The assistant topographer of the party, to whom the boy was next introduced, was a great surprise. He looked like anything except what he was. Not particularly prepossessing, he had a large head, already nearly bald, he was slightly bow-legged and short and scant of speech. It was not until weeks later that the boy found out why he had been selected for the trip. His strength was herculean, and in spite of the fact that he was not slightly built he could put a mountain goat to shame at scaling an apparently inaccessible crag. As Magee, the Irishman of the party, described him, "Tie his hands behind his back, and he'll climb up the side of a house with his toenails and his eyebrows." Of the two camp hands, one was an Indian called Harry, a fine specimen of one of the famous tribes which successfully resisted Russian rule in the early years, and who was regarded as one of the most expert canoeists who had ever been in the Survey. The other was Magee. And Magee was sufficiently described by his full name, which was Patrick Aloysius Magee. He was a devil-may-care Irishman from Galway, who had spent fifteen years in the gold camps, and had tossed over the poker table and the faro layout the little bags of gold dust that had represented years of weary work. It was not that hope had died out in him, which made him leave prospecting and take to the Survey, but in his own way of putting it, "There were too many men of the female sex around the gold camps now." He had been a sailor for some years, too, in the old sailing-ship days, and had left the sea because of his contempt for steam. As for the cook, his chief recommendation was that "he could cook an eight-course dinner out of a pair of old boots, and make a man believe he had had something to eat when he was still as hungry as when he sat down." Altogether, Roger thought, as the little gunboat got under way and steamed for Seldovia, near the southern bend of the Kenai peninsula, a more aggressive body of men he had never met, and he determined to hold up his end, no matter what should come.