“That’s so,” assented Phil, “and from this time on Nel-te shall wear it as a charm, though I suppose it won’t stay with him any longer than suits its convenience. I never had a superstition in my life, and haven’t believed in such things, but I must confess that my unbelief is shaken by this affair. There isn’t any possible way, that I can see, for this tooth to have got here except by magic of some kind.”
“It beats the Flying Dutchman and merrymaids,” said Jalap Coombs, solemnly, as he lighted his pipe for a quieting smoke. “D’ye know, lads, I’m coming to think as how it were all on account of this ’ere curio being aboard the steamer Norsk that she stopped and picked you up in Bering Sea that night.”
“Nonsense!” cried Phil. “That is impossible.”
Thus purely through ignorance this lad, who was usually so sensible and level-headed, declared with one breath his belief in an impossibility, and with the next his disbelief of a fact. All of which serves to illustrate the folly of making assertions concerning subjects about which we are ignorant. There is nothing so mysterious that it cannot be explained, and nothing more foolish than to declare a thing impossible simply because we are too ignorant to understand it.
In the present case Serge and Jalap Coombs, and even Phil, who should have known better, were ready to believe that the fur-seal’s tooth had come to them through some supernatural agency, because, in their ignorance, they could not imagine how it could have come in any other way. We laugh at their simplicity because of our wisdom. We saw Mr. Platt Riley drop the tooth into one of their sleeping-bags at Forty Mile. Knowing this, it is easy to understand how that same sleeping-bag, which happened to be the extra one acquired by the turning over to Jalap Coombs of Strengel’s stolen property, should be selected as Nel-te’s travelling-bag, and lashed to a sledge for his occupancy in the daytime. In his restlessness he had kicked the tooth about until it finally worked its way into one of his little fur boots, and that is all there was to the mystery.
Still, it afforded a fertile topic for conversation around that lonely mountain-side camp-fire long after Phil had strung it on a buckskin thong and hung it about the child’s neck, at the same time taking the precaution to tuck it snugly inside his little fur parka. All agreed that they were glad to have the fur-seal’s tooth in their possession once more; and on account of its presence among them they were ready to face the difficulties that would confront them on the morrow with a cheerful confidence.