Chapter II: The Voyage of the "beaver" (2)

"Next of a tribe called Tartars, very bad Indians, more in number than the leaves of the forest, who killed Johnsmith and all his warriors in battle. But Johnsmith came alive again to be a war slave sold to Turkish squaws.

"From which captivity he did escape by using his chain to club down a Turkish war lord whose head he chopped off, then took his armor, sword, and horse for that great ride he made, the ride of a hundred days back to the Christian tribes. They hailed him as first of all their warriors.

"Then of his passage in the little trade ship which fought two Spanish battleships. Oh, you must remember how they boarded, and when they got the fore part of the ship he touched off his powder barrels there and blew up the forecastle.

"Last of his coming to London, only twenty-five years old, but passing rich in plunder, first of all warriors on earth in glory, and so beautiful a man that every woman worshiped him--even as I did."

"Oh well, it's only fairy tales," said Storm resignedly.

"Boo!" said all the fairies. "Boo-oo-oo!"

"Truly it was like a fairy tale," said Pocahontas, and the fairies were ever so pleased, "when Johnsmith came into Virginia.

"My father King Powhatan watched that English camp in Virginia, of wasters led by idiots, who starved and squabbled until the sickness took their silly voices one by one out into the silence. 'There's only one man among them,' said my father Powhatan, 'so they landed him in irons--this fellow they call Johnsmith.' But we called him the Great Werowance. 'I'll kill him,' said Powhatan, 'and the rest of them will blow away like the dead leaves in winter.'

"But Johnsmith had the heart of a saint and the mind of a boy, magic beyond our biggest medicine men, and such a queer little laugh. Our warriors laid his head on a block to club his brains out, but I took his head in my arms and held on tight, so they must kill me first. After that he always used to call me his little daughter.

"My father was the biggest of all kings, but Captain Johnsmith was his master. Time and again Powhatan tried to get him killed but Werowance would come and talk it over, smoking with him, laughing at him. Once I ran through the woods all night to tell him that Powhatan's army was coming against his little helpless camp, but instead of running away he unpacked his goods to give me presents--oh, such lovely gifts if only I'd dared to take them, to be caught wearing them.

"Then came the night when the soldiers blew up his boat with gunpowder, and what was left of him was sent to die in England. You swore to me that he died there, or I'd never have married you. And yet in my heart I knew all the time, that he lived. But how was I to get to England and to him unless I married you? Well," she sighed, "it can't be helped. We're married.

"Verily when we got to England, Johnsmith was alive, but then you see I was married, to a little man with a temper--and so jealous. Well, better jealous than runagate!"

"Go on. Twist the knife deeper."

She put her little head sideways and chirped like a squirrel, then made a great pretense that she did no such thing.

All the fairies were poking one another in the ribs, ever so slyly.

"Johnsmith heard of my coming. The camp crier called it among the tipis in London town, but who believes what he says! And then one day the hero walked in Philpot Lane among the smelly lodges, when who should he see but Uttamatomahkin, one of Powhatan's counselors, who went with a stick and a knife, making a notch for every man he met. Powhatan had ordered him to find out the number of English warriors there were for killing. Johnsmith hailed him, making the sign for peace.

"'Oh, Great Werowance, Master of all the Seas,'" cried Uttamatomahkin. "'I come with the Lady Pocahontas, and her husband, and her baby son to seek you.'"

"So they walked together, the chief notching his stick for every man they met. 'Now show me God,' said he, supposing that the God of the English ought to live in their chief village.

"'Nay,' answered Johnsmith, 'but is it really true my little one is here?'

"They came to the Sachem, Sir Thomas of the English tribe in Virginia, and asked him about the Princess Pocahontas.

"'I hear,' said the Sachem, 'she is a very civil formal gentlewoman--though she be squaw in the wigwam of Bear-who-sulks.'"

"You made that up!" Storm snarled.

"I did," said Pocahontas. "Then Johnsmith put on his chief's dress, his war bonnet, and best velvet robe. He brushed his curly beard up, so, and his mustaches straight out like a wildcat seeking his love. He rode his painted war horse to the Bishop's tipi, where you and I were lying, with our small baby boy.

