The Magnetic North by Elizabeth Robins

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CHAPTER I

WINTER CAMP ON THE YUKON

"To labour and to be content with that a man hath is a sweet life; but
he that findeth a treasure is above them both."--_Ecclesiasticus_.

Of course they were bound for the Klondyke. Every creature in the
North-west was bound for the Klondyke. Men from the South too, and men
from the East, had left their ploughs and their pens, their factories,
pulpits, and easy-chairs, each man like a magnetic needle suddenly set
free and turning sharply to the North; all set pointing the self-same
way since that July day in '97, when the _Excelsior_ sailed into San
Francisco harbour, bringing from the uttermost regions at the top of
the map close upon a million dollars in nuggets and in gold-dust.

Some distance this side of the Arctic Circle, on the right bank of the
Yukon, a little detachment of that great army pressing northward, had
been wrecked early in the month of September.

They had realised, on leaving the ocean-going ship that landed them at
St. Michael's Island (near the mouth of the great river), that they
could not hope to reach Dawson that year. But instead of "getting cold
feet," as the phrase for discouragement ran, and turning back as
thousands did, or putting in the winter on the coast, they determined,
with an eye to the spring rush, to cover as many as possible of the
seventeen hundred miles of waterway before navigation closed.

They knew, in a vague way, that winter would come early, but they had
not counted on the big September storm that dashed their heavy-laden
boats against the floe-ice, ultimately drove them ashore, and nearly
cost the little party their lives. On that last day of the long
struggle up the stream, a stiff north-easter was cutting the middle
reach of the mighty river, two miles wide here, into a choppy and
dangerous sea.

Day by day, five men in the two little boats, had kept serious eyes on
the shore. Then came the morning when, out of the monotonous cold and
snow-flurries, something new appeared, a narrow white rim forming on
the river margin--the first ice!

"Winter beginning to show his teeth," said one man, with an effort at
jocosity.

Day by day, nearer came the menace; narrower and swifter still ran the
deep black water strip between the encroaching ice-lines. But the
thought that each day's sailing or rowing meant many days nearer the
Klondyke, seemed to inspire a superhuman energy. Day by day each man
had felt, and no man yet had said, "We must camp to-night for eight
months." They had looked landward, shivered, and held on their way.

But on this particular morning, when they took in sail, they realised
it was to be that abomination of desolation on the shore or death. And
one or other speedily.

Nearer the white teeth gleamed, fiercer the gale, swifter the current,
sweeping back the boats. The _Mary C._ was left behind, fighting for
life, while it seemed as if no human power could keep the _Tulare_ from
being hurled against the western shore. Twice, in spite of all they
could do, she was driven within a few feet of what looked like certain
death. With a huge effort, that last time, her little crew had just got
her well in mid-stream, when a heavy roller breaking on the starboard
side drenched the men and half filled the cockpit. Each rower, still
pulling for dear life with one hand, bailed the boat with the other;
but for all their promptness a certain amount of the water froze solid
before they could get it out.

"Great luck, if we're going to take in water like this," said the
cheerful Kentuckian, shipping his oar and knocking off the ice--"great
luck that all the stores are so well protected."

"Protected!" snapped out an anxious, cast-iron-looking man at the
rudder.

"Yes, protected. How's water to get through the ice-coat that's over
everything?"

The cast-iron steersman set his jaw grimly. They seemed to be
comparatively safe now, with half a mile of open water between them and
the western shore.

But they sat as before, stiff, alert, each man in his ice jacket that
cracked and crunched as he bent to his oar. Now right, now left, again
they eyed the shore.

Would it be--could it be there they would have to land? And if they
did...?

Lord, how it blew!

"Hard a-port!" called out the steersman. There, just ahead, was a great
white-capped "roller" coming--coming, the biggest wave they had
encountered since leaving open sea.

But MacCann, the steersman, swung the boat straight into the crested
roller, and the _Tulare_ took it gamely, "bow on." All was going well
when, just in the boiling middle of what they had thought was foaming
"white-cap," the boat struck something solid, shivered, and went
shooting down, half under water; recovered, up again, and seemed to
pause in a second's doubt on the very top of the great wave. In that
second that seemed an eternity one man's courage snapped.

Potts threw down his oar and swore by----and by----he wouldn't pull
another----stroke on the----Yukon.

While he was pouring out the words, the steersman sprang from the
tiller, and seized Potts' oar just in time to save the boat from
capsizing. Then he and the big Kentuckian both turned on the distracted
Potts.

"You infernal quitter!" shouted the steersman, and choked with fury.
But even under the insult of that "meanest word in the language," Potts
sat glaring defiantly, with his half-frozen hands in his pockets.

"It ain't a river, anyhow, this ain't," he said. "It's plain, simple
Hell and water."

The others had no time to realise that Potts was clean out of his
senses for the moment, and the Kentuckian, still pulling like mad,
faced the "quitter" with a determination born of terror.

"If you can't row, take the rudder! Damnation! Take that rudder! Quick,
_or we'll kill you_!" And he half rose up, never dropping his oar.

Blindly, Potts obeyed.

The _Tulare_ was free now from the clinging mass at the bow, but they
knew they had struck their first floe.

Farther on they could see other white-caps bringing other ice masses
down. But there was no time for terrors ahead. The gale was steadily
driving them in shore again. Boat and oars alike were growing unwieldy
with their coating of ever-increasing ice, and human strength was no
match for the storm that was sweeping down from the Pole.

Lord, how it blew!

"There's a cove!" called out the Kentuckian. "Throw her in!" he shouted
to Potts. Sullenly the new steersman obeyed.

Rolling in on a great surge, the boat suddenly turned in a boiling
eddy, and the first thing anybody knew was that the _Tulare_ was on her
side and her crew in the water. Potts was hanging on to the gunwale and
damning the others for not helping him to save the boat.

She wasn't much of a boat when finally they got her into quiet water;
but the main thing was they had escaped with their lives and rescued a
good proportion of their winter provisions. All the while they were
doing this last, the Kentuckian kept turning to look anxiously for any
sign of the others, in his heart bitterly blaming himself for having
agreed to Potts' coming into the _Tulare_ that day in place of the
Kentuckian's own "pardner." When they had piled the rescued provisions
up on the bank, and just as they were covering the heap of bacon,
flour, and bean-bags, boxes, tools, and utensils with a tarpaulin, up
went a shout, and the two missing men appeared tramping along the
ice-encrusted shore.

Where was the _Mary C._? Well, she was at the bottom of the Yukon, and
her crew would like some supper.

They set up a tent, and went to bed that first night extremely well
pleased at being alive on any terms.

But people get over being glad about almost anything, unless misfortune
again puts an edge on the circumstance. The next day, not being in any
immediate danger, the boon of mere life seemed less satisfying.

In detachments they went up the river several miles, and down about as
far. They looked in vain for any sign of the _Mary C._. They prospected
the hills. From the heights behind the camp they got a pretty fair idea
of the surrounding country. It was not reassuring.

"As to products, there seems to be plenty of undersized timber, plenty
of snow and plenty of river, and, as far as I can see, just nothing
else."

"Well, there's oodles o' blueberries," said the Boy, his inky-looking
mouth bearing witness to veracity; "and there are black and red
currants in the snow, and rose-apples--"

"Oh, yes," returned the other, "it's a sort of garden of Eden!"

A little below here it was four miles from bank to bank of the main
channel, but at this point the river was only about two miles wide, and
white already with floating masses of floe-ice going on a swift current
down towards the sea, four hundred miles away.

The right bank presented to the mighty river a low chain of hills,
fringed at the base with a scattered growth of scrubby spruce, birch,
willow, and cotton-wood. Timber line was only two hundred feet above
the river brink; beyond that height, rocks and moss covered with
new-fallen snow.

But if their side seemed cheerless, what of the land on the left bank?
A swamp stretching endlessly on either hand, and back from the icy
flood as far as eye could see, broken only by sloughs and an occasional
ice-rimmed tarn.

"We've been travelling just eight weeks to arrive at this," said the
Kentuckian, looking at the desolate scene with a homesick eye.

"We're not only pretty far from home," grumbled another, "we're still
thirteen hundred miles away from the Klondyke."

These unenlivening calculations were catching.

"We're just about twenty-five hundred miles from the nearest railroad
or telegraph, and, now that winter's down on us, exactly eight months
from anywhere in the civilised world."

They had seen no sign of even savage life, no white trader, nothing to
show that any human foot had ever passed that way before.

In that stillness that was like the stillness of death, they went up
the hillside, with footsteps muffled in the clinging snow; and sixty
feet above the great river, in a part of the wood where the timber was
least unpromising, they marked out a site for their winter quarters.

Then this queer little company--a Denver bank-clerk, an ex-schoolmaster
from Nova Scotia, an Irish-American lawyer from San Francisco, a
Kentucky "Colonel" who had never smelt powder, and "the Boy" (who was
no boy at all, but a man of twenty-two)--these five set to work felling
trees, clearing away the snow, and digging foundations for a couple of
log-cabins--one for the Trio, as they called themselves, the other for
the Colonel and the Boy.

These two had chummed from the hour they met on the steamer that
carried them through the Golden Gate of the Pacific till--well, till
the end of my story.

The Colonel was a big tanned fellow, nearly forty--eldest of the
party--whom the others used to guy discreetly, because you couldn't
mention a place anywhere on the known globe, except the far north,
which he had not personally inspected. But for this foible, as the
untravelled considered it, he was well liked and a little
feared--except by the Boy, who liked him "first-rate," and feared him
not at all. They had promptly adopted each other before they discovered
that it was necessary to have one or more "pardners." It seemed, from
all accounts, to be true, that up there at the top of the world a man
alone is a man lost, and ultimately the party was added to as
aforesaid.

Only two of them knew anything about roughing it. Jimmie O'Flynn of
'Frisco, the Irish-American lawyer, had seen something of frontier
life, and fled it, and MacCann, the Nova Scotian schoolmaster, had
spent a month in one of the Caribou camps, and on the strength of that,
proudly accepted the nickname of "the Miner."

Colonel George Warren and Morris Burnet, the Boy, had the best outfits;
but this fact was held to be more than counter-balanced by the value of
the schoolmaster's experience at Caribou, and by the extraordinary
handiness of Potts, the Denver clerk, who had helped to build the
shelter on deck for the disabled sick on the voyage up. This young man
with the big mouth and lazy air had been in the office of a bank ever
since he left school, and yet, under pressure, he discovered a natural
neat-handedness and a manual dexterity justly envied by some of his
fellow-pioneers. His outfit was not more conspicuously meagre than
O'Flynn's, yet the Irishman was held to be the moneyed man of his
party. Just why was never fully developed, but it was always said,
"O'Flynn represents capital"; and O'Flynn, whether on that account, or
for a subtler and more efficient reason, always got the best of
everything that was going without money and without price.

On board ship O'Flynn, with his ready tongue and his golden
background--"representing capital"--was a leading spirit. Potts the
handy-man was a talker, too, and a good second. But, once in camp, Mac
the Miner was cock of the walk, in those first days, quoted "Caribou,"
and ordered everybody about to everybody's satisfaction.

In a situation like this, the strongest lean on the man who has ever
seen "anything like it" before. It was a comfort that anybody even
_thought_ he knew what to do under such new conditions. So the others
looked on with admiration and a pleasant confidence, while Mac boldly
cut a hole in the brand-new tent, and instructed Potts how to make a
flange out of a tin plate, with which to protect the canvas from the
heat of the stove-pipe. No more cooking now in the bitter open.
Everyone admired Mac's foresight when he said:

"We must build rock fireplaces in our cabins, or we'll find our one
little Yukon stove burnt out before the winter is over--before we have
a chance to use it out prospecting." And when Mac said they must pool
their stores, the Colonel and the Boy agreed as readily as O'Flynn,
whose stores consisted of a little bacon, some navy beans, and a
demijohn of whisky. O'Flynn, however, urged that probably every man had
a little "mite o' somethin'" that he had brought specially for
himself--somethin' his friends had given him, for instance. There was
Potts, now. They all knew how the future Mrs. Potts had brought a
plum-cake down to the steamer, when she came to say good-bye, and made
Potts promise he wouldn't unseal the packet till Christmas. It wouldn't
do to pool Potts' cake--never! There was the Colonel, the only man that
had a sack of coffee. He wouldn't listen when they had told him tea was
the stuff up here, and--well, perhaps other fellows didn't miss coffee
as much as a Kentuckian, though he _had_ heard--Never mind; they
wouldn't pool the coffee. The Boy had some preserved fruit that he
seemed inclined to be a hog about--

"Oh, look here. I haven't touched it!" "Just what I'm sayin'. You're
hoardin' that fruit."

It was known that Mac had a very dacint little medicine-chest. Of
course, if any fellow was ill, Mac wasn't the man to refuse him a
little cold pizen; but he must be allowed to keep his own medicine
chest--and that little pot o' Dundee marmalade. As for O'Flynn, he
would look after the "dimmi-john."

But Mac was dead against the whisky clause. Alcohol had been the curse
of Caribou, and in _this_ camp spirits were to be for medicinal
purposes only. Whereon a cloud descended on Mr. O'Flynn, and his health
began to suffer; but the precious demi-john was put away "in stock"
along with the single bottles belonging to the others. Mac had taken an
inventory, and no one in those early days dared touch anything without
his permission.

They had cut into the mountain-side for a level foundation, and were
hard at it now hauling logs.

"I wonder," said the Boy, stopping a moment in his work, and looking at
the bleak prospect round him--"I wonder if we're going to see anybody
all winter."

"Oh, sure to," Mac thought; "Indians, anyhow."

"Well, I begin to wish they'd mosy along," said Potts; and the sociable
O'Flynn backed him up.

It was towards noon on the sixth day after landing (they had come to
speak of this now as a voluntary affair), when they were electrified by
hearing strange voices; looked up from their work, and saw two white
men seated on a big cake of ice going down the river with the current.
When they recovered sufficiently from their astonishment at the
spectacle, they ran down the hillside, and proposed to help the
"castaways" to land. Not a bit of it.

"_Land_ in that place! What you take us for? Not much! We're going to
St. Michael's."

They had a small boat drawn up by them on the ice, and one man was
dressed in magnificent furs, a long sable overcoat and cap, and wearing
quite the air of a North Pole Nabob.

"Got any grub?" Mac called out.

"Yes; want some?"

"Oh no; I thought you--"

"You're not going to try to live through the winter _there?_"

"Yes."

"Lord! you _are_ in a fix!"

"That's we thought about you."

