Saturday brought a slight variation in the early morning routine. The others came straggling in, as usual, but once a week Mac was sure to be first, for he had to get Kaviak up. Mac's view of his whole duty to man seemed to centre in the Saturday scrubbing of Kaviak. Vainly had the Esquimer stood out against compliance with this most repulsive of foreign customs. He seemed to be always ready with some deep-laid scheme for turning the edge of Mac's iron resolution. He tried hiding at the bottom of the bed. It didn't work. The next time he crouched far back under the lower bunk. He was dragged out. Another Saturday he embedded himself, like a moth, in a bundle of old clothes. Mac shook him out. He had been very sanguine the day he hid in the library. This was a wooden box nailed to the wall on the right of the door. Most of the bigger books—Byron, Wordsworth, Dana's "Mineralogy," and two Bibles—he had taken out and concealed in the lower bunk very skilfully, far back behind the Colonel's feet. Copps's "Mining" and the two works on "Parliamentary Law" piled at the end of the box served as a pillow. After climbing in and folding himself up into an incredibly small space, Kaviak managed with superhuman skill to cover himself neatly with a patchwork quilt of Munsey, Scribner, Century, Strand, and Overland for August, '97. No one would suspect, glancing into that library, that underneath the usual top layer of light reading, was matter less august than Law, Poetry, Science, and Revelation.
It was the base Byron, tipping the wink to Mac out of the back of the bunk, that betrayed Kaviak.
It became evident that "Farva" began to take a dour pride in the Kid's perseverance. One morning he even pointed out to the camp the strong likeness between Kaviak and Robert Bruce.
"No, sah; the Scottish chief had to have an object-lesson, but Kaviak—Lawd!—Kaviak could give points to any spider livin'!"
This was on the morning that the Esquimer thought to escape scrubbing, even at the peril of his life, by getting up on to the swing-shelf —how, no man ever knew. But there he sat in terror, like a very young monkey in a wind-rocked tree, hardly daring to breathe, his arms clasped tight round the demijohn; but having Mac to deal with, the end of it was that he always got washed, and equally always he seemed to register a vow that, s'help him, Heaven! it should never happen again.
After breakfast came the clearing up. It should have been done (under this régime) by the Little Cabin men, but it seldom was. O'Flynn was expected to keep the well-hole in the river chopped open and to bring up water every day. This didn't always happen either, though to drink snow-water was to invite scurvy, Father Wills said. There was also a daily need, if the Colonel could be believed, for everybody to chop firewood.
"We got enough," was Potts' invariable opinion.
"For how long? S'pose we get scurvy and can't work; we'd freeze to death in a fortnight."
"Never saw a fireplace swalla logs whole an' never blink like this one."
"But you got no objection to sittin' by while the log-swallerin' goes on."