of delight and gentle strokings of their slim, brown hands, and then laid them away in fantastically carved Indian chests of yellow cedar.

Perhaps the strangest of these gifts had been a pair of homing pigeons, which had thrived and multiplied under the care of Add-'em-up Sam. A fluttering of wings now outside the doorway bespoke the presence of some of them, and Kilbuck stirred in his chair and opened his eyes.

He had been many hours alone in the store, but he had been prepared for that today. The entire post of Katleean was getting ready for the Potlatch, an Indian festival scheduled for the near future. For this occasion Kayak Bill, in his carefully secreted still across the lagoon, had completed a particularly potent batch of moonshine, known locally as hootch. The arrival, earlier in the afternoon, of the jocose old hootch-maker with a canoe-load of his fiery beverage, had been a signal for a gathering at his cabin across the courtyard. From the sounds that now floated out on the late afternoon air, he must already have distributed generous samples of his brew.

The White Chief rose from his chair and reached for another cigarette. As usual, he tossed it away after one long, deep inhalation. Before the smoke cleared from his head, he was crossing the store room with his easy panther tread—the result of former years of moccasin-wearing.

In the open doorway he paused, leaned against the portal and hooked one thumb beneath his scarlet belt. His narrow eyes swept the scene before him. Across the bay, between purple hills, a valley lay dreaming in rose-lavender mist. Blue above the August haze was a glimpse of a glacier, and farther back, peaks rose tier upon tier in the vague, amethystine distance.

Suddenly the quiet beauty was shot through with the sound of loud voices and snatches of song issuing from the cabin of Kayak Bill. The trader listened with a smile that was half a sneer. He himself never drank while at the post, deeming that it lessened his influence with the Indians. But among the secrets of his own experience were memories of wild days and nights aboard visiting schooners, at the end of which prone in the captain's bunk, he had lain for hours in alcoholic oblivion.

The voices from the cabin ceased abruptly. Then like the bellow of a fog horn on a lonely northern sea came Kayak Bill's deep bass:

  "Take me north of old Point Barrow
  Where there ain't no East or West;
  Where man has a thirst that lingers
  And where moonshine tastes the best;
  Where the Arctic ice-pack hovers
  'Twixt Alaska and the Pole,
  And there ain't no bloomin' fashions
  To perplex a good man's soul."

There was a momentary pause followed by a hubbub of masculine voices apparently in a dispute as to how the song should run. High above the others rose a squeaky Scandinavian protest:

"By yingo, ven ay ban cook on Soofie Suderlant ve sing it so dis vay——"

"Close yore mouth, Silvertip." As a whale would swallow a minnow so Kayak Bill's drawling tones engulfed the thin, high accents of the one-time cook of the Sophie Sutherland. "I ain't no nature for Swedes a-devilin' o' me. I been singin' that song for nigh on to ten yars, and by the roarin' Jasus, I reckon I know how to sing it. Come on boys—now all together!"

Joining the again raised bass of Kayak Bill, several voices took up the rollicking strain, among them the high, easily recognizable tenor of Silvertip, and the voice of another, a baritone of startling mellowness and purity, having in it a timbre of youth and recklessness:

  "Up into the Polar Seas,
  Where the Innuit maidens be,
  There's a fat, bright-eyed va-hee-ney
  A-waitin' there for me.
  She's sittin' in her igloo cold,
  Chewing on a muckluck sole,
  And the sun comes up at midnight
  From an ice-pack round the Pole."

At the sound of the baritone, the White Chief hitched his shoulders with a movement of satisfaction. Add-'em-up Sam's successor, the bookkeeper, was bidding fair to follow in the sodden footsteps of his predecessor. Given a little more time and this baritone-singing cheechako[2] would be where the White Chief need have no anxiety as to the accounts rendered the Company's new president, whom Kilbuck had never seen. A little more time, a little more hootch, and he would also have settled the case of Na-lee-nah.

The thought of the Thlinget girl's soft brown eyes brought a momentary pang. The white plague permitted few native women to become old. Twice now Naleenah had lost her voice, and only last night he had noticed behind her soft, her singularly beautiful little ears, the peculiar drawn look that to his practiced eye spelled tuberculosis. She would last two years more, perhaps, but in the meantime he must protect himself—he stirred uneasily. The bookkeeper must be made to take her off his hands.

His musing was broken into by another burst of song:

  "Oh-o-o-o! I am a jolly rover
  And I lead a jolly life!
  I have my hootch and salmon
  And a little squaw to wife."

Simultaneously the door of Kayak Bill's cabin opened and the owner, a tatterdemalion figure, stood for a moment on the doorstep. Stretching his arms above his head, he yawned prodigiously, and then, espying Kilbuck, sauntered across the courtyard toward him.

An old sombrero curved jauntily on red-grey hair that was overly long. A wavy beard of auburn-grey spread over the front of his blue flannel shirt. Hanging loosely from his shoulders a hair-seal waistcoat, brightly trimmed with red flannel, served as a coat above faded blue overalls, and from the knees down Kayak Bill was finished off with hip rubber boots, the turned-down tops of which flapped with every step, lending a swashbuckling air to his rolling gait.

He seated himself leisurely on the steps below the platform in front of the trading-post door.

"By hell, Chief," he drawled, drawing a huge clasp-knife from his pocket, "I been grazin' on this here Alasky range nigh on to twenty yars, and so help me Hannah, I never did find a place so wild or a bunch o' hombres so tough but what sooner or later all hands starts a-singin' o' the female sect." With a movement of his thumb Kayak Bill released the formidable blade of the knife, and nonchalantly, dexterously, began using it as a toothpick.

"Yas," he said slowly, in answer to the other's silence, "a-talkin' and a-singin' o' women and love. . . . Now, I hearn tell a heap about love and women in my time, but neither o' them things has affected my heart ever, though one time a spell back, tobaccy did. Still, Chief, with all respects to yore sentiments regardin' them Chocolate Drops what inhabits yore harem, . . . still, it sort o' roils me up to hear a white man a-talkin' and a-singin' o' takin' a squaw to wife."

There was an involuntary contraction of the hand that was hooked under Paul Kilbuck's belt. Not another man from Dixon's Entrance to Point Barrow would have dared to hint at the White Chief's domestic arrangements in that gentleman's hearing, but there was something in the soft twinkle of Kayak Bill's hazel eye, something in the crude, whimsical philosophy distilled in the old hootch-maker's heart, that amused, while it piqued the trader at Katleean. He sat down now on the steps beside his visitor.

"Kayak," he said, almost gently, "when an old fellow like you begins to talk about squaws I have to smile. A man past sixty—! But how about twenty-five years ago? . . . What's a man