We had struck this deserted cabin after a hard day on trail. The dogs
had been fed, the supper dishes washed, the beds made, and we were now
enjoying that most delicious hour that comes each day, and but once each
day, on the Alaskan trail, the hour when nothing intervenes between the
tired body and bed save the smoking of the evening pipe. Some former
denizen of the cabin had decorated its walls with illustrations torn from
magazines and newspapers, and it was these illustrations that had held
Sitka Charley's attention from the moment of our arrival two hours
before. He had studied them intently, ranging from one to another and
back again, and I could see that there was uncertainty in his mind, and
bepuzzlement.

"Well?" I finally broke the silence.

He took the pipe from his mouth and said simply, "I do not understand."

He smoked on again, and again removed the pipe, using it to point at the
_Police Gazette_ illustration.

"That picture--what does it mean? I do not understand."

I looked at the picture. A man, with a preposterously wicked face, his
right hand pressed dramatically to his heart, was falling backward to the
floor. Confronting him, with a face that was a composite of destroying
angel and Adonis, was a man holding a smoking revolver.

"One man is killing the other man," I said, aware of a distinct
bepuzzlement of my own and of failure to explain.

"Why?" asked Sitka Charley.

"I do not know," I confessed.

"That picture is all end," he said. "It has no beginning."

"It is life," I said.

"Life has beginning," he objected.

I was silenced for the moment, while his eyes wandered on to an adjoining
decoration, a photographic reproduction of somebody's "Leda and the
Swan."

"That picture," he said, "has no beginning. It has no end. I do not
understand pictures."

"Look at that picture," I commanded, pointing to a third decoration. "It
means something. Tell me what it means to you."

He studied it for several minutes.

"The little girl is sick," he said finally. "That is the doctor looking
at her. They have been up all night--see, the oil is low in the lamp,
the first morning light is coming in at the window. It is a great
sickness; maybe she will die, that is why the doctor looks so hard. That
is the mother. It is a great sickness, because the mother's head is on
the table and she is crying."

"How do you know she is crying?" I interrupted. "You cannot see her
face.