“Let me go, Canim,” she sobbed.

But he twisted her wrist till she ceased to struggle.  “The memories of the little moose-bird are overstrong and make trouble,” he began.

“I know!  I know!” she broke in.  “I see the man in the snow, and as never before I see him crawl on hand and knee.  And I, who am a little child, am carried on his back.  And this is before Pow-Wah-Kaan and the time I came to live in a little corner of the earth.”

“You know,” he answered, forcing her toward the door; “but you will go with me down the Yukon and forget.”

“Never shall I forget!  So long as my skin is white shall I remember!” She clutched frantically at the door-post and looked a last appeal to Mrs. Evelyn Van Wyck.

“Then will I teach thee to forget, I, Canim, the Canoe!”

As he spoke he pulled her fingers clear and passed out with her upon the trail.

THE LEAGUE OF THE OLD MEN

At the Barracks a man was being tried for his life.  He was an old man, a native from the Whitefish River, which empties into the Yukon below Lake Le Barge.  All Dawson was wrought up over the affair, and likewise the Yukon-dwellers for a thousand miles up and down.  It has been the custom of the land-robbing and sea-robbing Anglo-Saxon to give the law to conquered peoples, and ofttimes this law is harsh.  But in the case of Imber the law for once seemed inadequate and weak.  In the mathematical nature of things, equity did not reside in the punishment to be accorded him.  The punishment was a foregone conclusion, there could be no doubt of that; and though it was capital, Imber had but one life, while the tale against him was one of scores.

In fact, the blood of so many was upon his hands that the killings attributed to him did not permit of precise enumeration.  Smoking a pipe by the trail-side or lounging around the stove, men made rough estimates of the numbers that had perished at his hand.  They had been whites, all of them, these poor murdered people, and they had been slain singly, in pairs, and in parties.  And so purposeless and wanton had been these killings, that they had long been a mystery to the mounted police, even in the time of the captains, and later, when the creeks realized, and a governor came from the Dominion to make the land pay for its prosperity.

But more mysterious still was the coming of Imber to Dawson to give himself up.  It was in the late spring, when the Yukon was growling and writhing under its ice, that the old Indian climbed painfully up the bank from the river trail and stood blinking on the main street.  Men who had witnessed his advent, noted that he was weak and tottery, and that he staggered over to a heap of cabin-logs and sat down.  He sat there a full day, staring straight before him at the unceasing tide of white men that flooded past.  Many a head jerked curiously to the side to meet his stare, and more than one remark was dropped anent the old Siwash with so strange a look upon his face.  No end of men remembered afterward that they had been struck by his extraordinary figure, and forever afterward prided themselves upon their swift discernment of the unusual.