heavy brogans, completed his outfit.

But he was none the less a striking personage to these simple
fisherfolk of the great Yukon Delta, who, all their lives, had stared
out on Bering Sea and in that time seen but two white men,--the census
enumerator and a lost Jesuit priest. They were a poor people, with
neither gold in the ground nor valuable furs in hand, so the whites
had passed them afar. Also, the Yukon, through the thousands of years,
had shoaled that portion of the sea with the detritus of Alaska till
vessels grounded out of sight of land. So the sodden coast, with its
long inside reaches and huge mud-land archipelagoes, was avoided by
the ships of men, and the fisherfolk knew not that such things were.

Koogah, the Bone-Scratcher, retreated backward in sudden haste,
tripping over his staff and falling to the ground. "Nam-Bok!" he
cried, as he scrambled wildly for footing. "Nam-Bok, who was blown off
to sea, come back!"

The men and women shrank away, and the children scuttled off between
their legs. Only Opee-Kwan was brave, as befitted the head man of
the village. He strode forward and gazed long and earnestly at the
new-comer.

"It _is_ Nam-Bok," he said at last, and at the conviction in his voice
the women wailed apprehensively and drew farther away.

The lips of the stranger moved indecisively, and his brown throat
writhed and wrestled with unspoken words.

"La la, it is Nam-Bok," Bask-Wah-Wan croaked, peering up into his