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"There it is." Porportuk pointed at El-Soo. Klakee-Nah could not understand. He peered down the table, brushed his eyes, and peered again. "Your daughter, El-Soo her will I take and the debt be no more. I will burn the debt there in the candle." Klakee-Nah's great chest began to heave. "Ho! ho! a joke. Ho! ho! ho!" he laughed Homerically.
Porportuk once took it upon himself to chide El-Soo upon the wasteful way of life in the large house it was when he had about absorbed the last of Klakee-Nah's wealth but he never ventured so to chide again. El-Soo, like her father, was an aristocrat, as disdainful of money as he, and with an equal sense of honour as finely strung.
The old roystering crowd was there, and, as of old, three frost-bitten sailors were there, fresh from the long traverse from the Arctic, survivors of a ship's company of seventy-four. At Klakee-Nah's back were four old men, all that were left him of the slaves of his youth.
With rheumy eyes they saw to his needs, with palsied hands filling his glass or striking him on the back between the shoulders when death stirred and he coughed and gasped. It was a wild night, and as the hours passed and the fun laughed and roared along, death stirred more restlessly in Klakee-Nah's throat. Then it was that he sent for Porportuk.
"I know naught of the next world," Porportuk explained. "I do business in this world." Klakee-Nah's face cleared. "This comes of sleeping cold of nights," he laughed. He pondered for a space, then said, "It is in this world that you must be paid. There remains to me this house. Take it, and burn the debt in the candle there." "It is an old house and not worth the money," Porportuk made answer.
And Porportuk came in from the outside frost to look with disapproving eyes upon the meat and wine on the table for which he had paid. But as he looked down the length of flushed faces to the far end and saw the face of El-Soo, the light in his eyes flared up, and for a moment the disapproval vanished. Place was made for him at Klakee-Nah's side, and a glass placed before him.
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