better go to bed."

Jim knocked out his pipe and went.

A few days afterwards he started for the settlement with two of his
men. They were good workmen and Jake was unwilling to let them go, but
they had been with Jim in the North and he needed helpers whom he could
trust, for he was going to make a bold experiment. He needed food,
powder, and tools, and it was hard to keep the camp supplied.
Pack-horses could not carry much over the mountain-trail and the
freighters' charges were high. Jim imagined he could bring up the
goods cheaper by canoe, although the plan had drawbacks.

He reached the settlement, and after waiting a few days sat one evening
on the hotel veranda. Burned matches and cigar-ends lay about the
dirty boards; the windows of the mean ship-lap house were guarded by
fine wire net. The door had been removed, and a frame, filled in with
gauze and held by a spring, slammed noisily when one went in or out.
For all that, the hotel was full of dust and flies, and mosquitoes
hummed about the hot rooms at night. The snow had melted below the
timber line and a long trail of smoke floated across the somber forest.
A fire was working through the trees and a smell of burning came down
the valley.

Three or four men in ragged overalls lounged about the veranda, and the
landlord leaned against a post. He wore a white shirt with gold studs,
and his clothes were good.

"Now you have got your truck, I reckon you'll pull out," he remarked.

"We start up river at daybreak."

"Then you're surely foolish. If you can't make it, there's trouble
coming to you next time."

Jim understood the hint. The pack-horse freighters had enjoyed a
monopoly of transport to the mining camps. The river was off the
regular line, and its navigation was difficult except when the water
reached a certain level, but if Jim's experiment proved that supplies
could be taken by canoes transport charges would come down.

"There are some awkward portages, but I think I can get through," he
said.

"I wasn't figuring on the portages," the landlord rejoined, meaningly.
"Somas Charlie's a tough proposition to run up against." He indicated
a man coming along the road. "Somas has his tillicums, and around this
settlement what he says goes."

In the Chinook jargon, _tillicum_ means something like a familiar
spirit, and Jim thought he saw what the other implied. He had had
trouble to get articles he needed and had met with annoying del