“Doubled up with the cold most likely,” Dick suggested, putting a pause into the narrative while he hung one of Molly’s skirts up to dry, “and went down like a pot of lead.”

“My idea.  So I finished the course alone, half-dead when I made Dyea in the dark of the evening.  The tide favored, and I ran the sloop plump to the bank, in the shelter of the river.  Couldn’t go an inch further, for the fresh water was frozen solid.  Halyards and blocks were that iced up I didn’t dare lower mainsail or jib.  First I broached a pint of the cargo raw, and then, leaving all standing, ready for the start, and with a blanket around me, headed across the flat to the camp.  No mistaking, it was a grand layout.  The Chilcats had come in a body—­dogs, babies, and canoes—­to say nothing of the Dog-Ears, the Little Salmons, and the Missions.  Full half a thousand of them to celebrate Tilly’s wedding, and never a white man in a score of miles.

“Nobody took note of me, the blanket over my head and hiding my face, and I waded knee deep through the dogs and youngsters till I was well up to the front.  The show was being pulled off in a big open place among the trees, with great fires burning and the snow moccasin-packed as hard as Portland cement.  Next me was Tilly, beaded and scarlet-clothed galore, and against her Chief George and his head men.  The shaman was being helped out by the big medicines from the other tribes, and it shivered my spine up and down, the deviltries they cut.  I caught myself wondering if the folks in Liverpool could only see me now; and I thought of yellow-haired Gussie, whose brother I licked after my first voyage, just because he was not for having a sailorman courting his sister.  And with Gussie in my eyes I looked at Tilly.  A rum old world, thinks I, with man a-stepping in trails the mother little dreamed of when he lay at suck.

“So be.  When the noise was loudest, walrus hides booming and priests a-singing, I says, ‘Are you ready?’ Gawd!  Not a start, not a shot of the eyes my way, not the twitch of a muscle.  ‘I knew,’ she answers, slow and steady as a calm spring tide.  ‘Where?’ ’The high bank at the edge of the ice,’ I whispers back.  ‘Jump out when I give the word.’

“Did I say there was no end of huskies?  Well, there was no end.  Here, there, everywhere, they were scattered about,—­tame wolves and nothing less.  When the strain runs thin they breed them in the bush with the wild, and they’re bitter fighters.  Right at the toe of my moccasin lay a big brute, and by the heel another.  I doubled the first one’s tail, quick, till it snapped in my grip.  As his jaws clipped together where my hand should have been, I threw the second one by the scruff straight into his mouth.  ‘Go!’ I cried to Tilly.

“You know how they fight.  In the wink of an eye there was a raging hundred of them, top and bottom, ripping and tearing each other, kids and squaws tumbling which way, and the camp gone wild.  Tilly’d slipped away, so I followed.  But when I looked over my shoulder at the skirt of the crowd, the devil laid me by the heart, and I dropped the blanket and went back.