man had
+departed in a glass coach drawn by six cream-coloured horses. But he
+had been "in a hell of a hurry," evidently. Men were exchanging
+glances.
+
+"Funny nobody saw him."
+
+"When'd he light out?"
+
+"About five this morning."
+
+Oh, that explained it. The people who were up at five were abed now.
+And the group round the tent whispered that Austin had done the unheard
+of--had gone off and left the night gang at three o'clock in the
+morning. They had said so as the day shift turned out.
+
+"But how'd the young feller get such a thing as a horse?"
+
+"Hired it off a stranger out from Dawson yesterday," Maudie answered
+shortly.
+
+"Oh, that Frenchman--Count--a--Whirligig?"
+
+But Maudie was tired of giving information and getting none. The answer
+came from one in the group.
+
+"Yes, that French feller came in with a couple o' fusst-class horses.
+He's camped away over there beyond Muskeeter." He pointed down Bonanza.
+
+"P'raps you won't mind just mentionin'," said Maudie with growing
+irritation, "why you're makin' yourself so busy about my friends?"
+(Only strong resentment could have induced the plural.)
+
+When she heard what had happened and what was suspected she uttered a
+contemptuous "Tschah!" and made for the tent. The constable followed.
+She wheeled fiercely round.
+
+"The man in there hasn't been out o' this tent since he was carried up
+from the creek last night. I can swear to it."
+
+"Can you swear the other was here all the time?"
+
+No answer.
+
+"Did he say what he went to Dawson for?"
+
+"The doctor."
+
+One or two laughed. "Who's sick enough to send for a Dawson doctor?"
+
+"So you think he's gone for a----"
+
+"I know he is."
+
+"And do you know what it costs to have a doctor come all the way out
+here?"
+
+"Yes, beasts! won't budge till you've handed over five hundred dollars.
+Skunks!"
+
+"Did your friend mention how he meant to raise the dust?"
+
+"He's got it," she said curtly.
+
+"Why, he was livin' off his pardner. Hadn't a red cent."
+
+"She's shieldin' him," the men about the door agreed.
+
+"Lord! he done it well--got away with five hundred and a horse!"
+
+"He had words with Austin, himself, the night o' the clean-up. Sassed
+Scowl Austin! Right quiet, but, oh my! Told him to his face his gold
+was dirty, and washed it off his hands with a look----Gawd! you could
+see Austin was mad clear through, from his shirt-buttons to his spine.
+You bet Scowl said something back that got the young feller's monkey
+up."
+
+They all agreed that the only wonder was that Austin had lived as
+long--"On the other side o' the line--Gee!"
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+That evening the Boy, riding hard, came into camp with a doctor,
+followed discreetly in the rear by an N. W. M. P., really mounted this
+time. It had occurred to the Boy that people looked at him hard, and
+when he saw the groups gathered about the tent his heart contracted
+sharply. Had the Colonel died? He flung himself off the horse, winced
+as his foot cried out, told Joey Bludsoe to look after both beasts a
+minute, and led the Dawson doctor towards the tent.
+
+The constable followed.
+
+Maudie, at the door, looked at her old enemy queerly, and just as,
+without greeting, he pushed by, "S'pose you've heard Scowl Austin's
+dead?" she said in a low voice.
+
+"No! Dead, eh? Well, there's one rattlesnake less in the woods."
+
+The constable stopped him with a touch on the shoulder: "We have a
+warrant for you."
+
+The Colonel lifted his head and stared about, in a dazed way, as the
+Boy stopped short and stammered, "Warr--what for?"
+
+"For the murder of Scoville----"
+
+"Look here," he whispered: "I--I don't know what you mean, but I'll go
+along with you, of course, only don't talk before this man. He's
+sick----" He beckoned the doctor. "This is the man I brought you to
+see." Then he turned his back on the wide, horrified eyes of his
+friend, saying, "Back in a minute, Kentucky." Outside: "Give me a
+second, boys, will you?" he said to the N. W. M. P.'s, "just till I
+hear what that doctor fella says about my pardner."
+
+He stood there with the Buckeyes, the police, and the various day gangs
+that were too excited to go to bed. And he asked them where Austin was
+found, and other details of the murder, wearily conscious that the
+friendliest there felt sure that the man who questioned could best fill
+in the gaps in the story. When the doctor came out, Maudie at his heels
+firing off quick questions, the Boy hobbled forward.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Temperature a hundred and four," said the Dawson doctor.
+
+"Oh, is--is that much or little?"
+
+"Well, it's more than most of us go in for."
+
+"Can you tell what's the matter with him?"
+
+"Oh, typhoid, of course."
