erly long.
A wavy beard of auburn-grey spread over the front of his blue flannel
shirt. Hanging loosely from his shoulders a hair-seal waistcoat,
brightly trimmed with red flannel, served as a coat above faded blue
overalls, and from the knees down Kayak Bill was finished off with hip
rubber boots, the turned-down tops of which flapped with every step,
lending a swashbuckling air to his rolling gait.

He seated himself leisurely on the steps below the platform in front of
the trading-post door.

"By hell, Chief," he drawled, drawing a huge clasp-knife from his
pocket, "I been grazin' on this here Alasky range nigh on to twenty
yars, and so help me Hannah, I never did find a place so wild or a
bunch o' hombres so tough but what sooner or later all hands starts
a-singin' o' the female sect." With a movement of his thumb Kayak Bill
released the formidable blade of the knife, and nonchalantly,
dexterously, began using it as a toothpick.

"Yas," he said slowly, in answer to the other's silence, "a-talkin' and
a-singin' o' women and love. . . . Now, I hearn tell a heap about love
and women in my time, but neither o' them things has affected my heart
ever, though one time a spell back, tobaccy did. Still, Chief, with
all respects to yore sentiments regardin' them Chocolate Drops what
inhabits yore harem, . . . still, it sort o' roils me up to hear a
white man a-talkin' and a-singin' o' takin' a squaw to wife."

There was an involuntary contraction of the hand that was hooked under
Paul Kilbuck's belt. Not another man from Dixon's Entrance to Point
Barrow would have dared to hint at the White Chief's domestic
arrangements in that gentleman's hearing, but there was something in
the soft twinkle of Kayak Bill's hazel eye, something in the crude,
whimsical philosophy distilled in the old hootch-maker's heart, that
amused, while it piqued the trader at Katleean. He sat down now on the
steps beside his visitor.

"Kayak," he said, almost gently, "when an old fellow like you begins to
talk about squaws I have to smile. A man past sixty--! But how about
twenty-five years ago? . . . What's a man going to do when he finds
himself on the edge of the wilderness and--he wants a woman?"
Kilbuck's voice rose slightly, his black brows drew together over the
pale, unseeing eyes that sought the distant peaks, his thin nostrils
quivered. "It's a wild country up here, Kayak. Makes a man hunger for
something soft and feminine--and