1 files changed, 6564 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/12336-0.txt b/12336-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0cc3856
--- /dev/null
+++ b/12336-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,6564 @@
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12336 ***
+
+BROWN WOLF
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Brown Wolf
+
+AND
+
+Other Jack London Stories
+
+
+As chosen by
+
+Franklin K. Mathiews
+
+Chief Scout Librarian, Boy Scouts of America
+
+
+
+
+TABLE OF CONTENTS
+
+BROWN WOLF
+
+THAT SPOT
+
+TRUST
+
+ALL GOLD CANYON
+
+THE STORY OF KEESH
+
+NAM-BOK THE UNVERACIOUS
+
+YELLOW HANDKERCHIEF
+
+MAKE WESTING
+
+THE HEATHEN
+
+THE HOBO AND THE FAIRY
+
+"JUST MEAT"
+
+A NOSE FOR THE KING
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+Boys delight in men who have had adventures, and when they are
+privileged to read of such exploits in thrilling story form, that is the
+"seventh heaven" for them. Such a "boys' man" was Jack London, whose
+whole life was one of stirring action on land and sea. Gifted as a story
+teller, he wrote books almost without end. Some of them, "The Call of
+the Wild," "The Sea Wolf" and "White Fang," have already been recognized
+as fine books for boys. Others, volumes of short stories, contain many
+of like interest, possessing the same qualities that have made the other
+and longer stories so acceptable as juveniles.
+
+Effort has been made by the editor to bring together in one volume a
+number of such stories, not for the reason alone that there might be
+another Jack London book for boys, but also in order to add to our
+juvenile literature a volume likely "to be chewed and digested," as
+Bacon says, a book worthy "to be read whole, and with diligence and
+attention." For my belief is that boys read altogether too few of such
+books. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say, have too few
+opportunities to read such books, because so often we fail to see how
+quick in their reading their minds are to grasp the more difficult, and
+how keen and competent their conscience to draw the right conclusion
+when situations are presented wherein men err so grievously.
+
+It is hoped the stories presented will serve to exercise both the boy's
+mind and conscience; that seeing and feeling life and nature as Jack
+London saw and felt it--the best and the worst in human nature, with the
+Infinite always near and from whom there is no escape--seeing and
+feeling such things boys will develop the emotional muscles of the
+spirit, have opened up new windows to their imaginations, and withal add
+some line or color to their life's ideals.
+
+FRANKLIN K. MATHIEWS, Chief Scout Librarian, Boy Scouts of America.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+BROWN WOLF
+
+
+She had delayed, because of the dew-wet grass, in order to put on her
+overshoes, and when she emerged from the house found her waiting husband
+absorbed in the wonder of a bursting almond-bud. She sent a questing
+glance across the tall grass and in and out among the orchard trees.
+
+"Where's Wolf?" she asked.
+
+"He was here a moment ago." Walt Irvine drew himself away with a jerk
+from the metaphysics and poetry of the organic miracle of blossom, and
+surveyed the landscape. "He was running a rabbit the last I saw of him."
+
+"Wolf! Wolf! Here, Wolf!" she called, as they left the clearing and took
+the trail that led down through the waxen-belled manzanita jungle to
+the county road.
+
+Irvine thrust between his lips the little finger of each hand and lent
+to her efforts a shrill whistling.
+
+She covered her ears hastily and made a wry grimace.
+
+"My! for a poet, delicately attuned and all the rest of it, you can make
+unlovely noises. My eardrums are pierced. You outwhistle----"
+
+"Orpheus."
+
+"I was about to say a street-arab," she concluded severely.
+
+"Poesy does not prevent one from being practical--at least it doesn't
+prevent _me_. Mine is no futility of genius that can't sell gems to the
+magazines."
+
+He assumed a mock extravagance, and went on:
+
+"I am no attic singer, no ballroom warbler. And why? Because I am
+practical. Mine is no squalor of song that cannot transmute itself, with
+proper exchange value, into a flower-crowned cottage, a sweet
+mountain-meadow, a grove of redwoods, an orchard of thirty-seven trees,
+one long row of blackberries and two short rows of strawberries, to say
+nothing of a quarter of a mile of gurgling brook."
+
+"Oh, that all your song-transmutations were as successful!" she laughed.
+
+"Name one that wasn't."
+
+"Those two beautiful sonnets that you transmuted into the cow that was
+accounted the worst milker in the township."
+
+"She was beautiful----" he began.
+
+"But she didn't give milk," Madge interrupted.
+
+"But she _was_ beautiful, now, wasn't she?" he insisted.
+
+"And here's where beauty and utility fall out," was her reply. "And
+there's the Wolf!"
+
+From the thicket-covered hillside came a crashing of underbrush, and
+then, forty feet above them, on the edge of the sheer wall of rock,
+appeared a wolf's head and shoulders. His braced forepaws dislodged a
+pebble, and with sharp-pricked ears and peering eyes he watched the fall
+of the pebble till it struck at their feet. Then he transferred his gaze
+and with open mouth laughed down at them.
+
+"You Wolf, you!" and "You blessed Wolf!" the man and woman called out to
+him. The ears flattened back and down at the sound, and the head seemed
+to snuggle under the caress of an invisible hand.
+
+They watched him scramble backward into the thicket, then proceeded on
+their way. Several minutes later, rounding a turn in the trail where the
+descent was less precipitous, he joined them in the midst of a miniature
+avalanche of pebbles and loose soil. He was not demonstrative. A pat and
+a rub around the ears from the man, and a more prolonged caressing from
+the woman, and he was away down the trail in front of them, gliding
+effortlessly over the ground in true wolf fashion.
+
+In build and coat and brush he was a huge timber-wolf; but the lie was
+given to his wolf-hood by his color and marking. There the dog
+unmistakably advertised itself. No wolf was ever colored like him. He
+was brown, deep brown, red-brown, an orgy of browns. Back and shoulders
+were a warm brown that paled on the sides and underneath to a yellow
+that was dingy because of the brown that lingered in it. The white of
+the throat and paws and the spots over the eyes was dirty because of the
+persistent and ineradicable brown, while the eyes themselves were twin
+topazes, golden and brown.
+
+The man and woman loved the dog very much; perhaps this was because it
+had been such a task to win his love. It had been no easy matter when he
+first drifted in mysteriously out of nowhere to their little mountain
+cottage. Footsore and famished, he had killed a rabbit under their very
+noses and under their very windows, and then crawled away and slept by
+the spring at the foot of the blackberry bushes. When Walt Irvine went
+down to inspect the intruder, he was snarled at for his pains, and Madge
+likewise was snarled at when she went down to present, as a
+peace-offering, a large pan of bread and milk.
+
+A most unsociable dog he proved to be, resenting all their advances,
+refusing to let them lay hands on him, menacing them with bared fangs
+and bristling hair. Nevertheless he remained, sleeping and resting by
+the spring, and eating the food they gave him after they set it down at
+a safe distance and retreated. His wretched physical condition explained
+why he lingered; and when he had recuperated, after several days'
+sojourn, he disappeared.
+
+And this would have been the end of him, so far as Irvine and his wife
+were concerned, had not Irvine at that particular time been called away
+into the northern part of the state. Biding along on the train, near to
+the line between California and Oregon, he chanced to look out of the
+window and saw his unsociable guest sliding along the wagon road, brown
+and wolfish, tired yet tireless, dust-covered and soiled with two
+hundred miles of travel.
+
+Now Irvine was a man of impulse, a poet. He got off the train at the
+next station, bought a piece of meat at a butcher shop, and captured the
+vagrant on the outskirts of the town. The return trip was made in the
+baggage car, and so Wolf came a second time to the mountain cottage.
+Here he was tied up for a week and made love to by the man and woman.
+But it was very circumspect love-making. Remote and alien as a traveller
+from another planet, he snarled down their soft-spoken love-words. He
+never barked. In all the time they had him he was never known to bark.
+
+To win him became a problem. Irvine liked problems. He had a metal plate
+made, on which was stamped: "Return to Walt Irvine, Glen Ellen, Sonoma
+County, California." This was riveted to a collar and strapped about the
+dog's neck. Then he was turned loose, and promptly He disappeared. A
+day later came a telegram from Mendocino County. In twenty hours he had
+made over a hundred miles to the north, and was still going when
+captured.
+
+He came back by Wells Fargo Express, was tied up three days, and was
+loosed on the fourth and lost. This time he gained southern Oregon
+before he was caught and returned. Always, as soon as he received his
+liberty, he fled away, and always he fled north. He was possessed of an
+obsession that drove him north. The homing instinct, Irvine called it,
+after he had expended the selling price of a sonnet in getting the
+animal back from northern Oregon.
+
+Another time the brown wanderer succeeded in traversing half the length
+of California, all of Oregon, and most of Washington, before he was
+picked up and returned "Collect." A remarkable thing was the speed with
+which he traveled. Fed up and rested, as soon as he was loosed he
+devoted all his energy to getting over the ground. On the first day's
+run he was known to cover as high as a hundred and fifty miles, and
+after that he would average a hundred miles a day until caught. He
+always arrived back lean and hungry and savage, and always departed
+fresh and vigorous, cleaving his way northward in response to some
+prompting of his being that no one could understand.
+
+But at last, after a futile year of flight, he accepted the inevitable
+and elected to remain at the cottage where first he had killed the
+rabbit and slept by the spring. Even after that, a long time elapsed
+before the man and woman succeeded in patting him. It was a great
+victory, for they alone were allowed to put hands on him. He was
+fastidiously exclusive, and no guest at the cottage ever succeeded in
+making up to him. A low growl greeted such approach; if any one had the
+hardihood to come nearer, the lips lifted, the naked fangs appeared, and
+the growl became a snarl--a snarl so terrible and malignant that it awed
+the stoutest of them, as it likewise awed the farmers' dogs that knew
+ordinary dog snarling, but had never seen wolf snarling before.
+
+He was without antecedents. His history began with Walt and Madge. He
+had come up from the south, but never a clew did they get of the owner
+from whom he had evidently fled. Mrs. Johnson, their nearest neighbor
+and the one who supplied them with milk, proclaimed him a Klondike dog.
+Her brother was burrowing for frozen pay-streaks in that far country,
+and so she constituted herself an authority on the subject.
+
+But they did not dispute her. There were the tips of Wolf's ears,
+obviously so severely frozen at some time that they would never quite
+heal again. Besides, he looked like the photographs of the Alaskan dogs
+they saw published in magazines and newspapers. They often speculated
+over his past, and tried to conjure up (from what they had read and
+heard) what his northland life had been. That the northland still drew
+him, they knew; for at night they sometimes heard him crying softly; and
+when the north wind blew and the bite of frost was in the air, a great
+restlessness would come upon him and he would lift a mournful lament
+which they knew to be the long wolf-howl. Yet he never barked. No
+provocation was great enough to draw from him that canine cry.
+
+Long discussion they had, during the time of winning him, as to whose
+dog he was. Each claimed him, and each proclaimed loudly any expression
+of affection made by him. But the man had the better of it at first,
+chiefly because he was a man. It was patent that Wolf had had no
+experience with women. He did not understand women. Madge's skirts were
+something he never quite accepted. The swish of them was enough to set
+him a-bristle with suspicion, and on a windy day she could not approach
+him at all.
+
+On the other hand, it was Madge who fed him; also it was she who ruled
+the kitchen, and it was by her favor, and her favor alone, that he was
+permitted to come within that sacred precinct. It was because of these
+things that she bade fair to overcome the handicap of her garments. Then
+it was that Walt put forth special effort, making it a practice to have
+Wolf lie at his feet while he wrote, and, between petting and talking,
+losing much time from his work. Walt won in the end, and his victory was
+most probably due to the fact that he was a man, though Madge averred
+that they would have had another quarter of a mile of gurgling brook,
+and at least two west winds sighing through their redwoods, had Walt
+properly devoted his energies to song-transmutation and left Wolf alone
+to exercise a natural taste and an unbiased judgment.
+
+"It's about time I heard from those triolets," Walt said, after a
+silence of five minutes, during which they had swung steadily down the
+trail. "There'll be a check at the post office, I know, and we'll
+transmute it into beautiful buckwheat flour, a gallon of maple syrup,
+and a new pair of overshoes for you."
+
+"And into beautiful milk from Mrs. Johnson's beautiful cow," Madge
+added. "To-morrow's the first of the month, you know."
+
+Walt scowled unconsciously; then his face brightened, and he clapped his
+hand to his breast pocket.
+
+"Never mind. I have here a nice, beautiful, new cow, the best milker in
+California."
+
+"When did you write it?" she demanded eagerly. Then, reproachfully, "And
+you never showed it to me."
+
+"I saved it to read to you on the way to the post office, in a spot
+remarkably like this one," he answered, indicating, with a wave of his
+hand, a dry log on which to sit.
+
+A tiny stream flowed out of a dense fern-brake, slipped down a
+mossy-lipped stone, and ran across the path at their feet. From the
+valley arose the mellow song of meadow larks, while about them, in and
+out, through sunshine and shadow, fluttered great yellow butterflies.
+
+Up from below came another sound that broke in upon Walt reading softly
+from his manuscript. It was a crunching of heavy feet, punctuated now
+and again by the clattering of a displaced stone. As Walt finished and
+looked to his wife for approval, a man came into view around the turn of
+the trail. He was bareheaded and sweaty. With a handkerchief in one hand
+he mopped his face, while in the other hand he carried a new hat and a
+wilted starched collar which he had removed from his neck. He was a
+well-built man, and his muscles seemed on the point of bursting out of
+the painfully new and ready-made black clothes he wore.
+
+"Warm day," Walt greeted him. Walt believed in country democracy, and
+never missed an opportunity to practice it.
+
+The man paused and nodded.
+
+"I guess I ain't used much to the warm," he vouchsafed half
+apologetically. "I'm more accustomed to zero weather."
+
+"You don't find any of that in this country," Walt laughed.
+
+"Should say not," the man answered. "An' I ain't here a-lookin' for it
+neither. I'm tryin' to find my sister. Mebbe you know where she lives.
+Her name's Johnson, Mrs. William Johnson."
+
+"You're not her Klondike brother!" Madge cried, her eyes bright with
+interest, "about whom we've heard so much?"
+
+"Yes'm, that's me," he answered modestly. "My name's Miller, Skiff
+Miller. I just thought I'd s'prise her."
+
+"You are on the right track then. Only you've come by the footpath."
+Madge stood up to direct him, pointing up the canyon a quarter of a
+mile. "You see that blasted redwood! Take the little trail turning off
+to the right. It's the short cut to her house. You can't miss it."
+
+"Yes'm, thank you, ma'am," he said.
+
+He made tentative efforts to go, but seemed awkwardly rooted to the
+spot. He was gazing at her with an open admiration of which he was quite
+unconscious, and which was drowning, along with him, in the rising sea
+of embarrassment in which he floundered.
+
+"We'd like to hear you tell about the Klondike," Madge said. "Mayn't we
+come over some day while you are at your sister's! Or, better yet,
+won't you come over and have dinner with us?"
+
+"Yes'm, thank you, ma'am," he mumbled mechanically. Then he caught
+himself up and added: "I ain't stoppin' long. I got to be pullin' north
+again. I go out on to-night's train. You see, I've got a mail contract
+with the government."
+
+When Madge had said that it was too bad, he made another futile effort
+to go. But he could not take his eyes from her face. He forgot his
+embarrassment in his admiration, and it was her turn to flush and feel
+uncomfortable.
+
+It was at this juncture, when Walt had just decided it was time for him
+to be saying something to relieve the strain, that Wolf, who had been
+away nosing through the brush, trotted wolf-like into view.
+
+Skiff Miller's abstraction disappeared. The pretty woman before him
+passed out of his field of vision. He had eyes only for the dog, and a
+great wonder came into his face.
+
+"Well, I'll be hanged!" he enunciated slowly and solemnly.
+
+He sat down ponderingly on the log, leaving Madge standing. At the sound
+of his voice, Wolf's ears had flattened down, then his mouth had opened
+in a laugh. He trotted slowly up to the stranger and first smelled his
+hands, then licked them with his tongue.
+
+Skiff Miller patted the dog's head, and slowly and solemnly repeated,
+"Well, I'll be hanged!"
+
+"Excuse me, ma'am," he said the next moment, "I was just s'prised some,
+that was all."
+
+"We're surprised, too," she answered lightly. "We never saw Wolf make up
+to a stranger before."
+
+"Is that what you call him--Wolf?" the man asked.
+
+Madge nodded. "But I can't understand his friendliness toward
+you--unless it's because you're from the Klondike. He's a Klondike dog,
+you know."
+
+"Yes'm," Miller said absently. He lifted one of Wolf's forelegs and
+examined the footpads, pressing them and denting them with his thumb.
+"Kind of soft," he remarked. "He ain't been on trail for a long time."
+
+"I say," Walt broke in, "it is remarkable the way he lets you handle
+him."
+
+Skiff Miller arose, no longer awkward with admiration of Madge, and in
+a sharp, businesslike manner asked, "How long have you had him?"
+
+But just then the dog, squirming and rubbing against the newcomer's
+legs, opened his mouth and barked. It was an explosive bark, brief and
+joyous, but a bark.
+
+"That's a new one on me," Skiff Miller remarked.
+
+Walt and Madge stared at each other. The miracle had happened. Wolf had
+barked.
+
+"It's the first time he ever barked," Madge said.
+
+"First time I ever heard him, too," Miller volunteered.
+
+Madge smiled at him. The man was evidently a humorist.
+
+"Of course," she said, "since you have only seen him for five minutes."
+
+Skiff Miller looked at her sharply, seeking in her face the guile her
+words had led him to suspect.
+
+"I thought you understood," he said slowly. "I thought you'd tumbled to
+it from his makin' up to me. He's my dog. His name ain't Wolf. It's
+Brown."
+
+"Oh, Walt!" was Madge's instinctive cry to her husband.
+
+Walt was on the defensive at once.
+
+"How do you know he's your dog?" he demanded.
+
+"Because he is," was the reply.
+
+"Mere assertion," Walt said sharply.
+
+In his slow and pondering way, Skiff Miller looked at him, then asked,
+with a nod of his head toward Madge:
+
+"How d'you know she's your wife? You just say, 'Because she is,' and
+I'll say it's mere assertion. The dog's mine. I bred 'm an' raised 'm,
+an' I guess I ought to know. Look here. I'll prove it to you."
+
+Skiff Miller turned to the dog. "Brown!" His voice rang out sharply, and
+at the sound the dog's ears flattened down as to a caress. "Gee!" The
+dog made a swinging turn to the right. "Now mush-on!" And the dog ceased
+his swing abruptly and started straight ahead, halting obediently at
+command.
+
+"I can do it with whistles," Skiff Miller said proudly. "He was my lead
+dog."
+
+"But you are not going to take him away with you?" Madge asked
+tremulously.
+
+The man nodded.
+
+"Back into that awful Klondike world of suffering?"
+
+He nodded and added: "Oh, it ain't so bad as all that. Look at me.
+Pretty healthy specimen, ain't I!"
+
+"But the dogs! The terrible hardship, the heart-breaking toil, the
+starvation, the frost! Oh, I've read about it and I know."
+
+"I nearly ate him once, over on Little Fish River," Miller volunteered
+grimly. "If I hadn't got a moose that day was all that saved 'm."
+
+"I'd have died first!" Madge cried.
+
+"Things is different down here," Miller explained. "You don't have to
+eat dogs. You think different just about the time you're all in. You've
+never been all in, so you don't know anything about it."
+
+"That's the very point," she argued warmly. "Dogs are not eaten in
+California. Why not leave him here? He is happy. He'll never want for
+food--you know that. He'll never suffer from cold and hardship. Here all
+is softness and gentleness. Neither the human nor nature is savage. He
+will never know a whip-lash again. And as for the weather--why, it
+never snows here."
+
+"But it's all-fired hot in summer, beggin' your pardon," Skiff Miller
+laughed.
+
+"But you do not answer," Madge continued passionately. "What have you to
+offer him in that northland life?"
+
+"Grub, when I've got it, and that's most of the time," came the answer.
+
+"And the rest of the time?"
+
+"No grub."
+
+"And the work?"
+
+"Yes, plenty of work," Miller blurted out impatiently. "Work without
+end, an' famine, an' frost, an' all the rest of the miseries--that's
+what he'll get when he comes with me. But he likes it. He is used to it.
+He knows that life. He was born to it an' brought up to it. An' you
+don't know anything about it. You don't know what you're talking about.
+That's where the dog belongs, and that's where he'll be happiest."
+
+"The dog doesn't go," Walt announced in a determined voice. "So there is
+no need of further discussion."
+
+"What's that?" Skiff Miller demanded, big brows lowering and an
+obstinate flush of blood reddening his forehead.
+
+"I said the dog doesn't go, and that settles it. I don't believe he's
+your dog. You may have seen him sometime. You may even sometime have
+driven him for his owner. But his obeying the ordinary driving commands
+of the Alaskan trail is no demonstration that he is yours. Any dog in
+Alaska would obey you as he obeyed. Besides, he is undoubtedly a
+valuable dog, as dogs go in Alaska, and that is sufficient explanation
+of your desire to get possession of him. Anyway, you've got to prove
+property."
+
+Skiff Miller, cool and collected, the obstinate flush a trifle deeper on
+his forehead, his huge muscles bulging under the black cloth of his
+coat, carefully looked the poet up and down as though measuring the
+strength of his slenderness.
+
+The Klondiker's face took on a contemptuous expression as he said
+finally: "I reckon there's nothin' in sight to prevent me takin' the dog
+right here an' now."
+
+Walt's face reddened, and the striking-muscles of his arms and shoulders
+seemed to stiffen and grow tense. His wife fluttered apprehensively
+into the breach.
+
+"Maybe Mr. Miller is right," she said. "I am afraid that he is. Wolf
+does seem to know him, and certainly he answers to the name of 'Brown.'
+He made friends with him instantly, and you know that's something he
+never did with anybody before. Besides, look at the way he barked. He
+was just bursting with joy. Joy over what? Without doubt at finding Mr.
+Miller."
+
+Walt's striking-muscles relaxed, and his shoulders seemed to droop with
+hopelessness.
+
+"I guess you're right, Madge," he said. "Wolf isn't Wolf, but Brown, and
+he must belong to Mr. Miller."
+
+"Perhaps Mr. Miller will sell him," she suggested. "We can buy him."
+
+Skiff Miller shook his head, no longer belligerent, but kindly, quick to
+be generous in response to generousness.
+
+"I had five dogs," he said, casting about for the easiest way to temper
+his refusal. "He was the leader. They was the crack team of Alaska.
+Nothin' could touch 'em. In 1898 I refused five thousand dollars for the
+bunch. Dogs was high, then, anyway; but that wasn't what made the fancy
+price. It was the team itself. Brown was the best in the team. That
+winter I refused twelve hundred for 'm. I didn't sell 'm then, an' I
+ain't a-sellin' 'm now. Besides, I think a mighty lot of that dog. I've
+been lookin' for 'm for three years. It made me fair sick when I found
+he'd been stole--not the value of him, but the--well, I liked 'm so,
+that's all. I couldn't believe my eyes when I seen 'm just now. I
+thought I was dreamin'. It was too good to be true. Why, I was his
+nurse. I put 'm to bed, snug every night. His mother died, and I brought
+'m up on condensed milk at two dollars a can when I couldn't afford it
+in my own coffee. He never knew any mother but me. He used to suck my
+finger regular, the darn little pup--that finger right there!"
+
+And Skiff Miller, too overwrought for speech, held up a forefinger for
+them to see.
+
+"That very finger," he managed to articulate, as though it somehow
+clinched the proof of ownership and the bond of affection.
+
+He was still gazing at his extended finger when Madge began to speak.
+
+"But the dog," she said. "You haven't considered the dog."
+
+Skiff Miller looked puzzled.
+
+"Have you thought about him?" she asked.
+
+"Don't know what you're drivin' at," was the response.
+
+"Maybe the dog has some choice in the matter," Madge went on. "Maybe he
+has his likes and desires. You have not considered him. You give him no
+choice. It has never entered your mind that possibly he might prefer
+California to Alaska. You consider only what you like. You do with him
+as you would with a sack of potatoes or a bale of hay."
+
+This was a new way of looking at it, and Miller was visibly impressed as
+he debated it in his mind. Madge took advantage of his indecision.
+
+"If you really love him, what would be happiness to him would be your
+happiness also," she urged.
+
+Skiff Miller continued to debate with himself, and Madge stole a glance
+of exultation to her husband, who looked back warm approval.
+
+"What do you think?" the Klondiker suddenly demanded.
+
+It was her turn to be puzzled. "What do you mean?" she asked.
+
+"D'ye think he'd sooner stay in California!"
+
+She nodded her head with positiveness. "I am sure of it."
+
+Skiff Miller again debated with himself, though this time aloud, at the
+same time running his gaze in a judicial way over the mooted animal.
+
+"He was a good worker. He's done a heap of work for me. He never loafed
+on me, an' he was a joe-dandy at hammerin' a raw team into shape. He's
+got a head on him. He can do everything but talk. He knows what you say
+to him. Look at 'm now. He knows we're talkin' about him."
+
+The dog was lying at Skiff Miller's feet, head close down on paws, ears
+erect and listening, and eyes that were quick and eager to follow the
+sound of speech as it fell from the lips of first one and then the
+other.
+
+"An' there's a lot of work in 'm yet. He's good for years to come. An' I
+do like him."
+
+Once or twice after that Skiff Miller opened his mouth and closed it
+again without speaking. Finally he said:
+
+"I'll tell you what I'll do. Your remarks, ma'am, has some weight in
+them. The dog's worked hard, and maybe he's earned a soft berth an' has
+got a right to choose. Anyway, we'll leave it up to him. Whatever he
+says, goes. You people stay right here settin' down. I'll say good-by
+and walk off casual-like. If he wants to stay, he can stay. If he wants
+to come with me, let 'm come. I won't call 'm to come an' don't you call
+'m to come back."
+
+He looked with sudden suspicion at Madge, and added, "Only you must play
+fair. No persuadin' after my back is turned."
+
+"We'll play fair," Madge began, but Skiff Miller broke in on her
+assurances.
+
+"I know the ways of women," he announced. "Their hearts is soft. When
+their hearts is touched they're likely to stack the cards, look at the
+bottom of the deck, an' lie--beggin' your pardon, ma'am. I'm only
+discoursin' about women in general."
+
+"I don't know how to thank you," Madge quavered.
+
+"I don't see as you've got any call to thank me," he replied. "Brown
+ain't decided yet. Now you won't mind if I go away slow! It's no more'n
+fair, seein' I'll be out of sight inside a hundred yards."
+
+Madge agreed, and added, "And I promise you faithfully that we won't do
+anything to influence him."
+
+"Well, then, I might as well he gettin' along," Skiff Miller said in the
+ordinary tones of one departing.
+
+At this change in his voice, Wolf lifted his head quickly, and still
+more quickly got to his feet when the man and woman shook hands. He
+sprang up on his hind legs, resting his fore paws on her hip and at the
+same time licking Skiff Miller's hand. When the latter shook hands with
+Walt, Wolf repeated his act, resting his weight on Walt and licking both
+men's hands.
+
+"It ain't no picnic, I can tell you that," were the Klondiker's last
+words, as he turned and went slowly up the trail.
+
+For the distance of twenty feet Wolf watched him go, himself all
+eagerness and expectancy, as though waiting for the man to turn and
+retrace his steps. Then, with a quick low whine, Wolf sprang after him,
+overtook him, caught his hand between his teeth with reluctant
+tenderness, and strove gently to make him pause.
+
+Failing in this, Wolf raced back to where Walt Irvine sat, catching his
+coat sleeve in his teeth and trying vainly to drag him after the
+retreating man.
+
+Wolf's perturbation began to wax. He desired ubiquity. He wanted to be
+in two places at the same time, with the old master and the new, and
+steadily the distance between them was increasing. He sprang about
+excitedly, making short nervous leaps and twists, now toward one, now
+toward the other, in painful indecision, not knowing his own mind,
+desiring both and unable to choose, uttering quick sharp whines and
+beginning to pant.
+
+He sat down abruptly on his haunches, thrusting his nose upward, the
+mouth opening and closing with jerking movements, each time opening
+wider. These jerking movements were in unison with the recurrent spasms
+that attacked the throat, each spasm severer and more intense than the
+preceding one. And in accord with jerks and spasms the larynx began to
+vibrate, at first silently, accompanied by the rush of air expelled from
+the lungs, then sounding a low, deep note, the lowest in the register of
+the human ear. All this was the nervous and muscular preliminary to
+howling.
+
+But just as the howl was on the verge of bursting from the full throat,
+the wide-opened mouth was closed, the paroxysms ceased, and he looked
+long and steadily at the retreating man. Suddenly Wolf turned his head,
+and over his shoulder just as steadily regarded Walt. The appeal was
+unanswered. Not a word nor a sign did the dog receive, no suggestion and
+no clew as to what his conduct should be.
+
+A glance ahead to where the old master was nearing the curve of the
+trail excited him again. He sprang to his feet with a whine, and then,
+struck by a new idea, turned his attention to Madge. Hitherto he had
+ignored her, but now, both masters failing him, she alone was left. He
+went over to her and snuggled his head in her lap, nudging her arm with
+his nose--an old trick of his when begging for favors. He backed away
+from her and began writhing and twisting playfully, curvetting and
+prancing, half rearing and striking his forepaws to the earth,
+struggling with all his body, from the wheedling eyes and flattening
+ears to the wagging tail, to express the thought that was in him and
+that was denied him utterance.
+
+This, too, he soon abandoned. He was depressed by the coldness of these
+humans who had never been cold before. No response could he draw from
+them, no help could he get. They did not consider him. They were as
+dead.
+
+He turned and silently gazed after the old master. Skiff Miller was
+rounding the curve. In a moment he would be gone from view. Yet he never
+turned his head, plodding straight onward, slowly and methodically, as
+though possessed of no interest in what was occurring behind his back.
+
+And in this fashion he went out of view. Wolf waited for him to
+reappear. He waited a long minute, silently, quietly, without movement,
+as though turned to stone--withal stone quick with eagerness and desire.
+He barked once, and waited. Then he turned and trotted back to Walt
+Irvine. He sniffed his hand and dropped down heavily at his feet,
+watching the trail where it curved emptily from view.
+
+The tiny stream slipping down the mossy-lipped stone seemed suddenly to
+increase the volume of its gurgling noise. Save for the meadow larks,
+there was no other sound. The great yellow butterflies drifted silently
+through the sunshine and lost themselves in the drowsy shadows. Madge
+gazed triumphantly at her husband.
+
+A few minutes later Wolf got upon his feet. Decision and deliberation
+marked his movements. He did not glance at the man and woman. His eyes
+were fixed up the trail. He had made up his mind. They knew it. And they
+knew, so far as they were concerned, that the ordeal had just begun.
+
+He broke into a trot, and Madge's lips pursed, forming an avenue for the
+caressing sound that it was the will of her to send forth. But the
+caressing sound was not made. She was impelled to look at her husband,
+and she saw the sternness with which he watched her. The pursed lips
+relaxed, and she sighed inaudibly.
+
+Wolf's trot broke into a run. Wider and wider were the leaps he made.
+Not once did he turn his head, his wolf's brush standing out straight
+behind him. He cut sharply across the curve of the trail and was gone.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+THAT SPOT
+
+
+I don't think much of Stephen Mackaye any more, though I used to swear
+by him. I know that in those days I loved him more than my own brother.
+If ever I meet Stephen Mackaye again, I shall not be responsible for my
+actions. It passes beyond me that a man with whom I shared food and
+blanket, and with whom I mushed over the Chilcoot Trail, should turn out
+the way he did. I always sized Steve up as a square man, a kindly
+comrade, without an iota of anything vindictive or malicious in his
+nature. I shall never trust my judgment in men again. Why, I nursed that
+man through typhoid fever; we starved together on the headwaters of the
+Stewart; and he saved my life on the Little Salmon. And now, after the
+years we were together, all I can say of Stephen Mackaye is that he is
+the meanest man I ever knew.
+
+We started for the Klondike in the fall rush of 1897, and we started too
+late to get over Chilcoot Pass before the freeze-up. We packed our
+outfit on our backs part way over, when the snow began to fly, and then
+we had to buy dogs in order to sled it the rest of the way. That was how
+we came to get that Spot. Dogs were high, and we paid one hundred and
+ten dollars for him. He looked worth it. I say _looked_, because he was
+one of the finest appearing dogs I ever saw. He weighed sixty pounds,
+and he had all the lines of a good sled animal. We never could make out
+his breed. He wasn't husky, nor Malemute, nor Hudson Bay; he looked like
+all of them and he didn't look like any of them; and on top of it all he
+had some of the white man's dog in him, for on one side, in the thick of
+the mixed yellow-brown-red-and-dirty-white that was his prevailing
+color, there was a spot of coal-black as big as a water-bucket. That was
+why we called him Spot.
+
+He was a good looker all right. When he was in condition his muscles
+stood out in bunches all over him. And he was the strongest looking
+brute I ever saw in Alaska, also the most intelligent looking. To run
+your eyes over him, you'd think he could outpull three dogs of his own
+weight. Maybe he could, but I never saw it. His intelligence didn't run
+that way. He could steal and forage to perfection; he had an instinct
+that was positively grewsome for divining when work was to be done and
+for making a sneak accordingly; and for getting lost and not staying
+lost he was nothing short of inspired. But when it came to work, the way
+that intelligence dribbled out of him and left him a mere clot of
+wobbling, stupid jelly would make your heart bleed.
+
+There are times when I think it wasn't stupidity. Maybe, like some men I
+know, he was too wise to work. I shouldn't wonder if he put it all over
+us with that intelligence of his. Maybe he figured it all out and
+decided that a licking now and again and no work was a whole lot better
+than work all the time and no licking. He was intelligent enough for
+such a computation. I tell you, I've sat and looked into that dog's eyes
+till the shivers ran up and down my spine and the marrow crawled like
+yeast, what of the intelligence I saw shining out. I can't express
+myself about that intelligence. It is beyond mere words. I saw it,
+that's all. At times it was like gazing into a human soul, to look into
+his eyes; and what I saw there frightened me and started all sorts of
+ideas in my own mind of reincarnation and all the rest. I tell you I
+sensed something big in that brute's eyes; there was a message there,
+but I wasn't big enough myself to catch it. Whatever it was (I know I'm
+making a fool of myself)--whatever it was, it baffled me. I can't give
+an inkling of what I saw in that brute's eyes; it wasn't light, it
+wasn't color; it was something that moved, away back, when the eyes
+themselves weren't moving. And I guess I didn't see it move, either; I
+only sensed that it moved. It was an expression,--that's what it
+was,--and I got an impression of it. No; it was different from a mere
+expression; it was more than that. I don't know what it was, but it gave
+me a feeling of kinship just the same. Oh, no, not sentimental kinship.
+It was, rather, a kinship of equality. Those eyes never pleaded like a
+deer's eyes. They challenged. No, it wasn't defiance. It was just a calm
+assumption of equality. And I don't think it was deliberate. My belief
+is that it was unconscious on his part. It was there because it was
+there, and it couldn't help shining out. No, I don't mean shine. It
+didn't shine; it _moved_. I know I'm talking rot, but if you'd looked
+into that animal's eyes the way I have, you'd understand. Steve was
+affected the same way I was. Why, I tried to kill that Spot once--he was
+no good for anything; and I fell down on it. I led him out into the
+brush, and he came along slow and unwilling. He knew what was going on.
+I stopped in a likely place, put my foot on the rope, and pulled my big
+Colt's. And that dog sat down and looked at me. I tell you he didn't
+plead. He just looked. And I saw all kinds of incomprehensible things
+moving, yes, _moving,_ in those eyes of his. I didn't really see them
+move; I thought I saw them, for, as I said before, I guess I only sensed
+them. And I want to tell you right now that it got beyond me. It was
+like killing a man, a conscious, brave man who looked calmly into your
+gun as much as to say, "Who's afraid?" Then, too, the message seemed so
+near that, instead of pulling the trigger quick, I stopped to see if I
+could catch the message. There it was, right before me, glimmering all
+around in those eyes of his. And then it was too late. I got scared. I
+was trembly all over, and my stomach generated a nervous palpitation
+that made me seasick. I just sat down and looked at that dog, and he
+looked at me, till I thought I was going crazy. Do you want to know what
+I did? I threw down the gun and ran back to camp with the fear of God in
+my heart. Steve laughed at me. But I notice that Steve led Spot into the
+woods, a week later, for the same purpose, and that Steve came back
+alone, and a little later Spot drifted back, too.
+
+At any rate, Spot wouldn't work. We paid a hundred and ten dollars for
+him from the bottom of our sack, and he wouldn't work. He wouldn't even
+tighten the traces. Steve spoke to him the first time we put him in
+harness, and he sort of shivered, that was all. Not an ounce on the
+traces. He just stood still and wobbled, like so much jelly. Steve
+touched him with the whip. He yelped, but not an ounce. Steve touched
+him again, a bit harder, and he howled--the regular long wolf howl. Then
+Steve got mad and gave him half a dozen, and I came on the run from the
+tent. I told Steve he was brutal with the animal, and we had some
+words--the first we'd ever had. He threw the whip down in the snow, and
+walked away mad. I picked it up and went to it. That Spot trembled and
+wobbled and cowered before ever I swung the lash, and with the first
+bite of it he howled like a lost soul. Next he lay down in the snow. I
+started the rest of the dogs, and they dragged him along while I threw
+the whip into him. He rolled over on his back and bumped along, his four
+legs waving in the air, himself howling as though he was going through a
+sausage machine. Steve came back and laughed at me, and I apologized for
+what I'd said.
