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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Faith of Men, by Jack London
+#27-34 in our series by Jack London
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+The Faith of Men
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+by Jack London
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+November, 1997  [Etext 1096]
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Faith of Men, by Jack London
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+
+
+
+
+The Faith of Men
+
+
+
+
+Contents:
+
+A Relic of the Pliocene
+A Hyperborean Brew
+The Faith of Men
+Too Much Gold
+The One Thousand Dozen
+The Marriage of Lit-lit
+Batard
+The Story of Jees Uck
+
+
+
+
+A RELIC OF THE PLIOCENE
+
+
+
+I wash my hands of him at the start.  I cannot father his tales,
+nor will I be responsible for them.  I make these preliminary
+reservations, observe, as a guard upon my own integrity.  I possess
+a certain definite position in a small way, also a wife; and for
+the good name of the community that honours my existence with its
+approval, and for the sake of her posterity and mine, I cannot take
+the chances I once did, nor foster probabilities with the careless
+improvidence of youth.  So, I repeat, I wash my hands of him, this
+Nimrod, this mighty hunter, this homely, blue-eyed, freckle-faced
+Thomas Stevens.
+
+Having been honest to myself, and to whatever prospective olive
+branches my wife may be pleased to tender me, I can now afford to
+be generous.  I shall not criticize the tales told me by Thomas
+Stevens, and, further, I shall withhold my judgment.  If it be
+asked why, I can only add that judgment I have none.  Long have I
+pondered, weighed, and balanced, but never have my conclusions been
+twice the same--forsooth! because Thomas Stevens is a greater man
+than I.  If he have told truths, well and good; if untruths, still
+well and good.  For who can prove? or who disprove?  I eliminate
+myself from the proposition, while those of little faith may do as
+I have done--go find the same Thomas Stevens, and discuss to his
+face the various matters which, if fortune serve, I shall relate.
+As to where he may be found?  The directions are simple:  anywhere
+between 53 north latitude and the Pole, on the one hand; and, on
+the other, the likeliest hunting grounds that lie between the east
+coast of Siberia and farthermost Labrador.  That he is there,
+somewhere, within that clearly defined territory, I pledge the word
+of an honourable man whose expectations entail straight speaking
+and right living.
+
+Thomas Stevens may have toyed prodigiously with truth, but when we
+first met (it were well to mark this point), he wandered into my
+camp when I thought myself a thousand miles beyond the outermost
+post of civilization.  At the sight of his human face, the first in
+weary months, I could have sprung forward and folded him in my arms
+(and I am not by any means a demonstrative man); but to him his
+visit seemed the most casual thing under the sun.  He just strolled
+into the light of my camp, passed the time of day after the custom
+of men on beaten trails, threw my snowshoes the one way and a
+couple of dogs the other, and so made room for himself by the fire.
+Said he'd just dropped in to borrow a pinch of soda and to see if I
+had any decent tobacco.  He plucked forth an ancient pipe, loaded
+it with painstaking care, and, without as much as by your leave,
+whacked half the tobacco of my pouch into his.  Yes, the stuff was
+fairly good.  He sighed with the contentment of the just, and
+literally absorbed the smoke from the crisping yellow flakes, and
+it did my smoker's heart good to behold him.
+
+Hunter?  Trapper?  Prospector?  He shrugged his shoulders No; just
+sort of knocking round a bit.  Had come up from the Great Slave
+some time since, and was thinking of trapsing over into the Yukon
+country.  The factor of Koshim had spoken about the discoveries on
+the Klondike, and he was of a mind to run over for a peep.  I
+noticed that he spoke of the Klondike in the archaic vernacular,
+calling it the Reindeer River--a conceited custom that the Old
+Timers employ against the CHECHAQUAS and all tenderfeet in general.
+But he did it so naively and as such a matter of course, that there
+was no sting, and I forgave him.  He also had it in view, he said,
+before he crossed the divide into the Yukon, to make a little run
+up Fort o' Good Hope way.
+
+Now Fort o' Good Hope is a far journey to the north, over and
+beyond the Circle, in a place where the feet of few men have trod;
+and when a nondescript ragamuffin comes in out of the night, from
+nowhere in particular, to sit by one's fire and discourse on such
+in terms of "trapsing" and "a little run," it is fair time to rouse
+up and shake off the dream.  Wherefore I looked about me; saw the
+fly and, underneath, the pine boughs spread for the sleeping furs;
+saw the grub sacks, the camera, the frosty breaths of the dogs
+circling on the edge of the light; and, above, a great streamer of
+the aurora, bridging the zenith from south-east to north-west.  I
+shivered.  There is a magic in the Northland night, that steals in
+on one like fevers from malarial marshes.  You are clutched and
+downed before you are aware.  Then I looked to the snowshoes, lying
+prone and crossed where he had flung them.  Also I had an eye to my
+tobacco pouch.  Half, at least, of its goodly store had vamosed.
+That settled it.  Fancy had not tricked me after all.
+
+Crazed with suffering, I thought, looking steadfastly at the man--
+one of those wild stampeders, strayed far from his bearings and
+wandering like a lost soul through great vastnesses and unknown
+deeps.  Oh, well, let his moods slip on, until, mayhap, he gathers
+his tangled wits together.  Who knows?--the mere sound of a fellow-
+creature's voice may bring all straight again.
+
+So I led him on in talk, and soon I marvelled, for he talked of
+game and the ways thereof.  He had killed the Siberian wolf of
+westernmost Alaska, and the chamois in the secret Rockies.  He
+averred he knew the haunts where the last buffalo still roamed;
+that he had hung on the flanks of the caribou when they ran by the
+hundred thousand, and slept in the Great Barrens on the musk-ox's
+winter trail.
+
+And I shifted my judgment accordingly (the first revision, but by
+no account the last), and deemed him a monumental effigy of truth.
+Why it was I know not, but the spirit moved me to repeat a tale
+told to me by a man who had dwelt in the land too long to know
+better.  It was of the great bear that hugs the steep slopes of St
+Elias, never descending to the levels of the gentler inclines.  Now
+God so constituted this creature for its hillside habitat that the
+legs of one side are all of a foot longer than those of the other.
+This is mighty convenient, as will be reality admitted.  So I
+hunted this rare beast in my own name, told it in the first person,
+present tense, painted the requisite locale, gave it the necessary
+garnishings and touches of verisimilitude, and looked to see the
+man stunned by the recital.
+
+Not he.  Had he doubted, I could have forgiven him.  Had he
+objected, denying the dangers of such a hunt by virtue of the
+animal's inability to turn about and go the other way--had he done
+this, I say, I could have taken him by the hand for the true
+sportsman that he was.  Not he.  He sniffed, looked on me, and
+sniffed again; then gave my tobacco due praise, thrust one foot
+into my lap, and bade me examine the gear.  It was a MUCLUC of the
+Innuit pattern, sewed together with sinew threads, and devoid of
+beads or furbelows.  But it was the skin itself that was
+remarkable.  In that it was all of half an inch thick, it reminded
+me of walrus-hide; but there the resemblance ceased, for no walrus
+ever bore so marvellous a growth of hair.  On the side and ankles
+this hair was well-nigh worn away, what of friction with underbrush
+and snow; but around the top and down the more sheltered back it
+was coarse, dirty black, and very thick.  I parted it with
+difficulty and looked beneath for the fine fur that is common with
+northern animals, but found it in this case to be absent.  This,
+however, was compensated for by the length.  Indeed, the tufts that
+had survived wear and tear measured all of seven or eight inches.
+
+I looked up into the man's face, and he pulled his foot down and
+asked, "Find hide like that on your St Elias bear?"
+
+I shook my head.  "Nor on any other creature of land or sea," I
+answered candidly.  The thickness of it, and the length of the
+hair, puzzled me.
+
+"That," he said, and said without the slightest hint of
+impressiveness, "that came from a mammoth."
+
+"Nonsense!" I exclaimed, for I could not forbear the protest of my
+unbelief.  "The mammoth, my dear sir, long ago vanished from the
+earth.  We know it once existed by the fossil remains that we have
+unearthed, and by a frozen carcase that the Siberian sun saw fit to
+melt from out the bosom of a glacier; but we also know that no
+living specimen exists.  Our explorers--"
+
+At this word he broke in impatiently.  "Your explorers?  Pish!  A
+weakly breed.  Let us hear no more of them.  But tell me, O man,
+what you may know of the mammoth and his ways."
+
+Beyond contradiction, this was leading to a yarn; so I baited my
+hook by ransacking my memory for whatever data I possessed on the
+subject in hand.  To begin with, I emphasized that the animal was
+prehistoric, and marshalled all my facts in support of this.  I
+mentioned the Siberian sand-bars that abounded with ancient mammoth
+bones; spoke of the large quantities of fossil ivory purchased from
+the Innuits by the Alaska Commercial Company; and acknowledged
+having myself mined six- and eight-foot tusks from the pay gravel
+of the Klondike creeks.  "All fossils," I concluded, "found in the
+midst of debris deposited through countless ages."
+
+"I remember when I was a kid," Thomas Stevens sniffed (he had a
+most confounded way of sniffing), "that I saw a petrified water-
+melon.  Hence, though mistaken persons sometimes delude themselves
+into thinking that they are really raising or eating them, there
+are no such things as extant water-melons?"
+
+"But the question of food," I objected, ignoring his point, which
+was puerile and without bearing.  "The soil must bring forth
+vegetable life in lavish abundance to support so monstrous
+creations.  Nowhere in the North is the soil so prolific.  Ergo,
+the mammoth cannot exist."
+
+"I pardon your ignorance concerning many matters of this Northland,
+for you are a young man and have travelled little; but, at the same
+time, I am inclined to agree with you on one thing.  The mammoth no
+longer exists.  How do I know?  I killed the last one with my own
+right arm."
+
+Thus spake Nimrod, the mighty Hunter.  I threw a stick of firewood
+at the dogs and bade them quit their unholy howling, and waited.
+Undoubtedly this liar of singular felicity would open his mouth and
+requite me for my St. Elias bear.
+
+"It was this way," he at last began, after the appropriate silence
+had intervened.  "I was in camp one day--"
+
+"Where?" I interrupted.
+
+He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the north-east, where
+stretched a TERRA INCOGNITA into which vastness few men have
+strayed and fewer emerged.  "I was in camp one day with Klooch.
+Klooch was as handsome a little KAMOOKS as ever whined betwixt the
+traces or shoved nose into a camp kettle.  Her father was a full-
+blood Malemute from Russian Pastilik on Bering Sea, and I bred her,
+and with understanding, out of a clean-legged bitch of the Hudson
+Bay stock.  I tell you, O man, she was a corker combination.  And
+now, on this day I have in mind, she was brought to pup through a
+pure wild wolf of the woods--grey, and long of limb, with big lungs
+and no end of staying powers.  Say!  Was there ever the like?  It
+was a new breed of dog I had started, and I could look forward to
+big things.
+
+"As I have said, she was brought neatly to pup, and safely
+delivered.  I was squatting on my hams over the litter--seven
+sturdy, blind little beggars--when from behind came a bray of
+trumpets and crash of brass.  There was a rush, like the wind-
+squall that kicks the heels of the rain, and I was midway to my
+feet when knocked flat on my face.  At the same instant I heard
+Klooch sigh, very much as a man does when you've planted your fist
+in his belly.  You can stake your sack I lay quiet, but I twisted
+my head around and saw a huge bulk swaying above me.  Then the blue
+sky flashed into view and I got to my feet.  A hairy mountain of
+flesh was just disappearing in the underbrush on the edge of the
+open.  I caught a rear-end glimpse, with a stiff tail, as big in
+girth as my body, standing out straight behind.  The next second
+only a tremendous hole remained in the thicket, though I could
+still hear the sounds as of a tornado dying quickly away,
+underbrush ripping and tearing, and trees snapping and crashing.
+
+"I cast about for my rifle.  It had been lying on the ground with
+the muzzle against a log; but now the stock was smashed, the barrel
+out of line, and the working-gear in a thousand bits.  Then I
+looked for the slut, and--and what do you suppose?"
+
+I shook my head.
+
+"May my soul burn in a thousand hells if there was anything left of
+her!  Klooch, the seven sturdy, blind little beggars--gone, all
+gone.  Where she had stretched was a slimy, bloody depression in
+the soft earth, all of a yard in diameter, and around the edges a
+few scattered hairs."
+
+I measured three feet on the snow, threw about it a circle, and
+glanced at Nimrod.
+
+"The beast was thirty long and twenty high," he answered, "and its
+tusks scaled over six times three feet.  I couldn't believe,
+myself, at the time, for all that it had just happened.  But if my
+senses had played me, there was the broken gun and the hole in the
+brush.  And there was--or, rather, there was not--Klooch and the
+pups.  O man, it makes me hot all over now when I think of it
+Klooch!  Another Eve!  The mother of a new race!  And a rampaging,
+ranting, old bull mammoth, like a second flood, wiping them, root
+and branch, off the face of the earth!  Do you wonder that the
+blood-soaked earth cried out to high God?  Or that I grabbed the
+hand-axe and took the trail?"
+
+"The hand-axe?" I exclaimed, startled out of myself by the picture.
+"The hand-axe, and a big bull mammoth, thirty feet long, twenty
+feet--"
+
+Nimrod joined me in my merriment, chuckling gleefully.  "Wouldn't
+it kill you?" he cried.  "Wasn't it a beaver's dream?  Many's the
+time I've laughed about it since, but at the time it was no
+laughing matter, I was that danged mad, what of the gun and Klooch.
+Think of it, O man!  A brand-new, unclassified, uncopyrighted
+breed, and wiped out before ever it opened its eyes or took out its
+intention papers!  Well, so be it.  Life's full of disappointments,
+and rightly so.  Meat is best after a famine, and a bed soft after
+a hard trail.
+
+"As I was saying, I took out after the beast with the hand-axe, and
+hung to its heels down the valley; but when he circled back toward
+the head, I was left winded at the lower end.  Speaking of grub, I
+might as well stop long enough to explain a couple of points.  Up
+thereabouts, in the midst of the mountains, is an almighty curious
+formation.  There is no end of little valleys, each like the other
+much as peas in a pod, and all neatly tucked away with straight,
+rocky walls rising on all sides.  And at the lower ends are always
+small openings where the drainage or glaciers must have broken out.
+The only way in is through these mouths, and they are all small,
+and some smaller than others.  As to grub--you've slushed around on
+the rain-soaked islands of the Alaskan coast down Sitka way, most
+likely, seeing as you're a traveller.  And you know how stuff grows
+there--big, and juicy, and jungly.  Well, that's the way it was
+with those valleys.  Thick, rich soil, with ferns and grasses and
+such things in patches higher than your head.  Rain three days out
+of four during the summer months; and food in them for a thousand
+mammoths, to say nothing of small game for man.
+
+"But to get back.  Down at the lower end of the valley I got winded
+and gave over.  I began to speculate, for when my wind left me my
+dander got hotter and hotter, and I knew I'd never know peace of
+mind till I dined on roasted mammoth-foot.  And I knew, also, that
+that stood for SKOOKUM MAMOOK PUKAPUK--excuse Chinook, I mean there
+was a big fight coming.  Now the mouth of my valley was very
+narrow, and the walls steep.  High up on one side was one of those
+big pivot rocks, or balancing rocks, as some call them, weighing
+all of a couple of hundred tons.  Just the thing.  I hit back for
+camp, keeping an eye open so the bull couldn't slip past, and got
+my ammunition.  It wasn't worth anything with the rifle smashed; so
+I opened the shells, planted the powder under the rock, and touched
+it off with slow fuse.  Wasn't much of a charge, but the old
+boulder tilted up lazily and dropped down into place, with just
+space enough to let the creek drain nicely.  Now I had him."
+
+"But how did you have him?" I queried.  "Who ever heard of a man
+killing a mammoth with a hand-axe?  And, for that matter, with
+anything else?"
+
+"O man, have I not told you I was mad?" Nimrod replied, with a
+slight manifestation of sensitiveness.  "Mad clean through, what of
+Klooch and the gun.  Also, was I not a hunter?  And was this not
+new and most unusual game?  A hand-axe?  Pish!  I did not need it.
+Listen, and you shall hear of a hunt, such as might have happened
+in the youth of the world when cavemen rounded up the kill with
+hand-axe of stone.  Such would have served me as well.  Now is it
+not a fact that man can outwalk the dog or horse?  That he can wear
+them out with the intelligence of his endurance?"
+
+I nodded.
+
+"Well?"
+
+The light broke in on me, and I bade him continue.
+
+"My valley was perhaps five miles around.  The mouth was closed.
+There was no way to get out.  A timid beast was that bull mammoth,
+and I had him at my mercy.  I got on his heels again hollered like
+a fiend, pelted him with cobbles, and raced him around the valley
+three times before I knocked off for supper.  Don't you see?  A
+race-course!  A man and a mammoth!  A hippodrome, with sun, moon,
+and stars to referee!
+
+"It took me two months to do it, but I did it.  And that's no
+beaver dream.  Round and round I ran him, me travelling on the
+inner circle, eating jerked meat and salmon berries on the run, and
+snatching winks of sleep between.  Of course, he'd get desperate at
+times and turn.  Then I'd head for soft ground where the creek
+spread out, and lay anathema upon him and his ancestry, and dare
+him to come on.  But he was too wise to bog in a mud puddle.  Once
+he pinned me in against the walls, and I crawled back into a deep
+crevice and waited.  Whenever he felt for me with his trunk, I'd
+belt him with the hand-axe till he pulled out, shrieking fit to
+split my ear drums, he was that mad.  He knew he had me and didn't
+have me, and it near drove him wild.  But he was no man's fool.  He
+knew he was safe as long as I stayed in the crevice, and he made up
+his mind to keep me there.  And he was dead right, only he hadn't
+figured on the commissary.  There was neither grub nor water around
+that spot, so on the face of it he couldn't keep up the siege.
+He'd stand before the opening for hours, keeping an eye on me and
+flapping mosquitoes away with his big blanket ears.  Then the
+thirst would come on him and he'd ramp round and roar till the
+earth shook, calling me every name he could lay tongue to.  This
+was to frighten me, of course; and when he thought I was
+sufficiently impressed, he'd back away softly and try to make a
+sneak for the creek.  Sometimes I'd let him get almost there--only
+a couple of hundred yards away it was--when out I'd pop and back
+he'd come, lumbering along like the old landslide he was.  After
+I'd done this a few times, and he'd figured it out, he changed his
+tactics.  Grasped the time element, you see.  Without a word of
+warning, away he'd go, tearing for the water like mad, scheming to
+get there and back before I ran away.  Finally, after cursing me
+most horribly, he raised the siege and deliberately stalked off to
+the water-hole.
+
+"That was the only time he penned me,--three days of it,--but after
+that the hippodrome never stopped.  Round, and round, and round,
+like a six days' go-as-I-please, for he never pleased.  My clothes
+went to rags and tatters, but I never stopped to mend, till at last
+I ran naked as a son of earth, with nothing but the old hand-axe in
+one hand and a cobble in the other.  In fact, I never stopped, save
+for peeps of sleep in the crannies and ledges of the cliffs.  As
+for the bull, he got perceptibly thinner and thinner--must have
+lost several tons at least--and as nervous as a schoolmarm on the
+wrong side of matrimony.  When I'd come up with him and yell, or
+lain him with a rock at long range, he'd jump like a skittish colt
+and tremble all over.  Then he'd pull out on the run, tail and
+trunk waving stiff, head over one shoulder and wicked eyes blazing,
+and the way he'd swear at me was something dreadful.  A most
+immoral beast he was, a murderer, and a blasphemer.
+
+"But towards the end he quit all this, and fell to whimpering and
+crying like a baby.  His spirit broke and he became a quivering
+jelly-mountain of misery.  He'd get attacks of palpitation of the
+heart, and stagger around like a drunken man, and fall down and
+bark his shins.  And then he'd cry, but always on the run.  O man,
+the gods themselves would have wept with him, and you yourself or
+any other man.  It was pitiful, and there was so I much of it, but
+I only hardened my heart and hit up the pace.  At last I wore him
+clean out, and he lay down, broken-winded, broken-hearted, hungry,
+and thirsty.  When I found he wouldn't budge, I hamstrung him, and
+spent the better part of the day wading into him with the hand-axe,
+he a-sniffing and sobbing till I worked in far enough to shut him
+off.  Thirty feet long he was, and twenty high, and a man could
+sling a hammock between his tusks and sleep comfortably.  Barring
+the fact that I had run most of the juices out of him, he was fair
+eating, and his four feet, alone, roasted whole, would have lasted
+a man a twelvemonth.  I spent the winter there myself."
+
+"And where is this valley?" I asked
+
+He waved his hand in the direction of the north-east, and said:
+"Your tobacco is very good.  I carry a fair share of it in my
+pouch, but I shall carry the recollection of it until I die.  In
+token of my appreciation, and in return for the moccasins on your
+own feet, I will present to you these muclucs.  They commemorate
+Klooch and the seven blind little beggars.  They are also souvenirs
+of an unparalleled event in history, namely, the destruction of the
+oldest breed of animal on earth, and the youngest.  And their chief
+virtue lies in that they will never wear out."
+
+Having effected the exchange, he knocked the ashes from his pipe,
+gripped my hand good-night, and wandered off through the snow.
+Concerning this tale, for which I have already disclaimed
+responsibility, I would recommend those of little faith to make a
+visit to the Smithsonian Institute.  If they bring the requisite
+credentials and do not come in vacation time, they will undoubtedly
+gain an audience with Professor Dolvidson.  The muclucs are in his
+possession, and he will verify, not the manner in which they were
+obtained, but the material of which they are composed.  When he
+states that they are made from the skin of the mammoth, the
+scientific world accepts his verdict.  What more would you have?
+
+
+
+A HYPERBOREAN BREW
+
+
+
+[The story of a scheming white man among the strange people who
+live on the rim of the Arctic sea]
+
+
+Thomas Stevens's veracity may have been indeterminate as X, and his
+imagination the imagination of ordinary men increased to the nth
+power, but this, at least, must be said:  never did he deliver
+himself of word nor deed that could be branded as a lie outright. .
+. He may have played with probability, and verged on the extremest
+edge of possibility, but in his tales the machinery never creaked.
+That he knew the Northland like a book, not a soul can deny.  That
+he was a great traveller, and had set foot on countless unknown
+trails, many evidences affirm.  Outside of my own personal
+knowledge, I knew men that had met him everywhere, but principally
+on the confines of Nowhere.  There was Johnson, the ex-Hudson Bay
+Company factor, who had housed him in a Labrador factory until his
+dogs rested up a bit, and he was able to strike out again.  There
+was McMahon, agent for the Alaska Commercial Company, who had run
+across him in Dutch Harbour, and later on, among the outlying
+islands of the Aleutian group.  It was indisputable that he had
+guided one of the earlier United States surveys, and history states
+positively that in a similar capacity he served the Western Union
+when it attempted to put through its trans-Alaskan and Siberian
+telegraph to Europe.  Further, there was Joe Lamson, the whaling
+captain, who, when ice-bound off the mouth of the Mackenzie, had
+had him come aboard after tobacco.  This last touch proves Thomas
+Stevens's identity conclusively.  His quest for tobacco was
+perennial and untiring.  Ere we became fairly acquainted, I learned
+to greet him with one hand, and pass the pouch with the other.  But
+the night I met him in John O'Brien's Dawson saloon, his head was
+wreathed in a nimbus of fifty-cent cigar smoke, and instead of my
+pouch he demanded my sack.  We were standing by a faro table, and
+forthwith he tossed it upon the "high card."  "Fifty," he said, and
+the game-keeper nodded.  The "high card" turned, and he handed back
+my sack, called for a "tab," and drew me over to the scales, where
+the weigher nonchalantly cashed him out fifty dollars in dust.
+
+"And now we'll drink," he said; and later, at the bar, when he
+lowered his glass:  "Reminds me of a little brew I had up Tattarat
+way.  No, you have no knowledge of the place, nor is it down on the
+charts.  But it's up by the rim of the Arctic Sea, not so many
+hundred miles from the American line, and all of half a thousand
+God-forsaken souls live there, giving and taking in marriage, and
+starving and dying in-between-whiles.  Explorers have overlooked
+them, and you will not find them in the census of 1890.  A whale-
+ship was pinched there once, but the men, who had made shore over
+the ice, pulled out for the south and were never heard of.
+
+"But it was a great brew we had, Moosu and I," he added a moment
+later, with just the slightest suspicion of a sigh.
+
+I knew there were big deeds and wild doings behind that sigh, so I
+haled him into a corner, between a roulette outfit and a poker
+layout, and waited for his tongue to thaw.
+
+"Had one objection to Moosu," he began, cocking his head
+meditatively--"one objection, and only one.  He was an Indian from
+over on the edge of the Chippewyan country, but the trouble was,
+he'd picked up a smattering of the Scriptures.  Been campmate a
+season with a renegade French Canadian who'd studied for the
+church.  Moosu'd never seen applied Christianity, and his head was
+crammed with miracles, battles, and dispensations, and what not he
+didn't understand.  Otherwise he was a good sort, and a handy man
+on trail or over a fire.
+
+"We'd had a hard time together and were badly knocked out when we
+plumped upon Tattarat.  Lost outfits and dogs crossing a divide in
+a fall blizzard, and our bellies clove to our backs and our clothes
+were in rags when we crawled into the village.  They weren't much
+surprised at seeing us--because of the whalemen--and gave us the
+meanest shack in the village to live in, and the worst of their
+leavings to live on.  What struck me at the time as strange was
+that they left us strictly alone.  But Moosu explained it.
+
+"'Shaman SICK TUMTUM,' he said, meaning the shaman, or medicine
+man, was jealous, and had advised the people to have nothing to do
+with us.  From the little he'd seen of the whalemen, he'd learned
+that mine was a stronger race, and a wiser; so he'd only behaved as
+shamans have always behaved the world over.  And before I get done,
+you'll see how near right he was.
+
+"'These people have a law,' said Mosu:  'whoso eats of meat must
+hunt.  We be awkward, you and I, O master, in the weapons of this
+country; nor can we string bows nor fling spears after the manner
+approved.  Wherefore the shaman and Tummasook, who is chief, have
+put their heads together, and it has been decreed that we work with
+the women and children in dragging in the meat and tending the
+wants of the hunters.'
+
+"'And this is very wrong,' I made to answer; 'for we be better men,
+Moosu, than these people who walk in darkness.  Further, we should
+rest and grow strong, for the way south is long, and on that trail
+the weak cannot prosper.'"
+
+"'But we have nothing,' he objected, looking about him at the
+rotten timbers of the igloo, the stench of the ancient walrus meat
+that had been our supper disgusting his nostrils.  'And on this
+fare we cannot thrive.  We have nothing save the bottle of "pain-
+killer," which will not fill emptiness, so we must bend to the yoke
+of the unbeliever and become hewers of wood and drawers of water.
+And there be good things in this place, the which we may not have.
+Ah, master, never has my nose lied to me, and I have followed it to
+secret caches and among the fur-bales of the igloos.  Good
+provender did these people extort from the poor whalemen, and this
+provender has wandered into few hands.  The woman Ipsukuk, who
+dwelleth in the far end of the village next she igloo of the chief,
+possesseth much flour and sugar, and even have my eyes told me of
+molasses smeared on her face.  And in the igloo of Tummasook, the
+chief, there be tea--have I not seen the old pig guzzling?  And the
+shaman owneth a caddy of "Star" and two buckets of prime smoking.
+And what have we?  Nothing!  Nothing!'
+
+"But I was stunned by the word he brought of the tobacco, and made
+no answer.
+
+"And Moosu, what of his own desire, broke silence:  'And there be
+Tukeliketa, daughter of a big hunter and wealthy man.  A likely
+girl.  Indeed, a very nice girl.'
+
+"I figured hard during the night while Moosu snored, for I could
+not bear the thought of the tobacco so near which I could not
+smoke.  True, as he had said, we had nothing.  But the way became
+clear to me, and in the morning I said to him:  'Go thou cunningly
+abroad, after thy fashion, and procure me some sort of bone,
+crooked like a goose-neck, and hollow.  Also, walk humbly, but have
+eyes awake to the lay of pots and pans and cooking contrivances.
+And remember, mine is the white man's wisdom, and do what I have
+bid you, with sureness and despatch.'
+
+"While he was away I placed the whale-oil cooking lamp in the
+middle of the igloo, and moved the mangy sleeping furs back that I
+might have room.  Then I took apart his gun and put the barrel by
+handy, and afterwards braided many wicks from the cotton that the
+women gather wild in the summer.  When he came back, it was with
+the bone I had commanded, and with news that in the igloo of
+Tummasook there was a five-gallon kerosene can and a big copper
+kettle.  So I said he had done well and we would tarry through the
+day.  And when midnight was near I made harangue to him.
+
+"'This chief, this Tummasook, hath a copper kettle, likewise a
+kerosene can.'  I put a rock, smooth and wave-washed, in Moosu's
+hand.  'The camp is hushed and the stars are winking.  Go thou,
+creep into the chief's igloo softly, and smite him thus upon the
+belly, and hard.  And let the meat and good grub of the days to
+come put strength into thine arm.  There will be uproar and outcry,
+and the village will come hot afoot.  But be thou unafraid.  Veil
+thy movements and lose thy form in the obscurity of the night and
+the confusion of men.  And when the woman Ipsukuk is anigh thee,--
+she who smeareth her face with molasses,--do thou smite her
+likewise, and whosoever else that possesseth flour and cometh to
+thy hand.  Then do thou lift thy voice in pain and double up with
+clasped hands, and make outcry in token that thou, too, hast felt
+the visitation of the night.  And in this way shall we achieve
+honour and great possessions, and the caddy of "Star" and the prime
+smoking, and thy Tukeliketa, who is a likely maiden.'
+
+"When he had departed on this errand, I bided patiently in the
+shack, and the tobacco seemed very near.  Then there was a cry of
+affright in the night, that became an uproar and assailed the sky.
+I seized the 'pain-killer' and ran forth.  There was much noise,
+and a wailing among the women, and fear sat heavily on all.
+Tummasook and the woman Ipsukuk rolled on the ground in pain, and
+with them there were divers others, also Moosu.  I thrust aside
+those that cluttered the way of my feet, and put the mouth of the
+bottle to Moosu's lips.  And straightway he became well and ceased
+his howling.  Whereat there was a great clamour for the bottle from
+the others so stricken.  But I made harangue, and ere they tasted
+and were made well I had mulcted Tummasook of his copper kettle and
+kerosene can, and the woman Ipsukuk of her sugar and molasses, and
+the other sick ones of goodly measures of flour.  The shaman
+glowered wickedly at the people around my knees, though he poorly
+concealed the wonder that lay beneath.  But I held my head high,
+and Moosu groaned beneath the loot as he followed my heels to the
+shack.
