ong mirro's saloons
has, and not havin' no acquaintance with myself in a beard a-tall, I
pots my image! Ha! Ha! Ha!" Kayak Bill's laugh gurgled out slowly
like mellow liquor from a wide-mouthed bottle. "Wall, after I got done
a-payin' for the mirro' and a-settin' 'em up for the boys, and a-payin'
for a saw bones to fix me up--me bein' conside-ble carved by glass, I
don't have no more money than a jack-rabbit. So I says to myself:
'Bill, you ol' jackass, you got to reform, that's all there are to it.
We can't have the whole durned world laughin' at you when yore in yore
liquor!', I says. . . . And I did reform, Lady! So help me Hannah, I
did!" Kayak Bill, with an air of conscious virtue, was filling his
pipe again.

While Ellen gathered up her knitting, the corners of her mouth were
twitching with amusement.

"Kayak Bill," she said as she shook her finger at him playfully, "you
surely have an effective way of making a confession. I don't really
know whether to praise you for your sobriety or scold you for
horrifying me a moment ago."

Ellen heard the old man's chuckle as she arose. Her face went sober,
however, the moment her eyes sought the couch where her husband sat
still engrossed with the White Chief. Though she lingered Shane did
not turn her way, and she finally moved toward the door through which
her sister had gone an hour earlier.

"Thank you for telling me about tonight, Kayak," she said as she passed
him. "I'm going up now to warn Jean and Loll, but--" she hesitated, "I
wish more of the men in Katleean had been 'weaned' as you were."

She saw approval in the slow softening of his hazel eyes, and as the
door closed behind her she caught a remark the old hootch-maker
addressed to the dog at his feet.

"By hell, Kobuk," he pronounced earnestly, "that little lady's husband
has sure fell into a bed of four leaf clovers!"

She stored this quaint tribute away in her mind and told it to Jean
that evening after she had repeated for the second time Kayak's warning
regarding the arrival of the funeral canoes. But Jean, determined not
to miss any detail of the strange Thlinget festival, watched till an
opportunity presented itself, and then, disregarding Ellen's advice,
slipped away to the beach to a pile of silvery drift-logs that lay at
the edge of the rice-grass, where she knew she could not be seen except
from the sea. The girl settled herself comfortably among the logs just
as the long day wa