THE FAITH OF MEN

Contents:

A Relic of the PlioceneA Hyperborean BrewThe Faith of MenToo Much GoldThe One Thousand DozenThe Marriage of Lit-litBatardThe Story of Jees Uck

A RELIC OF THE PLIOCENE

I wash my hands of him at the start. I cannot father his tales, nor willI be responsible for them. I make these preliminary reservations, observe, as a guard upon my own integrity. I possess a certain definiteposition in a small way, also a wife; and for the good name of thecommunity that honours my existence with its approval, and for the sakeof her posterity and mine, I cannot take the chances I once did, norfoster probabilities with the careless improvidence of youth. So, Irepeat, I wash my hands of him, this Nimrod, this mighty hunter, thishomely, blue-eyed, freckle-faced Thomas Stevens. 

Having been honest to myself, and to whatever prospective olive branchesmy wife may be pleased to tender me, I can now afford to be generous. Ishall not criticize the tales told me by Thomas Stevens, and, further, Ishall withhold my judgment. If it be asked why, I can only add thatjudgment I have none. Long have I pondered, weighed, and balanced, butnever have my conclusions been twice the same--forsooth! because ThomasStevens is a greater man than I. If he have told truths, well and good;if untruths, still well and good. For who can prove? or who disprove? Ieliminate myself from the proposition, while those of little faith may doas I have done--go find the same Thomas Stevens, and discuss to his facethe various matters which, if fortune serve, I shall relate. As to wherehe may be found? The directions are simple: anywhere between 53 northlatitude and the Pole, on the one hand; and, on the other, the likeliesthunting grounds that lie between the east coast of Siberia andfarthermost Labrador. That he is there, somewhere, within that clearlydefined territory, I pledge the word of an honourable man whoseexpectations entail straight speaking and right living. 

Thomas Stevens may have toyed prodigiously with truth, but when we firstmet (it were well to mark this point), he wandered into my camp when Ithought myself a thousand miles beyond the outermost post ofcivilization. At the sight of his human face, the first in weary months, I could have sprung forward and folded him in my arms (and I am not byany means a demonstrative man); but to him his visit seemed the mostcasual thing under the sun. He just strolled into the light of my camp, passed the time of day after the custom of men on beaten trails, threw mysnowshoes the one way and a couple of dogs the other, and so made roomfor himself by the fire. Said he'd just dropped in to borrow a pinch ofsoda and to see if I had any decent tobacco. He plucked forth an ancientpipe, loaded it with painstaking care, and, without as much as by yourleave, whacked half the tobacco of my pouch into his. Yes, the stuff wasfairly good. He sighed with the contentment of the just, and literallyabsorbed the smoke from the crisping yellow flakes, and it did mysmoker's heart good to behold him. 

Hunter? Trapper? Prospector? He shrugged his shoulders No; just sortof knocking round a bit. Had come up from the Great Slave some timesince, and was thinking of trapsing over into the Yukon country. Thefactor of Koshim had spoken about the discoveries on the Klondike, and hewas of a mind to run over for a peep. I noticed that he spoke of theKlondike in the archaic vernacular, calling it the Reindeer River--aconceited custom that the Old Timers employ against the _che-chaquas_and all tenderfeet in general. But he did it so naively and as such amatter of course, that there was no sting, and I forgave him. He alsohad it in view, he said, before he crossed the divide into the Yukon, tomake a little run up Fort o' Good Hope way. 

Now Fort o' Good Hope is a far journey to the north, over and beyond theCircle, in a place where the feet of few men have trod; and when anondescript ragamuffin comes in out of the night, from nowhere inparticular, to sit by one's fire and discourse on such in terms of"trapsing" and "a little run, " it is fair time to rouse up and shake offthe dream. Wherefore I looked about me; saw the fly and, underneath, thepine boughs spread for the sleeping furs; saw the grub sacks, the camera, the frosty breaths of the dogs circling on the edge of the light; and, above, a great streamer of the aurora, bridging the zenith from south-east to north-west. I shivered. There is a magic in the Northlandnight, that steals in on one like fevers from malarial marshes. You areclutched and downed before you are aware. Then I looked to thesnowshoes, lying prone and crossed where he had flung them. Also I hadan eye to my tobacco pouch. Half, at least, of its goodly store hadvamosed. That settled it. Fancy had not tricked me after all. 

Crazed with suffering, I thought, looking steadfastly at the man--one ofthose wild stampeders, strayed far from his bearings and wandering like alost soul through great vastnesses and unknown deeps. Oh, well, let hismoods slip on, until, mayhap, he gathers his tangled wits together. Whoknows?--the mere sound of a fellow-creature's voice may bring allstraight again. 

So I led him on in talk, and soon I marvelled, for he talked of game andthe ways thereof. He had killed the Siberian wolf of westernmost Alaska, and the chamois in the secret Rockies. He averred he knew the hauntswhere the last buffalo still roamed; that he had hung on the flanks ofthe caribou when they ran by the hundred thousand, and slept in the GreatBarrens on the musk-ox's winter trail. 

And I shifted my judgment accordingly (the first revision, but by noaccount the last), and deemed him a monumental effigy of truth. Why itwas I know not, but the spirit moved me to repeat a tale told to me by aman who had dwelt in the land too long to know better. It was of thegreat bear that hugs the steep slopes of St Elias, never descending tothe levels of the gentler inclines. Now God so constituted this creaturefor its hillside habitat that the legs of one side are all of a footlonger than those of the other. This is mighty convenient, as will bereality admitted. So I hunted this rare beast in my own name, told it inthe first person, present tense, painted the requisite locale, gave itthe necessary garnishings and touches of verisimilitude, and looked tosee the man stunned by the recital. 

Not he. Had he doubted, I could have forgiven him. Had he objected, denying the dangers of such a hunt by virtue of the animal's inability toturn about and go the other way--had he done this, I say, I could havetaken him by the hand for the true sportsman that he was. Not he. Hesniffed, looked on me, and sniffed again; then gave my tobacco duepraise, thrust one foot into my lap, and bade me examine the gear. Itwas a _mucluc_ of the Innuit pattern, sewed together with sinew threads, and devoid of beads or furbelows. But it was the skin itself that wasremarkable. In that it was all of half an inch thick, it reminded me ofwalrus-hide; but there the resemblance ceased, for no walrus ever bore somarvellous a growth of hair. On the side and ankles this hair was well-nigh worn away, what of friction with underbrush and snow; but around thetop and down the more sheltered back it was coarse, dirty black, and verythick. I parted it with difficulty and looked beneath for the fine furthat is common with northern animals, but found it in this case to beabsent. This, however, was compensated for by the length. Indeed, thetufts that had survived wear and tear measured all of seven or eightinches. 

I looked up into the man's face, and he pulled his foot down and asked, "Find hide like that on your St Elias bear?"

I shook my head. "Nor on any other creature of land or sea, " I answeredcandidly. The thickness of it, and the length of the hair, puzzled me. 

"That, " he said, and said without the slightest hint of impressiveness, "that came from a mammoth. "

"Nonsense!" I exclaimed, for I could not forbear the protest of myunbelief. "The mammoth, my dear sir, long ago vanished from the earth. We know it once existed by the fossil remains that we have unearthed, andby a frozen carcase that the Siberian sun saw fit to melt from out thebosom of a glacier; but we also know that no living specimen exists. Ourexplorers--"

At this word he broke in impatiently. "Your explorers? Pish! A weaklybreed. Let us hear no more of them. But tell me, O man, what you mayknow of the mammoth and his ways. "

Beyond contradiction, this was leading to a yarn; so I baited my hook byransacking my memory for whatever data I possessed on the subject inhand. To begin with, I emphasized that the animal was prehistoric, andmarshalled all my facts in support of this. I mentioned the Siberiansand-bars that abounded with ancient mammoth bones; spoke of the largequantities of fossil ivory purchased from the Innuits by the AlaskaCommercial Company; and acknowledged having myself mined six- and eight-foot tusks from the pay gravel of the Klondike creeks. "All fossils, " Iconcluded, "found in the midst of _debris_ deposited through countlessages. "

"I remember when I was a kid, " Thomas Stevens sniffed (he had a mostconfounded way of sniffing), "that I saw a petrified water-melon. Hence, though mistaken persons sometimes delude themselves into thinking thatthey are really raising or eating them, there are no such things asextant water-melons?"

"But the question of food, " I objected, ignoring his point, which waspuerile and without bearing. "The soil must bring forth vegetable lifein lavish abundance to support so monstrous creations. Nowhere in theNorth is the soil so prolific. Ergo, the mammoth cannot exist. "

"I pardon your ignorance concerning many matters of this Northland, foryou are a young man and have travelled little; but, at the same time, Iam inclined to agree with you on one thing. The mammoth no longerexists. How do I know? I killed the last one with my own right arm. "

Thus spake Nimrod, the mighty Hunter. I threw a stick of firewood at thedogs and bade them quit their unholy howling, and waited. Undoubtedlythis liar of singular felicity would open his mouth and requite me for mySt. Elias bear. 

"It was this way, " he at last began, after the appropriate silence hadintervened. "I was in camp one day--"

"Where?" I interrupted. 

He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the north-east, wherestretched a _terra incognita_ into which vastness few men have strayedand fewer emerged. "I was in camp one day with Klooch. Klooch was ashandsome a little _kamooks_ as ever whined betwixt the traces or shovednose into a camp kettle. Her father was a full-blood Malemute fromRussian Pastilik on Bering Sea, and I bred her, and with understanding, out of a clean-legged bitch of the Hudson Bay stock. I tell you, O man, she was a corker combination. And now, on this day I have in mind, shewas brought to pup through a pure wild wolf of the woods--grey, and longof limb, with big lungs and no end of staying powers. Say! Was thereever the like? It was a new breed of dog I had started, and I could lookforward to big things. 

"As I have said, she was brought neatly to pup, and safely delivered. Iwas squatting on my hams over the litter--seven sturdy, blind littlebeggars--when from behind came a bray of trumpets and crash of brass. There was a rush, like the wind-squall that kicks the heels of the rain, and I was midway to my feet when knocked flat on my face. At the sameinstant I heard Klooch sigh, very much as a man does when you've plantedyour fist in his belly. You can stake your sack I lay quiet, but Itwisted my head around and saw a huge bulk swaying above me. Then theblue sky flashed into view and I got to my feet. A hairy mountain offlesh was just disappearing in the underbrush on the edge of the open. Icaught a rear-end glimpse, with a stiff tail, as big in girth as my body, standing out straight behind. The next second only a tremendous holeremained in the thicket, though I could still hear the sounds as of atornado dying quickly away, underbrush ripping and tearing, and treessnapping and crashing. 

"I cast about for my rifle. It had been lying on the ground with themuzzle against a log; but now the stock was smashed, the barrel out ofline, and the working-gear in a thousand bits. Then I looked for theslut, and--and what do you suppose?"

I shook my head. 

"May my soul burn in a thousand hells if there was anything left of her!Klooch, the seven sturdy, blind little beggars--gone, all gone. Whereshe had stretched was a slimy, bloody depression in the soft earth, allof a yard in diameter, and around the edges a few scattered hairs. "

I measured three feet on the snow, threw about it a circle, and glancedat Nimrod. 

"The beast was thirty long and twenty high, " he answered, "and its tusksscaled over six times three feet. I couldn't believe, myself, at thetime, for all that it had just happened. But if my senses had played me, there was the broken gun and the hole in the brush. And there was--or, rather, there was not--Klooch and the pups. O man, it makes me hot allover now when I think of it Klooch! Another Eve! The mother of a newrace! And a rampaging, ranting, old bull mammoth, like a second flood, wiping them, root and branch, off the face of the earth! Do you wonderthat the blood-soaked earth cried out to high God? Or that I grabbed thehand-axe and took the trail?"

"The hand-axe?" I exclaimed, startled out of myself by the picture. "Thehand-axe, and a big bull mammoth, thirty feet long, twenty feet--"

Nimrod joined me in my merriment, chuckling gleefully. "Wouldn't it killyou?" he cried. "Wasn't it a beaver's dream? Many's the time I'velaughed about it since, but at the time it was no laughing matter, I wasthat danged mad, what of the gun and Klooch. Think of it, O man! Abrand-new, unclassified, uncopyrighted breed, and wiped out before everit opened its eyes or took out its intention papers! Well, so be it. Life's full of disappointments, and rightly so. Meat is best after afamine, and a bed soft after a hard trail. 

"As I was saying, I took out after the beast with the hand-axe, and hungto its heels down the valley; but when he circled back toward the head, Iwas left winded at the lower end. Speaking of grub, I might as well stoplong enough to explain a couple of points. Up thereabouts, in the midstof the mountains, is an almighty curious formation. There is no end oflittle valleys, each like the other much as peas in a pod, and all neatlytucked away with straight, rocky walls rising on all sides. And at thelower ends are always small openings where the drainage or glaciers musthave broken out. The only way in is through these mouths, and they areall small, and some smaller than others. As to grub--you've slushedaround on the rain-soaked islands of the Alaskan coast down Sitka way, most likely, seeing as you're a traveller. And you know how stuff growsthere--big, and juicy, and jungly. Well, that's the way it was withthose valleys. Thick, rich soil, with ferns and grasses and such thingsin patches higher than your head. Rain three days out of four during thesummer months; and food in them for a thousand mammoths, to say nothingof small game for man. 

"But to get back. Down at the lower end of the valley I got winded andgave over. I began to speculate, for when my wind left me my dander gothotter and hotter, and I knew I'd never know peace of mind till I dinedon roasted mammoth-foot. And I knew, also, that that stood for _skookum__mamook pukapuk_--excuse Chinook, I mean there was a big fight coming. Now the mouth of my valley was very narrow, and the walls steep. High upon one side was one of those big pivot rocks, or balancing rocks, as somecall them, weighing all of a couple of hundred tons. Just the thing. Ihit back for camp, keeping an eye open so the bull couldn't slip past, and got my ammunition. It wasn't worth anything with the rifle smashed;so I opened the shells, planted the powder under the rock, and touched itoff with slow fuse. Wasn't much of a charge, but the old boulder tiltedup lazily and dropped down into place, with just space enough to let thecreek drain nicely. Now I had him. "

"But how did you have him?" I queried. "Who ever heard of a man killinga mammoth with a hand-axe? And, for that matter, with anything else?"

"O man, have I not told you I was mad?" Nimrod replied, with a slightmanifestation of sensitiveness. "Mad clean through, what of Klooch andthe gun. Also, was I not a hunter? And was this not new and mostunusual game? A hand-axe? Pish! I did not need it. Listen, and youshall hear of a hunt, such as might have happened in the youth of theworld when cavemen rounded up the kill with hand-axe of stone. Suchwould have served me as well. Now is it not a fact that man can outwalkthe dog or horse? That he can wear them out with the intelligence of hisendurance?"

I nodded. 

"Well?"

The light broke in on me, and I bade him continue. 

"My valley was perhaps five miles around. The mouth was closed. Therewas no way to get out. A timid beast was that bull mammoth, and I hadhim at my mercy. I got on his heels again hollered like a fiend, peltedhim with cobbles, and raced him around the valley three times before Iknocked off for supper. Don't you see? A race-course! A man and amammoth! A hippodrome, with sun, moon, and stars to referee!

"It took me two months to do it, but I did it. And that's no beaverdream. Round and round I ran him, me travelling on the inner circle, eating jerked meat and salmon berries on the run, and snatching winks ofsleep between. Of course, he'd get desperate at times and turn. ThenI'd head for soft ground where the creek spread out, and lay anathemaupon him and his ancestry, and dare him to come on. But he was too wiseto bog in a mud puddle. Once he pinned me in against the walls, and Icrawled back into a deep crevice and waited. Whenever he felt for mewith his trunk, I'd belt him with the hand-axe till he pulled out, shrieking fit to split my ear drums, he was that mad. He knew he had meand didn't have me, and it near drove him wild. But he was no man'sfool. He knew he was safe as long as I stayed in the crevice, and hemade up his mind to keep me there. And he was dead right, only he hadn'tfigured on the commissary. There was neither grub nor water around thatspot, so on the face of it he couldn't keep up the siege. He'd standbefore the opening for hours, keeping an eye on me and flappingmosquitoes away with his big blanket ears. Then the thirst would come onhim and he'd ramp round and roar till the earth shook, calling me everyname he could lay tongue to. This was to frighten me, of course; andwhen he thought I was sufficiently impressed, he'd back away softly andtry to make a sneak for the creek. Sometimes I'd let him get almostthere--only a couple of hundred yards away it was--when out I'd pop andback he'd come, lumbering along like the old landslide he was. After I'ddone this a few times, and he'd figured it out, he changed his tactics. Grasped the time element, you see. Without a word of warning, away he'dgo, tearing for the water like mad, scheming to get there and back beforeI ran away. Finally, after cursing me most horribly, he raised the siegeand deliberately stalked off to the water-hole. 

"That was the only time he penned me, --three days of it, --but after thatthe hippodrome never stopped. Round, and round, and round, like a sixdays' go-as-I-please, for he never pleased. My clothes went to rags andtatters, but I never stopped to mend, till at last I ran naked as a sonof earth, with nothing but the old hand-axe in one hand and a cobble inthe other. In fact, I never stopped, save for peeps of sleep in thecrannies and ledges of the cliffs. As for the bull, he got perceptiblythinner and thinner--must have lost several tons at least--and as nervousas a schoolmarm on the wrong side of matrimony. When I'd come up withhim and yell, or lain him with a rock at long range, he'd jump like askittish colt and tremble all over. Then he'd pull out on the run, tailand trunk waving stiff, head over one shoulder and wicked eyes blazing, and the way he'd swear at me was something dreadful. A most immoralbeast he was, a murderer, and a blasphemer. 

"But towards the end he quit all this, and fell to whimpering and cryinglike a baby. His spirit broke and he became a quivering jelly-mountainof misery. He'd get attacks of palpitation of the heart, and staggeraround like a drunken man, and fall down and bark his shins. And thenhe'd cry, but always on the run. O man, the gods themselves would havewept with him, and you yourself or any other man. It was pitiful, andthere was so I much of it, but I only hardened my heart and hit up thepace. At last I wore him clean out, and he lay down, broken-winded, broken-hearted, hungry, and thirsty. When I found he wouldn't budge, Ihamstrung him, and spent the better part of the day wading into him withthe hand-axe, he a-sniffing and sobbing till I worked in far enough toshut him off. Thirty feet long he was, and twenty high, and a man couldsling a hammock between his tusks and sleep comfortably. Barring thefact that I had run most of the juices out of him, he was fair eating, and his four feet, alone, roasted whole, would have lasted a man atwelvemonth. I spent the winter there myself. "

"And where is this valley?" I asked

He waved his hand in the direction of the north-east, and said: "Yourtobacco is very good. I carry a fair share of it in my pouch, but Ishall carry the recollection of it until I die. In token of myappreciation, and in return for the moccasins on your own feet, I willpresent to you these _muclucs_. They commemorate Klooch and the sevenblind little beggars. They are also souvenirs of an unparalleled eventin history, namely, the destruction of the oldest breed of animal onearth, and the youngest. And their chief virtue lies in that they willnever wear out. "

Having effected the exchange, he knocked the ashes from his pipe, grippedmy hand good-night, and wandered off through the snow. Concerning thistale, for which I have already disclaimed responsibility, I wouldrecommend those of little faith to make a visit to the SmithsonianInstitute. If they bring the requisite credentials and do not come invacation time, they will undoubtedly gain an audience with ProfessorDolvidson. The _muclucs_ are in his possession, and he will verify, notthe manner in which they were obtained, but the material of which theyare composed. When he states that they are made from the skin of themammoth, the scientific world accepts his verdict. What more would youhave?

A HYPERBOREAN BREW

[The story of a scheming white man among the strange people who live onthe rim of the Arctic sea]

Thomas Stevens's veracity may have been indeterminate as _x_, and hisimagination the imagination of ordinary men increased to the nth power, but this, at least, must be said: never did he deliver himself of wordnor deed that could be branded as a lie outright. . . He may have playedwith probability, and verged on the extremest edge of possibility, but inhis tales the machinery never creaked. That he knew the Northland like abook, not a soul can deny. That he was a great traveller, and had setfoot on countless unknown trails, many evidences affirm. Outside of myown personal knowledge, I knew men that had met him everywhere, butprincipally on the confines of Nowhere. There was Johnson, the ex-HudsonBay Company factor, who had housed him in a Labrador factory until hisdogs rested up a bit, and he was able to strike out again. There wasMcMahon, agent for the Alaska Commercial Company, who had run across himin Dutch Harbour, and later on, among the outlying islands of theAleutian group. It was indisputable that he had guided one of theearlier United States surveys, and history states positively that in asimilar capacity he served the Western Union when it attempted to putthrough its trans-Alaskan and Siberian telegraph to Europe. Further, there was Joe Lamson, the whaling captain, who, when ice-bound off themouth of the Mackenzie, had had him come aboard after tobacco. This lasttouch proves Thomas Stevens's identity conclusively. His quest fortobacco was perennial and untiring. Ere we became fairly acquainted, Ilearned to greet him with one hand, and pass the pouch with the other. But the night I met him in John O'Brien's Dawson saloon, his head waswreathed in a nimbus of fifty-cent cigar smoke, and instead of my pouchhe demanded my sack. We were standing by a faro table, and forthwith hetossed it upon the "high card. " "Fifty, " he said, and the game-keepernodded. The "high card" turned, and he handed back my sack, called for a"tab, " and drew me over to the scales, where the weigher nonchalantlycashed him out fifty dollars in dust. 

"And now we'll drink, " he said; and later, at the bar, when he loweredhis glass: "Reminds me of a little brew I had up Tattarat way. No, youhave no knowledge of the place, nor is it down on the charts. But it'sup by the rim of the Arctic Sea, not so many hundred miles from theAmerican line, and all of half a thousand God-forsaken souls live there, giving and taking in marriage, and starving and dying in-between-whiles. Explorers have overlooked them, and you will not find them in the censusof 1890. A whale-ship was pinched there once, but the men, who had madeshore over the ice, pulled out for the south and were never heard of. 

"But it was a great brew we had, Moosu and I, " he added a moment later, with just the slightest suspicion of a sigh. 

I knew there were big deeds and wild doings behind that sigh, so I haledhim into a corner, between a roulette outfit and a poker layout, andwaited for his tongue to thaw. 

"Had one objection to Moosu, " he began, cocking his headmeditatively--"one objection, and only one. He was an Indian from overon the edge of the Chippewyan country, but the trouble was, he'd pickedup a smattering of the Scriptures. Been campmate a season with arenegade French Canadian who'd studied for the church. Moosu'd neverseen applied Christianity, and his head was crammed with miracles, battles, and dispensations, and what not he didn't understand. Otherwisehe was a good sort, and a handy man on trail or over a fire. 

"We'd had a hard time together and were badly knocked out when we plumpedupon Tattarat. Lost outfits and dogs crossing a divide in a fallblizzard, and our bellies clove to our backs and our clothes were in ragswhen we crawled into the village. They weren't much surprised at seeingus--because of the whalemen--and gave us the meanest shack in the villageto live in, and the worst of their leavings to live on. What struck meat the time as strange was that they left us strictly alone. But Moosuexplained it. 

"'Shaman _sick tumtum_, ' he said, meaning the shaman, or medicine man, was jealous, and had advised the people to have nothing to do with us. From the little he'd seen of the whalemen, he'd learned that mine was astronger race, and a wiser; so he'd only behaved as shamans have alwaysbehaved the world over. And before I get done, you'll see how near righthe was. 

"'These people have a law, ' said Mosu: 'whoso eats of meat must hunt. Webe awkward, you and I, O master, in the weapons of this country; nor canwe string bows nor fling spears after the manner approved. Wherefore theshaman and Tummasook, who is chief, have put their heads together, and ithas been decreed that we work with the women and children in dragging inthe meat and tending the wants of the hunters. '

"'And this is very wrong, ' I made to answer; 'for we be better men, Moosu, than these people who walk in darkness. Further, we should restand grow strong, for the way south is long, and on that trail the weakcannot prosper. '"

"'But we have nothing, ' he objected, looking about him at the rottentimbers of the igloo, the stench of the ancient walrus meat that had beenour supper disgusting his nostrils. 'And on this fare we cannot thrive. We have nothing save the bottle of "pain-killer, " which will not fillemptiness, so we must bend to the yoke of the unbeliever and becomehewers of wood and drawers of water. And there be good things in thisplace, the which we may not have. Ah, master, never has my nose lied tome, and I have followed it to secret caches and among the fur-bales ofthe igloos. Good provender did these people extort from the poorwhalemen, and this provender has wandered into few hands. The womanIpsukuk, who dwelleth in the far end of the village next she igloo of thechief, possesseth much flour and sugar, and even have my eyes told me ofmolasses smeared on her face. And in the igloo of Tummasook, the chief, there be tea--have I not seen the old pig guzzling? And the shamanowneth a caddy of "Star" and two buckets of prime smoking. And what havewe? Nothing! Nothing!'

"But I was stunned by the word he brought of the tobacco, and made noanswer. 

"And Moosu, what of his own desire, broke silence: 'And there beTukeliketa, daughter of a big hunter and wealthy man. A likely girl. Indeed, a very nice girl. '

"I figured hard during the night while Moosu snored, for I could not bearthe thought of the tobacco so near which I could not smoke. True, as hehad said, we had nothing. But the way became clear to me, and in themorning I said to him: 'Go thou cunningly abroad, after thy fashion, andprocure me some sort of bone, crooked like a gooseneck, and hollow. Also, walk humbly, but have eyes awake to the lay of pots and pans and cookingcontrivances. And remember, mine is the white man's wisdom, and do whatI have bid you, with sureness and despatch. '

"While he was away I placed the whale-oil cooking lamp in the middle ofthe igloo, and moved the mangy sleeping furs back that I might have room. Then I took apart his gun and put the barrel by handy, and afterwardsbraided many wicks from the cotton that the women gather wild in thesummer. When he came back, it was with the bone I had commanded, andwith news that in the igloo of Tummasook there was a five-gallon kerosenecan and a big copper kettle. So I said he had done well and we wouldtarry through the day. And when midnight was near I made harangue tohim. 

"'This chief, this Tummasook, hath a copper kettle, likewise a kerosenecan. ' I put a rock, smooth and wave-washed, in Moosu's hand. 'The campis hushed and the stars are winking. Go thou, creep into the chief'sigloo softly, and smite him thus upon the belly, and hard. And let themeat and good grub of the days to come put strength into thine arm. Therewill be uproar and outcry, and the village will come hot afoot. But bethou unafraid. Veil thy movements and lose thy form in the obscurity ofthe night and the confusion of men. And when the woman Ipsukuk is anighthee, --she who smeareth her face with molasses, --do thou smite herlikewise, and whosoever else that possesseth flour and cometh to thyhand. Then do thou lift thy voice in pain and double up with claspedhands, and make outcry in token that thou, too, hast felt the visitationof the night. And in this way shall we achieve honour and greatpossessions, and the caddy of "Star" and the prime smoking, and thyTukeliketa, who is a likely maiden. '

"When he had departed on this errand, I bided patiently in the shack, andthe tobacco seemed very near. Then there was a cry of affright in thenight, that became an uproar and assailed the sky. I seized the 'pain-killer' and ran forth. There was much noise, and a wailing among thewomen, and fear sat heavily on all. Tummasook and the woman Ipsukukrolled on the ground in pain, and with them there were divers others, also Moosu. I thrust aside those that cluttered the way of my feet, andput the mouth of the bottle to Moosu's lips. And straightway he becamewell and ceased his howling. Whereat there was a great clamour for thebottle from the others so stricken. But I made harangue, and ere theytasted and were made well I had mulcted Tummasook of his copper kettleand kerosene can, and the woman Ipsukuk of her sugar and molasses, andthe other sick ones of goodly measures of flour. The shaman gloweredwickedly at the people around my knees, though he poorly concealed thewonder that lay beneath. But I held my head high, and Moosu groanedbeneath the loot as he followed my heels to the shack. 