+
+"There I set to work.  In Tummasook's copper kettle I mixed three
+quarts of wheat flour with five of molasses, and to this I added of
+water twenty quarts.  Then I placed the kettle near the lamp, that
+it might sour in the warmth and grow strong.  Moosu understood, and
+said my wisdom passed understanding and was greater than Solomon's,
+who he had heard was a wise man of old time.  The kerosene can I
+set over the lamp, and to its nose I affixed a snout, and into the
+snout the bone that was like a gooseneck.  I sent Moosu without to
+pound ice, while I connected the barrel of his gun with the
+gooseneck, and midway on the barrel I piled the ice he had pounded.
+And at the far end of the gun-barrel, beyond the pan of ice, I
+placed a small iron pot.  When the brew was strong enough (and it
+was two days ere it could stand on its own legs), I filled the
+kerosene can with it, and lighted the wicks I had braided.
+
+"Now that all was ready, I spoke to Moosu.  'Go forth,' I said, 'to
+the chief men of the village, and give them greeting, and bid them
+come into my igloo and sleep the night away with me and the gods.'
+
+"The brew was singing merrily when they began shoving aside the
+skin flap and crawling in, and I was heaping cracked ice on the
+gun-barrel.  Out of the priming hole at the far end, drip, drip,
+drip into the iron pot fell the liquor--HOOCH, you know.  But
+they'd never seen the like, and giggled nervously when I made
+harangue about its virtues.  As I talked I noted the jealousy in
+the shaman's eye, so when I had done, I placed him side by side
+with Tummasook and the woman Ipsukuk.  Then I gave them to drink,
+and their eyes watered and their stomachs warmed, till from being
+afraid they reached greedily for more; and when I had them well
+started, I turned to the others.  Tummasook made a brag about how
+he had once killed a polar bear, and in the vigour of his pantomime
+nearly slew his mother's brother.  But nobody heeded.  The woman
+Ipsukuk fell to weeping for a son lost long years agone in the ice,
+and the shaman made incantation and prophecy.  So it went, and
+before morning they were all on the floor, sleeping soundly with
+the gods.
+
+"The story tells itself, does it not?  The news of the magic potion
+spread.  It was too marvellous for utterance.  Tongues could tell
+but a tithe of the miracles it performed.  It eased pain, gave
+surcease to sorrow, brought back old memories, dead faces, and
+forgotten dreams.  It was a fire that ate through all the blood,
+and, burning, burned not.  It stoutened the heart, stiffened the
+back, and made men more than men.  It revealed the future, and gave
+visions and prophecy.  It brimmed with wisdom and unfolded secrets.
+There was no end of the things it could do, and soon there was a
+clamouring on all hands to sleep with the gods.  They brought their
+warmest furs, their strongest dogs, their best meats; but I sold
+the hooch with discretion, and only those were favoured that
+brought flour and molasses and sugar.  And such stores poured in
+that I set Moosu to build a cache to hold them, for there was soon
+no space in the igloo.  Ere three days had passed Tummasook had
+gone bankrupt.  The shaman, who was never more than half drunk
+after the first night, watched me closely and hung on for the
+better part of the week.  But before ten days were gone, even the
+woman Ipsukuk exhausted her provisions, and went home weak and
+tottery.
+
+"But Moosu complained.  'O master,' he said, 'we have laid by great
+wealth in molasses and sugar and flour, but our shack is yet mean,
+our clothes thin, and our sleeping furs mangy.  There is a call of
+the belly for meat the stench of which offends not the stars, and
+for tea such as Tummasook guzzles, and there is a great yearning
+for the tobacco of Neewak, who is shaman and who plans to destroy
+us.  I have flour until I am sick, and sugar and molasses without
+stint, yet is the heart of Moosu sore and his bed empty.'
+
+"'Peace!' I answered, 'thou art weak of understanding and a fool.
+Walk softly and wait, and we will grasp it all.  But grasp now, and
+we grasp little, and in the end it will be nothing.  Thou art a
+child in the way of the white man's wisdom.  Hold thy tongue and
+watch, and I will show you the way my brothers do overseas, and, so
+doing, gather to themselves the riches of the earth.  It is what is
+called "business," and what dost thou know about business?'
+
+"But the next day he came in breathless.  'O master, a strange
+thing happeneth in the igloo of Neewak, the shaman; wherefore we
+are lost, and we have neither worn the warm furs nor tasted the
+good tobacco, what of your madness for the molasses and flour.  Go
+thou and witness whilst I watch by the brew.'
+
+"So I went to the igloo of Neewak.  And behold, he had made his own
+still, fashioned cunningly after mine.  And as he beheld me he
+could ill conceal his triumph.  For he was a man of parts, and his
+sleep with the gods when in my igloo had not been sound.
+
+"But I was not disturbed, for I knew what I knew, and when I
+returned to my own igloo, I descanted to Moosu, and said:  'Happily
+the property right obtains amongst this people, who otherwise have
+been blessed with but few of the institutions of men.  And because
+of this respect for property shall you and I wax fat, and, further,
+we shall introduce amongst them new institutions that other peoples
+have worked out through great travail and suffering.'
+
+"But Moosu understood dimly, till the shaman came forth, with eyes
+flashing and a threatening note in his voice, and demanded to trade
+with me.  'For look you,' he cried, 'there be of flour and molasses
+none in all the village.  The like have you gathered with a shrewd
+hand from my people, who have slept with your gods and who now have
+nothing save large heads, and weak knees, and a thirst for cold
+water that they cannot quench.  This is not good, and my voice has
+power among them; so it were well that we trade, you and I, even as
+you have traded with them, for molasses and flour.'
+
+"And I made answer:  'This be good talk, and wisdom abideth in thy
+mouth.  We will trade.  For this much of flour and molasses givest
+thou me the caddy of "Star" and the two buckets of smoking.'
+
+"And Moosu groaned, and when the trade was made and the shaman
+departed, he upbraided me:  'Now, because of thy madness are we,
+indeed, lost!  Neewak maketh hooch on his own account, and when the
+time is ripe, he will command the people to drink of no hooch but
+his hooch.  And in this way are we undone, and our goods worthless,
+and our igloo mean, and the bed of Moosu cold and empty!'
+
+"And I answered:  'By the body of the wolf, say I, thou art a fool,
+and thy father before thee, and thy children after thee, down to
+the last generation.  Thy wisdom is worse than no wisdom and thine
+eyes blinded to business, of which I have spoken and whereof thou
+knowest nothing.  Go, thou son of a thousand fools, and drink of
+the hooch that Neewak brews in his igloo, and thank thy gods that
+thou hast a white man's wisdom to make soft the bed thou liest in.
+Go! and when thou hast drunken, return with the taste still on thy
+lips, that I may know.'
+
+"And two days after, Neewak sent greeting and invitation to his
+igloo.  Moosu went, but I sat alone, with the song of the still in
+my ears, and the air thick with the shaman's tobacco; for trade was
+slack that night, and no one dropped in but Angeit, a young hunter
+that had faith in me.  Later, Moosu came back, his speech thick
+with chuckling and his eyes wrinkling with laughter.
+
+"'Thou art a great man,' he said.  'Thou art a great man, O master,
+and because of thy greatness thou wilt not condemn Moosu, thy
+servant, who ofttimes doubts and cannot be made to understand.'
+
+"'And wherefore now?' I demanded.  'Hast thou drunk overmuch?  And
+are they sleeping sound in the igloo of Neewak, the shaman?'
+
+"'Nay, they are angered and sore of body, and Chief Tummasook has
+thrust his thumbs in the throat of Neewak, and sworn by the bones
+of his ancestors to look upon his face no more.  For behold! I went
+to the igloo, and the brew simmered and bubbled, and the steam
+journeyed through the gooseneck even as thy steam, and even as
+thine it became water where it met the ice, and dropped into the
+pot at the far end.  And Neewak gave us to drink, and lo, it was
+not like thine, for there was no bite to the tongue nor tingling to
+the eyeballs, and of a truth it was water.  So we drank, and we
+drank overmuch; yet did we sit with cold hearts and solemn.  And
+Neewak was perplexed and a cloud came on his brow.  And he took
+Tummasook and Ipsukuk alone of all the company and set them apart,
+and bade them drink and drink and drink.  And they drank and drank
+and drank, and yet sat solemn and cold, till Tummasook arose in
+wrath and demanded back the furs and the tea he had paid.  And
+Ipsukuk raised her voice, thin and angry.  And the company demanded
+back what they had given, and there was a great commotion.'
+
+"'Does the son of a dog deem me a whale?' demanded Tummasook,
+shoving back the skin flap and standing erect, his face black and
+his brows angry.  'Wherefore I am filled, like a fish-bladder, to
+bursting, till I can scarce walk, what of the weight within me.
+Lalah!  I have drunken as never before, yet are my eyes clear, my
+knees strong, my hand steady.'
+
+"'The shaman cannot send us to sleep with the gods,' the people
+complained, stringing in and joining us, 'and only in thy igloo may
+the thing be done.'
+
+"So I laughed to myself as I passed the hooch around and the guests
+made merry.  For in the flour I had traded to Neewak I had mixed
+much soda that I had got from the woman Ipsukuk.  So how could his
+brew ferment when the soda kept it sweet?  Or his hooch be hooch
+when it would not sour?
+
+"After that our wealth flowed in without let or hindrance.  Furs we
+had without number, and the fancy-work of the women, all of the
+chief's tea, and no end of meat.  One day Moosu retold for my
+benefit, and sadly mangled, the story of Joseph in Egypt, but from
+it I got an idea, and soon I had half the tribe at work building me
+great meat caches.  And of all they hunted I got the lion's share
+and stored it away.  Nor was Moosu idle.  He made himself a pack of
+cards from birch bark, and taught Neewak the way to play seven-up.
+He also inveigled the father of Tukeliketa into the game.  And one
+day he married the maiden, and the next day he moved into the
+shaman's house, which was the finest in the village.  The fall of
+Neewak was complete, for he lost all his possessions, his walrus-
+hide drums, his incantation tools--everything.  And in the end he
+became a hewer of wood and drawer of water at the beck and call of
+Moosu.  And Moosu--he set himself up as shaman, or high priest, and
+out of his garbled Scripture created new gods and made incantation
+before strange altars.
+
+"And I was well pleased, for I thought it good that church and
+state go hand in hand, and I had certain plans of my own concerning
+the state.  Events were shaping as I had foreseen.  Good temper and
+smiling faces had vanished from the village.  The people were
+morose and sullen.  There were quarrels and fighting, and things
+were in an uproar night and day.  Moosu's cards were duplicated and
+the hunters fell to gambling among themselves.  Tummasook beat his
+wife horribly, and his mother's brother objected and smote him with
+a tusk of walrus till he cried aloud in the night and was shamed
+before the people.  Also, amid such diversions no hunting was done,
+and famine fell upon the land.  The nights were long and dark, and
+without meat no hooch could be bought; so they murmured against the
+chief.  This I had played for, and when they were well and hungry,
+I summoned the whole village, made a great harangue, posed as
+patriarch, and fed the famishing.  Moosu made harangue likewise,
+and because of this and the thing I had done I was made chief.
+Moosu, who had the ear of God and decreed his judgments, anointed
+me with whale blubber, and right blubberly he did it, not
+understanding the ceremony.  And between us we interpreted to the
+people the new theory of the divine right of kings.  There was
+hooch galore, and meat and feastings, and they took kindly to the
+new order.
+
+"So you see, O man, I have sat in the high places, and worn the
+purple, and ruled populations.  And I might yet be a king had the
+tobacco held out, or had Moosu been more fool and less knave.  For
+he cast eyes upon Esanetuk, eldest daughter to Tummasook, and I
+objected.
+
+"'O brother,' he explained, 'thou hast seen fit to speak of
+introducing new institutions amongst this people, and I have
+listened to thy words and gained wisdom thereby.  Thou rulest by
+the God-given right, and by the God-given right I marry.'
+
+"I noted that he 'brothered' me, and was angry and put my foot
+down.  But he fell back upon the people and made incantations for
+three days, in which all hands joined; and then, speaking with the
+voice of God, he decreed polygamy by divine fiat.  But he was
+shrewd, for he limited the number of wives by a property
+qualification, and because of which he, above all men, was favoured
+by his wealth.  Nor could I fail to admire, though it was plain
+that power had turned his head, and he would not be satisfied till
+all the power and all the wealth rested in his own hands.  So he
+became swollen with pride, forgot it was I that had placed him
+there, and made preparations to destroy me.
+
+"But it was interesting, for the beggar was working out in his own
+way an evolution of primitive society.  Now I, by virtue of the
+hooch monopoly, drew a revenue in which I no longer permitted him
+to share.  So he meditated for a while and evolved a system of
+ecclesiastical taxation.  He laid tithes upon the people, harangued
+about fat firstlings and such things, and twisted whatever twisted
+texts he had ever heard to serve his purpose.  Even this I bore in
+silence, but when he instituted what may be likened to a graduated
+income-tax, I rebelled, and blindly, for this was what he worked
+for.  Thereat, he appealed to the people, and they, envious of my
+great wealth and well taxed themselves, upheld him.  'Why should we
+pay,' they asked, 'and not you?  Does not the voice of God speak
+through the lips of Moosu, the shaman?'  So I yielded.  But at the
+same time I raised the price of hooch, and lo, he was not a whit
+behind me in raising my taxes.
+
+"Then there was open war.  I made a play for Neewak and Tummasook,
+because of the traditionary rights they possessed; but Moosu won
+out by creating a priesthood and giving them both high office.  The
+problem of authority presented itself to him, and he worked it out
+as it has often been worked before.  There was my mistake.  I
+should have been made shaman, and he chief; but I saw it too late,
+and in the clash of spiritual and temporal power I was bound to be
+worsted.  A great controversy waged, but it quickly became one-
+sided.  The people remembered that he had anointed me, and it was
+clear to them that the source of my authority lay, not in me, but
+in Moosu.  Only a few faithful ones clung to me, chief among whom
+Angeit was; while he headed the popular party and set whispers
+afloat that I had it in mind to overthrow him and set up my own
+gods, which were most unrighteous gods.  And in this the clever
+rascal had anticipated me, for it was just what I had intended--
+forsake my kingship, you see, and fight spiritual with spiritual.
+So he frightened the people with the iniquities of my peculiar
+gods--especially the one he named 'Biz-e-Nass'--and nipped the
+scheme in the bud.
+
+"Now, it happened that Kluktu, youngest daughter to Tummasook, had
+caught my fancy, and I likewise hers.  So I made overtures, but the
+ex-chief refused bluntly--after I had paid the purchase price--and
+informed me that she was set aside for Moosu.  This was too much,
+and I was half of a mind to go to his igloo and slay him with my
+naked hands; but I recollected that the tobacco was near gone, and
+went home laughing.  The next day he made incantation, and
+distorted the miracle of the loaves and fishes till it became
+prophecy, and I, reading between the lines, saw that it was aimed
+at the wealth of meat stored in my caches.  The people also read
+between the lines, and, as he did not urge them to go on the hunt,
+they remained at home, and few caribou or bear were brought in.
+
+"But I had plans of my own, seeing that not only the tobacco but
+the flour and molasses were near gone.  And further, I felt it my
+duty to prove the white man's wisdom and bring sore distress to
+Moosu, who had waxed high-stomached, what of the power I had given
+him.  So that night I went to my meat caches and toiled mightily,
+and it was noted next day that all the dogs of the village were
+lazy.  No one suspected, and I toiled thus every night, and the
+dogs grew fat and fatter, and the people lean and leaner.  They
+grumbled and demanded the fulfilment of prophecy, but Moosu
+restrained them, waiting for their hunger to grow yet greater.  Nor
+did he dream, to the very last, of the trick I had been playing on
+the empty caches.
+
+"When all was ready, I sent Angeit, and the faithful ones whom I
+had fed privily, through the village to call assembly.  And the
+tribe gathered on a great space of beaten snow before my door, with
+the meat caches towering stilt-legged in the rear.  Moosu came
+also, standing on the inner edge of the circle opposite me,
+confident that I had some scheme afoot, and prepared at the first
+break to down me.  But I arose, giving him salutation before all
+men.
+
+"'O Moosu, thou blessed of God,' I began, 'doubtless thou hast
+wondered in that I have called this convocation together; and
+doubtless, because of my many foolishnesses, art thou prepared for
+rash sayings and rash doings.  Not so.  It has been said, that
+those the gods would destroy they first make mad.  And I have been
+indeed mad.  I have crossed thy will, and scoffed at thy authority,
+and done divers evil and wanton things.  Wherefore, last night a
+vision was vouchsafed me, and I have seen the wickedness of my
+ways.  And thou stoodst forth like a shining star, with brows
+aflame, and I knew in mine own heart thy greatness.  I saw all
+things clearly.  I knew that thou didst command the ear of God, and
+that when you spoke he listened.  And I remembered that whatever of
+the good deeds that I had done, I had done through the grace of
+God, and the grace of Moosu.
+
+"'Yes, my children,' I cried, turning to the people, 'whatever
+right I have done, and whatever good I have done, have been because
+of the counsel of Moosu.  When I listened to him, affairs
+prospered; when I closed my ears, and acted according to my folly,
+things came to folly.  By his advice it was that I laid my store of
+meat, and in time of darkness fed the famishing.  By his grace it
+was that I was made chief.  And what have I done with my chiefship?
+Let me tell you.  I have done nothing.  My head was turned with
+power, and I deemed myself greater than Moosu, and, behold I have
+come to grief.  My rule has been unwise, and the gods are angered.
+Lo, ye are pinched with famine, and the mothers are dry-breasted,
+and the little babies cry through the long nights.  Nor do I, who
+have hardened my heart against Moosu, know what shall be done, nor
+in what manner of way grub shall be had.'
+
+"At this there was nodding and laughing, and the people put their
+heads together, and I knew they whispered of the loaves and fishes.
+I went on hastily.  'So I was made aware of my foolishness and of
+Moosu's wisdom; of my own unfitness and of Moosu's fitness.  And
+because of this, being no longer mad, I make acknowledgment and
+rectify evil.  I did cast unrighteous eyes upon Kluktu, and lo, she
+was sealed to Moosu.  Yet is she mine, for did I not pay to
+Tummasook the goods of purchase?  But I am well unworthy of her,
+and she shall go from the igloo of her father to the igloo of
+Moosu.  Can the moon shine in the sunshine?  And further, Tummasook
+shall keep the goods of purchase, and she be a free gift to Moosu,
+whom God hath ordained her rightful lord.
+
+"'And further yet, because I have used my wealth unwisely, and to
+oppress ye, O my children, do I make gifts of the kerosene can to
+Moosu, and the gooseneck, and the gun-barrel, and the copper
+kettle.  Therefore, I can gather to me no more possessions, and
+when ye are athirst for hooch, he will quench ye and without
+robbery.  For he is a great man, and God speaketh through his lips.
+
+"'And yet further, my heart is softened, and I have repented me of
+my madness.  I, who am a fool and a son of fools; I, who am the
+slave of the bad god Biz-e-Nass; I, who see thy empty bellies and
+knew not wherewith to fill them--why shall I be chief, and sit
+above thee, and rule to thine own destruction?  Why should I do
+this, which is not good?  But Moosu, who is shaman, and who is wise
+above men, is so made that he can rule with a soft hand and justly.
+And because of the things I have related do I make abdication and
+give my chiefship to Moosu, who alone knoweth how ye may be fed in
+this day when there be no meat in the land.'
+
+"At this there was a great clapping of hands, and the people cried,
+'KLOSHE!  KLOSHE!' which means 'good.'  I had seen the wonder-worry
+in Moosu's eyes; for he could not understand, and was fearful of my
+white man's wisdom.  I had met his wishes all along the line, and
+even anticipated some; and standing there, self-shorn of all my
+power, he knew the time did not favour to stir the people against
+me.
+
+"Before they could disperse I made announcement that while the
+still went to Moosu, whatever hooch I possessed went to the people.
+Moosu tried to protest at this, for never had we permitted more
+than a handful to be drunk at a time; but they cried, 'KLOSHE!
+KLOSHE!' and made festival before my door.  And while they waxed
+uproarious without, as the liquor went to their heads, I held
+council within with Angeit and the faithful ones.  I set them the
+tasks they were to do, and put into their mouths the words they
+were to say.  Then I slipped away to a place back in the woods
+where I had two sleds, well loaded, with teams of dogs that were
+not overfed.  Spring was at hand, you see, and there was a crust to
+the snow; so it was the best time to take the way south.  Moreover,
+the tobacco was gone.  There I waited, for I had nothing to fear.
+Did they bestir themselves on my trail, their dogs were too fat,
+and themselves too lean, to overtake me; also, I deemed their
+bestirring would be of an order for which I had made due
+preparation.
+
+"First came a faithful one, running, and after him another.  'O
+master,' the first cried, breathless, 'there be great confusion in
+the village, and no man knoweth his own mind, and they be of many
+minds.  Everybody hath drunken overmuch, and some be stringing
+bows, and some be quarrelling one with another.  Never was there
+such a trouble.'
+
+"And the second one:  'And I did as thou biddest, O master,
+whispering shrewd words in thirsty ears, and raising memories of
+the things that were of old time.  The woman Ipsukuk waileth her
+poverty and the wealth that no longer is hers.  And Tummasook
+thinketh himself once again chief, and the people are hungry and
+rage up and down.'
+
+"And a third one:  'And Neewak hath overthrown the altars of Moosu,
+and maketh incantation before the time-honoured and ancient gods.
+And all the people remember the wealth that ran down their throats,
+and which they possess no more.  And first, Esanetuk, who be SICK
+TUMTUM, fought with Kluktu, and there was much noise.  And next,
+being daughters of the one mother, did they fight with Tukeliketa.
+And after that did they three fall upon Moosu, like wind-squalls,
+from every hand, till he ran forth from the igloo, and the people
+mocked him.  For a man who cannot command his womankind is a fool.'
+
+"Then came Angeit:  'Great trouble hath befallen Moosu, O master,
+for I have whispered to advantage, till the people came to Moosu,
+saying they were hungry and demanding the fulfilment of prophecy.
+And there was a loud shout of "Itlwillie! Itlwillie!"  (Meat.)  So
+he cried peace to his womenfolk, who were overwrought with anger
+and with hooch, and led the tribe even to thy meat caches.  And he
+bade the men open them and be fed.  And lo, the caches were empty.
+There was no meat.  They stood without sound, the people being
+frightened, and in the silence I lifted my voice.  "O Moosu, where
+is the meat?  That there was meat we know.  Did we not hunt it and
+drag it in from the hunt?  And it were a lie to say one man hath
+eaten it; yet have we seen nor hide nor hair.  Where is the meat, O
+Moosu?  Thou hast the ear of God.  Where is the meat?"
+
+"'And the people cried, "Thou hast the ear of God.  Where is the
+meat?"  And they put their heads together and were afraid.  Then I
+went among them, speaking fearsomely of the unknown things, of the
+dead that come and go like shadows and do evil deeds, till they
+cried aloud in terror and gathered all together, like little
+children afraid of the dark.  Neewak made harangue, laying this
+evil that had come upon them at the door of Moosu.  When he had
+done, there was a furious commotion, and they took spears in their
+hands, and tusks of walrus, and clubs, and stones from the beach.
+But Moosu ran away home, and because he had not drunken of hooch
+they could not catch him, and fell one over another and made haste
+slowly.  Even now they do howl without his igloo, and his woman-
+folk within, and what of the noise, he cannot make himself heard.'
+
+"'O Angeit, thou hast done well,' I commanded.  'Go now, taking
+this empty sled and the lean dogs, and ride fast to the igloo of
+Moosu; and before the people, who are drunken, are aware, throw him
+quick upon the sled and bring him to me.'
+
+"I waited and gave good advice to the faithful ones till Angeit
+returned.  Moosu was on the sled, and I saw by the fingermarks on
+his face that his womankind had done well by him.  But he tumbled
+off and fell in the snow at my feet, crying:  'O master, thou wilt
+forgive Moosu, thy servant, for the wrong things he has done!  Thou
+art a great man!  Surely wilt thou forgive!'
+
+"'Call me "brother," Moosu--call me "brother,"' I chided, lifting
+him to his feet with the toe of my moccasin.  'Wilt thou evermore
+obey?'
+
+"'Yea, master,' he whimpered, 'evermore.'
+
+"'Then dispose thy body, so, across the sled,' I shifted the
+dogwhip to my right hand.  'And direct thy face downwards, toward
+the snow.  And make haste, for we journey south this day.'  And
+when he was well fixed I laid the lash upon him, reciting, at every
+stroke, the wrongs he had done me. 'This for thy disobedience in
+general--whack!  And this for thy disobedience in particular--
+whack! whack!  And this for Esanetuk!  And this for thy soul's
+welfare!  And this for the grace of thy authority!  And this for
+Kluktu!  And this for thy rights God-given!  And this for thy fat
+firstlings!  And this and this for thy income-tax and thy loaves
+and fishes!  And this for all thy disobedience!  And this, finally,
+that thou mayest henceforth walk softly and with understanding!
+Now cease thy sniffling and get up!  Gird on thy snowshoes and go
+to the fore and break trail for the dogs.  CHOOK!  MUSH-ON!  Git!'"
+
+Thomas Stevens smiled quietly to himself as he lighted his fifth
+cigar and sent curling smoke-rings ceilingward.
+
+"But how about the people of Tattarat?" I asked.  "Kind of rough,
+wasn't it, to leave them flat with famine?"
+
+And he answered, laughing, between two smoke-rings, "Were there not
+the fat dogs?"
+
+
+
+THE FAITH OF MEN
+
+
+
+"Tell you what we'll do; we'll shake for it."
+
+"That suits me," said the second man, turning, as he spoke, to the
+Indian that was mending snow-shoes in a corner of the cabin.
+"Here, you Billebedam, take a run down to Oleson's cabin like a
+good fellow, and tell him we want to borrow his dice box."
+
+This sudden request in the midst of a council on wages of men,
+wood, and grub surprised Billebedam.  Besides, it was early in the
+day, and he had never known white men of the calibre of Pentfield
+and Hutchinson to dice and play till the day's work was done.  But
+his face was impassive as a Yukon Indian's should be, as he pulled
+on his mittens and went out the door.
+
+Though eight o'clock, it was still dark outside, and the cabin was
+lighted by a tallow candle thrust into an empty whisky bottle.  It
+stood on the pine-board table in the middle of a disarray of dirty
+tin dishes.  Tallow from innumerable candles had dripped down the
+long neck of the bottle and hardened into a miniature glacier.  The
+small room, which composed the entire cabin, was as badly littered
+as the table; while at one end, against the wall, were two bunks,
+one above the other, with the blankets turned down just as the two
+men had crawled out in the morning.
+
+Lawrence Pentfield and Corry Hutchinson were millionaires, though
+they did not look it.  There seemed nothing unusual about them,
+while they would have passed muster as fair specimens of lumbermen
+in any Michigan camp.  But outside, in the darkness, where holes
+yawned in the ground, were many men engaged in windlassing muck and
+gravel and gold from the bottoms of the holes where other men
+received fifteen dollars per day for scraping it from off the
+bedrock.  Each day thousands of dollars' worth of gold were scraped
+from bedrock and windlassed to the surface, and it all belonged to
+Pentfield and Hutchinson, who took their rank among the richest
+kings of Bonanza.
+
+Pentfield broke the silence that followed on Billebedam's departure
+by heaping the dirty plates higher on the table and drumming a
+tattoo on the cleared space with his knuckles.  Hutchinson snuffed
+the smoky candle and reflectively rubbed the soot from the wick
+between thumb and forefinger.
+
+"By Jove, I wish we could both go out!" he abruptly exclaimed.
+"That would settle it all."
+
+Pentfield looked at him darkly.
+
+"If it weren't for your cursed obstinacy, it'd be settled anyway.
+All you have to do is get up and go.  I'll look after things, and
+next year I can go out."
+
+"Why should I go?  I've no one waiting for me--"
+
+"Your people," Pentfield broke in roughly.
+
+"Like you have," Hutchinson went on.  "A girl, I mean, and you know
+it."
+
+Pentfield shrugged his shoulders gloomily.  "She can wait, I
+guess."
+
+"But she's been waiting two years now."
+
+"And another won't age her beyond recognition."
+
+"That'd be three years.  Think of it, old man, three years in this
+end of the earth, this falling-off place for the damned!"
+Hutchinson threw up his arm in an almost articulate groan.
+
+He was several years younger than his partner, not more than
+twenty-six, and there was a certain wistfulness in his face that
+comes into the faces of men when they yearn vainly for the things
+they have been long denied.  This same wistfulness was in
+Pentfield's face, and the groan of it was articulate in the heave
+of his shoulders.
+
+"I dreamed last night I was in Zinkand's," he said.  "The music
+playing, glasses clinking, voices humming, women laughing, and I
+was ordering eggs--yes, sir, eggs, fried and boiled and poached and
+scrambled, and in all sorts of ways, and downing them as fast as
+they arrived."
+
+"I'd have ordered salads and green things," Hutchinson criticized
+hungrily, "with a big, rare, Porterhouse, and young onions and
+radishes,--the kind your teeth sink into with a crunch."
+
+"I'd have followed the eggs with them, I guess, if I hadn't
+awakened," Pentfield replied.
+
+He picked up a trail-scarred banjo from the floor and began to
+strum a few wandering notes.  Hutchinson winced and breathed
+heavily.
+
+"Quit it!" he burst out with sudden fury, as the other struck into
+a gaily lifting swing.  "It drives me mad.  I can't stand it"
+
+Pentfield tossed the banjo into a bunk and quoted:-
+
+
+"Hear me babble what the weakest won't confess -
+I am Memory and Torment--I am Town!
+I am all that ever went with evening dress!"
+
+
+The other man winced where he sat and dropped his head forward on
+the table.  Pentfield resumed the monotonous drumming with his
+knuckles.  A loud snap from the door attracted his attention.  The
+frost was creeping up the inside in a white sheet, and he began to
+hum:-
+
+
+"The flocks are folded, boughs are bare,
+The salmon takes the sea;
+And oh, my fair, would I somewhere
+Might house my heart with thee."
