A bunk was hastily made up on the floor, and on this the little Esquimau was placed.
“He’s got no fever,” Clay said, after examining the little thermometer he had been holding under the lad’s tongue. The way I size it up is that he starved so long last winter that his stomach rejected the greasy heavy blubber with which they broke their long fast in the spring. I believe that he will come out all right with careful feeding and good care. The first thing to do is to take off those filthy furs he has got on, give him a good bath, and find something clean and warm for him to wear.”
“I find him some clothes what gets too small for me, but which I can pin up a little for him,” said Ike. “Say, I think I call him after a good friend of mine, a fellow named Abe. I think Abe a pretty name for him.”
When the last of the mangy furs were removed from the little lad, the boys stood back and viewed him pitifully, wondering how the spark of life had managed to keep alight in such a wasted and shrunken skeleton. Abe objected as much as his feeble strength would permit, to the awful bath, but when he was, at last, rubbed clean and dressed in a suit of Ike’s pajamas, he drank a bowl of warm soup greedily and in a few minutes was sound asleep. Alex had been cooking supper while his chums had labored over the lad and they now sat down to a meal of delicious fried salmon, coffee, and mealy potatoes. They had but finished, when the Shaman appeared, slipping in softly like a cat. The boys had had no time to separate the good records from the bad. All they could do was to wind up the wheezy old machine, start it going, and trust to luck, which proved to be in their favor, for the Shaman listened like one entranced, to songs, minstrel jokes and music.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE TRADE
The records could hardly have been worse and the machine was suffering badly from the asthma, but the Shaman could not have shown more appreciation had it been the grandest combination in existence. “Won’t you come Home, Bill Bailey?” seemed to give him complete satisfaction, but “Ain’t It Funny When You’re Out of Money That the Only Thing You Get Is Sympathy?” brought forth an expressive grunt, while “If You Ain’t Got No Money, Why You Needn’t Come Around,” appeared to afford him great pleasure. Then Alex made the mistake he had been dreading all the evening. After winding up the machine he slipped in a fresh record and started it going. At the first snappy, scratching, breaking sounds, Alex and Ike looked at each other in dismay. It was the worst record in the lot because it had been their favorite and had been played over and over again until it was only a battered wreck, seamed with scratches and disfigured by cracks. Of the former Battle Hymn of the Republic there remained only a few unintelligible words and a discordant discord.
The boys glanced at the Shaman fearfully and were surprised to find him grinning with delight at the awful discord.
“I know that spirit,” he declared, proudly, as the record ended with one last abrupt crash, “It’s the voice of Luna, the great Yukon spirit. It is his voice. I know it. Many seasons I have heard it when he was breaking up the ice in the spring. Have you more of the spirits to put into the box?”
But Alex was not going to risk another mistake. It might not turn out so fortunately next time. “There are dozens more of them,” he said, “but we are getting tired of calling them forth. It is enough for tonight. We have proved that all white men are not liars.”