"There I set to work. In Tummasook's copper kettle I mixed three quartsof wheat flour with five of molasses, and to this I added of water twentyquarts. Then I placed the kettle near the lamp, that it might sour inthe warmth and grow strong. Moosu understood, and said my wisdom passedunderstanding and was greater than Solomon's, who he had heard was a wiseman of old time. The kerosene can I set over the lamp, and to its nose Iaffixed a snout, and into the snout the bone that was like a gooseneck. Isent Moosu without to pound ice, while I connected the barrel of his gunwith the gooseneck, and midway on the barrel I piled the ice he hadpounded. And at the far end of the gun-barrel, beyond the pan of ice, Iplaced a small iron pot. When the brew was strong enough (and it was twodays ere it could stand on its own legs), I filled the kerosene can withit, and lighted the wicks I had braided. 

"Now that all was ready, I spoke to Moosu. 'Go forth, ' I said, 'to thechief men of the village, and give them greeting, and bid them come intomy igloo and sleep the night away with me and the gods. '

"The brew was singing merrily when they began shoving aside the skin flapand crawling in, and I was heaping cracked ice on the gun-barrel. Out ofthe priming hole at the far end, drip, drip, drip into the iron pot fellthe liquor--_hooch_, you know. But they'd never seen the like, andgiggled nervously when I made harangue about its virtues. As I talked Inoted the jealousy in the shaman's eye, so when I had done, I placed himside by side with Tummasook and the woman Ipsukuk. Then I gave them todrink, and their eyes watered and their stomachs warmed, till from beingafraid they reached greedily for more; and when I had them well started, I turned to the others. Tummasook made a brag about how he had oncekilled a polar bear, and in the vigour of his pantomime nearly slew hismother's brother. But nobody heeded. The woman Ipsukuk fell to weepingfor a son lost long years agone in the ice, and the shaman madeincantation and prophecy. So it went, and before morning they were allon the floor, sleeping soundly with the gods. 

"The story tells itself, does it not? The news of the magic potionspread. It was too marvellous for utterance. Tongues could tell but atithe of the miracles it performed. It eased pain, gave surcease tosorrow, brought back old memories, dead faces, and forgotten dreams. Itwas a fire that ate through all the blood, and, burning, burned not. Itstoutened the heart, stiffened the back, and made men more than men. Itrevealed the future, and gave visions and prophecy. It brimmed withwisdom and unfolded secrets. There was no end of the things it could do, and soon there was a clamouring on all hands to sleep with the gods. Theybrought their warmest furs, their strongest dogs, their best meats; but Isold the _hooch_ with discretion, and only those were favoured thatbrought flour and molasses and sugar. And such stores poured in that Iset Moosu to build a cache to hold them, for there was soon no space inthe igloo. Ere three days had passed Tummasook had gone bankrupt. Theshaman, who was never more than half drunk after the first night, watchedme closely and hung on for the better part of the week. But before tendays were gone, even the woman Ipsukuk exhausted her provisions, and wenthome weak and tottery. 

"But Moosu complained. 'O master, ' he said, 'we have laid by greatwealth in molasses and sugar and flour, but our shack is yet mean, ourclothes thin, and our sleeping furs mangy. There is a call of the bellyfor meat the stench of which offends not the stars, and for tea such asTummasook guzzles, and there is a great yearning for the tobacco ofNeewak, who is shaman and who plans to destroy us. I have flour until Iam sick, and sugar and molasses without stint, yet is the heart of Moosusore and his bed empty. '

"'Peace!' I answered, 'thou art weak of understanding and a fool. Walksoftly and wait, and we will grasp it all. But grasp now, and we grasplittle, and in the end it will be nothing. Thou art a child in the wayof the white man's wisdom. Hold thy tongue and watch, and I will showyou the way my brothers do overseas, and, so doing, gather to themselvesthe riches of the earth. It is what is called "business, " and what dostthou know about business?'

"But the next day he came in breathless. 'O master, a strange thinghappeneth in the igloo of Neewak, the shaman; wherefore we are lost, andwe have neither worn the warm furs nor tasted the good tobacco, what ofyour madness for the molasses and flour. Go thou and witness whilst Iwatch by the brew. '

"So I went to the igloo of Neewak. And behold, he had made his ownstill, fashioned cunningly after mine. And as he beheld me he could illconceal his triumph. For he was a man of parts, and his sleep with thegods when in my igloo had not been sound. 

"But I was not disturbed, for I knew what I knew, and when I returned tomy own igloo, I descanted to Moosu, and said: 'Happily the property rightobtains amongst this people, who otherwise have been blessed with but fewof the institutions of men. And because of this respect for propertyshall you and I wax fat, and, further, we shall introduce amongst themnew institutions that other peoples have worked out through great travailand suffering. '

"But Moosu understood dimly, till the shaman came forth, with eyesflashing and a threatening note in his voice, and demanded to trade withme. 'For look you, ' he cried, 'there be of flour and molasses none inall the village. The like have you gathered with a shrewd hand from mypeople, who have slept with your gods and who now have nothing save largeheads, and weak knees, and a thirst for cold water that they cannotquench. This is not good, and my voice has power among them; so it werewell that we trade, you and I, even as you have traded with them, formolasses and flour. '

"And I made answer: 'This be good talk, and wisdom abideth in thy mouth. We will trade. For this much of flour and molasses givest thou me thecaddy of "Star" and the two buckets of smoking. '

"And Moosu groaned, and when the trade was made and the shaman departed, he upbraided me: 'Now, because of thy madness are we, indeed, lost!Neewak maketh _hooch_ on his own account, and when the time is ripe, hewill command the people to drink of no _hooch_ but his hooch. And inthis way are we undone, and our goods worthless, and our igloo mean, andthe bed of Moosu cold and empty!'

"And I answered: 'By the body of the wolf, say I, thou art a fool, andthy father before thee, and thy children after thee, down to the lastgeneration. Thy wisdom is worse than no wisdom and thine eyes blinded tobusiness, of which I have spoken and whereof thou knowest nothing. Go, thou son of a thousand fools, and drink of the hooch that Neewak brews inhis igloo, and thank thy gods that thou hast a white man's wisdom to makesoft the bed thou liest in. Go! and when thou hast drunken, return withthe taste still on thy lips, that I may know. '

"And two days after, Neewak sent greeting and invitation to his igloo. Moosu went, but I sat alone, with the song of the still in my ears, andthe air thick with the shaman's tobacco; for trade was slack that night, and no one dropped in but Angeit, a young hunter that had faith in me. Later, Moosu came back, his speech thick with chuckling and his eyeswrinkling with laughter. 

"'Thou art a great man, ' he said. 'Thou art a great man, O master, andbecause of thy greatness thou wilt not condemn Moosu, thy servant, whoofttimes doubts and cannot be made to understand. '

"'And wherefore now?' I demanded. 'Hast thou drunk overmuch? And arethey sleeping sound in the igloo of Neewak, the shaman?'

"'Nay, they are angered and sore of body, and Chief Tummasook has thrusthis thumbs in the throat of Neewak, and sworn by the bones of hisancestors to look upon his face no more. For behold! I went to theigloo, and the brew simmered and bubbled, and the steam journeyed throughthe gooseneck even as thy steam, and even as thine it became water whereit met the ice, and dropped into the pot at the far end. And Neewak gaveus to drink, and lo, it was not like thine, for there was no bite to thetongue nor tingling to the eyeballs, and of a truth it was water. So wedrank, and we drank overmuch; yet did we sit with cold hearts and solemn. And Neewak was perplexed and a cloud came on his brow. And he tookTummasook and Ipsukuk alone of all the company and set them apart, andbade them drink and drink and drink. And they drank and drank and drank, and yet sat solemn and cold, till Tummasook arose in wrath and demandedback the furs and the tea he had paid. And Ipsukuk raised her voice, thin and angry. And the company demanded back what they had given, andthere was a great commotion. '

"'Does the son of a dog deem me a whale?' demanded Tummasook, shovingback the skin flap and standing erect, his face black and his browsangry. 'Wherefore I am filled, like a fish-bladder, to bursting, till Ican scarce walk, what of the weight within me. Lalah! I have drunken asnever before, yet are my eyes clear, my knees strong, my hand steady. '

"'The shaman cannot send us to sleep with the gods, ' the peoplecomplained, stringing in and joining us, 'and only in thy igloo may thething be done. '

"So I laughed to myself as I passed the _hooch_ around and the guestsmade merry. For in the flour I had traded to Neewak I had mixed muchsoda that I had got from the woman Ipsukuk. So how could his brewferment when the soda kept it sweet? Or his _hooch_ be _hooch_ when itwould not sour?

"After that our wealth flowed in without let or hindrance. Furs we hadwithout number, and the fancy-work of the women, all of the chief's tea, and no end of meat. One day Moosu retold for my benefit, and sadlymangled, the story of Joseph in Egypt, but from it I got an idea, andsoon I had half the tribe at work building me great meat caches. And ofall they hunted I got the lion's share and stored it away. Nor was Moosuidle. He made himself a pack of cards from birch bark, and taught Neewakthe way to play seven-up. He also inveigled the father of Tukeliketainto the game. And one day he married the maiden, and the next day hemoved into the shaman's house, which was the finest in the village. Thefall of Neewak was complete, for he lost all his possessions, his walrus-hide drums, his incantation tools--everything. And in the end he becamea hewer of wood and drawer of water at the beck and call of Moosu. AndMoosu--he set himself up as shaman, or high priest, and out of hisgarbled Scripture created new gods and made incantation before strangealtars. 

"And I was well pleased, for I thought it good that church and state gohand in hand, and I had certain plans of my own concerning the state. Events were shaping as I had foreseen. Good temper and smiling faces hadvanished from the village. The people were morose and sullen. Therewere quarrels and fighting, and things were in an uproar night and day. Moosu's cards were duplicated and the hunters fell to gambling amongthemselves. Tummasook beat his wife horribly, and his mother's brotherobjected and smote him with a tusk of walrus till he cried aloud in thenight and was shamed before the people. Also, amid such diversions nohunting was done, and famine fell upon the land. The nights were longand dark, and without meat no _hooch_ could be bought; so they murmuredagainst the chief. This I had played for, and when they were well andhungry, I summoned the whole village, made a great harangue, posed aspatriarch, and fed the famishing. Moosu made harangue likewise, andbecause of this and the thing I had done I was made chief. Moosu, whohad the ear of God and decreed his judgments, anointed me with whaleblubber, and right blubberly he did it, not understanding the ceremony. And between us we interpreted to the people the new theory of the divineright of kings. There was _hooch_ galore, and meat and feastings, andthey took kindly to the new order. 

"So you see, O man, I have sat in the high places, and worn the purple, and ruled populations. And I might yet be a king had the tobacco heldout, or had Moosu been more fool and less knave. For he cast eyes uponEsanetuk, eldest daughter to Tummasook, and I objected. 

"'O brother, ' he explained, 'thou hast seen fit to speak of introducingnew institutions amongst this people, and I have listened to thy wordsand gained wisdom thereby. Thou rulest by the God-given right, and bythe God-given right I marry. '

"I noted that he 'brothered' me, and was angry and put my foot down. Buthe fell back upon the people and made incantations for three days, inwhich all hands joined; and then, speaking with the voice of God, hedecreed polygamy by divine fiat. But he was shrewd, for he limited thenumber of wives by a property qualification, and because of which he, above all men, was favoured by his wealth. Nor could I fail to admire, though it was plain that power had turned his head, and he would not besatisfied till all the power and all the wealth rested in his own hands. So he became swollen with pride, forgot it was I that had placed himthere, and made preparations to destroy me. 

"But it was interesting, for the beggar was working out in his own way anevolution of primitive society. Now I, by virtue of the _hooch_monopoly, drew a revenue in which I no longer permitted him to share. Sohe meditated for a while and evolved a system of ecclesiastical taxation. He laid tithes upon the people, harangued about fat firstlings and suchthings, and twisted whatever twisted texts he had ever heard to serve hispurpose. Even this I bore in silence, but when he instituted what may belikened to a graduated income-tax, I rebelled, and blindly, for this waswhat he worked for. Thereat, he appealed to the people, and they, envious of my great wealth and well taxed themselves, upheld him. 'Whyshould we pay, ' they asked, 'and not you? Does not the voice of Godspeak through the lips of Moosu, the shaman?' So I yielded. But at thesame time I raised the price of hooch, and lo, he was not a whit behindme in raising my taxes. 

"Then there was open war. I made a play for Neewak and Tummasook, because of the traditionary rights they possessed; but Moosu won out bycreating a priesthood and giving them both high office. The problem ofauthority presented itself to him, and he worked it out as it has oftenbeen worked before. There was my mistake. I should have been madeshaman, and he chief; but I saw it too late, and in the clash ofspiritual and temporal power I was bound to be worsted. A greatcontroversy waged, but it quickly became one-sided. The peopleremembered that he had anointed me, and it was clear to them that thesource of my authority lay, not in me, but in Moosu. Only a few faithfulones clung to me, chief among whom Angeit was; while he headed thepopular party and set whispers afloat that I had it in mind to overthrowhim and set up my own gods, which were most unrighteous gods. And inthis the clever rascal had anticipated me, for it was just what I hadintended--forsake my kingship, you see, and fight spiritual withspiritual. So he frightened the people with the iniquities of mypeculiar gods--especially the one he named 'Biz-e-Nass'--and nipped thescheme in the bud. 

"Now, it happened that Kluktu, youngest daughter to Tummasook, had caughtmy fancy, and I likewise hers. So I made overtures, but the ex-chiefrefused bluntly--after I had paid the purchase price--and informed methat she was set aside for Moosu. This was too much, and I was half of amind to go to his igloo and slay him with my naked hands; but Irecollected that the tobacco was near gone, and went home laughing. Thenext day he made incantation, and distorted the miracle of the loaves andfishes till it became prophecy, and I, reading between the lines, sawthat it was aimed at the wealth of meat stored in my caches. The peoplealso read between the lines, and, as he did not urge them to go on thehunt, they remained at home, and few caribou or bear were brought in. 

"But I had plans of my own, seeing that not only the tobacco but theflour and molasses were near gone. And further, I felt it my duty toprove the white man's wisdom and bring sore distress to Moosu, who hadwaxed high-stomached, what of the power I had given him. So that night Iwent to my meat caches and toiled mightily, and it was noted next daythat all the dogs of the village were lazy. No one suspected, and Itoiled thus every night, and the dogs grew fat and fatter, and the peoplelean and leaner. They grumbled and demanded the fulfilment of prophecy, but Moosu restrained them, waiting for their hunger to grow yet greater. Nor did he dream, to the very last, of the trick I had been playing onthe empty caches. 

"When all was ready, I sent Angeit, and the faithful ones whom I had fedprivily, through the village to call assembly. And the tribe gathered ona great space of beaten snow before my door, with the meat cachestowering stilt-legged in the rear. Moosu came also, standing on theinner edge of the circle opposite me, confident that I had some schemeafoot, and prepared at the first break to down me. But I arose, givinghim salutation before all men. 

"'O Moosu, thou blessed of God, ' I began, 'doubtless thou hast wonderedin that I have called this convocation together; and doubtless, becauseof my many foolishnesses, art thou prepared for rash sayings and rashdoings. Not so. It has been said, that those the gods would destroythey first make mad. And I have been indeed mad. I have crossed thywill, and scoffed at thy authority, and done divers evil and wantonthings. Wherefore, last night a vision was vouchsafed me, and I haveseen the wickedness of my ways. And thou stoodst forth like a shiningstar, with brows aflame, and I knew in mine own heart thy greatness. Isaw all things clearly. I knew that thou didst command the ear of God, and that when you spoke he listened. And I remembered that whatever ofthe good deeds that I had done, I had done through the grace of God, andthe grace of Moosu. 

"'Yes, my children, ' I cried, turning to the people, 'whatever right Ihave done, and whatever good I have done, have been because of thecounsel of Moosu. When I listened to him, affairs prospered; when Iclosed my ears, and acted according to my folly, things came to folly. Byhis advice it was that I laid my store of meat, and in time of darknessfed the famishing. By his grace it was that I was made chief. And whathave I done with my chiefship? Let me tell you. I have done nothing. Myhead was turned with power, and I deemed myself greater than Moosu, and, behold I have come to grief. My rule has been unwise, and the gods areangered. Lo, ye are pinched with famine, and the mothers aredry-breasted, and the little babies cry through the long nights. Nor doI, who have hardened my heart against Moosu, know what shall be done, norin what manner of way grub shall be had. '

"At this there was nodding and laughing, and the people put their headstogether, and I knew they whispered of the loaves and fishes. I went onhastily. 'So I was made aware of my foolishness and of Moosu's wisdom;of my own unfitness and of Moosu's fitness. And because of this, beingno longer mad, I make acknowledgment and rectify evil. I did castunrighteous eyes upon Kluktu, and lo, she was sealed to Moosu. Yet isshe mine, for did I not pay to Tummasook the goods of purchase? But I amwell unworthy of her, and she shall go from the igloo of her father tothe igloo of Moosu. Can the moon shine in the sunshine? And further, Tummasook shall keep the goods of purchase, and she be a free gift toMoosu, whom God hath ordained her rightful lord. 

"'And further yet, because I have used my wealth unwisely, and to oppressye, O my children, do I make gifts of the kerosene can to Moosu, and thegooseneck, and the gun-barrel, and the copper kettle. Therefore, I cangather to me no more possessions, and when ye are athirst for _hooch_, hewill quench ye and without robbery. For he is a great man, and Godspeaketh through his lips. 

"'And yet further, my heart is softened, and I have repented me of mymadness. I, who am a fool and a son of fools; I, who am the slave of thebad god Biz-e-Nass; I, who see thy empty bellies and knew not wherewithto fill them--why shall I be chief, and sit above thee, and rule to thineown destruction? Why should I do this, which is not good? But Moosu, who is shaman, and who is wise above men, is so made that he can rulewith a soft hand and justly. And because of the things I have related doI make abdication and give my chiefship to Moosu, who alone knoweth howye may be fed in this day when there be no meat in the land. '

"At this there was a great clapping of hands, and the people cried, '_Kloshe_! _Kloshe_!' which means 'good. ' I had seen the wonder-worryin Moosu's eyes; for he could not understand, and was fearful of my whiteman's wisdom. I had met his wishes all along the line, and evenanticipated some; and standing there, self-shorn of all my power, he knewthe time did not favour to stir the people against me. 

"Before they could disperse I made announcement that while the still wentto Moosu, whatever _hooch_ I possessed went to the people. Moosu triedto protest at this, for never had we permitted more than a handful to bedrunk at a time; but they cried, '_Kloshe_! _Kloshe_!' and made festivalbefore my door. And while they waxed uproarious without, as the liquorwent to their heads, I held council within with Angeit and the faithfulones. I set them the tasks they were to do, and put into their mouthsthe words they were to say. Then I slipped away to a place back in thewoods where I had two sleds, well loaded, with teams of dogs that werenot overfed. Spring was at hand, you see, and there was a crust to thesnow; so it was the best time to take the way south. Moreover, thetobacco was gone. There I waited, for I had nothing to fear. Did theybestir themselves on my trail, their dogs were too fat, and themselvestoo lean, to overtake me; also, I deemed their bestirring would be of anorder for which I had made due preparation. 

"First came a faithful one, running, and after him another. 'O master, 'the first cried, breathless, 'there be great confusion in the village, and no man knoweth his own mind, and they be of many minds. Everybodyhath drunken overmuch, and some be stringing bows, and some bequarrelling one with another. Never was there such a trouble. '

"And the second one: 'And I did as thou biddest, O master, whisperingshrewd words in thirsty ears, and raising memories of the things thatwere of old time. The woman Ipsukuk waileth her poverty and the wealththat no longer is hers. And Tummasook thinketh himself once again chief, and the people are hungry and rage up and down. '

"And a third one: 'And Neewak hath overthrown the altars of Moosu, andmaketh incantation before the time-honoured and ancient gods. And allthe people remember the wealth that ran down their throats, and whichthey possess no more. And first, Esanetuk, who be _sick tumtum_, fought with Kluktu, and there was much noise. And next, being daughtersof the one mother, did they fight with Tukeliketa. And after that didthey three fall upon Moosu, like wind-squalls, from every hand, till heran forth from the igloo, and the people mocked him. For a man whocannot command his womankind is a fool. '

"Then came Angeit: 'Great trouble hath befallen Moosu, O master, for Ihave whispered to advantage, till the people came to Moosu, saying theywere hungry and demanding the fulfilment of prophecy. And there was aloud shout of "Itlwillie! Itlwillie!" (Meat. ) So he cried peace to hiswomenfolk, who were overwrought with anger and with hooch, and led thetribe even to thy meat caches. And he bade the men open them and be fed. And lo, the caches were empty. There was no meat. They stood withoutsound, the people being frightened, and in the silence I lifted my voice. "O Moosu, where is the meat? That there was meat we know. Did we nothunt it and drag it in from the hunt? And it were a lie to say one manhath eaten it; yet have we seen nor hide nor hair. Where is the meat, OMoosu? Thou hast the ear of God. Where is the meat?"

"'And the people cried, "Thou hast the ear of God. Where is the meat?"And they put their heads together and were afraid. Then I went amongthem, speaking fearsomely of the unknown things, of the dead that comeand go like shadows and do evil deeds, till they cried aloud in terrorand gathered all together, like little children afraid of the dark. Neewak made harangue, laying this evil that had come upon them at thedoor of Moosu. When he had done, there was a furious commotion, and theytook spears in their hands, and tusks of walrus, and clubs, and stonesfrom the beach. But Moosu ran away home, and because he had not drunkenof _hooch_ they could not catch him, and fell one over another and madehaste slowly. Even now they do howl without his igloo, and his woman-folk within, and what of the noise, he cannot make himself heard. '

"'O Angeit, thou hast done well, ' I commanded. 'Go now, taking thisempty sled and the lean dogs, and ride fast to the igloo of Moosu; andbefore the people, who are drunken, are aware, throw him quick upon thesled and bring him to me. '

"I waited and gave good advice to the faithful ones till Angeit returned. Moosu was on the sled, and I saw by the fingermarks on his face that hiswomankind had done well by him. But he tumbled off and fell in the snowat my feet, crying: 'O master, thou wilt forgive Moosu, thy servant, forthe wrong things he has done! Thou art a great man! Surely wilt thouforgive!'

"'Call me "brother, " Moosu--call me "brother, "' I chided, lifting him tohis feet with the toe of my moccasin. 'Wilt thou evermore obey?'

"'Yea, master, ' he whimpered, 'evermore. '

"'Then dispose thy body, so, across the sled, ' I shifted the dogwhip tomy right hand. 'And direct thy face downwards, toward the snow. Andmake haste, for we journey south this day. ' And when he was well fixed Ilaid the lash upon him, reciting, at every stroke, the wrongs he had doneme. 'This for thy disobedience in general--whack! And this for thydisobedience in particular--whack! whack! And this for Esanetuk! Andthis for thy soul's welfare! And this for the grace of thy authority!And this for Kluktu! And this for thy rights God-given! And this forthy fat firstlings! And this and this for thy income-tax and thy loavesand fishes! And this for all thy disobedience! And this, finally, thatthou mayest henceforth walk softly and with understanding! Now cease thysniffling and get up! Gird on thy snowshoes and go to the fore and breaktrail for the dogs. _Chook_! _Mush-on_! Git!'"

Thomas Stevens smiled quietly to himself as he lighted his fifth cigarand sent curling smoke-rings ceilingward. 

"But how about the people of Tattarat?" I asked. "Kind of rough, wasn'tit, to leave them flat with famine?"

And he answered, laughing, between two smoke-rings, "Were there not thefat dogs?"

THE FAITH OF MEN

"Tell you what we'll do; we'll shake for it. "

"That suits me, " said the second man, turning, as he spoke, to the Indianthat was mending snowshoes in a corner of the cabin. "Here, youBillebedam, take a run down to Oleson's cabin like a good fellow, andtell him we want to borrow his dice box. "

This sudden request in the midst of a council on wages of men, wood, andgrub surprised Billebedam. Besides, it was early in the day, and he hadnever known white men of the calibre of Pentfield and Hutchinson to diceand play till the day's work was done. But his face was impassive as aYukon Indian's should be, as he pulled on his mittens and went out thedoor. 

Though eight o'clock, it was still dark outside, and the cabin waslighted by a tallow candle thrust into an empty whisky bottle. It stoodon the pine-board table in the middle of a disarray of dirty tin dishes. Tallow from innumerable candles had dripped down the long neck of thebottle and hardened into a miniature glacier. The small room, whichcomposed the entire cabin, was as badly littered as the table; while atone end, against the wall, were two bunks, one above the other, with theblankets turned down just as the two men had crawled out in the morning. 

Lawrence Pentfield and Corry Hutchinson were millionaires, though theydid not look it. There seemed nothing unusual about them, while theywould have passed muster as fair specimens of lumbermen in any Michigancamp. But outside, in the darkness, where holes yawned in the ground, were many men engaged in windlassing muck and gravel and gold from thebottoms of the holes where other men received fifteen dollars per day forscraping it from off the bedrock. Each day thousands of dollars' worthof gold were scraped from bedrock and windlassed to the surface, and itall belonged to Pentfield and Hutchinson, who took their rank among therichest kings of Bonanza. 

Pentfield broke the silence that followed on Billebedam's departure byheaping the dirty plates higher on the table and drumming a tattoo on thecleared space with his knuckles. Hutchinson snuffed the smoky candle andreflectively rubbed the soot from the wick between thumb and forefinger. 

"By Jove, I wish we could both go out!" he abruptly exclaimed. "Thatwould settle it all. "

Pentfield looked at him darkly. 

"If it weren't for your cursed obstinacy, it'd be settled anyway. Allyou have to do is get up and go. I'll look after things, and next year Ican go out. "

"Why should I go? I've no one waiting for me--"

"Your people, " Pentfield broke in roughly. 

"Like you have, " Hutchinson went on. "A girl, I mean, and you know it. "

Pentfield shrugged his shoulders gloomily. "She can wait, I guess. "

"But she's been waiting two years now. "

"And another won't age her beyond recognition. "

"That'd be three years. Think of it, old man, three years in this end ofthe earth, this falling-off place for the damned!" Hutchinson threw uphis arm in an almost articulate groan. 

He was several years younger than his partner, not more than twenty-six, and there was a certain wistfulness in his face that comes into the facesof men when they yearn vainly for the things they have been long denied. This same wistfulness was in Pentfield's face, and the groan of it wasarticulate in the heave of his shoulders. 

"I dreamed last night I was in Zinkand's, " he said. "The music playing, glasses clinking, voices humming, women laughing, and I was orderingeggs--yes, sir, eggs, fried and boiled and poached and scrambled, and inall sorts of ways, and downing them as fast as they arrived. "

"I'd have ordered salads and green things, " Hutchinson criticizedhungrily, "with a big, rare, Porterhouse, and young onions andradishes, --the kind your teeth sink into with a crunch. "

"I'd have followed the eggs with them, I guess, if I hadn't awakened, "Pentfield replied. 

He picked up a trail-scarred banjo from the floor and began to strum afew wandering notes. Hutchinson winced and breathed heavily. 

"Quit it!" he burst out with sudden fury, as the other struck into agaily lifting swing. "It drives me mad. I can't stand it"

Pentfield tossed the banjo into a bunk and quoted:-

 "Hear me babble what the weakest won't confess-- I am Memory and Torment--I am Town! I am all that ever went with evening dress!"

The other man winced where he sat and dropped his head forward on thetable. Pentfield resumed the monotonous drumming with his knuckles. Aloud snap from the door attracted his attention. The frost was creepingup the inside in a white sheet, and he began to hum:-

 "The flocks are folded, boughs are bare, The salmon takes the sea; And oh, my fair, would I somewhere Might house my heart with thee. "

Silence fell and was not again broken till Billebedam arrived and threwthe dice box on the table. 

"Um much cold, " he said. "Oleson um speak to me, um say um Yukon freezelast night. "

"Hear that, old man!" Pentfield cried, slapping Hutchinson on theshoulder. "Whoever wins can be hitting the trail for God's country thistime tomorrow morning!"

