It had taken Gregg Harlan some time to realize fully that mere existence on Kon Klayu was an all-absorbing problem! but when he did so the primitiveness of it stimulated, intoxicated him, not as liquor had once done, but with a freshness that cleared his brain and sent his blood racing through his veins. Every cell in his body tingled with life. He felt this exhilaration in his swinging stride, his up-lifting chin. By Christmas he was no more tormented by a craving for liquor. On the contrary he was nauseated at the memory of his stupid, sodden days at Katleean. Alaska, the Great Country, which either makes or breaks, had challenged him to prove himself a man—and he had accepted the challenge. Kon Klayu, Island of mystery and beauty had laid its charm upon him, for despite the hardships it was a place where romance and adventure were the realities of life.

For the first time in his twenty-five years he felt the spur of responsibility. He was filled with a desire to fight, to conquer, to do something to try his new strength and to earn favor in the eyes of Jean—and Ellen. He grinned boyishly to himself, sometimes, when this mighty urge to noble deeds resolved itself into the accomplishing of prosaic tasks such as getting in firewood and hunting shellfish.

In the matter of clothes, Boreland and Kayak were the only ones who were in any way prepared for the cold weather. Ellen had cut up a scarlet blanket to make Harlan and Loll winter coats. Jean had fashioned for herself an attractive mackinaw from a small white blanket, and the young man was not blind to the picture she made, red-cheeked, laughing, trotting along beside him on the beach as they looked for sea food.

One windy day Kayak Bill came in from the beach without his cherished sombrero.

"The gol durned breeze snatched it often my haid, and lit out with it for foreign parts," he drawled sadly as he smoothed down his wildly blown locks. Despite Ellen's anxious protests he went bareheaded after that, although he wound his scarf about his ears on extra cold days. His hair continued to grow unchecked also, for after watching Ellen earnestly manipulating an inverted bowl and a pair of scissors while she trimmed her protesting husband's hair, Kayak spoke with slow conviction:

"I hearn tell o' lady barbers down in the States, but I ain't no nature for 'em a-fussin' round my noggin. My kin folks drug me to the Methydist meetin' house once a-fore I stampeded from Texas, and the sarmon teched on a long-haired pugilist, Samson, what was trimmed by a lady barber by the name o' Dahlia." . . .

For some time Kayak and Boreland had been trying, as they put it, to "taper off" on their tobacco. Harlan, when he found that the Hoonah was not coming, had given up smoking so that the older men might longer enjoy what tobacco was left. After days of silent, mental wrestling with his desire, he reached the stage where he had successfully downed the craving, and he watched with grim amusement, and no little sympathy, his partners' vain efforts to limit themselves to one pipe after each meal.

There finally came a day when Kayak and Shane sat at the supper table lighting their farewell pipes.

"Goo' bye, lovely Lady Nicotine!" Airily Boreland waved a hand through the smoke. "I bid thee farewell without fear and without regret! . . . As a matter of fact, Bill, I've intended to quit right along, and this makes it easy. Filthy habit, anyway, and I don't want to set a bad example for Loll."

It was from Jean that Harlan learned the details of the following dismal day. It was so stormy that the men could not go out to work. After breakfast Shane and Kayak had risen from the table and, pipes in hand, instinctively sought the tobacco-box in the corner. Their fingers met on the bare tin bottom. With blank looks they faced each other.

"Hell, Kayak, I'd forgotten!" Boreland grinned sheepishly. "Now begins the battle of Nicotine! Buck up, pard!" He forced a cheerfulness into his tones as he slapped Kayak's shoulder.

Kayak Bill looked down at the empty pipe cupped lovingly in his hand. With a sound between a grunt and a groan he put it back into his pocket and dawdled dispiritedly off into the other room to his bunk behind the tarpaulin.

Shane thrust both hands deep into the pockets of his overalls and shifted his weight alternately from heel to toe. . . . Crossing over to the stove where his wife stood he bent upon her a wistful, little-lost-dog expression, so ridiculous in a man of his size that Ellen burst into laughter.

"Poor—little—thing!" she sympathized, patting his cheek. "It's lost its pacifier, it has!"

With a sickly grin Shane turned to the window and dully watched the slanting sleet blown by the gale. . . . Kayak's puffing snore came presently from the other room. Boreland wheeled about, glaring.

"By thunder! to think that old cuss can sleep at a time like this! . . . The man must have a heart of stone! For two cents I'd go in there and . . ."

He paced the floor, his hands fidgeting.

"Are you sure, El, you didn't save out a box of tobacco on us, just to give us a bit of a surprise now," he asked hopefully for the third time that morning.

In the days that followed Harlan could not make up his mind who suffered most during the "battle of Nicotine"—Shane or Kayak Bill, or Ellen. He grew to feel a bit sorry for Ellen. He found himself gradually assuming the duties neglected by the other two men during their period of misery. Boreland lost much of his good-natured cheerfulness. He was inclined to view the food situation with increased alarm. He often spoke sharply to Lollie, and sometimes to his wife. But invariably after an irritable outburst he sought to make up to the boy with some home-made toy, or a new story of adventure. With Ellen his method of apology was different. He would put his arm across her shoulders and look down at her whimsically.

"I swan to goodness, little fellow, if I wasn't an angel I couldn't live with you at all, at all, you're that peevish since I've stopped smoking." Then with his most wistful Irish look he would add, "Be patient with me El. I'm having a hell of a time."

