* * * * *

Three hours later, when they were all sitting round the fire, Kaviak dosed, and warm, and asleep in the lower bunk, the door opened, and in walked a white man followed by an Indian.

“I’m George Benham.”  They had all heard of the Anvik trader, a man of some wealth and influence, and they made him welcome.

The Indian was his guide, he said, and he had a team outside of seven dogs.  He was going to the steamship Oklahoma on some business, and promised Father Wills of Holy Cross that he’d stop on the way, and deliver a letter to Mr. MacCann.

“Stop on the way!  I should think so.”

“We were goin’ to have supper to-night, anyhow, and you’ll stay and sleep here.”

All Mac’s old suspicions of the Jesuits seemed to return with the advent of that letter.

“I’ll read it presently.”  He laid it on the mantel-shelf, between the sewing-kit and the tobacco-can, and he looked at it, angrily, every now and then, while he helped to skin Mr. Benham.  That gentleman had thrown back his hood, pulled off his great moose-skin gauntlets and his beaver-lined cap, and now, with a little help, dragged the drill parki over his head, and after that the fine lynx-bordered deer-skin, standing revealed at last as a well-built fellow, of thirty-eight or so, in a suit of mackinaws, standing six feet two in his heelless salmon-skin snow-boots.  “Bring in my traps, will you?” he said to the Indian, and then relapsed into silence.  The Indian reappeared with his arms full.

“Fine lot o’ pelts you have there,” said the Colonel.

Benham didn’t answer.  He seemed to be a close-mouthed kind of a chap.  As the Indian sorted and piled the stuff in the corner, Potts said: 

“Got any furs you want to sell?”

“No.”

“Where you takin’ ’em?”

“Down to the Oklahoma.”

“All this stuff for Cap’n Rainey?”

Benham nodded.

“I reckon there’s a mistake about the name, and he’s Cap’n Tom Thumb or Commodore Nutt.”  The Boy had picked up a little parki made carefully of some very soft dark fur and trimmed with white rabbit, the small hood bordered with white fox.

“That’s a neat piece of work,” said the Colonel.

Benham nodded.  “One of the Shageluk squaws can do that sort of thing.”

“What’s the fur?”

“Musk-rat.”  And they talked of the weather—­how the mercury last week had been solid in the trading-post thermometer, so it was “over forty degrees, anyhow.”

“What’s the market price of a coat like that?” Mac said suddenly.

“That isn’t a ‘market’ coat.  It’s for a kid of Rainey’s back in the States.”

Still Mac eyed it enviously.

“What part of the world are you from, sir?” said the Colonel when they had drawn up to the supper table.

“San Francisco.  Used to teach numskulls Latin and mathematics in the Las Palmas High School.”