+
+
+Silence fell and was not again broken till Billebedam arrived and
+threw the dice box on the table.
+
+"Um much cold," he said.  "Oleson um speak to me, um say um Yukon
+freeze last night."
+
+"Hear that, old man!" Pentfield cried, slapping Hutchinson on the
+shoulder.  "Whoever wins can be hitting the trail for God's country
+this time tomorrow morning!"
+
+He picked up the box, briskly rattling the dice.
+
+"What'll it be?"
+
+"Straight poker dice," Hutchinson answered.  "Go on and roll them
+out."
+
+Pentfield swept the dishes from the table with a crash and rolled
+out the five dice.  Both looked tragedy.  The shake was without a
+pair and five-spot high.
+
+"A stiff!" Pentfield groaned.
+
+After much deliberating Pentfield picked up all the five dice and
+put them in the box.
+
+"I'd shake to the five if I were you," Hutchinson suggested.
+
+"No, you wouldn't, not when you see this," Pentfield replied,
+shaking out the dice.
+
+Again they were without a pair, running this time in unbroken
+sequence from two to six.
+
+"A second stiff!" he groaned.  "No use your shaking, Corry.  You
+can't lose."
+
+The other man gathered up the dice without a word, rattled them,
+rolled them out on the table with a flourish, and saw that he had
+likewise shaken a six-high stiff.
+
+"Tied you, anyway, but I'll have to do better than that," he said,
+gathering in four of them and shaking to the six.  "And here's what
+beats you!"
+
+But they rolled out deuce, tray, four, and five--a stiff still and
+no better nor worse than Pentfield's throw.
+
+Hutchinson sighed.
+
+"Couldn't happen once in a million times," said.
+
+"Nor in a million lives," Pentfield added, catching up the dice and
+quickly throwing them out.  Three fives appeared, and, after much
+delay, he was rewarded by a fourth five on the second shake.
+Hutchinson seemed to have lost his last hope.
+
+But three sixes turned up on his first shake.  A great doubt rose
+in the other's eyes, and hope returned into his.  He had one more
+shake.  Another six and he would go over the ice to salt water and
+the States.
+
+He rattled the dice in the box, made as though to cast them,
+hesitated, and continued rattle them.
+
+"Go on!  Go on!  Don't take all night about it!" Pentfield cried
+sharply, bending his nails on the table, so tight was the clutch
+with which he strove to control himself.
+
+The dice rolled forth, an upturned six meeting their eyes.  Both
+men sat staring at it.  There was a long silence.  Hutchinson shot
+a covert glance at his partner, who, still more covertly, caught
+it, and pursed up his lips in an attempt to advertise his
+unconcern.
+
+Hutchinson laughed as he got up on his feet.  It was a nervous,
+apprehensive laugh.  It was a case where it was more awkward to win
+than lose.  He walked over to his partner, who whirled upon him
+fiercely:-
+
+"Now you just shut up, Corry!  I know all you're going to say--that
+you'd rather stay in and let me go, and all that; so don't say it.
+You've your own people in Detroit to see, and that's enough.
+Besides, you can do for me the very thing I expected to do if I
+went out."
+
+"And that is--?"
+
+Pentfield read the full question in his partner's eyes, and
+answered:-
+
+"Yes, that very thing.  You can bring her in to me.  The only
+difference will be a Dawson wedding instead of a San Franciscan
+one."
+
+"But, man alike!" Corry Hutchinson objected "how under the sun can
+I bring her in?  We're not exactly brother and sister, seeing that
+I have not even met her, and it wouldn't be just the proper thing,
+you know, for us to travel together.  Of course, it would be all
+right--you and I know that; but think of the looks of it, man!"
+
+Pentfield swore under his breath, consigning the looks of it to a
+less frigid region than Alaska.
+
+"Now, if you'll just listen and not get astride that high horse of
+yours so blamed quick," his partner went on, "you'll see that the
+only fair thing under the circumstances is for me to let you go out
+this year.  Next year is only a year away, and then I can take my
+fling."
+
+Pentfield shook his head, though visibly swayed by the temptation.
+
+"It won't do, Corry, old man.  I appreciate your kindness and all
+that, but it won't do.  I'd be ashamed every time I thought of you
+slaving away in here in my place."
+
+A thought seemed suddenly to strike him.  Burrowing into his bunk
+and disrupting it in his eagerness, he secured a writing-pad and
+pencil, and sitting down at the table, began to write with
+swiftness and certitude.
+
+"Here," he said, thrusting the scrawled letter into his partner's
+hand.  "You just deliver that and everything'll be all right."
+
+Hutchinson ran his eye over it and laid it down.
+
+"How do you know the brother will be willing to make that beastly
+trip in here?" he demanded.
+
+"Oh, he'll do it for me--and for his sister," Pentfield replied.
+"You see, he's tenderfoot, and I wouldn't trust her with him alone.
+But with you along it will be an easy trip and a safe one.  As soon
+as you get out, you'll go to her and prepare her.  Then you can
+take your run east to your own people, and in the spring she and
+her brother'll be ready to start with you.  You'll like her, I
+know, right from the jump; and from that, you'll know her as soon
+as you lay eyes on her."
+
+So saying he opened the back of his watch and exposed a girl's
+photograph pasted on the inside of the case.  Corry Hutchinson
+gazed at it with admiration welling up in his eyes.
+
+"Mabel is her name," Pentfield went on.  "And it's just as well you
+should know how to find the house.  Soon as you strike 'Frisco,
+take a cab, and just say, 'Holmes's place, Myrdon Avenue'--I doubt
+if the Myrdon Avenue is necessary.  The cabby'll know where Judge
+Holmes lives.
+
+"And say," Pentfield continued, after a pause, "it won't be a bad
+idea for you to get me a few little things which a--er--"
+
+"A married man should have in his business," Hutchinson blurted out
+with a grin.
+
+Pentfield grinned back.
+
+"Sure, napkins and tablecloths and sheets and pillowslips, and such
+things.  And you might get a good set of china.  You know it'll
+come hard for her to settle down to this sort of thing.  You can
+freight them in by steamer around by Bering Sea.  And, I say,
+what's the matter with a piano?"
+
+Hutchinson seconded the idea heartily.  His reluctance had
+vanished, and he was warming up to his mission.
+
+"By Jove!  Lawrence," he said at the conclusion of the council, as
+they both rose to their feet, "I'll bring back that girl of yours
+in style.  I'll do the cooking and take care of the dogs, and all
+that brother'll have to do will be to see to her comfort and do for
+her whatever I've forgotten.  And I'll forget damn little, I can
+tell you."
+
+The next day Lawrence Pentfield shook hands with him for the last
+time and watched him, running with his dogs, disappear up the
+frozen Yukon on his way to salt water and the world.  Pentfield
+went back to his Bonanza mine, which was many times more dreary
+than before, and faced resolutely into the long winter.  There was
+work to be done, men to superintend, and operations to direct in
+burrowing after the erratic pay streak; but his heart was not in
+the work.  Nor was his heart in any work till the tiered logs of a
+new cabin began to rise on the hill behind the mine.  It was a
+grand cabin, warmly built and divided into three comfortable rooms.
+Each log was hand-hewed and squared--an expensive whim when the
+axemen received a daily wage of fifteen dollars; but to him nothing
+could be too costly for the home in which Mabel Holmes was to live.
+
+So he went about with the building of the cabin, singing, "And oh,
+my fair, would I somewhere might house my heart with thee!"  Also,
+he had a calendar pinned on the wall above the table, and his first
+act each morning was to check off the day and to count the days
+that were left ere his partner would come booming down the Yukon
+ice in the spring.  Another whim of his was to permit no one to
+sleep in the new cabin on the hill.  It must be as fresh for her
+occupancy as the square-hewed wood was fresh; and when it stood
+complete, he put a padlock on the door.  No one entered save
+himself, and he was wont to spend long hours there, and to come
+forth with his face strangely radiant and in his eyes a glad, warm
+light.
+
+In December he received a letter from Corry Hutchinson.  He had
+just seen Mabel Holmes.  She was all she ought to be, to be
+Lawrence Pentfield's wife, he wrote.  He was enthusiastic, and his
+letter sent the blood tingling through Pentfield's veins.  Other
+letters followed, one on the heels of another, and sometimes two or
+three together when the mail lumped up.  And they were all in the
+same tenor.  Corry had just come from Myrdon Avenue; Corry was just
+going to Myrdon Avenue; or Corry was at Myrdon Avenue.  And he
+lingered on and on in San Francisco, nor even mentioned his trip to
+Detroit.
+
+Lawrence Pentfield began to think that his partner was a great deal
+in the company of Mabel Holmes for a fellow who was going east to
+see his people.  He even caught himself worrying about it at times,
+though he would have worried more had he not known Mabel and Corry
+so well.  Mabel's letters, on the other hand, had a great deal to
+say about Corry.  Also, a thread of timidity that was near to
+disinclination ran through them concerning the trip in over the ice
+and the Dawson marriage.  Pentfield wrote back heartily, laughing
+at her fears, which he took to be the mere physical ones of danger
+and hardship rather than those bred of maidenly reserve.
+
+But the long winter and tedious wait, following upon the two
+previous long winters, were telling upon him.  The superintendence
+of the men and the pursuit of the pay streak could not break the
+irk of the daily round, and the end of January found him making
+occasional trips to Dawson, where he could forget his identity for
+a space at the gambling tables.  Because he could afford to lose,
+he won, and "Pentfield's luck" became a stock phrase among the faro
+players.
+
+His luck ran with him till the second week in February.  How much
+farther it might have run is conjectural; for, after one big game,
+he never played again.
+
+It was in the Opera House that it occurred, and for an hour it had
+seemed that he could not place his money on a card without making
+the card a winner.  In the lull at the end of a deal, while the
+game-keeper was shuffling the deck, Nick Inwood the owner of the
+game, remarked, apropos of nothing:-
+
+"I say, Pentfield, I see that partner of yours has been cutting up
+monkey-shines on the outside."
+
+"Trust Corry to have a good time," Pentfield had answered;
+"especially when he has earned it."
+
+"Every man to his taste," Nick Inwood laughed; "but I should
+scarcely call getting married a good time."
+
+"Corry married!" Pentfield cried, incredulous and yet surprised out
+of himself for the moment.
+
+'Sure," Inwood said.  "I saw it in the 'Frisco paper that came in
+over the ice this morning."
+
+"Well, and who's the girl?" Pentfield demanded, somewhat with the
+air of patient fortitude with which one takes the bait of a catch
+and is aware at the time of the large laugh bound to follow at his
+expense.
+
+Nick Inwood pulled the newspaper from his pocket and began looking
+it over, saying:-
+
+"I haven't a remarkable memory for names, but it seems to me it's
+something like Mabel--Mabel--oh yes, here it--'Mabel Holmes,
+daughter of Judge Holmes,'--whoever he is."
+
+Lawrence Pentfield never turned a hair, though he wondered how any
+man in the North could know her name.  He glanced coolly from face
+to face to note any vagrant signs of the game that was being played
+upon him, but beyond a healthy curiosity the faces betrayed
+nothing.  Then he turned to the gambler and said in cold, even
+tones:-
+
+"Inwood, I've got an even five hundred here that says the print of
+what you have just said is not in that paper."
+
+The gambler looked at him in quizzical surprise.  "Go 'way, child.
+I don't want your money."
+
+"I thought so," Pentfield sneered, returning to the game and laying
+a couple of bets.
+
+Nick Inwood's face flushed, and, as though doubting his senses, he
+ran careful eyes over the print of a quarter of a column.  Then be
+turned on Lawrence Pentfield.
+
+"Look here, Pentfield," he said, in a quiet, nervous manner; "I
+can't allow that, you know."
+
+"Allow what?" Pentfield demanded brutally.
+
+"You implied that I lied."
+
+"Nothing of the sort," came the reply.  "I merely implied that you
+were trying to be clumsily witty."
+
+"Make your bets, gentlemen," the dealer protested.
+
+"But I tell you it's true," Nick Inwood insisted.
+
+"And I have told you I've five hundred that says it's not in that
+paper," Pentfield answered, at the same time throwing a heavy sack
+of dust on the table.
+
+"I am sorry to take your money," was the retort, as Inwood thrust
+the newspaper into Pentfield's hand.
+
+Pentfield saw, though he could not quite bring himself to believe.
+Glancing through the headline, "Young Lochinvar came out of the
+North," and skimming the article until the names of Mabel Holmes
+and Corry Hutchinson, coupled together, leaped squarely before his
+eyes, he turned to the top of the page.  It was a San Francisco
+paper.
+
+"The money's yours, Inwood," he remarked, with a short laugh.
+"There's no telling what that partner of mine will do when he gets
+started."
+
+Then he returned to the article and read it word for word, very
+slowly and very carefully.  He could no longer doubt.  Beyond
+dispute, Corry Hutchinson had married Mabel Holmes.  "One of the
+Bonanza kings," it described him, "a partner with Lawrence
+Pentfield (whom San Francisco society has not yet forgotten), and
+interested with that gentleman in other rich, Klondike properties."
+Further, and at the end, he read, "It is whispered that Mr. and
+Mrs. Hutchinson will, after a brief trip east to Detroit, make
+their real honeymoon journey into the fascinating Klondike
+country."
+
+"I'll be back again; keep my place for me," Pentfield said, rising
+to his feet and taking his sack, which meantime had hit the blower
+and came back lighter by five hundred dollars.
+
+He went down the street and bought a Seattle paper.  It contained
+the same facts, though somewhat condensed.  Corry and Mabel were
+indubitably married.  Pentfield returned to the Opera House and
+resumed his seat in the game.  He asked to have the limit removed.
+
+"Trying to get action," Nick Inwood laughed, as he nodded assent to
+the dealer.  "I was going down to the A. C. store, but now I guess
+I'll stay and watch you do your worst."
+
+This Lawrence Pentfield did at the end of two hours' plunging, when
+the dealer bit the end off a fresh cigar and struck a match as he
+announced that the bank was broken.  Pentfield cashed in for forty
+thousand, shook hands with Nick Inwood, and stated that it was the
+last time he would ever play at his game or at anybody's else's.
+
+No one knew nor guessed that he had been hit, much less hit hard.
+There was no apparent change in his manner.  For a week he went
+about his work much as he had always done, when he read an account
+of the marriage in a Portland paper.  Then he called in a friend to
+take charge of his mine and departed up the Yukon behind his dogs.
+He held to the Salt Water trail till White River was reached, into
+which he turned.  Five days later he came upon a hunting camp of
+the White River Indians.  In the evening there was a feast, and he
+sat in honour beside the chief; and next morning he headed his dogs
+back toward the Yukon.  But he no longer travelled alone.  A young
+squaw fed his dogs for him that night and helped to pitch camp.
+She had been mauled by a bear in her childhood and suffered from a
+slight limp.  Her name was Lashka, and she was diffident at first
+with the strange white man that had come out of the Unknown,
+married her with scarcely a look or word, and now was carrying her
+back with him into the Unknown.
+
+But Lashka's was better fortune than falls to most Indian girls
+that mate with white men in the Northland.  No sooner was Dawson
+reached than the barbaric marriage that had joined them was re-
+solemnized, in the white man's fashion, before a priest.  From
+Dawson, which to her was all a marvel and a dream, she was taken
+directly to the Bonanza claim and installed in the square-hewed
+cabin on the hill.
+
+The nine days' wonder that followed arose not so much out of the
+fact of the squaw whom Lawrence Pentfield had taken to bed and
+board as out of the ceremony that had legalized the tie.  The
+properly sanctioned marriage was the one thing that passed the
+community's comprehension.  But no one bothered Pentfield about it.
+So long as a man's vagaries did no special hurt to the community,
+the community let the man alone, nor was Pentfield barred from the
+cabins of men who possessed white wives.  The marriage ceremony
+removed him from the status of squaw-man and placed him beyond
+moral reproach, though there were men that challenged his taste
+where women were concerned.
+
+No more letters arrived from the outside.  Six sledloads of mails
+had been lost at the Big Salmon.  Besides, Pentfield knew that
+Corry and his bride must by that time have started in over the
+trail.  They were even then on their honeymoon trip--the honeymoon
+trip he had dreamed of for himself through two dreary years.  His
+lip curled with bitterness at the thought; but beyond being kinder
+to Lashka he gave no sign.
+
+March had passed and April was nearing its end, when, one spring
+morning, Lashka asked permission to go down the creek several miles
+to Siwash Pete's cabin.  Pete's wife, a Stewart River woman, had
+sent up word that something was wrong with her baby, and Lashka,
+who was pre-eminently a mother-woman and who held herself to be
+truly wise in the matter of infantile troubles, missed no
+opportunity of nursing the children of other women as yet more
+fortunate than she.
+
+Pentfield harnessed his dogs, and with Lashka behind took the trail
+down the creek bed of Bonanza.  Spring was in the air.  The
+sharpness had gone out of the bite of the frost and though snow
+still covered the land, the murmur and trickling of water told that
+the iron grip of winter was relaxing.  The bottom was dropping out
+of the trail, and here and there a new trail had been broken around
+open holes.  At such a place, where there was not room for two
+sleds to pass, Pentfield heard the jingle of approaching bells and
+stopped his dogs.
+
+A team of tired-looking dogs appeared around the narrow bend,
+followed by a heavily-loaded sled.  At the gee-pole was a man who
+steered in a manner familiar to Pentfield, and behind the sled
+walked two women.  His glance returned to the man at the gee-pole.
+It was Corry.  Pentfield got on his feet and waited.  He was glad
+that Lashka was with him.  The meeting could not have come about
+better had it been planned, he thought.  And as he waited he
+wondered what they would say, what they would be able to say.  As
+for himself there was no need to say anything.  The explaining was
+all on their side, and he was ready to listen to them.
+
+As they drew in abreast, Corry recognized him and halted the dogs.
+With a "Hello, old man," he held out his hand.
+
+Pentfield shook it, but without warmth or speech.  By this time the
+two women had come up, and he noticed that the second one was Dora
+Holmes.  He doffed his fur cap, the flaps of which were flying,
+shook hands with her, and turned toward Mabel.  She swayed forward,
+splendid and radiant, but faltered before his outstretched hand.
+He had intended to say, "How do you do, Mrs. Hutchinson?"--but
+somehow, the Mrs. Hutchinson had choked him, and all he had managed
+to articulate was the "How do you do?"
+
+There was all the constraint and awkwardness in the situation he
+could have wished.  Mabel betrayed the agitation appropriate to her
+position, while Dora, evidently brought along as some sort of
+peacemaker, was saying:-
+
+"Why, what is the matter, Lawrence?"
+
+Before he could answer, Corry plucked him by the sleeve and drew
+him aside.
+
+"See here, old man, what's this mean?" Corry demanded in a low
+tone, indicating Lashka with his eyes.
+
+"I can hardly see, Corry, where you can have any concern in the
+matter," Pentfield answered mockingly.
+
+But Corry drove straight to the point.
+
+"What is that squaw doing on your sled?  A nasty job you've given
+me to explain all this away.  I only hope it can be explained away.
+Who is she?  Whose squaw is she?"
+
+Then Lawrence Pentfield delivered his stroke, and he delivered it
+with a certain calm elation of spirit that seemed somewhat to
+compensate for the wrong that had been done him.
+
+"She is my squaw," he said; "Mrs. Pentfield, if you please."
+
+Corry Hutchinson gasped, and Pentfield left him and returned to the
+two women.  Mabel, with a worried expression on her face, seemed
+holding herself aloof.  He turned to Dora and asked, quite
+genially, as though all the world was sunshine:- "How did you stand
+the trip, anyway?  Have any trouble to sleep warm?"
+
+"And, how did Mrs. Hutchinson stand it?" he asked next, his eyes on
+Mabel.
+
+"Oh, you dear ninny!" Dora cried, throwing her arms around him and
+hugging him.  "Then you saw it, too!  I thought something was the
+matter, you were acting so strangely."
+
+"I--I hardly understand," he stammered.
+
+"It was corrected in next day's paper," Dora chattered on.  "We did
+not dream you would see it.  All the other papers had it correctly,
+and of course that one miserable paper was the very one you saw!"
+
+"Wait a moment!  What do you mean?" Pentfield demanded, a sudden
+fear at his heart, for he felt himself on the verge of a great
+gulf.
+
+But Dora swept volubly on.
+
+"Why, when it became known that Mabel and I were going to Klondike,
+EVERY OTHER WEEK said that when we were gone, it would be lovely on
+Myrdon Avenue, meaning, of course, lonely."
+
+"Then--"
+
+"I am Mrs. Hutchinson," Dora answered.  "And you thought it was
+Mabel all the time--"
+
+"Precisely the way of it," Pentfield replied slowly.  "But I can
+see now.  The reporter got the names mixed.  The Seattle and
+Portland paper copied."
+
+He stood silently for a minute.  Mabel's face was turned toward him
+again, and he could see the glow of expectancy in it.  Corry was
+deeply interested in the ragged toe of one of his moccasins, while
+Dora was stealing sidelong glances at the immobile face of Lashka
+sitting on the sled.  Lawrence Pentfield stared straight out before
+him into a dreary future, through the grey vistas of which he saw
+himself riding on a sled behind running dogs with lame Lashka by
+his side.
+
+Then he spoke, quite simply, looking Mabel in the eyes.
+
+"I am very sorry.  I did not dream it.  I thought you had married
+Corry.  That is Mrs. Pentfield sitting on the sled over there."
+
+Mabel Holmes turned weakly toward her sister, as though all the
+fatigue of her great journey had suddenly descended on her.  Dora
+caught her around the waist.  Corry Hutchinson was still occupied
+with his moccasins.  Pentfield glanced quickly from face to face,
+then turned to his sled.
+
+"Can't stop here all day, with Pete's baby waiting," he said to
+Lashka.
+
+The long whip-lash hissed out, the dogs sprang against the breast
+bands, and the sled lurched and jerked ahead.
+
+"Oh, I say, Corry," Pentfield called back, "you'd better occupy the
+old cabin.  It's not been used for some time.  I've built a new one
+on the hill."
+
+
+
+TOO MUCH GOLD
+
+
+
+This being a story--and a truer one than it may appear--of a mining
+country, it is quite to be expected that it will be a hard-luck
+story.  But that depends on the point of view.  Hard luck is a mild
+way of terming it so far as Kink Mitchell and Hootchinoo Bill are
+concerned; and that they have a decided opinion on the subject is a
+matter of common knowledge in the Yukon country.
+
+It was in the fall of 1896 that the two partners came down to the
+east bank of the Yukon, and drew a Peterborough canoe from a moss-
+covered cache.  They were not particularly pleasant-looking
+objects.  A summer's prospecting, filled to repletion with hardship
+and rather empty of grub, had left their clothes in tatters and
+themselves worn and cadaverous.  A nimbus of mosquitoes buzzed
+about each man's head.  Their faces were coated with blue clay.
+Each carried a lump of this damp clay, and, whenever it dried and
+fell from their faces, more was daubed on in its place.  There was
+a querulous plaint in their voices, an irritability of movement and
+gesture, that told of broken sleep and a losing struggle with the
+little winged pests.
+
+"Them skeeters'll be the death of me yet," Kink Mitchell whimpered,
+as the canoe felt the current on her nose, and leaped out from the
+bank
+
+"Cheer up, cheer up.  We're about done," Hootchinoo Bill answered,
+with an attempted heartiness in his funereal tones that was
+ghastly.  "We'll be in Forty Mile in forty minutes, and then--
+cursed little devil!"
+
+One hand left his paddle and landed on the back of his neck with a
+sharp slap.  He put a fresh daub of clay on the injured part,
+swearing sulphurously the while.  Kink Mitchell was not in the
+least amused.  He merely improved the opportunity by putting a
+thicker coating of clay on his own neck.
+
+They crossed the Yukon to its west bank, shot down-stream with easy
+stroke, and at the end of forty minutes swung in close to the left
+around the tail of an island.  Forty Mile spread itself suddenly
+before them.  Both men straightened their backs and gazed at the
+sight.  They gazed long and carefully, drifting with the current,
+in their faces an expression of mingled surprise and consternation
+slowly gathering.  Not a thread of smoke was rising from the
+hundreds of log-cabins.  There was no sound of axes biting sharply
+into wood, of hammering and sawing.  Neither dogs nor men loitered
+before the big store.  No steamboats lay at the bank, no canoes,
+nor scows, nor poling-boats.  The river was as bare of craft as the
+town was of life.
+
+"Kind of looks like Gabriel's tooted his little horn, and you an'
+me has turned up missing," remarked Hootchinoo Bill.
+
+His remark was casual, as though there was nothing unusual about
+the occurrence.  Kink Mitchell's reply was just as casual as though
+he, too, were unaware of any strange perturbation of spirit.
+
+"Looks as they was all Baptists, then, and took the boats to go by
+water," was his contribution.
+
+"My ol' dad was a Baptist," Hootchinoo Bill supplemented.  "An' he
+always did hold it was forty thousand miles nearer that way."
+
+This was the end of their levity.  They ran the canoe in and
+climbed the high earth bank.  A feeling of awe descended upon them
+as they walked the deserted streets.  The sunlight streamed
+placidly over the town.  A gentle wind tapped the halyards against
+the flagpole before the closed doors of the Caledonia Dance Hall.
+Mosquitoes buzzed, robins sang, and moose birds tripped hungrily
+among the cabins; but there was no human life nor sign of human
+life.
+
+"I'm just dyin' for a drink," Hootchinoo Bill said and
+unconsciously his voice sank to a hoarse whisper.
+
+His partner nodded his head, loth to hear his own voice break the
+stillness.  They trudged on in uneasy silence till surprised by an
+open door.  Above this door, and stretching the width of the
+building, a rude sign announced the same as the "Monte Carlo."  But
+beside the door, hat over eyes, chair tilted back, a man sat
+sunning himself.  He was an old man.  Beard and hair were long and
+white and patriarchal.
+
+"If it ain't ol' Jim Cummings, turned up like us, too late for
+Resurrection!" said Kink Mitchell.
+
+"Most like he didn't hear Gabriel tootin'," was Hootchinoo Bill's
+suggestion.
+
+"Hello, Jim!  Wake up!" he shouted.
+
+The old man unlimbered lamely, blinking his eyes and murmuring
+automatically:  "What'll ye have, gents?  What'll ye have?"
+
+They followed him inside and ranged up against the long bar where
+of yore a half-dozen nimble bar-keepers found little time to loaf.
+The great room, ordinarily aroar with life, was still and gloomy as
+a tomb.  There was no rattling of chips, no whirring of ivory
+balls.  Roulette and faro tables were like gravestones under their
+canvas covers.  No women's voices drifted merrily from the dance-
+room behind.  Ol' Jim Cummings wiped a glass with palsied hands,
+and Kink Mitchell scrawled his initials on the dust-covered bar.
+
+"Where's the girls?" Hootchinoo Bill shouted, with affected
+geniality.
+
+"Gone," was the ancient bar-keeper's reply, in a voice thin and
+aged as himself, and as unsteady as his hand.
+
+"Where's Bidwell and Barlow?"
+
+"Gone."
+
+"And Sweetwater Charley?"
+
+"Gone."
+
+"And his sister?"
+
+"Gone too."
+
+"Your daughter Sally, then, and her little kid?"
+
+"Gone, all gone."  The old man shook his head sadly, rummaging in
+an absent way among the dusty bottles.
+
+"Great Sardanapolis!  Where?" Kink Mitchell exploded, unable longer
+to restrain himself.  "You don't say you've had the plague?"
+
+"Why, ain't you heerd?"  The old man chuckled quietly.  "They-all's
+gone to Dawson."
+
+"What-like is that?" Bill demanded.  "A creek? or a bar? or a
+place?"
+
+"Ain't never heered of Dawson, eh?"  The old man chuckled
+exasperatingly.  "Why, Dawson's a town, a city, bigger'n Forty
+Mile.  Yes, sir, bigger'n Forty Mile."
+
+"I've ben in this land seven year," Bill announced emphatically,
+"an' I make free to say I never heard tell of the burg before.
+Hold on!  Let's have some more of that whisky.  Your information's
+flabbergasted me, that it has.  Now just whereabouts is this
+Dawson-place you was a-mentionin'?"
+
+"On the big flat jest below the mouth of Klondike," ol' Jim
+answered.  "But where has you-all ben this summer?"
+
+"Never you mind where we-all's ben," was Kink Mitchell's testy
+reply.  "We-all's ben where the skeeters is that thick you've got
+to throw a stick into the air so as to see the sun and tell the
+time of day.  Ain't I right, Bill?"
+
+"Right you are," said Bill.  "But speakin' of this Dawson-place how
+like did it happen to be, Jim?"
+
+"Ounce to the pan on a creek called Bonanza, an' they ain't got to
+bed-rock yet."
+
+"Who struck it?"
+
+"Carmack."
+
+At mention of the discoverer's name the partners stared at each
+other disgustedly.  Then they winked with great solemnity.
+
+"Siwash George," sniffed Hootchinoo Bill.
+
+"That squaw-man," sneered Kink Mitchell.
+
+"I wouldn't put on my moccasins to stampede after anything he'd
+ever find," said Bill.
+
+"Same here," announced his partner.  "A cuss that's too plumb lazy
+to fish his own salmon.  That's why he took up with the Indians.
+S'pose that black brother-in-law of his,--lemme see, Skookum Jim,
+eh?--s'pose he's in on it?"
+
+The old bar-keeper nodded.  "Sure, an' what's more, all Forty Mile,
+exceptin' me an' a few cripples."
+
+"And drunks," added Kink Mitchell.
+
+"No-sir-ee!" the old man shouted emphatically.
+
+"I bet you the drinks Honkins ain't in on it!" Hootchinoo Bill
+cried with certitude.
+
+Ol' Jim's face lighted up.  "I takes you, Bill, an' you loses."
+
+"However did that ol' soak budge out of Forty Mile?" Mitchell
+demanded.
+
+"The ties him down an' throws him in the bottom of a polin'-boat,"
+ol' Jim explained.  "Come right in here, they did, an' takes him
+out of that there chair there in the corner, an' three more drunks
+they finds under the pianny.  I tell you-alls the whole camp hits
+up the Yukon for Dawson jes' like Sam Scratch was after them,--
+wimmen, children, babes in arms, the whole shebang.  Bidwell comes
+to me an' sez, sez he, 'Jim, I wants you to keep tab on the Monte
+Carlo.  I'm goin'.'
