The Faith of Men

Ver.04.29.93*END*

The Faith of Men

Contents:

A Relic of the Pliocene

A Hyperborean Brew

The Faith of Men

Too Much Gold

The One Thousand Dozen

The Marriage of Lit-lit

Batard

The Story of Jees Uck

A RELIC OF THE PLIOCENE

I wash my hands of him at the start. I cannot father his tales,

nor will I be responsible for them. I make these preliminary

reservations, observe, as a guard upon my own integrity. I possess

a certain definite position in a small way, also a wife; and for

the good name of the community that honours my existence with its

approval, and for the sake of her posterity and mine, I cannot take

the chances I once did, nor foster probabilities with the careless

improvidence of youth. So, I repeat, I wash my hands of him, this

Nimrod, this mighty hunter, this homely, blue-eyed, freckle-faced

Thomas Stevens.

Having been honest to myself, and to whatever prospective olive

branches my wife may be pleased to tender me, I can now afford to

be generous. I shall not criticize the tales told me by Thomas

Stevens, and, further, I shall withhold my judgment. If it be

asked why, I can only add that judgment I have none. Long have I

pondered, weighed, and balanced, but never have my conclusions been

twice the same--forsooth! because Thomas Stevens is a greater man

than I. If he have told truths, well and good; if untruths, still

well and good. For who can prove? or who disprove? I eliminate

myself from the proposition, while those of little faith may do as

I have done--go find the same Thomas Stevens, and discuss to his

face the various matters which, if fortune serve, I shall relate.

As to where he may be found? The directions are simple: anywhere

between 53 north latitude and the Pole, on the one hand; and, on

the other, the likeliest hunting grounds that lie between the east

coast of Siberia and farthermost Labrador. That he is there,

somewhere, within that clearly defined territory, I pledge the word

of an honourable man whose expectations entail straight speaking

and right living.

Thomas Stevens may have toyed prodigiously with truth, but when we

first met (it were well to mark this point), he wandered into my

camp when I thought myself a thousand miles beyond the outermost

post of civilization. At the sight of his human face, the first in

weary months, I could have sprung forward and folded him in my arms

(and I am not by any means a demonstrative man); but to him his

visit seemed the most casual thing under the sun. He just strolled

into the light of my camp, passed the time of day after the custom

of men on beaten trails, threw my snowshoes the one way and a

couple of dogs the other, and so made room for himself by the fire.

Said he'd just dropped in to borrow a pinch of soda and to see if I

had any decent tobacco. He plucked forth an ancient pipe, loaded

it with painstaking care, and, without as much as by your leave,

whacked half the tobacco of my pouch into his. Yes, the stuff was

fairly good. He sighed with the contentment of the just, and

literally absorbed the smoke from the crisping yellow flakes, and

it did my smoker's heart good to behold him.

Hunter? Trapper? Prospector? He shrugged his shoulders No; just

sort of knocking round a bit. Had come up from the Great Slave

some time since, and was thinking of trapsing over into the Yukon

country. The factor of Koshim had spoken about the discoveries on

the Klondike, and he was of a mind to run over for a peep. I

noticed that he spoke of the Klondike in the archaic vernacular,

calling it the Reindeer River--a conceited custom that the Old

Timers employ against the CHECHAQUAS and all tenderfeet in general.

But he did it so naively and as such a matter of course, that there

was no sting, and I forgave him. He also had it in view, he said,

before he crossed the divide into the Yukon, to make a little run

up Fort o' Good Hope way.

Now Fort o' Good Hope is a far journey to the north, over and

beyond the Circle, in a place where the feet of few men have trod;

and when a nondescript ragamuffin comes in out of the night, from

nowhere in particular, to sit by one's fire and discourse on such

in terms of "trapsing" and "a little run," it is fair time to rouse

up and shake off the dream. Wherefore I looked about me; saw the

fly and, underneath, the pine boughs spread for the sleeping furs;

saw the grub sacks, the camera, the frosty breaths of the dogs

circling on the edge of the light; and, above, a great streamer of

the aurora, bridging the zenith from south-east to north-west. I

shivered. There is a magic in the Northland night, that steals in

on one like fevers from malarial marshes. You are clutched and

downed before you are aware. Then I looked to the snowshoes, lying

prone and crossed where he had flung them. Also I had an eye to my

tobacco pouch. Half, at least, of its goodly store had vamosed.

That settled it. Fancy had not tricked me after all.

Crazed with suffering, I thought, looking steadfastly at the man--

one of those wild stampeders, strayed far from his bearings and

wandering like a lost soul through great vastnesses and unknown

deeps. Oh, well, let his moods slip on, until, mayhap, he gathers

his tangled wits together. Who knows?--the mere sound of a fellow-

creature's voice may bring all straight again.

So I led him on in talk, and soon I marvelled, for he talked of

game and the ways thereof. He had killed the Siberian wolf of

westernmost Alaska, and the chamois in the secret Rockies. He

averred he knew the haunts where the last buffalo still roamed;

that he had hung on the flanks of the caribou when they ran by the

hundred thousand, and slept in the Great Barrens on the musk-ox's

winter trail.

And I shifted my judgment accordingly (the first revision, but by

no account the last), and deemed him a monumental effigy of truth.

Why it was I know not, but the spirit moved me to repeat a tale

told to me by a man who had dwelt in the land too long to know

better. It was of the great bear that hugs the steep slopes of St

Elias, never descending to the levels of the gentler inclines. Now

God so constituted this creature for its hillside habitat that the

legs of one side are all of a foot longer than those of the other.

This is mighty convenient, as will be reality admitted. So I

hunted this rare beast in my own name, told it in the first person,

present tense, painted the requisite locale, gave it the necessary

garnishings and touches of verisimilitude, and looked to see the

man stunned by the recital.

Not he. Had he doubted, I could have forgiven him. Had he

objected, denying the dangers of such a hunt by virtue of the

animal's inability to turn about and go the other way--had he done

this, I say, I could have taken him by the hand for the true

sportsman that he was. Not he. He sniffed, looked on me, and

sniffed again; then gave my tobacco due praise, thrust one foot

into my lap, and bade me examine the gear. It was a MUCLUC of the

Innuit pattern, sewed together with sinew threads, and devoid of

beads or furbelows. But it was the skin itself that was

remarkable. In that it was all of half an inch thick, it reminded

me of walrus-hide; but there the resemblance ceased, for no walrus

ever bore so marvellous a growth of hair. On the side and ankles

this hair was well-nigh worn away, what of friction with underbrush

and snow; but around the top and down the more sheltered back it

was coarse, dirty black, and very thick. I parted it with

difficulty and looked beneath for the fine fur that is common with

northern animals, but found it in this case to be absent. This,

however, was compensated for by the length. Indeed, the tufts that

had survived wear and tear measured all of seven or eight inches.

I looked up into the man's face, and he pulled his foot down and

asked, "Find hide like that on your St Elias bear?"

I shook my head. "Nor on any other creature of land or sea," I

answered candidly. The thickness of it, and the length of the

hair, puzzled me.

"That," he said, and said without the slightest hint of

impressiveness, "that came from a mammoth."

"Nonsense!" I exclaimed, for I could not forbear the protest of my

unbelief. "The mammoth, my dear sir, long ago vanished from the

earth. We know it once existed by the fossil remains that we have

unearthed, and by a frozen carcase that the Siberian sun saw fit to

melt from out the bosom of a glacier; but we also know that no

living specimen exists. Our explorers--"

At this word he broke in impatiently. "Your explorers? Pish! A

weakly breed. Let us hear no more of them. But tell me, O man,

what you may know of the mammoth and his ways."

Beyond contradiction, this was leading to a yarn; so I baited my

hook by ransacking my memory for whatever data I possessed on the

subject in hand. To begin with, I emphasized that the animal was

prehistoric, and marshalled all my facts in support of this. I

mentioned the Siberian sand-bars that abounded with ancient mammoth

bones; spoke of the large quantities of fossil ivory purchased from

the Innuits by the Alaska Commercial Company; and acknowledged

having myself mined six- and eight-foot tusks from the pay gravel

of the Klondike creeks. "All fossils," I concluded, "found in the

midst of debris deposited through countless ages."

"I remember when I was a kid," Thomas Stevens sniffed (he had a

most confounded way of sniffing), "that I saw a petrified water-

melon. Hence, though mistaken persons sometimes delude themselves

into thinking that they are really raising or eating them, there

are no such things as extant water-melons?"

"But the question of food," I objected, ignoring his point, which

was puerile and without bearing. "The soil must bring forth

vegetable life in lavish abundance to support so monstrous

creations. Nowhere in the North is the soil so prolific. Ergo,

the mammoth cannot exist."

"I pardon your ignorance concerning many matters of this Northland,

for you are a young man and have travelled little; but, at the same

time, I am inclined to agree with you on one thing. The mammoth no

longer exists. How do I know? I killed the last one with my own

right arm."

Thus spake Nimrod, the mighty Hunter. I threw a stick of firewood

at the dogs and bade them quit their unholy howling, and waited.

Undoubtedly this liar of singular felicity would open his mouth and

requite me for my St. Elias bear.

"It was this way," he at last began, after the appropriate silence

had intervened. "I was in camp one day--"

"Where?" I interrupted.

He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the north-east, where

stretched a TERRA INCOGNITA into which vastness few men have

strayed and fewer emerged. "I was in camp one day with Klooch.

Klooch was as handsome a little KAMOOKS as ever whined betwixt the

traces or shoved nose into a camp kettle. Her father was a full-

blood Malemute from Russian Pastilik on Bering Sea, and I bred her,

and with understanding, out of a clean-legged bitch of the Hudson

Bay stock. I tell you, O man, she was a corker combination. And

now, on this day I have in mind, she was brought to pup through a

pure wild wolf of the woods--grey, and long of limb, with big lungs

and no end of staying powers. Say! Was there ever the like? It

was a new breed of dog I had started, and I could look forward to

big things.

"As I have said, she was brought neatly to pup, and safely

delivered. I was squatting on my hams over the litter--seven

sturdy, blind little beggars--when from behind came a bray of

trumpets and crash of brass. There was a rush, like the wind-

squall that kicks the heels of the rain, and I was midway to my

feet when knocked flat on my face. At the same instant I heard

Klooch sigh, very much as a man does when you've planted your fist

in his belly. You can stake your sack I lay quiet, but I twisted

my head around and saw a huge bulk swaying above me. Then the blue

sky flashed into view and I got to my feet. A hairy mountain of

flesh was just disappearing in the underbrush on the edge of the

open. I caught a rear-end glimpse, with a stiff tail, as big in

girth as my body, standing out straight behind. The next second

only a tremendous hole remained in the thicket, though I could

still hear the sounds as of a tornado dying quickly away,

underbrush ripping and tearing, and trees snapping and crashing.

"I cast about for my rifle. It had been lying on the ground with

the muzzle against a log; but now the stock was smashed, the barrel

out of line, and the working-gear in a thousand bits. Then I

looked for the slut, and--and what do you suppose?"

I shook my head.

"May my soul burn in a thousand hells if there was anything left of

her! Klooch, the seven sturdy, blind little beggars--gone, all

gone. Where she had stretched was a slimy, bloody depression in

the soft earth, all of a yard in diameter, and around the edges a

few scattered hairs."

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

glanced at Nimrod.

"The beast was thirty long and twenty high," he answered, "and its

tusks scaled over six times three feet. I couldn't believe,

myself, at the time, for all that it had just happened. But if my

senses had played me, there was the broken gun and the hole in the

brush. And there was--or, rather, there was not--Klooch and the

pups. O man, it makes me hot all over now when I think of it

Klooch! Another Eve! The mother of a new race! And a rampaging,

ranting, old bull mammoth, like a second flood, wiping them, root

and branch, off the face of the earth! Do you wonder that the

blood-soaked earth cried out to high God? Or that I grabbed the

hand-axe and took the trail?"

"The hand-axe?" I exclaimed, startled out of myself by the picture.

"The hand-axe, and a big bull mammoth, thirty feet long, twenty

feet--"

Nimrod joined me in my merriment, chuckling gleefully. "Wouldn't

it kill you?" he cried. "Wasn't it a beaver's dream? Many's the

time I've laughed about it since, but at the time it was no

laughing matter, I was that danged mad, what of the gun and Klooch.

Think of it, O man! A brand-new, unclassified, uncopyrighted

breed, and wiped out before ever it opened its eyes or took out its

intention papers! Well, so be it. Life's full of disappointments,

and rightly so. Meat is best after a famine, and a bed soft after

a hard trail.

"As I was saying, I took out after the beast with the hand-axe, and

hung to its heels down the valley; but when he circled back toward

the head, I was left winded at the lower end. Speaking of grub, I

might as well stop long enough to explain a couple of points. Up

thereabouts, in the midst of the mountains, is an almighty curious

formation. There is no end of little valleys, each like the other

much as peas in a pod, and all neatly tucked away with straight,

rocky walls rising on all sides. And at the lower ends are always

small openings where the drainage or glaciers must have broken out.

The only way in is through these mouths, and they are all small,

and some smaller than others. As to grub--you've slushed around on

the rain-soaked islands of the Alaskan coast down Sitka way, most

likely, seeing as you're a traveller. And you know how stuff grows

there--big, and juicy, and jungly. Well, that's the way it was

with those valleys. Thick, rich soil, with ferns and grasses and

such things in patches higher than your head. Rain three days out

of four during the summer months; and food in them for a thousand

mammoths, to say nothing of small game for man.

"But to get back. Down at the lower end of the valley I got winded

and gave over. I began to speculate, for when my wind left me my

dander got hotter and hotter, and I knew I'd never know peace of

mind till I dined on roasted mammoth-foot. And I knew, also, that

that stood for SKOOKUM MAMOOK PUKAPUK--excuse Chinook, I mean there

was a big fight coming. Now the mouth of my valley was very

narrow, and the walls steep. High up on one side was one of those

big pivot rocks, or balancing rocks, as some call them, weighing

all of a couple of hundred tons. Just the thing. I hit back for

camp, keeping an eye open so the bull couldn't slip past, and got

my ammunition. It wasn't worth anything with the rifle smashed; so

I opened the shells, planted the powder under the rock, and touched

it off with slow fuse. Wasn't much of a charge, but the old

boulder tilted up lazily and dropped down into place, with just

space enough to let the creek drain nicely. Now I had him."

"But how did you have him?" I queried. "Who ever heard of a man

killing a mammoth with a hand-axe? And, for that matter, with

anything else?"

"O man, have I not told you I was mad?" Nimrod replied, with a

slight manifestation of sensitiveness. "Mad clean through, what of

Klooch and the gun. Also, was I not a hunter? And was this not

new and most unusual game? A hand-axe? Pish! I did not need it.

Listen, and you shall hear of a hunt, such as might have happened

in the youth of the world when cavemen rounded up the kill with

hand-axe of stone. Such would have served me as well. Now is it

not a fact that man can outwalk the dog or horse? That he can wear

them out with the intelligence of his endurance?"

I nodded.

"Well?"

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

"My valley was perhaps five miles around. The mouth was closed.

There was no way to get out. A timid beast was that bull mammoth,

and I had him at my mercy. I got on his heels again hollered like

a fiend, pelted him with cobbles, and raced him around the valley

three times before I knocked off for supper. Don't you see? A

race-course! A man and a mammoth! A hippodrome, with sun, moon,

and stars to referee!

"It took me two months to do it, but I did it. And that's no

beaver dream. Round and round I ran him, me travelling on the

inner circle, eating jerked meat and salmon berries on the run, and

snatching winks of sleep between. Of course, he'd get desperate at

times and turn. Then I'd head for soft ground where the creek

spread out, and lay anathema upon him and his ancestry, and dare

him to come on. But he was too wise to bog in a mud puddle. Once

he pinned me in against the walls, and I crawled back into a deep

crevice and waited. Whenever he felt for me with his trunk, I'd

belt him with the hand-axe till he pulled out, shrieking fit to

split my ear drums, he was that mad. He knew he had me and didn't

have me, and it near drove him wild. But he was no man's fool. He

knew he was safe as long as I stayed in the crevice, and he made up

his mind to keep me there. And he was dead right, only he hadn't

figured on the commissary. There was neither grub nor water around

that spot, so on the face of it he couldn't keep up the siege.

He'd stand before the opening for hours, keeping an eye on me and

flapping mosquitoes away with his big blanket ears. Then the

thirst would come on him and he'd ramp round and roar till the

earth shook, calling me every name he could lay tongue to. This

was to frighten me, of course; and when he thought I was

sufficiently impressed, he'd back away softly and try to make a

sneak for the creek. Sometimes I'd let him get almost there--only

a couple of hundred yards away it was--when out I'd pop and back

he'd come, lumbering along like the old landslide he was. After

I'd done this a few times, and he'd figured it out, he changed his

tactics. Grasped the time element, you see. Without a word of

warning, away he'd go, tearing for the water like mad, scheming to

get there and back before I ran away. Finally, after cursing me

most horribly, he raised the siege and deliberately stalked off to

the water-hole.

"That was the only time he penned me,--three days of it,--but after

that the hippodrome never stopped. Round, and round, and round,

like a six days' go-as-I-please, for he never pleased. My clothes

went to rags and tatters, but I never stopped to mend, till at last

I ran naked as a son of earth, with nothing but the old hand-axe in

one hand and a cobble in the other. In fact, I never stopped, save

for peeps of sleep in the crannies and ledges of the cliffs. As

for the bull, he got perceptibly thinner and thinner--must have

lost several tons at least--and as nervous as a schoolmarm on the

wrong side of matrimony. When I'd come up with him and yell, or

lain him with a rock at long range, he'd jump like a skittish colt

and tremble all over. Then he'd pull out on the run, tail and

trunk waving stiff, head over one shoulder and wicked eyes blazing,

and the way he'd swear at me was something dreadful. A most

immoral beast he was, a murderer, and a blasphemer.

"But towards the end he quit all this, and fell to whimpering and

crying like a baby. His spirit broke and he became a quivering

jelly-mountain of misery. He'd get attacks of palpitation of the

heart, and stagger around like a drunken man, and fall down and

bark his shins. And then he'd cry, but always on the run. O man,

the gods themselves would have wept with him, and you yourself or

any other man. It was pitiful, and there was so I much of it, but

I only hardened my heart and hit up the pace. At last I wore him

clean out, and he lay down, broken-winded, broken-hearted, hungry,

and thirsty. When I found he wouldn't budge, I hamstrung him, and

spent the better part of the day wading into him with the hand-axe,

he a-sniffing and sobbing till I worked in far enough to shut him

off. Thirty feet long he was, and twenty high, and a man could

sling a hammock between his tusks and sleep comfortably. Barring

the fact that I had run most of the juices out of him, he was fair

eating, and his four feet, alone, roasted whole, would have lasted

a man a twelvemonth. I spent the winter there myself."

"And where is this valley?" I asked

He waved his hand in the direction of the north-east, and said:

"Your tobacco is very good. I carry a fair share of it in my

pouch, but I shall carry the recollection of it until I die. In

token of my appreciation, and in return for the moccasins on your

own feet, I will present to you these muclucs. They commemorate

Klooch and the seven blind little beggars. They are also souvenirs

of an unparalleled event in history, namely, the destruction of the

oldest breed of animal on earth, and the youngest. And their chief

virtue lies in that they will never wear out."

Having effected the exchange, he knocked the ashes from his pipe,

gripped my hand good-night, and wandered off through the snow.

Concerning this tale, for which I have already disclaimed

responsibility, I would recommend those of little faith to make a

visit to the Smithsonian Institute. If they bring the requisite

credentials and do not come in vacation time, they will undoubtedly

gain an audience with Professor Dolvidson. The muclucs are in his

possession, and he will verify, not the manner in which they were

obtained, but the material of which they are composed. When he

states that they are made from the skin of the mammoth, the

scientific world accepts his verdict. What more would you have?

A HYPERBOREAN BREW

[The story of a scheming white man among the strange people who

live on the rim of the Arctic sea]

Thomas Stevens's veracity may have been indeterminate as X, and his

imagination the imagination of ordinary men increased to the nth

power, but this, at least, must be said: never did he deliver

himself of word nor deed that could be branded as a lie outright. .

. He may have played with probability, and verged on the extremest

edge of possibility, but in his tales the machinery never creaked.

That he knew the Northland like a book, not a soul can deny. That

he was a great traveller, and had set foot on countless unknown

trails, many evidences affirm. Outside of my own personal

knowledge, I knew men that had met him everywhere, but principally

on the confines of Nowhere. There was Johnson, the ex-Hudson Bay

Company factor, who had housed him in a Labrador factory until his

dogs rested up a bit, and he was able to strike out again. There

was McMahon, agent for the Alaska Commercial Company, who had run

across him in Dutch Harbour, and later on, among the outlying

islands of the Aleutian group. It was indisputable that he had

guided one of the earlier United States surveys, and history states

positively that in a similar capacity he served the Western Union

when it attempted to put through its trans-Alaskan and Siberian

telegraph to Europe. Further, there was Joe Lamson, the whaling

captain, who, when ice-bound off the mouth of the Mackenzie, had

had him come aboard after tobacco. This last touch proves Thomas

Stevens's identity conclusively. His quest for tobacco was

perennial and untiring. Ere we became fairly acquainted, I learned

to greet him with one hand, and pass the pouch with the other. But

the night I met him in John O'Brien's Dawson saloon, his head was

wreathed in a nimbus of fifty-cent cigar smoke, and instead of my

pouch he demanded my sack. We were standing by a faro table, and

forthwith he tossed it upon the "high card." "Fifty," he said, and

the game-keeper nodded. The "high card" turned, and he handed back

my sack, called for a "tab," and drew me over to the scales, where

the weigher nonchalantly cashed him out fifty dollars in dust.

"And now we'll drink," he said; and later, at the bar, when he

lowered his glass: "Reminds me of a little brew I had up Tattarat

way. No, you have no knowledge of the place, nor is it down on the

charts. But it's up by the rim of the Arctic Sea, not so many

hundred miles from the American line, and all of half a thousand

God-forsaken souls live there, giving and taking in marriage, and

starving and dying in-between-whiles. Explorers have overlooked

them, and you will not find them in the census of 1890. A whale-

ship was pinched there once, but the men, who had made shore over

the ice, pulled out for the south and were never heard of.

"But it was a great brew we had, Moosu and I," he added a moment

later, with just the slightest suspicion of a sigh.

I knew there were big deeds and wild doings behind that sigh, so I

haled him into a corner, between a roulette outfit and a poker

layout, and waited for his tongue to thaw.

"Had one objection to Moosu," he began, cocking his head

meditatively--"one objection, and only one. He was an Indian from

over on the edge of the Chippewyan country, but the trouble was,

he'd picked up a smattering of the Scriptures. Been campmate a

season with a renegade French Canadian who'd studied for the

church. Moosu'd never seen applied Christianity, and his head was

crammed with miracles, battles, and dispensations, and what not he

didn't understand. Otherwise he was a good sort, and a handy man

on trail or over a fire.

"We'd had a hard time together and were badly knocked out when we

plumped upon Tattarat. Lost outfits and dogs crossing a divide in

a fall blizzard, and our bellies clove to our backs and our clothes

were in rags when we crawled into the village. They weren't much

surprised at seeing us--because of the whalemen--and gave us the

meanest shack in the village to live in, and the worst of their

leavings to live on. What struck me at the time as strange was

that they left us strictly alone. But Moosu explained it.

"'Shaman SICK TUMTUM,' he said, meaning the shaman, or medicine

man, was jealous, and had advised the people to have nothing to do

with us. From the little he'd seen of the whalemen, he'd learned

that mine was a stronger race, and a wiser; so he'd only behaved as

shamans have always behaved the world over. And before I get done,

you'll see how near right he was.

"'These people have a law,' said Mosu: 'whoso eats of meat must

hunt. We be awkward, you and I, O master, in the weapons of this

country; nor can we string bows nor fling spears after the manner

approved. Wherefore the shaman and Tummasook, who is chief, have

put their heads together, and it has been decreed that we work with

the women and children in dragging in the meat and tending the

wants of the hunters.'

"'And this is very wrong,' I made to answer; 'for we be better men,

Moosu, than these people who walk in darkness. Further, we should

rest and grow strong, for the way south is long, and on that trail

the weak cannot prosper.'"

"'But we have nothing,' he objected, looking about him at the

rotten timbers of the igloo, the stench of the ancient walrus meat

that had been our supper disgusting his nostrils. 'And on this

fare we cannot thrive. We have nothing save the bottle of "pain-

killer," which will not fill emptiness, so we must bend to the yoke

of the unbeliever and become hewers of wood and drawers of water.

And there be good things in this place, the which we may not have.

Ah, master, never has my nose lied to me, and I have followed it to

secret caches and among the fur-bales of the igloos. Good

provender did these people extort from the poor whalemen, and this

provender has wandered into few hands. The woman Ipsukuk, who

dwelleth in the far end of the village next she igloo of the chief,

possesseth much flour and sugar, and even have my eyes told me of

molasses smeared on her face. And in the igloo of Tummasook, the

chief, there be tea--have I not seen the old pig guzzling? And the

shaman owneth a caddy of "Star" and two buckets of prime smoking.

And what have we? Nothing! Nothing!'

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

no answer.

"And Moosu, what of his own desire, broke silence: 'And there be

Tukeliketa, daughter of a big hunter and wealthy man. A likely

girl. Indeed, a very nice girl.'

"I figured hard during the night while Moosu snored, for I could

not bear the thought of the tobacco so near which I could not

smoke. True, as he had said, we had nothing. But the way became

clear to me, and in the morning I said to him: 'Go thou cunningly

abroad, after thy fashion, and procure me some sort of bone,

crooked like a goose-neck, and hollow. Also, walk humbly, but have

eyes awake to the lay of pots and pans and cooking contrivances.

And remember, mine is the white man's wisdom, and do what I have

bid you, with sureness and despatch.'

"While he was away I placed the whale-oil cooking lamp in the

middle of the igloo, and moved the mangy sleeping furs back that I

might have room. Then I took apart his gun and put the barrel by

handy, and afterwards braided many wicks from the cotton that the

women gather wild in the summer. When he came back, it was with

the bone I had commanded, and with news that in the igloo of

Tummasook there was a five-gallon kerosene can and a big copper

kettle. So I said he had done well and we would tarry through the

day. And when midnight was near I made harangue to him.

"'This chief, this Tummasook, hath a copper kettle, likewise a

kerosene can.' I put a rock, smooth and wave-washed, in Moosu's

hand. 'The camp is hushed and the stars are winking. Go thou,

creep into the chief's igloo softly, and smite him thus upon the

belly, and hard. And let the meat and good grub of the days to

come put strength into thine arm. There will be uproar and outcry,

and the village will come hot afoot. But be thou unafraid. Veil

thy movements and lose thy form in the obscurity of the night and

the confusion of men. And when the woman Ipsukuk is anigh thee,--

she who smeareth her face with molasses,--do thou smite her

likewise, and whosoever else that possesseth flour and cometh to

thy hand. Then do thou lift thy voice in pain and double up with

clasped hands, and make outcry in token that thou, too, hast felt

the visitation of the night. And in this way shall we achieve

honour and great possessions, and the caddy of "Star" and the prime

smoking, and thy Tukeliketa, who is a likely maiden.'

