“You’re Cheechakos—on the gold trail?” she asked.
Bill laughed. The whole position suddenly dawned on him.
“No,” he said. “No, Kid. We’re an outfit on the gold trail, sure,” he went on quite seriously. “But we’re decent citizens. And there’s not a thing to this camp to scare you. Will you come right ashore?”
For answer the girl’s paddle stirred more deeply and the nose of her canoe shot up to the vessel on which the man was standing. He held out one brown hand to assist her, but it was ignored. The Kid rose to her feet, tall and beautifully slim, and sprang on to the vessel beside him, carrying her own mooring rope of rawhide in her hand.
“I’m kind of glad you ain’t—Cheechakos,” she said.
And they both laughed as they passed back together over the bales of outfit with which the boat was laden, and reached the river bank where Chilcoot and Mike were waiting for them.
CHAPTER III
REINDEER FARM
The Indian, Usak, and the Kid were standing in the great enclosure where three half-breed Eskimos were engaged in the operation of breaking young buck reindeer to the sled work of the trail. They took no part in it. It was the daily occupation in the springtime of the year. It began before the break-up of winter, when it was conducted with heavily weighted sleds, and, with the passing of the snow it was continued with the long pole carryalls, which is the Eskimo means of transport over land in summer. The carryall was in use now and it was an interesting struggle between the skill of the squat, sturdy, brown-skinned breakers, and the half-scared, half-angry fighting will of a finely grown buck deer whose ragged coat of winter gave him the size of a three-year-old steer.
Haltered, and ranged along the rough-poled fence of the great corral stood twenty or thirty young bucks awaiting their turn in the rawhide harness, and they gazed round on the spectacle of their fighting brother with eyes of mild wonder at the commotion he was creating. Otherwise they seemed utterly unconcerned in their gentle submissiveness. They were all man-handled and tame. They had been handled almost from their birth, for the whole success of the farm depended on the turning out of fully broken cattle, trained for the work of transport within the Arctic, where the Eskimo estimate them above every other means of traversing the vast spaces of snow and ice, or the barren, lichen-grown territory of summer over which they were wont to roam.