thought, on the barren stretches of Bering
Sea, in the heartbreaking mazes of the Great Delta, on the terrible
winter journey from Point Barrow to the Porcupine? Father Roubeau
puffed heavily at his trail-worn pipe, and gazed on the reddisked sun,
poised somberly on the edge of the northern horizon.

Malemute Kid wound up his watch. It was midnight.

'Cheer up, old man!' The Kid was evidently gathering up a broken thread.

'God surely will forgive such a lie. Let me give you the word of a man
who strikes a true note: If She have spoken a word, remember thy lips
are sealed, And the brand of the Dog is upon him by whom is the secret
revealed.

If there be trouble to Herward, and a lie of the blackest can clear,
Lie, while thy lips can move or a man is alive to hear.'

Father Roubeau removed his pipe and reflected. 'The man speaks true,
but my soul is not vexed with that. The lie and the penance stand with
God; but--but--'

'What then? Your hands are clean.' 'Not so. Kid, I have thought much,
and yet the thing remains. I knew, and made her go back.' The clear
note of a robin rang out from the wooden bank, a partridge drummed the
call in the distance, a moose lunged noisily in the eddy; but the twain
smoked on in silence.

The Wisdom of the Trail

Sitka Charley had achieved the impossible. Other Indians might have
known as much of the wisdom of the trail as he did; but he alone knew
the white man's wisdom, the honor of the trail, and the law. But these
things had not come to him in a day. The aboriginal mind is slow to
generalize, and many facts, repeated often, are required to compass an
understanding. Sitka Charley, from boyhood, had been thrown continually
with white men, and as a man he had elected to cast his fortunes with
them, expatriating himself, once and for all, from his own people. Even
then, respecting, almost venerating their power, and pondering over it,
he had yet to divine its secret essence--the honor and the law. And it
was only by the cumulative evidence of years that he had finally come
to understand. Being an alien, when he did know, he knew it better than
the white man himself; being an Indian, he had achieved the impossible.

And of these things had been bred a certain contempt for his own
people--a contempt which he had made it a custom to conceal, but which
now burst forth in a polyglot whirlwind of curses upon the heads of
Kah-Chucte and Gowhee. They cringed before him like a brace o