CHAPTER II

THE MYSTERY AND BOBBY

Abel had often seen death before. He had seen men drowned, men who had
frozen to death, men accidentally shot to death, and men who had died
naturally and comfortably in their beds. It was, therefore, not the
sight of death that startled him, but the horror and tragic appeal in
the dead man's staring eyes. It was uncanny and supernatural.

This, at least, was Abel's first intuitive impression. Though he could
not have defined this impression or put his thoughts into words, he
felt much as one would feel who had heard a dead man speak.

He pushed his skiff a few yards away and, resting upon his oars, viewed
the derelict from a respectful distance. His impulse was to row back to
Itigailit Island at once and leave the boat and its ghastly, silent
skipper to the mercies of the sea. But the mystery fascinated him. The
beseeching gaze that had met his had roused his imagination. And so for
a long time he sat in silent contemplation of the boat, wondering from
whence it and the thing it contained had come, and how the man had met
his death.

Abel Zachariah was a Christian, but he was also an Eskimo, and he had
inherited the superstitions of untold generations of heathen
ancestors--superstitions that to him were truths above contradiction. He
held it as a fact beyond dispute that all unnatural or accidental deaths
were brought about by the evil spirits with which his forefathers had
peopled the sea and the desolate land in which he lived. It was his firm
belief that evil spirits remained to haunt the place where a victim had
been lured to violent death, as in the present instance had plainly been
the case. He had no doubt that the boat was haunted, and therefore he
kept his distance, for unless by some subtle and certain charm the
spirits could be driven off, none but a foolhardy man would ever venture
to board the derelict, and Abel was not a foolhardy man.

These superstitions seem very foolish to us, no doubt; but, after all,
were they one whit more foolish or groundless than the countless
superstitions to which many educated and seemingly intelligent Christian
people of civilization are bound? As, for instance, the superstition
that where thirteen sit together at table one will die within the year.

And so Abel Zachariah, being a man of caution, held aloof from the boat
which he had so eagerly set out to salvage; and sitting engrossed in
contemplation, he in his skiff and