As Harlan watched the struggles of his partners he grew to have a better opinion of his own power of self-control. Jean was responsible for this in a way. Sometimes on stormy days when it was impossible to go outside, the patience of the whole family would be sorely tried by the actions of the older men. They would research every nook and corner of the cabin, go into the pockets of every garment and even rip linings in their efforts to find some over-looked bit of tobacco. After just so much of this, Jean would turn on them scornfully and compare their childish actions with those of Harlan when he was undergoing the same deprivation. Undoubtedly this holding him up as a good example had the opposite effect to that hoped for by Jean, but it nevertheless caused a warm glow to encircle his heart.

One day Boreland made a great discovery: By pulverizing the old nicotine-laden pipes, of which there were over half a dozen, he found that the resultant mixture could be smoked. He and his partner in disgrace did no work that day. In disgust Ellen banished them to the woodshed to do their smoking. From this place of refuge Kayak Bill's drawling tones of immense satisfaction floated out at intervals:

"Honest to grandma, Shane, I'm a-feelin' like a new man."

By the time the corncobs had all been pulverized and consumed, and but one cannabalistic pipe, itself pared down until it held but a thimbleful, was left between them, all the other members of the party had arrayed themselves against the sufferers. By persisting even though sickness was often the penalty for smoking an extra strong pulverized pipe, they had forfeited the sympathy of all hands. Matters came to a crisis one afternoon, when Boreland, taking a candle, crawled up into the loft to make one more search among the provisions.

Suddenly there was heard a great commotion overhead—a beating and a floundering about.

"Hey! Get some water up here—quick!" came Shane's alarmed shout.
"I've set the bloody place afire!"

Half an hour later the fire was out, thanks to the efforts of the bucket brigade which rushed water from the spring, but in the roof was a gapping hole, and much of the outfit stowed away in the loft was wet again.

Boreland came slowly down from above. He was besmudged, apologetic and sheepish. Ellen was waiting for him. She looked him over from head to foot, her blue eyes snapping, scorn and supreme disgust radiating from her. Next she turned to Kayak Bill and took him in with the same look.

"Now, men, listen to me," she said sternly, as they both started to slip toward the door. "I've reached the limit of my endurance." She emphasized her next remarks with a decisive finger. "The very next one of you who mentions tobacco inside this cabin will be banished to the smoke-house to live by himself. I mean every word I say!" With hang-dog looks the culprits turned away and disappeared through the door. Ellen, with business-like brevity, climbed up into the loft to investigate. Harlan followed.

He found a roll of tar paper with which to mend the hole in the roof and helped Ellen shift the dunnage bags which had been wetted by the water. They worked in silence for some time.

Suddenly Ellen stopped in her operations. She rested her palms on the floor and looked up at Harlan. In the candle-lit gloom of the loft he could see that her eyes were twinkling. A new friendliness was in the ingenuous smile she gave him.

"Gregg," she said in a tone that finally admitted him to her friendship, "remember—there isn't a man living who cannot be benefited by having a good, sound scolding once in a while." . . .

And so the days passed until the end of January. They were stormy ones for the most part, yet no ruby sand showed on the beach of Kon Klayu. One clear, cold morning Harlan and Jean were gathering shellfish among the boulders on Sunset Point. The air was strangely still and under the pale sunshine the sapphire waters were tinged with rose and lavender. They had long been accustomed to those tricks played with sea and clouds by the magician Mirage, and today the crest of each billow was magnified until, on the horizon the points seemed to leap up into the sky. Above a lucid space in the southwest a mass of silver and amethyst tinted clouds moved slowly and spread out like a platform. They sat on a flat boulder to watch the changing beauty of the colors. Their daily forays for shellfish had deepened their love of the sea—its ways of mystery that were ever bringing to their attention some new loveliness of form and tint. Now, before their incredulous eyes there appeared rising from the cloud bank the illusion of graciously rounded domes, spires, minarets, and the next instant they were gazing on a city of enchantment softly reflected in a pearly sea—a silvery city of fantasy like an exquisite shadowy drawing of some foreign land. . . . They sat silent, entranced. How long the vision lingered neither of them knew. . . . Then a breeze fanned their faces and in a twinkling the city of dreams vanished.

They raced back to the cabin with their news but found the others on the porch. They too had witnessed the phenomenon. Kayak Bill alone showed no surprise.

"That's what sourdoughs up here calls 'The Silent City,'" he drawled.
"Alasky folks have been seein' it for yars. One time I saw it above
Muir glacier, and one time when I was a-crusin' in the Bering Sea.
Sailors calls it a mirrage. If I don't miss my guess, there'll be hell
a-poppin' in the way of a storm purty soon."

Kayak was right. Within twenty-tour hours the worst southwest gale experienced racked the Island. The strange reverberating roll from the south Cliffs beat with weird insistence on their ears for three long days and nights. When the weather cleared the immediate need for shellfish sent Jean and Harlan out among the rocks again.

They were coming home from Skeleton Rib with their pails full of "gumboots," making a desultory search for pay-sand, which no one had seen for weeks. They left the beach and turned toward the little lake visible from the cabin porch. The storm had shifted the cannon-ball shaped boulders which characterized that part of the shore, stripped the tundra of every sign of vegetation, and exposed the brown turf beneath. Gregg in restoring his knife to his pocket, dropped it. As he stooped to pick it up a look of astonishment crossed his face. He sank on his knees and eagerly scanned the brown surface beneath.

"Jean!" There was excitement in his voice as he beckoned her. "Look!"

The girl rushed to his side. She bent to look and caught her breath.

The dark surface of the turf was flecked with glittering colors of gold.