“You don’t mean he’s here already?” “Well, he _was_.” “When? It can’t be the person I mean?” “Lame man, about sixty? Yes, yes, remember him perfectly. Couldn’t quite make him out, for he didn’t seem to care a tinker’s curse about getting to the Klondike. The boys set him down finally as a sort of a missionary, because” (with a laugh) “he seemed so ready to go the wrong way.” “Which way?” “Up the coast to Golovin Bay.” No, he hadn’t come back. A trader from Kwimkuk, who had been down for supplies, said Mar was staying up there at the Swedish Mission. That was all the clerk knew. He was turning the pages back to the entries of the previous summer. “That’s the man!” And there was Mar’s unmistakable signature staring Cheviot in the face. “But that’s ’97,” he said bewildered. He pulled out Hildegarde’s letter, and looked again at the date. It was a year old. Shortie Hinkson stopped sweeping out the office to say: “One o’ them missionary fellers come down here from Golovin Sat’day. No, he ain’t gone back yit. I seen him only a while ago goin’ by the A.C. office.” When a few minutes later, among the crowd down by the old Block House, the missionary was run to earth, Cheviot found him a great tow-headed Swede, looking as if he had been not so much cut out of wood as hacked out, and with a very dull implement at that. Close at his elbow, and appealed to now and then for verification of some statement, was a thin little dark man, with glittering black eyes and a turn for silence. The tall missionary was bargaining about some “canned stuff” with the great A.C. Company’s agent, Captain Seilberg. This magnate, leaning against one of the mounted cannon the Russians had left behind in ’67, was looking through a spy-glass at the ship discernible on the far horizon, while between ejaculatory oaths he “did business” with the rugged Lutheran. Waiting for a chance to introduce himself, Cheviot wondered aside to a bystander why those two talked English to each other. “Oh, Seilberg’s a Norwegian.” “No, a Dane,” put in another, overhearing. “I thought,” said Cheviot, “they could all understand one another after a fashion—all Scandinavians.” “Scanda who? Well, anyway, they’re too thick on the ground in Alaska for us to bother about fine distinctions.” “Yes,” agreed the customs officer, as Cheviot pressed forward to speak to the missionary, “so far as we’re concerned they’re all Scandahoojians together.” Certainly Mr. Christianson knew Mr. Mar. Mr. Mar was still at the Mission House up at Kwimkuk. How to get there? The big missionary turned to his silent companion, who still stood gloomily by. Mr. Björk and he wouldn’t mind taking back a passenger in their boat. They were going just as soon as they’d settled matters with Captain Seilberg.