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“So? So?” Tyee mused, too stunned for speech.

He started suddenly, and shivered, for the voice of Bill-Man shot out at him from the passage.

“It is well,” it said. “I look for the man who crawls with the broken neck, and lo, do I find Tyee. Throw down thy gun, Tyee, so that I may hear it strike among the rocks.”

Tyee obeyed passively, and Bill-Man crawled forward into the light. Tyee looked at him curiously. He was gaunt and worn and dirty, and his eyes burned like twin coals in their cavernous sockets.

“I am hungry, Tyee,” he said. “Very hungry.”

“And I am dirt at thy feet,” Tyee responded.

“Thy word is my law. Further, I commanded my people not to withstand thee. I counselled–“

But Bill-Man had turned and was calling back into the passage. “Hey! Charley! Jim! Fetch the woman along and come on!”

“We go now to eat,” he said, when his comrades and Mesahchie had joined him.

Tyee rubbed his hands deprecatingly. “We have little, but it is thine.”

“After that we go south on the snow,” Bill-Man continued.

“May you go without hardship and the trail be easy.”

“It is a long way. We will need dogs and food–much!”

“Thine the pick of our dogs and the food they may carry.”

Bill-Man slipped over the edge of the opening and prepared to descend. “But we come again, Tyee. We come again, and our days shall be long in the land.”

And so they departed into the trackless south, Bill-Man, his brothers, and Mesahchie. And when the next year came, the Search Number Two rode at anchor in Mandell Bay. The few Mandell men, who survived because their wounds had prevented their crawling into the cave, went to work at the best of the Sunlanders and dug in the ground. They hunt and fish no more, but receive a daily wage, with which they buy flour, sugar, calico, and such things which the Search Number Two brings on her yearly trip from the Sunlands.

And this mine is worked in secret, as many Northland mines have been worked; and no white man outside the Company, which is Bill-Man, Jim, and Charley, knows the whereabouts of Mandell on the rim of the polar sea. Aab-Waak still carries his head on one shoulder, is become an oracle, and preaches peace to the younger generation, for which he receives a pension from the Company. Tyee is foreman of the mine. But he has achieved a new theory concerning the Sunlanders.

“They that live under the path of the sun are not soft,” he says, smoking his pipe and watching the day-shift take itself off and the night-shift go on. “For the sun enters into their blood and burns them with a great fire till they are filled with lusts and passions. They burn always, so that they may not know when they are beaten. Further, there is an unrest in them, which is a devil, and they are flung out over the earth to toil and suffer and fight without end. I know. I am Tyee.”