"When he had departed on this errand, I bided patiently in the

shack, and the tobacco seemed very near. Then there was a cry of

affright in the night, that became an uproar and assailed the sky.

I seized the 'pain-killer' and ran forth. There was much noise,

and a wailing among the women, and fear sat heavily on all.

Tummasook and the woman Ipsukuk rolled on the ground in pain, and

with them there were divers others, also Moosu. I thrust aside

those that cluttered the way of my feet, and put the mouth of the

bottle to Moosu's lips. And straightway he became well and ceased

his howling. Whereat there was a great clamour for the bottle from

the others so stricken. But I made harangue, and ere they tasted

and were made well I had mulcted Tummasook of his copper kettle and

kerosene can, and the woman Ipsukuk of her sugar and molasses, and

the other sick ones of goodly measures of flour. The shaman

glowered wickedly at the people around my knees, though he poorly

concealed the wonder that lay beneath. But I held my head high,

and Moosu groaned beneath the loot as he followed my heels to the

shack.

"There I set to work. In Tummasook's copper kettle I mixed three

quarts of wheat flour with five of molasses, and to this I added of

water twenty quarts. Then I placed the kettle near the lamp, that

it might sour in the warmth and grow strong. Moosu understood, and

said my wisdom passed understanding and was greater than Solomon's,

who he had heard was a wise man of old time. The kerosene can I

set over the lamp, and to its nose I affixed a snout, and into the

snout the bone that was like a gooseneck. I sent Moosu without to

pound ice, while I connected the barrel of his gun with the

gooseneck, and midway on the barrel I piled the ice he had pounded.

And at the far end of the gun-barrel, beyond the pan of ice, I

placed a small iron pot. When the brew was strong enough (and it

was two days ere it could stand on its own legs), I filled the

kerosene can with it, and lighted the wicks I had braided.

"Now that all was ready, I spoke to Moosu. 'Go forth,' I said, 'to

the chief men of the village, and give them greeting, and bid them

come into my igloo and sleep the night away with me and the gods.'

"The brew was singing merrily when they began shoving aside the

skin flap and crawling in, and I was heaping cracked ice on the

gun-barrel. Out of the priming hole at the far end, drip, drip,

drip into the iron pot fell the liquor--HOOCH, you know. But

they'd never seen the like, and giggled nervously when I made

harangue about its virtues. As I talked I noted the jealousy in

the shaman's eye, so when I had done, I placed him side by side

with Tummasook and the woman Ipsukuk. Then I gave them to drink,

and their eyes watered and their stomachs warmed, till from being

afraid they reached greedily for more; and when I had them well

started, I turned to the others. Tummasook made a brag about how

he had once killed a polar bear, and in the vigour of his pantomime

nearly slew his mother's brother. But nobody heeded. The woman

Ipsukuk fell to weeping for a son lost long years agone in the ice,

and the shaman made incantation and prophecy. So it went, and

before morning they were all on the floor, sleeping soundly with

the gods.

"The story tells itself, does it not? The news of the magic potion

spread. It was too marvellous for utterance. Tongues could tell

but a tithe of the miracles it performed. It eased pain, gave

surcease to sorrow, brought back old memories, dead faces, and

forgotten dreams. It was a fire that ate through all the blood,

and, burning, burned not. It stoutened the heart, stiffened the

back, and made men more than men. It revealed the future, and gave

visions and prophecy. It brimmed with wisdom and unfolded secrets.

There was no end of the things it could do, and soon there was a

clamouring on all hands to sleep with the gods. They brought their

warmest furs, their strongest dogs, their best meats; but I sold

the hooch with discretion, and only those were favoured that

brought flour and molasses and sugar. And such stores poured in

that I set Moosu to build a cache to hold them, for there was soon

no space in the igloo. Ere three days had passed Tummasook had

gone bankrupt. The shaman, who was never more than half drunk

after the first night, watched me closely and hung on for the

better part of the week. But before ten days were gone, even the

woman Ipsukuk exhausted her provisions, and went home weak and

tottery.

"But Moosu complained. 'O master,' he said, 'we have laid by great

wealth in molasses and sugar and flour, but our shack is yet mean,

our clothes thin, and our sleeping furs mangy. There is a call of

the belly for meat the stench of which offends not the stars, and

for tea such as Tummasook guzzles, and there is a great yearning

for the tobacco of Neewak, who is shaman and who plans to destroy

us. I have flour until I am sick, and sugar and molasses without

stint, yet is the heart of Moosu sore and his bed empty.'

"'Peace!' I answered, 'thou art weak of understanding and a fool.

Walk softly and wait, and we will grasp it all. But grasp now, and

we grasp little, and in the end it will be nothing. Thou art a

child in the way of the white man's wisdom. Hold thy tongue and

watch, and I will show you the way my brothers do overseas, and, so

doing, gather to themselves the riches of the earth. It is what is

called "business," and what dost thou know about business?'

"But the next day he came in breathless. 'O master, a strange

thing happeneth in the igloo of Neewak, the shaman; wherefore we

are lost, and we have neither worn the warm furs nor tasted the

good tobacco, what of your madness for the molasses and flour. Go

thou and witness whilst I watch by the brew.'

"So I went to the igloo of Neewak. And behold, he had made his own

still, fashioned cunningly after mine. And as he beheld me he

could ill conceal his triumph. For he was a man of parts, and his

sleep with the gods when in my igloo had not been sound.

"But I was not disturbed, for I knew what I knew, and when I

returned to my own igloo, I descanted to Moosu, and said: 'Happily

the property right obtains amongst this people, who otherwise have

been blessed with but few of the institutions of men. And because

of this respect for property shall you and I wax fat, and, further,

we shall introduce amongst them new institutions that other peoples

have worked out through great travail and suffering.'

"But Moosu understood dimly, till the shaman came forth, with eyes

flashing and a threatening note in his voice, and demanded to trade

with me. 'For look you,' he cried, 'there be of flour and molasses

none in all the village. The like have you gathered with a shrewd

hand from my people, who have slept with your gods and who now have

nothing save large heads, and weak knees, and a thirst for cold

water that they cannot quench. This is not good, and my voice has

power among them; so it were well that we trade, you and I, even as

you have traded with them, for molasses and flour.'

"And I made answer: 'This be good talk, and wisdom abideth in thy

mouth. We will trade. For this much of flour and molasses givest

thou me the caddy of "Star" and the two buckets of smoking.'

"And Moosu groaned, and when the trade was made and the shaman

departed, he upbraided me: 'Now, because of thy madness are we,

indeed, lost! Neewak maketh hooch on his own account, and when the

time is ripe, he will command the people to drink of no hooch but

his hooch. And in this way are we undone, and our goods worthless,

and our igloo mean, and the bed of Moosu cold and empty!'

"And I answered: 'By the body of the wolf, say I, thou art a fool,

and thy father before thee, and thy children after thee, down to

the last generation. Thy wisdom is worse than no wisdom and thine

eyes blinded to business, of which I have spoken and whereof thou

knowest nothing. Go, thou son of a thousand fools, and drink of

the hooch that Neewak brews in his igloo, and thank thy gods that

thou hast a white man's wisdom to make soft the bed thou liest in.

Go! and when thou hast drunken, return with the taste still on thy

lips, that I may know.'

"And two days after, Neewak sent greeting and invitation to his

igloo. Moosu went, but I sat alone, with the song of the still in

my ears, and the air thick with the shaman's tobacco; for trade was

slack that night, and no one dropped in but Angeit, a young hunter

that had faith in me. Later, Moosu came back, his speech thick

with chuckling and his eyes wrinkling with laughter.

"'Thou art a great man,' he said. 'Thou art a great man, O master,

and because of thy greatness thou wilt not condemn Moosu, thy

servant, who ofttimes doubts and cannot be made to understand.'

"'And wherefore now?' I demanded. 'Hast thou drunk overmuch? And

are they sleeping sound in the igloo of Neewak, the shaman?'

"'Nay, they are angered and sore of body, and Chief Tummasook has

thrust his thumbs in the throat of Neewak, and sworn by the bones

of his ancestors to look upon his face no more. For behold! I went

to the igloo, and the brew simmered and bubbled, and the steam

journeyed through the gooseneck even as thy steam, and even as

thine it became water where it met the ice, and dropped into the

pot at the far end. And Neewak gave us to drink, and lo, it was

not like thine, for there was no bite to the tongue nor tingling to

the eyeballs, and of a truth it was water. So we drank, and we

drank overmuch; yet did we sit with cold hearts and solemn. And

Neewak was perplexed and a cloud came on his brow. And he took

Tummasook and Ipsukuk alone of all the company and set them apart,

and bade them drink and drink and drink. And they drank and drank

and drank, and yet sat solemn and cold, till Tummasook arose in

wrath and demanded back the furs and the tea he had paid. And

Ipsukuk raised her voice, thin and angry. And the company demanded

back what they had given, and there was a great commotion.'

"'Does the son of a dog deem me a whale?' demanded Tummasook,

shoving back the skin flap and standing erect, his face black and

his brows angry. 'Wherefore I am filled, like a fish-bladder, to

bursting, till I can scarce walk, what of the weight within me.

Lalah! I have drunken as never before, yet are my eyes clear, my

knees strong, my hand steady.'

"'The shaman cannot send us to sleep with the gods,' the people

complained, stringing in and joining us, 'and only in thy igloo may

the thing be done.'

"So I laughed to myself as I passed the hooch around and the guests

made merry. For in the flour I had traded to Neewak I had mixed

much soda that I had got from the woman Ipsukuk. So how could his

brew ferment when the soda kept it sweet? Or his hooch be hooch

when it would not sour?

"After that our wealth flowed in without let or hindrance. Furs we

had without number, and the fancy-work of the women, all of the

chief's tea, and no end of meat. One day Moosu retold for my

benefit, and sadly mangled, the story of Joseph in Egypt, but from

it I got an idea, and soon I had half the tribe at work building me

great meat caches. And of all they hunted I got the lion's share

and stored it away. Nor was Moosu idle. He made himself a pack of

cards from birch bark, and taught Neewak the way to play seven-up.

He also inveigled the father of Tukeliketa into the game. And one

day he married the maiden, and the next day he moved into the

shaman's house, which was the finest in the village. The fall of

Neewak was complete, for he lost all his possessions, his walrus-

hide drums, his incantation tools--everything. And in the end he

became a hewer of wood and drawer of water at the beck and call of

Moosu. And Moosu--he set himself up as shaman, or high priest, and

out of his garbled Scripture created new gods and made incantation

before strange altars.

"And I was well pleased, for I thought it good that church and

state go hand in hand, and I had certain plans of my own concerning

the state. Events were shaping as I had foreseen. Good temper and

smiling faces had vanished from the village. The people were

morose and sullen. There were quarrels and fighting, and things

were in an uproar night and day. Moosu's cards were duplicated and

the hunters fell to gambling among themselves. Tummasook beat his

wife horribly, and his mother's brother objected and smote him with

a tusk of walrus till he cried aloud in the night and was shamed

before the people. Also, amid such diversions no hunting was done,

and famine fell upon the land. The nights were long and dark, and

without meat no hooch could be bought; so they murmured against the

chief. This I had played for, and when they were well and hungry,

I summoned the whole village, made a great harangue, posed as

patriarch, and fed the famishing. Moosu made harangue likewise,

and because of this and the thing I had done I was made chief.

Moosu, who had the ear of God and decreed his judgments, anointed

me with whale blubber, and right blubberly he did it, not

understanding the ceremony. And between us we interpreted to the

people the new theory of the divine right of kings. There was

hooch galore, and meat and feastings, and they took kindly to the

new order.

"So you see, O man, I have sat in the high places, and worn the

purple, and ruled populations. And I might yet be a king had the

tobacco held out, or had Moosu been more fool and less knave. For

he cast eyes upon Esanetuk, eldest daughter to Tummasook, and I

objected.

"'O brother,' he explained, 'thou hast seen fit to speak of

introducing new institutions amongst this people, and I have

listened to thy words and gained wisdom thereby. Thou rulest by

the God-given right, and by the God-given right I marry.'

"I noted that he 'brothered' me, and was angry and put my foot

down. But he fell back upon the people and made incantations for

three days, in which all hands joined; and then, speaking with the

voice of God, he decreed polygamy by divine fiat. But he was

shrewd, for he limited the number of wives by a property

qualification, and because of which he, above all men, was favoured

by his wealth. Nor could I fail to admire, though it was plain

that power had turned his head, and he would not be satisfied till

all the power and all the wealth rested in his own hands. So he

became swollen with pride, forgot it was I that had placed him

there, and made preparations to destroy me.

"But it was interesting, for the beggar was working out in his own

way an evolution of primitive society. Now I, by virtue of the

hooch monopoly, drew a revenue in which I no longer permitted him

to share. So he meditated for a while and evolved a system of

ecclesiastical taxation. He laid tithes upon the people, harangued

about fat firstlings and such things, and twisted whatever twisted

texts he had ever heard to serve his purpose. Even this I bore in

silence, but when he instituted what may be likened to a graduated

income-tax, I rebelled, and blindly, for this was what he worked

for. Thereat, he appealed to the people, and they, envious of my

great wealth and well taxed themselves, upheld him. 'Why should we

pay,' they asked, 'and not you? Does not the voice of God speak

through the lips of Moosu, the shaman?' So I yielded. But at the

same time I raised the price of hooch, and lo, he was not a whit

behind me in raising my taxes.

"Then there was open war. I made a play for Neewak and Tummasook,

because of the traditionary rights they possessed; but Moosu won

out by creating a priesthood and giving them both high office. The

problem of authority presented itself to him, and he worked it out

as it has often been worked before. There was my mistake. I

should have been made shaman, and he chief; but I saw it too late,

and in the clash of spiritual and temporal power I was bound to be

worsted. A great controversy waged, but it quickly became one-

sided. The people remembered that he had anointed me, and it was

clear to them that the source of my authority lay, not in me, but

in Moosu. Only a few faithful ones clung to me, chief among whom

Angeit was; while he headed the popular party and set whispers

afloat that I had it in mind to overthrow him and set up my own

gods, which were most unrighteous gods. And in this the clever

rascal had anticipated me, for it was just what I had intended--

forsake my kingship, you see, and fight spiritual with spiritual.

So he frightened the people with the iniquities of my peculiar

gods--especially the one he named 'Biz-e-Nass'--and nipped the

scheme in the bud.

"Now, it happened that Kluktu, youngest daughter to Tummasook, had

caught my fancy, and I likewise hers. So I made overtures, but the

ex-chief refused bluntly--after I had paid the purchase price--and

informed me that she was set aside for Moosu. This was too much,

and I was half of a mind to go to his igloo and slay him with my

naked hands; but I recollected that the tobacco was near gone, and

went home laughing. The next day he made incantation, and

distorted the miracle of the loaves and fishes till it became

prophecy, and I, reading between the lines, saw that it was aimed

at the wealth of meat stored in my caches. The people also read

between the lines, and, as he did not urge them to go on the hunt,

they remained at home, and few caribou or bear were brought in.

"But I had plans of my own, seeing that not only the tobacco but

the flour and molasses were near gone. And further, I felt it my

duty to prove the white man's wisdom and bring sore distress to

Moosu, who had waxed high-stomached, what of the power I had given

him. So that night I went to my meat caches and toiled mightily,

and it was noted next day that all the dogs of the village were

lazy. No one suspected, and I toiled thus every night, and the

dogs grew fat and fatter, and the people lean and leaner. They

grumbled and demanded the fulfilment of prophecy, but Moosu

restrained them, waiting for their hunger to grow yet greater. Nor

did he dream, to the very last, of the trick I had been playing on

the empty caches.

"When all was ready, I sent Angeit, and the faithful ones whom I

had fed privily, through the village to call assembly. And the

tribe gathered on a great space of beaten snow before my door, with

the meat caches towering stilt-legged in the rear. Moosu came

also, standing on the inner edge of the circle opposite me,

confident that I had some scheme afoot, and prepared at the first

break to down me. But I arose, giving him salutation before all

men.

"'O Moosu, thou blessed of God,' I began, 'doubtless thou hast

wondered in that I have called this convocation together; and

doubtless, because of my many foolishnesses, art thou prepared for

rash sayings and rash doings. Not so. It has been said, that

those the gods would destroy they first make mad. And I have been

indeed mad. I have crossed thy will, and scoffed at thy authority,

and done divers evil and wanton things. Wherefore, last night a

vision was vouchsafed me, and I have seen the wickedness of my

ways. And thou stoodst forth like a shining star, with brows

aflame, and I knew in mine own heart thy greatness. I saw all

things clearly. I knew that thou didst command the ear of God, and

that when you spoke he listened. And I remembered that whatever of

the good deeds that I had done, I had done through the grace of

God, and the grace of Moosu.

"'Yes, my children,' I cried, turning to the people, 'whatever

right I have done, and whatever good I have done, have been because

of the counsel of Moosu. When I listened to him, affairs

prospered; when I closed my ears, and acted according to my folly,

things came to folly. By his advice it was that I laid my store of

meat, and in time of darkness fed the famishing. By his grace it

was that I was made chief. And what have I done with my chiefship?

Let me tell you. I have done nothing. My head was turned with

power, and I deemed myself greater than Moosu, and, behold I have

come to grief. My rule has been unwise, and the gods are angered.

Lo, ye are pinched with famine, and the mothers are dry-breasted,

and the little babies cry through the long nights. Nor do I, who

have hardened my heart against Moosu, know what shall be done, nor

in what manner of way grub shall be had.'

"At this there was nodding and laughing, and the people put their

heads together, and I knew they whispered of the loaves and fishes.

I went on hastily. 'So I was made aware of my foolishness and of

Moosu's wisdom; of my own unfitness and of Moosu's fitness. And

because of this, being no longer mad, I make acknowledgment and

rectify evil. I did cast unrighteous eyes upon Kluktu, and lo, she

was sealed to Moosu. Yet is she mine, for did I not pay to

Tummasook the goods of purchase? But I am well unworthy of her,

and she shall go from the igloo of her father to the igloo of

Moosu. Can the moon shine in the sunshine? And further, Tummasook

shall keep the goods of purchase, and she be a free gift to Moosu,

whom God hath ordained her rightful lord.

"'And further yet, because I have used my wealth unwisely, and to

oppress ye, O my children, do I make gifts of the kerosene can to

Moosu, and the gooseneck, and the gun-barrel, and the copper

kettle. Therefore, I can gather to me no more possessions, and

when ye are athirst for hooch, he will quench ye and without

robbery. For he is a great man, and God speaketh through his lips.

"'And yet further, my heart is softened, and I have repented me of

my madness. I, who am a fool and a son of fools; I, who am the

slave of the bad god Biz-e-Nass; I, who see thy empty bellies and

knew not wherewith to fill them--why shall I be chief, and sit

above thee, and rule to thine own destruction? Why should I do

this, which is not good? But Moosu, who is shaman, and who is wise

above men, is so made that he can rule with a soft hand and justly.

And because of the things I have related do I make abdication and

give my chiefship to Moosu, who alone knoweth how ye may be fed in

this day when there be no meat in the land.'

"At this there was a great clapping of hands, and the people cried,

'KLOSHE! KLOSHE!' which means 'good.' I had seen the wonder-worry

in Moosu's eyes; for he could not understand, and was fearful of my

white man's wisdom. I had met his wishes all along the line, and

even anticipated some; and standing there, self-shorn of all my

power, he knew the time did not favour to stir the people against

me.

"Before they could disperse I made announcement that while the

still went to Moosu, whatever hooch I possessed went to the people.

Moosu tried to protest at this, for never had we permitted more

than a handful to be drunk at a time; but they cried, 'KLOSHE!

KLOSHE!' and made festival before my door. And while they waxed

uproarious without, as the liquor went to their heads, I held

council within with Angeit and the faithful ones. I set them the

tasks they were to do, and put into their mouths the words they

were to say. Then I slipped away to a place back in the woods

where I had two sleds, well loaded, with teams of dogs that were

not overfed. Spring was at hand, you see, and there was a crust to

the snow; so it was the best time to take the way south. Moreover,

the tobacco was gone. There I waited, for I had nothing to fear.

Did they bestir themselves on my trail, their dogs were too fat,

and themselves too lean, to overtake me; also, I deemed their

bestirring would be of an order for which I had made due

preparation.

"First came a faithful one, running, and after him another. 'O

master,' the first cried, breathless, 'there be great confusion in

the village, and no man knoweth his own mind, and they be of many

minds. Everybody hath drunken overmuch, and some be stringing

bows, and some be quarrelling one with another. Never was there

such a trouble.'

"And the second one: 'And I did as thou biddest, O master,

whispering shrewd words in thirsty ears, and raising memories of

the things that were of old time. The woman Ipsukuk waileth her

poverty and the wealth that no longer is hers. And Tummasook

thinketh himself once again chief, and the people are hungry and

rage up and down.'

"And a third one: 'And Neewak hath overthrown the altars of Moosu,

and maketh incantation before the time-honoured and ancient gods.

And all the people remember the wealth that ran down their throats,

and which they possess no more. And first, Esanetuk, who be SICK

TUMTUM, fought with Kluktu, and there was much noise. And next,

being daughters of the one mother, did they fight with Tukeliketa.

And after that did they three fall upon Moosu, like wind-squalls,

from every hand, till he ran forth from the igloo, and the people

mocked him. For a man who cannot command his womankind is a fool.'

"Then came Angeit: 'Great trouble hath befallen Moosu, O master,

for I have whispered to advantage, till the people came to Moosu,

saying they were hungry and demanding the fulfilment of prophecy.

And there was a loud shout of "Itlwillie! Itlwillie!" (Meat.) So

he cried peace to his womenfolk, who were overwrought with anger

and with hooch, and led the tribe even to thy meat caches. And he

bade the men open them and be fed. And lo, the caches were empty.

There was no meat. They stood without sound, the people being

frightened, and in the silence I lifted my voice. "O Moosu, where

is the meat? That there was meat we know. Did we not hunt it and

drag it in from the hunt? And it were a lie to say one man hath

eaten it; yet have we seen nor hide nor hair. Where is the meat, O

Moosu? Thou hast the ear of God. Where is the meat?"

"'And the people cried, "Thou hast the ear of God. Where is the

meat?" And they put their heads together and were afraid. Then I

went among them, speaking fearsomely of the unknown things, of the

dead that come and go like shadows and do evil deeds, till they

cried aloud in terror and gathered all together, like little

children afraid of the dark. Neewak made harangue, laying this

evil that had come upon them at the door of Moosu. When he had

done, there was a furious commotion, and they took spears in their

hands, and tusks of walrus, and clubs, and stones from the beach.

But Moosu ran away home, and because he had not drunken of hooch

they could not catch him, and fell one over another and made haste

slowly. Even now they do howl without his igloo, and his woman-

folk within, and what of the noise, he cannot make himself heard.'

"'O Angeit, thou hast done well,' I commanded. 'Go now, taking

this empty sled and the lean dogs, and ride fast to the igloo of

Moosu; and before the people, who are drunken, are aware, throw him

quick upon the sled and bring him to me.'

"I waited and gave good advice to the faithful ones till Angeit

returned. Moosu was on the sled, and I saw by the fingermarks on

his face that his womankind had done well by him. But he tumbled

off and fell in the snow at my feet, crying: 'O master, thou wilt

forgive Moosu, thy servant, for the wrong things he has done! Thou

art a great man! Surely wilt thou forgive!'

"'Call me "brother," Moosu--call me "brother,"' I chided, lifting

him to his feet with the toe of my moccasin. 'Wilt thou evermore

obey?'

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

"'Then dispose thy body, so, across the sled,' I shifted the

dogwhip to my right hand. 'And direct thy face downwards, toward

the snow. And make haste, for we journey south this day.' And

when he was well fixed I laid the lash upon him, reciting, at every

stroke, the wrongs he had done me. 'This for thy disobedience in

general--whack! And this for thy disobedience in particular--

whack! whack! And this for Esanetuk! And this for thy soul's

welfare! And this for the grace of thy authority! And this for

Kluktu! And this for thy rights God-given! And this for thy fat

firstlings! And this and this for thy income-tax and thy loaves

and fishes! And this for all thy disobedience! And this, finally,

that thou mayest henceforth walk softly and with understanding!

Now cease thy sniffling and get up! Gird on thy snowshoes and go

to the fore and break trail for the dogs. CHOOK! MUSH-ON! Git!'"

Thomas Stevens smiled quietly to himself as he lighted his fifth

cigar and sent curling smoke-rings ceilingward.

"But how about the people of Tattarat?" I asked. "Kind of rough,

wasn't it, to leave them flat with famine?"

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

the fat dogs?"

THE FAITH OF MEN

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

"That suits me," said the second man, turning, as he spoke, to the

Indian that was mending snow-shoes in a corner of the cabin.

"Here, you Billebedam, take a run down to Oleson's cabin like a

good fellow, and tell him we want to borrow his dice box."

This sudden request in the midst of a council on wages of men,

wood, and grub surprised Billebedam. Besides, it was early in the

day, and he had never known white men of the calibre of Pentfield

and Hutchinson to dice and play till the day's work was done. But

his face was impassive as a Yukon Indian's should be, as he pulled

on his mittens and went out the door.

Though eight o'clock, it was still dark outside, and the cabin was

lighted by a tallow candle thrust into an empty whisky bottle. It

stood on the pine-board table in the middle of a disarray of dirty

tin dishes. Tallow from innumerable candles had dripped down the

long neck of the bottle and hardened into a miniature glacier. The

small room, which composed the entire cabin, was as badly littered

as the table; while at one end, against the wall, were two bunks,

one above the other, with the blankets turned down just as the two

men had crawled out in the morning.

Lawrence Pentfield and Corry Hutchinson were millionaires, though

they did not look it. There seemed nothing unusual about them,

while they would have passed muster as fair specimens of lumbermen

in any Michigan camp. But outside, in the darkness, where holes

yawned in the ground, were many men engaged in windlassing muck and

gravel and gold from the bottoms of the holes where other men

received fifteen dollars per day for scraping it from off the

bedrock. Each day thousands of dollars' worth of gold were scraped

from bedrock and windlassed to the surface, and it all belonged to

Pentfield and Hutchinson, who took their rank among the richest

kings of Bonanza.

Pentfield broke the silence that followed on Billebedam's departure

by heaping the dirty plates higher on the table and drumming a

tattoo on the cleared space with his knuckles. Hutchinson snuffed

the smoky candle and reflectively rubbed the soot from the wick

between thumb and forefinger.

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

"That would settle it all."

Pentfield looked at him darkly.

"If it weren't for your cursed obstinacy, it'd be settled anyway.

All you have to do is get up and go. I'll look after things, and

next year I can go out."

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

"Your people," Pentfield broke in roughly.

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

it."

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

guess."

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

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

"That'd be three years. Think of it, old man, three years in this

end of the earth, this falling-off place for the damned!"

Hutchinson threw up his arm in an almost articulate groan.

He was several years younger than his partner, not more than

twenty-six, and there was a certain wistfulness in his face that

comes into the faces of men when they yearn vainly for the things

they have been long denied. This same wistfulness was in

Pentfield's face, and the groan of it was articulate in the heave

of his shoulders.

"I dreamed last night I was in Zinkand's," he said. "The music

playing, glasses clinking, voices humming, women laughing, and I

was ordering eggs--yes, sir, eggs, fried and boiled and poached and

scrambled, and in all sorts of ways, and downing them as fast as

they arrived."

