We knew that it would not greatly interfere with our plans to lie another week at the Allakaket, and that would bring our departure after the monthly journey of the mail-carrier and would thus compel him to break trail for us through all that snow. That is the way the mail-carriers in Alaska are usually treated, but Arthur and I took some pride in keeping as closely as possible to the announced dates of visitation and in doing such share of trail breaking as fell to us.

[Sidenote: TRAIL BREAKING]

So on Monday, the 3d of January, 1910, we bade farewell to Deaconess Carter and her colleague and to the native charges they rule and care for so admirably, and set out on our journey with an additional boy from the mission to help us through the heavy snow of the Koyukuk valley. For ten or twelve miles the way lay down the river, and the going was slow and toilsome from the first, although there had been some pa.s.sage from Moses' Village to the mission, and there was, therefore, some trail. Our start had been late--it is next to impossible to get an early start from a mission; there is always some native who must have audience at the last moment--and after the long repose we were so soft that the heavy trail had wearied us, and we decided to "call it a day" when in five and a half hours we came to the road-house, the last occupied habitation between the Allakaket and Tanana. Soon after we reached the village there came trooping down from the mission a number of the inhabitants gone up for Christmas, who, after weeping upon our necks, so to speak, at our departure, had left us to break out that drifted trail for their convenient return. So will Indians treat a white man almost always, but I had thought myself an exception and was vexed to find that so they had treated me.

The next morning we entered the uninhabited wilderness with three feet of new snow on the trail and no pa.s.sage over it since it had fallen. Our first trouble was finding the trail at all. The previous fall the Alaska Road Commission had appropriated a sum of money to stake this trail from Tanana to the Koyukuk River, for it pa.s.ses over wind-swept, treeless wastes, where many men had lost their way. Starting out from Tanana, the men employed had done their work well until within ten miles of the Koyukuk River. There it was found that the labour and cost already expended had exhausted the appropriation, whereupon the proceedings were immediately stopped; not another stake was driven, and the whole party returned to Tanana and mushed two hundred and fifty miles up the Yukon to spend another little appropriation upon another trail. That is the unbusinesslike system in which the money available for such work in Alaska has been handled.

The first trail breaker goes ahead with a long stick, which he thrusts continually down through the snow. The slightly harder surface over which sleds and dogs have pa.s.sed reveals itself by offering more resistance to the penetration of the stick, and that is the only way the trail can be found. Even with three feet of new snow upon it, it is well worth while finding, or otherwise there is no bottom at all and way must be made through all the snow of the winter. But all Alaskan trails are serpentine, and it is very difficult to put the new trail right on top of the old one. Back and forth the second trail breaker goes between his leader and the sled, and at intervals the first man comes back and forth also. And with it all is no path packed solid enough for the dogs to draw the heavy sled without great difficulty. We should have had a toboggan, but toboggans are little used on the Koyukuk, and we had only our sled. In five hours we made five miles and were worn out. We decided to pitch our tent and go ahead and break trail for the morrow's journey. On the lakes interspersed amongst the brush we had to break an entirely new trail, for we could find no trace of the old one.

If five miles in five hours be poor going, what is four miles in seven and a half hours? That is all we made the next day despite the snow-shoeing of the previous evening. The heavy sled was continually getting off the trail, however wide we show-shoed it. The two of us ahead went over every step of the distance four or five times, and sometimes all of us had to go back and forth again and again before the sled could be brought along at all. It was from 5 to 10 above zero all day, and at intervals snow fell heavily. We got at last to the middle of a little lake and were confronted by open water, the result of some warm spring, one supposes. Here we must stop until a laborious journey was made to the bank, trees were cut and carried, and the open place bridged so that the sled might be pa.s.sed over it. Then again our painful progress was resumed until, as it grew dark, we reached the bank of the Kornutna, or Old Man Creek, and here we pitched tent again, and I went forward upon the bed of the stream to break out a part of to-morrow's path. That night two more inches of snow fell.

[Sidenote: DOG DRIVING]

For four miles the trail lies along the surface of this creek, and then takes up a steep gully and over a divide. That four miles was all we made the next day, back and forth, back and forth, wearily tramping it to and fro, dogs and men alike exhausted with the toil. The hatefulness of dog mushing usually appears under such circ.u.mstances; the whip is constantly plied, the senseless objurgations rise shriller and fuller.