"Now may it please your worship Master Rolfe. There was little me tied up with strings like a sacred medicine bundle, in wooden hoops, and a stomacher stiff as a baby's cradle board, a piccadill collar stuck out all round with skewers, a tall hat, and high-heeled moccasins--yes, with red heels tap-tap-tap on a floor like black ice. Tap-tap-tap--flop, then scramble up to my feet, and tap, tap, tap--lawks!"

She slithered round the Tuft of Moss, like a cat on glare ice, pretending to overbalance and recover, wide-eyed, hands outstretched.

Some of the fairies skirled and ran away.

"I couldn't run to him on heels like that. I couldn't love him properly in stomacher and farthingale. I knew he'd hate me in blue, because I'm yellow, and what could I do but beat the air with a fan of three plumes or a stick? He never liked face paint either--men who kiss nicely object to the taste. H'm? No? But then you don't kiss nicely like dear Johnsmith.

"On the whole I couldn't bear it. At the sight of him I tried to run and couldn't. So I just turned away, flopped on the floor, and howled. Yes, there's your civil formal Lady Rebecca, Royal Squaw, gentlewoman, and tied up with a husband, sniff, boo-hoo-hoo-oo! Although he was only a little one."

Storm crouched in the moss a picture of glum despair, and all the fairies poking fun at him.

"Out with it," he growled. "You ran away with Johnsmith!"

"Ran away with grand-dad! He kissed you as if you were his long lost little one, and took you to walk in the fields, his arm about your neck, until I'd time to mend the ravages in my face-paint."

Storm looked up, wistfully, humbly. "I seem to remember," he whispered. "Father of Virginia and New England."

"Founder of the United States," said Rain, "for so my spirit-guide would call him."

"Captain John Smith? Why didn't you call him by his proper name?"

"Beshrew me I did," she answered indignantly. "All the time."

"Oh, you little liar!"

* * * * * * *

"I may be a little liar," said the bos'n, "but this is the first I've heered about it. Now wake up properly."

The bos'n had brought Bill hard-tack and water for breakfast, together with a hunk of cold meat pie pinched from the cabin pantry. He unlocked the handcuffs, and put the food on the small paint-shelf. "When youse put that inside your belt," said he, "Old Home-sweet-home says you kin make yourself scarce, and join your watch, my son, the watch below."

VII

The old man nagged like an old woman and Mr. Dodd looked haggard, haunted, grew irritable, and hounded the men at their work. As to the second mate, he seemed demoralized altogether. Nor was there comfort in the forecastle, where the straining bowsprit worked a passage for the water until all bunks were sodden and men wrung out wet clothes to put on damp ones after their watch on deck. The presence of a sneak made talk unsafe, and there was sullen silence in that wet, black, freezing hole, while the Cape Horn swell struck like a battering-ram and freezing sprays lashed high. Then somehow Captain Home took exception to a glance or a word from Auld Jock, flew in a passion, had the man spread-eagled, and gave him three dozen to show him who was master.

"Rope's end" could not be mentioned after that, or "rope," a word but seldom used afloat. It was barred lest that or ever so slight a reference remind Auld Jock of the outrage. Delicately tactful, afraid to take over his duties lest they affront his pride, the fellows would leave to him the bit of meat which had a trace of fat, offer all sorts of little courtesies, seek Jock's advice in their affairs, ask his opinion when a point was argued. Silas was once more a member of the mess, apparently quite friends again with Bill, for in this general mourning all men were brothers. But on duty there were no chanteys sung. The job which had taken five minutes was now dragged out for an hour; a surly obedience, a scowling glance, replaced the old alacrity of service, and Captain Home had remarkably narrow escapes from blocks or marlinespikes which fell from aloft by accident.

Then at long last, driven far down towards the Antarctic after six weeks of awful cold, of furious gales, of peril without and smoldering mutiny within, the ship won round the Horn. Sheeted with ice from truck to keelson, she drove before a polar gale straight to the norrard. A storm jib, and a close-reefed to'gallant sail kept her just clear of being jumped by black-browed, white-manned, hell-bred, mast-high combers, outroaring the Antarctic wind, while sheeted spray slashed overhead, and on the rolling decks green seas came aft, waist deep.

