“How much?” said Cultus George.

“Wait, you fellows!  Now listen, George.  We don’t want you to make any mistake.  These starving people are your kind of people.  They’re another tribe, but they’re Indians just the same.  Now you’ve seen what the white men are doing—­coughing up their dust, giving their dogs and sleds, falling over one another to hit the trail.  Only the best men can go with the first sleds.  Look at Fat Olsen there.  He was ready to fight because they wouldn’t let him go.  You ought to be mighty proud because all men think you are a number-one musher.  It isn’t a case of how much, but how quick.”

“How much?” said Cultus George.

“Kill him!” “Bust his head!” “Tar and feathers!” were several of the cries in the wild medley that went up, the spirit of philanthropy and good fellowship changed to brute savagery on the instant.

In the storm-center Cultus George stood imperturbable, while Smoke thrust back the fiercest and shouted: 

“Wait!  Who’s running this?” The clamor died away.  “Fetch a rope,” he added quietly.

Cultus George shrugged his shoulders, his face twisting tensely in a sullen and incredulous grin.  He knew this white-man breed.  He had toiled on trail with it and eaten its flour and bacon and beans too long not to know it.  It was a law-abiding breed.  He knew that thoroughly.  It always punished the man who broke the law.  But he had broken no law.  He knew its law.  He had lived up to it.  He had neither murdered, stolen, nor lied.  There was nothing in the white man’s law against charging a price and driving a bargain.  They all charged a price and drove bargains.  He was doing nothing more than that, and it was the thing they had taught him.  Besides, if he wasn’t good enough to drink with them, then he was not good enough to be charitable with them, nor to join them in any other of their foolish diversions.

Neither Smoke nor any man there glimpsed what lay in Cultus George’s brain, behind his attitude and prompting his attitude.  Though they did not know it, they were as beclouded as he in the matter of mutual understanding.  To them, he was a selfish brute; to him, they were selfish brutes.

When the rope was brought, Long Bill Haskell, Fat Olsen, and the craps-player, with much awkwardness and angry haste, got the slip-noose around the Indian’s neck and rove the rope over a rafter.  At the other end of the dangling thing a dozen men tailed on, ready to hoist away.

Nor had Cultus George resisted.  He knew it for what it was—­bluff.  The whites were strong on bluff.  Was not draw-poker their favorite game?  Did they not buy and sell and make all bargains with bluff?  Yes; he had seen a white man do business with a look on his face of four aces and in his hand a busted straight.

“Wait,” Smoke commanded.  “Tie his hands.  We don’t want him climbing.”

More bluff, Cultus George decided, and passively permitted his hands to be tied behind his back.