“Is it?” interrupted Phil. “Seems to me this whole affair is about as completely snarled as any I ever had anything to do with, unless it was a fighting dog-team. To begin with―― But, I say, suppose we have supper first and discuss the situation afterwards. I for one am too hungry to think.”
“If you are any more hungry than I am you are hungry enough to be dangerous,” laughed Serge; while Jalap Coombs remarked that supper was the very thing he was considering when Phil entered the room. “And a mighty poor lookout it were,” he added, “for I hadn’t any grub, nor didn’t know the best place to steal any, nor yet warn’t quite hungry enough to steal a supper anyway. So I were jest concluding to go without, same as I did for dinner. But ef you boys has got anything to eat――”
“Have we?” cried Phil; “you just wait and see. Serge, did you know this was Christmas Day?”
“Well, it is so near to it, and this meeting is such a joyous occasion, that I move we trot out our mince-pies, and plum-puddings, and roast turkeys, and pemmican, and things, and have a regular Christmas blowout. That is, always supposing that Mr. Coombs will loan us the use of his house. This is your house, is it not, Mr. Coombs?”
“Sartain it is,” replied the mate, with a grin, and entering fully into Phil’s absurdities. “Leastways, there ain’t no one come to turn me out of it yet. So you’re as welcome to it as I be. For, as old Kite Roberson useter say――”
“Let’s have him for dessert,” laughed Phil, as he started outside to discover what had become of the sledges.
It is doubtful if there was a happier party in the Yukon Valley, or even in all Alaska, than that which unbidden, though none the less certain of their welcome, took possession of the mission-house at old Fort Adams that roaring December night. Certainly no one could be happier than was Jalap Coombs at this meeting with the boys in whose fortunes his had become so strangely involved. At the time of their opportune appearance he was in one of the most unhappy and perplexing predicaments of his whole checkered career; but now his troubles were blown away like a morning mist, and already wellnigh forgotten.
When the schooner _Philomel_, finally released from the bank on which she had grounded, reached St. Michaels, Mr. Ryder was greatly distressed by the accounts given him of the expedition on which Phil and Serge had embarked. Knowing nothing of the conditions under which they had been so glad to accept the friendly offer of a roundabout passage to Sitka, and receiving a cruelly false impression of Gerald Hamer’s character as well as of his objects in ascending the Yukon, he concluded that the boys had been trapped into a reckless venture, which could only lead them to disaster and suffering. In fancy he saw them imprisoned by an arctic winter on a wretchedly constructed and poorly equipped boat, as the _Chimo_ was described to him, or in some squalid Indian village, confronted by freezing, starvation, and disease, remote from human aid and without the means of escape.