He went off between the pines, and Van Brunt found himself staring
into Thom's warm eyes. Five years, he mused, and she can't be more
than twenty now. A most remarkable creature. Being Eskimo, she should
have a little flat excuse for a nose, and lo, it is neither broad nor
flat, but aquiline, with nostrils delicately and sensitively formed
as any fine lady's of a whiter breed--the Indian strain somewhere, be
assured, Avery Van Brunt. And, Avery Van Brunt, don't be nervous, she
won't eat you; she's only a woman, and not a bad-looking one at that.
Oriental rather than aborigine. Eyes large and fairly wide apart, with
just the faintest hint of Mongol obliquity. Thom, you're an anomaly.
You're out of place here among these Eskimos, even if your father is
one. Where did your mother come from? or your grandmother? And Thom,
my dear, you're a beauty, a frigid, frozen little beauty with Alaskan
lava in your blood, and please don't look at me that way.

He laughed and stood up. Her insistent stare disconcerted him. A dog
was prowling among the grub-sacks. He would drive it away and place
them into safety against Fairfax's return. But Thom stretched out a
detaining hand and stood up, facing him.

"You?" she said, in the Arctic tongue which differs little from
Greenland to Point Barrow. "You?"

And the swift expression of her face demanded all for which "you"
stood, his reason for existence, his presence there, his relation to
her husband--everything.

"Brother," he answered in the same tongue, with a sweeping gesture to
the south. "Brothers we be, your man and I."