ions with the friendly coat-tail.

Everybody laughed but Mac, who pretended not to know what was going on
behind his back.

"Gentlemen," he began harshly, with the air of one about to launch a
heavy indictment, "there's one element largely represented here by
numbers and by interests"--he turned round suddenly toward the natives,
and almost swung Kaviak off into space--"one element not explicitly
referred to in the speeches, either of welcome or of thanks. But,
gentlemen, I submit that these hitherto unrecognised Natives are our
real hosts, and a word about them won't be out of place. I've been told
to-day that, whether in Alaska, Greenland, or British America, they
call themselves _Innuits,_ which means human beings. They believed, no
doubt, that they were the only ones in the world. I've been thinking a
great deal about these Esquimaux of late--"

"Hear, hear!"

"About their origin and their destiny." (Mac was beginning to enjoy
himself. The Boy was beginning to be bored and to drum softly with his
fingers.) "Now, gentlemen, Buffon says that the poles were the first
portions of the earth's crust to cool. While the equator, and even the
tropics of Cancer and of Capricorn, were still too boiling hot to
support life, up here in the Arctic regions there was a carboniferous
era goin' on--"

"Where's the coal, then?" sneered Potts.

"It's bein' discovered ... all over ... ask him" (indicating Father
Wills, who smiled assent). "Tropical forests grew where there are
glayshers now, and elephants and mastodons began life here."

"Jimminy Christmas!" interrupted the Boy, sitting up very straight. "Is
that Buffer you quoted a good authority?"

"First-rate," Mac snapped out defiantly.

"Good Lord! then the Garden o' Eden was up here."

"Hey?"

"Course! _This_ was the cradle o' the human race. Blow the Ganges! Blow
the Nile! It was our Yukon that saw the first people, 'cause of course
the first people lived in the first place got ready for 'em."

"That don't follow. Read your Bible."

"If I'm not right, how did it happen there were men here when the North
was first discovered?"

"Sh!"

"Mac's got the floor."

"Shut up!"

But the Boy thumped the table with one hand and arraigned the
schoolmaster with the other.

"Now, Mac, I put it to you as a man o' science: if the race had got a
foothold in any other part o' the world, what in Sam Hill could make
'em come up here?"

"_We're_ here."

"Yes, tomfools afte