But the travellers on the ice-raft went by laughing and joking at the
men safe on shore with their tents and provisions. It made some of them
visibly uneasy. _Would_ they win through? Were they crazy to try it?
They had looked forward eagerly to the first encounter with their kind,
but this vision floating by on the treacherous ice, of men who rather
dared the current and the crash of contending floes than land where
_they_ were, seemed of evil augury. The little incident left a
curiously sinister impression on the camp.

Even Mac was found agreeing with the others of his Trio that, since
they had a grand, tough time in front of them, it was advisable to get
through the black months ahead with as little wear and tear as
possible. In spite of the Trio's superior talents, they built a small
ramshackle cabin with a tumble-down fireplace, which served them so ill
that they ultimately spent all their waking hours in the more
comfortable quarters of the Colonel and the Boy. It had been agreed
that these two, with the help, or, at all events, the advice, of the
others, should build the bigger, better cabin, where the stores should
be kept and the whole party should mess--a cabin with a solid outside
chimney of stone and an open fireplace, generous of proportion and
ancient of design, "just like down South."

The weather was growing steadily colder; the ice was solid now many
feet out from each bank of the river. In the middle of the flood the
clotted current still ran with floe-ice, but it was plain the river was
settling down for its long sleep.

Not silently, not without stress and thunder. The handful of dwellers
on the shore would be waked in the night by the shock and crash of
colliding floes, the sound of the great winds rushing by, and--"Hush!
What's that?" Tired men would start up out of sleep and sit straight to
listen. Down below, among the ice-packs, the noise as of an old-time
battle going on--tumult and crashing and a boom! boom! like
cannonading.

Then one morning they woke to find all still, the conflict over, the
Yukon frozen from bank to bank. No sound from that day on; no more
running water for a good seven months.

Winter had come.

While the work went forward they often spoke of the only two people
they had thus far seen. Both Potts and O'Flynn had been heard to envy
them.

Mac had happened to say that he believed the fellow in furs was an
Englishman--a Canadian, at the very least. The Americans chaffed him,
and said, "That accounts for it," in a tone not intended to flatter.
Mac hadn't thought of it before, but he was prepared to swear now that
if an Englishman--they were the hardiest pioneers on earth--or a
Canadian was in favour of lighting out, "it must be for some good
reason."

"Oh yes; we all know that reason."

The Americans laughed, and Mac, growing hot, was goaded into vaunting
the Britisher and running down the Yankee.

"Yankee!" echoed the Kentuckian. "And up in Nova Scotia they let this
man teach school! Doesn't know the difference yet between the little
corner they call New England and all the rest of America."

"All the rest of America!" shouted Mac. "The cheeky way you people of
the States have of gobbling the Continent (in _talk_), just as though
the British part of it wasn't the bigger half!"

"Yes; but when you think _which_ half, you ought to be obliged to any
fellow for forgetting it." And then they referred to effete monarchical
institutions, and by the time they reached the question of the kind of
king the Prince of Wales would make, Mac was hardly a safe man to argue
with.

There was one bond between him and the Kentucky Colonel: they were both
religious men; and although Mac was blue Presbyterian and an inveterate
theologian, somehow, out here in the wilderness, it was more possible
to forgive a man for illusions about the Apostolic Succession and
mistaken views upon Church government. The Colonel, at all events, was
not so lax but what he was ready to back up the Calvinist in an
endeavour to keep the Sabbath (with a careful compromise between church
and chapel) and help him to conduct a Saturday-night Bible-class.

But if the Boy attended the Bible-class with fervour and aired his
heresies with uncommon gusto, if he took with equal geniality Colonel
Warren's staid remonstrance and Mac's fiery objurgation, Sunday morning
invariably found him more "agnostic" than ever, stoutly declining to
recognise the necessity for "service." For this was an occasion when
you couldn't argue or floor anybody, or hope to make Mac "hoppin' mad,"
or have the smallest kind of a shindy. The Colonel read the lessons,
Mac prayed, and they all sang, particularly O'Flynn. Now, the Boy
couldn't sing a note, so there was no fair division of entertainment,
wherefore he would go off into the woods with his gun for company, and
the Catholic O'Flynn, and even Potts, were in better odour than he
"down in camp" on Sundays. So far you may travel, and yet not escape
the tyranny of the "outworn creeds."

The Boy came back a full hour before service on the second Sunday with
a couple of grouse and a beaming countenance. Mac, who was cook that
week, was the only man left in the tent. He looked agreeably surprised
at the apparition.

"Hello!" says he more pleasantly than his Sunday gloom usually
permitted. "Back in time for service?"

"I've found a native," says the Boy, speaking as proudly as any
Columbus. "He's hurt his foot, and he's only got one eye, but he's
splendid. Told me no end of things. He's coming here as fast as his
foot will let him--he and three other Indians--Esquimaux, I mean. They
haven't had anything to eat but berries and roots for seven days."

The Boy was feverishly overhauling the provisions behind the stove.

"Look here," says Mac, "hold on there. I don't know that we've come all
this way to feed a lot o' dirty savages."

"But they're starving." Then, seeing that that fact did not produce the
desired impression: "My savage is an awfully good fellow. He--he's a
converted savage, seems to be quite a Christian." Then, hastily
following up his advantage: "He's been taught English by the Jesuits at
the mission forty miles above us, on the river. He can give us a whole
heap o' tips."

Mac was slowly bringing out a small panful of cold boiled beans.

"There are four of them," said the Boy--"big fellows, almost as big as
our Colonel, and _awful_ hungry."

Mac looked at the handful of beans and then at the small sheet-iron
stove.

"There are more cooking," says he not over-cordially.

"The one that talks good English is the son of the chief. You can see
he's different from the others. Knows a frightful lot. He's taught me
some of his language already. The men with him said 'Kaiomi' to
everything I asked, and that means 'No savvy.' Says he'll teach
me--he'll teach all of us--how to snow-shoe."

"We know how to snow-shoe."

"Oh, I mean on those long narrow snow-shoes that make you go so fast
you always trip up! He'll show us how to steer with a pole, and how to
make fish-traps and--and everything."

Mac began measuring out some tea.

"He's got a team of Esquimaux dogs--calls 'em Mahlemeuts, and he's got
a birch-bark canoe, and a skin kyak from the coast." Then with an
inspiration: "His people are the sort of Royal Family down there,"
added the Boy, thinking to appeal to the Britisher's monarchical
instincts.

Mac had meditatively laid his hand on a side of bacon, the Boy's eyes
following.

"He's asked us--_all_ of us, and we're five--up to visit him at Pymeut,
the first village above us here." Mac took up a knife to cut the bacon.
"And--good gracious! why, I forgot the grouse; they can have the
grouse!"

"No, they can't," said Mac firmly; "they're lucky to get bacon."

The Boy's face darkened ominously. When he looked like that the elder
men found it was "healthiest to give him his head." But the young face
cleared as quickly as it had clouded. After all, the point wasn't worth
fighting for, since grouse would take time to cook, and--here were the
natives coming painfully along the shore.

The Boy ran out and shouted and waved his cap. The other men of the
camp, who had gone in the opposite direction, across the river ice to
look at an air-hole, came hurrying back and reached camp about the same
time as the visitors.

"Thought you said they were big fellows!" commented Mac, who had come
to the door for a glimpse of the Indians as they toiled up the <DW72>.

"Well, so they are!"

"Why, the Colonel would make two of any one of them."

"The Colonel! Oh well, you can't expect anybody else to be quite as big
as that. I was in a hurry, but I suppose what I meant was, they could
eat as much as the Colonel."

"How do you know?"

"Well, just look how broad they are. It doesn't matter to your stomach
whether you're big up and down, or big to and fro."

"It's their furs make 'em look like that. They're the most awful little
runts I ever saw!"

"Well, I reckon _you'd_ think they were big, too--big as Nova
Scotia--if _you'd_ found 'em--come on 'em suddenly like that in the
woods--"

"Which is the...?"

"Oh, the son of the chief is in the middle, the one who is taking off
his civilised fur-coat. He says his father's got a heap of pelts (you
could get things for your collection, Mac), and he's got two
reindeer-skin shirts with hoods--'parkis,' you know, like the others
are wearing--"

They were quite near now.

"How do," said the foremost native affably.

"How do." The Boy came forward and shook hands as though he hadn't seen
him for a month. "This," says he, turning first to Mac and then to the
other white men, "this is Prince Nicholas of Pymeut. Walk right in, all
of you, and have something to eat."

The visitors sat on the ground round the stove, as close as they could
get without scorching, and the atmosphere was quickly heavy with their
presence. When they slipped back their hoods it was seen that two of
the men wore the "tartar tonsure," after the fashion of the coast.

"Where do you come from?" inquired the Colonel of the man nearest him,
who simply blinked and was dumb.

"This is the one that talks English," said the Boy, indicating Nicholas,
"and he lives at Pymeut, and he's been converted."

"How far is Pymeut?"

"We sleep Pymeut to-night," says Nicholas.

"Which way?"

The native jerked his head up the river.

"Many people there?"

He nodded.

"White men, too?"

He shook his head.

"How far to the nearest white men?"

Nicholas's mind wandered from the white man's catechism and fixed
itself on his race's immemorial problem: how far it was to the nearest
thing to eat.

"I thought you said he could speak English."

"So he can, first rate. He and I had a great pow-wow, didn't we,
Nicholas?"

Nicholas smiled absently, and fixed his one eye on the bacon that Mac
was cutting on the deal box into such delicate slices.

"He'll talk all right," said the Boy, "when he's had some breakfast."

Mac had finished the cutting, and now put the frying-pan on an open
hole in the little stove.

"Cook him?" inquired Nicholas.

"Yes. Don't you cook him?"

"Take heap time, cook him."

"You couldn't eat it raw!"

Nicholas nodded emphatically.

Mac said "No," but the Boy was curious to see if they would really eat
it uncooked.

"Let them have _some_ of it raw while the rest is frying"; and he
beckoned the visitors to the deal box. They made a dart forward,
gathered up the fat bacon several slices at a time, and pushed it into
their mouths.

"Ugh!" said the Colonel under his breath.

Mac quickly swept what was left into the frying-pan, and began to cut a
fresh lot.

The Boy divided the cold beans, got out biscuits, and poured the tea,
while silence and a strong smell of ancient fish and rancid seal
pervaded the little tent.

O'Flynn put a question or two, but Nicholas had gone stone-deaf. There
was no doubt about it, they had been starving.

After a good feed they sat stolidly by the fire, with no sign of
consciousness, save the blinking of beady eyes, till the Colonel
suggested a smoke. Then they all grinned broadly, and nodded with great
vigour. Even those who had no other English understood "tobacco."

When he had puffed awhile, Nicholas took his pipe out of his mouth,
and, looking at the Boy, said:

"You no savvy catch fish in winter?"

"Through the ice? No. How you do it?"

"Make hole--put down trap--heap fish all winter."

"You get enough to live on?" asked the Colonel.

"They must have dried fish, too, left over from the summer," said Mac.

Nicholas agreed. "And berries and flour. When snow begin get soft,
Pymeuts all go off--" He motioned with his big head towards the hills.

"What do you get there?" Mac was becoming interested.

"Caribou, moose--"

"Any furs?"

"Yes; trap ermun, marten--"

"Lynx, too, I suppose, and fox?"

Nicholas nodded. "All kinds. Wolf--muskrat, otter--wolverine--all
kinds."

"You got some skins now?" asked the Nova Scotian.

"Y--yes. More when snow get soft. You come Pymeut--me show."

"Where have ye been just now?" asked O'Flynn.

"St. Michael."

"How long since ye left there?"

"Twelve sleeps."

"He means thirteen days."

Nicholas nodded.

"They couldn't possibly walk that far in--"

"Oh yes," says the Boy; "they don't follow the windings of the river,
they cut across the portage, you know."

"Snow come--no trail--big mountains--all get lost."

"What did you go to St. Michael's for?"

"Oh, me pilot. Me go all over. Me leave N. A. T. and T. boat St.
Michael's last trip."

"Then you're in the employ of the great North American Trading and
Transportation Company?"

Nicholas gave that funny little duck of the head that meant yes.

"That's how you learnt English," says the Colonel.

"No; me learn English at Holy Cross. Me been baptize."

"At that Jesuit mission up yonder?"

"Forty mile."

"Well," says Potts, "I guess you've had enough walking for one winter."

Nicholas seemed not to follow this observation. The Boy interpreted:

"You heap tired, eh? You no go any more long walk till ice go out, eh?"

Nicholas grinned.

"Me go Ikogimeut--all Pymeut go."

"What for?"

"Big feast."

"Oh, the Russian mission there gives a feast?"

"No. Big Innuit feast."

"When?"

"Pretty quick. Every year big feast down to Ikogimeut when Yukon ice
get hard, so man go safe with dog-team."

"Do many people go?"

"All Innuit go, plenty Ingalik go."

"How far do they come?"

"All over; come from Koserefsky, come from Anvik--sometime Nulato."

"Why, Nulato's an awful distance from Ikogimeut."

"Three hundred and twenty miles," said the pilot, proud of his general
information, and quite ready, since he had got a pipe between his
teeth, to be friendly and communicative.

"What do you do at Ikogimeut when you have these--" "Big fire--big
feed--tell heap stories--big dance. Oh, heap big time!"

"Once every year, eh, down at Ikogimeut?"

"Three times ev' year. Ev' village, and"--he lowered his voice, not
with any hit of reverence or awe, but with an air of making a sly and
cheerful confidence--"and when man die."

"You make a feast and have a dance when a friend dies?"

"If no priests. Priests no like. Priests say, 'Man no dead; man gone
up.'" Nicholas pondered the strange saying, and slowly shook his head.

"In that the priests are right," said Mac grudgingly.

It was anything but politic, but for the life of him the Boy couldn't
help chipping in:

"You think when man dead he stay dead, eh, and you might as well make a
feast?"

Nicholas gave his quick nod. "We got heap muskeetah, we cold, we
hungry. We here heap long time. Dead man, he done. Why no big feast? Oh
yes, heap big feast."

The Boy was enraptured. He would gladly have encouraged these pagan
deliverances on the part of the converted Prince, but the Colonel was
scandalised, and Mac, although in his heart of hearts not ill-satisfied
at the evidence of the skin-deep Christianity of a man delivered over
to the corrupt teaching of the Jesuits, found in this last fact all the
stronger reason for the instant organisation of a good Protestant
prayer-meeting. Nicholas of Pymeut must not be allowed to think it was
only Jesuits who remembered the Sabbath day to keep it holy.

And the three "pore benighted heathen" along with him, if they didn't
understand English words, they should have an object-lesson, and Mac
would himself pray the prayers they couldn't utter for themselves. He
jumped up, motioned the Boy to put on more wood, cleared away the
granite-ware dishes, filled the bean-pot and set it back to simmer,
while the Colonel got out Mac's Bible and his own Prayer-Book.