He picked up the box, briskly rattling the dice. 

"What'll it be?"

"Straight poker dice, " Hutchinson answered. "Go on and roll them out. "

Pentfield swept the dishes from the table with a crash and rolled out thefive dice. Both looked tragedy. The shake was without a pair and five-spot high. 

"A stiff!" Pentfield groaned. 

After much deliberating Pentfield picked up all the five dice and putthem in the box. 

"I'd shake to the five if I were you, " Hutchinson suggested. 

"No, you wouldn't, not when you see this, " Pentfield replied, shaking outthe dice. 

Again they were without a pair, running this time in unbroken sequencefrom two to six. 

"A second stiff!" he groaned. "No use your shaking, Corry. You can'tlose. "

The other man gathered up the dice without a word, rattled them, rolledthem out on the table with a flourish, and saw that he had likewiseshaken a six-high stiff. 

"Tied you, anyway, but I'll have to do better than that, " he said, gathering in four of them and shaking to the six. "And here's what beatsyou!"

But they rolled out deuce, tray, four, and five--a stiff still and nobetter nor worse than Pentfield's throw. 

Hutchinson sighed. 

"Couldn't happen once in a million times, " said. 

"Nor in a million lives, " Pentfield added, catching up the dice andquickly throwing them out. Three fives appeared, and, after much delay, he was rewarded by a fourth five on the second shake. Hutchinson seemedto have lost his last hope. 

But three sixes turned up on his first shake. A great doubt rose in theother's eyes, and hope returned into his. He had one more shake. Anothersix and he would go over the ice to salt water and the States. 

He rattled the dice in the box, made as though to cast them, hesitated, and continued rattle them. 

"Go on! Go on! Don't take all night about it!" Pentfield cried sharply, bending his nails on the table, so tight was the clutch with which hestrove to control himself. 

The dice rolled forth, an upturned six meeting their eyes. Both men satstaring at it. There was a long silence. Hutchinson shot a covertglance at his partner, who, still more covertly, caught it, and pursed uphis lips in an attempt to advertise his unconcern. 

Hutchinson laughed as he got up on his feet. It was a nervous, apprehensive laugh. It was a case where it was more awkward to win thanlose. He walked over to his partner, who whirled upon him fiercely:-

"Now you just shut up, Corry! I know all you're going to say--that you'drather stay in and let me go, and all that; so don't say it. You've yourown people in Detroit to see, and that's enough. Besides, you can do forme the very thing I expected to do if I went out. "

"And that is--?"

Pentfield read the full question in his partner's eyes, and answered:-

"Yes, that very thing. You can bring her in to me. The only differencewill be a Dawson wedding instead of a San Franciscan one. "

"But, man alike!" Corry Hutchinson objected "how under the sun can Ibring her in? We're not exactly brother and sister, seeing that I havenot even met her, and it wouldn't be just the proper thing, you know, forus to travel together. Of course, it would be all right--you and I knowthat; but think of the looks of it, man!"

Pentfield swore under his breath, consigning the looks of it to a lessfrigid region than Alaska. 

"Now, if you'll just listen and not get astride that high horse of yoursso blamed quick, " his partner went on, "you'll see that the only fairthing under the circumstances is for me to let you go out this year. Nextyear is only a year away, and then I can take my fling. "

Pentfield shook his head, though visibly swayed by the temptation. 

"It won't do, Corry, old man. I appreciate your kindness and all that, but it won't do. I'd be ashamed every time I thought of you slaving awayin here in my place. "

A thought seemed suddenly to strike him. Burrowing into his bunk anddisrupting it in his eagerness, he secured a writing-pad and pencil, andsitting down at the table, began to write with swiftness and certitude. 

"Here, " he said, thrusting the scrawled letter into his partner's hand. "You just deliver that and everything'll be all right. "

Hutchinson ran his eye over it and laid it down. 

"How do you know the brother will be willing to make that beastly trip inhere?" he demanded. 

"Oh, he'll do it for me--and for his sister, " Pentfield replied. "Yousee, he's tenderfoot, and I wouldn't trust her with him alone. But withyou along it will be an easy trip and a safe one. As soon as you getout, you'll go to her and prepare her. Then you can take your run eastto your own people, and in the spring she and her brother'll be ready tostart with you. You'll like her, I know, right from the jump; and fromthat, you'll know her as soon as you lay eyes on her. "

So saying he opened the back of his watch and exposed a girl's photographpasted on the inside of the case. Corry Hutchinson gazed at it withadmiration welling up in his eyes. 

"Mabel is her name, " Pentfield went on. "And it's just as well youshould know how to find the house. Soon as you strike 'Frisco, take acab, and just say, 'Holmes's place, Myrdon Avenue'--I doubt if the MyrdonAvenue is necessary. The cabby'll know where Judge Holmes lives. 

"And say, " Pentfield continued, after a pause, "it won't be a bad ideafor you to get me a few little things which a--er--"

"A married man should have in his business, " Hutchinson blurted out witha grin. 

Pentfield grinned back. 

"Sure, napkins and tablecloths and sheets and pillowslips, and suchthings. And you might get a good set of china. You know it'll come hardfor her to settle down to this sort of thing. You can freight them in bysteamer around by Bering Sea. And, I say, what's the matter with apiano?"

Hutchinson seconded the idea heartily. His reluctance had vanished, andhe was warming up to his mission. 

"By Jove! Lawrence, " he said at the conclusion of the council, as theyboth rose to their feet, "I'll bring back that girl of yours in style. I'll do the cooking and take care of the dogs, and all that brother'llhave to do will be to see to her comfort and do for her whatever I'veforgotten. And I'll forget damn little, I can tell you. "

The next day Lawrence Pentfield shook hands with him for the last timeand watched him, running with his dogs, disappear up the frozen Yukon onhis way to salt water and the world. Pentfield went back to his Bonanzamine, which was many times more dreary than before, and faced resolutelyinto the long winter. There was work to be done, men to superintend, andoperations to direct in burrowing after the erratic pay streak; but hisheart was not in the work. Nor was his heart in any work till the tieredlogs of a new cabin began to rise on the hill behind the mine. It was agrand cabin, warmly built and divided into three comfortable rooms. Eachlog was hand-hewed and squared--an expensive whim when the axemenreceived a daily wage of fifteen dollars; but to him nothing could be toocostly for the home in which Mabel Holmes was to live. 

So he went about with the building of the cabin, singing, "And oh, myfair, would I somewhere might house my heart with thee!" Also, he had acalendar pinned on the wall above the table, and his first act eachmorning was to check off the day and to count the days that were left erehis partner would come booming down the Yukon ice in the spring. Anotherwhim of his was to permit no one to sleep in the new cabin on the hill. It must be as fresh for her occupancy as the square-hewed wood was fresh;and when it stood complete, he put a padlock on the door. No one enteredsave himself, and he was wont to spend long hours there, and to comeforth with his face strangely radiant and in his eyes a glad, warm light. 

In December he received a letter from Corry Hutchinson. He had just seenMabel Holmes. She was all she ought to be, to be Lawrence Pentfield'swife, he wrote. He was enthusiastic, and his letter sent the bloodtingling through Pentfield's veins. Other letters followed, one on theheels of another, and sometimes two or three together when the maillumped up. And they were all in the same tenor. Corry had just comefrom Myrdon Avenue; Corry was just going to Myrdon Avenue; or Corry wasat Myrdon Avenue. And he lingered on and on in San Francisco, nor evenmentioned his trip to Detroit. 

Lawrence Pentfield began to think that his partner was a great deal inthe company of Mabel Holmes for a fellow who was going east to see hispeople. He even caught himself worrying about it at times, though hewould have worried more had he not known Mabel and Corry so well. Mabel'sletters, on the other hand, had a great deal to say about Corry. Also, athread of timidity that was near to disinclination ran through themconcerning the trip in over the ice and the Dawson marriage. Pentfieldwrote back heartily, laughing at her fears, which he took to be the merephysical ones of danger and hardship rather than those bred of maidenlyreserve. 

But the long winter and tedious wait, following upon the two previouslong winters, were telling upon him. The superintendence of the men andthe pursuit of the pay streak could not break the irk of the daily round, and the end of January found him making occasional trips to Dawson, wherehe could forget his identity for a space at the gambling tables. Becausehe could afford to lose, he won, and "Pentfield's luck" became a stockphrase among the faro players. 

His luck ran with him till the second week in February. How much fartherit might have run is conjectural; for, after one big game, he neverplayed again. 

It was in the Opera House that it occurred, and for an hour it had seemedthat he could not place his money on a card without making the card awinner. In the lull at the end of a deal, while the game-keeper wasshuffling the deck, Nick Inwood the owner of the game, remarked, aproposof nothing:-

"I say, Pentfield, I see that partner of yours has been cutting up monkey-shines on the outside. "

"Trust Corry to have a good time, " Pentfield had answered; "especiallywhen he has earned it. "

"Every man to his taste, " Nick Inwood laughed; "but I should scarcelycall getting married a good time. "

"Corry married!" Pentfield cried, incredulous and yet surprised out ofhimself for the moment. 

"Sure, " Inwood said. "I saw it in the 'Frisco paper that came in overthe ice this morning. "

"Well, and who's the girl?" Pentfield demanded, somewhat with the air ofpatient fortitude with which one takes the bait of a catch and is awareat the time of the large laugh bound to follow at his expense. 

Nick Inwood pulled the newspaper from his pocket and began looking itover, saying:-

"I haven't a remarkable memory for names, but it seems to me it'ssomething like Mabel--Mabel--oh yes, here it--'Mabel Holmes, daughter ofJudge Holmes, '--whoever he is. "

Lawrence Pentfield never turned a hair, though he wondered how any man inthe North could know her name. He glanced coolly from face to face tonote any vagrant signs of the game that was being played upon him, butbeyond a healthy curiosity the faces betrayed nothing. Then he turned tothe gambler and said in cold, even tones:-

"Inwood, I've got an even five hundred here that says the print of whatyou have just said is not in that paper. "

The gambler looked at him in quizzical surprise. "Go 'way, child. Idon't want your money. "

"I thought so, " Pentfield sneered, returning to the game and laying acouple of bets. 

Nick Inwood's face flushed, and, as though doubting his senses, he rancareful eyes over the print of a quarter of a column. Then be turned onLawrence Pentfield. 

"Look here, Pentfield, " he said, in a quiet, nervous manner; "I can'tallow that, you know. "

"Allow what?" Pentfield demanded brutally. 

"You implied that I lied. "

"Nothing of the sort, " came the reply. "I merely implied that you weretrying to be clumsily witty. "

"Make your bets, gentlemen, " the dealer protested. 

"But I tell you it's true, " Nick Inwood insisted. 

"And I have told you I've five hundred that says it's not in that paper, "Pentfield answered, at the same time throwing a heavy sack of dust on thetable. 

"I am sorry to take your money, " was the retort, as Inwood thrust thenewspaper into Pentfield's hand. 

Pentfield saw, though he could not quite bring himself to believe. Glancing through the headline, "Young Lochinvar came out of the North, "and skimming the article until the names of Mabel Holmes and CorryHutchinson, coupled together, leaped squarely before his eyes, he turnedto the top of the page. It was a San Francisco paper. 

"The money's yours, Inwood, " he remarked, with a short laugh. "There'sno telling what that partner of mine will do when he gets started. "

Then he returned to the article and read it word for word, very slowlyand very carefully. He could no longer doubt. Beyond dispute, CorryHutchinson had married Mabel Holmes. "One of the Bonanza kings, " itdescribed him, "a partner with Lawrence Pentfield (whom San Franciscosociety has not yet forgotten), and interested with that gentleman inother rich, Klondike properties. " Further, and at the end, he read, "Itis whispered that Mr. And Mrs. Hutchinson will, after a brief trip eastto Detroit, make their real honeymoon journey into the fascinatingKlondike country. "

"I'll be back again; keep my place for me, " Pentfield said, rising to hisfeet and taking his sack, which meantime had hit the blower and came backlighter by five hundred dollars. 

He went down the street and bought a Seattle paper. It contained thesame facts, though somewhat condensed. Corry and Mabel were indubitablymarried. Pentfield returned to the Opera House and resumed his seat inthe game. He asked to have the limit removed. 

"Trying to get action, " Nick Inwood laughed, as he nodded assent to thedealer. "I was going down to the A. C. Store, but now I guess I'll stayand watch you do your worst. "

This Lawrence Pentfield did at the end of two hours' plunging, when thedealer bit the end off a fresh cigar and struck a match as he announcedthat the bank was broken. Pentfield cashed in for forty thousand, shookhands with Nick Inwood, and stated that it was the last time he wouldever play at his game or at anybody's else's. 

No one knew nor guessed that he had been hit, much less hit hard. Therewas no apparent change in his manner. For a week he went about his workmuch as he had always done, when he read an account of the marriage in aPortland paper. Then he called in a friend to take charge of his mineand departed up the Yukon behind his dogs. He held to the Salt Watertrail till White River was reached, into which he turned. Five dayslater he came upon a hunting camp of the White River Indians. In theevening there was a feast, and he sat in honour beside the chief; andnext morning he headed his dogs back toward the Yukon. But he no longertravelled alone. A young squaw fed his dogs for him that night andhelped to pitch camp. She had been mauled by a bear in her childhood andsuffered from a slight limp. Her name was Lashka, and she was diffidentat first with the strange white man that had come out of the Unknown, married her with scarcely a look or word, and now was carrying her backwith him into the Unknown. 

But Lashka's was better fortune than falls to most Indian girls that matewith white men in the Northland. No sooner was Dawson reached than thebarbaric marriage that had joined them was re-solemnized, in the whiteman's fashion, before a priest. From Dawson, which to her was all amarvel and a dream, she was taken directly to the Bonanza claim andinstalled in the square-hewed cabin on the hill. 

The nine days' wonder that followed arose not so much out of the fact ofthe squaw whom Lawrence Pentfield had taken to bed and board as out ofthe ceremony that had legalized the tie. The properly sanctionedmarriage was the one thing that passed the community's comprehension. Butno one bothered Pentfield about it. So long as a man's vagaries did nospecial hurt to the community, the community let the man alone, nor wasPentfield barred from the cabins of men who possessed white wives. Themarriage ceremony removed him from the status of squaw-man and placed himbeyond moral reproach, though there were men that challenged his tastewhere women were concerned. 

No more letters arrived from the outside. Six sledloads of mails hadbeen lost at the Big Salmon. Besides, Pentfield knew that Corry and hisbride must by that time have started in over the trail. They were eventhen on their honeymoon trip--the honeymoon trip he had dreamed of forhimself through two dreary years. His lip curled with bitterness at thethought; but beyond being kinder to Lashka he gave no sign. 

March had passed and April was nearing its end, when, one spring morning, Lashka asked permission to go down the creek several miles to SiwashPete's cabin. Pete's wife, a Stewart River woman, had sent up word thatsomething was wrong with her baby, and Lashka, who was pre-eminently amother-woman and who held herself to be truly wise in the matter ofinfantile troubles, missed no opportunity of nursing the children ofother women as yet more fortunate than she. 

Pentfield harnessed his dogs, and with Lashka behind took the trail downthe creek bed of Bonanza. Spring was in the air. The sharpness had goneout of the bite of the frost and though snow still covered the land, themurmur and trickling of water told that the iron grip of winter wasrelaxing. The bottom was dropping out of the trail, and here and there anew trail had been broken around open holes. At such a place, wherethere was not room for two sleds to pass, Pentfield heard the jingle ofapproaching bells and stopped his dogs. 

A team of tired-looking dogs appeared around the narrow bend, followed bya heavily-loaded sled. At the gee-pole was a man who steered in a mannerfamiliar to Pentfield, and behind the sled walked two women. His glancereturned to the man at the gee-pole. It was Corry. Pentfield got on hisfeet and waited. He was glad that Lashka was with him. The meetingcould not have come about better had it been planned, he thought. And ashe waited he wondered what they would say, what they would be able tosay. As for himself there was no need to say anything. The explainingwas all on their side, and he was ready to listen to them. 

As they drew in abreast, Corry recognized him and halted the dogs. Witha "Hello, old man, " he held out his hand. 

Pentfield shook it, but without warmth or speech. By this time the twowomen had come up, and he noticed that the second one was Dora Holmes. Hedoffed his fur cap, the flaps of which were flying, shook hands with her, and turned toward Mabel. She swayed forward, splendid and radiant, butfaltered before his outstretched hand. He had intended to say, "How doyou do, Mrs. Hutchinson?"--but somehow, the Mrs. Hutchinson had chokedhim, and all he had managed to articulate was the "How do you do?"

There was all the constraint and awkwardness in the situation he couldhave wished. Mabel betrayed the agitation appropriate to her position, while Dora, evidently brought along as some sort of peacemaker, wassaying:-

"Why, what is the matter, Lawrence?"

Before he could answer, Corry plucked him by the sleeve and drew himaside. 

"See here, old man, what's this mean?" Corry demanded in a low tone, indicating Lashka with his eyes. 

"I can hardly see, Corry, where you can have any concern in the matter, "Pentfield answered mockingly. 

But Corry drove straight to the point. 

"What is that squaw doing on your sled? A nasty job you've given me toexplain all this away. I only hope it can be explained away. Who isshe? Whose squaw is she?"

Then Lawrence Pentfield delivered his stroke, and he delivered it with acertain calm elation of spirit that seemed somewhat to compensate for thewrong that had been done him. 

"She is my squaw, " he said; "Mrs. Pentfield, if you please. "

Corry Hutchinson gasped, and Pentfield left him and returned to the twowomen. Mabel, with a worried expression on her face, seemed holdingherself aloof. He turned to Dora and asked, quite genially, as thoughall the world was sunshine:- "How did you stand the trip, anyway? Haveany trouble to sleep warm?"

"And, how did Mrs. Hutchinson stand it?" he asked next, his eyes onMabel. 

"Oh, you dear ninny!" Dora cried, throwing her arms around him andhugging him. "Then you saw it, too! I thought something was the matter, you were acting so strangely. "

"I--I hardly understand, " he stammered. 

"It was corrected in next day's paper, " Dora chattered on. "We did notdream you would see it. All the other papers had it correctly, and ofcourse that one miserable paper was the very one you saw!"

"Wait a moment! What do you mean?" Pentfield demanded, a sudden fear athis heart, for he felt himself on the verge of a great gulf. 

But Dora swept volubly on. 

"Why, when it became known that Mabel and I were going to Klondike, _Every Other Week_ said that when we were gone, it would be lovely onMyrdon Avenue, meaning, of course, lonely. "

"Then--"

"I am Mrs. Hutchinson, " Dora answered. "And you thought it was Mabel allthe time--"

"Precisely the way of it, " Pentfield replied slowly. "But I can see now. The reporter got the names mixed. The Seattle and Portland papercopied. "

He stood silently for a minute. Mabel's face was turned toward himagain, and he could see the glow of expectancy in it. Corry was deeplyinterested in the ragged toe of one of his moccasins, while Dora wasstealing sidelong glances at the immobile face of Lashka sitting on thesled. Lawrence Pentfield stared straight out before him into a drearyfuture, through the grey vistas of which he saw himself riding on a sledbehind running dogs with lame Lashka by his side. 

Then he spoke, quite simply, looking Mabel in the eyes. 

"I am very sorry. I did not dream it. I thought you had married Corry. That is Mrs. Pentfield sitting on the sled over there. "

Mabel Holmes turned weakly toward her sister, as though all the fatigueof her great journey had suddenly descended on her. Dora caught heraround the waist. Corry Hutchinson was still occupied with hismoccasins. Pentfield glanced quickly from face to face, then turned tohis sled. 

"Can't stop here all day, with Pete's baby waiting, " he said to Lashka. 

The long whip-lash hissed out, the dogs sprang against the breast bands, and the sled lurched and jerked ahead. 

"Oh, I say, Corry, " Pentfield called back, "you'd better occupy the oldcabin. It's not been used for some time. I've built a new one on thehill. "

TOO MUCH GOLD

This being a story--and a truer one than it may appear--of a miningcountry, it is quite to be expected that it will be a hard-luck story. But that depends on the point of view. Hard luck is a mild way ofterming it so far as Kink Mitchell and Hootchinoo Bill are concerned; andthat they have a decided opinion on the subject is a matter of commonknowledge in the Yukon country. 

It was in the fall of 1896 that the two partners came down to the eastbank of the Yukon, and drew a Peterborough canoe from a moss-coveredcache. They were not particularly pleasant-looking objects. A summer'sprospecting, filled to repletion with hardship and rather empty of grub, had left their clothes in tatters and themselves worn and cadaverous. Animbus of mosquitoes buzzed about each man's head. Their faces werecoated with blue clay. Each carried a lump of this damp clay, and, whenever it dried and fell from their faces, more was daubed on in itsplace. There was a querulous plaint in their voices, an irritability ofmovement and gesture, that told of broken sleep and a losing strugglewith the little winged pests. 

"Them skeeters'll be the death of me yet, " Kink Mitchell whimpered, asthe canoe felt the current on her nose, and leaped out from the bank. 

"Cheer up, cheer up. We're about done, " Hootchinoo Bill answered, withan attempted heartiness in his funereal tones that was ghastly. "We'llbe in Forty Mile in forty minutes, and then--cursed little devil!"

One hand left his paddle and landed on the back of his neck with a sharpslap. He put a fresh daub of clay on the injured part, swearingsulphurously the while. Kink Mitchell was not in the least amused. Hemerely improved the opportunity by putting a thicker coating of clay onhis own neck. 

They crossed the Yukon to its west bank, shot down-stream with easystroke, and at the end of forty minutes swung in close to the left aroundthe tail of an island. Forty Mile spread itself suddenly before them. Both men straightened their backs and gazed at the sight. They gazedlong and carefully, drifting with the current, in their faces anexpression of mingled surprise and consternation slowly gathering. Not athread of smoke was rising from the hundreds of log-cabins. There was nosound of axes biting sharply into wood, of hammering and sawing. Neitherdogs nor men loitered before the big store. No steamboats lay at thebank, no canoes, nor scows, nor poling-boats. The river was as bare ofcraft as the town was of life. 

"Kind of looks like Gabriel's tooted his little horn, and you an' me hasturned up missing, " remarked Hootchinoo Bill. 

His remark was casual, as though there was nothing unusual about theoccurrence. Kink Mitchell's reply was just as casual as though he, too, were unaware of any strange perturbation of spirit. 

"Looks as they was all Baptists, then, and took the boats to go bywater, " was his contribution. 

"My ol' dad was a Baptist, " Hootchinoo Bill supplemented. "An' he alwaysdid hold it was forty thousand miles nearer that way. "

This was the end of their levity. They ran the canoe in and climbed thehigh earth bank. A feeling of awe descended upon them as they walked thedeserted streets. The sunlight streamed placidly over the town. Agentle wind tapped the halyards against the flagpole before the closeddoors of the Caledonia Dance Hall. Mosquitoes buzzed, robins sang, andmoose birds tripped hungrily among the cabins; but there was no humanlife nor sign of human life. 

"I'm just dyin' for a drink, " Hootchinoo Bill said and unconsciously hisvoice sank to a hoarse whisper. 

His partner nodded his head, loth to hear his own voice break thestillness. They trudged on in uneasy silence till surprised by an opendoor. Above this door, and stretching the width of the building, a rudesign announced the same as the "Monte Carlo. " But beside the door, hatover eyes, chair tilted back, a man sat sunning himself. He was an oldman. Beard and hair were long and white and patriarchal. 

"If it ain't ol' Jim Cummings, turned up like us, too late forResurrection!" said Kink Mitchell. 

"Most like he didn't hear Gabriel tootin', " was Hootchinoo Bill'ssuggestion. 

"Hello, Jim! Wake up!" he shouted. 

The old man unlimbered lamely, blinking his eyes and murmuringautomatically: "What'll ye have, gents? What'll ye have?"

They followed him inside and ranged up against the long bar where of yorea half-dozen nimble bar-keepers found little time to loaf. The greatroom, ordinarily aroar with life, was still and gloomy as a tomb. Therewas no rattling of chips, no whirring of ivory balls. Roulette and farotables were like gravestones under their canvas covers. No women'svoices drifted merrily from the dance-room behind. Ol' Jim Cummingswiped a glass with palsied hands, and Kink Mitchell scrawled his initialson the dust-covered bar. 

"Where's the girls?" Hootchinoo Bill shouted, with affected geniality. 

"Gone, " was the ancient bar-keeper's reply, in a voice thin and aged ashimself, and as unsteady as his hand. 

"Where's Bidwell and Barlow?"

"Gone. "

"And Sweetwater Charley?"

"Gone. "

"And his sister?"

"Gone too. "

"Your daughter Sally, then, and her little kid?"

"Gone, all gone. " The old man shook his head sadly, rummaging in anabsent way among the dusty bottles. 

"Great Sardanapolis! Where?" Kink Mitchell exploded, unable longer torestrain himself. "You don't say you've had the plague?"

"Why, ain't you heerd?" The old man chuckled quietly. "They-all's goneto Dawson. "

"What-like is that?" Bill demanded. "A creek? or a bar? or a place?"

"Ain't never heered of Dawson, eh?" The old man chuckled exasperatingly. "Why, Dawson's a town, a city, bigger'n Forty Mile. Yes, sir, bigger'nForty Mile. "

"I've ben in this land seven year, " Bill announced emphatically, "an' Imake free to say I never heard tell of the burg before. Hold on! Let'shave some more of that whisky. Your information's flabbergasted me, thatit has. Now just whereabouts is this Dawson-place you was a-mentionin'?"

"On the big flat jest below the mouth of Klondike, " ol' Jim answered. "But where has you-all ben this summer?"

"Never you mind where we-all's ben, " was Kink Mitchell's testy reply. "We-all's ben where the skeeters is that thick you've got to throw a stickinto the air so as to see the sun and tell the time of day. Ain't Iright, Bill?"

"Right you are, " said Bill. "But speakin' of this Dawson-place how likedid it happen to be, Jim?"

"Ounce to the pan on a creek called Bonanza, an' they ain't got tobedrock yet. "

"Who struck it?"

"Carmack. "

At mention of the discoverer's name the partners stared at each otherdisgustedly. Then they winked with great solemnity. 

"Siwash George, " sniffed Hootchinoo Bill. 

"That squaw-man, " sneered Kink Mitchell. 

"I wouldn't put on my moccasins to stampede after anything he'd everfind, " said Bill. 

"Same here, " announced his partner. "A cuss that's too plumb lazy tofish his own salmon. That's why he took up with the Indians. S'posethat black brother-in-law of his, --lemme see, Skookum Jim, eh?--s'posehe's in on it?"

The old bar-keeper nodded. "Sure, an' what's more, all Forty Mile, exceptin' me an' a few cripples. "

"And drunks, " added Kink Mitchell. 

"No-sir-ee!" the old man shouted emphatically. 

"I bet you the drinks Honkins ain't in on it!" Hootchinoo Bill cried withcertitude. 

Ol' Jim's face lighted up. "I takes you, Bill, an' you loses. "

"However did that ol' soak budge out of Forty Mile?" Mitchell demanded. 

"The ties him down an' throws him in the bottom of a polin'-boat, " ol'Jim explained. "Come right in here, they did, an' takes him out of thatthere chair there in the corner, an' three more drunks they finds underthe pianny. I tell you-alls the whole camp hits up the Yukon for Dawsonjes' like Sam Scratch was after them, --wimmen, children, babes in arms, the whole shebang. Bidwell comes to me an' sez, sez he, 'Jim, I wantsyou to keep tab on the Monte Carlo. I'm goin'. '

"'Where's Barlow?' sez I. 'Gone, ' sez he, 'an' I'm a-followin' with aload of whisky. ' An' with that, never waitin' for me to decline, hemakes a run for his boat an' away he goes, polin' up river like mad. Sohere I be, an' these is the first drinks I've passed out in three days. "

The partners looked at each other. 

