In the open doorway he paused, leaned against the portal and hooked one thumb beneath his scarlet belt. His narrow eyes swept the scene before him. Across the bay, between purple hills, a valley lay dreaming in rose-lavender mist. Blue above the August haze was a glimpse of a glacier, and farther back, peaks rose tier upon tier in the vague, amethystine distance.
Suddenly the quiet beauty was shot through with the sound of loud voices and snatches of song issuing from the cabin of Kayak Bill. The trader listened with a smile that was half a sneer. He himself never drank while at the post, deeming that it lessened his influence with the Indians. But among the secrets of his own experience were memories of wild days and nights aboard visiting schooners, at the end of which prone in the captain's bunk, he had lain for hours in alcoholic oblivion.
The voices from the cabin ceased abruptly. Then like the bellow of a fog horn on a lonely northern sea came Kayak Bill's deep bass:
"Take me north of old Point Barrow
Where there ain't no East or West;
Where man has a thirst that lingers
And where moonshine tastes the best;
Where the Arctic ice-pack hovers
'Twixt Alaska and the Pole,
And there ain't no bloomin' fashions
To perplex a good man's soul."
There was a momentary pause followed by a hubbub of masculine voices apparently in a dispute as to how the song should run. High above the others rose a squeaky Scandinavian protest:
"By yingo, ven ay ban cook on Soofie Suderlant ve sing it so dis vay——"
"Close yore mouth, Silvertip." As a whale would swallow a minnow so Kayak Bill's drawling tones engulfed the thin, high accents of the one-time cook of the Sophie Sutherland. "I ain't no nature for Swedes a-devilin' o' me. I been singin' that song for nigh on to ten yars, and by the roarin' Jasus, I reckon I know how to sing it. Come on boys—now all together!"
Joining the again raised bass of Kayak Bill, several voices took up the rollicking strain, among them the high, easily recognizable tenor of Silvertip, and the voice of another, a baritone of startling mellowness and purity, having in it a timbre of youth and recklessness:
"Up into the Polar Seas,
Where the Innuit maidens be,
There's a fat, bright-eyed va-hee-ney
A-waitin' there for me.
She's sittin' in her igloo cold,
Chewing on a muckluck sole,
And the sun comes up at midnight
From an ice-pack round the Pole."
At the sound of the baritone, the White Chief hitched his shoulders with a movement of satisfaction. Add-'em-up Sam's successor, the bookkeeper, was bidding fair to follow in the sodden footsteps of his predecessor. Given a little more time and this baritone-singing cheechako[2] would be where the White Chief need have no anxiety as to the accounts rendered the Company's new president, whom Kilbuck had never seen. A little more time, a little more hootch, and he would also have settled the case of Na-lee-nah.