d met him everywhere, but
principally on the confines of Nowhere. There was Johnson, the ex-Hudson
Bay Company factor, who had housed him in a Labrador factory until his
dogs rested up a bit, and he was able to strike out again. There was
McMahon, agent for the Alaska Commercial Company, who had run across him
in Dutch Harbour, and later on, among the outlying islands of the
Aleutian group. It was indisputable that he had guided one of the
earlier United States surveys, and history states positively that in a
similar capacity he served the Western Union when it attempted to put
through its trans-Alaskan and Siberian telegraph to Europe. Further,
there was Joe Lamson, the whaling captain, who, when ice-bound off the
mouth of the Mackenzie, had had him come aboard after tobacco. This last
touch proves Thomas Stevens's identity conclusively. His quest for
tobacco was perennial and untiring. Ere we became fairly acquainted, I
learned to greet him with one hand, and pass the pouch with the other.
But the night I met him in John O'Brien's Dawson saloon, his head was
wreathed in a nimbus of fifty-cent cigar smoke, and instead of my pouch
he demanded my sack. We were standing by a faro table, and forthwith he
tossed it upon the "high card." "Fifty," he said, and the game-keeper
nodded. The "high card" turned, and he handed back my sack, called for a
"tab," and drew me over to the scales, where the weigher nonchalantly
cashed him out fifty dollars in dust.

"And now we'll drink," he said; and later, at the bar, when he lowered
his glass: "Reminds me of a little brew I had up Tattarat way. No, you
have no knowledge of the place, nor is it down on the charts. But it's
up by the rim of the Arctic Sea, not so many hundred miles from the
American line, and all of half a thousand God-forsaken souls live there,
giving and taking in marriage, and starving and dying in-between-whiles.
Explorers have overlooked them, and you will not find them in the census
of 1890. A whale-ship was pinched there once, but the men, who had made
shore over the ice, pulled out for the south and were never heard of.

"But it was a great brew we had, Moosu and I," he added a moment later,
with just the slightest suspicion of a sigh.

I knew there were big deeds and wild doings behind that sigh, so I haled
him into a corner, between a roulette outfit and a poker layout, and
waited for his tongue to thaw.

"Had one objection to Moosu," he began,