Jock and the Iroquois, the two strongest men in the watch, were at the wheel, the mate standing by lest a kick of the rudder whirl them into the scuppers. Forward the rest of the men hung on, half drowned, Silas and Bill together in the starboard shrouds. "Say," the American had to shout to make himself heard in that uproar, "jest you keep an eye on the old man, aft there in the rigging. He knows he daren't heave to, and if we broach we'll founder; but if he's man enough he'll set three reefs in the tawps'l and let her rip for Hail Columbia."

By the fading daylight Bill saw the gleam in this Yankee's eyes, the smile upon his lips, the triumph of him, caught the exultant laugh, and for the first time knew that here was indeed a man. But as it needs a light to cast a shadow, this new admiration for the Yankee sharpened Bill's memory of the betrayal, so mean an act of spite. If the ship won through to the Columbia, Silas had prospects ahead a life to live. If she broached to, if one of these vindictive monster seas should batter in her ribs, and send her reeling down through the black deeps beneath, he need not go to Newgate, or be hanged at Tyburn on a false charge of murdering his mother. As he looked at Silas the lad's lips appeared to be drawn, gray, smoldering, while in his eyes the American saw grief so awful that he turned away. He was afraid.

To fear is only human, but the display of it is cowardice, that meanest selfishness which infects and saps and drains away the courage of others just when they need their strength. So Silas, knowing at the inner-most of his being that he was afraid of Bill, in spirit terrified, must needs, for his manhood's sake, attempt to bluff.

"Shucks! You got a grouch ag'in me still?" he challenged.

"Yes," answered Bill, through his clenched teeth, "I has."

"You'd as lief fight it out?"

"In the second dog watch if we've time," said Bill, "or the middle watch if we hasn't."

"Right-o. Where?"

"On the bowsprit end. We'll 'ave it out with knives."

Silas wished then with all his heart he had not tried to bluff.

"You mean that?" he asked huskily.

"I mean," said Bill, "as I'm afraid to live, and Silas," he stared into the man's eyes, "you're scared to die!"

"Waal, that's a fact. I am--leastways to die at such a job as that."

"When you sneaked," said Bill, "your words was murder."

A heavy sea crashed inboard, filled the fore deck, and when the spray cleared they saw the galley all adrift against the half-poop.

"Bill," said Silas, "I ax your pardon for what I done."

"And I forgives yer, Silas."

"Bill--I see the old man screeching for us."

But Bill saw his mother standing amid the wash and wreckage aft. She nodded and smiled to him. Then she was gone, and the lad went to his duty about the shattered galley.

VIII

The gale was at its height during the middle watch, but on towards dawn began to flaw with lulls between the furious squalls, so when the starboard watch was called the captain had the idlers on deck, served rum, and set the topsail. It was a sign that, for Cape Horn was conquered, and in their victorious mood, with the sudden glow of liquor warming them, the men forgot the gloom of the long nights, the piercing cold, drenched clothing, boils, wet berths, the chronic hunger, and mental weariness from lack of sleep, their burning hatred of the captain, even the lack of that human kindness which alone makes life worth living. The setting of the topsail was a sign of better days, of favoring winds, of sunshine, warmth, the Happy Latitudes ahead, water to wash with, a landfall, a seaport, fresh food, and an all-night's rest.

Until this time Bill's mind had dwelt mainly upon the past, with a sick yearning for his mother, and for the barge, the only home he had known, the merry traffic down the Lower Reaches, the stir and throb of London. If he thought of the future, it was only with dread of being taken back, and hanged as a matter of course--yes, just as Uncle Joey had been turned off at Tyburn. Now a new impulse filled him. Was he such a fool as to be taken back there alive? "Yes, if they're smart enough to catch me once I gets ashore!"

He was tailing on the halliard. For the outrage upon Auld Jock, the ship's best chantey man, no man would start a stave. Yet in his mind was the memory of the Trawling chantey picked up long ago from the Barking fisherman. He began to hum the tune, aloud before he knew, and presently a Shetlander of the starboard watch took up the chorus, one after another caught the melody, and Bill roared out the bass, yelped the high grace notes:

"Now up jumps the Herring--the King of the sea,
He jump to the tiller--shouts 'Hellum a lee.'

"Chorus, you fellers--

For it's windy old weather,
Stormy bad weather,
And when the wind blow
We must all pull together!"

IX

At Robinson Crusoe's Island, which is now called Juan Fernandez, the _Beaver_ put in for water, and there her consort the _Nereid_ joined company, having been out of sight for a month.