+
+There was no getting any work out of that Spot; and to make up for it,
+he was the biggest pig-glutton of a dog I ever saw. On top of that, he
+was the cleverest thief. There was no circumventing him. Many a
+breakfast we went without our bacon because Spot had been there first.
+And it was because of him that we nearly starved to death up the
+Stewart. He figured out the way to break into our meat-cache, and what
+he didn't eat, the rest of the team did. But he was impartial. He stole
+from every body. He was a restless dog always very busy snooping around
+or going somewhere. And there was never a camp within five miles that he
+didn't raid. The worst of it was that they always came back on us to pay
+his board bill, which was just, being the law of the land; but it was
+mighty hard on us, especially that first winter on the Chilcoot, when we
+were busted, paying for whole hams and sides of bacon that we never ate.
+He could fight, too, that Spot. He could do anything but work. He never
+pulled a pound, but he was the boss of the whole team. The way he made
+those dogs stand around was an education. He bullied them, and there was
+always one or more of them fresh-marked with his fangs. But he was more
+than a bully. He wasn't afraid of anything that walked on four legs; and
+I've seen him march, single-handed, into a strange team, without any
+provocation whatever, and put the _kibosh_ on the whole outfit. Did I
+say he could eat? I caught him eating the whip once. That's straight. He
+started in at the lash, and when I caught him he was down to the handle,
+and still going.
+
+But he was a good looker. At the end of the first week we sold him for
+seventy-five dollars to the Mounted Police. They had experienced
+dog-drivers, and we knew that by the time he'd covered the six hundred
+miles to Dawson he'd be a good sled-dog. I say we _knew_, for we were
+just getting acquainted with that Spot. A little later we were not brash
+enough to know anything where he was concerned. A week later we woke up
+in the morning to the dangdest dog-fight we'd ever heard. It was that
+Spot came back and knocking the team into shape. We ate a pretty
+depressing breakfast, I can tell you; but cheered up two hours afterward
+when we sold him to an official courier, bound in to Dawson with
+government despatches. That Spot was only three days in coming back,
+and, as usual, celebrated his arrival with a rough-house.
+
+We spent the winter and spring, after our own outfit was across the
+pass, freighting other people's outfits; and we made a fat stake. Also,
+we made money out of Spot. If we sold him once, we sold him twenty
+times. He always came back, and no one asked for their money. We didn't
+want the money. We'd have paid handsomely for any one to take him off
+our hands for keeps. We had to get rid of him, and we couldn't give him
+away, for that would have been suspicious. But he was such a fine looker
+that we never had any difficulty in selling him. "Unbroke," we'd say,
+and they'd pay any old price for him. We sold him as low as twenty-five
+dollars, and once we got a hundred and fifty for him. That particular
+party returned him in person, refused to take his money back, and the
+way he abused us was something awful. He said it was cheap at the price
+to tell us what he thought of us; and we felt he was so justified that
+we never talked back. But to this day I've never quite regained all the
+old self-respect that was mine before that man talked to me.
+
+When the ice cleared out of the lakes and river, we put our outfit in a
+Lake Bennett boat and started for Dawson. We had a good team of dogs,
+and of course we piled them on top the outfit. That Spot was
+along--there was no losing him; and a dozen times, the first day, he
+knocked one or another of the dogs overboard in the course of fighting
+with them. It was close quarters, and he didn't like being crowded.
+
+"What that dog needs is space," Steve said the second day. "Let's
+maroon him."
+
+We did, running the boat in at Caribou Crossing for him to jump ashore.
+Two of the other dogs, good dogs, followed him; and we lost two whole
+days trying to find them. We never saw those two dogs again; but the
+quietness and relief we enjoyed made us decide, like the man who refused
+his hundred and fifty, that it was cheap at the price. For the first
+time in months Steve and I laughed and whistled and sang. We were as
+happy as clams. The dark days were over. The nightmare had been lifted.
+That Spot was gone.
+
+Three weeks later, one morning, Steve and I were standing on the
+river-bank at Dawson. A small boat was just arriving from Lake Bennett.
+I saw Steve give a start, and heard him say something that was not nice
+and that was not under his breath. Then I looked; and there, in the bow
+of the boat, with ears pricked up, sat Spot. Steve and I sneaked
+immediately, like beaten curs, like cowards, like absconders from
+justice. It was this last that the lieutenant of police thought when he
+saw us sneaking. He surmised that there was law-officers in the boat
+who were after us. He didn't wait to find out, but kept us in sight,
+and in the M. & M. saloon got us in a corner. We had a merry time
+explaining, for we refused to go back to the boat and meet Spot; and
+finally he held us under guard of another policeman while he went to the
+boat. After we got clear of him, we started for the cabin, and when we
+arrived, there was that Spot sitting on the stoop waiting for us. Now
+how did he know we lived there? There were forty thousand people in
+Dawson that summer, and how did he _savve_ our cabin out of all the
+cabins? How did he know we were in Dawson, anyway? I leave it to you.
+But don't forget what I have said about his intelligence and that
+immortal something I have seen glimmering in his eyes.
+
+There was no getting rid of him any more. There were too many people in
+Dawson who had bought him up on Chilcoot, and the story got around. Half
+a dozen times we put him on board steamboats going down the Yukon; but
+he merely went ashore at the first landing and trotted back up the bank.
+We couldn't sell him, we couldn't kill him (both Steve and I had tried),
+and nobody else was able to kill him. He bore a charmed life. I've seen
+him go down in a dog-fight on the main street with fifty dogs on top of
+him, and when they were separated, he'd appear on all his four legs,
+unharmed, while two of the dogs that had been on top of him would be
+lying dead.
+
+I saw him steal a chunk of moose meat from Major Dinwiddie's cache so
+heavy that he could just keep one jump ahead of Mrs. Dinwiddie's squaw
+cook, who was after him with an axe. As he went up the hill, after the
+squaw gave up, Major Dinwiddie himself came out and pumped his
+Winchester into the landscape. He emptied his magazine twice, and never
+touched that Spot. Then a policeman came along and arrested him for
+discharging firearms inside the city limits. Major Dinwiddie paid his
+fine, and Steve and I paid him for the moose meat at the rate of a
+dollar a pound, bones and all. That was what he paid for it. Meat was
+high that year.
+
+I am only telling what I saw with my own eyes. And now I'll tell you
+something also. I saw that Spot fall through a water-hole. The ice was
+three and a half feet thick, and the current sucked him under like a
+straw. Three hundred yards below was the big water-hole used by the
+hospital. Spot crawled out of the hospital water-hole, licked off the
+water, bit out the ice that had formed between his toes, trotted up the
+bank, and whipped a big Newfoundland belonging to the Gold Commissioner.
+
+In the fall of 1898, Steve and I poled up the Yukon on the last water,
+bound for Stewart River. We took the dogs along, all except Spot. We
+figured we'd been feeding him long enough. He'd cost us more time and
+trouble and money and grub than we'd got by selling him on the
+Chilcoot--especially grub. So Steve and I tied him down in the cabin and
+pulled our freight. We camped that night at the mouth of Indian River,
+and Steve and I were pretty facetious over having shaken him. Steve was
+a funny fellow, and I was just sitting up in the blankets and laughing
+when a tornado hit camp. The way that Spot walked into those dogs and
+gave them what-for was hair-raising. Now how did he get loose? It's up
+to you. I haven't any theory. And how did he get across the Klondike
+River? That's another facer. And anyway, how did he know we had gone up
+the Yukon? You see, we went by water, and he couldn't smell our tracks.
+Steve and I began to get superstitious about that dog. He got on our
+nerves, too; and, between you and me, we were just a mite afraid of him.
+
+The freeze-up came on when we were at the mouth of Henderson Creek, and
+we traded him off for two sacks of flour to an outfit that was bound up
+White River after copper. Now that whole outfit was lost. Never trace
+nor hide nor hair of men, dogs, sleds, or anything was ever found. They
+dropped clean out of sight. It became one of the mysteries of the
+country. Steve and I plugged away up the Stewart, and six weeks
+afterward that Spot crawled into camp. He was a perambulating skeleton,
+and could just drag along; but he got there. And what I want to know is
+who told him we were up the Stewart? We could have gone a thousand other
+places. How did he know? You tell me, and I'll tell you.
+
+No losing him. At the Mayo he started a row with an Indian dog. The buck
+who owned the dog took a swing at Spot with an axe, missed him, and
+killed his own dog. Talk about magic and turning bullets aside--I, for
+one, consider it a blamed sight harder to turn an axe aside with a big
+buck at the other end of it. And I saw him do it with my own eyes. That
+buck didn't want to kill his own dog. You've got to show me.
+
+I told you about Spot breaking into our meat-cache. It was nearly the
+death of us. There wasn't any more meat to be killed and meat was all we
+had to live on. The moose had gone back several hundred miles and the
+Indians with them. There we were. Spring was on and we had to wait for
+the river to break. We got pretty thin before we decided to eat the
+dogs, and we decided to eat Spot first. Do you know what that dog did?
+He sneaked. Now how did he know our minds were made up to eat him? We
+sat up nights laying for him, but he never came back, and we ate the
+other dogs. We ate the whole team.
+
+And now for the sequel. You know what it is when a big river breaks up
+and a few billion tons of ice go out, jamming and milling and grinding.
+Just in the thick of it, when the Stewart went out, rumbling and
+roaring, we sighted Spot out in the middle. He'd got caught as he was
+trying to cross up above somewhere. Steve and I yelled and shouted and
+ran up and down the bank, tossing our hats in the air. Sometimes we'd
+stop and hug each other, we were that boisterous, for we saw Spot's
+finish. He didn't have a chance in a million. He didn't have any chance
+at all. After the ice-run, we got into a canoe and paddled down to the
+Yukon, and down the Yukon to Dawson, stopping to feed up for a week at
+the cabins at the mouth of Henderson Creek. And as we came in to the
+bank at Dawson, there sat that Spot, waiting for us, his ears pricked
+up, his tail wagging, his mouth smiling, extending a hearty welcome to
+us. Now how did he get out of that ice? How did he know we were coming
+to Dawson, to the very hour and minute, to be out there on the bank
+waiting for us?
+
+The more I think of that Spot, the more I am convinced that there are
+things in this world that go beyond science. On no scientific grounds
+can that Spot be explained. It's psychic phenomena, or mysticism, or
+something of that sort, I guess, with a lot of Theosophy thrown in. The
+Klondike is a good country. I might have been there yet, and become a
+millionaire, if it hadn't been for Spot. He got on my nerves. I stood
+him for two years all together, and then I guess my stamina broke. It
+was the summer of 1899 when I pulled out. I didn't say anything to
+Steve. I just sneaked. But I fixed it up all right. I wrote Steve a
+note, and enclosed a package of "rough-on-rats," telling him what to do
+with it. I was worn down to skin and bone by that Spot, and I was that
+nervous that I'd jump and look around when there wasn't anybody within
+hailing distance. But it was astonishing the way I recuperated when I
+got quit of him. I got back twenty pounds before I arrived in San
+Francisco, and by the time I'd crossed the ferry to Oakland I was my old
+self again, so that even my wife looked in vain for any change in me.
+
+Steve wrote to me once, and his letter seemed irritated. He took it kind
+of hard because I'd left him with Spot. Also, he said he'd used the
+"rough-on-rats," per directions, and that there was nothing doing. A
+year went by. I was back in the office and prospering in all ways--even
+getting a bit fat. And then Steve arrived. He didn't look me up. I read
+his name in the steamer list, and wondered why. But I didn't wonder
+long. I got up one morning and found that Spot chained to the gatepost
+and holding up the milkman. Steve went north to Seattle, I learned, that
+very morning. I didn't put on any more weight. My wife made me buy him a
+collar and tag, and within an hour he showed his gratitude by killing
+her pet Persian cat. There is no getting rid of that Spot. He will be
+with me until I die, for he'll never die. My appetite is not so good
+since he arrived, and my wife says I am looking peaked. Last night that
+Spot got into Mr. Harvey's hen-house (Harvey is my next door neighbor)
+and killed nineteen of his fancy-bred chickens. I shall have to pay for
+them. My neighbors on the other side quarreled with my wife and then
+moved out. Spot was the cause of it. And that is why I am disappointed
+in Stephen Mackaye. I had no idea he was so mean a man.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+TRUST
+
+
+All lines had been cast off, and the _Seattle No. 4_ was pulling slowly
+out from the shore. Her decks were piled high with freight and baggage,
+and swarmed with a heterogeneous company of Indians, dogs, and
+dog-mushers, prospectors, traders, and homeward-bound gold-seekers. A
+goodly portion of Dawson was lined up on the bank, saying good-by. As
+the gang-plank came in and the steamer nosed into the stream, the clamor
+of farewell became deafening. Also, in that eleventh moment, everybody
+began to remember final farewell messages and to shout them back and
+forth across the widening stretch of water. Louis Bondell, curling his
+yellow mustache with one hand and languidly waving the other hand to his
+friends on shore, suddenly remembered something and sprang to the rail.
+
+"Oh, Fred!" he bawled. "Oh, Fred!"
+
+The "Fred" desired thrust a strapping pair of shoulders through the
+forefront of the crowd on the bank and tried to catch Louis Bondell's
+message. The latter grew red in the face with vain vociferation. Still
+the water widened between steamboat and shore.
+
+"Hey you, Captain Scott!" he yelled at the pilot-house. "Stop the boat!"
+
+The gongs clanged, and the big stern wheel reversed, then stopped. All
+hands on steamboat and on bank took advantage of this respite to
+exchange final, new, and imperative farewells. More futile than ever was
+Louis Bondell's effort to make himself heard. The _Seattle No. 4_ lost
+way and drifted down-stream, and Captain Scott had to go ahead and
+reverse a second time. His head disappeared inside the pilot-house,
+coming into view a moment later behind a big megaphone.
+
+Now Captain Scott had a remarkable voice, and the "Shut up!" he
+launched at the crowd on deck and on shore could have been heard at the
+top of Moosehide Mountain and as far as Klondike City. This official
+remonstrance from the pilot-house spread a film of silence over the
+tumult.
+
+"Now, what do you want to say?" Captain Scott demanded.
+
+"Tell Fred Churchill--he's on the bank there--tell him to go to
+Macdonald. It's in his safe--a small gripsack of mine. Tell him to get
+it and bring it out when he comes."
+
+In the silence Captain Scott bellowed the message ashore through the
+megaphone:--
+
+"You, Fred Churchill, go to Macdonald--in his safe--small
+gripsack--belongs to Louis Bondell--important! Bring it out when you
+come! Got it?"
+
+Churchill waved his hand in token that he had got it. In truth, had
+Macdonald, half a mile away, opened his window, he'd have got it, too.
+The tumult of farewell rose again, the gongs clanged, and the _Seattle
+No. 4_ went ahead, swung out into the stream, turned on her heel, and
+headed down the Yukon, Bondell and Churchill waving farewell and mutual
+affection to the last.
+
+That was in midsummer. In the fall of the year, the _W.H. Willis_
+started up the Yukon with two hundred homeward-bound pilgrims on board.
+Among them was Churchill. In his stateroom, in the middle of a
+clothes-bag, was Louis Bondell's grip. It was a small, stout leather
+affair, and its weight of forty pounds always made Churchill nervous
+when he wandered too far from it. The man in the adjoining stateroom had
+a treasure of gold-dust hidden similarly in a clothes-bag, and the pair
+of them ultimately arranged to stand watch and watch. While one went
+down to eat, the other kept an eye on the two stateroom doors. When
+Churchill wanted to take a hand at whist, the other man mounted guard,
+and when the other man wanted to relax his soul, Churchill read
+four-months'-old newspapers on a camp stool between the two doors.
+
+There were signs of an early winter, and the question that was discussed
+from dawn till dark, and far into the dark, was whether they would get
+out before the freeze-up or be compelled to abandon the steamboat and
+tramp out over the ice. There were irritating delays. Twice the engines
+broke down and had to be tinkered up, and each time there were snow
+flurries to warn them of the imminence of winter. Nine times the _W.H.
+Willis_ essayed to ascend the Five-Finger Rapids with her impaired
+machinery, and when she succeeded, she was four days behind her very
+liberal schedule. The question that then arose was whether or not the
+steamboat _Flora_ would wait for her above the Box Cañon. The stretch of
+water between the head of the Box Cañon and the foot of the White Horse
+Rapids was unnavigable for steamboats and passengers were transshipped
+at that point, walking around the rapids from one steamboat to the
+other. There were no telephones in the country, hence no way of
+informing the waiting _Flora_ that the _Willis_ was four days late, but
+coming.
+
+When the _W.H. Willis_ pulled into White Horse, it was learned that the
+_Flora_ had waited three days over the limit, and had departed only a
+few hours before. Also, it was learned that she would tie up at Tagish
+Post till nine o'clock, Sunday morning. It was then four o'clock
+Saturday afternoon. The pilgrims called a meeting. On board was a large
+Peterborough canoe, consigned to the police post at the head of Lake
+Bennett. They agreed to be responsible for it and to deliver it. Next,
+they called for volunteers. Two men were needed to make a race for the
+_Flora_. A score of men volunteered on the instant. Among them was
+Churchill, such being his nature that he volunteered before he thought
+of Bondell's gripsack. When this thought came to him, he began to hope
+that he would not be selected; but a man who had made a name as captain
+of a college football eleven, as a president of an athletic club, as a
+dog-musher and a stampeder in the Yukon, and, moreover, who possessed
+such shoulders as he, had no right to avoid the honor. It was thrust
+upon him and upon a gigantic German, Nick Antonsen.
+
+While a crowd of the pilgrims, the canoe on their shoulders, started on
+a trot over the portage, Churchill ran to his stateroom. He turned the
+contents of the clothes-bag on the floor and caught up the grip with the
+intention of intrusting it to the man next door. Then the thought smote
+him that it was not his grip, and that he had no right to let it out of
+his own possession. So he dashed ashore with it and ran up the portage,
+changing it often from one hand to the other, and wondering if it really
+did not weigh more than forty pounds.
+
+It was half-past four in the afternoon when the two men started. The
+current of the Thirty Mile River was so strong that rarely could they
+use the paddles. It was out on one bank with a tow-line over the
+shoulders stumbling over the rocks, forcing a way through the
+underbrush, slipping at times and falling into the water, wading often
+up to the knees and waist; and then, when an insurmountable bluff was
+encountered, it was into the canoe, out paddles, and a wild and losing
+dash across the current to the other bank, in paddles, over the side,
+and out tow-line again. It was exhausting work. Antonsen toiled like the
+giant he was, uncomplaining, persistent, but driven to his utmost by the
+powerful body and indomitable brain of Churchill. They never paused for
+rest. It was go, go, and keep on going. A crisp wind blew down the
+river, freezing their hands and making it imperative, from time to time,
+to beat the blood back into the numb fingers. As night came on, they
+were compelled to trust to luck. They fell repeatedly on the untraveled
+banks and tore their clothing to shreds in the underbrush they could not
+see. Both men were badly scratched and bleeding. A dozen times, in their
+wild dashes from bank to bank, they struck snags and were capsized. The
+first time this happened, Churchill dived and groped in three feet of
+water for the gripsack. He lost half an hour in recovering it, and after
+that it was carried securely lashed to the canoe. As long as the canoe
+floated it was safe. Antonsen jeered at the grip, and toward morning
+began to abuse it; but Churchill vouchsafed no explanations.
+
+Their delays and mischances were endless. On one swift bend, around
+which poured a healthy young rapid, they lost two hours, making a score
+of attempts and capsizing twice. At this point, on both banks, were
+precipitous bluffs, rising out of deep water, and along which they could
+neither tow nor pole, while they could not gain with the paddles against
+the current. At each attempt they strained to the utmost with the
+paddles, and each time, with hearts nigh to bursting from the effort,
+they were played out and swept back. They succeeded finally by an
+accident. In the swiftest current, near the end of another failure, a
+freak of the current sheered the canoe out of Churchill's control and
+flung it against the bluff. Churchill made a blind leap at the bluff and
+landed in a crevice. Holding on with one hand, he held the swamped canoe
+with the other till Antonsen dragged himself out of the water. Then they
+pulled the canoe out and rested. A fresh start at this crucial point
+took them by. They landed on the bank above and plunged immediately
+ashore and into the brush with the tow-line.
+
+Daylight found them far below Tagish Post. At nine o 'clock Sunday
+morning they could hear the _Flora_ whistling her departure. And when,
+at ten o'clock, they dragged themselves in to the Post, they could just
+barely see the _Flora's_ smoke far to the southward. It was a pair of
+worn-out tatterdemalions that Captain Jones of the Mounted Police
+welcomed and fed, and he afterward averred that they possessed two of
+the most tremendous appetites he had ever observed. They lay down and
+slept in their wet rags by the stove. At the end of two hours Churchill
+got up, carried Bondell's grip, which he had used for a pillow, down to
+the canoe, kicked Antonsen awake, and started in pursuit of the _Flora_.
+
+"There's no telling what might happen--machinery break down or
+something," was his reply to Captain Jones's expostulations. "I'm going
+to catch that steamer and send her back for the boys."
+
+Tagish Lake was white with a fall gale that blew in their teeth. Big,
+swinging seas rushed upon the canoe, compelling one man to bail and
+leaving one man to paddle. Headway could not be made. They ran along the
+shallow shore and went overboard, one man ahead on the tow-line, the
+other shoving on the canoe. They fought the gale up to their waists in
+the icy water, often up to their necks, often over their heads and
+buried by the big, crested waves. There was no rest, never a moment's
+pause from the cheerless, heart-breaking battle. That night, at the head
+of Tagish Lake, in the thick of a driving snow-squall, they overhauled
+the _Flora._ Antonsen fell on board, lay where he had fallen, and snored.
+Churchill looked like a wild man. His clothes barely clung to him. His
+face was iced up and swollen from the protracted effort of twenty-four
+hours, while his hands were so swollen that he could not close the
+fingers. As for his feet, it was an agony to stand upon them.
+
+The captain of the _Flora_ was loath to go back to White Horse.
+Churchill was persistent and imperative; the captain was stubborn. He
+pointed out finally that nothing was to be gained by going back, because
+the only ocean steamer at Dyea, the _Athenian_, was to sail on Tuesday
+morning, and that he could not make the back trip to White Horse and
+bring up the stranded pilgrims in time to make the connection.
+
+"What time does the _Athenian_ sail?" Churchill demanded.
+
+"Seven o'clock, Tuesday morning."
+
+"All right," Churchill said, at the same time kicking a tattoo on the
+ribs of the snoring Antonsen. "You go back to White Horse. We'll go
+ahead and hold the _Athenian_."
+
+Antonsen, stupid with sleep, not yet clothed in his waking mind, was
+bundled into the canoe, and did not realize what had happened till he
+was drenched with the icy spray of a big sea, and heard Churchill
+snarling at him through the darkness:--
+
+"Paddle, can't you! Do you want to be swamped?"
+
+Daylight found them at Caribou Crossing, the wind dying down, and
+Antonsen too far gone to dip a paddle. Churchill grounded the canoe on a
+quiet beach, where they slept. He took the precaution of twisting his
+arm under the weight of his head. Every few minutes the pain of the pent
+circulation aroused him, whereupon he would look at his watch and twist
+the other arm under his head. At the end of two hours he fought with
+Antonsen to rouse him. Then they started. Lake Bennett, thirty miles in
+length, was like a mill-pond; but, halfway across, a gale from the south
+smote them and turned the water white. Hour after hour they repeated the
+struggle on Tagish, over the side, pulling and shoving on the canoe, up
+to their waists and necks, and over their heads, in the icy water;
+toward the last the good-natured giant played completely out. Churchill
+drove him mercilessly; but when he pitched forward and bade fair to
+drown in three feet of water, the other dragged him into the canoe.
+After that, Churchill fought on alone, arriving at the police post at
+the head of Bennett in the early afternoon. He tried to help Antonsen
+out of the canoe, but failed. He listened to the exhausted man's heavy
+breathing, and envied him when he thought of what he himself had yet to
+undergo. Antonsen could lie there and sleep; but he, behind time, must
+go on over mighty Chilcoot and down to the sea. The real struggle lay
+before him, and he almost regretted the strength that resided in his
+frame because of the torment it could inflict upon that frame.
+
+Churchill pulled the canoe up on the beach, seized Bondell's grip, and
+started on a limping dog-trot for the police post.
+
+"There's a canoe down there, consigned to you from Dawson," he hurled at
+the officer who answered his knock. "And there's a man in it pretty near
+dead. Nothing serious; only played out. Take care of him. I've got to
+rush. Good-by. Want to catch the _Athenian_."
+
+A mile portage connected Lake Bennett and Lake Linderman, and his last
+words he flung back after him as he resumed the trot. It was a very
+painful trot, but he clenched his teeth and kept on, forgetting his pain
+most of the time in the fervent heat with which he regarded the
+gripsack. It was a severe handicap. He swung it from one hand to the
+other, and back again. He tucked it under his arm. He threw one hand
+over the opposite shoulder, and the bag bumped and pounded on his back
+as he ran along. He could scarcely hold it in his bruised and swollen
+fingers, and several times he dropped it. Once, in changing from one
+hand to the other, it escaped his clutch and fell in front of him,
+tripped him up, and threw him violently to the ground.
+
+At the far end of the portage he bought an old set of pack-straps for a
+dollar, and in them he swung the grip. Also, he chartered a launch to
+run him the six miles to the upper end of Lake Linderman, where he
+arrived at four in the afternoon. The _Athenian_ was to sail from Dyea
+next morning at seven. Dyea was twenty-eight miles away, and between
+towered Chilcoot. He sat down to adjust his foot-gear for the long
+climb, and woke up. He had dozed the instant he sat down, though he had
+not slept thirty seconds. He was afraid his next doze might be longer,
+so he finished fixing his foot-gear standing up. Even then he was
+overpowered for a fleeting moment. He experienced the flash of
+unconsciousness; becoming aware of it, in midair, as his relaxed body
+was sinking to the ground and as he caught himself together, he
+stiffened his muscles with a spasmodic wrench, and escaped the fall. The
+sudden jerk back to consciousness left him sick and trembling. He beat
+his head with the heel of his hand, knocking wakefulness into the numb
+brain.
+
+Jack Burns's pack-train was starting back light for Crater Lake, and
+Churchill was invited to a mule. Burns wanted to put the gripsack on
+another animal, but Churchill held on to it, carrying it on his
+saddle-pommel. But he dozed, and the grip persisted in dropping off the
+pommel, one side or the other, each time wakening him with a sickening
+start. Then, in the early darkness, Churchill's mule brushed him against
+a projecting branch that laid his cheek open. To cap it, the mule
+blundered off the trail and fell, throwing rider and gripsack out upon
+the rocks. After that, Churchill walked, or stumbled, rather, over the
+apology for a trail, leading the mule. Stray and awful odors, drifting
+from each side the trail, told of the horses that had died in the rush
+for gold. But he did not mind. He was too sleepy. By the time Long Lake
+was reached, however, he had recovered from his sleepiness; and at Deep
+Lake he resigned the gripsack to Burns. But thereafter, by the light of
+the dim stars, he kept his eyes on Burns. There were not going to be any
+accidents with that bag.
+
+At Crater Lake the pack-train went into camp, and Churchill, slinging
+the grip on his back, started the steep climb for the summit. For the
+first time, on that precipitous wall, he realized how tired he was. He
+crept and crawled like a crab, burdened by the weight of his limbs. A
+distinct and painful effort of will was required each time he lifted a
+foot. An hallucination came to him that he was shod with lead, like a
+deep-sea diver, and it was all he could do to resist the desire to reach
+down and feel the lead. As for Bondell's gripsack, it was inconceivable
+that forty pounds could weigh so much. It pressed him down like a
+mountain, and he looked back with unbelief to the year before, when he
+had climbed that same pass with a hundred and fifty pounds on his back,
+If those loads had weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, then Bondell's
+grip weighed five hundred.
+
+The first rise of the divide from Crater Lake was across a small
+glacier. Here was a well-defined trail. But above the glacier, which was
+also above timber-line, was naught but a chaos of naked rock and
+enormous boulders. There was no way of seeing the trail in the darkness,
+and he blundered on, paying thrice the ordinary exertion for all that he
+accomplished. He won the summit in the thick of howling wind and driving
+snow, providentially stumbling upon a small, deserted tent, into which
+he crawled. There he found and bolted some ancient fried potatoes and
+half a dozen raw eggs.
+
+When the snow ceased and the wind eased down, he began the almost
+impossible descent. There was no trail, and he stumbled and blundered,
+often finding himself, at the last moment, on the edge of rocky walls
+and steep slopes the depth of which he had no way of judging. Part way
+down, the stars clouded over again, and in the consequent obscurity he
+slipped and rolled and slid for a hundred feet, landing bruised and
+bleeding on the bottom of a large shallow hole. From all about him arose
+the stench of dead horses. The hole was handy to the trail, and the
+packers had made a practice of tumbling into it their broken and dying
+animals. The stench overpowered him, making him deathly sick, and as in
+a nightmare he scrambled out. Halfway up, he recollected Bondell's
+gripsack. It had fallen into the hole with him; the pack-strap had
+evidently broken, and he had forgotten it. Back he went into the
+pestilential charnel-pit, where he crawled around on hands and knees and
+groped for half an hour. Altogether he encountered and counted seventeen
+dead horses (and one horse still alive that he shot with his revolver)
+before he found Bondell's grip. Looking back upon a life that had not
+been without valor and achievement, he unhesitatingly declared to
+himself that this return after the grip was the most heroic act he had
+ever performed. So heroic was it that he was twice on the verge of
+fainting before he crawled out of the hole.
+
+By the time he had descended to the Scales, the steep pitch of Chilcoot
+was past, and the way became easier. Not that it was an easy way,
+however, in the best of places; but it became a really possible trail,
+along which he could have made good time if he had not been worn out, if
+he had had light with which to pick his steps, and if it had not been
+for Bondell's gripsack. To him, in his exhausted condition, it was the
+last straw. Having barely strength to carry himself along, the
+additional weight of the grip was sufficient to throw him nearly every
+time he tripped or stumbled. And when he escaped tripping, branches
+reached out in the darkness, hooked the grip between his shoulders, and
+held him back.
+
+His mind was made up that if he missed the _Athenian_ it would be the
+fault of the gripsack. In fact, only two things remained in his
+consciousness--Bondell's grip and the steamer. He knew only those two
+things, and they became identified, in a way, with some stern mission
+upon which he had journeyed and toiled for centuries. He walked and
+struggled on as in a dream. A part of the dream was his arrival at Sheep
+Camp. He stumbled into a saloon, slid his shoulders out of the straps,
+and started to deposit the grip at his feet. But it slipped from his
+fingers and struck the floor with a heavy thud that was not unnoticed by
+two men who were just leaving. Churchill drank a glass of whiskey, told
+the barkeeper to call him in ten minutes, and sat down, his feet on the
+grip, his head on his knees.
+
+So badly did his misused body stiffen, that when he was called it
+required another ten minutes and a second glass of whiskey to unbend his
+joints and limber up the muscles.
+
+"Hey! not that way!" the barkeeper shouted, and then went after him and
+started him through the darkness toward Canyon City. Some little husk of
+inner consciousness told Churchill that the direction was right, and,
+still as in a dream, he took the canyon trail. He did not know what
+warned him, but after what seemed several centuries of travelling, he
+sensed danger and drew his revolver. Still in the dream, he saw two men
+step out and heard them halt him. His revolver went off four times, and
+he saw the flashes and heard the explosions of their revolvers. Also, he
+was aware that he had been hit in the thigh. He saw one man go down,
+and, as the other came for him, he smashed him a straight blow with the
+heavy revolver full in the face. Then he turned and ran. He came from
+the dream shortly afterward, to find himself plunging down the trail at
+a limping lope. His first thought was for the gripsack. It was still on
+his back. He was convinced that what had happened was a dream till he
+felt for his revolver and found it gone. Next he became aware of a sharp
+stinging of his thigh, and after investigating, he found his hand warm
+with blood. It was a superficial wound, but it was incontestable. He
+became wider awake, and kept up the lumbering run to Canyon City.
+
+He found a man, with a team of horses and a wagon, who got out of bed
+and harnessed up for twenty dollars. Churchill crawled in on the
+wagon-bed and slept, the gripsack still on his back. It was a rough
+ride, over water-washed boulders down the Dyea Valley; but he roused
+only when the wagon hit the highest places. Any altitude of his body
+above the wagon-bed of less than a foot did not faze him. The last mile
+was smooth going, and he slept soundly.
+
+He came to in the gray dawn, the driver shaking him savagely and howling
+into his ear that the _Athenian_ was gone. Churchill looked blankly at
+the deserted harbor.
+
+"There's a smoke over at Skaguay," the man said.
+
+Churchill's eyes were too swollen to see that far, but he said: "It's
+she. Get me a boat."
+
+The driver was obliging, and found a skiff and a man to row it for ten
+dollars, payment in advance. Churchill paid, and was helped into the
+skiff. It was beyond him to get in by himself. It was six miles to
+Skaguay, and he had a blissful thought of sleeping those six miles. But
+the man did not know how to row, and Churchill took the oars and toiled
+for a few more centuries. He never knew six longer and more excruciating
+miles. A snappy little breeze blew up the inlet and held him back. He
+had a gone feeling at the pit of the stomach, and suffered from
+faintness and numbness. At his command, the man took the bailer and
+threw salt water into his face.
+
+The _Athenian's_ anchor was up-and-down when they came alongside, and
+Churchill was at the end of his last remnant of strength.
+
+"Stop her! Stop her!" he shouted hoarsely. "Important message! Stop
+her!"
+
+Then he dropped his chin on his chest and slept. "When half a dozen men
+started to carry him up the gang-plank, he awoke, reached for the grip,
+and clung to it like a drowning man. On deck he became a center of
+horror and curiosity. The clothing in which he had left White Horse was
+represented by a few rags, and he was as frayed as his clothing. He had
+traveled for fifty-five hours at the top notch of endurance. He had
+slept six hours in that time, and he was twenty pounds lighter than when
+he started. Face and hands and body were scratched and bruised, and he
+could scarcely see. He tried to stand up, but failed, sprawling out on
+the deck, hanging on to the gripsack, and delivering his message.
+
+"Now, put me to bed," he finished; "I'll eat when I wake up."
+
+They did him honor, carrying him down in his rags and dirt and
+depositing him and Bondell's grip in the bridal chamber, which was the
+biggest and most luxurious stateroom in the ship. Twice he slept the
+clock around, and he had bathed and shaved and eaten and was leaning
+over the rail smoking a cigar when the two hundred pilgrims from White
+Horse came alongside.
+
+By the time the _Athenian_ arrived in Seattle, Churchill had fully
+recuperated, and he went ashore with Bondell's grip in his hand. He
+felt proud of that grip. To him it stood for achievement and integrity
+and trust. "I've delivered the goods," was the way he expressed these
+various high terms to himself. It was early in the evening, and he went
+straight to Bondell's home. Louis Bondell was glad to see him, shaking
+hands with both hands at the same time and dragging him into the house.
+
+"Oh, thanks, old man; it was good of you to bring it out," Bondell said
+when he received the gripsack.
+
+He tossed it carelessly upon a couch, and Churchill noted with an
+appreciative eye the rebound of its weight from the springs. Bondell was
+volleying him with questions.
+
+"How did you make out? How're the boys! What became of Bill Smithers? Is
+Del Bishop still with Pierce? Did he sell my dogs? How did Sulphur
+Bottom show up? You're looking fine. What steamer did you come out on?"
+
+To all of which Churchill gave answer, till half an hour had gone by and
+the first lull in the conversation had arrived.
+
+"Hadn't you better take a look at it?" he suggested, nodding his head at
+the gripsack.
+
+"Oh, it's all right," Bondell answered. "Did Mitchell's dump turn out
+as much as he expected?"
+
+"I think you'd better look at it," Churchill insisted. "When I deliver a
+thing, I want to be satisfied that it's all right. There's always the
+chance that somebody might have got into it when I was asleep, or
+something."
+
+"It's nothing important, old man," Bondell answered, with a laugh.
+
+"Nothing important," Churchill echoed in a faint, small voice. Then he
+spoke with decision: "Louis, what's in that bag? I want to know."
+
+Louis looked at him curiously, then left the room and returned with a
+bunch of keys. He inserted his hand and drew out a heavy .44 Colt's
+revolver. Next came out a few boxes of ammunition for the revolver and
+several boxes of Winchester cartridges.
+
+Churchill took the gripsack and looked into it. Then he turned it upside
+down and shook it gently.
+
+"The gun's all rusted," Bondell said. "Must have been out in the rain."
+
+"Yes," Churchill answered. "Too bad it got wet. I guess I was a bit
+careless."
+
+He got up and went outside. Ten minutes later Louis Bondell went out
+and found him on the steps, sitting down, elbows on knees and chin on
+hands, gazing steadfastly out into the darkness.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+ALL GOLD CANYON
+
+
+It was the green heart of the canyon, where the walls swerved back from
+the rigid plan and relieved their harshness of line by making a little
+sheltered nook and filling it to the brim with sweetness and roundness
+and softness. Here all things rested. Even the narrow stream ceased its
+turbulent down-rush long enough to form a quiet pool. Knee-deep in the
+water, with drooping head and half-shut eyes, drowsed a red-coated,
+many-antlered buck.