"I'd have ordered salads and green things," Hutchinson criticized

hungrily, "with a big, rare, Porterhouse, and young onions and

radishes,--the kind your teeth sink into with a crunch."

"I'd have followed the eggs with them, I guess, if I hadn't

awakened," Pentfield replied.

He picked up a trail-scarred banjo from the floor and began to

strum a few wandering notes. Hutchinson winced and breathed

heavily.

"Quit it!" he burst out with sudden fury, as the other struck into

a gaily lifting swing. "It drives me mad. I can't stand it"

Pentfield tossed the banjo into a bunk and quoted:-

"Hear me babble what the weakest won't confess -

I am Memory and Torment--I am Town!

I am all that ever went with evening dress!"

The other man winced where he sat and dropped his head forward on

the table. Pentfield resumed the monotonous drumming with his

knuckles. A loud snap from the door attracted his attention. The

frost was creeping up the inside in a white sheet, and he began to

hum:-

"The flocks are folded, boughs are bare,

The salmon takes the sea;

And oh, my fair, would I somewhere

Might house my heart with thee."

Silence fell and was not again broken till Billebedam arrived and

threw the dice box on the table.

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

freeze last night."

"Hear that, old man!" Pentfield cried, slapping Hutchinson on the

shoulder. "Whoever wins can be hitting the trail for God's country

this time tomorrow morning!"

He picked up the box, briskly rattling the dice.

"What'll it be?"

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

out."

Pentfield swept the dishes from the table with a crash and rolled

out the five dice. Both looked tragedy. The shake was without a

pair and five-spot high.

"A stiff!" Pentfield groaned.

After much deliberating Pentfield picked up all the five dice and

put them in the box.

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

"No, you wouldn't, not when you see this," Pentfield replied,

shaking out the dice.

Again they were without a pair, running this time in unbroken

sequence from two to six.

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

can't lose."

The other man gathered up the dice without a word, rattled them,

rolled them out on the table with a flourish, and saw that he had

likewise shaken a six-high stiff.

"Tied you, anyway, but I'll have to do better than that," he said,

gathering in four of them and shaking to the six. "And here's what

beats you!"

But they rolled out deuce, tray, four, and five--a stiff still and

no better nor worse than Pentfield's throw.

Hutchinson sighed.

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

"Nor in a million lives," Pentfield added, catching up the dice and

quickly throwing them out. Three fives appeared, and, after much

delay, he was rewarded by a fourth five on the second shake.

Hutchinson seemed to have lost his last hope.

But three sixes turned up on his first shake. A great doubt rose

in the other's eyes, and hope returned into his. He had one more

shake. Another six and he would go over the ice to salt water and

the States.

He rattled the dice in the box, made as though to cast them,

hesitated, and continued rattle them.

"Go on! Go on! Don't take all night about it!" Pentfield cried

sharply, bending his nails on the table, so tight was the clutch

with which he strove to control himself.

The dice rolled forth, an upturned six meeting their eyes. Both

men sat staring at it. There was a long silence. Hutchinson shot

a covert glance at his partner, who, still more covertly, caught

it, and pursed up his lips in an attempt to advertise his

unconcern.

Hutchinson laughed as he got up on his feet. It was a nervous,

apprehensive laugh. It was a case where it was more awkward to win

than lose. He walked over to his partner, who whirled upon him

fiercely:-

"Now you just shut up, Corry! I know all you're going to say--that

you'd rather stay in and let me go, and all that; so don't say it.

You've your own people in Detroit to see, and that's enough.

Besides, you can do for me the very thing I expected to do if I

went out."

"And that is--?"

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

answered:-

"Yes, that very thing. You can bring her in to me. The only

difference will be a Dawson wedding instead of a San Franciscan

one."

"But, man alike!" Corry Hutchinson objected "how under the sun can

I bring her in? We're not exactly brother and sister, seeing that

I have not even met her, and it wouldn't be just the proper thing,

you know, for us to travel together. Of course, it would be all

right--you and I know that; but think of the looks of it, man!"

Pentfield swore under his breath, consigning the looks of it to a

less frigid region than Alaska.

"Now, if you'll just listen and not get astride that high horse of

yours so blamed quick," his partner went on, "you'll see that the

only fair thing under the circumstances is for me to let you go out

this year. Next year is only a year away, and then I can take my

fling."

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

"It won't do, Corry, old man. I appreciate your kindness and all

that, but it won't do. I'd be ashamed every time I thought of you

slaving away in here in my place."

A thought seemed suddenly to strike him. Burrowing into his bunk

and disrupting it in his eagerness, he secured a writing-pad and

pencil, and sitting down at the table, began to write with

swiftness and certitude.

"Here," he said, thrusting the scrawled letter into his partner's

hand. "You just deliver that and everything'll be all right."

Hutchinson ran his eye over it and laid it down.

"How do you know the brother will be willing to make that beastly

trip in here?" he demanded.

"Oh, he'll do it for me--and for his sister," Pentfield replied.

"You see, he's tenderfoot, and I wouldn't trust her with him alone.

But with you along it will be an easy trip and a safe one. As soon

as you get out, you'll go to her and prepare her. Then you can

take your run east to your own people, and in the spring she and

her brother'll be ready to start with you. You'll like her, I

know, right from the jump; and from that, you'll know her as soon

as you lay eyes on her."

So saying he opened the back of his watch and exposed a girl's

photograph pasted on the inside of the case. Corry Hutchinson

gazed at it with admiration welling up in his eyes.

"Mabel is her name," Pentfield went on. "And it's just as well you

should know how to find the house. Soon as you strike 'Frisco,

take a cab, and just say, 'Holmes's place, Myrdon Avenue'--I doubt

if the Myrdon Avenue is necessary. The cabby'll know where Judge

Holmes lives.

"And say," Pentfield continued, after a pause, "it won't be a bad

idea for you to get me a few little things which a--er--"

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

with a grin.

Pentfield grinned back.

"Sure, napkins and tablecloths and sheets and pillowslips, and such

things. And you might get a good set of china. You know it'll

come hard for her to settle down to this sort of thing. You can

freight them in by steamer around by Bering Sea. And, I say,

what's the matter with a piano?"

Hutchinson seconded the idea heartily. His reluctance had

vanished, and he was warming up to his mission.

"By Jove! Lawrence," he said at the conclusion of the council, as

they both rose to their feet, "I'll bring back that girl of yours

in style. I'll do the cooking and take care of the dogs, and all

that brother'll have to do will be to see to her comfort and do for

her whatever I've forgotten. And I'll forget damn little, I can

tell you."

The next day Lawrence Pentfield shook hands with him for the last

time and watched him, running with his dogs, disappear up the

frozen Yukon on his way to salt water and the world. Pentfield

went back to his Bonanza mine, which was many times more dreary

than before, and faced resolutely into the long winter. There was

work to be done, men to superintend, and operations to direct in

burrowing after the erratic pay streak; but his heart was not in

the work. Nor was his heart in any work till the tiered logs of a

new cabin began to rise on the hill behind the mine. It was a

grand cabin, warmly built and divided into three comfortable rooms.

Each log was hand-hewed and squared--an expensive whim when the

axemen received a daily wage of fifteen dollars; but to him nothing

could be too costly for the home in which Mabel Holmes was to live.

So he went about with the building of the cabin, singing, "And oh,

my fair, would I somewhere might house my heart with thee!" Also,

he had a calendar pinned on the wall above the table, and his first

act each morning was to check off the day and to count the days

that were left ere his partner would come booming down the Yukon

ice in the spring. Another whim of his was to permit no one to

sleep in the new cabin on the hill. It must be as fresh for her

occupancy as the square-hewed wood was fresh; and when it stood

complete, he put a padlock on the door. No one entered save

himself, and he was wont to spend long hours there, and to come

forth with his face strangely radiant and in his eyes a glad, warm

light.

In December he received a letter from Corry Hutchinson. He had

just seen Mabel Holmes. She was all she ought to be, to be

Lawrence Pentfield's wife, he wrote. He was enthusiastic, and his

letter sent the blood tingling through Pentfield's veins. Other

letters followed, one on the heels of another, and sometimes two or

three together when the mail lumped up. And they were all in the

same tenor. Corry had just come from Myrdon Avenue; Corry was just

going to Myrdon Avenue; or Corry was at Myrdon Avenue. And he

lingered on and on in San Francisco, nor even mentioned his trip to

Detroit.

Lawrence Pentfield began to think that his partner was a great deal

in the company of Mabel Holmes for a fellow who was going east to

see his people. He even caught himself worrying about it at times,

though he would have worried more had he not known Mabel and Corry

so well. Mabel's letters, on the other hand, had a great deal to

say about Corry. Also, a thread of timidity that was near to

disinclination ran through them concerning the trip in over the ice

and the Dawson marriage. Pentfield wrote back heartily, laughing

at her fears, which he took to be the mere physical ones of danger

and hardship rather than those bred of maidenly reserve.

But the long winter and tedious wait, following upon the two

previous long winters, were telling upon him. The superintendence

of the men and the pursuit of the pay streak could not break the

irk of the daily round, and the end of January found him making

occasional trips to Dawson, where he could forget his identity for

a space at the gambling tables. Because he could afford to lose,

he won, and "Pentfield's luck" became a stock phrase among the faro

players.

His luck ran with him till the second week in February. How much

farther it might have run is conjectural; for, after one big game,

he never played again.

It was in the Opera House that it occurred, and for an hour it had

seemed that he could not place his money on a card without making

the card a winner. In the lull at the end of a deal, while the

game-keeper was shuffling the deck, Nick Inwood the owner of the

game, remarked, apropos of nothing:-

"I say, Pentfield, I see that partner of yours has been cutting up

monkey-shines on the outside."

"Trust Corry to have a good time," Pentfield had answered;

"especially when he has earned it."

"Every man to his taste," Nick Inwood laughed; "but I should

scarcely call getting married a good time."

"Corry married!" Pentfield cried, incredulous and yet surprised out

of himself for the moment.

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

over the ice this morning."

"Well, and who's the girl?" Pentfield demanded, somewhat with the

air of patient fortitude with which one takes the bait of a catch

and is aware at the time of the large laugh bound to follow at his

expense.

Nick Inwood pulled the newspaper from his pocket and began looking

it over, saying:-

"I haven't a remarkable memory for names, but it seems to me it's

something like Mabel--Mabel--oh yes, here it--'Mabel Holmes,

daughter of Judge Holmes,'--whoever he is."

Lawrence Pentfield never turned a hair, though he wondered how any

man in the North could know her name. He glanced coolly from face

to face to note any vagrant signs of the game that was being played

upon him, but beyond a healthy curiosity the faces betrayed

nothing. Then he turned to the gambler and said in cold, even

tones:-

"Inwood, I've got an even five hundred here that says the print of

what you have just said is not in that paper."

The gambler looked at him in quizzical surprise. "Go 'way, child.

I don't want your money."

"I thought so," Pentfield sneered, returning to the game and laying

a couple of bets.

Nick Inwood's face flushed, and, as though doubting his senses, he

ran careful eyes over the print of a quarter of a column. Then be

turned on Lawrence Pentfield.

"Look here, Pentfield," he said, in a quiet, nervous manner; "I

can't allow that, you know."

"Allow what?" Pentfield demanded brutally.

"You implied that I lied."

"Nothing of the sort," came the reply. "I merely implied that you

were trying to be clumsily witty."

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

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

"And I have told you I've five hundred that says it's not in that

paper," Pentfield answered, at the same time throwing a heavy sack

of dust on the table.

"I am sorry to take your money," was the retort, as Inwood thrust

the newspaper into Pentfield's hand.

Pentfield saw, though he could not quite bring himself to believe.

Glancing through the headline, "Young Lochinvar came out of the

North," and skimming the article until the names of Mabel Holmes

and Corry Hutchinson, coupled together, leaped squarely before his

eyes, he turned to the top of the page. It was a San Francisco

paper.

"The money's yours, Inwood," he remarked, with a short laugh.

"There's no telling what that partner of mine will do when he gets

started."

Then he returned to the article and read it word for word, very

slowly and very carefully. He could no longer doubt. Beyond

dispute, Corry Hutchinson had married Mabel Holmes. "One of the

Bonanza kings," it described him, "a partner with Lawrence

Pentfield (whom San Francisco society has not yet forgotten), and

interested with that gentleman in other rich, Klondike properties."

Further, and at the end, he read, "It is whispered that Mr. and

Mrs. Hutchinson will, after a brief trip east to Detroit, make

their real honeymoon journey into the fascinating Klondike

country."

"I'll be back again; keep my place for me," Pentfield said, rising

to his feet and taking his sack, which meantime had hit the blower

and came back lighter by five hundred dollars.

He went down the street and bought a Seattle paper. It contained

the same facts, though somewhat condensed. Corry and Mabel were

indubitably married. Pentfield returned to the Opera House and

resumed his seat in the game. He asked to have the limit removed.

"Trying to get action," Nick Inwood laughed, as he nodded assent to

the dealer. "I was going down to the A. C. store, but now I guess

I'll stay and watch you do your worst."

This Lawrence Pentfield did at the end of two hours' plunging, when

the dealer bit the end off a fresh cigar and struck a match as he

announced that the bank was broken. Pentfield cashed in for forty

thousand, shook hands with Nick Inwood, and stated that it was the

last time he would ever play at his game or at anybody's else's.

No one knew nor guessed that he had been hit, much less hit hard.

There was no apparent change in his manner. For a week he went

about his work much as he had always done, when he read an account

of the marriage in a Portland paper. Then he called in a friend to

take charge of his mine and departed up the Yukon behind his dogs.

He held to the Salt Water trail till White River was reached, into

which he turned. Five days later he came upon a hunting camp of

the White River Indians. In the evening there was a feast, and he

sat in honour beside the chief; and next morning he headed his dogs

back toward the Yukon. But he no longer travelled alone. A young

squaw fed his dogs for him that night and helped to pitch camp.

She had been mauled by a bear in her childhood and suffered from a

slight limp. Her name was Lashka, and she was diffident at first

with the strange white man that had come out of the Unknown,

married her with scarcely a look or word, and now was carrying her

back with him into the Unknown.

But Lashka's was better fortune than falls to most Indian girls

that mate with white men in the Northland. No sooner was Dawson

reached than the barbaric marriage that had joined them was re-

solemnized, in the white man's fashion, before a priest. From

Dawson, which to her was all a marvel and a dream, she was taken

directly to the Bonanza claim and installed in the square-hewed

cabin on the hill.

The nine days' wonder that followed arose not so much out of the

fact of the squaw whom Lawrence Pentfield had taken to bed and

board as out of the ceremony that had legalized the tie. The

properly sanctioned marriage was the one thing that passed the

community's comprehension. But no one bothered Pentfield about it.

So long as a man's vagaries did no special hurt to the community,

the community let the man alone, nor was Pentfield barred from the

cabins of men who possessed white wives. The marriage ceremony

removed him from the status of squaw-man and placed him beyond

moral reproach, though there were men that challenged his taste

where women were concerned.

No more letters arrived from the outside. Six sledloads of mails

had been lost at the Big Salmon. Besides, Pentfield knew that

Corry and his bride must by that time have started in over the

trail. They were even then on their honeymoon trip--the honeymoon

trip he had dreamed of for himself through two dreary years. His

lip curled with bitterness at the thought; but beyond being kinder

to Lashka he gave no sign.

March had passed and April was nearing its end, when, one spring

morning, Lashka asked permission to go down the creek several miles

to Siwash Pete's cabin. Pete's wife, a Stewart River woman, had

sent up word that something was wrong with her baby, and Lashka,

who was pre-eminently a mother-woman and who held herself to be

truly wise in the matter of infantile troubles, missed no

opportunity of nursing the children of other women as yet more

fortunate than she.

Pentfield harnessed his dogs, and with Lashka behind took the trail

down the creek bed of Bonanza. Spring was in the air. The

sharpness had gone out of the bite of the frost and though snow

still covered the land, the murmur and trickling of water told that

the iron grip of winter was relaxing. The bottom was dropping out

of the trail, and here and there a new trail had been broken around

open holes. At such a place, where there was not room for two

sleds to pass, Pentfield heard the jingle of approaching bells and

stopped his dogs.

A team of tired-looking dogs appeared around the narrow bend,

followed by a heavily-loaded sled. At the gee-pole was a man who

steered in a manner familiar to Pentfield, and behind the sled

walked two women. His glance returned to the man at the gee-pole.

It was Corry. Pentfield got on his feet and waited. He was glad

that Lashka was with him. The meeting could not have come about

better had it been planned, he thought. And as he waited he

wondered what they would say, what they would be able to say. As

for himself there was no need to say anything. The explaining was

all on their side, and he was ready to listen to them.

As they drew in abreast, Corry recognized him and halted the dogs.

With a "Hello, old man," he held out his hand.

Pentfield shook it, but without warmth or speech. By this time the

two women had come up, and he noticed that the second one was Dora

Holmes. He doffed his fur cap, the flaps of which were flying,

shook hands with her, and turned toward Mabel. She swayed forward,

splendid and radiant, but faltered before his outstretched hand.

He had intended to say, "How do you do, Mrs. Hutchinson?"--but

somehow, the Mrs. Hutchinson had choked him, and all he had managed

to articulate was the "How do you do?"

There was all the constraint and awkwardness in the situation he

could have wished. Mabel betrayed the agitation appropriate to her

position, while Dora, evidently brought along as some sort of

peacemaker, was saying:-

"Why, what is the matter, Lawrence?"

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

him aside.

"See here, old man, what's this mean?" Corry demanded in a low

tone, indicating Lashka with his eyes.

"I can hardly see, Corry, where you can have any concern in the

matter," Pentfield answered mockingly.

But Corry drove straight to the point.

"What is that squaw doing on your sled? A nasty job you've given

me to explain all this away. I only hope it can be explained away.

Who is she? Whose squaw is she?"

Then Lawrence Pentfield delivered his stroke, and he delivered it

with a certain calm elation of spirit that seemed somewhat to

compensate for the wrong that had been done him.

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

Corry Hutchinson gasped, and Pentfield left him and returned to the

two women. Mabel, with a worried expression on her face, seemed

holding herself aloof. He turned to Dora and asked, quite

genially, as though all the world was sunshine:- "How did you stand

the trip, anyway? Have any trouble to sleep warm?"

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

Mabel.

"Oh, you dear ninny!" Dora cried, throwing her arms around him and

hugging him. "Then you saw it, too! I thought something was the

matter, you were acting so strangely."

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

"It was corrected in next day's paper," Dora chattered on. "We did

not dream you would see it. All the other papers had it correctly,

and of course that one miserable paper was the very one you saw!"

"Wait a moment! What do you mean?" Pentfield demanded, a sudden

fear at his heart, for he felt himself on the verge of a great

gulf.

But Dora swept volubly on.

"Why, when it became known that Mabel and I were going to Klondike,

EVERY OTHER WEEK said that when we were gone, it would be lovely on

Myrdon Avenue, meaning, of course, lonely."

"Then--"

"I am Mrs. Hutchinson," Dora answered. "And you thought it was

Mabel all the time--"

"Precisely the way of it," Pentfield replied slowly. "But I can

see now. The reporter got the names mixed. The Seattle and

Portland paper copied."

He stood silently for a minute. Mabel's face was turned toward him

again, and he could see the glow of expectancy in it. Corry was

deeply interested in the ragged toe of one of his moccasins, while

Dora was stealing sidelong glances at the immobile face of Lashka

sitting on the sled. Lawrence Pentfield stared straight out before

him into a dreary future, through the grey vistas of which he saw

himself riding on a sled behind running dogs with lame Lashka by

his side.

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

"I am very sorry. I did not dream it. I thought you had married

Corry. That is Mrs. Pentfield sitting on the sled over there."

Mabel Holmes turned weakly toward her sister, as though all the

fatigue of her great journey had suddenly descended on her. Dora

caught her around the waist. Corry Hutchinson was still occupied

with his moccasins. Pentfield glanced quickly from face to face,

then turned to his sled.

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

Lashka.

The long whip-lash hissed out, the dogs sprang against the breast

bands, and the sled lurched and jerked ahead.

"Oh, I say, Corry," Pentfield called back, "you'd better occupy the

old cabin. It's not been used for some time. I've built a new one

on the hill."

TOO MUCH GOLD

This being a story--and a truer one than it may appear--of a mining

country, it is quite to be expected that it will be a hard-luck

story. But that depends on the point of view. Hard luck is a mild

way of terming it so far as Kink Mitchell and Hootchinoo Bill are

concerned; and that they have a decided opinion on the subject is a

matter of common knowledge in the Yukon country.

It was in the fall of 1896 that the two partners came down to the

east bank of the Yukon, and drew a Peterborough canoe from a moss-

covered cache. They were not particularly pleasant-looking

objects. A summer's prospecting, filled to repletion with hardship

and rather empty of grub, had left their clothes in tatters and

themselves worn and cadaverous. A nimbus of mosquitoes buzzed

about each man's head. Their faces were coated with blue clay.

Each carried a lump of this damp clay, and, whenever it dried and

fell from their faces, more was daubed on in its place. There was

a querulous plaint in their voices, an irritability of movement and

gesture, that told of broken sleep and a losing struggle with the

little winged pests.

"Them skeeters'll be the death of me yet," Kink Mitchell whimpered,

as the canoe felt the current on her nose, and leaped out from the

bank

"Cheer up, cheer up. We're about done," Hootchinoo Bill answered,

with an attempted heartiness in his funereal tones that was

ghastly. "We'll be in Forty Mile in forty minutes, and then--

cursed little devil!"

One hand left his paddle and landed on the back of his neck with a

sharp slap. He put a fresh daub of clay on the injured part,

swearing sulphurously the while. Kink Mitchell was not in the

least amused. He merely improved the opportunity by putting a

thicker coating of clay on his own neck.

They crossed the Yukon to its west bank, shot down-stream with easy

stroke, and at the end of forty minutes swung in close to the left

around the tail of an island. Forty Mile spread itself suddenly

before them. Both men straightened their backs and gazed at the

sight. They gazed long and carefully, drifting with the current,

in their faces an expression of mingled surprise and consternation

slowly gathering. Not a thread of smoke was rising from the

hundreds of log-cabins. There was no sound of axes biting sharply

into wood, of hammering and sawing. Neither dogs nor men loitered

before the big store. No steamboats lay at the bank, no canoes,

nor scows, nor poling-boats. The river was as bare of craft as the

town was of life.

"Kind of looks like Gabriel's tooted his little horn, and you an'

me has turned up missing," remarked Hootchinoo Bill.

His remark was casual, as though there was nothing unusual about

the occurrence. Kink Mitchell's reply was just as casual as though

he, too, were unaware of any strange perturbation of spirit.

"Looks as they was all Baptists, then, and took the boats to go by

water," was his contribution.

"My ol' dad was a Baptist," Hootchinoo Bill supplemented. "An' he

always did hold it was forty thousand miles nearer that way."

This was the end of their levity. They ran the canoe in and

climbed the high earth bank. A feeling of awe descended upon them

as they walked the deserted streets. The sunlight streamed

placidly over the town. A gentle wind tapped the halyards against

the flagpole before the closed doors of the Caledonia Dance Hall.

Mosquitoes buzzed, robins sang, and moose birds tripped hungrily

among the cabins; but there was no human life nor sign of human

life.

"I'm just dyin' for a drink," Hootchinoo Bill said and

unconsciously his voice sank to a hoarse whisper.

His partner nodded his head, loth to hear his own voice break the

stillness. They trudged on in uneasy silence till surprised by an

open door. Above this door, and stretching the width of the

building, a rude sign announced the same as the "Monte Carlo." But

beside the door, hat over eyes, chair tilted back, a man sat

sunning himself. He was an old man. Beard and hair were long and

white and patriarchal.

"If it ain't ol' Jim Cummings, turned up like us, too late for

Resurrection!" said Kink Mitchell.

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

suggestion.

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

The old man unlimbered lamely, blinking his eyes and murmuring

automatically: "What'll ye have, gents? What'll ye have?"

They followed him inside and ranged up against the long bar where

of yore a half-dozen nimble bar-keepers found little time to loaf.

The great room, ordinarily aroar with life, was still and gloomy as

a tomb. There was no rattling of chips, no whirring of ivory

balls. Roulette and faro tables were like gravestones under their

canvas covers. No women's voices drifted merrily from the dance-

room behind. Ol' Jim Cummings wiped a glass with palsied hands,

and Kink Mitchell scrawled his initials on the dust-covered bar.

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

geniality.

"Gone," was the ancient bar-keeper's reply, in a voice thin and

aged as himself, and as unsteady as his hand.

"Where's Bidwell and Barlow?"

"Gone."

"And Sweetwater Charley?"

"Gone."

"And his sister?"

"Gone too."

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

"Gone, all gone." The old man shook his head sadly, rummaging in

an absent way among the dusty bottles.

"Great Sardanapolis! Where?" Kink Mitchell exploded, unable longer

to restrain himself. "You don't say you've had the plague?"

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

gone to Dawson."

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

place?"

"Ain't never heered of Dawson, eh?" The old man chuckled

exasperatingly. "Why, Dawson's a town, a city, bigger'n Forty

Mile. Yes, sir, bigger'n Forty Mile."

"I've ben in this land seven year," Bill announced emphatically,

"an' I make free to say I never heard tell of the burg before.

Hold on! Let's have some more of that whisky. Your information's

flabbergasted me, that it has. Now just whereabouts is this

Dawson-place you was a-mentionin'?"

"On the big flat jest below the mouth of Klondike," ol' Jim

answered. "But where has you-all ben this summer?"

"Never you mind where we-all's ben," was Kink Mitchell's testy

reply. "We-all's ben where the skeeters is that thick you've got

to throw a stick into the air so as to see the sun and tell the

time of day. Ain't I right, Bill?"

"Right you are," said Bill. "But speakin' of this Dawson-place how

like did it happen to be, Jim?"

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

bed-rock yet."

"Who struck it?"

"Carmack."

At mention of the discoverer's name the partners stared at each

other disgustedly. Then they winked with great solemnity.

"Siwash George," sniffed Hootchinoo Bill.

"That squaw-man," sneered Kink Mitchell.

"I wouldn't put on my moccasins to stampede after anything he'd

ever find," said Bill.

"Same here," announced his partner. "A cuss that's too plumb lazy

to fish his own salmon. That's why he took up with the Indians.

S'pose that black brother-in-law of his,--lemme see, Skookum Jim,

eh?--s'pose he's in on it?"

The old bar-keeper nodded. "Sure, an' what's more, all Forty Mile,

exceptin' me an' a few cripples."

"And drunks," added Kink Mitchell.

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

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

cried with certitude.

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

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

demanded.

"The ties him down an' throws him in the bottom of a polin'-boat,"

ol' Jim explained. "Come right in here, they did, an' takes him

out of that there chair there in the corner, an' three more drunks

they finds under the pianny. I tell you-alls the whole camp hits

up the Yukon for Dawson jes' like Sam Scratch was after them,--

wimmen, children, babes in arms, the whole shebang. Bidwell comes

to me an' sez, sez he, 'Jim, I wants you to keep tab on the Monte

Carlo. I'm goin'.'

"'Where's Barlow?' sez I. 'Gone,' sez he, 'an' I'm a-followin'

with a load of whisky.' An' with that, never waitin' for me to

decline, he makes a run for his boat an' away he goes, polin' up

river like mad. So here I be, an' these is the first drinks I've

passed out in three days."

