himself in silence,
tilting his sombrero to the back of his head--the only concession to
convention he ever made, since Kayak had never been known to remove
that article of apparel until he sought his bunk at night.

"I just been mouchin' round down in the Village, Chief," he drawled,
"seein' if there was anything a-doin' in the way o' local sin, and they
tells me that the funeral canoes is a-comin' in tonight."

CHAPTER V

THE FUNERAL CANOES

Ellen glanced up at the old hootch-maker sitting serenely on the other
side of the fireplace. Some time during the day he had put on high
leather boots but having neglected to lace them, the bellows-tongued
tops stood away from his sturdy legs and the raw-hide laces squirmed
about his feet like live things.

"The funeral canoes?" she echoed, wonderingly.

Kayak Bill turned to her with a sort of slow eagerness, as if he had
been awaiting an excuse to look at her.

"Yas, Lady. They're a-bringin' in the ashes o' their dead kin from up
in the Valley of the Kag-wan-tan."

Ellen's mind reverted to the many strange things she had heard during
her short stay in Katleean, concerning the coming Potlatch of the
Indians. This land and its people were new and mysterious to her.
These primitive Thlingets, descendants of the fiercest and most
intelligent of all the northern tribes were, withal, a fearful people
living in a world of powerful and malignant spirits who frowned from
the rocks, glittered from the cold, white mountains and glaciers,
whispered in the trees and cackled derisively from the campfires; a
world of hostile eyes spying upon them in the hope that some of their
weird and mystic tabus might be broken, and of sly ears listening to
avenge some careless remark. A childlike people they were, who spoke
kindly to the winds and offered bits of fish for its favor; who begged
the capricious sea to give them food, and who spent most of their lives
working for the comfort of the dead--the Restless Ones--who sweep the
winter skies when the day is done, beckoning, whispering. The Northern
Lights the white man calls them, as they leap and play above the frozen
peaks, but the Thlinget knows them to be the spirits of the dead,
homeless in space but hovering confidently overhead until their
relatives on earth can give a Potlatch for their repose.

Running like a black thread through the woof of the spirit tales was
the mention of witch-craft--witchcraft with which Kilbuck w