“He hasn’t gone back yet,” interrupted the clerk, studying the superscription.
“You don’t mean he’s here already?”
“Well, he was.”
“When? It can’t be the person I mean?”
“Lame man, about sixty? Yes, yes, remember him perfectly. Couldn’t quite make him out, for he didn’t seem to care a tinker’s curse about getting to the Klondike. The boys set him down finally as a sort of a missionary, because” (with a laugh) “he seemed so ready to go the wrong way.”
“Which way?”
“Up the coast to Golovin Bay.” No, he hadn’t come back. A trader from Kwimkuk, who had been down for supplies, said Mar was staying up there at the Swedish Mission. That was all the clerk knew. He was turning the pages back to the entries of the previous summer. “That’s the man!” And there was Mar’s unmistakable signature staring Cheviot in the face.
“But that’s ’97,” he said bewildered. He pulled out Hildegarde’s letter, and looked again at the date. It was a year old.
Shortie Hinkson stopped sweeping out the office to say: “One o’ them missionary fellers come down here from Golovin Sat’day. No, he ain’t gone back yit. I seen him only a while ago goin’ by the A.C. office.”
When a few minutes later, among the crowd down by the old Block House, the missionary was run to earth, Cheviot found him a great tow-headed Swede, looking as if he had been not so much cut out of wood as hacked out, and with a very dull implement at that. Close at his elbow, and appealed to now and then for verification of some statement, was a thin little dark man, with glittering black eyes and a turn for silence.