+
+The Boy pulled his hat over his eyes.
+
+"Guess you won't mind my stayin' now?" said Maudie at his elbow,
+speaking low.
+
+He looked up. "You goin' to take care of him? Good care?" he asked
+harshly.
+
+But Maudie seemed not to mind. The tears went down her cheeks, as, with
+never a word, she nodded, and turned towards the tent.
+
+"Say," he hobbled after her, "that doctor's all right--only wanted
+fifty." He laid four hundred-dollar bills in her hand. She seemed about
+to speak, when he interrupted hoarsely, "And look here: pull the
+Colonel through, Maudie--pull him through!"
+
+"I'll do my darnedest."
+
+He held out his hand. He had never given it to her before, and he
+forgot that few people would care now to take it. But she gave him hers
+with no grudging. Then, on a sudden, impulse, "You ain't takin' him to
+Dawson to-night?" she said to the constable.
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Why, he's done the trip twice already."
+
+"I can do it again well enough."
+
+"Then you got to wait a minute." She spoke to the constable as if she
+had been Captain Constantine himself. "Better just go in and see the
+Colonel," she said to the Boy. "He's been askin' for you."
+
+"N-no, Maudie; I can go to Dawson all right, but I don't feel up to
+goin' in there again."
+
+"You'll be sorry if you don't." And then he knew what a temperature at a
+hundred and four foreboded.
+
+He went back into the tent, dreading to face the Colonel more than he
+had ever dreaded anything in his life.
+
+But the sick man lay, looking out drowsily, peacefully, through
+half-shut eyes, not greatly concerned, one would say, about anything.
+The Boy went over and stood under the gray blanket canopy, looking down
+with a choking sensation that delayed his question: "How you feelin'
+now, Kentucky?"
+
+"All right."
+
+"Why, that's good news. Then you--you won't mind my goin' off to--to do
+a little prospectin'?"
+
+The sick man frowned: "You stay right where you are. There's plenty in
+that jampot."
+
+"Yes, yes! jampot's fillin' up fine."
+
+"Besides," the low voice wavered on, "didn't we agree we'd learned the
+lesson o' the North?"
+
+"The lesson o' the North?" repeated the other with filling eyes.
+
+"Yes, sah. A man alone's a man lost. We got to stick together, Boy."
+The eyelids fell heavily.
+
+"Yes, yes, Colonel." He pressed the big hand. His mouth made the
+motion, not the sound, "Good-bye, pardner."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+THE GOING HOME
+
+  "Despair lies down and grovels, grapples not
+  With evil, casts the burden of its lot.
+  This Age climbs earth.
+  --To challenge heaven.
+  --Not less The lower deeps.
+  It laughs at Happiness."
+    --George Meredith
+
+
+Everybody on Bonanza knew that the Colonel had left off struggling to
+get out of his bed to go to work, had left off calling for his pardner.
+Quite in his right senses again, he could take in Maudie's explanation
+that the Boy was gone to Dawson, probably to get something for the
+Colonel to eat. For the Doctor was a crank and wouldn't let the sick
+man have his beans and bacon, forbade him even such a delicacy as fresh
+pork, though the Buckeyes nobly offered to slaughter one of their
+newly-acquired pigs, the first that ever rooted in Bonanza refuse, and
+more a terror to the passing Indian than any bear or wolf.
+
+"But the Boy's a long time," the Colonel would say wistfully.
+
+Before this quieter phase set in, Maudie had sent into Dawson for
+Potts, O'Flynn and Mac, that they might distract the Colonel's mind
+from the pardner she knew could not return. But O'Flynn, having married
+the girl at the Moosehorn Cafe, had excuse of ancient validity for not
+coming; Potts was busy breaking the faro bank, and Mac was waiting till
+an overdue Lower River steamer should arrive.
+
+Nicholas of Pymeut had gone back as pilot of the Weare, but Princess
+Muckluck was still about, now with Skookum Bill, son of the local
+chief, now alone, trudging up and down Bonanza like one looking for
+something lost. The Colonel heard her voice outside the tent and had
+her in.
+
+"You goin' to marry Skookum Bill, as they say?"
+
+Muckluck only laughed, but the Indian hung about waiting the Princess's
+pleasure.
+
+"When your pardner come back?" she would indiscreetly ask the Colonel.
+"Why he goes to Dawson?" And every few hours she would return: "Why he
+stay so long?"
+
+At last Maudie took her outside and told her.
+
+Muckluck gaped, sat down a minute, and rocked her body back and forth
+with hidden face, got up and called sharply: "Skookum!"
