and inseparable even in manhood. One
of these young men said to his friend: "I'll stay if you will." And the
other quickly agreed. After the ship sailed, and the land of the
midnight sun had become icy and black, one of these comrades fell ill,
and soon died. The living one placed the body in the room with the ship
supplies, where it froze stiff; and during all the long polar night of
solitude and ghastly gloom he lived next to this sepulchre that
contained his dead friend. When the ship returned the crew found the
living comrade an old man with hair as white as snow, and never in his
life afterward was he seen to smile.

These stories stirred my emotions like Doyle's tale about Jones' Ranch.
How wonderful, beautiful, terrible and tragical is human life! Again I
heard the still, sad music of humanity, the eternal beat and moan of the
waves upon a lonely shingle shore. Who would not be a teller of tales?

Copple followed Nielsen with a story about a prodigious feat of his
own--a story of incredible strength and endurance, which at first I took
to be a satire on Nielsen's remarkable narrative. But Copple seemed
deadly serious, and I began to see that he possessed a strange
simplicity of exaggeration. The boys thought Copple stretched the truth
a little, but I thought that he believed what he told.

Haught was a great teller of tales, and his first story of the evening
happened to be about his brother Bill. They had a long chase after a
bear and became separated. Bill was new at the game, and he was a
peculiar fellow anyhow. Much given to talking to himself! Haught finally
rode to the edge of a ridge and espied Bill under a pine in which the
hounds had treed a bear. Bill did not hear Haught's approach, and on the
moment he was stalking round the pine, swearing at the bear, which clung
to a branch about half way up. Then Haught discovered two more
full-grown bears up in the top of the pine, the presence of which Bill
had not the remotest suspicion. "Ahuh! you ole black Jasper!" Bill was
yelling. "I treed you an' in a minnit I'm agoin' to assassinate you.
Chased me about a hundred miles--! An' thought you'd fool me, didn't
you? Why, I've treed more bears than you ever saw--! You needn't look at
me like thet, 'cause I'm mad as a hornet. I'm agoin' to assassinate you
in a minnit an' skin your black har off, I am--"

"Bill," interrupted Haught, "what are you goin' to do about the other
two bears up in the top of the tree?"