The Boy did his stoking gloomily, reading aright these portents. Almost
eclipsed was joy in this "find" of his (for he regarded the precious
Nicholas as his own special property). It was all going to end in
his--the Boy's--being hooked in for service. As long as the Esquimaux
were there _he_ couldn't, of course, tear himself away. And here was
the chance they'd all been waiting for. Here was a native chock-full of
knowledge of the natural law and the immemorial gospel of the North,
who would be gone soon--oh, very soon, if Mac and the Colonel went on
like this--and they were going to choke off Nicholas's communicativeness
with--a service!

"It's Sunday, you know," says the Colonel to the Prince, laying open
his book, "and we were just going to have church. You are accustomed to
going to church at Holy Cross, aren't you?"

"When me kid me go church."

"You haven't gone since you grew up? They still have church there,
don't they?"

"Oh, Father Brachet, him have church."

"Why don't you go?"

Nicholas was vaguely conscious of threatened disapproval.

"Me ... me must take up fish-traps."

"Can't you do that another day?"

It seemed not to have occurred to Nicholas before. He sat and
considered the matter.

"Isn't Father Brachet," began the Colonel gravely--"he doesn't like it,
does he, when you don't come to church?"

"He take care him church; him know me take care me fish-trap."

But Nicholas saw plainly out of his one eye that he was not growing in
popularity. Suddenly that solitary organ gleamed with self-justification.

"Me bring fish to Father Brachet and to Mother Aloysius and the
Sisters."

Mac and the Colonel exchanged dark glances.

"Do Mother Aloysius and the Sisters live where Father Brachet does?"

"Father Brachet, and Father Wills, and Brother Paul, and Brother
Etienne, all here." The native put two fingers on the floor. "Big white
cross in middle"--he laid down his pipe to personate the
cross--"here"--indicating the other side--"here Mother Aloysius and the
Sisters."

"I thought," says Mac, "we'd be hearing of a convent convenient."

"Me help Father Brachet," observed Nicholas proudly. "Me show him boys
how make traps, show him girls how make mucklucks." "_What_!" gasps the
horrified Mac, "Father Brachet has got a family?"

"Famly?" inquired Nicholas. "Kaiomi"; and he shook his head
uncertainly.

"You say Father Brachet has got boys, and"--as though this were a yet
deeper brand of iniquity--"_girls_?"

Nicholas, though greatly mystified, nodded firmly.

"I suppose he thinks away off up here nobody will ever know. Oh, these
Jesuits!"

"How many children has this shameless priest?"

"Father Brachet, him got seventeen boys, and--me no savvy how much
girl--twelve girl ... twenty girl ..."

The Boy, who had been splitting with inward laughter, exploded at this
juncture.

"He keeps a native school, Mac."

"Yes," says Nicholas, "teach boy make table, chair, potatoes grow--all
kinds. Sisters teach girl make dinner, wash--all kinds. Heap good
people up at Holy Cross."

"Divil a doubt of it," says O'Flynn.

But this blind belauding of the children of Loyola only fired Mac the
more to give the heathen a glimpse of the true light. In what darkness
must they grope when a sly, intriguing Jesuit (it was well known they
were all like that) was for them a type of the "heap good man"--a
priest, forsooth, who winked at Sabbath-breaking because he and his
neighbouring nuns shared in the spoil!

Well, they must try to have a truly impressive service. Mac and the
Colonel telegraphed agreement on this head. Savages were said to be
specially touched by music.

"I suppose when you were a kid the Jesuits taught you chants and so
on," said the Colonel, kindly.

"Kaiomi," answered Nicholas after reflection.

"You can sing, can't you?" asks O'Flynn.

"Sing? No, me dance!"

The Boy roared with delight.

"Why, yes, I never thought of that. You fellows do the songs, and
Nicholas and I'll do the dances."

Mac glowered angrily. "Look here: if you don't mind being blasphemous
for yourself, don't demoralise the natives."

"Well, I like that! Didn't Miriam dance before the Lord? Why shouldn't
Nicholas and me?"

The Colonel cleared his throat, and began to read the lessons for the
day. The natives sat and watched him closely. They really behaved very
well, and the Boy was enormously proud of his new friends. There was a
great deal at stake. The Boy felt he must walk warily, and he already
regretted those light expressions about dancing before the Lord. All
the fun of the winter might depend on a friendly relation between
Pymeut and the camp. It was essential that the Esquimaux should not
only receive, but make, a good impression.

The singing "From Greenland's icy mountains to India's coral strand"
seemed to please them; but when, after the Colonel's "Here endeth the
second lesson," Mac said, in sepulchral tones, "Let us pray," the
visitors seemed to think it was time to go home.

"No," said Mac sternly, "they mustn't go in the middle of the meeting";
and he proceeded to kneel down.

But Nicholas was putting on his fur coat, and the others only waited to
follow him out. The Boy, greatly concerned lest, after all, the visit
should end badly, dropped on his knees to add the force of his own
example, and through the opening phrases of Mac's prayer the agnostic
was heard saying, in a loud stage-whisper, "Do like me--down! Look
here! Suppose you ask us come big feast, and in the middle of your
dance we all go home--.

"Oh no," remonstrated Nicholas.

"Very well. These friends o' mine no like man go home in the middle.
They heap mad at me when I no stay. You savvy?"

"Me savvy," says Nicholas slowly and rather depressed.

"Kneel down, then," says the Boy. And first Nicholas, and then the
others, went on their knees.

Alternately they looked in the Boy's corner where the grub was, and
then over their shoulders at the droning Mac and back, catching the
Boy's eye, and returning his reassuring nods and grins.

Mac, who had had no innings up to this point, was now embarked upon a
most congenial occupation. Wrestling with the Lord on behalf of the
heathen, he lost count of time. On and on the prayer wound its slow
way; involution after involution, coil after coil, like a snake, the
Boy thought, lazing in the sun. Unaccustomed knees grew sore.

"Hearken to the cry of them that walk in darkness, misled by wolves in
sheep's clothing--_wolves_, Lord, wearing the sign of the Holy Cross--"

O'Flynn shuffled, and Mac pulled himself up. No light task this of
conveying to the Creator, in covert terms, a due sense of the iniquity
of the Jesuits, without, at the same time, stirring O'Flynn's bile, and
seeing him get up and stalk out of meeting, as had happened once
before.

O'Flynn was not deeply concerned about religious questions, but "there
were limits." The problem was how to rouse the Lord without rousing
O'Flynn--a piece of negotiation so delicate, calling for a skill in
pious invective so infinitely absorbing to Mac's particular cast of
mind, that he was quickly stone-blind and deaf to all things else.

"Not all the heathen are sunk in iniquity; but they are weak, tempted,
and they weary, Lord!"

"Amen," said the Boy, discreetly. "How long?" groaned Mac--"Oh Lord,
how long?" But it was much longer than he realised. The Boy saw the
visitors shifting from one knee to another, and feared the worst. But
he sympathised deeply with their predicament. To ease his own legs, he
changed his position, and dragged a corner of the sailcloth down off
the little pile of provisions, and doubled it under his knees.

The movement revealed the bag of dried apples within arm's length.
Nicholas was surreptitiously reaching for his coat. No doubt about it,
he had come to the conclusion that this was the fitting moment to
depart. A look over his shoulder showed Mac absorbed, and taking fresh
breath at "Sixthly, Oh Lord." The Boy put out a hand, and dragged the
apple-bag slowly, softly towards him. The Prince dropped the sleeve of
his coat, and fixed his one eye on his friend. The Boy undid the neck
of the sack, thrust in his hand, and brought out a fistfull. Another
look at Mac--still hard at it, trying to spare O'Flynn's feelings
without mincing matters with the Almighty.

The Boy winked at Nicholas, made a gesture, "Catch!" and fired a bit of
dried apple at him, at the same time putting a piece in his own mouth
to show him it was all right.

Nicholas followed suit, and seemed pleased with the result. He showed
all his strong, white teeth, and ecstatically winked his one eye back
at the Boy, who threw him another bit and then a piece to each of the
others.

The Colonel had "caught on," and was making horrible frowns at the Boy.
Potts and O'Flynn looked up, and in dumbshow demanded a share. No? Very
well, they'd tell Mac. So the Boy had to feed them, too, to keep them
quiet. And still Mac prayed the Lord to catch up this slip he had made
here on the Yukon with reference to the natives. In the midst of a
powerful peroration, he happened to open his eyes a little, and they
fell on the magnificent great sable collar of Prince Nicholas's coat.

Without any of the usual slowing down, without the accustomed warning
of a gradual descent from the high themes of heaven to the things of
common earth, Mac came down out of the clouds with a bump, and the
sudden, business-like "Amen" startled all the apple-chewing
congregation.

Mac stood up, and says he to Nicholas:

"Where did you get that coat?"

Nicholas, still on his knees, stared, and seemed in doubt if this were
a part of the service.

"Where did you get that coat?" repeated Mac.

The Boy had jumped up nimbly. "I told you his father has a lot of
furs."

"Like this?"

"No," says Nicholas; "this belong white man."

"Ha," says Mac excitedly, "I thought I'd seen it before. Tell us how
you got it."

"Me leave St. Michael; me got ducks, reindeer meat--oh, _plenty_
kow-kow! [Footnote: Food] Two sleeps away St. Michael me meet Indian.
Heap hungry. Him got bully coat." Nicholas picked it up off the floor.
"Him got no kow-kow. Him say, 'Give me duck, give me back-fat. You take
coat, him too heavy.' Me say, 'Yes.'"

"But how did he get the coat?"

"Him say two white men came down river on big ice."

"Yes, yes--"

"Men sick." He tapped his forehead. "Man no sick, he no go down with
the ice"; and Nicholas shuddered. "Before Ikogimeut, ice jam. Indian
see men jump one big ice here, more big ice here, and one... go down.
Indian"--Nicholas imitated throwing out a line--"man tie mahout
round--but--big ice come--" Nicholas dashed his hands together, and
then paused significantly. "Indian sleep there. Next day ice hard.
Indian go little way out to see. Man dead. Him heap good coat," he
wound up unemotionally, and proceeded to put it on.

"And the other white man--what became of him?"

Nicholas shrugged: "Kaiomi," though it was plain he knew well enough
the other lay under the Yukon ice.

"And that--_that_ was the end of the fellows who went by jeering at
us!"

"We'd better not crow yet," said Mac. And they bade Prince Nicholas and
his heathen retinue good-bye in a mood chastened not by prayer alone.

CHAPTER II

HOUSE-WARMING

"There is a sort of moral climate in a household."--JOHN MORLEY.

No idle ceremony this, but the great problem of the dwellers in the
country of the Yukon.

The Colonel and the Boy made up their minds that, whatever else they
had or had not, they would have a warm house to live in. And when they
had got it, they would have a "Blow-out" to celebrate the achievement.

"We'll invite Nicholas," says the Boy. "I'll go to Pymeut myself, and
let him know we are going to have 'big fire, big feed. Oh, heap big
time!'"

If the truth were told, it had been a difficult enough matter to keep
away from Pymeut since the hour Nicholas had vanished in that
direction; but until winter quarters were made, and until they were
proved to be warm, there was no time for the amenities of life.

The Big Cabin (as it was quite seriously called, in contradistinction
to the hut of the Trio) consisted of a single room, measuring on the
outside sixteen feet by eighteen feet.

The walls of cotton-wood logs soared upward to a level of six feet, and
this height was magnificently increased in the middle by the angle of
the mildly gable roof. But before the cabin was breast-high the Boy had
begun to long for a window.

"Sorry we forgot the plate-glass," says Mac.

"Wudn't ye like a grrand-piana?" asks O'Flynn.

"What's the use of goin' all the way from Nova Scotia to Caribou," says
the Boy to the Schoolmaster-Miner, "if you haven't learned the way to
make a window like the Indians, out of transparent skin?"

Mac assumed an air of elevated contempt.

"I went to mine, not to learn Indian tricks."

"When the door's shut it'll be dark as the inside of a cocoa-nut."

"You ought to have thought of that before you left the sunny South,"
said Potts.

"It'll be dark all winter, window or no window," Mac reminded them.

"Never mind," said the Colonel, "when the candles give out we'll have
the fire-light. Keep all the spruce knots, boys!"

But one of the boys was not pleased. The next day, looking for a
monkey-wrench under the tarpaulin, he came across the wooden box a
California friend had given him at parting, containing a dozen tall
glass jars of preserved fruit. The others had growled at the extra bulk
and weight, when the Boy put the box into the boat at St. Michael's,
but they had now begun to look kindly on it and ask when it was to be
opened. He had answered firmly:

"Not before Christmas," modifying this since Nicholas's visit to "Not
before the House-Warming." But one morning the Boy was found pouring
the fruit out of the jars into some empty cans.

"What you up to?"

"Wait an' see." He went to O'Flynn, who was dish-washer that week, got
him to melt a couple of buckets of snow over the open-air campfire and
wash the fruit-jars clean.

"Now, Colonel," says the Boy, "bring along that buck-saw o' yours and
lend a hand."

They took off the top log from the south wall of the cabin, measured a
two-foot space in the middle, and the Colonel sawed out the superfluous
spruce intervening. While he went on doing the same for the other logs
on that side, the Boy roughly chiselled a moderately flat sill. Then
one after another he set up six of the tall glass jars in a row, and
showed how, alternating with the other six bottles turned upside down,
the thick belly of one accommodating itself to the thin neck of the
other, the twelve made a very decent rectangle of glass. When they had
hoisted up, and fixed in place, the logs on each side, and the big
fellow that went all across on top; when they had filled the
inconsiderable cracks between the bottles with some of the mud-mortar
with which the logs were to be chinked, behold a double glass window
fit for a king!

The Boy was immensely pleased.

"Oh, that's an old dodge," said Mac depreciatingly. "Why, they did that
at Caribou!"

"Then, why in--Why didn't you suggest it?"

"You wait till you know more about this kind o' life, and you won't go
in for fancy touches."

Nevertheless, the man who had mined at Caribou seemed to feel that some
contribution from him was necessary to offset the huge success of that
window. He did not feel called upon to help to split logs for the roof
of the Big Cabin, but he sat cutting and whittling away at a little
shelf which he said was to be nailed up at the right of the Big Cabin
door. Its use was not apparent, but no one dared call it a "fancy
touch," for Mac was a miner, and had been to Caribou.

When the shelf was nailed up, its maker brought forth out of his
medicine-chest a bottle of Perry Davis's Pain-killer.

