Joe had suddenly caught a wrestling grip on him, and before the tipsy man of the ice knew what had happened, he was swung into the air and sent whirling into the shallow water of Kotzebue Sound, gun and all. Joe sprang to the umiak. “Shove off!” he said sharply, and putting his own shoulder to the light boat, with Harry’s help it slid into deep water while Joe sprang aboard. A roar of laughter went up from the crowd on shore as the discomfited Eskimo staggered to his feet, and tried in vain to use his wet gun on the fast receding boat. Then a moment after, the mood of the crowd changed, and they began to shoot, but none of the shots took effect. The wind was at their backs, and under steady strokes of the paddle the umiak was soon out of shooting distance. The last the two boys saw of the great trading fair at Hotham Inlet was a group of their former companions standing on the beach shooting at them. The last they heard was the uproar of drunken riot and occasional rifle-shots as the land blurred in the distance behind them. They were free once more, headed south, and the dancing waters of Kotzebue Sound flashed around them as they spread their deerskin sail before the freshening breeze. “We are well out of that,” said Joe, glancing to windward with a sailor-man’s eye, “but I don’t exactly like the looks of the weather.” Harry noted the gathering clouds to northward, the discontent in the voice of the wind overhead, and agreed with him. The shallow waters of the sound were already leaping in a jumble of waves, from whose white caps the wind-snatched spindrift swept to leeward. Their light boat danced along like an eggshell before the wind, safe as yet, but with it he well knew they could go only with the gale. They were bound to sail before it. After all, what matter? That was the direction in which they wished to go, and the harder it blew the faster they would go. So while Joe stood by the steering paddle, Harry busied himself in making all snug aboard, and tried not to fret about the weather.