+
+They took the trail for town. Potts said, when he passed them, they
+were going as if the devil were at their heels--wouldn't even stop to
+say how the Colonel was. So Potts had come to see for himself--and to
+bring the Colonel some letters just arrived.
+
+Mac was close behind ... but the Boy? No-no. They wouldn't let anybody
+see him; and Potts shook his head.
+
+"Well, you can come in," said Maudie, "if you keep your head shut about
+the Boy."
+
+The Colonel was lying flat, with that unfaltering ceiling-gaze of the
+sick. Now his vision dropped to the level of faces at the door.
+"Hello!" But as they advanced he looked behind them anxiously. Only
+Mac--no, Kaviak at his heels! and the sick man's disappointment
+lightened to a smile. He would have held out a hand, but Maudie stopped
+him. She took the little fellow's fingers and laid them on the
+Colonel's.
+
+"Now sit down and be quiet," she said nervously.
+
+Potts and Mac obeyed, but Kaviak had fastened his fine little hand on
+the weak one, and anchored so, stared about taking his bearings.
+
+"How did you get to the Klondyke, Kaviak?" said the Colonel in a thin,
+breathy voice.
+
+"Came up with Sister Winifred," Farva answered for him. "She was sent
+for to help with the epidemic. Dyin' like flies in Dawson--h'm--ahem!"
+(Apologetic glance at Maudie.) "Sister Winifred promised to keep Kaviak
+with her. Woman of her word."
+
+"Well, what you think o' Dawson?" the low voice asked.
+
+Kaviak understood the look at least, and smiled back, grew suddenly
+grave, intent, looked sharply round, loosed his hold of the Colonel,
+bent down, and retired behind the bed. That was where Nig was. Their
+foregathering added nothing to the tranquility of the occasion, and
+both were driven forth by Maudie.
+
+Potts read the Colonel his letters, and helped him to sign a couple of
+cheques. The "Louisville instructions" had come through at last.
+
+After that the Colonel slept, and when he woke it was only to wander
+away into that world where Maudie was lost utterly, and where the
+Colonel was at home. There was chastening in such hours for Maudie of
+Minook. "Now he's found the Other One," she would say to herself--"the
+One he was looking for."
+
+That same evening, as they sat in the tent in an interval of relief
+from the Colonel's muttering monotone, they heard Nig making some sort
+of unusual manifestation outside; heard the grunting of those pioneer
+pigs; heard sounds of a whispered "Sh! Kaviak. Shut up, Nig!" Then a
+low, tuneless crooning:
+
+  "Wen yo' see a pig a-goin' along
+    Widder straw in de sider 'is mouf,
+  It'll be er tuhble wintuh,
+    En yo' bettah move down Souf."
+
+"Why, the Boy's back!" said the Colonel suddenly in a clear, collected
+voice.
+
+Maudie had jumped up, but the Boy put his head in the tent, smiling,
+and calling out:
+
+"They told me he was getting on all right, but I just thought maybe he
+was asleep." He came in and bent over his pardner. "Hello, everybody!
+Why, you got it so fine and dark in here, I can hardly see how well
+you're lookin', Colonel!" And he dropped into the nurse's place by the
+bedside.
+
+"Maudie's lined the tent with black drill," said the Colonel. "You
+brought home anything to eat?"
+
+"Well, no----" (Maudie telegraphed); "found it all I could do to bring
+myself back."
+
+"Oh, well, that's the main thing," said the Colonel, battling with
+disappointment. Pricked by some quickened memory of the Boy's last
+home-coming: "I've had pretty queer dreams about you: been givin'
+Maudie the meanest kind of a time."
+
+"Don't go gassin', Colonel," admonished the nurse.
+
+"It's pretty tough, I can tell you," he said irritably, "to be as weak
+as a day-old baby, and to have to let other people----"
+
+"Mustn't talk!" ordered Mac. The Colonel raised his head with sudden
+anger. It did not mend matters that Maudie was there to hold him down
+before a lot of men.
+
+"You go to Halifax," said the Boy to Mac, blustering a trifle. "The
+Colonel may stand a little orderin' about from Maudie--don't blame him
+m'self. But Kentucky ain't going to be bossed by any of us."
+
+The Colonel lay quite still again, and when he spoke it was quietly
+enough.
+
+"Reckon I'm in the kind of a fix when a man's got to take orders."
+
+"Foolishness! Don't let him jolly you, boys. The Colonel's always
+sayin' he ain't a soldier, but I reckon you better look out how you
+rile Kentucky!"
+
+The sick man ignored the trifling. "The worst of it is bein' so
+useless."
+
+"Useless! You just wait till you see what a lot o' use we mean to make
+of you. No crawlin' out of it like that."
