e babe Tukesan
grew up among them.

Tukesan was married successively to two Toyaat brothers, to both of whom
she was barren. Because of this, other women shook their heads, and no
third Toyaat man could be found to dare matrimony with the childless
widow. But at this time, many hundred miles above, at Fort Yukon, was a
man, Spike O'Brien. Fort Yukon was a Hudson Bay Company post, and Spike
O'Brien one of the Company's servants. He was a good servant, but he
achieved an opinion that the service was bad, and in the course of time
vindicated that opinion by deserting. It was a year's journey, by the
chain of posts, back to York Factory on Hudson's Bay. Further, being
Company posts, he knew he could not evade the Company's clutches. Nothing
retained but to go down the Yukon. It was true no white man had ever
gone down the Yukon, and no white man knew whether the Yukon emptied into
the Arctic Ocean or Bering Sea; but Spike O'Brien was a Celt, and the
promise of danger was a lure he had ever followed.

A few weeks later, somewhat battered, rather famished, and about dead
with river-fever, he drove the nose of his canoe into the earth bank by
the village of the Toyaats and promptly fainted away. While getting his
strength back, in the weeks that followed, he looked upon Tukesan and
found her good. Like the father of Shpack, who lived to a ripe old age
among the Siberian Deer People, Spike O'Brien might have left his aged
bones with the Toyaats. But romance gripped his heart-strings and would
not let him stay. As he had journeyed from York Factory to Fort Yukon,
so, first among men, might he journey from Fort Yukon to the sea and win
the honour of being the first man to make the North-West Passage by land.
So he departed down the river, won the honour, and was unannaled and
unsung. In after years he ran a sailors' boarding-house in San
Francisco, where he became esteemed a most remarkable liar by virtue of
the gospel truths he told. But a child was born to Tukesan, who had been
childless. And this child was Jees Uck. Her lineage has been traced at
length to show that she was neither Indian, nor Eskimo, nor Innuit, nor
much of anything else; also to show what waifs of the generations we are,
all of us, and the strange meanderings of the seed from which we spring.

What with the vagrant blood in her and the heritage compounded of many
races, Jees Uck developed a wonderful young beauty. Bizarre, perhaps, it
was,