The other Indians surrounded him in a defiant attitude—the first sign of insubordination that had yet appeared among them, and the boys seeing that they had encountered a mystery which could not at once be unraveled, and that the relic had some almost overpowering importance to the Siwashes, determined to drop the matter for the time being, and put it up later to the commander of the camp.
The aborigines went back quietly to their labor in the afternoon, and the boys who were at work with the miner, laying out the foundation for the sawmill, took occasion in the intervals of their labor to tell Swiftwater the story of the narwhal’s horn, and the incident that had taken place at noon. The guide listened with close attention, and at the finish of the incident his face was rather grave.
“I’ll talk with that main guy Siwash, some time this afternoon. Meantime, I wish you would all leave this matter in my hands. It may turn out to be of more importance to us than we think.”
The Scouts readily agreed, and toward the middle of the afternoon the miner left them and strolled over to where the Indians were at work on the sod house, and calling the “chief” to one side walked away with him to the bank of the creek.
“Well,” said Jack, when they were all together at one end of the foundation, “what do you think of it? There seems to be more in that horn than we thought when we decided to bring it along with us.”
“Yes,” replied Rand, “and we seem to be coming out of the little end of it.”
“Faith,” exclaimed Gerald, “it looks as if that Indian was going to hold on to our relic, and the others seem as if they were going to stand by him.”
“They certainly have seen something like it before,” commented Dick, “and maybe it’s worth more to them than to us. It was only a mere guess of ours, after Colonel Snow undertook to interpret it to us, that there might be anything behind it, and it was only because it had evidently come from an Arctic country that we even thought of bringing it along with us.”
“I think,” said Rand, “that we shall have trouble getting it back, and I, for one, propose that we leave the whole matter in the hands of Swiftwater and try and get the true inwardness of the thing from him. It ought to be a good story if we don’t get anything else out of it.” This view was readily agreed to, and the afternoon’s work was progressing satisfactorily when Don, after deep thought, said:
“I’ve been listening to this Siwash language, and I haed me doots as to whether it was a real language like Gaelic or English or just a rumble, but when I heard that head man scream like a white man I concluded that it’s got some elements of a language.”