ot to torture and death. Poor Cheenbuk! he was ever
against war--yet war has been forced on him. I fear we shall never see
him again. Hoi! my leg is bad. I can't understand how the
Fire-spouters could hit it without the little thing going through my
back first."

"I wish all the Fire-spouters were deep in the inside of a whale's
belly," growled Ondikik, whose wound was beginning to render him
feverish and rusty. "Arrows and spears can be pulled out, but when the
little spouter things go in we don't know where they go to. They
disappear and leave an ugly hole behind them."

At this point Raventik, on whom the command had devolved, came forward
with a choice piece of juicy walrus blubber on a flat stone for a plate.

"Our chiefs will eat," he said, "it will do them good--make their hearts
strong and ease the wounds."

"No," said Gartok decisively, "none for me."

"Take it away!" cried the other sharply.

"No?" exclaimed Raventik in surprise. You see, he had never in his life
been wounded or ill, and could not understand the possibility of
refusing food, except when too full of it. Being a sympathetic soul,
however, he pressed it on the invalids, but received replies so very
discouraging that he was induced to forbear.

Old Uleeta turned out to be a more intelligent, it not more kindly,
nurse. After she had eaten her supper and succeeded in bolting the last
bite that had refused to go down when she could eat no more, she came
forward with a bladder full of water, and some rabbit-skins, for the
purpose of dressing the wounds.

"Gently, mother," said Gartok with a suppressed groan, "you lay hold of
me as if I were a seal."

"You are quite as self-willed, my son," replied the old woman. "If you
had not gone out to fight you would not have come back with a hole in
your leg."

"If I had not come into the world I should not have been here to trouble
you, mother."

"There's truth in that, my son," returned the woman, as if the idea were
new to her.

At this Ondikik groaned--whether at the contemptibly obvious character
of the idea, or at ideas in general, or in consequence of pain, we
cannot tell.

"You said, mother, that Cheenbuk gave them a good deal of trouble?"

"Ay, he gave them sore hearts and sore bodies."

"They deserved it! what right had they to come with their fire-spouters
to attack us?"

"What right had you to go without your fire-spouters to attack _them_?"
demanded old Uleeta, somewh