+
+On one side, beginning at the very lip of the pool, was a tiny meadow, a
+cool, resilient surface of green that extended to the base of the
+frowning wall. Beyond the pool a gentle slope of earth ran up and up to
+meet the opposing wall. Fine grass covered the slope--grass that was
+spangled with flowers, with here and there patches of color, orange and
+purple and golden. Below, the canyon was shut in. There was no view.
+The walls leaned together abruptly and the canyon ended in a chaos of
+rocks, moss-covered and hidden by a green screen of vines and creepers
+and boughs of trees. Up the canyon rose far hills and peaks, the big
+foothills, pine-covered and remote. And far beyond, like clouds upon the
+border of the sky, towered minarets of white, where the Sierra's eternal
+snows flashed austerely the blazes of the sun.
+
+There was no dust in the canyon. The leaves and flowers were clean and
+virginal. The grass was young velvet. Over the pool three cottonwoods
+sent their snowy fluffs fluttering down the quiet air. On the slope the
+blossoms of the wine-wooded manzanita filled the air with springtime
+odors, while the leaves, wise with experience, were already beginning
+their vertical twist against the coming aridity of summer. In the open
+spaces on the slope, beyond the farthest shadow-reach of the manzanita,
+poised the mariposa lilies, like so many flights of jewelled moths
+suddenly arrested and on the verge of trembling into flight again. Here
+and there that woods harlequin, the madrone, permitting itself to be
+caught in the act of changing its pea-green trunk to madder-red,
+breathed its fragrance into the air from great clusters of waxen bells.
+Creamy white were these bells, shaped like lilies-of-the-valley, with
+the sweetness of perfume that is of the springtime.
+
+There was not a sigh of wind. The air was drowsy with its weight of
+perfume. It was a sweetness that would have been cloying had the air
+been heavy and humid. But the air was sharp and thin. It was as
+starlight transmuted into atmosphere, shot through and warmed by
+sunshine, and flower-drenched with sweetness.
+
+An occasional butterfly drifted in and out through the patches of light
+and shade. And from all about rose the low and sleepy hum of mountain
+bees--feasting Sybarites that jostled one another good-naturedly at the
+board, nor found time for rough discourtesy. So quietly did the little
+stream drip and ripple its way through the canyon that it spoke only in
+faint and occasional gurgles. The voice of the stream was as a drowsy
+whisper, ever interrupted by dozings and silences, ever lifted again in
+the awakenings.
+
+The motion of all things was a drifting in the heart of the canyon.
+Sunshine and butterflies drifted in and out among the trees. The hum of
+the bees and the whisper of the stream were a drifting of sound. And the
+drifting sound and drifting color seemed to weave together in the making
+of a delicate and intangible fabric which was the spirit of the place.
+It was a spirit of peace that was not of death, but of smooth-pulsing
+life, of quietude that was not silence, of movement that was not action,
+of repose that was quick with existence without being violent with
+struggle and travail. The spirit of the place was the spirit of the
+peace of the living, somnolent with the easement and content of
+prosperity, and undisturbed by rumors of far wars.
+
+The red-coated, many-antlered buck acknowledged the lordship of the
+spirit of the place and dozed knee-deep in the cool, shaded pool. There
+seemed no flies to vex him and he was languid with rest. Sometimes his
+ears moved when the stream awoke and whispered; but they moved lazily,
+with foreknowledge that it was merely the stream grown garrulous at
+discovery that it had slept.
+
+But there came a time when the buck's ears lifted and tensed with swift
+eagerness for sound. His head was turned down the canyon. His
+sensitive, quivering nostrils scented the air. His eyes could not
+pierce the green screen through which the stream rippled away, but to
+his ears came the voice of a man. It was a steady, monotonous, singsong
+voice. Once the buck heard the harsh clash of metal upon rock. At the
+sound he snorted with a sudden start that jerked him through the air
+from water to meadow, and his feet sank into the young velvet, while he
+pricked his ears and again scented the air. Then he stole across the
+tiny meadow, pausing once and again to listen, and faded away out of the
+canyon like a wraith, soft-footed and without sound.
+
+The clash of steel-shod soles against the rocks began to be heard, and
+the man's voice grew louder. It was raised in a sort of chant and became
+distinct with nearness, so that the words could be heard:
+
+   "Tu'n around an' tu'n yo' face
+   Untoe them sweet hills of grace
+     (D' pow'rs of sin yo' am scornin'!).
+   Look about an' look aroun'
+   Fling yo' sin-pack on d' groun'
+     (Yo' will meet wid d' Lord in d' mornin'!)."
+
+'A sound of scrambling accompanied the song, and the spirit of the place
+fled away on the heels of the red-coated buck. The green screen was
+burst asunder, and a man peered out at the meadow and the pool and the
+sloping side-hill. He was a deliberate sort of man. He took in the scene
+with one embracing glance, then ran his eyes over the details to verify
+the general impression. Then, and not until then, did he open his mouth
+in vivid and solemn approval:
+
+"Smoke of life an' snakes of purgatory! Will you just look at that! Wood
+an' water an' grass an' a side-hill! A pocket-hunter's delight an' a
+cayuse's paradise! Cool green for tired eyes! Pink pills for pale people
+ain't in it. A secret pasture for prospectors and a resting-place for
+tired burros. It's just booful!"
+
+He was a sandy-complexioned man in whose face geniality and humor seemed
+the salient characteristics. It was a mobile face, quick-changing to
+inward mood and thought. Thinking was in him a visible process. Ideas
+chased across his face like wind-flaws across the surface of a lake. His
+hair, sparse and unkempt of growth, was as indeterminate and colorless
+as his complexion. It would seem that all the color of his frame had
+gone into his eyes, for they were startlingly blue. Also, they were
+laughing and merry eyes, within them much of the naiveté and wonder of
+the child; and yet, in an unassertive way, they contained much of calm
+self-reliance and strength of purpose founded upon self-experience and
+experience of the world.
+
+From out the screen of vines and creepers he flung ahead of him a
+miner's pick and shovel and gold-pan. Then he crawled out himself into
+the open. He was clad in faded overalls and black cotton shirt, with
+hobnailed brogans on his feet, and on his head a hat whose shapelessness
+and stains advertised the rough usage of wind and rain and sun and
+camp-smoke. He stood erect, seeing wide-eyed the secrecy of the scene
+and sensuously inhaling the warm, sweet breath of the canyon-garden
+through nostrils that dilated and quivered with delight. His eyes
+narrowed to laughing slits of blue, his face wreathed itself in joy, and
+his mouth curled in a smile as he cried aloud:
+
+"Jumping dandelions and happy hollyhocks, but that smells good to me!
+Talk about your attar o' roses an' cologne factories! They ain't in it!"
+
+He had the habit of soliloquy. His quick-changing facial expressions
+might tell every thought and mood, but the tongue, perforce, ran hard
+after, repeating, like a second Boswell.
+
+The man lay down on the lip of the pool and drank long and deep of its
+water. "Tastes good to me," he murmured, lifting his head and gazing
+across the pool at the side-hill, while he wiped his mouth with the back
+of his hand. The side-hill attracted his attention. Still lying on his
+stomach, he studied the hill formation long and carefully. It was a
+practised eye that traveled up the slope to the crumbling canyon-wall
+and back and down again to the edge of the pool. He scrambled to his
+feet and favored the side-hill with a second survey.
+
+"Looks good to me," he concluded, picking up his pick and shovel and
+gold-pan.
+
+He crossed the stream below the pool, stepping agilely from stone to
+stone. Where the side-hill touched the water he dug up a shovelful of
+dirt and put it into the gold-pan. He squatted down, holding the pan in
+his two hands, and partly immersing it in the stream. Then he imparted
+to the pan a deft circular motion that sent the water sluicing in and
+out through the dirt and gravel. The larger and the lighter particles
+worked to the surface, and these, by a skilful dipping movement of the
+pan, he spilled out and over the edge. Occasionally, to expedite
+matters, he rested the pan and with his fingers raked out the large
+pebbles and pieces of rock.
+
+The contents of the pan diminished rapidly until only fine dirt and the
+smallest bits of gravel remained. At this stage he began to work very
+deliberately and carefully. It was fine washing, and he washed fine and
+finer, with a keen scrutiny and delicate and fastidious touch. At last
+the pan seemed empty of everything but water; but with a quick
+semi-circular flirt that sent the water flying over the shallow rim into
+the stream, he disclosed a layer of black sand on the bottom of the pan.
+So thin was this layer that it was like a streak of paint. He examined
+it closely. In the midst of it was a tiny golden speck. He dribbled a
+little water in over the depressed edge of the pan. With a quick flirt
+he sent the water sluicing across the bottom, turning the grains of
+black sand over and over. A second tiny golden speck rewarded his
+effort.
+
+The washing had now become very fine--fine beyond all need of ordinary
+placer-mining. He worked the black sand, a small portion at a time, up
+the shallow rim of the pan. Each small portion he examined sharply, so
+that his eyes saw every grain of it before he allowed it to slide over
+the edge and away. Jealously, bit by bit, he let the black sand slip
+away. A golden speck, no larger than a pin-point, appeared on the rim,
+and by his manipulation of the water it returned to the bottom of the
+pan. And in such fashion another speck was disclosed, and another. Great
+was his care of them. Like a shepherd he herded his flock of golden
+specks so that not one should be lost. At last, of the pan of dirt
+nothing remained but his golden herd. He counted it, and then, after all
+his labor, sent it flying out of the pan with one final swirl of water.
+
+But his blue eyes were shining with desire as he rose to his feet.
+"Seven," he muttered aloud, asserting the sum of the specks for which he
+had toiled so hard and which he had so wantonly thrown away. "Seven," he
+repeated, with the emphasis of one trying to impress a number on his
+memory.
+
+He stood still a long while, surveying the hillside. In his eyes was a
+curiosity, new-aroused and burning. There was an exultance about his
+bearing and a keenness like that of a hunting animal catching the fresh
+scent of game.
+
+He moved down the stream a few steps and took a second panful of dirt.
+
+Again came the careful washing, the jealous herding of the golden
+specks, and the wantonness with which he sent them flying into the
+stream.
+
+"Five," he muttered, and repeated, "five."
+
+He could not forbear another survey of the hill before filling the pan
+farther down the stream. His golden herds diminished. "Four, three, two,
+two, one," were his memory tabulations as he moved down the stream. When
+but one speck of gold rewarded his washing, he stopped and built a fire
+of dry twigs. Into this he thrust the gold-pan and burned it till it was
+blue-black. He held up the pan and examined it critically. Then he
+nodded approbation. Against such a color-background he could defy the
+tiniest yellow speck to elude him.
+
+Still moving down the stream, he panned again. A single speck was his
+reward. A third pan contained no gold at all. Not satisfied with this,
+he panned three times again, taking his shovels of dirt within a foot of
+one another. Each pan proved empty of gold, and the fact, instead of
+discouraging him, seemed to give him satisfaction. His elation increased
+with each barren washing, until he arose, exclaiming jubilantly:
+
+"If it ain't the real thing, may God knock off my head with sour
+apples!"
+
+Returning to where he had started operations, he began to pan up the
+stream. At first his golden herds increased--increased prodigiously.
+"Fourteen, eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-six," ran his memory
+tabulations. Just above the pool he struck his richest pan--thirty-five
+colors.
+
+"Almost enough to save," he remarked regretfully as he allowed the water
+to sweep them away.
+
+The sun climbed to the top of the sky. The man worked on. Pan by pan, he
+went up the stream, the tally of results steadily decreasing.
+
+"It's just booful, the way it peters out," he exulted when a shovelful
+of dirt contained no more than a single speck of gold. And when no
+specks at all were found in several pans, he straightened up and favored
+the hillside with a confident glance.
+
+"Ah, ha! Mr. Pocket!" he cried out, as though to an auditor hidden
+somewhere above him beneath the surface of the slope. "Ah, ha! Mr.
+Pocket! I'm a-comin', I'm a-comin', an' I'm shorely gwine to get yer!
+You heah me, Mr. Pocket? I'm gwine to get yer as shore as punkins ain't
+cauliflowers!"
+
+He turned and flung a measuring glance at the sun poised above him in
+the azure of the cloudless sky. Then he went down the canyon, following
+the line of shovel-holes he had made in filling the pans. He crossed the
+stream below the pool and disappeared through the green screen. There
+was little opportunity for the spirit of the place to return with its
+quietude and repose, for the man's voice, raised in ragtime song, still
+dominated the canyon with possession.
+
+After a time, with a greater clashing of steel-shod feet on rock, he
+returned. The green screen was tremendously agitated. It surged back and
+forth in the throes of a struggle. There was a loud grating and clanging
+of metal. The man's voice leaped to a higher pitch and was sharp with
+imperativeness. A large body plunged and panted. There was a snapping
+and ripping and rending, and amid a shower of falling leaves a horse
+burst through the screen. On its back was a pack, and from this trailed
+broken vines and torn creepers. The animal gazed with astonished eyes at
+the scene into which it had been precipitated, then dropped its head to
+the grass and began contentedly to graze. A second horse scrambled into
+view, slipping once on the mossy rocks and regaining equilibrium when
+its hoofs sank into the yielding surface of the meadow. It was
+riderless, though on its back was a high-horned Mexican saddle, scarred
+and discolored by long usage.
+
+The man brought up the rear. He threw off pack and saddle, with an eye
+to camp location, and gave the animals their freedom to graze. He
+unpacked his food and got out frying-pan and coffee-pot. He gathered an
+armful of dry wood, and with a few stones made a place for his fire.
+
+"My!" he said, "but I've got an appetite. I could scoff iron-filings an'
+horseshoe nails an' thank you kindly, ma'am, for a second helpin'."
+
+He straightened up, and, while he reached for matches in the pocket of
+his overalls, his eyes traveled across the pool to the side-hill. His
+fingers had clutched the match-box, but they relaxed their hold and the
+hand came out empty. The man wavered perceptibly. He looked at his
+preparations for cooking and he looked at the hill.
+
+"Guess I'll take another whack at her," he concluded, starting to cross
+the stream.
+
+"They ain't no sense in it, I know," he mumbled apologetically. "But
+keepin' grub back an hour ain't go in' to hurt none, I reckon."
+
+A few feet back from his first line of test-pans he started a second
+line. The sun dropped down the western sky, the shadows lengthened, but
+the man worked on. He began a third line of test-pans. He was
+cross-cutting the hillside, line by line, as he ascended. The center of
+each line produced the richest pans, while the ends came where no colors
+showed in the pan. And as he ascended the hillside the lines grew
+perceptibly shorter. The regularity with which their length diminished
+served to indicate that somewhere up the slope the last line would be so
+short as to have scarcely length at all, and that beyond could come
+only a point. The design was growing into an inverted "V." The
+converging sides of this "V" marked the boundaries of the gold-bearing
+dirt.
+
+The apex of the "V" was evidently the man's goal. Often he ran his eye
+along the converging sides and on up the hill, trying to divine the
+apex, the point where the gold-bearing dirt must cease. Here resided
+"Mr. Pocket"--for so the man familiarly addressed the imaginary point
+above him on the slope, crying out:
+
+"Come down out o' that, Mr. Pocket! Be right smart an' agreeable, an'
+come down!"
+
+"All right," he would add later, in a voice resigned to determination.
+"All right, Mr. Pocket. It's plain to me I got to come right up an'
+snatch you out bald-headed. An' I'll do it! I'll do it!" he would
+threaten still later.
+
+Each pan he carried down to the water to wash, and as he went higher up
+the hill the pans grew richer, until he began to save the gold in an
+empty baking powder can which he carried carelessly in his hip-pocket.
+So engrossed was he in his toil that he did not notice the long twilight
+of oncoming night. It was not until he tried vainly to see the gold
+colors in the bottom of the pan that he realized the passage of time.
+He straightened up abruptly. An expression of whimsical wonderment and
+awe overspread his face as he drawled:
+
+"Gosh darn my buttons! if I didn't plumb forget dinner!"
+
+He stumbled across the stream in the darkness and lighted his
+long-delayed fire. Flapjacks and bacon and warmed-over beans constituted
+his supper. Then he smoked a pipe by the smouldering coals, listening to
+the night noises and watching the moonlight stream through the canyon.
+After that he unrolled his bed, took off his heavy shoes, and pulled the
+blankets up to his chin. His face showed white in the moonlight, like
+the face of a corpse. But it was a corpse that knew its resurrection,
+for the man rose suddenly on one elbow and gazed across at his hillside.
+
+"Good night, Mr. Pocket," he called sleepily. "Goodnight."
+
+He slept through the early gray of morning until the direct rays of the
+sun smote his closed eyelids, when he awoke with a start and looked
+about him until he had established the continuity of his existence and
+identified his present self with the days previously lived.
+
+To dress, he had merely to buckle on his shoes. He glanced at his
+fireplace and at his hillside, wavered, but fought down the temptation
+and started the fire.
+
+"Keep yer shirt on, Bill; keep yer shirt on," he admonished himself.
+"What's the good of rushin'? No use in gettin' all het up an' sweaty.
+Mr. Pocket'll wait for you. He ain't a-runnin' away before you can get
+your breakfast. Now, what you want, Bill, is something fresh in yer bill
+o' fare. So it's up to you to go an' get it."
+
+He cut a short pole at the water's edge and drew from one of his pockets
+a bit of line and a draggled fly that had once been a royal coachman.
+
+"Mebbe they'll bite in the early morning," he muttered, as he made his
+first cast into the pool. And a moment later he was gleefully crying:
+"What'd I tell you, eh? What'd I tell you?"
+
+He had no reel, nor any inclination to waste time, and by main strength,
+and swiftly, he drew out of the water a flashing ten-inch trout. Three
+more, caught in rapid succession, furnished his breakfast. When he came
+to the stepping-stones on his way to his hillside, he was struck by a
+sudden thought, and paused.
+
+"I'd just better take a hike down-stream a ways," he said. "There's no
+tellin' who may be snoopin' around."
+
+But he crossed over on the stones, and with a "I really oughter take
+that hike," the need of the precaution passed out of his mind and he
+fell to work.
+
+At nightfall he straightened up. The small of his back was stiff from
+stooping toil, and as he put his hand behind him to soothe the
+protesting muscles, he said:
+
+"Now what d'ye think of that? I clean forgot my dinner again! If I don't
+watch out, I'll sure be degeneratin' into a two-meal-a-day crank."
+
+"Pockets is the hangedest things I ever see for makin' a man
+absent-minded," he communed that night, as he crawled into his blankets.
+Nor did he forget to call up the hillside, "Good night, Mr. Pocket! Good
+night!"
+
+Rising with the sun, and snatching a hasty breakfast, he was early at
+work. A fever seemed to be growing in him, nor did the increasing
+richness of the test-pans allay this fever. There was a flush in his
+cheek other than that made by the heat of the sun, and he was oblivious
+to fatigue and the passage of time. When he filled a pan with dirt, he
+ran down the hill to wash it; nor could he forbear running up the hill
+again, panting and stumbling profanely, to refill the pan.
+
+He was now a hundred yards from the water, and the inverted "V" was
+assuming definite proportions. The width of the pay-dirt steadily
+decreased, and the man extended in his mind's eye the sides of the "V"
+to their meeting place far up the hill. This was his goal, the apex of
+the "V," and he panned many times to locate it.
+
+"Just about two yards above that manzanita bush an' a yard to the
+right," he finally concluded.
+
+Then the temptation seized him. "As plain as the nose on your face," he
+said, as he abandoned his laborious cross-cutting and climbed to the
+indicated apex. He filled a pan and carried it down the hill to wash. It
+contained no trace of gold. He dug deep, and he dug shallow, filling
+and washing a dozen pans, and was unrewarded even by the tiniest golden
+speck. He was enraged at having yielded to the temptation, and berated
+himself blasphemously and pridelessly. Then he went down the hill and
+took up the cross-cutting.
+
+"Slow an' certain, Bill; slow an' certain," he crooned. "Short-cuts to
+fortune ain't in your line, an' it's about time you know it. Get wise,
+Bill; get wise. Slow an' certain's the only hand you can play; so go to
+it, an' keep to it, too."
+
+As the cross-cuts decreased, showing that the sides of the "V" were
+converging, the depth of the "V" increased. The gold-trace was dipping
+into the hill. It was only at thirty inches beneath the surface that he
+could get colors in his pan. The dirt he found at twenty-five inches
+from the surface, and at thirty-five inches yielded barren pans. At the
+base of the "V," by the water's edge, he had found the gold colors at
+the grass roots. The higher he went up the hill, the deeper the gold
+dipped. To dig a hole three feet deep in order to get one test-pan was a
+task of no mean magnitude; while between the man and the apex intervened
+an untold number of such holes to be dug. "An' there's no tellin' how
+much deeper it'll pitch," he sighed, in a moment's pause, while his
+fingers soothed his aching back.
+
+Feverish with desire, with aching back and stiffening muscles, with pick
+and shovel gouging and mauling the soft brown earth, the man toiled up
+the hill. Before him was the smooth slope, spangled with flowers and
+made sweet with their breath. Behind him was devastation. It looked like
+some terrible eruption breaking out on the smooth skin of the hill. His
+slow progress was like that of a slug, befouling beauty with a monstrous
+trail.
+
+Though the dipping gold-trace increased the man's work, he found
+consolation in the increasing richness of the pans. Twenty cents, thirty
+cents, fifty cents, sixty cents, were the values of the gold found in
+the pans, and at nightfall he washed his banner pan, which gave him a
+dollar's worth of gold-dust from a shovelful of dirt.
+
+"I'll just bet it's my luck to have some inquisitive one come buttin' in
+here on my pasture," he mumbled sleepily that night as he pulled the
+blankets up to his chin.
+
+Suddenly he sat upright. "Bill!" he called sharply. "Now, listen to me,
+Bill; d'ye hear! It's up to you, to-morrow mornin', to mosey round an'
+see what you can see. Understand? To-morrow morning, an' don't you
+forget it!"
+
+He yawned and glanced across at his side-hill. "Good night, Mr. Pocket,"
+he called.
+
+In the morning he stole a march on the sun, for he had finished
+breakfast when its first rays caught him, and he was climbing the wall
+of the canyon where it crumbled away and gave footing. From the outlook
+at the top he found himself in the midst of loneliness. As far as he
+could see, chain after chain of mountains heaved themselves into his
+vision. To the east his eyes, leaping the miles between range and range
+and between many ranges, brought up at last against the white-peaked
+Sierras--the main crest, where the backbone of the Western world reared
+itself against the sky. To the north and south he could see more
+distinctly the cross-systems that broke through the main trend of the
+sea of mountains. To the west the ranges fell away, one behind the
+other, diminishing and fading into the gentle foothills that, in turn,
+descended into the great valley which he could not see.
+
+And in all that mighty sweep of earth he saw no sign of man nor of the
+handiwork of man--save only the torn bosom of the hillside at his feet.
+The man looked long and carefully. Once, far down his own canyon, he
+thought he saw in the air a faint hint of smoke. He looked again and
+decided that it was the purple haze of the hills made dark by a
+convolution of the canyon wall at its back.
+
+"Hey, you, Mr. Pocket!" he called down into the canyon. "Stand out from
+under! I'm a-comin', Mr. Pocket! I'm a-comin'!"
+
+The heavy brogans on the man's feet made him appear clumsy-footed, but
+he swung down from the giddy height as lightly and airily as a mountain
+goat. A rock, turning under his foot on the edge of the precipice, did
+not disconcert him. He seemed to know the precise time required for the
+turn to culminate in disaster, and in the meantime he utilized the false
+footing itself for the momentary earth-contact necessary to carry him on
+into safety. Where the earth sloped so steeply that it was impossible to
+stand for a second upright, the man did not hesitate. His foot pressed
+the impossible surface for but a fraction of the fatal second and gave
+him the bound that carried him onward. Again, where even the fraction
+of a second's footing was out of the question, he would swing his body
+past by a moment's hand-grip on a jutting knob of rock, a crevice, or a
+precariously rooted shrub. At last, with a wild leap and yell, he
+exchanged the face of the wall for an earth-slide and finished the
+descent in the midst of several tons of sliding earth and gravel.
+
+His first pan of the morning washed out over two dollars in coarse gold.
+It was from the centre of the "V." To either side the diminution in the
+values of the pans was swift. His lines of cross-cutting holes were
+growing very short. The converging sides of the inverted "V" were only a
+few yards apart. Their meeting-point was only a few yards above him. But
+the pay-streak was dipping deeper and deeper into the earth. By early
+afternoon he was sinking the test-holes five feet before the pans could
+show the gold-trace.
+
+For that matter, the gold-trace had become something more than a trace;
+it was a placer mine in itself, and the man resolved to come back after
+he had found the pocket and work over the ground. But the increasing
+richness of the pans began to worry him. By late afternoon the worth of
+the pans had grown to three and four dollars. The man scratched his head
+perplexedly and looked a few feet up the hill at the manzanita bush that
+marked approximately the apex of the "V." He nodded his head and said
+oracularly:
+
+"It's one o' two things, Bill: one o' two things. Either Mr. Pocket's
+spilled himself all out an' down the hill, or else Mr. Pocket's so rich
+you maybe won't be able to carry him all away with you. And that'd be an
+awful shame, wouldn't it, now?" He chuckled at contemplation of so
+pleasant a dilemma.
+
+Nightfall found him by the edge of the stream, his eyes wrestling with
+the gathering darkness over the washing of a five-dollar pan.
+
+"Wisht I had an electric light to go on working," he said.
+
+He found sleep difficult that night. Many times he composed himself and
+closed his eyes for slumber to overtake him; but his blood pounded with
+too strong desire, and as many times his eyes opened and he murmured
+wearily, "Wisht it was sun-up."
+
+Sleep came to him in the end, but his eyes were open with the first
+paling of the stars, and the gray of dawn caught him with breakfast
+finished and climbing the hillside in the direction of the secret
+abiding-place of Mr. Pocket.
+
+The first cross-cut the man made, there was space for only three holes,
+so narrow had become the pay-streak and so close was he to the
+fountainhead of the golden stream he had been following for four days.
+
+"Be ca'm, Bill; be ca'm," he admonished himself, as he broke ground for
+the final hole where the sides of the "V" had at last come together in a
+point.
+
+"I've got the almighty cinch on you, Mr. Pocket, an' you can't lose me,"
+he said many times as he sank the hole deeper and deeper.
+
+Four feet, five feet, six feet, he dug his way down into the earth. The
+digging grew harder. His pick grated on broken rock. He examined the
+rock. "Rotten quartz," was his conclusion as, with the shovel, he
+cleared the bottom of the hole of loose dirt. He attacked the crumbling
+quartz with the pick, bursting the disintegrating rock asunder with
+every stroke.
+
+He thrust his shovel into the loose mass. His eye caught a gleam of
+yellow. He dropped the shovel and squatted suddenly on his heels. As a
+farmer rubs the clinging earth from fresh-dug potatoes, so the man, a
+piece of rotten quartz held in both hands, rubbed the dirt away.
+
+"Sufferin' Sardanopolis!" he cried. "Lumps an' chunks of it! Lumps an'
+chunks of it!"
+
+It was only half rock he held in his hand. The other half was virgin
+gold. He dropped it into his pan and examined another piece. Little
+yellow was to be seen, but with his strong fingers he crumbled the
+rotten quartz away till both hands were filled with glowing yellow. He
+rubbed the dirt away from fragment after fragment, tossing them into the
+gold-pan. It was a treasure-hole. So much had the quartz rotted away
+that there was less of it than there was of gold. Now and again he found
+a piece to which no rock clung--a piece that was all gold. A chunk,
+where the pick had laid open the heart of the gold, glittered like a
+handful of yellow jewels, and he cocked his head at it and slowly turned
+it around and over to observe the rich play of the light upon it.
+
+"Talk about yer Too Much Gold diggin's!" the man snorted contemptuously.
+"Why, this diggin' 'd make it look like thirty cents. This diggin' is
+All Gold. An' right here an' now I name this yere canyon 'All Gold
+Canyon,' b' gosh!"
+
+Still squatting on his heels, he continued examining the fragments and
+tossing them into the pan. Suddenly there came to him a premonition of
+danger. It seemed a shadow had fallen upon him. But there was no shadow.
+His heart had given a great jump up into his throat and was choking him.
+Then his blood slowly chilled and he felt the sweat of his shirt cold
+against his flesh.
+
+He did not spring up nor look around. He did not move. He was
+considering the nature of the premonition he had received, trying to
+locate the source of the mysterious force that had warned him, striving
+to sense the imperative presence of the unseen thing that threatened
+him. There is an aura of things hostile, made manifest by messengers too
+refined for the senses to know; and this aura he felt, but knew not how
+he felt it. His was the feeling as when a cloud passes over the sun. It
+seemed that between him and life had passed something dark and
+smothering and menacing; a gloom, as it were, that swallowed up life and
+made for death--his death.
+
+Every force of his being impelled him to spring up and confront the
+unseen danger, but his soul dominated the panic, and he remained
+squatting on his heels, in his hands a chunk of gold. He did not dare to
+look around, but he knew by now that there was something behind him and
+above him. He made believe to be interested in the gold in his hand. He
+examined it critically, turned it over and over, and rubbed the dirt
+from it. And all the time he knew that something behind him was looking
+at the gold over his shoulder.
+
+Still feigning interest in the chunk of gold in his hand, he listened
+intently and he heard the breathing of the thing behind him. His eyes
+searched the ground in front of him for a weapon, but they saw only the
+uprooted gold, worthless to him now in his extremity. There was his
+pick, a handy weapon on occasion; but this was not such an occasion. The
+man realized his predicament. He was in a narrow hole that was seven
+feet deep. His head did not come to the surface of the ground. He was in
+a trap.
+
+He remained squatting on his heels. He was quite cool and collected; but
+his mind, considering every factor, showed him only his helplessness.
+He continued rubbing the dirt from the quartz fragments and throwing the
+gold into the pan. There was nothing else for him to do. Yet he knew
+that he would have to rise up, sooner or later, and face the danger that
+breathed at his back. The minutes passed, and with the passage of each
+minute he knew that by so much he was nearer the time when he must stand
+up, or else--and his wet shirt went cold against his flesh again at the
+thought--or else he might receive death as he stooped there over his
+treasure.
+
+Still he squatted on his heels, rubbing dirt from gold and debating in
+just what manner he should rise up. He might rise up with a rush and
+claw his way out of the hole to meet whatever threatened on the even
+footing above ground. Or he might rise up slowly and carelessly, and
+feign casually to discover the thing that breathed at his back. His
+instinct and every fighting fibre of his body favored the mad, clawing
+rush to the surface. His intellect, and the craft thereof, favored the
+slow and cautious meeting with the thing that menaced and which he could
+not see. And while he debated, a loud, crashing noise burst on his ear.
+At the same instant he received a stunning blow on the left side of the
+back, and from the point of impact felt a rush of flame through his
+flesh. He sprang up in the air, but halfway to his feet collapsed. His
+body crumpled in like a leaf withered in sudden heat, and he came down,
+his chest across his pan of gold, his face in the dirt and rock, his
+legs tangled and twisted because of the restricted space at the bottom
+of the hole. His legs twitched convulsively several times. His body was
+shaken as with a mighty ague. There was a slow expansion of the lungs,
+accompanied by a deep sigh. Then the air was slowly, very slowly,
+exhaled, and his body as slowly flattened itself down into inertness.
+
+Above, revolver in hand, a man was peering down over the edge of the
+hole. He peered for a long time at the prone and motionless body beneath
+him. After a while the stranger sat down on the edge of the hole so that
+he could see into it, and rested the revolver on his knee. Reaching his
+hand into a pocket, he drew out a wisp of brown paper. Into this he
+dropped a few crumbs of tobacco. The combination became a cigarette,
+brown and squat, with the ends turned in. Not once did he take his eyes
+from the body at the bottom of the hole. He lighted the cigarette and
+drew its smoke into his lungs with a caressing intake of the breath. He
+smoked slowly. Once the cigarette went out and he relighted it. And all
+the while he studied the body beneath him.
+
+In the end he tossed the cigarette stub away and rose to his feet. He
+moved to the edge of the hole. Spanning it, a hand resting on each edge,
+and with the revolver still in the right hand, he muscled his body down
+into the hole. While his feet were yet a yard from the bottom he
+released his hands and dropped down.
+
+At the instant his feet struck bottom he saw the pocket-miner's arm leap
+out, and his own legs knew a swift, jerking grip that overthrew him. In
+the nature of the jump his revolver hand was above his head. Swiftly as
+the grip had flashed about his legs, just as swiftly he brought the
+revolver down. He was still in the air, his fall in process of
+completion, when he pulled the trigger. The explosion was deafening in
+the confined space. The smoke filled the hole so that he could see
+nothing. He struck the bottom on his back, and like a cat's the
+pocket-miner's body was on top of him. Even as the miner's body passed
+on top, the stranger crooked in his right arm to fire; and even in that
+instant the miner, with a quick thrust of elbow, struck his wrist. The
+muzzle was thrown up and the bullet thudded into the dirt of the side of
+the hole.
+
+The next instant the stranger felt the miner's hand grip his wrist. The
+struggle was now for the revolver. Each man strove to turn it against
+the other's body. The smoke in the hole was clearing. The stranger,
+lying on his back, was beginning to see dimly. But suddenly he was
+blinded by a handful of dirt deliberately flung into his eyes by his
+antagonist. In that moment of shock his grip on the revolver was broken.
+In the next moment he felt a smashing darkness descend upon his brain,
+and in the midst of the darkness even the darkness ceased.
+
+But the pocket-miner fired again and again, until the revolver was
+empty. Then he tossed it from him and, breathing heavily, sat down on
+the dead man's legs.
+
+The miner was sobbing and struggling for breath. "Measly skunk!" he
+panted; "a-campin' on my trail an' lettin' me do the work, an' then
+shootin' me in the back!"
+
+He was half crying from anger and exhaustion. He peered at the face of
+the dead man. It was sprinkled with loose dirt and gravel, and it was
+difficult to distinguish the features.
+
+"Never laid eyes on him before," the miner concluded his scrutiny. "Just
+a common an' ordinary thief, hang him! An' he shot me in the back! He
+shot me in the back!"
+
+He opened his shirt and felt himself, front and back, on his left side.
+
+"Went clean through, and no harm done!" he cried jubilantly. "I'll bet
+he aimed all right all right; but he drew the gun over when he pulled
+the trigger--the cur! But I fixed 'm! Oh, I fixed 'm!"
+
+His fingers were investigating the bullet-hole in his side, and a shade
+of regret passed over his face. "It's goin' to be stiffer'n hell," he
+said. "An' it's up to me to get mended an' get out o'here."
+
+He crawled out of the hole and went down the hill to his camp. Half an
+hour later he returned, leading his pack-horse. His open shirt
+disclosed the rude bandages with which he had dressed his wound. He was
+slow and awkward with his left-hand movements, but that did not prevent
+his using the arm.
+
+The bight of the pack-rope under the dead man's shoulders enabled him to
+heave the body out of the hole. Then he set to work gathering up his
+gold. He worked steadily for several hours, pausing often to rest his
+stiffening shoulder and to exclaim:
+
+"He shot me in the back, the measly skunk! He shot me in the back!"
+
+When his treasure was quite cleaned up and wrapped securely into a
+number of blanket-covered parcels, he made an estimate of its value.
+
+"Four hundred pounds, or I'm a Hottentot," he concluded. "Say two
+hundred in quartz an' dirt--that leaves two hundred pounds of gold.
+Bill! Wake up! Two hundred pounds of gold! Forty thousand dollars! An'
+it's yourn--all yourn!"
+
+He scratched his head delightedly and his fingers blundered into an
+unfamiliar groove. They quested along it for several inches. It was a
+crease through his scalp where the second bullet had ploughed.
+
+He walked angrily over to the dead man.
+
+"You would, would you!" he bullied. "You would, eh? Well, I fixed you
+good an' plenty, an' I'll give you decent burial, too. That's more'n
+you'd have done for me."
+
+He dragged the body to the edge of the hole and toppled it in. It struck
+the bottom with a dull crash, on its side, the face twisted up to the
+light. The miner peered down at it.
+
+"An' you shot me in the back!" he said accusingly.
+
+With pick and shovel he filled the hole. Then he loaded the gold on his
+horse. It was too great a load for the animal, and when he had gained
+his camp he transferred part of it to his saddle-horse. Even so, he was
+compelled to abandon a portion of his outfit--pick and shovel and
+gold-pan, extra food and cooking utensils, and divers odds and ends.
+
+The sun was at the zenith when the man forced the horses at the screen
+of vines and creepers. To climb the huge boulders the animals were
+compelled to uprear and struggle blindly through the tangled mass of
+vegetation. Once the saddle-horse fell heavily and the man removed the
+pack to get the animal on its feet. After it started on its way again
+the man thrust his head out from among the leaves and peered up at the
+hillside.
+
+"The measly skunk!" he said, and disappeared.
+
+There was a ripping and tearing of vines and boughs. The trees surged
+back and forth, marking the passage of the animals through the midst of
+them. There was a clashing of steel-shod hoofs on stone, and now and
+again a sharp cry of command. Then the voice of the man was raised in
+song:--
+
+   "Tu'n around an' tu'n yo' face
+   Untoe them sweet hills of grace
+     (D' pow'rs of sin yo' am scornin'!).