The partners looked at each other.

"Gosh darn my buttoms!" said Hootchinoo Bill. "Seems likes you and

me, Kink, is the kind of folks always caught out with forks when it

rains soup."

"Wouldn't it take the saleratus out your dough, now?" said Kink

Mitchell. "A stampede of tin-horns, drunks, an' loafers."

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

caboodle."

"Genooine miners like you an' me, Kink," he went on academically,

"is all out an' sweatin' hard over Birch Creek way. Not a genooine

miner in this whole crazy Dawson outfit, and I say right here, not

a step do I budge for any Carmack strike. I've got to see the

colour of the dust first."

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

Having wet this resolution, they beached the canoe, transferred its

contents to their cabin, and cooked dinner. But as the afternoon

wore along they grew restive. They were men used to the silence of

the great wilderness, but this gravelike silence of a town worried

them. They caught themselves listening for familiar sounds--

"waitin' for something to make a noise which ain't goin' to make a

noise," as Bill put it. They strolled through the deserted streets

to the Monte Carlo for more drinks, and wandered along the river

bank to the steamer landing, where only water gurgled as the eddy

filled and emptied, and an occasional salmon leapt flashing into

the sun.

They sat down in the shade in front of the store and talked with

the consumptive storekeeper, whose liability to hemorrhage

accounted for his presence. Bill and Kink told him how they

intended loafing in their cabin and resting up after the hard

summer's work. They told him, with a certain insistence, that was

half appeal for belief, half challenge for contradiction, how much

they were going to enjoy their idleness. But the storekeeper was

uninterested. He switched the conversation back to the strike on

Klondike, and they could not keep him away from it. He could think

of nothing else, talk of nothing else, till Hootchinoo Bill rose up

in anger and disgust.

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

"Same here," said Kink Mitchell, with a brightening face. "One'd

think something was doin' up there, 'stead of bein' a mere stampede

of greenhorns an' tinhorns."

But a boat came into view from downstream. It was long and slim.

It hugged the bank closely, and its three occupants, standing

upright, propelled it against the stiff current by means of long

poles.

"Circle City outfit," said the storekeeper. "I was lookin' for 'em

along by afternoon. Forty Mile had the start of them by a hundred

and seventy miles. But gee! they ain't losin' any time!"

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

complacently.

As he spoke, another boat appeared in sight, followed after a brief

interval by two others. By this time the first boat was abreast of

the men on the bank. Its occupants did not cease poling while

greetings were exchanged, and, though its progress was slow, a

half-hour saw it out of sight up river.

Still they came from below, boat after boat, in endless procession.

The uneasiness of Bill and Kink increased. They stole speculative,

tentative glances at each other, and when their eyes met looked

away in embarrassment. Finally, however, their eyes met and

neither looked away.

Kink opened his mouth to speak, but words failed him and his mouth

remained open while he continued to gaze at his partner.

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

They grinned sheepishly at each other, and by tacit consent started

to walk away. Their pace quickened, and by the time they arrived

at their cabin they were on the run.

"Can't lose no time with all that multitude a-rushin' by," Kink

spluttered, as he jabbed the sour-dough can into the beanpot with

one hand and with the other gathered in the frying-pan and coffee-

pot.

"Should say not," gasped Bill, his head and shoulders buried in a

clothes-sack wherein were stored winter socks and underwear. "I

say, Kink, don't forget the saleratus on the corner shelf back of

the stove."

Half-an-hour later they were launching the canoe and loading up,

while the storekeeper made jocular remarks about poor, weak mortals

and the contagiousness of "stampedin' fever." But when Bill and

Kink thrust their long poles to bottom and started the canoe

against the current, he called after them:-

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

two for me!"

They nodded their heads vigorously and felt sorry for the poor

wretch who remained perforce behind.

* * * * *

Kink and Bill were sweating hard. According to the revised

Northland Scripture, the stampede is to the swift, the blazing of

stakes to the strong, and the Crown in royalties, gathers to itself

the fulness thereof. Kink and Bill were both swift and strong.

They took the soggy trail at a long, swinging gait that broke the

hearts of a couple of tender-feet who tried to keep up with them.

Behind, strung out between them and Dawson (where the boats were

discarded and land travel began), was the vanguard of the Circle

City outfit. In the race from Forty Mile the partners had passed

every boat, winning from the leading boat by a length in the Dawson

eddy, and leaving its occupants sadly behind the moment their feet

struck the trail.

"Huh! couldn't see us for smoke," Hootchinoo Bill chuckled,

flirting the stinging sweat from his brow and glancing swiftly back

along the way they had come.

Three men emerged from where the trail broke through the trees.

Two followed close at their heels, and then a man and a woman shot

into view.

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

Bill quickened his pace. Mitchell glanced back in more leisurely

fashion.

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

"And here's one that's loped himself out," said Bill, pointing to

the side of the trail.

A man was lying on his back panting in the culminating stages of

violent exhaustion. His face was ghastly, his eyes bloodshot and

glazed, for all the world like a dying man.

"CHECHAQUO!" Kink Mitchell grunted, and it was the grunt of the old

"sour dough" for the green-horn, for the man who outfitted with

"self-risin'" flour and used baking-powder in his biscuits.

The partners, true to the old-timer custom, had intended to stake

down-stream from the strike, but when they saw claim 81 BELOW

blazed on a tree,--which meant fully eight miles below Discovery,--

they changed their minds. The eight miles were covered in less

than two hours. It was a killing pace, over so rough trail, and

they passed scores of exhausted men that had fallen by the wayside.

At Discovery little was to be learned of the upper creek.

Cormack's Indian brother-in-law, Skookum Jim, had a hazy notion

that the creek was staked as high as the 30's; but when Kink and

Bill looked at the corner-stakes of 79 ABOVE, they threw their

stampeding packs off their backs and sat down to smoke. All their

efforts had been vain. Bonanza was staked from mouth to source,--

"out of sight and across the next divide." Bill complained that

night as they fried their bacon and boiled their coffee over

Cormack's fire at Discovery.

"Try that pup," Carmack suggested next morning.

"That pup" was a broad creek that flowed into Bonanza at 7 ABOVE.

The partners received his advice with the magnificent contempt of

the sour dough for a squaw-man, and, instead, spent the day on

Adam's Creek, another and more likely-looking tributary of Bonanza.

But it was the old story over again--staked to the sky-line.

For threes days Carmack repeated his advice, and for three days

they received it contemptuously. But on the fourth day, there

being nowhere else to go, they went up "that pup." They knew that

it was practically unstaked, but they had no intention of staking.

The trip was made more for the purpose of giving vent to their ill-

humour than for anything else. They had become quite cynical,

sceptical. They jeered and scoffed at everything, and insulted

every chechaquo they met along the way.

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

for location.

"Moose pasture," sneered Kink Mitchell.

But Bill gravely paced off five hundred feet up the creek and

blazed the corner-stakes. He had picked up the bottom of a candle-

box, and on the smooth side he wrote the notice for his centre-

stake:-

THIS MOOSE PASTURE IS RESERVED FOR THE

SWEDES AND CHECHAQUOS.

- BILL RADER.

Kink read it over with approval, saying:-

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

So the name of Charles Mitchell was added to the notice; and many

an old sour dough's face relaxed that day at sight of the handiwork

of a kindred spirit.

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

camp.

"To hell with pups!" was Hootchinoo Bill's reply. "Me and Kink's

goin' a-lookin' for Too Much Gold when we get rested up."

Too Much Gold was the fabled creek of which all sour doughs

dreamed, whereof it was said the gold was so thick that, in order

to wash it, gravel must first be shovelled into the sluice-boxes.

But the several days' rest, preliminary to the quest for Too Much

Gold, brought a slight change in their plan, inasmuch as it brought

one Ans Handerson, a Swede.

Ans Handerson had been working for wages all summer at Miller Creek

over on the Sixty Mile, and, the summer done, had strayed up

Bonanza like many another waif helplessly adrift on the gold tides

that swept willy-nilly across the land. He was tall and lanky.

His arms were long, like prehistoric man's, and his hands were like

soup-plates, twisted and gnarled, and big-knuckled from toil. He

was slow of utterance and movement, and his eyes, pale blue as his

hair was pale yellow, seemed filled with an immortal dreaming, the

stuff of which no man knew, and himself least of all. Perhaps this

appearance of immortal dreaming was due to a supreme and vacuous

innocence. At any rate, this was the valuation men of ordinary

clay put upon him, and there was nothing extraordinary about the

composition of Hootchinoo Bill and Kink Mitchell.

The partners had spent a day of visiting and gossip, and in the

evening met in the temporary quarters of the Monte Carlo--a large

tent were stampeders rested their weary bones and bad whisky sold

at a dollar a drink. Since the only money in circulation was dust,

and since the house took the "down-weight" on the scales, a drink

cost something more than a dollar. Bill and Kink were not

drinking, principally for the reason that their one and common sack

was not strong enough to stand many excursions to the scales.

"Say, Bill, I've got a chechaquo on the string for a sack of

flour," Mitchell announced jubilantly.

Bill looked interested and pleased. Grub as scarce, and they were

not over-plentifully supplied for the quest after Too Much Gold.

"Flour's worth a dollar a pound," he answered. "How like do you

calculate to get your finger on it?"

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

"What claim?" Bill was surprised. Then he remembered the

reservation he had staked off for the Swedes, and said, "Oh!"

"I wouldn't be so clost about it, though," he added. "Give 'm the

whole thing while you're about it, in a right free-handed way."

Bill shook his head. "If I did, he'd get clean scairt and prance

off. I'm lettin' on as how the ground is believed to be valuable,

an' that we're lettin' go half just because we're monstrous short

on grub. After the dicker we can make him a present of the whole

shebang."

"If somebody ain't disregarded our notice," Bill objected, though

he was plainly pleased at the prospect of exchanging the claim for

a sack of flour.

"She ain't jumped," Kink assured him. "It's No. 24, and it stands.

The chechaquos took it serious, and they begun stakin' where you

left off. Staked clean over the divide, too. I was gassin' with

one of them which has just got in with cramps in his legs."

It was then, and for the first time, that they heard the slow and

groping utterance of Ans Handerson.

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

gat a claim."

The partners winked at each other, and a few minutes later a

surprised and grateful Swede was drinking bad whisky with two hard-

hearted strangers. But he was as hard-headed as they were hard-

hearted. The sack made frequent journeys to the scales, followed

solicitously each time by Kink Mitchell's eyes, and still Ans

Handerson did not loosen up. In his pale blue eyes, as in summer

seas, immortal dreams swam up and burned, but the swimming and the

burning were due to the tales of gold and prospect pans he heard,

rather than to the whisky he slid so easily down his throat.

The partners were in despair, though they appeared boisterous and

jovial of speech and action.

"Don't mind me, my friend," Hootchinoo Bill hiccoughed, his hand

upon Ans Handerson's shoulder. "Have another drink. We're just

celebratin' Kink's birthday here. This is my pardner, Kink, Kink

Mitchell. An' what might your name be?"

This learned, his hand descended resoundingly on Kink's back, and

Kink simulated clumsy self-consciousness in that he was for the

time being the centre of the rejoicing, while Ans Handerson looked

pleased and asked them to have a drink with him. It was the first

and last time he treated, until the play changed and his canny soul

was roused to unwonted prodigality. But he paid for the liquor

from a fairly healthy-looking sack. "Not less 'n eight hundred in

it," calculated the lynx-eyed Kink; and on the strength of it he

took the first opportunity of a privy conversation with Bidwell,

proprietor of the bad whisky and the tent.

"Here's my sack, Bidwell," Kink said, with the intimacy and surety

of one old-timer to another. "Just weigh fifty dollars into it for

a day or so more or less, and we'll be yours truly, Bill an' me."

Thereafter the journeys of the sack to the scales were more

frequent, and the celebration of Kink's natal day waxed hilarious.

He even essayed to sing the old-timer's classic, "The Juice of the

Forbidden Fruit," but broke down and drowned his embarrassment in

another round of drinks. Even Bidwell honoured him with a round or

two on the house; and he and Bill were decently drunk by the time

Ans Handerson's eyelids began to droop and his tongue gave promise

of loosening.

Bill grew affectionate, then confidential. He told his troubles

and hard luck to the bar-keeper and the world in general, and to

Ans Handerson in particular. He required no histrionic powers to

act the part. The bad whisky attended to that. He worked himself

into a great sorrow for himself and Bill, and his tears were

sincere when he told how he and his partner were thinking of

selling a half-interest in good ground just because they were short

of grub. Even Kink listened and believed.

Ans Handerson's eyes were shining unholily as he asked, "How much

you tank you take?"

Bill and Kink did not hear him, and he was compelled to repeat his

query. They appeared reluctant. He grew keener. And he swayed

back and forward, holding on to the bar and listened with all his

ears while they conferred together on one side, and wrangled as to

whether they should or not, and disagreed in stage whispers over

the price they should set.

"Two hundred and--hic!--fifty," Bill finally announced, "but we

reckon as we won't sell."

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

seconded Bidwell.

"Yes, indeedy," added Kink. "We ain't in no charity business a-

disgorgin' free an' generous to Swedes an' white men."

"Ay tank we haf another drink," hiccoughed Ans Handerson, craftily

changing the subject against a more propitious time.

And thereafter, to bring about that propitious time, his own sack

began to see-saw between his hip pocket and the scales. Bill and

Kink were coy, but they finally yielded to his blandishments.

Whereupon he grew shy and drew Bidwell to one side. He staggered

exceedingly, and held on to Bidwell for support as he asked -

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

"Sure," Bidwell answered heartily. "Known 'em for years. Old sour

doughs. When they sell a claim, they sell a claim. They ain't no

air-dealers."

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

two men.

But by now he was dreaming deeply, and he proclaimed he would have

the whole claim or nothing. This was the cause of great pain to

Hootchinoo Bill. He orated grandly against the "hawgishness" of

chechaquos and Swedes, albeit he dozed between periods, his voice

dying away to a gurgle, and his head sinking forward on his breast.

But whenever roused by a nudge from Kink or Bidwell, he never

failed to explode another volley of abuse and insult.

Ans Handerson was calm under it all. Each insult added to the

value of the claim. Such unamiable reluctance to sell advertised

but one thing to him, and he was aware of a great relief when

Hootchinoo Bill sank snoring to the floor, and he was free to turn

his attention to his less intractable partner.

Kink Mitchell was persuadable, though a poor mathematician. He

wept dolefully, but was willing to sell a half-interest for two

hundred and fifty dollars or the whole claim for seven hundred and

fifty. Ans Handerson and Bidwell laboured to clear away his

erroneous ideas concerning fractions, but their labour was vain.

He spilled tears and regrets all over the bar and on their

shoulders, which tears, however, did not wash away his opinion,

that if one half was worth two hundred and fifty, two halves were

worth three times as much.

In the end,--and even Bidwell retained no more than hazy

recollections of how the night terminated,--a bill of sale was

drawn up, wherein Bill Rader and Charles Mitchell yielded up all

right and title to the claim known as 24 ELDORADO, the same being

the name the creek had received from some optimistic chechaquo.

When Kink had signed, it took the united efforts of the three to

arouse Bill. Pen in hand, he swayed long over the document; and,

each time he rocked back and forth, in Ans Handerson's eyes flashed

and faded a wondrous golden vision. When the precious signature

was at last appended and the dust paid over, he breathed a great

sigh, and sank to sleep under a table, where he dreamed immortally

until morning.

But the day was chill and grey. He felt bad. His first act,

unconscious and automatic, was to feel for his sack. Its lightness

startled him. Then, slowly, memories of the night thronged into

his brain. Rough voices disturbed him. He opened his eyes and

peered out from under the table. A couple of early risers, or,

rather, men who had been out on trail all night, were vociferating

their opinions concerning the utter and loathsome worthlessness of

Eldorado Creek. He grew frightened, felt in his pocket, and found

the deed to 24 ELDORADO.

Ten minutes later Hootchinoo Bill and Kink Mitchell were roused

from their blankets by a wild-eyed Swede that strove to force upon

them an ink-scrawled and very blotty piece of paper.

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

money back."

Tears were in his eyes and throat. They ran down his cheeks as he

knelt before them and pleaded and implored. But Bill and Kink did

not laugh. They might have been harder hearted.

"First time I ever hear a man squeal over a minin' deal," Bill

said. "An' I make free to say 'tis too onusual for me to savvy."

"Same here," Kink Mitchell remarked. "Minin' deals is like horse-

tradin'."

They were honest in their wonderment. They could not conceive of

themselves raising a wail over a business transaction, so they

could not understand it in another man.

"The poor, ornery chechaquo," murmured Hootchinoo Bill, as they

watched the sorrowing Swede disappear up the trail.

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

And ere the day was out they purchased flour and bacon at

exorbitant prices with Ans Handerson's dust and crossed over the

divide in the direction of the creeks that lie between Klondike and

Indian River.

Three months later they came back over the divide in the midst of a

snow-storm and dropped down the trail to 24 ELDORADO. It merely

chanced that the trail led them that way. They were not looking

for the claim. Nor could they see much through the driving white

till they set foot upon the claim itself. And then the air

lightened, and they beheld a dump, capped by a windlass that a man

was turning. They saw him draw a bucket of gravel from the hole

and tilt it on the edge of the dump. Likewise they saw another,

man, strangely familiar, filling a pan with the fresh gravel. His

hands were large; his hair wets pale yellow. But before they

reached him, he turned with the pan and fled toward a cabin. He

wore no hat, and the snow falling down his neck accounted for his

haste. Bill and Kink ran after him, and came upon him in the

cabin, kneeling by the stove and washing the pan of gravel in a tub

of water.

He was too deeply engaged to notice more than that somebody had

entered the cabin. They stood at his shoulder and looked on. He

imparted to the pan a deft circular motion, pausing once or twice

to rake out the larger particles of gravel with his fingers. The

water was muddy, and, with the pan buried in it, they could see

nothing of its contents. Suddenly he lifted the pan clear and sent

the water out of it with a flirt. A mass of yellow, like butter in

a churn, showed across the bottom.

Hootchinoo Bill swallowed. Never in his life had he dreamed of so

rich a test-pan.

"Kind of thick, my friend," he said huskily. "How much might you

reckon that-all to be?"

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

ounces."

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

Still Ans Handerson kept his head down, absorbed in putting in the

fine touches which wash out the last particles of dross, though he

answered, "Ay tank Ay ban wort' five hundred t'ousand dollar."

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

"Yes, Bill, gosh!" said Kink Mitchell; and they went out softly and

closed the door.

THE ONE THOUSAND DOZEN

David Rasmunsen was a hustler, and, like many a greater man, a man

of the one idea. Wherefore, when the clarion call of the North

rang on his ear, he conceived an adventure in eggs and bent all his

energy to its achievement. He figured briefly and to the point,

and the adventure became iridescent-hued, splendid. That eggs

would sell at Dawson for five dollars a dozen was a safe working

premise. Whence it was incontrovertible that one thousand dozen

would bring, in the Golden Metropolis, five thousand dollars.

On the other hand, expense was to be considered, and he considered

it well, for he was a careful man, keenly practical, with a hard

head and a heart that imagination never warmed. At fifteen cents a

dozen, the initial cost of his thousand dozen would be one hundred

and fifty dollars, a mere bagatelle in face of the enormous profit.

And suppose, just suppose, to be wildly extravagant for once, that

transportation for himself and eggs should run up eight hundred and

fifty more; he would still have four thousand clear cash and clean

when the last egg was disposed of and the last dust had rippled

into his sack

"You see, Alma,"--he figured it over with his wife, the cosy

dining-room submerged in a sea of maps, government surveys, guide-

books, and Alaskan itineraries,--"you see, expenses don't really

begin till you make Dyea--fifty dollars'll cover it with a first-

class passage thrown in. Now from Dyea to Lake Linderman, Indian

packers take your goods over for twelve cents a pound, twelve

dollars a hundred, or one hundred and twenty dollars a thousand.

Say I have fifteen hundred pounds, it'll cost one hundred and

eighty dollars--call it two hundred and be safe. I am creditably

informed by a Klondiker just come out that I can buy a boat for

three hundred. But the same man says I'm sure to get a couple of

passengers for one hundred and fifty each, which will give me the

boat for nothing, and, further, they can help me manage it. And .

. . that's all; I put my eggs ashore from the boat at Dawson. Now

let me see how much is that?"

"Fifty dollars from San Francisco to Dyea, two hundred from Dyea to

Linderman, passengers pay for the boat--two hundred and fifty all

told," she summed up swiftly.

"And a hundred for my clothes and personal outfit," he went on

happily; "that leaves a margin of five hundred for emergencies.

And what possible emergencies can arise?"

Alma shrugged her shoulders and elevated her brows. If that vast

Northland was capable of swallowing up a man and a thousand dozen

eggs, surely there was room and to spare for whatever else he might

happen to possess. So she thought, but she said nothing. She knew

David Rasmunsen too well to say anything.

"Doubling the time because of chance delays, I should make the trip

in two months. Think of it, Alma! Four thousand in two months!

Beats the paltry hundred a month I'm getting now. Why, we'll build

further out where we'll have more space, gas in every room, and a

view, and the rent of the cottage'll pay taxes, insurance, and

water, and leave something over. And then there's always the

chance of my striking it and coming out a millionaire. Now tell

me, Alma, don't you think I'm very moderate?"

And Alma could hardly think otherwise. Besides, had not her own

cousin,--though a remote and distant one to be sure, the black

sheep, the harum-scarum, the ne'er-do-well,--had not he come down

out of that weird North country with a hundred thousand in yellow

dust, to say nothing of a half-ownership in the hole from which it

came?

David Rasmunsen's grocer was surprised when he found him weighing

eggs in the scales at the end of the counter, and Rasmunsen himself

was more surprised when he found that a dozen eggs weighed a pound

and a half--fifteen hundred pounds for his thousand dozen! There

would be no weight left for his clothes, blankets, and cooking

utensils, to say nothing of the grub he must necessarily consume by

the way. His calculations were all thrown out, and he was just

proceeding to recast them when he hit upon the idea of weighing

small eggs. "For whether they be large or small, a dozen eggs is a

dozen eggs," he observed sagely to himself; and a dozen small ones

he found to weigh but a pound and a quarter. Thereat the city of

San Francisco was overrun by anxious-eyed emissaries, and

commission houses and dairy associations were startled by a sudden

demand for eggs running not more than twenty ounces to the dozen.

Rasmunsen mortgaged the little cottage for a thousand dollars,

arranged for his wife to make a prolonged stay among her own

people, threw up his job, and started North. To keep within his

schedule he compromised on a second-class passage, which, because

of the rush, was worse than steerage; and in the late summer, a

pale and wabbly man, he disembarked with his eggs on the Dyea

beach. But it did not take him long to recover his land legs and

appetite. His first interview with the Chilkoot packers

straightened him up and stiffened his backbone. Forty cents a

pound they demanded for the twenty-eight-mile portage, and while he

caught his breath and swallowed, the price went up to forty-three.

Fifteen husky Indians put the straps on his packs at forty-five,

but took them off at an offer of forty-seven from a Skaguay Croesus

in dirty shirt and ragged overalls who had lost his horses on the

White Pass trail and was now making a last desperate drive at the

country by way of Chilkoot.

But Rasmunsen was clean grit, and at fifty cents found takers, who,

two days later, set his eggs down intact at Linderman. But fifty

cents a pound is a thousand dollars a ton, and his fifteen hundred

pounds had exhausted his emergency fund and left him stranded at

the Tantalus point where each day he saw the fresh-whipsawed boats

departing for Dawson. Further, a great anxiety brooded over the

camp where the boats were built. Men worked frantically, early and

late, at the height of their endurance, caulking, nailing, and

pitching in a frenzy of haste for which adequate explanation was

not far to seek. Each day the snow-line crept farther down the

bleak, rock-shouldered peaks, and gale followed gale, with sleet

and slush and snow, and in the eddies and quiet places young ice

formed and thickened through the fleeting hours. And each morn,

toil-stiffened men turned wan faces across the lake to see if the

freeze-up had come. For the freeze-up heralded the death of their

hope--the hope that they would be floating down the swift river ere

navigation closed on the chain of lakes.

To harrow Rasmunsen's soul further, he discovered three competitors

in the egg business. It was true that one, a little German, had

gone broke and was himself forlornly back-tripping the last pack of

the portage; but the other two had boats nearly completed, and were

daily supplicating the god of merchants and traders to stay the

iron hand of winter for just another day. But the iron hand closed

down over the land. Men were being frozen in the blizzard which

swept Chilkoot, and Rasmunsen frosted his toes ere he was aware.

He found a chance to go passenger with his freight in a boat just

shoving off through the rubble, but two hundred hard cash, was

required, and he had no money.

"Ay tank you yust wait one leedle w'ile," said the Swedish boat-

builder, who had struck his Klondike right there and was wise

enough to know it--"one leedle w'ile und I make you a tam fine

skiff boat, sure Pete."

With this unpledged word to go on, Rasmunsen hit the back trail to

Crater Lake, where he fell in with two press correspondents whose

tangled baggage was strewn from Stone House, over across the Pass,

and as far as Happy Camp.

"Yes," he said with consequence. "I've a thousand dozen eggs at

Linderman, and my boat's just about got the last seam caulked.

Consider myself in luck to get it. Boats are at a premium, you

know, and none to be had."

Whereupon and almost with bodily violence the correspondents

clamoured to go with him, fluttered greenbacks before his eyes, and

spilled yellow twenties from hand to hand. He could not hear of

it, but they over-persuaded him, and he reluctantly consented to

take them at three hundred apiece. Also they pressed upon him the

passage money in advance. And while they wrote to their respective

journals concerning the Good Samaritan with the thousand dozen

eggs, the Good Samaritan was hurrying back to the Swede at

Linderman.

"Here, you! Gimme that boat!" was his salutation, his hand

jingling the correspondents' gold pieces and his eyes hungrily bent

upon the finished craft.

The Swede regarded him stolidly and shook his head.

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

four. Take it."

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

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

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

it's a mistake.'

The Swede wavered. "Ay tank yes," he finally said, and the last

Rasmunsen saw of him his vocabulary was going to wreck in a vain

effort to explain the mistake to the other fellows.

The German slipped and broke his ankle on the steep hogback above

Deep Lake, sold out his stock for a dollar a dozen, and with the

proceeds hired Indian packers to carry him back to Dyea. But on

the morning Rasmunsen shoved off with his correspondents, his two

rivals followed suit.

'How many you got?" one of them, a lean little New Englander,

called out.

"One thousand dozen," Rasmunsen answered proudly.

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

hundred."

The correspondents offered to lend him the money; but Rasmunsen

declined, and the Yankee closed with the remaining rival, a brawny

son of the sea and sailor of ships and things, who promised to show

them all a wrinkle or two when it came to cracking on. And crack

on he did, with a large tarpaulin square-sail which pressed the bow

half under at every jump. He was the first to run out of

Linderman, but, disdaining the portage, piled his loaded boat on

the rocks in the boiling rapids. Rasmunsen and the Yankee, who

likewise had two passengers, portaged across on their backs and

then lined their empty boats down through the bad water to Bennett.