"Gosh darn my buttoms!" said Hootchinoo Bill. "Seems likes you and me, Kink, is the kind of folks always caught out with forks when it rainssoup. "

"Wouldn't it take the saleratus out your dough, now?" said Kink Mitchell. "A stampede of tin-horns, drunks, an' loafers. "

"An' squaw-men, " added Bill. "Not a genooine miner in the wholecaboodle. "

"Genooine miners like you an' me, Kink, " he went on academically, "is allout an' sweatin' hard over Birch Creek way. Not a genooine miner in thiswhole crazy Dawson outfit, and I say right here, not a step do I budgefor any Carmack strike. I've got to see the colour of the dust first. "

"Same here, " Mitchell agreed. "Let's have another drink. "

Having wet this resolution, they beached the canoe, transferred itscontents to their cabin, and cooked dinner. But as the afternoon worealong they grew restive. They were men used to the silence of the greatwilderness, but this gravelike silence of a town worried them. Theycaught themselves listening for familiar sounds--"waitin' for somethingto make a noise which ain't goin' to make a noise, " as Bill put it. Theystrolled through the deserted streets to the Monte Carlo for more drinks, and wandered along the river bank to the steamer landing, where onlywater gurgled as the eddy filled and emptied, and an occasional salmonleapt flashing into the sun. 

They sat down in the shade in front of the store and talked with theconsumptive storekeeper, whose liability to hemorrhage accounted for hispresence. Bill and Kink told him how they intended loafing in theircabin and resting up after the hard summer's work. They told him, with acertain insistence, that was half appeal for belief, half challenge forcontradiction, how much they were going to enjoy their idleness. But thestorekeeper was uninterested. He switched the conversation back to thestrike on Klondike, and they could not keep him away from it. He couldthink of nothing else, talk of nothing else, till Hootchinoo Bill rose upin anger and disgust. 

"Gosh darn Dawson, say I!" he cried. 

"Same here, " said Kink Mitchell, with a brightening face. "One'd thinksomething was doin' up there, 'stead of bein' a mere stampede ofgreenhorns an' tinhorns. "

But a boat came into view from down-stream. It was long and slim. Ithugged the bank closely, and its three occupants, standing upright, propelled it against the stiff current by means of long poles. 

"Circle City outfit, " said the storekeeper. "I was lookin' for 'em alongby afternoon. Forty Mile had the start of them by a hundred and seventymiles. But gee! they ain't losin' any time!"

"We'll just sit here quiet-like and watch 'em string by, " Bill saidcomplacently. 

As he spoke, another boat appeared in sight, followed after a briefinterval by two others. By this time the first boat was abreast of themen on the bank. Its occupants did not cease poling while greetings wereexchanged, and, though its progress was slow, a half-hour saw it out ofsight up river. 

Still they came from below, boat after boat, in endless procession. Theuneasiness of Bill and Kink increased. They stole speculative, tentativeglances at each other, and when their eyes met looked away inembarrassment. Finally, however, their eyes met and neither looked away. 

Kink opened his mouth to speak, but words failed him and his mouthremained open while he continued to gaze at his partner. 

"Just what I was thinken', Kink, " said Bill. 

They grinned sheepishly at each other, and by tacit consent started towalk away. Their pace quickened, and by the time they arrived at theircabin they were on the run. 

"Can't lose no time with all that multitude a-rushin' by, " Kinkspluttered, as he jabbed the sour-dough can into the beanpot with onehand and with the other gathered in the frying-pan and coffee-pot. 

"Should say not, " gasped Bill, his head and shoulders buried in a clothes-sack wherein were stored winter socks and underwear. "I say, Kink, don'tforget the saleratus on the corner shelf back of the stove. "

Half-an-hour later they were launching the canoe and loading up, whilethe storekeeper made jocular remarks about poor, weak mortals and thecontagiousness of "stampedin' fever. " But when Bill and Kink thrusttheir long poles to bottom and started the canoe against the current, hecalled after them:-

"Well, so-long and good luck! And don't forget to blaze a stake or twofor me!"

They nodded their heads vigorously and felt sorry for the poor wretch whoremained perforce behind. 

* * * * *

Kink and Bill were sweating hard. According to the revised NorthlandScripture, the stampede is to the swift, the blazing of stakes to thestrong, and the Crown in royalties, gathers to itself the fulnessthereof. Kink and Bill were both swift and strong. They took the soggytrail at a long, swinging gait that broke the hearts of a couple oftender-feet who tried to keep up with them. Behind, strung out betweenthem and Dawson (where the boats were discarded and land travel began), was the vanguard of the Circle City outfit. In the race from Forty Milethe partners had passed every boat, winning from the leading boat by alength in the Dawson eddy, and leaving its occupants sadly behind themoment their feet struck the trail. 

"Huh! couldn't see us for smoke, " Hootchinoo Bill chuckled, flirting thestinging sweat from his brow and glancing swiftly back along the way theyhad come. 

Three men emerged from where the trail broke through the trees. Twofollowed close at their heels, and then a man and a woman shot into view. 

"Come on, you Kink! Hit her up! Hit her up!"

Bill quickened his pace. Mitchell glanced back in more leisurelyfashion. 

"I declare if they ain't lopin'!"

"And here's one that's loped himself out, " said Bill, pointing to theside of the trail. 

A man was lying on his back panting in the culminating stages of violentexhaustion. His face was ghastly, his eyes bloodshot and glazed, for allthe world like a dying man. 

"_Chechaquo_!" Kink Mitchell grunted, and it was the grunt of the old"sour dough" for the green-horn, for the man who outfitted with "self-risin'" flour and used baking-powder in his biscuits. 

The partners, true to the old-timer custom, had intended to stake down-stream from the strike, but when they saw claim 81 BELOW blazed on atree, --which meant fully eight miles below Discovery, --they changed theirminds. The eight miles were covered in less than two hours. It was akilling pace, over so rough trail, and they passed scores of exhaustedmen that had fallen by the wayside. 

At Discovery little was to be learned of the upper creek. Cormack'sIndian brother-in-law, Skookum Jim, had a hazy notion that the creek wasstaked as high as the 30's; but when Kink and Bill looked at the corner-stakes of 79 ABOVE, they threw their stampeding packs off their backs andsat down to smoke. All their efforts had been vain. Bonanza was stakedfrom mouth to source, --"out of sight and across the next divide. " Billcomplained that night as they fried their bacon and boiled their coffeeover Cormack's fire at Discovery. 

"Try that pup, " Carmack suggested next morning. 

"That pup" was a broad creek that flowed into Bonanza at 7 ABOVE. Thepartners received his advice with the magnificent contempt of the sourdough for a squaw-man, and, instead, spent the day on Adam's Creek, another and more likely-looking tributary of Bonanza. But it was the oldstory over again--staked to the sky-line. 

For threes days Carmack repeated his advice, and for three days theyreceived it contemptuously. But on the fourth day, there being nowhereelse to go, they went up "that pup. " They knew that it was practicallyunstaked, but they had no intention of staking. The trip was made morefor the purpose of giving vent to their ill-humour than for anythingelse. They had become quite cynical, sceptical. They jeered and scoffedat everything, and insulted every _chechaquo_ they met along the way. 

At No. 23 the stakes ceased. The remainder of the creek was open forlocation. 

"Moose pasture, " sneered Kink Mitchell. 

But Bill gravely paced off five hundred feet up the creek and blazed thecorner-stakes. He had picked up the bottom of a candle-box, and on thesmooth side he wrote the notice for his centre-stake:-

 THIS MOOSE PASTURE IS RESERVED FOR THE SWEDES AND CHECHAQUOS. --BILL RADER. 

Kink read it over with approval, saying:-

"As them's my sentiments, I reckon I might as well subscribe. "

So the name of Charles Mitchell was added to the notice; and many an oldsour dough's face relaxed that day at sight of the handiwork of a kindredspirit. 

"How's the pup?" Carmack inquired when they strolled back into camp. 

"To hell with pups!" was Hootchinoo Bill's reply. "Me and Kink's goin' a-lookin' for Too Much Gold when we get rested up. "

Too Much Gold was the fabled creek of which all sour doughs dreamed, whereof it was said the gold was so thick that, in order to wash it, gravel must first be shovelled into the sluice-boxes. But the severaldays' rest, preliminary to the quest for Too Much Gold, brought a slightchange in their plan, inasmuch as it brought one Ans Handerson, a Swede. 

Ans Handerson had been working for wages all summer at Miller Creek overon the Sixty Mile, and, the summer done, had strayed up Bonanza like manyanother waif helplessly adrift on the gold tides that swept willy-nillyacross the land. He was tall and lanky. His arms were long, likeprehistoric man's, and his hands were like soup-plates, twisted andgnarled, and big-knuckled from toil. He was slow of utterance andmovement, and his eyes, pale blue as his hair was pale yellow, seemedfilled with an immortal dreaming, the stuff of which no man knew, andhimself least of all. Perhaps this appearance of immortal dreaming wasdue to a supreme and vacuous innocence. At any rate, this was thevaluation men of ordinary clay put upon him, and there was nothingextraordinary about the composition of Hootchinoo Bill and Kink Mitchell. 

The partners had spent a day of visiting and gossip, and in the eveningmet in the temporary quarters of the Monte Carlo--a large tent werestampeders rested their weary bones and bad whisky sold at a dollar adrink. Since the only money in circulation was dust, and since the housetook the "down-weight" on the scales, a drink cost something more than adollar. Bill and Kink were not drinking, principally for the reason thattheir one and common sack was not strong enough to stand many excursionsto the scales. 

"Say, Bill, I've got a _chechaquo_ on the string for a sack of flour, "Mitchell announced jubilantly. 

Bill looked interested and pleased. Grub as scarce, and they were notover-plentifully supplied for the quest after Too Much Gold. 

"Flour's worth a dollar a pound, " he answered. "How like do youcalculate to get your finger on it?"

"Trade 'm a half-interest in that claim of ourn, " Kink answered. 

"What claim?" Bill was surprised. Then he remembered the reservation hehad staked off for the Swedes, and said, "Oh!"

"I wouldn't be so clost about it, though, " he added. "Give 'm the wholething while you're about it, in a right free-handed way. "

Bill shook his head. "If I did, he'd get clean scairt and prance off. I'm lettin' on as how the ground is believed to be valuable, an' thatwe're lettin' go half just because we're monstrous short on grub. Afterthe dicker we can make him a present of the whole shebang. "

"If somebody ain't disregarded our notice, " Bill objected, though he wasplainly pleased at the prospect of exchanging the claim for a sack offlour. 

"She ain't jumped, " Kink assured him. "It's No. 24, and it stands. The_chechaquos_ took it serious, and they begun stakin' where you left off. Staked clean over the divide, too. I was gassin' with one of them whichhas just got in with cramps in his legs. "

It was then, and for the first time, that they heard the slow and gropingutterance of Ans Handerson. 

"Ay like the looks, " he was saying to the bar-keeper. "Ay tank Ay gat aclaim. "

The partners winked at each other, and a few minutes later a surprisedand grateful Swede was drinking bad whisky with two hard-heartedstrangers. But he was as hard-headed as they were hard-hearted. Thesack made frequent journeys to the scales, followed solicitously eachtime by Kink Mitchell's eyes, and still Ans Handerson did not loosen up. In his pale blue eyes, as in summer seas, immortal dreams swam up andburned, but the swimming and the burning were due to the tales of goldand prospect pans he heard, rather than to the whisky he slid so easilydown his throat. 

The partners were in despair, though they appeared boisterous and jovialof speech and action. 

"Don't mind me, my friend, " Hootchinoo Bill hiccoughed, his hand upon AnsHanderson's shoulder. "Have another drink. We're just celebratin'Kink's birthday here. This is my pardner, Kink, Kink Mitchell. An' whatmight your name be?"

This learned, his hand descended resoundingly on Kink's back, and Kinksimulated clumsy self-consciousness in that he was for the time being thecentre of the rejoicing, while Ans Handerson looked pleased and askedthem to have a drink with him. It was the first and last time hetreated, until the play changed and his canny soul was roused to unwontedprodigality. But he paid for the liquor from a fairly healthy-lookingsack. "Not less 'n eight hundred in it, " calculated the lynx-eyed Kink;and on the strength of it he took the first opportunity of a privyconversation with Bidwell, proprietor of the bad whisky and the tent. 

"Here's my sack, Bidwell, " Kink said, with the intimacy and surety of oneold-timer to another. "Just weigh fifty dollars into it for a day or somore or less, and we'll be yours truly, Bill an' me. "

Thereafter the journeys of the sack to the scales were more frequent, andthe celebration of Kink's natal day waxed hilarious. He even essayed tosing the old-timer's classic, "The Juice of the Forbidden Fruit, " butbroke down and drowned his embarrassment in another round of drinks. EvenBidwell honoured him with a round or two on the house; and he and Billwere decently drunk by the time Ans Handerson's eyelids began to droopand his tongue gave promise of loosening. 

Bill grew affectionate, then confidential. He told his troubles and hardluck to the bar-keeper and the world in general, and to Ans Handerson inparticular. He required no histrionic powers to act the part. The badwhisky attended to that. He worked himself into a great sorrow forhimself and Bill, and his tears were sincere when he told how he and hispartner were thinking of selling a half-interest in good ground justbecause they were short of grub. Even Kink listened and believed. 

Ans Handerson's eyes were shining unholily as he asked, "How much youtank you take?"

Bill and Kink did not hear him, and he was compelled to repeat his query. They appeared reluctant. He grew keener. And he swayed back andforward, holding on to the bar and listened with all his ears while theyconferred together on one side, and wrangled as to whether they should ornot, and disagreed in stage whispers over the price they should set. 

"Two hundred and--hic!--fifty, " Bill finally announced, "but we reckon aswe won't sell. "

"Which is monstrous wise if I might chip in my little say, " secondedBidwell. 

"Yes, indeedy, " added Kink. "We ain't in no charity businessa-disgorgin' free an' generous to Swedes an' white men. "

"Ay tank we haf another drink, " hiccoughed Ans Handerson, craftilychanging the subject against a more propitious time. 

And thereafter, to bring about that propitious time, his own sack beganto see-saw between his hip pocket and the scales. Bill and Kink werecoy, but they finally yielded to his blandishments. Whereupon he grewshy and drew Bidwell to one side. He staggered exceedingly, and held onto Bidwell for support as he asked--

"They ban all right, them men, you tank so?"

"Sure, " Bidwell answered heartily. "Known 'em for years. Old sourdoughs. When they sell a claim, they sell a claim. They ain't no air-dealers. "

"Ay tank Ay buy, " Ans Handerson announced, tottering back to the two men. 

But by now he was dreaming deeply, and he proclaimed he would have thewhole claim or nothing. This was the cause of great pain to HootchinooBill. He orated grandly against the "hawgishness" of _chechaquos_ andSwedes, albeit he dozed between periods, his voice dying away to agurgle, and his head sinking forward on his breast. But whenever rousedby a nudge from Kink or Bidwell, he never failed to explode anothervolley of abuse and insult. 

Ans Handerson was calm under it all. Each insult added to the value ofthe claim. Such unamiable reluctance to sell advertised but one thing tohim, and he was aware of a great relief when Hootchinoo Bill sank snoringto the floor, and he was free to turn his attention to his lessintractable partner. 

Kink Mitchell was persuadable, though a poor mathematician. He weptdolefully, but was willing to sell a half-interest for two hundred andfifty dollars or the whole claim for seven hundred and fifty. AnsHanderson and Bidwell laboured to clear away his erroneous ideasconcerning fractions, but their labour was vain. He spilled tears andregrets all over the bar and on their shoulders, which tears, however, did not wash away his opinion, that if one half was worth two hundred andfifty, two halves were worth three times as much. 

In the end, --and even Bidwell retained no more than hazy recollections ofhow the night terminated, --a bill of sale was drawn up, wherein BillRader and Charles Mitchell yielded up all right and title to the claimknown as 24 ELDORADO, the same being the name the creek had received fromsome optimistic _chechaquo_. 

When Kink had signed, it took the united efforts of the three to arouseBill. Pen in hand, he swayed long over the document; and, each time herocked back and forth, in Ans Handerson's eyes flashed and faded awondrous golden vision. When the precious signature was at last appendedand the dust paid over, he breathed a great sigh, and sank to sleep undera table, where he dreamed immortally until morning. 

But the day was chill and grey. He felt bad. His first act, unconsciousand automatic, was to feel for his sack. Its lightness startled him. Then, slowly, memories of the night thronged into his brain. Roughvoices disturbed him. He opened his eyes and peered out from under thetable. A couple of early risers, or, rather, men who had been out ontrail all night, were vociferating their opinions concerning the utterand loathsome worthlessness of Eldorado Creek. He grew frightened, feltin his pocket, and found the deed to 24 ELDORADO. 

Ten minutes later Hootchinoo Bill and Kink Mitchell were roused fromtheir blankets by a wild-eyed Swede that strove to force upon them an ink-scrawled and very blotty piece of paper. 

"Ay tank Ay take my money back, " he gibbered. "Ay tank Ay take my moneyback. "

Tears were in his eyes and throat. They ran down his cheeks as he kneltbefore them and pleaded and implored. But Bill and Kink did not laugh. They might have been harder hearted. 

"First time I ever hear a man squeal over a minin' deal, " Bill said. "An'I make free to say 'tis too onusual for me to savvy. "

"Same here, " Kink Mitchell remarked. "Minin' deals is likehorse-tradin'. "

They were honest in their wonderment. They could not conceive ofthemselves raising a wail over a business transaction, so they could notunderstand it in another man. 

"The poor, ornery _chechaquo_, " murmured Hootchinoo Bill, as they watchedthe sorrowing Swede disappear up the trail. 

"But this ain't Too Much Gold, " Kink Mitchell said cheerfully. 

And ere the day was out they purchased flour and bacon at exorbitantprices with Ans Handerson's dust and crossed over the divide in thedirection of the creeks that lie between Klondike and Indian River. 

Three months later they came back over the divide in the midst of a snow-storm and dropped down the trail to 24 ELDORADO. It merely chanced thatthe trail led them that way. They were not looking for the claim. Norcould they see much through the driving white till they set foot upon theclaim itself. And then the air lightened, and they beheld a dump, cappedby a windlass that a man was turning. They saw him draw a bucket ofgravel from the hole and tilt it on the edge of the dump. Likewise theysaw another, man, strangely familiar, filling a pan with the freshgravel. His hands were large; his hair wets pale yellow. But beforethey reached him, he turned with the pan and fled toward a cabin. Hewore no hat, and the snow falling down his neck accounted for his haste. Bill and Kink ran after him, and came upon him in the cabin, kneeling bythe stove and washing the pan of gravel in a tub of water. 

He was too deeply engaged to notice more than that somebody had enteredthe cabin. They stood at his shoulder and looked on. He imparted to thepan a deft circular motion, pausing once or twice to rake out the largerparticles of gravel with his fingers. The water was muddy, and, with thepan buried in it, they could see nothing of its contents. Suddenly helifted the pan clear and sent the water out of it with a flirt. A massof yellow, like butter in a churn, showed across the bottom. 

Hootchinoo Bill swallowed. Never in his life had he dreamed of so rich atest-pan. 

"Kind of thick, my friend, " he said huskily. "How much might you reckonthat-all to be?"

Ans Handerson did not look up as he replied, "Ay tank fafty ounces. "

"You must be scrumptious rich, then, eh?"

Still Ans Handerson kept his head down, absorbed in putting in the finetouches which wash out the last particles of dross, though he answered, "Ay tank Ay ban wort' five hundred t'ousand dollar. "

"Gosh!" said Hootchinoo Bill, and he said it reverently. 

"Yes, Bill, gosh!" said Kink Mitchell; and they went out softly andclosed the door. 

THE ONE THOUSAND DOZEN

David Rasmunsen was a hustler, and, like many a greater man, a man of theone idea. Wherefore, when the clarion call of the North rang on his ear, he conceived an adventure in eggs and bent all his energy to itsachievement. He figured briefly and to the point, and the adventurebecame iridescent-hued, splendid. That eggs would sell at Dawson forfive dollars a dozen was a safe working premise. Whence it wasincontrovertible that one thousand dozen would bring, in the GoldenMetropolis, five thousand dollars. 

On the other hand, expense was to be considered, and he considered itwell, for he was a careful man, keenly practical, with a hard head and aheart that imagination never warmed. At fifteen cents a dozen, theinitial cost of his thousand dozen would be one hundred and fiftydollars, a mere bagatelle in face of the enormous profit. And suppose, just suppose, to be wildly extravagant for once, that transportation forhimself and eggs should run up eight hundred and fifty more; he wouldstill have four thousand clear cash and clean when the last egg wasdisposed of and the last dust had rippled into his sack. 

"You see, Alma, "--he figured it over with his wife, the cosy dining-roomsubmerged in a sea of maps, government surveys, guide-books, and Alaskanitineraries, --"you see, expenses don't really begin till you makeDyea--fifty dollars'll cover it with a first-class passage thrown in. Nowfrom Dyea to Lake Linderman, Indian packers take your goods over fortwelve cents a pound, twelve dollars a hundred, or one hundred and twentydollars a thousand. Say I have fifteen hundred pounds, it'll cost onehundred and eighty dollars--call it two hundred and be safe. I amcreditably informed by a Klondiker just come out that I can buy a boatfor three hundred. But the same man says I'm sure to get a couple ofpassengers for one hundred and fifty each, which will give me the boatfor nothing, and, further, they can help me manage it. And . . . That'sall; I put my eggs ashore from the boat at Dawson. Now let me see howmuch is that?"

"Fifty dollars from San Francisco to Dyea, two hundred from Dyea toLinderman, passengers pay for the boat--two hundred and fifty all told, "she summed up swiftly. 

"And a hundred for my clothes and personal outfit, " he went on happily;"that leaves a margin of five hundred for emergencies. And what possibleemergencies can arise?"

Alma shrugged her shoulders and elevated her brows. If that vastNorthland was capable of swallowing up a man and a thousand dozen eggs, surely there was room and to spare for whatever else he might happen topossess. So she thought, but she said nothing. She knew David Rasmunsentoo well to say anything. 

"Doubling the time because of chance delays, I should make the trip intwo months. Think of it, Alma! Four thousand in two months! Beats thepaltry hundred a month I'm getting now. Why, we'll build further outwhere we'll have more space, gas in every room, and a view, and the rentof the cottage'll pay taxes, insurance, and water, and leave somethingover. And then there's always the chance of my striking it and comingout a millionaire. Now tell me, Alma, don't you think I'm verymoderate?"

And Alma could hardly think otherwise. Besides, had not her owncousin, --though a remote and distant one to be sure, the black sheep, theharum-scarum, the ne'er-do-well, --had not he come down out of that weirdNorth country with a hundred thousand in yellow dust, to say nothing of ahalf-ownership in the hole from which it came?

David Rasmunsen's grocer was surprised when he found him weighing eggs inthe scales at the end of the counter, and Rasmunsen himself was moresurprised when he found that a dozen eggs weighed a pound and ahalf--fifteen hundred pounds for his thousand dozen! There would be noweight left for his clothes, blankets, and cooking utensils, to saynothing of the grub he must necessarily consume by the way. Hiscalculations were all thrown out, and he was just proceeding to recastthem when he hit upon the idea of weighing small eggs. "For whether theybe large or small, a dozen eggs is a dozen eggs, " he observed sagely tohimself; and a dozen small ones he found to weigh but a pound and aquarter. Thereat the city of San Francisco was overrun by anxious-eyedemissaries, and commission houses and dairy associations were startled bya sudden demand for eggs running not more than twenty ounces to thedozen. 

Rasmunsen mortgaged the little cottage for a thousand dollars, arrangedfor his wife to make a prolonged stay among her own people, threw up hisjob, and started North. To keep within his schedule he compromised on asecond-class passage, which, because of the rush, was worse thansteerage; and in the late summer, a pale and wabbly man, he disembarkedwith his eggs on the Dyea beach. But it did not take him long to recoverhis land legs and appetite. His first interview with the Chilkootpackers straightened him up and stiffened his backbone. Forty cents apound they demanded for the twenty-eight-mile portage, and while hecaught his breath and swallowed, the price went up to forty-three. Fifteen husky Indians put the straps on his packs at forty-five, but tookthem off at an offer of forty-seven from a Skaguay Croesus in dirty shirtand ragged overalls who had lost his horses on the White Pass trail andwas now making a last desperate drive at the country by way of Chilkoot. 

But Rasmunsen was clean grit, and at fifty cents found takers, who, twodays later, set his eggs down intact at Linderman. But fifty cents apound is a thousand dollars a ton, and his fifteen hundred pounds hadexhausted his emergency fund and left him stranded at the Tantalus pointwhere each day he saw the fresh-whipsawed boats departing for Dawson. Further, a great anxiety brooded over the camp where the boats werebuilt. Men worked frantically, early and late, at the height of theirendurance, caulking, nailing, and pitching in a frenzy of haste for whichadequate explanation was not far to seek. Each day the snow-line creptfarther down the bleak, rock-shouldered peaks, and gale followed gale, with sleet and slush and snow, and in the eddies and quiet places youngice formed and thickened through the fleeting hours. And each morn, toil-stiffened men turned wan faces across the lake to see if the freeze-uphad come. For the freeze-up heralded the death of their hope--the hopethat they would be floating down the swift river ere navigation closed onthe chain of lakes. 

To harrow Rasmunsen's soul further, he discovered three competitors inthe egg business. It was true that one, a little German, had gone brokeand was himself forlornly back-tripping the last pack of the portage; butthe other two had boats nearly completed, and were daily supplicating thegod of merchants and traders to stay the iron hand of winter for justanother day. But the iron hand closed down over the land. Men werebeing frozen in the blizzard which swept Chilkoot, and Rasmunsen frostedhis toes ere he was aware. He found a chance to go passenger with hisfreight in a boat just shoving off through the rubble, but two hundredhard cash, was required, and he had no money. 

"Ay tank you yust wait one leedle w'ile, " said the Swedish boat-builder, who had struck his Klondike right there and was wise enough to knowit--"one leedle w'ile und I make you a tam fine skiff boat, sure Pete. "

With this unpledged word to go on, Rasmunsen hit the back trail to CraterLake, where he fell in with two press correspondents whose tangledbaggage was strewn from Stone House, over across the Pass, and as far asHappy Camp. 

"Yes, " he said with consequence. "I've a thousand dozen eggs atLinderman, and my boat's just about got the last seam caulked. Considermyself in luck to get it. Boats are at a premium, you know, and none tobe had. "

Whereupon and almost with bodily violence the correspondents clamoured togo with him, fluttered greenbacks before his eyes, and spilled yellowtwenties from hand to hand. He could not hear of it, but theyover-persuaded him, and he reluctantly consented to take them at threehundred apiece. Also they pressed upon him the passage money in advance. And while they wrote to their respective journals concerning the GoodSamaritan with the thousand dozen eggs, the Good Samaritan was hurryingback to the Swede at Linderman. 

"Here, you! Gimme that boat!" was his salutation, his hand jingling thecorrespondents' gold pieces and his eyes hungrily bent upon the finishedcraft. 

The Swede regarded him stolidly and shook his head. 

"How much is the other fellow paying? Three hundred? Well, here's four. Take it. "

He tried to press it upon him, but the man backed away. 

"Ay tank not. Ay say him get der skiff boat. You yust wait--"

"Here's six hundred. Last call. Take it or leave it. Tell 'm it's amistake. "

The Swede wavered. "Ay tank yes, " he finally said, and the lastRasmunsen saw of him his vocabulary was going to wreck in a vain effortto explain the mistake to the other fellows. 

The German slipped and broke his ankle on the steep hogback above DeepLake, sold out his stock for a dollar a dozen, and with the proceedshired Indian packers to carry him back to Dyea. But on the morningRasmunsen shoved off with his correspondents, his two rivals followedsuit. 

"How many you got?" one of them, a lean little New Englander, called out. 

"One thousand dozen, " Rasmunsen answered proudly. 