+   Look about an' look aroun'
+   Fling yo' sin-pack on d' groun'
+     (Yo'-will meet wid d' Lord in d' mornin'!)."
+
+The song grew faint and fainter, and through the silence crept back the
+spirit of the place. The stream once more drowsed and whispered; the hum
+of the mountain bees rose sleepily. Down through the perfume-weighted
+air fluttered the snowy fluffs of the cottonwoods. The butterflies
+drifted in and out among the trees, and over all blazed the quiet
+sunshine. Only remained the hoof-marks in the meadow and the torn
+hillside to mark the boisterous trail of the life that had broken the
+peace of the place and passed on.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF KEESH
+
+
+Keesh lived long ago on the rim of the polar sea, was head man of his
+village through many and prosperous years, and died full of honors with
+his name on the lips of men. So long ago did he live that only the old
+men remember his name, his name and the tale, which they got from the
+old men before them, and which the old men to come will tell to their
+children and their children's children down to the end of time. And the
+winter darkness, when the north gales make their long sweep across the
+ice-pack, and the air is filled with flying white, and no man may
+venture forth, is the chosen time for the telling of how Keesh, from the
+poorest _igloo_ in the village, rose to power and place over them all.
+
+He was a bright boy, so the tale runs, healthy and strong, and he had
+seen thirteen suns, in their way of reckoning time. For each winter the
+sun leaves the land in darkness, and the next year a new sun returns so
+that they may be warm again and look upon one another's faces. The
+father of Keesh had been a very brave man, but he had met his death in a
+time of famine, when he sought to save the lives of his people by taking
+the life of a great polar bear. In his eagerness he came to close
+grapples with the bear, and his bones were crushed; but the bear had
+much meat on him and the people were saved. Keesh was his only son, and
+after that Keesh lived alone with his mother. But the people are prone
+to forget, and they forgot the deed of his father; and he being but a
+boy, and his mother only a woman, they, too, were swiftly forgotten, and
+ere long came to live in the meanest of all the _igloos_.
+
+It was at a council, one night, in the big _igloo_ of Klosh-Kwan, the
+chief, that Keesh showed the blood that ran in his veins and the manhood
+that stiffened his back. With the dignity of an elder, he rose to his
+feet, and waited for silence amid the babble of voices.
+
+"It is true that meat be apportioned me and mine," he said. "But it is
+ofttimes old and tough, this meat, and, moreover, it has an unusual
+quantity of bones."
+
+The hunters, grizzled and gray, and lusty and young, were aghast. The
+like had never been known before. A child, that talked like a grown man,
+and said harsh things to their very faces!
+
+But steadily and with seriousness, Keesh went on. "For that I know my
+father, Bok, was a great hunter, I speak these words. It is said that
+Bok brought home more meat than any of the two best hunters, that with
+his own hands he attended to the division of it, that with his own eyes
+he saw to it that the least old woman and the least old man received
+fair share."
+
+"Na! Na!" the men cried. "Put the child out!" "Send him off to bed!" "He
+is no man that he should talk to men and gray-beards!"
+
+He waited calmly till the uproar died down.
+
+"Thou hast a wife, Ugh-Gluk," he said, "and for her dost thou speak. And
+thou, too, Massuk, a mother also, and for them dost thou speak. My
+mother has no one, save me; wherefore I speak. As I say, though Bok be
+dead because he hunted over-keenly, it is just that I, who am his son,
+and that Ikeega, who is my mother and was his wife, should have meat in
+plenty so long as there be meat in plenty in the tribe. I, Keesh, the
+son of Bok, have spoken."
+
+He sat down, his ears keenly alert to the flood of protest and
+indignation his words had created.
+
+"That a boy should speak in council!" old Ugh-Gluk was mumbling.
+
+"Shall the babes in arms tell us men the things we shall do?" Massuk
+demanded in a loud voice. "Am I a man that I should be made a mock by
+every child that cries for meat?"
+
+The anger boiled a white heat. They ordered him to bed, threatened that
+he should have no meat at all, and promised him sore beatings for his
+presumption. Keesh's eyes began to flash, and the blood to pound darkly
+under his skin. In the midst of the abuse he sprang to his feet.
+
+"Hear me, ye men!" he cried. "Never shall I speak in the council again,
+never again till the men come to me and say, 'It is well, Keesh, that
+thou shouldst speak, it is well and it is our wish.' Take this now, ye
+men, for my last word. Bok, my father, was a great hunter. I too, his
+son, shall go and hunt the meat that I eat. And be it known, now, that
+the division of that which I kill shall be fair. And no widow nor weak
+one shall cry in the night because there is no meat, when the strong men
+are groaning in great pain for that they have eaten overmuch. And in the
+days to come there shall be shame upon the strong men who have eaten
+overmuch. I, Keesh, have said it!"
+
+Jeers and scornful laughter followed him out of the _igloo_, but his jaw
+was set and he went his way, looking neither to right nor left.
+
+The next day he went forth along the shoreline where the ice and the
+land met together. Those who saw him go noted that he carried his bow,
+with a goodly supply of bone-barbed arrows, and that across his shoulder
+was his father's big hunting-spear. And there was laughter, and much
+talk, at the event. It was an unprecedented occurrence. Never did boys
+of his tender age go forth to hunt, much less to hunt alone. Also were
+there shaking of heads and prophetic mutterings, and the women looked
+pityingly at Ikeega, and her face was grave and sad.
+
+"He will be back ere long," they said cheeringly.
+
+"Let him go; it will teach him a lesson," the hunters said. "And he will
+come back shortly, and he will be meek and soft of speech in the days to
+follow."
+
+But a day passed, and a second, and on the third a wild gale blew, and
+there was no Keesh. Ikeega tore her hair and put soot of the seal-oil on
+her face in token of her grief; and the women assailed the men with
+bitter words in that they had mistreated the boy and sent him to his
+death; and the men made no answer, preparing to go in search of the body
+when the storm abated.
+
+Early next morning, however, Keesh strode into the village. But he came
+not shamefacedly. Across his shoulders he bore a burden of fresh-killed
+meat. And there was importance in his step and arrogance in his speech.
+
+"Go, ye men, with the dogs and sledges, and take my trail for the better
+part of a day's travel," he said. "There is much meat on the ice--a
+she-bear and two half-grown cubs."
+
+Ikeega was overcome with joy, but he received her demonstrations in
+manlike fashion, saying: "Come, Ikeega, let us eat. And after that I
+shall sleep, for I am weary."
+
+And he passed into their _igloo_ and ate profoundly, and after that
+slept for twenty running hours.
+
+There was much doubt at first, much doubt and discussion. The killing of
+a polar bear is very dangerous, but thrice dangerous is it, and three
+times thrice, to kill a mother bear with her cubs. The men could not
+bring themselves to believe that the boy Keesh, single-handed, had
+accomplished so great a marvel. But the women spoke of the fresh-killed
+meat he had brought on his back, and this was an overwhelming argument
+against their unbelief. So they finally departed, grumbling greatly that
+in all probability, if the thing were so, he had neglected to cut up the
+carcasses. Now in the north it is very necessary that this should be
+done as soon as a kill is made. If not, the meat freezes so solidly as
+to turn the edge of the sharpest knife, and a three-hundred-pound bear,
+frozen stiff, is no easy thing to put upon a sled and haul over the
+rough ice. But arrived at the spot, they found not only the kill which
+they had doubted, but that Keesh had quartered the beasts in true hunter
+fashion, and removed the entrails.
+
+Thus began the mystery of Keesh, a mystery that deepened and deepened
+with the passing of the days. His very next trip he killed a young bear,
+nearly full-grown, and on the trip following, a large male bear and his
+mate. He was ordinarily gone from three to four days, though it was
+nothing unusual for him to stay away a week at a time on the ice-field.
+Always he declined company on these expeditions, and the people
+marveled. "How does he do it?" they demanded of one another. "Never does
+he take a dog with him, and dogs are of such great help, too."
+
+"Why dost thou hunt only bear?" Klosh-Kwan once ventured to ask.
+
+And Keesh made fitting answer. "It is well known that there is more meat
+on the bear," he said.
+
+But there was also talk of witchcraft in the village. "He hunts with
+evil spirits," some of the people contended, "wherefore his hunting is
+rewarded. How else can it be, save that he hunts with evil spirits?"
+
+"Mayhap they be not evil, but good, these spirits," others said. "It is
+known that his father was a mighty hunter. May not his father hunt with
+him so that he may attain excellence and patience and understanding? Who
+knows?"
+
+None the less, his success continued, and the less skilful hunters were
+often kept busy hauling in his meat. And in the division of it he was
+just. As his father had done before him, he saw to it that the least old
+woman and the last old man received a fair portion, keeping no more for
+himself than his needs required. And because of this, and of his merit
+as a hunter, he was looked upon with respect, and even awe; and there
+was talk of making him chief after old Klosh-Kwan. Because of the things
+he had done, they looked for him to appear again in the council, but he
+never came, and they were ashamed to ask.
+
+"I am minded to build me an _igloo_," he said one day to Klosh-Kwan and
+a number of the hunters. "It shall be a large _igloo_, wherein Ikeega
+and I can dwell in comfort."
+
+"Ay," they nodded gravely.
+
+"But I have no time. My business is hunting, and it takes all my time.
+So it is but just that the men and women of the village who eat my meat
+should build me my _igloo_."
+
+And the _igloo_ was built accordingly, on a generous scale which
+exceeded even the dwelling of Klosh-Kwan. Keesh and his mother moved
+into it, and it was the first prosperity she had enjoyed since the death
+of Bok. Nor was material prosperity alone hers, for, because of her
+wonderful son and the position he had given her, she came to be looked
+upon as the first woman in all the village; and the women were given to
+visiting her, to asking her advice, and to quoting her wisdom when
+arguments arose among themselves or with the men.
+
+But it was the mystery of Keesh's marvelous hunting that took chief
+place in all their minds. And one day Ugh-Gluk taxed him with witchcraft
+to his face.
+
+"It is charged," Ugh-Gluk said ominously, "that thou dealest with evil
+spirits, wherefore thy hunting is rewarded."
+
+"Is not the meat good?" Keesh made answer. "Has one in the village yet
+to fall sick from the eating of it! How dost thou know that witchcraft
+be concerned? Or dost thou guess, in the dark, merely because of the
+envy that consumes thee?"
+
+And Ugh-Gluk withdrew discomfited, the women laughing at him as he
+walked away. But in the council one night, after long deliberation, it
+was determined to put spies on his track when he went forth to hunt, so
+that his methods might be learned. So, on his next trip, Bim and Bawn,
+two young men, and of hunters the craftiest, followed after him, taking
+care not to be seen. After five days they returned, their eyes bulging
+and their tongues a-tremble to tell what they had seen. The council was
+hastily called in Klosh-Kwan's dwelling, and Bim took up the tale.
+
+"Brothers! As commanded, we journeyed on the trail of Keesh, and
+cunningly we journeyed, so that he might not know. And midway of the
+first day he picked up with a great he-bear. It was a very great bear."
+
+"None greater," Bawn corroborated, and went on himself. "Yet was the
+bear not inclined to fight, for he turned away and made off slowly over
+the ice. This we saw from the rocks of the shore, and the bear came
+toward us, and after him came Keesh, very much unafraid. And he shouted
+harsh words after the bear, and waved his arms about, and made much
+noise. Then did the bear grow angry, and rise up on his hind legs, and
+growl. But Keesh walked right up to the bear."
+
+"Ay," Bim continued the story. "Right up to the bear Keesh walked. And
+the bear took after him, and Keesh ran away. But as he ran he dropped a
+little round ball on the ice. And the bear stopped and smelled of it,
+and then swallowed it up. And Keesh continued to run away and drop
+little round balls, and the bear continued to swallow them up."
+
+Exclamations and cries of doubt were being made, and Ugh-Gluk expressed
+open unbelief.
+
+"With our own eyes we saw it," Bim affirmed.
+
+And Bawn--"Ay, with our own eyes. And this continued until the bear
+stood suddenly upright and cried aloud in pain, and thrashed his
+forepaws madly about. And Keesh continued to make off over the ice to a
+safe distance. But the bear gave him no notice, being occupied with the
+misfortune the little round balls had wrought within him."
+
+"Ay, within him," Bim interrupted. "For he did claw at himself, and
+leap about over the ice like a playful puppy, save from the way he
+growled and squealed it was plain it was not play but pain. Never did I
+see such a sight!"
+
+"Nay, never was such a sight seen," Bawn took up the strain. "And
+furthermore, it was such a large bear."
+
+"Witchcraft," Ugh-Gluk suggested.
+
+"I know not," Bawn replied. "I tell only of what my eyes beheld. And
+after a while the bear grew weak and tired, for he was very heavy and he
+had jumped about with exceeding violence, and he went off along the
+shore-ice, shaking his head slowly from side to side and sitting down
+ever and again to squeal and cry. And Keesh followed after the bear, and
+we followed after Keesh, and for that day and three days more we
+followed. The bear grew weak, and never ceased crying from his pain."
+
+"It was a charm!" Ugh-Gluk exclaimed. "Surely it was a charm!"
+
+"It may well be."
+
+And Bim relieved Bawn. "The bear wandered, now this way and now that,
+doubling back and forth and crossing his trail in circles, so that at
+the end he was near where Keesh had first come upon him. By this time he
+was quite sick, the bear, and could crawl no farther, so Keesh came up
+close and speared him to death."
+
+"And then?" Klosh-Kwan demanded.
+
+"Then we left Keesh skinning the bear, and came running that the news of
+the killing might be told."
+
+And in the afternoon of that day the women hauled in the meat of the
+bear while the men sat in council assembled. When Keesh arrived a
+messenger was sent to him, bidding him come to the council. But he sent
+reply, saying that he was hungry and tired; also that his _igloo_ was
+large and comfortable and could hold many men.
+
+And curiosity was so strong on the men that the whole council,
+Klosh-Kwan to the fore, rose up and went to the _igloo_ of Keesh. He was
+eating, but he received them with respect and seated them according to
+their rank. Ikeega was proud and embarrassed by turns, but Keesh was
+quite composed.
+
+Klosh-Kwan recited the information brought by Bim and Bawn, and at its
+close said in a stern voice: "So explanation is wanted, O Keesh, of thy
+manner of hunting. Is there witchcraft in it?"
+
+Keesh looked up and smiled. "Nay, O Klosh-Kwan. It is not for a boy to
+know aught of witches, and of witches I know nothing. I have but devised
+a means whereby I may kill the ice-bear with ease, that is all. It be
+headcraft, not witchcraft."
+
+"And may any man?"
+
+"Any man."
+
+There was a long silence. The men looked in one another's faces, and
+Keesh went on eating.
+
+"And ... and ... and wilt thou tell us, O Keesh?" Klosh-Kwan finally
+asked in a tremulous voice.
+
+"Yea, I will tell thee." Keesh finished sucking a marrow-bone and rose
+to his feet. "It is quite simple. Behold!"
+
+He picked up a thin strip of whalebone and showed it to them. The ends
+were sharp as needle-points. The strip he coiled carefully, till it
+disappeared in his hand. Then, suddenly releasing it, it sprang straight
+again. He picked up a piece of blubber.
+
+"So," he said, "one takes a small chunk of blubber, thus, and thus makes
+it hollow. Then into the hollow goes the whalebone, so, tightly coiled,
+and another piece of blubber is fitted over the whalebone. After that it
+is put outside where it freezes into a little round ball. The bear
+swallows the little round ball, the blubber melts, the whalebone with
+its sharp ends stands out straight, the bear gets sick, and when the
+bear is very sick, why, you kill him with a spear. It is quite simple."
+
+And Ugh-Gluk said "Oh!" and Klosh-Kwan said "Ah!" And each said
+something after his own manner, and all understood.
+
+And this is the story of Keesh, who lived long ago on the rim of the
+polar sea. Because he exercised headcraft and not witchcraft, he rose
+from the meanest _igloo_ to be head man of his village, and through all
+the years that he lived, it is related, his tribe was prosperous, and
+neither widow nor weak one cried aloud in the night because there was no
+meat.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+NAM-BOK THE UNVERACIOUS
+
+
+"A Bidarka, is it not so! Look! a bidarka, and one man who drives
+clumsily with a paddle!"
+
+Old Bask-Wah-Wan rose to her knees, trembling with weakness and
+eagerness, and gazed out over the sea.
+
+"Nam-Bok was ever clumsy at the paddle," she maundered reminiscently,
+shading the sun from her eyes and staring across the silver-spilled
+water. "Nam-Bok was ever clumsy. I remember...."
+
+But the women and children laughed loudly, and there was a gentle
+mockery in their laughter, and her voice dwindled till her lips moved
+without sound.
+
+Koogah lifted his grizzled head from his bone-carving and followed the
+path of her eyes. Except when wide yawns took it off its course, a
+bidarka was heading in for the beach. Its occupant was paddling with
+more strength than dexterity, and made his approach along the zigzag
+line of most resistance. Koogah's head dropped to his work again, and on
+the ivory tusk between his knees he scratched the dorsal fin of a fish
+the like of which never swam in the sea.
+
+"It is doubtless the man from the next village," he said finally, "come
+to consult with me about the marking of things on bone. And the man is a
+clumsy man. He will never know how."
+
+"It is Nam-Bok," old Bask-Wah-Wan repeated. "Should I not know my son!"
+she demanded shrilly. "I say, and I say again, it is Nam-Bok."
+
+"And so thou hast said these many summers," one of the women chided
+softly. "Ever when the ice passed out of the sea hast thou sat and
+watched through the long day, saying at each chance canoe, 'This is
+Nam-Bok.' Nam-Bok is dead, O Bask-Wah-Wan, and the dead do not come
+back. It cannot be that the dead come back."
+
+"Nam-Bok!" the old woman cried, so loud and clear that the whole
+village was startled and looked at her.
+
+She struggled to her feet and tottered down the sand. She stumbled over
+a baby lying in the sun, and the mother hushed its crying and hurled
+harsh words after the old woman, who took no notice. The children ran
+down the beach in advance of her, and as the man in the bidarka drew
+closer, nearly capsizing with one of his ill-directed strokes, the women
+followed. Koogah dropped his walrus tusk and went also, leaning heavily
+upon his staff, and after him loitered the men in twos and threes.
+
+The bidarka turned broadside and the ripple of surf threatened to swamp
+it, only a naked boy ran into the water and pulled the bow high up on
+the sand. The man stood up and sent a questing glance along the line of
+villagers. A rainbow sweater, dirty and the worse for wear, clung
+loosely to his broad shoulders, and a red cotton handkerchief was
+knotted in sailor fashion about his throat. A fisherman's tam-o'-shanter
+on his close-clipped head, and dungaree trousers and heavy brogans
+completed his outfit.
+
+But he was none the less a striking personage to these simple
+fisherfolk of the great Yukon Delta, who, all their lives, had stared
+out on Bering Sea and in that time seen but two white men,--the census
+enumerator and a lost Jesuit priest. They were a poor people, with
+neither gold in the ground nor valuable furs in hand, so the whites had
+passed them afar. Also, the Yukon, through the thousands of years, had
+shoaled that portion of the sea with the detritus of Alaska till vessels
+grounded out of sight of land. So the sodden coast, with its long inside
+reaches and huge mud-land archipelagoes, was avoided by the ships of
+men, and the fisherfolk knew not that such things were.
+
+Koogah, the Bone-Scratcher, retreated backward in sudden haste, tripping
+over his staff and falling to the ground. "Nam-Bok!" he cried, as he
+scrambled wildly for footing. "Nam-Bok, who was blown off to sea, come
+back!"
+
+The men and women shrank away, and the children scuttled off between
+their legs. Only Opee-Kwan was brave, as befitted the head man of the
+village. He strode forward and gazed long and earnestly at the newcomer.
+
+"It is Nam-Bok," he said at last, and at the conviction in his voice
+the women wailed apprehensively and drew farther away.
+
+The lips of the stranger moved indecisively, and his brown throat
+writhed and wrestled with unspoken words.
+
+"La, la, it is Nam-Bok," Bask-Wah-Wan croaked, peering up into his face.
+"Ever did I say Nam-Bok would come back."
+
+"Ay, it is Nam-Bok come back." This time it was Nam-Bok himself who
+spoke, putting a leg over the side of the bidarka and standing with one
+foot afloat and one ashore. Again his throat writhed and wrestled as he
+grappled after forgotten words. And when the words came forth they were
+strange of sound and a spluttering of the lips accompanied the
+gutturals. "Greetings, O brothers," he said, "brothers of old time
+before I went away with the off-shore wind."
+
+He stepped out with both feet on the sand, and Opee-Kwan waved him back.
+
+"Thou art dead, Nam-Bok," he said.
+
+Nam-Bok laughed. "I am fat."
+
+"Dead men are not fat," Opee-Kwan confessed. "Thou hast fared well, but
+it is strange. No man may mate with the off-shore wind and come back on
+the heels of the years."
+
+"I have come back," Nam-Bok answered simply.
+
+"Mayhap thou art a shadow, then, a passing shadow of the Nam-Bok that
+was. Shadows come back."
+
+"I am hungry. Shadows do not eat."
+
+But Opee-Kwan doubted, and brushed his hand across his brow in sore
+puzzlement. Nam-Bok was likewise puzzled, and as he looked up and down
+the line found no welcome in the eyes of the fisherfolk. The men and
+women whispered together. The children stole timidly back among their
+elders, and bristling dogs fawned up to him and sniffed suspiciously.
+
+"I bore thee, Nam-Bok, and I gave thee suck when thou wast little,"
+Bask-Wah-Wan whimpered, drawing closer; "and shadow though thou be, or
+no shadow, I will give thee to eat now."
+
+Nam-Bok made to come to her, but a growl of fear and menace warned him
+back. He said something angrily in a strange tongue, and added, "No
+shadow am I, but a man."
+
+"Who may know concerning the things of mystery?" Opee-Kwan demanded,
+half of himself and half of his tribespeople. "We are, and in a breath
+we are not. If the man may become shadow, may not the shadow become man?
+Nam-Bok was, but is not. This we know, but we do not know if this be
+Nam-Bok or the shadow of Nam-Bok."
+
+Nam-Bok cleared his throat and made answer. "In the old time long ago,
+thy father's father, Opee-Kwan, went away and came back on the heels of
+the years. Nor was a place by the fire denied him. It is said ..." He
+paused significantly, and they hung on his utterance. "It is said," he
+repeated, driving his point home with deliberation, "that Sipsip, his
+_klooch_, bore him two sons after he came back."
+
+"But he had no doings with the off-shore wind," Opee-Kwan retorted. "He
+went away into the heart of the land, and it is in the nature of things
+that a man may go on and on into the land."
+
+"And likewise the sea. But that is neither here nor there. It is said
+... that thy father's father told strange tales of the things he saw."
+
+"Ay, strange tales he told."
+
+"I, too, have strange tales to tell," Nam-Bok stated insidiously. And,
+as they wavered, "And presents likewise."
+
+He pulled from the bidarka a shawl, marvelous of texture and color, and
+flung it about his mother's shoulders. The women voiced a collective
+sigh of admiration, and old Bask-Wah-Wan ruffled the gay material and
+patted it and crooned in childish joy.
+
+"He has tales to tell," Koogah muttered. "And presents," a woman
+seconded.
+
+And Opee-Kwan knew that his people were eager, and further, he was aware
+himself of an itching curiosity concerning those untold tales. "The
+fishing has been good," he said judiciously, "and we have oil in plenty.
+So come, Nam-Bok, let us feast."
+
+Two of the men hoisted the bidarka on their shoulders and carried it up
+to the fire. Nam-Bok walked by the side of Opee-Kwan, and the villagers
+followed after, save those of the women who lingered a moment to lay
+caressing fingers on the shawl.
+
+There was little talk while the feast went on, though many and curious
+were the glances stolen at the son of Bask-Wah-Wan. This embarrassed
+him--not because he was modest of spirit, however, but for the fact
+that the stench of the seal-oil had robbed him of his appetite, and that
+he keenly desired to conceal his feelings on the subject.
+
+"Eat; thou art hungry," Opee-Kwan commanded, and Nam-Bok shut both his
+eyes and shoved his fist into the big pot of putrid fish.
+
+"La la, be not ashamed. The seal were many this year, and strong men are
+ever hungry." And Bask-Wah-Wan sopped a particularly offensive chunk of
+salmon into the oil and passed it fondly and dripping to her son.
+
+In despair, when premonitory symptoms warned him that his stomach was
+not so strong as of old, he filled his pipe and struck up a smoke. The
+people fed on noisily and watched. Few of them could boast of intimate
+acquaintance with the precious weed, though now and again small
+quantities and abominable qualities were obtained in trade from the
+Eskimos to the northward. Koogah, sitting next to him, indicated that he
+was not averse to taking a draw, and between two mouthfuls, with the oil
+thick on his lips, sucked away at the amber stem. And thereupon Nam-Bok
+held his stomach with a shaky hand and declined the proffered return.
+Koogah could keep the pipe, he said, for he had intended so to honor him
+from the first. And the people licked their fingers and approved of his
+liberality.
+
+Opee-Kwan rose to his feet. "And now, O Nam-Bok, the feast is ended, and
+we would listen concerning the strange things you have seen."
+
+The fisherfolk applauded with their hands, and gathering about them
+their work, prepared to listen. The men were busy fashioning spears and
+carving on ivory, while the women scraped the fat from the hides of the
+hair seal and made them pliable or sewed muclucs with threads of sinew.
+Nam-Bok's eyes roved over the scene, but there was not the charm about
+it that his recollection had warranted him to expect. During the years
+of his wandering he had looked forward to just this scene, and now that
+it had come he was disappointed. It was a bare and meagre life, he
+deemed, and not to be compared to the one to which he had become used.
+Still, he would open their eyes a bit, and his own eyes sparkled at the
+thought.
+
+"Brothers," he began, with the smug complacency of a man about to relate
+the big things he has done, "it was late summer of many summers back,
+with much such weather as this promises to be, when I went away. You all
+remember the day, when the gulls flew low, and the wind blew strong from
+the land, and I could not hold my bidarka against it. I tied the
+covering of the bidarka about me so that no water could get in, and all
+of the night I fought with the storm. And in the morning there was no
+land,--only the sea,--and the off-shore wind held me close in its arms
+and bore me along. Three such nights whitened into dawn and showed me no
+land, and the off-shore wind would not let me go.
+
+"And when the fourth day came, I was as a madman. I could not dip my
+paddle for want of food; and my head went round and round, what of the
+thirst that was upon me. But the sea was no longer angry, and the soft
+south wind was blowing, and as I looked about me I saw a sight that made
+me think I was indeed mad."
+
+Nam-Bok paused to pick away a sliver of salmon lodged between his teeth,
+and the men and women, with idle hands and heads craned forward, waited.
+
+"It was a canoe, a big canoe. If all the canoes I have ever seen were
+made into one canoe, it would not be so large."
+
+There were exclamations of doubt, and Koogah, whose years were many,
+shook his head.
+
+"If each bidarka were as a grain of sand," Nam-Bok defiantly continued,
+"and if there were as many bidarkas as there be grains of sand in this
+beach, still would they not make so big a canoe as this I saw on the
+morning of the fourth day. It was a very big canoe, and it was called a
+_schooner_. I saw this thing of wonder, this great schooner, coming
+after me, and on it I saw men----"
+
+"Hold, O Nam-Bok!" Opee-Kwan broke in. "What manner of men were
+they?--big men?"
+
+"Nay, mere men like you and me."
+
+"Did the big canoe come fast?"
+
+"Ay."
+
+"The sides were tall, the men short." Opee-Kwan stated the premises with
+conviction. "And did these men dip with long paddles?"
+
+Nam-Bok grinned. "There were no paddles," he said.
+
+Mouths remained open, and a long silence dropped down. Ope-Kwan
+borrowed Koogah's pipe for a couple of contemplative sucks. One of the
+younger women giggled nervously and drew upon herself angry eyes.
+
+"There were no paddles?" Opee-Kwan asked softly, returning the pipe.
+
+"The south wind was behind," Nam-Bok explained.
+
+"But the wind drift is slow."
+
+"The schooner had wings--thus." He sketched a diagram of masts and sails
+in the sand, and the men crowded around and studied it. The wind was
+blowing briskly, and for more graphic elucidation he seized the corners
+of his mother's shawl and spread them out till it bellied like a sail.
+Bask Wah-Wan scolded and struggled, but was blown down the breach for a
+score of feet and left breathless and stranded in a heap of driftwood.
+The men uttered sage grunts of comprehension, but Koogah suddenly tossed
+back his hoary head.
+
+"Ho! Ho!" he laughed. "A foolish thing, this big canoe! A most foolish
+thing! The plaything of the wind! Wheresoever the wind goes, it goes
+too. No man who journeys therein may name the landing beach, for always
+he goes with the wind, and the wind goes everywhere, but no man knows
+where."
+
+"It is so," Opee-Kwan supplemented gravely. "With the wind the going is
+easy, but against the wind a man striveth hard; and for that they had no
+paddles these men on the big canoe did not strive at all."
+
+"Small need to strive," Nam-Bok cried angrily. "The schooner went
+likewise against the wind."
+
+"And what said you made the sch--sch--schooner go?" Koogah asked,
+tripping craftily over the strange word.
+
+"The wind," was the impatient response.
+
+"Then the wind made the sch--sch--schooner go against the wind." Old
+Koogah dropped an open leer to Opee-Kwan, and, the laughter growing
+around him, continued: "The wind blows from the south and blows the
+schooner south. The wind blows against the wind. The wind blows one way
+and the other at the same time. It is very simple. We understand,
+Nam-Bok. We clearly understand."
+
+"Thou art a fool!"
+
+"Truth falls from thy lips," Koogah answered meekly. "I was over-long
+in understanding, and the thing was simple."
+
+But Nam-Bok's face was dark, and he said rapid words which they had
+never heard before. Bone-scratching and skin-scraping were resumed, but
+he shut his lips tightly on the tongue that could not be believed.
+
+"This sch--sch--schooner," Koogah imperturbably asked; "it was made of a
+big tree?"
+
+"It was made of many trees," Nam-Bok snapped shortly. "It was very big."
+
+He lapsed into sullen silence again, and Opee-Kwan nudged Koogah, who
+shook his head with slow amazement and murmured, "It is very strange."
+
+Nam-Bok took the bait. "That is nothing," he said airily; "you should
+see the _steamer._ As the grain of sand is to the bidarka, as the
+bidarka is to the schooner, so the schooner is to the steamer. Further,
+the steamer is made of iron. It is all iron."
+
+"Nay, nay, Nam-Bok," cried the head man; "how can that be? Always iron
+goes to the bottom. For behold, I received an iron knife in trade from
+the head man of the next village, and yesterday the iron knife slipped
+from my fingers and went down, down, into the sea. To all things there
+be law. Never was there one thing outside the law. This we know. And,
+moreover, we know that things of a kind have the one law, and that all
+iron has the one law. So unsay thy words, Nam-Bok, that we may yet honor
+thee."
+
+"It is so," Nam-Bok persisted. "The steamer is all iron and does not
+sink."
+
+"Nay, nay; this cannot be."
+
+"With my own eyes I saw it."
+
+"It is not in the nature of things."
+
+"But tell me, Nam-Bok," Koogah interrupted, for fear the tale would go
+no farther, "tell me the manner of these men in finding their way across
+the sea when there is no land by which to steer."
+
+"The sun points out the path."
+
+"But how?"
+
+"At midday the head man of the schooner takes a thing through which his
+eye looks at the sun, and then he makes the sun climb down out of the
+sky to the edge of the earth."
+
+"Now this be evil medicine!" cried Opee-Kwan, aghast at the sacrilege.
+The men held up their hands in horror, and the women moaned. "This be
+evil medicine. It is not good to misdirect the great sun which drives
+away the night and gives us the seal, the salmon, and warm weather."
+
+"What if it be evil medicine?" Nam-Bok demanded truculently. "I, too,
+have looked through the thing at the sun and made the sun climb down out
+of the sky."
+
+Those who were nearest drew away from him hurriedly, and a woman covered
+the face of a child at her breast so that his eye might not fall upon
+it.
+
+"But on the morning of the fourth day, O Nam-Bok," Koogah suggested; "on
+the morning of the fourth day when the sch--sch--schooner came after
+thee?"
+
+"I had little strength left in me and could not run away. So I was taken
+on board and water was poured down my throat and good food given me.
+Twice, my brothers, you have seen a white man. These men were all white
+and as many as have I fingers and toes. And when I saw they were full of
+kindness, I took heart, and I resolved to bring away with me report of
+all that I saw. And they taught me the work they did, and gave me good
+food and a place to sleep.
+
+"And day after day we went over the sea, and each day the head man drew
+the sun down out of the sky and made it tell where we were. And when the
+waves were kind, we hunted the fur seal and I marvelled much, for always
+did they fling the meat and the fat away and save only the skin."
+
+Opee-Kwan's mouth was twitching violently, and he was about to make
+denunciation of such waste when Koogah kicked him to be still.
+
+"After a weary time, when the sun was gone and the bite of the frost
+come into the air, the head man pointed the nose of the schooner south.
+South and east we traveled for days upon days, with never the land in
+sight, and we were near to the village from which hailed the men----"
+
+"How did they know they were near?" Opee-Kwan, unable to contain himself
+longer, demanded. "There was no land to see."
+
+Nam-Bok glowered on him wrathfully. "Did I not say the head man brought
+the sun down out of the sky?"
+
+Koogah interposed, and Nam-Bok went on. "As I say, when we were near to
+that village a great storm blew up, and in the night we were helpless
+and knew not where we were----"
+
+"Thou hast just said the head man knew----"
+
+"Oh, peace, Opee-Kwan. Thou art a fool and cannot understand. As I say,
+we were helpless in the night, when I heard, above the roar of the
+storm, the sound of the sea on the beach. And next we struck with a
+mighty crash and I was in the water, swimming. It was a rock-bound
+coast, with one patch of beach in many miles, and the law was that I
+should dig my hands into the sand and draw myself clear of the surf. The
+other men must have pounded against the rocks, for none of them came
+ashore but the head man, and him I knew only by the ring on his finger.
+
+"When day came, there being nothing of the schooner, I turned my face to
+the land and journeyed into it that I might get food and look upon the
+faces of the people. And when I came to a house I was taken in and given
+to eat, for I had learned their speech, and the white men are ever
+kindly. And it was a house bigger than all the houses built by us and
+our fathers before us."
+
+"It was a mighty house," Koogah said, masking his unbelief with wonder.
+
+"And many trees went into the making of such a house," Opee-Kwan added,
+taking the cue.
+
+"That is nothing." Nam-Bok shrugged his shoulders in belittling fashion.
+"As our houses are to that house, so that house was to the houses I was
+yet to see."
+
+"And they are not big men?"
+
+"Nay; mere men like you and me," Nam-Bok answered. "I had cut a stick
+that I might walk in comfort, and remembering that I was to bring report
+to you, my brothers, I cut a notch in the stick for each person who
+lived in that house. And I stayed there many days, and worked, for which
+they gave me _money_--a thing of which you know nothing, but which is
+very good.
+
+"And one day I departed from that place to go farther into the land. And
+as I walked I met many people, and I cut smaller notches in the stick,
+that there might be room for all. Then I came upon a strange thing. On
+the ground before me was a bar of iron, as big in thickness as my arm,
+and a long step away was another bar of iron----"
+
+"Then wert thou a rich man," Opee-Kwan asserted; "for iron be worth more
+than anything else in the world. It would have made many knives."
+
+"Nay, it was not mine."
+
+"It was a find, and a find be lawful."
+
+"Not so; the white men had placed it there. And further, these bars were
+so long that no man could carry them away--so long that as far as I
+could see there was no end to them."
+
+"Nam-Bok, that is very much iron," Opee-Kwan cautioned.
+
+"Ay, it was hard to believe with my own eyes upon it; but I could not
+gainsay my eyes. And as I looked I heard ..." He turned abruptly upon
+the head man. "Opee-Kwan, thou hast heard the sea-lion bellow in his
+anger. Make it plain in thy mind of as many sea-lions as there be waves
+to the sea, and make it plain that all these sea-lions be made into one
+sea-lion, and as that one sea-lion would bellow so bellowed the thing I
+heard."
+
+The fisherfolk cried aloud in astonishment, and Opee-Kwan's jaw lowered
+and remained lowered.
+
+"And in the distance I saw a monster like unto a thousand whales. It was
+one-eyed, and vomited smoke, and it snorted with exceeding loudness. I
+was afraid and ran with shaking legs along the path between the bars.
+But it came with speed of the wind, this monster, and I leaped the iron
+bars with its breath hot on my face ..."
+
+Opee-Kwan gained control of his jaw again. "And--and then, O Nam-Bok?"
+
+"Then it came by on the bars, and harmed me not; and when my legs could
+hold me up again it was gone from sight. And it is a very common thing
+in that country. Even the women and children are not afraid. Men make
+them to do work, these monsters."
+
+"As we make our dogs do work?" Koogah asked, with sceptic twinkle in his
+eye.
+
+"Ay, as we make our dogs do work."
+
+"And how do they breed these--these things?" Opee-Kwan questioned.
+
+"They breed not at all. Men fashion them cunningly of iron, and feed
+them with stone, and give them water to drink. The stone becomes fire,
+and the water becomes steam, and the steam of the water is the breath of
+their nostrils, and--"
+
+"There, there, O Nam-Bok," Opee-Kwan interrupted. "Tell us of other
+wonders. We grow tired of this which we may not understand."
