!" called Harlan, endeavoring to accomplish
the feat of rolling up a trouser leg as he hobbled. "Come back here!"
His voice took on an exaggerated tone of threat. "Don't you realize
that a squaw's place is three steps to the rear!"

In answer to his shout she turned, and laughingly waited for him. He
advanced, suddenly assuming the slouching, shoulder-swinging gait of
the "bad man," his brows drawn and fierce, his chin thrust out.

"Don't cross muh, woman!" he hissed, melodramatically. "I tell yuh,
I'm rough, an' I'm tough, an' I'm from Katleean! Muh bite is poi-sson,
an' muh s-s-s-ting is d-e-a-t-h! To the rear, I say!"

Quick as a flash the girl bent, and catching up a long streamer of damp
kelp tossed it about his neck, retaining her hold on it as she ran
ahead.

"Speak not to me of the rear, Man!" she intoned boastfully. "_I_ am
Xun, the Unfettered! Xun, the Woman-of-the-North-Wind! Men move not
in the North except by my will. My breath in their lungs brings
oblivion. My voice in their ears--and the trail--is--empty! Come!"

Laughing derisively at his pawing efforts to dislodge the clammy kelp,
she drew him along until the streamer broke. Then still talking their
happy nonsense, they trotted side by side toward the cliffs.

Half a mile farther on Jean sat down on a spherical boulder and donned
her moccasins. Afterward they turned in from the beach, crossed a flat
sweep of tundra and ascended the hill to the top of the Island. As
they walked toward the edge of the cliffs the shrill chorus of
thousands of sea-birds grew louder.

"O-o-o-o!" there was a little bell-like shiver in the girl's voice.
"There's no sound in all the world so wild, so suggestive of the
mystery of the untamed, as the calling of nesting gulls, Gregg!" They
stood on the promontory with the winged things dipping and swirling all
about them. Jean continued slowly, as if trying to put into words some
illusive feeling. "Sometimes--it frightens me--I don't know why--and
at the same time, it fills me with such a sense of freedom and
lightness that often, just for a little moment, I almost believe I too
might rise into the air and balance myself against the breeze with
them!"

Harlan had never seen the nesting grounds of gulls in season, but Jean,
before coming to Kon Klayu, had once gone ashore on a gull island
during laying time.

"For weeks afterward," she told him, "every night when I closed my eyes
I could see the green