+
+"It's quite true," said Mac harshly; "we all kind of look to you
+still."
+
+"Course we do!" The Boy turned to the others. "The O'Flynns comin' all
+the way out from Dawson to-morrow to get Kentucky's opinion on a big
+scheme o' theirs. Did you ever hear what that long-headed Lincoln said
+when the Civil War broke out? 'I would like to have God on my side, but
+I must have Kentucky.'"
+
+"I've been so out o' my head, I thought you were arrested."
+
+"No 'out of your head' about it--was arrested. They thought I'd cleared
+Scowl Austin off the earth."
+
+"Do they know who did?" Potts and Maudie asked in a breath.
+
+"That Klondyke Indian that's sweet on Princess Muckluck."
+
+"What had Austin done to him?"
+
+"Nothin'. Reckon Skookum Bill was about the only man on Bonanza who had
+no objection to the owner of o. Said so in Court."
+
+"What did he kill him for?"
+
+"Well," said the Boy, "it's just one o' those topsy-turvy things that
+happen up here. You saw that Indian that came in with Nicholas? Some
+years ago he killed a drunken white man who was after him with a knife.
+There was no means of tryin' the Indian where the thing happened, so he
+was taken outside.
+
+"The Court found he'd done the killin' in self-defence, and sent him
+back. Well, sir, that native had the time of his life bein' tried for
+murder. He'd travelled on a railroad, seen a white man's city, lived
+like a lord, and came home to be the most famous man of his tribe. Got
+a taste for travel, too. Comes to the Klondyke, and his fame fires
+Skookum Bill. All you got to do is to kill one o' these white men, and
+they take you and show you all the wonders o' the earth. So he puts a
+bullet into Austin."
+
+"Why didn't he own up, then, and get his reward?"
+
+"Muckluck knew better--made him hold his tongue about it."
+
+"And then made him own up when she saw----"
+
+The boy nodded.
+
+"What's goin' to happen?"
+
+"Oh, he'll swing to-morrow instead o' me. By the way, Colonel, a fella
+hunted me up this mornin' who'd been to Minook. Looked good to him.
+I've sold out Idaho Bar."
+
+"'Nough to buy back your Orange Grove?"
+
+He shook his head. "'Nough to pay my debts and start over again."
+
+When the Dawson doctor left that night Maudie, as usual, followed him
+out. They waited a long time for her to come back.
+
+"Perhaps she's gone to her own tent;" and the Boy went to see. He
+found her where the Colonel used to go to smoke, sitting, staring out
+to nowhere.
+
+As the boy looked closer he saw she had been crying, for even in the
+midst of honest service Maudie, like many a fine lady before her, could
+not forego the use of cosmetic. Her cheeks were streaked and stained.
+
+"Five dollars a box here, too," she said mechanically, as she wiped
+some of the rouge off with a handkerchief. Her hand shook.
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+"It's all up," she answered.
+
+"Not with him?" He motioned towards the tent.
+
+She nodded.
+
+"Doctor says so?"
+
+"----and I knew it before, only I wouldn't believe it."
+
+She had spoken with little agitation, but now she flung her arms out
+with a sudden anguish that oddly took the air of tossing into space
+Bonanza and its treasure. It was the motion of one who renounces the
+thing that means the most--a final fling in the face of the gods. The
+Boy stood quite still, submitting his heart to that first quick rending
+and tearing asunder which is only the initial agony of parting.
+
+"How soon?" he said, without raising his eyes.
+
+"Oh, he holds on--it may be a day or two."
+
+The Boy walked slowly away towards the ridge of the low hill. Maudie
+turned and watched him. On the top of the divide he stopped, looking
+over. Whatever it was he saw off there, he could not meet it yet. He
+flung himself down with his face in the fire-weed, and lay there all
+night long.
+
+Kaviak was sent after him in the morning, but only to say, "Breakfast,
+Maudie's tent."
+
+The Boy saw that Mac and Potts knew. For the first time the Big Chimney
+men felt a barrier between them and that one who had been the common
+bond, keeping the incongruous allied and friendly. Only Nig ran in and
+out, unchilled by the imminence of the Colonel's withdrawal from his
+kind.
+
+Towards noon the O'Flynns came up the creek, and were stopped near the
+tent by the others. They all stood talking low till a noise of
+scuffling broke the silence within. They drew nearer, and heard the
+Colonel telling Maudie not to turn out Nig and Kaviak.
+
+"I like seein' my friends. Where's the Boy?"
+
+So they went in.
+
+Did he know? He must know, or he would have asked O'Flynn what the
+devil made him look like that! All he said was: "Hello! How do you do,
+madam?" and he made a weak motion of one hand towards Mrs. O'Flynn to
+do duty for that splendid bow of his. Then, as no one spoke, "You're
+too late, O'Flynn."
