And this mine is worked in secret, as many Northland mines have been worked; and no white man outside the Company, which is Bill-Man, Jim, and Charley, knows the whereabouts of Mandell on the rim of the polar sea.  Aab-Waak still carries his head on one shoulder, is become an oracle, and preaches peace to the younger generation, for which he receives a pension from the Company.  Tyee is foreman of the mine.  But he has achieved a new theory concerning the Sunlanders.

“They that live under the path of the sun are not soft,” he says, smoking his pipe and watching the day-shift take itself off and the night-shift go on.  “For the sun enters into their blood and burns them with a great fire till they are filled with lusts and passions.  They burn always, so that they may not know when they are beaten.  Further, there is an unrest in them, which is a devil, and they are flung out over the earth to toil and suffer and fight without end.  I know.  I am Tyee.”

THE SICKNESS OF LONE CHIEF

This is a tale that was told to me by two old men.  We sat in the smoke of a mosquito-smudge, in the cool of the day, which was midnight; and ever and anon, throughout the telling, we smote lustily and with purpose at such of the winged pests as braved the smoke for a snack at our hides.  To the right, beneath us, twenty feet down the crumbling bank, the Yukon gurgled lazily.  To the left, on the rose-leaf rim of the low-lying hills, smouldered the sleepy sun, which saw no sleep that night nor was destined to see sleep for many nights to come.

The old men who sat with me and valorously slew mosquitoes were Lone Chief and Mutsak, erstwhile comrades in arms, and now withered repositories of tradition and ancient happening.  They were the last of their generation and without honor among the younger set which had grown up on the farthest fringe of a mining civilization.  Who cared for tradition in these days, when spirits could be evoked from black bottles, and black bottles could be evoked from the complaisant white men for a few hours’ sweat or a mangy fur?  Of what potency the fearful rites and masked mysteries of shamanism, when daily that living wonder, the steamboat, coughed and spluttered up and down the Yukon in defiance of all law, a veritable fire-breathing monster?  And of what value was hereditary prestige, when he who now chopped the most wood, or best conned a stern-wheeler through the island mazes, attained the chiefest consideration of his fellows?

Of a truth, having lived too long, they had fallen on evil days, these two old men, Lone Chief and Mutsak, and in the new order they were without honor or place.  So they waited drearily for death, and the while their hearts warmed to the strange white man who shared with them the torments of the mosquito-smudge and lent ready ear to their tales of old time before the steamboat came.

“So a girl was chosen for me,” Lone Chief was saying.  His voice, shrill and piping, ever and again dropped plummet-like into a hoarse and rattling bass, and, just as one became accustomed to it, soaring upward into the thin treble—­alternate cricket chirpings and bullfrog croakings, as it were.