ad-houses had sprung up along the western portion of it, so
that we should not have to make camp again on the way to Iditarod City.
All of which Minchumina John had collected from the people in the
cabin, and now presented to me as reason why he should be released from
further service. I was loath to let him go until we were actually _at_
the road-house described, but he wanted to go back to the lake for the
potlatch then preparing, and said that two days' delay would bar him
from the best of the festivities.

So I settled with him, giving him fifty dollars of the sixty dollars
covenanted to the Iditarod, and grub enough to take him back to the
lake, and a rifle, for he was unprovided with firearms, and he went his
way back, richly content, to the gorging of unlimited moose meat that
awaited him, and the boy and I went ours. So far as merely his company
was concerned I was not sorry to lose him. The old saying holds good
upon the trail that "two is company and three is none." He interfered
with my boy's lessons. Since he had scarce any English, and could not be
ignored, the conversation was mainly in Indian. In a word he pulled the
company down to a native level. And I was anxious that Walter's
education should proceed.

This boy had been with me for two years, winter and summer, and it was a
great pleasure to witness his gracious development of body, mind, and
character. Clean-limbed, smooth-skinned, slender, and supple, his Indian
blood showing chiefly in a slight swarth of complexion and aquilinity of
feature, he now approached his twentieth year and began to gain the
strength of his manhood and to give promise of more than the average
stature and physical power. With only one full year's schooling behind
him, the year before he came to me, his active intelligence had made
such quick use of it that there was good foundation to build upon; and
our desultory lessons in camp--reading aloud, writing from dictation,
geography and history in such snippets as circumstances permitted--were
eagerly made the most of, and his mental horizon broadened continually.
Until his sixteenth year he had lived amongst the Indians almost
exclusively and had little English and could not read nor write. He was
adept in all wilderness arts. An axe, a rifle, a flaying knife, a skin
needle with its sinew thread--with all these he was at home; he could
construct a sled or a pair of snow-shoes, going to the woods for his
birch, drying it and st