+
+"Too late?"
+
+"Had a job in your line...." Then suddenly: "Maudie's worth the whole
+lot of you."
+
+They knew it was his way of saying "She's told me." They all sat and
+looked at the floor. Nothing happened for a long time. At last: "Well,
+you all know what my next move is; what's yours?"
+
+There was another silence, but not nearly so long.
+
+"What prospects, pardners?" he repeated.
+
+The Boy looked at Maudie. She made a little gesture of "I've done all
+the fightin' I'm good for." The Colonel's eyes, clear again and
+tranquil, travelled from face to face.
+
+O'Flynn cleared his throat, but it was Mac who spoke.
+
+"Yes--a--we would like to hold a last--hold a counsel o' war. We've
+always kind o' followed your notions--at least"--veracity pared down
+the compliment--"at least, you can't say but what we've always listened
+to you."
+
+"Yes, you might just--a--start us as well as you can," says Potts.
+
+The Colonel smiled a little. Each man still "starting"--forever
+starting for somewhere or something, until he should come to this place
+where the Colonel was. Even he, why, he was "starting" too. For him
+this was no end other than a chapter's ending. But these men he had
+lived and suffered with, they all wanted to talk the next move
+over--not his, theirs--all except the Boy, it seemed.
+
+Mac was in the act of changing his place to be nearer the Colonel, when
+Potts adroitly forestalled him. The others drew off a little and made
+desultory talk, while Potts in an undertone told how he'd had a run of
+bad luck. No doubt it would turn, but if ever he got enough again to
+pay his passage home, he'd put it in the bank and never risk it.
+
+"I swear I wouldn't! I've got to go out in the fall--goin' to get
+myself married Christmas; and, if she's willing, we'll come up here on
+the first boat in the spring--with backing this time."
+
+He showed a picture. The Colonel studied it.
+
+"I believe she'll come," he said.
+
+And Potts was so far from clairvoyance that he laughed, awkwardly
+flattered; then anxiously: "Wish I was sure o' my passage money."
+
+When Potts, before he meant to, had yielded place to O'Flynn, the
+Colonel was sworn to secrecy, and listened to excited whispers of gold
+in the sand off yonder on the coast of the Behring Sea. The world in
+general wouldn't know the authenticity of the new strike till next
+season. He and Mrs. O'Flynn would take the first boat sailing out of
+San Francisco in the spring.
+
+"Oh, you're going outside too?"
+
+"In the fahll--yes, yes. Ye see, I ain't like the rest. I've got Mrs.
+O'Flynn to consider. Dawson's great, but it ain't the place to start a
+famully."
+
+"Where you goin', Mac?" said the Colonel to the irate one, who was
+making for the door. "I want a little talk with you."
+
+Mac turned back, and consented to express his opinion of the money
+there was to be made out of tailings by means of a new hydraulic
+process. He was going to lend Kaviak to Sister Winifred again on the
+old terms. She'd take him along when she returned to Holy Cross, and
+Mac would go outside, raise a little capital, return, and make a
+fortune. For the moment he was broke--hadn't even passage money. Did
+the Colonel think he could----
+
+The Colonel seemed absorbed in that eternal interrogation of the
+tent-top.
+
+"Mine, you know"--Mac drew nearer still, and went on in the lowered
+voice--"mine's a special case. A man's bound to do all he can for his
+boys."
+
+"I didn't know you had boys."
+
+Mac jerked "Yes" with his square head. "Bobbie's goin' on six now."
+
+"The others older?"
+
+"Others?" Mac stared an instant. "Oh, there's only one more." He
+grinned with embarrassment, and hitched his head towards Kaviak.
+
+"I guess you've jawed enough," said Maudie, leaving the others and
+coming to the foot of the bed.
+
+"And Maudie's goin' back, too," said the sick man.
+
+She nodded.
+
+"And you're never goin' to leave her again?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Maudie's a little bit of All Right," said the patient. The Big Chimney
+men assented, but with sudden misgiving.
+
+"What was that job ye said ye were wantin' me forr?"
+
+"Oh, Maudie's got a friend of hers to fix it up."
+
+"Fix what up?" demanded Potts.
+
+"Little postscript to my will."
+
+Mac jerked his head at the nurse. With that clear sight of dying eyes
+the Colonel understood. A meaner spirit would have been galled at the
+part those "Louisville Instructions" had been playing, but cheap
+cynicism was not in the Colonel's line. He knew the awful pinch of life
+up here, and he thought no less of his comrades for asking that last
+service of getting them home. But it was the day of the final
+"clean-up" for the Colonel; he must not leave misapprehension behind.
