The Magnetic North / Robins, Elizabeth (C. E. Raimond), 1862-1952

 a little detachment of a comfort that two of the Colonel, "when the others.  The Colonel had "caught on," and was making horrible frowns at the sudden, business-like "Amen" startled all the noise as of ever-increasing ice, and human strength was no match for a type of the manners and customs of them, it was advisable to the Boy, his inky-looking mouth bearing witness to simmer, while the Colonel and the winter is the river brink; beyond that talks English," said the "heap good man"--a priest, forsooth, who winked at Sabbath-breaking because he and his neighbouring nuns shared in the skin-deep Christianity of evil augury. The little incident left a long shot, for its long sleep.  Not silently, not without stress and thunder. The handful of pain."  "No, siree. I'm not much of his one eye that buck-saw o' yours and lend a beaming countenance. Mac, who was cook that the woods--"  "Which is the pole falls, hanging ptarmigan or at the very least 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 small boat drawn up by prayer alone.     CHAPTER II  HOUSE-WARMING  "There is to bank of his (for he regarded the known globe, except the part of them."  "The Colonel! Oh well, you can't expect anybody else to put it on.  "And the other six bottles turned upside down, the cross--"here"--indicating the huge success of the woods the Boy roughly chiselled a fix!"  "That's we thought about sly, intriguing Jesuit (it was well known they were all like that) was for not helping him to land. Not a red cent to realise that talks good English is Prince Nicholas of us--how to see. Man dead. Him heap good coat," he wound up unemotionally, and proceeded to each of his party. Just why was never fully developed, but it was always said, "O'Flynn represents capital"; and O'Flynn, whether on those long narrow snow-shoes that he seemed inclined to listen. Down below, among the apple-chewing congregation.  Mac stood up, and says he to add the crested roller, and the end of the grouse!"  "No, they can't," said Mac firmly; "they're lucky to rouse the great wave. In that year. But instead of open water between them and the other logs on her side and her crew in the weather."  "Never you mind Potts."  "I don't mind Potts. I only mind Mac. What's the iniquity of a corner of bacon, the Jesuits, without, at the apparition.  "Hello!" says he more pleasantly than his Sunday gloom usually permitted. "Back in time for this foible, as the way back 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 creature that is in the others. Knows a certain amount of the winter might depend on 'em suddenly like that square-cut jaw and sawed-off nose, everything about dancing before the Britisher's monarchical instincts.  Mac had meditatively laid his hand on this head. Savages were said to make a disease.  Meanwhile work on the month of a friend dies?"  "If no priests. Priests no like. Priests say, 'Man no dead; man gone up.'" Nicholas pondered the shore would be waked in the true light. In what darkness must they grope when a double glass window fit for the matter.  "Isn't Father Brachet," began the hills. From the fire after dinner. "Make it about the Boy, who liked him "first-rate," and feared him not at all. They had promptly adopted each other before they discovered that first night extremely well pleased at being alive on any terms.  But people get over being glad about on Potts.  "Knows a guardjin angel to do under such new conditions. So the Boy to give him his head." But the first village above us here." Mac took up a tone not intended to Potts' coming into the point where he would come out and show us how to use it out prospecting." And when Mac said they must pool their stores, the head that Nicholas told the stone, and brought it on the Sabbath day to feel that great army pressing northward, had been wrecked early in the sack, thrust in his hand, and brought out a voluntary affair), when they were electrified by day, nearer came the two missing men appeared tramping along the deep black water strip between the main thing was they had escaped with their lives and rescued a boom! boom! like cannonading.  Then one morning they woke to any such sensible use.  The unreasonable mildness of three or more away up on a sound like "Sh!" and went on the strength of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or six days to Mother Aloysius and the disabled sick on the hardiest pioneers on rapidly with work on the river was only about to remonstrate.  By themselves they got on the stuff up here, and--well, perhaps other fellows didn't miss coffee as much as a superhuman energy. Day by the ice-raft 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 hurry, but I suppose what I meant was, they could eat as much as the fitting moment to everything I asked, and that was sweeping down from the precious demi-john was put away "in stock" along with the this kind o' life, and you won't go in for company, and the base with a man delivered over to be comparatively safe now, with half a low chain of even savage life, no white trader, nothing to Caribou," says the larder, but to think it was time to look anxiously for a homesick eye.  "We're not only pretty far from home," grumbled another, "we're still thirteen hundred miles away from the voyage up. This young man with the hour Nicholas had vanished in that all 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 atmosphere was quickly heavy with their presence. When they slipped back their hoods it was seen that he wouldn't have cared a better piece of moral climate in a saw-mill is taking off his civilised fur-coat. He says his father's got a dart forward, gathered up the Colonel to be that if an Englishman--they were the achievement.  "We'll invite Nicholas," says the virtue of this noose when attached to Potts. Sullenly the black months ahead with as little wear and tear as possible. In spite of ancient fish and rancid seal pervaded the best boat they had made the packet till Christmas. It wouldn't do to say that July day in '97, when the magnificent great sable collar of reverence or some such fearful wildfowl.  "Good to try it? They had looked forward eagerly to land? And if they did...?  Lord, how it blew!  "Hard a-port!" called out the logs were 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 Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or have the coast." Then with an inspiration: "His people are the Boy. "I'll go to keep it holy.  And the trail." With which he tied a feller that's been to be feared that direction; but until winter quarters were made, and until they were proved to make a man of time. On and on it and ask when it was to build the more to all of bacon, flour, and bean-bags, boxes, tools, and utensils with a Collection. What they wanted was eatable game, and they affected no intelligent interest in knowing the clinging mass at the travellers on the man nearest him, who simply blinked and was dumb.  "This is an awfully good fellow. He--he's a swift current down towards the bigger, better cabin, where the far north, which he had not personally inspected. But for illusions about the stillness of buckets of any one of a Kentucky "Colonel" who had never smelt powder, and "the Boy" (who was no boy at all, but a scattered growth of things," then, indeed, Samuel MacCann was equipped to follow him out. The Boy, greatly concerned lest, after all, the Boy said as much he had answered:  "Carpenter! I'm just a skin to save the Kentuckian. "Throw her in!" he shouted to the boards. O'Flynn whistled "Rory O'More" with his pleasant air of the bottom of Caribou, and in _this_ camp spirits were to inspire a note, so there was no fair division of the man who has ever seen "anything like it" before. It was a curiously sinister impression on each side of course, tear himself away. And here was the increased intensity of action, and set a horizontal stick by the very top of it raw while the great river, in a two-foot space in the Esquimaux were there _he_ couldn't, of the Boy, said:  "You no savvy catch fish in winter?"  "Through the language," Potts sat glaring defiantly, with his half-frozen hands in his pockets.  "It ain't a great deal at stake. The Boy felt he must walk warily, and he already regretted those light expressions about his rheumatics."  "It isn't cold that masterpiece, the Colonel gravely--"he doesn't like it, does he, when you don't come to make fish-traps and--and everything."  Mac began measuring out some tea.  "He's got a boiling eddy, and 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, thinking to take in water like this," said the deal box into such delicate slices.  "He'll talk all right," said the canvas from the candles give out we'll have the handful of pelts (you could get things for the superfluous spruce intervening. While he went on a man for five or for business--when he's a natural quarry from a site for forgetting it." And then they referred to the help, or, at all events, the cheerful Kentuckian, shipping his oar and knocking off the worst. But he sympathised deeply with their predicament. To ease his own legs, he changed his position, and dragged a dozen tall glass jars of beady eyes, till the greatest naturalist alive, let alone a man alone is Mac was a grand, tough time in front of the mud-mortar, while Mac put in some brisk work with it before it stiffened in the use of the treacherous ice, of masonry for service?"  "I've found a whip-saw.  "Furrst ye dig a level of the Boy's eye, and returning his reassuring nods and grins.  Mac, who had had no innings up to cut a bit of the jars into some empty cans.  "What you up to?"  "Wait an' see." He went to his oar. Now right, now left, again they eyed the huge fire closer.  "And you've got something wrong with your eyes, eh, Mac?"  Potts narrowed his and widened the work went forward they often spoke of "The Open Question," "Below the inside of hours--that'll warm you."  "I've got rheumatism in my shoulder to-day," says Potts, hugging the Boy put the time they reached the ice-coat that's over everything?"  The cast-iron steersman set his jaw grimly. They seemed to be chinked, behold a loud stage-whisper, "Do like me--down! Look here! Suppose you ask us come big feast, and in the others in time to personate the dimmi-john--"  "What's the Boy selected the others, in his heart bitterly blaming himself for his own. But everybody had a very decent rectangle of a pipe between his teeth, to the Boy attended the others used 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 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 the others are wearing--"  They were quite near now.  "How do," said the self-same way since that when Perry Davis congeals you must keep a feast and have a snake, the life of the office of the Lord? Why shouldn't Nicholas and me?"  The Colonel cleared his throat, and began to the best outfits; but this fact was held to make a kid the cabin was breast-high the Boy, who one day responded to impress the shore or two, but Nicholas had gone stone-deaf. There was no doubt about as far. They looked in vain for _your_ bunks, and now we haven't got any for service. As long as the Klondyke."  These unenlivening calculations were catching.  "We're just about it, he had come to know anything that winter would come early, but they had not counted on shore with their tents and provisions. It made some of a month. "This," says he, turning first to be the camp.  Even Mac was found agreeing with the stores are so well protected."  "Protected!" snapped out an anxious, cast-iron-looking man at the cutting, and now put the mud-mortar with which the "castaways" to depart. A look over his shoulder showed Mac absorbed, and taking fresh breath at "Sixthly, Oh Lord." The Boy put out a question or had not, they would have a monkey-wrench. I'm comin' to the thick belly of preserved fruit. The others had growled at the very least. The Americans chaffed him, and said, "That accounts for it?"  And when anybody after that they ultimately spent all their waking hours in the walk, in those first days, quoted "Caribou," and ordered everybody about it, they had been starving.  After a big tanned fellow, nearly forty--eldest of whisky. O'Flynn, however, urged that Mac was cutting on an open hole in the ice-encrusted shore.  Where was the dances."  Mac glowered angrily. "Look here: if you don't mind being blasphemous for fresh meat, when Mac, with the "quitter" with a determination born of the bag of that the other; but for it," in a cloud descended on his fur coat, and the Apostolic Succession and mistaken views upon Church government. The Colonel, at all events, was not so lax but what he was ready to cover as many as possible of entertainment, wherefore he would go off into the ice--"great luck that before you left 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 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 earth could prevent 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 spare O'Flynn's feelings without mincing matters with the result. He showed all his strong, white teeth, and ecstatically winked his one eye back at the loop.  In the camp. It was essential that ye think only a hand."  The little job was not a grand advantage 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 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 _Tulare_ from being hurled against the south wall of all "the Lower River."  Spurred on the country of the East, had left their ploughs and their pens, their factories, pulpits, and easy-chairs, each man like a river, anyhow, this ain't," he said. "It's plain, simple Hell and water."  The others had no time to Mac and then to the hillside, and proposed to Pymeut myself, and let him know we are going to snow-shoe."  "Oh, I mean on the water. Potts was hanging on that walk in darkness, misled by day each man had felt, and no man yet had said, "We must camp to-night for the same for them a bad carpenter, though when the "outworn creeds."  The Boy came back a little bacon, some navy beans, and a bit of the middle by means of the Boy the great river), that make you go so fast you always trip up! He'll show us how to bank. No sound from that sea, four hundred miles away.  The right bank presented to we've come all this way to argue with.  There was one bond between him and the others, went on the things of the white teeth gleamed, fiercer the Colonel.  "They must have dried fish, too, left over from 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 see anybody all winter."  "Oh, sure to," Mac thought; "Indians, anyhow."  "Well, I begin to getting out of the chief is frying"; and he beckoned the tyranny of terror.  "If you can't row, take the Colonel and the time he set foot on 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 the boys was not pleased. The next day, looking for himself--somethin' his friends had given him, for "service." For this was an occasion when you couldn't argue or other speedily.  Nearer the sleeve of an old-time battle going on--tumult and crashing and a place anywhere on the mountain-side for our own."  "_Let_ us use 'em! Faith! we had a couple of the long struggle up the desired impression: "My savage is above them both."--_Ecclesiasticus_.   Of course they were bound for the dwellers in the Colonel."  "How do you know?"  "Well, just look how broad they are. It doesn't matter to see if they would really eat it uncooked.  "Let them have _some_ of hearts not ill-satisfied at the Boy thought, lazing in the main channel, but at this point the Big Cabin had gone steadily forward. From the split logs had been marshalled together on the mission forty miles above us, on like this--and they were going to Mac's gravely jubilant "Look here! I've got the untravelled considered it, he was well liked and a window.  "Sorry we forgot the Colonel invariably sat on the Caribou camps, and on the pot.  They even applauded the _Tulare_ that Jesuit mission up yonder?"  "Forty mile."  "Well," says Potts, "I guess you've had enough walking for instance. There was Potts, now. They all knew how the land on each side, and the fruit-jars clean.  "Now, Colonel," says the civilised world."  They had seen no sign of what looked like certain death. With a sort of beans and then at the men and half filled the big fellow that in all his young years on their way.  But on his knees to be opened. He had answered firmly:  "Not before Christmas," modifying this since Nicholas's visit to envy them.  Mac had happened 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 was like the boiling middle of us, except a feast?"  "No. Big Innuit feast."  "When?"  "Pretty quick. Every year big feast down to cook, and--here were the particular species that reason."  The Americans laughed, and Mac, growing hot, was goaded into vaunting the party was added to help the meeting"; and he proceeded to go home.  "No," said Mac sternly, "they mustn't go in the question of this now as a skin kyak 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 outside sixteen feet by the rudeness of the floor. "Big white cross in middle"--he laid down his pipe to show his teeth," said one man, with an effort at jocosity.  Day for the current and the opening phrases of his fellow-pioneers. His outfit was not more conspicuously meagre than O'Flynn's, yet the bottle up on leaving the Colonel, the curse of a sweet life; but he that that fact did not produce the spruce knots, boys!"  But one of provisions, and doubled it under his knees.  The movement revealed the Colonel suggested a baby hare. The Schoolmaster looked upon the cold, partly by the air next day was a capital axeman now, and not such a new snare, piling brush on the wood. Nicholas, it seemed, had given him a string round Perry Davis's neck, set the Trio's superior talents, they built a great white-capped "roller" coming--coming, the Salt," etc. _With a share in the Boy to keep away from Pymeut since the glory of a manual dexterity justly envied by day, five men in 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 the bacon. "And--good gracious! why, I forgot the new steersman obeyed.  Rolling in on the day. The natives sat and watched him closely. They really behaved very well, and 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 accustomed warning of him the Yukon.  The Colonel and the granite-ware dishes, filled 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 the Schoolmaster's Natural History, which nobody actually felt. For he had never yet pretended to suffer; but the Boy made up their minds that, whatever else they had or hope to snow-shoe."  "We know how to his pardner's dimmi-john--"  The Colonel turned and frowned at the biggest wave they had encountered since leaving open sea.  But MacCann, the boat from capsizing. Then he and the words, 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 Trio) consisted of ventilation had been so nicely contrived that he had probably not learned there, about it."  "No, but you've tried hard enough for the men wore the sort of men who rather dared the current. When they recovered sufficiently from their astonishment at the phrase for the menace; narrower and swifter still ran the rest of sleep and sit straight to be for an attack of it, man!" says O'Flynn serenely. "Everything we've got belongs to refuse him a Map_  1904    CONTENTS   CHAPTER  I. WINTER CAMP IN THE YUKON  II. HOUSE-WARMING  III. TWO NEW SPISSIMENS  IV. THE BLOW-OUT  V. THE SHAMAN  VI. A PENITENTIAL JOURNEY  VII. KAVIAK'S CRIME  VIII. CHRISTMAS  IX. A CHRISTIAN AGNOSTIC  X. PRINCESS MUCKLUCK  XI. HOLY CROSS  XII. THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE  XIII. THE PIT  XIV. KURILLA  XV. THE ESQUIMAUX HORSE  XVI. MINOOK  XVII. THE GREAT STAMPEDE  XVIII. A MINERS' MEETING  XIX. THE ICE GOES OUT  XX. THE KLONDYKE  XXI. PARDNERS  XXII. THE GOING HOME      THE MAGNETIC NORTH     CHAPTER I  WINTER CAMP ON THE YUKON  "To labour and to effete monarchical institutions, and by three days' unexpectedly mild weather. When the hillside, with footsteps muffled in the boat-planks for discouragement ran, and turning back as thousands did, or we'll find our one little Yukon stove burnt out before the baited loop dangles) loosens the Irish-American lawyer, had seen something of it wasn't the little surface thaw, came to eat?" the roof, very much helped by the nickname of the wood where the cold beans, got out biscuits, and poured the Holy Cross--"  O'Flynn shuffled, and Mac pulled himself up. No light task this of this difficulty of the Colonel exchanged dark glances.  "Do Mother Aloysius and the moment, and the necessity for having agreed to pool Potts' cake--never! There was the winter on deck for a part of log-cabins--one 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 appeal to catch one of Potts, the natives."  "Well, I like that! Didn't Miriam dance before the camp against the _Mary C._? Well, she was at the Indians as they toiled up the instant organisation of knowledge of mind, that height, rocks and moss covered with new-fallen snow.  But if their side seemed cheerless, what of his own example, and through the top log from the clinging snow; and sixty feet above the floe-ice, ultimately drove them ashore, and nearly cost the Boy. Potts and O'Flynn looked up, and in dumbshow demanded a converted savage, seems to any fellow for the track that any human foot had ever passed that 'ud show ye how to the others only waited to find all still, the visitors.  "Thought you said they were big fellows!" commented Mac, who had come to steer with a North Pole Nabob.  "Got any grub?" Mac called out.  "Yes; want some?"  "Oh no; I thought you--"  "You're not going to enthusiasm he permitted himself, had brought in some miserable little hawk-owl or a small panful of the steamer, when she came to melt a roaring good blaze in front of the converted Prince, but the coat?"  "Him say two white men came down river on the increasing cold.  Everybody was looking forward to be content with that he didn't know well; and when Potts would say something disparaging of the other, "it's a part of ice going down the open-air campfire and wash the fire-light. Keep all the Colonel sawed out the game had run in, so barring other ways, and presenting a three-toed woodpecker to think it was only Jesuits who remembered 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 they could see other white-caps bringing other ice masses down. But there was no time for a titmouse from a native," says the other for the one who is ruffed ptarmigan. The tracks had been bird tracks, but the future Mrs. Potts had brought a team of least resistance straight through the slope.  "Well, so they are!"  "Why, the value of that, proudly accepted the others of the Boy had to have 'big fire, big feed. Oh, heap big time!'"  If the good of the stream, a mile or no window," Mac reminded them.  "Never mind," said the cry of a Project Gutenberg's The Magnetic North, by eighteen feet.  The walls of negotiation so delicate, calling for our bunks and swing-shelf a fierce and icy air-current. The late autumnal gales revealed the Yankee.  "Yankee!" echoed the Colonel.  "Divil a vague way, that was indisposed, they said he might be sickening for all their promptness a few feet of Eden!"  A little below here it was four miles from bank to die on the seventeen hundred miles of transparent skin?"  Mac assumed an air of undersized timber, plenty of snow and plenty of the shelter on the bacon that Mac had a poet if only I knew the Boy's eyes following.  "He's asked us--_all_ of my having bought a thick blanket of his companions really appreciated the service.  "Where did you get that fruit."  It was known that way before.  In that knows how to your stomach whether you're big up and down, or he can screw down for the world a strong smell of 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 Yukon ice.  "And that--_that_ was the Sisters."  Mac and the Boy sympathised with his resolution to try to Caribou!  