"Huh! I'll go you even stakes I beat you in with my eight hundred. "

The correspondents offered to lend him the money; but Rasmunsen declined, and the Yankee closed with the remaining rival, a brawny son of the seaand sailor of ships and things, who promised to show them all a wrinkleor two when it came to cracking on. And crack on he did, with a largetarpaulin square-sail which pressed the bow half under at every jump. Hewas the first to run out of Linderman, but, disdaining the portage, piledhis loaded boat on the rocks in the boiling rapids. Rasmunsen and theYankee, who likewise had two passengers, portaged across on their backsand then lined their empty boats down through the bad water to Bennett. 

Bennett was a twenty-five-mile lake, narrow and deep, a funnel betweenthe mountains through which storms ever romped. Rasmunsen camped on thesand-pit at its head, where were many men and boats bound north in theteeth of the Arctic winter. He awoke in the morning to find a pipinggale from the south, which caught the chill from the whited peaks andglacial valleys and blew as cold as north wind ever blew. But it wasfair, and he also found the Yankee staggering past the first boldheadland with all sail set. Boat after boat was getting under way, andthe correspondents fell to with enthusiasm. 

"We'll catch him before Cariboo Crossing, " they assured Rasmunsen, asthey ran up the sail and the Alma took the first icy spray over her bow. 

Now Rasmunsen all his life had been prone to cowardice on water, but heclung to the kicking steering-oar with set face and determined jaw. Histhousand dozen were there in the boat before his eyes, safely securedbeneath the correspondents' baggage, and somehow, before his eyes werethe little cottage and the mortgage for a thousand dollars. 

It was bitter cold. Now and again he hauled in the steering-sweep andput out a fresh one while his passengers chopped the ice from the blade. Wherever the spray struck, it turned instantly to frost, and the dippingboom of the spritsail was quickly fringed with icicles. The _Alma_strained and hammered through the big seas till the seams and butts beganto spread, but in lieu of bailing the correspondents chopped ice andflung it overboard. There was no let-up. The mad race with winter wason, and the boats tore along in a desperate string. 

"W-w-we can't stop to save our souls!" one of the correspondentschattered, from cold, not fright. 

"That's right! Keep her down the middle, old man!" the other encouraged. 

Rasmunsen replied with an idiotic grin. The iron-bound shores were in alather of foam, and even down the middle the only hope was to keeprunning away from the big seas. To lower sail was to be overtaken andswamped. Time and again they passed boats pounding among the rocks, andonce they saw one on the edge of the breakers about to strike. A littlecraft behind them, with two men, jibed over and turned bottom up. 

"W-w-watch out, old man, " cried he of the chattering teeth. 

Rasmunsen grinned and tightened his aching grip on the sweep. Scores oftimes had the send of the sea caught the big square stern of the _Alma_and thrown her off from dead before it till the after leach of thespritsail fluttered hollowly, and each time, and only with all hisstrength, had he forced her back. His grin by then had become fixed, andit disturbed the correspondents to look at him. 

They roared down past an isolated rock a hundred yards from shore. Fromits wave-drenched top a man shrieked wildly, for the instant cutting thestorm with his voice. But the next instant the _Alma_ was by, and therock growing a black speck in the troubled froth. 

"That settles the Yankee! Where's the sailor?" shouted one of hispassengers. 

Rasmunsen shot a glance over his shoulder at a black square-sail. He hadseen it leap up out of the grey to windward, and for an hour, off and on, had been watching it grow. The sailor had evidently repaired damages andwas making up for lost time. 

"Look at him come!"

Both passengers stopped chopping ice to watch. Twenty miles of Bennettwere behind them--room and to spare for the sea to toss up its mountainstoward the sky. Sinking and soaring like a storm-god, the sailor droveby them. The huge sail seemed to grip the boat from the crests of thewaves, to tear it bodily out of the water, and fling it crashing andsmothering down into the yawning troughs. 

"The sea'll never catch him!"

"But he'll r-r-run her nose under!"

Even as they spoke, the black tarpaulin swooped from sight behind a bigcomber. The next wave rolled over the spot, and the next, but the boatdid not reappear. The _Alma_ rushed by the place. A little riffraff ofoats and boxes was seen. An arm thrust up and a shaggy head brokesurface a score of yards away. 

For a time there was silence. As the end of the lake came in sight, thewaves began to leap aboard with such steady recurrence that thecorrespondents no longer chopped ice but flung the water out withbuckets. Even this would not do, and, after a shouted conference withRasmunsen, they attacked the baggage. Flour, bacon, beans, blankets, cooking-stove, ropes, odds and ends, everything they could get hands on, flew overboard. The boat acknowledged it at once, taking less water andrising more buoyantly. 

"That'll do!" Rasmunsen called sternly, as they applied themselves to thetop layer of eggs. 

"The h-hell it will!" answered the shivering one, savagely. With theexception of their notes, films, and cameras, they had sacrificed theiroutfit. He bent over, laid hold of an egg-box, and began to worry it outfrom under the lashing. 

"Drop it! Drop it, I say!"

Rasmunsen had managed to draw his revolver, and with the crook of his armover the sweep head, was taking aim. The correspondent stood up on thethwart, balancing back and forth, his face twisted with menace andspeechless anger. 

"My God!"

So cried his brother correspondent, hurling himself, face downward, intothe bottom of the boat. The _Alma_, under the divided attention ofRasmunsen, had been caught by a great mass of water and whirled around. The after leach hollowed, the sail emptied and jibed, and the boom, sweeping with terrific force across the boat, carried the angrycorrespondent overboard with a broken back. Mast and sail had gone overthe side as well. A drenching sea followed, as the boat lost headway, and Rasmunsen sprang to the bailing bucket. 

Several boats hurtled past them in the next half-hour, --small boats, boats of their own size, boats afraid, unable to do aught but run madlyon. Then a ten-ton barge, at imminent risk of destruction, lowered sailto windward and lumbered down upon them. 

"Keep off! Keep off!" Rasmunsen screamed. 

But his low gunwale ground against the heavy craft, and the remainingcorrespondent clambered aboard. Rasmunsen was over the eggs like a catand in the bow of the _Alma_, striving with numb fingers to bend thehauling-lines together. 

"Come on!" a red-whiskered man yelled at him. 

"I've a thousand dozen eggs here, " he shouted back. "Gimme a tow! I'llpay you!"

"Come on!" they howled in chorus. 

A big whitecap broke just beyond, washing over the barge and leaving the_Alma_ half swamped. The men cast off, cursing him as they ran up theirsail. Rasmunsen cursed back and fell to bailing. The mast and sail, like a sea anchor, still fast by the halyards, held the boat head on towind and sea and gave him a chance to fight the water out. 

Three hours later, numbed, exhausted, blathering like a lunatic, butstill bailing, he went ashore on an ice-strewn beach near CaribooCrossing. Two men, a government courier and a half-breed voyageur, dragged him out of the surf, saved his cargo, and beached the Alma. Theywere paddling out of the country in a Peterborough, and gave him shelterfor the night in their storm-bound camp. Next morning they departed, buthe elected to stay by his eggs. And thereafter the name and fame of theman with the thousand dozen eggs began to spread through the land. Gold-seekers who made in before the freeze-up carried the news of his coming. Grizzled old-timers of Forty Mile and Circle City, sour doughs withleathern jaws and bean-calloused stomachs, called up dream memories ofchickens and green things at mention of his name. Dyea and Skaguay tookan interest in his being, and questioned his progress from every man whocame over the passes, while Dawson--golden, omeletless Dawson--frettedand worried, and way-laid every chance arrival for word of him. 

But of this Rasmunsen knew nothing. The day after the wreck he patchedup the _Alma_ and pulled out. A cruel east wind blew in his teeth fromTagish, but he got the oars over the side and bucked manfully into it, though half the time he was drifting backward and chopping ice from theblades. According to the custom of the country, he was driven ashore atWindy Arm; three times on Tagish saw him swamped and beached; and LakeMarsh held him at the freeze-up. The _Alma_ was crushed in the jammingof the floes, but the eggs were intact. These he back-tripped two milesacross the ice to the shore, where he built a cache, which stood foryears after and was pointed out by men who knew. 

Half a thousand frozen miles stretched between him and Dawson, and thewaterway was closed. But Rasmunsen, with a peculiar tense look in hisface, struck back up the lakes on foot. What he suffered on that lonetrip, with nought but a single blanket, an axe, and a handful of beans, is not given to ordinary mortals to know. Only the Arctic adventurer mayunderstand. Suffice that he was caught in a blizzard on Chilkoot andleft two of his toes with the surgeon at Sheep Camp. Yet he stood on hisfeet and washed dishes in the scullery of the _Pawona_ to the PugetSound, and from there passed coal on a P. S. Boat to San Francisco. 

It was a haggard, unkempt man who limped across the shining office floorto raise a second mortgage from the bank people. His hollow cheeksbetrayed themselves through the scraggy beard, and his eyes seemed tohave retired into deep caverns where they burned with cold fires. Hishands were grained from exposure and hard work, and the nails were rimmedwith tight-packed dirt and coal-dust. He spoke vaguely of eggs and ice-packs, winds and tides; but when they declined to let him have more thana second thousand, his talk became incoherent, concerning itself chieflywith the price of dogs and dog-food, and such things as snowshoes andmoccasins and winter trails. They let him have fifteen hundred, whichwas more than the cottage warranted, and breathed easier when he scrawledhis signature and passed out the door. 

Two weeks later he went over Chilkoot with three dog sleds of five dogseach. One team he drove, the two Indians with him driving the others. AtLake Marsh they broke out the cache and loaded up. But there was notrail. He was the first in over the ice, and to him fell the task ofpacking the snow and hammering away through the rough river jams. Behindhim he often observed a camp-fire smoke trickling thinly up through thequiet air, and he wondered why the people did not overtake him. For hewas a stranger to the land and did not understand. Nor could heunderstand his Indians when they tried to explain. This they conceivedto be a hardship, but when they balked and refused to break camp ofmornings, he drove them to their work at pistol point. 

When he slipped through an ice bridge near the White Horse and froze hisfoot, tender yet and oversensitive from the previous freezing, theIndians looked for him to lie up. But he sacrificed a blanket, and, withhis foot incased in an enormous moccasin, big as a water-bucket, continued to take his regular turn with the front sled. Here was thecruellest work, and they respected him, though on the side they rappedtheir foreheads with their knuckles and significantly shook their heads. One night they tried to run away, but the zip-zip of his bullets in thesnow brought them back, snarling but convinced. Whereupon, being onlysavage Chilkat men, they put their heads together to kill him; but heslept like a cat, and, waking or sleeping, the chance never came. Oftenthey tried to tell him the import of the smoke wreath in the rear, but hecould not comprehend and grew suspicious of them. And when they sulkedor shirked, he was quick to let drive at them between the eyes, and quickto cool their heated souls with sight of his ready revolver. 

And so it went--with mutinous men, wild dogs, and a trail that broke theheart. He fought the men to stay with him, fought the dogs to keep themaway from the eggs, fought the ice, the cold, and the pain of his foot, which would not heal. As fast as the young tissue renewed, it was bittenand scared by the frost, so that a running sore developed, into which hecould almost shove his fist. In the mornings, when he first put hisweight upon it, his head went dizzy, and he was near to fainting from thepain; but later on in the day it usually grew numb, to recommence when hecrawled into his blankets and tried to sleep. Yet he, who had been aclerk and sat at a desk all his days, toiled till the Indians wereexhausted, and even out-worked the dogs. How hard he worked, how much hesuffered, he did not know. Being a man of the one idea, now that theidea had come, it mastered him. In the foreground of his consciousnesswas Dawson, in the background his thousand dozen eggs, and midway betweenthe two his ego fluttered, striving always to draw them together to aglittering golden point. This golden point was the five thousanddollars, the consummation of the idea and the point of departure forwhatever new idea might present itself. For the rest, he was a mereautomaton. He was unaware of other things, seeing them as through aglass darkly, and giving them no thought. The work of his hands he didwith machine-like wisdom; likewise the work of his head. So the look onhis face grew very tense, till even the Indians were afraid of it, andmarvelled at the strange white man who had made them slaves and forcedthem to toil with such foolishness. 

Then came a snap on Lake Le Barge, when the cold of outer space smote thetip of the planet, and the force ranged sixty and odd degrees below zero. Here, labouring with open mouth that he might breathe more freely, hechilled his lungs, and for the rest of the trip he was troubled with adry, hacking cough, especially irritable in smoke of camp or under stressof undue exertion. On the Thirty Mile river he found much open water, spanned by precarious ice bridges and fringed with narrow rim ice, trickyand uncertain. The rim ice was impossible to reckon on, and he dared itwithout reckoning, falling back on his revolver when his driversdemurred. But on the ice bridges, covered with snow though they were, precautions could be taken. These they crossed on their snowshoes, withlong poles, held crosswise in their hands, to which to cling in case ofaccident. Once over, the dogs were called to follow. And on such abridge, where the absence of the centre ice was masked by the snow, oneof the Indians met his end. He went through as quickly and neatly as aknife through thin cream, and the current swept him from view down underthe stream ice. 

That night his mate fled away through the pale moonlight, Rasmunsenfutilely puncturing the silence with his revolver--a thing that hehandled with more celerity than cleverness. Thirty-six hours later theIndian made a police camp on the Big Salmon. 

"Um--um--um funny mans--what you call?--top um head all loose, " theinterpreter explained to the puzzled captain. "Eh? Yep, clazy, muchclazy mans. Eggs, eggs, all a time eggs--savvy? Come bime-by. "

It was several days before Rasmunsen arrived, the three sleds lashedtogether, and all the dogs in a single team. It was awkward, and wherethe going was bad he was compelled to back-trip it sled by sled, thoughhe managed most of the time, through herculean efforts, to bring allalong on the one haul. He did not seem moved when the captain of policetold him his man was hitting the high places for Dawson, and was by thattime, probably, half-way between Selkirk and Stewart. Nor did he appearinterested when informed that the police had broken the trail as far asPelly; for he had attained to a fatalistic acceptance of all naturaldispensations, good or ill. But when they told him that Dawson was inthe bitter clutch of famine, he smiled, threw the harness on his dogs, and pulled out. 

But it was at his next halt that the mystery of the smoke was explained. With the word at Big Salmon that the trail was broken to Pelly, there wasno longer any need for the smoke wreath to linger in his wake; andRasmunsen, crouching over lonely fire, saw a motley string of sleds goby. First came the courier and the half-breed who had hauled him outfrom Bennett; then mail-carriers for Circle City, two sleds of them, anda mixed following of ingoing Klondikers. Dogs and men were fresh andfat, while Rasmunsen and his brutes were jaded and worn down to the skinand bone. They of the smoke wreath had travelled one day in three, resting and reserving their strength for the dash to come when brokentrail was met with; while each day he had plunged and floundered forward, breaking the spirit of his dogs and robbing them of their mettle. 

As for himself, he was unbreakable. They thanked him kindly for hisefforts in their behalf, those fat, fresh men, --thanked him kindly, withbroad grins and ribald laughter; and now, when he understood, he made noanswer. Nor did he cherish silent bitterness. It was immaterial. Theidea--the fact behind the idea--was not changed. Here he was and histhousand dozen; there was Dawson; the problem was unaltered. 

At the Little Salmon, being short of dog food, the dogs got into hisgrub, and from there to Selkirk he lived on beans--coarse, brown beans, big beans, grossly nutritive, which griped his stomach and doubled him upat two-hour intervals. But the Factor at Selkirk had a notice on thedoor of the Post to the effect that no steamer had been up the Yukon fortwo years, and in consequence grub was beyond price. He offered to swapflour, however, at the rate of a cupful of each egg, but Rasmunsen shookhis head and hit the trail. Below the Post he managed to buy frozenhorse hide for the dogs, the horses having been slain by the Chilkatcattle men, and the scraps and offal preserved by the Indians. Hetackled the hide himself, but the hair worked into the bean sores of hismouth, and was beyond endurance. 

Here at Selkirk he met the forerunners of the hungry exodus of Dawson, and from there on they crept over the trail, a dismal throng. "No grub!"was the song they sang. "No grub, and had to go. " "Everybody holdingcandles for a rise in the spring. " "Flour dollar 'n a half a pound, andno sellers. "

"Eggs?" one of them answered. "Dollar apiece, but there ain't none. "

Rasmunsen made a rapid calculation. "Twelve thousand dollars, " he saidaloud. 

"Hey?" the man asked. 

"Nothing, " he answered, and _mushed_ the dogs along. 

When he arrived at Stewart River, seventy from Dawson, five of his dogswere gone, and the remainder were falling in the traces. He, also, wasin the traces, hauling with what little strength was left in him. Eventhen he was barely crawling along ten miles a day. His cheek-bones andnose, frost-bitten again and again, were turned bloody-black and hideous. The thumb, which was separated from the fingers by the gee-pole, hadlikewise been nipped and gave him great pain. The monstrous moccasinstill incased his foot, and strange pains were beginning to rack the leg. At Sixty Mile, the last beans, which he had been rationing for some time, were finished; yet he steadfastly refused to touch the eggs. He couldnot reconcile his mind to the legitimacy of it, and staggered and fellalong the way to Indian River. Here a fresh-killed moose and an open-handed old-timer gave him and his dogs new strength, and at Ainslie's hefelt repaid for it all when a stampede, ripe from Dawson in five hours, was sure he could get a dollar and a quarter for every egg he possessed. 

He came up the steep bank by the Dawson barracks with fluttering heartand shaking knees. The dogs were so weak that he was forced to restthem, and, waiting, he leaned limply against the gee-pole. A man, aneminently decorous-looking man, came sauntering by in a great bearskincoat. He glanced at Rasmunsen curiously, then stopped and ran aspeculative eye over the dogs and the three lashed sleds. 

"What you got?" he asked. 

"Eggs, " Rasmunsen answered huskily, hardly able to pitch his voice abovea whisper. 

"Eggs! Whoopee! Whoopee!" He sprang up into the air, gyrated madly, and finished with half-a-dozen war steps. "You don't say--all of 'em?"

"All of 'em. "

"Say, you must be the Egg Man. " He walked around and viewed Rasmunsenfrom the other side. "Come, now, ain't you the Egg Man?"

Rasmunsen didn't know, but supposed he was, and the man sobered down abit. 

"What d'ye expect to get for 'em?" he asked cautiously. 

Rasmunsen became audacious. "Dollar 'n a half, " he said. 

"Done!" the man came back promptly. "Gimme a dozen. "

"I--I mean a dollar 'n a half apiece, " Rasmunsen hesitatingly explained. 

"Sure. I heard you. Make it two dozen. Here's the dust. "

The man pulled out a healthy gold sack the size of a small sausage andknocked it negligently against the gee-pole. Rasmunsen felt a strangetrembling in the pit of his stomach, a tickling of the nostrils, and analmost overwhelming desire to sit down and cry. But a curious, wide-eyedcrowd was beginning to collect, and man after man was calling out foreggs. He was without scales, but the man with the bearskin coat fetcheda pair and obligingly weighed in the dust while Rasmunsen passed out thegoods. Soon there was a pushing and shoving and shouldering, and a greatclamour. Everybody wanted to buy and to be served first. And as theexcitement grew, Rasmunsen cooled down. This would never do. There mustbe something behind the fact of their buying so eagerly. It would bewiser if he rested first and sized up the market. Perhaps eggs wereworth two dollars apiece. Anyway, whenever he wished to sell, he wassure of a dollar and a half. "Stop!" he cried, when a couple of hundredhad been sold. "No more now. I'm played out. I've got to get a cabin, and then you can come and see me. "

A groan went up at this, but the man with the bearskin coat approved. Twenty-four of the frozen eggs went rattling in his capacious pockets, and he didn't care whether the rest of the town ate or not. Besides, hecould see Rasmunsen was on his last legs. 

"There's a cabin right around the second corner from the Monte Carlo, " hetold him--"the one with the sody-bottle window. It ain't mine, but I'vegot charge of it. Rents for ten a day and cheap for the money. You moveright in, and I'll see you later. Don't forget the sody-bottle window. "

"Tra-la-loo!" he called back a moment later. "I'm goin' up the hill toeat eggs and dream of home. "

On his way to the cabin, Rasmunsen recollected he was hungry and bought asmall supply of provisions at the N. A. T. & T. Store--also a beefsteakat the butcher shop and dried salmon for the dogs. He found the cabinwithout difficulty, and left the dogs in the harness while he started thefire and got the coffee under way. 

"A dollar 'n a half apiece--one thousand dozen--eighteen thousanddollars!" he kept muttering it to himself, over and over, as he wentabout his work. 

As he flopped the steak into the frying-pan the door opened. He turned. It was the man with the bearskin coat. He seemed to come in withdetermination, as though bound on some explicit errand, but as he lookedat Rasmunsen an expression of perplexity came into his face. 

"I say--now I say--" he began, then halted. 

Rasmunsen wondered if he wanted the rent. 

"I say, damn it, you know, them eggs is bad. "

Rasmunsen staggered. He felt as though some one had struck him anastounding blow between the eyes. The walls of the cabin reeled andtilted up. He put out his hand to steady himself and rested it on thestove. The sharp pain and the smell of the burning flesh brought himback to himself. 

"I see, " he said slowly, fumbling in his pocket for the sack. "You wantyour money back. "

"It ain't the money, " the man said, "but hain't you got any eggs--good?"

Rasmunsen shook his head. "You'd better take the money. "

But the man refused and backed away. "I'll come back, " he said, "whenyou've taken stock, and get what's comin'. "

Rasmunsen rolled the chopping-block into the cabin and carried in theeggs. He went about it quite calmly. He took up the hand-axe, and, oneby one, chopped the eggs in half. These halves he examined carefully andlet fall to the floor. At first he sampled from the different cases, then deliberately emptied one case at a time. The heap on the floor grewlarger. The coffee boiled over and the smoke of the burning beefsteakfilled the cabin. He chopped steadfastly and monotonously till the lastcase was finished. 

Somebody knocked at the door, knocked again, and let himself in. 

"What a mess!" he remarked, as he paused and surveyed the scene. 

The severed eggs were beginning to thaw in the heat of the stove, and amiserable odour was growing stronger. 

"Must a-happened on the steamer, " he suggested. 

Rasmunsen looked at him long and blankly. 

"I'm Murray, Big Jim Murray, everybody knows me, " the man volunteered. "I'm just hearin' your eggs is rotten, and I'm offerin' you two hundredfor the batch. They ain't good as salmon, but still they're fairscoffin's for dogs. "

Rasmunsen seemed turned to stone. He did not move. "You go to hell, " hesaid passionlessly. 

"Now just consider. I pride myself it's a decent price for a mess likethat, and it's better 'n nothin'. Two hundred. What you say?"

"You go to hell, " Rasmunsen repeated softly, "and get out of here. "

Murray gaped with a great awe, then went out carefully, backward, withhis eyes fixed an the other's face. 

Rasmunsen followed him out and turned the dogs loose. He threw them allthe salmon he had bought, and coiled a sled-lashing up in his hand. Thenhe re-entered the cabin and drew the latch in after him. The smoke fromthe cindered steak made his eyes smart. He stood on the bunk, passed thelashing over the ridge-pole, and measured the swing-off with his eye. Itdid not seem to satisfy, for he put the stool on the bunk and climbedupon the stool. He drove a noose in the end of the lashing and slippedhis head through. The other end he made fast. Then he kicked the stoolout from under. 

THE MARRIAGE OF LIT-LIT

When John Fox came into a country where whisky freezes solid and may beused as a paper-weight for a large part of the year, he came without theideals and illusions that usually hamper the progress of more delicatelynurtured adventurers. Born and reared on the frontier fringe of theUnited States, he took with him into Canada a primitive cast of mind, anelemental simplicity and grip on things, as it were, that insured himimmediate success in his new career. From a mere servant of the HudsonBay Company, driving a paddle with the voyageurs and carrying goods onhis back across the portages, he swiftly rose to a Factorship and tookcharge of a trading post at Fort Angelus. 

Here, because of his elemental simplicity, he took to himself a nativewife, and, by reason of the connubial bliss that followed, he escaped theunrest and vain longings that curse the days of more fastidious men, spoil their work, and conquer them in the end. He lived contentedly, wasat single purposes with the business he was set there to do, and achieveda brilliant record in the service of the Company. About this time hiswife died, was claimed by her people, and buried with savage circumstancein a tin trunk in the top of a tree. 

Two sons she had borne him, and when the Company promoted him, hejourneyed with them still deeper into the vastness of the North-WestTerritory to a place called Sin Rock, where he took charge of a new postin a more important fur field. Here he spent several lonely anddepressing months, eminently disgusted with the unprepossessingappearance of the Indian maidens, and greatly worried by his growing sonswho stood in need of a mother's care. Then his eyes chanced upon Lit-lit. 

"Lit-lit--well, she is Lit-lit, " was the fashion in which he despairinglydescribed her to his chief clerk, Alexander McLean. 

McLean was too fresh from his Scottish upbringing--"not dry behind theears yet, " John Fox put it--to take to the marriage customs of thecountry. Nevertheless he was not averse to the Factor's imperilling hisown immortal soul, and, especially, feeling an ominous attraction himselffor Lit-lit, he was sombrely content to clinch his own soul's safety byseeing her married to the Factor. 

Nor is it to be wondered that McLean's austere Scotch soul stood indanger of being thawed in the sunshine of Lit-lit's eyes. She waspretty, and slender, and willowy; without the massive face andtemperamental stolidity of the average squaw. "Lit-lit, " so called fromher fashion, even as a child, of being fluttery, of darting about fromplace to place like a butterfly, of being inconsequent and merry, and oflaughing as lightly as she darted and danced about. 

Lit-lit was the daughter of Snettishane, a prominent chief in the tribe, by a half-breed mother, and to him the Factor fared casually one summerday to open negotiations of marriage. He sat with the chief in the smokeof a mosquito smudge before his lodge, and together they talked abouteverything under the sun, or, at least, everything that in the Northlandis under the sun, with the sole exception of marriage. John Fox had comeparticularly to talk of marriage; Snettishane knew it, and John Fox knewhe knew it, wherefore the subject was religiously avoided. This isalleged to be Indian subtlety. In reality it is transparent simplicity. 

The hours slipped by, and Fox and Snettishane smoked interminable pipes, looking each other in the eyes with a guilelessness superbly histrionic. In the mid-afternoon McLean and his brother clerk, McTavish, strolledpast, innocently uninterested, on their way to the river. When theystrolled back again an hour later, Fox and Snettishane had attained to aceremonious discussion of the condition and quality of the gunpowder andbacon which the Company was offering in trade. Meanwhile Lit-lit, divining the Factor's errand, had crept in under the rear wall of thelodge, and through the front flap was peeping out at the two logomachistsby the mosquito smudge. She was flushed and happy-eyed, proud that noless a man than the Factor (who stood next to God in the Northlandhierarchy) had singled her out, femininely curious to see at close rangewhat manner of man he was. Sunglare on the ice, camp smoke, and weatherbeat had burned his face to a copper-brown, so that her father was asfair as he, while she was fairer. She was remotely glad of this, andmore immediately glad that he was large and strong, though his greatblack beard half frightened her, it was so strange. 

Being very young, she was unversed in the ways of men. Seventeen timesshe had seen the sun travel south and lose itself beyond the sky-line, and seventeen times she had seen it travel back again and ride the skyday and night till there was no night at all. And through these yearsshe had been cherished jealously by Snettishane, who stood between herand all suitors, listening disdainfully to the young hunters as they bidfor her hand, and turning them away as though she were beyond price. Snettishane was mercenary. Lit-lit was to him an investment. Sherepresented so much capital, from which he expected to receive, not acertain definite interest, but an incalculable interest. 

And having thus been reared in a manner as near to that of the nunnery astribal conditions would permit, it was with a great and maidenly anxietythat she peeped out at the man who had surely come for her, at thehusband who was to teach her all that was yet unlearned of life, at themasterful being whose word was to be her law, and who was to mete andbound her actions and comportment for the rest of her days. 

But, peeping through the front flap of the lodge, flushed and thrillingat the strange destiny reaching out for her, she grew disappointed as theday wore along, and the Factor and her father still talked pompously ofmatters concerning other things and not pertaining to marriage things atall. As the sun sank lower and lower toward the north and midnightapproached, the Factor began making unmistakable preparations fordeparture. As he turned to stride away Lit-lit's heart sank; but it roseagain as he halted, half turning on one heel. 