+
+"I wanted Maudie to have my Minook claim----"
+
+"Got a Minook claim o' my own."
+
+"So I've left it to be divided----"
+
+They all looked up.
+
+"One-half to go to a little girl in 'Frisco, and the other half--well,
+I've left the other half to Kaviak. Strikes me he ought to have a
+little piece o' the North."
+
+"Y-yes!"
+
+"Oh, yes!"
+
+"Good idea!"
+
+"Mac thought he'd go over to the other tent and cook some dinner. There
+was a general movement. As they were going out:
+
+"Boy!"
+
+"Yes?" He came back, Nig followed, and the two stood by the camp-bed
+waiting their Colonel's orders.
+
+"Don't you go wastin' any more time huntin' gold-mines."
+
+"I don't mean to."
+
+"Go back to your own work; go back to your own people."
+
+The Boy listened and looked away.
+
+"It's good to go pioneering, but it's good to go home. Oh-h--!" the
+face on the pillow was convulsed for that swift passing moment--"best
+of all to go home. And if you leave your home too long, your home
+leaves you."
+
+"Home doesn't seem so important as it did when I came up here."
+
+The Colonel fastened one hand feverishly on his pardner's arm.
+
+"I've been afraid of that. It's magic; break away. Promise me you'll go
+back and stay. Lord, Lord!" he laughed feebly, "to think a fella should
+have to be urged to leave the North alone. Wonderful place, but there's
+Black Magic in it. Or who'd ever come--who'd ever stay?"
+
+He looked anxiously into the Boy's set face.
+
+"I'm not saying the time was wasted," he went on; "I reckon it was a
+good thing you came."
+
+"Yes, it was a good thing I came."
+
+"You've learned a thing or two."
+
+"Several."
+
+"Specially on the Long Trail."
+
+"Most of all on the Long Trail."
+
+The Colonel shut his eyes. Maudie came and held a cup to his lips.
+
+"Thank you. I begin to feel a little foggy. What was it we learned on
+the Trail, pardner?" But the Boy had turned away. "Wasn't it--didn't we
+learn how near a tolerable decent man is to bein' a villain?"
+
+"We learned that a man can't be quite a brute as long as he sticks to
+another man."
+
+"Oh, was that it?"
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the night Maudie went away to sleep. The Boy watched.
+
+"Do you know what I'm thinking about?" the sick man said suddenly.
+
+"About--that lady down at home?"
+
+"Guess again."
+
+"About--those fellas at Holy Cross?"
+
+"No, I never was as taken up with the Jesuits as you were. No, Sah, I'm
+thinkin' about the Czar." (Poor old Colonel! he was wandering again.)
+"Did I ever tell you I saw him once?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Did--had a good look at him. Knew a fella in Petersburg, too, that--"
+He rested a moment. "That Czar's all right. Only he sends the wrong
+people to Siberia. Ought to go himself, and take his Ministers, for a
+winter on the Trail." On his face suddenly the old half-smiling,
+half-shrewd look. "But, Lord bless you! 'tisn't only the Czar. We all
+have times o' thinkin' we're some punkins. Specially Kentuckians. I
+reckon most men have their days when they're twelve feet high, and
+wouldn't stoop to say 'Thank ye' to a King. Let 'em go on the Winter
+Trail."
+
+"Yes," agreed the Boy, "they'd find out--" And he stopped.
+
+"Plenty o' use for Head Men, though." The faint voice rang with an echo
+of the old authority. "No foolishness, but just plain: 'I'm the one
+that's doin' the leadin'--like Nig here--and it's my business to lick
+the hind dog if he shirks.'" He held out his hand and closed it over
+his friend's. "I was Boss o' the Big Chimney, Boy, but you were Boss o'
+the Trail."
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Colonel was buried in the old moose pasture, with people standing
+by who knew that the world had worn a friendlier face because he had
+been in it. That much was clear, even before it was found that he had
+left to each of the Big Chimney men five hundred dollars, not to be
+drawn except for the purpose of going home.
+
+They thought it was the sense of that security that made them put off
+the day. They would "play the game up to the last moment, and see--"
+
+September's end brought no great change in fortune, but a change withal
+of deep significance. The ice had begun to run in the Yukon. No man
+needed telling it would "be a tuhble wintah, and dey'd better move down
+Souf." All the late boats by both routes had been packed. Those men who
+had failed, and yet, most tenacious, were hanging on for some last
+lucky turn of the wheel, knew the risk they ran. And now to-day the
+final boat of the year was going down the long way to the Behring Sea,
+and by the Canadian route, open a little longer, the Big Chimney men,
+by grace of that one left behind, would be on the last ship to shoot
+the rapids in '98.