Bennett was a twenty-five-mile lake, narrow and deep, a funnel

between the mountains through which storms ever romped. Rasmunsen

camped on the sand-pit at its head, where were many men and boats

bound north in the teeth of the Arctic winter. He awoke in the

morning to find a piping gale from the south, which caught the

chill from the whited peaks and glacial valleys and blew as cold as

north wind ever blew. But it was fair, and he also found the

Yankee staggering past the first bold headland with all sail set.

Boat after boat was getting under way, and the correspondents fell

to with enthusiasm.

"We'll catch him before Cariboo Crossing," they assured Rasmunsen,

as they ran up the sail and the Alma took the first icy spray over

her bow.

Now Rasmunsen all his life had been prone to cowardice on water,

but he clung to the kicking steering-oar with set face and

determined jaw. His thousand dozen were there in the boat before

his eyes, safely secured beneath the correspondents' baggage, and

somehow, before his eyes were the little cottage and the mortgage

for a thousand dollars.

It was bitter cold. Now and again he hauled in the steering-sweep

and put out a fresh one while his passengers chopped the ice from

the blade. Wherever the spray struck, it turned instantly to

frost, and the dipping boom of the spritsail was quickly fringed

with icicles. The Alma strained and hammered through the big seas

till the seams and butts began to spread, but in lieu of bailing

the correspondents chopped ice and flung it overboard. There was

no let-up. The mad race with winter was on, and the boats tore

along in a desperate string.

"W-w-we can't stop to save our souls!" one of the correspondents

chattered, from cold, not fright.

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

encouraged.

Rasmunsen replied with an idiotic grin. The iron-bound shores were

in a lather of foam, and even down the middle the only hope was to

keep running away from the big seas. To lower sail was to be

overtaken and swamped. Time and again they passed boats pounding

among the rocks, and once they saw one on the edge of the breakers

about to strike. A little craft behind them, with two men, jibed

over and turned bottom up.

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

Rasmunsen grinned and tightened his aching grip on the sweep.

Scores of times had the send of the sea caught the big square stern

of the Alma and thrown her off from dead before it till the after

leach of the spritsail fluttered hollowly, and each time, and only

with all his strength, had he forced her back. His grin by then

had become fixed, and it disturbed the correspondents to look at

him.

They roared down past an isolated rock a hundred yards from shore.

From its wave-drenched top a man shrieked wildly, for the instant

cutting the storm with his voice. But the next instant the Alma

was by, and the rock growing a black speck in the troubled froth.

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

passengers.

Rasmunsen shot a glance over his shoulder at a black square-sail.

He had seen it leap up out of the grey to windward, and for an

hour, off and on, had been watching it grow. The sailor had

evidently repaired damages and was making up for lost time.

"Look at him come!"

Both passengers stopped chopping ice to watch. Twenty miles of

Bennett were behind them--room and to spare for the sea to toss up

its mountains toward the sky. Sinking and soaring like a storm-

god, the sailor drove by them. The huge sail seemed to grip the

boat from the crests of the waves, to tear it bodily out of the

water, and fling it crashing and smothering down into the yawning

troughs.

"The sea'll never catch him!"

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

Even as they spoke, the black tarpaulin swooped from sight behind a

big comber. The next wave rolled over the spot, and the next, but

the boat did not reappear. The Alma rushed by the place. A little

riffraff of oats and boxes was seen. An arm thrust up and a shaggy

head broke surface a score of yards away.

For a time there was silence. As the end of the lake came in

sight, the waves began to leap aboard with such steady recurrence

that the correspondents no longer chopped ice but flung the water

out with buckets. Even this would not do, and, after a shouted

conference with Rasmunsen, they attacked the baggage. Flour,

bacon, beans, blankets, cooking-stove, ropes, odds and ends,

everything they could get hands on, flew overboard. The boat

acknowledged it at once, taking less water and rising more

buoyantly.

"That'll do!" Rasmunsen called sternly, as they applied themselves

to the top layer of eggs.

"The h-hell it will!" answered the shivering one, savagely. With

the exception of their notes, films, and cameras, they had

sacrificed their outfit. He bent over, laid hold of an egg-box,

and began to worry it out from under the lashing.

"Drop it! Drop it, I say!"

Rasmunsen had managed to draw his revolver, and with the crook of

his arm over the sweep head, was taking aim. The correspondent

stood up on the thwart, balancing back and forth, his face twisted

with menace and speechless anger.

"My God!"

So cried his brother correspondent, hurling himself, face downward,

into the bottom of the boat. The Alma, under the divided attention

of Rasmunsen, had been caught by a great mass of water and whirled

around. The after leach hollowed, the sail emptied and jibed, and

the boom, sweeping with terrific force across the boat, carried the

angry correspondent overboard with a broken back. Mast and sail

had gone over the side as well. A drenching sea followed, as the

boat lost headway, and Rasmunsen sprang to the bailing bucket

Several boats hurtled past them in the next half-hour,--small

boats, boats of their own size, boats afraid, unable to do aught

but run madly on. Then a ten-ton barge, at imminent risk of

destruction, lowered sail to windward and lumbered down upon them.

"Keep off! Keep off!" Rasmunsen screamed.

But his low gunwale ground against the heavy craft, and the

remaining correspondent clambered aboard. Rasmunsen was over the

eggs like a cat and in the bow of the Alma, striving with numb

fingers to bend the hauling-lines together.

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

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

I'll pay you!"

"Come on!" they howled in chorus.

A big whitecap broke just beyond, washing over the barge and

leaving the Alma half swamped. The men cast off, cursing him as

they ran up their sail. Rasmunsen cursed back and fell to bailing.

The mast and sail, like a sea anchor, still fast by the halyards,

held the boat head on to wind and sea and gave him a chance to

fight the water out.

Three hours later, numbed, exhausted, blathering like a lunatic,

but still bailing, he went ashore on an ice-strewn beach near

Cariboo Crossing. Two men, a government courier and a half-breed

voyageur, dragged him out of the surf, saved his cargo, and beached

the Alma. They were paddling out of the country in a Peterborough,

and gave him shelter for the night in their storm-bound camp. Next

morning they departed, but he elected to stay by his eggs. And

thereafter the name and fame of the man with the thousand dozen

eggs began to spread through the land. Gold-seekers who made in

before the freeze-up carried the news of his coming. Grizzled old-

timers of Forty Mile and Circle City, sour doughs with leathern

jaws and bean-calloused stomachs, called up dream memories of

chickens and green things at mention of his name. Dyea and Skaguay

took an interest in his being, and questioned his progress from

every man who came over the passes, while Dawson--golden,

omeletless Dawson--fretted and worried, and way-laid every chance

arrival for word of him.

But of this Rasmunsen knew nothing. The day after the wreck he

patched up the Alma and pulled out. A cruel east wind blew in his

teeth from Tagish, but he got the oars over the side and bucked

manfully into it, though half the time he was drifting backward and

chopping ice from the blades. According to the custom of the

country, he was driven ashore at Windy Arm; three times on Tagish

saw him swamped and beached; and Lake Marsh held him at the freeze-

up. The Alma was crushed in the jamming of the floes, but the eggs

were intact. These he back-tripped two miles across the ice to the

shore, where he built a cache, which stood for years after and was

pointed out by men who knew.

Half a thousand frozen miles stretched between him and Dawson, and

the waterway was closed. But Rasmunsen, with a peculiar tense look

in his face, struck back up the lakes on foot. What he suffered on

that lone trip, with nought but a single blanket, an axe, and a

handful of beans, is not given to ordinary mortals to know. Only

the Arctic adventurer may understand. Suffice that he was caught

in a blizzard on Chilkoot and left two of his toes with the surgeon

at Sheep Camp. Yet he stood on his feet and washed dishes in the

scullery of the PAWONA to the Puget Sound, and from there passed

coal on a P. S. boat to San Francisco.

It was a haggard, unkempt man who limped across the shining office

floor to raise a second mortgage from the bank people. His hollow

cheeks betrayed themselves through the scraggy beard, and his eyes

seemed to have retired into deep caverns where they burned with

cold fires. His hands were grained from exposure and hard work,

and the nails were rimmed with tight-packed dirt and coal-dust. He

spoke vaguely of eggs and ice-packs, winds and tides; but when they

declined to let him have more than a second thousand, his talk

became incoherent, concerning itself chiefly with the price of dogs

and dog-food, and such things as snowshoes and moccasins and winter

trails. They let him have fifteen hundred, which was more than the

cottage warranted, and breathed easier when he scrawled his

signature and passed out the door.

Two weeks later he went over Chilkoot with three dog sleds of five

dogs each. One team he drove, the two Indians with him driving the

others. At Lake Marsh they broke out the cache and loaded up. But

there was no trail. He was the first in over the ice, and to him

fell the task of packing the snow and hammering away through the

rough river jams. Behind him he often observed a camp-fire smoke

trickling thinly up through the quiet air, and he wondered why the

people did not overtake him. For he was a stranger to the land and

did not understand. Nor could he understand his Indians when they

tried to explain. This they conceived to be a hardship, but when

they balked and refused to break camp of mornings, he drove them to

their work at pistol point.

When he slipped through an ice bridge near the White Horse and

froze his foot, tender yet and oversensitive from the previous

freezing, the Indians looked for him to lie up. But he sacrificed

a blanket, and, with his foot incased in an enormous moccasin, big

as a water-bucket, continued to take his regular turn with the

front sled. Here was the cruellest work, and they respected him,

though on the side they rapped their foreheads with their knuckles

and significantly shook their heads. One night they tried to run

away, but the zip-zip of his bullets in the snow brought them back,

snarling but convinced. Whereupon, being only savage Chilkat men,

they put their heads together to kill him; but he slept like a cat,

and, waking or sleeping, the chance never came. Often they tried

to tell him the import of the smoke wreath in the rear, but he

could not comprehend and grew suspicious of them. And when they

sulked or shirked, he was quick to let drive at them between the

eyes, and quick to cool their heated souls with sight of his ready

revolver.

And so it went--with mutinous men, wild dogs, and a trail that

broke the heart. He fought the men to stay with him, fought the

dogs to keep them away from the eggs, fought the ice, the cold, and

the pain of his foot, which would not heal. As fast as the young

tissue renewed, it was bitten and scared by the frost, so that a

running sore developed, into which he could almost shove his fist.

In the mornings, when he first put his weight upon it, his head

went dizzy, and he was near to fainting from the pain; but later on

in the day it usually grew numb, to recommence when he crawled into

his blankets and tried to sleep. Yet he, who had been a clerk and

sat at a desk all his days, toiled till the Indians were exhausted,

and even out-worked the dogs. How hard he worked, how much he

suffered, he did not know. Being a man of the one idea, now that

the idea had come, it mastered him. In the foreground of his

consciousness was Dawson, in the background his thousand dozen

eggs, and midway between the two his ego fluttered, striving always

to draw them together to a glittering golden point. This golden

point was the five thousand dollars, the consummation of the idea

and the point of departure for whatever new idea might present

itself. For the rest, he was a mere automaton. He was unaware of

other things, seeing them as through a glass darkly, and giving

them no thought. The work of his hands he did with machine-like

wisdom; likewise the work of his head. So the look on his face

grew very tense, till even the Indians were afraid of it, and

marvelled at the strange white man who had made them slaves and

forced them to toil with such foolishness.

Then came a snap on Lake Le Barge, when the cold of outer space

smote the tip of the planet, and the force ranged sixty and odd

degrees below zero. Here, labouring with open mouth that he might

breathe more freely, he chilled his lungs, and for the rest of the

trip he was troubled with a dry, hacking cough, especially

irritable in smoke of camp or under stress of undue exertion. On

the Thirty Mile river he found much open water, spanned by

precarious ice bridges and fringed with narrow rim ice, tricky and

uncertain. The rim ice was impossible to reckon on, and he dared

it without reckoning, falling back on his revolver when his drivers

demurred. But on the ice bridges, covered with snow though they

were, precautions could be taken. These they crossed on their

snowshoes, with long poles, held crosswise in their hands, to which

to cling in case of accident. Once over, the dogs were called to

follow. And on such a bridge, where the absence of the centre ice

was masked by the snow, one of the Indians met his end. He went

through as quickly and neatly as a knife through thin cream, and

the current swept him from view down under the stream ice.

That night his mate fled away through the pale moonlight, Rasmunsen

futilely puncturing the silence with his revolver--a thing that he

handled with more celerity than cleverness. Thirty-six hours later

the Indian made a police camp on the Big Salmon.

"Um--um--um funny mans--what you call?--top um head all loose," the

interpreter explained to the puzzled captain. "Eh? Yep, clazy,

much clazy mans. Eggs, eggs, all a time eggs--savvy? Come bime-

by."

It was several days before Rasmunsen arrived, the three sleds

lashed together, and all the dogs in a single team. It was

awkward, and where the going was bad he was compelled to back-trip

it sled by sled, though he managed most of the time, through

herculean efforts, to bring all along on the one haul. He did not

seem moved when the captain of police told him his man was hitting

the high places for Dawson, and was by that time, probably, half-

way between Selkirk and Stewart. Nor did he appear interested when

informed that the police had broken the trail as far as Pelly; for

he had attained to a fatalistic acceptance of all natural

dispensations, good or ill. But when they told him that Dawson was

in the bitter clutch of famine, he smiled, threw the harness on his

dogs, and pulled out.

But it was at his next halt that the mystery of the smoke was

explained. With the word at Big Salmon that the trail was broken

to Pelly, there was no longer any need for the smoke wreath to

linger in his wake; and Rasmunsen, crouching over lonely fire, saw

a motley string of sleds go by. First came the courier and the

half-breed who had hauled him out from Bennett; then mail-carriers

for Circle City, two sleds of them, and a mixed following of

ingoing Klondikers. Dogs and men were fresh and fat, while

Rasmunsen and his brutes were jaded and worn down to the skin and

bone. They of the smoke wreath had travelled one day in three,

resting and reserving their strength for the dash to come when

broken trail was met with; while each day he had plunged and

floundered forward, breaking the spirit of his dogs and robbing

them of their mettle.

As for himself, he was unbreakable. They thanked him kindly for

his efforts in their behalf, those fat, fresh men,--thanked him

kindly, with broad grins and ribald laughter; and now, when he

understood, he made no answer. Nor did he cherish silent

bitterness. It was immaterial. The idea--the fact behind the

idea--was not changed. Here he was and his thousand dozen; there

was Dawson; the problem was unaltered.

At the Little Salmon, being short of dog food, the dogs got into

his grub, and from there to Selkirk he lived on beans--coarse,

brown beans, big beans, grossly nutritive, which griped his stomach

and doubled him up at two-hour intervals. But the Factor at

Selkirk had a notice on the door of the Post to the effect that no

steamer had been up the Yukon for two years, and in consequence

grub was beyond price. He offered to swap flour, however, at the

rate of a cupful of each egg, but Rasmunsen shook his head and hit

the trail. Below the Post he managed to buy frozen horse hide for

the dogs, the horses having been slain by the Chilkat cattle men,

and the scraps and offal preserved by the Indians. He tackled the

hide himself, but the hair worked into the bean sores of his mouth,

and was beyond endurance.

Here at Selkirk he met the forerunners of the hungry exodus of

Dawson, and from there on they crept over the trail, a dismal

throng. "No grub!" was the song they sang. "No grub, and had to

go." "Everybody holding candles for a rise in the spring." "Flour

dollar 'n a half a pound, and no sellers."

"Eggs?" one of them answered. "Dollar apiece, but there ain't

none."

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

said aloud.

"Hey?" the man asked.

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

When he arrived at Stewart River, seventy from Dawson, five of his

dogs were gone, and the remainder were falling in the traces. He,

also, was in the traces, hauling with what little strength was left

in him. Even then he was barely crawling along ten miles a day.

His cheek-bones and nose, frost-bitten again and again, were turned

bloody-black and hideous. The thumb, which was separated from the

fingers by the gee-pole, had likewise been nipped and gave him

great pain. The monstrous moccasin still incased his foot, and

strange pains were beginning to rack the leg. At Sixty Mile, the

last beans, which he had been rationing for some time, were

finished; yet he steadfastly refused to touch the eggs. He could

not reconcile his mind to the legitimacy of it, and staggered and

fell along the way to Indian River. Here a fresh-killed moose and

an open-handed old-timer gave him and his dogs new strength, and at

Ainslie's he felt repaid for it all when a stampede, ripe from

Dawson in five hours, was sure he could get a dollar and a quarter

for every egg he possessed.

He came up the steep bank by the Dawson barracks with fluttering

heart and shaking knees. The dogs were so weak that he was forced

to rest them, and, waiting, he leaned limply against the gee-pole.

A man, an eminently decorous-looking man, came sauntering by in a

great bearskin coat. He glanced at Rasmunsen curiously, then

stopped and ran a speculative eye over the dogs and the three

lashed sleds.

"What you got?" he asked.

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

above a whisper.

"Eggs! Whoopee! Whoopee!" He sprang up into the air, gyrated

madly, and finished with half-a-dozen war steps. "You don't say--

all of 'em?"

"All of 'em."

"Say, you must be the Egg Man." He walked around and viewed

Rasmunsen from the other side. "Come, now, ain't you the Egg Man?"

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

down a bit.

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

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

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

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

explained.

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

The man pulled out a healthy gold sack the size of a small sausage

and knocked it negligently against the gee-pole. Rasmunsen felt a

strange trembling in the pit of his stomach, a tickling of the

nostrils, and an almost overwhelming desire to sit down and cry.

But a curious, wide-eyed crowd was beginning to collect, and man

after man was calling out for eggs. He was without scales, but the

man with the bearskin coat fetched a pair and obligingly weighed in

the dust while Rasmunsen passed out the goods. Soon there was a

pushing and shoving and shouldering, and a great clamour.

Everybody wanted to buy and to be served first. And as the

excitement grew, Rasmunsen cooled down. This would never do.

There must be something behind the fact of their buying so eagerly.

It would be wiser if he rested first and sized up the market.

Perhaps eggs were worth two dollars apiece. Anyway, whenever he

wished to sell, he was sure of a dollar and a half. "Stop!" he

cried, when a couple of hundred had been sold. "No more now. I'm

played out. I've got to get a cabin, and then you can come and see

me."

A groan went up at this, but the man with the bearskin coat

approved. Twenty-four of the frozen eggs went rattling in his

capacious pockets, and he didn't care whether the rest of the town

ate or not. Besides, he could see Rasmunsen was on his last legs.

"There's a cabin right around the second corner from the Monte

Carlo," he told him--"the one with the sody-bottle window. It

ain't mine, but I've got charge of it. Rents for ten a day and

cheap for the money. You move right in, and I'll see you later.

Don't forget the sody-bottle window."

"Tra-la-loo!" he called back a moment later. "I'm goin' up the

hill to eat eggs and dream of home."

On his way to the cabin, Rasmunsen recollected he was hungry and

bought a small supply of provisions at the N. A. T. & T. store--

also a beefsteak at the butcher shop and dried salmon for the dogs.

He found the cabin without difficulty, and left the dogs in the

harness while he started the fire and got the coffee under way.

A dollar 'n a half apiece--one thousand dozen--eighteen thousand

dollars!" he kept muttering it to himself, over and over, as he

went about his work.

As he flopped the steak into the frying-pan the door opened. He

turned. It was the man with the bearskin coat. He seemed to come

in with determination, as though bound on some explicit errand, but

as he looked at Rasmunsen an expression of perplexity came into his

face.

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

Rasmunsen wondered if he wanted the rent.

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

Rasmunsen staggered. He felt as though some one had struck him an

astounding blow between the eyes. The walls of the cabin reeled

and tilted up. He put out his hand to steady himself and rested it

on the stove. The sharp pain and the smell of the burning flesh

brought him back to himself.

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

want your money back."

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

good?"

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

But the man refused and backed away. "I'll come back," he said,

"when you've taken stock, and get what's comin'."

Rasmunsen rolled the chopping-block into the cabin and carried in

the eggs. He went about it quite calmly. He took up the hand-axe,

and, one by one, chopped the eggs in half. These halves he

examined carefully and let fall to the floor. At first he sampled

from the different cases, then deliberately emptied one case at a

time. The heap on the floor grew larger. The coffee boiled over

and the smoke of the burning beefsteak filled the cabin. He

chopped steadfastly and monotonously till the last case was

finished.

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

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

The severed eggs were beginning to thaw in the heat of the stove,

and a miserable odour was growing stronger.

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

Rasmunsen looked at him long and blankly.

"I'm Murray, Big Jim Murray, everybody knows me," the man

volunteered. "I'm just hearin' your eggs is rotten, and I'm

offerin' you two hundred for the batch. They ain't good as salmon,

but still they're fair scoffin's for dogs."

Rasmunsen seemed turned to stone. He did not move. "You go to

hell," he said passionlessly.

"Now just consider. I pride myself it's a decent price for a mess

like that, and it's better 'n nothin'. Two hundred. What you

say?"

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

Murray gaped with a great awe, then went out carefully, backward,

with his eyes fixed an the other's face.

Rasmunsen followed him out and turned the dogs loose. He threw

them all the salmon he had bought, and coiled a sled-lashing up in

his hand. Then he re-entered the cabin and drew the latch in after

him. The smoke from the cindered steak made his eyes smart. He

stood on the bunk, passed the lashing over the ridge-pole, and

measured the swing-off with his eye. It did not seem to satisfy,

for he put the stool on the bunk and climbed upon the stool. He

drove a noose in the end of the lashing and slipped his head

through. The other end he made fast. Then he kicked the stool out

from under.

THE MARRIAGE OF LIT-LIT

When John Fox came into a country where whisky freezes solid and

may be used as a paper-weight for a large part of the year, he came

without the ideals and illusions that usually hamper the progress

of more delicately nurtured adventurers. Born and reared on the

frontier fringe of the United States, he took with him into Canada

a primitive cast of mind, an elemental simplicity and grip on

things, as it were, that insured him immediate success in his new

career. From a mere servant of the Hudson Bay Company, driving a

paddle with the voyageurs and carrying goods on his back across the

portages, he swiftly rose to a Factorship and took charge of a

trading post at Fort Angelus.

Here, because of his elemental simplicity, he took to himself a

native wife, and, by reason of the connubial bliss that followed,

he escaped the unrest and vain longings that curse the days of more

fastidious men, spoil their work, and conquer them in the end. He

lived contentedly, was at single purposes with the business he was

set there to do, and achieved a brilliant record in the service of

the Company. About this time his wife died, was claimed by her

people, and buried with savage circumstance in a tin trunk in the

top of a tree.

Two sons she had borne him, and when the Company promoted him, he

journeyed with them still deeper into the vastness of the North-

West Territory to a place called Sin Rock, where he took charge of

a new post in a more important fur field. Here he spent several

lonely and depressing months, eminently disgusted with the

unprepossessing appearance of the Indian maidens, and greatly

worried by his growing sons who stood in need of a mother's care.

Then his eyes chanced upon Lit-lit.

"Lit-lit--well, she is Lit-lit," was the fashion in which he

despairingly described her to his chief clerk, Alexander McLean.

McLean was too fresh from his Scottish upbringing--"not dry behind

the ears yet," John Fox put it--to take to the marriage customs of

the country. Nevertheless he was not averse to the Factor's

imperilling his own immortal soul, and, especially, feeling an

ominous attraction himself for Lit-lit, he was sombrely content to

clinch his own soul's safety by seeing her married to the Factor.

Nor is it to be wondered that McLean's austere Scotch soul stood in

danger of being thawed in the sunshine of Lit-lit's eyes. She was

pretty, and slender, and willowy; without the massive face and

temperamental stolidity of the average squaw. "Lit-lit," so called

from her fashion, even as a child, of being fluttery, of darting

about from place to place like a butterfly, of being inconsequent

and merry, and of laughing as lightly as she darted and danced

about.

Lit-lit was the daughter of Snettishane, a prominent chief in the

tribe, by a half-breed mother, and to him the Factor fared casually

one summer day to open negotiations of marriage. He sat with the

chief in the smoke of a mosquito smudge before his lodge, and

together they talked about everything under the sun, or, at least,

everything that in the Northland is under the sun, with the sole

exception of marriage. John Fox had come particularly to talk of

marriage; Snettishane knew it, and John Fox knew he knew it,

wherefore the subject was religiously avoided. This is alleged to

be Indian subtlety. In reality it is transparent simplicity.

The hours slipped by, and Fox and Snettishane smoked interminable

pipes, looking each other in the eyes with a guilelessness superbly

histrionic. In the mid-afternoon McLean and his brother clerk,

McTavish, strolled past, innocently uninterested, on their way to

the river. When they strolled back again an hour later, Fox and

Snettishane had attained to a ceremonious discussion of the

condition and quality of the gunpowder and bacon which the Company

was offering in trade. Meanwhile Lit-lit, divining the Factor's

errand, had crept in under the rear wall of the lodge, and through

the front flap was peeping out at the two logomachists by the

mosquito smudge. She was flushed and happy-eyed, proud that no

less a man than the Factor (who stood next to God in the Northland

hierarchy) had singled her out, femininely curious to see at close

range what manner of man he was. Sunglare on the ice, camp smoke,

and weather beat had burned his face to a copper-brown, so that her

father was as fair as he, while she was fairer. She was remotely

glad of this, and more immediately glad that he was large and

strong, though his great black beard half frightened her, it was so

strange.

Being very young, she was unversed in the ways of men. Seventeen

times she had seen the sun travel south and lose itself beyond the

sky-line, and seventeen times she had seen it travel back again and

ride the sky day and night till there was no night at all. And

through these years she had been cherished jealously by

Snettishane, who stood between her and all suitors, listening

disdainfully to the young hunters as they bid for her hand, and

turning them away as though she were beyond price. Snettishane was

mercenary. Lit-lit was to him an investment. She represented so

much capital, from which he expected to receive, not a certain

definite interest, but an incalculable interest.

And having thus been reared in a manner as near to that of the

nunnery as tribal conditions would permit, it was with a great and

maidenly anxiety that she peeped out at the man who had surely come

for her, at the husband who was to teach her all that was yet

unlearned of life, at the masterful being whose word was to be her

law, and who was to mete and bound her actions and comportment for

the rest of her days.

But, peeping through the front flap of the lodge, flushed and

thrilling at the strange destiny reaching out for her, she grew

disappointed as the day wore along, and the Factor and her father

still talked pompously of matters concerning other things and not

pertaining to marriage things at all. As the sun sank lower and

lower toward the north and midnight approached, the Factor began

making unmistakable preparations for departure. As he turned to

stride away Lit-lit's heart sank; but it rose again as he halted,

half turning on one heel.

"Oh, by the way, Snettishane," he said, "I want a squaw to wash for

me and mend my clothes."

Snettishane grunted and suggested Wanidani, who was an old woman

and toothless.

"No, no," interposed the Factor. "What I want is a wife. I've

been kind of thinking about it, and the thought just struck me that

you might know of some one that would suit."

Snettishane looked interested, whereupon the Factor retraced his

steps, casually and carelessly to linger and discuss this new and

incidental topic.

"Kattou?" suggested Snettishane.

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

"Laska?"

"Her knees be wide apart when she stands upright. Kips, your

biggest dog, can leap between her knees when she stands upright."

"Senatee?" went on the imperturbable Snettishane.

But John Fox feigned anger, crying: "What foolishness is this? Am

I old, that thou shouldst mate me with old women? Am I toothless?

lame of leg? blind of eye? Or am I poor that no bright-eyed maiden

may look with favour upon me? Behold! I am the Factor, both rich

and great, a power in the land, whose speech makes men tremble and

is obeyed!"

