The two walked back on the tundra together, and Harry tied up the poke and put it in its hiding-place again. Joe, weary with his morning’s work, sat down in the tent, but Harry wandered outside. His thoughts were still of home and the people there. He had heard the steamer whistle again, why he did not know. Home was not so very far away now, he felt that, but the thought made him only the more homesick. He noted some men coming up the creek, seemingly strangers, but strangers were plentiful there now. Probably these were more people from the ship coming up to join those who were with Colonel Lane. There was a big man a little ahead of the group, and Harry did not notice that as he approached he looked earnestly at him and almost broke into a run. The great man rushed up to him, took him by the shoulders, and turned him round, looking him square in the face, then let out a roar that echoed from the surrounding hills. [Illustration: SLUICING AT CANDLE CREEK] “It’s him!” he bellowed. “It’s him! Great jumping Jehoshaphat, it’s him! I knew he’d turn up. You couldn’t lose him. Didn’t I see him go overboard in the straits in a livin’ gale of wind and come back bringing a Yukon goose with him? It’s the seven-time winner, cap. But where’s Joe?” Joe answered for himself, rushing out of the tent and flying by the great boatswain of the Bowhead,—for who else would it be?—into his father’s arms. A moment later Harry was gripping Captain Nickerson’s hand with one of his, the big boatswain’s with the other, and laughing and crying and talking all at once, while Mr. Jones, the taciturn first mate stood by, erect and solemn, and seeming to look as if all this waste of words was a very wrong thing. When the two boys were released from the hands of Captain Nickerson and the boatswain, the first mate extended his, and though his face twitched with emotion all he said was, “How d’ do. Glad.” Evidently Mr. Jones’s characteristics had lost nothing in two years.