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And Skulpin, who had dragged me down, shot with a pistol from where he lay, and Ligoun toppled and fell, as an old pine topples and falls in the teeth of the wind." Palitlum ceased. His eyes, smouldering moodily, were bent upon the fire, and his cheek was dark with blood. "And thou, Palitlum?" I demanded. "And thou?" "I? I did remember the Law, and I slew Opitsah the Knife, which was well.
Nay, O Hair-Face, for I was unknown as Palitlum in those days, being called Olo, the Ever-Hungry. The drink was to come after. 'It be good to fight, spoke Ligoun, 'but it be foolish. In the Boston Man Country, as I saw with mine eyes, they are not given to fighting one with another, and they be strong.
And the while you gather to you the gold that hides in our mountains and the fish that swim in our seas; and Palitlum, and the brothers of Palitlum, dig the gold for thee and net the fish, and are glad to be made glad when out of thy wisdom thou deemest it fit that the 'Three Star' should wet our lips." "I was minded to hear of Ligoun," I said impatiently.
Palitlum fumbled under his shirt and drew forth a beaded sheath, and from the sheath, a knife. It was a knife home-wrought and crudely fashioned from a whip-saw file; a knife such as one may find possessed by old men in a hundred Alaskan villages. "The knife of Ligoun?" I said, and Palitlum nodded. "And for the knife of Ligoun," I said, "will I give thee ten bottles of 'Three Star."
Yet honor was mine at the potlatch of Niblack, on the Skoot, and the memory of it, and the memory of Ligoun, be dear to me. Nay, didst thou turn the sea itself into 'Three Star' and say that it were all mine for the knife, yet would I keep the knife. I am Palitlum, the Drinker, but I was once Olo, the Ever-Hungry, who bore up Ligoun with his youth!"
"It is 'Three Star, and a better than what they poison their bellies with down there," I answered, sweeping my hand, as it were, over the yawning chasm of blackness and down to where the beach fires glinted far below tiny jets of flame which gave proportion and reality to the night. Palitlum sighed and shook his head. "Wherefore I am here with thee."
"It is a way of the Thlinket-folk," Palitlum vouchsafed half apologetically. And I remembered the gun-fighters and bad men of my own Western land, and was not perplexed at the way of the Thlinket-folk. "In time," Palitlum continued, "we came to Chief Niblack and the Skoots. It was a feast great almost as the potlatch of Ligoun.
But because of his many deeds, and in punishment, a warship carried him away, even to thy country, O Hair-Face and Boston Man; and the years were many ere he came back, and I was grown to something more than a boy and something less than a young man. And Ligoun, being childless in his old age, made much of me, and grown wise, gave me of his wisdom. "'It be good to fight, O Palitlum, said he.
But Palitlum looked at me slowly. "Hair-Face, I am weak as water, and easy as a woman. I have soiled my belly with quass, and hooch, and 'Three Star. My eyes are blunted, my ears have lost their keenness, and my strength has gone into fat. And I am without honor in these days, and am called Palitlum, the Drinker.
"Thou art a great man, Palitlum," I said, "and I honor thee." Palitlum reached out his hand. "The 'Three Star' between thy knees be mine for the tale I have told," he said. And as I looked on the frown of the cliff at our backs, I saw the shadow of a man's torso, monstrous beneath a huge inverted bottle. "The sun sinks, Canim, and the heat of the day is gone!"
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