Snettishane was inwardly pleased, though his sphinx-like visage

never relaxed. He was drawing the Factor, and making him break

ground. Being a creature so elemental as to have room for but one

idea at a time, Snettishane could pursue that one idea a greater

distance than could John Fox. For John Fox, elemental as he was,

was still complex enough to entertain several glimmering ideas at a

time, which debarred him from pursuing the one as single-heartedly

or as far as did the chief.

Snettishane calmly continued calling the roster of eligible

maidens, which, name by name, as fast as uttered, were stamped

ineligible by John Fox, with specified objections appended. Again

he gave it up and started to return to the Fort. Snettishane

watched him go, making no effort to stop him, but seeing him, in

the end, stop himself.

"Come to think of it," the Factor remarked, "we both of us forgot

Lit-lit. Now I wonder if she'll suit me?"

Snettishane met the suggestion with a mirthless face, behind the

mask of which his soul grinned wide. It was a distinct victory.

Had the Factor gone but one step farther, perforce Snettishane

would himself have mentioned the name of Lit-lit, but--the Factor

had not gone that one step farther.

The chief was non-committal concerning Lit-lit's suitability, till

he drove the white man into taking the next step in order of

procedure.

"Well," the Factor meditated aloud, "the only way to find out is to

make a try of it." He raised his voice. "So I will give for Lit-

lit ten blankets and three pounds of tobacco which is good

tobacco."

Snettishane replied with a gesture which seemed to say that all the

blankets and tobacco in all the world could not compensate him for

the loss of Lit-lit and her manifold virtues. When pressed by the

Factor to set a price, he coolly placed it at five hundred

blankets, ten guns, fifty pounds of tobacco, twenty scarlet cloths,

ten bottles of rum, a music-box, and lastly the good-will and best

offices of the Factor, with a place by his fire.

The Factor apparently suffered a stroke of apoplexy, which stroke

was successful in reducing the blankets to two hundred and in

cutting out the place by the fire--an unheard-of condition in the

marriages of white men with the daughters of the soil. In the end,

after three hours more of chaffering, they came to an agreement.

For Lit-lit Snettishane was to receive one hundred blankets, five

pounds of tobacco, three guns, and a bottle of rum, goodwill and

best offices included, which according to John Fox, was ten

blankets and a gun more than she was worth. And as he went home

through the wee sma' hours, the three-o'clock sun blazing in the

due north-east, he was unpleasantly aware that Snettishane had

bested him over the bargain.

Snettishane, tired and victorious, sought his bed, and discovered

Lit-lit before she could escape from the lodge.

He grunted knowingly: "Thou hast seen. Thou has heard. Wherefore

it be plain to thee thy father's very great wisdom and

understanding. I have made for thee a great match. Heed my words

and walk in the way of my words, go when I say go, come when I bid

thee come, and we shall grow fat with the wealth of this big white

man who is a fool according to his bigness."

The next day no trading was done at the store. The Factor opened

whisky before breakfast, to the delight of McLean and McTavish,

gave his dogs double rations, and wore his best moccasins. Outside

the Fort preparations were under way for a POTLATCH. Potlatch

means "a giving," and John Fox's intention was to signalize his

marriage with Lit-lit by a potlatch as generous as she was good-

looking. In the afternoon the whole tribe gathered to the feast.

Men, women, children, and dogs gorged to repletion, nor was there

one person, even among the chance visitors and stray hunters from

other tribes, who failed to receive some token of the bridegroom's

largess.

Lit-lit, tearfully shy and frightened, was bedecked by her bearded

husband with a new calico dress, splendidly beaded moccasins, a

gorgeous silk handkerchief over her raven hair, a purple scarf

about her throat, brass ear-rings and finger-rings, and a whole

pint of pinchbeck jewellery, including a Waterbury watch.

Snettishane could scarce contain himself at the spectacle, but

watching his chance drew her aside from the feast.

"Not this night, nor the next night," he began ponderously, "but in

the nights to come, when I shall call like a raven by the river

bank, it is for thee to rise up from thy big husband, who is a

fool, and come to me.

"Nay, nay," he went on hastily, at sight of the dismay in her face

at turning her back upon her wonderful new life. "For no sooner

shall this happen than thy big husband, who is a fool, will come

wailing to my lodge. Then it is for thee to wail likewise,

claiming that this thing is not well, and that the other thing thou

dost not like, and that to be the wife of the Factor is more than

thou didst bargain for, only wilt thou be content with more

blankets, and more tobacco, and more wealth of various sorts for

thy poor old father, Snettishane. Remember well, when I call in

the night, like a raven, from the river bank."

Lit-lit nodded; for to disobey her father was a peril she knew

well; and, furthermore, it was a little thing he asked, a short

separation from the Factor, who would know only greater gladness at

having her back. She returned to the feast, and, midnight being

well at hand, the Factor sought her out and led her away to the

Fort amid joking and outcry, in which the squaws were especially

conspicuous.

Lit-lit quickly found that married life with the head-man of a fort

was even better than she had dreamed. No longer did she have to

fetch wood and water and wait hand and foot upon cantankerous

menfolk. For the first time in her life she could lie abed till

breakfast was on the table. And what a bed!--clean and soft, and

comfortable as no bed she had ever known. And such food! Flour,

cooked into biscuits, hot-cakes and bread, three times a day and

every day, and all one wanted! Such prodigality was hardly

believable.

To add to her contentment, the Factor was cunningly kind. He had

buried one wife, and he knew how to drive with a slack rein that

went firm only on occasion, and then went very firm. "Lit-lit is

boss of this place," he announced significantly at the table the

morning after the wedding. "What she says goes. Understand?" And

McLean and McTavish understood. Also, they knew that the Factor

had a heavy hand.

But Lit-lit did not take advantage. Taking a leaf from the book of

her husband, she at once assumed charge of his own growing sons,

giving them added comforts and a measure of freedom like to that

which he gave her. The two sons were loud in the praise of their

new mother; McLean and McTavish lifted their voices; and the Factor

bragged of the joys of matrimony till the story of her good

behaviour and her husband's satisfaction became the property of all

the dwellers in the Sin Rock district.

Whereupon Snettishane, with visions of his incalculable interest

keeping him awake of nights, thought it time to bestir himself. On

the tenth night of her wedded life Lit-lit was awakened by the

croaking of a raven, and she knew that Snettishane was waiting for

her by the river bank. In her great happiness she had forgotten

her pact, and now it came back to her with behind it all the

childish terror of her father. For a time she lay in fear and

trembling, loath to go, afraid to stay. But in the end the Factor

won the silent victory, and his kindness plus his great muscles and

square jaw, nerved her to disregard Snettishane's call.

But in the morning she arose very much afraid, and went about her

duties in momentary fear of her father's coming. As the day wore

along, however, she began to recover her spirits. John Fox,

soundly berating McLean and McTavish for some petty dereliction of

duty, helped her to pluck up courage. She tried not to let him go

out of her sight, and when she followed him into the huge cache and

saw him twirling and tossing great bales around as though they were

feather pillows, she felt strengthened in her disobedience to her

father. Also (it was her first visit to the warehouse, and Sin

Rock was the chief distributing point to several chains of lesser

posts), she was astounded at the endlessness of the wealth there

stored away.

This sight and the picture in her mind's eye of the bare lodge of

Snettishane, put all doubts at rest. Yet she capped her conviction

by a brief word with one of her step-sons. "White daddy good?" was

what she asked, and the boy answered that his father was the best

man he had ever known. That night the raven croaked again. On the

night following the croaking was more persistent. It awoke the

Factor, who tossed restlessly for a while. Then he said aloud,

"Damn that raven," and Lit-lit laughed quietly under the blankets.

In the morning, bright and early, Snettishane put in an ominous

appearance and was set to breakfast in the kitchen with Wanidani.

He refused "squaw food," and a little later bearded his son-in-law

in the store where the trading was done. Having learned, he said,

that his daughter was such a jewel, he had come for more blankets,

more tobacco, and more guns--especially more guns. He had

certainly been cheated in her price, he held, and he had come for

justice. But the Factor had neither blankets nor justice to spare.

Whereupon he was informed that Snettishane had seen the missionary

at Three Forks, who had notified him that such marriages were not

made in heaven, and that it was his father's duty to demand his

daughter back.

"I am good Christian man now," Snettishane concluded. "I want my

Lit-lit to go to heaven."

The Factor's reply was short and to the point; for he directed his

father-in-law to go to the heavenly antipodes, and by the scruff of

the neck and the slack of the blanket propelled him on that trail

as far as the door.

But Snettishane sneaked around and in by the kitchen, cornering

Lit-lit in the great living-room of the Fort.

"Mayhap thou didst sleep over-sound last night when I called by the

river bank," he began, glowering darkly.

"Nay, I was awake and heard." Her heart was beating as though it

would choke her, but she went on steadily, "And the night before I

was awake and heard, and yet again the night before."

And thereat, out of her great happiness and out of the fear that it

might be taken from her, she launched into an original and glowing

address upon the status and rights of woman--the first new-woman

lecture delivered north of Fifty-three.

But it fell on unheeding ears. Snettishane was still in the dark

ages. As she paused for breath, he said threateningly, "To-night I

shall call again like the raven."

At this moment the Factor entered the room and again helped

Snettishane on his way to the heavenly antipodes.

That night the raven croaked more persistently than ever. Lit-lit,

who was a light sleeper, heard and smiled. John Fox tossed

restlessly. Then he awoke and tossed about with greater

restlessness. He grumbled and snorted, swore under his breath and

over his breath, and finally flung out of bed. He groped his way

to the great living-room, and from the rack took down a loaded

shot-gun--loaded with bird-shot, left therein by the careless

McTavish.

The Factor crept carefully out of the Fort and down to the river.

The croaking had ceased, but he stretched out in the long grass and

waited. The air seemed a chilly balm, and the earth, after the

heat of the day, now and again breathed soothingly against him.

The Factor, gathered into the rhythm of it all, dozed off, with his

head upon his arm, and slept.

Fifty yards away, head resting on knees, and with his back to John

Fox, Snettishane likewise slept, gently conquered by the quietude

of the night. An hour slipped by and then he awoke, and, without

lifting his head, set the night vibrating with the hoarse gutturals

of the raven call.

The Factor roused, not with the abrupt start of civilized man, but

with the swift and comprehensive glide from sleep to waking of the

savage. In the night-light he made out a dark object in the midst

of the grass and brought his gun to bear upon it. A second croak

began to rise, and he pulled the trigger. The crickets ceased from

their sing-song chant, the wildfowl from their squabbling, and the

raven croak broke midmost and died away in gasping silence.

John Fox ran to the spot and reached for the thing he had killed,

but his fingers closed on a coarse mop of hair and he turned

Snettishane's face upward to the starlight. He knew how a shotgun

scattered at fifty yards, and he knew that he had peppered

Snettishane across the shoulders and in the small of the back. And

Snettishane knew that he knew, but neither referred to it

"What dost thou here?" the Factor demanded. "It were time old

bones should be in bed."

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

his skin.

"Old bones will not sleep," he said solemnly. "I weep for my

daughter, for my daughter Lit-lit, who liveth and who yet is dead,

and who goeth without doubt to the white man's hell."

"Weep henceforth on the far bank, beyond ear-shot of the Fort,"

said John Fox, turning on his heel, "for the noise of thy weeping

is exceeding great and will not let one sleep of nights."

"My heart is sore," Snettishane answered, "and my days and nights

be black with sorrow."

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

"As the raven is black," Snettishane said.

Never again was the voice of the raven heard by the river bank.

Lit-lit grows matronly day by day and is very happy. Also, there

are sisters to the sons of John Fox's first wife who lies buried in

a tree. Old Snettishane is no longer a visitor at the Fort, and

spends long hours raising a thin, aged voice against the filial

ingratitude of children in general and of his daughter Lit-lit in

particular. His declining years are embittered by the knowledge

that he was cheated, and even John Fox has withdrawn the assertion

that the price for Lit-lit was too much by ten blankets and a gun.

BATARD

Batard was a devil. This was recognized throughout the Northland.

"Hell's Spawn" he was called by many men, but his master, Black

Leclere, chose for him the shameful name "Batard." Now Black

Leclere was also a devil, and the twain were well matched. There

is a saying that when two devils come together, hell is to pay.

This is to be expected, and this certainly was to be expected when

Batard and Black Leclere came together. The first time they met,

Batard was a part-grown puppy, lean and hungry, with bitter eyes;

and they met with snap and snarl, and wicked looks, for Leclere's

upper lip had a wolfish way of lifting and showing the white, cruel

teeth. And it lifted then, and his eyes glinted viciously, as he

reached for Batard and dragged him out from the squirming litter.

It was certain that they divined each other, for on the instant

Batard had buried his puppy fangs in Leclere's hand, and Leclere,

thumb and finger, was coolly choking his young life out of him.

"SACREDAM," the Frenchman said softly, flirting the quick blood

from his bitten hand and gazing down on the little puppy choking

and gasping in the snow.

Leclere turned to John Hamlin, storekeeper of the Sixty Mile Post.

"Dat fo' w'at Ah lak heem. 'Ow moch, eh, you, M'sieu'? 'Ow moch?

Ah buy heem, now; Ah buy heem queek."

And because he hated him with an exceeding bitter hate, Leclere

bought Batard and gave him his shameful name. And for five years

the twain adventured across the Northland, from St. Michael's and

the Yukon delta to the head-reaches of the Pelly and even so far as

the Peace River, Athabasca, and the Great Slave. And they acquired

a reputation for uncompromising wickedness, the like of which never

before attached itself to man and dog.

Batard did not know his father--hence his name--but, as John Hamlin

knew, his father was a great grey timber wolf. But the mother of

Batard, as he dimly remembered her, was snarling, bickering,

obscene, husky, full-fronted and heavy-chested, with a malign eye,

a cat-like grip on life, and a genius for trickery and evil. There

was neither faith nor trust in her. Her treachery alone could be

relied upon, and her wild-wood amours attested her general

depravity. Much of evil and much of strength were there in these,

Batard's progenitors, and, bone and flesh of their bone and flesh,

he had inherited it all. And then came Black Leclere, to lay his

heavy hand on the bit of pulsating puppy life, to press and prod

and mould till it became a big bristling beast, acute in knavery,

overspilling with hate, sinister, malignant, diabolical. With a

proper master Batard might have made an ordinary, fairly efficient

sled-dog. He never got the chance: Leclere but confirmed him in

his congenital iniquity.

The history of Batard and Leclere is a history of war--of five

cruel, relentless years, of which their first meeting is fit

summary. To begin with, it was Leclere's fault, for he hated with

understanding and intelligence, while the long-legged, ungainly

puppy hated only blindly, instinctively, without reason or method.

At first there were no refinements of cruelty (these were to come

later), but simple beatings and crude brutalities. In one of these

Batard had an ear injured. He never regained control of the riven

muscles, and ever after the ear drooped limply down to keep keen

the memory of his tormentor. And he never forgot.

His puppyhood was a period of foolish rebellion. He was always

worsted, but he fought back because it was his nature to fight

back. And he was unconquerable. Yelping shrilly from the pain of

lash and club, he none the less contrived always to throw in the

defiant snarl, the bitter vindictive menace of his soul which

fetched without fail more blows and beatings. But his was his

mother's tenacious grip on life. Nothing could kill him. He

flourished under misfortune, grew fat with famine, and out of his

terrible struggle for life developed a preternatural intelligence.

His were the stealth and cunning of the husky, his mother, and the

fierceness and valour of the wolf, his father.

Possibly it was because of his father that he never wailed. His

puppy yelps passed with his lanky legs, so that he became grim and

taciturn, quick to strike, slow to warn. He answered curse with

snarl, and blow with snap, grinning the while his implacable

hatred; but never again, under the extremest agony, did Leclere

bring from him the cry of fear nor of pain. This unconquerableness

but fanned Leclere's wrath and stirred him to greater deviltries.

Did Leclere give Batard half a fish and to his mates whole ones,

Batard went forth to rob other dogs of their fish. Also he robbed

caches and expressed himself in a thousand rogueries, till he

became a terror to all dogs and masters of dogs. Did Leclere beat

Batard and fondle Babette--Babette who was not half the worker he

was--why, Batard threw her down in the snow and broke her hind leg

in his heavy jaws, so that Leclere was forced to shoot her.

Likewise, in bloody battles, Batard mastered all his team-mates,

set them the law of trail and forage, and made them live to the law

he set.

In five years he heard but one kind word, received but one soft

stroke of a hand, and then he did not know what manner of things

they were. He leaped like the untamed thing he was, and his jaws

were together in a flash. It was the missionary at Sunrise, a

newcomer in the country, who spoke the kind word and gave the soft

stroke of the hand. And for six months after, he wrote no letters

home to the States, and the surgeon at McQuestion travelled two

hundred miles on the ice to save him from blood-poisoning.

Men and dogs looked askance at Batard when he drifted into their

camps and posts. The men greeted him with feet threateningly

lifted for the kick, the dogs with bristling manes and bared fangs.

Once a man did kick Batard, and Batard, with quick wolf snap,

closed his jaws like a steel trap on the man's calf and crunched

down to the bone. Whereat the man was determined to have his life,

only Black Leclere, with ominous eyes and naked hunting-knife,

stepped in between. The killing of Batard--ah, SACREDAM, THAT was

a pleasure Leclere reserved for himself. Some day it would happen,

or else--bah! who was to know? Anyway, the problem would be

solved.

For they had become problems to each other. The very breath each

drew was a challenge and a menace to the other. Their hate bound

them together as love could never bind. Leclere was bent on the

coming of the day when Batard should wilt in spirit and cringe and

whimper at his feet. And Batard--Leclere knew what was in Batard's

mind, and more than once had read it in Batard's eyes. And so

clearly had he read, that when Batard was at his back, he made it a

point to glance often over his shoulder.

Men marvelled when Leclere refused large money for the dog. "Some

day you'll kill him and be out his price," said John Hamlin once,

when Batard lay panting in the snow where Leclere had kicked him,

and no one knew whether his ribs were broken, and no one dared look

to see.

"Dat," said Leclere, dryly, "dat is my biz'ness, M'sieu'."

And the men marvelled that Batard did not run away. They did not

understand. But Leclere understood. He was a man who lived much

in the open, beyond the sound of human tongue, and he had learned

the voices of wind and storm, the sigh of night, the whisper of

dawn, the clash of day. In a dim way he could hear the green

things growing, the running of the sap, the bursting of the bud.

And he knew the subtle speech of the things that moved, of the

rabbit in the snare, the moody raven beating the air with hollow

wing, the baldface shuffling under the moon, the wolf like a grey

shadow gliding betwixt the twilight and the dark. And to him

Batard spoke clear and direct. Full well he understood why Batard

did not run away, and he looked more often over his shoulder.

When in anger, Batard was not nice to look upon, and more than once

had he leapt for Leclere's throat, to be stretched quivering and

senseless in the snow, by the butt of the ever ready dogwhip. And

so Batard learned to bide his time. When he reached his full

strength and prime of youth, he thought the time had come. He was

broad-chested, powerfully muscled, of far more than ordinary size,

and his neck from head to shoulders was a mass of bristling hair--

to all appearances a full-blooded wolf. Leclere was lying asleep

in his furs when Batard deemed the time to be ripe. He crept upon

him stealthily, head low to earth and lone ear laid back, with a

feline softness of tread. Batard breathed gently, very gently, and

not till he was close at hand did he raise his head. He paused for

a moment and looked at the bronzed bull throat, naked and knotty,

and swelling to a deep steady pulse. The slaver dripped down his

fangs and slid off his tongue at the sight, and in that moment he

remembered his drooping ear, his uncounted blows and prodigious

wrongs, and without a sound sprang on the sleeping man.

Leclere awoke to the pang of the fangs in his throat, and, perfect

animal that he was, he awoke clear-headed and with full

comprehension. He closed on Batard's windpipe with both his hands,

and rolled out of his furs to get his weight uppermost. But the

thousands of Batard's ancestors had clung at the throats of

unnumbered moose and caribou and dragged them down, and the wisdom

of those ancestors was his. When Leclere's weight came on top of

him, he drove his hind legs upwards and in, and clawed down chest

and abdomen, ripping and tearing through skin and muscle. And when

he felt the man's body wince above him and lift, he worried and

shook at the man's throat. His team-mates closed around in a

snarling circle, and Batard, with failing breath and fading sense,

knew that their jaws were hungry for him. But that did not matter-

-it was the man, the man above him, and he ripped and clawed, and

shook and worried, to the last ounce of his strength. But Leclere

choked him with both his hands, till Batard's chest heaved and

writhed for the air denied, and his eyes glazed and set, and his

jaws slowly loosened, and his tongue protruded black and swollen.

"Eh? Bon, you devil!" Leclere gurgled mouth and throat clogged

with his own blood, as he shoved the dizzy dog from him.

And then Leclere cursed the other dogs off as they fell upon

Batard. They drew back into a wider circle, squatting alertly on

their haunches and licking their chops, the hair on every neck

bristling and erect.

Batard recovered quickly, and at sound of Leclere's voice, tottered

to his feet and swayed weakly back and forth.

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

you plentee, by GAR!"

Batard, the air biting into his exhausted lungs like wine, flashed

full into the man's face, his jaws missing and coming together with

a metallic clip. They rolled over and over on the snow, Leclere

striking madly with his fists. Then they separated, face to face,

and circled back and forth before each other. Leclere could have

drawn his knife. His rifle was at his feet. But the beast in him

was up and raging. He would do the thing with his hands--and his

teeth. Batard sprang in, but Leclere knocked him over with a blow

of the fist, fell upon him, and buried his teeth to the bone in the

dog's shoulder.

It was a primordial setting and a primordial scene, such as might

have been in the savage youth of the world. An open space in a

dark forest, a ring of grinning wolf-dogs, and in the centre two

beasts, locked in combat, snapping and snarling raging madly about

panting, sobbing, cursing, straining, wild with passion, in a fury

of murder, ripping and tearing and clawing in elemental

brutishness.

But Leclere caught Batard behind the ear with a blow from his fist,

knocking him over, and, for the instant, stunning him. Then

Leclere leaped upon him with his feet, and sprang up and down,

striving to grind him into the earth. Both Batard's hind legs were

broken ere Leclere ceased that he might catch breath.

"A-a-ah! A-a-ah!" he screamed, incapable of speech, shaking his

fist, through sheer impotence of throat and larynx.

But Batard was indomitable. He lay there in a helpless welter, his

lip feebly lifting and writhing to the snarl he had not the

strength to utter. Leclere kicked him, and the tired jaws closed

on the ankle, but could not break the skin.

Then Leclere picked up the whip and proceeded almost to cut him to

pieces, at each stroke of the lash crying: "Dis taim Ah break you!

Eh? By GAR! Ah break you!"

In the end, exhausted, fainting from loss of blood, he crumpled up

and fell by his victim, and when the wolf-dogs closed in to take

their vengeance, with his last consciousness dragged his body on

top of Batard to shield him from their fangs.

This occurred not far from Sunrise, and the missionary, opening the

door to Leclere a few hours later, was surprised to note the

absence of Batard from the team. Nor did his surprise lessen when

Leclere threw back the robes from the sled, gathered Batard into

his arms and staggered across the threshold. It happened that the

surgeon of McQuestion, who was something of a gadabout, was up on a

gossip, and between them they proceeded to repair Leclere,

"Merci, non," said he. "Do you fix firs' de dog. To die? NON.

Eet is not good. Becos' heem Ah mus' yet break. Dat fo' w'at he

mus' not die."

The surgeon called it a marvel, the missionary a miracle, that

Leclere pulled through at all; and so weakened was he, that in the

spring the fever got him, and he went on his back again. Batard

had been in even worse plight, but his grip on life prevailed, and

the bones of his hind legs knit, and his organs righted themselves,

during the several weeks he lay strapped to the floor. And by the

time Leclere, finally convalescent, sallow and shaky, took the sun

by the cabin door, Batard had reasserted his supremacy among his

kind, and brought not only his own team-mates but the missionary's

dogs into subjection.

He moved never a muscle, nor twitched a hair, when, for the first

time, Leclere tottered out on the missionary's arm, and sank down

slowly and with infinite caution on the three-legged stool.

"BON!" he said. "BON! De good sun!" And he stretched out his

wasted hands and washed them in the warmth.

Then his gaze fell on the dog, and the old light blazed back in his

eyes. He touched the missionary lightly on the arm. "Mon pere,

dat is one beeg devil, dat Batard. You will bring me one pistol,

so, dat Ah drink de sun in peace."

And thenceforth for many days he sat in the sun before the cabin

door. He never dozed, and the pistol lay always across his knees.

Batard had a way, the first thing each day, of looking for the

weapon in its wonted place. At sight of it he would lift his lip

faintly in token that he understood, and Leclere would lift his own

lip in an answering grin. One day the missionary took note of the

trick.

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

Leclere laughed softly. "Look you, mon pere. Dat w'at Ah now

spik, to dat does he lissen."

As if in confirmation, Batard just perceptibly wriggled his lone

ear up to catch the sound.

"Ah say 'keel'."

Batard growled deep down in his throat, the hair bristled along his

neck, and every muscle went tense and expectant.

"Ah lift de gun, so, like dat." And suiting action to word, he

sighted the pistol at Batard. Batard, with a single leap,

sideways, landed around the corner of the cabin out of sight.

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

"But why does he not run away?"

The Frenchman's shoulders went up in the racial shrug that means

all things from total ignorance to infinite understanding.

"Then why do you not kill him?"

Again the shoulders went up.

"Mon pere," he said after a pause, "de taim is not yet. He is one

beeg devil. Some taim Ah break heem, so an' so, all to leetle

bits. Hey? some taim. BON!"

A day came when Leclere gathered his dogs together and floated down

in a bateau to Forty Mile, and on to the Porcupine, where he took a

commission from the P. C. Company, and went exploring for the

better part of a year. After that he poled up the Koyokuk to

deserted Arctic City, and later came drifting back, from camp to

camp, along the Yukon. And during the long months Batard was well

lessoned. He learned many tortures, and, notably, the torture of

hunger, the torture of thirst, the torture of fire, and, worst of

all, the torture of music.

Like the rest of his kind, he did not enjoy music. It gave him

exquisite anguish, racking him nerve by nerve, and ripping apart

every fibre of his being. It made him howl, long and wolf-life, as

when the wolves bay the stars on frosty nights. He could not help

howling. It was his one weakness in the contest with Leclere, and

it was his shame. Leclere, on the other hand, passionately loved

music--as passionately as he loved strong drink. And when his soul

clamoured for expression, it usually uttered itself in one or the

other of the two ways, and more usually in both ways. And when he

had drunk, his brain a-lilt with unsung song and the devil in him

aroused and rampant, his soul found its supreme utterance in

torturing Batard.

"Now we will haf a leetle museek," he would say. "Eh? W'at you

t'ink, Batard?"

It was only an old and battered harmonica, tenderly treasured and

patiently repaired; but it was the best that money could buy, and

out of its silver reeds he drew weird vagrant airs that men had

never heard before. Then Batard, dumb of throat, with teeth tight

clenched, would back away, inch by inch, to the farthest cabin

corner. And Leclere, playing, playing, a stout club tucked under

his arm, followed the animal up, inch by inch, step by step, till

there was no further retreat.

