in the girl's heart vanished. She drew a deep breath of
the night air and turned reluctantly from the window. "There's a strip
of open water leading north to eighty-three--" she hummed. The words
stirred in her dim, venturesome imaginings. She felt suddenly on the
threshold of adventure beyond which might lie the fierce, wild things
of romance that only men have known. It alarmed, even while it
exhilarated her. She felt afraid, yet daring. She was beginning to
feel the lure of Alaska--the vast, the untamed, the inscrutable, the
promising.

As she slipped between her blankets she thought of the young white man.
Squaw-man he might be, and a drunkard, but he had the heart of an
adventurer . . . he was young . . . and he could sing . . .

CHAPTER VI

THE WHITE CHIEF MAKES MEDICINE

Sunless and softly grey morning came to Katleean. The water, smooth as
satin, stretched away to the mist-shrouded hills. Owing to some odd,
mirage-like condition of the atmosphere trees bordering the lagoon
across the bay stood high and clear above a bank of fog. The liquid
music of the surf was hushed as if to give place to a new sound that
pulsed unceasingly on the quiet air: the strange and thrilling boom of
Thlinget drums. Up from the great Potlatch-house in the Village
floated the savage resonance adding a barbaric note of announcement to
the placid beauty of the scene. Above the roofs of the native houses
and straight between the totems of the Thunder-bird and the Bear, rose
the black smoke of the Potlatch fire.

Though it was early, the double doors of the trading-post stood open
for the White Chief had been abroad several hours. After a night of
revelry in Katleean there were always knife-wounds to dress, battered
heads to bind up, bullets to extract, and even broken bones to set.
The nearest doctor was five hundred miles away and Kilbuck, often the
only sober man at the post, with the exception of Kayak Bill, performed
these services.

Some said that he had learned all he knew of medical science from the
row of gold-lettered volumes tucked away in one corner of his dusky
living-room; others claimed that a great eastern medical college had
known him as a student in the far-off days before Alaska took him for
her own. Whatever was the source of his knowledge he did his work with
a degree of rough skill, and humanely, using as an antidote for the
pain he inflicted during these operations, stupendous quantities of