he'd stop on the way, and
deliver a letter to Mr. MacCann.

"Stop on the way! I should think so."

"We were goin' to have supper to-night, anyhow, and you'll stay and
sleep here."

All Mac's old suspicions of the Jesuits seemed to return with the
advent of that letter.

"I'll read it presently." He laid it on the mantel-shelf, between the
sewing-kit and the tobacco-can, and he looked at it, angrily, every now
and then, while he helped to skin Mr. Benham. That gentleman had thrown
back his hood, pulled off his great moose-skin gauntlets and his
beaver-lined cap, and now, with a little help, dragged the drill parki
over his head, and after that the fine lynx-bordered deer-skin,
standing revealed at last as a well-built fellow, of thirty-eight or
so, in a suit of mackinaws, standing six feet two in his heelless
salmon-skin snow-boots. "Bring in my traps, will you?" he said to the
Indian, and then relapsed into silence. The Indian reappeared with his
arms full.

"Fine lot o' pelts you have there," said the Colonel.

Benham didn't answer. He seemed to be a close-mouthed kind of a chap.
As the Indian sorted and piled the stuff in the corner, Potts said:

"Got any furs you want to sell?"

"No."

"Where you takin' 'em?"

"Down to the _Oklahoma_."

"All this stuff for Cap'n Rainey?"

Benham nodded.

"I reckon there's a mistake about the name, and he's Cap'n Tom Thumb or
Commodore Nutt." The Boy had picked up a little parki made carefully of
some very soft dark fur and trimmed with white rabbit, the small hood
bordered with white fox.

"That's a neat piece of work," said the Colonel.

Benham nodded. "One of the Shageluk squaws can do that sort of thing."

"What's the fur?"

"Musk-rat." And they talked of the weather--how the mercury last week
had been solid in the trading-post thermometer, so it was "over forty
degrees, anyhow."

"What's the market price of a coat like that?" Mac said suddenly.

"That isn't a 'market' coat. It's for a kid of Rainey's back in the
States."

Still Mac eyed it enviously.

"What part of the world are you from, sir?" said the Colonel when they
had drawn up to the supper table.

"San Francisco. Used to teach numskulls Latin and mathematics in the
Las Palmas High School."

"What's the value of a coat like that little one?" interrupted Mac.

"Oh, about twenty dollars."

"The Shageluks ask that much?"

Benham laughed. "If _you_ asked the Shageluks, they'd say forty."