At first Batard would crowd himself into the smallest possible

space, grovelling close to the floor; but as the music came nearer

and nearer, he was forced to uprear, his back jammed into the logs,

his fore legs fanning the air as though to beat off the rippling

waves of sound. He still kept his teeth together, but severe

muscular contractions attacked his body, strange twitchings and

jerkings, till he was all a-quiver and writhing in silent torment.

As he lost control, his jaws spasmodically wrenched apart, and deep

throaty vibrations issued forth, too low in the register of sound

for human ear to catch. And then, nostrils distended, eyes

dilated, hair bristling in helpless rage, arose the long wolf howl.

It came with a slurring rush upwards, swelling to a great heart-

breaking burst of sound, and dying away in sadly cadenced woe--then

the next rush upward, octave upon octave; the bursting heart; and

the infinite sorrow and misery, fainting, fading, falling, and

dying slowly away.

It was fit for hell. And Leclere, with fiendish ken, seemed to

divine each particular nerve and heartstring, and with long wails

and tremblings and sobbing minors to make it yield up its last

shred of grief. It was frightful, and for twenty-four hours after,

Batard was nervous and unstrung, starting at common sounds,

tripping over his own shadow, but, withal, vicious and masterful

with his team-mates. Nor did he show signs of a breaking spirit.

Rather did he grow more grim and taciturn, biding his time with an

inscrutable patience that began to puzzle and weigh upon Leclere.

The dog would lie in the firelight, motionless, for hours, gazing

straight before him at Leclere, and hating him with his bitter

eyes.

Often the man felt that he had bucked against the very essence of

life--the unconquerable essence that swept the hawk down out of the

sky like a feathered thunderbolt, that drove the great grey goose

across the zones, that hurled the spawning salmon through two

thousand miles of boiling Yukon flood. At such times he felt

impelled to--express his own unconquerable essence; and with strong

drink, wild music, and Batard, he indulged in vast orgies, wherein

he pitted his puny strength in the face of things, and challenged

all that was, and had been, and was yet to be.

"Dere is somet'ing dere," he affirmed, when the rhythmed vagaries

of his mind touched the secret chords of Batard's being and brought

forth the long lugubrious howl. "Ah pool eet out wid bot' my

han's, so, an' so. Ha! ha! Eet is fonee! Eet is ver' fonee! De

priest chant, de womans pray, de mans swear, de leetle bird go

peep-peep, Batard, heem go yow-yow--an' eet is all de ver' same

t'ing. Ha! ha!"

Father Gautier, a worthy priest, one reproved him with instances of

concrete perdition. He never reproved him again.

"Eet may be so, mon pere," he made answer. "An' Ah t'ink Ah go

troo hell a-snappin', lak de hemlock troo de fire. Eh, mon pere?"

But all bad things come to an end as well as good, and so with

Black Leclere. On the summer low water, in a poling boat, he left

McDougall for Sunrise. He left McDougall in company with Timothy

Brown, and arrived at Sunrise by himself. Further, it was known

that they had quarrelled just previous to pulling out; for the

Lizzie, a wheezy ten-ton stern-wheeler, twenty-four hours behind,

beat Leclere in by three days. And when he did get in, it was with

a clean-drilled bullet-hole through his shoulder muscle, and a tale

of ambush and murder.

A strike had been made at Sunrise, and things had changed

considerably. With the infusion of several hundred gold-seekers, a

deal of whisky, and half-a-dozen equipped gamblers, the missionary

had seen the page of his years of labour with the Indians wiped

clean. When the squaws became preoccupied with cooking beans and

keeping the fire going for the wifeless miners, and the bucks with

swapping their warm furs for black bottles and broken time-pieces,

he took to his bed, said "Bless me" several times, and departed to

his final accounting in a rough-hewn, oblong box. Whereupon the

gamblers moved their roulette and faro tables into the mission

house, and the click of chips and clink of glasses went up from

dawn till dark and to dawn again.

Now Timothy Brown was well beloved among these adventurers of the

North. The one thing against him was his quick temper and ready

fist--a little thing, for which his kind heart and forgiving hand

more than atoned. On the other hand, there was nothing to atone

for Black Leclere. He was "black," as more than one remembered

deed bore witness, while he was as well hated as the other was

beloved. So the men of Sunrise put an antiseptic dressing on his

shoulder and haled him before Judge Lynch.

It was a simple affair. He had quarrelled with Timothy Brown at

McDougall. With Timothy Brown he had left McDougall. Without

Timothy Brown he had arrived at Sunrise. Considered in the light

of his evilness, the unanimous conclusion was that he had killed

Timothy Brown. On the other hand, Leclere acknowledged their

facts, but challenged their conclusion, and gave his own

explanation. Twenty miles out of Sunrise he and Timothy Brown were

poling the boat along the rocky shore. From that shore two rifle-

shots rang out. Timothy Brown pitched out of the boat and went

down bubbling red, and that was the last of Timothy Brown. He,

Leclere, pitched into the bottom of the boat with a stinging

shoulder. He lay very quiet, peeping at the shore. After a time

two Indians stuck up their heads and came out to the water's edge,

carrying between them a birch-bark canoe. As they launched it,

Leclere let fly. He potted one, who went over the side after the

manner of Timothy Brown. The other dropped into the bottom of the

canoe, and then canoe and poling boat went down the stream in a

drifting battle. After that they hung up on a split current, and

the canoe passed on one side of an island, the poling boat on the

other. That was the last of the canoe, and he came on into

Sunrise. Yes, from the way the Indian in the canoe jumped, he was

sure he had potted him. That was all. This explanation was not

deemed adequate. They gave him ten hours' grace while the Lizzie

steamed down to investigate. Ten hours later she came wheezing

back to Sunrise. There had been nothing to investigate. No

evidence had been found to back up his statements. They told him

to make his will, for he possessed a fifty-thousand dollar Sunrise

claim, and they were a law-abiding as well as a law-giving breed.

Leclere shrugged his shoulders. "Bot one t'ing," he said; "a

leetle, w'at you call, favour--a leetle favour, dat is eet. I gif

my feefty t'ousan' dollair to de church. I gif my husky dog,

Batard, to de devil. De leetle favour? Firs' you hang heem, an'

den you hang me. Eet is good, eh?"

Good it was, they agreed, that Hell's Spawn should break trail for

his master across the last divide, and the court was adjourned down

to the river bank, where a big spruce tree stood by itself.

Slackwater Charley put a hangman's knot in the end of a hauling-

line, and the noose was slipped over Leclere's head and pulled

tight around his neck. His hands were tied behind his back, and he

was assisted to the top of a cracker box. Then the running end of

the line was passed over an over-hanging branch, drawn taut, and

made fast. To kick the box out from under would leave him dancing

on the air.

"Now for the dog," said Webster Shaw, sometime mining engineer.

"You'll have to rope him, Slackwater."

Leclere grinned. Slackwater took a chew of tobacco, rove a running

noose, and proceeded leisurely to coil a few turns in his hand. He

paused once or twice to brush particularly offensive mosquitoes

from off his face. Everybody was brushing mosquitoes, except

Leclere, about whose head a small cloud was visible. Even Batard,

lying full-stretched on the ground with his fore paws rubbed the

pests away from eyes and mouth.

But while Slackwater waited for Batard to lift his head, a faint

call came from the quiet air, and a man was seen waving his arms

and running across the flat from Sunrise. It was the store-keeper.

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

"Little Sandy and Bernadotte's jes' got in," he explained with

returning breath. "Landed down below an' come up by the short cut.

Got the Beaver with 'm. Picked 'm up in his canoe, stuck in a back

channel, with a couple of bullet-holes in 'm. Other buck was Klok

Kutz, the one that knocked spots out of his squaw and dusted."

"Eh? W'at Ah say? Eh?" Leclere cried exultantly. "Dat de one fo'

sure! Ah know. Ah spik true."

"The thing to do is to teach these damned Siwashes a little

manners," spoke Webster Shaw. "They're getting fat and sassy, and

we'll have to bring them down a peg. Round in all the bucks and

string up the Beaver for an object lesson. That's the programme.

Come on and let's see what he's got to say for himself."

"Heh, M'sieu!" Leclere called, as the crowd began to melt away

through the twilight in the direction of Sunrise. "Ah lak ver'

moch to see de fon."

"Oh, we'll turn you loose when we come back," Webster Shaw shouted

over his shoulder. "In the meantime meditate on your sins and the

ways of Providence. It will do you good, so be grateful."

As is the way with men who are accustomed to great hazards, whose

nerves are healthy and trained in patience, so it was with Leclere

who settled himself to the long wait--which is to say that he

reconciled his mind to it. There was no settling of the body, for

the taut rope forced him to stand rigidly erect. The least

relaxation of the leg muscles pressed the rough-fibred noose into

his neck, while the upright position caused him much pain in his

wounded shoulder. He projected his under lip and expelled his

breath upwards along his face to blow the mosquitoes away from his

eyes. But the situation had its compensation. To be snatched from

the maw of death was well worth a little bodily suffering, only it

was unfortunate that he should miss the hanging of the Beaver.

And so he mused, till his eyes chanced to fall upon Batard, head

between fore paws and stretched on the ground asleep. And their

Leclere ceased to muse. He studied the animal closely, striving to

sense if the sleep were real or feigned. Batard's sides were

heaving regularly, but Leclere felt that the breath came and went a

shade too quickly; also he felt that there was a vigilance or

alertness to every hair that belied unshackling sleep. He would

have given his Sunrise claim to be assured that the dog was not

awake, and once, when one of his joints cracked, he looked quickly

and guiltily at Batard to see if he roused. He did not rouse then

but a few minutes later he got up slowly and lazily, stretched, and

looked carefully about him.

"Sacredam," said Leclere under his breath.

Assured that no one was in sight or hearing, Batard sat down,

curled his upper lip almost into a smile, looked up at Leclere, and

licked his chops.

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

Batard came nearer, the useless ear wabbling, the good ear cocked

forward with devilish comprehension. He thrust his head on one

side quizzically, and advanced with mincing, playful steps. He

rubbed his body gently against the box till it shook and shook

again. Leclere teetered carefully to maintain his equilibrium.

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

Batard snarled at the word and shook the box with greater force.

Then he upreared, and with his fore paws threw his weight against

it higher up. Leclere kicked out with one foot, but the rope bit

into his neck and checked so abruptly as nearly to overbalance him.

"Hi, ya! Chook! Mush-on!" he screamed.

Batard retreated, for twenty feet or so, with a fiendish levity in

his bearing that Leclere could not mistake. He remembered the dog

often breaking the scum of ice on the water hole by lifting up and

throwing his weight upon it; and remembering, he understood what he

now had in mind. Batard faced about and paused. He showed his

white teeth in a grin, which Leclere answered; and then hurled his

body through the air, in full charge, straight for the box.

Fifteen minutes later, Slackwater Charley and Webster Shaw

returning, caught a glimpse of a ghostly pendulum swinging back and

forth in the dim light. As they hurriedly drew in closer, they

made out the man's inert body, and a live thing that clung to it,

and shook and worried, and gave to it the swaying motion.

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

But Batard glared at him, and snarled threateningly, without

loosing his jaws.

Slackwater Charley got out his revolver, but his hand was shaking,

as with a chill, and he fumbled.

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

Webster Shaw laughed shortly, drew a sight between the gleaming

eyes, and pressed the trigger. Batard's body twitched with the

shock, threshed the ground spasmodically for a moment, and went

suddenly limp. But his teeth still held fast locked.

THE STORY OF JEES' UCK

There have been renunciations and renunciations. But, in its

essence, renunciation is ever the same. And the paradox of it is,

that men and women forego the dearest thing in the world for

something dearer. It was never otherwise. Thus it was when Abel

brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. The

firstlings and the fat thereof were to him the dearest things in

the world; yet he gave them over that he might be on good terms

with God. So it was with Abraham when he prepared to offer up his

son Isaac on a stone. Isaac was very dear to him; but God, in

incomprehensible ways, was yet dearer. It may be that Abraham

feared the Lord. But whether that be true or not it has since been

determined by a few billion people that he loved the Lord and

desired to serve him.

And since it has been determined that love is service, and since to

renounce is to serve, then Jees Uck, who was merely a woman of a

swart-skinned breed, loved with a great love. She was unversed in

history, having learned to read only the signs of weather and of

game; so she had never heard of Abel nor of Abraham; nor, having

escaped the good sisters at Holy Cross, had she been told the story

of Ruth, the Moabitess, who renounced her very God for the sake of

a stranger woman from a strange land. Jees Uck had learned only

one way of renouncing, and that was with a club as the dynamic

factor, in much the same manner as a dog is made to renounce a

stolen marrow-bone. Yet, when the time came, she proved herself

capable of rising to the height of the fair-faced royal races and

of renouncing in right regal fashion.

So this is the story of Jees Uck, which is also the story of Neil

Bonner, and Kitty Bonner, and a couple of Neil Bonner's progeny.

Jees Uck was of a swart-skinned breed, it is true, but she was not

an Indian; nor was she an Eskimo; nor even an Innuit. Going

backward into mouth tradition, there appears the figure of one

Skolkz, a Toyaat Indian of the Yukon, who journeyed down in his

youth to the Great Delta where dwell the Innuits, and where he

foregathered with a woman remembered as Olillie. Now the woman

Olillie had been bred from an Eskimo mother by an Innuit man. And

from Skolkz and Olillie came Halie, who was one-half Toyaat Indian,

one-quarter Innuit, and one-quarter Eskimo. And Halie was the

grandmother of Jees Uck.

Now Halie, in whom three stocks had been bastardized, who cherished

no prejudice against further admixture, mated with a Russian fur

trader called Shpack, also known in his time as the Big Fat.

Shpack is herein classed Russian for lack of a more adequate term;

for Shpack's father, a Slavonic convict from the Lower Provinces,

had escaped from the quicksilver mines into Northern Siberia, where

he knew Zimba, who was a woman of the Deer People and who became

the mother of Shpack, who became the grandfather of Jees Uck.

Now had not Shpack been captured in his boyhood by the Sea People,

who fringe the rim of the Arctic Sea with their misery, he would

not have become the grandfather of Jees Uck and there would be no

story at all. But he WAS captured by the Sea People, from whom he

escaped to Kamchatka, and thence, on a Norwegian whale-ship, to the

Baltic. Not long after that he turned up in St. Petersburg, and

the years were not many till he went drifting east over the same

weary road his father had measured with blood and groans a half-

century before. But Shpack was a free man, in the employ of the

great Russian Fur Company. And in that employ he fared farther and

farther east, until he crossed Bering Sea into Russian America; and

at Pastolik, which is hard by the Great Delta of the Yukon, became

the husband of Halie, who was the grandmother of Jees Uck. Out of

this union came the woman-child, Tukesan.

Shpack, under the orders of the Company, made a canoe voyage of a

few hundred miles up the Yukon to the post of Nulato. With him he

took Halie and the babe Tukesan. This was in 1850, and in 1850 it

was that the river Indians fell upon Nulato and wiped it from the

face of the earth. And that was the end of Shpack and Halie. On

that terrible night Tukesan disappeared. To this day the Toyaats

aver they had no hand in the trouble; but, be that as it may, the

fact remains that the babe Tukesan grew up among them.

Tukesan was married successively to two Toyaat brothers, to both of

whom she was barren. Because of this, other women shook their

heads, and no third Toyaat man could be found to dare matrimony

with the childless widow. But at this time, many hundred miles

above, at Fort Yukon, was a man, Spike O'Brien. Fort Yukon was a

Hudson Bay Company post, and Spike O'Brien one of the Company's

servants. He was a good servant, but he achieved an opinion that

the service was bad, and in the course of time vindicated that

opinion by deserting. It was a year's journey, by the chain of

posts, back to York Factory on Hudson's Bay. Further, being

Company posts, he knew he could not evade the Company's clutches.

Nothing retained but to go down the Yukon. It was true no white

man had ever gone down the Yukon, and no white man knew whether the

Yukon emptied into the Arctic Ocean or Bering Sea; but Spike

O'Brien was a Celt, and the promise of danger was a lure he had

ever followed.

A few weeks later, somewhat battered, rather famished, and about

dead with river-fever, he drove the nose of his canoe into the

earth bank by the village of the Toyaats and promptly fainted away.

While getting his strength back, in the weeks that followed, he

looked upon Tukesan and found her good. Like the father of Shpack,

who lived to a ripe old age among the Siberian Deer People, Spike

O'Brien might have left his aged bones with the Toyaats. But

romance gripped his heart-strings and would not let him stay. As

he had journeyed from York Factory to Fort Yukon, so, first among

men, might he journey from Fort Yukon to the sea and win the honour

of being the first man to make the North-West Passage by land. So

he departed down the river, won the honour, and was unannaled and

unsung. In after years he ran a sailors' boarding-house in San

Francisco, where he became esteemed a most remarkable liar by

virtue of the gospel truths he told. But a child was born to

Tukesan, who had been childless. And this child was Jees Uck. Her

lineage has been traced at length to show that she was neither

Indian, nor Eskimo, nor Innuit, nor much of anything else; also to

show what waifs of the generations we are, all of us, and the

strange meanderings of the seed from which we spring.

What with the vagrant blood in her and the heritage compounded of

many races, Jees Uck developed a wonderful young beauty. Bizarre,

perhaps, it was, and Oriental enough to puzzle any passing

ethnologist. A lithe and slender grace characterized her. Beyond

a quickened lilt to the imagination, the contribution of the Celt

was in no wise apparent. It might possibly have put the warm blood

under her skin, which made her face less swart and her body fairer;

but that, in turn, might have come from Shpack, the Big Fat, who

inherited the colour of his Slavonic father. And, finally, she had

great, blazing black eyes--the half-caste eye, round, full-orbed,

and sensuous, which marks the collision of the dark races with the

light. Also, the white blood in her, combined with her knowledge

that it was in her, made her, in a way, ambitious. Otherwise by

upbringing and in outlook on life, she was wholly and utterly a

Toyaat Indian.

One winter, when she was a young woman, Neil Bonner came into her

life. But he came into her life, as he had come into the country,

somewhat reluctantly. In fact, it was very much against his will,

coming into the country. Between a father who clipped coupons and

cultivated roses, and a mother who loved the social round, Neil

Bonner had gone rather wild. He was not vicious, but a man with

meat in his belly and without work in the world has to expend his

energy somehow, and Neil Bonner was such a man. And he expended

his energy in such a fashion and to such extent that when the

inevitable climax came, his father, Neil Bonner, senior, crawled

out of his roses in a panic and looked on his son with a wondering

eye. Then he hied himself away to a crony of kindred pursuits,

with whom he was wont to confer over coupons and roses, and between

the two the destiny of young Neil Bonner was made manifest. He

must go away, on probation, to live down his harmless follies in

order that he might live up to their own excellent standard.

This determined upon, and young Neil a little repentant and a great

deal ashamed, the rest was easy. The cronies were heavy

stockholders in the P. C. Company. The P. C. Company owned fleets

of river-steamers and ocean-going craft, and, in addition to

farming the sea, exploited a hundred thousand square miles or so of

the land that, on the maps of geographers, usually occupies the

white spaces. So the P. C. Company sent young Neil Bonner north,

where the white spaces are, to do its work and to learn to be good

like his father. "Five years of simplicity, close to the soil and

far from temptation, will make a man of him," said old Neil Bonner,

and forthwith crawled back among his roses. Young Neil set his

jaw, pitched his chin at the proper angle, and went to work. As an

underling he did his work well and gained the commendation of his

superiors. Not that he delighted in the work, but that it was the

one thing that prevented him from going mad.

The first year he wished he was dead. The second year he cursed

God. The third year he was divided between the two emotions, and

in the confusion quarrelled with a man in authority. He had the

best of the quarrel, though the man in authority had the last

word,--a word that sent Neil Bonner into an exile that made his old

billet appear as paradise. But he went without a whimper, for the

North had succeeded in making him into a man.

Here and there, on the white spaces on the map, little circlets

like the letter "o" are to be found, and, appended to these

circlets, on one side or the other, are names such as "Fort

Hamilton," "Yanana Station," "Twenty Mile," thus leading one to

imagine that the white spaces are plentifully besprinkled with

towns and villages. But it is a vain imagining. Twenty Mile,

which is very like the rest of the posts, is a log building the

size of a corner grocery with rooms to let up-stairs. A long-

legged cache on stilts may be found in the back yard; also a couple

of outhouses. The back yard is unfenced, and extends to the

skyline and an unascertainable bit beyond. There are no other

houses in sight, though the Toyaats sometimes pitch a winter camp a

mile or two down the Yukon. And this is Twenty Mile, one tentacle

of the many-tentacled P. C. Company. Here the agent, with an

assistant, barters with the Indians for their furs, and does an

erratic trade on a gold-dust basis with the wandering miners.

Here, also, the agent and his assistant yearn all winter for the

spring, and when the spring comes, camp blasphemously on the roof

while the Yukon washes out the establishment. And here, also, in

the fourth year of his sojourn in the land, came Neil Bonner to

take charge.

He had displaced no agent; for the man that previously ran the post

had made away with himself; "because of the rigours of the place,"

said the assistant, who still remained; though the Toyaats, by

their fires, had another version. The assistant was a shrunken-

shouldered, hollow-chested man, with a cadaverous face and

cavernous cheeks that his sparse black beard could not hide. He

coughed much, as though consumption gripped his lungs, while his

eyes had that mad, fevered light common to consumptives in the last

stage. Pentley was his name--Amos Pentley--and Bonner did not like

him, though he felt a pity for the forlorn and hopeless devil.

They did not get along together, these two men who, of all men,

should have been on good terms in the face of the cold and silence

and darkness of the long winter.

In the end, Bonner concluded that Amos was partly demented, and

left him alone, doing all the work himself except the cooking.

Even then, Amos had nothing but bitter looks and an undisguised

hatred for him. This was a great loss to Bonner; for the smiling

face of one of his own kind, the cheery word, the sympathy of

comradeship shared with misfortune--these things meant much; and

the winter was yet young when he began to realize the added

reasons, with such an assistant, that the previous agent had found

to impel his own hand against his life.

It was very lonely at Twenty Mile. The bleak vastness stretched

away on every side to the horizon. The snow, which was really

frost, flung its mantle over the land and buried everything in the

silence of death. For days it was clear and cold, the thermometer

steadily recording forty to fifty degrees below zero. Then a

change came over the face of things. What little moisture had

oozed into the atmosphere gathered into dull grey, formless clouds;

it became quite warm, the thermometer rising to twenty below; and

the moisture fell out of the sky in hard frost-granules that hissed

like dry sugar or driving sand when kicked underfoot. After that

it became clear and cold again, until enough moisture had gathered

to blanket the earth from the cold of outer space. That was all.

Nothing happened. No storms, no churning waters and threshing

forests, nothing but the machine-like precipitation of accumulated

moisture. Possibly the most notable thing that occurred through

the weary weeks was the gliding of the temperature up to the

unprecedented height of fifteen below. To atone for this, outer

space smote the earth with its cold till the mercury froze and the

spirit thermometer remained more than seventy below for a

fortnight, when it burst. There was no telling how much colder it

was after that. Another occurrence, monotonous in its regularity,

was the lengthening of the nights, till day became a mere blink of

light between the darkness.

Neil Bonner was a social animal. The very follies for which he was

doing penance had been bred of his excessive sociability. And

here, in the fourth year of his exile, he found himself in company-

-which were to travesty the word--with a morose and speechless

creature in whose sombre eyes smouldered a hatred as bitter as it

was unwarranted. And Bonner, to whom speech and fellowship were as

the breath of life, went about as a ghost might go, tantalized by

the gregarious revelries of some former life. In the day his lips

were compressed, his face stern; but in the night he clenched his

hands, rolled about in his blankets, and cried aloud like a little

child. And he would remember a certain man in authority and curse

him through the long hours. Also, he cursed God. But God

understands. He cannot find it in his heart to blame weak mortals

who blaspheme in Alaska.

And here, to the post of Twenty Mile, came Jees Uck, to trade for

flour and bacon, and beads, and bright scarlet cloths for her fancy

work. And further, and unwittingly, she came to the post of Twenty

Mile to make a lonely man more lonely, make him reach out empty

arms in his sleep. For Neil Bonner was only a man. When she first

came into the store, he looked at her long, as a thirsty man may

look at a flowing well. And she, with the heritage bequeathed her

by Spike O'Brien, imagined daringly and smiled up into his eyes,

not as the swart-skinned peoples should smile at the royal races,

but as a woman smiles at a man. The thing was inevitable; only, he

did not see it, and fought against her as fiercely and passionately

as he was drawn towards her. And she? She was Jees Uck, by

upbringing wholly and utterly a Toyaat Indian woman.

She came often to the post to trade. And often she sat by the big

wood stove and chatted in broken English with Neil Bonner. And he

came to look for her coming; and on the days she did not come he

was worried and restless. Sometimes he stopped to think, and then

she was met coldly, with a resolve that perplexed and piqued her,

and which, she was convinced, was not sincere. But more often he

did not dare to think, and then all went well and there were smiles

and laughter. And Amos Pentley, gasping like a stranded catfish,

his hollow cough a-reek with the grave, looked upon it all and

grinned. He, who loved life, could not live, and it rankled his

soul that others should be able to live. Wherefore he hated

Bonner, who was so very much alive and into whose eyes sprang joy

at the sight of Jees Uck. As for Amos, the very thought of the

girl was sufficient to send his blood pounding up into a

hemorrhage.

Jees Uck, whose mind was simple, who thought elementally and was

unused to weighing life in its subtler quantities, read Amos

Pentley like a book. She warned Bonner, openly and bluntly, in few

words; but the complexities of higher existence confused the

situation to him, and he laughed at her evident anxiety. To him,

Amos was a poor, miserable devil, tottering desperately into the

grave. And Bonner, who had suffered much, found it easy to forgive

greatly.

But one morning, during a bitter snap, he got up from the

breakfast-table and went into the store. Jees Uck was already

there, rosy from the trail, to buy a sack of flour. A few minutes

later, he was out in the snow lashing the flour on her sled. As he

bent over he noticed a stiffness in his neck and felt a premonition

of impending physical misfortune. And as he put the last half-

hitch into the lashing and attempted to straighten up, a quick

spasm seized him and he sank into the snow. Tense and quivering,

head jerked back, limbs extended, back arched and mouth twisted and

distorted, he appeared as though being racked limb from limb.

Without cry or sound, Jees Uck was in the snow beside him; but he

clutched both her wrists spasmodically, and as long as the

convulsion endured she was helpless. In a few moments the spasm

relaxed and he was left weak and fainting, his forehead beaded with

sweat, and his lips flecked with foam.

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

Inside!"

He started to crawl on hands and knees, but she raised him up, and,

supported by her young arm, he made faster progress. As he entered

the store the spasm seized him again, and his body writhed

irresistibly away from her and rolled and curled on the floor.

Amos Pentley came and looked on with curious eyes.

"Oh, Amos!" she cried in an agony of apprehension and helplessness,

"him die, you think?" But Amos shrugged his shoulders and

continued to look on.

Bonner's body went slack, the tense muscles easing down and an

expression of relief coming into his face. "Quick!" he gritted

between his teeth, his mouth twisting with the on-coming of the

next spasm and with his effort to control it. "Quick, Jees Uck!