+
+"You do not understand?" Nam-Bok asked despairingly.
+
+"Nay, we do not understand," the men and women wailed back. "We cannot
+understand."
+
+Nam-Bok thought of a combined harvester, and of the machines wherein
+visions of living men were to be seen, and of the machines from which
+came the voices of men, and he knew his people could never understand.
+
+"Dare I say I rode this iron monster through the land?" he asked
+bitterly.
+
+Opee-Kwan threw up his hands, palms outward, in open incredulity. "Say
+on; say anything. We listen."
+
+"Then did I ride the iron monster, for which I gave money--"
+
+"Thou saidst it was fed with stone."
+
+"And likewise, thou fool, I said money was a thing of which you know
+nothing. As I say, I rode the monster through the land, and through
+many villages, until I came to a big village on a salt arm of the sea.
+And the houses shoved their roofs among the stars in the sky, and the
+clouds drifted by them, and everywhere was much smoke. And the roar of
+that village was like the roar of the sea in storm, and the people were
+so many that I flung away my stick and no longer remembered the notches
+upon it."
+
+"Hadst thou made small notches," Koogah reproved, "thou mightst have
+brought report."
+
+Nam-Bok whirled upon him in anger. "Had I made small notches! Listen,
+Koogah, thou scratcher of bone! If I had made small notches neither the
+stick, nor twenty sticks, could have borne them--nay, not all the
+driftwood of all the beaches between this village and the next. And if
+all of you, the women and children as well, were twenty times as many,
+and if you had twenty hands each, and in each hand a stick and a knife,
+still the notches could not be cut for the people I saw, so many were
+they and so fast did they come and go."
+
+"There cannot be so many people in all the world," Opee-Kwan objected,
+for he was stunned and his mind could not grasp such magnitude of
+numbers.
+
+"What dost thou know of all the world and how large it is?" Nam-Bok
+demanded.
+
+"But there cannot be so many people in one place."
+
+"Who art thou to say what can be and what cannot be?"
+
+"It stands to reason there cannot be so many people in one place. Their
+canoes would clutter the sea till there was no room. And they could
+empty the sea each day of its fish, and they would not all be fed."
+
+"So it would seem," Nam-Bok made final answer; "yet it was so. With my
+own eyes I saw, and flung my stick away." He yawned heavily and rose to
+his feet. "I have paddled far. The day has been long, and I am tired.
+Now I will sleep, and to-morrow we will have further talk upon the
+things I have seen."
+
+Bask-Wah-Wan, hobbling fearfully in advance, proud indeed, yet awed by
+her wonderful son, led him to her _igloo_ and stowed him away among the
+greasy, ill-smelling furs. But the men lingered by the fire, and a
+council was held wherein was there much whispering and low-voiced
+discussion.
+
+An hour passed, and a second, and Nam-Bok slept, and the talk went on.
+The evening sun dipped toward the northwest, and at eleven at night was
+nearly due north. Then it was that the head man and the bone-scratcher
+separated themselves from the council and aroused Nam-Bok. He blinked up
+into their faces and turned on his side to sleep again. Opee-Kwan
+gripped him by the arm and kindly but firmly shook his senses back into
+him.
+
+"Come, Nam-Bok, arise!" he commanded. "It be time."
+
+"Another feast!" Nam-Bok cried. "Nay, I am not hungry. Go on with the
+eating and let me sleep."
+
+"Time to be gone!" Koogah thundered.
+
+But Opee-Kwan spoke more softly. "Thou wast bidarka-mate with me when we
+were boys," he said. "Together we first chased the seal and drew the
+salmon from the traps. And thou didst drag me back to life, Nam-Bok,
+when the sea closed over me and I was sucked down to the black rocks.
+Together we hungered and bore the chill of the frost, and together we
+crawled beneath the one fur and lay close to each other. And because of
+these things, and the kindness in which I stood to thee, it grieves me
+sore that thou shouldst return such a remarkable liar. We cannot
+understand, and our heads be dizzy with the things thou hast spoken. It
+is not good, and there has been much talk in the council. Wherefore we
+send thee away, that our heads may remain clear and strong and be not
+troubled by the unaccountable things."
+
+"These things thou speakest of be shadows," Koogah took up the strain.
+"From the shadow-world thou hast brought them, and to the shadow-world
+thou must return them. Thy bidarka be ready, and the tribespeople wait.
+They may not sleep until thou art gone."
+
+Nam-Bok was perplexed, but hearkened to the voice of the head man.
+
+"If thou art Nam-Bok," Opee-Kwan was saying, "thou art a fearful and
+most wonderful liar; if thou art the shadow of Nam-Bok, then thou
+speakest of shadows, concerning which it is not good that living men
+have knowledge. This great village thou hast spoken of we deem the
+village of shadows. Therein flutter the souls of the dead; for the dead
+be many and the living few. The dead do not come back. Never have the
+dead come back--save thou with thy wonder-tales. It is not meet that the
+dead come back, and should we permit it, great trouble may be our
+portion."
+
+Nam-Bok knew his people well and was aware that the voice of the council
+was supreme. So he allowed himself to be led down to the water's edge,
+where he was put aboard his bidarka and a paddle thrust into his hand. A
+stray wildfowl honked somewhere to seaward, and the surf broke limply
+and hollowly on the sand. A dim twilight brooded over land and water,
+and in the north the sun smouldered, vague and troubled, and draped
+about with blood-red mists. The gulls were flying low. The off-shore
+wind blew keen and chill, and the black-massed clouds behind it gave
+promise of bitter weather.
+
+"Out of the sea thou earnest," Opee-Kwan chanted oracularly, "and back
+into the sea thou goest. Thus is balance achieved and all things brought
+to law."
+
+Bask-Wah-Wan limped to the froth-mark and cried, "I bless thee,
+Nam-Bok, for that thou remembered me."
+
+But Koogah, shoving Nam-Bok clear or the beach, tore the shawl from her
+shoulders and flung it into the bidarka.
+
+"It is cold in the long nights," she wailed; "and the frost is prone to
+nip old bones."
+
+"The thing is a shadow," the bone-scratcher answered, "and shadows
+cannot keep thee warm."
+
+Nam-Bok stood up that his voice might carry. "O Bask-Wah-Wan, mother
+that bore me!" he called. "Listen to the words of Nam-Bok, thy son.
+There be room in his bidarka for two, and he would that thou earnest
+with him. For his journey is to where there are fish and oil in plenty.
+There the frost comes not, and life is easy, and the things of iron do
+the work of men. Wilt thou come, O Bask-Wah-Wan?"
+
+She debated a moment, while the bidarka drifted swiftly from her, then
+raised her voice to a quavering treble. "I am old, Nam-Bok, and soon I
+shall pass down among the shadows. But I have no wish to go before my
+time. I am old, Nam-Bok, and I am afraid."
+
+A shaft of light shot across the dim-lit sea and wrapped boat and man
+in a splendor of red and gold. Then a hush fell upon the fisherfolk, and
+only was heard the moan of the off-shore wind and the cries of the gulls
+flying low in the air.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+YELLOW HANDKERCHIEF
+
+
+"I'm not wanting to dictate to you, lad," Charley said, "but I'm very
+much against your making a last raid. You've gone safely through rough
+times with rough men, and it would be a shame to have something happen
+to you at the very end."
+
+"But how can I get out of making a last raid?" I demanded, with the
+cocksureness of youth. "There always has to be a last, you know, to
+anything."
+
+Charley crossed his legs, leaned back, and considered the problem. "Very
+true. But why not call the capture of Demetrios Contos the last? You're
+back from it safe and sound and hearty, for all your good wetting,
+and--and----" His voice broke and he could not speak for a moment. "And
+I could never forgive myself if anything happened to you now."
+
+I laughed at Charley's fears while I gave in to the claims of his
+affection, and agreed to consider the last raid already performed. We
+had been together for two years, and now I was leaving the fish patrol
+in order to go back and finish my education. I had earned and saved
+money to put me through three years at the high school, and though the
+beginning of the term was several months away, I intended doing a lot of
+studying for the entrance examinations.
+
+My belongings were packed snugly in a sea-chest, and I was all ready to
+buy my ticket and ride down on the train to Oakland, when Neil
+Partington arrived in Benicia. The _Reindeer_ was needed immediately for
+work far down on the Lower Bay, and Neil said he intended to run
+straight for Oakland. As that was his home and as I was to live with his
+family while going to school, he saw no reason, he said, why I should
+not put my chest aboard and come along.
+
+So the chest went aboard, and in the middle of the afternoon we hoisted
+the _Reindeer's_ big mainsail and cast off. It was tantalizing fall
+weather. The sea-breeze, which had blown steadily all summer, was gone,
+and in its place were capricious winds and murky skies which made the
+time of arriving anywhere extremely problematical. We started on the
+first of the ebb, and as we slipped down the Carquinez Straits, I looked
+my last for some time upon Benicia and the bight at Turner's Shipyard,
+where we had besieged the _Lancashire Queen,_ and had captured Big Alec,
+the King of the Greeks. And at the mouth of the Straits I looked with
+not a little interest upon the spot where a few days before I should
+have drowned but for the good that was in the nature of Demetrios
+Contos.
+
+A great wall of fog advanced across San Pablo Bay to meet us, and in a
+few minutes the _Reindeer_ was running blindly through the damp
+obscurity. Charley, who was steering, seemed to have an instinct for
+that kind of work. How he did it, he himself confessed that he did not
+know; but he had a way of calculating winds, currents, distance, time,
+drift, and sailing speed that was truly marvellous.
+
+"It looks as though it were lifting," Neil Partington said, a couple of
+hours after we had entered the fog. "Where do you say we are, Charley?"
+
+Charley looked at his watch. "Six o'clock, and three hours more of
+ebb," he remarked casually.
+
+"But where do you say we are!" Neil insisted.
+
+Charley pondered a moment, and then answered, "The tide has edged us
+over a bit out of our course, but if the fog lifts right now, as it is
+going to lift, you'll find we're not more than a thousand miles off
+McNear's Landing."
+
+"You might be a little more definite by a few miles, anyway," Neil
+grumbled, showing by his tone that he disagreed.
+
+"All right, then," Charley said, conclusively, "not less than a quarter
+of a mile, nor more than a half."
+
+The wind freshened with a couple of little puffs, and the fog thinned
+perceptibly.
+
+"McNear's is right off there," Charley said, pointing directly into the
+fog on our weather beam.
+
+The three of us were peering intently in that direction, when the
+_Reindeer_ struck with a dull crash and came to a standstill. We ran
+forward, and found her bowsprit entangled in the tanned rigging of a
+short, chunky mast. She had collided, head on, with a Chinese junk
+lying at anchor.
+
+At the moment we arrived forward, five Chinese, like so many bees, came
+swarming out of the little 'tween-decks cabin, the sleep still in their
+eyes.
+
+Leading them came a big, muscular man, conspicuous for his pock-marked
+face and the yellow silk handkerchief swathed about his head. It was
+Yellow Handkerchief, the Chinaman whom we had arrested for illegal
+shrimp-fishing the year before, and who, at that time, had nearly sunk
+the _Reindeer_, as he had nearly sunk it now by violating the rules of
+navigation.
+
+"What d'ye mean, you yellow-faced heathen, lying here in a fairway
+without a horn a-going?" Charley cried hotly.
+
+"Mean?" Neil calmly answered. "Just take a look--that's what he means."
+
+Our eyes followed the direction indicated by Neil's finger, and we saw
+the open amidships of the junk, half filled, as we found on closer
+examination, with fresh-caught shrimps. Mingled with the shrimps were
+myriads of small fish, from a quarter of an inch upward in size. Yellow
+Handkerchief had lifted the trap-net at high-water slack, and, taking
+advantage of the concealment offered by the fog, had boldly been lying
+by, waiting to lift the net again at low-water slack.
+
+"Well," Neil hummed and hawed, "in all my varied and extensive
+experience as a fish patrolman, I must say this is the easiest capture I
+ever made. What'll we do with them, Charley?"
+
+"Tow the junk into San Rafael, of course," came the answer. Charley
+turned to me. "You stand by the junk, lad, and I'll pass you a towing
+line. If the wind doesn't fail us, we'll make the creek before the tide
+gets too low, sleep at San Rafael, and arrive in Oakland to-morrow by
+midday."
+
+So saying, Charley and Neil returned to the _Reindeer_ and got under
+way, the junk towing astern. I went aft and took charge of the prize,
+steering by means of an antiquated tiller and a rudder with large,
+diamond-shaped holes, through which the water rushed back and forth.
+
+By now the last of the fog had vanished, and Charley's estimate of our
+position was confirmed by the sight of McNear's Landing a short
+half-mile away, following: along the west shore, we rounded Point Pedro
+in plain view of the Chinese shrimp villages, and a great to-do was
+raised when they saw one of their junks towing behind the familiar fish
+patrol sloop.
+
+The wind, coming off the land, was rather puffy and uncertain, and it
+would have been more to our advantage had it been stronger. San Rafael
+Creek, up which we had to go to reach the town and turn over our
+prisoners to the authorities, ran through wide-stretching marshes, and
+was difficult to navigate on a falling tide, while at low tide it was
+impossible to navigate at all. So, with the tide already half-ebbed, it
+was necessary for us to make time. This the heavy junk prevented,
+lumbering along behind and holding the _Reindeer_ back by just so much
+dead weight.
+
+"Tell those coolies to get up that sail," Charley finally called to me.
+"We don't want to hang up on the mud flats for the rest of the night."
+
+I repeated the order to Yellow Handkerchief, who mumbled it huskily to
+his men. He was suffering from a bad cold, which doubled him up in
+convulsive coughing spells and made his eyes heavy and bloodshot. This
+made him more evil-looking than ever, and when he glared viciously at
+me I remembered with a shiver the close shave I had had with him at the
+time of his previous arrest.
+
+His crew sullenly tailed on to the halyards, and the strange, outlandish
+sail, lateen in rig and dyed a warm brown, rose in the air. We were
+sailing on the wind, and when Yellow Handkerchief flattened down the
+sheet the junk forged ahead and the tow-line went slack. Fast as the
+_Reindeer_ could sail, the junk outsailed her; and to avoid running her
+down I hauled a little closer on the wind. But the junk likewise
+outpointed, and in a couple of minutes I was abreast of the _Reindeer_
+and to windward. The tow-line had now tautened, at right angles to the
+two boats, and the predicament was laughable.
+
+"Cast off!" I shouted.
+
+Charley hesitated.
+
+"It's all right," I added. "Nothing can happen. We'll make the creek on
+this tack, and you'll be right behind me all the way up to San Rafael."
+
+At this Charley cast off, and Yellow Handkerchief sent one of his men
+forward to haul in the line. In the gathering darkness I could just
+make out the mouth of San Rafael Creek, and by the time we entered it I
+could barely see its banks. The _Reindeer_ was fully five minutes
+astern, and we continued to leave her astern as we beat up the narrow,
+winding channel. With Charley behind us, it seemed I had little to fear
+from my five prisoners; but the darkness prevented my keeping a sharp
+eye on them, so I transferred my revolver from my trousers pocket to the
+side pocket of my coat, where I could more quickly put my hand on it.
+
+Yellow Handkerchief was the one I feared, and that he knew it and made
+use of it, subsequent events will show. He was sitting a few feet away
+from me, on what then happened to be the weather side of the junk. I
+could scarcely see the outlines of his form, but I soon became convinced
+that he was slowly, very slowly, edging closer to me. I watched him
+carefully. Steering with my left hand, I slipped my right into my pocket
+and got hold of the revolver.
+
+I saw him shift along for a couple of inches, and I was just about to
+order him back--the words were trembling on the tip of my tongue--when
+I was struck with great force by a heavy figure that had leaped through
+the air upon me from the lee side. It was one of the crew. He pinioned
+my right arm so that I could not withdraw my hand from my pocket, and at
+the same time clapped his other hand over my mouth. Of course, I could
+have struggled away from him and freed my hand or gotten my mouth clear
+so that I might cry an alarm, but in a trice Yellow Handkerchief was on
+top of me.
+
+I struggled around to no purpose in the bottom of the junk, while my
+legs and arms were tied and my mouth securely bound in what I afterward
+found to be a cotton shirt. Then I was left lying in the bottom. Yellow
+Handkerchief took the tiller, issuing his orders in whispers; and from
+our position at the time, and from the alteration of the sail, which I
+could dimly make out above me as a blot against the stars, I knew the
+junk was being headed into the mouth of a small slough which emptied at
+that point into San Rafael Creek.
+
+In a couple of minutes we ran softly alongside the bank, and the sail
+was silently lowered. The Chinese kept very quiet. Yellow Handkerchief
+sat down in the bottom alongside of me, and I could feel him straining
+to repress his raspy, hacking cough. Possibly seven or eight minutes
+later I heard Charley's voice as the _Reindeer_ went past the mouth of
+the slough.
+
+"I can't tell you how relieved I am," I could plainly hear him saying to
+Neil, "that the lad has finished with the fish patrol without accident."
+
+Here Neil said something which I could not catch, and then Charley's
+voice went on:
+
+"The youngster takes naturally to the water, and if when he finishes
+high school he takes a course in navigation and goes deep sea, I see no
+reason why he shouldn't rise to be master of the finest and biggest ship
+afloat."
+
+It was all very flattering to me, but lying there, bound and gagged by
+my own prisoners, with the voices growing faint and fainter as the
+_Reindeer_ slipped on through the darkness toward San Rafael, I must say
+I was not in quite the proper situation to enjoy my smiling future. With
+the _Reindeer_ went my last hope. What was to happen next I could not
+imagine, for the Chinese were a different race from mine and from what
+I knew I was confident that fair play was no part of their make-up.
+
+After waiting a few minutes longer, the crew hoisted the lateen sail,
+and Yellow Handkerchief steered down toward the mouth of San Rafael
+Creek. The tide was getting lower, and he had difficulty in escaping the
+mud-banks. I was hoping he would run aground, but he succeeded in making
+the bay without accident.
+
+As we passed out of the creek a noisy discussion arose, which I knew
+related to me. Yellow Handkerchief was vehement, but the other four as
+vehemently opposed him. It was very evident that he advocated doing away
+with me and that they were afraid of the consequences. I was familiar
+enough with the Chinese character to know that fear alone restrained
+them. But what plan they offered in place of Yellow Handkerchief's
+murderous one, I could not make out.
+
+My feelings, as my fate hung in the balance, may be guessed. The
+discussion developed into a quarrel, in the midst of which Yellow
+Handkerchief unshipped the heavy tiller and sprang toward me. But his
+four companions threw themselves between, and a clumsy struggle took
+place for possession of the tiller. In the end Yellow Handkerchief was
+overcome, and sullenly returned to the steering, while they soundly
+berated him for his rashness.
+
+Not long after, the sail was run down and the junk slowly urged forward
+by means of the sweeps. I felt it ground gently on the soft mud. Three
+of the Chinese--they all wore long sea-boots--got over the side, and the
+other two passed me across the rail. With Yellow Handkerchief at my legs
+and his two companions at my shoulders, they began to flounder along
+through the mud. After some time their feet struck firmer footing, and I
+knew they were carrying me up some beach. The location of this beach was
+not doubtful in my mind. It could be none other than one of the Marin
+Islands, a group of rocky islets which lay off the Marin County shore.
+
+When they reached the firm sand that marked high tide, I was dropped,
+and none too gently. Yellow Handkerchief kicked me spitefully in the
+ribs, and then the trio floundered back through the mud to the junk. A
+moment later I heard the sail go up and slat in the wind as they drew
+in the sheet. Then silence fell, and I was left to my own devices for
+getting free.
+
+I remembered having seen tricksters writhe and squirm out of ropes with
+which they were bound, but though I writhed and squirmed like a good
+fellow, the knots remained as hard as ever, and there was no appreciable
+slack. In the course of my squirming, however, I rolled over upon a heap
+of clam-shells--the remains, evidently, of some yachting party's
+clam-bake. This gave me an idea. My hands were tied behind my back; and,
+clutching a shell in them, I rolled over and over, up the beach, till I
+came to the rocks I knew to be there.
+
+Rolling around and searching, I finally discovered a narrow crevice,
+into which I shoved the shell. The edge of it was sharp, and across the
+sharp edge I proceeded to saw the rope that bound my wrists. The edge of
+the shell was also brittle, and I broke it by bearing too heavily upon
+it. Then I rolled back to the heap and returned with as many shells as I
+could carry in both hands. I broke many shells, cut my hands a number of
+times, and got cramps in my legs from my strained position and my
+exertions.
+
+While I was suffering from the cramps, and resting, I heard a familiar
+halloo drift across the water. It was Charley, searching for me. The gag
+in my mouth prevented me from replying, and I could only lie there,
+helplessly fuming, while he rowed past the island and his voice slowly
+lost itself in the distance.
+
+I returned to the sawing process, and at the end of half an hour
+succeeded in severing the rope. The rest was easy. My hands once free,
+it was a matter of minutes to loosen my legs and to take the gag out of
+my mouth. I ran around the island to make sure it _was_ an island and
+not by any chance a portion of the mainland. An island it certainly was,
+one of the Marin group, fringed with a sandy beach and surrounded by a
+sea of mud. Nothing remained but to wait till daylight and to keep warm;
+for it was a cold, raw night for California, with just enough wind to
+pierce the skin and cause one to shiver.
+
+To keep up the circulation, I ran around the island a dozen times or so,
+and clambered across its rocky backbone as many times more--all of which
+was of greater service to me, as I afterward discovered, than merely to
+warm me up. In the midst of this exercise I wondered if I had lost
+anything out of my pockets while rolling over and over in the sand. A
+search showed the absence of my revolver and pocket-knife. The first
+Yellow Handkerchief had taken; but the knife had been lost in the sand.
+
+I was hunting for it when the sound of rowlocks came to my ears. At
+first, of course, I thought of Charley; but on second thought I knew
+Charley would be calling out as he rowed along. A sudden premonition of
+danger seized me. The Marin Islands are lonely places; chance visitors
+in the dead of night are hardly to be expected. What if it were Yellow
+Handkerchief? The sound made by the rowlocks grew more distinct. I
+crouched in the sand and listened intently. The boat, which I judged a
+small skiff from the quick stroke of the oars, was landing in the mud
+about fifty yards up the beach. I heard a raspy, hacking cough, and my
+heart stood still. It was Yellow Handkerchief. Not to be robbed of his
+revenge by his more cautious companions, he had stolen away from the
+village and come back alone.
+
+I did some swift thinking. I was unarmed and helpless on a tiny islet,
+and a yellow barbarian, whom I had reason to fear, was coming after me.
+Any place was safer than the island, and I turned instinctively to the
+water, or rather to the mud. As he began to flounder ashore through the
+mud, I started to flounder out into it, going over the same course which
+the Chinese had taken in landing me and in returning to the junk.
+
+Yellow Handkerchief, believing me to be lying tightly bound, exercised
+no care, but came ashore noisily. This helped me, for, under the shield
+of his noise and making no more myself than necessary, I managed to
+cover fifty feet by the time he had made the beach. Here I lay down in
+the mud. It was cold and clammy, and made me shiver, but I did not care
+to stand up and run the risk of being discovered by his sharp eyes.
+
+He walked down the beach straight to where he had left me lying, and I
+had a fleeting feeling of regret at not being able to see his surprise
+when he did not find me. But it was a very fleeting regret, for my teeth
+were chattering with the cold.
+
+What his movements were after that I had largely to deduce from the
+facts of the situation, for I could scarcely see him in the dim
+starlight. But I was sure that the first thing he did was to make the
+circuit of the beach to learn if landings had been made by other boats.
+This he would have known at once by the tracks through the mud.
+
+Convinced that no boat had removed me from the island, he next started
+to find out what had become of me. Beginning at the pile of clam-shells,
+he lighted matches to trace my tracks in the sand. At such times I could
+see his villainous face plainly, and, when the sulphur from the matches
+irritated his lungs, between the raspy cough that followed and the
+clammy mud in which I was lying, I confess I shivered harder than ever.
+
+The multiplicity of my footprints puzzled him. Then the idea that I
+might be out in the mud must have struck him, for he waded out a few
+yards in my direction, and, stooping, with his eyes searched the dim
+surface long and carefully. He could not have been more than fifteen
+feet from me, and had he lighted a match he would surely have discovered
+me.
+
+He returned to the beach and clambered about over the rocky backbone,
+again hunting for me with lighted matches. The closeness of the shave
+impelled me to further flight. Not daring to wade upright, on account of
+the noise made by floundering and by the suck of the mud, I remained
+lying down in the mud and propelled myself over its surface by means of
+my hands. Still keeping the trail made by the Chinese in going from and
+to the junk, I held on until I reached the water. Into this I waded to a
+depth of three feet, and then I turned off to the side on a line
+parallel with the beach.
+
+The thought came to me of going toward Yellow Handkerchief's skiff and
+escaping in it, but at that very moment he returned to the beach, and,
+as though fearing the very thing I had in mind, he slushed out through
+the mud to assure himself that the skiff was safe. This turned me in the
+opposite direction. Half swimming, half wading, with my head just out of
+water and avoiding splashing, I succeeded in putting about a hundred
+feet between myself and the spot where the Chinese had begun to wade
+ashore from the junk. I drew myself out on the mud and remained lying
+flat.
+
+Again Yellow Handkerchief returned to the beach and made a search of
+the island, and again he returned to the heap of clam-shells. I knew
+what was running in his mind as well as he did himself. No one could
+leave or land without making tracks in the mud. The only tracks to be
+seen were those leading from his skiff and from where the junk had been.
+I was not on the island. I must have left it by one or the other of
+those two tracks. He had just been over the one to his skiff, and was
+certain I had not left that way. Therefore I could have left the island
+only by going over the tracks of the junk landing. This he proceeded to
+verify by wading out over them himself, lighting matches as he came
+along.
+
+When he arrived at the point where I had first lain, I knew, by the
+matches he burned and the time he took, that he had discovered the marks
+left by my body. These he followed straight to the water and into it,
+but in three feet of water he could no longer see them. On the other
+hand, as the tide was still falling, he could easily make out the
+impression made by the junk's bow, and could have likewise made out the
+impression of any other boat if it had landed at that particular spot.
+But there was no such mark; and I knew that he was absolutely convinced
+that I was hiding somewhere in the mud.
+
+But to hunt on a dark night for a boy in a sea of mud would be like
+hunting for a needle in a haystack, and he did not attempt it. Instead
+he went back to the beach and prowled around for some time. I was hoping
+he would give me up and go, for by this time I was suffering severely
+from the cold. At last he waded out to his skiff and rowed away. What if
+this departure of Yellow Handkerchief's were a sham? What if he had done
+it merely to entice me ashore?
+
+The more I thought of it the more certain I became that he had made a
+little too much noise with his oars as he rowed away. So I remained,
+lying in the mud and shivering. I shivered till the muscles of the small
+of my back ached and pained me as badly as the cold, and I had need of
+all my self-control to force myself to remain in my miserable situation.
+
+It was well that I did, however, for, possibly an hour later, I thought
+I could make out something moving on the beach. I watched intently, but
+my ears were rewarded first, by a raspy cough I knew only too well.
+Yellow Handkerchief had sneaked back, landed on the other side of the
+island, and crept around to surprise me if I had returned.
+
+After that, though hours passed without sign of him, I was afraid to
+return to the island at all. On the other hand, I was almost equally
+afraid that I should die of the exposure I was undergoing. I had never
+dreamed one could suffer so. I grew so cold and numb, finally, that I
+ceased to shiver. But my muscles and bones began to ache in a way that
+was agony. The tide had long since begun to rise and, foot by foot, it
+drove me in toward the beach. High water came at three o'clock, and at
+three o'clock I drew myself up on the beach, more dead than alive, and
+too helpless to have offered any resistance had Yellow Handkerchief
+swooped down upon me.
+
+But no Yellow Handkerchief appeared. He had given me up and gone back to
+Point Pedro. Nevertheless, I was in a deplorable, not to say a
+dangerous, condition. I could not stand upon my feet, much less walk. My
+clammy, muddy garments clung to me like sheets of ice. I thought I
+should never get them off. So numb and lifeless were my fingers, and so
+weak was I that it seemed to take an hour to get off my shoes. I had not
+the strength to break the porpoise-hide laces, and the knots defied me.
+I repeatedly beat my hands upon the rocks to get some sort of life into
+them. Sometimes I felt sure I was going to die.
+
+But in the end,--after several centuries, it seemed to me,--I got off
+the last of my clothes. The water was now close at hand, and I crawled
+painfully into it and washed the mud from my naked body. Still, I could
+not get on my feet and walk and I was afraid to lie still. Nothing
+remained but to crawl weakly, like a snail, and at the cost of constant
+pain, up and down the sand. I kept this up as long as possible, but as
+the east paled with the coming of dawn I began to succumb. The sky grew
+rosy-red, and the golden rim of the sun, showing above the horizon,
+found me lying helpless and motionless among the clam-shells.
+
+As in a dream, I saw the familiar mainsail of the _Reindeer_ as she
+slipped out of San Rafael Creek on a light puff of morning air. This
+dream was very much broken. There are intervals I can never recollect on
+looking back over it. Three things, however, I distinctly remember: the
+first sight of the _Reindeer's_ mainsail; her lying at anchor a few
+hundred feet away and a small boat leaving her side; and the cabin stove
+roaring red-hot, myself swathed all over with blankets, except on the
+chest and shoulders, which Charley was pounding and mauling
+unmercifully, and my mouth and throat burning with the coffee which Neil
+Partington was pouring down a trifle too hot.
+
+But burn or no burn, I tell you it felt good. By the time we arrived in
+Oakland I was as limber and strong as ever,--though Charley and Neil
+Partington were afraid I was going to have pneumonia, and Mrs.
+Partington, for my first six months of school, kept an anxious eye upon
+me to discover the first symptoms of consumption.
+
+Time flies. It seems but yesterday that I was a lad of sixteen on the
+fish patrol. Yet I know that I arrived this very morning from China,
+with a quick passage to my credit, and master of the barkentine
+_Harvester_. And I know that to-morrow morning I shall run over to
+Oakland to see Neil Partington and his wife and family, and later on up
+to Benicia to see Charley Le Grant and talk over old times. No; I shall
+not go to Benicia, now that I think about it. I expect to be a highly
+interested party to a wedding, shortly to take place. Her name is Alice
+Partington, and, since Charley has promised to be best man, he will have
+to come down to Oakland instead.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+MAKE WESTING
+
+_Whatever you do, make westing! make westing!_
+--Sailing directions for Cape Horn.
+
+
+For seven weeks the _Mary Rogers_ had been between 50° south in the
+Atlantic and 50° south in the Pacific, which meant that for seven weeks
+she had been struggling to round Cape Horn. For seven weeks she had been
+either in dirt, or close to dirt, save once, and then, following upon
+six days of excessive dirt, which she had ridden out under the shelter
+of the redoubtable Terra Del Fuego coast, she had almost gone ashore
+during a heavy swell in the dead calm that had suddenly fallen. For
+seven weeks she had wrestled with the Cape Horn gray-beards, and in
+return been buffeted and smashed by them. She was a wooden ship, and her
+ceaseless straining had opened her seams, so that twice a day the watch
+took its turn at the pumps.
+
+The _Mary Rogers_ was strained, the crew was strained, and big Dan
+Cullen, master, was likewise strained. Perhaps he was strained most of
+all, for upon him rested the responsibility of that titanic struggle. He
+slept most of the time in his clothes, though he rarely slept. He
+haunted the deck at night, a great, burly, robust ghost, black with the
+sunburn of thirty years of sea and hairy as an orang-utan. He, in turn,
+was haunted by one thought of action, a sailing direction for the Horn:
+_Whatever you do, make westing! make westing!_ It was an obsession. He
+thought of nothing else, except, at times, to blaspheme God for sending
+such bitter weather.
+
+_Make westing!_ He hugged the Horn, and a dozen times lay hove to with
+the iron Cape bearing east-by-north, or north-north-east, a score of
+miles away. And each time the eternal west wind smote him back and he
+made easting. He fought gale after gale, south to 64°, inside the
+antarctic drift-ice, and pledged his immortal soul to the Powers of
+Darkness for a bit of westing, for a slant to take him around. And he
+made easting. In despair, he had tried to make the passage through the
+Straits of Le Maire. Halfway through, the wind hauled to the north 'ard
+of northwest, the glass dropped to 28.88, and he turned and ran before a
+gale of cyclonic fury, missing, by a hair's breadth, piling up the _Mary
+Rogers_ on the black-toothed rocks. Twice he had made west to the Diego
+Ramirez Rocks, one of the times saved between two snow-squalls by
+sighting the gravestones of ships a quarter of a mile dead ahead.
+
+Blow! Captain Dan Cullen instanced all his thirty years at sea to prove
+that never had it blown so before. The _Mary Rogers_ was hove to at the
+time he gave the evidence, and, to clinch it, inside half an hour the
+_Mary Rogers_ was hove down to the hatches. Her new main-topsail and
+brand new spencer were blown away like tissue paper; and five sails,
+furled and fast under double gaskets, were blown loose and stripped from
+the yards. And before morning the _Mary Rogers_ was hove down twice
+again, and holes were knocked in her bulwarks to ease her decks from
+the weight of ocean that pressed her down.
+
+On an average of once a week Captain Dan Cullen caught glimpses of the
+sun. Once, for ten minutes, the sun shone at midday, and ten minutes
+afterward a new gale was piping up, both watches were shortening sail,
+and all was buried in the obscurity of a driving snow-squall. For a
+fortnight, once, Captain Dan Cullen was without a meridian or a
+chronometer sight. Rarely did he know his position within half a degree,
+except when in sight of land; for sun and stars remained hidden behind
+the sky, and it was so gloomy that even at the best the horizons were
+poor for accurate observations. A gray gloom shrouded the world. The
+clouds were gray; the great driving seas were leaden gray gloom shrouded
+the world. The clouds were gray; the great driving seas were leadening;
+even the occasional albatrosses were gray, while the snow-flurries were
+not white, but gray, under the sombre pall of the heavens.
+
+Life on board the _Mary Rogers_ was gray,--gray and gloomy. The faces of
+the sailors were blue-gray; they were afflicted with sea-cuts and
+sea-boils, and suffered exquisitely. They were shadows of men. For
+seven weeks, in the forecastle or on deck, they had not known what it
+was to be dry. They had forgotten what it was to sleep out a watch, and
+all watches it was, "All hands on deck!" They caught snatches of
+agonized sleep, and they slept in their oilskins ready for the
+everlasting call. So weak and worn were they that it took both watches
+to do the work of one. That was why both watches were on deck so much of
+the time. And no shadow of a man could shirk duty. Nothing less than a
+broken leg could enable a man to knock off work; and there were two
+such, who had been mauled and pulped by the seas that broke aboard.
+
+One other man who was the shadow of a man was George Dorety. He was the
+only passenger on board, a friend of the firm, and he had elected to
+make the voyage for his health. But seven weeks of Cape Horn had not
+bettered his health. He gasped and panted in his bunk through the long,
+heaving nights; and when on deck he was so bundled up for warmth that he
+resembled a peripatetic old-clothes shop. At midday, eating at the cabin
+table in a gloom so deep that the swinging sea-lamps burned always, he
+looked as blue-gray as the sickest, saddest man for'ard. Nor did gazing
+across the table at Captain Dan Cullen have any cheering effect upon
+him. Captain Cullen chewed and scowled and kept silent. The scowls were
+for God, and with every chew he reiterated the sole thought of his
+existence, which was _make westing._ He was a big, hairy brute, and the
+sight of him was not stimulating to the other's appetite. He looked upon
+George Dorety as a Jonah, and told him so, once each meal, savagely
+transferring the scowl from God to the passenger and back again.
+
+Nor did the mate prove a first aid to a languid appetite. Joshua Higgins
+by name, a seaman by profession and pull, but a pot-wolloper by
+capacity, he was a loose-jointed, sniffling creature, heartless and
+selfish and cowardly, without a soul, in fear of his life of Dan Cullen,
+and a bully over the sailors, who knew that behind the mate was Captain
+Cullen, the lawgiver and compeller, the driver and the destroyer, the
+incarnation of a dozen bucko mates. In that wild weather at the southern
+end of the earth, Joshua Higgins ceased washing. His grimy face usually
+robbed George Dorety of what little appetite he managed to accumulate.
+Ordinarily this lavatorial dereliction would have caught Captain
+Cullen's eye and vocabulary, but in the present his mind was filled with
+making westing, to the exclusion of all other things not contributory
+thereto. Whether the mate's face was clean or dirty had no bearing upon
+westing. Later on, when 50° south in the Pacific had been reached,
+Joshua Higgins would wash his face very abruptly. In the meantime, at
+the cabin table, where gray twilight alternated with lamplight while the
+lamps were being filled, George Dorety sat between the two men, one a
+tiger and the other a hyena, and wondered why God had made them. The
+second mate, Matthew Turner, was a true sailor and a man, but George
+Dorety did not have the solace of his company, for he ate by himself,
+solitary, when they had finished.
