ouble. Jes' quit, an' we'll hang yeh neat and handy,
an' be done with it."

"Steady, all!" Lawson, the sailorman, bawled. "Jam his head into the
bean pot and batten down."

"But my fingah, suh," Mr. Taylor protested.

"Leggo with y'r finger, then! Always in the way!"

"But I can't, Mistah Lawson. It's in the critter's gullet, and nigh
chewed off as 't is."

"Stand by for stays!" As Lawson gave the warning, Jan half lifted
himself, and the struggling quartet floundered across the tent into a
muddle of furs and blankets. In its passage it cleared the body of a
man, who lay motionless, bleeding from a bullet-wound in the neck.

All this was because of the madness which had come upon Jan--the madness
which comes upon a man who has stripped off the raw skin of earth and
grovelled long in primal nakedness, and before whose eyes rises the fat
vales of the homeland, and into whose nostrils steals the whiff of bay,
and grass, and flower, and new-turned soil. Through five frigid years
Jan had sown the seed. Stuart River, Forty Mile, Circle City, Koyokuk,
Kotzebue, had marked his bleak and strenuous agriculture, and now it was
Nome that bore the harvest,--not the Nome of golden beaches and ruby
sands, but the Nome of '97, before Anvil City was located, or Eldorado
District organized. John Gordon was a Yankee, and should have known
better. But he passed the sharp word at a time when Jan's blood-shot
eyes blazed and his teeth gritted in torment. And because of this, there
was a smell of saltpetre in the tent, and one lay quietly, while the
other fought like a cornered rat, and refused to hang in the decent and
peacable manner suggested by his comrades.

"If you will allow me, Mistah Lawson, befoah we go further in this
rumpus, I would say it wah a good idea to pry this hyer varmint's teeth
apart. Neither will he bite off, nor will he let go. He has the wisdom
of the sarpint, suh, the wisdom of the sarpint."

"Lemme get the hatchet to him!" vociferated the sailor. "Lemme get the
hatchet!" He shoved the steel edge close to Mr. Taylor's finger and used
the man's teeth as a fulcrum. Jan held on and breathed through his nose,
snorting like a grampus. "Steady, all! Now she takes it!"

"Thank you, suh; it is a powerful relief." And Mr. Taylor proceeded to
gather into his arms the victim's wildly waving legs.

But Jan upreared in his Berserker rage; bleeding, frothing, cursing; five
frozen years thawing into su