So saying, the natives backed slowly out of the engine-room, which was flush with the deck. Jack, completely taken aback, hesitated for a moment, which gave the men time to clamber over the low sides of the Yukon Rover and into their bidarkas. As Jack emerged on deck, they started paddling swiftly off.
Jack bounded into his cabin and came back with a rifle. He had no intention of shooting the men, but he wanted to give them a good scare. He had hardly raised the weapon to his shoulder before he saw the chief rise up in his wabbly skin boat and whirl his nogock. From the weapon there flew, much as a stone is projected from a sling, a sharp-barbed dart of steel.
The boy by some instinct dodged swiftly, and the barbed dart whistled by his ear and sank into the woodwork of the deck-house.
In his indignation, he discharged the rifle. The bullet must have gone uncomfortably close to the natives, although he did not aim it at them, for they fell to their paddles with feverish energy and vanished around a bend in the stream, working furiously to get out of range.
"Well," remarked Jack to himself, "our adventures are surely beginning without losing any time over it."
[CHAPTER XVIII.]
AN ENCOUNTER WITH THE NATIVES.
Jack hastened to the store-room and found that the wily natives in their soft-soled skin shoes had wrought great havoc there, while he, all unconsciously in the engine-room, was working without dreaming that there were unwelcome visitors on board. The Yukon Rover was well stocked with food and there were settlements up the river where the raided stock could be replenished, but it annoyed the boy to think that the plundering rascals had had such an easy time in absconding with what they had abstracted from the steamer's larder.