eyed Pymeut. Half a dozen times
O'Flynn had gone beyond the stockade to find out if he wasn't in sight,
and finally came back looking intensely disgusted, bringing a couple of
white travellers who had arrived from the opposite direction; very
cold, one of them deaf, and with frost-bitten feet, and both so tired
they could hardly speak. Of course, they were made as comfortable as
was possible, the frozen one rubbed with snow and bandaged, and both
given bacon and corn-bread and hot tea.

"You oughtn't to let yourself get into a state like this," said Mac,
thinking ruefully of these strangers' obvious inability to travel for a
day or two, and of the Christmas dinner, to which Benham alone had been
bidden, by a great stretch of hospitality.

"That's all very well," said the stranger, who shouted when he talked
at all, "but how's a man to know his feet are going to freeze?"

"Ye see, sorr," O'Flynn explained absent-mindedly, "Misther MacCann
didn't know yer pardner was deaf."

This point of view seemed to thaw some of the frost out of the two
wayfarers. They confided that they were Salmon P. Hardy and Bill
Schiff, fellow-passengers in the _Merwin_, "locked in the ice down
below," and they'd mined side by side back in the States at Cripple
Creek. "Yes, sir, and sailed for the Klondyke from Seattle last July."
And now at Christmas they were hoping that, with luck, they might reach
the new Minook Diggings, seven hundred miles this side of the Klondyke,
before the spring rush. During this recital O'Flynn kept rolling his
eyes absently.

"Theyse a quare noise without."

"It's the wind knockin' down yer chimbly," says Mr. Hardy
encouragingly.

"It don't sound like Nich'las, annyhow. May the divil burrn him in
tarment and ile fur disappoyntin' th' kid."

A rattle at the latch, and the Pymeut opened the door.

"Lorrd love ye! ye're a jool, Nich'las!" screamed O'Flynn; and the
mucklucks passed from one to the other so surreptitiously that for all
Kaviak's wide-eyed watchfulness he detected nothing.

Nicholas supped with his white friends, and seemed bent on passing the
night with them. He had to be bribed with tobacco and a new half-dollar
to go home and keep Christmas in the bosom of his family. And still, at
the door, he hesitated, drew back, and laid the silver coin on the
table.

"No. It nights."

"But it isn't really dark."

"Pretty soon heap dark."

"Why, I thought you natives could find your way day or nigh