+
+"'Where's Barlow?' sez I.  'Gone,' sez he, 'an' I'm a-followin'
+with a load of whisky.'  An' with that, never waitin' for me to
+decline, he makes a run for his boat an' away he goes, polin' up
+river like mad.  So here I be, an' these is the first drinks I've
+passed out in three days."
+
+The partners looked at each other.
+
+"Gosh darn my buttoms!" said Hootchinoo Bill.  "Seems likes you and
+me, Kink, is the kind of folks always caught out with forks when it
+rains soup."
+
+"Wouldn't it take the saleratus out your dough, now?" said Kink
+Mitchell.  "A stampede of tin-horns, drunks, an' loafers."
+
+"An' squaw-men," added Bill.  "Not a genooine miner in the whole
+caboodle."
+
+"Genooine miners like you an' me, Kink," he went on academically,
+"is all out an' sweatin' hard over Birch Creek way.  Not a genooine
+miner in this whole crazy Dawson outfit, and I say right here, not
+a step do I budge for any Carmack strike.  I've got to see the
+colour of the dust first."
+
+"Same here," Mitchell agreed.  "Let's have another drink."
+
+Having wet this resolution, they beached the canoe, transferred its
+contents to their cabin, and cooked dinner.  But as the afternoon
+wore along they grew restive.  They were men used to the silence of
+the great wilderness, but this gravelike silence of a town worried
+them.  They caught themselves listening for familiar sounds--
+"waitin' for something to make a noise which ain't goin' to make a
+noise," as Bill put it.  They strolled through the deserted streets
+to the Monte Carlo for more drinks, and wandered along the river
+bank to the steamer landing, where only water gurgled as the eddy
+filled and emptied, and an occasional salmon leapt flashing into
+the sun.
+
+They sat down in the shade in front of the store and talked with
+the consumptive storekeeper, whose liability to hemorrhage
+accounted for his presence.  Bill and Kink told him how they
+intended loafing in their cabin and resting up after the hard
+summer's work.  They told him, with a certain insistence, that was
+half appeal for belief, half challenge for contradiction, how much
+they were going to enjoy their idleness.  But the storekeeper was
+uninterested.  He switched the conversation back to the strike on
+Klondike, and they could not keep him away from it.  He could think
+of nothing else, talk of nothing else, till Hootchinoo Bill rose up
+in anger and disgust.
+
+"Gosh darn Dawson, say I!" he cried.
+
+"Same here," said Kink Mitchell, with a brightening face.  "One'd
+think something was doin' up there, 'stead of bein' a mere stampede
+of greenhorns an' tinhorns."
+
+But a boat came into view from downstream.  It was long and slim.
+It hugged the bank closely, and its three occupants, standing
+upright, propelled it against the stiff current by means of long
+poles.
+
+"Circle City outfit," said the storekeeper.  "I was lookin' for 'em
+along by afternoon.  Forty Mile had the start of them by a hundred
+and seventy miles.  But gee! they ain't losin' any time!"
+
+'We'll just sit here quiet-like and watch 'em string by," Bill said
+complacently.
+
+As he spoke, another boat appeared in sight, followed after a brief
+interval by two others.  By this time the first boat was abreast of
+the men on the bank.  Its occupants did not cease poling while
+greetings were exchanged, and, though its progress was slow, a
+half-hour saw it out of sight up river.
+
+Still they came from below, boat after boat, in endless procession.
+The uneasiness of Bill and Kink increased.  They stole speculative,
+tentative glances at each other, and when their eyes met looked
+away in embarrassment.  Finally, however, their eyes met and
+neither looked away.
+
+Kink opened his mouth to speak, but words failed him and his mouth
+remained open while he continued to gaze at his partner.
+
+"Just what I was thinken', Kink," said Bill.
+
+They grinned sheepishly at each other, and by tacit consent started
+to walk away.  Their pace quickened, and by the time they arrived
+at their cabin they were on the run.
+
+"Can't lose no time with all that multitude a-rushin' by," Kink
+spluttered, as he jabbed the sour-dough can into the beanpot with
+one hand and with the other gathered in the frying-pan and coffee-
+pot.
+
+"Should say not," gasped Bill, his head and shoulders buried in a
+clothes-sack wherein were stored winter socks and underwear.  "I
+say, Kink, don't forget the saleratus on the corner shelf back of
+the stove."
+
+Half-an-hour later they were launching the canoe and loading up,
+while the storekeeper made jocular remarks about poor, weak mortals
+and the contagiousness of "stampedin' fever."  But when Bill and
+Kink thrust their long poles to bottom and started the canoe
+against the current, he called after them:-
+
+"Well, so-long and good luck!  And don't forget to blaze a stake or
+two for me!"
+
+They nodded their heads vigorously and felt sorry for the poor
+wretch who remained perforce behind.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Kink and Bill were sweating hard.  According to the revised
+Northland Scripture, the stampede is to the swift, the blazing of
+stakes to the strong, and the Crown in royalties, gathers to itself
+the fulness thereof.  Kink and Bill were both swift and strong.
+They took the soggy trail at a long, swinging gait that broke the
+hearts of a couple of tender-feet who tried to keep up with them.
+Behind, strung out between them and Dawson (where the boats were
+discarded and land travel began), was the vanguard of the Circle
+City outfit.  In the race from Forty Mile the partners had passed
+every boat, winning from the leading boat by a length in the Dawson
+eddy, and leaving its occupants sadly behind the moment their feet
+struck the trail.
+
+"Huh! couldn't see us for smoke," Hootchinoo Bill chuckled,
+flirting the stinging sweat from his brow and glancing swiftly back
+along the way they had come.
+
+Three men emerged from where the trail broke through the trees.
+Two followed close at their heels, and then a man and a woman shot
+into view.
+
+"Come on, you Kink!  Hit her up!  Hit her up!"
+
+Bill quickened his pace.  Mitchell glanced back in more leisurely
+fashion.
+
+"I declare if they ain't lopin'!"
+
+"And here's one that's loped himself out," said Bill, pointing to
+the side of the trail.
+
+A man was lying on his back panting in the culminating stages of
+violent exhaustion.  His face was ghastly, his eyes bloodshot and
+glazed, for all the world like a dying man.
+
+"CHECHAQUO!" Kink Mitchell grunted, and it was the grunt of the old
+"sour dough" for the green-horn, for the man who outfitted with
+"self-risin'" flour and used baking-powder in his biscuits.
+
+The partners, true to the old-timer custom, had intended to stake
+down-stream from the strike, but when they saw claim 81 BELOW
+blazed on a tree,--which meant fully eight miles below Discovery,--
+they changed their minds.  The eight miles were covered in less
+than two hours.  It was a killing pace, over so rough trail, and
+they passed scores of exhausted men that had fallen by the wayside.
+
+At Discovery little was to be learned of the upper creek.
+Cormack's Indian brother-in-law, Skookum Jim, had a hazy notion
+that the creek was staked as high as the 30's; but when Kink and
+Bill looked at the corner-stakes of 79 ABOVE, they threw their
+stampeding packs off their backs and sat down to smoke.  All their
+efforts had been vain.  Bonanza was staked from mouth to source,--
+"out of sight and across the next divide."  Bill complained that
+night as they fried their bacon and boiled their coffee over
+Cormack's fire at Discovery.
+
+"Try that pup," Carmack suggested next morning.
+
+"That pup" was a broad creek that flowed into Bonanza at 7 ABOVE.
+The partners received his advice with the magnificent contempt of
+the sour dough for a squaw-man, and, instead, spent the day on
+Adam's Creek, another and more likely-looking tributary of Bonanza.
+But it was the old story over again--staked to the sky-line.
+
+For threes days Carmack repeated his advice, and for three days
+they received it contemptuously.  But on the fourth day, there
+being nowhere else to go, they went up "that pup."  They knew that
+it was practically unstaked, but they had no intention of staking.
+The trip was made more for the purpose of giving vent to their ill-
+humour than for anything else.  They had become quite cynical,
+sceptical.  They jeered and scoffed at everything, and insulted
+every chechaquo they met along the way.
+
+At No. 23 the stakes ceased.  The remainder of the creek was open
+for location.
+
+"Moose pasture," sneered Kink Mitchell.
+
+But Bill gravely paced off five hundred feet up the creek and
+blazed the corner-stakes.  He had picked up the bottom of a candle-
+box, and on the smooth side he wrote the notice for his centre-
+stake:-
+
+
+THIS MOOSE PASTURE IS RESERVED FOR THE
+SWEDES AND CHECHAQUOS.
+- BILL RADER.
+
+
+Kink read it over with approval, saying:-
+
+"As them's my sentiments, I reckon I might as well subscribe."
+
+So the name of Charles Mitchell was added to the notice; and many
+an old sour dough's face relaxed that day at sight of the handiwork
+of a kindred spirit.
+
+"How's the pup?" Carmack inquired when they strolled back into
+camp.
+
+"To hell with pups!" was Hootchinoo Bill's reply.  "Me and Kink's
+goin' a-lookin' for Too Much Gold when we get rested up."
+
+Too Much Gold was the fabled creek of which all sour doughs
+dreamed, whereof it was said the gold was so thick that, in order
+to wash it, gravel must first be shovelled into the sluice-boxes.
+But the several days' rest, preliminary to the quest for Too Much
+Gold, brought a slight change in their plan, inasmuch as it brought
+one Ans Handerson, a Swede.
+
+Ans Handerson had been working for wages all summer at Miller Creek
+over on the Sixty Mile, and, the summer done, had strayed up
+Bonanza like many another waif helplessly adrift on the gold tides
+that swept willy-nilly across the land.  He was tall and lanky.
+His arms were long, like prehistoric man's, and his hands were like
+soup-plates, twisted and gnarled, and big-knuckled from toil.  He
+was slow of utterance and movement, and his eyes, pale blue as his
+hair was pale yellow, seemed filled with an immortal dreaming, the
+stuff of which no man knew, and himself least of all.  Perhaps this
+appearance of immortal dreaming was due to a supreme and vacuous
+innocence.  At any rate, this was the valuation men of ordinary
+clay put upon him, and there was nothing extraordinary about the
+composition of Hootchinoo Bill and Kink Mitchell.
+
+The partners had spent a day of visiting and gossip, and in the
+evening met in the temporary quarters of the Monte Carlo--a large
+tent were stampeders rested their weary bones and bad whisky sold
+at a dollar a drink.  Since the only money in circulation was dust,
+and since the house took the "down-weight" on the scales, a drink
+cost something more than a dollar.  Bill and Kink were not
+drinking, principally for the reason that their one and common sack
+was not strong enough to stand many excursions to the scales.
+
+"Say, Bill, I've got a chechaquo on the string for a sack of
+flour," Mitchell announced jubilantly.
+
+Bill looked interested and pleased.  Grub as scarce, and they were
+not over-plentifully supplied for the quest after Too Much Gold.
+
+"Flour's worth a dollar a pound," he answered.  "How like do you
+calculate to get your finger on it?"
+
+"Trade 'm a half-interest in that claim of ourn," Kink answered.
+
+"What claim?" Bill was surprised.  Then he remembered the
+reservation he had staked off for the Swedes, and said, "Oh!"
+
+"I wouldn't be so clost about it, though," he added.  "Give 'm the
+whole thing while you're about it, in a right free-handed way."
+
+Bill shook his head.  "If I did, he'd get clean scairt and prance
+off.  I'm lettin' on as how the ground is believed to be valuable,
+an' that we're lettin' go half just because we're monstrous short
+on grub.  After the dicker we can make him a present of the whole
+shebang."
+
+"If somebody ain't disregarded our notice," Bill objected, though
+he was plainly pleased at the prospect of exchanging the claim for
+a sack of flour.
+
+"She ain't jumped," Kink assured him.  "It's No. 24, and it stands.
+The chechaquos took it serious, and they begun stakin' where you
+left off.  Staked clean over the divide, too.  I was gassin' with
+one of them which has just got in with cramps in his legs."
+
+It was then, and for the first time, that they heard the slow and
+groping utterance of Ans Handerson.
+
+"Ay like the looks," he was saying to the bar-keeper.  "Ay tank Ay
+gat a claim."
+
+The partners winked at each other, and a few minutes later a
+surprised and grateful Swede was drinking bad whisky with two hard-
+hearted strangers.  But he was as hard-headed as they were hard-
+hearted.  The sack made frequent journeys to the scales, followed
+solicitously each time by Kink Mitchell's eyes, and still Ans
+Handerson did not loosen up.  In his pale blue eyes, as in summer
+seas, immortal dreams swam up and burned, but the swimming and the
+burning were due to the tales of gold and prospect pans he heard,
+rather than to the whisky he slid so easily down his throat.
+
+The  partners were in despair, though they appeared boisterous and
+jovial of speech and action.
+
+"Don't mind me, my friend," Hootchinoo Bill hiccoughed, his hand
+upon Ans Handerson's shoulder.  "Have another drink.  We're just
+celebratin' Kink's birthday here.  This is my pardner, Kink, Kink
+Mitchell.  An' what might your name be?"
+
+This learned, his hand descended resoundingly on Kink's back, and
+Kink simulated clumsy self-consciousness in that he was for the
+time being the centre of the rejoicing, while Ans Handerson looked
+pleased and asked them to have a drink with him.  It was the first
+and last time he treated, until the play changed and his canny soul
+was roused to unwonted prodigality.  But he paid for the liquor
+from a fairly healthy-looking sack.  "Not less 'n eight hundred in
+it," calculated the lynx-eyed Kink; and on the strength of it he
+took the first opportunity of a privy conversation with Bidwell,
+proprietor of the bad whisky and the tent.
+
+"Here's my sack, Bidwell," Kink said, with the intimacy and surety
+of one old-timer to another.  "Just weigh fifty dollars into it for
+a day or so more or less, and we'll be yours truly, Bill an' me."
+
+Thereafter the journeys of the sack to the scales were more
+frequent, and the celebration of Kink's natal day waxed hilarious.
+He even essayed to sing the old-timer's classic, "The Juice of the
+Forbidden Fruit," but broke down and drowned his embarrassment in
+another round of drinks.  Even Bidwell honoured him with a round or
+two on the house; and he and Bill were decently drunk by the time
+Ans Handerson's eyelids began to droop and his tongue gave promise
+of loosening.
+
+Bill grew affectionate, then confidential.  He told his troubles
+and hard luck to the bar-keeper and the world in general, and to
+Ans Handerson in particular.  He required no histrionic powers to
+act the part.  The bad whisky attended to that.  He worked himself
+into a great sorrow for himself and Bill, and his tears were
+sincere when he told how he and his partner were thinking of
+selling a half-interest in good ground just because they were short
+of grub.  Even Kink listened and believed.
+
+Ans Handerson's eyes were shining unholily as he asked, "How much
+you tank you take?"
+
+Bill and Kink did not hear him, and he was compelled to repeat his
+query.  They appeared reluctant.  He grew keener.  And he swayed
+back and forward, holding on to the bar and listened with all his
+ears while they conferred together on one side, and wrangled as to
+whether they should or not, and disagreed in stage whispers over
+the price they should set.
+
+"Two hundred and--hic!--fifty," Bill finally announced, "but we
+reckon as we won't sell."
+
+"Which is monstrous wise if I might chip in my little say,"
+seconded Bidwell.
+
+"Yes, indeedy," added Kink.  "We ain't in no charity business a-
+disgorgin' free an' generous to Swedes an' white men."
+
+"Ay tank we haf another drink," hiccoughed Ans Handerson, craftily
+changing the subject against a more propitious time.
+
+And thereafter, to bring about that propitious time, his own sack
+began to see-saw between his hip pocket and the scales.  Bill and
+Kink were coy, but they finally yielded to his blandishments.
+Whereupon he grew shy and drew Bidwell to one side.  He staggered
+exceedingly, and held on to Bidwell for support as he asked -
+
+"They ban all right, them men, you tank so?"
+
+"Sure," Bidwell answered heartily.  "Known 'em for years.  Old sour
+doughs.  When they sell a claim, they sell a claim.  They ain't no
+air-dealers."
+
+"Ay tank Ay buy," Ans Handerson announced, tottering back to the
+two men.
+
+But by now he was dreaming deeply, and he proclaimed he would have
+the whole claim or nothing.  This was the cause of great pain to
+Hootchinoo Bill.  He orated grandly against the "hawgishness" of
+chechaquos and Swedes, albeit he dozed between periods, his voice
+dying away to a gurgle, and his head sinking forward on his breast.
+But whenever roused by a nudge from Kink or Bidwell, he never
+failed to explode another volley of abuse and insult.
+
+Ans Handerson was calm under it all.  Each insult added to the
+value of the claim.  Such unamiable reluctance to sell advertised
+but one thing to him, and he was aware of a great relief when
+Hootchinoo Bill sank snoring to the floor, and he was free to turn
+his attention to his less intractable partner.
+
+Kink Mitchell was persuadable, though a poor mathematician.  He
+wept dolefully, but was willing to sell a half-interest for two
+hundred and fifty dollars or the whole claim for seven hundred and
+fifty.  Ans Handerson and Bidwell laboured to clear away his
+erroneous ideas concerning fractions, but their labour was vain.
+He spilled tears and regrets all over the bar and on their
+shoulders, which tears, however, did not wash away his opinion,
+that if one half was worth two hundred and fifty, two halves were
+worth three times as much.
+
+In the end,--and even Bidwell retained no more than hazy
+recollections of how the night terminated,--a bill of sale was
+drawn up, wherein Bill Rader and Charles Mitchell yielded up all
+right and title to the claim known as 24 ELDORADO, the same being
+the name the creek had received from some optimistic chechaquo.
+
+When Kink had signed, it took the united efforts of the three to
+arouse Bill.  Pen in hand, he swayed long over the document; and,
+each time he rocked back and forth, in Ans Handerson's eyes flashed
+and faded a wondrous golden vision.  When the precious signature
+was at last appended and the dust paid over, he breathed a great
+sigh, and sank to sleep under a table, where he dreamed immortally
+until morning.
+
+But the day was chill and grey.  He felt bad.  His first act,
+unconscious and automatic, was to feel for his sack.  Its lightness
+startled him.  Then, slowly, memories of the night thronged into
+his brain.  Rough voices disturbed him.  He opened his eyes and
+peered out from under the table.  A couple of early risers, or,
+rather, men who had been out on trail all night, were vociferating
+their opinions concerning the utter and loathsome worthlessness of
+Eldorado Creek.  He grew frightened, felt in his pocket, and found
+the deed to 24 ELDORADO.
+
+Ten minutes later Hootchinoo Bill and Kink Mitchell were roused
+from their blankets by a wild-eyed Swede that strove to force upon
+them an ink-scrawled and very blotty piece of paper.
+
+"Ay tank Ay take my money back," he gibbered.  "Ay tank Ay take my
+money back."
+
+Tears were in his eyes and throat.  They ran down his cheeks as he
+knelt before them and pleaded and implored.  But Bill and Kink did
+not laugh.  They might have been harder hearted.
+
+"First time I ever hear a man squeal over a minin' deal," Bill
+said.  "An' I make free to say 'tis too onusual for me to savvy."
+
+"Same here," Kink Mitchell remarked.  "Minin' deals is like horse-
+tradin'."
+
+They were honest in their wonderment.  They could not conceive of
+themselves raising a wail over a business transaction, so they
+could not understand it in another man.
+
+"The poor, ornery chechaquo," murmured Hootchinoo Bill, as they
+watched the sorrowing Swede disappear up the trail.
+
+"But this ain't Too Much Gold," Kink Mitchell said cheerfully.
+
+And ere the day was out they purchased flour and bacon at
+exorbitant prices with Ans Handerson's dust and crossed over the
+divide in the direction of the creeks that lie between Klondike and
+Indian River.
+
+Three months later they came back over the divide in the midst of a
+snow-storm and dropped down the trail to 24 ELDORADO.  It merely
+chanced that the trail led them that way.  They were not looking
+for the claim.  Nor could they see much through the driving white
+till they set foot upon the claim itself.  And then the air
+lightened, and they beheld a dump, capped by a windlass that a man
+was turning.  They saw him draw a bucket of gravel from the hole
+and tilt it on the edge of the dump.  Likewise they saw another,
+man, strangely familiar, filling a pan with the fresh gravel.  His
+hands were large; his hair wets pale yellow.  But before they
+reached him, he turned with the pan and fled toward a cabin.  He
+wore no hat, and the snow falling down his neck accounted for his
+haste.  Bill and Kink ran after him, and came upon him in the
+cabin, kneeling by the stove and washing the pan of gravel in a tub
+of water.
+
+He was too deeply engaged to notice more than that somebody had
+entered the cabin.  They stood at his shoulder and looked on.  He
+imparted to the pan a deft circular motion, pausing once or twice
+to rake out the larger particles of gravel with his fingers.  The
+water was muddy, and, with the pan buried in it, they could see
+nothing of its contents.  Suddenly he lifted the pan clear and sent
+the water out of it with a flirt.  A mass of yellow, like butter in
+a churn, showed across the bottom.
+
+Hootchinoo Bill swallowed.  Never in his life had he dreamed of so
+rich a test-pan.
+
+"Kind of thick, my friend," he said huskily.  "How much might you
+reckon that-all to be?"
+
+Ans Handerson did not look up as he replied, "Ay tank fafty
+ounces."
+
+"You must be scrumptious rich, then, eh?"
+
+Still Ans Handerson kept his head down, absorbed in putting in the
+fine touches which wash out the last particles of dross, though he
+answered, "Ay tank Ay ban wort' five hundred t'ousand dollar."
+
+"Gosh!" said Hootchinoo Bill, and he said it reverently.
+
+"Yes, Bill, gosh!" said Kink Mitchell; and they went out softly and
+closed the door.
+
+
+
+THE ONE THOUSAND DOZEN
+
+
+
+David Rasmunsen was a hustler, and, like many a greater man, a man
+of the one idea.  Wherefore, when the clarion call of the North
+rang on his ear, he conceived an adventure in eggs and bent all his
+energy to its achievement.  He figured briefly and to the point,
+and the adventure became iridescent-hued, splendid.  That eggs
+would sell at Dawson for five dollars a dozen was a safe working
+premise.  Whence it was incontrovertible that one thousand dozen
+would bring, in the Golden Metropolis, five thousand dollars.
+
+On the other hand, expense was to be considered, and he considered
+it well, for he was a careful man, keenly practical, with a hard
+head and a heart that imagination never warmed.  At fifteen cents a
+dozen, the initial cost of his thousand dozen would be one hundred
+and fifty dollars, a mere bagatelle in face of the enormous profit.
+And suppose, just suppose, to be wildly extravagant for once, that
+transportation for himself and eggs should run up eight hundred and
+fifty more; he would still have four thousand clear cash and clean
+when the last egg was disposed of and the last dust had rippled
+into his sack
+
+"You see, Alma,"--he figured it over with his wife, the cosy
+dining-room submerged in a sea of maps, government surveys, guide-
+books, and Alaskan itineraries,--"you see, expenses don't really
+begin till you make Dyea--fifty dollars'll cover it with a first-
+class passage thrown in.  Now from Dyea to Lake Linderman, Indian
+packers take your goods over for twelve cents a pound, twelve
+dollars a hundred, or one hundred and twenty dollars a thousand.
+Say I have fifteen hundred pounds, it'll cost one hundred and
+eighty dollars--call it two hundred and be safe.  I am creditably
+informed by a Klondiker just come out that I can buy a boat for
+three hundred.  But the same man says I'm sure to get a couple of
+passengers for one hundred and fifty each, which will give me the
+boat for nothing, and, further, they can help me manage it.  And .
+. . that's all; I put my eggs ashore from the boat at Dawson.  Now
+let me see how much is that?"
+
+"Fifty dollars from San Francisco to Dyea, two hundred from Dyea to
+Linderman, passengers pay for the boat--two hundred and fifty all
+told," she summed up swiftly.
+
+"And a hundred for my clothes and personal outfit," he went on
+happily; "that leaves a margin of five hundred for emergencies.
+And what possible emergencies can arise?"
+
+Alma shrugged her shoulders and elevated her brows.  If that vast
+Northland was capable of swallowing up a man and a thousand dozen
+eggs, surely there was room and to spare for whatever else he might
+happen to possess.  So she thought, but she said nothing.  She knew
+David Rasmunsen too well to say anything.
+
+"Doubling the time because of chance delays, I should make the trip
+in two months.  Think of it, Alma!  Four thousand in two months!
+Beats the paltry hundred a month I'm getting now.  Why, we'll build
+further out where we'll have more space, gas in every room, and a
+view, and the rent of the cottage'll pay taxes, insurance, and
+water, and leave something over.  And then there's always the
+chance of my striking it and coming out a millionaire.  Now tell
+me, Alma, don't you think I'm very moderate?"
+
+And Alma could hardly think otherwise.  Besides, had not her own
+cousin,--though a remote and distant one to be sure, the black
+sheep, the harum-scarum, the ne'er-do-well,--had not he come down
+out of that weird North country with a hundred thousand in yellow
+dust, to say nothing of a half-ownership in the hole from which it
+came?
+
+David Rasmunsen's grocer was surprised when he found him weighing
+eggs in the scales at the end of the counter, and Rasmunsen himself
+was more surprised when he found that a dozen eggs weighed a pound
+and a half--fifteen hundred pounds for his thousand dozen!  There
+would be no weight left for his clothes, blankets, and cooking
+utensils, to say nothing of the grub he must necessarily consume by
+the way.  His calculations were all thrown out, and he was just
+proceeding to recast them when he hit upon the idea of weighing
+small eggs.  "For whether they be large or small, a dozen eggs is a
+dozen eggs," he observed sagely to himself; and a dozen small ones
+he found to weigh but a pound and a quarter.  Thereat the city of
+San Francisco was overrun by anxious-eyed emissaries, and
+commission houses and dairy associations were startled by a sudden
+demand for eggs running not more than twenty ounces to the dozen.
+
+Rasmunsen mortgaged the little cottage for a thousand dollars,
+arranged for his wife to make a prolonged stay among her own
+people, threw up his job, and started North.  To keep within his
+schedule he compromised on a second-class passage, which, because
+of the rush, was worse than steerage; and in the late summer, a
+pale and wabbly man, he disembarked with his eggs on the Dyea
+beach.  But it did not take him long to recover his land legs and
+appetite.  His first interview with the Chilkoot packers
+straightened him up and stiffened his backbone.  Forty cents a
+pound they demanded for the twenty-eight-mile portage, and while he
+caught his breath and swallowed, the price went up to forty-three.
+Fifteen husky Indians put the straps on his packs at forty-five,
+but took them off at an offer of forty-seven from a Skaguay Croesus
+in dirty shirt and ragged overalls who had lost his horses on the
+White Pass trail and was now making a last desperate drive at the
+country by way of Chilkoot.
+
+But Rasmunsen was clean grit, and at fifty cents found takers, who,
+two days later, set his eggs down intact at Linderman.  But fifty
+cents a pound is a thousand dollars a ton, and his fifteen hundred
+pounds had exhausted his emergency fund and left him stranded at
+the Tantalus point where each day he saw the fresh-whipsawed boats
+departing for Dawson.  Further, a great anxiety brooded over the
+camp where the boats were built.  Men worked frantically, early and
+late, at the height of their endurance, caulking, nailing, and
+pitching in a frenzy of haste for which adequate explanation was
+not far to seek.  Each day the snow-line crept farther down the
+bleak, rock-shouldered peaks, and gale followed gale, with sleet
+and slush and snow, and in the eddies and quiet places young ice
+formed and thickened through the fleeting hours.  And each morn,
+toil-stiffened men turned wan faces across the lake to see if the
+freeze-up had come.  For the freeze-up heralded the death of their
+hope--the hope that they would be floating down the swift river ere
+navigation closed on the chain of lakes.
+
+To harrow Rasmunsen's soul further, he discovered three competitors
+in the egg business.  It was true that one, a little German, had
+gone broke and was himself forlornly back-tripping the last pack of
+the portage; but the other two had boats nearly completed, and were
+daily supplicating the god of merchants and traders to stay the
+iron hand of winter for just another day.  But the iron hand closed
+down over the land.  Men were being frozen in the blizzard which
+swept Chilkoot, and Rasmunsen frosted his toes ere he was aware.
+He found a chance to go passenger with his freight in a boat just
+shoving off through the rubble, but two hundred hard cash, was
+required, and he had no money.
+
+"Ay tank you yust wait one leedle w'ile," said the Swedish boat-
+builder, who had struck his Klondike right there and was wise
+enough to know it--"one leedle w'ile und I make you a tam fine
+skiff boat, sure Pete."
+
+With this unpledged word to go on, Rasmunsen hit the back trail to
+Crater Lake, where he fell in with two press correspondents whose
+tangled baggage was strewn from Stone House, over across the Pass,
+and as far as Happy Camp.
+
+"Yes," he said with consequence.  "I've a thousand dozen eggs at
+Linderman, and my boat's just about got the last seam caulked.
+Consider myself in luck to get it.  Boats are at a premium, you
+know, and none to be had."
+
+Whereupon and almost with bodily violence the correspondents
+clamoured to go with him, fluttered greenbacks before his eyes, and
+spilled yellow twenties from hand to hand.  He could not hear of
+it, but they over-persuaded him, and he reluctantly consented to
+take them at three hundred apiece.  Also they pressed upon him the
+passage money in advance.  And while they wrote to their respective
+journals concerning the Good Samaritan with the thousand dozen
+eggs, the Good Samaritan was hurrying back to the Swede at
+Linderman.
+
+"Here, you!  Gimme that boat!" was his salutation, his hand
+jingling the correspondents' gold pieces and his eyes hungrily bent
+upon the finished craft.
+
+The Swede regarded him stolidly and shook his head.
+
+"How much is the other fellow paying?  Three hundred?  Well, here's
+four.  Take it."
+
+He tried to press it upon him, but the man backed away.
+
+"Ay tank not.  Ay say him get der skiff boat.  You yust wait--"
+
+'Here's six hundred.  Last call.  Take it or leave it.  Tell 'm
+it's a mistake.'
+
+The Swede wavered.  "Ay tank yes," he finally said, and the last
+Rasmunsen saw of him his vocabulary was going to wreck in a vain
+effort to explain the mistake to the other fellows.
+
+The German slipped and broke his ankle on the steep hogback above
+Deep Lake, sold out his stock for a dollar a dozen, and with the
+proceeds hired Indian packers to carry him back to Dyea.  But on
+the morning Rasmunsen shoved off with his correspondents, his two
+rivals followed suit.
+
+'How many you got?" one of them, a lean little New Englander,
+called out.
+
+"One thousand dozen," Rasmunsen answered proudly.
