His mother ran to pick him up. His face was twisted with agony.
He tried to stand, for her sake, but the effort was too much for him, and he sank back in her arms, weak as a baby. What was she to do? The men who ran the exhibit had not kept their promises. Pomiuk was the chief bread-winner for them all. The coins he had nicked with his whip were most of what they had to spend.
With this money they sent out and got a so-called "surgeon" who did not know his business, but took the money just the same. He patched up poor "Prince" Pomiuk so that the boy was worse off than before.
The Fair closed: the Eskimo were stranded. If that had happened on a sea-beach at home, they would have known what to do: they would have laughed—for they are merry people, like our southern negroes—and they would have killed sea-birds with stones and made their way alongshore. But to be stranded in Chicago is another story. God knows how a few survivors of the band found pity in men's hearts, and straggled back to their home at Nachoak Bay.
Pomiuk's wound never healed—he could not run about, nor walk, nor even stand. His mother had to carry him everywhere. In Newfoundland the fishermen and the sealers, desperately poor as they were, took them into their bare cabins, and gave them bread and tea taken from the mouths of their own hungry children.
Dr. Frederick Cook, creation's champion liar, did a golden deed for which the Recording Angel should give him a good mark in the Book of Life. He made room for several of the Eskimo on his journey to the Labrador coast: and fishing-schooners took the rest of the survivors.
Imagine how happy Pomiuk was, in spite of the pain in his hip, when he thought of crawling back into the mouth of his own snow house again, and rubbing noses with his father once more!
But when the mother and the child were put ashore at Nachoak Bay—they were told that the father's spirit was at play with the rest among the northern lights. In this world they would not see him again. He had been murdered while his wife and child were in Chicago.
It was at that dark hour that Dr. Grenfell came into his life.
Grenfell found the poor little boy, who had earned so much money, and brought so much glory to his tribe, lying naked on the rocks beside the hut. The mother had married again, and gone off "over the mountains" with the other children, leaving her crippled son to the tender mercy of the neighbors. It was indeed a "come-down" in the world for a "prince," whose father was a "king" among his fellows. It was deemed best to send Pomiuk south on the little hospital steamer with the Doctor. The Doctor could fix him up, if anybody could, and moreover—this was the clinching argument—he was "no good fishing." So the next day found Pomiuk bound south, clasping his only worldly possession—a letter from a clergyman of Andover, Massachusetts. There was a photograph with it. If you asked Pomiuk what he had there, he would turn on that magic smile and show you the picture, and say: "Me love even him."