Mac insinuated himself brusquely between the victim and his persecutors.  He took the dirty object away from the priest with scant ceremony, in spite of the whisper, “Infection!” and gave it back to the wrathful owner.

“You talk his language, don’t you?” Mac demanded of Nicholas.

The Pymeut pilot nodded.

“Tell him, if he’ll lend the thing to me to wash, he shall have it back.”

Nicholas explained.

Kaviak, with streaming eyes and quivering lips, reluctantly handed it over, and watched Mac anxiously till overwhelmed by a yet greater misfortune in the shape of a bath for himself.

“How shall I clean this thing thoroughly?” Mac condescended to ask Father Wills.  The priest shrugged.

“He’ll have forgotten it to-morrow.”

“He shall have it to-morrow,” said Mac.

With his back to Kaviak, the Boy, O’Flynn, and Potts crowding round him, Mac ripped open the little bird-skin pouch, and took out three objects—­an ivory mannikin, a crow’s feather, and a thing that Father Wills said was a seal-blood plug.

“What’s it for?” “Same as the rest.  It’s an amulet; only as it’s used to stop the flow of blood from the wound of a captive seal, it is supposed to be the best of all charms for anyone who spits blood.”

“I’ll clean ’em all after the Blow-Out,” said Mac, and he went out, buried the charms in the snow, and stuck up a spruce twig to mark the spot.

Meanwhile, to poor Kaviak it was being plainly demonstrated what an awful fate descended on a person so unlucky as to part with his amulet.  He stood straight up in the bucket like a champagne-bottle in a cooler, and he could not have resented his predicament more if he had been set in crushed ice instead of warm water.  Under the remorseless hands of Nicholas he began to splutter and choke, to fizz, and finally explode with astonishment and wrath.  It was quite clear Nicholas was trying to drown him.  He took the treatment so to heart, that he kept on howling dismally for some time after he was taken out, and dried, and linimented and dosed by Mac, whose treachery about the amulet he seemed to forgive, since “Farva” had had the air of rescuing him from the horrors he had endured in that water-bucket, where, for all Kaviak knew, he might have stayed till he succumbed to death.  The Boy contributed a shirt of his own, and helped Mac to put it on the incredibly thin little figure.  The shirt came down to Kaviak’s heels, and had to have the sleeves rolled up every two minutes.  But by the time the reindeer-steak was nearly done Kaviak was done, too, and O’Flynn had said, “That Spissimen does ye credit, Mac.”

Said Spissimen was now staring hungrily out of the Colonel’s bunk, holding towards Mac an appealing hand, with half a yard of shirt-sleeve falling over it.

Mac pretended not to see, and drew up to the table the one remaining available thing to sit on, his back to his patient.