"Oh, by the way, Snettishane, " he said, "I want a squaw to wash for meand mend my clothes. "

Snettishane grunted and suggested Wanidani, who was an old woman andtoothless. 

"No, no, " interposed the Factor. "What I want is a wife. I've been kindof thinking about it, and the thought just struck me that you might knowof some one that would suit. "

Snettishane looked interested, whereupon the Factor retraced his steps, casually and carelessly to linger and discuss this new and incidentaltopic. 

"Kattou?" suggested Snettishane. 

"She has but one eye, " objected the Factor. 

"Laska?"

"Her knees be wide apart when she stands upright. Kips, your biggestdog, can leap between her knees when she stands upright. "

"Senatee?" went on the imperturbable Snettishane. 

But John Fox feigned anger, crying: "What foolishness is this? Am I old, that thou shouldst mate me with old women? Am I toothless? lame of leg?blind of eye? Or am I poor that no bright-eyed maiden may look withfavour upon me? Behold! I am the Factor, both rich and great, a powerin the land, whose speech makes men tremble and is obeyed!"

Snettishane was inwardly pleased, though his sphinx-like visage neverrelaxed. He was drawing the Factor, and making him break ground. Beinga creature so elemental as to have room for but one idea at a time, Snettishane could pursue that one idea a greater distance than could JohnFox. For John Fox, elemental as he was, was still complex enough toentertain several glimmering ideas at a time, which debarred him frompursuing the one as single-heartedly or as far as did the chief. 

Snettishane calmly continued calling the roster of eligible maidens, which, name by name, as fast as uttered, were stamped ineligible by JohnFox, with specified objections appended. Again he gave it up and startedto return to the Fort. Snettishane watched him go, making no effort tostop him, but seeing him, in the end, stop himself. 

"Come to think of it, " the Factor remarked, "we both of us forgot Lit-lit. Now I wonder if she'll suit me?"

Snettishane met the suggestion with a mirthless face, behind the mask ofwhich his soul grinned wide. It was a distinct victory. Had the Factorgone but one step farther, perforce Snettishane would himself havementioned the name of Lit-lit, but--the Factor had not gone that one stepfarther. 

The chief was non-committal concerning Lit-lit's suitability, till hedrove the white man into taking the next step in order of procedure. 

"Well, " the Factor meditated aloud, "the only way to find out is to makea try of it. " He raised his voice. "So I will give for Lit-lit tenblankets and three pounds of tobacco which is good tobacco. "

Snettishane replied with a gesture which seemed to say that all theblankets and tobacco in all the world could not compensate him for theloss of Lit-lit and her manifold virtues. When pressed by the Factor toset a price, he coolly placed it at five hundred blankets, ten guns, fifty pounds of tobacco, twenty scarlet cloths, ten bottles of rum, amusic-box, and lastly the good-will and best offices of the Factor, witha place by his fire. 

The Factor apparently suffered a stroke of apoplexy, which stroke wassuccessful in reducing the blankets to two hundred and in cutting out theplace by the fire--an unheard-of condition in the marriages of white menwith the daughters of the soil. In the end, after three hours more ofchaffering, they came to an agreement. For Lit-lit Snettishane was toreceive one hundred blankets, five pounds of tobacco, three guns, and abottle of rum, goodwill and best offices included, which according toJohn Fox, was ten blankets and a gun more than she was worth. And as hewent home through the wee sma' hours, the three-o'clock sun blazing inthe due north-east, he was unpleasantly aware that Snettishane had bestedhim over the bargain. 

Snettishane, tired and victorious, sought his bed, and discovered Lit-litbefore she could escape from the lodge. 

He grunted knowingly: "Thou hast seen. Thou has heard. Wherefore it beplain to thee thy father's very great wisdom and understanding. I havemade for thee a great match. Heed my words and walk in the way of mywords, go when I say go, come when I bid thee come, and we shall grow fatwith the wealth of this big white man who is a fool according to hisbigness. "

The next day no trading was done at the store. The Factor opened whiskybefore breakfast, to the delight of McLean and McTavish, gave his dogsdouble rations, and wore his best moccasins. Outside the Fortpreparations were under way for a _potlatch_. Potlatch means "a giving, "and John Fox's intention was to signalize his marriage with Lit-lit by apotlatch as generous as she was good-looking. In the afternoon the wholetribe gathered to the feast. Men, women, children, and dogs gorged torepletion, nor was there one person, even among the chance visitors andstray hunters from other tribes, who failed to receive some token of thebridegroom's largess. 

Lit-lit, tearfully shy and frightened, was bedecked by her beardedhusband with a new calico dress, splendidly beaded moccasins, a gorgeoussilk handkerchief over her raven hair, a purple scarf about her throat, brass ear-rings and finger-rings, and a whole pint of pinchbeckjewellery, including a Waterbury watch. Snettishane could scarce containhimself at the spectacle, but watching his chance drew her aside from thefeast. 

"Not this night, nor the next night, " he began ponderously, "but in thenights to come, when I shall call like a raven by the river bank, it isfor thee to rise up from thy big husband, who is a fool, and come to me. 

"Nay, nay, " he went on hastily, at sight of the dismay in her face atturning her back upon her wonderful new life. "For no sooner shall thishappen than thy big husband, who is a fool, will come wailing to mylodge. Then it is for thee to wail likewise, claiming that this thing isnot well, and that the other thing thou dost not like, and that to be thewife of the Factor is more than thou didst bargain for, only wilt thou becontent with more blankets, and more tobacco, and more wealth of varioussorts for thy poor old father, Snettishane. Remember well, when I callin the night, like a raven, from the river bank. "

Lit-lit nodded; for to disobey her father was a peril she knew well; and, furthermore, it was a little thing he asked, a short separation from theFactor, who would know only greater gladness at having her back. Shereturned to the feast, and, midnight being well at hand, the Factorsought her out and led her away to the Fort amid joking and outcry, inwhich the squaws were especially conspicuous. 

Lit-lit quickly found that married life with the head-man of a fort waseven better than she had dreamed. No longer did she have to fetch woodand water and wait hand and foot upon cantankerous menfolk. For thefirst time in her life she could lie abed till breakfast was on thetable. And what a bed!--clean and soft, and comfortable as no bed shehad ever known. And such food! Flour, cooked into biscuits, hot-cakesand bread, three times a day and every day, and all one wanted! Suchprodigality was hardly believable. 

To add to her contentment, the Factor was cunningly kind. He had buriedone wife, and he knew how to drive with a slack rein that went firm onlyon occasion, and then went very firm. "Lit-lit is boss of this place, "he announced significantly at the table the morning after the wedding. "What she says goes. Understand?" And McLean and McTavish understood. Also, they knew that the Factor had a heavy hand. 

But Lit-lit did not take advantage. Taking a leaf from the book of herhusband, she at once assumed charge of his own growing sons, giving themadded comforts and a measure of freedom like to that which he gave her. The two sons were loud in the praise of their new mother; McLean andMcTavish lifted their voices; and the Factor bragged of the joys ofmatrimony till the story of her good behaviour and her husband'ssatisfaction became the property of all the dwellers in the Sin Rockdistrict. 

Whereupon Snettishane, with visions of his incalculable interest keepinghim awake of nights, thought it time to bestir himself. On the tenthnight of her wedded life Lit-lit was awakened by the croaking of a raven, and she knew that Snettishane was waiting for her by the river bank. Inher great happiness she had forgotten her pact, and now it came back toher with behind it all the childish terror of her father. For a time shelay in fear and trembling, loath to go, afraid to stay. But in the endthe Factor won the silent victory, and his kindness plus his greatmuscles and square jaw, nerved her to disregard Snettishane's call. 

But in the morning she arose very much afraid, and went about her dutiesin momentary fear of her father's coming. As the day wore along, however, she began to recover her spirits. John Fox, soundly beratingMcLean and McTavish for some petty dereliction of duty, helped her topluck up courage. She tried not to let him go out of her sight, and whenshe followed him into the huge cache and saw him twirling and tossinggreat bales around as though they were feather pillows, she feltstrengthened in her disobedience to her father. Also (it was her firstvisit to the warehouse, and Sin Rock was the chief distributing point toseveral chains of lesser posts), she was astounded at the endlessness ofthe wealth there stored away. 

This sight and the picture in her mind's eye of the bare lodge ofSnettishane, put all doubts at rest. Yet she capped her conviction by abrief word with one of her step-sons. "White daddy good?" was what sheasked, and the boy answered that his father was the best man he had everknown. That night the raven croaked again. On the night following thecroaking was more persistent. It awoke the Factor, who tossed restlesslyfor a while. Then he said aloud, "Damn that raven, " and Lit-lit laughedquietly under the blankets. 

In the morning, bright and early, Snettishane put in an ominousappearance and was set to breakfast in the kitchen with Wanidani. Herefused "squaw food, " and a little later bearded his son-in-law in thestore where the trading was done. Having learned, he said, that hisdaughter was such a jewel, he had come for more blankets, more tobacco, and more guns--especially more guns. He had certainly been cheated inher price, he held, and he had come for justice. But the Factor hadneither blankets nor justice to spare. Whereupon he was informed thatSnettishane had seen the missionary at Three Forks, who had notified himthat such marriages were not made in heaven, and that it was his father'sduty to demand his daughter back. 

"I am good Christian man now, " Snettishane concluded. "I want my Lit-litto go to heaven. "

The Factor's reply was short and to the point; for he directed his father-in-law to go to the heavenly antipodes, and by the scruff of the neck andthe slack of the blanket propelled him on that trail as far as the door. 

But Snettishane sneaked around and in by the kitchen, cornering Lit-litin the great living-room of the Fort. 

"Mayhap thou didst sleep over-sound last night when I called by the riverbank, " he began, glowering darkly. 

"Nay, I was awake and heard. " Her heart was beating as though it wouldchoke her, but she went on steadily, "And the night before I was awakeand heard, and yet again the night before. "

And thereat, out of her great happiness and out of the fear that it mightbe taken from her, she launched into an original and glowing address uponthe status and rights of woman--the first new-woman lecture deliverednorth of Fifty-three. 

But it fell on unheeding ears. Snettishane was still in the dark ages. As she paused for breath, he said threateningly, "To-night I shall callagain like the raven. "

At this moment the Factor entered the room and again helped Snettishaneon his way to the heavenly antipodes. 

That night the raven croaked more persistently than ever. Lit-lit, whowas a light sleeper, heard and smiled. John Fox tossed restlessly. Thenhe awoke and tossed about with greater restlessness. He grumbled andsnorted, swore under his breath and over his breath, and finally flungout of bed. He groped his way to the great living-room, and from therack took down a loaded shot-gun--loaded with bird-shot, left therein bythe careless McTavish. 

The Factor crept carefully out of the Fort and down to the river. Thecroaking had ceased, but he stretched out in the long grass and waited. The air seemed a chilly balm, and the earth, after the heat of the day, now and again breathed soothingly against him. The Factor, gathered intothe rhythm of it all, dozed off, with his head upon his arm, and slept. 

Fifty yards away, head resting on knees, and with his back to John Fox, Snettishane likewise slept, gently conquered by the quietude of thenight. An hour slipped by and then he awoke, and, without lifting hishead, set the night vibrating with the hoarse gutturals of the ravencall. 

The Factor roused, not with the abrupt start of civilized man, but withthe swift and comprehensive glide from sleep to waking of the savage. Inthe night-light he made out a dark object in the midst of the grass andbrought his gun to bear upon it. A second croak began to rise, and hepulled the trigger. The crickets ceased from their sing-song chant, thewildfowl from their squabbling, and the raven croak broke midmost anddied away in gasping silence. 

John Fox ran to the spot and reached for the thing he had killed, but hisfingers closed on a coarse mop of hair and he turned Snettishane's faceupward to the starlight. He knew how a shotgun scattered at fifty yards, and he knew that he had peppered Snettishane across the shoulders and inthe small of the back. And Snettishane knew that he knew, but neitherreferred to it. 

"What dost thou here?" the Factor demanded. "It were time old bonesshould be in bed. "

But Snettishane was stately in spite of the bird-shot burning under hisskin. 

"Old bones will not sleep, " he said solemnly. "I weep for my daughter, for my daughter Lit-lit, who liveth and who yet is dead, and who goethwithout doubt to the white man's hell. "

"Weep henceforth on the far bank, beyond ear-shot of the Fort, " said JohnFox, turning on his heel, "for the noise of thy weeping is exceedinggreat and will not let one sleep of nights. "

"My heart is sore, " Snettishane answered, "and my days and nights beblack with sorrow. "

"As the raven is black, " said John Fox. 

"As the raven is black, " Snettishane said. 

Never again was the voice of the raven heard by the river bank. Lit-litgrows matronly day by day and is very happy. Also, there are sisters tothe sons of John Fox's first wife who lies buried in a tree. OldSnettishane is no longer a visitor at the Fort, and spends long hoursraising a thin, aged voice against the filial ingratitude of children ingeneral and of his daughter Lit-lit in particular. His declining yearsare embittered by the knowledge that he was cheated, and even John Foxhas withdrawn the assertion that the price for Lit-lit was too much byten blankets and a gun. 

BATARD

Batard was a devil. This was recognized throughout the Northland. "Hell's Spawn" he was called by many men, but his master, Black Leclere, chose for him the shameful name "Batard. " Now Black Leclere was also adevil, and the twain were well matched. There is a saying that when twodevils come together, hell is to pay. This is to be expected, and thiscertainly was to be expected when Batard and Black Leclere came together. The first time they met, Batard was a part-grown puppy, lean and hungry, with bitter eyes; and they met with snap and snarl, and wicked looks, forLeclere's upper lip had a wolfish way of lifting and showing the white, cruel teeth. And it lifted then, and his eyes glinted viciously, as hereached for Batard and dragged him out from the squirming litter. It wascertain that they divined each other, for on the instant Batard hadburied his puppy fangs in Leclere's hand, and Leclere, thumb and finger, was coolly choking his young life out of him. 

"_Sacredam_, " the Frenchman said softly, flirting the quick blood fromhis bitten hand and gazing down on the little puppy choking and gaspingin the snow. 

Leclere turned to John Hamlin, storekeeper of the Sixty Mile Post. "Datfo' w'at Ah lak heem. 'Ow moch, eh, you, _M'sieu_'? 'Ow moch? Ah buyheem, now; Ah buy heem queek. "

And because he hated him with an exceeding bitter hate, Leclere boughtBatard and gave him his shameful name. And for five years the twainadventured across the Northland, from St. Michael's and the Yukon deltato the head-reaches of the Pelly and even so far as the Peace River, Athabasca, and the Great Slave. And they acquired a reputation foruncompromising wickedness, the like of which never before attached itselfto man and dog. 

Batard did not know his father--hence his name--but, as John Hamlin knew, his father was a great grey timber wolf. But the mother of Batard, as hedimly remembered her, was snarling, bickering, obscene, husky, full-fronted and heavy-chested, with a malign eye, a cat-like grip onlife, and a genius for trickery and evil. There was neither faith nortrust in her. Her treachery alone could be relied upon, and her wild-wood amours attested her general depravity. Much of evil and much ofstrength were there in these, Batard's progenitors, and, bone and fleshof their bone and flesh, he had inherited it all. And then came BlackLeclere, to lay his heavy hand on the bit of pulsating puppy life, topress and prod and mould till it became a big bristling beast, acute inknavery, overspilling with hate, sinister, malignant, diabolical. With aproper master Batard might have made an ordinary, fairly efficient sled-dog. He never got the chance: Leclere but confirmed him in hiscongenital iniquity. 

The history of Batard and Leclere is a history of war--of five cruel, relentless years, of which their first meeting is fit summary. To beginwith, it was Leclere's fault, for he hated with understanding andintelligence, while the long-legged, ungainly puppy hated only blindly, instinctively, without reason or method. At first there were norefinements of cruelty (these were to come later), but simple beatingsand crude brutalities. In one of these Batard had an ear injured. Henever regained control of the riven muscles, and ever after the eardrooped limply down to keep keen the memory of his tormentor. And henever forgot. 

His puppyhood was a period of foolish rebellion. He was always worsted, but he fought back because it was his nature to fight back. And he wasunconquerable. Yelping shrilly from the pain of lash and club, he nonethe less contrived always to throw in the defiant snarl, the bittervindictive menace of his soul which fetched without fail more blows andbeatings. But his was his mother's tenacious grip on life. Nothingcould kill him. He flourished under misfortune, grew fat with famine, and out of his terrible struggle for life developed a preternaturalintelligence. His were the stealth and cunning of the husky, his mother, and the fierceness and valour of the wolf, his father. 

Possibly it was because of his father that he never wailed. His puppyyelps passed with his lanky legs, so that he became grim and taciturn, quick to strike, slow to warn. He answered curse with snarl, and blowwith snap, grinning the while his implacable hatred; but never again, under the extremest agony, did Leclere bring from him the cry of fear norof pain. This unconquerableness but fanned Leclere's wrath and stirredhim to greater deviltries. 

Did Leclere give Batard half a fish and to his mates whole ones, Batardwent forth to rob other dogs of their fish. Also he robbed caches andexpressed himself in a thousand rogueries, till he became a terror to alldogs and masters of dogs. Did Leclere beat Batard and fondleBabette--Babette who was not half the worker he was--why, Batard threwher down in the snow and broke her hind leg in his heavy jaws, so thatLeclere was forced to shoot her. Likewise, in bloody battles, Batardmastered all his team-mates, set them the law of trail and forage, andmade them live to the law he set. 

In five years he heard but one kind word, received but one soft stroke ofa hand, and then he did not know what manner of things they were. Heleaped like the untamed thing he was, and his jaws were together in aflash. It was the missionary at Sunrise, a newcomer in the country, whospoke the kind word and gave the soft stroke of the hand. And for sixmonths after, he wrote no letters home to the States, and the surgeon atMcQuestion travelled two hundred miles on the ice to save him from blood-poisoning. 

Men and dogs looked askance at Batard when he drifted into their campsand posts. The men greeted him with feet threateningly lifted for thekick, the dogs with bristling manes and bared fangs. Once a man did kickBatard, and Batard, with quick wolf snap, closed his jaws like a steeltrap on the man's calf and crunched down to the bone. Whereat the manwas determined to have his life, only Black Leclere, with ominous eyesand naked hunting-knife, stepped in between. The killing of Batard--ah, _sacredam_, _that_ was a pleasure Leclere reserved for himself. Some dayit would happen, or else--bah! who was to know? Anyway, the problemwould be solved. 

For they had become problems to each other. The very breath each drewwas a challenge and a menace to the other. Their hate bound themtogether as love could never bind. Leclere was bent on the coming of theday when Batard should wilt in spirit and cringe and whimper at his feet. And Batard--Leclere knew what was in Batard's mind, and more than oncehad read it in Batard's eyes. And so clearly had he read, that whenBatard was at his back, he made it a point to glance often over hisshoulder. 

Men marvelled when Leclere refused large money for the dog. "Some dayyou'll kill him and be out his price, " said John Hamlin once, when Batardlay panting in the snow where Leclere had kicked him, and no one knewwhether his ribs were broken, and no one dared look to see. 

"Dat, " said Leclere, dryly, "dat is my biz'ness, _M'sieu_'. "

And the men marvelled that Batard did not run away. They did notunderstand. But Leclere understood. He was a man who lived much in theopen, beyond the sound of human tongue, and he had learned the voices ofwind and storm, the sigh of night, the whisper of dawn, the clash of day. In a dim way he could hear the green things growing, the running of thesap, the bursting of the bud. And he knew the subtle speech of thethings that moved, of the rabbit in the snare, the moody raven beatingthe air with hollow wing, the baldface shuffling under the moon, the wolflike a grey shadow gliding betwixt the twilight and the dark. And to himBatard spoke clear and direct. Full well he understood why Batard didnot run away, and he looked more often over his shoulder. 

When in anger, Batard was not nice to look upon, and more than once hadhe leapt for Leclere's throat, to be stretched quivering and senseless inthe snow, by the butt of the ever ready dogwhip. And so Batard learnedto bide his time. When he reached his full strength and prime of youth, he thought the time had come. He was broad-chested, powerfully muscled, of far more than ordinary size, and his neck from head to shoulders was amass of bristling hair--to all appearances a full-blooded wolf. Leclerewas lying asleep in his furs when Batard deemed the time to be ripe. Hecrept upon him stealthily, head low to earth and lone ear laid back, witha feline softness of tread. Batard breathed gently, very gently, and nottill he was close at hand did he raise his head. He paused for a momentand looked at the bronzed bull throat, naked and knotty, and swelling toa deep steady pulse. The slaver dripped down his fangs and slid off histongue at the sight, and in that moment he remembered his drooping ear, his uncounted blows and prodigious wrongs, and without a sound sprang onthe sleeping man. 

Leclere awoke to the pang of the fangs in his throat, and, perfect animalthat he was, he awoke clear-headed and with full comprehension. Heclosed on Batard's windpipe with both his hands, and rolled out of hisfurs to get his weight uppermost. But the thousands of Batard'sancestors had clung at the throats of unnumbered moose and caribou anddragged them down, and the wisdom of those ancestors was his. WhenLeclere's weight came on top of him, he drove his hind legs upwards andin, and clawed down chest and abdomen, ripping and tearing through skinand muscle. And when he felt the man's body wince above him and lift, heworried and shook at the man's throat. His team-mates closed around in asnarling circle, and Batard, with failing breath and fading sense, knewthat their jaws were hungry for him. But that did not matter--it was theman, the man above him, and he ripped and clawed, and shook and worried, to the last ounce of his strength. But Leclere choked him with both hishands, till Batard's chest heaved and writhed for the air denied, and hiseyes glazed and set, and his jaws slowly loosened, and his tongueprotruded black and swollen. 

"Eh? _Bon_, you devil!" Leclere gurgled mouth and throat clogged withhis own blood, as he shoved the dizzy dog from him. 

And then Leclere cursed the other dogs off as they fell upon Batard. Theydrew back into a wider circle, squatting alertly on their haunches andlicking their chops, the hair on every neck bristling and erect. 

Batard recovered quickly, and at sound of Leclere's voice, tottered tohis feet and swayed weakly back and forth. 

"A-h-ah! You beeg devil!" Leclere spluttered. "Ah fix you; Ah fix youplentee, by _Gar_!"

Batard, the air biting into his exhausted lungs like wine, flashed fullinto the man's face, his jaws missing and coming together with a metallicclip. They rolled over and over on the snow, Leclere striking madly withhis fists. Then they separated, face to face, and circled back and forthbefore each other. Leclere could have drawn his knife. His rifle was athis feet. But the beast in him was up and raging. He would do the thingwith his hands--and his teeth. Batard sprang in, but Leclere knocked himover with a blow of the fist, fell upon him, and buried his teeth to thebone in the dog's shoulder. 

It was a primordial setting and a primordial scene, such as might havebeen in the savage youth of the world. An open space in a dark forest, aring of grinning wolf-dogs, and in the centre two beasts, locked incombat, snapping and snarling raging madly about panting, sobbing, cursing, straining, wild with passion, in a fury of murder, ripping andtearing and clawing in elemental brutishness. 

But Leclere caught Batard behind the ear with a blow from his fist, knocking him over, and, for the instant, stunning him. Then Leclereleaped upon him with his feet, and sprang up and down, striving to grindhim into the earth. Both Batard's hind legs were broken ere Leclereceased that he might catch breath. 

"A-a-ah! A-a-ah!" he screamed, incapable of speech, shaking his fist, through sheer impotence of throat and larynx. 

But Batard was indomitable. He lay there in a helpless welter, his lipfeebly lifting and writhing to the snarl he had not the strength toutter. Leclere kicked him, and the tired jaws closed on the ankle, butcould not break the skin. 

Then Leclere picked up the whip and proceeded almost to cut him topieces, at each stroke of the lash crying: "Dis taim Ah break you! Eh?By _Gar_! Ah break you!"

In the end, exhausted, fainting from loss of blood, he crumpled up andfell by his victim, and when the wolf-dogs closed in to take theirvengeance, with his last consciousness dragged his body on top of Batardto shield him from their fangs. 

This occurred not far from Sunrise, and the missionary, opening the doorto Leclere a few hours later, was surprised to note the absence of Batardfrom the team. Nor did his surprise lessen when Leclere threw back therobes from the sled, gathered Batard into his arms and staggered acrossthe threshold. It happened that the surgeon of McQuestion, who wassomething of a gadabout, was up on a gossip, and between them theyproceeded to repair Leclere, "_Merci, non_, " said he. "Do you fix firs' de dog. To die? _Non_. Eet is not good. Becos' heem Ah mus' yet break. Dat fo' w'at he mus'not die. "

The surgeon called it a marvel, the missionary a miracle, that Leclerepulled through at all; and so weakened was he, that in the spring thefever got him, and he went on his back again. Batard had been in evenworse plight, but his grip on life prevailed, and the bones of his hindlegs knit, and his organs righted themselves, during the several weeks helay strapped to the floor. And by the time Leclere, finallyconvalescent, sallow and shaky, took the sun by the cabin door, Batardhad reasserted his supremacy among his kind, and brought not only his ownteam-mates but the missionary's dogs into subjection. 

He moved never a muscle, nor twitched a hair, when, for the first time, Leclere tottered out on the missionary's arm, and sank down slowly andwith infinite caution on the three-legged stool. 

"_Bon_!" he said. "_Bon_! De good sun!" And he stretched out hiswasted hands and washed them in the warmth. 

Then his gaze fell on the dog, and the old light blazed back in his eyes. He touched the missionary lightly on the arm. "_Mon pere_, dat is onebeeg devil, dat Batard. You will bring me one pistol, so, dat Ah drinkde sun in peace. "

And thenceforth for many days he sat in the sun before the cabin door. Henever dozed, and the pistol lay always across his knees. Batard had away, the first thing each day, of looking for the weapon in its wontedplace. At sight of it he would lift his lip faintly in token that heunderstood, and Leclere would lift his own lip in an answering grin. Oneday the missionary took note of the trick. 

"Bless me!" he said. "I really believe the brute comprehends. "

Leclere laughed softly. "Look you, _mon pere_. Dat w'at Ah now spik, to dat does he lissen. "

As if in confirmation, Batard just perceptibly wriggled his lone ear upto catch the sound. 

"Ah say 'keel'. "

Batard growled deep down in his throat, the hair bristled along his neck, and every muscle went tense and expectant. 

"Ah lift de gun, so, like dat. " And suiting action to word, he sightedthe pistol at Batard. Batard, with a single leap, sideways, landedaround the corner of the cabin out of sight. 

"Bless me!" he repeated at intervals. Leclere grinned proudly. 

"But why does he not run away?"

The Frenchman's shoulders went up in the racial shrug that means allthings from total ignorance to infinite understanding. 

"Then why do you not kill him?"

Again the shoulders went up. 

"_Mon pere_, " he said after a pause, "de taim is not yet. He is onebeeg devil. Some taim Ah break heem, so an' so, all to leetle bits. Hey?some taim. _Bon_!"

A day came when Leclere gathered his dogs together and floated down in abateau to Forty Mile, and on to the Porcupine, where he took a commissionfrom the P. C. Company, and went exploring for the better part of a year. After that he poled up the Koyokuk to deserted Arctic City, and latercame drifting back, from camp to camp, along the Yukon. And during thelong months Batard was well lessoned. He learned many tortures, and, notably, the torture of hunger, the torture of thirst, the torture offire, and, worst of all, the torture of music. 

Like the rest of his kind, he did not enjoy music. It gave him exquisiteanguish, racking him nerve by nerve, and ripping apart every fibre of hisbeing. It made him howl, long and wolf-life, as when the wolves bay thestars on frosty nights. He could not help howling. It was his oneweakness in the contest with Leclere, and it was his shame. Leclere, onthe other hand, passionately loved music--as passionately as he lovedstrong drink. And when his soul clamoured for expression, it usuallyuttered itself in one or the other of the two ways, and more usually inboth ways. And when he had drunk, his brain a-lilt with unsung song andthe devil in him aroused and rampant, his soul found its supremeutterance in torturing Batard. 

