e I rave in madness and the
medicine men make charms over me. When you come into Bethel Mission
I'll be dead. Good-bye."

"Good Hell! We're takin' ye to Bethel and a doctor in ten minutes.
A week's travel as the trail goes, but we'll save a chunk of ye yet,
old man."

Five days later a broken team crawled over the snow to the Moravian
Mission, urged by two men gaunt from the trail, and blistered by the
cold. From the sledge came shrieks and throaty mutterings, horrid
gabblings of post-freezing madness and Dr. Forrest, lifting back the
robe, found Orloff lashed into his couch.

"Five days from Togiak. Two hundred miles in heavy trails,"
explained George wearily, as the cries of the maniac dimmed behind
the log walls.

Two hours later Forrest spoke gravely as they nursed their frost
bites in his room.

"We have operated. He will recover."

"It's a sad, sad day,"' mourned George. "It just takes the taste out
of everything for me. He's a cripple now, eh ?"

"Yes! Helpless! I did not know Father Orloff had many--er--friends
hereabout," continued the doctor. "He was thought to be hated by the
whites. I'm glad the report was wrong."

"Friends be damned," said the other strongly. "What's a friend? Ye
can get them any place, but where can ye find another enemy like that
man?"

THE SCOURGE

Coming down coast from the Kotzebue country they stumbled onto the
little camp in the early winter, and as there was food a plenty, of
its kind, whereas they had subsisted for some days on puree of seal
oil and short ribs of dog, Captain and Big George decided to winter.
A maxim of the north teaches to cabin by a grub-pile.

It was an odd village they beheld that first day. Instead of the
clean moss-chinked log shelters men were wont to build in this land,
they found the community housed like marmots in holes and burrows.

It seemed that the troop had landed, fresh from the States, a hundred
and a quarter strong, hot with the lust for gold, yet shaken by the
newspaper horrors of Alaska's rigorous hardships and forbidding
climate.

Debouching in the early fall, they had hastily prepared for an
Associated Press-painted Arctic winter.

Had they been forced to winter in the mountains of Idaho, or among
Montana's passes, they would have prepared simply and effectively.
Here, however, in a mystic land, surrounded by the unknown, they grew
panic stricken and lost their wits.

Thus, when the two "old timers"