Part 62 (2/2)

As he greeted the two strangers, and said simply that he had just arrived, himself, by way of the Anvik portage, the Colonel felt that he must have meant from New York or from Paris instead of the words he added, ”from St. Michael's.”

He claimed instant kins.h.i.+p with the Colonel on the strength of their both being Southerners.

”I'm a Baltimore man,” he said, with an accent no Marylander can purge of pride.

”How long since you've been home?”

”Oh, I go back every year.”

”He goes all over ze world, to tell ze people--”

”--something of the work being done here by Father Brachet--and all of them.” He included the other priests and lay-brothers in a slight circular movement of the grizzled head.

And to collect funds! the Colonel rightly divined, little guessing how triumphantly he achieved that end.

”Alaska is so remote,” said the Travelling Priest, as if in apology for popular ignorance, ”and people think of it so... inadequately, shall we say? In trying to explain the conditions up here, I have my chief difficulty in making them realise the great distances we have to cover.

You tell them that in the Indian tongue Alaska means ”the great country,” they smile, and think condescendingly of savage imagery. It is vain to say we have an area of six hundred thousand square miles. We talk much in these days of education; but few men and no women can count! Our Eastern friends get some idea of what we mean, when we tell them Alaska is bigger than all the Atlantic States from Maine to Louisiana with half of great Texas thrown in. With a coast-line of twenty six thousand miles, this Alaska of ours turns to the sea a greater frontage than all the sh.o.r.es of all the United States combined.

It extends so far out towards Asia that it carries the dominions of the Great Republic as far west of San Francisco as New York is east of it, making California a central state. I try to give Europeans some idea of it by saying that if you add England, Ireland, and Scotland together, and to that add France, and to that add Italy, you still lack enough to make a country the size of Alaska. I do not speak of our mountains, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen thousand feet high, and our Yukon, flowing for more than two thousand miles through a country almost virgin still.”

”You travel about up here a good deal?”

”He travels _all_ ze time. He will not rest,” said Father Brachet as one airing an ancient grievance.

”Yes, I will rest now--a little. I have been eight hundred miles over the ice, with dogs, since January 1.”

The Boy looked at him with something very like reverence. Here was a man who could give you tips!

”You have travelled abroad, too,” the Colonel rather stated than asked.

”I spent a good deal of my youth in France and Germany.”

”Educated over there?”

”Well, I am a Johns Hopkins man, but I may say I found my education in Rome. Speaking of education”--he turned to the other priests--”I have greatly advanced my grammar since we parted.” Father Brachet answered with animation in French, and the conversation went forward for some minutes in that tongue. The discussion was interrupted to introduce the other new face, at the bottom of the table, to the Big Chimney men: ”Resident Fazzer Roget of ze Kuskoquim mission.”

”That is the best man on snow-shoes in Central Alaska,” said Father Richmond low to the Colonel, nodding at the Kuskoquim priest.

”And he knows more of two of ze native dialects here zan anyone else,”

added the Father Superior.

”You must forgive our speaking much of the Indian tongues,” said Father Richmond. ”We are all making dictionaries and grammars; we have still to translate much of our religious instruction, and the great variety in dialect of the scattered tribes keeps us busy with linguistic studies.”

”Tomorrow you must see our schools,” said Father Brachet.

But the Boy answered quickly that they could not afford the time. He was surprised at the Colonel's silence; but the Boy didn't know what the Colonel's feet felt like.

Kentucky ain't sorry, he said to himself, to have a back to his chair, and to eat off china again. Kentucky's a voluptuary! I'll have to drag him away by main force; and the Boy allowed Father Richmond to help him yet more abundantly to the potatoes and cabbage grown last summer in the mission garden!

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