"And I'm going to have my say," Charles asserted with increasing
irritability. "And it's lucky for you with your fool sentiments
that you've got somebody to think ahead for you, else you'd all
starve to death. I tell you that famine's coming. I've been
studying the situation. Flour will be two dollars a pound, or ten,
and no sellers. You mark my words."

Across the rubble-covered flats, up the dark canyon to Sheep Camp,
past the over-hanging and ever-threatening glaciers to the Scales,
and from the Scales up the steep pitches of ice-scoured rock where
packers climbed with hands and feet, Old Tarwater camp-cooked and
packed and sang. He blew across Chilcoot Pass, above timberline,
in the first swirl of autumn snow. Those below, without firewood,
on the bitter rim of Crater Lake, heard from the driving obscurity
above them a weird voice chanting:


"Like Argus of the ancient times,
We leave this modern Greece,
Tum-tum, tum-tum, tum, tum, tum-tum,
To shear the Golden Fleece."


And out of the snow flurries they saw appear a tall, gaunt form,
with whiskers of flying white that blended with the storm, bending
under a sixty-pound pack of camp dunnage.

"Father Christmas!" was the hail. And then: "Three rousing cheers
for Father Christmas!"