+
+Not only to the thousands who were going, to those who stayed behind
+there was something in the leaving of the last boat--something that
+knocked upon the heart. They, too, could still go home. They gathered
+at the docks and told one another they wouldn't leave Dawson for fifty
+thousand dollars, then looked at the "failures" with home-sick eyes,
+remembering those months before the luckiest Klondyker could hear from
+the world outside. Between now and then, what would have come to pass
+up here, and what down there below!
+
+The Boy had got a place for Muckluck in the A. C. Store. She was handy
+at repairing and working in fur, and said she was "all right" on this
+bright autumn morning when the Boy went in to say good-bye. With a
+white woman and an Indian boy, in a little room overlooking the
+water-front, Muckluck was working in the intervals of watching the
+crowds on the wharf. Eyes more experienced than hers might well stare.
+Probably in no other place upon the globe was gathered as motley a
+crew: English, Indian, Scandinavian, French, German, Negroes, Chinese,
+Poles, Japs, Finns. All the fine gentlemen had escaped by earlier
+boats. All the smart young women with their gold-nugget buttons as big
+as your thumb, lucky miners from the creeks with heavy consignments of
+dust to take home, had been too wary to run any risk of the
+Never-Know-What closing inopportunely. The great majority here, on the
+wharf, dazed or excited, lugging miscellaneous possessions--things they
+had clung to in straits so desperate they knew no more how to relax
+their hold than dead fingers do--these were men whose last chance had
+been the Klondyke, and who here, as elsewhere, had failed. Many who
+came in young were going out old; but the odd thing was that those
+worst off went out game--no whining, none of the ostentatious pathos of
+those broken on the wheel of a great city.
+
+A man under Muckluck's window, dressed in a moose-skin shirt, straw
+hat, broadcloth trousers, and carpet slippers, in one hand a tin pail,
+in the other something tied in a handkerchief, called out lustily to a
+ragged individual, cleaving a way through the throng, "Got your stuff
+aboard?"
+
+"Yes, goin' to get it off. I ain't goin' home till next year."
+
+And the face above the moose-skin shirt was stricken with a sudden
+envy. Without any telling, he knew just how his pardner's heart had
+failed him, when it came to turning his tattered back on the
+possibilities of the Klondyke.
+
+"Oh, I'm comin' back soon's I get a grub-stake."
+
+"I ain't," said another with a dazed expression--a Klondyker carrying
+home his frying-pan, the one thing, apparently, saved out of the wreck.
+
+"You think you ain't comin' back? Just wait! Once you've lived up here,
+the Outside ain't good enough fur yer."
+
+"Right!" said an old Forty-miler, "you can try it; but Lord! how you'll
+miss this goll-darn Yukon."
+
+Among the hundreds running about, talking, bustling, hauling
+heterogeneous luggage, sending last letters, doing last deals, a score
+of women either going by this boat or saying good-bye to those who
+were; and Potts, the O'Flynns, and Mac waiting to hand over Kaviak to
+Sister Winifred.
+
+The Boy at the open window above, staring down on the tatterdemalion
+throng, remembered his first meeting with the Big Chimney men as the
+Washington City steamed out of San Francisco's Golden Gate a year and a
+month before.
+
+Of course, even in default of finding millions, something stirring
+might have happened, something heroic, rewarding to the spirit, if no
+other how; but (his own special revelation blurred, swamped for the
+moment in the common wreck) he said to himself that nothing of the sort
+had befallen the Big Chimney men any more than to the whipped and
+bankrupt crew struggling down there on the wharf. They simply had
+failed--all alike. And yet there was between them and the common
+failures of the world one abiding difference: these had greatly dared.
+As long as the meanest in that crowd drew breath and held to memory, so
+long might he remember the brave and terrible days of the Klondyke
+Rush, and that he had borne in it his heavy share. No share in any mine
+save that--the knowledge that he was not among the vast majority who
+sit dully to the end beside what things they were born to--the earnings
+of other men, the savings of other women, afraid to go seeking after
+better lest they lose the good they have. They had failed, but it could
+never be said of a Klondyker that he had not tried. He might, in truth,
+look down upon the smug majority that smiles at unusual endeavour,
+unless success excuses, crowns it. No one there, after all, so poor but
+he had one possession treasured among kings. And he had risked it. What
+could a man do more?
+
+"Good-bye, Muckluck."
+
+"Goo'-bye? Boat Canada way no go till Thursday."
+
+"Thursday, yes," he said absently, eyes still on the American ship.
+
+"Then why you say goo'-bye to-day?"