Of course Bill wanted to go ashore with the watering party, so the old man clapped him in irons lest he attempt an escape. "Losing your day's work," said Silas, who came to him at dinner time in the 'tween-decks, and brought food for them both.

Bill yawned. "Sleep is good," said he. "I didn't intend to run--at least, not here."

They sat on the deck with the food between them, to share the salt meat and biscuit.

"You hadn't oughter run," answered Silas. "Them Chilian loafers ashore what thinks they're soldiers ain't worth encouraging. Set 'em to hunting you--why, they'd get swelled head mistaking themselves for white men. You want to wait until we makes little old North America, where there's more room."

"You been on this west coast?" said Bill.

"You betcher--droguing hides along them Mexican ports, from San Diego all the way up north to San Francisco. Yes, and when I was whaling, I been to Roosian America. We watered at New Archangel!"

"Away north?"

"Sure, and in between California and the Roosian fur-trade forts is the British claims. That's from San Francisco up to 54° 40" north--all Hudson's Bay posts, wot we're heading for now. The British hain't got no rights to be there anyways, seeing it's U.S.A."

"What rights 'as you got to our forts?"

"Oh, as to that, the English can take their rotten forts away and bury 'em. It's the country belongs to us. We bought it from France. It's part of Louisiana."

"'Ow abart the moon?"

Silas grinned joyfully. "Waal," he drawled in his very slow speech, "it's this a-way. The President he come along to tell my mother as he'd like to owe her ten dollars, if she could fix it. I axed him about the moon, but I sort o' disremember exactly what he said. Lemme see. Why, yes.

"Mr. President, he says, says he, 'Waal, Silas, it ain't lo-cated, the moon ain't, yet,' says he, 'but when it is lo-cated, you kin bet yer life no foreigners will be up early enough in the mawning, but they'll find our stakes in fust.'"

Bill was profoundly impressed, and tried in vain to recollect any such conversation of his own with King William IV.

"Another time," said Silas thoughtfully, "when the President went buggy riding with my father, he telled him that when we're good and ready, we're going to run you British out of Oregon."

* * * * * * *

"--and Padre, Silas says----"

"Is that the dog-faced man?" asked Rain.

"More like a wolf," said Storm. "Him as is going to give me his gun, to make up for the way he sneaked."

"Give you his gun?" asked Rain, delighted.

"Yes; it's a good gun too, if I can get a flint for the lock. If it had a flint, of course he wouldn't give it me. Besides, there's no powder or ball."

"When will he give it?" asked Rain.

"When we gets to the mouth of your river."

"I'll pray to the Sun for a flint," said Rain.

"Padre"--the lad looked up at the fairy clergyman, who was frightfully busy working at his book--"Silas says that the Americans is going to run us English out of Oregon."

The padre abandoned his work in despair, swung round on his high stool, put up his spectacles, and looked over the top of the rims at these disturbing children who squatted very comfy on the corner, holding each other's hands. "Ah! that reminds me," he said. "Julia is engaged!"

"Oh!" Rain cried. "But, Padre, you know there is no marrying here."

"Did I say marrying?" asked the clergyman. "No, Julia took a fancy to Lion King-at-Arms, and is engaged, digesting him." He sighed. "She has such a temperature! Ah! yes, and by the way, young Storm, I have a letter which will interest you."

"Eh?" Storm jumped to his feet. "But of course there hain't no letters in Dreamland." He sat down again disappointed.

"Pause, my son. Think it out. The fairies know all about everything. Well, how would they know anything if they never got any news? When a letter is destroyed down there on Earth, of course it comes here by fairy post at once. This letter"--he grubbed about for some time in his desk--"Ah! here. It came I see in 1806, so it's been quite a long time waiting for you."

"Twenty-eight years! Nine years before I was born!"

"So matters are arranged. The little beforehand and the little behindhand are attributes of the fore-handed fairies. Now, this particular letter is in Russian; but there again, pause, and reflect. It is a thought, my son, and thoughts are things which flash from mind to mind. I am speaking Spanish, but you hear in English, and Rain understands in Blackfoot. You shall read this Russian letter in your own language."

Bill wanted the letter, but the padre would lecture, so it couldn't be helped.

