So they waited, though very impatiently, in Klukwan for nearly a week, during which time Phil had ample opportunities for studying Chilkat architecture and totem poles. The houses of the village were all built of heavy hewn planks set on end. They had bark or plank roofs, with a square opening in each for the egress of smoke. Many of them had glass windows and ordinary doors; but in others the doors were placed so high from the ground as to be reached by ladders on both outside and inside. The great totem poles that stood before every house were ten, twenty, or thirty feet tall, and covered with heraldic carvings from bottom to top.
During this time of waiting the Shaman made repeated offers to sell the strangers a canoe, all of which were indignantly declined. That they did not appropriate one to their own use was for the very simple reason that all, except a few very small or leaky canoes, mysteriously disappeared from the village that first night.
At length the tricky medicine-man was forced to yield to the threats of the Princess, who had taken the part of our travellers from the first, and to popular clamor. He therefore announced one evening that he had been informed during a vision that the fur-seal's tooth would reappear among them on the morrow.
On the following morning Phil and his companions were aroused by a tremendous shouting and firing of guns, all of which announced that the happy event had taken place.
"Now," cried Phil, "perhaps we will get our canoe."
But there were no canoes to be seen on the beach, and the Shaman coolly informed them that, though the precious tooth had indeed come back to dwell with the Chilkats, they would still be obliged to wait until some of the canoes returned from the hunting expeditions on which they had all been taken.
At this Phil fell into such a rage that, regardless of consequences, he was on the point of giving the old fraud a most beautiful thrashing, when his uplifted arm was startlingly arrested by the deep boom of a heavy gun that seemed to come from the mouth of the river.