About this time they took an inventory of their possessions. They had a tent, umiak, rifles, and ammunition, flour, sugar, salt, matches, and clothes rather the worse for wear, but new muckalucks. They had a few battered kitchen utensils, sufficient for rough camp housekeeping, a little dried fish, and some caribou meat, but not much. They had also vigorous health, courage, and a great desire to get home, and they planned to make a start soon, but while they planned things happened. As may be imagined, among such a horde of barbarians from strange villages all was not law and order. At first the excitement of trading and the novelty of the situation kept everybody busy, but by and by barter got to be an old story. Contests and games became prevalent, trials of strength in wrestling, shooting-matches, blanket-tossing, in which if no one volunteered to be tossed they went out and caught some one, who was tossed whether he needed it or not. Barbarians are like children, and those who lost at the games were not always good-natured. But the sport of all others at this meet seemed to be football. Not the Rugby game, but a sort of go-as-you-please match, in which a few started, then newcomers joined the weaker side, till hundreds swept back and forth across the tundra, sometimes for many hours. There were no rules to this game; it was simply get the ball back any way you could, and some of these ways proved to be rough indeed. Yet all these things caused only minor fracases and individual discontent. There was another matter which threatened to make things more serious, and in fact did so. That was the making of “hootch.” If you mix flour and water and let it ferment, then distill the mixture by means of a rude apparatus, the result is “hootch.” Probably the coast natives learned this method from some renegade white man; then the business spread. It came to the sandspit that summer, and, as a result, old single-barreled shotguns were in great demand. If you take one of these and put the butt of the barrel in a good hot fire, the block becomes unbrazed from the breech and the barrel is a tube. It serves as the worm of a primitive still. Many of these machines were set up in the topeks on the sandspit, and the resultant hilarity became noticeable long before the boys discovered its cause. They foresaw trouble, but they could do nothing to prevent it. They did remonstrate with old Panik, the head man of the tribe with which they had come down river, and toward whom they had very friendly feelings. Indeed, since the kindness of the village to the boys had been in part repaid by their help in saving the youngsters from the river ice, there had been strong bonds of brotherhood between them all. Panik had become infected with the desire to make the new drink, and had paid many skins to a Chuckchis for the old gun. He built a small fire at his topek door, and while Harry argued with him he thrust the butt of the barrel into it with a cheerful grin.