"I see," he continued, "that it went down on board the Russian scow _Peter Paul_, when she foundered in a gale off Iterup in 1807. It is written by a man you are to meet in Oregon, a Lieutenant Tschirikov. His grandfather, you know, was the great Lieutenant Tschirikov, the Russian explorer who sailed with Vitus Bering in 1741. He made the first landfall when the Russians discovered North America from the west."

Storm groaned, for at this rate he would never get the letter.

"I'm frightened," said Rain. "Letters are supernatural, and fearfully powerful medicine. Hadn't Storm better pray to the Sun before he reads?"

"N-no." The padre thought this over very carefully. "Lieutenant Tschirikov is bald, quite bald, and very very fat, so he should be quite harmless. The truly dangerous magicians are never bald or fat like Tschirikov."

"Still, I think," said Rain most fearfully, "dear Storm, you'd better make a sacrifice to the Sun. Just hang up something."

Ever obedient to her, Storm jumped up, grabbed the padre's spectacles, ran out, and hung them on a tree as a sacrifice to the Sun. Then he came in again, snatched the letter, and read. It seemed to have no bearing upon his affairs, but still one never knows:

To His EXCELLENCY
COLONEL THE BARIN ALEXEI ALEXANDROVITCH,,
GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF EASTERN SIBERIA,
IRKUTSK.
ST. PETR, KADIAK ISLAND, RUSSIAN AMERICA,

_July_ 10th, 1806.

VENERABLE BROTHER,--

In the name of all the saints--vodka! Send barrels! I languish on salmon, and Eskimo, inhaling the latter, for so far I have been mercifully delivered from the necessity of eating any. They are suffocating.

I pray you salute the Immaculate Ruin, our Aunt, and kiss her on my behalf. Thus I shall have done my duty, but not suffered.

Oh for the delights of your Excellency's palace, and a clean shirt!

How I envy you the very least of those perquisites and assumptions of plunder which ever flow into your treasury, pickings worthy a minister of state. But at the least I am solvent, for so long as I can blow my own trumpet I shall never be destitute, having Her Excellency--Salute!--yourself--General Salute!--and the Immaculate Ruin--nine guns!--to borrow from. In default of roubles I repay, as you perceive, in compliments.

Baranov, you know, spent last summer in extending the Company's operations to a point a few thousands versts or so from here, and far to the eastward of Mt. St. Elias. Here's to St. Elias! I was with him--not Elijah, you stupid--in the _St. Paul_, my present command, and he had all the natives that could be mustered, in some three hundred skin canoes. Most of them, by the way, were drowned in Icy Bay, but when Baranov makes an omelet he likes to hear the eggs splash. We founded a post in the country of the Sitka tribes, and called it New Arkangel. On our return westward in the autumn, we left behind some twenty-three men as garrison, but they have foolishly allowed themselves to be done to death. So we sail in a few days to massacre the Sitkas, the only amusement there is to look forward to at present.

Meanwhile I have put in for repairs here at St. Petr; and beyond some little diversion of which it is the purpose of this present writing to advise you, I have little to do except play cards with the priest, and listen to the oddest lot of legends that ever came out of a monastery. Yum! Yum!

I do not suppose that you care to hear about the conditions of the country and the fur trade, or I would regale you with an account of all the hunters drowned, stabbed, or starved since I last wrote. Nay, I will not weary you with commonplaces. It is enough that men such as ourselves of the first fashion are condemned to be bored all day with the affairs of the canaille, without letting them intrude upon our private correspondence. Verily our revered grandparent deserved to be exterminated and heavily fined for his idiocy in discovering such a country.

As a matter of fact, however, I am not writing to amuse either myself or you, but to tell you how I managed to fall out with Baranov. As the insolent old fool has written to Golovnin and others to get me sent home in disgrace. I want your Excellency to have his paws burned. How such a base-born, red-haired, shopkeeping, bald-headed, shriveled-up he-bear came to be Governor of Russian America I cannot imagine.

Well, early in June I arrived at Ounalashka, in the Aleutian Islands, with supplies from Petropavlovsk; found the Governor there, and began to unload. From the first I heard of little else but the charms of Olga--the Little Fur Seal--they called her--daughter of a big Aleut chief from Oumnack. I entertained the old gentleman on board the St. Paul, until he grew mellow with my particular vodka, now, alas! no more. Olga sat in a corner with her big dark eyes fixed on me, her red lips just a little parted, and her black hair streaming down on either side of her face: only a savage, of course, but one cannot expect court ladies from the entourage of Her Imperial Majesty. When I thought the chief was in a sufficiently amiable humor--you could have buttoned his grin behind his neck--I asked how many skins he required for his very plain daughter. Not that I wanted her. But still I felt some curiosity. It would not be good for his morals to encourage his avarice.