Once the sled is started, it must by any means be kept going, that as great a distance as possible may be covered before it stops again. The poor brutes, sinking almost to their bellies despite the snow-shoeing, have no purchase for the exercise of their strength and continually flounder and wallow. Our whip was lost and I was glad of it, for even as considerate a boy as Arthur is apt to lose patience and temper when, having started the sled with much labour by gee pole and rope about his chest, it goes but a few feet and comes to a halt again, or slips from the track and turns over in the deep snow. But it is at such times, too, that one appreciates at his full value such a n.o.ble puller as our wheel dog Nanook. He spares himself not at all; the one absorbing occupation of every nerve and muscle of his body is pulling. His trace is always taut, or, if he lose footing for a moment and the trace slacken, he is up and at it again that the sled lose not its momentum if he can help it. When the lead line is pulled back that the sled may be started by the jerk of the dogs' sudden traction, Nanook lunges forward at the command, "Mush!" and strains at the collar, mouth open and panting, tongue dropping moisture, as keen and eager to keep that sled moving as is the driver himself. All day he labours and struggles, s.n.a.t.c.hing a mouthful of snow now and then to cool his overheated body, and he drops in his tracks when the final halt is made, utterly weary, yet always with the brave heart in him to give his bark, his five-note characteristic bark of gladness, that the day's work is done at last.

It is senseless brutality to whip such a dog, and most of our dogs were of that mettle, though Nanook was the strongest and most faithful of the bunch. One's heart goes out to them with grat.i.tude and love--old "Lingo," "Nig," "s...o...b..ll," "Wolf," and "Doc"--as one realises what loyal, cheerful service they give.

[Sidenote: VIOLENT FLUCTUATIONS]

Arthur was so unwell with a violent cold and cough, that had been growing worse for a couple of days, that I decided on two things: to leave him in the tent while I snow-shoed ahead the next day, and to send back the boy I had brought from the mission to secure a fresh supply of food; for the back trail was, of course, comparatively easy. Arthur's condition threatened pneumonia, to my notion, and I believe he was saved from an attack of that disease which is so often fatal in this country by long rubbing all over the neck and the chest with a remedy that was new then--a menthol balm. I have used it again and again since and I am now never without it. A second application made in the morning, I started out, show-shoeing up the long hill and then down into the flat, and so to the mail-carrier's little hut that is reached under good conditions of trail the first day from Moses' Village, and then back again to the tent. That day a tendon in my right leg behind the knee became increasingly troublesome, and in climbing the hill on the return was acutely painful. I recognised it as "mal-de-raquet," well known in the Northwest, where the snow is commonly much deeper than in Alaska, and I found relief in the application of the same a.n.a.lgesic menthol balm that I was rejoiced to find had wrought a great improvement in Arthur's condition.

Meanwhile the warm weather of the past three or four days was over and another period of violent fluctuations of temperature similar to that around Christmastide was upon us. We went to bed with the thermometer at 10 below zero and were wakened by the cold at two in the morning to find it at 40 below, so we had to keep a fire going the rest of the night; for as soon as the fire in the stove goes out a tent becomes just as cold as outdoors.

We moved forward the next morning, but the trail we had broken was too narrow and had to be widened, which meant one snow-shoe in the deep snow all the time, a very fatiguing process that brought into painful play again the tendon strained with five days' heavy snow-shoeing.

The temperature was around 40 below all day, and our progress was so slow that it was not easy to keep warm, and the dogs whined at the innumerable stops. Yesterday it had been 10 below, the day before 10 above, and now, to-day, 40 below. It is hard to dress for such changeable weather, especially hard to dress the feet. My own wear, all the winter through, is a pair of smoke-tanned, moose-hide breeches, tanned on the Yukon but tailored outside. They are a perfect windbreak, yet allow ventilation, and they are very warm; but those who perspire much on exertion cannot wear them. The amount of covering upon the feet must be varied, in some measure at least, as the temperature changes.

The Esquimau fur boot, with fur on the inside of the sole and on the outside of the upper, is my favourite footwear, with more or less of sock inside it as the weather requires; but such sudden changes as we were experiencing always find one or leave one with too much or too little footwear. By one-thirty we had struggled to the top of the hill, and it was very evident that the cabin was out of the question that day; so, since to pa.s.s down into the flat was to pa.s.s out of eligible camping timber, we pitched tent on the brow of the hill.