+
+"Huh!  I'll go you even stakes I beat you in with my eight
+hundred."
+
+The correspondents offered to lend him the money; but Rasmunsen
+declined, and the Yankee closed with the remaining rival, a brawny
+son of the sea and sailor of ships and things, who promised to show
+them all a wrinkle or two when it came to cracking on.  And crack
+on he did, with a large tarpaulin square-sail which pressed the bow
+half under at every jump.  He was the first to run out of
+Linderman, but, disdaining the portage, piled his loaded boat on
+the rocks in the boiling rapids.  Rasmunsen and the Yankee, who
+likewise had two passengers, portaged across on their backs and
+then lined their empty boats down through the bad water to Bennett.
+
+Bennett was a twenty-five-mile lake, narrow and deep, a funnel
+between the mountains through which storms ever romped.  Rasmunsen
+camped on the sand-pit at its head, where were many men and boats
+bound north in the teeth of the Arctic winter.  He awoke in the
+morning to find a piping gale from the south, which caught the
+chill from the whited peaks and glacial valleys and blew as cold as
+north wind ever blew.  But it was fair, and he also found the
+Yankee staggering past the first bold headland with all sail set.
+Boat after boat was getting under way, and the correspondents fell
+to with enthusiasm.
+
+"We'll catch him before Cariboo Crossing," they assured Rasmunsen,
+as they ran up the sail and the Alma took the first icy spray over
+her bow.
+
+Now Rasmunsen all his life had been prone to cowardice on water,
+but he clung to the kicking steering-oar with set face and
+determined jaw.  His thousand dozen were there in the boat before
+his eyes, safely secured beneath the correspondents' baggage, and
+somehow, before his eyes were the little cottage and the mortgage
+for a thousand dollars.
+
+It was bitter cold.  Now and again he hauled in the steering-sweep
+and put out a fresh one while his passengers chopped the ice from
+the blade.  Wherever the spray struck, it turned instantly to
+frost, and the dipping boom of the spritsail was quickly fringed
+with icicles.  The Alma strained and hammered through the big seas
+till the seams and butts began to spread, but in lieu of bailing
+the correspondents chopped ice and flung it overboard.  There was
+no let-up.  The mad race with winter was on, and the boats tore
+along in a desperate string.
+
+"W-w-we can't stop to save our souls!" one of the correspondents
+chattered, from cold, not fright.
+
+"That's right!  Keep her down the middle, old man!" the other
+encouraged.
+
+Rasmunsen replied with an idiotic grin.  The iron-bound shores were
+in a lather of foam, and even down the middle the only hope was to
+keep running away from the big seas.  To lower sail was to be
+overtaken and swamped.  Time and again they passed boats pounding
+among the rocks, and once they saw one on the edge of the breakers
+about to strike.  A little craft behind them, with two men, jibed
+over and turned bottom up.
+
+"W-w-watch out, old man," cried he of the chattering teeth.
+
+Rasmunsen grinned and tightened his aching grip on the sweep.
+Scores of times had the send of the sea caught the big square stern
+of the Alma and thrown her off from dead before it till the after
+leach of the spritsail fluttered hollowly, and each time, and only
+with all his strength, had he forced her back.  His grin by then
+had become fixed, and it disturbed the correspondents to look at
+him.
+
+They roared down past an isolated rock a hundred yards from shore.
+From its wave-drenched top a man shrieked wildly, for the instant
+cutting the storm with his voice.  But the next instant the Alma
+was by, and the rock growing a black speck in the troubled froth.
+
+"That settles the Yankee!  Where's the sailor?" shouted one of his
+passengers.
+
+Rasmunsen shot a glance over his shoulder at a black square-sail.
+He had seen it leap up out of the grey to windward, and for an
+hour, off and on, had been watching it grow.  The sailor had
+evidently repaired damages and was making up for lost time.
+
+"Look at him come!"
+
+Both passengers stopped chopping ice to watch.  Twenty miles of
+Bennett were behind them--room and to spare for the sea to toss up
+its mountains toward the sky.  Sinking and soaring like a storm-
+god, the sailor drove by them.  The huge sail seemed to grip the
+boat from the crests of the waves, to tear it bodily out of the
+water, and fling it crashing and smothering down into the yawning
+troughs.
+
+"The sea'll never catch him!"
+
+"But he'll r-r-run her nose under!"
+
+Even as they spoke, the black tarpaulin swooped from sight behind a
+big comber.  The next wave rolled over the spot, and the next, but
+the boat did not reappear.  The Alma rushed by the place.  A little
+riffraff of oats and boxes was seen.  An arm thrust up and a shaggy
+head broke surface a score of yards away.
+
+For a time there was silence.  As the end of the lake came in
+sight, the waves began to leap aboard with such steady recurrence
+that the correspondents no longer chopped ice but flung the water
+out with buckets.  Even this would not do, and, after a shouted
+conference with Rasmunsen, they attacked the baggage.  Flour,
+bacon, beans, blankets, cooking-stove, ropes, odds and ends,
+everything they could get hands on, flew overboard.  The boat
+acknowledged it at once, taking less water and rising more
+buoyantly.
+
+"That'll do!" Rasmunsen called sternly, as they applied themselves
+to the top layer of eggs.
+
+"The h-hell it will!" answered the shivering one, savagely.  With
+the exception of their notes, films, and cameras, they had
+sacrificed their outfit.  He bent over, laid hold of an egg-box,
+and began to worry it out from under the lashing.
+
+"Drop it!  Drop it, I say!"
+
+Rasmunsen had managed to draw his revolver, and with the crook of
+his arm over the sweep head, was taking aim.  The correspondent
+stood up on the thwart, balancing back and forth, his face twisted
+with menace and speechless anger.
+
+"My God!"
+
+So cried his brother correspondent, hurling himself, face downward,
+into the bottom of the boat.  The Alma, under the divided attention
+of Rasmunsen, had been caught by a great mass of water and whirled
+around.  The after leach hollowed, the sail emptied and jibed, and
+the boom, sweeping with terrific force across the boat, carried the
+angry correspondent overboard with a broken back.  Mast and sail
+had gone over the side as well.  A drenching sea followed, as the
+boat lost headway, and Rasmunsen sprang to the bailing bucket
+
+Several boats hurtled past them in the next half-hour,--small
+boats, boats of their own size, boats afraid, unable to do aught
+but run madly on.  Then a ten-ton barge, at imminent risk of
+destruction, lowered sail to windward and lumbered down upon them.
+
+"Keep off!  Keep off!" Rasmunsen screamed.
+
+But his low gunwale ground against the heavy craft, and the
+remaining correspondent clambered aboard.  Rasmunsen was over the
+eggs like a cat and in the bow of the Alma, striving with numb
+fingers to bend the hauling-lines together.
+
+"Come on!" a red-whiskered man yelled at him.
+
+"I've a thousand dozen eggs here," he shouted back.  "Gimme a tow!
+I'll pay you!"
+
+"Come on!" they howled in chorus.
+
+A big whitecap broke just beyond, washing over the barge and
+leaving the Alma half swamped.  The men cast off, cursing him as
+they ran up their sail.  Rasmunsen cursed back and fell to bailing.
+The mast and sail, like a sea anchor, still fast by the halyards,
+held the boat head on to wind and sea and gave him a chance to
+fight the water out.
+
+Three hours later, numbed, exhausted, blathering like a lunatic,
+but still bailing, he went ashore on an ice-strewn beach near
+Cariboo Crossing.  Two men, a government courier and a half-breed
+voyageur, dragged him out of the surf, saved his cargo, and beached
+the Alma.  They were paddling out of the country in a Peterborough,
+and gave him shelter for the night in their storm-bound camp.  Next
+morning they departed, but he elected to stay by his eggs.  And
+thereafter the name and fame of the man with the thousand dozen
+eggs began to spread through the land.  Gold-seekers who made in
+before the freeze-up carried the news of his coming.  Grizzled old-
+timers of Forty Mile and Circle City, sour doughs with leathern
+jaws and bean-calloused stomachs, called up dream memories of
+chickens and green things at mention of his name.  Dyea and Skaguay
+took an interest in his being, and questioned his progress from
+every man who came over the passes, while Dawson--golden,
+omeletless Dawson--fretted and worried, and way-laid every chance
+arrival for word of him.
+
+But of this Rasmunsen knew nothing.  The day after the wreck he
+patched up the Alma and pulled out.  A cruel east wind blew in his
+teeth from Tagish, but he got the oars over the side and bucked
+manfully into it, though half the time he was drifting backward and
+chopping ice from the blades.  According to the custom of the
+country, he was driven ashore at Windy Arm; three times on Tagish
+saw him swamped and beached; and Lake Marsh held him at the freeze-
+up.  The Alma was crushed in the jamming of the floes, but the eggs
+were intact.  These he back-tripped two miles across the ice to the
+shore, where he built a cache, which stood for years after and was
+pointed out by men who knew.
+
+Half a thousand frozen miles stretched between him and Dawson, and
+the waterway was closed.  But Rasmunsen, with a peculiar tense look
+in his face, struck back up the lakes on foot.  What he suffered on
+that lone trip, with nought but a single blanket, an axe, and a
+handful of beans, is not given to ordinary mortals to know.  Only
+the Arctic adventurer may understand.  Suffice that he was caught
+in a blizzard on Chilkoot and left two of his toes with the surgeon
+at Sheep Camp.  Yet he stood on his feet and washed dishes in the
+scullery of the PAWONA to the Puget Sound, and from there passed
+coal on a P. S. boat to San Francisco.
+
+It was a haggard, unkempt man who limped across the shining office
+floor to raise a second mortgage from the bank people.  His hollow
+cheeks betrayed themselves through the scraggy beard, and his eyes
+seemed to have retired into deep caverns where they burned with
+cold fires.  His hands were grained from exposure and hard work,
+and the nails were rimmed with tight-packed dirt and coal-dust.  He
+spoke vaguely of eggs and ice-packs, winds and tides; but when they
+declined to let him have more than a second thousand, his talk
+became incoherent, concerning itself chiefly with the price of dogs
+and dog-food, and such things as snowshoes and moccasins and winter
+trails.  They let him have fifteen hundred, which was more than the
+cottage warranted, and breathed easier when he scrawled his
+signature and passed out the door.
+
+Two weeks later he went over Chilkoot with three dog sleds of five
+dogs each.  One team he drove, the two Indians with him driving the
+others.  At Lake Marsh they broke out the cache and loaded up.  But
+there was no trail.  He was the first in over the ice, and to him
+fell the task of packing the snow and hammering away through the
+rough river jams.  Behind him he often observed a camp-fire smoke
+trickling thinly up through the quiet air, and he wondered why the
+people did not overtake him.  For he was a stranger to the land and
+did not understand.  Nor could he understand his Indians when they
+tried to explain.  This they conceived to be a hardship, but when
+they balked and refused to break camp of mornings, he drove them to
+their work at pistol point.
+
+When he slipped through an ice bridge near the White Horse and
+froze his foot, tender yet and oversensitive from the previous
+freezing, the Indians looked for him to lie up.  But he sacrificed
+a blanket, and, with his foot incased in an enormous moccasin, big
+as a water-bucket, continued to take his regular turn with the
+front sled.  Here was the cruellest work, and they respected him,
+though on the side they rapped their foreheads with their knuckles
+and significantly shook their heads.  One night they tried to run
+away, but the zip-zip of his bullets in the snow brought them back,
+snarling but convinced.  Whereupon, being only savage Chilkat men,
+they put their heads together to kill him; but he slept like a cat,
+and, waking or sleeping, the chance never came.  Often they tried
+to tell him the import of the smoke wreath in the rear, but he
+could not comprehend and grew suspicious of them.  And when they
+sulked or shirked, he was quick to let drive at them between the
+eyes, and quick to cool their heated souls with sight of his ready
+revolver.
+
+And so it went--with mutinous men, wild dogs, and a trail that
+broke the heart.  He fought the men to stay with him, fought the
+dogs to keep them away from the eggs, fought the ice, the cold, and
+the pain of his foot, which would not heal.  As fast as the young
+tissue renewed, it was bitten and scared by the frost, so that a
+running sore developed, into which he could almost shove his fist.
+In the mornings, when he first put his weight upon it, his head
+went dizzy, and he was near to fainting from the pain; but later on
+in the day it usually grew numb, to recommence when he crawled into
+his blankets and tried to sleep.  Yet he, who had been a clerk and
+sat at a desk all his days, toiled till the Indians were exhausted,
+and even out-worked the dogs.  How hard he worked, how much he
+suffered, he did not know.  Being a man of the one idea, now that
+the idea had come, it mastered him.  In the foreground of his
+consciousness was Dawson, in the background his thousand dozen
+eggs, and midway between the two his ego fluttered, striving always
+to draw them together to a glittering golden point.  This golden
+point was the five thousand dollars, the consummation of the idea
+and the point of departure for whatever new idea might present
+itself.  For the rest, he was a mere automaton.  He was unaware of
+other things, seeing them as through a glass darkly, and giving
+them no thought.  The work of his hands he did with machine-like
+wisdom; likewise the work of his head.  So the look on his face
+grew very tense, till even the Indians were afraid of it, and
+marvelled at the strange white man who had made them slaves and
+forced them to toil with such foolishness.
+
+Then came a snap on Lake Le Barge, when the cold of outer space
+smote the tip of the planet, and the force ranged sixty and odd
+degrees below zero.  Here, labouring with open mouth that he might
+breathe more freely, he chilled his lungs, and for the rest of the
+trip he was troubled with a dry, hacking cough, especially
+irritable in smoke of camp or under stress of undue exertion.  On
+the Thirty Mile river he found much open water, spanned by
+precarious ice bridges and fringed with narrow rim ice, tricky and
+uncertain.  The rim ice was impossible to reckon on, and he dared
+it without reckoning, falling back on his revolver when his drivers
+demurred.  But on the ice bridges, covered with snow though they
+were, precautions could be taken.  These they crossed on their
+snowshoes, with long poles, held crosswise in their hands, to which
+to cling in case of accident.  Once over, the dogs were called to
+follow.  And on such a bridge, where the absence of the centre ice
+was masked by the snow, one of the Indians met his end.  He went
+through as quickly and neatly as a knife through thin cream, and
+the current swept him from view down under the stream ice.
+
+That night his mate fled away through the pale moonlight, Rasmunsen
+futilely puncturing the silence with his revolver--a thing that he
+handled with more celerity than cleverness.  Thirty-six hours later
+the Indian made a police camp on the Big Salmon.
+
+"Um--um--um funny mans--what you call?--top um head all loose," the
+interpreter explained to the puzzled captain.  "Eh?  Yep, clazy,
+much clazy mans.  Eggs, eggs, all a time eggs--savvy?  Come bime-
+by."
+
+It was several days before Rasmunsen arrived, the three sleds
+lashed together, and all the dogs in a single team.  It was
+awkward, and where the going was bad he was compelled to back-trip
+it sled by sled, though he managed most of the time, through
+herculean efforts, to bring all along on the one haul.  He did not
+seem moved when the captain of police told him his man was hitting
+the high places for Dawson, and was by that time, probably, half-
+way between Selkirk and Stewart.  Nor did he appear interested when
+informed that the police had broken the trail as far as Pelly; for
+he had attained to a fatalistic acceptance of all natural
+dispensations, good or ill.  But when they told him that Dawson was
+in the bitter clutch of famine, he smiled, threw the harness on his
+dogs, and pulled out.
+
+But it was at his next halt that the mystery of the smoke was
+explained.  With the word at Big Salmon that the trail was broken
+to Pelly, there was no longer any need for the smoke wreath to
+linger in his wake; and Rasmunsen, crouching over lonely fire, saw
+a motley string of sleds go by.  First came the courier and the
+half-breed who had hauled him out from Bennett; then mail-carriers
+for Circle City, two sleds of them, and a mixed following of
+ingoing Klondikers.  Dogs and men were fresh and fat, while
+Rasmunsen and his brutes were jaded and worn down to the skin and
+bone.  They of the smoke wreath had travelled one day in three,
+resting and reserving their strength for the dash to come when
+broken trail was met with; while each day he had plunged and
+floundered forward, breaking the spirit of his dogs and robbing
+them of their mettle.
+
+As for himself, he was unbreakable.  They thanked him kindly for
+his efforts in their behalf, those fat, fresh men,--thanked him
+kindly, with broad grins and ribald laughter; and now, when he
+understood, he made no answer.  Nor did he cherish silent
+bitterness.  It was immaterial.  The idea--the fact behind the
+idea--was not changed.  Here he was and his thousand dozen; there
+was Dawson; the problem was unaltered.
+
+At the Little Salmon, being short of dog food, the dogs got into
+his grub, and from there to Selkirk he lived on beans--coarse,
+brown beans, big beans, grossly nutritive, which griped his stomach
+and doubled him up at two-hour intervals.  But the Factor at
+Selkirk had a notice on the door of the Post to the effect that no
+steamer had been up the Yukon for two years, and in consequence
+grub was beyond price.  He offered to swap flour, however, at the
+rate of a cupful of each egg, but Rasmunsen shook his head and hit
+the trail.  Below the Post he managed to buy frozen horse hide for
+the dogs, the horses having been slain by the Chilkat cattle men,
+and the scraps and offal preserved by the Indians.  He tackled the
+hide himself, but the hair worked into the bean sores of his mouth,
+and was beyond endurance.
+
+Here at Selkirk he met the forerunners of the hungry exodus of
+Dawson, and from there on they crept over the trail, a dismal
+throng.  "No grub!" was the song they sang.  "No grub, and had to
+go."  "Everybody holding candles for a rise in the spring."  "Flour
+dollar 'n a half a pound, and no sellers."
+
+"Eggs?" one of them answered.  "Dollar apiece, but there ain't
+none."
+
+Rasmunsen made a rapid calculation.  "Twelve thousand dollars," he
+said aloud.
+
+"Hey?" the man asked.
+
+"Nothing," he answered, and MUSHED the dogs along.
+
+When he arrived at Stewart River, seventy from Dawson, five of his
+dogs were gone, and the remainder were falling in the traces.  He,
+also, was in the traces, hauling with what little strength was left
+in him.  Even then he was barely crawling along ten miles a day.
+His cheek-bones and nose, frost-bitten again and again, were turned
+bloody-black and hideous.  The thumb, which was separated from the
+fingers by the gee-pole, had likewise been nipped and gave him
+great pain.  The monstrous moccasin still incased his foot, and
+strange pains were beginning to rack the leg.  At Sixty Mile, the
+last beans, which he had been rationing for some time, were
+finished; yet he steadfastly refused to touch the eggs.  He could
+not reconcile his mind to the legitimacy of it, and staggered and
+fell along the way to Indian River.  Here a fresh-killed moose and
+an open-handed old-timer gave him and his dogs new strength, and at
+Ainslie's he felt repaid for it all when a stampede, ripe from
+Dawson in five hours, was sure he could get a dollar and a quarter
+for every egg he possessed.
+
+He came up the steep bank by the Dawson barracks with fluttering
+heart and shaking knees.  The dogs were so weak that he was forced
+to rest them, and, waiting, he leaned limply against the gee-pole.
+A man, an eminently decorous-looking man, came sauntering by in a
+great bearskin coat.  He glanced at Rasmunsen curiously, then
+stopped and ran a speculative eye over the dogs and the three
+lashed sleds.
+
+"What you got?" he asked.
+
+"Eggs," Rasmunsen answered huskily, hardly able to pitch his voice
+above a whisper.
+
+"Eggs!  Whoopee!  Whoopee!"  He sprang up into the air, gyrated
+madly, and finished with half-a-dozen war steps.  "You don't say--
+all of 'em?"
+
+"All of 'em."
+
+"Say, you must be the Egg Man."  He walked around and viewed
+Rasmunsen from the other side.  "Come, now, ain't you the Egg Man?"
+
+Rasmunsen didn't know, but supposed he was, and the man sobered
+down a bit.
+
+"What d'ye expect to get for 'em?" he asked cautiously.
+
+Rasmunsen became audacious. "Dollar 'n a half," he said.
+
+"Done!" the man came back promptly.  "Gimme a dozen."
+
+"I--I mean a dollar 'n a half apiece," Rasmunsen hesitatingly
+explained.
+
+"Sure.  I heard you.  Make it two dozen.  Here's the dust."
+
+The man pulled out a healthy gold sack the size of a small sausage
+and knocked it negligently against the gee-pole.  Rasmunsen felt a
+strange trembling in the pit of his stomach, a tickling of the
+nostrils, and an almost overwhelming desire to sit down and cry.
+But a curious, wide-eyed crowd was beginning to collect, and man
+after man was calling out for eggs.  He was without scales, but the
+man with the bearskin coat fetched a pair and obligingly weighed in
+the dust while Rasmunsen passed out the goods.  Soon there was a
+pushing and shoving and shouldering, and a great clamour.
+Everybody wanted to buy and to be served first.  And as the
+excitement grew, Rasmunsen cooled down.  This would never do.
+There must be something behind the fact of their buying so eagerly.
+It would be wiser if he rested first and sized up the market.
+Perhaps eggs were worth two dollars apiece.  Anyway, whenever he
+wished to sell, he was sure of a dollar and a half.  "Stop!" he
+cried, when a couple of hundred had been sold.  "No more now.  I'm
+played out.  I've got to get a cabin, and then you can come and see
+me."
+
+A groan went up at this, but the man with the bearskin coat
+approved.  Twenty-four of the frozen eggs went rattling in his
+capacious pockets, and he didn't care whether the rest of the town
+ate or not.  Besides, he could see Rasmunsen was on his last legs.
+
+"There's a cabin right around the second corner from the Monte
+Carlo," he told him--"the one with the sody-bottle window.  It
+ain't mine, but I've got charge of it.  Rents for ten a day and
+cheap for the money.  You move right in, and I'll see you later.
+Don't forget the sody-bottle window."
+
+"Tra-la-loo!" he called back a moment later.  "I'm goin' up the
+hill to eat eggs and dream of home."
+
+On his way to the cabin, Rasmunsen recollected he was hungry and
+bought a small supply of provisions at the N. A. T. & T. store--
+also a beefsteak at the butcher shop and dried salmon for the dogs.
+He found the cabin without difficulty, and left the dogs in the
+harness while he started the fire and got the coffee under way.
+
+A dollar 'n a half apiece--one thousand dozen--eighteen thousand
+dollars!" he kept muttering it to himself, over and over, as he
+went about his work.
+
+As he flopped the steak into the frying-pan the door opened.  He
+turned.  It was the man with the bearskin coat.  He seemed to come
+in with determination, as though bound on some explicit errand, but
+as he looked at Rasmunsen an expression of perplexity came into his
+face.
+
+"I say--now I say--" he began, then halted.
+
+Rasmunsen wondered if he wanted the rent.
+
+"I say, damn it, you know, them eggs is bad."
+
+Rasmunsen staggered.  He felt as though some one had struck him an
+astounding blow between the eyes.  The walls of the cabin reeled
+and tilted up.  He put out his hand to steady himself and rested it
+on the stove.  The sharp pain and the smell of the burning flesh
+brought him back to himself.
+
+"I see," he said slowly, fumbling in his pocket for the sack.  "You
+want your money back."
+
+"It ain't the money," the man said, "but hain't you got any eggs--
+good?"
+
+Rasmunsen shook his head.  "You'd better take the money."
+
+But the man refused and backed away.  "I'll come back," he said,
+"when you've taken stock, and get what's comin'."
+
+Rasmunsen rolled the chopping-block into the cabin and carried in
+the eggs.  He went about it quite calmly.  He took up the hand-axe,
+and, one by one, chopped the eggs in half.  These halves he
+examined carefully and let fall to the floor.  At first he sampled
+from the different cases, then deliberately emptied one case at a
+time.  The heap on the floor grew larger.  The coffee boiled over
+and the smoke of the burning beefsteak filled the cabin.  He
+chopped steadfastly and monotonously till the last case was
+finished.
+
+Somebody knocked at the door, knocked again, and let himself in.
+
+"What a mess!" he remarked, as he paused and surveyed the scene.
+
+The severed eggs were beginning to thaw in the heat of the stove,
+and a miserable odour was growing stronger.
+
+"Must a-happened on the steamer," he suggested.
+
+Rasmunsen looked at him long and blankly.
+
+"I'm Murray, Big Jim Murray, everybody knows me," the man
+volunteered.  "I'm just hearin' your eggs is rotten, and I'm
+offerin' you two hundred for the batch.  They ain't good as salmon,
+but still they're fair scoffin's for dogs."
+
+Rasmunsen seemed turned to stone.  He did not move.  "You go to
+hell," he said passionlessly.
+
+"Now just consider.  I pride myself it's a decent price for a mess
+like that, and it's better 'n nothin'.  Two hundred.  What you
+say?"
+
+"You go to hell," Rasmunsen repeated softly, "and get out of here."
+
+Murray gaped with a great awe, then went out carefully, backward,
+with his eyes fixed an the other's face.
+
+Rasmunsen followed him out and turned the dogs loose.  He threw
+them all the salmon he had bought, and coiled a sled-lashing up in
+his hand.  Then he re-entered the cabin and drew the latch in after
+him.  The smoke from the cindered steak made his eyes smart.  He
+stood on the bunk, passed the lashing over the ridge-pole, and
+measured the swing-off with his eye.  It did not seem to satisfy,
+for he put the stool on the bunk and climbed upon the stool.  He
+drove a noose in the end of the lashing and slipped his head
+through.  The other end he made fast.  Then he kicked the stool out
+from under.
+
+
+
+THE MARRIAGE OF LIT-LIT
+
+
+
+When John Fox came into a country where whisky freezes solid and
+may be used as a paper-weight for a large part of the year, he came
+without the ideals and illusions that usually hamper the progress
+of more delicately nurtured adventurers.  Born and reared on the
+frontier fringe of the United States, he took with him into Canada
+a primitive cast of mind, an elemental simplicity and grip on
+things, as it were, that insured him immediate success in his new
+career.  From a mere servant of the Hudson Bay Company, driving a
+paddle with the voyageurs and carrying goods on his back across the
+portages, he swiftly rose to a Factorship and took charge of a
+trading post at Fort Angelus.
+
+Here, because of his elemental simplicity, he took to himself a
+native wife, and, by reason of the connubial bliss that followed,
+he escaped the unrest and vain longings that curse the days of more
+fastidious men, spoil their work, and conquer them in the end.  He
+lived contentedly, was at single purposes with the business he was
+set there to do, and achieved a brilliant record in the service of
+the Company.  About this time his wife died, was claimed by her
+people, and buried with savage circumstance in a tin trunk in the
+top of a tree.
+
+Two sons she had borne him, and when the Company promoted him, he
+journeyed with them still deeper into the vastness of the North-
+West Territory to a place called Sin Rock, where he took charge of
+a new post in a more important fur field.  Here he spent several
+lonely and depressing months, eminently disgusted with the
+unprepossessing appearance of the Indian maidens, and greatly
+worried by his growing sons who stood in need of a mother's care.
+Then his eyes chanced upon Lit-lit.
+
+"Lit-lit--well, she is Lit-lit," was the fashion in which he
+despairingly described her to his chief clerk, Alexander McLean.
+
+McLean was too fresh from his Scottish upbringing--"not dry behind
+the ears yet," John Fox put it--to take to the marriage customs of
+the country.  Nevertheless he was not averse to the Factor's
+imperilling his own immortal soul, and, especially, feeling an
+ominous attraction himself for Lit-lit, he was sombrely content to
+clinch his own soul's safety by seeing her married to the Factor.
+
+Nor is it to be wondered that McLean's austere Scotch soul stood in
+danger of being thawed in the sunshine of Lit-lit's eyes.  She was
+pretty, and slender, and willowy; without the massive face and
+temperamental stolidity of the average squaw.  "Lit-lit," so called
+from her fashion, even as a child, of being fluttery, of darting
+about from place to place like a butterfly, of being inconsequent
+and merry, and of laughing as lightly as she darted and danced
+about.
+
+Lit-lit was the daughter of Snettishane, a prominent chief in the
+tribe, by a half-breed mother, and to him the Factor fared casually
+one summer day to open negotiations of marriage.  He sat with the
+chief in the smoke of a mosquito smudge before his lodge, and
+together they talked about everything under the sun, or, at least,
+everything that in the Northland is under the sun, with the sole
+exception of marriage.  John Fox had come particularly to talk of
+marriage; Snettishane knew it, and John Fox knew he knew it,
+wherefore the subject was religiously avoided.  This is alleged to
+be Indian subtlety.  In reality it is transparent simplicity.
+
+The hours slipped by, and Fox and Snettishane smoked interminable
+pipes, looking each other in the eyes with a guilelessness superbly
+histrionic.  In the mid-afternoon McLean and his brother clerk,
+McTavish, strolled past, innocently uninterested, on their way to
+the river.  When they strolled back again an hour later, Fox and
+Snettishane had attained to a ceremonious discussion of the
+condition and quality of the gunpowder and bacon which the Company
+was offering in trade.  Meanwhile Lit-lit, divining the Factor's
+errand, had crept in under the rear wall of the lodge, and through
+the front flap was peeping out at the two logomachists by the
+mosquito smudge.  She was flushed and happy-eyed, proud that no
+less a man than the Factor (who stood next to God in the Northland
+hierarchy) had singled her out, femininely curious to see at close
+range what manner of man he was.  Sunglare on the ice, camp smoke,
+and weather beat had burned his face to a copper-brown, so that her
+father was as fair as he, while she was fairer.  She was remotely
+glad of this, and more immediately glad that he was large and
+strong, though his great black beard half frightened her, it was so
+strange.
+
+Being very young, she was unversed in the ways of men.  Seventeen
+times she had seen the sun travel south and lose itself beyond the
+sky-line, and seventeen times she had seen it travel back again and
+ride the sky day and night till there was no night at all.  And
+through these years she had been cherished jealously by
+Snettishane, who stood between her and all suitors, listening
+disdainfully to the young hunters as they bid for her hand, and
+turning them away as though she were beyond price.  Snettishane was
+mercenary.  Lit-lit was to him an investment.  She represented so
+much capital, from which he expected to receive, not a certain
+definite interest, but an incalculable interest.
+
+And having thus been reared in a manner as near to that of the
+nunnery as tribal conditions would permit, it was with a great and
+maidenly anxiety that she peeped out at the man who had surely come
+for her, at the husband who was to teach her all that was yet
+unlearned of life, at the masterful being whose word was to be her
+law, and who was to mete and bound her actions and comportment for
+the rest of her days.
