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for it was the Colonel's affair to take up proceedings at this point make the coffee and the mush and keep it from burning, fry the bacon, and serve up breakfast. Saturday brought a slight variation in the early morning routine. The others came straggling in, as usual, but once a week Mac was sure to be first, for he had to get Kaviak up.
Kaviak, seeing the keen look menacing his treasure, lifted a shrunken yellow hand and clasped tight the dirty shapeless object suspended from a raw-hide necklace. Nicholas seemed to hesitate to divest him of this sole remaining possession. "You must get him to give it up," said Father Wills, "and burn it." Kaviak flatly declined to fall in with as much as he understood of this arrangement.
"Why, to be first in the field, and stake a gold-mine, of course." The Colonel laid a rough hand on the Boy's shoulder. He shook it off impatiently, and before the older man could speak: "Look here, let's talk sense. Somebody's got to go, or there'll be trouble. Potts says Kaviak. But what difference would Kaviak make? I've been afraid you'd get ahead of me.
"Oh, there's only one more." He grinned with embarrassment, and hitched his head towards Kaviak. "I guess you've jawed enough," said Maudie, leaving the others and coming to the foot of the bed. "And Maudie's goin' back, too," said the sick man. She nodded. "And you're never goin' to leave her again?" "No." "Maudie's a little bit of All Right," said the patient.
Nobody could discover that he minded much, though he learnt to try to shorten the ceremony by saying "I solly" all the way to the cabin. As a rule he was strangely undemonstrative; but in his own grave little fashion he conducted life with no small intelligence, and learned, with an almost uncanny quickness, each man's uses from the Kaviak point of view.
Mac got up, and not only Kaviak watched him for syrup was a luxury not expected every day every neck had craned, every pair of eyes had followed anxiously to that row of rapidly diminishing tins, all that was left of the things they all liked best, and they still this side of Christmas! "What you rubber-neckin' about?" Mac snapped at the Boy as he came back with the fresh supply.
The morning after the ejection of Potts, and his unwilling reception at the Big Cabin, Mac and O'Flynn failed to appear for breakfast. "Guess they're huffy," says Potts, stretching out his feet, very comfortable in their straw-lined mucklucks, before the big blaze. "Bring on the coffee, Kaviak." "No," says the Colonel, "we won't begin without the other fellows."
"And now, you see" he turned the can bottom side up "all gone!" "Oh-h!" murmured Kaviak with an accent of polite regret. Then, with recovered cheerfulness, he pointed to the store corner: "Maw!" Potts laughed in his irritating way, and Mac's face got red. Things began to look black for Kaviak. "Say, fellas, see here!" The Boy hammered the lid on the can with his fist, and then held it out.
The Boy contributed a shirt of his own, and helped Mac to put it on the incredibly thin little figure. The shirt came down to Kaviak's heels, and had to have the sleeves rolled up every two minutes. But by the time the reindeer-steak was nearly done Kaviak was done, too, and O'Flynn had said, "That Spissimen does ye credit, Mac."
Mac tried to soothe him. But Kaviak, casting about for charms to disarm the awful fury of the white man able to endure with dignity any reverse save that of having his syrup spilt cried out: "I solly solly. Our Farva " "I'm sorry, too, Kaviak," Mac interrupted, gathering the child up to him; "and we won't either of us do it any more."
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