orth he found that a white woman meant more to men
than in the States. After three months in Katleean a white woman had
come to stand for the cleanness and the decencies of life. He found
himself longing to be near and speak to these two visiting women of his
own kind. He had heard of the "woman hunger" of Alaska and recognized
in himself the symptoms of that state which causes even the most
hardened misogynist to travel a hundred perilous miles merely to look
on a white woman's face and hear her voice.

And music--the music of Jean's violin drew him like a magnet. Every
evening when she played on the afterdeck of the _Hoonah_ he slipped
down to the Point beyond the Indian Village and listened--listened
hungrily, with a longing to join her and explain his stupid innocence
in connection with the dead Naleenah. His youth called to hers, and he
wanted this clean-hearted girl to think well of him.

His drunkenness--but of course there was no excuse for that. He
despised weakness in a man, and he had thought a good deal about his
own of late. The episode of Naleenah had brought him face to face with
the grim realities attending his drifting.

Sometimes when he looked at Silvertip, lolling brutish and drunken on
the blankets of his bunk, Harlan had wondered what alcohol did for the
squaw-man. Once he had tried to outline to the one-time cook of the
_Sophie Sutherland_, the beauties, as _he_ saw them, of getting drunk.
He recalled now his sensations from the moment the alcohol began
creeping through his veins, softly, warmly, creating a glow about his
heart. Vistas then opened up before him. Romance and adventure
beckoned him. . . . Later, when the stimulant reached the centers of
his brain, like the sentient fingers of a musician touching the
keyboard of his soul, it produced golden harmonies from those keys
whose tones are love, rhythm, color, appreciation of the beautiful:
Inhibitions melted away in the amber light that enfolded him. Lovely
things he had read or seen or thought and kept to himself for lack of
expression formed themselves into words of exquisite simplicity that
were to his ear as pastel shades to the eye. He could sing then, as he
never sang at other times. Music that was felt, rather than heard,
swayed him, and his feet, his hands, his whole body longed to dance and
interpret this rhythm of the universe.

Afterward came oblivion, a sweet forgetting of all unpleasantness, a
divine sense of