+
+But, peeping through the front flap of the lodge, flushed and
+thrilling at the strange destiny reaching out for her, she grew
+disappointed as the day wore along, and the Factor and her father
+still talked pompously of matters concerning other things and not
+pertaining to marriage things at all.  As the sun sank lower and
+lower toward the north and midnight approached, the Factor began
+making unmistakable preparations for departure.  As he turned to
+stride away Lit-lit's heart sank; but it rose again as he halted,
+half turning on one heel.
+
+"Oh, by the way, Snettishane," he said, "I want a squaw to wash for
+me and mend my clothes."
+
+Snettishane grunted and suggested Wanidani, who was an old woman
+and toothless.
+
+"No, no," interposed the Factor.  "What I want is a wife.  I've
+been kind of thinking about it, and the thought just struck me that
+you might know of some one that would suit."
+
+Snettishane looked interested, whereupon the Factor retraced his
+steps, casually and carelessly to linger and discuss this new and
+incidental topic.
+
+"Kattou?" suggested Snettishane.
+
+"She has but one eye," objected the Factor.
+
+"Laska?"
+
+"Her knees be wide apart when she stands upright.  Kips, your
+biggest dog, can leap between her knees when she stands upright."
+
+"Senatee?" went on the imperturbable Snettishane.
+
+But John Fox feigned anger, crying:  "What foolishness is this?  Am
+I old, that thou shouldst mate me with old women?  Am I toothless?
+lame of leg? blind of eye?  Or am I poor that no bright-eyed maiden
+may look with favour upon me?  Behold!  I am the Factor, both rich
+and great, a power in the land, whose speech makes men tremble and
+is obeyed!"
+
+Snettishane was inwardly pleased, though his sphinx-like visage
+never relaxed.  He was drawing the Factor, and making him break
+ground.  Being a creature so elemental as to have room for but one
+idea at a time, Snettishane could pursue that one idea a greater
+distance than could John Fox.  For John Fox, elemental as he was,
+was still complex enough to entertain several glimmering ideas at a
+time, which debarred him from pursuing the one as single-heartedly
+or as far as did the chief.
+
+Snettishane calmly continued calling the roster of eligible
+maidens, which, name by name, as fast as uttered, were stamped
+ineligible by John Fox, with specified objections appended.  Again
+he gave it up and started to return to the Fort.  Snettishane
+watched him go, making no effort to stop him, but seeing him, in
+the end, stop himself.
+
+"Come to think of it," the Factor remarked, "we both of us forgot
+Lit-lit.  Now I wonder if she'll suit me?"
+
+Snettishane met the suggestion with a mirthless face, behind the
+mask of which his soul grinned wide.  It was a distinct victory.
+Had the Factor gone but one step farther, perforce Snettishane
+would himself have mentioned the name of Lit-lit, but--the Factor
+had not gone that one step farther.
+
+The chief was non-committal concerning Lit-lit's suitability, till
+he drove the white man into taking the next step in order of
+procedure.
+
+"Well," the Factor meditated aloud, "the only way to find out is to
+make a try of it."  He raised his voice.  "So I will give for Lit-
+lit ten blankets and three pounds of tobacco which is good
+tobacco."
+
+Snettishane replied with a gesture which seemed to say that all the
+blankets and tobacco in all the world could not compensate him for
+the loss of Lit-lit and her manifold virtues.  When pressed by the
+Factor to set a price, he coolly placed it at five hundred
+blankets, ten guns, fifty pounds of tobacco, twenty scarlet cloths,
+ten bottles of rum, a music-box, and lastly the good-will and best
+offices of the Factor, with a place by his fire.
+
+The Factor apparently suffered a stroke of apoplexy, which stroke
+was successful in reducing the blankets to two hundred and in
+cutting out the place by the fire--an unheard-of condition in the
+marriages of white men with the daughters of the soil.  In the end,
+after three hours more of chaffering, they came to an agreement.
+For Lit-lit Snettishane was to receive one hundred blankets, five
+pounds of tobacco, three guns, and a bottle of rum, goodwill and
+best offices included, which according to John Fox, was ten
+blankets and a gun more than she was worth.  And as he went home
+through the wee sma' hours, the three-o'clock sun blazing in the
+due north-east, he was unpleasantly aware that Snettishane had
+bested him over the bargain.
+
+Snettishane, tired and victorious, sought his bed, and discovered
+Lit-lit before she could escape from the lodge.
+
+He grunted knowingly:  "Thou hast seen.  Thou has heard.  Wherefore
+it be plain to thee thy father's very great wisdom and
+understanding.  I have made for thee a great match.  Heed my words
+and walk in the way of my words, go when I say go, come when I bid
+thee come, and we shall grow fat with the wealth of this big white
+man who is a fool according to his bigness."
+
+The next day no trading was done at the store.  The Factor opened
+whisky before breakfast, to the delight of McLean and McTavish,
+gave his dogs double rations, and wore his best moccasins.  Outside
+the Fort preparations were under way for a POTLATCH.  Potlatch
+means "a giving," and John Fox's intention was to signalize his
+marriage with Lit-lit by a potlatch as generous as she was good-
+looking.  In the afternoon the whole tribe gathered to the feast.
+Men, women, children, and dogs gorged to repletion, nor was there
+one person, even among the chance visitors and stray hunters from
+other tribes, who failed to receive some token of the bridegroom's
+largess.
+
+Lit-lit, tearfully shy and frightened, was bedecked by her bearded
+husband with a new calico dress, splendidly beaded moccasins, a
+gorgeous silk handkerchief over her raven hair, a purple scarf
+about her throat, brass ear-rings and finger-rings, and a whole
+pint of pinchbeck jewellery, including a Waterbury watch.
+Snettishane could scarce contain himself at the spectacle, but
+watching his chance drew her aside from the feast.
+
+"Not this night, nor the next night," he began ponderously, "but in
+the nights to come, when I shall call like a raven by the river
+bank, it is for thee to rise up from thy big husband, who is a
+fool, and come to me.
+
+"Nay, nay," he went on hastily, at sight of the dismay in her face
+at turning her back upon her wonderful new life.  "For no sooner
+shall this happen than thy big husband, who is a fool, will come
+wailing to my lodge.  Then it is for thee to wail likewise,
+claiming that this thing is not well, and that the other thing thou
+dost not like, and that to be the wife of the Factor is more than
+thou didst bargain for, only wilt thou be content with more
+blankets, and more tobacco, and more wealth of various sorts for
+thy poor old father, Snettishane.  Remember well, when I call in
+the night, like a raven, from the river bank."
+
+Lit-lit nodded; for to disobey her father was a peril she knew
+well; and, furthermore, it was a little thing he asked, a short
+separation from the Factor, who would know only greater gladness at
+having her back.  She returned to the feast, and, midnight being
+well at hand, the Factor sought her out and led her away to the
+Fort amid joking and outcry, in which the squaws were especially
+conspicuous.
+
+Lit-lit quickly found that married life with the head-man of a fort
+was even better than she had dreamed.  No longer did she have to
+fetch wood and water and wait hand and foot upon cantankerous
+menfolk.  For the first time in her life she could lie abed till
+breakfast was on the table.  And what a bed!--clean and soft, and
+comfortable as no bed she had ever known.  And such food!  Flour,
+cooked into biscuits, hot-cakes and bread, three times a day and
+every day, and all one wanted!  Such prodigality was hardly
+believable.
+
+To add to her contentment, the Factor was cunningly kind.  He had
+buried one wife, and he knew how to drive with a slack rein that
+went firm only on occasion, and then went very firm.  "Lit-lit is
+boss of this place," he announced significantly at the table the
+morning after the wedding.  "What she says goes.  Understand?"  And
+McLean and McTavish understood.  Also, they knew that the Factor
+had a heavy hand.
+
+But Lit-lit did not take advantage.  Taking a leaf from the book of
+her husband, she at once assumed charge of his own growing sons,
+giving them added comforts and a measure of freedom like to that
+which he gave her.  The two sons were loud in the praise of their
+new mother; McLean and McTavish lifted their voices; and the Factor
+bragged of the joys of matrimony till the story of her good
+behaviour and her husband's satisfaction became the property of all
+the dwellers in the Sin Rock district.
+
+Whereupon Snettishane, with visions of his incalculable interest
+keeping him awake of nights, thought it time to bestir himself.  On
+the tenth night of her wedded life Lit-lit was awakened by the
+croaking of a raven, and she knew that Snettishane was waiting for
+her by the river bank.  In her great happiness she had forgotten
+her pact, and now it came back to her with behind it all the
+childish terror of her father.  For a time she lay in fear and
+trembling, loath to go, afraid to stay.  But in the end the Factor
+won the silent victory, and his kindness plus his great muscles and
+square jaw, nerved her to disregard Snettishane's call.
+
+But in the morning she arose very much afraid, and went about her
+duties in momentary fear of her father's coming.  As the day wore
+along, however, she began to recover her spirits.  John Fox,
+soundly berating McLean and McTavish for some petty dereliction of
+duty, helped her to pluck up courage.  She tried not to let him go
+out of her sight, and when she followed him into the huge cache and
+saw him twirling and tossing great bales around as though they were
+feather pillows, she felt strengthened in her disobedience to her
+father.  Also (it was her first visit to the warehouse, and Sin
+Rock was the chief distributing point to several chains of lesser
+posts), she was astounded at the endlessness of the wealth there
+stored away.
+
+This sight and the picture in her mind's eye of the bare lodge of
+Snettishane, put all doubts at rest.  Yet she capped her conviction
+by a brief word with one of her step-sons.  "White daddy good?" was
+what she asked, and the boy answered that his father was the best
+man he had ever known.  That night the raven croaked again.  On the
+night following the croaking was more persistent.  It awoke the
+Factor, who tossed restlessly for a while.  Then he said aloud,
+"Damn that raven," and Lit-lit laughed quietly under the blankets.
+
+In the morning, bright and early, Snettishane put in an ominous
+appearance and was set to breakfast in the kitchen with Wanidani.
+He refused "squaw food," and a little later bearded his son-in-law
+in the store where the trading was done.  Having learned, he said,
+that his daughter was such a jewel, he had come for more blankets,
+more tobacco, and more guns--especially more guns.  He had
+certainly been cheated in her price, he held, and he had come for
+justice.  But the Factor had neither blankets nor justice to spare.
+Whereupon he was informed that Snettishane had seen the missionary
+at Three Forks, who had notified him that such marriages were not
+made in heaven, and that it was his father's duty to demand his
+daughter back.
+
+"I am good Christian man now," Snettishane concluded.  "I want my
+Lit-lit to go to heaven."
+
+The Factor's reply was short and to the point; for he directed his
+father-in-law to go to the heavenly antipodes, and by the scruff of
+the neck and the slack of the blanket propelled him on that trail
+as far as the door.
+
+But Snettishane sneaked around and in by the kitchen, cornering
+Lit-lit in the great living-room of the Fort.
+
+"Mayhap thou didst sleep over-sound last night when I called by the
+river bank," he began, glowering darkly.
+
+"Nay, I was awake and heard."  Her heart was beating as though it
+would choke her, but she went on steadily, "And the night before I
+was awake and heard, and yet again the night before."
+
+And thereat, out of her great happiness and out of the fear that it
+might be taken from her, she launched into an original and glowing
+address upon the status and rights of woman--the first new-woman
+lecture delivered north of Fifty-three.
+
+But it fell on unheeding ears.  Snettishane was still in the dark
+ages.  As she paused for breath, he said threateningly, "To-night I
+shall call again like the raven."
+
+At this moment the Factor entered the room and again helped
+Snettishane on his way to the heavenly antipodes.
+
+That night the raven croaked more persistently than ever.  Lit-lit,
+who was a light sleeper, heard and smiled.  John Fox tossed
+restlessly.  Then he awoke and tossed about with greater
+restlessness.  He grumbled and snorted, swore under his breath and
+over his breath, and finally flung out of bed.  He groped his way
+to the great living-room, and from the rack took down a loaded
+shot-gun--loaded with bird-shot, left therein by the careless
+McTavish.
+
+The Factor crept carefully out of the Fort and down to the river.
+The croaking had ceased, but he stretched out in the long grass and
+waited.  The air seemed a chilly balm, and the earth, after the
+heat of the day, now and again breathed soothingly against him.
+The Factor, gathered into the rhythm of it all, dozed off, with his
+head upon his arm, and slept.
+
+Fifty yards away, head resting on knees, and with his back to John
+Fox, Snettishane likewise slept, gently conquered by the quietude
+of the night.  An hour slipped by and then he awoke, and, without
+lifting his head, set the night vibrating with the hoarse gutturals
+of the raven call.
+
+The Factor roused, not with the abrupt start of civilized man, but
+with the swift and comprehensive glide from sleep to waking of the
+savage.  In the night-light he made out a dark object in the midst
+of the grass and brought his gun to bear upon it.  A second croak
+began to rise, and he pulled the trigger.  The crickets ceased from
+their sing-song chant, the wildfowl from their squabbling, and the
+raven croak broke midmost and died away in gasping silence.
+
+John Fox ran to the spot and reached for the thing he had killed,
+but his fingers closed on a coarse mop of hair and he turned
+Snettishane's face upward to the starlight.  He knew how a shotgun
+scattered at fifty yards, and he knew that he had peppered
+Snettishane across the shoulders and in the small of the back.  And
+Snettishane knew that he knew, but neither referred to it
+
+"What dost thou here?" the Factor demanded.  "It were time old
+bones should be in bed."
+
+But Snettishane was stately in spite of the bird-shot burning under
+his skin.
+
+"Old bones will not sleep," he said solemnly.  "I weep for my
+daughter, for my daughter Lit-lit, who liveth and who yet is dead,
+and who goeth without doubt to the white man's hell."
+
+"Weep henceforth on the far bank, beyond ear-shot of the Fort,"
+said John Fox, turning on his heel, "for the noise of thy weeping
+is exceeding great and will not let one sleep of nights."
+
+"My heart is sore," Snettishane answered, "and my days and nights
+be black with sorrow."
+
+"As the raven is black," said John Fox.
+
+"As the raven is black," Snettishane said.
+
+Never again was the voice of the raven heard by the river bank.
+Lit-lit grows matronly day by day and is very happy.  Also, there
+are sisters to the sons of John Fox's first wife who lies buried in
+a tree.  Old Snettishane is no longer a visitor at the Fort, and
+spends long hours raising a thin, aged voice against the filial
+ingratitude of children in general and of his daughter Lit-lit in
+particular.  His declining years are embittered by the knowledge
+that he was cheated, and even John Fox has withdrawn the assertion
+that the price for Lit-lit was too much by ten blankets and a gun.
+
+
+
+BATARD
+
+
+
+Batard was a devil.  This was recognized throughout the Northland.
+"Hell's Spawn" he was called by many men, but his master, Black
+Leclere, chose for him the shameful name "Batard."  Now Black
+Leclere was also a devil, and the twain were well matched.  There
+is a saying that when two devils come together, hell is to pay.
+This is to be expected, and this certainly was to be expected when
+Batard and Black Leclere came together.  The first time they met,
+Batard was a part-grown puppy, lean and hungry, with bitter eyes;
+and they met with snap and snarl, and wicked looks, for Leclere's
+upper lip had a wolfish way of lifting and showing the white, cruel
+teeth.  And it lifted then, and his eyes glinted viciously, as he
+reached for Batard and dragged him out from the squirming litter.
+It was certain that they divined each other, for on the instant
+Batard had buried his puppy fangs in Leclere's hand, and Leclere,
+thumb and finger, was coolly choking his young life out of him.
+
+"SACREDAM," the Frenchman said softly, flirting the quick blood
+from his bitten hand and gazing down on the little puppy choking
+and gasping in the snow.
+
+Leclere turned to John Hamlin, storekeeper of the Sixty Mile Post.
+"Dat fo' w'at Ah lak heem.  'Ow moch, eh, you, M'sieu'?  'Ow moch?
+Ah buy heem, now; Ah buy heem queek."
+
+And because he hated him with an exceeding bitter hate, Leclere
+bought Batard and gave him his shameful name.  And for five years
+the twain adventured across the Northland, from St. Michael's and
+the Yukon delta to the head-reaches of the Pelly and even so far as
+the Peace River, Athabasca, and the Great Slave.  And they acquired
+a reputation for uncompromising wickedness, the like of which never
+before attached itself to man and dog.
+
+Batard did not know his father--hence his name--but, as John Hamlin
+knew, his father was a great grey timber wolf.  But the mother of
+Batard, as he dimly remembered her, was snarling, bickering,
+obscene, husky, full-fronted and heavy-chested, with a malign eye,
+a cat-like grip on life, and a genius for trickery and evil.  There
+was neither faith nor trust in her.  Her treachery alone could be
+relied upon, and her wild-wood amours attested her general
+depravity.  Much of evil and much of strength were there in these,
+Batard's progenitors, and, bone and flesh of their bone and flesh,
+he had inherited it all.  And then came Black Leclere, to lay his
+heavy hand on the bit of pulsating puppy life, to press and prod
+and mould till it became a big bristling beast, acute in knavery,
+overspilling with hate, sinister, malignant, diabolical.  With a
+proper master Batard might have made an ordinary, fairly efficient
+sled-dog.  He never got the chance:  Leclere but confirmed him in
+his congenital iniquity.
+
+The history of Batard and Leclere is a history of war--of five
+cruel, relentless years, of which their first meeting is fit
+summary.  To begin with, it was Leclere's fault, for he hated with
+understanding and intelligence, while the long-legged, ungainly
+puppy hated only blindly, instinctively, without reason or method.
+At first there were no refinements of cruelty (these were to come
+later), but simple beatings and crude brutalities.  In one of these
+Batard had an ear injured.  He never regained control of the riven
+muscles, and ever after the ear drooped limply down to keep keen
+the memory of his tormentor.  And he never forgot.
+
+His puppyhood was a period of foolish rebellion.  He was always
+worsted, but he fought back because it was his nature to fight
+back.  And he was unconquerable.  Yelping shrilly from the pain of
+lash and club, he none the less contrived always to throw in the
+defiant snarl, the bitter vindictive menace of his soul which
+fetched without fail more blows and beatings.  But his was his
+mother's tenacious grip on life.  Nothing could kill him.  He
+flourished under misfortune, grew fat with famine, and out of his
+terrible struggle for life developed a preternatural intelligence.
+His were the stealth and cunning of the husky, his mother, and the
+fierceness and valour of the wolf, his father.
+
+Possibly it was because of his father that he never wailed.  His
+puppy yelps passed with his lanky legs, so that he became grim and
+taciturn, quick to strike, slow to warn.  He answered curse with
+snarl, and blow with snap, grinning the while his implacable
+hatred; but never again, under the extremest agony, did Leclere
+bring from him the cry of fear nor of pain.  This unconquerableness
+but fanned Leclere's wrath and stirred him to greater deviltries.
+
+Did Leclere give Batard half a fish and to his mates whole ones,
+Batard went forth to rob other dogs of their fish.  Also he robbed
+caches and expressed himself in a thousand rogueries, till he
+became a terror to all dogs and masters of dogs.  Did Leclere beat
+Batard and fondle Babette--Babette who was not half the worker he
+was--why, Batard threw her down in the snow and broke her hind leg
+in his heavy jaws, so that Leclere was forced to shoot her.
+Likewise, in bloody battles, Batard mastered all his team-mates,
+set them the law of trail and forage, and made them live to the law
+he set.
+
+In five years he heard but one kind word, received but one soft
+stroke of a hand, and then he did not know what manner of things
+they were.  He leaped like the untamed thing he was, and his jaws
+were together in a flash.  It was the missionary at Sunrise, a
+newcomer in the country, who spoke the kind word and gave the soft
+stroke of the hand.  And for six months after, he wrote no letters
+home to the States, and the surgeon at McQuestion travelled two
+hundred miles on the ice to save him from blood-poisoning.
+
+Men and dogs looked askance at Batard when he drifted into their
+camps and posts.  The men greeted him with feet threateningly
+lifted for the kick, the dogs with bristling manes and bared fangs.
+Once a man did kick Batard, and Batard, with quick wolf snap,
+closed his jaws like a steel trap on the man's calf and crunched
+down to the bone.  Whereat the man was determined to have his life,
+only Black Leclere, with ominous eyes and naked hunting-knife,
+stepped in between.  The killing of Batard--ah, SACREDAM, THAT was
+a pleasure Leclere reserved for himself.  Some day it would happen,
+or else--bah! who was to know?  Anyway, the problem would be
+solved.
+
+For they had become problems to each other.  The very breath each
+drew was a challenge and a menace to the other.  Their hate bound
+them together as love could never bind.  Leclere was bent on the
+coming of the day when Batard should wilt in spirit and cringe and
+whimper at his feet.  And Batard--Leclere knew what was in Batard's
+mind, and more than once had read it in Batard's eyes.  And so
+clearly had he read, that when Batard was at his back, he made it a
+point to glance often over his shoulder.
+
+Men marvelled when Leclere refused large money for the dog.  "Some
+day you'll kill him and be out his price," said John Hamlin once,
+when Batard lay panting in the snow where Leclere had kicked him,
+and no one knew whether his ribs were broken, and no one dared look
+to see.
+
+"Dat," said Leclere, dryly, "dat is my biz'ness, M'sieu'."
+
+And the men marvelled that Batard did not run away.  They did not
+understand.  But Leclere understood.  He was a man who lived much
+in the open, beyond the sound of human tongue, and he had learned
+the voices of wind and storm, the sigh of night, the whisper of
+dawn, the clash of day.  In a dim way he could hear the green
+things growing, the running of the sap, the bursting of the bud.
+And he knew the subtle speech of the things that moved, of the
+rabbit in the snare, the moody raven beating the air with hollow
+wing, the baldface shuffling under the moon, the wolf like a grey
+shadow gliding betwixt the twilight and the dark.  And to him
+Batard spoke clear and direct.  Full well he understood why Batard
+did not run away, and he looked more often over his shoulder.
+
+When in anger, Batard was not nice to look upon, and more than once
+had he leapt for Leclere's throat, to be stretched quivering and
+senseless in the snow, by the butt of the ever ready dogwhip.  And
+so Batard learned to bide his time.  When he reached his full
+strength and prime of youth, he thought the time had come.  He was
+broad-chested, powerfully muscled, of far more than ordinary size,
+and his neck from head to shoulders was a mass of bristling hair--
+to all appearances a full-blooded wolf.  Leclere was lying asleep
+in his furs when Batard deemed the time to be ripe.  He crept upon
+him stealthily, head low to earth and lone ear laid back, with a
+feline softness of tread.  Batard breathed gently, very gently, and
+not till he was close at hand did he raise his head.  He paused for
+a moment and looked at the bronzed bull throat, naked and knotty,
+and swelling to a deep steady pulse.  The slaver dripped down his
+fangs and slid off his tongue at the sight, and in that moment he
+remembered his drooping ear, his uncounted blows and prodigious
+wrongs, and without a sound sprang on the sleeping man.
+
+Leclere awoke to the pang of the fangs in his throat, and, perfect
+animal that he was, he awoke clear-headed and with full
+comprehension.  He closed on Batard's windpipe with both his hands,
+and rolled out of his furs to get his weight uppermost.  But the
+thousands of Batard's ancestors had clung at the throats of
+unnumbered moose and caribou and dragged them down, and the wisdom
+of those ancestors was his.  When Leclere's weight came on top of
+him, he drove his hind legs upwards and in, and clawed down chest
+and abdomen, ripping and tearing through skin and muscle.  And when
+he felt the man's body wince above him and lift, he worried and
+shook at the man's throat.  His team-mates closed around in a
+snarling circle, and Batard, with failing breath and fading sense,
+knew that their jaws were hungry for him.  But that did not matter-
+-it was the man, the man above him, and he ripped and clawed, and
+shook and worried, to the last ounce of his strength.  But Leclere
+choked him with both his hands, till Batard's chest heaved and
+writhed for the air denied, and his eyes glazed and set, and his
+jaws slowly loosened, and his tongue protruded black and swollen.
+
+"Eh?  Bon, you devil!" Leclere gurgled mouth and throat clogged
+with his own blood, as he shoved the dizzy dog from him.
+
+And then Leclere cursed the other dogs off as they fell upon
+Batard.  They drew back into a wider circle, squatting alertly on
+their haunches and licking their chops, the hair on every neck
+bristling and erect.
+
+Batard recovered quickly, and at sound of Leclere's voice, tottered
+to his feet and swayed weakly back and forth.
+
+"A-h-ah!  You beeg devil!" Leclere spluttered.  "Ah fix you; Ah fix
+you plentee, by GAR!"
+
+Batard, the air biting into his exhausted lungs like wine, flashed
+full into the man's face, his jaws missing and coming together with
+a metallic clip.  They rolled over and over on the snow, Leclere
+striking madly with his fists.  Then they separated, face to face,
+and circled back and forth before each other.  Leclere could have
+drawn his knife.  His rifle was at his feet.  But the beast in him
+was up and raging.  He would do the thing with his hands--and his
+teeth.  Batard sprang in, but Leclere knocked him over with a blow
+of the fist, fell upon him, and buried his teeth to the bone in the
+dog's shoulder.
+
+It was a primordial setting and a primordial scene, such as might
+have been in the savage youth of the world.  An open space in a
+dark forest, a ring of grinning wolf-dogs, and in the centre two
+beasts, locked in combat, snapping and snarling raging madly about
+panting, sobbing, cursing, straining, wild with passion, in a fury
+of murder, ripping and tearing and clawing in elemental
+brutishness.
+
+But Leclere caught Batard behind the ear with a blow from his fist,
+knocking him over, and, for the instant, stunning him.  Then
+Leclere leaped upon him with his feet, and sprang up and down,
+striving to grind him into the earth.  Both Batard's hind legs were
+broken ere Leclere ceased that he might catch breath.
+
+"A-a-ah!  A-a-ah!" he screamed, incapable of speech, shaking his
+fist, through sheer impotence of throat and larynx.
+
+But Batard was indomitable.  He lay there in a helpless welter, his
+lip feebly lifting and writhing to the snarl he had not the
+strength to utter.  Leclere kicked him, and the tired jaws closed
+on the ankle, but could not break the skin.
+
+Then Leclere picked up the whip and proceeded almost to cut him to
+pieces, at each stroke of the lash crying:  "Dis taim Ah break you!
+Eh?  By GAR!  Ah break you!"
+
+In the end, exhausted, fainting from loss of blood, he crumpled up
+and fell by his victim, and when the wolf-dogs closed in to take
+their vengeance, with his last consciousness dragged his body on
+top of Batard to shield him from their fangs.
+
+This occurred not far from Sunrise, and the missionary, opening the
+door to Leclere a few hours later, was surprised to note the
+absence of Batard from the team.  Nor did his surprise lessen when
+Leclere threw back the robes from the sled, gathered Batard into
+his arms and staggered across the threshold.  It happened that the
+surgeon of McQuestion, who was something of a gadabout, was up on a
+gossip, and between them they proceeded to repair Leclere,
+
+"Merci, non," said he.  "Do you fix firs' de dog.  To die?  NON.
+Eet is not good.  Becos' heem Ah mus' yet break.  Dat fo' w'at he
+mus' not die."
+
+The surgeon called it a marvel, the missionary a miracle, that
+Leclere pulled through at all; and so weakened was he, that in the
+spring the fever got him, and he went on his back again.  Batard
+had been in even worse plight, but his grip on life prevailed, and
+the bones of his hind legs knit, and his organs righted themselves,
+during the several weeks he lay strapped to the floor.  And by the
+time Leclere, finally convalescent, sallow and shaky, took the sun
+by the cabin door, Batard had reasserted his supremacy among his
+kind, and brought not only his own team-mates but the missionary's
+dogs into subjection.
+
+He moved never a muscle, nor twitched a hair, when, for the first
+time, Leclere tottered out on the missionary's arm, and sank down
+slowly and with infinite caution on the three-legged stool.
+
+"BON!" he said.  "BON!  De good sun!"  And he stretched out his
+wasted hands and washed them in the warmth.
+
+Then his gaze fell on the dog, and the old light blazed back in his
+eyes.  He touched the missionary lightly on the arm.  "Mon pere,
+dat is one beeg devil, dat Batard.  You will bring me one pistol,
+so, dat Ah drink de sun in peace."
+
+And thenceforth for many days he sat in the sun before the cabin
+door.  He never dozed, and the pistol lay always across his knees.
+Batard had a way, the first thing each day, of looking for the
+weapon in its wonted place.  At sight of it he would lift his lip
+faintly in token that he understood, and Leclere would lift his own
+lip in an answering grin.  One day the missionary took note of the
+trick.
+
+"Bless me!" he said.  "I really believe the brute comprehends."
+
+Leclere laughed softly.  "Look you, mon pere.  Dat w'at Ah now
+spik, to dat does he lissen."
+
+As if in confirmation, Batard just perceptibly wriggled his lone
+ear up to catch the sound.
+
+"Ah say 'keel'."
+
+Batard growled deep down in his throat, the hair bristled along his
+neck, and every muscle went tense and expectant.
+
+"Ah lift de gun, so, like dat."  And suiting action to word, he
+sighted the pistol at Batard.  Batard, with a single leap,
+sideways, landed around the corner of the cabin out of sight.
+
+"Bless me!" he repeated at intervals.  Leclere grinned proudly.
+
+"But why does he not run away?"
+
+The Frenchman's shoulders went up in the racial shrug that means
+all things from total ignorance to infinite understanding.
+
+"Then why do you not kill him?"
+
+Again the shoulders went up.
+
+"Mon pere," he said after a pause, "de taim is not yet.  He is one
+beeg devil.  Some taim Ah break heem, so an' so, all to leetle
+bits.  Hey? some taim.  BON!"
+
+A day came when Leclere gathered his dogs together and floated down
+in a bateau to Forty Mile, and on to the Porcupine, where he took a
+commission from the P. C. Company, and went exploring for the
+better part of a year.  After that he poled up the Koyokuk to
+deserted Arctic City, and later came drifting back, from camp to
+camp, along the Yukon.  And during the long months Batard was well
+lessoned.  He learned many tortures, and, notably, the torture of
+hunger, the torture of thirst, the torture of fire, and, worst of
+all, the torture of music.
