He dashed into the circle of firelight, and beheld Nig standing with a bandaged paw, placidly eating softened biscuit out of the family frying-pan.

It was short work getting down to the village.  They had one king salmon and two white fish from the first Indian they saw, who wanted hootch for them, and got only tabak.

In the biggest of the huts, nearly full of men, women, and children, coughing, sickly-looking, dejected, the natives made room for the strangers.  When the white men had supped they handed over the remains of their meal (as is expected) to the head of the house.  This and a few matches or a little tobacco on parting, is all he looks for in return for shelter, room for beds on the floor, snow-water laboriously melted, use of the fire, and as much wood as they like to burn, even if it is a barren place, and fuel is the precious far-travelled “drift.”

It is curious to see how soon travellers get past that first cheeckalko feeling that it is a little “nervy,” as the Boy had said, to walk into another man’s house uninvited, an absolute stranger, and take possession of everything you want without so much as “by your leave.”  You soon learn it is the Siwash[*] custom.

[Footnote:  Siwash, corruption of French-Canadian sauvage, applied all over the North to the natives, their possessions and their customs.]

Nothing would have seemed stranger now, or more inhuman, than the civilized point of view.

The Indians trailed out one by one, all except the old buck to whom the hut belonged.  He hung about for a bit till he was satisfied the travellers had no hootch, not even a little for the head of the house, and yet they seemed to be fairly decent fellows.  Then he rolls up his blankets, for there is a premium on sleeping-space, and goes out, with never a notion that he is doing more than any man would, anywhere in the world, to find a place in some neighbour’s hut to pass the night.

He leaves the two strangers, as Indian hospitality ordains, to the warmest places in the best hut, with two young squaws, one old one, and five children, all sleeping together on the floor, as a matter of course.

The Colonel and the Boy had flung themselves down on top of their sleeping-bag, fed and warmed and comforted.  Only the old squaw was still up.  She had been looking over the travellers’ boots and “mitts,” and now, without a word or even a look being exchanged upon the subject, she sat there in the corner, by the dim, seal-oil light, sewing on new thongs, patching up holes, and making the strange men tidy—­men she had never seen before and would never see again.  And this, no tribute to the Colonel’s generosity or the youth and friendly manners of the Boy.  They knew the old squaw would have done just the same had the mucklucks and the mitts belonged to “the tramp of the Yukon,” with nothing to barter and not a cent in his pocket.  This, again, is a Siwash custom.