The cold business of making camp was done, all dispositions for the night complete, supper for men and dogs was cooked and ours eating, when we heard a noise in the distance that set our dogs barking and presently came the boy I had sent back, accompanied by an Indian and a fresh team loaded with such a bountiful supply of food, much of it cooked, that one felt it was worth while to get into distress to receive such generous and prompt succour. The ladies at the mission had sat up and cooked all night and had despatched the fastest team in the village the next morning to bring their provisions to us and to help us along. They had thought us at Tanana when we were not yet at the end of the first day's stage from Moses' Village. It would have been impossible for us to reach Tanana on the dog food and man food we started with.

[Sidenote: SIXTY-FIVE BELOW ZERO]

It was so cold and we were so crowded that I arose at three and made a fire and sat over it the rest of the night, and after breakfast, although it was Sunday, morning prayer being said, I started ahead again to break out the trail deeper and wider, leaving the teams with the distributed loads to follow. The thermometer stood at 38 below zero when I left camp, but as I began the descent it was evident that it grew colder, and at the bottom of the hill I was sure it was 20 colder at least. Reaching the cabin, I kindled a fire and started back to meet the teams. About a mile from the cabin I saw them, for, since the load was distributed in the two sleds progress was much better; but by this time it had grown so cold that the dogs were almost entirely obscured from view by the clouds of steam that encompa.s.sed them. We hurried as best we might and reached the cabin about eleven, and as soon as we were arrived I took out the thermometer and let it lie long enough to get the temperature of the air, and it read 65 below zero. There had been no atmospheric change at all; it was simply the most marked instance I ever knew of the influence of alt.i.tude upon temperature. We had descended perhaps three hundred feet, and in that distance had found a difference of 27 in temperature.

The cabin was a wretched shack without door or window and full of holes, and in no part of it could one stand upright. We set ourselves to make things as comfortable as possible, however, rigging up the canvas sled cover for an outer door and a blanket for an inner door, and stopping up the worst of the holes with sacking. Then we went out and cut fresh spruce boughs to lie upon, and prospected around quite a while before we found dry wood nearly a quarter of a mile away. It was quite a business cutting that wood and packing the heavy sticks on one's shoulders, through the brush and up and down the banks of the little creek where it grew, on snow-shoes, at 65 below zero.

Our Sabbath day's journey done, the hut safely reached and furnished with fuel, we did not linger long after supper, but, evening prayer said, went to bed as the most comfortable place in the still cold cabin, thankful not to be in a tent in such severe weather.

The next day gave us fresh temperature fluctuations. At nine A. M. it clouded and rose to 35 below, by noon it had cleared again and the thermometer fell to 55 below, and at nine P. M. it stood once more at 65 below. The milder weather of the morning sent all hands out breaking trail, save myself, for with all our stuff in a cabin without a door it was not wise to leave it altogether--a dog might break a chain and work havoc--so I stayed behind in the little dark hovel, a candle burning all day, and read some fifty pages of Boswell's _Life of Samuel Johnson_ over again. Some such little India-paper cla.s.sic it is my habit to carry each winter. Last year I reread Pepys's _Diary_ and the year before much of the _Decline and Fall_. Certain places are for ever a.s.sociated in my mind with the rereading of certain old books. The Chandalar River is to me as much the scene of _Lorna Doone_, which I read for the sixth or seventh time on my first journey along it, as Exmoor itself; and _The Cloister and the Hearth_, that n.o.ble historical romance, belongs in my literary geography to the Alatna-Kobuk portage. So will Boswell always bring back to me this trip across country from the Koyukuk to the Yukon through the deep snow.

The boys came back after dark, having broken some nine miles of trail and having suffered a good deal from the cold. I had supper cooked, and when that was done and the dogs fed we fell to reading the Gospels and Epistles for the Epiphany season, the boys reading aloud by turns. The all-day fire had warmed the little hut thoroughly, and despite the cold outside we were snug and comfortable within.

[Sidenote: SEVENTY BELOW ZERO]

That night the thermometer touched 70 below zero, within 2 of the greatest cold I have recorded in seven years' winter travel; a greater cold, I believe, than any arctic expedition has ever recorded, for it is in a continental climate like Siberia or interior Alaska, and not in the marine climate around the North Pole, that the thermometer falls lowest.

