"Never shall I forget! So long as my skin is white shall I remember!"
She clutched frantically at the door-post and looked a last appeal to
Mrs. Evelyn Van Wyck.

"Then will I teach thee to forget, I, Canim, the Canoe!"

As he spoke he pulled her fingers clear and passed out with her upon
the trail.

THE LEAGUE OF THE OLD MEN

At the Barracks a man was being tried for his life. He was an old man,
a native from the Whitefish River, which empties into the Yukon below
Lake Le Barge. All Dawson was wrought up over the affair, and likewise
the Yukon-dwellers for a thousand miles up and down. It has been the
custom of the land-robbing and sea-robbing Anglo-Saxon to give the law
to conquered peoples, and ofttimes this law is harsh. But in the
case of Imber the law for once seemed inadequate and weak. In the
mathematical nature of things, equity did not reside in the punishment
to be accorded him. The punishment was a foregone conclusion, there
could be no doubt of that; and though it was capital, Imber had but
one life, while the tale against him was one of scores.

In fact, the blood of so many was upon his hands that the killings
attributed to him did not permit of precise enumeration. Smoking a
pipe by the trail-side or lounging around the stove, men made rough
estimates of the numbers that had perished at his hand. They had been
whites, all of them, these poor murdered people, and they had been
slain singly, in pairs, and in parties. And so purposeless and wanton
had been these killings, that they had long been a mystery to the
mounted police, even in the time of the captains, and later, when the
creeks realized, and a governor came from the Dominion to make the
land pay for its prosperity.

But more mysterious still was the coming of Imber to Dawson to give
himself up. It was in the late spring, when the Yukon was growling and
writhing under its ice, that the old Indian climbed painfully up the
bank from the river trail and stood blinking on the main street. Men
who had witnessed his advent, noted that he was weak and tottery, and
that he staggered over to a heap of cabin-logs and sat down. He sat
there a full day, staring straight before him at the unceasing tide of
white men that flooded past. Many a head jerked curiously to the side
to meet his stare, and more than one remark was dropped anent the old
Siwash with so strange a look upon his face. No end of men remembered
afterward that they had been st