To which he replied that all my skins wouldn't buy her, because the great lord Baranov demanded her for wife. Now the Governor has more skins than I have hairs; but I have wisdom, and wisdom is better than many skins; so I told the chief that if he would give me Olga I would tell him all about everything. You know I picked up ventriloquism at the Naval College, so that when the chief derided me, voices were heard laughing at him from under his chair, out of the vodka bottles, in the beams overhead and all over the cabin. He said I was a great doctor, and knew everything; but how could he give me Olga when he had also promised her to Ivan, a young chief in the village? Moreover, she was in love with a fourth party. I told him that I was very wise, and that I loved Olga.

Now, to make a long story short, I disposed of the pretenders as follows: The fourth party I won over by giving him an old cocked hat and a broken sword, together with the degree of Sublime Exaltation in the Ancient and Hereditary Order of Mystical Gluttons. The initiation was a most imposing ceremony. I read the ritual from the ship's big medicine book, and in token of the ancient and hide-bound traditions of the Order, encased his head in plaster of Paris and painted his nose red. After marching thrice round the cabin on all fours we concluded the ceremony with an oath, whereby he is bound to present himself in person at Irkutsk, and there to deliver letters credential to His Excellency the Venerable and Supreme Grand Master of the Order, take him into his arms, rub noses in token of amity and a joyful heart, and to receive the appointment of Minister of Stolen Goods in the government of the province. He sails in the ship of my little friend Hans Schlitz, and I hereby commend him to your brotherly love.

Now for the third party, Ivan, the young Chief: I sent him to Baranov in the dead of the night to ask why he has red hair; but instead of having his mind enriched with the important revelations which were to have been uttered by the Governor on hearing this mystic password, my poor friend Ivan had his body decorated with quite other forms of enrichment, and was found next morning on top of the church belfry with one eye and three fingers missing and his nose pointing round the corner. Baranov is inclined, at times, to be a little playful.

The fourth party being under your Excellency's care, and the third suitor ignominiously rejected by the Little One as damaged goods, I had now to compensate her father for not getting Baranov's skins. Wherefore I proceeded to instill the most subtle wisdom into the head of my future father-in-law. I taught him a little sleight of hand, and some card tricks; showed him how to run a sword through his body by means of a tin tube in the shape of a half belt, invented for him a beautiful system of fortune telling, and gave him the ship's speaking trumpet with which to bellow at the people through his big medicine mask. I showed him the effects of phosphorus upon the face at night, and how even white people turn black when painted with nitrate of silver. But the most polite of his new accomplishments is the ventriloquism--a trick which he has raised to the dignity of a fine art. Suffice it to say that I qualified that savage to become such an intolerable nuisance that he is to-day the recognized terror of all Aliaska, and possesses more skins than even Baranov could have offered for his daughter.

But alas for all my virtue and my discretion! Just as I had won the Little Fur Seal, for whose sake Baranov piled up his skins in vain, the young Aleut Chief was undergoing repairs, and the fourth party proceeding to rub noses with your Excellency at Irkutsk, the old chief came to me, crouched down on the cabin floor, and began to wail.

I took him by the scruff, rattled his teeth, and ordered him to speak.

"She's gone," he moaned--"gone away in the night, and left her poor old father all alone!"

I hauled him on deck by the ear, kicked him overboard, and went to Baranov. Our sorrows had made us brethren, and we wept. We were sampling a small keg of brandy, to assuage our anguish, when in came Ivan, with his nose bandaged up and his tongue hanging out, to mourn with us.

In proof of our sympathy we gave him some of the brandy, and as we three sat together mingling our tears with our spirits, a rude little boy came in and laughed at us. Olga, he said, was his sister, and had whispered to him last night, before she went away that _any one who wanted Fur Seal would have to hunt_! She said also that she was going to St. Petr on Kadiak Island, and bade him tell nobody of the fact, particularly Captain Tschirikov.

