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I was too tired and sleepy to talk, for I had come down from the hills the previous afternoon to find the equinoxial raging, and as a result the roadhouse full from floor to ridge-pole with the motley crew that had sifted out from the interior. The coastwise craft were hugging the lee of the sandy islet, waiting for the blow to abate; telephone-wires were down, and Bering’s waters had piled in from the south until they flooded the endless sloughs and tide flats behind Solomon City, destroyed the ferries, and cut us off both east and west, by land and by sea. It were better, I had thought, to wait on the coast for a day or so, watching for a chance to dodge to Nome, than to return to the mines, so I had lugged my war bag into Anderson’s place and made formal demand for shelter.

The proprietor had apologized as he assigned me a bunk. “It’s the best I’ve got,” said he. “I’ve put you alongside of the stove, so if the boys snore too loud you can heave coal on ’em. Them big lumps is better than your boots.”

I had tried both fuel and footgear fruitlessly, and when my outraged ears would not permit further slumber I had given up the attempt. Now, while the blue-haired man with insomnia dealt “Idiot’s Delight” I sat vaguely fascinated by the play of his hands, half dozing under the drone of his voice.

The wind rioted without, whipping the sea spray across the sand-dunes until it rattled upon our walls like shot. Meanwhile my companion adventured aimlessly, his strange and vagrant fancies calling for no answer, his odd and morbid journeyings matching well with the whimpering night. His stories were without beginning, and they lacked any end. They commenced without reason, led through unfrequented paths, then closed for no cause. Through them ran no thread of relevancy. They were neither cogent nor cohesive. Their incidents took shape and tumbled forth irrelated and inconsequent. Wherefore I knew them for the truth, and found myself ere long wide-eyed and still, my brain as keen as ever nature made it.

The story of the dead Frenchman has seemed strained and gruesome to me since, but that night the storm made it real, and the stranger’s unsmiling earnestness robbed it of offense. His words told me a tale of which he had no thought, and painted pictures quite apart from those he had in mind. His very frame of mind, his pagan superstition, his frank, irreverent philosophy, disclosed queer glimpses of this land where morals are of the fourth dimension, where life is a gamble and death a joke. Whether he really believed all he said or whether he made sport of me I do not know. It may be that the elfin voices of the storm roused in him an impulse to gratify his distorted sense of humor at my expense–or at his own. He began somewhat as follows:

“It’s a good night for a dead man to walk.” Then, seeing the flicker in my eyes, he ran on: “You don’t think they can do it, eh? Well, I didn’t believe it neither, and I’m not sure I believe it now, but I’ve seen queer things–queer things–and I’ve only got one pair to draw to. Either they happened as I saw them or I’m crazy.” He leaped at his story boldly.

“I’m pretty tired and hungry when I hit Council City late one fall, for I’d upset my rowboat, lost my outfit, and ‘mushed’ it one hundred fifty miles. My whole digestive paraphernalia is in a state of innocuous desuetude, if you know what that is, because all I save from the wreck is a flour-sack full of cigarette-papers and a package of chocolate pills about the size of a match-head. Each one of these pellets is warranted to contain sufficient nourishment to last the Germany army for one month. I read it on the label. They may have had it in them; I don’t know. I swallowed one every morning and then filled up on reindeer moss till I felt like the leaping-pad in a circus.