“All along of a pretty squaw that looked too kindly at him.  After we got clear, I lectured him on women in general and squaws in particular, and he promised to behave.  Then we had a hot time with the Little Salmons.  He was cuter this time, and I didn’t know for keeps, but I guessed.  He said it was the medicine man who got horstile; but nothing’ll stir up a medicine man quicker’n women, and the facts pointed that way.  When I talked it over with him in a fatherly way he got wrathy, and I had to take him out on the bank and give him a threshing.  Then he got sulky, and didn’t brighten up till we ran into the mouth of the Reindeer River, where a camp of Siwashes were fishing salmon.  But he had it in for me all the time, only I didn’t know it,—­was ready any time to give me the double cross.

“Now, there’s no denying he’s got a taking way with women.  All he has to do is to whistle ’em up like dogs.  Most remarkable faculty, that.  There was the wickedest, prettiest squaw among the Reindeers.  Never saw her beat, excepting Bella.  Well, I guess he whistled her up, for he delayed in the camp longer than was necessary.  Being partial to women—­”

“That will do, Mr. Bishop,” interrupted the chairman, who, from profitless watching of Frona’s immobile face, had turned to her hand, the nervous twitching and clinching of which revealed what her face had hidden.  “That will do, Mr. Bishop.  I think we have had enough of squaws.”

“Pray do not temper the testimony,” Frona chirruped, sweetly.  “It seems very important.”

“Do you know what I am going to say next?” Del demanded hotly of the chairman.  “You don’t, eh?  Then shut up.  I’m running this particular sideshow.”

Bill Brown sprang in to avert hostilities, but the chairman restrained himself, and Bishop went on.

“I’d been done with the whole shooting-match, squaws and all, if you hadn’t broke me off.  Well, as I said, he had it in for me, and the first thing I didn’t know, he’d hit me on the head with a rifle-stock, bundled the squaw into the canoe, and pulled out.  You all know what the Yukon country was in ’84.  And there I was, without an outfit, left alone, a thousand miles from anywhere.  I got out all right, though there’s no need of telling how, and so did he.  You’ve all heard of his adventures in Siberia.  Well,” with an impressive pause, “I happen to know a thing or two myself.”

He shoved a hand into the big pocket of his mackinaw jacket and pulled out a dingy leather-bound volume of venerable appearance.

“I got this from Pete Whipple’s old woman,—­Whipple of Eldorado.  It concerns her grand-uncle or great-grand-uncle, I don’t know which; and if there’s anybody here can read Russian, why, it’ll go into the details of that Siberian trip.  But as there’s no one here that can—­”

“Courbertin!  He can read it!” some one called in the crowd.

A way was made for the Frenchman forthwith, and he was pushed and shoved, protestingly, to the front.