"London, Jack - Tales of the klondyke" - читать интересную книгу автора (London Jack)

dip of the midnight sun. The gloaming and the dawn were so
commingled that there was no night,--simply a wedding of day with
day, a scarcely perceptible blending of two circles of the sun. A
kildee timidly chirped good-night; the full, rich throat of a
robin proclaimed good-morrow. From an island on the breast of the
Yukon a colony of wild fowl voiced its interminable wrongs, while
a loon laughed mockingly back across a still stretch of river.

In the foreground, against the bank of a lazy eddy, birch-bark
canoes were lined two and three deep. Ivory-bladed spears, bone-
barbed arrows, buckskin-thonged bows, and simple basket-woven
traps bespoke the fact that in the muddy current of the river the
salmon-run was on. In the background, from the tangle of skin
tents and drying frames, rose the voices of the fisher folk.
Bucks skylarked with bucks or flirted with the maidens, while the
older squaws, shut out from this by virtue of having fulfilled the
end of their existence in reproduction, gossiped as they braided
rope from the green roots of trailing vines. At their feet their
naked progeny played and squabbled, or rolled in the muck with the
tawny wolf-dogs.

To one side of the encampment, and conspicuously apart from it,
stood a second camp of two tents. But it was a white man's camp.
If nothing else, the choice of position at least bore convincing
evidence of this. In case of offence, it commanded the Indian
quarters a hundred yards away; of defence, a rise to the ground
and the cleared intervening space; and last, of defeat, the swift
slope of a score of yards to the canoes below. From one of the
tents came the petulant cry of a sick child and the crooning song
of a mother. In the open, over the smouldering embers of a fire,
two men held talk.

"Eh? I love the church like a good son. Bien! So great a love
that my days have been spent in fleeing away from her, and my
nights in dreaming dreams of reckoning. Look you!" The half-
breed's voice rose to an angry snarl. "I am Red River born. My
father was white--as white as you. But you are Yankee, and he was
British bred, and a gentleman's son. And my mother was the
daughter of a chief, and I was a man. Ay, and one had to look the
second time to see what manner of blood ran in my veins; for I
lived with the whites, and was one of them, and my father's heart
beat in me. It happened there was a maiden--white--who looked on
me with kind eyes. Her father had much land and many horses; also
he was a big man among his people, and his blood was the blood of
the French. He said the girl knew not her own mind, and talked
overmuch with her, and became wroth that such things should be.

"But she knew her mind, for we came quick before the priest. And
quicker had come her father, with lying words, false promises, I
know not what; so that the priest stiffened his neck and would not