The Magnetic North. Elizabeth Robins
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