"Now at Caribou," says he, "they haven't got any more thermometers
kicking round than we have here, but they discovered that when Perry
Davis congeals you must keep a sharp look-out for frost-bite, and when
Perry Davis freezes solid, you'd better mind your eye and stay in your
cabin, if you don't want to die on the trail." With which he tied a
string round Perry Davis's neck, set the bottle up on the shelf, and
secured it firmly in place. They all agreed it was a grand advantage to
have been to Caribou!

But Mac knew things that he had probably not learned there, about
trees, and rocks, and beasts, and their manners and customs and family
names. If there were more than a half-truth in the significant lament
of a very different man, "I should be a poet if only I knew the names
of things," then, indeed, Samuel MacCann was equipped to make a mark in
literature.

From the time he set foot on the volcanic shore of St Michael's Island,
Mac had begun his "collection."

Nowadays, when he would spend over "that truck of his" hours that might
profitably (considering his talents) be employed in helping to fortify
the camp against the Arctic winter, his companions felt it little use
to remonstrate.

By themselves they got on rapidly with work on the roof, very much
helped by three days' unexpectedly mild weather. When the split logs
had been marshalled together on each side of the comb, they covered
them with dried moss and spruce boughs.

Over all they laid a thick blanket of the earth which had been dug out
to make a level foundation. The cracks in the walls were chinked with
moss and mud-mortar. The floor was the naked ground, "to be carpeted
with skins by-and-by," so Mac said; but nobody believed Mac would put a
skin to any such sensible use.

The unreasonable mildness of three or four days and the little surface
thaw, came to an abrupt end in a cold rain that turned to sleet as it
fell. Nobody felt like going far afield just then, even after game, but
they had set the snare that Nicholas told the Boy about on that first
encounter in the wood. Nicholas, it seemed, had given him a noose made
of twisted sinew, and showed how it worked in a running loop. He had
illustrated the virtue of this noose when attached to a pole balanced
in the crotch of a tree, caught over a horizontal stick by means of a
small wooden pin tied to the snare. A touch at the light end of the
suspended pole (where the baited loop dangles) loosens the pin, and the
heavy end of the pole falls, hanging ptarmigan or partridge in the air.

For some time after rigging this contrivance, whenever anyone reported
"tracks," Mac and the Boy would hasten to the scene of action, and set
a new snare, piling brush on each side of the track that the game had
run in, so barring other ways, and presenting a line of least
resistance straight through the loop.

In the early days Mac would come away from these preparations saying
with dry pleasure:

"Now, with luck, we may get a _Xema Sabinii_," or some such fearful
wildfowl.

"Good to eat?" the Boy would ask, having had his disappointments ere
now in moments of hunger for fresh meat, when Mac, with the nearest
approach to enthusiasm he permitted himself, had brought in some
miserable little hawk-owl or a three-toed woodpecker to add, not to the
larder, but to the "collection."

"No, you don't _eat_ Sabine gulls," Mac would answer pityingly.

But those snares never seemed to know what they were there for. The
first one was set expressly to catch one of the commonest birds that
fly--Mac's _Lagopus albus_, the beautiful white Arctic grouse, or at
the very least a _Bonasa umbellus_, which, being interpreted, is ruffed
ptarmigan. The tracks had been bird tracks, but the creature that swung
in the air next day was a baby hare. The Schoolmaster looked upon the
incident as being in the nature of a practical joke, and resented it.
But the others were enchanted, and professed thereafter a rooted
suspicion of the soundness of the Schoolmaster's Natural History, which
nobody actually felt. For he had never yet pretended to know anything
that he didn't know well; and when Potts would say something
disparaging of Mac's learning behind his back (which was against the
unwritten rules of the game) the Colonel invariably sat on Potts.

"Knows a darned sight too much? No, he _don't_, sir; that's just the
remarkable thing about Mac. He isn't trying to carry any more than he
can swing."

At the same time it is to be feared that none of his companions really
appreciated the pedagogue's learning. Nor had anyone but the Boy
sympathised with his resolution to make a Collection. What they wanted
was eatable game, and they affected no intelligent interest in knowing
the manners and customs of the particular species that was sending up
appetising odours from the pot.

They even applauded the rudeness of the Boy, who one day responded to
Mac's gravely jubilant "Look here! I've got the _Parus Hudsonicus_!"--

"Poor old man! What do you do for it?"

And when anybody after that was indisposed, they said he might be
sickening for an attack of Parus Hudsonicus, and in that case it was a
bad look-out.

Well for Mac that he wouldn't have cared a red cent to impress the
greatest naturalist alive, let alone a lot of fellows who didn't know a
titmouse from a disease.

Meanwhile work on the Big Cabin had gone steadily forward. From the
outside it looked finished now, and distinctly imposing. From what were
left of the precious planks out of the bottom of the best boat they had
made the door--two by four, and opening directly in front of that
masterpiece, the rock fireplace. The great stone chimney was the pride
of the camp and the talk before the winter was done of all "the Lower
River."

Spurred on partly by the increased intensity of the cold, partly by the
Colonel's nonsense about the way they did it "down South," Mac roused
himself, and turned out a better piece of masonry for the Big Cabin
than he had thought necessary for his own. But everybody had a share in
the glory of that fireplace. The Colonel, Potts, and the Boy selected
the stone, and brought it on a rude litter out of a natural quarry from
a place a mile or more away up on the bare mountain-side. O'Flynn mixed
and handed up the mud-mortar, while Mac put in some brisk work with it
before it stiffened in the increasing cold.

Everybody was looking forward to getting out of the tent and into the
warm cabin, and the building of the fireplace stirred enthusiasm. It
was two and a half feet deep, three and a half feet high, and four feet
wide, and when furnished with ten-inch hack logs, packed in glowing
ashes and laid one above another, with a roaring good blaze in front of
birch and spruce, that fire would take a lot of beating, as the Boy
admitted, "even in the tat-pine Florida country."

But no fire on earth could prevent the cabin from being swept through,
the moment the door was opened, by a fierce and icy air-current. The
late autumnal gales revealed the fact that the sole means of
ventilation had been so nicely contrived that whoever came in or went
out admitted a hurricane of draught that nearly knocked him down. Potts
said it took a good half-hour, after anyone had opened the door, to
heat the place up again.

"What! You cold?" inquired the usual culprit. The Boy had come in to
put an edge on his chopper. "It's stopped snowin', an' you better come
along with me, Potts. Swing an axe for a couple of hours--that'll warm
you."

"I've got rheumatism in my shoulder to-day," says Potts, hugging the
huge fire closer.

"And you've got something wrong with your eyes, eh, Mac?"

Potts narrowed his and widened the great mouth; but he had turned his
head so Mac couldn't see him.

The Nova Scotian only growled and refilled his pipe. Up in the woods
the Boy repeated the conversation to the Colonel, who looked across at
O'Flynn several yards away, and said: "Hush!"

"Why must I shut up? Mac's _eyes_ do look rather queer and bloodshot. I
should think he'd rather feel we lay it to his eyes than know we're
afraid he's peterin' out altogether."

"I never said I was afraid--"

"No, you haven't _said_ much." "I haven't opened my head about it."

"No, but you've tried hard enough for five or six days to get Mac to
the point where he would come out and show us how to whip-saw. You
haven't _said_ anything, but you've--you've got pretty dignified each
time you failed, and we all know what that means."

"We ought to have begun sawing boards for our bunks and swing-shelf a
week back, before this heavy snowfall. Besides, there's enough
fire-wood now; we're only marking time until--"

"Until Mac's eyes get all right. I understand."

Again the Colonel had made a sound like "Sh!" and went on swinging his
axe.

They worked without words till the Boy's tree came down. Then he
stopped a moment, and wiped his face.

"It isn't so cold to-day, not by a long shot, for all Potts's howling
about his rheumatics."

"It isn't cold that starts that kind of pain."

"No, siree. I'm not much of a doctor, but I can see Potts's rheumatism
doesn't depend on the weather."

"Never you mind Potts."

"I don't mind Potts. I only mind Mac. What's the matter with Mac,
anyway?"

"Oh, he's just got cold feet. Maybe he'll thaw out by-and-by."

"Did you ever think what Mac's like? With that square-cut jaw and
sawed-off nose, everything about him goin' like this"--the Boy
described a few quick blunt angles in the air--"well, sir, he's the
livin' image of a monkey-wrench. I'm comin' to think he's as much like
it inside as he is out. He can screw up for a prayer-meetin', or he can
screw down for business--when he's a mind, but, as Jimmie over there
says, 'the divil a different pace can you put him through.' I _like_
monkey-wrenches! I'm only sayin' they aren't as limber as willa-trees."

No response from the Colonel, who was making the chips fly. It had cost
his great body a good many aches and bruises, but he was a capital
axeman now, and not such a bad carpenter, though when the Boy said as
much he had answered:

"Carpenter! I'm just a sort of a well-meanin' wood-butcher"; and deeply
he regretted that in all his young years on a big place in the country
he had learnt so little about anything but horses and cattle.

On the way back to dinner they spoke again of this difficulty of the
boards. O'Flynn whistled "Rory O'More" with his pleasant air of
detachment.

"You and the others would take more interest in the subject," said the
Boy a little hotly, "if we hadn't let you fellows use nearly all the
boat-planks for _your_ bunks, and now we haven't got any for our own."

"_Let_ us use 'em! Faith! we had a right to'm."

"To boards out of _our_ boat!"

"And ye can have the loan o' the whip-saw to make more, whenever the
fancy takes ye."

"Loan o' the whip-saw! Why, it's mine," says the Colonel.

"Divil a bit of it, man!" says O'Flynn serenely. "Everything we've got
belongs to all of us, except a sack o' coffee, a medicine-chest, and a
dimmi-john. And it's mesilf that's afraid the dimmi-john--"

"What's the use of my having bought a whip-saw?" interrupted the
Colonel, hurriedly. "What's the good of it, if the only man that knows
how to use it--"

"Is more taken up wid bein' a guardjin angel to his pardner's
dimmi-john--"

The Colonel turned and frowned at the proprietor of the dimmi-john. The
Boy had dropped behind to look at some marten tracks in the
fresh-fallen snow.

"I'll follow that trail after dinner," says he, catching up the others
in time to hear O'Flynn say:

"If it wusn't that ye think only a feller that's been to Caribou can
teach ye annything it's Jimmie O'Flynn that 'ud show ye how to play a
chune on that same whip-saw."

"Will you show us after dinner?"

"Sure I will."

And he was as good as his word.

This business of turning a tree into boards without the aid of a
saw-mill is a thing many placer-miners have to learn; for, even if they
are disposed to sleep on the floor, and to do without shelves, they
can't do sluicing without sluice-boxes, and they can't make those long,
narrow boxes without boards.

So every party that is well fitted out has a whip-saw.

"Furrst ye dig a pit," O'Flynn had said airily, stretched out before
the fire after dinner. "Make it about four feet deep, and as long as
ye'd like yer boards. When ye've done that I'll come and take a hand."

The little job was not half finished when the light tailed. Two days
more of soil-burning and shovelling saw it done.

"Now ye sling a couple o' saplings acrost the durrt ye've chucked out.
R-right! Now ye roll yer saw-timber inter the middle. R-right! An' on
each side ye want a log to stand on. See? Wid yer 'guide-man' on top
sthradlin' yer timberr, watchin' the chalk-line and doin' the pull-up,
and the otherr fellerr in the pit lookin' afther the haul-down, ye'll
be able to play a chune wid that there whip-saw that'll make the
serryphims sick o' plain harps." O'Flynn superintended it all, and even
Potts had the curiosity to come out and see what they were up to. Mac
was "kind o' dozin'" by the fire.

When the frame was finished O'Flynn helped to put the trial-log in
place, having marked it off with charcoal to indicate inch and a
quarter planks. Then the Colonel, down in the pit, and O'Flynn on top
of the frame, took the great two-handled saw between them, and began
laboriously, one drawing the big blade up, and the other down,
vertically through the log along the charcoal line.

"An' _that's_ how it's done, wid bits of yer arrums and yer back that
have niver been called on to wurruk befure. An' whin ye've been at it
an hour ye'll find it goes betther wid a little blasphemin';" and he
gave his end of the saw to the reluctant Potts.

Potts was about this time as much of a problem to his pardners as was
the ex-schoolmaster. If the bank clerk had surprised them all by his
handiness on board ship, and by making a crane to swing the pots over
the fire, he surprised them all still more in these days by an apparent
eclipse of his talents. It was unaccountable. Potts's carpentering,
Potts's all-round cleverness, was, like "payrock in a pocket," as the
miners say, speedily worked out, and not a trace of it afterwards to be
found.

But less and less was the defection of the Trio felt. The burly
Kentucky stock-farmer was getting his hand in at "frontier" work,
though he still couldn't get on without his "<DW65>," as the Boy said,
slyly indicating that it was he who occupied this exalted post. These
two soon had the bunks made out of the rough planks they had sawed with
all a green-horn's pains. They put in a fragrant mattress of spring
moss, and on that made up a bed of blankets and furs.

More boards were laboriously turned out to make the great swing-shelf
to hang up high in the angle of the roof, where the provisions might be
stored out of reach of possible marauders.

The days were very short now, bringing only about five hours of pallid
light, so little of which struggled through the famous bottle-window
that at all hours they depended chiefly on the blaze from the great
fireplace. There was still a good deal of work to be done indoors,
shelves to be put up on the left as you entered (whereon the
granite-ware tea-service, etc., was kept), a dinner-table to be made,
and three-legged stools. While these additions--"fancy touches," as the
Trio called them--were being made, Potts and O'Flynn, although
occasionally they went out for an hour or two, shot-gun on shoulder,
seldom brought home anything, and for the most part were content with
doing what they modestly considered their share of the cooking and
washing. For the rest, they sat by the fire playing endless games of
euchre, seven-up and bean poker, while Mac, more silent than ever,
smoked and read Copps's "Mining Laws" and the magazines of the previous
August.

Nobody heard much in those days of Caribou. The Colonel had gradually
slipped into the position of Boss of the camp. The Trio were still just
a trifle afraid of him, and he, on his side, never pressed a dangerous
issue too far.

But this is a little to anticipate.

One bitter gray morning, that had reduced Perry Davis to a solid lump
of ice, O'Flynn, the Colonel, and the Boy were bringing into the cabin
the last of the whip-sawed boards. The Colonel halted and looked
steadily up the river.

"Is that a beast or a human?" said he.

"It's a man," the Boy decided after a moment--"no, two men, single
file, and--yes--Colonel, it's dogs. Hooray! a dog-team at last!"

They had simultaneously dropped the lumber. The Boy ran on to tell the
cook to prepare more grub, and then pelted after O'Flynn and the
Colonel, who had gone down to meet the newcomers--an Indian driving
five dogs, which were hitched tandem to a low Esquimaux sled, with a
pack and two pairs of web-foot snow-shoes lashed on it, and followed by
a white man. The Indian was a fine fellow, younger than Prince
Nicholas, and better off in the matter of eyes. The white man was a
good deal older than either, with grizzled hair, a worn face, bright
dark eyes, and a pleasant smile.

