and their faces turn this way and that, and the
faces of some be underneath where the backs of their heads should be.
It is not good to look upon; for when life returned to me I saw them
all by the light of a torch which the Sunlanders left, and I had been
laid with them in the row."

"So? So?" Tyee mused, too stunned for speech.

He started suddenly, and shivered, for the voice of Bill-Man shot out
at him from the passage.

"It is well," it said. "I look for the man who crawls with the broken
neck, and lo, do I find Tyee. Throw down thy gun, Tyee, so that I may
hear it strike among the rocks."

Tyee obeyed passively, and Bill-Man crawled forward into the light.
Tyee looked at him curiously. He was gaunt and worn and dirty, and his
eyes burned like twin coals in their cavernous sockets.

"I am hungry, Tyee," he said. "Very hungry."

"And I am dirt at thy feet," Tyee responded.

"Thy word is my law. Further, I commanded my people not to withstand
thee. I counselled--"

But Bill-Man had turned and was calling back into the passage. "Hey!
Charley! Jim! Fetch the woman along and come on!"

"We go now to eat," he said, when his comrades and Mesahchie had
joined him.

Tyee rubbed his hands deprecatingly. "We have little, but it is
thine."

"After that we go south on the snow," Bill-Man continued.

"May you go without hardship and the trail be easy."

"It is a long way. We will need dogs and food--much!"

"Thine the pick of our dogs and the food they may carry."

Bill-Man slipped over the edge of the opening and prepared to descend.
"But we come again, Tyee. We come again, and our days shall be long in
the land."

And so they departed into the trackless south, Bill-Man, his brothers,
and Mesahchie. And when the next year came, the _Search Number Two_
rode at anchor in Mandell Bay. The few Mandell men, who survived
because their wounds had prevented their crawling into the cave, went
to work at the best of the Sunlanders and dug in the ground. They hunt
and fish no more, but receive a daily wage, with which they buy flour,
sugar, calico, and such things which the _Search Number Two_ brings on
her yearly trip from the Sunlands.

And this mine is worked in secret, as many Northland mines have been
worked; and no white man outside the Company, which is Bill-Man, Jim,
and Charley, knows the whereabouts of Mandell on the rim of the polar
sea. Aab-Waak still carries his head on one shoulder, is become an
oracle