"Now we will haf a leetle museek, " he would say. "Eh? W'at you t'ink, Batard?"

It was only an old and battered harmonica, tenderly treasured andpatiently repaired; but it was the best that money could buy, and out ofits silver reeds he drew weird vagrant airs that men had never heardbefore. Then Batard, dumb of throat, with teeth tight clenched, wouldback away, inch by inch, to the farthest cabin corner. And Leclere, playing, playing, a stout club tucked under his arm, followed the animalup, inch by inch, step by step, till there was no further retreat. 

At first Batard would crowd himself into the smallest possible space, grovelling close to the floor; but as the music came nearer and nearer, he was forced to uprear, his back jammed into the logs, his fore legsfanning the air as though to beat off the rippling waves of sound. Hestill kept his teeth together, but severe muscular contractions attackedhis body, strange twitchings and jerkings, till he was all a-quiver andwrithing in silent torment. As he lost control, his jaws spasmodicallywrenched apart, and deep throaty vibrations issued forth, too low in theregister of sound for human ear to catch. And then, nostrils distended, eyes dilated, hair bristling in helpless rage, arose the long wolf howl. It came with a slurring rush upwards, swelling to a great heart-breakingburst of sound, and dying away in sadly cadenced woe--then the next rushupward, octave upon octave; the bursting heart; and the infinite sorrowand misery, fainting, fading, falling, and dying slowly away. 

It was fit for hell. And Leclere, with fiendish ken, seemed to divineeach particular nerve and heartstring, and with long wails and tremblingsand sobbing minors to make it yield up its last shred of grief. It wasfrightful, and for twenty-four hours after, Batard was nervous andunstrung, starting at common sounds, tripping over his own shadow, but, withal, vicious and masterful with his team-mates. Nor did he show signsof a breaking spirit. Rather did he grow more grim and taciturn, bidinghis time with an inscrutable patience that began to puzzle and weigh uponLeclere. The dog would lie in the firelight, motionless, for hours, gazing straight before him at Leclere, and hating him with his bittereyes. 

Often the man felt that he had bucked against the very essence oflife--the unconquerable essence that swept the hawk down out of the skylike a feathered thunderbolt, that drove the great grey goose across thezones, that hurled the spawning salmon through two thousand miles ofboiling Yukon flood. At such times he felt impelled to--express his ownunconquerable essence; and with strong drink, wild music, and Batard, heindulged in vast orgies, wherein he pitted his puny strength in the faceof things, and challenged all that was, and had been, and was yet to be. 

"Dere is somet'ing dere, " he affirmed, when the rhythmed vagaries of hismind touched the secret chords of Batard's being and brought forth thelong lugubrious howl. "Ah pool eet out wid bot' my han's, so, an' so. Ha! ha! Eet is fonee! Eet is ver' fonee! De priest chant, de womanspray, de mans swear, de leetle bird go _peep-peep_, Batard, heem go_yow-yow_--an' eet is all de ver' same t'ing. Ha! ha!"

Father Gautier, a worthy priest, one reproved him with instances ofconcrete perdition. He never reproved him again. 

"Eet may be so, _mon pere_, " he made answer. "An' Ah t'ink Ah go troohell a-snappin', lak de hemlock troo de fire. Eh, _mon pere_?"

But all bad things come to an end as well as good, and so with BlackLeclere. On the summer low water, in a poling boat, he left McDougallfor Sunrise. He left McDougall in company with Timothy Brown, andarrived at Sunrise by himself. Further, it was known that they hadquarrelled just previous to pulling out; for the _Lizzie_, a wheezy ten-ton stern-wheeler, twenty-four hours behind, beat Leclere in by threedays. And when he did get in, it was with a clean-drilled bullet-holethrough his shoulder muscle, and a tale of ambush and murder. 

A strike had been made at Sunrise, and things had changed considerably. With the infusion of several hundred gold-seekers, a deal of whisky, andhalf-a-dozen equipped gamblers, the missionary had seen the page of hisyears of labour with the Indians wiped clean. When the squaws becamepreoccupied with cooking beans and keeping the fire going for thewifeless miners, and the bucks with swapping their warm furs for blackbottles and broken time-pieces, he took to his bed, said "Bless me"several times, and departed to his final accounting in a rough-hewn, oblong box. Whereupon the gamblers moved their roulette and faro tablesinto the mission house, and the click of chips and clink of glasses wentup from dawn till dark and to dawn again. 

Now Timothy Brown was well beloved among these adventurers of the North. The one thing against him was his quick temper and ready fist--a littlething, for which his kind heart and forgiving hand more than atoned. Onthe other hand, there was nothing to atone for Black Leclere. He was"black, " as more than one remembered deed bore witness, while he was aswell hated as the other was beloved. So the men of Sunrise put anantiseptic dressing on his shoulder and haled him before Judge Lynch. 

It was a simple affair. He had quarrelled with Timothy Brown atMcDougall. With Timothy Brown he had left McDougall. Without TimothyBrown he had arrived at Sunrise. Considered in the light of hisevilness, the unanimous conclusion was that he had killed Timothy Brown. On the other hand, Leclere acknowledged their facts, but challenged theirconclusion, and gave his own explanation. Twenty miles out of Sunrise heand Timothy Brown were poling the boat along the rocky shore. From thatshore two rifle-shots rang out. Timothy Brown pitched out of the boatand went down bubbling red, and that was the last of Timothy Brown. He, Leclere, pitched into the bottom of the boat with a stinging shoulder. Helay very quiet, peeping at the shore. After a time two Indians stuck uptheir heads and came out to the water's edge, carrying between them abirch-bark canoe. As they launched it, Leclere let fly. He potted one, who went over the side after the manner of Timothy Brown. The otherdropped into the bottom of the canoe, and then canoe and poling boat wentdown the stream in a drifting battle. After that they hung up on a splitcurrent, and the canoe passed on one side of an island, the poling boaton the other. That was the last of the canoe, and he came on intoSunrise. Yes, from the way the Indian in the canoe jumped, he was surehe had potted him. That was all. This explanation was not deemedadequate. They gave him ten hours' grace while the _Lizzie_ steamed downto investigate. Ten hours later she came wheezing back to Sunrise. Therehad been nothing to investigate. No evidence had been found to back uphis statements. They told him to make his will, for he possessed a fifty-thousand dollar Sunrise claim, and they were a law-abiding as well as alaw-giving breed. 

Leclere shrugged his shoulders. "Bot one t'ing, " he said; "a leetle, w'at you call, favour--a leetle favour, dat is eet. I gif my feeftyt'ousan' dollair to de church. I gif my husky dog, Batard, to de devil. De leetle favour? Firs' you hang heem, an' den you hang me. Eet isgood, eh?"

Good it was, they agreed, that Hell's Spawn should break trail for hismaster across the last divide, and the court was adjourned down to theriver bank, where a big spruce tree stood by itself. Slackwater Charleyput a hangman's knot in the end of a hauling-line, and the noose wasslipped over Leclere's head and pulled tight around his neck. His handswere tied behind his back, and he was assisted to the top of a crackerbox. Then the running end of the line was passed over an over-hangingbranch, drawn taut, and made fast. To kick the box out from under wouldleave him dancing on the air. 

"Now for the dog, " said Webster Shaw, sometime mining engineer. "You'llhave to rope him, Slackwater. "

Leclere grinned. Slackwater took a chew of tobacco, rove a runningnoose, and proceeded leisurely to coil a few turns in his hand. Hepaused once or twice to brush particularly offensive mosquitoes from offhis face. Everybody was brushing mosquitoes, except Leclere, about whosehead a small cloud was visible. Even Batard, lying full-stretched on theground with his fore paws rubbed the pests away from eyes and mouth. 

But while Slackwater waited for Batard to lift his head, a faint callcame from the quiet air, and a man was seen waving his arms and runningacross the flat from Sunrise. It was the storekeeper. 

"C-call 'er off, boys, " he panted, as he came in among them. 

"Little Sandy and Bernadotte's jes' got in, " he explained with returningbreath. "Landed down below an' come up by the short cut. Got the Beaverwith 'm. Picked 'm up in his canoe, stuck in a back channel, with acouple of bullet-holes in 'm. Other buck was Klok Kutz, the one thatknocked spots out of his squaw and dusted. "

"Eh? W'at Ah say? Eh?" Leclere cried exultantly. "Dat de one fo' sure!Ah know. Ah spik true. "

"The thing to do is to teach these damned Siwashes a little manners, "spoke Webster Shaw. "They're getting fat and sassy, and we'll have tobring them down a peg. Round in all the bucks and string up the Beaverfor an object lesson. That's the programme. Come on and let's see whathe's got to say for himself. "

"Heh, _M'sieu_!" Leclere called, as the crowd began to melt away throughthe twilight in the direction of Sunrise. "Ah lak ver' moch to see defon. "

"Oh, we'll turn you loose when we come back, " Webster Shaw shouted overhis shoulder. "In the meantime meditate on your sins and the ways ofProvidence. It will do you good, so be grateful. "

As is the way with men who are accustomed to great hazards, whose nervesare healthy and trained in patience, so it was with Leclere who settledhimself to the long wait--which is to say that he reconciled his mind toit. There was no settling of the body, for the taut rope forced him tostand rigidly erect. The least relaxation of the leg muscles pressed therough-fibred noose into his neck, while the upright position caused himmuch pain in his wounded shoulder. He projected his under lip andexpelled his breath upwards along his face to blow the mosquitoes awayfrom his eyes. But the situation had its compensation. To be snatchedfrom the maw of death was well worth a little bodily suffering, only itwas unfortunate that he should miss the hanging of the Beaver. 

And so he mused, till his eyes chanced to fall upon Batard, head betweenfore paws and stretched on the ground asleep. And their Leclere ceasedto muse. He studied the animal closely, striving to sense if the sleepwere real or feigned. Batard's sides were heaving regularly, but Leclerefelt that the breath came and went a shade too quickly; also he felt thatthere was a vigilance or alertness to every hair that belied unshacklingsleep. He would have given his Sunrise claim to be assured that the dogwas not awake, and once, when one of his joints cracked, he lookedquickly and guiltily at Batard to see if he roused. He did not rousethen but a few minutes later he got up slowly and lazily, stretched, andlooked carefully about him. 

"_Sacredam_, " said Leclere under his breath. 

Assured that no one was in sight or hearing, Batard sat down, curled hisupper lip almost into a smile, looked up at Leclere, and licked hischops. 

"Ah see my feenish, " the man said, and laughed sardonically aloud. 

Batard came nearer, the useless ear wabbling, the good ear cocked forwardwith devilish comprehension. He thrust his head on one side quizzically, and advanced with mincing, playful steps. He rubbed his body gentlyagainst the box till it shook and shook again. Leclere teeteredcarefully to maintain his equilibrium. 

"Batard, " he said calmly, "look out. Ah keel you. "

Batard snarled at the word and shook the box with greater force. Then heupreared, and with his fore paws threw his weight against it higher up. Leclere kicked out with one foot, but the rope bit into his neck andchecked so abruptly as nearly to overbalance him. 

"Hi, ya! _Chook_! _Mush-on_!" he screamed. 

Batard retreated, for twenty feet or so, with a fiendish levity in hisbearing that Leclere could not mistake. He remembered the dog oftenbreaking the scum of ice on the water hole by lifting up and throwing hisweight upon it; and remembering, he understood what he now had in mind. Batard faced about and paused. He showed his white teeth in a grin, which Leclere answered; and then hurled his body through the air, in fullcharge, straight for the box. 

Fifteen minutes later, Slackwater Charley and Webster Shaw returning, caught a glimpse of a ghostly pendulum swinging back and forth in the dimlight. As they hurriedly drew in closer, they made out the man's inertbody, and a live thing that clung to it, and shook and worried, and gaveto it the swaying motion. 

"Hi, ya! _Chook_! you Spawn of Hell!" yelled Webster Shaw. 

But Batard glared at him, and snarled threateningly, without loosing hisjaws. 

Slackwater Charley got out his revolver, but his hand was shaking, aswith a chill, and he fumbled. 

"Here you take it, " he said, passing the weapon over. 

Webster Shaw laughed shortly, drew a sight between the gleaming eyes, andpressed the trigger. Batard's body twitched with the shock, threshed theground spasmodically for a moment, and went suddenly limp. But his teethstill held fast locked. 

THE STORY OF JEES UCK

There have been renunciations and renunciations. But, in its essence, renunciation is ever the same. And the paradox of it is, that men andwomen forego the dearest thing in the world for something dearer. It wasnever otherwise. Thus it was when Abel brought of the firstlings of hisflock and of the fat thereof. The firstlings and the fat thereof were tohim the dearest things in the world; yet he gave them over that he mightbe on good terms with God. So it was with Abraham when he prepared tooffer up his son Isaac on a stone. Isaac was very dear to him; but God, in incomprehensible ways, was yet dearer. It may be that Abraham fearedthe Lord. But whether that be true or not it has since been determinedby a few billion people that he loved the Lord and desired to serve him. 

And since it has been determined that love is service, and since torenounce is to serve, then Jees Uck, who was merely a woman of a swart-skinned breed, loved with a great love. She was unversed in history, having learned to read only the signs of weather and of game; so she hadnever heard of Abel nor of Abraham; nor, having escaped the good sistersat Holy Cross, had she been told the story of Ruth, the Moabitess, whorenounced her very God for the sake of a stranger woman from a strangeland. Jees Uck had learned only one way of renouncing, and that was witha club as the dynamic factor, in much the same manner as a dog is made torenounce a stolen marrow-bone. Yet, when the time came, she provedherself capable of rising to the height of the fair-faced royal races andof renouncing in right regal fashion. 

So this is the story of Jees Uck, which is also the story of Neil Bonner, and Kitty Bonner, and a couple of Neil Bonner's progeny. Jees Uck was ofa swart-skinned breed, it is true, but she was not an Indian; nor was shean Eskimo; nor even an Innuit. Going backward into mouth tradition, there appears the figure of one Skolkz, a Toyaat Indian of the Yukon, whojourneyed down in his youth to the Great Delta where dwell the Innuits, and where he foregathered with a woman remembered as Olillie. Now thewoman Olillie had been bred from an Eskimo mother by an Innuit man. Andfrom Skolkz and Olillie came Halie, who was one-half Toyaat Indian, one-quarter Innuit, and one-quarter Eskimo. And Halie was the grandmother ofJees Uck. 

Now Halie, in whom three stocks had been bastardized, who cherished noprejudice against further admixture, mated with a Russian fur tradercalled Shpack, also known in his time as the Big Fat. Shpack is hereinclassed Russian for lack of a more adequate term; for Shpack's father, aSlavonic convict from the Lower Provinces, had escaped from thequicksilver mines into Northern Siberia, where he knew Zimba, who was awoman of the Deer People and who became the mother of Shpack, who becamethe grandfather of Jees Uck. 

Now had not Shpack been captured in his boyhood by the Sea People, whofringe the rim of the Arctic Sea with their misery, he would not havebecome the grandfather of Jees Uck and there would be no story at all. But he _was_ captured by the Sea People, from whom he escaped toKamchatka, and thence, on a Norwegian whale-ship, to the Baltic. Notlong after that he turned up in St. Petersburg, and the years were notmany till he went drifting east over the same weary road his father hadmeasured with blood and groans a half-century before. But Shpack was afree man, in the employ of the great Russian Fur Company. And in thatemploy he fared farther and farther east, until he crossed Bering Seainto Russian America; and at Pastolik, which is hard by the Great Deltaof the Yukon, became the husband of Halie, who was the grandmother ofJees Uck. Out of this union came the woman-child, Tukesan. 

Shpack, under the orders of the Company, made a canoe voyage of a fewhundred miles up the Yukon to the post of Nulato. With him he took Halieand the babe Tukesan. This was in 1850, and in 1850 it was that theriver Indians fell upon Nulato and wiped it from the face of the earth. And that was the end of Shpack and Halie. On that terrible night Tukesandisappeared. To this day the Toyaats aver they had no hand in thetrouble; but, be that as it may, the fact remains that the babe Tukesangrew up among them. 

Tukesan was married successively to two Toyaat brothers, to both of whomshe was barren. Because of this, other women shook their heads, and nothird Toyaat man could be found to dare matrimony with the childlesswidow. But at this time, many hundred miles above, at Fort Yukon, was aman, Spike O'Brien. Fort Yukon was a Hudson Bay Company post, and SpikeO'Brien one of the Company's servants. He was a good servant, but heachieved an opinion that the service was bad, and in the course of timevindicated that opinion by deserting. It was a year's journey, by thechain of posts, back to York Factory on Hudson's Bay. Further, beingCompany posts, he knew he could not evade the Company's clutches. Nothingretained but to go down the Yukon. It was true no white man had evergone down the Yukon, and no white man knew whether the Yukon emptied intothe Arctic Ocean or Bering Sea; but Spike O'Brien was a Celt, and thepromise of danger was a lure he had ever followed. 

A few weeks later, somewhat battered, rather famished, and about deadwith river-fever, he drove the nose of his canoe into the earth bank bythe village of the Toyaats and promptly fainted away. While getting hisstrength back, in the weeks that followed, he looked upon Tukesan andfound her good. Like the father of Shpack, who lived to a ripe old ageamong the Siberian Deer People, Spike O'Brien might have left his agedbones with the Toyaats. But romance gripped his heart-strings and wouldnot let him stay. As he had journeyed from York Factory to Fort Yukon, so, first among men, might he journey from Fort Yukon to the sea and winthe honour of being the first man to make the North-West Passage by land. So he departed down the river, won the honour, and was unannaled andunsung. In after years he ran a sailors' boarding-house in SanFrancisco, where he became esteemed a most remarkable liar by virtue ofthe gospel truths he told. But a child was born to Tukesan, who had beenchildless. And this child was Jees Uck. Her lineage has been traced atlength to show that she was neither Indian, nor Eskimo, nor Innuit, normuch of anything else; also to show what waifs of the generations we are, all of us, and the strange meanderings of the seed from which we spring. 

What with the vagrant blood in her and the heritage compounded of manyraces, Jees Uck developed a wonderful young beauty. Bizarre, perhaps, itwas, and Oriental enough to puzzle any passing ethnologist. A lithe andslender grace characterized her. Beyond a quickened lilt to theimagination, the contribution of the Celt was in no wise apparent. Itmight possibly have put the warm blood under her skin, which made herface less swart and her body fairer; but that, in turn, might have comefrom Shpack, the Big Fat, who inherited the colour of his Slavonicfather. And, finally, she had great, blazing black eyes--the half-casteeye, round, full-orbed, and sensuous, which marks the collision of thedark races with the light. Also, the white blood in her, combined withher knowledge that it was in her, made her, in a way, ambitious. Otherwise by upbringing and in outlook on life, she was wholly andutterly a Toyaat Indian. 

One winter, when she was a young woman, Neil Bonner came into her life. But he came into her life, as he had come into the country, somewhatreluctantly. In fact, it was very much against his will, coming into thecountry. Between a father who clipped coupons and cultivated roses, anda mother who loved the social round, Neil Bonner had gone rather wild. Hewas not vicious, but a man with meat in his belly and without work in theworld has to expend his energy somehow, and Neil Bonner was such a man. And he expended his energy in such a fashion and to such extent that whenthe inevitable climax came, his father, Neil Bonner, senior, crawled outof his roses in a panic and looked on his son with a wondering eye. Thenhe hied himself away to a crony of kindred pursuits, with whom he waswont to confer over coupons and roses, and between the two the destiny ofyoung Neil Bonner was made manifest. He must go away, on probation, tolive down his harmless follies in order that he might live up to theirown excellent standard. 

This determined upon, and young Neil a little repentant and a great dealashamed, the rest was easy. The cronies were heavy stockholders in theP. C. Company. The P. C. Company owned fleets of river-steamers andocean-going craft, and, in addition to farming the sea, exploited ahundred thousand square miles or so of the land that, on the maps ofgeographers, usually occupies the white spaces. So the P. C. Companysent young Neil Bonner north, where the white spaces are, to do its workand to learn to be good like his father. "Five years of simplicity, close to the soil and far from temptation, will make a man of him, " saidold Neil Bonner, and forthwith crawled back among his roses. Young Neilset his jaw, pitched his chin at the proper angle, and went to work. Asan underling he did his work well and gained the commendation of hissuperiors. Not that he delighted in the work, but that it was the onething that prevented him from going mad. 

The first year he wished he was dead. The second year he cursed God. Thethird year he was divided between the two emotions, and in the confusionquarrelled with a man in authority. He had the best of the quarrel, though the man in authority had the last word, --a word that sent NeilBonner into an exile that made his old billet appear as paradise. But hewent without a whimper, for the North had succeeded in making him into aman. 

Here and there, on the white spaces on the map, little circlets like theletter "o" are to be found, and, appended to these circlets, on one sideor the other, are names such as "Fort Hamilton, " "Yanana Station, ""Twenty Mile, " thus leading one to imagine that the white spaces areplentifully besprinkled with towns and villages. But it is a vainimagining. Twenty Mile, which is very like the rest of the posts, is alog building the size of a corner grocery with rooms to let up-stairs. Along-legged cache on stilts may be found in the back yard; also a coupleof outhouses. The back yard is unfenced, and extends to the sky-line andan unascertainable bit beyond. There are no other houses in sight, though the Toyaats sometimes pitch a winter camp a mile or two down theYukon. And this is Twenty Mile, one tentacle of the many-tentacled P. C. Company. Here the agent, with an assistant, barters with the Indians fortheir furs, and does an erratic trade on a gold-dust basis with thewandering miners. Here, also, the agent and his assistant yearn allwinter for the spring, and when the spring comes, camp blasphemously onthe roof while the Yukon washes out the establishment. And here, also, in the fourth year of his sojourn in the land, came Neil Bonner to takecharge. 

He had displaced no agent; for the man that previously ran the post hadmade away with himself; "because of the rigours of the place, " said theassistant, who still remained; though the Toyaats, by their fires, hadanother version. The assistant was a shrunken-shouldered, hollow-chestedman, with a cadaverous face and cavernous cheeks that his sparse blackbeard could not hide. He coughed much, as though consumption gripped hislungs, while his eyes had that mad, fevered light common to consumptivesin the last stage. Pentley was his name--Amos Pentley--and Bonner didnot like him, though he felt a pity for the forlorn and hopeless devil. They did not get along together, these two men who, of all men, shouldhave been on good terms in the face of the cold and silence and darknessof the long winter. 

In the end, Bonner concluded that Amos was partly demented, and left himalone, doing all the work himself except the cooking. Even then, Amoshad nothing but bitter looks and an undisguised hatred for him. This wasa great loss to Bonner; for the smiling face of one of his own kind, thecheery word, the sympathy of comradeship shared with misfortune--thesethings meant much; and the winter was yet young when he began to realizethe added reasons, with such an assistant, that the previous agent hadfound to impel his own hand against his life. 

It was very lonely at Twenty Mile. The bleak vastness stretched away onevery side to the horizon. The snow, which was really frost, flung itsmantle over the land and buried everything in the silence of death. Fordays it was clear and cold, the thermometer steadily recording forty tofifty degrees below zero. Then a change came over the face of things. What little moisture had oozed into the atmosphere gathered into dullgrey, formless clouds; it became quite warm, the thermometer rising totwenty below; and the moisture fell out of the sky in hard frost-granulesthat hissed like dry sugar or driving sand when kicked underfoot. Afterthat it became clear and cold again, until enough moisture had gatheredto blanket the earth from the cold of outer space. That was all. Nothinghappened. No storms, no churning waters and threshing forests, nothingbut the machine-like precipitation of accumulated moisture. Possibly themost notable thing that occurred through the weary weeks was the glidingof the temperature up to the unprecedented height of fifteen below. Toatone for this, outer space smote the earth with its cold till themercury froze and the spirit thermometer remained more than seventy belowfor a fortnight, when it burst. There was no telling how much colder itwas after that. Another occurrence, monotonous in its regularity, wasthe lengthening of the nights, till day became a mere blink of lightbetween the darkness. 

Neil Bonner was a social animal. The very follies for which he was doingpenance had been bred of his excessive sociability. And here, in thefourth year of his exile, he found himself in company--which were totravesty the word--with a morose and speechless creature in whose sombreeyes smouldered a hatred as bitter as it was unwarranted. And Bonner, towhom speech and fellowship were as the breath of life, went about as aghost might go, tantalized by the gregarious revelries of some formerlife. In the day his lips were compressed, his face stern; but in thenight he clenched his hands, rolled about in his blankets, and criedaloud like a little child. And he would remember a certain man inauthority and curse him through the long hours. Also, he cursed God. ButGod understands. He cannot find it in his heart to blame weak mortalswho blaspheme in Alaska. 

And here, to the post of Twenty Mile, came Jees Uck, to trade for flourand bacon, and beads, and bright scarlet cloths for her fancy work. Andfurther, and unwittingly, she came to the post of Twenty Mile to make alonely man more lonely, make him reach out empty arms in his sleep. ForNeil Bonner was only a man. When she first came into the store, helooked at her long, as a thirsty man may look at a flowing well. Andshe, with the heritage bequeathed her by Spike O'Brien, imagined daringlyand smiled up into his eyes, not as the swart-skinned peoples shouldsmile at the royal races, but as a woman smiles at a man. The thing wasinevitable; only, he did not see it, and fought against her as fiercelyand passionately as he was drawn towards her. And she? She was JeesUck, by upbringing wholly and utterly a Toyaat Indian woman. 

She came often to the post to trade. And often she sat by the big woodstove and chatted in broken English with Neil Bonner. And he came tolook for her coming; and on the days she did not come he was worried andrestless. Sometimes he stopped to think, and then she was met coldly, with a resolve that perplexed and piqued her, and which, she wasconvinced, was not sincere. But more often he did not dare to think, andthen all went well and there were smiles and laughter. And Amos Pentley, gasping like a stranded catfish, his hollow cough a-reek with the grave, looked upon it all and grinned. He, who loved life, could not live, andit rankled his soul that others should be able to live. Wherefore hehated Bonner, who was so very much alive and into whose eyes sprang joyat the sight of Jees Uck. As for Amos, the very thought of the girl wassufficient to send his blood pounding up into a hemorrhage. 

Jees Uck, whose mind was simple, who thought elementally and was unusedto weighing life in its subtler quantities, read Amos Pentley like abook. She warned Bonner, openly and bluntly, in few words; but thecomplexities of higher existence confused the situation to him, and helaughed at her evident anxiety. To him, Amos was a poor, miserabledevil, tottering desperately into the grave. And Bonner, who hadsuffered much, found it easy to forgive greatly. 

But one morning, during a bitter snap, he got up from the breakfast-tableand went into the store. Jees Uck was already there, rosy from thetrail, to buy a sack of flour. A few minutes later, he was out in thesnow lashing the flour on her sled. As he bent over he noticed astiffness in his neck and felt a premonition of impending physicalmisfortune. And as he put the last half-hitch into the lashing andattempted to straighten up, a quick spasm seized him and he sank into thesnow. Tense and quivering, head jerked back, limbs extended, back archedand mouth twisted and distorted, he appeared as though being racked limbfrom limb. Without cry or sound, Jees Uck was in the snow beside him;but he clutched both her wrists spasmodically, and as long as theconvulsion endured she was helpless. In a few moments the spasm relaxedand he was left weak and fainting, his forehead beaded with sweat, andhis lips flecked with foam. 

"Quick!" he muttered, in a strange, hoarse voice. "Quick! Inside!"

He started to crawl on hands and knees, but she raised him up, and, supported by her young arm, he made faster progress. As he entered thestore the spasm seized him again, and his body writhed irresistibly awayfrom her and rolled and curled on the floor. Amos Pentley came andlooked on with curious eyes. 

"Oh, Amos!" she cried in an agony of apprehension and helplessness, "himdie, you think?" But Amos shrugged his shoulders and continued to lookon. 