"I had heard some white men had camped hereabouts," says he. "I am glad
to see we have such substantial neighbours." He was looking up at the
stone chimney, conspicuous a long way off.

"We didn't know we had any white neighbours," said the Colonel in his
most grand and gracious manner. "How far away are you, sir?"

"About forty miles above."

As he answered he happened to be glancing at the Boy, and observed his
eagerness cloud slightly. Hadn't Nicholas said it was "about forty
miles above" that the missionaries lived?

"But to be only forty miles away," the stranger went on,
misinterpreting the fading gladness, "is to be near neighbours in this
country."

"We aren't quite fixed yet," said the Colonel, "but you must come in
and have some dinner with us. We can promise you a good fire, anyhow."

"Thank you. You have chosen a fine site." And the bright eyes with the
deep crow's-feet raying out from the corners scanned the country in so
keen and knowing a fashion that the Boy, with hope reviving, ventured:

"Are--are you a prospector?"

"No. I am Father Wills from Holy Cross."

"Oh!" And the Boy presently caught up with the Indian, and walked on
beside him, looking back every now and then to watch the dogs or
examine the harness. The driver spoke English, and answered questions
with a tolerable intelligence. "Are dogs often driven without reins?"

The Indian nodded.

The Colonel, after the stranger had introduced himself, was just a
shade more reserved, but seemed determined not to be lacking in
hospitality. O'Flynn was overflowing, or would have been had the Jesuit
encouraged him. He told their story, or, more properly, his own, and
how they had been wrecked.

"And so ye're the Father Superior up there?" says the Irishman, pausing
to take breath.

"No. Our Superior is Father Brachet. That's a well-built cabin!"

The dogs halted, though they had at least five hundred yards still to
travel before they would reach the well-built cabin.

"_Mush!_" shouted the Indian.

The dogs cleared the ice-reef, and went spinning along so briskly over
the low hummocks that the driver had to run to keep up with them.

The Boy was flying after when the priest, having caught sight of his
face, called out: "Here! Wait! Stop a moment!" and hurried forward.

He kicked through the ice-crust, gathered up a handful of snow, and
began to rub it on the Boy's right cheek.

"What in the name of--" The Boy was drawing back angrily.

"Keep still," ordered the priest; "your cheek is frozen"; and he
applied more snow and more friction. "You ought to watch one another in
such weather as this. When a man turns dead-white like that, he's
touched with frost-bite." After he had restored the circulation: "There
now, don't go near the fire, or it will begin to hurt."

"Thank you," said the Boy, a little shame-faced. "It's all right now, I
suppose?"

"I think so," said the priest. "You'll lose the skin, and you may be a
little sore--nothing to speak of," with which he fell back to the
Colonel's side.

The dogs had settled down into a jog-trot now, but were still well on
in front.

"Is 'mush' their food?" asked the Boy.

"_Mush?_ No, fish."

"Why does your Indian go on like that about mush, then?"

"Oh, that's the only word the dogs know, except--a--certain expressions
we try to discourage the Indians from using. In the old days the
dog-drivers used to say 'mahsh.' Now you never hear anything but
swearing and 'mush,' a corruption of the French-Canadian _marche_." He
turned to the Colonel: "You'll get over trying to wear cheechalko boots
here--nothing like mucklucks with a wisp of straw inside for this
country."

"I agree wid ye. I got me a pair in St. Michael's," says O'Flynn
proudly, turning out his enormous feet. "Never wore anything so
comf'table in me life."

"You ought to have drill parkis too, like this of mine, to keep out the
wind."

They were going up the <DW72> now, obliquely to the cabin, close behind
the dogs, who were pulling spasmodically between their little rests.

Father Wills stooped and gathered up some moss that the wind had swept
almost bare of snow. "You see that?" he said to O'Flynn, while the Boy
stopped, and the Colonel hurried on. "Wherever you find that growing no
man need starve."

The Colonel looked back before entering the cabin and saw that the Boy
seemed to have forgotten not alone the Indian, but the dogs, and was
walking behind with the Jesuit, face upturned, smiling, as friendly as
you please.

Within a different picture.

Potts and Mac were having a row about something, and the Colonel struck
in sharply on their growling comments upon each other's character and
probable destination.

"Got plenty to eat? Two hungry men coming in. One's an Indian, and you
know what that means, and the other's a Catholic priest." It was this
bomb that he had hurried on to get exploded and done with before the
said priest should appear on the scene.

"A _what_?" Mac raised his heavy eyes with fight in every wooden
feature.

"A Jesuit priest is what I said."

"He won't eat his dinner here."

"That is exactly what he will do."

"Not by--" Whether it was the monstrous proposition that had unstrung
Mac, he was obliged to steady himself against the table with a shaking
hand. But he set those square features of his like iron, and, says he,
"No Jesuit sits down to the same table with me."

"That means, then, that you'll eat alone."

"Not if I know it."

The Colonel slid in place the heavy wooden bar that had never before
been requisitioned to secure the door, and he came and stood in the
middle of the cabin, where he could let out all his inches. Just
clearing the swing-shelf, he pulled his great figure up to its full
height, and standing there like a second Goliath, he said quite softly
in that lingo of his childhood that always came back to his tongue's
tip in times of excitement: "Just as shuah as yo' bohn that priest will
eat his dinner to-day in my cabin, sah; and if yo' going t' make any
trouble, just say so now, and we'll get it ovah, and the place cleaned
up again befoh our visitors arrive."

"Mind what you're about, Mac," growled Potts. "You know he could lick
the stuffin' out o' you."

The ex-schoolmaster produced some sort of indignant sound in his throat
and turned, as if he meant to go out. The Colonel came a little nearer.
Mac flung up his head and squared for battle.

Potts, in a cold sweat, dropped a lot of tinware with a rattle, while
the Colonel said, "No, no. We'll settle this after the people go, Mac."
Then in a whisper: "Look here: I've been trying to shield you for ten
days. Don't give yourself away now--before the first white neighbour
that comes to see us. You call yourself a Christian. Just see if you
can't behave like one, for an hour or two, to a fellow-creature that's
cold and hungry. Come, _you're_ the man we've always counted on! Do the
honours, and take it out of me after our guests are gone."

Mac seemed in a haze. He sat down heavily on some beanbags in the
corner; and when the newcomers were brought in and introduced, he "did
the honours" by glowering at them with red eyes, never breaking his
surly silence.

"Well!" says Father Wills, looking about, "I must say you're very
comfortable here. If more people made homes like this, there'd be fewer
failures." They gave him the best place by the fire, and Potts dished
up dinner. There were only two stools made yet. The Boy rolled his
section of sawed spruce over near the priest, and prepared to dine at
his side.

"No, no," said Father Wills firmly. "You shall sit as far away from
this splendid blaze as you can get, or you will have trouble with that
cheek." So the Boy had to yield his place to O'Flynn, and join Mac over
on the bean-bags.

"Why didn't you get a parki when you were at St. Michael's?" said the
priest as this change was being effected.

"We had just as much--more than we could carry. Besides, I thought we
could buy furs up river; anyway, I'm warm enough."

"No you are not," returned the priest smiling. "You must get a parki
with a hood."

"I've got an Arctic cap; it rolls down over my ears and goes all round
my neck--just leaves a little place in front for my eyes."

"Yes; wear that if you go on the trail; but the good of the parki hood
is, that it is trimmed all round with long wolf-hair. You see"--he
picked his parki up off the floor and showed it to the company--"those
long hairs standing out all round the face break the force of the wind.
It is wonderful how the Esquimaux hood lessens the chance of
frost-bite."

While the only object in the room that he didn't seem to see was Mac,
he was most taken up with the fireplace.

The Colonel laid great stress on the enormous services of the
delightful, accomplished master-mason over there on the beanbags, who
sat looking more than ever like a monkey-wrench incarnate.

But whether that Jesuit was as wily as the Calvinist thought, he had
quite wit enough to overlook the great chimney-builder's wrathful
silence.

He was not the least "professional," talked about the country and how
to live here, saying incidentally that he had spent twelve years at the
mission of the Holy Cross. The Yukon wasn't a bad place to live in, he
told them, if men only took the trouble to learn how to live here.
While teaching the Indians, there was a great deal to learn from them
as well.

"You must all come and see our schools," he wound up.

"We'd like to awfully," said the Boy, and all but Mac echoed him. "We
were so afraid," he went on, "that we mightn't see anybody all winter
long."

"Oh, you'll have more visitors than you want."

"_Shall_ we, though?" Then, with a modified rapture: "Indians, I
suppose, and--and missionaries."

"Traders, too, and miners, and this year cheechalkos as well. You are
directly on the great highway of winter travel. Now that there's a good
hard crust on the snow you will have dog-trains passing every week, and
sometimes two or three."

It was good news!

"We've already had one visitor before you," said the Boy, looking
wonderfully pleased at the prospect the priest had opened out. "You
must know Nicholas of Pymeut, don't you?"

"Oh yes; we all know Nicholas"; and the priest smiled.

"We _like_ him," returned the Boy as if some slighting criticism had
been passed upon his friend.

"Of course you do; so do we all"; and still that look of quiet
amusement on the worn face and a keener twinkle glinting in the eyes.

"We're afraid he's sick," the Boy began.

Before the priest could answer, "He was educated at Howly Cross, he
_says_," contributed O'Flynn.

"Oh, he's been to Holy Cross, among other places."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, Nicholas is a most impartial person. He was born at Pymeut, but
his father, who is the richest and most intelligent man in his tribe,
took Nicholas to Ikogimeut when the boy was only six. He was brought up
in the Russian mission there, as the father had been before him, and
was a Greek--in religion--till he was fourteen. There was a famine that
year down yonder, so Nicholas turned Catholic and came up to us. He was
at Holy Cross some years, when business called him to Anvik, where he
turned Episcopalian. At Eagle City, I believe, he is regarded as a
pattern Presbyterian. There are those that say, since he has been a
pilot, Nicholas makes six changes a trip in his religious convictions."

Father Wills saw that the Colonel, to whom he most frequently addressed
himself, took his pleasantry gravely. "Nicholas is not a bad fellow,"
he added. "He told me you had been kind to him."

"If you believe that about his insincerity," said the Colonel, "are you
not afraid the others you spend your life teaching may turn out as
little credit to you--to Christianity?"

The priest glanced at the listening Indian. "No," said he gravely; "I
do not think _all_ the natives are like Nicholas. Andrew here is a true
son of the Church. But even if it were otherwise, _we_, you know"--the
Jesuit rose from the table with that calm smile of his--"we simply do
the work without question. The issue is not in our hands." He made the
sign of the cross and set back his stool.

"Come, Andrew," he said; "we must push on."

The Indian repeated the priest's action, and went out to see to the
dogs.

"Oh, are you going right away?" said the Colonel politely, and O'Flynn
volubly protested.

"We thought," said the Boy, "you'd sit awhile and smoke and--at least,
of course, I don't mean smoke exactly--but--"

The Father smiled and shook his head.

"Another time I would stay gladly."

"Where are you going now?"

"Andrew and I are on our way to the _Oklahoma_, the steamship frozen in
the ice below here."

"How far?" asked the Boy.

"About seven miles below the Russian mission, and a mile or so up the
Kuskoquim Slough."

"Wrecked there?"

"Oh no. Gone into winter quarters."

"In a slew?" for it was so Father Wills pronounced s-l-o-u-g-h.

"Oh, that's what they call a blind river up in this country. They come
into the big streams every here and there, and cheechalkos are always
mistaking them for the main channel. Sometimes they're wider and deeper
for a mile or so than the river proper, but before you know it they
land you in a marsh. This place I'm going to, a little way up the
Kuskoquim, out of danger when the ice breaks up, has been chosen for a
new station by the N. A. T. and T. Company--rival, you know, to the
old-established Alaska Commercial, that inherited the Russian fur
monopoly and controlled the seal and salmon trade so long. Well, the
younger company runs the old one hard, and they've sent this steamer
into winter quarters loaded with provisions, ready to start for Dawson
the instant the ice goes out."

"Why, then, it's the very boat that'll be takin' us to the Klondyke."

"You just goin' down to have a look at her?" asked Potts enviously.

"No. I go to get relief for the Pymeuts."

"What's the matter with 'em?"

"Epidemic all summer, starvation now."

"Guess you won't find _any_body's got such a lot he wants to give it
away to the Indians."

"Our Father Superior has given much," said the priest gently; "but we
are not inexhaustible at Holy Cross. And the long winter is before us.
Many of the supply steamers have failed to get in, and the country is
flooded with gold-seekers. There'll be wide-spread want this
year--terrible suffering all up and down the river."

"The more reason for people to hold on to what they've got. A white
man's worth more 'n an Indian."

The priest's face showed no anger, not even coldness.

"White men have got a great deal out of Alaska and as yet done little
but harm here. The government ought to help the natives, and we believe
the Government will. All we ask of the captain of the _Oklahoma_ is to
sell us, on fair terms, a certain supply, we assuming part of the risk,
and both of us looking to the Government to make it good."

"Reckon you'll find that steamer-load down in the ice is worth its
weight in gold," said Potts.

"One must always try," replied the Father.

He left the doorpost, straightened his bowed back, and laid a hand on
the wooden latch.

"But Nicholas--when you left Pymeut was he--" began the Boy.

"Oh, he is all right," the Father smiled and nodded. "Brother Paul has
been looking after Nicholas's father. The old chief has enough food,
but he has been very ill. By the way, have you any letters you want to
send out?"

"Oh, if we'd only known!" was the general chorus; and Potts flew to
close and stamp one he had hardly more than begun to the future Mrs.
Potts.

The Boy had thoughtlessly opened the door to have a look at the dogs.

"Shut that da--Don't keep the door open!" howled Potts, trying to hold
his precious letter down on the table while he added "only two words."
The Boy slammed the door behind him.

"With all our trouble, the cabin isn't really warm," said the Colonel
apologetically. "In a wind like this, if the door is open, we have to
hold fast to things to keep them from running down the Yukon. It's a
trial to anybody's temper."

"Why don't you build a false wall?"

"Well, I don't know; we hadn't thought of it."

"You'd find it correct this draught"; and the priest explained his
views on the subject while Potts's letter was being addressed. Andrew
put his head in.

"Ready, Father!"

As the priest was pocketing the letter the Boy dashed in, put on the
Arctic cap he set such store by, and a fur coat and mittens.

"Do you mind if I go a little way with you?" he said.