+
+On Saturday morning, July 24, George Dorety awoke to a feeling of life
+and headlong movement. On deck he found the _Mary Rogers_ running off
+before a howling southeaster. Nothing was set but the lower topsails and
+the foresail. It was all she could stand, yet she was making fourteen
+knots, as Mr. Turner shouted in Dorety's ear when he came on deck. And
+it was all westing. She was going around the Horn at last ... if the
+wind held. Mr. Turner looked happy. The end of the struggle was in
+sight. But Captain Cullen did not look happy. He scowled at Dorety in
+passing. Captain Cullen did not want God to know that he was pleased
+with that wind. He had a conception of a malicious God, and believed in
+his secret soul that if God knew it was a desirable wind, God would
+promptly efface it and send a snorter from the west. So he walked softly
+before God, smothering his joy down under scowls and muttered curses,
+and, so, fooling God, for God was the only thing in the universe of
+which Dan Cullen was afraid.
+
+All Saturday and Saturday night the _Mary Rogers_ raced her westing.
+Persistently she logged her fourteen knots, so that by Sunday morning
+she had covered three hundred and fifty miles. If the wind held, she
+would make around. If it failed, and the snorter came from anywhere
+between southwest and north, back the _Mary Rogers_ would be hurled and
+be no better off than she had been seven weeks before. And on Sunday
+morning the wind _was_ failing. The big sea was going down and running
+smooth. Both watches were on deck setting sail after sail as fast as the
+ship could stand it. And now Captain Cullen went around brazenly before
+God, smoking a big cigar, smiling jubilantly, as if the failing wind
+delighted him, while down underneath he was raging against God for
+taking the life out of the blessed wind. _Make westing_! So he would, if
+God would only leave him alone. Secretly, he pledged himself anew to the
+Powers of Darkness, if they would let him make westing. He pledged
+himself so easily because he did not believe in the Powers of Darkness.
+He really believed only in God, though he did not know it. And in his
+inverted theology God was really the Prince of Darkness. Captain Cullen
+was a devil-worshipper, but he called the devil by another name, that
+was all.
+
+At midday, after calling eight bells, Captain Cullen ordered the royals
+on. The men went aloft faster than they had gone in weeks. Not alone
+were they nimble because of the westing, but a benignant sun was shining
+down and limbering their stiff bodies. George Dorety stood aft, near
+Captain Cullen, less bundled in clothes than usual, soaking in the
+grateful warmth as he watched the scene. Swiftly and abruptly the
+incident occurred. There was a cry from the foreroyal-yard of "Man
+overboard!" Somebody threw a life buoy over the side, and at the same
+instant the second mate's voice came aft, ringing and peremptory:--
+
+"Hard down your helm!"
+
+The man at the wheel never moved a spoke. He knew better, for Captain
+Dan Cullen was standing alongside of him. He wanted to move a spoke, to
+move all the spokes, to grind the wheel down, hard down, for his comrade
+drowning in the sea. He glanced at Captain Dan Cullen, and Captain Dan
+Cullen gave no sign.
+
+"Down! Hard down!" the second mate roared, as he sprang aft.
+
+But he ceased springing and commanding, and stood still, when he saw Dan
+Cullen by the wheel. And big Dan Cullen puffed at his cigar and said
+nothing. Astern, and going astern fast, could be seen the sailor. He had
+caught the life buoy and was clinging to it. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved.
+The men aloft clung to the royal yards and watched with terror stricken
+faces. And the _Mary Rogers_ raced on, making her westing. A long,
+silent minute passed.
+
+"Who was it!" Captain Cullen demanded.
+
+"Mops, sir," eagerly answered the sailor at the wheel.
+
+Mops topped a wave astern and disappeared temporarily in the trough. It
+was a large wave, but it was no graybeard. A small boat could live
+easily in such a sea, and in such a sea the _Mary Rogers_ could easily
+come to. But she could not come to and make westing at the same time.
+
+For the first time in all his years, George Dorety was seeing a real
+drama of life and death--a sordid little drama in which the scales
+balanced an unknown sailor named Mops against a few miles of longitude.
+At first he had watched the man astern, but now he watched big Dan
+Cullen, hairy and black, vested with power of life and death, smoking a
+cigar.
+
+Captain Dan Cullen smoked another long, silent minute. Then he removed
+the cigar from his mouth. He glanced aloft at the spars of the _Mary
+Rogers_, and overside at the sea.
+
+"Sheet home the royals!" he cried.
+
+Fifteen minutes later they sat at table, in the cabin, with food served
+before them. On one side of George Dorety sat Dan Cullen, the tiger, on
+the other side, Joshua Higgins, the hyena. Nobody spoke. On deck the men
+were sheeting home the skysails. George Dorety could hear their cries,
+while a persistent vision haunted him of a man called Mops, alive and
+well, clinging to a life buoy miles astern in that lonely ocean. He
+glanced at Captain Cullen, and experienced a feeling of nausea, for the
+man was eating his food with relish, almost bolting it.
+
+"Captain Cullen," Dorety said, "you are in command of this ship, and it
+is not proper for me to comment now upon what you do. But I wish to say
+one thing. There is a hereafter, and yours will be a hot one."
+
+Captain Cullen did not even scowl. In his voice was regret as he
+said:--"It was blowing a living gale. It was impossible to save the
+man."
+
+"He fell from the royal-yard," Dorety cried hotly. "You were setting the
+royals at the time. Fifteen minutes afterward you were setting the
+skysails."
+
+"It was a living gale, wasn't it, Mr. Higgins?" Captain Cullen said,
+turning to the mate.
+
+"If you'd brought her to, it'd have taken the sticks out of her," was
+the mate's answer. "You did the proper thing, Captain Cullen. The man
+hadn't a ghost of a show."
+
+George Dorety made no answer, and to the meal's end no one spoke. After
+that, Dorety had his meals served in his stateroom. Captain Cullen
+scowled at him no longer, though no speech was exchanged between them,
+while the _Mary Rogers_ sped north toward warmer latitudes. At the end
+of the week, Dan Cullen cornered Dorety on deck.
+
+"What are you going to do when we get to Frisco?" he demanded bluntly.
+
+"I am going to swear out a warrant for your arrest," Dorety answered
+quietly. "I am going to charge you with murder, and I am going to see
+you hanged for it."
+
+"You're almighty sure of yourself," Captain Cullen sneered, turning on
+his heel.
+
+A second week passed, and one morning found George Dorety standing in
+the coach-house companionway at the for'ard end of the long poop, taking
+his first gaze around the deck. The _Mary Rogers_ was reaching
+full-and-by, in a stiff breeze. Every sail was set and drawing,
+including the staysails. Captain Cullen strolled for'ard along the poop.
+He strolled carelessly, glancing at the passenger out of the corner of
+his eye. Dorety was looking the other way, standing with head and
+shoulders outside the companionway, and only the back of his head was to
+be seen. Captain Cullen, with swift eye, embraced the mainstaysail-block
+and the head and estimated the distance. He glanced about him. Nobody
+was looking. Aft, Joshua Higgins, pacing up and down, had just turned
+his back and was going the other way. Captain Cullen bent over suddenly
+and cast the staysail-sheet off from its pin. The heavy block hurtled
+through the air, smashing Dorety's head like an egg-shell and hurtling
+on and back and forth as the staysail whipped and slatted in the wind.
+Joshua Higgins turned around to see what had carried away, and met the
+full blast of the vilest portion of Captain Cullen's profanity.
+
+"I made the sheet fast myself," whimpered the mate in the first lull,
+"with an extra turn to make sure. I remember it distinctly."
+
+"Made fast?" the captain snarled back, for the benefit of the watch as
+it struggled to capture the flying sail before it tore to ribbons. "You
+couldn't make your grandmother fast, you useless scullion. If you made
+that sheet fast with an extra turn, why didn't it stay fast? That's what
+I want to know. Why didn't it stay fast?"
+
+The mate whined inarticulately.
+
+"Oh, shut up!" was the final word of Captain Cullen.
+
+Half an hour later he was as surprised as any when the body of George
+Dorety was found inside the companionway on the floor. In the afternoon,
+alone in his room, he doctored up the log.
+
+"_Ordinary seaman, Karl Brun," he wrote, "lost overboard from
+foreroyal-yard in a gale of wind. Was running at the time, and for the
+safety of the ship did not dare come up to the wind. Nor could a boat
+have lived in the sea that was running_."
+
+On another page, he wrote:--
+
+"_Had often warned Mr. Dorety about the danger he ran because of his
+carelessness on deck. I told him, once, that some day he would get his
+head knocked off by a block. A carelessly fastened mainstaysail sheet
+was the cause of the accident, which was deeply to be regretted because
+Mr. Dorety was a favorite with all of us_."
+
+Captain Dan Cullen read over his literary effort with admiration,
+blotted the page, and closed the log. He lighted a cigar and stared
+before him. He felt the _Mary Rogers_ lift, and heel, and surge along,
+and knew that she was making nine knots. A smile of satisfaction slowly
+dawned on his black and hairy face. Well, anyway, he had made his
+westing and fooled God.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+THE HEATHEN
+
+
+I met him first in a hurricane; and though we had gone through the
+hurricane on the same schooner, it was not until the schooner had gone
+to pieces under us that I first laid eyes on him. Without doubt I had
+seen him with the rest of the kanaka crew on board, but I had not
+consciously been aware of his existence, for the _Petite Jeanne_ was
+rather overcrowded. In addition to her eight or ten kanaka seamen, her
+white captain, mate, and supercargo, and her six cabin passengers, she
+sailed from Rangiroa with something like eighty-five deck
+passengers--Paumotans and Tahitians, men, women, and children each with
+a trade box, to say nothing of sleeping-mats, blankets, and
+clothes-bundles.
+
+The pearling season in the Paumotus was over, and all hands were
+returning to Tahiti. The six of us cabin passengers were pearl-buyers.
+Two were Americans, one was Ah Choon (the whitest Chinese I have ever
+known), one was a German, one was a Polish Jew, and I completed the half
+dozen.
+
+It had been a prosperous season. Not one of us had cause for complaint,
+nor one of the eighty-five deck passengers either. All had done well,
+and all were looking forward to a rest-off and a good time in Papeete.
+
+Of course, the _Petite Jeanne_ was overloaded. She was only seventy
+tons, and she had no right to carry a tithe of the mob she had on board.
+Beneath her hatches she was crammed and jammed with pearl-shell and
+copra. Even the trade room was packed full of shell. It was a miracle
+that the sailors could work her. There was no moving about the decks.
+They simply climbed back and forth along the rails.
+
+In the night-time they walked upon the sleepers, who carpeted the deck,
+I'll swear, two deep. Oh! and there were pigs and chickens on deck, and
+sacks of yams, while every conceivable place was festooned with strings
+of drinking cocoanuts and bunches of bananas. On both sides, between the
+fore and main shrouds, guys had been stretched, just low enough for the
+foreboom to swing clear; and from each of these guys at least fifty
+bunches of bananas were suspended.
+
+It promised to be a messy passage, even if we did make it in the two or
+three days that would have been required if the southeast trades had
+been blowing fresh. But they weren't blowing fresh. After the first five
+hours the trade died away in a dozen or so gasping fans. The calm
+continued all that night and the next day--one of those glaring, glassy
+calms, when the very thought of opening one's eyes to look at it is
+sufficient to cause a headache.
+
+The second day a man died--an Easter Islander, one of the best divers
+that season in the lagoon. Smallpox--that is what it was; though how
+smallpox could come on board, when there had been no known cases ashore
+when we left Rangiroa, is beyond me. There it was, though--smallpox, a
+man dead, and three others down on their backs.
+
+There was nothing to be done. We could not segregate the sick, nor could
+we care for them. We were packed like sardines. There was nothing to do
+but rot or die--that is, there was nothing to do after the night that
+followed the first death. On that night, the mate, the supercargo, the
+Polish Jew, and four native divers sneaked away in the large whale-boat.
+They were never heard of again. In the morning the captain promptly
+scuttled the remaining boats, and there we were.
+
+That day there were two deaths; the following day three; then it jumped
+to eight. It was curious to see how we took it. The natives, for
+instance, fell into a condition of dumb, stolid fear. The
+captain--Oudouse, his name was, a Frenchman--became very nervous and
+voluble. He actually got the twitches. He was a large, fleshy man,
+weighing at least two hundred pounds, and he quickly became a faithful
+representation of a quivering jelly-mountain of fat.
+
+The German, the two Americans, and myself bought up all the Scotch
+whiskey, and proceeded to stay drunk. The theory was beautiful--namely,
+if we kept ourselves soaked in alcohol, every smallpox germ that came
+into contact with us would immediately be scorched to a cinder. And the
+theory worked, though I must confess that neither Captain Oudouse nor Ah
+Choon were attacked by the disease either. The Frenchman did not drink
+at all, while Ah Choon restricted himself to one drink daily.
+
+It was a pretty time. The sun, going into northern declination, was
+straight overhead. There was no wind, except for frequent squalls, which
+blew fiercely for from five minutes to half an hour, and wound up by
+deluging us with rain. After each squall, the awful sun would come out,
+drawing clouds of steam from the soaked decks.
+
+The steam was not nice. It was the vapor of death, freighted with
+millions and millions of germs. We always took another drink when we saw
+it going up from the dead and dying, and usually we took two or three
+more drinks, mixing them exceptionally stiff. Also, we made it a rule to
+take an additional several each time they hove the dead over to the
+sharks that swarmed about us.
+
+We had a week of it, and then the whiskey gave out. It is just as well,
+or I shouldn't be alive now. It took a sober man to pull through what
+followed, as you will see when I mention the little fact that only two
+men did pull through. The other man was the heathen--at least, that was
+what I heard Captain Oudouse call him at the moment I first became
+aware of the heathen's existence. But to come back.
+
+It was at the end of the week, with the whiskey gone, and the
+pearl-buyers sober, that I happened to glance at the barometer that hung
+in the cabin companionway. Its normal register in the Paumotus was
+29.90, and it was quite customary to see it vacillate between 29.85 and
+30.00, or even 30.05; but to see it as I saw it, down to 29.62, was
+sufficient to sober the most drunken pearl-buyer that ever incinerated
+smallpox microbes in Scotch whiskey.
+
+I called Captain Oudouse's attention to it, only to be informed that he
+had watched it going down for several hours. There was little to do, but
+that little he did very well, considering the circumstances. He took off
+the light sails, shortened right down to storm canvas, spread
+life-lines, and waited for the wind. His mistake lay in what he did
+after the wind came. He hove to on the port tack, which was the right
+thing to do south of the Equator, if--and there was the rub--_if_ one
+were _not_ in the direct path of the hurricane.
+
+We were in the direct path. I could see that by the steady increase of
+the wind and the equally steady fall of the barometer. I wanted him to
+turn and run with the wind on the port quarter until the barometer
+ceased falling, and then to heave to. We argued till he was reduced to
+hysteria, but budge he would not. The worst of it was that I could not
+get the rest of the pearl-buyers to back me up. Who was I, anyway, to
+know more about the sea and its ways than a properly qualified captain?
+was what was in their minds, I knew.
+
+Of course the sea rose with the wind frightfully; and I shall never
+forget the first three seas the _Petite Jeanne_ shipped. She had fallen
+off, as vessels do at times when hove to, and the first sea made a clean
+breach. The life-lines were only for the strong and well, and little
+good were they even for them when the women and children, the bananas
+and cocoanuts, the pigs and trade boxes, the sick and the dying, were
+swept along in a solid, screeching, groaning mass.
+
+The second sea filled the _Petite Jeanne's_ decks flush with the rails;
+and, as her stern sank down and her bow tossed skyward, all the
+miserable dunnage of life and luggage poured aft. It was a human
+torrent. They came head-first, feet-first, sidewise, rolling over and
+over, twisting, squirming, writhing, and crumpling up. Now and again one
+caught a grip on a stanchion or a rope; but the weight of the bodies
+behind tore such grips loose.
+
+One man I noticed fetch up, head on and square on, with the
+starboard-bitt. His head cracked like an egg. I saw what was coming,
+sprang on top of the cabin, and from there into the mainsail itself. Ah
+Choon and one of the Americans tried to follow me, but I was one jump
+ahead of them. The American was swept away and over the stern like a
+piece of chaff. Ah Choon caught a spoke of the wheel, and swung in
+behind it. But a strapping Raratonga vahine (woman)--she must have
+weighed two hundred and fifty--brought up against him, and got an arm
+around his neck. He clutched the kanaka steersman with his other hand;
+and just at that moment the schooner flung down to starboard.
+
+The rush of bodies and sea that was coming along the port runway between
+the cabin and the rail turned abruptly and poured to starboard. Away
+they went--vahine, Ah Choon, and steersman: and I swear I saw Ah Choon
+grin at me with philosophic resignation as he cleared the rail and went
+under.
+
+The third sea--the biggest of the three--did not do so much damage. By
+the time it arrived nearly everybody was in the rigging. On deck perhaps
+a dozen gasping, half-drowned, and half-stunned wretches were rolling
+about or attempting to crawl into safety. They went by the board, as did
+the wreckage of the two remaining boats. The other pearl-buyers and
+myself, between seas, managed to get about fifteen women and children
+into the cabin, and battened down. Little good it did the poor creatures
+in the end.
+
+Wind? Out of all my experience I could not have believed it possible for
+the wind to blow as it did. There is no describing it. How can one
+describe a nightmare? It was the same way with that wind. It tore the
+clothes off our bodies. I say _tore them off_, and I mean it. I am not
+asking you to believe it. I am merely telling something that I saw and
+felt. There are times when I do not believe it myself. I went through
+it, and that is enough. One could not face that wind and live. It was a
+monstrous thing, and the most monstrous thing about it was that it
+increased and continued to increase.
+
+Imagine countless millions and billions of tons of sand. Imagine this
+sand tearing along at ninety, a hundred, a hundred and twenty, or any
+other number of miles per hour. Imagine, further, this sand to be
+invisible, impalpable, yet to retain all the weight and density of sand.
+Do all this, and you may get a vague inkling of what that wind was like.
+
+Perhaps sand is not the right comparison. Consider it mud, invisible,
+impalpable, but heavy as mud. Nay, it goes beyond that. Consider every
+molecule of air to be a mud-bank in itself. Then try to imagine the
+multitudinous impact of mud-banks. No; it is beyond me. Language may be
+adequate to express the ordinary conditions of life, but it cannot
+possibly express any of the conditions of so enormous a blast of wind.
+It would have been better had I stuck by my original intention of not
+attempting a description.
+
+I will say this much: The sea, which had risen at first, was beaten down
+by that wind. More: it seemed as if the whole ocean had been sucked up
+in the maw of the hurricane, and hurled on through that portion of
+space which previously had been occupied by the air.
+
+Of course, our canvas had gone long before. But Captain Oudouse had on
+the _Petite Jeanne_ something I had never before seen on a South Sea
+schooner--a sea-anchor. It was a conical canvas bag, the mouth of which
+was kept open by a huge hoop of iron. The sea-anchor was bridled
+something like a kite, so that it bit into the water as a kite bites
+into the air, but with a difference. The sea-anchor remained just under
+the surface of the ocean in a perpendicular position. A long line, in
+turn, connected it with the schooner. As a result, the _Petite Jeanne_
+rode bow on to the wind and to what sea there was.
+
+The situation really would have been favorable had we not been in the
+path of the storm. True, the wind itself tore our canvas out of the
+gaskets, jerked out our topmasts, and made a raffle of our running-gear,
+but still we would have come through nicely had we not been square in
+front of the advancing storm-centre. That was what fixed us. I was in a
+state of stunned, numbed, paralyzed collapse from enduring the impact
+of the wind, and I think I was just about ready to give up and die when
+the centre smote us. The blow we received was an absolute lull. There
+was not a breath of air. The effect on one was sickening.
+
+Remember that for hours we had been at terrific muscular tension,
+withstanding the awful pressure of that wind. And then, suddenly, the
+pressure was removed. I know that I felt as though I was about to
+expand, to fly apart in all directions. It seemed as if every atom
+composing my body was repelling every other atom and was on the verge of
+rushing off irresistibly into space. But that lasted only for a moment.
+Destruction was upon us.
+
+In the absence of the wind and pressure the sea rose. It jumped, it
+leaped, it soared straight toward the clouds. Remember, from every point
+of the compass that inconceivable wind was blowing in toward the centre
+of calm. The result was that the seas sprang up from every point of the
+compass. There was no wind to check them. They popped up like corks
+released from the bottom of a pail of water. There was no system to
+them, no stability. They were hollow, maniacal seas. They were eighty
+feet high at the least. They were not seas at all. They resembled no sea
+a man had ever seen.
+
+They were splashes, monstrous splashes--that is all. Splashes that were
+eighty feet high. Eighty! They were more than eighty. They went over our
+mastheads. They were spouts, explosions. They were drunken. They fell
+anywhere, anyhow. They jostled one another; they collided. They rushed
+together and collapsed upon one another, or fell apart like a thousand
+waterfalls all at once. It was no ocean any man had ever dreamed of,
+that hurricane centre. It was confusion thrice confounded. It was
+anarchy. It was a hell-pit of sea-water gone mad.
+
+The _Petite Jeanne_? I don't know. The heathen told me afterward that he
+did not know. She was literally torn apart, ripped wide open, beaten
+into a pulp, smashed into kindling wood, annihilated. When I came to I
+was in the water, swimming automatically, though I was about two-thirds
+drowned. How I got there I had no recollection. I remembered seeing the
+_Petite Jeanne_ fly to pieces at what must have been the instant that my
+own consciousness was buffetted out of me. But there I was, with
+nothing to do but make the best of it, and in that best there was little
+promise. The wind was blowing again, the sea was much smaller and more
+regular, and I knew that I had passed through the centre. Fortunately,
+there were no sharks about. The hurricane had dissipated the ravenous
+horde that had surrounded the death ship and fed off the dead.
+
+It was about midday when the _Petite Jeanne_ went to pieces, and it must
+have been two hours afterward when I picked up with one of her
+hatch-covers. Thick rain was driving at the time; and it was the merest
+chance that flung me and the hatch-cover together. A short length of
+line was trailing from the rope handle; and I knew that I was good for a
+day, at least, if the sharks did not return. Three hours later, possibly
+a little longer, sticking close to the cover, and, with closed eyes,
+concentrating my whole soul upon the task of breathing in enough air to
+keep me going and at the same time of avoiding breathing in enough water
+to drown me, it seemed to me that I heard voices. The rain had ceased,
+and wind and sea were easing marvellously. Not twenty feet away from me
+on another hatch-cover, were Captain Oudouse and the heathen. They were
+fighting over the possession of the cover--at least, the Frenchman was.
+
+"_Paien noir_!" I heard him scream, and at the same time I saw him kick
+the kanaka.
+
+Now, Captain Oudouse had lost all his clothes, except his shoes, and
+they were heavy brogans. It was a cruel blow, for it caught the heathen
+on the mouth and the point of the chin, half stunning him. I looked for
+him to retaliate, but he contented himself with swimming about forlornly
+a safe ten feet away. Whenever a fling of the sea threw him closer, the
+Frenchman, hanging on with his hands, kicked out at him with both feet.
+Also, at the moment of delivering each kick, he called the kanaka a
+black heathen.
+
+"For two centimes I'd come over there and drown you, you white beast!" I
+yelled.
+
+The only reason I did not go was that I felt too tired. The very thought
+of the effort to swim over was nauseating. So I called to the kanaka to
+come to me, and proceeded to share the hatch-cover with him. Otoo, he
+told me his name was (pronounced o-to-o); also, he told me that he was
+a native of Bora Bora, the most westerly of the Society Group. As I
+learned afterward, he had got the hatch-cover first, and, after some
+time, encountering Captain Oudouse, had offered to share it with him,
+and had been kicked off for his pains.
+
+And that was how Otoo and I first came together. He was no fighter. He
+was all sweetness and gentleness, a love-creature, though he stood
+nearly six feet tall and was muscled like a gladiator. He was no
+fighter, but he was also no coward. He had the heart of a lion; and in
+the years that followed I have seen him run risks that I would never
+dream of taking. What I mean is that while he was no fighter, and while
+he always avoided precipitating a row, he never ran away from trouble
+when it started. And it was "'Ware shoal!" when once Otoo went into
+action. I shall never forget what he did to Bill King. It occurred in
+German Samoa. Bill King was hailed the champion heavyweight of the
+American Navy. He was a big brute of a man, a veritable gorilla, one of
+those hard-hitting, rough-housing chaps, and clever with his fists as
+well. He picked the quarrel, and he kicked Otoo twice and struck him
+once before Otoo felt it to be necessary to fight. I don't think it
+lasted four minutes, at the end of which time Bill King was the unhappy
+possessor of four broken ribs, a broken forearm, and a dislocated
+shoulder-blade. Otoo knew nothing of scientific boxing. He was merely a
+manhandler; and Bill King was something like three months in recovering
+from the bit of manhandling he received that afternoon on Apia beach.
+
+But I am running ahead of my yarn. We shared the hatch-cover between us.
+We took turn and turn about, one lying flat on the cover and resting,
+while the other, submerged to the neck, merely held on with his hands.
+For two days and nights, spell and spell, on the cover and in the water,
+we drifted over the ocean. Toward the last I was delirious most of the
+time; and there were times, too, when I heard Otoo babbling and raving
+in his native tongue. Our continuous immersion prevented us from dying
+of thirst, though the sea-water and the sunshine gave us the prettiest
+imaginable combination of salt pickle and sunburn.
+
+In the end, Otoo saved my life; for I came to lying on the beach twenty
+feet from the water, sheltered from the sun by a couple of cocoanut
+leaves. No one but Otoo could have dragged me there and stuck up the
+leaves for shade. He was lying beside me. I went off again; and the next
+time I came round, it was cool and starry night, and Otoo was pressing a
+drinking cocoanut to my lips.
+
+We were the sole survivors of the _Petite Jeanne._ Captain Oudouse must
+have succumbed to exhaustion, for several days later his hatch-cover
+drifted ashore without him. Otoo and I lived with the natives of the
+atoll for a week, when we were rescued by a French cruiser and taken to
+Tahiti. In the meantime, however, we had performed the ceremony of
+exchanging names. In the South Seas such a ceremony binds two men closer
+together than blood-brothership. The initiative had been mine; and Otoo
+was rapturously delighted when I suggested it.
+
+"It is well," he said, in Tahitian. "For we have been mates together for
+two days on the lips of Death."
+
+"But Death stuttered." I smiled.
+
+"It was a brave deed you did, master," he replied, "and Death was not
+vile enough to speak."
+
+"Why do you 'master' me?" I demanded, with a show of hurt feelings. "We
+have exchanged names. To you I am Otoo. To me you are Charley. And
+between you and me, forever and forever, you shall be Charley, and I
+shall be Otoo. It is the way of the custom. And when we die, if it does
+happen that we live again somewhere beyond the stars and the sky, still
+shall you be Charley to me, and I Otoo to you."
+
+"Yes, master," he answered, his eyes luminous and soft with joy.
+
+"There you go!" I cried indignantly.
+
+"What does it matter what my lips utter?" he argued. "They are only my
+lips. But I shall think Otoo always. Whenever I think of myself, I shall
+think of you. Whenever men call me by name, I shall think of you. And
+beyond the sky and beyond the stars, always and forever, you shall be
+Otoo to me. Is it well, master?"
+
+I hid my smile, and answered that it was well.
+
+We parted at Papeete. I remained ashore to recuperate; and he went on
+in a cutter to his own island, Bora Bora. Six weeks later he was back. I
+was surprised, for he had told me of his wife, and said that he was
+returning to her, and would give over sailing on far voyages.
+
+"Where do you go, master?" he asked after our first greetings.
+
+I shrugged my shoulders. It was a hard question.
+
+"All the world," was my answer--"all the world, all the sea, and all the
+islands that are in the sea."
+
+"I will go with you," he said simply. "My wife is dead."
+
+I never had a brother; but from what I have seen of other men's
+brothers, I doubt if any man ever had a brother that was to him what
+Otoo was to me. He was brother and father and mother as well. And this I
+know: I lived a straighter and better man because of Otoo. I cared
+little for other men, but I had to live straight in Otoo's eyes. Because
+of him I dared not tarnish myself. He made me his ideal, compounding me,
+I fear, chiefly out of his own love and worship; and there were times
+when I stood close to the steep pitch of Hades, and would have taken
+the plunge had not the thought of Otoo restrained me. His pride in me
+entered into me, until it became one of the major rules in my personal
+code to do nothing that would diminish that pride of his.
+
+Naturally, I did not learn right away what his feelings were toward me.
+He never criticised, never censured; and slowly the exalted place I held
+in his eyes dawned upon me, and slowly I grew to comprehend the hurt I
+could inflict upon him by being anything less than my best.
+
+For seventeen years we were together; for seventeen years he was at my
+shoulder, watching while I slept, nursing me through fever and
+wounds--ay, and receiving wounds in fighting for me. He signed on the
+same ships with me; and together we ranged the Pacific from Hawaii to
+Sydney Head, and from Torres Straits to the Galapagos. We blackbirded
+from the New Hebrides and the Line Islands over to the westward clear
+through the Louisades, New Britain, New Ireland, and New Hanover. We
+were wrecked three times--in the Gilberts, in the Santa Cruz group, and
+in the Fijis. And we traded and salved wherever a dollar promised in
+the way of pearl and pearl-shell, copra, beche-de-mer, hawkbill
+turtle-shell, and stranded wrecks.
+
+It began in Papeete, immediately after his announcement that he was
+going with me over all the sea, and the islands in the midst thereof.
+There was a club in those days in Papeete, where the pearlers, traders,
+captains, and riffraff of South Sea adventurers foregathered. The play
+ran high, and the drink ran high; and I am very much afraid that I kept
+later hours than were becoming or proper. No matter what the hour was
+when I left the club, there was Otoo waiting to see me safely home.
+
+At first I smiled; next I chided him. Then I told him flatly that I
+stood in need of no wet-nursing. After that I did not see him when I
+came out of the club. Quite by accident, a week or so later, I
+discovered that he still saw me home, lurking across the street among
+the shadows of the mango-trees. What could I do? I know what I did do.
+
+Insensibly I began to keep better hours. On wet and stormy nights, in
+the thick of the folly and the fun, the thought would persist in coming
+to me of Otoo keeping his dreary vigil under the dripping mangoes.
+Truly, he had made a better man of me. Yet he was not strait-laced. And
+he knew nothing of common Christian morality. All the people on Bora
+Bora were Christians; but he was a heathen, the only unbeliever on the
+island, a gross materialist, who believed that when he died he was dead.
+He believed merely in fair play and square dealing. Petty meanness, in
+his code, was almost as serious as wanton homicide; and I do believe
+that he respected a murderer more than a man given to small practices.
+
+Otoo had my welfare always at heart. He thought ahead for me, weighed my
+plans, and took a greater interest in them than I did myself. At first,
+when I was unaware of this interest of his in my affairs, he had to
+divine my intentions, as, for instance, at Papeete, when I contemplated
+going partners with a knavish fellow-countryman on a guano venture. I
+did not know he was a knave. Nor did any white man in Papeete. Neither
+did Otoo know, but he saw how thick we were getting, and found out for
+me, and without my asking him. Native sailors from the ends of the seas
+knock about on the beach in Tahiti; and Otoo, suspicious merely, went
+among them till he had gathered sufficient data to justify his
+suspicions. Oh, it was a nice history, that of Randolph Waters. I
+couldn't believe it when Otoo first narrated it; but when I sheeted it
+home to Waters he gave in without a murmur, and got away on the first
+steamer to Aukland.
+
+At first, I am free to confess, I couldn't help resenting Otoo's poking
+his nose into my business. But I knew that he was wholly unselfish; and
+soon I had to acknowledge his wisdom and discretion. He had his eyes
+open always to my main chance, and he was both keen-sighted and
+far-sighted. In time he became my counsellor, until he knew more of my
+business than I did myself. He really had my interest at heart more than
+I did. Mine was the magnificent carelessness of youth, for I preferred
+romance to dollars, and adventure to a comfortable billet with all night
+in. So it was well that I had some one to look out for me. I know that
+if it had not been for Otoo, I should not be here to-day.
+
+Of numerous instances, let me give one. I had had some experience in
+blackbirding before I went pearling in the Paumotus. Otoo and I were in
+Samoa--we really were on the beach and hard aground--when my chance came
+to go as recruiter on a blackbird brig. Otoo signed on before the mast;
+and for the next half-dozen years, in as many ships, we knocked about
+the wildest portions of Melanesia. Otoo saw to it that he always pulled
+stroke-oar in my boat. Our custom in recruiting labor was to land the
+recruiter on the beach. The covering boat always lay on its oars several
+hundred feet off shore, while the recruiter's boat, also lying on its
+oars, kept afloat on the edge of the beach. When I landed with my
+trade-goods, leaving my steering sweep apeak, Otoo left his stroke
+position and came into the stern-sheets, where a Winchester lay ready to
+hand under a flap of canvas. The boat's crew was also armed, the Sniders
+concealed under canvas flaps that ran the length of the gunwales. While
+I was busy arguing and persuading the woolly-headed cannibals to come
+and labor on the Queensland plantations Otoo kept watch. And often and
+often his low voice warned me of suspicious actions and impending
+treachery. Sometimes it was the quick shot from his rifle, knocking a
+savage over, that was the first warning I received. And in my rush to
+the boat his hand was always there to jerk me flying aboard. Once, I
+remember, on _Santa Anna_, the boat grounded just as the trouble began.
+The covering boat was dashing to our assistance, but the several score
+of savages would have wiped us out before it arrived. Otoo took a flying
+leap ashore, dug both hands into the trade-goods, and scattered tobacco,
+beads, tomahawks, knives, and calicoes in all directions.
+
+This was too much for the woolly-heads. While they scrambled for the
+treasures, the boat was shoved clear, and we were aboard and forty feet
+away. And I got thirty recruits off that very beach in the next four
+hours.
+
+The particular instance I have in mind was on Malaita, the most savage
+island in the easterly Solomons. The natives had been remarkably
+friendly; and how were we to know that the whole village had been taking
+up a collection for over two years with which to buy a white man's head?
+The beggars are all head-hunters, and they especially esteem a white
+man's head. The fellow who captured the head would receive the whole
+collection. As I say, they appeared very friendly; and on this day I
+was fully a hundred yards down the beach from the boat. Otoo had
+cautioned me; and, as usual when I did not heed him, I came to grief.
+
+The first I knew, a cloud of spears sailed out of the mangrove swamp at
+me. At least a dozen were sticking into me. I started to run, but
+tripped over one that was fast in my calf, and went down. The
+woolly-heads made a run for me, each with a long-handled, fantail
+tomahawk with which to hack off my head. They were so eager for the
+prize that they got in one another's way. In the confusion, I avoided
+several hacks by throwing myself right and left on the sand.
+
+Then Otoo arrived--Otoo the manhandler. In some way he had got hold of a
+heavy war club, and at close quarters it was a far more efficient weapon
+than a rifle. He was right in the thick of them, so that they could not
+spear him, while their tomahawks seemed worse than useless. He was
+fighting for me, and he was in a true Berserker rage. The way he handled
+that club was amazing. Their skulls squashed like overripe oranges. It
+was not until he had driven them back, picked me up in his arms, and
+started to run, that he received his first wounds. He arrived in the
+boat with four spear thrusts, got his Winchester, and with it got a man
+for every shot. Then we pulled aboard the schooner and doctored up.
+
+Seventeen years we were together. He made me. I should to-day be a
+supercargo, a recruiter, or a memory, if it had not been for him.
+
+"You spend your money, and you go out and get more," he said one day.
+"It is easy to get money now. But when you get old, your money will be
+spent, and you will not be able to go out and get more. I know, master.
+I have studied the way of white men. On the beaches are many old men who
+were young once, and who could get money just like you. Now they are
+old, and they have nothing, and they wait about for the young men like
+you to come ashore and buy drinks for them.
+
+"The black boy is a slave on the plantations. He gets twenty dollars a
+year. He works hard. The overseer does not work hard. He rides a horse
+and watches the black boy work. He gets twelve hundred dollars a year. I
+am a sailor on the schooner. I get fifteen dollars a month. That is
+because I am a good sailor. I work hard. The captain has a double
+awning, and drinks beer out of long bottles. I have never seen him haul
+a rope or pull an oar. He gets one hundred and fifty dollars a month. I
+am a sailor. He is a navigator. Master, I think it would be very good
+for you to know navigation."
+
+Otoo spurred me on to it. He sailed with me as second mate on my first
+schooner, and he was far prouder of my command than I was myself. Later
+on it was:
+
+"The captain is well paid, master; but the ship is in his keeping, and
+he is never free from the burden. It is the owner who is better
+paid--the owner who sits ashore with many servants and turns his money
+over."
+
+"True, but a schooner costs five thousand dollars--an old schooner at
+that," I objected. "I should be an old man before I saved five thousand
+dollars."
+
+"There be short ways for white men to make money," he went on, pointing
+ashore at the cocoanut-fringed beach.
+
+We were in the Solomons at the time, picking up a cargo of ivory-nuts
+along the east coast of Guadalcanar.
+
+"Between this river mouth and the next it is two miles," he said. "The
+flat land runs far back. It is worth nothing now. Next year--who
+knows?--or the year after, men will pay much money for that land. The
+anchorage is good. Big steamers can lie close up. You can buy the land
+four miles deep from the old chief for ten thousand sticks of tobacco,
+ten bottles of square-face, and a Snider, which will cost you, maybe,
+one hundred dollars. Then you place the deed with the commissioner; and
+the next year, or the year after, you sell and become the owner of a
+ship."
