A few weeks later, somewhat battered, rather famished, and about
dead with river-fever, he drove the nose of his canoe into the
earth bank by the village of the Toyaats and promptly fainted away.
While getting his strength back, in the weeks that followed, he
looked upon Tukesan and found her good. Like the father of Shpack,
who lived to a ripe old age among the Siberian Deer People, Spike
O'Brien might have left his aged bones with the Toyaats. But
romance gripped his heart-strings and would not let him stay. As
he had journeyed from York Factory to Fort Yukon, so, first among
men, might he journey from Fort Yukon to the sea and win the honour
of being the first man to make the North-West Passage by land. So
he departed down the river, won the honour, and was unannaled and
unsung. In after years he ran a sailors' boarding-house in San
Francisco, where he became esteemed a most remarkable liar by
virtue of the gospel truths he told. But a child was born to
Tukesan, who had been childless. And this child was Jees Uck. Her
lineage has been traced at length to show that she was neither
Indian, nor Eskimo, nor Innuit, nor much of anything else; also to
show what waifs of the generations we are, all of us, and the
strange meanderings of the seed from which we spring.
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