find there to chase but sand fleas!"

CHAPTER IX

HARLAN WAKES UP

Gregg Harlan had watched with interest the Boreland's preparation for
departure to the island of Kon Klayu. For the first time in his life
he was doing some serious thinking; and ever since the Potlatch he had
been seeing himself in no complimentary light.

His chief source of self-disgust was his way of taking the information
that the Borelands, including Jean Wiley, thought him a squaw-man. In
his dejection his thoughts went back time and again to those few
moments of silent companionship when he had stood beside the girl in
the dusk and watched the funeral canoes come in. . . . Why hadn't he,
after the White Chief told him of his reputed connection with Naleenah,
why hadn't he followed Jean and explained? True, the shock and
surprise of the thing had momentarily swept him off his feet, but why
had he, in foolish reckless resentment against unjust circumstances,
rushed off instead to the cabin of Kayak Bill and taken glass after
glass of the stuff that had put him in such a state of oblivion that he
was unable to take any part in the Potlatch festivities? Since then he
had been too ashamed to approach either of the white women. He felt
that he must first do something to win their respect.

During his twenty-five years Harlan had been a drifter along the
pleasant ways of least resistance. This was, perhaps, because he had
never been called upon to shoulder responsibility. Six months before,
because of this tendency more than because he had been in love, he had
found himself involved in a foolish but unpleasant financial tangle
brought about by a plump, perfumed, pleasure-loving little blonde.
This small person from an eastern state had made his former knowledge
of the hectic night-life of San Francisco seem but a tuning up of the
orchestra before the overture. . . . After the inevitable parting of
the ways, he had found himself obliged to call upon his irate and
disgusted father for financial assistance. He had done this often
before--so often that this last episode, more scarlet than any of the
others, brought about a crisis. Later, penniless, but debtor to his
father only, he had departed under a cloud of paternal disapproval to
take the position of bookkeeper at faraway Katleean. It was then that
he decided he was through with women.

At the time he believed it, as all men do who make a similar decision,
but up here in the N