he had lured her away,
and there might be complications. So it was with small fervour that he
said: "Muckluck, I wish you'd come back and wait till morning."

"No, I go now." She was in the act of darting forward on those
snow-shoes, that she used so skillfully, when some sudden thought cried
halt. She even stopped crying. "I no like go near blow-hole by night. I
keep to trail--"

"But how the devil do you do it?"

She paid no heed to the interruption, seeming busy in taking something
over her head from round her neck.

"To-morrow," she said, lowering her tear-harshened voice, "you find
blow-hole. You give this to Yukon Inua--say I send it. He will not hate
you any more." She burst into a fresh flood of tears. In a moment the
dim sight of her, the faint trail of crying left in her wake, had so
wholly vanished that, but for the bit of string, as it seemed to be,
left in his half-frozen hands, he could almost have convinced himself
he had dreamt the unwelcome visit.

The half-shut eye of the camp fire gleamed cheerfully, as he ran back,
and crouched down where poor little Muckluck had knelt, so sure of a
welcome. Muckluck, cogitated the Boy, will believe more firmly than
ever that, if a man doesn't beat a girl, he doesn't mean business. What
was it he had wound round one hand? What was it dangling in the acrid
smoke? _That_, then--her trinket, the crowning ornament of her Holy
Cross holiday attire, that was what she was offering the old ogre of
the Yukon--for his unworthy sake. He stirred up the dying fire to see
it better. A woman's face--some Catholic saint? He held the medal lower
to catch the fitful blaze. "_D. G. Autocratrix Russorum_." The Great
Katharine! Only a little crown on her high-rolled hair, and her
splendid chest all uncovered to the Arctic cold.

Her Yukon subjects must have wondered that she wore no parki--this lady
who had claimed sole right to all the finest sables found in her new
American dominions. On the other side of the medal, Minerva, with a
Gorgon-furnished shield and a beautiful bone-tipped harpoon, as it
looked, with a throwing-stick and all complete. But she, too, would
strike the Yukon eye as lamentably chilly about the legs. How had these
ladies out of Russia and Olympus come to lodge in Ol' Chief's ighloo?
Had Glovotsky won this guerdon at Great Katharine's hands? Had he
brought it on that last long journey of his to Russian America, and
left it to his Pymeut children with his bon