The medicine! Never mind! Drag me!"

She knew where the medicine-chest stood, at the rear of the room

beyond the stove, and thither, by the legs, she dragged the

struggling man. As the spasm passed he began, very faint and very

sick, to overhaul the chest. He had seen dogs die exhibiting

symptoms similar to his own, and he knew what should be done. He

held up a vial of chloral hydrate, but his fingers were too weak

and nerveless to draw the cork. This Jees Uck did for him, while

he was plunged into another convulsion. As he came out of it he

found the open bottle proffered him, and looked into the great

black eyes of the woman and read what men have always read in the

Mate-woman's eyes. Taking a full dose of the stuff, he sank back

until another spasm had passed. Then he raised himself limply on

his elbow.

"Listen, Jees Uck!" he said very slowly, as though aware of the

necessity for haste and yet afraid to hasten. "Do what I say.

Stay by my side, but do not touch me. I must be very quiet, but

you must not go away." His jaw began to set and his face to quiver

and distort with the fore-running pangs, but he gulped and

struggled to master them. "Do not got away. And do not let Amos

go away. Understand! Amos must stay right here."

She nodded her head, and he passed off into the first of many

convulsions, which gradually diminished in force and frequency.

Jees Uck hung over him remembering his injunction and not daring to

touch him. Once Amos grew restless and made as though to go into

the kitchen; but a quick blaze from her eyes quelled him, and after

that, save for his laboured breathing and charnel cough, he was

very quiet.

Bonner slept. The blink of light that marked the day disappeared.

Amos, followed about by the woman's eyes, lighted the kerosene

lamps. Evening came on. Through the north window the heavens were

emblazoned with an auroral display, which flamed and flared and

died down into blackness. Some time after that, Neil Bonner

roused. First he looked to see that Amos was still there, then

smiled at Jees Uck and pulled himself up. Every muscle was stiff

and sore, and he smiled ruefully, pressing and prodding himself as

if to ascertain the extent of the ravage. Then his face went stern

and businesslike.

"Jees Uck," he said, "take a candle. Go into the kitchen. There

is food on the table--biscuits and beans and bacon; also, coffee in

the pot on the stove. Bring it here on the counter. Also, bring

tumblers and water and whisky, which you will find on the top shelf

of the locker. Do not forget the whisky."

Having swallowed a stiff glass of the whisky, he went carefully

through the medicine chest, now and again putting aside, with

definite purpose, certain bottles and vials. Then he set to work

on the food, attempting a crude analysis. He had not been unused

to the laboratory in his college days and was possessed of

sufficient imagination to achieve results with his limited

materials. The condition of tetanus, which had marked his

paroxysms, simplified matters, and he made but one test. The

coffee yielded nothing; nor did the beans. To the biscuits he

devoted the utmost care. Amos, who knew nothing of chemistry,

looked on with steady curiosity. But Jees Uck, who had boundless

faith in the white man's wisdom, and especially in Neil Bonner's

wisdom, and who not only knew nothing but knew that she knew

nothing watched his face rather than his hands.

Step by step he eliminated possibilities, until he came to the

final test. He was using a thin medicine vial for a tube, and this

he held between him and the light, watching the slow precipitation

of a salt through the solution contained in the tube. He said

nothing, but he saw what he had expected to see. And Jees Uck, her

eyes riveted on his face, saw something too,--something that made

her spring like a tigress upon Amos, and with splendid suppleness

and strength bend his body back across her knee. Her knife was out

of its sheaf and uplifted, glinting in the lamplight. Amos was

snarling; but Bonner intervened ere the blade could fall.

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

She dropped the man obediently, though with protest writ large on

her face; and his body thudded to the floor. Bonner nudged him

with his moccasined foot.

"Get up, Amos!" he commanded. "You've got to pack an outfit yet

to-night and hit the trail."

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

"I mean to say that you tried to kill me," Neil went on in cold,

even tones. "I mean to say that you killed Birdsall, for all the

Company believes he killed himself. You used strychnine in my

case. God knows with what you fixed him. Now I can't hang you.

You're too near dead as it is. But Twenty Mile is too small for

the pair of us, and you've got to mush. It's two hundred miles to

Holy Cross. You can make it if you're careful not to over-exert.

I'll give you grub, a sled, and three dogs. You'll be as safe as

if you were in jail, for you can't get out of the country. And

I'll give you one chance. You're almost dead. Very well. I shall

send no word to the Company until the spring. In the meantime, the

thing for you to do is to die. Now MUSH!"

"You go to bed!" Jees Uck insisted, when Amos had churned away into

the night towards Holy Cross. "You sick man yet, Neil."

"And you're a good girl, Jees Uck," he answered. "And here's my

hand on it. But you must go home."

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

He smiled, helped her on with her PARKA, and led her to the door.

"Only too well, Jees Uck," he said softly; "only too well."

After that the pall of the Arctic night fell deeper and blacker on

the land. Neil Bonner discovered that he had failed to put proper

valuation upon even the sullen face of the murderous and death-

stricken Amos. It became very lonely at Twenty Mile. "For the

love of God, Prentiss, send me a man," he wrote to the agent at

Fort Hamilton, three hundred miles up river. Six weeks later the

Indian messenger brought back a reply. It was characteristic:

"Hell. Both feet frozen. Need him myself--Prentiss."

To make matters worse, most of the Toyaats were in the back country

on the flanks of a caribou herd, and Jees Uck was with them.

Removing to a distance seemed to bring her closer than ever, and

Neil Bonner found himself picturing her, day by day, in camp and on

trail. It is not good to be alone. Often he went out of the quiet

store, bare-headed and frantic, and shook his fist at the blink of

day that came over the southern sky-line. And on still, cold

nights he left his bed and stumbled into the frost, where he

assaulted the silence at the top of his lungs, as though it were

some tangible, sentiment thing that he might arouse; or he shouted

at the sleeping dogs till they howled and howled again. One shaggy

brute he brought into the post, playing that it was the new man

sent by Prentiss. He strove to make it sleep decently under

blankets at nights and to sit at table and eat as a man should; but

the beast, mere domesticated wolf that it was, rebelled, and sought

out dark corners and snarled and bit him in the leg, and was

finally beaten and driven forth.

Then the trick of personification seized upon Neil Bonner and

mastered him. All the forces of his environment metamorphosed into

living, breathing entities and came to live with him. He recreated

the primitive pantheon; reared an altar to the sun and burned

candle fat and bacon grease thereon; and in the unfenced yard, by

the long-legged cache, made a frost devil, which he was wont to

make faces at and mock when the mercury oozed down into the bulb.

All this in play, of course. He said it to himself that it was in

play, and repeated it over and over to make sure, unaware that

madness is ever prone to express itself in make-believe and play.

One midwinter day, Father Champreau, a Jesuit missionary, pulled

into Twenty Mile. Bonner fell upon him and dragged him into the

post, and clung to him and wept, until the priest wept with him

from sheer compassion. Then Bonner became madly hilarious and made

lavish entertainment, swearing valiantly that his guest should not

depart. But Father Champreau was pressing to Salt Water on urgent

business for his order, and pulled out next morning, with Bonner's

blood threatened on his head.

And the threat was in a fair way toward realization, when the

Toyaats returned from their long hunt to the winter camp. They had

many furs, and there was much trading and stir at Twenty Mile.

Also, Jees Uck came to buy beads and scarlet cloths and things, and

Bonner began to find himself again. He fought for a week against

her. Then the end came one night when she rose to leave. She had

not forgotten her repulse, and the pride that drove Spike O'Brien

on to complete the North-West Passage by land was her pride.

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

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

And as she turned her face toward his with a sudden joyful flash,

he bent forward, slowly and gravely, as it were a sacred thing, and

kissed her on the lips. The Toyaats had never taught her the

meaning of a kiss upon the lips, but she understood and was glad.

With the coming of Jees Uck, at once things brightened up. She was

regal in her happiness, a source of unending delight. The

elemental workings of her mind and her naive little ways made an

immense sum of pleasurable surprise to the over-civilized man that

had stooped to catch her up. Not alone was she solace to his

loneliness, but her primitiveness rejuvenated his jaded mind. It

was as though, after long wandering, he had returned to pillow his

head in the lap of Mother Earth. In short, in Jees Uck he found

the youth of the world--the youth and the strength and the joy.

And to fill the full round of his need, and that they might not see

overmuch of each other, there arrived at Twenty Mile one Sandy

MacPherson, as companionable a man as ever whistled along the trail

or raised a ballad by a camp-fire. A Jesuit priest had run into

his camp, a couple of hundred miles up the Yukon, in the nick of

time to say a last word over the body of Sandy's partner. And on

departing, the priest had said, "My son, you will be lonely now."

And Sandy had bowed his head brokenly. "At Twenty Mile," the

priest added, "there is a lonely man. You have need of each other,

my son."

So it was that Sandy became a welcome third at the post, brother to

the man and woman that resided there. He took Bonner moose-hunting

and wolf-trapping; and, in return, Bonner resurrected a battered

and way-worn volume and made him friends with Shakespeare, till

Sandy declaimed iambic pentameters to his sled-dogs whenever they

waxed mutinous. And of the long evenings they played cribbage and

talked and disagreed about the universe, the while Jees Uck rocked

matronly in an easy-chair and darned their moccasins and socks.

Spring came. The sun shot up out of the south. The land exchanged

its austere robes for the garb of a smiling wanton. Everywhere

light laughed and life invited. The days stretched out their balmy

length and the nights passed from blinks of darkness to no darkness

at all. The river bared its bosom, and snorting steamboats

challenged the wilderness. There were stir and bustle, new faces,

and fresh facts. An assistant arrived at Twenty Mile, and Sandy

MacPherson wandered off with a bunch of prospectors to invade the

Koyokuk country. And there were newspapers and magazines and

letters for Neil Bonner. And Jees Uck looked on in worriment, for

she knew his kindred talked with him across the world.

Without much shock, it came to him that his father was dead. There

was a sweet letter of forgiveness, dictated in his last hours.

There were official letters from the Company, graciously ordering

him to turn the post over to the assistant and permitting him to

depart at his earliest pleasure. A long, legal affair from the

lawyers informed him of interminable lists of stocks and bonds,

real estate, rents, and chattels that were his by his father's

will. And a dainty bit of stationery, sealed and monogramed,

implored dear Neil's return to his heart-broken and loving mother.

Neil Bonner did some swift thinking, and when the Yukon Belle

coughed in to the bank on her way down to Bering Sea, he departed--

departed with the ancient lie of quick return young and blithe on

his lips.

"I'll come back, dear Jees Uck, before the first snow flies," he

promised her, between the last kisses at the gang-plank.

And not only did he promise, but, like the majority of men under

the same circumstances, he really meant it. To John Thompson, the

new agent, he gave orders for the extension of unlimited credit to

his wife, Jees Uck. Also, with his last look from the deck of the

Yukon Belle, he saw a dozen men at work rearing the logs that were

to make the most comfortable house along a thousand miles of river

front--the house of Jees Uck, and likewise the house of Neil

Bonner--ere the first flurry of snow. For he fully and fondly

meant to come back. Jees Uck was dear to him, and, further, a

golden future awaited the north. With his father's money he

intended to verify that future. An ambitious dream allured him.

With his four years of experience, and aided by the friendly

cooperation of the P. C. Company, he would return to become the

Rhodes of Alaska. And he would return, fast as steam could drive,

as soon as he had put into shape the affairs of his father, whom he

had never known, and comforted his mother, whom he had forgotten.

There was much ado when Neil Bonner came back from the Arctic. The

fires were lighted and the fleshpots slung, and he took of it all

and called it good. Not only was he bronzed and creased, but he

was a new man under his skin, with a grip on things and a

seriousness and control. His old companions were amazed when he

declined to hit up the pace in the good old way, while his father's

crony rubbed hands gleefully, and became an authority upon the

reclamation of wayward and idle youth.

For four years Neil Bonner's mind had lain fallow. Little that was

new had been added to it, but it had undergone a process of

selection. It had, so to say, been purged of the trivial and

superfluous. He had lived quick years, down in the world; and, up

in the wilds, time had been given him to organize the confused mass

of his experiences. His superficial standards had been flung to

the winds and new standards erected on deeper and broader

generalizations. Concerning civilization, he had gone away with

one set of values, had returned with another set of values. Aided,

also, by the earth smells in his nostrils and the earth sights in

his eyes, he laid hold of the inner significance of civilization,

beholding with clear vision its futilities and powers. It was a

simple little philosophy he evolved. Clean living was the way to

grace. Duty performed was sanctification. One must live clean and

do his duty in order that he might work. Work was salvation. And

to work toward life abundant, and more abundant, was to be in line

with the scheme of things and the will of God.

Primarily, he was of the city. And his fresh earth grip and virile

conception of humanity gave him a finer sense of civilization and

endeared civilization to him. Day by day the people of the city

clung closer to him and the world loomed more colossal. And, day

by day, Alaska grew more remote and less real. And then he met

Kitty Sharon--a woman of his own flesh and blood and kind; a woman

who put her hand into his hand and drew him to her, till he forgot

the day and hour and the time of the year the first snow flies on

the Yukon.

Jees Uck moved into her grand log-house and dreamed away three

golden summer months. Then came the autumn, post-haste before the

down rush of winter. The air grew thin and sharp, the days thin

and short. The river ran sluggishly, and skin ice formed in the

quiet eddies. All migratory life departed south, and silence fell

upon the land. The first snow flurries came, and the last homing

steamboat bucked desperately into the running mush ice. Then came

the hard ice, solid cakes and sheets, till the Yukon ran level with

its banks. And when all this ceased the river stood still and the

blinking days lost themselves in the darkness.

John Thompson, the new agent, laughed; but Jees Uck had faith in

the mischances of sea and river. Neil Bonner might be frozen in

anywhere between Chilkoot Pass and St. Michael's, for the last

travellers of the year are always caught by the ice, when they

exchange boat for sled and dash on through the long hours behind

the flying dogs.

But no flying dogs came up the trail, nor down the trail, to Twenty

Mile. And John Thompson told Jees Uck, with a certain gladness ill

concealed, that Bonner would never come back again. Also, and

brutally, he suggested his own eligibility. Jees Uck laughed in

his face and went back to her grand log-house. But when midwinter

came, when hope dies down and life is at its lowest ebb, Jees Uck

found she had no credit at the store. This was Thompson's doing,

and he rubbed his hands, and walked up and down, and came to his

door and looked up at Jees Uck's house and waited. And he

continued to wait. She sold her dog-team to a party of miners and

paid cash for her food. And when Thompson refused to honour even

her coin, Toyaat Indians made her purchases, and sledded them up to

her house in the dark.

In February the first post came in over the ice, and John Thompson

read in the society column of a five-months-old paper of the

marriage of Neil Bonner and Kitty Sharon. Jees Uck held the door

ajar and him outside while he imparted the information; and, when

he had done, laughed pridefully and did not believe. In March, and

all alone, she gave birth to a man-child, a brave bit of new life

at which she marvelled. And at that hour, a year later, Neil

Bonner sat by another bed, marvelling at another bit of new life

that had fared into the world.

The snow went off the ground and the ice broke out of the Yukon.

The sun journeyed north, and journeyed south again; and, the money

from the being spent, Jees Uck went back to her own people. Oche

Ish, a shrewd hunter, proposed to kill the meat for her and her

babe, and catch the salmon, if she would marry him. And Imego and

Hah Yo and Wy Nooch, husky young hunters all, made similar

proposals. But she elected to live alone and seek her own meat and

fish. She sewed moccasins and PARKAS and mittens--warm,

serviceable things, and pleasing to the eye, withal, what of the

ornamental hair-tufts and bead-work. These she sold to the miners,

who were drifting faster into the land each year. And not only did

she win food that was good and plentiful, but she laid money by,

and one day took passage on the Yukon Belle down the river.

At St. Michael's she washed dishes in the kitchen of the post. The

servants of the Company wondered at the remarkable woman with the

remarkable child, though they asked no questions and she vouchsafed

nothing. But just before Bering Sea closed in for the year, she

bought a passage south on a strayed sealing schooner. That winter

she cooked for Captain Markheim's household at Unalaska, and in the

spring continued south to Sitka on a whisky sloop. Later on

appeared at Metlakahtla, which is near to St. Mary's on the end of

the Pan-Handle, where she worked in the cannery through the salmon

season. When autumn came and the Siwash fishermen prepared to

return to Puget Sound, she embarked with a couple of families in a

big cedar canoe; and with them she threaded the hazardous chaos of

the Alaskan and Canadian coasts, till the Straits of Juan de Fuca

were passed and she led her boy by the hand up the hard pave of

Seattle.

There she met Sandy MacPherson, on a windy corner, very much

surprised and, when he had heard her story, very wroth--not so

wroth as he might have been, had he known of Kitty Sharon; but of

her Jees Uck breathed not a word, for she had never believed.

Sandy, who read commonplace and sordid desertion into the

circumstance, strove to dissuade her from her trip to San

Francisco, where Neil Bonner was supposed to live when he was at

home. And, having striven, he made her comfortable, bought her

tickets and saw her off, the while smiling in her face and

muttering "dam-shame" into his beard.

With roar and rumble, through daylight and dark, swaying and

lurching between the dawns, soaring into the winter snows and

sinking to summer valleys, skirting depths, leaping chasms,

piercing mountains, Jees Uck and her boy were hurled south. But

she had no fear of the iron stallion; nor was she stunned by this

masterful civilization of Neil Bonner's people. It seemed, rather,

that she saw with greater clearness the wonder that a man of such

godlike race had held her in his arms. The screaming medley of San

Francisco, with its restless shipping, belching factories, and

thundering traffic, did not confuse her; instead, she comprehended

swiftly the pitiful sordidness of Twenty Mile and the skin-lodged

Toyaat village. And she looked down at the boy that clutched her

hand and wondered that she had borne him by such a man.

She paid the hack-driver five pieces and went up the stone steps of

Neil Bonner's front door. A slant-eyed Japanese parleyed with her

for a fruitless space, then led her inside and disappeared. She

remained in the hall, which to her simply fancy seemed to be the

guest-room--the show-place wherein were arrayed all the household

treasures with the frank purpose of parade and dazzlement. The

walls and ceiling were of oiled and panelled redwood. The floor

was more glassy than glare-ice, and she sought standing place on

one of the great skins that gave a sense of security to the

polished surface. A huge fireplace--an extravagant fireplace, she

deemed it--yawned in the farther wall. A flood of light, mellowed

by stained glass, fell across the room, and from the far end came

the white gleam of a marble figure.

This much she saw, and more, when the slant-eyed servant led the

way past another room--of which she caught a fleeting glance--and

into a third, both of which dimmed the brave show of the entrance

hall. And to her eyes the great house seemed to hold out the

promise of endless similar rooms. There was such length and

breadth to them, and the ceilings were so far away! For the first

time since her advent into the white man's civilization, a feeling

of awe laid hold of her. Neil, her Neil, lived in this house,

breathed the air of it, and lay down at night and slept! It was

beautiful, all this that she saw, and it pleased her; but she felt,

also, the wisdom and mastery behind. It was the concrete

expression of power in terms of beauty, and it was the power that

she unerringly divined.

And then came a woman, queenly tall, crowned with a glory of hair

that was like a golden sun. She seemed to come toward Jees Uck as

a ripple of music across still water; her sweeping garment itself a

song, her body playing rhythmically beneath. Jees Uck herself was

a man compeller. There were Oche Ish and Imego and Hah Yo and Wy

Nooch, to say nothing of Neil Bonner and John Thompson and other

white men that had looked upon her and felt her power. But she

gazed upon the wide blue eyes and rose-white skin of this woman

that advanced to meet her, and she measured her with woman's eyes

looking through man's eyes; and as a man compeller she felt herself

diminish and grow insignificant before this radiant and flashing

creature.

"You wish to see my husband?" the woman asked; and Jees Uck gasped

at the liquid silver of a voice that had never sounded harsh cries

at snarling wolf-dogs, nor moulded itself to a guttural speech, nor

toughened in storm and frost and camp smoke.

"No," Jees Uck answered slowly and gropingly, in order that she

might do justice to her English. "I come to see Neil Bonner."

"He is my husband," the woman laughed.

Then it was true! John Thompson had not lied that bleak February

day, when she laughed pridefully and shut the door in his face. As

once she had thrown Amos Pentley across her knee and ripped her

knife into the air, so now she felt impelled to spring upon this

woman and bear her back and down, and tear the life out of her fair

body. But Jees Uck was thinking quickly and gave no sign, and

Kitty Bonner little dreamed how intimately she had for an instant

been related with sudden death.

Jees Uck nodded her head that she understood, and Kitty Bonner

explained that Neil was expected at any moment. Then they sat down

on ridiculously comfortable chairs, and Kitty sought to entertain

her strange visitor, and Jees Uck strove to help her.

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

"Sure. I wash um clothes," Jees Uck had answered, her English

abruptly beginning to grow atrocious.

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

Kitty caused her daughter to be brought, and while the children,

after their manner, struck an acquaintance, the mothers indulged in

the talk of mothers and drank tea from cups so fragile that Jees

Uck feared lest hers should crumble to pieces beneath her fingers.

Never had she seen such cups, so delicate and dainty. In her mind

she compared them with the woman who poured the tea, and there

uprose in contrast the gourds and pannikins of the Toyaat village

and the clumsy mugs of Twenty Mile, to which she likened herself.

And in such fashion and such terms the problem presented itself.

She was beaten. There was a woman other than herself better fitted

to bear and upbring Neil Bonner's children. Just as his people

exceeded her people, so did his womankind exceed her. They were

the man compellers, as their men were the world compellers. She

looked at the rose-white tenderness of Kitty Bonner's skin and

remembered the sun-beat on her own face. Likewise she looked from

brown hand to white--the one, work-worn and hardened by whip-handle

and paddle, the other as guiltless of toil and soft as a newborn

babe's. And, for all the obvious softness and apparent weakness,

Jees Uck looked into the blue eyes and saw the mastery she had seen

in Neil Bonner's eyes and in the eyes of Neil Bonner's people.

"Why, it's Jees Uck!" Neil Bonner said, when he entered. He said

it calmly, with even a ring of joyful cordiality, coming over to

her and shaking both her hands, but looking into her eyes with a

worry in his own that she understood.

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

"Fine, fine, Jees Uck," he answered heartily, though secretly

studying Kitty for some sign of what had passed between the two.

Yet he knew his wife too well to expect, even though the worst had

passed, such a sign.

"Well, I can't say how glad I am to see you," he went on. "What's

happened? Did you strike a mine? And when did you get in?"

"Oo-a, I get in to-day," she replied, her voice instinctively

seeking its guttural parts. "I no strike it, Neil. You known

Cap'n Markheim, Unalaska? I cook, his house, long time. No spend

money. Bime-by, plenty. Pretty good, I think, go down and see

White Man's Land. Very fine, White Man's Land, very fine," she

added. Her English puzzled him, for Sandy and he had sought,

constantly, to better her speech, and she had proved an apt pupil.

Now it seemed that she had sunk back into her race. Her face was

guileless, stolidly guileless, giving no cue. Kitty's untroubled

brow likewise baffled him. What had happened? How much had been

said? and how much guessed?

While he wrestled with these questions and while Jees Uck wrestled

with her problem--never had he looked so wonderful and great--a

silence fell.

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

Knew him! Jees Uck could not forbear a glance at the boy she had

borne him, and his eyes followed hers mechanically to the window

where played the two children. An iron hand seemed to tighten

across his forehead. His knees went weak and his heart leaped up

and pounded like a fist against his breast. His boy! He had never

dreamed it!

Little Kitty Bonner, fairylike in gauzy lawn, with pinkest of

cheeks and bluest of dancing eyes, arms outstretched and lips

puckered in invitation, was striving to kiss the boy. And the boy,

lean and lithe, sunbeaten and browned, skin-clad and in hair-

fringed and hair-tufted MUCLUCS that showed the wear of the sea and

rough work, coolly withstood her advances, his body straight and

stiff with the peculiar erectness common to children of savage

people. A stranger in a strange land, unabashed and unafraid, he

appeared more like an untamed animal, silent and watchful, his

black eyes flashing from face to face, quiet so long as quiet

endured, but prepared to spring and fight and tear and scratch for

life, at the first sign of danger.

The contrast between boy and girl was striking, but not pitiful.

There was too much strength in the boy for that, waif that he was

of the generations of Shpack, Spike O'Brien, and Bonner. In his

features, clean cut as a cameo and almost classic in their

severity, there were the power and achievement of his father, and

his grandfather, and the one known as the Big Fat, who was captured

by the Sea people and escaped to Kamchatka.

Neil Bonner fought his emotion down, swallowed it down, and choked

over it, though his face smiled with good-humour and the joy with

which one meets a friend.

"Your boy, eh, Jees Uck?" he said. And then turning to Kitty:

"Handsome fellow! He'll do something with those two hands of his

in this our world."

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

The young savage flashed his quick eyes upon her and dwelt over her

for a space, seeking out, as it were, the motive beneath the

question.

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

him.

"Injun talk," Jees Uck interposed, glibly manufacturing languages

on the spur of the moment. "Him Injun talk, NEE-AL all the same

'cracker.' Him baby, him like cracker; him cry for cracker. Him

say, 'NEE-AL, NEE-AL,' all time him say, 'NEE-AL.' Then I say that

um name. So um name all time Nee-al."

Never did sound more blessed fall upon Neil Bonner's ear than that

lie from Jees Uck's lips. It was the cue, and he knew there was

reason for Kitty's untroubled brow.

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

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

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

"Know him? Most intimately," Neil answered, and harked back to

dreary Twenty Mile and the man alone in the silence with his

thoughts.

And here might well end the story of Jees Uck but for the crown she

put upon her renunciation. When she returned to the North to dwell

in her grand log-house, John Thompson found that the P. C. Company

could make a shift somehow to carry on its business without his

aid. Also, the new agent and the succeeding agents received

instructions that the woman Jees Uck should be given whatsoever

goods and grub she desired, in whatsoever quantities she ordered,

and that no charge should be placed upon the books. Further, the

Company paid yearly to the woman Jees Uck a pension of five

thousand dollars.

When he had attained suitable age, Father Champreau laid hands upon

the boy, and the time was not long when Jees Uck received letters

regularly from the Jesuit college in Maryland. Later on these

letters came from Italy, and still later from France. And in the

end there returned to Alaska one Father Neil, a man mighty for good

in the land, who loved his mother and who ultimately went into a

wider field and rose to high authority in the order.

Jees Uck was a young woman when she went back into the North, and

men still looked upon her and yearned. But she lived straight, and

no breath was ever raised save in commendation. She stayed for a

while with the good sisters at Holy Cross, where she learned to

read and write and became versed in practical medicine and surgery.

After that she returned to her grand log-house and gathered about

her the young girls of the Toyaat village, to show them the way of

their feet in the world. It is neither Protestant nor Catholic,

this school in the house built by Neil Bonner for Jees Uck, his

wife; but the missionaries of all the sects look upon it with equal

favour. The latchstring is always out, and tired prospectors and

trail-weary men turn aside from the flowing river or frozen trail

to rest there for a space and be warm by her fire. And, down in

the States, Kitty Bonner is pleased at the interest her husband

takes in Alaskan education and the large sums he devotes to that

purpose; and, though she often smiles and chaffs, deep down and

secretly she is but the prouder of him.