creeks and trails, and there
was an ominous note in the rumble and grumble of their low-pitched
voices, which came to his ears like the growl of the sea from deep
caverns.

He sat close by a window, and his apathetic eyes rested now and again
on the dreary scene without. The sky was overcast, and a gray drizzle
was falling. It was flood-time on the Yukon. The ice was gone, and the
river was up in the town. Back and forth on the main street, in canoes
and poling-boats, passed the people that never rested. Often he saw
these boats turn aside from the street and enter the flooded square
that marked the Barracks' parade-ground. Sometimes they disappeared
beneath him, and he heard them jar against the house-logs and their
occupants scramble in through the window. After that came the slush
of water against men's legs as they waded across the lower room and
mounted the stairs. Then they appeared in the doorway, with doffed
hats and dripping sea-boots, and added themselves to the waiting
crowd.

And while they centred their looks on him, and in grim anticipation
enjoyed the penalty he was to pay, Imber looked at them, and mused on
their ways, and on their Law that never slept, but went on unceasing,
in good times and bad, in flood and famine, through trouble and terror
and death, and which would go on unceasing, it seemed to him, to the
end of time.

A man rapped sharply on a table, and the conversation droned away into
silence. Imber looked at the man. He seemed one in authority, yet
Imber divined the square-browed man who sat by a desk farther back
to be the one chief over them all and over the man who had rapped.
Another man by the same table uprose and began to read aloud from many
fine sheets of paper. At the top of each sheet he cleared his throat,
at the bottom moistened his fingers. Imber did not understand his
speech, but the others did, and he knew that it made them angry.
Sometimes it made them very angry, and once a man cursed him, in
single syllables, stinging and tense, till a man at the table rapped
him to silence.

For an interminable period the man read. His monotonous, sing-song
utterance lured Imber to dreaming, and he was dreaming deeply when the
man ceased. A voice spoke to him in his own Whitefish tongue, and he
roused up, without surprise, to look upon the face of his sister's
son, a young man who had wandered away years agone to make his
dwelling with the whites.

"Thou dost not remember me," he