+
+I followed his lead, and his words came true, though in three years,
+instead of two. Next came the grasslands deal on Guadalcanar--twenty
+thousand acres, on a governmental nine hundred and ninety-nine years'
+lease at a nominal sum. I owned the lease for precisely ninety days,
+when I sold it to a company for half a fortune. Always it was Otoo who
+looked ahead and saw the opportunity. He was responsible for the salving
+of the _Doncaster_--bought in at auction for a hundred pounds, and
+clearing three thousand after every expense was paid. He led me into the
+Savaii plantation and the cocoa venture on Upolu.
+
+We did not go seafaring so much as in the old days. I was too well off.
+I married, and my standard of living rose; but Otoo remained the same
+old-time Otoo, moving about the house or trailing through the office,
+his wooden pipe in his mouth, a shilling undershirt on his back, and a
+four-shilling lava-lava about his loins. I could not get him to spend
+money. There was no way of repaying him except with love, and God knows
+he got that in full measure from all of us. The children worshipped him;
+and if he had been spoilable, my wife would surely have been his
+undoing.
+
+The children! He really was the one who showed them the way of their
+feet in the world practical. He began by teaching them to walk. He sat
+up with them when they were sick. One by one, when they were scarcely
+toddlers, he took them down to the lagoon, and made them into
+amphibians. He taught them more than I ever knew of the habits of fish
+and the ways of catching them. In the bush it was the same thing. At
+seven, Tom knew more woodcraft than I ever dreamed existed. At six, Mary
+went over the Sliding Rock without a quiver, and I have seen strong men
+balk at that feat. And when Frank had just turned six he could bring up
+shillings from the bottom in three fathoms.
+
+"My people in Bora Bora do not like heathen--they are all Christians;
+and I do not like Bora Bora Christians," he said one day, when I, with
+the idea of getting him to spend some of the money that was rightfully
+his, had been trying to persuade him to make a visit to his own island
+in one of our schooners--a special voyage which I had hoped to make a
+record breaker in the matter of prodigal expense.
+
+I say one of _our_ schooners, though legally at the time they belonged
+to me. I struggled long with him to enter into partnership.
+
+"We have been partners from the day the _Petite Jeanne_ went down," he
+said at last. "But if your heart so wishes, then shall we become
+partners by the law. I have no work to do, yet are my expenses large. I
+drink and eat and smoke in plenty--it costs much, I know. I do not pay
+for the playing of billiards, for I play on your table; but still the
+money goes. Fishing on the reef is only a rich man's pleasure. It is
+shocking, the cost of hooks and cotton line. Yes; it is necessary that
+we be partners by the law. I need the money. I shall get it from the
+head clerk in the office."
+
+So the papers were made out and recorded. A year later I was compelled
+to complain.
+
+"Charley," said I, "you are a wicked old fraud, a miserly skinflint, a
+miserable land-crab. Behold, your share for the year in all our
+partnership has been thousands of dollars. The head clerk has given me
+this paper. It says that in the year you have drawn just eighty-seven
+dollars and twenty cents."
+
+"Is there any owing me?" he asked anxiously.
+
+"I tell you thousands and thousands," I answered.
+
+His face brightened, as with an immense relief.
+
+"It is well," he said. "See that the head clerk keeps good account of
+it. When I want it, I shall want it, and there must not be a cent
+missing.
+
+"If there is," he added fiercely, after a pause, "it must come out of
+the clerk's wages."
+
+And all the time, as I afterward learned, his will, drawn up by
+Carruthers, and making me sole beneficiary, lay in the American consul's
+safe.
+
+But the end came, as the end must come to all human associations. It
+occurred in the Solomons, where our wildest work had been done in the
+wild young days, and where we were once more--principally on a holiday,
+incidentally to look after our holdings on Florida Island and to look
+over the pearling possibilities of the Mboli Pass. We were lying at
+Savo, having run in to trade for curios.
+
+Now, Savo is alive with sharks. The custom of the woolly-heads of
+burying their dead in the sea did not tend to discourage the sharks from
+making the adjacent waters a hang-out. It was my luck to be coming
+aboard in a tiny, overloaded, native canoe, when the thing capsized.
+There were four woolly-heads and myself in it, or, rather, hanging to
+it. The schooner was a hundred yards away. I was just hailing for a boat
+when one of the woolly-heads began to scream. Holding on to the end of
+the canoe, both he and that portion of the canoe were dragged under
+several times. Then he loosed his clutch and disappeared. A shark had
+got him.
+
+The three remaining savages tried to climb out of the water upon the
+bottom of the canoe. I yelled and struck at the nearest with my fist,
+but it was no use. They were in a blind funk. The canoe could barely
+have supported one of them. Under the three it upended and rolled
+sidewise, throwing them back into the water.
+
+I abandoned the canoe and started to swim toward the schooner, expecting
+to be picked up by the boat before I got there. One of the savages
+elected to come with me, and we swam along silently, side by side, now
+and again putting our faces into the water and peering about for sharks.
+The screams of the man who stayed by the canoe informed us that he was
+taken. I was peering into the water when I saw a big shark pass directly
+beneath me. He was fully sixteen feet in length. I saw the whole thing.
+He got the woolly-head by the middle, and away he went, the poor devil,
+head, shoulders, and arms out of water all the time, screeching in a
+heartrending way. He was carried along in this fashion for several
+hundred feet, when he was dragged beneath the surface.
+
+I swam doggedly on, hoping that that was the last unattached shark. But
+there was another. Whether it was the one that had attacked the natives
+earlier, or whether it was one that had made a good meal elsewhere, I do
+not know. At any rate, he was not in such haste as the others. I could
+not swim so rapidly now, for a large part of my effort was devoted to
+keeping track of him. I was watching him when he made his first attack.
+By good luck I got both hands on his nose, and, though his momentum
+nearly shoved me under, I managed to keep him off. He veered clear, and
+began circling about again. A second time I escaped him by the same
+maneuver. The third rush was a miss on both sides. He sheered at the
+moment my hands should have landed on his nose, but his sandpaper hide
+(I had on a sleeveless undershirt) scraped the skin off one arm from
+elbow to shoulder.
+
+By this time I was played out, and gave up hope. The schooner was still
+two hundred feet away. My face was in the water, and I was watching him
+maneuver for another attempt, when I saw a brown body pass between us.
+It was Otoo.
+
+"Swim for the schooner, master!" he said. And he spoke gayly, as though
+the affair was a mere lark. "I know sharks. The shark is my brother."
+
+I obeyed, swimming slowly on, while Otoo swam about me, keeping always
+between me and the shark, foiling his rushes and encouraging me.
+
+"The davit tackle carried away, and they are rigging the falls," he
+explained, a minute or so later, and then went under to head off another
+attack.
+
+By the time the schooner was thirty feet away I was about done for. I
+could scarcely move. They were heaving lines at us from on board, but
+they continually fell short. The shark, finding that it was receiving no
+hurt, had become bolder. Several times it nearly got me, but each time
+Otoo was there just the moment before it was too late. Of course, Otoo
+could have saved himself any time. But he stuck by me.
+
+"Good-bye, Charley! I'm finished!" I just managed to gasp.
+
+I knew that the end had come, and that the next moment I should throw
+up my hands and go down.
+
+But Otoo laughed in my face, saying:
+
+"I will show you a new trick. I will make that shark feel sick!"
+
+He dropped in behind me, where the shark was preparing to come at me.
+
+"A little more to the left!" he next called out. "There is a line there
+on the water. To the left, master--to the left!"
+
+I changed my course and struck out blindly. I was by that time barely
+conscious. As my hand closed on the line I heard an exclamation from on
+board. I turned and looked. There was no sign of Otoo. The next instant
+he broke surface. Both hands were off at the wrist, the stumps spouting
+blood.
+
+"Otoo!" he called softly. And I could see in his gaze the love that
+thrilled in his voice.
+
+Then, and then only, at the very last of all our years, he called me by
+that name.
+
+"Good-by, Otoo!" he called.
+
+Then he was dragged under, and I was hauled aboard, where I fainted in
+the captain's arms.
+
+And so passed Otoo, who saved me and made me a man, and who saved me in
+the end. We met in the maw of a hurricane, and parted in the maw of a
+shark, with seventeen intervening years of comradeship, the like of
+which I dare to assert has never befallen two men, the one brown and the
+other white. If Jehovah be from His high place watching every sparrow
+fall, not least in His kingdom shall be Otoo, the one heathen of Bora
+Bora.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+THE HOBO AND THE FAIRY
+
+
+He lay on his back. So heavy was his sleep that the stamp of hoofs and
+cries of the drivers from the bridge that crossed the creek did not
+rouse him. Wagon after wagon, loaded high with grapes, passed the bridge
+on the way up the valley to the winery, and the coming of each wagon was
+like the explosion of sound and commotion in the lazy quiet of the
+afternoon.
+
+But the man was undisturbed. His head had slipped from the folded
+newspaper, and the straggling, unkempt hair was matted with the foxtails
+and burrs of the dry grass on which it lay. He was not a pretty sight.
+His mouth was open, disclosing a gap in the upper row where several
+teeth at some time had been knocked out. He breathed stertorously, at
+times grunting and moaning with the pain of his sleep. Also, he was very
+restless, tossing his arms about, making jerky, half-convulsive
+movements, and at times rolling his head from side to side in the burrs.
+This restlessness seemed occasioned partly by some internal discomfort,
+and partly by the sun that streamed down on his face and by the flies
+that buzzed and lighted and crawled upon the nose and cheeks and
+eyelids. There was no other place for them to crawl, for the rest of the
+face was covered with matted beard, slightly grizzled, but greatly
+dirt-stained and weather-discolored.
+
+The cheek-bones were blotched with the blood congested by the debauch
+that was evidently being slept off. This, too, accounted for the
+persistence with which the flies clustered around the mouth, lured by
+the alcohol-laden exhalations. He was a powerfully built man,
+thick-necked, broad-shouldered, with sinewy wrists and toil-distorted
+hands. Yet the distortion was not due to recent toil, nor were the
+callouses other than ancient that showed under the dirt of the one palm
+upturned. From time to time this hand clenched tightly and
+spasmodically into a fist, large, heavy-boned and wicked-looking.
+
+The man lay in the dry grass of a tiny glade that ran down to the
+tree-fringed bank of the stream. On either side of the glade was a
+fence, of the old stake-and-rider type, though little of it was to be
+seen, so thickly was it overgrown by wild blackberry bushes, scrubby
+oaks and young madrono trees. In the rear, a gate through a low paling
+fence led to a snug, squat bungalow, built in the California Spanish
+style and seeming to have been compounded directly from the landscape of
+which it was so justly a part. Neat and trim and modestly sweet was the
+bungalow, redolent of comfort and repose, telling with quiet certitude
+of some one that knew, and that had sought and found.
+
+Through the gate and into the glade came as dainty a little maiden as
+ever stepped out of an illustration made especially to show how dainty
+little maidens may be. Eight years she might have been, and, possibly, a
+trifle more, or less. Her little waist and little black-stockinged
+calves showed how delicately fragile she was; but the fragility was of
+mould only. There was no hint of anemia in the clear, healthy
+complexion nor in the quick, tripping step. She was a little, delicious
+blond, with hair spun of gossamer gold and wide blue eyes that were but
+slightly veiled by the long lashes. Her expression was of sweetness and
+happiness; it belonged by right to any face that sheltered in the
+bungalow.
+
+She carried a child's parasol, which she was careful not to tear against
+the scrubby branches and bramble bushes as she sought for wild poppies
+along the edge of the fence. They were late poppies, a third generation,
+which had been unable to resist the call of the warm October sun.
+
+Having gathered along one fence, she turned to cross to the opposite
+fence. Midway in the glade she came upon the tramp. Her startle was
+merely a startle. There was no fear in it. She stood and looked long and
+curiously at the forbidding spectacle, and was about to turn back when
+the sleeper moved restlessly and rolled his hand among the burrs. She
+noted the sun on his face, and the buzzing flies; her face grew
+solicitous, and for a moment she debated with herself. Then she tiptoed
+to his side, interposed the parasol between him and the sun, and
+brushed away the flies. After a time, for greater ease, she sat down
+beside him.
+
+An hour passed, during which she occasionally shifted the parasol from
+one tired hand to the other. At first the sleeper had been restless,
+but, shielded from the flies and the sun, his breathing became gentler
+and his movements ceased. Several times, however, he really frightened
+her. The first was the worst, coming abruptly and without warning.
+"Christ! How deep! How deep!" the man murmured from some profound of
+dream. The parasol was agitated; but the little girl controlled herself
+and continued her self-appointed ministrations.
+
+Another time it was a gritting of teeth, as of some intolerable agony.
+So terribly did the teeth crunch and grind together that it seemed they
+must crush into fragments. A little later he suddenly stiffened out. The
+hands clenched and the face set with the savage resolution of the dream.
+The eyelids trembled from the shock of the fantasy, seemed about to
+open, but did not. Instead, the lips muttered:
+
+"No; no! And once more no. I won't peach." The lips paused, then went
+on. "You might as well tie me up, warden, and cut me to pieces. That's
+all you can get outa me--blood. That's all any of you-uns has ever got
+outa me in this hole."
+
+After this outburst the man slept gently on, while the little girl still
+held the parasol aloft and looked down with a great wonder at the
+frowsy, unkempt creature, trying to reconcile it with the little part of
+life that she knew. To her ears came the cries of men, the stamp of
+hoofs on the bridge, and the creak and groan of wagons heavy laden. It
+was a breathless California Indian summer day. Light fleeces of cloud
+drifted in the azure sky, but to the west heavy cloud banks threatened
+with rain. A bee droned lazily by. From farther thickets came the calls
+of quail, and from the fields the songs of meadow larks. And oblivious
+to it all slept Ross Shanklin--Ross Shanklin, the tramp and outcast,
+ex-convict 4379, the bitter and unbreakable one who had defied all
+keepers and survived all brutalities.
+
+Texas-born, of the old pioneer stock that was always tough and stubborn,
+he had been unfortunate. At seventeen years of age he had been
+apprehended for horse stealing. Also, he had been convicted of stealing
+seven horses which he had not stolen, and he had been sentenced to
+fourteen years' imprisonment. This was severe under any circumstances,
+but with him it had been especially severe, because there had been no
+prior convictions against him. The sentiment of the people who believed
+him guilty had been that two years was adequate punishment for the
+youth, but the county attorney, paid according to the convictions he
+secured, had made seven charges against him and earned seven fees. Which
+goes to show that the county attorney valued twelve years of Ross
+Shanklin's life at less than a few dollars.
+
+Young Ross Shanklin had toiled terribly in jail; he had escaped, more
+than once; and he had been caught and sent back to toil in other and
+various jails. He had been triced up and lashed till he fainted had been
+revived and lashed again. He had been in the dungeon ninety days at a
+time. He had experienced the torment of the straightjacket. He knew what
+the humming bird was. He had been farmed out as a chattel by the state
+to the contractors. He had been trailed through swamps by bloodhounds.
+Twice he had been shot. For six years on end he had cut a cord and a
+half of wood each day in a convict lumber camp. Sick or well, he had cut
+that cord and a half or paid for it under a whip-lash knotted and
+pickled.
+
+And Ross Shanklin had not sweetened under the treatment. He had sneered,
+and raved, and defied. He had seen convicts, after the guards had
+manhandled them, crippled in body for life, or left to maunder in mind
+to the end of their days. He had seen convicts, even his own cell mate,
+goaded to murder by their keepers, go to the gallows reviling God. He
+had been in a break in which eleven of his kind were shot down. He had
+been through a mutiny, where, in the prison yard, with gatling guns
+trained upon them, three hundred convicts had been disciplined with pick
+handles wielded by brawny guards.
+
+He had known every infamy of human cruelty, and through it all he had
+never been broken. He had resented and fought to the last, until,
+embittered and bestial, the day came when he was discharged. Five
+dollars were given him in payment for the years of his labor and the
+flower of his manhood. And he had worked little in the years that
+followed. Work he hated and despised. He tramped, begged and stole,
+lied or threatened as the case might warrant, and drank to besottedness
+whenever he got the chance.
+
+The little girl was looking at him when he awoke. Like a wild animal,
+all of him was awake the instant he opened his eyes. The first he saw
+was the parasol, strangely obtruded between him and the sky. He did not
+start nor move, though his whole body seemed slightly to tense. His eyes
+followed down the parasol handle to the tight-clutched little fingers,
+and along the arm to the child's face. Straight and unblinking he looked
+into her eyes, and she, returning the look, was chilled and frightened
+by his glittering eyes, cold and harsh, withal bloodshot, and with no
+hint in them of the warm humanness she had been accustomed to see and
+feel in human eyes. They were the true prison eyes--the eyes of a man
+who had learned to talk little, who had forgotten almost how to talk.
+
+"Hello," he said finally, making no effort to change his position. "What
+game are you up to!"
+
+His voice was gruff and husky, and at first it had been harsh; but it
+had softened queerly in a feeble attempt at forgotten kindliness.
+
+"How do you do?" she said. "I'm not playing. The sun was on your face,
+and mamma says one oughtn't to sleep in the sun."
+
+The sweet clearness of her child's voice was pleasant to him, and he
+wondered why he had never noticed it in children's voices before. He sat
+up slowly and stared at her. He felt that he ought to say something, but
+speech with him was a reluctant thing.
+
+"I hope you slept well," she said gravely.
+
+"I sure did," he answered, never taking his eyes from her, amazed at the
+fairness and delicacy of her. "How long was you holdin' that contraption
+up over me?"
+
+"O-oh," she debated with herself, "a long, long time. I thought you
+would never wake up."
+
+"And I thought you was a fairy when I first seen you."
+
+He felt elated at his contribution to the conversation.
+
+"No, not a fairy," she smiled.
+
+He thrilled in a strange, numb way at the immaculate whiteness of her
+small even teeth.
+
+"I was just the good Samaritan," she added.
+
+"I reckon I never heard of that party."
+
+He was cudgelling his brains to keep the conversation going. Never
+having been at close quarters with a child since he was man-grown, he
+found it difficult.
+
+"What a funny man not to know about the good Samaritan. Don't you
+remember? A certain man went down to Jericho----"
+
+"I reckon I've been there," he interrupted.
+
+"I knew you were a traveler!" she cried, clapping her hands. "Maybe you
+saw the exact spot."
+
+"What spot?"
+
+"Why, where he fell among thieves and was left half dead. And then the
+good Samaritan went to him, and bound up his wounds, and poured in oil
+and wine--was that olive oil, do you think?"
+
+He shook his head slowly.
+
+"I reckon you got me there. Olive oil is something the dagoes cooks
+with. I never heard of it for busted heads."
+
+She considered his statement for a moment.
+
+"Well," she announced, "we use olive oil in _our_ cooking, so we must be
+dagoes. I never knew what they were before. I thought it was slang."
+
+"And the Samaritan dumped oil on his head," the tramp muttered
+reminiscently. "Seems to me I recollect a sky pilot sayin' something
+about that old gent. D'ye know, I've been looking for him off 'n on all
+my life, and never scared up hide nor hair of him. They ain't no more
+Samaritans."
+
+"Wasn't I one!" she asked quickly.
+
+He looked at her steadily, with a great curiosity and wonder. Her ear,
+by a movement exposed to the sun, was transparent. It seemed he could
+almost see through it. He was amazed at the delicacy of her coloring, at
+the blue of her eyes, at the dazzle of the sun-touched golden hair. And
+he was astounded by her fragility. It came to him that she was easily
+broken. His eye went quickly from his huge, gnarled paw to her tiny hand
+in which it seemed to him he could almost see the blood circulate. He
+knew the power in his muscles, and he knew the tricks and turns by which
+men use their bodies to ill-treat men. In fact, he knew little else, and
+his mind for the time ran in its customary channel. It was his way of
+measuring the beautiful strangeness of her. He calculated a grip, and
+not a strong one, that could grind her little fingers to pulp. He
+thought of fist blows he had given to men's heads, and received on his
+own head, and felt that the least of them could shatter hers like an
+egg-shell. He scanned her little shoulders and slim waist, and knew in
+all certitude that with his two hands he could rend her to pieces.
+
+"Wasn't I one?" she insisted again.
+
+He came back to himself with a shock--or away from himself, as the case
+happened. He was loath that the conversation should cease.
+
+"What?" he answered. "Oh, yes; you bet you was a Samaritan, even if you
+didn't have no olive oil." He remembered what his mind had been dwelling
+on, and asked, "But ain't you afraid?"
+
+"Of ... of me?" he added lamely.
+
+She laughed merrily.
+
+"Mamma says never to be afraid of anything. She says that if you're
+good, and you think good of other people, they'll be good, too."
+
+"And you was thinkin' good of me when you kept the sun off," he
+marveled.
+
+"But it's hard to think good of bees and nasty crawly things," she
+confessed.
+
+"But there's men that is nasty and crawly things," he argued.
+
+"Mamma says no. She says there's good in everyone.
+
+"I bet you she locks the house up tight at night just the same," he
+proclaimed triumphantly.
+
+"But she doesn't. Mamma isn't afraid of anything. That's why she lets me
+play out here alone when I want. Why, we had a robber once. Mamma got
+right up and found him. And what do you think! He was only a poor hungry
+man. And she got him plenty to eat from the pantry, and afterward she
+got him work to do."
+
+Ross Shanklin was stunned. The vista shown him of human nature was
+unthinkable. It had been his lot to live in a world of suspicion and
+hatred, of evil-believing and evil-doing. It had been his experience,
+slouching along village streets at nightfall, to see little children,
+screaming with fear, run from him to their mothers. He had even seen
+grown women shrink aside from him as he passed along the sidewalk.
+
+He was aroused by the girl clapping her hands as she cried out:
+
+"I know what you are! You're an open air crank. That's why you were
+sleeping here in the grass."
+
+He felt a grim desire to laugh, but repressed it.
+
+"And that's what tramps are--open air cranks," she continued. "I often
+wondered. Mamma believes in the open air. I sleep on the porch at night.
+So does she. This is our land. You must have climbed the fence. Mamma
+lets me when I put on my climbers--they're bloomers, you know. But you
+ought to be told something. A person doesn't know when they snore
+because they're asleep. But you do worse than that. You grit your teeth.
+That's bad. Whenever you are going to sleep you must think to yourself,
+'I won't grit my teeth, I won't grit my teeth,' over and over, just like
+that, and by and by you'll get out of the habit.
+
+"All bad things are habits. And so are all good things. And it depends
+on us what kind our habits are going to be. I used to pucker my
+eyebrows--wrinkle them all up, but mamma said I must overcome that
+habit. She said that when my eyebrows were wrinkled it was an
+advertisement that my brain was wrinkled inside, and that it wasn't good
+to have wrinkles in the brain. And then she smoothed my eyebrows with
+her hand and said I must always think _smooth_--_smooth_ inside, and
+_smooth_ outside. And do you know, it was easy. I haven't wrinkled my
+brows for ever so long. I've heard about filling teeth by thinking. But
+I don't believe that. Neither does mamma."
+
+She paused rather out of breath. Nor did he speak. Her flow of talk had
+been too much for him. Also, sleeping drunkenly, with open mouth, had
+made him very thirsty. But, rather than lose one precious moment, he
+endured the torment of his scorching throat and mouth. He licked his dry
+lips and struggled for speech.
+
+"What is your name?" he managed at last.
+
+"Joan."
+
+She looked her own question at him, and it was not necessary to voice
+it.
+
+"Mine is Ross Shanklin," he volunteered, for the first time in forgotten
+years giving his real name.
+
+"I suppose you've traveled a lot."
+
+"I sure have, but not as much as I might have wanted to."
+
+"Papa always wanted to travel, but he was too busy at the office. He
+never could get much time. He went to Europe once with mamma. That was
+before I was born. It takes money to travel."
+
+Ross Shanklin did not know whether to agree with this statement or not.
+
+"But it doesn't cost tramps much for expenses," she took the thought
+away from him. "Is that why you tramp?"
+
+He nodded and licked his lips.
+
+"Mamma says it's too bad that men must tramp to look for work. But
+there's lots of work now in the country. All the farmers in the valley
+are trying to get men. Have you been working?"
+
+He shook his head, angry with himself that he should feel shame at the
+confession when his savage reasoning told him he was right in despising
+work. But this was followed by another thought. This beautiful little
+creature was some man's child. She was one of the rewards of work.
+
+"I wish I had a little girl like you," he blurted out, stirred by a
+sudden consciousness of passion for paternity. "I'd work my hands off. I
+... I'd do anything."
+
+She considered his case with fitting gravity.
+
+"Then you aren't married?"
+
+"Nobody would have me."
+
+"Yes, they would, if ..."
+
+She did not turn up her nose, but she favored his dirt and rags with a
+look of disapprobation he could not mistake.
+
+"Go on," he half-shouted. "Shoot it into me. If I was washed--if I wore
+good clothes--if I was respectable--if I had a job and worked
+regular--if I wasn't what I am."
+
+To each statement she nodded.
+
+"Well, I ain't that kind," he rushed on. "I'm no good. I'm a tramp. I
+don't want to work, that's what. And I like dirt."
+
+Her face was eloquent with reproach as she said, "Then you were only
+making believe when you wished you had a little girl like me?"
+
+This left him speechless, for he knew, in all the depths of his
+new-found passion, that that was just what he did want.
+
+With ready tact, noting his discomfort, she sought to change the
+subject.
+
+"What do you think of God?" she asked. "I ain't never met him. What do
+you think about him?"
+
+His reply was evidently angry, and she was frank in her disapproval.
+
+"You are very strange," she said. "You get angry so easily. I never saw
+anybody before that got angry about God, or work, or being clean."
+
+"He never done anything for me," he muttered resentfully. He cast back
+in quick review of the long years of toil in the convict camps and
+mines. "And work never done anything for me neither."
+
+An embarrassing silence fell.
+
+He looked at her, numb and hungry with the stir of the father-love,
+sorry for his ill temper, puzzling his brain for something to say. She
+was looking off and away at the clouds, and he devoured her with his
+eyes. He reached out stealthily and rested one grimy hand on the very
+edge of her little dress. It seemed to him that she was the most
+wonderful thing in the world. The quail still called from the coverts,
+and the harvest sounds seemed abruptly to become very loud. A great
+loneliness oppressed him.
+
+"I'm ... I'm no good," he murmured huskily and repentantly.
+
+But, beyond a glance from her blue eyes, she took no notice. The silence
+was more embarrassing than ever. He felt that he could give the world
+just to touch with his lips that hem of her dress where his hand rested.
+But he was afraid of frightening her. He fought to find something to
+say, licking his parched lips and vainly attempting to articulate
+something, anything.
+
+"This ain't Sonoma Valley," he declared finally. "This is fairy land,
+and you're a fairy. Mebbe I'm asleep and dreaming. I don't know. You and
+me don't know how to talk together, because, you see, you're a fairy and
+don't know nothing but good things, and I'm a man from the bad, wicked
+world."
+
+Having achieved this much, he was left gasping for ideas like a stranded
+fish.
+
+"And you're going to tell me about the bad, wicked world," she cried,
+clapping her hands. "I'm just dying to know."
+
+He looked at her, startled, remembering the wreckage of womanhood he
+had encountered on the sunken ways of life. She was no fairy. She was
+flesh and blood, and the possibilities of wreckage were in her as they
+had been in him even when he lay at his mother's breast. And there was
+in her eagerness to know.
+
+"Nope," he said lightly, "this man from the bad, wicked world ain't
+going to tell you nothing of the kind. He's going to tell you of the
+good things in that world. He's going to tell you how he loved hosses
+when he was a shaver, and about the first hoss he straddled, and the
+first hoss he owned. Hosses ain't like men. They're better. They're
+clean--clean all the way through and back again. And, little fairy, I
+want to tell you one thing--there sure ain't nothing in the world like
+when you're settin' a tired hoss at the end of a long day, and when you
+just speak, and that tired animal lifts under you willing and hustles
+along. Hosses! They're my long suit. I sure dote on hosses. Yep. I used
+to be a cowboy once."
+
+She clapped her hands in the way that tore so delightfully to his heart,
+and her eyes were dancing, as she exclaimed:
+
+"A Texas cowboy! I always wanted to see one! I heard papa say once that
+cowboys are bow-legged. Are you?"
+
+"I sure was a Texas cowboy," he answered. "But it was a long time ago.
+And I'm sure bow-legged. You see, you can't ride much when you're young
+and soft without getting the legs bent some. Why, I was only a
+three-year-old when I begun. He was a three-year-old, too, fresh-broken.
+I led him up alongside the fence, dumb to the top rail, and dropped on.
+He was a pinto, and a real devil at bucking, but I could do anything
+with him. I reckon he knowed I was only a little shaver. Some hosses
+knows lots more 'n' you think."
+
+For half an hour Ross Shanklin rambled on with his horse reminiscences,
+never unconscious for a moment of the supreme joy that was his through
+the touch of his hand on the hem of her dress. The sun dropped slowly
+into the cloud bank, the quail called more insistently, and empty wagon
+after empty wagon rumbled back across the bridge. Then came a woman's
+voice.
+
+"Joan! Joan!" it called. "Where are you, dear?"
+
+The little girl answered, and Ross Shanklin saw a woman, clad in a
+soft, clinging gown, come through the gate from the bungalow. She was a
+slender, graceful woman, and to his charmed eyes she seemed rather to
+float along than walk like ordinary flesh and blood.
+
+"What have you been doing all afternoon?" the woman asked, as she came
+up.
+
+"Talking, mamma," the little girl replied. "I've had a very interesting
+time."
+
+Ross Shanklin scrambled to his feet and stood watchfully and awkwardly.
+The little girl took the mother's hand, and she, in turn, looked at him
+frankly and pleasantly, with a recognition of his humanness that was a
+new thing to him. In his mind ran the thought: _the woman who ain't
+afraid_. Not a hint was there of the timidity he was accustomed to
+seeing in women's eyes. And he was quite aware, and never more so, of
+his bleary-eyed, forbidding appearance.
+
+"How do you do?" she greeted him sweetly and naturally.
+
+"How do you do, ma'am," he responded, unpleasantly conscious of the
+huskiness and rawness of his voice.
+
+"And did you have an interesting time, too!" she smiled.
+
+"Yes, ma'am. I sure did. I was just telling your little girl about
+hosses."
+
+"He was a cowboy, once, mamma," she cried.
+
+The mother smiled her acknowledgment to him, and looked fondly down at
+the little girl. The thought that came into Ross Shanklin's mind was the
+awfulness of the crime if any one should harm either of the wonderful
+pair. This was followed by the wish that some terrible danger should
+threaten, so that he could fight, as he well knew how, with all his
+strength and life, to defend them.
+
+"You'll have to come along, dear," the mother said. "It's growing late."
+She looked at Ross Shanklin hesitantly. "Would you care to have
+something to eat?"
+
+"No, ma'am, thanking you kindly just the same. I ... I ain't hungry."
+
+"Then say good-bye, Joan," she counselled.
+
+"Good-bye." The little girl held out her hand, and her eyes lighted
+roguishly. "Good-bye, Mr. Man from the bad, wicked world."
+
+To him, the touch of her hand as he pressed it in his was the capstone
+of the whole adventure.
+
+"Good-bye, little fairy," he mumbled. "I reckon I got to be pullin'
+along."
+
+But he did not pull along. He stood staring after his vision until it
+vanished through the gate. The day seemed suddenly empty. He looked
+about him irresolutely, then climbed the fence, crossed the bridge, and
+slouched along the road. He was in a dream. He did not note his feet nor
+the way they led him. At times he stumbled in the dust-filled ruts.
+
+A mile farther on, he aroused at the crossroads. Before him stood the
+saloon. He came to a stop and stared at it, licking his lips. He sank
+his hand into his pants pocket and fumbled a solitary dime. "God!" he
+muttered. "God!" Then, with dragging, reluctant feet, went on along the
+road.
+
+He came to a big farm. He knew it must be big, because of the bigness of
+the house and the size and number of the barns and outbuildings. On the
+porch, in shirt sleeves, smoking a cigar, keen-eyed and middle-aged, was
+the farmer.
+
+"What's the chance for a job!" Ross Shanklin asked.
+
+The keen eyes scarcely glanced at him.
+
+"A dollar a day and grub," was the answer.
+
+Ross Shanklin swallowed and braced himself.
+
+"I'll pick grapes all right, or anything. But what's the chance for a
+steady job? You've got a big ranch here. I know hosses. I was born on
+one. I can drive team, ride, plough, break, do anything that anybody
+ever done with hosses."
+
+The other looked him over with an appraising, incredulous eye.
+
+"You don't look it," was the judgment.
+
+"I know I don't. Give me a chance. That's all. I'll prove it."
+
+The farmer considered, casting an anxious glance at the cloud bank into
+which the sun had sunk.
+
+"I'm short a teamster, and I'll give you the chance to make good. Go and
+get supper with the hands."
+
+Ross Shanklin's voice was very husky, and he spoke with an effort.
+
+"All right. I'll make good. Where can I get a drink of water and wash
+up?"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+"JUST MEAT"
+
+
+He strolled to the corner and glanced up and down the intersecting
+street, but saw nothing save the oases of light shed by the street lamps
+at the successive crossings. Then he strolled back the way he had come.
+He was a shadow of a man sliding noiselessly and without undue movement
+through the semi darkness. Also he was very alert, like a wild animal in
+the jungle, keenly perceptive and receptive. The movement of another in
+the darkness about him would need to have been more shadowy than he to
+have escaped him.
+
+In addition to the running advertisement of the state of affairs carried
+to him by his senses, he had a subtler perception, a _feel_, of the
+atmosphere around him. He knew that the house in front of which he
+paused for a moment, contained children. Yet by no willed effort of
+perception did he have this knowledge. For that matter, he was not even
+aware that he knew, so occult was the impression. Yet, did a moment
+arise in which action, in relation to that house, were imperative, he
+would have acted on the assumption that it contained children. He was
+not aware of all that he knew about the neighborhood.
+
+In the same way, he knew not how, he knew that no danger threatened in
+the footfalls that came up the cross street. Before he saw the walker,
+he knew him for a belated pedestrian hurrying home. The walker came into
+view at the crossing and disappeared on up the street. The man that
+watched, noted a light that flared up in the window of a house on the
+corner, and as it died down he knew it for an expiring match. This was
+conscious identification of familiar phenomena, and through his mind
+flitted the thought, "Wanted to know what time." In another house one
+room was lighted. The light burned dimly and steadily, and he had the
+feel that it was a sick room.
+
+He was especially interested in a house across the street in the middle
+of the block. To this house he paid most attention. No matter what way
+he looked, nor what way he walked, his looks and his steps always
+returned to it. Except for an open window above the porch, there was
+nothing unusual about the house. Nothing came in nor out. Nothing
+happened. There were no lighted windows, nor had lights appeared and
+disappeared in any of the windows. Yet it was the central point of his
+consideration. He rallied to it each time after a divination of the
+state of the neighborhood.
+
+Despite his feel of things, he was not confident. He was supremely
+conscious of the precariousness of his situation. Though unperturbed by
+the footfalls of the chance pedestrian, he was as keyed up and sensitive
+and ready to be startled as any timorous deer. He was aware of the
+possibility of other intelligences prowling about in the
+darkness--intelligences similar to his own in movement, perception, and
+divination.
+
+Far down the street he caught a glimpse of something that moved. And he
+knew it was no late home-goer, but menace and danger. He whistled twice
+to the house across the street, then faded away shadow-like to the
+corner and around the corner. Here he paused and looked about him
+carefully. Reassured, he peered back around the corner and studied the
+object that moved and that was coming nearer. He had divined aright. It
+was a policeman.
+
+The man went down the cross street to the next corner, from the shelter
+of which he watched the corner he had just left. He saw the policeman
+pass by, going straight on up the street. He paralleled the policeman's
+course, and from the next corner again watched him go by; then he
+returned the way he had come. He whistled once to the house across the
+street, and after a time whistled once again. There was reassurance in
+the whistle, just as there had been warning in the previous double
+whistle.
+
+He saw a dark bulk outline itself on the roof of the porch and slowly
+descend a pillar. Then it came down the steps, passed through the small
+iron gate, and went down the sidewalk, taking on the form of a man. He
+that watched kept on his own side the street and moved on abreast to the
+corner, where he crossed over and joined the other. He was quite small
+alongside the man he accosted.
+
+"How'd you make out, Matt?" he asked.
+
+The other grunted indistinctly, and walked on in silence a few steps.
+
+"I reckon I landed the goods," he said.
+
+Jim chuckled in the darkness, and waited for further information. The
+blocks passed by; under their feet, and he grew impatient.
+
+"Well, how about them goods?" he asked. "What kind of a haul did you
+make, anyway?"
+
+"I was too busy to figger it out, but it's fat. I can tell you that
+much, Jim, it's fat. I don't dast to think how fat it is. Wait till we
+get to the room."
+
+Jim looked at him keenly under the street lamp of the next crossing, and
+saw that his face was a trifle grim and that he carried his left arm
+peculiarly.
+
+"What's the matter with your arm?" he demanded.
+
+"The little cuss bit me. Hope I don't get hydrophoby. Folks gets
+hydrophoby from man-bite sometimes, don't they?"
+
+"Gave you a fight, eh!" Jim asked encouragingly.
+
+The other grunted.
+
+"You're certainly hard to get information from," Jim burst out
+irritably. "Tell us about it. You ain't goin' to lose money just
+a-tellin' a guy."
+
+"I guess I choked him some," came the answer. Then, by way of
+explanation, "He woke up on me."
+
+"You did it neat. I never heard a sound."
