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"I've been ready this half-hour hangin' about waitin' for you. That devil Joe," he went on, lowering his voice as he came up and speaking hurriedly, "has been trying to drag Yagorsha's girl into his ighloo. They've just had a fight out yonder on the ice. I got her away, but not before he'd thrown her down and given her a bloody face. We ought to tell old Yagorsha, hey?" Muckluck chuckled.
Usually Yagorsha's stories were tragic, or, at least, of serious interest, ranging from bereaved parents who turned into wolverines, all the way to the machinations of the Horrid Dwarf and the Cannibal Old Woman. The Colonel looked at Nicholas. He seemed as entertained as the rest, but quite willing to leave his family history in professional hands.
Nobody else in sight but Yagorsha's daughter down at the water-hole. "Where's my pardner gone?" The child only stared, having no English apparently. While the Boy packed the rest of the things, and made the tattered canvas fast under the lashing, Joe came out of the Kachime. He stood studying the prospect a moment, and his dull eyes suddenly gleamed.
But strangely enough, when, through sheer fatigue, his voice failed and his chin fell on his broad chest, a lad of fourteen or so, who had also had difficulty to keep awake, would jog Yagorsha's arm, repeating interrogatively the last phrase used, whereon the old Story-Teller would rouse himself and begin afresh, with an iteration of the previous statement.
When consciousness came back it brought the sound of Yagorsha's yarning by the fire, and the occasional laugh or grunt punctuating the eternal "Story." The Colonel was sitting there among them, solacing himself by adding to the smoke that thickened the stifling air.
But Nicholas had got a grip of him, and while two of the Pymeuts hung on to the half-stunned Colonel to prevent his adding to the complication, Nicholas, with a good deal of trouble in spite of Yagorsha's help, hauled the Boy out of the hole and dragged him up on the ice-edge.
"Me Anna Yagorsha's daughter." "Oh, yes, I thought I'd seen you before." She seemed to be only a little older than Muckluck, but less attractive, chiefly on account of her fat and her look of ill-temper. She was on specially bad terms with a buck they called Joe, and they seemed to pass all their time abusing one another. The Boy craned his neck and looked round.
As the Story-teller seemed to be about to repeat the enlivening tradition concerning the almost mythical youth of Ol' Chief's father, that subject of the great Katharine's, whose blood was flowing still in Pymeut veins, just then in came Yagorsha's daughter with some message to her father. He grunted acquiescence, and she turned to go. Joe called something after her, and she snapped back.
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