Baranov rose from his chair with a most absurd assumption of dignity, and said: "Captain Tschirikov, you will at once beach the _St. Paul_ for repairs in the East Cove, and superintend the work in person. Ivan, you will report to me at nine o'clock this evening, and receive dispatches for Attoo Island. Boy, consider yourself entered on the books of the Company as my body servant, and be ready by to-morrow morning to go with me to Kadiak Island."

Dismissing Ivan and the boy, I told Baranov that I intended to beach my ship for repairs, not in the East Cove but at St. Petr, where there are better facilities. He at once ordered me under arrest. I replied that I was not accustomed to receive indignities at the hands of tradesmen, that as a naval officer I was responsible to no civilian, and only refrained from calling him out because he was not a gentleman. Leaving him speechless with rage, I boarded my vessel, slipped and buoyed my cable, and squared away for Kadiak.

A Russian does not sleep when he is out wife-hunting, and you have only to hold in remembrance the black eyes of my Little Fur Seal to realize that I was not many days in reaching her hiding place. I landed at St. Petr with my whole starboard watch, and proceeded to search the village. Just as one of my men entered a house, he called to me, but I reached the front door only in time to see something flutter out at the back. Giving chase, I had the Little Fur Seal safe in my arms within a hundred yards of the house. We have hunted bears together, O my brother, and faced them when they were defending their cubs; but a she-bear in the spring is a lamb compared to Olga. She scratched, kicked, bit, screamed; she tried to plunge a long knife into me, and when I took that from her, clutched my hair. Wherefore I do beseech thee, Alexei Pavlovitch, as thou dost honor the memory of our sire, to send for a wig to Petersburg--just a little wig, with a becoming queue, in the latest mode of the _vielle noblesse_, in size about the same as you wear on full-dress occasions. Have this consigned to the care of Hans Schlitz at Petropavlovsk.

When I got her down to the boat the Little One began to sulk; and except for some little scratching as we got her up over the ship's side, she sulked on consistently until supper time. I felt like a brute as, after a solitary meal in the cabin, I smoked my pipe before turning in. I was conscious all the time of the glare from her black eyes. Whenever I tried to make friends they flashed upon me like twin stars; while once in my bunk I had an uncomfortable presentiment that, presently finding me asleep, she would cut me off in the flower of my youth with a big butcher knife. But reflecting that it is much wiser to sleep than to lie awake imagining vain things, and greatly solaced by the memory of having seen Baranov's vessel beating her way up the harbor, I partly closed my eyes, and dozed a little.

As luck would have it, I was just sufficiently awake to note that the Little One, believing me to be asleep, was stirring. To give her confidence, I snored comfortably and, unsuspected by her, watched every movement. How pretty she looked as she stood in the faint glow of the candlelight, and then moved slowly towards me, almost imperceptibly and softly as a panther! Picture to yourself, Alexei, the gentle swaying of her limbs, the tangled mass of shadowy hair, the brilliant eyes, the full red lips! Outside I could hear Baranov's crew letting their anchor go, and taking in their canvas. I thought also, with a sense of pleasure, of Ivan stealing slowly along the coast in his canoe towards us. Then, brother, conceive my delight as I saw her creep past the locker upon which lay the knife without even stretching out her hand towards it. A moment later I felt that she was bending over me; her breath played upon my face, her lips drew closer and closer, until at last they rested upon my cheek, leaving there the imprint of the sweetest small round kiss that ever sent a thrill of joy through the heart of man.

_The Little Fur Seal was mine!_

Your affectionate brother,
NICOLAI.

In the padre's little adobe house Storm finished reading, and at once the fairies, peeping round the edge of the door and the window, made grand pretense that they had not heard.

"Padre," asked Rain, "what's bald?"

The holy man lowered his head to show the shaven tonsure. "That," said he.

"Oh!" said Rain. "I never saw a bald before. We don't have any in the Blackfoot nation." Tears came to her eyes and made them glisten. "And fat," she said. "Poor Nicolai! Poor Little Fur Seal! Storm, when you meet him in the Oregon be kind to him and comfort him for the fat and bald. And give her my love too."

"If I remember," answered Storm.

* * * * * * *

And Bill awakened because the bos'n knelt beside him with a lantern, taking off the handcuffs. The _Beaver_ was at sea.