a voice, in tones not
altogether joyless, and Peelo shoved his broad-cheeked, jovial face
for a moment into the light.

"Thou, too," Neegah affirmed. "And there were others. Why is there
such a restlessness upon the Sunlanders?" he demanded petulantly. "Why
do they not stay at home? The Snow People do not wander to the lands
of the Sunlanders."

"Better were it to ask why they come," cried a voice from the
darkness, and Aab-Waak pushed his way to the front.

"Ay! Why they come!" clamored many voices, and Aab-Waak waved his hand
for silence.

"Men do not dig in the ground for nothing," he began. "And I have it
in mind of the Whale People, who are likewise Sunlanders, and who lost
their ship in the ice. You all remember the Whale People, who came to
us in their broken boats, and who went away into the south with dogs
and sleds when the frost arrived and snow covered the land. And you
remember, while they waited for the frost, that one man of them dug in
the ground, and then two men and three, and then all men of them, with
great excitement and much disturbance. What they dug out of the ground
we do not know, for they drove us away so we could not see. But
afterward, when they were gone, we looked and found nothing. Yet there
be much ground and they did not dig it all."

"Ay, Aab-Waak! Ay!" cried the people in admiration.

"Wherefore I have it in mind," he concluded, "that one Sunlander tells
another, and that these Sunlanders have been so told and are come to
dig in the ground."

"But how can it be that Bill-Man speaks our tongue?" demanded a little
weazened old hunter,--"Bill-Man, upon whom never before our eyes have
rested?"

"Bill-Man has been other times in the Snow Lands," Aab-Waak answered,
"else would he not speak the speech of the Bear People, which is like
the speech of the Hungry Folk, which is very like the speech of the
Mandells. For there have been many Sunlanders among the Bear People,
few among the Hungry Folk, and none at all among the Mandells, save
the Whale People and those who sleep now in the igloo of Neegah."

"Their sugar is very good," Neegah commented, "and their flour."

"They have great wealth," Ounenk added. "Yesterday I was to their
ship, and beheld most cunning tools of iron, and knives, and guns, and
flour, and sugar, and strange foods without end."

"It is so, brothers!" Tyee stood up and exulted inwardly at the
respect and silence his people accorded him. "They be very rich,