“Tutchi’s Village!” exclaimed Cantine, his teeth clicking incessantly as he whacked the ice from bis garments. “Where’s it moved to? It was hunting sign of it we fell in.”
“Moved five miles up the Klokliok,” spluttered the other, setting the stove-door ajar to obtain a floor-streamer of light in the gloomy cabin. “But you better strip quick. Use that back room there to change. You’ll find a dunnage-bag full of clothes—some of them woman’s things—under the bunk. While you throw them on, I’ll rustle more wood to stoke up the stove. I used all I had in to cook supper. And you can light the candle on the shelf there to see by. I was just getting up to reach for it when I heard your yells!”
Gulping down the last of his pilot-bread, the owner of the cabin was gone while he spoke.
Cantine reached up to the shelf, took off the tallow candle stuck in a wide-necked pickle-bottle, reached a box of matches from the same shelf and lighted the wick.
From force of habit he fingered up a small bunch of matches out of the box and went to shove them into his vest pocket.
“Wait, Jose, wait!” cautioned Blera. “They’ll be as bad as the others if you put them there. Put them in the dry clothes, and after this don’t trust a bottle any more. Get one of those rubber match-safes with the screw top. And now for the dry clothes! I feel as if I can work my arms and legs once more.”
Taking the candle from Jose, she moved across the cabin toward the door of the back room. The yellow light flooding the main room showed it to be built of the customary spruce logs chinked with moss and plastered with mud.
The floor was of rough-hewn slabs. Of slabs, too, but a little better smoothed, was the rude table upon which supper was spread. The table stood under the window which instead of glass for a light boasted a square of golden-brown moose-skin rubbed so smooth as to be almost transparent.
Upon the opposite wall was a bunk also formed of slabs. The Yukon stove stood at the end, and it, with the wood-box behind, completed the furnishings of the cabin.
Out of the empty wood-box the huskies raised their heads and growled so ominously at Blera’s and Jose’s movements that the two ran the last few steps across the floor and shut the door of the back room with a bang.