+
+"Jim," the other said with seriousness, "it's a hangin' matter. I fixed
+'m. I had to. He woke up on me. You an' me's got to do some layin' low
+for a spell."
+
+Jim gave a low whistle of comprehension.
+
+"Did you hear me whistle!" he asked suddenly.
+
+"Sure. I was all done. I was just comin' out."
+
+"It was a bull. But he wasn't on a little bit. Went right by an' kept
+a-paddin' the hoof outa sight. Then I came back an' gave you the
+whistle. What made you take so long after that?"
+
+"I was waitin' to make sure," Matt explained.
+
+"I was mighty glad when I heard you whistle again. It's hard work
+waitin'. I just sat there an' thought an' thought ... oh, all kinds of
+things. It's remarkable what a fellow'll think about. And then there
+was a darn cat that kept movin' around the house an' botherin' me with
+its noises."
+
+"An' it's fat!" Jim exclaimed irrelevantly and with joy.
+
+"I'm sure tellin' you, Jim, it's fat. I'm plum' anxious for another look
+at 'em."
+
+Unconsciously the two men quickened their pace. Yet they did not relax
+from their caution. Twice they changed their course in order to avoid
+policemen, and they made very sure that they were not observed when they
+dived into the dark hallway of a cheap rooming house down town.
+
+Not until they had gained their own room on the top floor, did they
+scratch a match. While Jim lighted a lamp, Matt locked the door and
+threw the bolts into place. As he turned, he noticed that his partner
+was waiting expectantly. Matt smiled to himself at the other's
+eagerness.
+
+"Them search-lights is all right," he said, drawing forth a small pocket
+electric lamp and examining it. "But we got to get a new battery. It's
+runnin' pretty weak. I thought once or twice it'd leave me in the dark.
+Funny arrangements in that house. I near got lost. His room was on the
+left, an' that fooled me some."
+
+"I told you it was on the left," Jim interrupted.
+
+"You told me it was on the right," Matt went on. "I guess I know what
+you told me, an' there's the map you drew."
+
+Fumbling in his vest pocket, he drew out a folded slip of paper. As he
+unfolded it, Jim bent over and looked.
+
+"I did make a mistake," he confessed.
+
+"You sure did. It got me guessin' some for a while."
+
+"But it don't matter now," Jim cried. "Let's see what you got."
+
+"It does matter," Matt retorted. "It matters a lot ... to me. I've got
+to run all the risk. I put my head in the trap while you stay on the
+street. You got to get on to yourself an' be more careful. All right,
+I'll show you."
+
+He dipped loosely into his trousers pocket and brought out a handful of
+small diamonds. He spilled them out in a blazing stream on the greasy
+table. Jim let out a great oath.
+
+"That's nothing," Matt said with triumphant complacence. "I ain't begun
+yet."
+
+From one pocket after another he continued bringing forth the spoil.
+There were many diamonds wrapped in chamois skin that were larger than
+those in the first handful. From one pocket he brought out a handful of
+very small cut gems.
+
+"Sun dust," he remarked, as he spilled them on the table in a space by
+themselves.
+
+Jim examined them.
+
+"Just the same, they retail for a couple of dollars each," he said. "Is
+that all?"
+
+"Ain't it enough?" the other demanded in an aggrieved tone.
+
+"Sure it is," Jim answered with unqualified approval. "Better'n I
+expected. I wouldn't take a cent less than ten thousan' for the bunch."
+
+"Ten thousan'," Matt sneered. "They're worth twic't that, an' I don't
+know anything about joolery, either. Look at that big boy!"
+
+He picked it out from the sparkling heap and held it near to the lamp
+with the air of an expert, weighing and judging.
+
+"Worth a thousan' all by its lonely," was Jim's quicker judgment.
+
+"A thousan' your grandmother," was Matt's scornful rejoinder. "You
+couldn't buy it for three."
+
+"Wake me up! I'm dreamin'!" The sparkle of the gems was in Jim's eyes,
+and he began sorting out the larger diamonds and examining them. "We're
+rich men, Matt--we'll be regular swells."
+
+"It'll take years to get rid of 'em," was Matt's more practical thought.
+
+"But think how we'll live! Nothin' to do but spend the money an' go on
+gettin' rid of 'em."
+
+Matt's eyes were beginning to sparkle, though sombrely, as his
+phlegmatic nature woke up.
+
+"I told you I didn't dast think how fat it was," he murmured in a low
+voice.
+
+"What a killin'! What a killin'!" was the other's more ecstatic
+utterance.
+
+"I almost forgot," Matt said, thrusting his hand into his inside coat
+pocket.
+
+A string of large pearls emerged from wrappings of tissue paper and
+chamois skin. Jim scarcely glanced at them.
+
+"They're worth money," he said, and returned to the diamonds.
+
+A silence fell on the two men. Jim played with the gems, running them
+through his fingers, sorting them into piles, and spreading them out
+flat and wide. He was a slender, weazened man, nervous, irritable,
+high-strung, and anaemic--a typical child of the gutter, with
+unbeautiful twisted features, small eyes, with face and mouth
+perpetually and feverishly hungry, brutish in a catlike way, stamped to
+the core with degeneracy.
+
+Matt did not finger the diamonds. He sat with chin on hands and elbows
+on table, blinking heavily at the blazing array. He was in every way a
+contrast to the other. No city had bred him. He was heavy muscled and
+hairy, gorilla-like in strength and aspect. For him there was no unseen
+world. His eyes were full and wide apart, and there seemed in them a
+certain bold brotherliness. They inspired confidence. But a closer
+inspection would have shown that his eyes were just a trifle too full,
+just a shade too wide apart. He exceeded, spilled over the limits of
+normality, and his features told lies about the man beneath.
+
+"The bunch is worth fifty thousan'," Jim remarked suddenly.
+
+"A hundred thousan'," Matt said.
+
+The silence returned and endured a long time, to be broken again by Jim.
+
+"What in blazes was he doin' with 'em all at the house?--that's what I
+want to know. I'd a-thought he'd kept 'em in the safe down at the
+store."
+
+Matt had just been considering the vision of the throttled man as he had
+last looked upon him in the dim light of the electric lantern; but he
+did not start at the mention of him.
+
+"There's no tellin'," he answered. "He might a-been getting ready to
+chuck his pardner. He might a-pulled out in the mornin' for parts
+unknown, if we hadn't happened along. I guess there's just as many
+thieves among honest men as there is among thieves. You read about such
+things in the papers, Jim. Pardners is always knifin' each other."
+
+A queer, nervous look came in the other's eyes. Matt did not betray that
+he noted it, though he said:--
+
+"What was you thinkin' about, Jim!"
+
+Jim was a trifle awkward for the moment.
+
+"Nothin'," he answered. "Only I was thinkin' just how funny it was--all
+them jools at his house. What made you ask?"
+
+"Nothin'. I was just wonderin', that was all."
+
+The silence settled down, broken by an occasional low and nervous giggle
+on the part of Jim. He was overcome by the spread of gems. It was not
+that he felt their beauty. He was unaware that they were beautiful in
+themselves. But in them his swift imagination visioned the joys of life
+they would buy, and all the desires and appetites of his diseased mind
+and sickly flesh were tickled by the promise they extended. He builded
+wondrous, orgy-haunted castles out of their brilliant fires, and was
+appalled at what he builded. Then it was that he giggled. It was all too
+impossible to be real. And yet there they blazed on the table before
+him, fanning the flame of the lust of him, and he giggled again.
+
+"I guess we might as well count 'em," Matt said suddenly, tearing
+himself away from his own visions. "You watch me an' see that it's
+square, because you an' me has got to be on the square, Jim.
+Understand?"
+
+Jim did not like this, and betrayed it in his eyes, while Matt did not
+like what he saw in his partner's eyes.
+
+"Understand!" Matt repeated, almost menacingly.
+
+"Ain't we always been square?" the other replied, on the defensive, what
+of the treachery already whispering in him.
+
+"It don't cost nothin', bein' square in hard times," Matt retorted.
+"It's bein' square in prosperity that counts. When we ain't got nothin',
+we can't help bein' square. We're prosperous now, an' we've got to be
+business men--honest business men. Understand?"
+
+"That's the talk for me," Jim approved, but deep down in the meagre soul
+of him,--and in spite of him,--wanton and lawless thoughts were stirring
+like chained beasts.
+
+Matt stepped to the food shelf behind the two-burner kerosene cooking
+stove. He emptied the tea from a paper bag, and from a second bag
+emptied some red peppers. Returning to the table with the bags, he put
+into them the two sizes of small diamonds. Then he counted the large
+gems and wrapped them in their tissue paper and chamois skin.
+
+"Hundred an' forty-seven good-sized ones," was his inventory; "twenty
+real big ones; two big boys and one whopper; an' a couple of fistfuls of
+teeny ones an' dust."
+
+He looked at Jim.
+
+"Correct," was the response.
+
+He wrote the count out on a slip of memorandum paper, and made a copy of
+it, giving one slip to his partner and retaining the other.
+
+"Just for reference," he said.
+
+Again he had recourse to the food shelf, where he emptied the sugar from
+a large paper bag. Into this he thrust the diamonds, large and small,
+wrapped it up in a bandana handkerchief, and stowed it away under his
+pillow. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed and took off his shoes.
+
+"An' you think they're worth a hundred thousan'?" Jim asked, pausing and
+looking up from the unlacing of his shoe.
+
+"Sure," was the answer. "I seen a dancer down in Arizona once, with some
+big sparklers on her. They wasn't real. She said if they was she
+wouldn't be dancin'. Said they'd be worth all of fifty thousan', an'
+she didn't have a dozen of 'em all told."
+
+"Who'd work for a livin'?" Jim triumphantly demanded. "Pick an' shovel
+work!" he sneered. "Work like a dog all my life, an' save all my wages,
+an' I wouldn't have half as much as we got to-night."
+
+"Dish washin's about your measure, an' you couldn't get more'n twenty a
+month an' board. Your figgers is 'way off, but your point is well taken.
+Let them that likes it, work. I rode range for thirty a month when I was
+young an' foolish. Well, I'm older, an' I ain't ridin' range."
+
+He got into bed on one side. Jim put out the light and followed him in
+on the other side.
+
+"How's your arm feel?" Jim queried amiably.
+
+Such concern was unusual, and Matt noted it, and replied:--
+
+"I guess there's no danger of hydrophoby. What made you ask?"
+
+Jim felt in himself a guilty stir, and under his breath he cursed the
+other's way of asking disagreeable questions; but aloud he answered:
+"Nothin', only you seemed scared of it at first. What are you goin' to
+do with your share, Matt?"
+
+"Buy a cattle ranch in Arizona an' set down an' pay other men to ride
+range for me. There's some several I'd like to see askin' a job from me,
+blast them! An' now you shut your face, Jim. It'll be some time before I
+buy that ranch. Just now I'm goin' to sleep."
+
+But Jim lay long awake, nervous and twitching, rolling about restlessly
+and rolling himself wide awake every time he dozed. The diamonds still
+blazed under his eyelids, and the fire of them hurt. Matt, in spite of
+his heavy nature, slept lightly, like a wild animal alert in its sleep;
+and Jim noticed, every time he moved, that his partner's body moved
+sufficiently to show that it had received the impression and that it was
+trembling on the verge of awakening. For that matter, Jim did not know
+whether or not, frequently, the other was awake. Once, quietly,
+betokening complete consciousness, Matt said to him: "Aw, go to sleep,
+Jim. Don't worry about them jools. They'll keep." And Jim had thought
+that at that particular moment Matt had been surely asleep.
+
+In the late morning Matt was awake with Jim's first movement, and
+thereafter he awoke and dozed with him until midday, when they got up
+together and began dressing.
+
+"I'm goin' out to get a paper an' some bread," Matt said. "You boil the
+coffee."
+
+As Jim listened, unconsciously his gaze left Matt's face and roved to
+the pillow, beneath which was the bundle wrapped in the bandana
+handkerchief. On the instant Matt's face became like a wild beast's.
+
+"Look here, Jim," he snarled. "You've got to play square. If you do me
+dirt, I'll fix you. Understand? I'd eat you, Jim. You know that. I'd
+bite right into your throat an' eat you like that much beefsteak."
+
+His sunburned skin was black with the surge of blood in it, and his
+tobacco-stained teeth were exposed by the snarling lips. Jim shivered
+and involuntarily cowered. There was death in the man he looked at. Only
+the night before that black-faced man had killed another with his hands,
+and it had not hurt his sleep. And in his own heart Jim was aware of a
+sneaking guilt, of a train of thought that merited all that was
+threatened.
+
+Matt passed out, leaving him still shivering. Then a hatred twisted his
+own face, and he softly hurled savage threats at the door. He remembered
+the jewels, and hastened to the bed, feeling under the pillow for the
+bandana bundle. He crushed it with his fingers to make certain that it
+still contained the diamonds. Assured that Matt had not carried them
+away, he looked toward the kerosene stove with a guilty start. Then he
+hurriedly lighted it, filled the coffee pot at the sink, and put it over
+the flame.
+
+The coffee was boiling when Matt returned, and while the latter cut the
+bread and put a slice of butter on the table, Jim poured out the coffee.
+It was not until he sat down and had taken a few sips of the coffee,
+that Matt pulled out the morning paper from his pocket.
+
+"We was way off," he said. "I told you I didn't dast figger out how fat
+it was. Look at that."
+
+He pointed to the head lines on the first page. "SWIFT NEMESIS ON
+BUJANNOFF'S TRACK," they read. "MURDERED IN HIS SLEEP AFTER ROBBING HIS
+PARTNER."
+
+"There you have it!" Matt cried. "He robbed his partner--robbed him
+like a dirty thief."
+
+"Half a million of jewels missin'," Jim read aloud. He put the paper
+down and stared at Matt.
+
+"That's what I told you," the latter said. "What in thunder do we know
+about jools? Half a million!--an' the best I could figger it was a
+hundred thousan'. Go on an' read the rest of it."
+
+They read on silently, their heads side by side, the untouched coffee
+growing cold; and ever and anon one or the other burst forth with some
+salient printed fact.
+
+"I'd like to seen Metzner's face when he opened the safe at the store
+this mornin'," Jim gloated.
+
+"He hit the high places right away for Bujannoff's house," Matt
+explained. "Go on an' read."
+
+"Was to have sailed last night at ten on the _Sajoda_ for the South
+Seas--steamship delayed by extra freight----"
+
+"That's why we caught 'm in bed," Matt interrupted. "It was just
+luck--like pickin' a fifty-to-one winner."
+
+"_Sajoda_ sailed at six this mornin'----"
+
+"He didn't catch her," Matt said. "I saw his alarm clock was set at
+five. That'd given 'm plenty of time ... only I come along an' put the
+_kibosh_ on his time. Go on."
+
+"Adolph Metzner in despair--the famous Haythorne pearl
+necklace--magnificently assorted pearls--valued by experts at from fifty
+to seventy thousan' dollars."
+
+Jim broke off to say solemnly, "Those oyster-eggs worth all that money!"
+
+He licked his lips and added, "They was beauties an' no mistake."
+
+"Big Brazilian gem," he read on. "Eighty thousan' dollars--many valuable
+gems of the first water--several thousan' small diamonds well worth
+forty thousan'."
+
+"What you don't know about jools is worth knowin'," Matt smiled good
+humoredly.
+
+"Theory of the sleuths," Jim read. "Thieves must have known--cleverly
+kept watch on Bujannoff's actions--must have learned his plan and
+trailed him to his house with the fruits of his robbery--"
+
+"Clever--" Matt broke out. "That's the way reputations is made ... in
+the noos-papers. How'd we know he was robbin' his pardner?"
+
+"Anyway, we've got the goods," Jim grinned. "Let's look at 'em again."
+
+He assured himself that the door was locked and bolted, while Matt
+brought out the bundle in the bandana and opened it on the table.
+
+"Ain't they beauties, though!" Jim exclaimed at sight of the pearls; and
+for a time he had eyes only for them. "Accordin' to the experts, worth
+from fifty to seventy thousan' dollars."
+
+"An' women like them things," Matt commented. "An' they'll do everything
+to get 'em--sell themselves, commit murder, anything."
+
+"Just like you an' me."
+
+"Not on your life," Matt retorted. "I'll commit murder for 'em, but not
+for their own sakes, but for the sake of what they'll get me. That's the
+difference. Women want the jools for themselves, an' I want the jools
+for the women an' such things they'll get me."
+
+"Lucky that men an' women don't want the same things," Jim remarked.
+
+"That's what makes commerce," Matt agreed; "people wantin' different
+things."
+
+In the middle of the afternoon Jim went out to buy food. While he was
+gone, Matt cleared the table of the jewels, wrapping them up as before
+and putting them under the pillow. Then he lighted the kerosene stove
+and started to boil water for the coffee. A few minutes later, Jim
+returned.
+
+"Most surprising," he remarked. "Streets, an' stores, an' people just
+like they always was. Nothin' changed. An' me walkin' along through it
+all a millionnaire. Nobody looked at me an' guessed it"
+
+Matt grunted unsympathetically. He had little comprehension of the
+lighter whims and fancies of his partner's imagination.
+
+"Did you get a porterhouse?" he demanded.
+
+"Sure, an' an inch thick. It's a peach. Look at it."
+
+He unwrapped the steak and held it up for the other's inspection. Then
+he made the coffee and set the table, while Matt fried the steak.
+
+"Don't put on too much of them red peppers," Jim warned. "I ain't used
+to your Mexican cookin'. You always season too hot."
+
+Matt grunted a laugh and went on with his cooking. Jim poured out the
+coffee, but first, into the nicked china cup, he emptied a powder he had
+carried in his vest pocket wrapped in a rice-paper. He had turned his
+back for the moment on his partner, but he did not dare to glance around
+at him. Matt placed a newspaper on the table, and on the newspaper set
+the hot frying pan. He cut the steak in half, and served Jim and
+himself.
+
+"Eat her while she's hot," he counselled, and with knife and fork set
+the example.
+
+"She's a dandy," was Jim's judgment, after his first mouthful. "But I
+tell you one thing straight. I'm never goin' to visit you on that
+Arizona ranch, so you needn't ask me."
+
+"What's the matter now?" Matt asked.
+
+"The Mexican cookin' on your ranch'd be too much for me. If I've got
+blue blazes a-comin' in the next life, I'm not goin' to torment my
+insides in this one!"
+
+He smiled, expelled his breath forcibly to cool his burning mouth, drank
+some coffee, and went on eating the steak.
+
+"What do you think about the next life anyway, Matt?" he asked a little
+later, while secretly he wondered why the other had not yet touched his
+coffee.
+
+"Ain't no next life," Matt answered, pausing from the steak to take his
+first sip of coffee. "Nor heaven nor hell, nor nothin'. You get all
+that's comin' right here in this life."
+
+"An' afterward?" Jim queried out of his morbid curiosity, for he knew
+that he looked upon a man that was soon to die. "An' afterward?" he
+repeated.
+
+"Did you ever see a man two weeks dead?" the other asked.
+
+Jim shook his head.
+
+"Well, I have. He was like this beefsteak you an' me is eatin'. It was
+once steer cavortin' over the landscape. But now it's just meat. That's
+all, just meat. An' that's what you an' me an' all people come
+to--meat."
+
+Matt gulped down the whole cup of coffee, and refilled the cup.
+
+"Are you scared to die?" he asked.
+
+Jim shook his head. "What's the use? I don't die anyway. I pass on an'
+live again--"
+
+"To go stealin', an' lyin', an' snivellin' through another life, an' go
+on that way forever an' ever an' ever?" Matt sneered.
+
+"Maybe I'll improve," Jim suggested hopefully. "Maybe stealin' won't be
+necessary in the life to come."
+
+He ceased abruptly, and stared straight before him, a frightened
+expression on his face.
+
+"What's the matter!" Matt demanded.
+
+"Nothin'. I was just wonderin'"--Jim returned to himself with an
+effort--"about this dyin', that was all."
+
+But he could not shake off the fright that had startled him. It was as
+if an unseen thing of gloom had passed him by, casting upon him the
+intangible shadow of its presence. He was aware of a feeling of
+foreboding. Something ominous was about to happen. Calamity hovered in
+the air. He gazed fixedly across the table at the other man. He could
+not understand. Was it that he had blundered and poisoned himself? No,
+Matt had the nicked cup, and he had certainly put the poison in the
+nicked cup.
+
+It was all his own imagination, was his next thought. It had played him
+tricks before. Fool! Of course it was. Of course something was about to
+happen, but it was about to happen to Matt. Had not Matt drunk the
+whole cup of coffee?
+
+Jim brightened up and finished his steak, sopping bread in the gravy
+when the meat was gone.
+
+"When I was a kid--" he began, but broke off abruptly.
+
+Again the unseen thing of gloom had fluttered, and his being was vibrant
+with premonition of impending misfortune. He felt a disruptive influence
+at work in the flesh of him, and in all his muscles there was a seeming
+that they were about to begin to twitch. He sat back suddenly, and as
+suddenly leaned forward with his elbows on the table. A tremor ran dimly
+through the muscles of his body. It was like the first rustling of
+leaves before the oncoming of wind. He clenched his teeth. It came
+again, a spasmodic tensing of his muscles. He knew panic at the revolt
+within his being. His muscles no longer recognized his mastery over
+them. Again they spasmodically tensed, despite the will of him, for he
+had willed that they should not tense. This was revolution within
+himself, this was anarchy; and the terror of impotence rushed up in him
+as his flesh gripped and seemed to seize him in a clutch, chills running
+up and down his back and sweat starting on his brow. He glanced about
+the room, and all the details of it smote him with a strange sense of
+familiarity. It was as though he had just returned from a long journey.
+He looked across the table at his partner. Matt was watching him and
+smiling. An expression of horror spread over Jim's face.
+
+"Matt!" he screamed. "You ain't doped me?"
+
+Matt smiled and continued to watch him. In the paroxysm that followed,
+Jim did not become unconscious. His muscles tensed and twitched and
+knotted, hurting him and crushing him in their savage grip. And in the
+midst of it all, it came to him that Matt was acting queerly. He was
+traveling the same road. The smile had gone from his face, and there was
+on it an intense expression, as if he were listening to some inner tale
+of himself and trying to divine the message. Matt got up and walked
+across the room and back again, then sat down.
+
+"You did this, Jim," he said quietly.
+
+"But I didn't think you'd try to fix _me_," Jim answered reproachfully.
+
+"Oh, I fixed you all right," Matt said, with teeth close together and
+shivering body. "What did you give me?"
+
+"Strychnine."
+
+"Same as I gave you," Matt volunteered. "It's some mess, ain't it!"
+
+"You're lyin', Matt," Jim pleaded. "You ain't doped me, have you?"
+
+"I sure did, Jim; an' I didn't overdose you, neither. I cooked it in as
+neat as you please in your half the porterhouse.--Hold on! Where're you
+goin'?"
+
+Jim had made a dash for the door, and was throwing back the bolts. Matt
+sprang in between and shoved him away.
+
+"Drug store," Jim panted. "Drug store."
+
+"No you don't. You'll stay right here. There ain't goin' to be any
+runnin' out an' makin' a poison play on the street--not with all them
+jools reposin' under the pillow. Savve? Even if you didn't die, you'd be
+in the hands of the police with a lot of explanations comin'. Emetics is
+the stuff for poison. I'm just as bad bit as you, an' I'm goin' to take
+a emetic. That's all they'd give you at a drug store, anyway."
+
+He thrust Jim back into the middle of the room and shot the bolts into
+place. As he went across the floor to the food shelf, he passed one hand
+over his brow and flung off the beaded sweat. It spattered audibly on
+the floor. Jim watched agonizedly as Matt got the mustard can and a cup
+and ran for the sink. He stirred a cupful of mustard and water and drank
+it down. Jim had followed him and was reaching with trembling hands for
+the empty cup. Again Matt shoved him away. As he mixed a second cupful,
+he demanded:
+
+"D'you think one cup'll do for me? You can wait till I'm done."
+
+Jim started to totter toward the door, but Matt checked him.
+
+"If you monkey with that door, I'll twist your neck. Savve? You can take
+yours when I'm done. An' if it saves you, I'll twist your neck, anyway.
+You ain't got no chance, nohow. I told you many times what you'd get if
+you did me dirt."
+
+"But you did me dirt, too," Jim articulated with an effort.
+
+Matt was drinking the second cupful, and did not answer. The sweat had
+got into Jim's eyes, and he could scarcely see his way to the table,
+where he got a cup for himself. But Matt was mixing a third cupful, and,
+as before, thrust him away.
+
+"I told you to wait till I was done," Matt growled. "Get outa my way."
+
+And Jim supported his twitching body by holding on to the sink, the
+while he yearned toward the yellowish concoction that stood for life. It
+was by sheer will that he stood and clung to the sink. His flesh strove
+to double him up and bring him to the floor. Matt drank the third
+cupful, and with difficulty managed to get to a chair and sit down. His
+first paroxysm was passing. The spasms that afflicted him were dying
+away. This good effect he ascribed to the mustard and water. He was
+safe, at any rate. He wiped the sweat from his face, and, in the
+interval of calm, found room for curiosity. He looked at his partner.
+
+A spasm had shaken the mustard can out of Jim's hands, and the contents
+were spilled upon the floor. He stooped to scoop some of the mustard
+into the cup, and the succeeding spasm doubled him up on the floor. Matt
+smiled.
+
+"Stay with it," he encouraged. "It's the stuff all right. It's fixed me
+up."
+
+Jim heard him and turned toward him with a stricken face, twisted with
+suffering and pleading. Spasm now followed spasm till he was in
+convulsions, rolling on the floor and yellowing his face and hair in the
+mustard.
+
+Matt laughed hoarsely at the sight, but the laugh broke midway. A tremor
+had run through his body. A new paroxysm was beginning. He arose and
+staggered across to the sink, where, with probing forefinger, he vainly
+strove to assist the action of the emetic. In the end, he clung to the
+sink as Jim had clung, filled with the horror of going down to the
+floor.
+
+The other's paroxysm had passed, and he sat up, weak and fainting, too
+weak to rise, his forehead dripping, his lips flecked with a foam made
+yellow by the mustard in which he had rolled. He rubbed his eyes with
+his knuckles, and groans that were like whines came from his throat.
+
+"What are you snifflin' about!" Matt demanded out of his agony. "All you
+got to do is die. An' when you die you're dead."
+
+"I ... ain't ... snifflin' ... it's ... the ... mustard ... stingin'
+... my ... eyes," Jim panted with desperate slowness.
+
+It was his last successful attempt at speech. Thereafter he babbled
+incoherently, pawing the air with shaking arms till a fresh convulsion
+stretched him on the floor.
+
+Matt struggled back to the chair, and, doubled up on it, with his arms
+clasped about his knees, he fought with his disintegrating flesh. He
+came out of the convulsion cool and weak. He looked to see how it went
+with the other, and saw him lying motionless.
+
+He tried to soliloquize, to be facetious, to have his last grim laugh at
+life, but his lips made only incoherent sounds. The thought came to him
+that the emetic had failed, and that nothing remained but the drug
+store. He looked toward the door and drew himself to his feet. There he
+saved himself from falling by clutching the chair. Another paroxysm had
+begun. And in the midst of the paroxysm, with his body and all the parts
+of it flying apart and writhing and twisting back again into knots, he
+clung to the chair and shoved it before him across the floor. The last
+shreds of his will were leaving him when he gained the door. He turned
+the key and shot back one bolt. He fumbled for the second bolt, but
+failed. Then he leaned his weight against the door and slid down gently
+to the floor.
+
+[Illustration:]
+
+
+
+
+A NOSE FOR THE KING
+
+
+In the morning calm of Korea, when its peace and tranquility truly
+merited its ancient name, "Cho-sen," there lived a politician by name Yi
+Chin Ho. He was a man of parts, and--who shall say?--perhaps in no wise
+worse than politicians the world over. But, unlike his brethren in other
+lands, Yi Chin Ho was in jail. Not that he had inadvertently diverted to
+himself public moneys, but that he had inadvertently diverted too much.
+Excess is to be deplored in all things, even in grafting, and Yi Chin
+Ho's excess had brought him to most deplorable straits.
+
+Ten thousand strings of cash he owed the government, and he lay in
+prison under sentence of death. There was one advantage to the
+situation--he had plenty of time in which to think. And he thought well.
+Then called he the jailer to him.
+
+"Most worthy man, you see before you one most wretched," he began. "Yet
+all will be well with me if you will but let me go free for one short
+hour this night. And all will be well with you, for I shall see to your
+advancement through the years, and you shall come at length to the
+directorship of all the prisons of Cho-sen."
+
+"How now?" demanded the jailer. "What foolishness is this? One short
+hour, and you but waiting for your head to be chopped off! And I, with
+an aged and much-to-be-respected mother, not to say anything of a wife
+and several children of tender years! Out upon you for the scoundrel
+that you are!"
+
+"From the Sacred City to the ends of all the Eight Coasts there is no
+place for me to hide," Yi Chin Ho made reply. "I am a man of wisdom, but
+of what worth my wisdom here in prison? Were I free, well I know I could
+seek out and obtain the money wherewith to repay the government. I know
+of a nose that will save me from all my difficulties."
+
+"A nose!" cried the jailer.
+
+"A nose," said Yi Chin Ho. "A remarkable nose, if I may say so, a most
+remarkable nose."
+
+The jailer threw up his hands despairingly. "Ah, what a wag you are,
+what a wag," he laughed. "To think that that very admirable wit of yours
+must go the way of the chopping-block!"
+
+And so saying, he turned and went away. But in the end, being a man soft
+of head and heart, when the night was well along he permitted Yi Chin Ho
+to go.
+
+Straight he went to the Governor, catching him alone and arousing him
+from his sleep.
+
+"Yi Chin Ho, or I'm no Governor!" cried the Governor. "What do you here
+who should be in prison waiting on the chopping-block!"
+
+"I pray your excellency to listen to me," said Yi Chin Ho, squatting on
+his hams by the bedside and lighting his pipe from the fire-box. "A dead
+man is without value. It is true, I am as a dead man, without value to
+the government, to your excellency, or to myself. But if, so to say,
+your excellency were to give me my freedom--"
+
+"Impossible!" cried the Governor. "Besides, you are condemned to death."
+
+"Your excellency well knows that if I can repay the ten thousand strings
+of cash, the government will pardon me," Yi Chin Ho went on. "So, as I
+say, if your excellency were to give me my freedom for a few days, being
+a man of understanding, I should then repay the government and be in
+position to be of service to your excellency. I should be in position to
+be of very great service to your excellency."
+
+"Have you a plan whereby you hope to obtain this money?" asked the
+Governor.
+
+"I have," said Yi Chin Ho.
+
+"Then come with it to me to-morrow night; I would now sleep," said the
+Governor, taking up his snore where it had been interrupted.
+
+On the following night, having again obtained leave of absence from the
+jailer, Yi Chin Ho presented himself at the Governor's bedside.
+
+"Is it you, Yi Chin Ho?" asked the Governor. "And have you the plan?"
+
+"It is I, your excellency," answered Yi Chin Ho, "and the plan is here."
+
+"Speak," commanded the Governor.
+
+"The plan is here," repeated Yi Chin Ho, "here in my hand."
+
+The Governor sat up and opened his eyes, Yi Chin Ho proffered in his
+hand a sheet of paper. The Governor held it to the light.
+
+"Nothing but a nose," said he.
+
+"A bit pinched, so, and so, your excellency," said Yi Chin Ho.
+
+"Yes, a bit pinched here and there, as you say," said the Governor.
+
+"Withal it is an exceeding corpulent nose, thus, and so, all in one
+place, at the end," proceeded Yi Chin Ho. "Your excellency would seek
+far and wide and many a day for that nose and find it not."
+
+"An unusual nose," admitted the Governor.
+
+"There is a wart upon it," said Yi Chin Ho.
+
+"A most unusual nose," said the Governor. "Never have I seen the like.
+But what do you with this nose, Yi Chin Ho!"
+
+"I seek it whereby to repay the money to the government," said Yi Chin
+Ho. "I seek it to be of service to your excellency, and I seek it to
+save my own worthless head. Further, I seek your excellency's seal upon
+this picture of the nose."
+
+And the Governor laughed and affixed the seal of state, and Yi Chin Ho
+departed. For a month and a day he traveled the King's Road which leads
+to the shore of the Eastern Sea; and there, one night, at the gate of
+the largest mansion of a wealthy city he knocked loudly for admittance.
+
+"None other than the master of the house will I see," said he fiercely
+to the frightened servants. "I travel upon the King's business."
+
+Straightway was he led to an inner room, where the master of the house
+was roused from his sleep and brought blinking before him.
+
+"You are Pak Chung Chang, head man of this city," said Yi Chin Ho in
+tones that were all-accusing. "I am upon the King's business."
+
+Pak Chung Chang trembled. Well he knew the King's business was ever a
+terrible business. His knees smote together, and he near fell to the
+floor.
+
+"The hour is late," he quavered. "Were it not well to----"
+
+"The King's business never waits!" thundered Yi Chin Ho. "Come apart
+with me, and swiftly. I have an affair of moment to discuss with you.
+
+"It is the King's affair," he added with even greater fierceness; so
+that Pak Chung Chang's silver pipe dropped from his nerveless fingers
+and clattered on the floor.
+
+"Know then," said Yi Chin Ho, when they had gone apart, "that the King
+is troubled with an affliction, a very terrible affliction. In that he
+failed to cure, the Court physician has had nothing else than his head
+chopped off. From all the Eight Provinces have the physicians come to
+wait upon the King. Wise consultation have they held, and they have
+decided that for a remedy for the King's affliction nothing else is
+required than a nose, a certain kind of nose, a very peculiar certain
+kind of nose.
+
+"Then by none other was I summoned than his excellency the prime
+minister himself. He put a paper into my hand. Upon this paper was the
+very peculiar kind of nose drawn by the physicians of the Eight
+Provinces, with the seal of state upon it.
+
+"'Go,' said his excellency the prime minister. 'Seek out this nose, for
+the King's affliction is sore. And wheresoever you find this nose upon
+the face of a man, strike it off forthright and bring it in all haste to
+the Court, for the King must be cured. Go, and come not back until your
+search is rewarded.'
+
+"And so I departed upon my quest," said Yi Chin Ho. "I have sought out
+the remotest corners of the kingdom; I have traveled the Eight
+Highways, searched the Eight Provinces, and sailed the seas of the Eight
+Coasts. And here I am."
+
+With a great flourish he drew a paper from his girdle, unrolled it with
+many snappings and cracklings, and thrust it before the face of Pak
+Chung Chang. Upon the paper was the picture of the nose.
+
+Pak Chung Chang stared upon it with bulging eyes.
+
+"Never have I beheld such a nose," he began.
+
+"There is a wart upon it," said Yi Chin Ho.
+
+"Never have I beheld----" Pak Chung Chang began again.
+
+"Bring your father before me," Yi Chin Ho interrupted sternly.
+
+"My ancient and very-much-to-be-respected ancestor sleeps," said Pak
+Chung Chang.
+
+"Why dissemble?" demanded Yi Chin Ho. "You know it is your father's
+nose. Bring him before me that I may strike it off and be gone. Hurry,
+lest I make bad report of you."
+
+"Mercy!" cried Pak Chung Chang, falling on his knees. "It is impossible!
+It is impossible! You cannot strike off my father's nose. He cannot go
+down without his nose to the grave. He will become a laughter and a
+byword, and all my days and nights will be filled with woe. O reflect!
+Report that you have seen no such nose in your travels. You, too, have a
+father."
+
+Pak Chung Chang clasped Yi Chin Ho's knees and fell to weeping on his
+sandals.
+
+"My heart softens strangely at your tears," said Yi Chin Ho. "I, too,
+know filial piety and regard. But--" He hesitated, then added, as though
+thinking aloud, "It is as much as my head is worth."
+
+"How much is your head worth?" asked Pak Chung Chang in a thin, small
+voice.
+
+"A not remarkable head," said Yi Chin Ho. "An absurdly unremarkable
+head! but, such is my great foolishness, I value it at nothing less than
+one hundred thousand strings of cash."
+
+"So be it," said Pak Chung Chang, rising to his feet.
+
+"I shall need horses to carry the treasure," said Yi Chin Ho, "and men
+to guard it well as I journey through the mountains. There are robbers
+abroad in the land."
+
+"There are robbers abroad in the land," said Pak Chung Chang, sadly.
+"But it shall be as you wish, so long as my ancient and
+very-much-to-be-respected ancestor's nose abide in its appointed
+place."
+
+"Say nothing to any man of this occurrence," said Yi Chin Ho, "else will
+other and more loyal servants than I be sent to strike off your father's
+nose."
+
+And so Yi Chin Ho departed on his way through the mountains, blithe of
+heart and gay of song as he listened to the jingling bells of his
+treasure-laden ponies.
+
+There is little more to tell. Yi Chin Ho prospered through the years. By
+his efforts the jailer attained at length to the directorship of all the
+prisons of Cho-sen; the Governor ultimately betook himself to the Sacred
+City to be prime minister to the King, while Yi Chin Ho became the
+King's boon companion and sat at table with him to the end of a round,
+fat life. But Pak Chung Chang fell into a melancholy, and ever after he
+shook his head sadly, with tears in his eyes, whenever he regarded the
+expensive nose of his ancient and very-much-to-be-respected ancestor.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Brown Wolf and Other Jack London
+Stories, by Jack London
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12336 ***