Malemute Kid wound up his watch.  It was midnight.

‘Cheer up, old man!’ The Kid was evidently gathering up a broken thread.

’God surely will forgive such a lie.  Let me give you the word of a man who strikes a true note:  If She have spoken a word, remember thy lips are sealed, And the brand of the Dog is upon him by whom is the secret revealed.

If there be trouble to Herward, and a lie of the blackest can clear, Lie, while thy lips can move or a man is alive to hear.’

Father Roubeau removed his pipe and reflected.  ’The man speaks true, but my soul is not vexed with that.  The lie and the penance stand with God; but—­but—­’

‘What then?  Your hands are clean.’  ’Not so.  Kid, I have thought much, and yet the thing remains.  I knew, and made her go back.’  The clear note of a robin rang out from the wooden bank, a partridge drummed the call in the distance, a moose lunged noisily in the eddy; but the twain smoked on in silence.

The Wisdom of the Trail

Sitka Charley had achieved the impossible.  Other Indians might have known as much of the wisdom of the trail as he did; but he alone knew the white man’s wisdom, the honor of the trail, and the law.  But these things had not come to him in a day.  The aboriginal mind is slow to generalize, and many facts, repeated often, are required to compass an understanding.  Sitka Charley, from boyhood, had been thrown continually with white men, and as a man he had elected to cast his fortunes with them, expatriating himself, once and for all, from his own people.  Even then, respecting, almost venerating their power, and pondering over it, he had yet to divine its secret essence—­the honor and the law.  And it was only by the cumulative evidence of years that he had finally come to understand.  Being an alien, when he did know, he knew it better than the white man himself; being an Indian, he had achieved the impossible.

And of these things had been bred a certain contempt for his own people—­a contempt which he had made it a custom to conceal, but which now burst forth in a polyglot whirlwind of curses upon the heads of Kah-Chucte and Gowhee.  They cringed before him like a brace of snarling wolf dogs, too cowardly to spring, too wolfish to cover their fangs.  They were not handsome creatures.  Neither was Sitka Charley.  All three were frightful-looking.  There was no flesh to their faces; their cheekbones were massed with hideous scabs which had cracked and frozen alternately under the intense frost; while their eyes burned luridly with the light which is born of desperation and hunger.  Men so situated, beyond the pale of the honor and the law, are not to be trusted.  Sitka Charley knew this; and this was why he had forced them to abandon their rifles with the rest of the camp outfit ten days before.  His rifle and Captain Eppingwell’s were the only ones that remained.