"Of course not," answered the priest. "I will send him back in half an
hour," he said low to the Colonel. "It's a hitter day."

It was curious how already he had divined the relation of the elder man
to the youngest of that odd household.

The moment they had gone Mac, with an obvious effort, pulled himself up
out of his corner, and, coming towards the Colonel at the fireplace, he
said thickly:

"You've put an insult upon me, Warren, and that's what I stand from no
man. Come outside."

The Colonel looked at him.

"All right, Mac; but we've just eaten a rousing big dinner. Even
Sullivan wouldn't accept that as the moment for a round. We'll both
have forty winks, hey? and Potts shall call us, and O'Flynn shall be
umpire. You can have the Boy's bunk."

Mac was in a haze again, and allowed himself to be insinuated into bed.

The others got rid of the dinner things, and "sat round" for an hour.

"Doubt if he sleeps long," says Potts a little before two; "that's what
he's been doing all morning."

"We haven't had any fresh meat for a week," returns the Colonel
significantly. "Why don't you and O'Flynn go down to meet the Boy, and
come round by the woods? There'll be full moon up by four o'clock; you
might get a brace of grouse or a rabbit or two."

O'Flynn was not very keen about it; but the Jesuit's visit had stirred
him up, and he offered less opposition to the unusual call to activity
than the Colonel expected.

When at last he was left alone with the sleeping man, the Kentuckian
put on a couple more logs, and sat down to wait. At three he got up,
swung the crane round so that the darting tongues of flame could lick
the hot-water pot, and then he measured out some coffee. In a quarter
of an hour the cabin was full of the fragrance of good Mocha.

The Colonel sat and waited. Presently he poured out a little coffee,
and drank it slowly, blissfully, with half-closed eyes. But when he had
set the granite cup down again, he stood up alert, like a man ready for
business. Mac had been asleep nearly three hours. The others wouldn't
be long now.

Well, if they came prematurely, they must go to the Little Cabin for
awhile. The Colonel shot the bar across door and jamb for the second
time that day. Mac stirred and lifted himself on his elbow, but he
wasn't really awake.

"Potts," he said huskily.

The Colonel made no sound. "Potts, measure me out two fingers, will
you? Cabin's damn cold."

No answer.

Mac roused himself, muttering compliments for Potts. When he had
bundled himself out over the side of the bunk, he saw the Colonel
seemingly dozing by the fire.

He waited a moment. Then, very softly, he made his way to the farther
end of the swing-shelf.

The Colonel opened one eye, shut it, and shuffled in a sleepy sort of
way. Mac turned sharply back to the fire.

The Colonel opened his eyes and yawned.

"I made some cawfee a little while back. Have some?"

"No."

"Better; it's A 1."

"Where's Potts?"

"Gone out for a little. Back soon." He poured out some of the strong,
black decoction, and presented it to his companion. "Just try it.
Finest cawfee in the world, sir."

Mac poured it down without seeming to bother about tasting it.

They sat quite still after that, till the Colonel said meditatively:

"You and I had a little account to settle, didn't we?"

"I'm ready."

But neither moved for several moments.

"See here, Mac: you haven't been ill or anything like that, have you?"

"No." There was no uncertain note in the answer; if anything, there was
in it more than the usual toneless decision. Mac's voice was
machine-made--as innocent of modulation as a buzz-saw, and with the
same uncompromising finality as the shooting of a bolt. "I'm ready to
stand up against any man."

"Good!" interrupted the Colonel. "Glad o' that, for I'm just longing to
see you stand up--"

Mac was on his feet in a flash.

"You had only to say so, if you wanted to see me stand up against any
man alive. And when I sit down again it's my opinion one of us two
won't be good-lookin' any more."

He pushed back the stools.

"I thought maybe it was only necessary to mention it," said the Colonel
slowly. "I've been wanting for a fortnight to see you stand up"--Mac
turned fiercely--"against Samuel David MacCann."

"Come on! I'm in no mood for monkeyin'!"

"Nor I. I realise, MacCann, we've come to a kind of a crisis. Things in
this camp are either going a lot better, or a lot worse, after to-day."

"There's nothing wrong, if you quit asking dirty Jesuits to sit down
with honest men."

"Yes; there's something worse out o' shape than that."

Mac waited warily.

"When we were stranded here, and saw what we'd let ourselves in for,
there wasn't one of us that didn't think things looked pretty much like
the last o' pea time. There was just one circumstance that kept us from
throwing up the sponge; _we had a man in camp."_

The Colonel paused.

Mac stood as expressionless as the wooden crane.

"A man we all believed in, who was going to help us pull through."
"That was you, I s'pose." Mac's hard voice chopped out the sarcasm.

"You know mighty well who it was. The Boy's all right, but he's young
for this kind o' thing--young and heady. There isn't much wrong with me
that I'm aware of, except that I don't know shucks. Potts's petering
out wasn't altogether a surprise, and nobody expected anything from
O'Flynn till we got to Dawson, when a lawyer and a fella with capital
behind him may come in handy. But there was one man--who had a head on
him, who had experience, and who"--he leaned over to emphasise the
climax--"who had _character_. It was on that man's account that I
joined this party."

Mac put his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall. His face
began to look a little more natural. The long sleep or the coffee had
cleared his eyes.

"Shall I tell you what I heard about that man last night?" asked the
Colonel gravely.

Mac looked up, but never opened his lips.

"You remember you wouldn't sit here--"

"The Boy was always in and out. The cabin was cold."

"I left the Boy and O'Flynn at supper-time and went down to the Little
Cabin to--"

"To see what I was doin'--to spy on me."

"Well, all right--maybe I was spying, too. Incidentally I wanted to
tell you the cabin was hot as blazes, and get you to come to supper. I
met Potts hurrying up for his grub, and I said, 'Where's Mac? Isn't he
coming?' and your pardner's answer was: 'Oh, let him alone. He's got a
flask in his bunk, swillin' and gruntin'; he's just in hog-heaven.'"

"Damn that sneak!"

"The man he was talkin' about, Mac, was the man we had all built our
hopes on."

"I'll teach Potts--"

"You can't, Mac. Potts has got to die and go to heaven--perhaps to
hell, before he'll learn any good. But you're a different breed. Teach
MacCann."

Mac suddenly sat down on the stool with his head in his hands.

"The Boy hasn't caught on," said the Colonel presently, "but he said
something this morning to show he was wondering about the change that's
come over you."

"That I don't split wood all day, I suppose, when we've got enough for
a month. Potts doesn't either. Why don't you go for Potts?"

"As the Boy said, I don't care about Potts. It's Mac that matters."

"Did the Boy say that?" He looked up.

The Colonel nodded.

"After you had made that chimney, you know, you were a kind of hero in
his eyes."

Mac looked away. "The cabin's been cold," he muttered.

"We are going to remedy that."

"I didn't bring any liquor into camp. You must admit that I didn't
intend--"

"I do admit it."

"And when O'Flynn said that about keeping his big demijohn out of the
inventory and apart from the common stores, I sat on him."

"So you did."

"I knew it was safest to act on the 'medicinal purposes' principle."

"So it is."

"But I wasn't thinking so much of O'Flynn. I was thinking of ... things
that had happened before ... for ... I'd had experience. Drink was the
curse of Caribou. It's something of a scourge up in Nova Scotia ... I'd
had experience."

"You did the very best thing possible under the circumstances." Mac was
feeling about after his self-respect, and must be helped to get hold of
it. "I realise, too, that the temptation is much greater in cold
countries," said the Kentuckian unblushingly. "Italians and Greeks
don't want fiery drinks half as much as Russians and
Scandinavians--haven't the same craving as Nova Scotians and
cold-country people generally, I suppose. But that only shows,
temperance is of more vital importance in the North."

"That's right! It's not much in my line to shift blame, even when I
don't deserve it; but you know so much you might as well know ... it
wasn't I who opened that demijohn first."

"But you don't mind being the one to shut it up--do you?"

"Shut it up?"

"Yes; let's get it down and--" The Colonel swung it off the shelf. It
was nearly empty, and only the Boy's and the Colonel's single bottles
stood unbroached. Even so, Mac's prolonged spree was something of a
mystery to the Kentuckian. It must be that a very little was too much
for Mac. The Colonel handed the demijohn to his companion, and lit the
solitary candle standing on its little block of wood, held in place
between three half-driven nails.

"What's that for?"

"Don't you want to seal it up?"

"I haven't got any wax."

"I have an inch or so." The Colonel produced out of his pocket the only
piece in camp.

Mac picked up a billet of wood, and drove the cork in flush with the
neck. Then, placing upright on the cork the helve of the hammer, he
drove the cork down a quarter of an inch farther.

"Give me your wax. What's for a seal?" They looked about. Mac's eye
fell on a metal button that hung by a thread from the old militia
jacket he was wearing. He put his hand up to it, paused, glanced
hurriedly at the Colonel, and let his fingers fall.

"Yes, yes," said the Kentuckian, "that'll make a capital seal."

"No; something of yours, I think, Colonel. The top of that tony
pencil-case, hey?"

The Colonel produced his gold pencil, watched Mac heat the wax, drop it
into the neck of the demijohn, and apply the initialled end of the
Colonel's property. While Mac, without any further waste of words, was
swinging the wicker-bound temptation up on the shelf again, they heard
voices.

"They're coming back," says the Kentuckian hurriedly. "But we've
settled our little account, haven't we, old man?"

Mac jerked his head in that automatic fashion that with him meant
genial and whole-hearted agreement.

"And if Potts or O'Flynn want to break that seal--"

"I'll call 'em down," says Mac. And the Colonel knew the seal was safe.

      *       *       *       *       *

"By-the-by, Colonel," said the Boy, just as he was turning in that
night, "I--a--I've asked that Jesuit chap to the House-Warming."

"Oh, you did, did you?"

"Yes."

"Well, you'd just better have a talk with Mac about it."

"Yes. I've been tryin' to think how I'd square Mac. Of course, I know
I'll have to go easy on the raw."

"I reckon you just will."

"If Monkey-wrench screws down hard on me, you'll come to the rescue,
won't you, Colonel?"

"No I'll side with Mac on that subject. Whatever he says, goes!"

"Humph! _that_ Jesuit's all right."

Not a word out of the Colonel.

CHAPTER III

TWO NEW SPISSIMENS

Medwjedew (zu Luka). Tag' mal--wer bist du? Ich
kenne dich nicht.

Luka. Kennst du denn sonst alle Leute?

Medwjedew. In meinem Revier muss ich jeden kennen und dich kenn'ich
nicht....

Luka. Das kommt wohl daher Onkelchen, dass dein Revier nicht die ganze
Erde umfasst ... 's ist da noch ein Endchen draussen geblieben....

One of the curious results of what is called wild life, is a blessed
release from many of the timidities that assail the easy liver in the
centres of civilisation. Potts was the only one in the white camp who
had doubts about the wisdom of having to do with the natives.

However, the agreeable necessity of going to Pymeut to invite Nicholas
to the Blow-out was not forced upon the Boy. They were still hard at
it, four days after the Jesuit had gone his way, surrounding the Big
Cabin with a false wall, that final and effectual barrier against
Boreas--finishing touch warranted to convert a cabin, so cold that it
drove its inmates to drink, into a dwelling where practical people,
without cracking a dreary joke, might fitly celebrate a House-Warming.

In spite of the shortness of the days, Father Wills's suggestion was
being carried out with a gratifying success. Already manifest were the
advantages of the stockade, running at a foot's distance round the
cabin to the height of the eaves, made of spruce saplings not even
lopped of their short bushy branches, but planted close together, after
burning the ground cleared of snow. A second visitation of mild
weather, and a further two days' thaw, made the Colonel determine to
fill in the space between the spruce stockade and the cabin with
"burnt-out" soil closely packed down and well tramped in. It was
generally conceded, as the winter wore on, that to this contrivance of
the "earthwork" belonged a good half of the credit of the Big Cabin,
and its renown as being the warmest spot on the lower river that
terrible memorable year of the Klondyke Rush.

The evergreen wall with the big stone chimney shouldering itself up to
look out upon the frozen highway, became a conspicuous feature in the
landscape, welcome as the weeks went on to many an eye wearied with
long looking for shelter, and blinded by the snow-whitened waste.

An exception to what became a rule was, of all men, Nicholas. When the
stockade was half done, the Prince and an equerry appeared on the
horizon, with the second team the camp had seen, the driver much
concerned to steer clear of the softened snow and keep to that part of
the river ice windswept and firm, if roughest of all. Nicholas regarded
the stockade with a cold and beady eye.

No, he hadn't time to look at it. He had promised to "mush." He wasn't
even hungry.

It did little credit to his heart, but he seemed more in haste to leave
his new friends than the least friendly of them would have expected.

"Oh, wait a sec.," urged the deeply disappointed Boy. "I wanted awf'ly
to see how your sled is made. It's better 'n Father Wills'."

"Humph!" grunted Nicholas scornfully; "him no got Innuit sled."

"Mac and I are goin' to try soon's the stockade's done--"

"Goo'-bye," interrupted Nicholas.

But the Boy paid no attention to the word of farewell. He knelt down in
the snow and examined the sled carefully.

"Spruce runners," he called out to Mac, "and--jee! they're shod with
ivory! _Jee!_ fastened with sinew and wooden pegs. Hey?"--looking up
incredulously at Nicholas--"not a nail in the whole shebang, eh?"

"Nail?" says Nicholas. "Huh, no _nail!_" as contemptuously as though
the Boy had said "bread-crumbs."

"Well, she's a daisy! When you comin' back?"

"Comin' pretty quick; goin' pretty quick. Goo'-bye! _Mush!_" shouted
Nicholas to his companion, and the dogs got up off their haunches.

But the Boy only laughed at Nicholas's struggles to get started. He
hung on to the loaded sled, examining, praising, while the dogs, after
the merest affectation of trying to make a start, looked round at him
over their loose collars and grinned contentedly.

"Me got to mush. Show nex' time. Mush!"

"What's here?" the Boy shouted through the "mushing"; and he tugged at
the goodly load, so neatly disposed under an old reindeer-skin
sleeping-bag, and lashed down with raw hide.

That? Oh, that was fish. _"Fish!_ Got so much fish at starving Pymeut
you can go hauling it down river? Well, sir, _we_ want fish. We _must_
have fish. Hey?" The Boy appealed to the others.

"Yes."

"R-right y'arre!"

"I reckon we just do!"

But Nicholas had other views.

"No, me take him--" He hitched his body in the direction of Ikogimeut.

"Bless my soul! you've got enough there for a regiment. You goin' to
sell him? Hey?"

Nicholas shook his head.

"Oh, come off the roof!" advised the Boy genially.

"You ain't carryin' it about for your health, I suppose?" said Potts.