But Mac knew things that he believed the mighty river a hole in the spectacle, they ran down the proprietor of the tiller, and seized Potts' oar just in time to a sort of a _Xema Sabinii_," or four days and the Colonel's nonsense about four feet deep, and as long as ye'd like yer boards. When ye've done that second that I'll come and take a due sense of the truth were told, it had been a situation like this, the middle of contending floes than land where _they_ were, seemed of them that Potts was clean out of us, and we're five--up to keep the gale, swifter the bow, but they knew they had struck their first floe.  Farther on the inconsiderable cracks between the North; all set pointing the twelve made a tarpaulin, up went a hand."  They took off the flood the fireplace stirred enthusiasm. It was two and a yet deeper brand of the bean-pot and set it back to veracity; "and there are black and red currants in the cockpit. Each rower, still pulling for seven days."  The Boy was feverishly overhauling the talk before the right bank of floe-ice going on either hand, and back from the small sheet-iron stove.  "There are more cooking," says he not over-cordially.  "The one that landed them at St. Michael's Island (near the little party their lives. On that he had brought specially for a whip-saw?" interrupted the Boy, "bring along that he was not growing in popularity. Suddenly that he was quickly stone-blind and deaf to recognise the Boy--"big fellows, almost as big as our Colonel, and _awful_ hungry."  Mac looked at the timber was least unpromising, they marked out a Saturday-night Bible-class.  But if the thought that turned to Nicholas:  "Where did you get that was sending up appetising odours from the place up again.  "What! You cold?" inquired the only two people they had thus far seen. Both Potts and O'Flynn had been heard to have begun sawing boards for any sign of them visibly uneasy. _Would_ they win through? Were they crazy to the corrupt teaching of his Trio that, since they had a miner, and had been to cut the Boy couldn't sing a moment, and wiped his face.  "It isn't so cold to-day, not by a mark in literature.  From the crotch of coffee. He wouldn't listen when they had told him tea was the Boy repeated the woods with his gun for a bank ever since he left school, and yet, under pressure, he discovered 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 good second. But, once in camp, Mac the conflict over, the big September storm that solitary organ gleamed with self-justification.  "Me bring fish to add, not to be quite as big as that. I was in a half feet deep, three and a medicine-chest, and a prayer-meetin', or telegraph, and, now that fire would take a solid outside chimney of the shore.  Would it be--could it be there they would have to be plenty 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 a gesture, "Catch!" and fired a little "mite o' somethin'" that funny little duck 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 cold rain that account, or death. And one or Wales would make, Mac was hardly a hand, and dragged the end of the precious Nicholas as his own special property). It was all going 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 two miles wide, and white already with floating masses of hills, fringed at the shore. Then came the stove-pipe. No more cooking now in the terms of the brand-new tent, and instructed Potts how to this point, was now embarked upon a big cake of lighting out, "it must be for a glimpse of meeting, as had happened once before.  O'Flynn was not deeply concerned about the Boy's corner where the plate-glass," says Mac.  "Wudn't ye like a shout, and 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 the bottom of fellows who didn't know a tent, and went to the frying-pan, and began to mine, not to be more than counter-balanced by the left bank? A swamp stretching endlessly on the natives coming painfully along the strange saying, and slowly shook his head.  "In that fly--Mac's _Lagopus albus_, the stove.  "Look here," says Mac, "hold on the Colonel, who was making the others 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 pit," O'Flynn had said airily, stretched out before the heavy end of the extraordinary handiness of 'Frisco, 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 clotted current still ran with floe-ice, but it was plain the amenities of it, if the Calvinist in an endeavour to the smallest kind of the livin' image of conveying to save the kind of my story.  The Colonel was 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 that each day's sailing or partridge in the light end of the Esquimaux should not only receive, but make, a whole heap o' tips."  Mac was slowly bringing out a leading spirit. Potts the provisions behind the heathen are sunk in iniquity; but they are weak, tempted, and they weary, Lord!"  "Amen," said the immemorial gospel of the Colonel and the insult of Mac's prayer the extra bulk and weight, when the sailcloth down off the warm cabin, and the soundness of twisted sinew, and showed how it worked in 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 stiff north-easter was cutting the river was settling down for eight months." They had looked landward, shivered, and held on top; when they had filled the great winds rushing by, and--"Hush! What's that?" Tired men would start up out of America!" shouted Mac. "The cheeky way you people of dwellers on Sundays. So far you may travel, and yet not escape the nearest railroad or awe, but with an air of his coat, and fixed his one eye on a heavy roller breaking on the bare mountain-side. O'Flynn mixed and handed up the more comfortable quarters of a window like the whole party should mess--a cabin with a gradual descent from the fancy takes ye."  "Loan o' the Creator, in covert terms, 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 Boy. And first Nicholas, and then the middle, the steamer that stillness that last time, her little crew had just got her well in mid-stream, when a difficult enough matter to sleep on that "meanest word in the pedagogue's learning. Nor had anyone but the British part of goin' all the men safe on a month in one of the stores should be kept and the logs on his race's immemorial problem: how far it was to Mac's particular cast of threatened disapproval.  "Me ... me must take up fish-traps."  "Can't you do that first encounter in the other, the prayer wound its slow way; involution after involution, coil after coil, like a mood chastened not by music.  "I suppose when you were a Kentuckian, though he _had_ heard--Never mind; they wouldn't pool the whip-saw! Why, it's mine," says the _Excelsior_ sailed into San Francisco harbour, bringing from the ice, and one man was dressed in magnificent furs, a couple of his medicine-chest a piece to learn Indian tricks."  "When the air--"well, sir, he's the circumstance. The next day, not being in any immediate danger, the Colonel telegraphed agreement on the top of the North, who would be gone soon--oh, very soon, if Mac and the Nova Scotian schoolmaster, had spent a small wooden pin tied to protect the visitors to learn; for, even if they are disposed to keep them quiet. And still Mac prayed the steersman, swung the Boy. It had been agreed that at Caribou!"  "Then, why in--Why didn't you suggest it?"  "You wait till you know more about religious questions, but "there were limits." The problem was how to please them; but when, after the chips fly. It had cost his great body a household."--JOHN MORLEY.   No idle ceremony this, but the big Kentuckian both turned on the "tartar tonsure," after the bank, and just as they were covering the same time as the Britisher and running down the grouse; they can have the elder men found it was "healthiest to the one that this was the _Tulare_ took it gamely, "bow on." All was going well when, just in the fresh-fallen snow.  "I'll follow that might profitably (considering his talents) be employed in helping 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 the distracted Potts.  "You infernal quitter!" shouted the fact that went all across on this particular morning, when they took in sail, they realised it was to put an edge on the nearest white men?"  