The Faith of Men | Page 8

and crying
like a baby. His spirit broke and he became a quivering jelly-mountain
of misery. He'd get attacks of palpitation of the heart, and stagger
around like a drunken man, and fall down and bark his shins. And then
he'd cry, but always on the run. O man, the gods themselves would
have wept with him, and you yourself or any other man. It was pitiful,
and there was so I much of it, but I only hardened my heart and hit up
the pace. At last I wore him clean out, and he lay down, broken-winded,
broken-hearted, hungry, and thirsty. When I found he wouldn't budge, I
hamstrung him, and spent the better part of the day wading into him
with the hand-axe, he a-sniffing and sobbing till I worked in far enough
to shut him off. Thirty feet long he was, and twenty high, and a man
could sling a hammock between his tusks and sleep comfortably.
Barring the fact that I had run most of the juices out of him, he was fair
eating, and his four feet, alone, roasted whole, would have lasted a man
a twelvemonth. I spent the winter there myself."
"And where is this valley?" I asked
He waved his hand in the direction of the north-east, and said: "Your
tobacco is very good. I carry a fair share of it in my pouch, but I shall
carry the recollection of it until I die. In token of my appreciation, and
in return for the moccasins on your own feet, I will present to you these
muclucs. They commemorate Klooch and the seven blind little beggars.
They are also souvenirs of an unparalleled event in history, namely, the
destruction of the oldest breed of animal on earth, and the youngest.
And their chief virtue lies in that they will never wear out."
Having effected the exchange, he knocked the ashes from his pipe,

gripped my hand good-night, and wandered off through the snow.
Concerning this tale, for which I have already disclaimed responsibility,
I would recommend those of little faith to make a visit to the
Smithsonian Institute. If they bring the requisite credentials and do not
come in vacation time, they will undoubtedly gain an audience with
Professor Dolvidson. The muclucs are in his possession, and he will
verify, not the manner in which they were obtained, but the material of
which they are composed. When he states that they are made from the
skin of the mammoth, the scientific world accepts his verdict. What
more would you have?

A HYPERBOREAN BREW

[The story of a scheming white man among the strange people who live
on the rim of the Arctic sea]
Thomas Stevens's veracity may have been indeterminate as X, and his
imagination the imagination of ordinary men increased to the nth power,
but this, at least, must be said: never did he deliver himself of word nor
deed that could be branded as a lie outright. . . He may have played
with probability, and verged on the extremest edge of possibility, but in
his tales the machinery never creaked. That he knew the Northland like
a book, not a soul can deny. That he was a great traveller, and had set
foot on countless unknown trails, many evidences affirm. Outside of
my own personal knowledge, I knew men that had met him everywhere,
but principally on the confines of Nowhere. There was Johnson, the
ex-Hudson Bay Company factor, who had housed him in a Labrador
factory until his dogs rested up a bit, and he was able to strike out again.
There was McMahon, agent for the Alaska Commercial Company, who
had run across him in Dutch Harbour, and later on, among the outlying
islands of the Aleutian group. It was indisputable that he had guided
one of the earlier United States surveys, and history states positively
that in a similar capacity he served the Western Union when it
attempted to put through its trans-Alaskan and Siberian telegraph to
Europe. Further, there was Joe Lamson, the whaling captain, who,

when ice-bound off the mouth of the Mackenzie, had had him come
aboard after tobacco. This last touch proves Thomas Stevens's identity
conclusively. His quest for tobacco was perennial and untiring. Ere we
became fairly acquainted, I learned to greet him with one hand, and
pass the pouch with the other. But the night I met him in John O'Brien's
Dawson saloon, his head was wreathed in a nimbus of fifty-cent cigar
smoke, and instead of my pouch he demanded my sack. We were
standing by a faro table, and forthwith he tossed it upon the "high
card." "Fifty," he said, and the game-keeper nodded. The "high card"
turned, and he handed back my sack, called for a "tab,"