Save for an hour or two getting wood, we all lay close next day, for the temperature at noon was no higher than 64 below. It is impossible to break trail at such temperature, or to travel as slowly as we were travelling. In the strong cold one must travel fast if one travel at all. Indeed, it is distinctly dangerous to be outdoors. As soon as one leaves the hut the cold smites one in the face like a mailed fist. The expiration of the breath makes a crackling sound, due, one judges, to the sudden congealing of the moisture that is expelled. From every cranny of the cabin a stream of smoke-like vapour pours into the air, giving the appearance that the house is on fire within. However warmly hands and feet may be clad, one cannot stand still for a minute without feeling the heat steadily oozing out and the cold creeping in.

Notwithstanding the weather, that evening the mail came along, the white man who is the carrier, two tall, strong natives, and nine dogs.

Only since descending to the flat had they suffered from the cold, for they found as great a difference as we did in the temperature; and they were grateful to us for the trail we had broken. The hut was uncomfortably crowded that night with seven people in it, but the thermometer stood at -56 and was rising, and gave us hope that we might move along to-morrow. Augmented as our party was into seven men, three sleds, and nineteen or twenty dogs, trail breaking would not be so arduous and progress would be much accelerated. There was good hope, moreover, that the heavy snow was confined to the Koyukuk valley and that when we pa.s.sed out of it we should find better going.

The morning found a temperature of 45 below, and we sallied forth, quite an expedition. Four, including myself, went ahead beating down the trail; one was at each gee pole, our team last, getting advantage of everything preceding. So far as the trail had been broken we made good time, covering the nine miles in about four hours. Another hour of somewhat slower progress took us to the top of a hill, and here the mail-carrier's two Indians had run ahead and built a great, roaring fire and arranged a wide, commodious couch of spruce boughs, and we cooked our lunch and took our ease for half an hour. The sky had clouded again and the temperature had risen to 28 below.

[Sidenote: CLOSE QUARTERS]

It is strange how some scenes of the trail linger in the memory, while others are completely forgotten. This noon halt I always remember as one of the pleasantest of all my journeyings. There was not a breath of wind, and the smoke rose straight into the air instead of volleying and eddying into one's face as camp-fires so often do on whichever side of them one sits. We were all weary with our five hours' trudge, and the rest was grateful; hungry, and the boiled ham they had sent from the mission was delicious. The warmth of the great fire and the cosiness of the thick, deep spruce boughs gave solid comfort, and the pipe after the meal was a luxurious enjoyment.

From that on the going was heavier and our progress slower, but we kept at it till dark, and still far into the night, fortunate in having two Indians who knew every step of the way, until at last we reached the hut that marks the end of the second stage from the Koyukuk River, on the top of a birch hill. We had made nineteen and a half miles that day and had taken eleven hours to do it.

If the noon rest be remembered as one of the pleasantest episodes of the trail, that night in the cabin on the hill I recall as one of the most miserable in my life. The hut was still smaller than the previous one, like it without door and window, and so low that one was bent double all the time. Walls and roof alike were covered with a thick coating of frost. The only wood discoverable in the dark was half-dry birch which would not burn in the stove but sent out volumes of smoke that blinded us. When the hut did begin to get a little warm, moisture from the roof dropped on everything. There we seven men huddled together, chilly and damp, choked and weary--a wretched band. There was no room for the necessary cooking operations; we had to cook and eat in relays; and how we slept, in what way seven men managed to pack themselves and stretch themselves in those narrow quarters, I cannot tell. However, we said our prayers and went to bed, snow falling heavily. The Indians were soon snoring, but sleep would not come to me, tired as I was, and I had not slept at all the previous night. So presently I took trional, X grs., and dozed off till morning.

Then we resolved to divide forces rather than subject ourselves to the miserable inconvenience of overcrowding these tiny huts, and at this stage of the journey it was possible to do so without losing a whole day, for there was a cabin for the noon rest. It was arranged that the mail-man should start first and make the full day's run if possible, while we should "call it a day" at the half-way hut.

So Bob and his Indians sallied forth while yet my boys were reading their lessons to me, and when they were done we hitched up and followed.

And as soon as we were down the hill and started along the bald flat, it was evident that we were out of the deep snowfall, for the present at any rate, and we plucked up spirit, for we were now to cross the wide, open, wind-swept uplands of the headwaters of the Melozitna and Tozitna, tributaries of the Yukon--the "Tozi" and "Melozi," as the white men call them--where snow never lies deep or long. We were out of the Koyukuk watershed now and in country drained by direct tributaries of the Yukon. The going was now incomparably the best we had had since we left the mission, the snow was light and we had the mail-carrier's trail; but, although the temperature had risen to 21 below, a keen wind put our parkee hoods up and our scarfs around our faces and made our 60 below clothing none too warm. In three hours we had reached the Melozi cabin, although that had included the climbing of a long, steep hill, and here we stayed for the rest of the day and night and shot some ptarmigan for supper, though we could easily have gone on and made the rest of the run.

