miles from Nome to Candle and back, the time being 76 hours, 16
minutes, and 28 seconds, and showed him the picture of his lead dog
pasted in the back of his watch. And Jake Berger got real gabby at last
and told the story about the old musher going up the White Horse Trail
in a blizzard and meeting the Bishop, only he didn't know it was the
Bishop. And the Bishop says, "How's the trail back of you, my friend?"
and the old musher just swore with the utmost profanity for three
straight minutes. Then he says to the Bishop, "And what's it like back
of you?" and the Bishop says, "Just like that!" Jake here got
embarrassed from talking so much and ordered another round of this
squirrel poison we was getting, and Jeff Tuttle begun his imitation of
the Sioux squaw with a hare lip reciting "Curfew Shall Not Ring
To-night." It was a pretty severe ordeal for the rest of us, but we was
ready to endure much if it would make this low den seem more homelike.
Only when Jeff got about halfway through the singing waiter comes up,
greatly shocked, and says none of that in here because they run an
orderly place, and we been talking too loud anyway. This waiter had a
skull exactly like a picture of one in a book I got that was dug up
after three hundred thousand years and the scientific world couldn't
ever agree whether it was an early man or a late ape. I decided I didn't
care to linger in a place where a being with a head like this could pass
on my diversions and offenses so I made a move to go. Jeff Tuttle says
to this waiter, "Fie, fie upon you, Roscoe! We shall go to some
respectable place where we can loosen up without being called for it."
The waiter said he was sorry, but the Bowery wasn't Broadway. And the
New Yorker whispered that it was just as well because we was lucky to
get out of this dive with our lives and property--and even after that
this anthropoid waiter come hurrying out to the taxis after us with my
fur piece and my solid gold vanity-box that I'd left behind on a chair.
This was a bitter blow to all of us after we'd been led to hope for
outrages of an illegal character. The New Yorker was certainly making a
misdeal every time he got the cards. None of us trusted him any more,
though Ben was still loyal and sensitive about him, like he was an only
child and from birth had not been like other children.

The lad now wanted to steer us into an Allied Bazaar that would still be
open, because he'd promised to sell twenty t