, and preaches peace to the younger generation, for which he
receives a pension from the Company. Tyee is foreman of the mine. But
he has achieved a new theory concerning the Sunlanders.

"They that live under the path of the sun are not soft," he says,
smoking his pipe and watching the day-shift take itself off and the
night-shift go on. "For the sun enters into their blood and burns them
with a great fire till they are filled with lusts and passions. They
burn always, so that they may not know when they are beaten. Further,
there is an unrest in them, which is a devil, and they are flung out
over the earth to toil and suffer and fight without end. I know. I am
Tyee."

THE SICKNESS OF LONE CHIEF

This is a tale that was told to me by two old men. We sat in the smoke
of a mosquito-smudge, in the cool of the day, which was midnight;
and ever and anon, throughout the telling, we smote lustily and with
purpose at such of the winged pests as braved the smoke for a snack at
our hides. To the right, beneath us, twenty feet down the crumbling
bank, the Yukon gurgled lazily. To the left, on the rose-leaf rim of
the low-lying hills, smouldered the sleepy sun, which saw no sleep
that night nor was destined to see sleep for many nights to come.

The old men who sat with me and valorously slew mosquitoes were
Lone Chief and Mutsak, erstwhile comrades in arms, and now withered
repositories of tradition and ancient happening. They were the last
of their generation and without honor among the younger set which had
grown up on the farthest fringe of a mining civilization. Who cared
for tradition in these days, when spirits could be evoked from black
bottles, and black bottles could be evoked from the complaisant white
men for a few hours' sweat or a mangy fur? Of what potency the fearful
rites and masked mysteries of shamanism, when daily that living
wonder, the steamboat, coughed and spluttered up and down the Yukon in
defiance of all law, a veritable fire-breathing monster? And of what
value was hereditary prestige, when he who now chopped the most wood,
or best conned a stern-wheeler through the island mazes, attained the
chiefest consideration of his fellows?

Of a truth, having lived too long, they had fallen on evil days, these
two old men, Lone Chief and Mutsak, and in the new order they were
without honor or place. So they waited drearily for death, and the
while their hearts warmed to the strange white man who sha