departed this world six months
before during a spell of delirium tremens, the trader had been obliged
to do his own.

Queer and clever things had Add-'em-up done to the books. Down in San
Francisco the directors of the Alaska Fur and Trading Company had long
suspected it no doubt, but it was not for nothing that Paul Kilbuck was
known up and down the coast of Alaska as the White Chief. No other man
in the North had such power and influence among the Thlinget tribes.
No other man sent in such quantities of prime pelts; hence the White
Chief of Katleean had never been obliged to give too strict an
accounting of his stewardship. Taking what belongs to a company is
not, in the elastic code of the North, considered stealing. "God is
high above and the Czar is far away," said the plundering, roistering
old Russians of Baranoff's day, and the spirit in the isolated posts
had not changed, though Russian adventurers come no more to rape Alaska
of her riches, and the Stars and Stripes now floats over the old-time
Russian stronghold at Sitka.

For eighteen years Kilbuck had been the agent of the Company. In
trading-posts up and down the coast where the trappers and prospectors
gather to outfit, many tales of the White Chief were afloat: his trips
to the Outside[1]; his lavish spending of money; his hiring of private
cars to take him from Seattle to New York; his princely entertainment
of beautiful women. In every story told of Paul Kilbuck there were
women. Sometimes they were white, but more often they were dusky
beauties of the North.

Among the several dark-eyed Thlinget women who occupied the mysterious
quarters back of the log store, there was always rejoicing when the
White Chief returned from his visits to the States. He was a generous
master, bringing back with him many presents from the land of the white
people--rings, beads, trinkets, and yards of bright colored silks. The
favorites of his household fondled these gifts for a time with soft,
guttural cries of delight and gentle strokings of their slim, brown
hands, and then laid them away in fantastically carved Indian chests of
yellow cedar.

Perhaps the strangest of these gifts had been a pair of homing pigeons,
which had thrived and multiplied under the care of Add-'em-up Sam. A
fluttering of wings now outside the doorway bespoke the presence of
some of them, and Kilbuck stirred in his chair and opened his eyes.

He had been many hours alone in the sto