"The people down at Ikogimeut don't need it like us. We're white
duffers, and can't get fish through the ice. You sell _some_ of it to
us." But Nicholas shook his head and shuffled along on his snow-shoes,
beckoning the dog-driver to follow.

"Or trade some fur--fur tay," suggested O'Flynn.

"Or for sugar," said Mac.

"Or for tobacco," tempted the Colonel.

And before that last word Nicholas's resolve went down. Up at the cabin
he unlashed the load, and it quickly became manifest that Nicholas was
a dandy at driving a bargain. He kept on saying shamelessly:

"More--more shuhg. Hey? Oh yes, me give heap fish. No nuff shuhg."

If it hadn't been for Mac (his own clear-headed self again, and by no
means to be humbugged by any Prince alive) the purchase of a portion of
that load of frozen fish, corded up like so much wood, would have laid
waste the commissariat.

But if the white men after this passage did not feel an absolute
confidence in Nicholas's fairness of mind, no such unworthy suspicion
of them found lodgment in the bosom of the Prince. With the exception
of some tobacco, he left all his ill-gotten store to be kept for him by
his new friends till he should return. When was that to be? In five
sleeps he would be back.

"Good! We'll have the stockade done by then. What do you say to our big
chimney, Nicholas?"

He emitted a scornful "Peeluck!"

"What! Our chimney no good?"

He shrugged: "Why you have so tall hole your house? How you cover him
up?"

"We don't want to cover him up."

"Humph! winter fin' you tall hole. Winter come down--bring in
snow--drive fire out." He shivered in anticipation of what was to
happen. "Peeluck!"

The white men laughed.

"What you up to now? Where you going?"

Well, the fact was, Nicholas had been sent by his great ally, the
Father Superior of Holy Cross, on a mission, very important, demanding
despatch.

"Father Brachet--him know him heap better send Nicholas when him want
man go God-damn quick. Me no stop--no--no stop."

He drew on his mittens proudly, unjarred by remembrance of how his good
resolution had come to grief.

"Where you off to now?"

"Me ketchum Father Wills--me give letter." He tapped his
deerskin-covered chest. "Ketchum _sure_ 'fore him leave Ikogimeut."

"You come back with Father Wills?"

Nicholas nodded.

"Hooray! we'll all work like sixty!" shouted the Boy, "and by Saturday
(that's five sleeps) we'll have the wall done and the house warm, and
you and"--he caught himself up; not thus in public would he break the
news to Mac--"you'll be back in time for the big Blow-Out." To clinch
matters, he accompanied Nicholas from the cabin to the river trail,
explaining: "You savvy? Big feast--all same Indian. Heap good grub. No
prayer-meetin'--you savvy?--no church this time. Big fire, big feed.
All kinds--apples, shuhg, bacon--no cook him, you no like," he added,
basely truckling to the Prince's peculiar taste.

Nicholas rolled his single eye in joyful anticipation, and promised
faithfully to grace the scene.

      *       *       *       *       *

This was all very fine ... but Father Wills! The last thing at night
and the first thing in the morning the Boy looked the problem in the
face, and devised now this, now that, adroit and disarming fashion of
breaking the news to Mac.

But it was only when the daring giver of invitations was safely in bed,
and Mac equally safe down in the Little Cabin, that it seemed possible
to broach the subject. He devised scenes in which, airily and
triumphantly, he introduced Father Wills, and brought Mac to the point
of pining for Jesuit society; but these scenes were actable only under
conditions of darkness and of solitude. The Colonel refused to have
anything to do with the matter.

"Our first business, as I see it, is to keep peace in the camp, and
hold fast to a good understanding with one another. It's just over
little things like this that trouble begins. Mac's one of us; Father
Wills is an outsider. I won't rile Mac for the sake of any Jesuit
alive. No, sir; this is _your_ funeral, and you're obliged to attend."

Before three of Nicholas's five sleeps were accomplished, the Boy began
to curse the hour he had laid eyes on Father Wills. He began even to
speculate desperately on the good priest's chances of tumbling into an
air-hole, or being devoured by a timely wolf. But no, life was never so
considerate as that. Yet he could neither face being the cause of the
first serious row in camp, nor endure the thought of having his
particular guest--drat him!--flouted, and the whole House-Warming
turned to failure and humiliation.

Indeed, the case looked desperate. Only one day more now before he
would appear--be flouted, insulted, and go off wounded, angry, leaving
the Boy with an irreconciliable quarrel against Mac, and the
House-Warming turned to chill recrimination and to wretchedness.

But until the last phantasmal hope went down before the logic of events
it was impossible not to cling to the idea of melting Mac's Arctic
heart. There was still one course untried.

Since there was so little left to do to the stockade, the Boy announced
that he thought he'd go up over the hill for a tramp. Gun in hand and
grub in pocket, he marched off to play his last trump-card. If he could
bring home a queer enough bird or beast for the collection, there was
still hope. To what lengths might Mac not go if one dangled before him
the priceless bait of a golden-tipped emperor goose, dressed in
imperial robes of rose-flecked snow? Or who, knowing Mac, would not
trust a _Xema Sabinii_ to play the part of a white-winged angel of
peace? Failing some such heavenly messenger, there was nothing for it
but that the Boy should face the ignominy of going forth to meet the
Father on the morrow, and confess the humiliating truth. It wasn't fair
to let him come expecting hospitality, and find--. Visions arose of Mac
receiving the bent and wayworn missionary with the greeting: "There is
no corner by the fire, no place in the camp for a pander to the Scarlet
Woman." The thought lent impassioned fervour to the quest for goose or
gull.

It was pretty late when he got back to camp, and the men were at
supper. No, he hadn't shot anything.

"What's that bulging in your pocket?"

"Sort o' stone."

"Struck it rich?"

"Don't give me any chin-music, boys; give me tea. I'm dog-tired."

But when Mac got up first, as usual, to go down to the Little Cabin to
"wood up" for the night, "I'll walk down with you," says the Boy,
though it was plain he was dead-beat.

He helped to revive the failing fire, and then, dropping on the section
of sawed wood that did duty for a chair, with some difficulty and a
deal of tugging he pulled "the sort o' stone" out of the pocket of his
duck shooting-jacket.

"See that?" He held the thing tightly clasped in his two red, chapped
hands.

Mac bent down, shading his eyes from the faint flame flicker.

"What is it?" "Piece o' tooth."

"By the Lord Harry! so it is." He took the thing nearer the faint
light. "Fossil! Where'd you get it?"

"Over yonder--by a little frozen river."

"How far? Any more? Only this?"

The Boy didn't answer. He went outside, and returned instantly, lugging
in something brown and whitish, weather-stained, unwieldy.

"I dropped this at the door as I came along home. Thought it might do
for the collection."

Mac stared with all his eyes, and hurriedly lit a candle. The Boy
dropped exhausted on a ragged bit of burlap by the bunks. Mac knelt
down opposite, pouring liberal libation of candle-grease on the
uncouth, bony mass between them.

"Part of the skull!" he rasped out, masking his ecstasy as well as he
could.

"Mastodon?" inquired the Boy.

Mac shook his head.

"I'll bet my boots," says Mac, "it's an _Elephas primigenius;_ and if
I'm right, it's 'a find,' young man. Where'd you stumble on him?"

"Over yonder." The Boy leaned his head against the lower bunk.

"Where?" "Across the divide. The bones have been dragged up on to some
rocks. I saw the end of a tusk stickin' up out of the snow, and I
scratched down till I found--" He indicated the trophy between them on
the floor.

"Tusk? How long?"

"'Bout nine feet." "We'll go and get it to-morrow."

No answer from the Boy.

"Early, hey?"

"Well--a--it's a good ways."

"What if it is?"

"Oh, I don't mind. I'd do more 'n that for you, Mac."

There was something unnatural in such devotion. Mac looked up. But the
Boy was too tired to play the big fish any longer. "I wonder if you'll
do something for me." He watched with a sinking heart Mac's sharp
uprising from the worshipful attitude. It was not like any other
mortal's gradual, many-jointed getting-up; it was more like the sudden
springing out of the big blade of a clasp-knife.

"What's your game?"

"Oh, I ain't got any game," said the Boy desperately; "or, if I have,
there's mighty little fun in it. However, I don't know as I want to
walk ten hours again in this kind o' weather with an elephant on my
back just for--for the poetry o' the thing." He laid his chapped hands
on the side board of the bunk and pulled himself up on his legs.

"What's your game?" repeated Mac sternly, as the Boy reached the door.

"What's the good o' talkin'?" he answered; but he paused, turned, and
leaned heavily against the rude lintel.

"Course, I know you'd be shot before you'd do it, but what I'd _like_,
would be to hear you say you wouldn't kick up a hell of a row if Father
Wills happens in to the House-Warmin'."

Mac jerked his set face, fire-reddened, towards the fossil-finder; and
he, without waiting for more, simply opened the door, and heavily
footed it back to the Big Cabin.

      *       *       *       *       *

Next morning when Mac came to breakfast he heard that the Boy had had
his grub half an hour before the usual time, and was gone off on some
tramp again. Mac sat and mused.

O'Flynn came in with a dripping bucket, and sat down to breakfast
shivering.

"Which way'd he go?"

"The Boy? Down river."

"Sure he didn't go over the divide?"

O'Flynn was sure. He'd just been down to the water-hole, and in the
faint light he'd seen the Boy far down on the river-trail "leppin" like
a hare in the direction of the Roosian mission."

"Goin' to meet ... a ... Nicholas?"

"Reckon so," said the Colonel, a bit ruffled. "Don't believe he'll run
like a hare very far with his feet all blistered."

"Did you know he'd discovered a fossil elephant?"

"No."

"Well, he has. I must light out, too, and have a look at it."

"Do; it'll be a cheerful sort of House-Warming with one of you off
scouring the country for more blisters and chilblains, and another
huntin' antediluvian elephants." The Colonel spoke with uncommon
irascibility. The great feast-day had certainly not dawned
propitiously.

When breakfast was done Mac left the Big Cabin without a word; but,
instead of going over the divide across the treeless snow-waste to the
little frozen river, where, turned up to the pale northern dawn, were
lying the bones of a beast that had trampled tropic forests, in that
other dawn of the Prime, the naturalist, turning his back on _Elephas
primigenius,_ followed in the track of the Boy down the great river
towards Ikogimeut.

      *       *       *       *       *

On the low left bank of the Yukon a little camp. On one side, a big
rock hooded with snow. At right angles, drawn up one on top of the
other, two sleds covered with reindeer-skins held down by stones. In
the corner formed by the angle of rocks and sleds, a small A-tent, very
stained and old. Burning before it on a hearth of greenwood, a little
fire struggling with a veering wind.

Mac had seen from far off the faint blue banners of smoke blowing now
right, now left, then tossed aloft in the pallid sunshine. He looked
about sharply for the Boy, as he had been doing this two hours. There
was the Jesuit bending over the fire, bettering the precarious position
of a saucepan that insisted on sitting lop-sided, looking down into the
heart of coals. Nicholas was holding up the tent-flap.

"Hello! How do!" he sang out, recognising Mac. The priest glanced up
and nodded pleasantly. Two Indians, squatting on the other side of the
fire, scrambled away as the shifting wind brought a cloud of stifling
smoke into their faces. "Where's the Boy?" demanded Mac, arresting the
stampede.

Nicholas's dog-driver stared, winked, and wiped his weeping,
smoke-reddened eyes.

"Is he in there?" Mac looked towards the tent.

Andrew nodded between coughs.

"What's he doing in there? Call him out," ordered Mac.

"He no walk."

Mac's hard face took on a look of cast-iron tragedy.

The wind, veering round again, had brought the last words to the priest
on the other side of the fire.

"Oh, it'll be all right by-and-by," he said cheerfully.

"But knocking up like that just for blisters?"

"Blisters? No; cold and general weakness. That's why we delayed--"

Without waiting to hear more Mac strode over to the tent, and as he
went in, Nicholas came out. No sign of the Boy--nobody, nothing. What?
Down in the corner a small, yellow face lying in a nest of fur. Bright,
dark eyes stared roundly, and as Mac glowered astonished at the
apparition, a mouth full of gleaming teeth opened, smiling, to say in a
very small voice:

"Farva!"

Astonished as Mac was, disappointed and relieved all at once, there was
something arresting in the appeal.

"I'm not your father," he said stiffly. "Who're you? Hey? You speak
English?"

The child stared at him fixedly, but suddenly, for no reason on earth,
it smiled again. Mac stood looking down at it, seeming lost in thought.
Presently the small object stirred, struggled about feebly under the
encompassing furs, and, freeing itself, held out its arms. The mites of
hands fluttered at his sleeve and made ineffectual clutches.

"What do you want?" To his own vast astonishment Mac lifted the little
thing out of its warm nest. It was woefully thin, and seemed, even to
his inexperience, to be insufficiently clothed, though the beaded
moccasins on its tiny feet were new and good.

"Why, you're only about as big as a minute," he said gruffly. "What's
the matter--sick?" It suddenly struck him as very extraordinary that he
should have taken up the child, and how extremely embarrassing it would
be if anyone came in and caught him. Clutching the small morsel
awkwardly, he fumbled with the furs preparatory to getting rid, without
delay, of the unusual burden. While he was straightening the things,
Father Wills appeared at the flap, smoking saucepan in hand. The
instant the cold air struck the child it began to cough.

"Oh, you mustn't do that!" said the priest to Mac with unexpected
severity. "Kaviak must lie in bed and keep warm." Down on the floor
went the saucepan. The child was caught away from the surprised Mac,
and the furs so closely gathered round the small shrunken body that
there was once more nothing visible but the wistful yellow face and
gleaming eyes, still turned searchingly on its most recent
acquaintance.

But the priest, without so much as a glance at the new-comer, proceeded
to feed Kaviak out of the saucepan, blowing vigorously at each spoonful
before administering.

"He's pretty hungry," commented Mac. "Where'd you find him?"

"In a little village up on the Kuskoquim. Kaviak's an Esquimaux from
Norton Sound, aren't you, Kaviak?" But the child was wholly absorbed,
it seemed, in swallowing and staring at Mac. "His family came up there
from the coast in a bidarra only last summer--all dead now. Everybody
else in the village--and there isn't but a handful--all ailing and all
hungry. I was tramping across an igloo there a couple of days ago, and
I heard a strange little muffled sound, more like a snared rabbit than
anything else. But the Indian with me said no, everybody who had lived
there was dead, and he was for hurrying on. They're superstitious, you
know, about a place where people have died. But I crawled in, and found
this little thing lying in a bundle of rags with its hands bound and
dried grass stuffed in its mouth. It was too weak to stir or do more
than occasionally to make that muffled noise that I'd heard coming up
through the smoke-hole."

