Part 6 (1/2)
Nicholas shrugged: ”Kaiomi,” though it was plain he knew well enough the other lay under the Yukon ice.
”And that--_that_ was the end of the fellows who went by jeering at us!”
”We'd better not crow yet,” said Mac. And they bade Prince Nicholas and his heathen retinue good-bye in a mood chastened not by prayer alone.
CHAPTER II
HOUSE-WARMING
”There is a sort of moral climate in a household.”--JOHN MORLEY.
No idle ceremony this, but the great problem of the dwellers in the country of the Yukon.
The Colonel and the Boy made up their minds that, whatever else they had or had not, they would have a warm house to live in. And when they had got it, they would have a ”Blow-out” to celebrate the achievement.
”We'll invite Nicholas,” says the Boy. ”I'll go to Pymeut myself, and let him know we are going to have 'big fire, big feed. Oh, heap big time!'”
If the truth were told, it had been a difficult enough matter to keep away from Pymeut since the hour Nicholas had vanished in that direction; but until winter quarters were made, and until they were proved to be warm, there was no time for the amenities of life.
The Big Cabin (as it was quite seriously called, in contradistinction to the hut of the Trio) consisted of a single room, measuring on the outside sixteen feet by eighteen feet.
The walls of cotton-wood logs soared upward to a level of six feet, and this height was magnificently increased in the middle by the angle of the mildly gable roof. But before the cabin was breast-high the Boy had begun to long for a window.
”Sorry we forgot the plate-gla.s.s,” says Mac.
”Wudn't ye like a grrand-piana?” asks O'Flynn.
”What's the use of goin' all the way from Nova Scotia to Caribou,” says the Boy to the Schoolmaster-Miner, ”if you haven't learned the way to make a window like the Indians, out of transparent skin?”
Mac a.s.sumed an air of elevated contempt.
”I went to mine, not to learn Indian tricks.”
”When the door's shut it'll be dark as the inside of a cocoa-nut.”
”You ought to have thought of that before you left the sunny South,”
said Potts.
”It'll be dark all winter, window or no window,” Mac reminded them.
”Never mind,” said the Colonel, ”when the candles give out we'll have the fire-light. Keep all the spruce knots, boys!”
But one of the boys was not pleased. The next day, looking for a monkey-wrench under the tarpaulin, he came across the wooden box a California friend had given him at parting, containing a dozen tall gla.s.s jars of preserved fruit. The others had growled at the extra bulk and weight, when the Boy put the box into the boat at St. Michael's, but they had now begun to look kindly on it and ask when it was to be opened. He had answered firmly:
”Not before Christmas,” modifying this since Nicholas's visit to ”Not before the House-Warming.” But one morning the Boy was found pouring the fruit out of the jars into some empty cans.
”What you up to?”