The captain began to laugh. He laughed and laughed. Then, looking at their faces, he grew grave. He looked at the compass. He said gently, “but it points south.”
“North, Yetzhabada,” answered Kolite, resignedly.
“But south too,” insisted the white man.
Of course when one end of the needle pointed north, the other pointed south. Kweetchel had never happened to notice this before. It made him very happy. He could go off home with Kolite without fear of angering the masterful Thing in the bright box.
The captain took them south with him and eventually landed them near their old place, at a village of their own tribe. He tried on the voyage to explain the real nature of the compass to Kweetchel, but he never succeeded.
Kweetchel stayed with his own people. In time missionaries found him, and he stopped keeping slaves and eating dog, and became a Christian, and wore a second-hand Stetson. He himself told me this story years ago.
He was a very old man then. I thought he was dead since. But the other day I saw a little totem-pole in a store in Victoria. It was carved of yellow cedar, about two feet high, gaily painted; such as old Indians make to sell to the summer tourists on the Coast. As soon as I saw it, I knew Kweetchel had made it, for he had carved it with all the characters of his saga. He was there, and Kolite, and a sea-lion, and the big canoe and the little canoe, and an albatross, and a terrible representation of Un-Una, in a cave, swallowing up Annoish-Haung. On the very top was something. . . .
I went into the store. They wanted ten dollars for the pole, which was dear. “But, as you can see,” said the man, “it has a heap on it. But no one knows what that thing on the top is.”
I bought the pole, because I knew all about it and what the thing on the top was.
It was a mariner’s compass in a yellow box.