"What you goin' to do with him?"

"Well, I hardly know. The Sisters will look after him for a while, if I
get him there alive."

"Why shouldn't you?"

Kaviak supplied the answer straightway by choking and falling into an
appalling fit of coughing.

"I've got some stuff that'll be good for that," said Mac, thinking of
his medicine-chest. "I'll give you some when we get back to camp."

The priest nodded, taking Mac's unheard of civility as a matter of
course.

"The ice is very rough; the jolting makes him cough awfully."

The Jesuit had fastened his eyes on Mac's woollen muffler, which had
been loosened during the ministering to Kaviak and had dropped on the
ground. "Do you need that scarf?" he asked, as though he suspected Mac
of wearing it for show. "Because if you didn't you could wrap it round
Kaviak while I help the men strike camp." And without waiting to see
how his suggestion was received, he caught up the saucepan, lifted the
flap, and vanished.

"Farva," remarked Kaviak, fixing melancholy eyes on Mac.

"I ain't your father," muttered the gentleman so addressed. He picked
up his scarf and hung it round his own neck.

"Farva!" insisted Kaviak. They looked at each other.

"You cold? That it, hey?" Mac knelt down and pulled away the furs. "God
bless me! you only got this one rag on? God bless me!" He pulled off
his muffler and wound the child in it mummy-wise, round and round,
muttering the while in a surly way. When it was half done he
stopped--thought profoundly with a furrow cutting deep into his square
forehead between the straight brows. Slowly he pulled his gloves out of
his pocket, and turned out from each beaver gauntlet an inner mitten of
knitted wool. "Here," he said, and put both little moccasined feet into
one of the capacious mittens. Much pleased with his ingenuity, he went
on winding the long scarf until the yellow little Esquimaux bore a
certain whimsical resemblance to one of the adorable Delia Robbia
infants. But Mac's sinewy hands were exerting a greater pressure than
he realized. The morsel made a remonstrant squeaking, and squirmed
feebly.

"Oh, oh! Too tight? Beg your pardon," said Mac hastily, as though not
only English, but punctilious manners were understanded of Kaviak. He
relaxed the woollen bandage till the morsel lay contented again within
its folds.

Nicholas came in for Kaviak, and for the furs, that he might pack them
both in the Father's sled. Already the true son of the Church was
undoing the ropes that lashed firm the canvas of the tent.

"Where's the Boy?" said Mac suddenly. "The young fellow that's with us.
You know, the one that found you that first Sunday and brought you to
camp. Where is he?"

Nicholas paused an instant with Kaviak on his shoulder.

"Kaiomi--no savvy."

"You not seen him to-day?"

"No. He no up--?" With the swaddled child he made a gesture up the
river towards the white camp.

"No, he came down this morning to meet you."

Nicholas shook his head, and went on gathering up the furs. As he and
Mac came out, Andrew was undoing the last fastening that held the
canvas to the stakes. In ten minutes they were on the trail, Andrew
leading, with Father Wills' dogs, Kaviak lying in the sled muffled to
the eyes, still looking round out of the corners--no, strangely enough,
the Kaviak eye had no corners, but fixedly he stared sideways at Mac.
"Farva," seeming not to take the smallest notice, trudged along on one
side of him, the priest on the other, and behind came Nicholas and the
other Indians with the second sled. It was too windy to talk much even
had they been inclined.

The only sounds were the _Mush! Mush!_ of the drivers, the grate and
swish of the runners over the ice, and Kaviak's coughing.

Mac turned once and frowned at him. It was curious that the child
seemed not to mind these menacing looks, not in the smallest degree.

By-and-by the order of march was disturbed.

Kaviak's right runner, catching at some obstacle, swerved and sent the
sled bumping along on its side, the small head of the passenger
narrowly escaping the ice. Mac caught hold of the single-tree and
brought the racing dogs to an abrupt halt. The priest and he righted
the sled, and Mac straddling it, tucked in a loosened end of fur. When
all was again in running order, Mac was on the same side as Father
Wills. He still wore that look of dour ill-temper, and especially did
he glower at the unfortunate Kaviak, seized with a fresh fit of
coughing that filled the round eyes with tears.

"Don't you get kind o' tired listenin' to that noise? Suppose I was to
carry--just for a bit--. This is the roughest place on the trail. Hi!
Stop!" he called to Andrew. The priest had said nothing; but divining
what Mac would be at, he helped him to undo the raw-hide lashing, and
when Kaviak was withdrawn he wrapped one of the lighter fur things
round him.

It was only when Mac had marched off, glowering still, and sternly
refusing to meet Kaviak's tearful but grateful eyes--it was only then,
bending over the sled and making fast the furs, that Father Wills, all
to himself, smiled a little.

It wasn't until they were in sight of the smoke from the Little Cabin
that Mac slackened his pace. He had never for a moment found the trail
so smooth that he could return his burden to the sled. Now, however, he
allowed Nicholas and the priest to catch up with him.

"You carry him the rest of the way," he commanded, and set his burden
in Nicholas's arms. Kaviak was ill-pleased, but Mac, falling behind
with the priest, stalked on with eyes upon the ground.

"I've got a boy of my own," he jerked out presently, with the air of a
man who accounts confidentially for some weakness.

"Really!" returned the priest; "they didn't tell me."

"I haven't told them yet."

"Oh, all right."

"Why is he called that heathen name?"

"Kaviak? Oh, it's the name of his tribe. His people belong to that
branch of the Innuits known as Kaviaks."

"Humph! Then he's only Kaviak as I'm MacCann. I suppose you've
christened him?"

"Well, not yet--no. What shall we call him? What's your boy's name?"
"Robert Bruce." They went on in silence till Mac said, "It's on account
of my boy I came up here."

"Oh!"

"It didn't use to matter if a man _was_ poor and self-taught, but in
these days of competition it's different. A boy must have chances if
he's going to fight the battle on equal terms. Of course, some boys
ain't worth botherin' about. But my boy--well, he seems to have
something in him."

The priest listened silently, but with that look of brotherliness on
his face that made it so easy to talk to him.

"It doesn't really matter to those other fellows." Mac jerked his hand
towards the camp. "It's never so important to men--who stand alone--but
I've _got_ to strike it rich over yonder." He lifted his head, and
frowned defiantly in the general direction of the Klondyke, thirteen
hundred miles away. "It's my one chance," he added half to himself. "It
means everything to Bob and me. Education, scientific education, costs
like thunder."

"In the United States?"

"Oh, I mean to send my boy to the old country. I want Bob to be
thorough."

The priest smiled, but almost imperceptibly.

"How old is he?"

"Oh, 'bout as old as this youngster." Mac spoke with calculated
indifference.

"Six or thereabouts?"

"No; four and a half. But he's bigger--"

"Of course."

"And you can see already--he's got a lot in him."

Father Wills nodded with a conviction that brought Mac nearer
confession than he had ever been in his life.

"You see," he said quite low, and as if the words were dragged out with
pincers, "the fact is--my married life--didn't pan out very well. And
I--ran away from home as a little chap--after a lickin'--and never went
back. But there's one thing I mean to make a success of--that's my
boy."

"Well, I believe you will, if you feel like that."

"Why, they've gone clean past the camp trail," said Mac sharply, "all
but Nicholas--and what in thunder?--he's put the kid back on the
sled--"

"Yes, I told my men we'd be getting on. But they were told to leave you
the venison--"

"What! You goin' straight on? Nonsense!" Mac interrupted, and began to
shout to the Indians.

"No; I _meant_ to stop; just tell your friends so," said the
unsuspecting Father; "but with a sick child--"

"What can you do for him that we can't? And to break the journey may
make a big difference. We've got some condensed milk left--and--"

"Ah yes, but we are more accustomed to--it's hardly fair to burden a
neighbour. No, we'll be getting on."

"If those fellers up there make a row about your bringing in a
youngster"--he thrust out his jaw--"they can settle the account with
me. I've got to do something for that cough before the kid goes on."

"Well," said the priest; and so wily are these Jesuits that he never
once mentioned that he was himself a qualified doctor in full and
regular practice. He kept his eyes on the finished stockade and the
great chimney, wearing majestically its floating plume of smoke.

"Hi!" Mac called between his hands to the Indians, who had gone some
distance ahead. "Hi!" He motioned them back up the hill trail.

O'Flynn had come out of the Little Cabin, and seemed to be laboriously
trundling something along the footpath. He got so excited when he heard
the noise and saw the party that, inadvertently, he let his burden
slide down the icy <DW72>, bumping and bouncing clumsily from one
impediment to another.

"Faith, look at 'im! Sure, that fossle can't resthrain his j'y at
seein' ye back. Mac, it's yer elephunt. I was takin' him in to the sate
of honour be the foir. We thought it 'ud be a pleasant surprise fur ye.
Sure, ye'r more surprised to see 'im leppin' down the hill to meet ye,
like a rale Irish tarrier."

Mac was angry, and didn't conceal the fact. As he ran to stop the thing
before it should be dashed to pieces, the priest happened to glance
back, and saw coming slowly along the river trail a solitary figure
that seemed to make its way with difficulty.

"It looks as though you'd have more than you bargained for at the
House-Warming," he said.

O'Flynn came down the hill babbling like a brook.

"Good-day to ye, Father. The blessin's o' Heaven on ye fur not kapin'
us starvin' anny longer. There's Potts been swearin', be this and be
that, that yourself and the little divvle wudn't be at the Blow-Out at
ahl, at ahl."

"You mean the Boy hasn't come back?" called out Mac. He leaned _Elephas
primigenius_ against a tuft of willow banked round with snow, and
turned gloomily as if to go back down the river again.

"Who's this?" They all stood and watched the limping traveller.

"Why it's--of course. I didn't know him with that thing tied over his
cap"; and Mac went to meet him.

The Boy bettered his pace.

"How did I miss you?" demanded Mac.

"Well," said the Boy, looking rather mischievous, "I can't think how it
happened on the way down, unless you passed when I 'd gone uphill a
piece after some tracks. I was lyin' under the Muff a few miles down
when you came back, and you--well, I kind o' thought you seemed to have
your hands full." Mac looked rigid and don't-you-try-to-chaff-me-sir.
"Besides," the Boy went on, "I couldn't cover the ground like you and
Father Wills."

"What's the matter with you?"

"Oh, nothin' to howl about. But see here, Mac."

"Well?"

"Soon's I can walk I'll go and get you the rest o' that elephant."

There was no more said till they got up to the others, who had waited
for the Indians to come back, and had unpacked Kaviak to spare him the
jolting uphill.

O'Flynn was screaming with excitement as he saw that the bundle
Nicholas was carrying had a head and two round eyes.

"The saints in glory be among us! What's that? Man alive, what _is_ it,
be the Siven?"

"That," answered Mac with a proprietary air, "is a little Esquimaux
boy, and I'm bringing him in to doctor his cold."

"Glory be! An Esquimer! And wid a cowld! Sure, he can have some o' my
linnyeemint. Well, y'arre a boss collector, Mac! Faith, ye bang the
Jews! And me thinkin' ye'd be satisfied wid yer elephunt. Not him, be
the Siven! It's an Esquimer he must have to finish off his collection,
wan wid the rale Arctic cowld in his head, and two eyes that goes
snappin' through ye like black torpeders. Two spissimens in wan day!
Yer growin' exthravagant, Mac. Why, musha, child, if I don't think yer
the dandy Spissimen o' the lot!"

CHAPTER IV

THE BLOW-OUT

"How good it is to invite men to the pleasant feast."

Comfortable as rock fireplace and stockade made the cabin now, the
Colonel had been feeling all that morning that the official
House-Warming was fore-doomed to failure. Nevertheless, as he was cook
that week, he could not bring himself to treat altogether lightly his
office of Master of the Feast. There would probably be no guests. Even
their own little company would likely be incomplete, but t here was to
be a spread that afternoon, "anyways."

Even had the Colonel needed any keeping up to the mark, the office
would have been cheerfully undertaken by O'Flynn or by Potts, for whom
interest in the gustatory aspect of the occasion was wholly undimmed by
the threatened absence of Mac and the "little divvle."

"There'll be the more for us," said Potts enthusiastically.

O'Flynn's argument seemed to halt upon a reservation. He looked over
the various contributions to the feast, set out on a board in front of
the water-bucket, and, "It's mate I'm wishin' fur," says he.

"We've got fish."

"That's only mate on Fridays. We've had fish fur five days stiddy, an'
befure that, bacon three times a day wid sivin days to the week, an'
not enough bacon ayther, begob, whin all's said and done! Not enough to
be fillin', and plenty to give us the scurrvy. May the divil dance on
shorrt rations!"

"No scurvy in this camp for a while yet," said the Colonel, throwing
some heavy objects into a pan and washing them vigorously round and
round.

"Pitaties!" O'Flynn's eyes dwelt lovingly on the rare food. "Ye've
hoarded 'em too long, man, they've sprouted."

"That won't prevent you hoggin' more'n your share, I'll bet," said
Potts pleasantly.

"I don't somehow like wasting the sprouts," observed the Colonel
anxiously. "It's such a wonderful sight--something growing." He had cut
one pallid slip, and held it tenderly between knife and thumb.

"Waste 'em with scurvy staring us in the face? Should think not. Mix
'em with cold potaters in a salad."

"No. Make slumgullion," commanded O'Flynn.

"What's that?" quoth the Colonel.

"Be the Siven! I only wonder I didn't think of it befure. Arre ye
listening, Kentucky? Ye take lots o' wathur, an' if ye want it rich, ye
take the wathur ye've boiled pitaties or cabbage in--a vegetable stock,
ye mind--and ye add a little flour, salt, and pepper, an' a tomater if
ye're in New York or 'Frisco, and ye boil all that together with a few
fish-bones or bacon-rin's to make it rale tasty."

"Yes--well?"

"Well, an' that's slumgullion."

"Don't sound heady enough for a 'Blow-Out,'" said the Colonel. "We'll
sober up on slumgullion to-morrow."

"Anyhow, it's mate I'm wishin' fur," sighed O'Flynn, subsiding among
the tin-ware. "What's the good o' the little divvle and his thramps, if
he can't bring home a burrud, or so much as the scut iv a rabbit furr
the soup?"

"Well, he's contributed a bottle of California apricots, and we'll have
boiled rice."

"An' punch, glory be!"

"Y-yes," answered the Colonel. "I've been thinkin' a good deal about
the punch."

"So's myself," said O'Flynn frankly; but Potts looked at the Colonel
suspiciously through narrowed eyes.

"There's very little whiskey left, and I propose to brew a mild bowl--"

"To hell

Question: Summarize the above passage in exactly 500 words and give a brief outlook on it.