+
+Like the rest of his kind, he did not enjoy music.  It gave him
+exquisite anguish, racking him nerve by nerve, and ripping apart
+every fibre of his being.  It made him howl, long and wolf-life, as
+when the wolves bay the stars on frosty nights.  He could not help
+howling.  It was his one weakness in the contest with Leclere, and
+it was his shame.  Leclere, on the other hand, passionately loved
+music--as passionately as he loved strong drink.  And when his soul
+clamoured for expression, it usually uttered itself in one or the
+other of the two ways, and more usually in both ways.  And when he
+had drunk, his brain a-lilt with unsung song and the devil in him
+aroused and rampant, his soul found its supreme utterance in
+torturing Batard.
+
+"Now we will haf a leetle museek," he would say.  "Eh?  W'at you
+t'ink, Batard?"
+
+It was only an old and battered harmonica, tenderly treasured and
+patiently repaired; but it was the best that money could buy, and
+out of its silver reeds he drew weird vagrant airs that men had
+never heard before.  Then Batard, dumb of throat, with teeth tight
+clenched, would back away, inch by inch, to the farthest cabin
+corner.  And Leclere, playing, playing, a stout club tucked under
+his arm, followed the animal up, inch by inch, step by step, till
+there was no further retreat.
+
+At first Batard would crowd himself into the smallest possible
+space, grovelling close to the floor; but as the music came nearer
+and nearer, he was forced to uprear, his back jammed into the logs,
+his fore legs fanning the air as though to beat off the rippling
+waves of sound.  He still kept his teeth together, but severe
+muscular contractions attacked his body, strange twitchings and
+jerkings, till he was all a-quiver and writhing in silent torment.
+As he lost control, his jaws spasmodically wrenched apart, and deep
+throaty vibrations issued forth, too low in the register of sound
+for human ear to catch.  And then, nostrils distended, eyes
+dilated, hair bristling in helpless rage, arose the long wolf howl.
+It came with a slurring rush upwards, swelling to a great heart-
+breaking burst of sound, and dying away in sadly cadenced woe--then
+the next rush upward, octave upon octave; the bursting heart; and
+the infinite sorrow and misery, fainting, fading, falling, and
+dying slowly away.
+
+It was fit for hell.  And Leclere, with fiendish ken, seemed to
+divine each particular nerve and heartstring, and with long wails
+and tremblings and sobbing minors to make it yield up its last
+shred of grief.  It was frightful, and for twenty-four hours after,
+Batard was nervous and unstrung, starting at common sounds,
+tripping over his own shadow, but, withal, vicious and masterful
+with his team-mates.  Nor did he show signs of a breaking spirit.
+Rather did he grow more grim and taciturn, biding his time with an
+inscrutable patience that began to puzzle and weigh upon Leclere.
+The dog would lie in the firelight, motionless, for hours, gazing
+straight before him at Leclere, and hating him with his bitter
+eyes.
+
+Often the man felt that he had bucked against the very essence of
+life--the unconquerable essence that swept the hawk down out of the
+sky like a feathered thunderbolt, that drove the great grey goose
+across the zones, that hurled the spawning salmon through two
+thousand miles of boiling Yukon flood.  At such times he felt
+impelled to--express his own unconquerable essence; and with strong
+drink, wild music, and Batard, he indulged in vast orgies, wherein
+he pitted his puny strength in the face of things, and challenged
+all that was, and had been, and was yet to be.
+
+"Dere is somet'ing dere," he affirmed, when the rhythmed vagaries
+of his mind touched the secret chords of Batard's being and brought
+forth the long lugubrious howl.  "Ah pool eet out wid bot' my
+han's, so, an' so.  Ha! ha!  Eet is fonee!  Eet is ver' fonee!  De
+priest chant, de womans pray, de mans swear, de leetle bird go
+peep-peep, Batard, heem go yow-yow--an' eet is all de ver' same
+t'ing.  Ha! ha!"
+
+Father Gautier, a worthy priest, one reproved him with instances of
+concrete perdition.  He never reproved him again.
+
+"Eet may be so, mon pere," he made answer.  "An' Ah t'ink Ah go
+troo hell a-snappin', lak de hemlock troo de fire.  Eh, mon pere?"
+
+But all bad things come to an end as well as good, and so with
+Black Leclere.  On the summer low water, in a poling boat, he left
+McDougall for Sunrise.  He left McDougall in company with Timothy
+Brown, and arrived at Sunrise by himself.  Further, it was known
+that they had quarrelled just previous to pulling out; for the
+Lizzie, a wheezy ten-ton stern-wheeler, twenty-four hours behind,
+beat Leclere in by three days.  And when he did get in, it was with
+a clean-drilled bullet-hole through his shoulder muscle, and a tale
+of ambush and murder.
+
+A strike had been made at Sunrise, and things had changed
+considerably.  With the infusion of several hundred gold-seekers, a
+deal of whisky, and half-a-dozen equipped gamblers, the missionary
+had seen the page of his years of labour with the Indians wiped
+clean.  When the squaws became preoccupied with cooking beans and
+keeping the fire going for the wifeless miners, and the bucks with
+swapping their warm furs for black bottles and broken time-pieces,
+he took to his bed, said "Bless me" several times, and departed to
+his final accounting in a rough-hewn, oblong box.  Whereupon the
+gamblers moved their roulette and faro tables into the mission
+house, and the click of chips and clink of glasses went up from
+dawn till dark and to dawn again.
+
+Now Timothy Brown was well beloved among these adventurers of the
+North.  The one thing against him was his quick temper and ready
+fist--a little thing, for which his kind heart and forgiving hand
+more than atoned.  On the other hand, there was nothing to atone
+for Black Leclere.  He was "black," as more than one remembered
+deed bore witness, while he was as well hated as the other was
+beloved.  So the men of Sunrise put an antiseptic dressing on his
+shoulder and haled him before Judge Lynch.
+
+It was a simple affair.  He had quarrelled with Timothy Brown at
+McDougall.  With Timothy Brown he had left McDougall.  Without
+Timothy Brown he had arrived at Sunrise.  Considered in the light
+of his evilness, the unanimous conclusion was that he had killed
+Timothy Brown.  On the other hand, Leclere acknowledged their
+facts, but challenged their conclusion, and gave his own
+explanation.  Twenty miles out of Sunrise he and Timothy Brown were
+poling the boat along the rocky shore.  From that shore two rifle-
+shots rang out.  Timothy Brown pitched out of the boat and went
+down bubbling red, and that was the last of Timothy Brown.  He,
+Leclere, pitched into the bottom of the boat with a stinging
+shoulder.  He lay very quiet, peeping at the shore.  After a time
+two Indians stuck up their heads and came out to the water's edge,
+carrying between them a birch-bark canoe.  As they launched it,
+Leclere let fly.  He potted one, who went over the side after the
+manner of Timothy Brown.  The other dropped into the bottom of the
+canoe, and then canoe and poling boat went down the stream in a
+drifting battle.  After that they hung up on a split current, and
+the canoe passed on one side of an island, the poling boat on the
+other.  That was the last of the canoe, and he came on into
+Sunrise.  Yes, from the way the Indian in the canoe jumped, he was
+sure he had potted him.  That was all.  This explanation was not
+deemed adequate.  They gave him ten hours' grace while the Lizzie
+steamed down to investigate.  Ten hours later she came wheezing
+back to Sunrise.  There had been nothing to investigate.  No
+evidence had been found to back up his statements.  They told him
+to make his will, for he possessed a fifty-thousand dollar Sunrise
+claim, and they were a law-abiding as well as a law-giving breed.
+
+Leclere shrugged his shoulders.  "Bot one t'ing," he said; "a
+leetle, w'at you call, favour--a leetle favour, dat is eet.  I gif
+my feefty t'ousan' dollair to de church.  I gif my husky dog,
+Batard, to de devil.  De leetle favour?  Firs' you hang heem, an'
+den you hang me.  Eet is good, eh?"
+
+Good it was, they agreed, that Hell's Spawn should break trail for
+his master across the last divide, and the court was adjourned down
+to the river bank, where a big spruce tree stood by itself.
+Slackwater Charley put a hangman's knot in the end of a hauling-
+line, and the noose was slipped over Leclere's head and pulled
+tight around his neck.  His hands were tied behind his back, and he
+was assisted to the top of a cracker box.  Then the running end of
+the line was passed over an over-hanging branch, drawn taut, and
+made fast.  To kick the box out from under would leave him dancing
+on the air.
+
+"Now for the dog," said Webster Shaw, sometime mining engineer.
+"You'll have to rope him, Slackwater."
+
+Leclere grinned.  Slackwater took a chew of tobacco, rove a running
+noose, and proceeded leisurely to coil a few turns in his hand.  He
+paused once or twice to brush particularly offensive mosquitoes
+from off his face.  Everybody was brushing mosquitoes, except
+Leclere, about whose head a small cloud was visible.  Even Batard,
+lying full-stretched on the ground with his fore paws rubbed the
+pests away from eyes and mouth.
+
+But while Slackwater waited for Batard to lift his head, a faint
+call came from the quiet air, and a man was seen waving his arms
+and running across the flat from Sunrise.  It was the store-keeper.
+
+"C-call 'er off, boys," he panted, as he came in among them.
+
+"Little Sandy and Bernadotte's jes' got in," he explained with
+returning breath.  "Landed down below an' come up by the short cut.
+Got the Beaver with 'm.  Picked 'm up in his canoe, stuck in a back
+channel, with a couple of bullet-holes in 'm.  Other buck was Klok
+Kutz, the one that knocked spots out of his squaw and dusted."
+
+"Eh?  W'at Ah say?  Eh?" Leclere cried exultantly.  "Dat de one fo'
+sure!  Ah know.  Ah spik true."
+
+"The thing to do is to teach these damned Siwashes a little
+manners," spoke Webster Shaw.  "They're getting fat and sassy, and
+we'll have to bring them down a peg.  Round in all the bucks and
+string up the Beaver for an object lesson.  That's the programme.
+Come on and let's see what he's got to say for himself."
+
+"Heh, M'sieu!" Leclere called, as the crowd began to melt away
+through the twilight in the direction of Sunrise.  "Ah lak ver'
+moch to see de fon."
+
+"Oh, we'll turn you loose when we come back," Webster Shaw shouted
+over his shoulder.  "In the meantime meditate on your sins and the
+ways of Providence.  It will do you good, so be grateful."
+
+As is the way with men who are accustomed to great hazards, whose
+nerves are healthy and trained in patience, so it was with Leclere
+who settled himself to the long wait--which is to say that he
+reconciled his mind to it.  There was no settling of the body, for
+the taut rope forced him to stand rigidly erect.  The least
+relaxation of the leg muscles pressed the rough-fibred noose into
+his neck, while the upright position caused him much pain in his
+wounded shoulder.  He projected his under lip and expelled his
+breath upwards along his face to blow the mosquitoes away from his
+eyes.  But the situation had its compensation.  To be snatched from
+the maw of death was well worth a little bodily suffering, only it
+was unfortunate that he should miss the hanging of the Beaver.
+
+And so he mused, till his eyes chanced to fall upon Batard, head
+between fore paws and stretched on the ground asleep.  And their
+Leclere ceased to muse.  He studied the animal closely, striving to
+sense if the sleep were real or feigned.  Batard's sides were
+heaving regularly, but Leclere felt that the breath came and went a
+shade too quickly; also he felt that there was a vigilance or
+alertness to every hair that belied unshackling sleep.  He would
+have given his Sunrise claim to be assured that the dog was not
+awake, and once, when one of his joints cracked, he looked quickly
+and guiltily at Batard to see if he roused.  He did not rouse then
+but a few minutes later he got up slowly and lazily, stretched, and
+looked carefully about him.
+
+"Sacredam," said Leclere under his breath.
+
+Assured that no one was in sight or hearing, Batard sat down,
+curled his upper lip almost into a smile, looked up at Leclere, and
+licked his chops.
+
+"Ah see my feenish," the man said, and laughed sardonically aloud.
+
+Batard came nearer, the useless ear wabbling, the good ear cocked
+forward with devilish comprehension.  He thrust his head on one
+side quizzically, and advanced with mincing, playful steps.  He
+rubbed his body gently against the box till it shook and shook
+again.  Leclere teetered carefully to maintain his equilibrium.
+
+"Batard," he said calmly, "look out.  Ah keel you."
+
+Batard snarled at the word and shook the box with greater force.
+Then he upreared, and with his fore paws threw his weight against
+it higher up.  Leclere kicked out with one foot, but the rope bit
+into his neck and checked so abruptly as nearly to overbalance him.
+
+"Hi, ya!  Chook!  Mush-on!" he screamed.
+
+Batard retreated, for twenty feet or so, with a fiendish levity in
+his bearing that Leclere could not mistake.  He remembered the dog
+often breaking the scum of ice on the water hole by lifting up and
+throwing his weight upon it; and remembering, he understood what he
+now had in mind.  Batard faced about and paused.  He showed his
+white teeth in a grin, which Leclere answered; and then hurled his
+body through the air, in full charge, straight for the box.
+
+Fifteen minutes later, Slackwater Charley and Webster Shaw
+returning, caught a glimpse of a ghostly pendulum swinging back and
+forth in the dim light.  As they hurriedly drew in closer, they
+made out the man's inert body, and a live thing that clung to it,
+and shook and worried, and gave to it the swaying motion.
+
+"Hi, ya!  Chook! you Spawn of Hell!" yelled Webster Shaw.
+
+But Batard glared at him, and snarled threateningly, without
+loosing his jaws.
+
+Slackwater Charley got out his revolver, but his hand was shaking,
+as with a chill, and he fumbled.
+
+"Here you take it," he said, passing the weapon over.
+
+Webster Shaw laughed shortly, drew a sight between the gleaming
+eyes, and pressed the trigger.  Batard's body twitched with the
+shock, threshed the ground spasmodically for a moment, and went
+suddenly limp.  But his teeth still held fast locked.
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF JEES' UCK
+
+
+
+There have been renunciations and renunciations.  But, in its
+essence, renunciation is ever the same.  And the paradox of it is,
+that men and women forego the dearest thing in the world for
+something dearer.  It was never otherwise.  Thus it was when Abel
+brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof.  The
+firstlings and the fat thereof were to him the dearest things in
+the world; yet he gave them over that he might be on good terms
+with God.  So it was with Abraham when he prepared to offer up his
+son Isaac on a stone.  Isaac was very dear to him; but God, in
+incomprehensible ways, was yet dearer.  It may be that Abraham
+feared the Lord.  But whether that be true or not it has since been
+determined by a few billion people that he loved the Lord and
+desired to serve him.
+
+And since it has been determined that love is service, and since to
+renounce is to serve, then Jees Uck, who was merely a woman of a
+swart-skinned breed, loved with a great love.  She was unversed in
+history, having learned to read only the signs of weather and of
+game; so she had never heard of Abel nor of Abraham; nor, having
+escaped the good sisters at Holy Cross, had she been told the story
+of Ruth, the Moabitess, who renounced her very God for the sake of
+a stranger woman from a strange land.  Jees Uck had learned only
+one way of renouncing, and that was with a club as the dynamic
+factor, in much the same manner as a dog is made to renounce a
+stolen marrow-bone.  Yet, when the time came, she proved herself
+capable of rising to the height of the fair-faced royal races and
+of renouncing in right regal fashion.
+
+So this is the story of Jees Uck, which is also the story of Neil
+Bonner, and Kitty Bonner, and a couple of Neil Bonner's progeny.
+Jees Uck was of a swart-skinned breed, it is true, but she was not
+an Indian; nor was she an Eskimo; nor even an Innuit.  Going
+backward into mouth tradition, there appears the figure of one
+Skolkz, a Toyaat Indian of the Yukon, who journeyed down in his
+youth to the Great Delta where dwell the Innuits, and where he
+foregathered with a woman remembered as Olillie.  Now the woman
+Olillie had been bred from an Eskimo mother by an Innuit man.  And
+from Skolkz and Olillie came Halie, who was one-half Toyaat Indian,
+one-quarter Innuit, and one-quarter Eskimo.  And Halie was the
+grandmother of Jees Uck.
+
+Now Halie, in whom three stocks had been bastardized, who cherished
+no prejudice against further admixture, mated with a Russian fur
+trader called Shpack, also known in his time as the Big Fat.
+Shpack is herein classed Russian for lack of a more adequate term;
+for Shpack's father, a Slavonic convict from the Lower Provinces,
+had escaped from the quicksilver mines into Northern Siberia, where
+he knew Zimba, who was a woman of the Deer People and who became
+the mother of Shpack, who became the grandfather of Jees Uck.
+
+Now had not Shpack been captured in his boyhood by the Sea People,
+who fringe the rim of the Arctic Sea with their misery, he would
+not have become the grandfather of Jees Uck and there would be no
+story at all.  But he WAS captured by the Sea People, from whom he
+escaped to Kamchatka, and thence, on a Norwegian whale-ship, to the
+Baltic.  Not long after that he turned up in St. Petersburg, and
+the years were not many till he went drifting east over the same
+weary road his father had measured with blood and groans a half-
+century before.  But Shpack was a free man, in the employ of the
+great Russian Fur Company.  And in that employ he fared farther and
+farther east, until he crossed Bering Sea into Russian America; and
+at Pastolik, which is hard by the Great Delta of the Yukon, became
+the husband of Halie, who was the grandmother of Jees Uck.  Out of
+this union came the woman-child, Tukesan.
+
+Shpack, under the orders of the Company, made a canoe voyage of a
+few hundred miles up the Yukon to the post of Nulato.  With him he
+took Halie and the babe Tukesan.  This was in 1850, and in 1850 it
+was that the river Indians fell upon Nulato and wiped it from the
+face of the earth.  And that was the end of Shpack and Halie.  On
+that terrible night Tukesan disappeared.  To this day the Toyaats
+aver they had no hand in the trouble; but, be that as it may, the
+fact remains that the babe Tukesan grew up among them.
+
+Tukesan was married successively to two Toyaat brothers, to both of
+whom she was barren.  Because of this, other women shook their
+heads, and no third Toyaat man could be found to dare matrimony
+with the childless widow.  But at this time, many hundred miles
+above, at Fort Yukon, was a man, Spike O'Brien.  Fort Yukon was a
+Hudson Bay Company post, and Spike O'Brien one of the Company's
+servants.  He was a good servant, but he achieved an opinion that
+the service was bad, and in the course of time vindicated that
+opinion by deserting.  It was a year's journey, by the chain of
+posts, back to York Factory on Hudson's Bay.  Further, being
+Company posts, he knew he could not evade the Company's clutches.
+Nothing retained but to go down the Yukon.  It was true no white
+man had ever gone down the Yukon, and no white man knew whether the
+Yukon emptied into the Arctic Ocean or Bering Sea; but Spike
+O'Brien was a Celt, and the promise of danger was a lure he had
+ever followed.
+
+A few weeks later, somewhat battered, rather famished, and about
+dead with river-fever, he drove the nose of his canoe into the
+earth bank by the village of the Toyaats and promptly fainted away.
+While getting his strength back, in the weeks that followed, he
+looked upon Tukesan and found her good.  Like the father of Shpack,
+who lived to a ripe old age among the Siberian Deer People, Spike
+O'Brien might have left his aged bones with the Toyaats.  But
+romance gripped his heart-strings and would not let him stay.  As
+he had journeyed from York Factory to Fort Yukon, so, first among
+men, might he journey from Fort Yukon to the sea and win the honour
+of being the first man to make the North-West Passage by land.  So
+he departed down the river, won the honour, and was unannaled and
+unsung.  In after years he ran a sailors' boarding-house in San
+Francisco, where he became esteemed a most remarkable liar by
+virtue of the gospel truths he told.  But a child was born to
+Tukesan, who had been childless.  And this child was Jees Uck.  Her
+lineage has been traced at length to show that she was neither
+Indian, nor Eskimo, nor Innuit, nor much of anything else; also to
+show what waifs of the generations we are, all of us, and the
+strange meanderings of the seed from which we spring.
+
+What with the vagrant blood in her and the heritage compounded of
+many races, Jees Uck developed a wonderful young beauty.  Bizarre,
+perhaps, it was, and Oriental enough to puzzle any passing
+ethnologist.  A lithe and slender grace characterized her.  Beyond
+a quickened lilt to the imagination, the contribution of the Celt
+was in no wise apparent.  It might possibly have put the warm blood
+under her skin, which made her face less swart and her body fairer;
+but that, in turn, might have come from Shpack, the Big Fat, who
+inherited the colour of his Slavonic father.  And, finally, she had
+great, blazing black eyes--the half-caste eye, round, full-orbed,
+and sensuous, which marks the collision of the dark races with the
+light.  Also, the white blood in her, combined with her knowledge
+that it was in her, made her, in a way, ambitious.  Otherwise by
+upbringing and in outlook on life, she was wholly and utterly a
+Toyaat Indian.
+
+One winter, when she was a young woman, Neil Bonner came into her
+life.  But he came into her life, as he had come into the country,
+somewhat reluctantly.  In fact, it was very much against his will,
+coming into the country.  Between a father who clipped coupons and
+cultivated roses, and a mother who loved the social round, Neil
+Bonner had gone rather wild.  He was not vicious, but a man with
+meat in his belly and without work in the world has to expend his
+energy somehow, and Neil Bonner was such a man.  And he expended
+his energy in such a fashion and to such extent that when the
+inevitable climax came, his father, Neil Bonner, senior, crawled
+out of his roses in a panic and looked on his son with a wondering
+eye.  Then he hied himself away to a crony of kindred pursuits,
+with whom he was wont to confer over coupons and roses, and between
+the two the destiny of young Neil Bonner was made manifest.  He
+must go away, on probation, to live down his harmless follies in
+order that he might live up to their own excellent standard.
+
+This determined upon, and young Neil a little repentant and a great
+deal ashamed, the rest was easy.  The cronies were heavy
+stockholders in the P. C. Company.  The P. C. Company owned fleets
+of river-steamers and ocean-going craft, and, in addition to
+farming the sea, exploited a hundred thousand square miles or so of
+the land that, on the maps of geographers, usually occupies the
+white spaces.  So the P. C. Company sent young Neil Bonner north,
+where the white spaces are, to do its work and to learn to be good
+like his father.  "Five years of simplicity, close to the soil and
+far from temptation, will make a man of him," said old Neil Bonner,
+and forthwith crawled back among his roses.  Young Neil set his
+jaw, pitched his chin at the proper angle, and went to work.  As an
+underling he did his work well and gained the commendation of his
+superiors.  Not that he delighted in the work, but that it was the
+one thing that prevented him from going mad.
+
+The first year he wished he was dead.  The second year he cursed
+God.  The third year he was divided between the two emotions, and
+in the confusion quarrelled with a man in authority.  He had the
+best of the quarrel, though the man in authority had the last
+word,--a word that sent Neil Bonner into an exile that made his old
+billet appear as paradise.  But he went without a whimper, for the
+North had succeeded in making him into a man.
+
+Here and there, on the white spaces on the map, little circlets
+like the letter "o" are to be found, and, appended to these
+circlets, on one side or the other, are names such as "Fort
+Hamilton," "Yanana Station," "Twenty Mile," thus leading one to
+imagine that the white spaces are plentifully besprinkled with
+towns and villages.  But it is a vain imagining.  Twenty Mile,
+which is very like the rest of the posts, is a log building the
+size of a corner grocery with rooms to let up-stairs.  A long-
+legged cache on stilts may be found in the back yard; also a couple
+of outhouses.  The back yard is unfenced, and extends to the
+skyline and an unascertainable bit beyond.  There are no other
+houses in sight, though the Toyaats sometimes pitch a winter camp a
+mile or two down the Yukon.  And this is Twenty Mile, one tentacle
+of the many-tentacled P. C. Company.  Here the agent, with an
+assistant, barters with the Indians for their furs, and does an
+erratic trade on a gold-dust basis with the wandering miners.
+Here, also, the agent and his assistant yearn all winter for the
+spring, and when the spring comes, camp blasphemously on the roof
+while the Yukon washes out the establishment.  And here, also, in
+the fourth year of his sojourn in the land, came Neil Bonner to
+take charge.
+
+He had displaced no agent; for the man that previously ran the post
+had made away with himself; "because of the rigours of the place,"
+said the assistant, who still remained; though the Toyaats, by
+their fires, had another version.  The assistant was a shrunken-
+shouldered, hollow-chested man, with a cadaverous face and
+cavernous cheeks that his sparse black beard could not hide.  He
+coughed much, as though consumption gripped his lungs, while his
+eyes had that mad, fevered light common to consumptives in the last
+stage.  Pentley was his name--Amos Pentley--and Bonner did not like
+him, though he felt a pity for the forlorn and hopeless devil.
+They did not get along together, these two men who, of all men,
+should have been on good terms in the face of the cold and silence
+and darkness of the long winter.
+
+In the end, Bonner concluded that Amos was partly demented, and
+left him alone, doing all the work himself except the cooking.
+Even then, Amos had nothing but bitter looks and an undisguised
+hatred for him.  This was a great loss to Bonner; for the smiling
+face of one of his own kind, the cheery word, the sympathy of
+comradeship shared with misfortune--these things meant much; and
+the winter was yet young when he began to realize the added
+reasons, with such an assistant, that the previous agent had found
+to impel his own hand against his life.
+
+It was very lonely at Twenty Mile.  The bleak vastness stretched
+away on every side to the horizon.  The snow, which was really
+frost, flung its mantle over the land and buried everything in the
+silence of death.  For days it was clear and cold, the thermometer
+steadily recording forty to fifty degrees below zero.  Then a
+change came over the face of things.  What little moisture had
+oozed into the atmosphere gathered into dull grey, formless clouds;
+it became quite warm, the thermometer rising to twenty below; and
+the moisture fell out of the sky in hard frost-granules that hissed
+like dry sugar or driving sand when kicked underfoot.  After that
+it became clear and cold again, until enough moisture had gathered
+to blanket the earth from the cold of outer space.  That was all.
+Nothing happened.  No storms, no churning waters and threshing
+forests, nothing but the machine-like precipitation of accumulated
+moisture.  Possibly the most notable thing that occurred through
+the weary weeks was the gliding of the temperature up to the
+unprecedented height of fifteen below.  To atone for this, outer
+space smote the earth with its cold till the mercury froze and the
+spirit thermometer remained more than seventy below for a
+fortnight, when it burst.  There was no telling how much colder it
+was after that.  Another occurrence, monotonous in its regularity,
+was the lengthening of the nights, till day became a mere blink of
+light between the darkness.
+
+Neil Bonner was a social animal.  The very follies for which he was
+doing penance had been bred of his excessive sociability.  And
+here, in the fourth year of his exile, he found himself in company-
+-which were to travesty the word--with a morose and speechless
+creature in whose sombre eyes smouldered a hatred as bitter as it
+was unwarranted.  And Bonner, to whom speech and fellowship were as
+the breath of life, went about as a ghost might go, tantalized by
+the gregarious revelries of some former life.  In the day his lips
+were compressed, his face stern; but in the night he clenched his
+hands, rolled about in his blankets, and cried aloud like a little
+child.  And he would remember a certain man in authority and curse
+him through the long hours.  Also, he cursed God.  But God
+understands.  He cannot find it in his heart to blame weak mortals
+who blaspheme in Alaska.
+
+And here, to the post of Twenty Mile, came Jees Uck, to trade for
+flour and bacon, and beads, and bright scarlet cloths for her fancy
+work.  And further, and unwittingly, she came to the post of Twenty
+Mile to make a lonely man more lonely, make him reach out empty
+arms in his sleep.  For Neil Bonner was only a man.  When she first
+came into the store, he looked at her long, as a thirsty man may
+look at a flowing well.  And she, with the heritage bequeathed her
+by Spike O'Brien, imagined daringly and smiled up into his eyes,
+not as the swart-skinned peoples should smile at the royal races,
+but as a woman smiles at a man.  The thing was inevitable; only, he
+did not see it, and fought against her as fiercely and passionately
+as he was drawn towards her.  And she?  She was Jees Uck, by
+upbringing wholly and utterly a Toyaat Indian woman.
+
+She came often to the post to trade.  And often she sat by the big
+wood stove and chatted in broken English with Neil Bonner.  And he
+came to look for her coming; and on the days she did not come he
+was worried and restless.  Sometimes he stopped to think, and then
+she was met coldly, with a resolve that perplexed and piqued her,
+and which, she was convinced, was not sincere.  But more often he
+did not dare to think, and then all went well and there were smiles
+and laughter.  And Amos Pentley, gasping like a stranded catfish,
+his hollow cough a-reek with the grave, looked upon it all and
+grinned.  He, who loved life, could not live, and it rankled his
+soul that others should be able to live.  Wherefore he hated
+Bonner, who was so very much alive and into whose eyes sprang joy
+at the sight of Jees Uck.  As for Amos, the very thought of the
+girl was sufficient to send his blood pounding up into a
+hemorrhage.
+
+Jees Uck, whose mind was simple, who thought elementally and was
+unused to weighing life in its subtler quantities, read Amos
+Pentley like a book.  She warned Bonner, openly and bluntly, in few
+words; but the complexities of higher existence confused the
+situation to him, and he laughed at her evident anxiety.  To him,
+Amos was a poor, miserable devil, tottering desperately into the
+grave.  And Bonner, who had suffered much, found it easy to forgive
+greatly.
+
+But one morning, during a bitter snap, he got up from the
+breakfast-table and went into the store.  Jees Uck was already
+there, rosy from the trail, to buy a sack of flour.  A few minutes
+later, he was out in the snow lashing the flour on her sled.  As he
+bent over he noticed a stiffness in his neck and felt a premonition
+of impending physical misfortune.  And as he put the last half-
+hitch into the lashing and attempted to straighten up, a quick
+spasm seized him and he sank into the snow.  Tense and quivering,
+head jerked back, limbs extended, back arched and mouth twisted and
+distorted, he appeared as though being racked limb from limb.
+Without cry or sound, Jees Uck was in the snow beside him; but he
+clutched both her wrists spasmodically, and as long as the
+convulsion endured she was helpless.  In a few moments the spasm
+relaxed and he was left weak and fainting, his forehead beaded with
+sweat, and his lips flecked with foam.
+
+"Quick!" he muttered, in a strange, hoarse voice.  "Quick!
+Inside!"
+
+He started to crawl on hands and knees, but she raised him up, and,
+supported by her young arm, he made faster progress.  As he entered
+the store the spasm seized him again, and his body writhed
+irresistibly away from her and rolled and curled on the floor.
+Amos Pentley came and looked on with curious eyes.
+
+"Oh, Amos!" she cried in an agony of apprehension and helplessness,
+"him die, you think?"  But Amos shrugged his shoulders and
+continued to look on.
