"Why not?" demanded the sailor, who had not for a moment expected anything else. "As soon as I found ye I were to bring ye to St. Michaels, and keep ye there till your father comes. Them's orders, and to disobey 'em would be mutiny, nigh as I kin make out." "That would be all right if you had found us; but you haven't." "Eh?" queried Jalap Coombs. "I hain't found ye?" "Certainly not," laughed Phil. "Instead of you finding us, we have found you. If you had struck us at Anvik, it is possible that we might have gone back with you, but as we have found you some four hundred miles from there, we shall certainly do nothing of the kind. You see, to begin with, we are under the greatest of obligations to Captain Hamer, who, by-the-way, is one of the finest men I ever met." Here Phil told of the terrible experience he and Serge had undergone in Bering Sea, and of their gallant rescue by Gerald Hamer, all of which the absorbed listener now heard for the first time. "Now," continued the lad, "we have left him just recovering from a dangerous illness, and unfitted to travel for some months. If he can't get word out to the coast before spring he will be a heavy loser. So Serge and I have undertaken to carry and deliver the message for him. Our entire outfit, down to the very clothing we wear, was furnished by him on that condition. It is also our duty to try and defeat the plans of his enemies, who are also our enemies, and now seem to have become yours as well. So you see we are in honor bound to push on with all speed. Besides all this, we certainly ought to be able to reach Sitka long before my father can get away from there, and so save him a long, tedious, and useless journey." "I'm not so sartain of that," demurred Jalap Coombs. "For ye've been trying to make Sitka long's ever I've knowed ye, which is going on a year now, and hain't come anywhere nigh to it yet. Still, as my old friend Kite Roberson useter say, 'Jalap, my son, allers steer by sarcumstances; for as a gineral thing they'll p'int straighter'n a compass,' and I am free to admit that your present sarcumstances is p'inting pretty direct towards Sitka. But how do ye propose to sarcumvent the villyans what run off with my dogs?" "Now you are talking straight business," laughed Phil. "As I understand it, the main object of those fellows is to capture the next season's trade of the Yukon Valley, and especially of the diggings at Forty Mile, by taking advance orders at lower rates than the old company has ever before offered. Even then their prices are certain to be exorbitant, and with Gerald Hamer's list I am certain I can underbid them. But that won't be of any use unless we can be first in the field, for after the orders are given and contracts signed those other chaps could laugh at us and our prices. So our only hope is to reach Forty Mile ahead of them." "Which ye can't do it without wings or steam," objected Jalap Coombs, "seeing they's got two good days' start."