The next day I sent the auxiliary sled and team and driver back to the Allakaket, keeping the mission boy with me, however, to return with the mail-carrier, who was already late and must go back as soon as he reached Tanana. I parted with the Indian regretfully, for he had been most helpful and always good-natured and cheerful, and had really begun to learn a little at our travelling night-school.

[Sidenote: THE STAKED TRAIL]

[Sidenote: THE ARCTIC SKIES]

A high wind was blowing, with the thermometer at 12 below, and the mail-man's trail was already drifted over and quite indistinguishable in the dark, and we began to appreciate the recent staking of this trail by the Road Commission. But for these stakes, set double, a hundred yards apart, so that they formed a lane, it would have been difficult if not impossible for us to travel on a day like this, for here was a stretch of sixteen or seventeen miles with never a tree and hardly the smallest bush. The wind blew stronger and stronger directly in our faces as we rose out of the Melozitna basin on the hill that is its watershed, and when the summit was reached and we turned and looked back there was nothing visible but a white, wind-swept waste. But ahead all the snow was most beautifully and delicately tinted from the reflection of the dawn on ragged shredded clouds that streamed across the southeastern sky. Where the sky was free of cloud it gave a wonderful clear green that was almost but not quite the colour of malachite. It was exactly the colour of the water the propeller of a steamship churns up where the Atlantic Ocean shallows to the rocky sh.o.r.e of the north coast of Ireland. The clouds themselves caught a deep dull red from the sunrise, which the snow gave back in blush pink. Such an exquisite colour harmony did the scene compose that the wind, lulling for a moment on the crest of the hill, seemed charmed into peace by it.

The feast of colour brought a train of colour memories, one hard upon the heels of another, as we went down the hill; the Catbells, this golden with bracken, that purple with heather, and each doubled in the depths of Derwent.w.a.ter; an October morning in the hardwood forests of the mountains of Tennessee, when for half an hour every gorgeous tint of red and yellow was lavishly flaunted--and then the whole pride and splendour of it wiped out at once by a wind that sprang up; the encircling and towering reds and pinks of a gigantic amphitheatre of rock in the Dolomites; a patch of flowers right against the snow in the high Rockies, so intensely blue that it seemed the whole vault of heaven could be tinctured with the pigment that one petal would distil. And, more inspiring than them all, there came the recollection of that wonderful sunrise and those blazing mountains of the Alatna-Kobuk portage. Every land has its glories, and the sky is everywhere a blank canvas for the display of splendid colour, but the tints of the arctic sky are of an infinite purity of individual tone that no other sky can show.

As we descended the hill into the Tozitna basin the wind rose again, now charged with heavy, driving snow, while in the valley the underfoot snow grew deep, so that it was drawing to dusk when we reached the cabin on a fork of the Tozitna where Bob the mail-man had spent the previous night, and there we stayed.

The next day is worthy of record for the sharp contrast it affords. All the night it had snowed heavily, and it snowed all the morning and into the afternoon. Some sixteen or seventeen inches of snow had fallen since Bob and his party pa.s.sed, and again we had no trail at all.

Moreover--strange plaint in January in Alaska!--the weather grew so warm that the snow continually balled up under the snow-shoes and clung to the sled and the dogs. At noon the thermometer stood at 17 above zero--and it was but four days ago that we recorded 70 below! It will be readily understood how such wide and sudden ranges of temperature add to the inconvenience and discomfort of mushing. Parkees, sweaters, shirts are shed one after the other, the fur cap becomes a nuisance, the mittens a burden, and still ploughing through the snow he is bathed in sweat who had forgotten what sweating felt like. The poor dogs suffer the most, for they have nothing they can shed and they can perspire only through the mouth. Their tongues drop water almost in a stream, they labour for their breath, and their eyes have a look that comes only with soft weather and a heavy trail. So constantly do they grab mouthfuls of snow that the operation becomes quite a check on our progress.