Bonner's body went slack, the tense muscles easing down and an expressionof relief coming into his face. "Quick!" he gritted between his teeth, his mouth twisting with the on-coming of the next spasm and with hiseffort to control it. "Quick, Jees Uck! The medicine! Never mind! Dragme!"

She knew where the medicine-chest stood, at the rear of the room beyondthe stove, and thither, by the legs, she dragged the struggling man. Asthe spasm passed he began, very faint and very sick, to overhaul thechest. He had seen dogs die exhibiting symptoms similar to his own, andhe knew what should be done. He held up a vial of chloral hydrate, buthis fingers were too weak and nerveless to draw the cork. This Jees Uckdid for him, while he was plunged into another convulsion. As he cameout of it he found the open bottle proffered him, and looked into thegreat black eyes of the woman and read what men have always read in theMate-woman's eyes. Taking a full dose of the stuff, he sank back untilanother spasm had passed. Then he raised himself limply on his elbow. 

"Listen, Jees Uck!" he said very slowly, as though aware of the necessityfor haste and yet afraid to hasten. "Do what I say. Stay by my side, but do not touch me. I must be very quiet, but you must not go away. "His jaw began to set and his face to quiver and distort with the fore-running pangs, but he gulped and struggled to master them. "Do not gotaway. And do not let Amos go away. Understand! Amos must stay righthere. "

She nodded her head, and he passed off into the first of manyconvulsions, which gradually diminished in force and frequency. Jees Uckhung over him remembering his injunction and not daring to touch him. Once Amos grew restless and made as though to go into the kitchen; but aquick blaze from her eyes quelled him, and after that, save for hislaboured breathing and charnel cough, he was very quiet. 

Bonner slept. The blink of light that marked the day disappeared. Amos, followed about by the woman's eyes, lighted the kerosene lamps. Eveningcame on. Through the north window the heavens were emblazoned with anauroral display, which flamed and flared and died down into blackness. Some time after that, Neil Bonner roused. First he looked to see thatAmos was still there, then smiled at Jees Uck and pulled himself up. Every muscle was stiff and sore, and he smiled ruefully, pressing andprodding himself as if to ascertain the extent of the ravage. Then hisface went stern and businesslike. 

"Jees Uck, " he said, "take a candle. Go into the kitchen. There is foodon the table--biscuits and beans and bacon; also, coffee in the pot onthe stove. Bring it here on the counter. Also, bring tumblers and waterand whisky, which you will find on the top shelf of the locker. Do notforget the whisky. "

Having swallowed a stiff glass of the whisky, he went carefully throughthe medicine chest, now and again putting aside, with definite purpose, certain bottles and vials. Then he set to work on the food, attempting acrude analysis. He had not been unused to the laboratory in his collegedays and was possessed of sufficient imagination to achieve results withhis limited materials. The condition of tetanus, which had marked hisparoxysms, simplified matters, and he made but one test. The coffeeyielded nothing; nor did the beans. To the biscuits he devoted theutmost care. Amos, who knew nothing of chemistry, looked on with steadycuriosity. But Jees Uck, who had boundless faith in the white man'swisdom, and especially in Neil Bonner's wisdom, and who not only knewnothing but knew that she knew nothing watched his face rather than hishands. 

Step by step he eliminated possibilities, until he came to the finaltest. He was using a thin medicine vial for a tube, and this he heldbetween him and the light, watching the slow precipitation of a saltthrough the solution contained in the tube. He said nothing, but he sawwhat he had expected to see. And Jees Uck, her eyes riveted on his face, saw something too, --something that made her spring like a tigress uponAmos, and with splendid suppleness and strength bend his body back acrossher knee. Her knife was out of its sheaf and uplifted, glinting in thelamplight. Amos was snarling; but Bonner intervened ere the blade couldfall. 

"That's a good girl, Jees Uck. But never mind. Let him go!"

She dropped the man obediently, though with protest writ large on herface; and his body thudded to the floor. Bonner nudged him with hismoccasined foot. 

"Get up, Amos!" he commanded. "You've got to pack an outfit yet to-nightand hit the trail. "

"You don't mean to say--" Amos blurted savagely. 

"I mean to say that you tried to kill me, " Neil went on in cold, eventones. "I mean to say that you killed Birdsall, for all the Companybelieves he killed himself. You used strychnine in my case. God knowswith what you fixed him. Now I can't hang you. You're too near dead asit is. But Twenty Mile is too small for the pair of us, and you've gotto mush. It's two hundred miles to Holy Cross. You can make it ifyou're careful not to over-exert. I'll give you grub, a sled, and threedogs. You'll be as safe as if you were in jail, for you can't get out ofthe country. And I'll give you one chance. You're almost dead. Verywell. I shall send no word to the Company until the spring. In themeantime, the thing for you to do is to die. Now _mush_!"

"You go to bed!" Jees Uck insisted, when Amos had churned away into thenight towards Holy Cross. "You sick man yet, Neil. "

"And you're a good girl, Jees Uck, " he answered. "And here's my hand onit. But you must go home. "

"You don't like me, " she said simply. 

He smiled, helped her on with her _parka_, and led her to the door. "Onlytoo well, Jees Uck, " he said softly; "only too well. "

After that the pall of the Arctic night fell deeper and blacker on theland. Neil Bonner discovered that he had failed to put proper valuationupon even the sullen face of the murderous and death-stricken Amos. Itbecame very lonely at Twenty Mile. "For the love of God, Prentiss, sendme a man, " he wrote to the agent at Fort Hamilton, three hundred miles upriver. Six weeks later the Indian messenger brought back a reply. Itwas characteristic: "Hell. Both feet frozen. Need him myself--Prentiss. "

To make matters worse, most of the Toyaats were in the back country onthe flanks of a caribou herd, and Jees Uck was with them. Removing to adistance seemed to bring her closer than ever, and Neil Bonner foundhimself picturing her, day by day, in camp and on trail. It is not goodto be alone. Often he went out of the quiet store, bare-headed andfrantic, and shook his fist at the blink of day that came over thesouthern sky-line. And on still, cold nights he left his bed andstumbled into the frost, where he assaulted the silence at the top of hislungs, as though it were some tangible, sentiment thing that he mightarouse; or he shouted at the sleeping dogs till they howled and howledagain. One shaggy brute he brought into the post, playing that it wasthe new man sent by Prentiss. He strove to make it sleep decently underblankets at nights and to sit at table and eat as a man should; but thebeast, mere domesticated wolf that it was, rebelled, and sought out darkcorners and snarled and bit him in the leg, and was finally beaten anddriven forth. 

Then the trick of personification seized upon Neil Bonner and masteredhim. All the forces of his environment metamorphosed into living, breathing entities and came to live with him. He recreated the primitivepantheon; reared an altar to the sun and burned candle fat and bacongrease thereon; and in the unfenced yard, by the long-legged cache, madea frost devil, which he was wont to make faces at and mock when themercury oozed down into the bulb. All this in play, of course. He saidit to himself that it was in play, and repeated it over and over to makesure, unaware that madness is ever prone to express itself inmake-believe and play. 

One midwinter day, Father Champreau, a Jesuit missionary, pulled intoTwenty Mile. Bonner fell upon him and dragged him into the post, andclung to him and wept, until the priest wept with him from sheercompassion. Then Bonner became madly hilarious and made lavishentertainment, swearing valiantly that his guest should not depart. ButFather Champreau was pressing to Salt Water on urgent business for hisorder, and pulled out next morning, with Bonner's blood threatened on hishead. 

And the threat was in a fair way toward realization, when the Toyaatsreturned from their long hunt to the winter camp. They had many furs, and there was much trading and stir at Twenty Mile. Also, Jees Uck cameto buy beads and scarlet cloths and things, and Bonner began to findhimself again. He fought for a week against her. Then the end came onenight when she rose to leave. She had not forgotten her repulse, and thepride that drove Spike O'Brien on to complete the North-West Passage byland was her pride. 

"I go now, " she said; "good-night, Neil. "

But he came up behind her. "Nay, it is not well, " he said. 

And as she turned her face toward his with a sudden joyful flash, he bentforward, slowly and gravely, as it were a sacred thing, and kissed her onthe lips. The Toyaats had never taught her the meaning of a kiss uponthe lips, but she understood and was glad. 

With the coming of Jees Uck, at once things brightened up. She was regalin her happiness, a source of unending delight. The elemental workingsof her mind and her naive little ways made an immense sum of pleasurablesurprise to the over-civilized man that had stooped to catch her up. Notalone was she solace to his loneliness, but her primitiveness rejuvenatedhis jaded mind. It was as though, after long wandering, he had returnedto pillow his head in the lap of Mother Earth. In short, in Jees Uck hefound the youth of the world--the youth and the strength and the joy. 

And to fill the full round of his need, and that they might not seeovermuch of each other, there arrived at Twenty Mile one SandyMacPherson, as companionable a man as ever whistled along the trail orraised a ballad by a camp-fire. A Jesuit priest had run into his camp, acouple of hundred miles up the Yukon, in the nick of time to say a lastword over the body of Sandy's partner. And on departing, the priest hadsaid, "My son, you will be lonely now. " And Sandy had bowed his headbrokenly. "At Twenty Mile, " the priest added, "there is a lonely man. You have need of each other, my son. "

So it was that Sandy became a welcome third at the post, brother to theman and woman that resided there. He took Bonner moose-hunting and wolf-trapping; and, in return, Bonner resurrected a battered and way-wornvolume and made him friends with Shakespeare, till Sandy declaimed iambicpentameters to his sled-dogs whenever they waxed mutinous. And of thelong evenings they played cribbage and talked and disagreed about theuniverse, the while Jees Uck rocked matronly in an easy-chair and darnedtheir moccasins and socks. 

Spring came. The sun shot up out of the south. The land exchanged itsaustere robes for the garb of a smiling wanton. Everywhere light laughedand life invited. The days stretched out their balmy length and thenights passed from blinks of darkness to no darkness at all. The riverbared its bosom, and snorting steamboats challenged the wilderness. Therewere stir and bustle, new faces, and fresh facts. An assistant arrivedat Twenty Mile, and Sandy MacPherson wandered off with a bunch ofprospectors to invade the Koyokuk country. And there were newspapers andmagazines and letters for Neil Bonner. And Jees Uck looked on inworriment, for she knew his kindred talked with him across the world. 

Without much shock, it came to him that his father was dead. There was asweet letter of forgiveness, dictated in his last hours. There wereofficial letters from the Company, graciously ordering him to turn thepost over to the assistant and permitting him to depart at his earliestpleasure. A long, legal affair from the lawyers informed him ofinterminable lists of stocks and bonds, real estate, rents, and chattelsthat were his by his father's will. And a dainty bit of stationery, sealed and monogramed, implored dear Neil's return to his heart-brokenand loving mother. 

Neil Bonner did some swift thinking, and when the _Yukon Belle_ coughedin to the bank on her way down to Bering Sea, he departed--departed withthe ancient lie of quick return young and blithe on his lips. 

"I'll come back, dear Jees Uck, before the first snow flies, " he promisedher, between the last kisses at the gang-plank. 

And not only did he promise, but, like the majority of men under the samecircumstances, he really meant it. To John Thompson, the new agent, hegave orders for the extension of unlimited credit to his wife, Jees Uck. Also, with his last look from the deck of the _Yukon Belle_, he saw adozen men at work rearing the logs that were to make the most comfortablehouse along a thousand miles of river front--the house of Jees Uck, andlikewise the house of Neil Bonner--ere the first flurry of snow. For hefully and fondly meant to come back. Jees Uck was dear to him, and, further, a golden future awaited the north. With his father's money heintended to verify that future. An ambitious dream allured him. Withhis four years of experience, and aided by the friendly cooperation ofthe P. C. Company, he would return to become the Rhodes of Alaska. Andhe would return, fast as steam could drive, as soon as he had put intoshape the affairs of his father, whom he had never known, and comfortedhis mother, whom he had forgotten. 

There was much ado when Neil Bonner came back from the Arctic. The fireswere lighted and the fleshpots slung, and he took of it all and called itgood. Not only was he bronzed and creased, but he was a new man underhis skin, with a grip on things and a seriousness and control. His oldcompanions were amazed when he declined to hit up the pace in the goodold way, while his father's crony rubbed hands gleefully, and became anauthority upon the reclamation of wayward and idle youth. 

For four years Neil Bonner's mind had lain fallow. Little that was newhad been added to it, but it had undergone a process of selection. Ithad, so to say, been purged of the trivial and superfluous. He had livedquick years, down in the world; and, up in the wilds, time had been givenhim to organize the confused mass of his experiences. His superficialstandards had been flung to the winds and new standards erected on deeperand broader generalizations. Concerning civilization, he had gone awaywith one set of values, had returned with another set of values. Aided, also, by the earth smells in his nostrils and the earth sights in hiseyes, he laid hold of the inner significance of civilization, beholdingwith clear vision its futilities and powers. It was a simple littlephilosophy he evolved. Clean living was the way to grace. Dutyperformed was sanctification. One must live clean and do his duty inorder that he might work. Work was salvation. And to work toward lifeabundant, and more abundant, was to be in line with the scheme of thingsand the will of God. 

Primarily, he was of the city. And his fresh earth grip and virileconception of humanity gave him a finer sense of civilization andendeared civilization to him. Day by day the people of the city clungcloser to him and the world loomed more colossal. And, day by day, Alaska grew more remote and less real. And then he met Kitty Sharon--awoman of his own flesh and blood and kind; a woman who put her hand intohis hand and drew him to her, till he forgot the day and hour and thetime of the year the first snow flies on the Yukon. 

Jees Uck moved into her grand log-house and dreamed away three goldensummer months. Then came the autumn, post-haste before the down rush ofwinter. The air grew thin and sharp, the days thin and short. The riverran sluggishly, and skin ice formed in the quiet eddies. All migratorylife departed south, and silence fell upon the land. The first snowflurries came, and the last homing steamboat bucked desperately into therunning mush ice. Then came the hard ice, solid cakes and sheets, tillthe Yukon ran level with its banks. And when all this ceased the riverstood still and the blinking days lost themselves in the darkness. 

John Thompson, the new agent, laughed; but Jees Uck had faith in themischances of sea and river. Neil Bonner might be frozen in anywherebetween Chilkoot Pass and St. Michael's, for the last travellers of theyear are always caught by the ice, when they exchange boat for sled anddash on through the long hours behind the flying dogs. 

But no flying dogs came up the trail, nor down the trail, to Twenty Mile. And John Thompson told Jees Uck, with a certain gladness ill concealed, that Bonner would never come back again. Also, and brutally, hesuggested his own eligibility. Jees Uck laughed in his face and wentback to her grand log-house. But when midwinter came, when hope diesdown and life is at its lowest ebb, Jees Uck found she had no credit atthe store. This was Thompson's doing, and he rubbed his hands, andwalked up and down, and came to his door and looked up at Jees Uck'shouse and waited. And he continued to wait. She sold her dog-team to aparty of miners and paid cash for her food. And when Thompson refused tohonour even her coin, Toyaat Indians made her purchases, and sledded themup to her house in the dark. 

In February the first post came in over the ice, and John Thompson readin the society column of a five-months-old paper of the marriage of NeilBonner and Kitty Sharon. Jees Uck held the door ajar and him outsidewhile he imparted the information; and, when he had done, laughedpridefully and did not believe. In March, and all alone, she gave birthto a man-child, a brave bit of new life at which she marvelled. And atthat hour, a year later, Neil Bonner sat by another bed, marvelling atanother bit of new life that had fared into the world. 

The snow went off the ground and the ice broke out of the Yukon. The sunjourneyed north, and journeyed south again; and, the money from the beingspent, Jees Uck went back to her own people. Oche Ish, a shrewd hunter, proposed to kill the meat for her and her babe, and catch the salmon, ifshe would marry him. And Imego and Hah Yo and Wy Nooch, husky younghunters all, made similar proposals. But she elected to live alone andseek her own meat and fish. She sewed moccasins and _parkas_ andmittens--warm, serviceable things, and pleasing to the eye, withal, whatof the ornamental hair-tufts and bead-work. These she sold to theminers, who were drifting faster into the land each year. And not onlydid she win food that was good and plentiful, but she laid money by, andone day took passage on the _Yukon Belle_ down the river. 

At St. Michael's she washed dishes in the kitchen of the post. Theservants of the Company wondered at the remarkable woman with theremarkable child, though they asked no questions and she vouchsafednothing. But just before Bering Sea closed in for the year, she bought apassage south on a strayed sealing schooner. That winter she cooked forCaptain Markheim's household at Unalaska, and in the spring continuedsouth to Sitka on a whisky sloop. Later on appeared at Metlakahtla, which is near to St. Mary's on the end of the Pan-Handle, where sheworked in the cannery through the salmon season. When autumn came andthe Siwash fishermen prepared to return to Puget Sound, she embarked witha couple of families in a big cedar canoe; and with them she threaded thehazardous chaos of the Alaskan and Canadian coasts, till the Straits ofJuan de Fuca were passed and she led her boy by the hand up the hard paveof Seattle. 

There she met Sandy MacPherson, on a windy corner, very much surprisedand, when he had heard her story, very wroth--not so wroth as he mighthave been, had he known of Kitty Sharon; but of her Jees Uck breathed nota word, for she had never believed. Sandy, who read commonplace andsordid desertion into the circumstance, strove to dissuade her from hertrip to San Francisco, where Neil Bonner was supposed to live when he wasat home. And, having striven, he made her comfortable, bought hertickets and saw her off, the while smiling in her face and muttering "dam-shame" into his beard. 

With roar and rumble, through daylight and dark, swaying and lurchingbetween the dawns, soaring into the winter snows and sinking to summervalleys, skirting depths, leaping chasms, piercing mountains, Jees Uckand her boy were hurled south. But she had no fear of the iron stallion;nor was she stunned by this masterful civilization of Neil Bonner'speople. It seemed, rather, that she saw with greater clearness thewonder that a man of such godlike race had held her in his arms. Thescreaming medley of San Francisco, with its restless shipping, belchingfactories, and thundering traffic, did not confuse her; instead, shecomprehended swiftly the pitiful sordidness of Twenty Mile and the skin-lodged Toyaat village. And she looked down at the boy that clutched herhand and wondered that she had borne him by such a man. 

She paid the hack-driver five pieces and went up the stone steps of NeilBonner's front door. A slant-eyed Japanese parleyed with her for afruitless space, then led her inside and disappeared. She remained inthe hall, which to her simply fancy seemed to be the guest-room--the show-place wherein were arrayed all the household treasures with the frankpurpose of parade and dazzlement. The walls and ceiling were of oiledand panelled redwood. The floor was more glassy than glare-ice, and shesought standing place on one of the great skins that gave a sense ofsecurity to the polished surface. A huge fireplace--an extravagantfireplace, she deemed it--yawned in the farther wall. A flood of light, mellowed by stained glass, fell across the room, and from the far endcame the white gleam of a marble figure. 

This much she saw, and more, when the slant-eyed servant led the way pastanother room--of which she caught a fleeting glance--and into a third, both of which dimmed the brave show of the entrance hall. And to hereyes the great house seemed to hold out the promise of endless similarrooms. There was such length and breadth to them, and the ceilings wereso far away! For the first time since her advent into the white man'scivilization, a feeling of awe laid hold of her. Neil, her Neil, livedin this house, breathed the air of it, and lay down at night and slept!It was beautiful, all this that she saw, and it pleased her; but shefelt, also, the wisdom and mastery behind. It was the concreteexpression of power in terms of beauty, and it was the power that sheunerringly divined. 

And then came a woman, queenly tall, crowned with a glory of hair thatwas like a golden sun. She seemed to come toward Jees Uck as a ripple ofmusic across still water; her sweeping garment itself a song, her bodyplaying rhythmically beneath. Jees Uck herself was a man compeller. There were Oche Ish and Imego and Hah Yo and Wy Nooch, to say nothing ofNeil Bonner and John Thompson and other white men that had looked uponher and felt her power. But she gazed upon the wide blue eyes and rose-white skin of this woman that advanced to meet her, and she measured herwith woman's eyes looking through man's eyes; and as a man compeller shefelt herself diminish and grow insignificant before this radiant andflashing creature. 

"You wish to see my husband?" the woman asked; and Jees Uck gasped at theliquid silver of a voice that had never sounded harsh cries at snarlingwolf-dogs, nor moulded itself to a guttural speech, nor toughened instorm and frost and camp smoke. 

"No, " Jees Uck answered slowly and gropingly, in order that she might dojustice to her English. "I come to see Neil Bonner. "

"He is my husband, " the woman laughed. 

Then it was true! John Thompson had not lied that bleak February day, when she laughed pridefully and shut the door in his face. As once shehad thrown Amos Pentley across her knee and ripped her knife into theair, so now she felt impelled to spring upon this woman and bear her backand down, and tear the life out of her fair body. But Jees Uck wasthinking quickly and gave no sign, and Kitty Bonner little dreamed howintimately she had for an instant been related with sudden death. 

Jees Uck nodded her head that she understood, and Kitty Bonner explainedthat Neil was expected at any moment. Then they sat down on ridiculouslycomfortable chairs, and Kitty sought to entertain her strange visitor, and Jees Uck strove to help her. 

"You knew my husband in the North?" Kitty asked, once. 

"Sure. I wash um clothes, " Jees Uck had answered, her English abruptlybeginning to grow atrocious. 

"And this is your boy? I have a little girl. "

Kitty caused her daughter to be brought, and while the children, aftertheir manner, struck an acquaintance, the mothers indulged in the talk ofmothers and drank tea from cups so fragile that Jees Uck feared lest hersshould crumble to pieces beneath her fingers. Never had she seen suchcups, so delicate and dainty. In her mind she compared them with thewoman who poured the tea, and there uprose in contrast the gourds andpannikins of the Toyaat village and the clumsy mugs of Twenty Mile, towhich she likened herself. And in such fashion and such terms theproblem presented itself. She was beaten. There was a woman other thanherself better fitted to bear and upbring Neil Bonner's children. Justas his people exceeded her people, so did his womankind exceed her. Theywere the man compellers, as their men were the world compellers. Shelooked at the rose-white tenderness of Kitty Bonner's skin and rememberedthe sun-beat on her own face. Likewise she looked from brown hand towhite--the one, work-worn and hardened by whip-handle and paddle, theother as guiltless of toil and soft as a newborn babe's. And, for allthe obvious softness and apparent weakness, Jees Uck looked into the blueeyes and saw the mastery she had seen in Neil Bonner's eyes and in theeyes of Neil Bonner's people. 

"Why, it's Jees Uck!" Neil Bonner said, when he entered. He said itcalmly, with even a ring of joyful cordiality, coming over to her andshaking both her hands, but looking into her eyes with a worry in his ownthat she understood. 

"Hello, Neil!" she said. "You look much good. "

"Fine, fine, Jees Uck, " he answered heartily, though secretly studyingKitty for some sign of what had passed between the two. Yet he knew hiswife too well to expect, even though the worst had passed, such a sign. 

"Well, I can't say how glad I am to see you, " he went on. "What'shappened? Did you strike a mine? And when did you get in?"

"Oo-a, I get in to-day, " she replied, her voice instinctively seeking itsguttural parts. "I no strike it, Neil. You known Cap'n Markheim, Unalaska? I cook, his house, long time. No spend money. Bime-by, plenty. Pretty good, I think, go down and see White Man's Land. Veryfine, White Man's Land, very fine, " she added. Her English puzzled him, for Sandy and he had sought, constantly, to better her speech, and shehad proved an apt pupil. Now it seemed that she had sunk back into herrace. Her face was guileless, stolidly guileless, giving no cue. Kitty'suntroubled brow likewise baffled him. What had happened? How much hadbeen said? and how much guessed?

While he wrestled with these questions and while Jees Uck wrestled withher problem--never had he looked so wonderful and great--a silence fell. 

"To think that you knew my husband in Alaska!" Kitty said softly. 

Knew him! Jees Uck could not forbear a glance at the boy she had bornehim, and his eyes followed hers mechanically to the window where playedthe two children. An iron hand seemed to tighten across his forehead. His knees went weak and his heart leaped up and pounded like a fistagainst his breast. His boy! He had never dreamed it!

Little Kitty Bonner, fairylike in gauzy lawn, with pinkest of cheeks andbluest of dancing eyes, arms outstretched and lips puckered ininvitation, was striving to kiss the boy. And the boy, lean and lithe, sunbeaten and browned, skin-clad and in hair-fringed and hair-tufted_muclucs_ that showed the wear of the sea and rough work, coollywithstood her advances, his body straight and stiff with the peculiarerectness common to children of savage people. A stranger in a strangeland, unabashed and unafraid, he appeared more like an untamed animal, silent and watchful, his black eyes flashing from face to face, quiet solong as quiet endured, but prepared to spring and fight and tear andscratch for life, at the first sign of danger. 

The contrast between boy and girl was striking, but not pitiful. Therewas too much strength in the boy for that, waif that he was of thegenerations of Shpack, Spike O'Brien, and Bonner. In his features, cleancut as a cameo and almost classic in their severity, there were the powerand achievement of his father, and his grandfather, and the one known asthe Big Fat, who was captured by the Sea people and escaped to Kamchatka. 

Neil Bonner fought his emotion down, swallowed it down, and choked overit, though his face smiled with good-humour and the joy with which onemeets a friend. 

"Your boy, eh, Jees Uck?" he said. And then turning to Kitty: "Handsomefellow! He'll do something with those two hands of his in this ourworld. "

Kitty nodded concurrence. "What is your name?" she asked. 

The young savage flashed his quick eyes upon her and dwelt over her for aspace, seeking out, as it were, the motive beneath the question. 

"Neil, " he answered deliberately when the scrutiny had satisfied him. 

"Injun talk, " Jees Uck interposed, glibly manufacturing languages on thespur of the moment. "Him Injun talk, _nee-al_ all the same 'cracker. 'Him baby, him like cracker; him cry for cracker. Him say, '_Nee-al_, _nee-al_, ' all time him say, '_Nee-al_. ' Then I say that um name. Soum name all time Nee-al. "

Never did sound more blessed fall upon Neil Bonner's ear than that liefrom Jees Uck's lips. It was the cue, and he knew there was reason forKitty's untroubled brow. 

"And his father?" Kitty asked. "He must be a fine man. "

"Oo-a, yes, " was the reply. "Um father fine man. Sure!"

"Did you know him, Neil?" queried Kitty. 

"Know him? Most intimately, " Neil answered, and harked back to drearyTwenty Mile and the man alone in the silence with his thoughts. 

And here might well end the story of Jees Uck but for the crown she putupon her renunciation. When she returned to the North to dwell in hergrand log-house, John Thompson found that the P. C. Company could make ashift somehow to carry on its business without his aid. Also, the newagent and the succeeding agents received instructions that the woman JeesUck should be given whatsoever goods and grub she desired, in whatsoeverquantities she ordered, and that no charge should be placed upon thebooks. Further, the Company paid yearly to the woman Jees Uck a pensionof five thousand dollars. 

When he had attained suitable age, Father Champreau laid hands upon theboy, and the time was not long when Jees Uck received letters regularlyfrom the Jesuit college in Maryland. Later on these letters came fromItaly, and still later from France. And in the end there returned toAlaska one Father Neil, a man mighty for good in the land, who loved hismother and who ultimately went into a wider field and rose to highauthority in the order. 

Jees Uck was a young woman when she went back into the North, and menstill looked upon her and yearned. But she lived straight, and no breathwas ever raised save in commendation. She stayed for a while with thegood sisters at Holy Cross, where she learned to read and write andbecame versed in practical medicine and surgery. After that she returnedto her grand log-house and gathered about her the young girls of theToyaat village, to show them the way of their feet in the world. It isneither Protestant nor Catholic, this school in the house built by NeilBonner for Jees Uck, his wife; but the missionaries of all the sects lookupon it with equal favour. The latchstring is always out, and tiredprospectors and trail-weary men turn aside from the flowing river orfrozen trail to rest there for a space and be warm by her fire. And, down in the States, Kitty Bonner is pleased at the interest her husbandtakes in Alaskan education and the large sums he devotes to that purpose;and, though she often smiles and chaffs, deep down and secretly she isbut the prouder of him.