+
+Bonner's body went slack, the tense muscles easing down and an
+expression of relief coming into his face.  "Quick!" he gritted
+between his teeth, his mouth twisting with the on-coming of the
+next spasm and with his effort to control it.  "Quick, Jees Uck!
+The medicine!  Never mind!  Drag me!"
+
+She knew where the medicine-chest stood, at the rear of the room
+beyond the stove, and thither, by the legs, she dragged the
+struggling man.  As the spasm passed he began, very faint and very
+sick, to overhaul the chest.  He had seen dogs die exhibiting
+symptoms similar to his own, and he knew what should be done.  He
+held up a vial of chloral hydrate, but his fingers were too weak
+and nerveless to draw the cork.  This Jees Uck did for him, while
+he was plunged into another convulsion.  As he came out of it he
+found the open bottle proffered him, and looked into the great
+black eyes of the woman and read what men have always read in the
+Mate-woman's eyes.  Taking a full dose of the stuff, he sank back
+until another spasm had passed.  Then he raised himself limply on
+his elbow.
+
+"Listen, Jees Uck!" he said very slowly, as though aware of the
+necessity for haste and yet afraid to hasten.  "Do what I say.
+Stay by my side, but do not touch me.  I must be very quiet, but
+you must not go away."  His jaw began to set and his face to quiver
+and distort with the fore-running pangs, but he gulped and
+struggled to master them.  "Do not got away.  And do not let Amos
+go away.  Understand!  Amos must stay right here."
+
+She nodded her head, and he passed off into the first of many
+convulsions, which gradually diminished in force and frequency.
+Jees Uck hung over him remembering his injunction and not daring to
+touch him.  Once Amos grew restless and made as though to go into
+the kitchen; but a quick blaze from her eyes quelled him, and after
+that, save for his laboured breathing and charnel cough, he was
+very quiet.
+
+Bonner slept.  The blink of light that marked the day disappeared.
+Amos, followed about by the woman's eyes, lighted the kerosene
+lamps.  Evening came on.  Through the north window the heavens were
+emblazoned with an auroral display, which flamed and flared and
+died down into blackness.  Some time after that, Neil Bonner
+roused.  First he looked to see that Amos was still there, then
+smiled at Jees Uck and pulled himself up.  Every muscle was stiff
+and sore, and he smiled ruefully, pressing and prodding himself as
+if to ascertain the extent of the ravage.  Then his face went stern
+and businesslike.
+
+"Jees Uck," he said, "take a candle.  Go into the kitchen.  There
+is food on the table--biscuits and beans and bacon; also, coffee in
+the pot on the stove.  Bring it here on the counter.  Also, bring
+tumblers and water and whisky, which you will find on the top shelf
+of the locker.  Do not forget the whisky."
+
+Having swallowed a stiff glass of the whisky, he went carefully
+through the medicine chest, now and again putting aside, with
+definite purpose, certain bottles and vials.  Then he set to work
+on the food, attempting a crude analysis.  He had not been unused
+to the laboratory in his college days and was possessed of
+sufficient imagination to achieve results with his limited
+materials.  The condition of tetanus, which had marked his
+paroxysms, simplified matters, and he made but one test.  The
+coffee yielded nothing; nor did the beans.  To the biscuits he
+devoted the utmost care.  Amos, who knew nothing of chemistry,
+looked on with steady curiosity.  But Jees Uck, who had boundless
+faith in the white man's wisdom, and especially in Neil Bonner's
+wisdom, and who not only knew nothing but knew that she knew
+nothing watched his face rather than his hands.
+
+Step by step he eliminated possibilities, until he came to the
+final test.  He was using a thin medicine vial for a tube, and this
+he held between him and the light, watching the slow precipitation
+of a salt through the solution contained in the tube.  He said
+nothing, but he saw what he had expected to see.  And Jees Uck, her
+eyes riveted on his face, saw something too,--something that made
+her spring like a tigress upon Amos, and with splendid suppleness
+and strength bend his body back across her knee.  Her knife was out
+of its sheaf and uplifted, glinting in the lamplight.  Amos was
+snarling; but Bonner intervened ere the blade could fall.
+
+"That's a good girl, Jees Uck.  But never mind.  Let him go!"
+
+She dropped the man obediently, though with protest writ large on
+her face; and his body thudded to the floor.  Bonner nudged him
+with his moccasined foot.
+
+"Get up, Amos!" he commanded.  "You've got to pack an outfit yet
+to-night and hit the trail."
+
+"You don't mean to say--" Amos blurted savagely.
+
+"I mean to say that you tried to kill me," Neil went on in cold,
+even tones.  "I mean to say that you killed Birdsall, for all the
+Company believes he killed himself.  You used strychnine in my
+case.  God knows with what you fixed him.  Now I can't hang you.
+You're too near dead as it is.  But Twenty Mile is too small for
+the pair of us, and you've got to mush.  It's two hundred miles to
+Holy Cross.  You can make it if you're careful not to over-exert.
+I'll give you grub, a sled, and three dogs.  You'll be as safe as
+if you were in jail, for you can't get out of the country.  And
+I'll give you one chance.  You're almost dead.  Very well.  I shall
+send no word to the Company until the spring.  In the meantime, the
+thing for you to do is to die.  Now MUSH!"
+
+"You go to bed!" Jees Uck insisted, when Amos had churned away into
+the night towards Holy Cross.  "You sick man yet, Neil."
+
+"And you're a good girl, Jees Uck," he answered.  "And here's my
+hand on it.  But you must go home."
+
+"You don't like me," she said simply.
+
+He smiled, helped her on with her PARKA, and led her to the door.
+"Only too well, Jees Uck," he said softly; "only too well."
+
+After that the pall of the Arctic night fell deeper and blacker on
+the land.  Neil Bonner discovered that he had failed to put proper
+valuation upon even the sullen face of the murderous and death-
+stricken Amos.  It became very lonely at Twenty Mile.  "For the
+love of God, Prentiss, send me a man," he wrote to the agent at
+Fort Hamilton, three hundred miles up river.  Six weeks later the
+Indian messenger brought back a reply.  It was characteristic:
+"Hell.  Both feet frozen.  Need him myself--Prentiss."
+
+To make matters worse, most of the Toyaats were in the back country
+on the flanks of a caribou herd, and Jees Uck was with them.
+Removing to a distance seemed to bring her closer than ever, and
+Neil Bonner found himself picturing her, day by day, in camp and on
+trail.  It is not good to be alone.  Often he went out of the quiet
+store, bare-headed and frantic, and shook his fist at the blink of
+day that came over the southern sky-line.  And on still, cold
+nights he left his bed and stumbled into the frost, where he
+assaulted the silence at the top of his lungs, as though it were
+some tangible, sentiment thing that he might arouse; or he shouted
+at the sleeping dogs till they howled and howled again.  One shaggy
+brute he brought into the post, playing that it was the new man
+sent by Prentiss.  He strove to make it sleep decently under
+blankets at nights and to sit at table and eat as a man should; but
+the beast, mere domesticated wolf that it was, rebelled, and sought
+out dark corners and snarled and bit him in the leg, and was
+finally beaten and driven forth.
+
+Then the trick of personification seized upon Neil Bonner and
+mastered him.  All the forces of his environment metamorphosed into
+living, breathing entities and came to live with him.  He recreated
+the primitive pantheon; reared an altar to the sun and burned
+candle fat and bacon grease thereon; and in the unfenced yard, by
+the long-legged cache, made a frost devil, which he was wont to
+make faces at and mock when the mercury oozed down into the bulb.
+All this in play, of course.  He said it to himself that it was in
+play, and repeated it over and over to make sure, unaware that
+madness is ever prone to express itself in make-believe and play.
+
+One midwinter day, Father Champreau, a Jesuit missionary, pulled
+into Twenty Mile.  Bonner fell upon him and dragged him into the
+post, and clung to him and wept, until the priest wept with him
+from sheer compassion.  Then Bonner became madly hilarious and made
+lavish entertainment, swearing valiantly that his guest should not
+depart.  But Father Champreau was pressing to Salt Water on urgent
+business for his order, and pulled out next morning, with Bonner's
+blood threatened on his head.
+
+And the threat was in a fair way toward realization, when the
+Toyaats returned from their long hunt to the winter camp.  They had
+many furs, and there was much trading and stir at Twenty Mile.
+Also, Jees Uck came to buy beads and scarlet cloths and things, and
+Bonner began to find himself again.  He fought for a week against
+her.  Then the end came one night when she rose to leave.  She had
+not forgotten her repulse, and the pride that drove Spike O'Brien
+on to complete the North-West Passage by land was her pride.
+
+"I go now," she said; "good-night, Neil."
+
+But he came up behind her.  "Nay, it is not well," he said.
+
+And as she turned her face toward his with a sudden joyful flash,
+he bent forward, slowly and gravely, as it were a sacred thing, and
+kissed her on the lips.  The Toyaats had never taught her the
+meaning of a kiss upon the lips, but she understood and was glad.
+
+With the coming of Jees Uck, at once things brightened up.  She was
+regal in her happiness, a source of unending delight.  The
+elemental workings of her mind and her naive little ways made an
+immense sum of pleasurable surprise to the over-civilized man that
+had stooped to catch her up.  Not alone was she solace to his
+loneliness, but her primitiveness rejuvenated his jaded mind.  It
+was as though, after long wandering, he had returned to pillow his
+head in the lap of Mother Earth.  In short, in Jees Uck he found
+the youth of the world--the youth and the strength and the joy.
+
+And to fill the full round of his need, and that they might not see
+overmuch of each other, there arrived at Twenty Mile one Sandy
+MacPherson, as companionable a man as ever whistled along the trail
+or raised a ballad by a camp-fire.  A Jesuit priest had run into
+his camp, a couple of hundred miles up the Yukon, in the nick of
+time to say a last word over the body of Sandy's partner.  And on
+departing, the priest had said, "My son, you will be lonely now."
+And Sandy had bowed his head brokenly.  "At Twenty Mile," the
+priest added, "there is a lonely man.  You have need of each other,
+my son."
+
+So it was that Sandy became a welcome third at the post, brother to
+the man and woman that resided there.  He took Bonner moose-hunting
+and wolf-trapping; and, in return, Bonner resurrected a battered
+and way-worn volume and made him friends with Shakespeare, till
+Sandy declaimed iambic pentameters to his sled-dogs whenever they
+waxed mutinous.  And of the long evenings they played cribbage and
+talked and disagreed about the universe, the while Jees Uck rocked
+matronly in an easy-chair and darned their moccasins and socks.
+
+Spring came.  The sun shot up out of the south.  The land exchanged
+its austere robes for the garb of a smiling wanton.  Everywhere
+light laughed and life invited.  The days stretched out their balmy
+length and the nights passed from blinks of darkness to no darkness
+at all.  The river bared its bosom, and snorting steamboats
+challenged the wilderness.  There were stir and bustle, new faces,
+and fresh facts.  An assistant arrived at Twenty Mile, and Sandy
+MacPherson wandered off with a bunch of prospectors to invade the
+Koyokuk country.  And there were newspapers and magazines and
+letters for Neil Bonner.  And Jees Uck looked on in worriment, for
+she knew his kindred talked with him across the world.
+
+Without much shock, it came to him that his father was dead.  There
+was a sweet letter of forgiveness, dictated in his last hours.
+There were official letters from the Company, graciously ordering
+him to turn the post over to the assistant and permitting him to
+depart at his earliest pleasure.  A long, legal affair from the
+lawyers informed him of interminable lists of stocks and bonds,
+real estate, rents, and chattels that were his by his father's
+will.  And a dainty bit of stationery, sealed and monogramed,
+implored dear Neil's return to his heart-broken and loving mother.
+
+Neil Bonner did some swift thinking, and when the Yukon Belle
+coughed in to the bank on her way down to Bering Sea, he departed--
+departed with the ancient lie of quick return young and blithe on
+his lips.
+
+"I'll come back, dear Jees Uck, before the first snow flies," he
+promised her, between the last kisses at the gang-plank.
+
+And not only did he promise, but, like the majority of men under
+the same circumstances, he really meant it.  To John Thompson, the
+new agent, he gave orders for the extension of unlimited credit to
+his wife, Jees Uck.  Also, with his last look from the deck of the
+Yukon Belle, he saw a dozen men at work rearing the logs that were
+to make the most comfortable house along a thousand miles of river
+front--the house of Jees Uck, and likewise the house of Neil
+Bonner--ere the first flurry of snow.  For he fully and fondly
+meant to come back.  Jees Uck was dear to him, and, further, a
+golden future awaited the north.  With his father's money he
+intended to verify that future.  An ambitious dream allured him.
+With his four years of experience, and aided by the friendly
+cooperation of the P. C. Company, he would return to become the
+Rhodes of Alaska.  And he would return, fast as steam could drive,
+as soon as he had put into shape the affairs of his father, whom he
+had never known, and comforted his mother, whom he had forgotten.
+
+There was much ado when Neil Bonner came back from the Arctic.  The
+fires were lighted and the fleshpots slung, and he took of it all
+and called it good.  Not only was he bronzed and creased, but he
+was a new man under his skin, with a grip on things and a
+seriousness and control.  His old companions were amazed when he
+declined to hit up the pace in the good old way, while his father's
+crony rubbed hands gleefully, and became an authority upon the
+reclamation of wayward and idle youth.
+
+For four years Neil Bonner's mind had lain fallow.  Little that was
+new had been added to it, but it had undergone a process of
+selection.  It had, so to say, been purged of the trivial and
+superfluous.  He had lived quick years, down in the world; and, up
+in the wilds, time had been given him to organize the confused mass
+of his experiences.  His superficial standards had been flung to
+the winds and new standards erected on deeper and broader
+generalizations.  Concerning civilization, he had gone away with
+one set of values, had returned with another set of values.  Aided,
+also, by the earth smells in his nostrils and the earth sights in
+his eyes, he laid hold of the inner significance of civilization,
+beholding with clear vision its futilities and powers.  It was a
+simple little philosophy he evolved.  Clean living was the way to
+grace.  Duty performed was sanctification.  One must live clean and
+do his duty in order that he might work.  Work was salvation.  And
+to work toward life abundant, and more abundant, was to be in line
+with the scheme of things and the will of God.
+
+Primarily, he was of the city.  And his fresh earth grip and virile
+conception of humanity gave him a finer sense of civilization and
+endeared civilization to him.  Day by day the people of the city
+clung closer to him and the world loomed more colossal.  And, day
+by day, Alaska grew more remote and less real.  And then he met
+Kitty Sharon--a woman of his own flesh and blood and kind; a woman
+who put her hand into his hand and drew him to her, till he forgot
+the day and hour and the time of the year the first snow flies on
+the Yukon.
+
+Jees Uck moved into her grand log-house and dreamed away three
+golden summer months.  Then came the autumn, post-haste before the
+down rush of winter.  The air grew thin and sharp, the days thin
+and short.  The river ran sluggishly, and skin ice formed in the
+quiet eddies.  All migratory life departed south, and silence fell
+upon the land.  The first snow flurries came, and the last homing
+steamboat bucked desperately into the running mush ice.  Then came
+the hard ice, solid cakes and sheets, till the Yukon ran level with
+its banks.  And when all this ceased the river stood still and the
+blinking days lost themselves in the darkness.
+
+John Thompson, the new agent, laughed; but Jees Uck had faith in
+the mischances of sea and river.  Neil Bonner might be frozen in
+anywhere between Chilkoot Pass and St. Michael's, for the last
+travellers of the year are always caught by the ice, when they
+exchange boat for sled and dash on through the long hours behind
+the flying dogs.
+
+But no flying dogs came up the trail, nor down the trail, to Twenty
+Mile.  And John Thompson told Jees Uck, with a certain gladness ill
+concealed, that Bonner would never come back again.  Also, and
+brutally, he suggested his own eligibility.  Jees Uck laughed in
+his face and went back to her grand log-house.  But when midwinter
+came, when hope dies down and life is at its lowest ebb, Jees Uck
+found she had no credit at the store.  This was Thompson's doing,
+and he rubbed his hands, and walked up and down, and came to his
+door and looked up at Jees Uck's house and waited.  And he
+continued to wait.  She sold her dog-team to a party of miners and
+paid cash for her food.  And when Thompson refused to honour even
+her coin, Toyaat Indians made her purchases, and sledded them up to
+her house in the dark.
+
+In February the first post came in over the ice, and John Thompson
+read in the society column of a five-months-old paper of the
+marriage of Neil Bonner and Kitty Sharon.  Jees Uck held the door
+ajar and him outside while he imparted the information; and, when
+he had done, laughed pridefully and did not believe.  In March, and
+all alone, she gave birth to a man-child, a brave bit of new life
+at which she marvelled.  And at that hour, a year later, Neil
+Bonner sat by another bed, marvelling at another bit of new life
+that had fared into the world.
+
+The snow went off the ground and the ice broke out of the Yukon.
+The sun journeyed north, and journeyed south again; and, the money
+from the being spent, Jees Uck went back to her own people.  Oche
+Ish, a shrewd hunter, proposed to kill the meat for her and her
+babe, and catch the salmon, if she would marry him.  And Imego and
+Hah Yo and Wy Nooch, husky young hunters all, made similar
+proposals.  But she elected to live alone and seek her own meat and
+fish.  She sewed moccasins and PARKAS and mittens--warm,
+serviceable things, and pleasing to the eye, withal, what of the
+ornamental hair-tufts and bead-work.  These she sold to the miners,
+who were drifting faster into the land each year.  And not only did
+she win food that was good and plentiful, but she laid money by,
+and one day took passage on the Yukon Belle down the river.
+
+At St. Michael's she washed dishes in the kitchen of the post.  The
+servants of the Company wondered at the remarkable woman with the
+remarkable child, though they asked no questions and she vouchsafed
+nothing.  But just before Bering Sea closed in for the year, she
+bought a passage south on a strayed sealing schooner.  That winter
+she cooked for Captain Markheim's household at Unalaska, and in the
+spring continued south to Sitka on a whisky sloop.  Later on
+appeared at Metlakahtla, which is near to St. Mary's on the end of
+the Pan-Handle, where she worked in the cannery through the salmon
+season.  When autumn came and the Siwash fishermen prepared to
+return to Puget Sound, she embarked with a couple of families in a
+big cedar canoe; and with them she threaded the hazardous chaos of
+the Alaskan and Canadian coasts, till the Straits of Juan de Fuca
+were passed and she led her boy by the hand up the hard pave of
+Seattle.
+
+There she met Sandy MacPherson, on a windy corner, very much
+surprised and, when he had heard her story, very wroth--not so
+wroth as he might have been, had he known of Kitty Sharon; but of
+her Jees Uck breathed not a word, for she had never believed.
+Sandy, who read commonplace and sordid desertion into the
+circumstance, strove to dissuade her from her trip to San
+Francisco, where Neil Bonner was supposed to live when he was at
+home.  And, having striven, he made her comfortable, bought her
+tickets and saw her off, the while smiling in her face and
+muttering "dam-shame" into his beard.
+
+With roar and rumble, through daylight and dark, swaying and
+lurching between the dawns, soaring into the winter snows and
+sinking to summer valleys, skirting depths, leaping chasms,
+piercing mountains, Jees Uck and her boy were hurled south.  But
+she had no fear of the iron stallion; nor was she stunned by this
+masterful civilization of Neil Bonner's people.  It seemed, rather,
+that she saw with greater clearness the wonder that a man of such
+godlike race had held her in his arms.  The screaming medley of San
+Francisco, with its restless shipping, belching factories, and
+thundering traffic, did not confuse her; instead, she comprehended
+swiftly the pitiful sordidness of Twenty Mile and the skin-lodged
+Toyaat village.  And she looked down at the boy that clutched her
+hand and wondered that she had borne him by such a man.
+
+She paid the hack-driver five pieces and went up the stone steps of
+Neil Bonner's front door.  A slant-eyed Japanese parleyed with her
+for a fruitless space, then led her inside and disappeared.  She
+remained in the hall, which to her simply fancy seemed to be the
+guest-room--the show-place wherein were arrayed all the household
+treasures with the frank purpose of parade and dazzlement.  The
+walls and ceiling were of oiled and panelled redwood.  The floor
+was more glassy than glare-ice, and she sought standing place on
+one of the great skins that gave a sense of security to the
+polished surface.  A huge fireplace--an extravagant fireplace, she
+deemed it--yawned in the farther wall.  A flood of light, mellowed
+by stained glass, fell across the room, and from the far end came
+the white gleam of a marble figure.
+
+This much she saw, and more, when the slant-eyed servant led the
+way past another room--of which she caught a fleeting glance--and
+into a third, both of which dimmed the brave show of the entrance
+hall.  And to her eyes the great house seemed to hold out the
+promise of endless similar rooms.  There was such length and
+breadth to them, and the ceilings were so far away!  For the first
+time since her advent into the white man's civilization, a feeling
+of awe laid hold of her.  Neil, her Neil, lived in this house,
+breathed the air of it, and lay down at night and slept!  It was
+beautiful, all this that she saw, and it pleased her; but she felt,
+also, the wisdom and mastery behind.  It was the concrete
+expression of power in terms of beauty, and it was the power that
+she unerringly divined.
+
+And then came a woman, queenly tall, crowned with a glory of hair
+that was like a golden sun.  She seemed to come toward Jees Uck as
+a ripple of music across still water; her sweeping garment itself a
+song, her body playing rhythmically beneath.  Jees Uck herself was
+a man compeller.  There were Oche Ish and Imego and Hah Yo and Wy
+Nooch, to say nothing of Neil Bonner and John Thompson and other
+white men that had looked upon her and felt her power.  But she
+gazed upon the wide blue eyes and rose-white skin of this woman
+that advanced to meet her, and she measured her with woman's eyes
+looking through man's eyes; and as a man compeller she felt herself
+diminish and grow insignificant before this radiant and flashing
+creature.
+
+"You wish to see my husband?" the woman asked; and Jees Uck gasped
+at the liquid silver of a voice that had never sounded harsh cries
+at snarling wolf-dogs, nor moulded itself to a guttural speech, nor
+toughened in storm and frost and camp smoke.
+
+"No," Jees Uck answered slowly and gropingly, in order that she
+might do justice to her English.  "I come to see Neil Bonner."
+
+"He is my husband," the woman laughed.
+
+Then it was true!  John Thompson had not lied that bleak February
+day, when she laughed pridefully and shut the door in his face.  As
+once she had thrown Amos Pentley across her knee and ripped her
+knife into the air, so now she felt impelled to spring upon this
+woman and bear her back and down, and tear the life out of her fair
+body.  But Jees Uck was thinking quickly and gave no sign, and
+Kitty Bonner little dreamed how intimately she had for an instant
+been related with sudden death.
+
+Jees Uck nodded her head that she understood, and Kitty Bonner
+explained that Neil was expected at any moment.  Then they sat down
+on ridiculously comfortable chairs, and Kitty sought to entertain
+her strange visitor, and Jees Uck strove to help her.
+
+"You knew my husband in the North?" Kitty asked, once.
+
+"Sure.  I wash um clothes," Jees Uck had answered, her English
+abruptly beginning to grow atrocious.
+
+"And this is your boy?  I have a little girl."
+
+Kitty caused her daughter to be brought, and while the children,
+after their manner, struck an acquaintance, the mothers indulged in
+the talk of mothers and drank tea from cups so fragile that Jees
+Uck feared lest hers should crumble to pieces beneath her fingers.
+Never had she seen such cups, so delicate and dainty.  In her mind
+she compared them with the woman who poured the tea, and there
+uprose in contrast the gourds and pannikins of the Toyaat village
+and the clumsy mugs of Twenty Mile, to which she likened herself.
+And in such fashion and such terms the problem presented itself.
+She was beaten.  There was a woman other than herself better fitted
+to bear and upbring Neil Bonner's children.  Just as his people
+exceeded her people, so did his womankind exceed her.  They were
+the man compellers, as their men were the world compellers.  She
+looked at the rose-white tenderness of Kitty Bonner's skin and
+remembered the sun-beat on her own face.  Likewise she looked from
+brown hand to white--the one, work-worn and hardened by whip-handle
+and paddle, the other as guiltless of toil and soft as a newborn
+babe's.  And, for all the obvious softness and apparent weakness,
+Jees Uck looked into the blue eyes and saw the mastery she had seen
+in Neil Bonner's eyes and in the eyes of Neil Bonner's people.
+
+"Why, it's Jees Uck!" Neil Bonner said, when he entered.  He said
+it calmly, with even a ring of joyful cordiality, coming over to
+her and shaking both her hands, but looking into her eyes with a
+worry in his own that she understood.
+
+"Hello, Neil!" she said.  "You look much good."
+
+"Fine, fine, Jees Uck," he answered heartily, though secretly
+studying Kitty for some sign of what had passed between the two.
+Yet he knew his wife too well to expect, even though the worst had
+passed, such a sign.
+
+"Well, I can't say how glad I am to see you," he went on.  "What's
+happened?  Did you strike a mine?  And when did you get in?"
+
+"Oo-a, I get in to-day," she replied, her voice instinctively
+seeking its guttural parts.  "I no strike it, Neil.  You known
+Cap'n Markheim, Unalaska?  I cook, his house, long time.  No spend
+money.  Bime-by, plenty.  Pretty good, I think, go down and see
+White Man's Land.  Very fine, White Man's Land, very fine," she
+added.  Her English puzzled him, for Sandy and he had sought,
+constantly, to better her speech, and she had proved an apt pupil.
+Now it seemed that she had sunk back into her race.  Her face was
+guileless, stolidly guileless, giving no cue.  Kitty's untroubled
+brow likewise baffled him.  What had happened?  How much had been
+said? and how much guessed?
+
+While he wrestled with these questions and while Jees Uck wrestled
+with her problem--never had he looked so wonderful and great--a
+silence fell.
+
+"To think that you knew my husband in Alaska!" Kitty said softly.
+
+Knew him!  Jees Uck could not forbear a glance at the boy she had
+borne him, and his eyes followed hers mechanically to the window
+where played the two children.  An iron hand seemed to tighten
+across his forehead.  His knees went weak and his heart leaped up
+and pounded like a fist against his breast.  His boy!  He had never
+dreamed it!
+
+Little Kitty Bonner, fairylike in gauzy lawn, with pinkest of
+cheeks and bluest of dancing eyes, arms outstretched and lips
+puckered in invitation, was striving to kiss the boy.  And the boy,
+lean and lithe, sunbeaten and browned, skin-clad and in hair-
+fringed and hair-tufted MUCLUCS that showed the wear of the sea and
+rough work, coolly withstood her advances, his body straight and
+stiff with the peculiar erectness common to children of savage
+people.  A stranger in a strange land, unabashed and unafraid, he
+appeared more like an untamed animal, silent and watchful, his
+black eyes flashing from face to face, quiet so long as quiet
+endured, but prepared to spring and fight and tear and scratch for
+life, at the first sign of danger.
+
+The contrast between boy and girl was striking, but not pitiful.
+There was too much strength in the boy for that, waif that he was
+of the generations of Shpack, Spike O'Brien, and Bonner.  In his
+features, clean cut as a cameo and almost classic in their
+severity, there were the power and achievement of his father, and
+his grandfather, and the one known as the Big Fat, who was captured
+by the Sea people and escaped to Kamchatka.
+
+Neil Bonner fought his emotion down, swallowed it down, and choked
+over it, though his face smiled with good-humour and the joy with
+which one meets a friend.
+
+"Your boy, eh, Jees Uck?" he said.  And then turning to Kitty:
+"Handsome fellow!  He'll do something with those two hands of his
+in this our world."
+
+Kitty nodded concurrence.  "What is your name?" she asked.
+
+The young savage flashed his quick eyes upon her and dwelt over her
+for a space, seeking out, as it were, the motive beneath the
+question.
+
+"Neil," he answered deliberately when the scrutiny had satisfied
+him.
+
+"Injun talk," Jees Uck interposed, glibly manufacturing languages
+on the spur of the moment.  "Him Injun talk, NEE-AL all the same
+'cracker.'  Him baby, him like cracker; him cry for cracker.  Him
+say, 'NEE-AL, NEE-AL,' all time him say, 'NEE-AL.'  Then I say that
+um name.  So um name all time Nee-al."
+
+Never did sound more blessed fall upon Neil Bonner's ear than that
+lie from Jees Uck's lips.  It was the cue, and he knew there was
+reason for Kitty's untroubled brow.
+
+"And his father?" Kitty asked.  "He must be a fine man."
+
+"Oo-a, yes," was the reply.  "Um father fine man.  Sure!"
+
+"Did you know him, Neil?" queried Kitty.
+
+"Know him?  Most intimately," Neil answered, and harked back to
+dreary Twenty Mile and the man alone in the silence with his
+thoughts.
+
+And here might well end the story of Jees Uck but for the crown she
+put upon her renunciation.  When she returned to the North to dwell
+in her grand log-house, John Thompson found that the P. C. Company
+could make a shift somehow to carry on its business without his
+aid.  Also, the new agent and the succeeding agents received
+instructions that the woman Jees Uck should be given whatsoever
+goods and grub she desired, in whatsoever quantities she ordered,
+and that no charge should be placed upon the books.  Further, the
+Company paid yearly to the woman Jees Uck a pension of five
+thousand dollars.
+
+When he had attained suitable age, Father Champreau laid hands upon
+the boy, and the time was not long when Jees Uck received letters
+regularly from the Jesuit college in Maryland.  Later on these
+letters came from Italy, and still later from France.  And in the
+end there returned to Alaska one Father Neil, a man mighty for good
+in the land, who loved his mother and who ultimately went into a
+wider field and rose to high authority in the order.
+
+Jees Uck was a young woman when she went back into the North, and
+men still looked upon her and yearned.  But she lived straight, and
+no breath was ever raised save in commendation.  She stayed for a
+while with the good sisters at Holy Cross, where she learned to
+read and write and became versed in practical medicine and surgery.
+After that she returned to her grand log-house and gathered about
+her the young girls of the Toyaat village, to show them the way of
+their feet in the world.  It is neither Protestant nor Catholic,
+this school in the house built by Neil Bonner for Jees Uck, his
+wife; but the missionaries of all the sects look upon it with equal
+favour.  The latchstring is always out, and tired prospectors and
+trail-weary men turn aside from the flowing river or frozen trail
+to rest there for a space and be warm by her fire.  And, down in
+the States, Kitty Bonner is pleased at the interest her husband
+takes in Alaskan education and the large sums he devotes to that
+purpose; and, though she often smiles and chaffs, deep down and
+secretly she is but the prouder of him.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Faith of Men, by Jack London
+