who should know--ruled him from the beginning with a club that was more
brutal than the club of the Eskimo.

For three months Wapi had been the property of Blake, and it was now the
dead of a long and sunless arctic night. Blake's cabin, built of ship
timber and veneered with blocks of ice, was built in the face of a deep
pit that sheltered it from wind and storm. To this cabin came the
Nanatalmutes from the east, and the Kogmollocks from the west, bartering
their furs and whalebone and seal-oil for the things Blake gave in
exchange, and adding women to their wares whenever Blake announced a
demand. The demand had been excellent this winter. Over in Darnley Bay,
thirty miles across the headland, was the whaler Harpoon frozen up for
the winter with a crew of thirty men, and straight out from the face of
his igloo cabin, less than a mile away, was the Flying Moon with a crew
of twenty more. It was Blake's business to wait and watch like a hawk for
such opportunities as there, and tonight--his watch pointed to the hour
of twelve, midnight--he was sitting in the light of a sputtering seal-oil
lamp adding up figures which told him that his winter, only half gone,
had already been an enormously profitable one.

"If the Mounted Police over at Herschel only knew," he chuckled. "Uppy,
if they did, they'd have an outfit after us in twenty-four hours."

Oopi, his Eskimo right-hand man, had learned to understand English, and
he nodded, his moon-face split by a wide and enigmatic grin. In his way,
"Uppy" was as clever as Shan Tung had been in his.

And Blake added, "We've sold every fur and every pound of bone and oil,
and we've forty Upisk wives to our credit at fifty dollars apiece."