In spite of the general opinion so strongly expressed, Roger felt a little scornful about being bothered with a few pesky mosquitoes, and he was inclined to think it an utterly foolish precaution when he was given an arrangement of netting to put over his head and let it hang down well over his shoulders, but his scorn vanished rapidly. Within an hour his hands, unprotected by gloves, became puffed and swollen from bites, and he found it necessary to put on thick buckskin to preserve him from the bites and to keep his sleeves rolled down. Even then he was not entirely free, for in some mysterious way the insects would work themselves into his clothes, and at night, although the tent was placed on a canvas which fastened to its sides like a floor, so that the mosquitoes could not come up from underneath, a few of them always were to be heard--and felt. So that, before many days had passed, Rogers was convinced that the Alaskan mosquito was a very important factor in life on the trail. [Illustration: THE ONLY BIT OF ROCK FOR MILES. A landmark in the vast treeless tundra. The chief of the division drawing in contour. _Photograph by U.S.G.S._] Five days after leaving the portage, having covered over one hundred miles of very easy going, the party made camp at Harper's Bend on the Tanana River. So far as buildings went, it was quite an imposing place, no less than nine huts being in evidence, but they were all vacant and deserted and a sense of loneliness and desolation hung over the place. The sight of human habitation, after so many weeks in the wild, ought to have given a sense of homelikeness, but instead the boy was conscious of an eerie sense of estrangement. At supper that evening Roger mentioned this feeling, and added: "Somehow I feel as if this place were haunted. It doesn't so much seem abandoned to nothingness as it does given to some uncanny ghost." Magee crossed himself. "Saints preserve us!" he said. "Don't talk like that, or ye'll bring the night-riders here." "Nonsense, Magee," reproved Rivers, "a man of your experience so superstitious! But the boy might be right, for all that." "By the power of good luck, why?" asked the Irishman. "You tell the story, Gersup," replied the chief, "you know more about it than I do." "Alaska's a pretty new country to be starting a ghost crop," the topographer began, "and, so far as I know, there aren't any here yet; but, if any place ought to have one, it should be Harper's Bend, right where we are now, and in this very house in which we are sitting." Magee shivered and looked about him apprehensively.