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Updated: June 14, 2025
"I'll go bail, ould Foxy," said Corporal O'Flynn, apostrophizing his superior officer under his breath, "that there's nothin' that your sharp eyes doesn't see if it's just a snake takin' advantage o' the privacy o' the dark hour to slough his skin. But I'd give ye," he hesitated, "me blessin', if you'd tell me what 'tis ye're lookin' for.
The Colonel, after the stranger had introduced himself, was just a shade more reserved, but seemed determined not to be lacking in hospitality. O'Flynn was overflowing, or would have been had the Jesuit encouraged him. He told their story, or, more properly, his own, and how they had been wrecked. "And so ye're the Father Superior up there?" says the Irishman, pausing to take breath. "No.
Before this quieter phase set in, Maudie had sent into Dawson for Potts, O'Flynn and Mac, that they might distract the Colonel's mind from the pardner she knew could not return. But O'Flynn, having married the girl at the Moosehorn Café, had excuse of ancient validity for not coming; Potts was busy breaking the faro bank, and Mac was waiting till an overdue Lower River steamer should arrive.
My triumph was complete. Even O'Flynn, who, like all Irishmen, had plenty of loose good-nature at bottom, and was as sudden and furious in his loves as in his hostilities, scrambled over the benches, regardless of patriots' toes, to shake me violently by the hand, and inform me that I was "a broth of a boy," and that "any little disagreements between us had vanished like a passing cloud from the sunshine of our fraternity" when my eye was caught by a face which there was no mistaking my cousin's!
O'Flynn was screaming with excitement as he saw that the bundle Nicholas was carrying had a head and two round eyes. "The saints in glory be among us! What's that? Man alive, what is it, be the Siven?" "That," answered Mac with a proprietary air, "is a little Esquimaux boy, and I'm bringing him in to doctor his cold." "Glory be! An Esquimer! And wid a cowld!
"You haven't told me who it is yet, dear." "Oh, darling, you haven't been listening. It is the dear woman who sent me the box full of new clothes Aunt Katie O'Flynn, at your service. But there! I must be off. I'll think of it all day, and it will make me so happy."
"Well, he's contributed a bottle of California apricots, and we'll have boiled rice." "An' punch, glory be!" "Y-yes," answered the Colonel. "I've been thinkin' a good deal about the punch." "So's myself," said O'Flynn frankly; but Potts looked at the Colonel suspiciously through narrowed eyes. "There's very little whiskey left, and I propose to brew a mild bowl " "To hell with your mild bowls!"
Even had the Colonel needed any keeping up to the mark, the office would have been cheerfully undertaken by O'Flynn or by Potts, for whom interest in the gustatory aspect of the occasion was wholly undimmed by the threatened absence of Mac and the "little divvle." "There'll be the more for us," said Potts enthusiastically. O'Flynn's argument seemed to halt upon a reservation.
Then one morning they woke to find all still, the conflict over, the Yukon frozen from bank to bank. No sound from that day on; no more running water for a good seven months. Winter had come. While the work went forward they often spoke of the only two people they had thus far seen. Both Potts and O'Flynn had been heard to envy them.
"Ye see, sorr," O'Flynn explained absent-mindedly, "Misther MacCann didn't know yer pardner was deaf." This point of view seemed to thaw some of the frost out of the two wayfarers. They confided that they were Salmon P. Hardy and Bill Schiff, fellow-passengers in the Merwin, "locked in the ice down below," and they'd mined side by side back in the States at Cripple Creek.
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