“Good! You come me potlatch,” which Jim explained was an invitation to visit him at his village on the occasion of a merrymaking similar to a Christmas celebration.
The Scouts retired that night full of the mystery of the thing, feeling as if they had come, somehow, into touch with a long dead past. Swiftwater appeared more reassured, but took occasion to visit the shack before turning in and found the aborigines all herded together with the dog in the almost air tight hut, ventilation appearing to be a thing abhorrent to them.
The first thing that became apparent when the boys and the miner threw back the cheesecloth door of their tent that kept out the horde of mosquitos in the early morning was the absolute silence of the forest. The six Indians had taken one of the two boats, and with the dog had silently drifted away during the night down the current of Gold.
CHAPTER X.
BUILDING THE CAMP.
The chagrin of Swiftwater Jim was almost too great for expression when the discovery of the Indians’ desertion was made.
“It was what I had feared,” he said. “Still, I thought our talk last night had absolutely satisfied them. I don’t think they were so much afraid of us as that they desired to be sure that the sacred bone got back safely to their village, and they knew that a big feast would be made for them when they returned. It would be useless to pursue them, for it would be a hard trip back to White Horse, and there would be no certainty of our being able to keep them if we got them back. Our work here is so nearly finished that I believe if we turn to it heartily we can complete it in the time we intended and get back to Skagway in time to meet Colonel Snow on his return from the northwest. How about it?”
The Scouts, and especially Rand, felt themselves to be to a certain extent responsible for the situation in which they found themselves that they readily agreed to turn to and exert themselves to the utmost to finish up the work of preparing the camp for the winter’s work.