"It's Injuns!" he announced. "Nine or ten of 'em, an' they headed nawth!" And, even as he spoke, a grotesquely feathered, beaver-topped head appeared above a frost-coated rock, almost at his elbow, and the two partners stared open-mouthed at the apparition. The face was white!
CHAPTER XIII
O'BRIEN
Surprise held Connie Morgan and Waseche Bill spellbound as they stood ankle-deep in the glittering frost spicules that carpeted the surface of the ice-locked river, and gazed speechless into the face that stared at them over the top of the rime-crusted rock.
The spell broke. From behind other rocks appeared other faces surmounted by odd beaver-skin caps, edged with the feathers of the blue, and snow goose, and of the great white Arctic owl. The partners glanced from one to the other of these strange, silent faces that regarded them through wide-set, in-slanting eyes. The faces were white—or rather, through the winter's accumulation of grease and blubber soot, they showed a light brownish yellow that, in comparison with the faces of other Indians, would easily pass for white. And they were so nearly alike that a stranger would have been at his wits' end to have distinguished one from another—all except the first one, the man whose face appeared so suddenly almost at Waseche Bill's side. He was taller than the others, his nose longer and thinner, and his whole lower face was concealed behind a luxurious growth of flaming red whiskers, while through the soot and grease his skin showed ruddy, rather than yellow, and his small, deep-set eyes were of a peculiar greenish hue.
"Japs an' Irish!" exclaimed Waseche Bill. "Carlson was right—even to his frozen fohest an' white Injuns!"
He addressed the company with a comprehensive wave of his arm:
"Good evenin', gents. How they comin'?"
His words were greeted with stony-faced stares as meaningless and void of expression as the stare of a frozen fish. Waseche tried again: