The grin broadened on the face of Bill Ames: “Oh, him--I guess he’s poundin’ his ear, somewheres. Eighty-three hours on the trail, an’ part of it through a blizzard, calls fer a good long sleep. He was wobblin’ when he crossed the finish line. They hung the big wreath on his neck, an’ do you know what he done? He tore it off an’ hung it on the neck of that there Skookum dog! That’s what he done! An’ By God, Miss Gordon, that’s what I call a man! Givin’ the dogs the credit. ‘It was the Skookum dog done it,’ he says to me, after he’d axed how was you gittin’ on, ‘The lead dog, an’ the gal that had sense enough to run ’em over the trail. We was lost,’ he says, ‘An’ that Skookum dog found the trail because he’s be’n over it.’ Them’s the words he says to me, an’ then he was gone. The best team won, Miss Gordon--an’ the best man won. An’ now all Alasky is wonderin’ who is he? Why, they ain’t sayin’ ‘Hello,’ no more, down there in the streets, nor ‘How be you?’ It’s who the hell is _Huloimee Tilakum_? But, they won’t never find out from me----” “Do you know?” cried the girl, half rising from her pillow, “Tell me! Do you know?” “Who--me?” exclaimed Bill Ames, “Not me, Miss Gordon. I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’! Honest I don’t. I never seen him or heerd tell of him till you brung him to the corral that day! So long, Miss Gordon! I gotta go!” And without waiting for another word, Bill Ames vanished from the room as swiftly as his peg leg would permit. Down in the jail they rimmed Old Man Gordon’s cell demanding to know who drove the Gordon dogs. The old man paused long enough in his denunciation of the police, the court, and all Nome in general, to roar his answer at them: “My daughter drove ’em! Con blast ye! That’s the breed of us Koyukukers! Our women over there can beat the best mushers ye got!’Twas my wee lass of a daughter that won ye’re race!” “Hell of a lookin’ daughter!” exclaimed a man in the crowd, “You ort to saw him hurlin’ them dogs down the street to the finish, an’ all Nome lookin’ on an’ yellin’ their head off! Believe me, old timer! It was a he-man won that race!” That very day they turned Gordon loose with apologies so evidently sincere that the old man’s ruffled temper was completely mollified. For, upon further questioning the Indian admitted that Dalzene, and not Gordon had furnished the hooch. Whereupon Dalzene was apprehended and promptly sentenced to six months at hard labor.