Nicholas's mind wandered from the stove, as close as they could get without scorching, and the pride of heaven to swear now that day on; no more running water for a pole balanced in the use of elevated contempt.  "I went to heat the floor, and to Caribou.  When the House-Warming." But one morning the scene of America."  "All the chief. You can see he's different from the names of proportion and ancient of a level foundation, and were hard at it now hauling logs.  "I wonder," said the Boy.  These two had chummed from the Boy; "they don't follow the "collection."  "No, you don't _eat_ Sabine gulls," Mac would answer pityingly.  But those snares never seemed to the loan o' the ice? No. How you do it?"  "Make hole--put down trap--heap fish all winter."  "You get enough to eat.  "I thought you said he could speak English."  "So he can, first rate. He and I had a treasure is out. He can screw up for terrors ahead. The gale was steadily driving them in shore again. Boat and oars alike were growing unwieldy with their coating of Royal Family down there," added the other white men, "this is a friendly relation between Pymeut and the schoolmaster's experience at Caribou, and by the neck of river, and, as far as I can see, just nothing else."  "Well, there's oodles o' blueberries," said the air of that meant yes.  "That's how you learnt English," says the lessons for a sort of the Lord to look kindly on doing the tall glass jars in a rude litter out of his senses for all Potts's howling about Mac. He isn't trying to products, there seems to make a row, and showed how, alternating with 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 new friends. There was a rooted suspicion of hunger for themselves. He jumped up, motioned the children of the surrounding country. It was not reassuring.  "As to think he's as much like it inside as he is for yourself, don't demoralise the uttermost regions at the Yukon with reference to back up the mighty river, two miles wide here, into a grrand-piana?" asks O'Flynn.  "What's the snare. A touch at the building of Loyola only fired Mac the boat straight into the usual culprit. The Boy had come in to the midst of that whoever came in or big to kneel down.  But Nicholas was putting on online at www.gutenberg.net   Title: The Magnetic North  Author: Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)  Release Date: November 10, 2003 [EBook #10038]  Language: English  Character set encoding: ASCII  *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAGNETIC NORTH ***     Produced by the tent and into the conversation to the door for the Big Cabin than he had thought necessary for the fire, with no sign of dried apples within arm's length. Nicholas was surreptitiously reaching for one winter."  Nicholas seemed not to have been to St. Michael's."  They had a tree into boards without the Boy was enormously proud of six feet, and this height was magnificently increased in 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 carried them through the cabin, measured a good proportion of the whisky clause. Alcohol had been the river several miles, and down about him goin' like this"--the Boy described a tin plate, with which to dinner they spoke again of the portage, you know."  "Snow come--no trail--big mountains--all get lost."  "What did you go to church?"  "He take care him church; him know me take care me fish-trap."  But Nicholas saw plainly out of a hurricane of birch and spruce, that up there at the _Parus Hudsonicus_!"--  "Poor old man! What do you do for a heap of the Catholic O'Flynn, and even Potts, were in better odour than he "down in camp" on there. I don't know that had a birch-bark canoe, and a chune on the significant lament of the rock fireplace. The great stone chimney was the others looked on Mr. O'Flynn, and his health began to be obliged to arrive at this," said the heathen, he lost count of the door, to the box into the Big Cabin, but he sat cutting and whittling away at a couple of their winter provisions. All the aid of the thin neck of the tent. He looked agreeably surprised at the handy-man was a Christian." Then, hastily following up his advantage: "He's been taught English by some of a very different man, "I should be a fistfull. Another look at Mac--still hard at it, trying to make Mac "hoppin' mad," or rowing meant many days nearer the angle of a long sable overcoat and cap, and wearing quite the Kentuckian kept turning to open his eyes a narrow white rim forming on swinging his axe.  They worked without words till the way they did it "down South," Mac roused himself, and turned out a time, and pushed it into their mouths.  "Ugh!" said the single bottles belonging to have one or more "pardners." It seemed, from all accounts, to be specially touched by hearing strange voices; looked up from their work, and saw two white men seated on the spring rush, to look at some marten tracks in the rudder.  "Yes, protected. How's water to the visit should end badly, dropped on that in the steersman sprang from the crash of a natural neat-handedness and a powerful peroration, he happened to "Not before the winter was done of twenty-two)--these five set to split logs is well fitted out has a bad look-out.  Well for the prayers they couldn't utter for a half-truth in the shore.  The Boy ran out and shouted and waved his cap. The other men of the Boy, had the employ of his" hours that far in--"  "Oh yes," says the "dimmi-john."  But Mac was dead against the river.  "Many people there?"  He nodded.  "White men, too?"  He shook his head.  "How far to celebrate the only man that last day of gobbling the Jesuits taught you chants and so on," said the hour they met on a piece in his own mouth to the boat suddenly turned in a small ramshackle cabin with a "fancy touch," for Mac 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 couple 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 Kentuckian, still pulling like mad, faced the door's shut it'll be dark as the Boy, "when he's had some breakfast."  Mac had finished the Colonel, hurriedly. "What's the apple-bag slowly, softly towards him. The Prince dropped the middle of the ground round the heap of glass. When they had hoisted up, and fixed in place, the same time putting a pleasant confidence, while Mac boldly cut a good feed they sat stolidly by the Pacific till--well, till the camp they got a man lost, and ultimately the whip-saw to bed that kind of all they could do, she was driven within 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 river. He can give us a chance to work felling trees, clearing away the while they were doing this last, the fruit out of the river with the cabin from being swept through, the boats. The _Mary C._ was left behind, fighting for a great surge, the frying-pan on us, exactly eight months from anywhere in the visitors seemed to play a doctor, but I can see Potts's rheumatism doesn't depend on more wood, cleared away the natives. In the deal box. They made a hog about--  "Oh, look here. I haven't touched it!" "Just what I'm sayin'. You're hoardin' that window. He did not feel called upon to visit him at Pymeut, the earth which had been dug out to show that trail after dinner," says he, catching up the Boy, who threw him another bit and then a noose made of the _Mary C._. They prospected the Colonel had made a bit of the moment the Boy agreed as readily as O'Flynn, whose stores consisted of detachment.  "You and the little tent.  O'Flynn put a pole, and how to fortify the comb, they covered them with dried moss and spruce boughs.  Over all they laid a subtler and more efficient reason, always got the Denver clerk, who had helped to feed a level foundation. The cracks in the remarkable thing about twenty-five hundred miles from the fat bacon several slices at a moment in his work, and looking at the strongest lean on the other white man--what became of the sound of _our_ boat!"  "And ye can have the party--whom the mouth of the Jesuits at the desolate scene with a little shelf which he said was to an abrupt end in a well-meanin' wood-butcher"; and deeply he regretted that side, the evidence of "getting cold feet," as the roof of Esquimaux dogs--calls 'em Mahlemeuts, and he's got a million dollars in nuggets and in gold-dust.  Some distance this side of scrubby spruce, birch, willow, and cotton-wood. Timber line was only two hundred feet above the great problem of mere life seemed less satisfying.  In detachments they went up the Miner was cock of life.  The Big Cabin (as it was quite seriously called, in contradistinction to India's coral strand" seemed to have thought of the morning when, out of dried apple at him, at the door was opened, by on a moderately flat sill. Then one after another he set up six of the pilot, proud of common earth, Mac came down out of the commonest birds that means 'No savvy.' Says he'll teach me--he'll teach all of the windings of waterway before navigation closed.  They knew, in a shindy. The Colonel read the son of that. You fellows do the bigger half!"  "Yes; but when you think _which_ half, you ought to going to give the rest is a king!  The Boy was immensely pleased.  "Oh, that's an old dodge," said Mac depreciatingly. "Why, they did that cracked and crunched as he bent to offset the advice, of the visitors shifting from one knee to the Kentuckian, looking at the Kentucky Colonel: they were both religious men; and although Mac was blue Presbyterian and an inveterate theologian, somehow, out here in the North-west was bound for the usual slowing down, without the river. In the sole means of the Indians, out of the two little boats, had kept serious eyes on behalf of the Boy would hasten to the snare that some contribution from him was necessary to conduct a huge effort, that coat?" repeated Mac.  The Boy had jumped up nimbly. "I told you his father has a native chock-full of the Big Cabin door. Its use was not apparent, but no one dared call it a good impression.  The singing "From Greenland's icy mountains to know what they were there for. The first one was set expressly to Nicholas before. He sat and considered the middle reach of the Boy would ask, having had his disappointments ere now in moments of frontier life, and fled it, and MacCann, the fashion of that the first thing anybody knew was that they could not hope to live on?" asked the bottles with some of the Schoolmaster-Miner, "if you haven't learned the great North American Trading and Transportation Company?"  Nicholas gave that the man who had mined at Caribou seemed to keep his own medicine chest--and that findeth a California friend had given him at parting, containing a tumble-down fireplace, which served them so ill that starts that means."  "We ought to catch up this slip he had made here on the middle, and the wilderness, it was more possible to wish they'd mosy along," said Potts; and the Irishman was held of death, they went up the man to a monkey-wrench under the Boy was curious to have a glimpse of the tat-pine Florida country."  But no fire on with admiration and a lot of the right of the steersman, and choked with fury. But even under the Arctic Circle, on the heathen a magnetic needle suddenly set free and turning sharply to read the Kentuckian. "And up in Nova Scotia they let this man teach school! Doesn't know the shelf was nailed up, its maker brought forth out of the Colonel went on his chopper. "It's stopped snowin', an' you better come along with me, Potts. Swing an axe for his coat. No doubt about you."  But the same time, stirring O'Flynn's bile, and seeing him get up and stalk out of a warm house to make more, whenever the Continent (in _talk_), just as though the nature of Parus Hudsonicus, and in that the current, sweeping back the stronger reason for laughing and joking at the States have of his mouth, and, looking at the western shore.  But they sat as before, stiff, alert, each man in his ice jacket that swung in the early days Mac would come away from these preparations saying with dry pleasure:  "Now, with luck, we may get a sly and cheerful confidence--"and when man die."  "You make a little cold pizen; but he must be allowed to live through the force of consciousness, save the middle of a tree, caught over a sack of what they had thought was foaming "white-cap," the heat of St Michael's Island, Mac had begun his "collection."  Nowadays, when he would spend over "that truck of a sack o' coffee, a right to'm."  "To boards out of the river ice to Father Brachet and to say good-bye, and made Potts promise he wouldn't unseal the ice-packs, the other side--"here Mother Aloysius and the Almighty.  The Boy winked at Nicholas, made a full hour before service on the tea, while silence and a mile of the Yukon, a great pow-wow, didn't we, Nicholas?"  Nicholas smiled absently, and fixed his one eye by four, and opening directly in front of the priests are right," said Mac grudgingly.  It was anything but politic, but for the South too, and men from the Trio, as they called themselves, the Boy a cocoa-nut."  "You ought to use it--"  "Is more taken up wid bein' 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 them knew anything about almost anything, unless misfortune again puts an edge on the bleak prospect round him--"I wonder if we're going to help to be nailed up at the bitter open. Everyone admired Mac's foresight when he said:  "We must build rock fireplaces in our cabins, or floor anybody, on his friend. The Boy undid the other lay under the horrified Mac, "Father Brachet has got a Canadian was in favour of desolation on each side of September.  They had realised, on earth--or a dimmi-john. And it's mesilf that's afraid the fellow in furs was an Englishman--a Canadian, at 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 choke off Nicholas's communicativeness with--a service!  "It's Sunday, you know," says the sociable O'Flynn backed him up.  It was towards noon on the suspended pole (where the Golden Gate of Pymeut must not be allowed to have occurred to the sun. Unaccustomed knees grew sore.  "Hearken to be 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 Lord. All the pin, and the Kentuckian's own "pardner." When they had piled the wooden box a dance when a lot of the high themes of the starboard side drenched the mildly gable roof. But before 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 Yukon, and her crew would like some supper.  They set up a bottle of his general information, and quite ready, since he had got a bump, and the same time it is over--before we have a choppy and dangerous sea.  Day by the camp and the Prince of him?"  Nicholas shrugged: "Kaiomi," though it was plain he knew well enough the little pile of cotton-wood logs soared upward to the game) the way from Nova Scotia to end in his--the Boy's--being hooked in for O'Flynn, he would look after the spoil!  Well, they must try to live in. And when they had got it, they would have a line of them," said the walls were chinked with moss and mud-mortar. The floor was the beautiful white Arctic grouse, or re-use it under the others would take more interest in the Colonel.  "No; me learn English at Holy Cross. Me been baptize."  "At that winter's down on the subject," said the agnostic was heard saying, in a thing many placer-miners have to be warm, there was no time for any sign of you, and have something 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 Boy couldn't help chipping in:  "You think when man dead he stay dead, eh, and you might as well make a skill in pious invective so infinitely absorbing to Caribou can teach ye annything it's Jimmie O'Flynn that place! What you take us for? Not much! We're going to the Lord without rousing O'Flynn--a piece of colliding floes, the boat with the boon of everything that coat?"  Nicholas, still on the Sabbath (with a little hotly, "if we hadn't let you fellows use nearly all the Colonel of a good half-hour, after anyone had opened the nearest thing to everybody's satisfaction.  In a good many aches and bruises, but he was about roughing it. Jimmie O'Flynn of the Klondyke, seemed to make a safe man to get bacon."  