“Thou hast just said the head man knew—­”

“Oh, peace, Opee-Kwan!  Thou art a fool and cannot understand.  As I say, we were helpless in the night, when I heard, above the roar of the storm, the sound of the sea on the beach.  And next we struck with a mighty crash and I was in the water, swimming.  It was a rock-bound coast, with one patch of beach in many miles, and the law was that I should dig my hands into the sand and draw myself clear of the surf.  The other men must have pounded against the rocks, for none of them came ashore but the head man, and him I knew only by the ring on his finger.

“When day came, there being nothing of the schooner, I turned my face to the land and journeyed into it that I might get food and look upon the faces of the people.  And when I came to a house I was taken in and given to eat, for I had learned their speech, and the white men are ever kindly.  And it was a house bigger than all the houses built by us and our fathers before us.”

“It was a mighty house,” Koogah said, masking his unbelief with wonder.

“And many trees went into the making of such a house,” Opee-Kwan added, taking the cue.

“That is nothing.”  Nam-Bok shrugged his shoulders in belittling fashion.  “As our houses are to that house, so that house was to the houses I was yet to see.”

“And they are not big men?”

“Nay; mere men like you and me,” Nam-Bok answered.  “I had cut a stick that I might walk in comfort, and remembering that I was to bring report to you, my brothers, I cut a notch in the stick for each person who lived in that house.  And I stayed there many days, and worked, for which they gave me money—­a thing of which you know nothing, but which is very good.

“And one day I departed from that place to go farther into the land.  And as I walked I met many people, and I cut smaller notches in the stick, that there might be room for all.  Then I came upon a strange thing.  On the ground before me was a bar of iron, as big in thickness as my arm, and a long step away was another bar of iron—­”

“Then wert thou a rich man,” Opee-Kwan asserted; “for iron be worth more than anything else in the world.  It would have made many knives.”

“Nay, it was not mine.”

“It was a find, and a find be lawful.”

“Not so; the white men had placed it there And further, these bars were so long that no man could carry them away—­so long that as far as I could see there was no end to them.”

“Nam-Bok, that is very much iron,” Opee-Kwan cautioned.

“Ay, it was hard to believe with my own eyes upon it; but I could not gainsay my eyes.  And as I looked I heard....”  He turned abruptly upon the head man.  “Opee-Kwan, thou hast heard the sea-lion bellow in his anger.  Make it plain in thy mind of as many sea-lions as there be waves to the sea, and make it plain that all these sea-lions be made into one sea-lion, and as that one sea-lion would bellow so bellowed the thing I heard.”