pon them. The thought that had been tormenting
him since the first day he began transferring the provisions, came back
now with an added urge. At the West Camp were flour, sugar, cornmeal
and dried fruit. With those ingredients he could make himself the
stuff that his system craved--make it as the Indians made it, with two
kerosene cans and a long piece of hollow kelp. In his hut on the other
side of the Island he could, undetected, heat the fermented mash in a
can, attach the piece of kelp to the top and immerse it in cold water
until the condensed steam came out at the other end in the form of
Thlinget _hoochinoo_.

As he huddled there on the brow of the hill he had cradled the thought
in his mind, planning in detail each step of the distilling. With
provisions so low it would be impossible to take enough from the cache
to make any quantity--but he might make sufficient to ease, just once,
the intolerable thirst that possessed him. It might be six weeks
before the _Hoonah_ returned--six weeks of torment and loneliness.

Another thing had been troubling him of late. His thoughts had been
returning to stories he had heard of Add-'em-up Sam who had died of
delirium tremens at Katleean. Silvertip, when in liquor, was fond of
detailing the last, violent days of the old bookkeeper. . . .
Sometimes, Harlan fancied, he too was beginning to see those fearful
shadowy images that dance on the borderland of insanity. How else
could he account for that spectre of the tundra which he saw,
sometimes, as he went home in the dusk--that dark, almost imperceptible
figure far off toward the south cliffs where the lone tree of Kon Klayu
stood on the brow of the hill? Was he too going the way of Add-'em-up
Sam?

As he sat there he had cursed himself for ever leaving the _Hoonah_ and
risking his life to help a woman whose kind, polite aloofness irritated
his drink-shattered nerves as an open declaration of hostility could
not have done--a woman to whom he was merely a foolish young man who
had chosen to get himself marooned, and whose presence forced her to
calculate more closely the alarmingly depleted store of provisions left
after the wetting of the tide.

Suddenly, in the midst of his bitter reverie, he raised his face from
his clasped arms. Up from the cabin below floated the faint, pure
harmony of violin strings. So exquisite, so lovely sounded the notes
in the wide, wild loneliness of the evening, that Harlan sat for