By two o'clock it was growing dusk, and we had but reached the bank of the other fork of the Tozitna, not more than eight or nine miles from the cabin where we spent the night and yet thirteen or fourteen miles from the cabin we had hoped to reach. Beyond the banks of the stream was no more timber for a long distance; was such another stretch of open country as we had pa.s.sed the previous day. So here was another disappointment, for camp must be made now lest there be no chance to make camp at all. But it was a good and comfortable camp, amidst the large spruce of the watercourse. Such disappointments are part of life on the trail; and supper done there was the more time for the boys.

The open country was again wind-swept, and being wind-swept the snow was somewhat hardened, and we fought our way against a gale, covering the twelve and three quarter miles in ten hours, Sunday though it was. At that last stage on the road to Tanana came out a young man from the mission with a dog team and an Indian, anxious at our long delay, and Harry Strangman's name is written here with grateful recognition of this kindness and many others. We went joyfully into town on the morrow, the 17th of January, having taken fifteen days to make a journey that is normally made in five.

[Sidenote: THE MAIL-CARRIER]

Half-way on that last day's mush we met the mail-man returning to the Koyukuk. So much had he been delayed that there was danger of a fine and all sorts of trouble, and the mail had been sent out to meet him at the noon cabin, together with a supply of grub for the return trip. But the caterer, whoever he was, forgot candles, and the mail-man would have had to make his way back to the Koyukuk without any means of artificial light, in the shortest days of the year, had we not been able to supply him with half a dozen candles that remained to us. It was a disappointment to George, the boy I had brought from the mission, that he must turn round and go back also. He had never "seen Tanana," which is quite a metropolis to him, and had looked forward to it keenly all the journey, but the boy braced up and took his disappointment manfully.

A pitiful procession it was that pa.s.sed us by and took our boy away; the poor, wearied dogs that had certainly earned the few days' rest they were so badly in need of left a trail of blood behind them that was sickening to see. Almost every one of them had sore, frozen feet; many of them were lame; and when we came to descend the long hill they had just climbed, right at its brow, where the stiffest pull had been, was a claw from a dog's foot frozen into b.l.o.o.d.y snow.

So far as there is anything heroic about the Alaskan trail, the mail-carriers are the real heroes. They must start out in all weathers, at all temperatures; they have a certain specified time in which to make their trips and they must keep within that time or there is trouble. The bordering country of the Canadian Yukon has a more humane government than ours. There neither mail-carrier nor any one else, save in some life-or-death emergency, with licence from the Northwest Mounted Police, may take out horse or dogs to start a journey when the temperature is lower than 45 below zero; but I have seen a reluctant mail-carrier chased out at 60 below zero, on pain of losing his job, on the American side. Moreover, between the seasons, when travel on the rivers is positively dangerous to life, the mail must still be despatched and received, although so great is the known risk to the mail, as well as to the carrier, that no one will send any letter that he cares at all about reaching its destination until the trails are established or the steamboats run. But the virtually empty pouches must be transported from office to office through the running, or over the rotting ice, just the same, on pain of the high displeasure and penalty of a department without brains and without bowels. I have often wished since I came to Alaska that I could be postmaster-general for one week, and so I suppose has almost every other resident of the country.

The week following my arrival at Tanana was a solid week of cold weather, the thermometer ranging around 50 and 60 below zero, and that means keeping pretty close to the house. Even the sentries at the army post are withdrawn and the protection of the garrison is confided to a man who watches the grounds from a gla.s.s-walled cupola above the headquarters building. Yet a week of confinement and inaction grows tiresome after life in the open.

Sunday is always a busy day here. The mission and native village are three miles away from the town, and service must be held at both. The mission at Tanana is not a happy place to visit for one who has the welfare of the natives at heart. Despite faithful and devoted effort to check it, the demoralisation goes on apace and the outlook is dark.

[Sidenote: SINGLE MEN IN BARRACKS]

"Single men in barracks don't grow into plaster saints," we are told; sometimes they seem to grow into drunken, l.u.s.tful devils without compa.s.sion for childhood, not to mention any feeling of magnanimity towards a feebler race. And when a girl who has been rough-handled, or who has been given drink until she is unable to resist the multiple outrage practised upon her, is told to pick out the malefactors from a company of soldiers, all clean-shaven, all dressed alike, all around the same age, she generally fails to identify altogether. So the offence goes unwhipped, and the officer is likely as not to address a reprimand to the complaining missionary for "preferring charges you are unable to substantiate." Yet an officer who had himself written such a letter told me once that all Indians looked alike to him. Even should the girl identify one or more men, they have usually half a dozen comrades ready to swear an alibi.