“Well done, Ted, that duck was twins,” cried his father, laughing, almost as excited as the boy himself, and they ran to pick up the birds.  Kalitan smiled, too, and quietly picked up one, saying: 

“This one Kalitan’s,” showing, as he spoke, his arrow through the bird’s side, for he had discharged an arrow as Ted fired his gun.

“Too bad, Ted.  I thought you were a mighty hunter, a Nimrod who killed two birds with one stone,” said Mr. Strong, but Ted laughed and said: 

“So I got the one I shot at, I don’t care.”  They had wild duck at supper that night, for Chetwoof plucked the birds and roasted them on a hot stone over the spruce logs, and Ted, tired and wet and hungry, thought he had never tasted such a delicious meal in his life.

CHAPTER IV

TED MEETS MR. BRUIN

It seemed to Ted as if he had scarcely touched the pillow on the nights which followed before it was daylight, and he would awake to find the sun streaming in at his tent flap.  He always meant to go fishing with Kalitan before breakfast, so the moment he woke up he jumped out of bed, if his pile of fragrant pine boughs covered with skins could be called a bed, and hurried through his toilet.  Quick as he tried to be, however, he was never ready before Kalitan, for, when Ted appeared, the Indian boy had always had his roll in the snow and was preparing his lines.

Kalitan was perfectly fascinated with the American boy.  He thought him the most wonderful specimen of a boy that he had ever seen.  He knew so much that Kalitan did not, and talked so brightly that being with Ted was to the Indian like having a book without the bother of reading.  There were some things about him that Kalitan could not understand, to be sure.  Ted talked to his father just as if he were another boy.  He even spoke to Tyee Klake on occasions when that august personage had not only not asked him a question, but was not speaking at all.  From the Thlinkit point of view, this was a most remarkable performance on Ted’s part, but Kalitan thought it must be all right for a “Boston boy,” for even the stern old chief seemed to regard happy-go-lucky Ted with approval.

Ted, on the other hand, thought Kalitan the most remarkable boy he had ever met in all his life.  He had not been much with boys.  His “Lady Mother,” as he always called the gentle, brown-eyed being who ruled his father and himself had not cared to have her little Galahad mingle with the rougher city boys who thronged the streets, and had kept him with herself a great deal.  Ted had loved books, and he and his little sister Judith had lived in a pleasant atmosphere of refinement, playing happily together until the boy had grown almost to dread anything common or low.  His mother knew he had moral courage, and would face any issue pluckily, but his father feared he would grow up a milksop, and thought he needed hardening.