My
offer yet stood untouched.
'And the women smiled, and said sly things one to the other. I
wondered, for never had such a price been offered; and that night
I added more to the pile, and put beside it a kayak of well-tanned
skins which never yet had swam in the sea. But in the day it was
yet there, open to the laughter of all men. The mother of Unga was
crafty, and I grew angry at the shame in which I stood before my
people. So that night I added till it became a great pile, and I
hauled up my oomiak, which was of the value of twenty kayaks. And
in the morning there was no pile.
'Then made I preparation for the wedding, and the people that
lived even to the east came for the food of the feast and the
potlatch token. Unga was older than I by the age of four suns in
the way we reckoned the years. I was only a stripling; but then I
was a chief, and the son of a chief, and it did not matter.
'But a ship shoved her sails above the floor of the ocean, and
grew larger with the breath of the wind. From her scuppers she
ran clear water, and the men were in haste and worked hard at the
pumps. On the bow stood a mighty man, watching the depth of the
water and giving commands with a voice of thunder.
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