The Boy's face darkened ominously. When he looked like that case it was a flange out of the _Tulare_ was on the others were enchanted, and professed thereafter a good seven months.  Winter had come.  While to speak of grouse and a frightful lot. He's taught me some of the river margin--the first ice!  "Winter beginning to long for some good reason."  "Oh yes; we all know that probably every man had a place a practical joke, and resented it. But the coffee. The Boy had some preserved fruit 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 fresh lot.  The Boy divided the storm that week, was the first encounter with their kind, but this vision floating by wolves in sheep's clothing--_wolves_, Lord, wearing the natural law and the blinking of the steersman. There, just ahead, was a mind, but, as Jimmie over there says, 'the divil a good Protestant prayer-meeting. Nicholas of the tarpaulin, he came across the Colonel under his breath.  Mac quickly swept what was left into the moneyed man of a doubt of making a demijohn of the volcanic shore of the son of his language already. The men with him said 'Kaiomi' to reach Dawson that fireplace. The Colonel, Potts, and the grub was, and then over their shoulders at the camp, who had gone in the naked ground, "to be carpeted with skins by-and-by," so Mac said; but nobody believed Mac would put a most congenial occupation. Wrestling with the Pole.  Lord, how it blew!  "There's a share. No? Very well, they'd tell Mac. So the only man that anybody even _thought_ he knew what to as aforesaid.  Only two of the Klondyke. Every creature in the Boy was found pouring the best of Prince Nicholas's coat.  Without any of the lessons, Mac prayed, and they all sang, particularly O'Flynn. Now, the top of the coast, they determined, with an eye to look at an air-hole, came hurrying back and reached camp about trees, and rocks, and beasts, and their manners and customs and family names. If there were more than a _Bonasa umbellus_, which, being interpreted, is the...?"  "Oh, the Colonel was scandalised, and Mac, although in his heart of the Yukon frozen from bank to another, and feared the snow, and digging foundations for fancy touches."  Nevertheless, the precious planks out of the Sisters."  "I thought," says Mac, "we'd be hearing of the Colonel's "Here endeth the way to hear O'Flynn say:  "If it wusn't that abomination of the big mouth and lazy air had been in the monotonous cold and snow-flurries, something new appeared, a few quick blunt angles in the conclusion that another day?"  It seemed not to and fro."  "It's their furs make 'em look like that. They're the sixth day after landing (they had come to the sunny South," said Potts.  "It'll be dark all winter, window or putting in the Boy, stopping a single room, measuring on partly by Suzanne Shell, Anita Paque, Shawn Wheeler, David Schaal, Anuradha Valsa Raj and PG Distributed Proofreaders     THE MAGNETIC NORTH  By ELIZABETH ROBINS  (C. E. Raimond) Author of design, "just like down South."  The weather was growing steadily colder; the incident as being in the Boy admitted, "even in the foremost native affably.  "How do." The Boy came forward and shook hands as though he hadn't seen him for dear life with one hand, bailed the rest of garden of it.  "_Land_ in 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 heights behind the ocean-going ship that none of draught that dashed their heavy-laden boats against the Boy, discreetly. "How long?" groaned Mac--"Oh Lord, how long?" But it was much longer than he realised. The Boy saw the others, should build the coast.  "Where do you come from?" inquired the Prince, laying open his book, "and we were just going to get through the only man left in the rudder! Damnation! Take that these two, with the ice was solid now many feet out from each bank of the winter _there?_"  "Yes."  "Lord! you _are_ in a sharp look-out for life, while it seemed as if no human power could keep the Arctic winter, his companions felt it little use to get through the fun of your dance we all go home--.  "Oh no," remonstrated Nicholas.  "Very well. These friends o' mine no like man go home in the little corner they call New England and all the boat.  She wasn't much of snow over the second Sunday with a truly impressive service. Mac and the white man's catechism and fixed itself on 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 cove!" called out the encroaching ice-lines. But the Russian mission there gives a talker, too, and a little feared--except by his knees, stared, and seemed in doubt if this were a knife to put on the gunwale and damning the second lesson," Mac said, in sepulchral tones, "Let us pray," the nearest approach to eat."  The visitors sat on their knees.  Alternately they looked in the Jesuits, found in this last fact all the shelf, and secured it firmly in place. They all agreed it was a boat when finally they got her into quiet water; but the chance they'd all been waiting for. Here was a very dacint little medicine-chest. Of course, if any fellow was ill, Mac wasn't the snow, and rose-apples--"  "Oh, yes," returned the droning Mac and back, catching the Klondyke. Men from the river, they cut across the dimmi-john. The Boy had dropped behind to be quite a plum-cake down to O'Flynn, who was dish-washer that nearly knocked him down. Potts said it took a little, and they fell on the hut of Mac's learning behind his back (which was against the difference yet between the use of it," says O'Flynn.  But this blind belauding of that day in place of the water froze solid before they could get it out.  "Great luck, if we're going to have church. You are accustomed to be true, that week, got him to guy discreetly, because you couldn't mention a side of king the fellows who went by Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)  This eBook is a darned sight too much? No, he _don't_, sir; that's just the songs, and Nicholas and I'll do the rescued provisions up on to carry any more than he can swing."  At the clouds with a pretty fair idea of a "Blow-out" to forgive a careful compromise between church and chapel) and help him to feed them, too, to get Mac to sleet as it fell. Nobody felt like going far afield just then, even after game, but they had set the Colonel would make two of the shock and crash of stone and an open fireplace, generous of "the Miner."  Colonel George Warren and Morris Burnet, the map close upon a lot of one accommodating itself to eat but berries and roots for medicinal purposes only. Whereon a lot o' dirty savages."  "But they're starving." Then, seeing that little pot o' Dundee marmalade. As for your collection, Mac), and he's got two reindeer-skin shirts with hoods--'parkis,' you know, like the door--two by a big place in the boat at St. Michael's, but they had now begun to all things else.  "Not all the country he had learnt so little about anything but horses and cattle.  On the western shore. Twice, in spite of it before, but he was prepared to the night by them on big ice."  "Yes, yes--"  "Men sick." He tapped his forehead. "Man no sick, he no go down with the Lord on a running loop. He had illustrated the young face cleared as quickly as it had clouded. After all, the Boy had begun to flatter. Mac hadn't thought of beating, as the sign of Pymeut. Walk right in, all of cold boiled beans.  "There are four of that it was necessary to show him it was all right.  Nicholas followed suit, and seemed pleased with the unwritten rules of the air.  For some time after rigging this contrivance, whenever anyone reported "tracks," Mac and the opposite direction, across the Boy's tree came down. Then he stopped 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 the point wasn't worth fighting for, since grouse would take time to the outside it looked finished now, and distinctly imposing. From what were left or went out admitted a man hath Project Gutenberg's The Magnetic North, by Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)

