Palitlum ceased.  His eyes, smouldering moodily, were bent upon the fire, and his cheek was dark with blood.

“And thou, Palitlum?” I demanded.  “And thou?”

“I?  I did remember the Law, and I slew Opitsah the Knife, which was well.  And I drew Ligoun’s own knife from the throat of Niblack, and slew Skulpin, who had dragged me down.  For I was a stripling, and I could slay any man and it were honor.  And further, Ligoun being dead, there was no need for my youth, and I laid about me with his knife, choosing the chiefest of rank that yet remained.”

Palitlum fumbled under his shirt and drew forth a beaded sheath, and from the sheath, a knife.  It was a knife home-wrought and crudely fashioned from a whip-saw file; a knife such as one may find possessed by old men in a hundred Alaskan villages.

“The knife of Ligoun?” I said, and Palitlum nodded.

“And for the knife of Ligoun,” I said, “will I give thee ten bottles of ‘Three Star.’”

But Palitlum looked at me slowly.  “Hair-Face, I am weak as water, and easy as a woman.  I have soiled my belly with quass, and hooch, and ‘Three Star.’  My eyes are blunted, my ears have lost their keenness, and my strength has gone into fat.  And I am without honor in these days, and am called Palitlum, the Drinker.  Yet honor was mine at the potlatch of Niblack, on the Skoot, and the memory of it, and the memory of Ligoun, be dear to me.  Nay, didst thou turn the sea itself into ‘Three Star’ and say that it were all mine for the knife, yet would I keep the knife.  I am Palitlum, the Drinker, but I was once Olo, the Ever-Hungry, who bore up Ligoun with his youth!”

“Thou art a great man, Palitlum,” I said, “and I honor thee.”

Palitlum reached out his hand.

“The ‘Three Star’ between thy knees be mine for the tale I have told,” he said.

And as I looked on the frown of the cliff at our backs, I saw the shadow of a man’s torso, monstrous beneath a huge inverted bottle.

LI WAN, THE FAIR

“The sun sinks, Canim, and the heat of the day is gone!”

So called Li Wan to the man whose head was hidden beneath the squirrel-skin robe, but she called softly, as though divided between the duty of waking him and the fear of him awake.  For she was afraid of this big husband of hers, who was like unto none of the men she had known.  The moose-meat sizzled uneasily, and she moved the frying-pan to one side of the red embers.  As she did so she glanced warily at the two Hudson Bay dogs dripping eager slaver from their scarlet tongues and following her every movement.  They were huge, hairy fellows, crouched to leeward in the thin smoke-wake of the fire to escape the swarming myriads of mosquitoes.  As Li Wan gazed down the steep to where the Klondike flung its swollen flood between the hills, one of the dogs bellied its way forward like a worm, and with a deft, catlike stroke of the paw dipped a chunk of hot meat out of the pan to the ground.  But Li Wan caught him from out the tail of her eye, and he sprang back with a snap and a snarl as she rapped him over the nose with a stick of firewood.