“Sartain it is,” replied the mate, with a grin, and entering fully into Phil’s absurdities. “Leastways, there ain’t no one come to turn me out of it yet. So you’re as welcome to it as I be. For, as old Kite Roberson useter say—”
“Let’s have him for dessert,” laughed Phil, as he started outside to discover what had become of the sledges.
[CHAPTER XVI]
THE MATE’S STORY
It is doubtful if there was a happier party in the Yukon Valley, or even in all Alaska, than that which unbidden, though none the less certain of their welcome, took possession of the mission-house at old Fort Adams that roaring December night. Certainly no one could be happier than was Jalap Coombs at this meeting with the boys in whose fortunes his had become so strangely involved. At the time of their opportune appearance he was in one of the most unhappy and perplexing predicaments of his whole checkered career; but now his troubles were blown away like a morning mist, and already wellnigh forgotten.
When the schooner Philomel, finally released from the bank on which she had grounded, reached St. Michaels, Mr. Ryder was greatly distressed by the accounts given him of the expedition on which Phil and Serge had embarked. Knowing nothing of the conditions under which they had been so glad to accept the friendly offer of a roundabout passage to Sitka, and receiving a cruelly false impression of Gerald Hamer’s character as well as of his objects in ascending the Yukon, he concluded that the boys had been trapped into a reckless venture, which could only lead them to disaster and suffering. In fancy he saw them imprisoned by an arctic winter on a wretchedly constructed and poorly equipped boat, as the Chimo was described to him, or in some squalid Indian village, confronted by freezing, starvation, and disease, remote from human aid and without the means of escape.
Bitterly did he deplore the accident that prevented him from organizing a relief party and going in person to their rescue. When, on the day after his own arrival, the revenue-cutter Bear touched at St. Michaels on her way south and her commander offered him a passage to San Francisco, where he could receive the surgical attendance he so greatly needed, he at first refused, declaring that nothing would induce him to leave the country without his boy Phil.
Then it was that Jalap Coombs offered to remain in his place, make an overland trip to the Yukon as soon as winter travel should be practicable, find the boys, and bring them back to St. Michaels, there to await Mr. Ryder’s return in the spring.
“But you know nothing of the country nor of sledge travel,” objected the latter. “You will not even know on what portion of the river to look for the boys. And, besides, what shall we do with the Philomel, which has already cost me more than I can well afford?”