+
+"Lot to do. I just wanted to make sure you were all right."
+
+Her creamy face was suddenly alight, but not with gratitude.
+
+"Oh, yes, all right here," she said haughtily. "I not like much the
+Boston men--King George men best." It was so her sore heart abjured her
+country. For among the natives of the Klondyke white history stops
+where it began when George the Third was King. "I think"--she shot
+sideways a shrewd look--"I think I marry a King George man."
+
+And at the prospect her head drooped heavily.
+
+"Then you'll want to wear this at your wedding."
+
+The Boy drew his hand out of his pocket, threw a walrus-string over her
+bent head, and when she could see clear again, her Katharine medal was
+swinging below her waist, and "the Boston man" was gone.
+
+She stared with blinded eyes out of the window, till suddenly in the
+mist one face was clear. The Boy! Standing still down there in the
+hurly-burly, hands in pockets, staring at the ship.
+
+Suddenly Sister Winifred, her black veil swirling in the wind. An
+orderly from St. Mary's Hospital following with a little trunk. At the
+gangway she is stopped by the purser, asked some questions, smiles at
+first and shakes her head, and then in dismay clasps her hands, seeming
+to plead, while the whistle shrieks.
+
+Muckluck turned and flew down the dark little stair, threaded her way
+in and out among the bystanders on the wharf till she reached the
+Sister's side. The nun was saying that she not only had no money, but
+that a Yukon purser must surely know the Sisters were forbidden to
+carry it. He could not doubt but the passage money would be made good
+when they got to Holy Cross. But the purser was a new man, and when Mac
+and others who knew the Yukon custom expostulated, he hustled them
+aside and told Sister Winifred to stand back, the gangway was going up.
+It was then the Boy came and spoke to the man, finally drew out some
+money and paid the fare. The nun, not recognising him, too bewildered
+by this rough passage with the world even to thank the stranger, stood
+motionless, grasping Kaviak's hand--two children, you would say--her
+long veil blowing, hurrying on before her to that haven in the waste,
+the mission at Holy Cross.
+
+Again the Boy was delaying the upward swing of the gangway: the nun's
+trunk must come on board. Two men rushed for it while he held down the
+gang.
+
+"Mustn't cry," he said to Muckluck. "You'll see Sister Winifred again."
+
+"Not for that I cry. Ah, I never shall have happiness!"
+
+"Yes, that trunk!" he called.
+
+In the babel of voices shouting from ship and shore, the Boy heard
+Princess Muckluck saying, with catches in her breath:
+
+"I always knew I would get no luck!"
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Ah! I was a bad child. The baddest of all the Pymeut children."
+
+"Yes, yes, they've got it now!" the Boy shouted up to the Captain. Then
+low, and smiling absently: "What did you do that was so bad. Princess?"
+
+"Me? I--I mocked at the geese. It was the summer they were so late; and
+as they flew past Pymeut I--yes, I mocked at them."
+
+A swaying and breaking of the crowd, the little trunk flung on board,
+the men rushing back to the wharf, the gang lifted, and the last Lower
+River boat swung out into the ice-flecked stream.
+
+Keen to piercing a cry rang out--Muckluck's:
+
+"Stop! They carry him off! It is meestake! Oh! Oh!"
+
+The Boy was standing for'ard, Nig beside him.
+
+O'Flynn rushed to the wharf's edge and screamed at the Captain to
+"Stop, be the Siven!" Mac issued orders most peremptory. Muckluck wept
+as excitedly as though there had never been question of the Boy's going
+away. But while the noise rose and fell, Potts drawled a "Guess he
+means to go that way!"
+
+"No, he don't!"
+
+"Stop, you--------, Captain!"
+
+"Stop your----boat!"
+
+"Well," said a bystander, "I never seen any feller as calm as that who
+was bein' took the way he didn't want to go."
+
+"D'ye mean there's a new strike?"
+
+The suggestion flashed electric through the crowd. It was the only
+possible explanation.
+
+"He knows what he's about."
+
+"Lord! I wish I'd 'a' froze to him!"
+
+"Yep," said Buck One, "never seen that young feller when he looked more
+like he wouldn't give a whoop in hell to change places with anybody."
+
+As O'Flynn, back from his chase, hoarse and puffing, stopped suddenly:
+
+"Be the Siven! Father Brachet said the little divil 'd be coming back
+to Howly Cross!"
+
+"Where's that?"
+
+"Lower River camp."
+
+"Gold there?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then you're talking through your hat!"
+
+"Say, Potts, where in hell is he goin'?"
+
+"Damfino!"
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Magnetic North
+by Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAGNETIC NORTH ***
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