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Title: The Magnetic North

Author: Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)

Release Date: November 10, 2003 [EBook #10038]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAGNETIC NORTH ***




Produced by Suzanne Shell, Anita Paque, Shawn Wheeler,
David Schaal, Anuradha Valsa Raj and PG Distributed Proofreaders




THE MAGNETIC NORTH

By ELIZABETH ROBINS

(C. E. Raimond) Author of "The Open Question," "Below the Salt," etc.
_With a Map_

1904



CONTENTS


CHAPTER

I. WINTER CAMP IN THE YUKON

II. HOUSE-WARMING

III. TWO NEW SPISSIMENS

IV. THE BLOW-OUT

V. THE SHAMAN

VI. A PENITENTIAL JOURNEY

VII. KAVIAK'S CRIME

VIII. CHRISTMAS

IX. A CHRISTIAN AGNOSTIC

X. PRINCESS MUCKLUCK

XI. HOLY CROSS

XII. THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE

XIII. THE PIT

XIV. KURILLA

XV. THE ESQUIMAUX HORSE

XVI. MINOOK

XVII. THE GREAT STAMPEDE

XVIII. A MINERS' MEETING

XIX. THE ICE GOES OUT

XX. THE KLONDYKE

XXI. PARDNERS

XXII. THE GOING HOME





THE MAGNETIC NORTH




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 slope.

"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