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Updated: June 15, 2025
Shaded candles burned on the floor, and beside them crouched Keok and Nawadlook. A glance told him what Sokwenna had done. The room was an arsenal.
That was the funny part of it. And he beat his drum savagely, scowling so that he almost shut his eyes, while Keok laughed outright. It was then that Alan opened his eyes and heard the last of the ship's bells. It was still dark. He turned on the light and looked at his watch. Tautuk's drum had tolled eight bells, aboard the ship, and it was four o'clock in the morning.
Mary Standish was leading the way up out of a dip in the tundra a quarter of a mile away, with Nawadlook and Keok close behind her. They trotted up a low ridge and disappeared. "It's none of my business," persisted Stampede, "but you didn't seem to expect her " "You're right," interrupted Alan, turning toward his pack. "I didn't expect her. I thought she was dead."
He could not keep his eyes from stealing glimpses at her hair when her head was bowed a little. She had smoothed it tonight until it was like softest velvet, with rich glints in it, and the amazing thought came to him that it would be sweetly pleasant to touch with one's hand. The discovery was almost a shock. Keok and Nawadlook had beautiful hair, but he had never thought of it in this way.
And then his heart gave a sudden throb and seemed to stop its beating. It was not Keok on the log. And it was not Nawadlook! He stood up and stepped out from his hiding-place. The slender figure of the girl on the log turned a little, and he saw the glint of golden sunshine in her hair. He called out. "Keok!" Was he mad? Had the sickness in his head turned his brain? And then: "Mary!" he called.
The morning of the fifth day he set out alone for the eastward herd, and on the sixth overtook Tatpan and his herdsmen. Tatpan, like Sokwenna's foster-children, Keok and Nawadlook, had a quarter-strain of white in him, and when Alan came up to him in the edge of the valley where the deer were grazing, he was lying on a rock, playing Yankee Doodle on a mouth-organ.
And it seemed to him that knowledge of this mystery was in the girl's face, glowing in a gentle embarrassment, as she told him she had been expecting him, and that Keok and Nawadlook had given up the cabin to them, so that he might question her uninterrupted. But with this soft flush of her uneasiness, revealing itself in her eyes and cheeks, he saw neither fear nor hesitation.
It's all done up in flags, waiting for you. She an' Nawadlook and Keok are running everything but the deer. The kids would leave their mothers for her, and the men " He chuckled again. "Why, the men even go to the Sunday school she's started! I went. Nawadlook sings." For a moment he was silent. Then he said in a subdued voice, "Alan, you've been a big fool." "I know it, Stampede."
"If you don't stay there, I'll open the door and go outside to fight! Do you understand? Stay there!" His clenched fist was in their faces, his voice almost a shout. He saw another white spurt of dust; the bullet crashed in tinware, and following the crash came a shriek from Keok in the attic. In that upper gloom Sokwenna's gun had fallen with a clatter.
Even Tautuk and Amuk Toolik, his chief herdsmen, were children. Nawadlook and Keok were children. Strong and loyal and ready to die for him in any fight or stress, they were still children. He gave Stampede his rifle and hastened on, determined to keep his eyes from questing for Mary Standish in these first minutes of his return.
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