Everybody in the village would profit, the Colonel went on; everybody should have a present if—­

Peetka interrupted with a snarl, and flung out low words of contemptuous refusal.

The Leader waked from a brief nap cramped and uneasy, and began to howl in sympathy.  His master stood up, the better to deliver a brutal kick.  This seemed to help the Leader to put up with cramp and confinement, just as one great discomfort will help his betters to forget several little ones.  But the Boy had risen with angry eyes.  Very well, he said impulsively; if he and his pardner couldn’t get a third dog (two were very little good) they would not stock fresh meat here.  In vain the Colonel whispered admonition.  No, sir, they would wait till they got to the next village.

“Belly far,” said a young hunter, placing ostentatiously in front his brace of grouse.

“We’re used to going belly far.  Take all your game away, and go home.”

A sorrowful silence fell upon the room.  They sat for some time like that, no one so much as moving, till a voice said, “We want tobacco,” and a general murmur of assent arose.  Peetka roused himself, pulled out of his shirt a concave stone and a little woody-looking knot.  The Boy leaned forward to see what it was.  A piece of dried fungus—­the kind you sometimes see on the birches up here.  Peetka was hammering a fragment of it into powder, with his heavy clasp-knife, on the concave stone.  He swept the particles into his pipe and applied to one of the fish-selling women for a match, lit up, and lounged back against the Leader, smiling disagreeably at the strangers.  A little laugh at their expense went round the room.  Oh, it wasn’t easy to get ahead of Peetka!  But even if he chose to pretend that he didn’t want cheechalko tobacco, it was very serious—­it was desperate—­to see all that Black Jack going on to the next village.  Several of the hitherto silent bucks remonstrated with Peetka—­even one of the women dared raise her voice.  She had not been able to go for fish:  where was her tobacco and tea?

Peetka burst into voluble defence of his position.  Casting occasional looks of disdain upon the strangers, he addressed most of his remarks to the owner of Red and Spotty.  Although the Colonel could not understand a word, he saw the moment approaching when that person would go back on his bargain.  With uncommon pleasure he could have throttled Peetka.

The Boy, to create a diversion, had begun talking to a young hunter in the front row about “the Long Trail,” and, seeing that several others craned and listened, he spoke louder, more slowly, dropping out all unnecessary or unusual words.  Very soon he had gained an audience and Peetka had lost one.  As the stranger went on describing their experiences the whole room listened with an attentiveness that would have been flattering had it been less strongly dashed with unbelief.  From beyond Anvik they