“How should I know they waited?” Aab-Waak gurgled.  “For my brothers had gone before, many of them, and there was no sound of struggle.  How should I know why there should be no sound of struggle?  And ere I knew, two hands were about my neck so that I could not cry out and warn my brothers yet to come.  And then there were two hands more on my head, and two more on my feet.  In this fashion the three Sunlanders had me.  And while the hands held my head in the one place, the hands on my feet swung my body around, and as we wring the neck of a duck in the marsh, so my week was wrung.

“But it was not given that I should die,” he went on, a remnant of pride yet glimmering.  “I, only, am left.  Oloof and the rest lie on their backs in a row, and their faces turn this way and that, and the faces of some be underneath where the backs of their heads should be.  It is not good to look upon; for when life returned to me I saw them all by the light of a torch which the Sunlanders left, and I had been laid with them in the row.”

“So?  So?” Tyee mused, too stunned for speech.

He started suddenly, and shivered, for the voice of Bill-Man shot out at him from the passage.

“It is well,” it said.  “I look for the man who crawls with the broken neck, and lo, do I find Tyee.  Throw down thy gun, Tyee, so that I may hear it strike among the rocks.”

Tyee obeyed passively, and Bill-Man crawled forward into the light.  Tyee looked at him curiously.  He was gaunt and worn and dirty, and his eyes burned like twin coals in their cavernous sockets.

“I am hungry, Tyee,” he said.  “Very hungry.”

“And I am dirt at thy feet,” Tyee responded.

“Thy word is my law.  Further, I commanded my people not to withstand thee.  I counselled—­”

But Bill-Man had turned and was calling back into the passage.  “Hey!  Charley!  Jim!  Fetch the woman along and come on!”

“We go now to eat,” he said, when his comrades and Mesahchie had joined him.

Tyee rubbed his hands deprecatingly.  “We have little, but it is thine.”

“After that we go south on the snow,” Bill-Man continued.

“May you go without hardship and the trail be easy.”

“It is a long way.  We will need dogs and food—­much!”

“Thine the pick of our dogs and the food they may carry.”

Bill-Man slipped over the edge of the opening and prepared to descend.  “But we come again, Tyee.  We come again, and our days shall be long in the land.”

And so they departed into the trackless south, Bill-Man, his brothers, and Mesahchie.  And when the next year came, the Search Number Two rode at anchor in Mandell Bay.  The few Mandell men, who survived because their wounds had prevented their crawling into the cave, went to work at the best of the Sunlanders and dug in the ground.  They hunt and fish no more, but receive a daily wage, with which they buy flour, sugar, calico, and such things which the Search Number Two brings on her yearly trip from the Sunlands.