When the Colonel sat down there was much applause, and O’Flynn, who had lent his cup to Nicholas, and didn’t feel he could wait till it came back, began to drink punch out of the dipper between shouts of: 

“Hooray!  Brayvo!  Here’s to the Kurrnul!  God bless him!  That’s rale oratry, Kurrnul!  Here’s to Kentucky—­and ould Ireland.”

Father Wills stood up, smiling, to reply.

"Friends" (the Boy thought the keen eyes rested a fraction of a moment longer on Mac than on the rest),—­"I think in some ways this is the pleasantest House-Warming I ever went to.  I won’t take up time thanking the Colonel for the friendly sentiments he’s expressed, though I return them heartily.  I must use these moments you are good enough to give me in telling you something of what I feel is implied in the founding of this camp of yours.

“Gentlemen, the few white dwellers in the Yukon country have not looked forward"_ (his eyes twinkled almost wickedly) "with that pleasure you might expect in exiles, to the influx of people brought up here by the great Gold Discovery.  We knew what that sort of craze leads to.  We knew that in a barren land like this, more and more denuded of wild game every year, more and more the prey of epidemic disease—­we knew that into this sorely tried and hungry world would come a horde of men, all of them ignorant of the conditions up here, most of them ill-provided with proper food and clothing, many of them (I can say it without offence in this company)—­many of them men whom the older, richer communities were glad to get rid of.  Gentlemen, I have ventured to take you into our confidence so far, because I want to take you still farther—­to tell you a little of the intense satisfaction with which we recognise that good fortune has sent us in you just the sort of neighbours we had not dared to hope for.  It means more to us than you realise.  When I heard a few weeks ago that, in addition to the boat-loads that had already got some distance up the river beyond Holy Cross—­“

“Going to Dawson?”

“Oh, yes, Klondyke mad—­”

“They’ll be there before us, boys!”

“Anyways, they’ll get to Minook.”

The Jesuit shook his head.  “It isn’t so certain.  They probably made only a couple of hundred miles or so before the Yukon went to sleep.”

“Then if grub gives out they’ll be comin’ back here?” suggested Potts.

"Small doubt of it," agreed the priest. "And when I heard there were parties of the same sort stranded at intervals all along the Lower River—­“

“You sure?”

He nodded.

"And when Father Orloff of the Russian mission told us that he was already having trouble with the two big rival parties frozen in the ice below Ikogimeut—­“

“Gosh!  Wonder if any of ’em were on our ship?”