“Aye, poorga!” answered Serge, and for the first time Phil comprehended the full significance of the terrible word which means the wind of death.
By noon human endurance could hold out no longer, and, ready to drop with cold, pain, and exhaustion, Phil led his train to camp in a belt of timber so thick that even that fierce wind could not penetrate it, though among the tree-tops it shrieked and howled with demoniac fury.
Thus from camp to camp, through sunshine and darkness, storm and calm, stinging cold and whirling snows, the little party toiled onward, making twenty, thirty, and as high as forty miles a day. They passed the Indian settlement of Nulato, once a noted Russian trading-post, at the end of ten days’ travel, and a week later gained the mission station of old Fort Adams, four hundred miles from their point of departure. At several Indian villages they had heard of the party in advance of them, whose camps they also sometimes found. The trail was growing fresh, and at Fort Adams they expected to gain definite information of those whom they sought, if indeed they did not overtake them at that point. At any rate, they would find a missionary there from whom they would surely receive news.
The first word obtained by Kurilla from the mission Indians, who swarmed forth to greet them, was that the missionary was absent, and that those whom they sought had passed only the day before. The second was that one of that party had returned but an hour previous, and was even now in the missionary’s house.
[“You fadder, yaas,”] added Kurilla, reassuringly, with a grin of delight, as he led Phil in that direction.
With a loudly beating heart the excited lad opened the door. There sat a man—a white man—in an attitude of the deepest dejection. He was long and lank. His fur garments ill became him. Phil’s heart sank; for in this uncouth figure there was no trace of his own dear father. Then, as the woe-begone face was slowly turned to meet his, he uttered a gasping shout of amazed recognition.
“Jalap Coombs, by all that is wonderful!”