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out, the moment he saw me, and there was a new light in his eye.

Breathlessly I told him what the consul had told me, hardly able to keep my astonishment from my voice.

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"Good," said Buchanan. "You hear, John. Now for the fastest safari we've ever done together. Pack!" And pack they did, in a manner one doesn't often see.

I sat on the bed utterly speechless, for this was an entirely new Buchanan, a Buchanan that, drunk and sober, had successfully fooled everybody who had ever known him. Within the half-hour every thing was ready, and the first boys had departed with their loads. Then went John, the Chinaman, a rifle over his shoulder, and last of all Buchanan. At the door he turned.

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'But-but will you be all right," I asked desperately.

'All right?" asked Buchanan with a great laugh. "All right? I'm going back to the life I understand. The life I never should have left but for anyway, good-bye," he ended hastily, and the next moment was hurrying after his safari.

"Well, I can't make head or tail of the affair," complained the consul, when I breathlessly related the morning's occurrence to him. "Who the deuce is the fellow, then?

VOL. CCXX.-NO. MCCCXXXI.

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'All's well that ends well,” quoted the consul, wearily picking up a sheaf of official-looking correspondence. "I hope the other man pulls through all right."

"So do I," I echoed heartily. And as events turned out he did; for when the doctor who had been sent up into the bush returned, some three weeks later, he was able to report that Roper was out of all danger, and being nursed back to health by his partner.

"Buchanan," he said, "rolled up more dead than alive. It says a lot for the man's amazing grit that he ever arrived at all, for he must have suffered untold agonies on the way. He was in shocking condition when he started."

I never met either Arthur Buchanan or his partner again, but I heard that they went northwards in the gold rush to Tanganyika, and did pretty well out of it, too. I hope they did.

THE MESSIAH OF BAFFIN LAND.

BY HERBERT PATRICK LEE.

PERHAPS this is a story that ought not to be told. It does not always do to shock sophisticated twentieth-century ears with tale that epitomises all that has ever been said about fact being stranger than fiction.

There were no white men in Kevetuk, but it was prosperous. There were abundant caribou in the mountains, salmon in the rivers, and many seal on the ice-covered waters of Home Bay. Two hundred miles southward, at Pangnirtung Fiord, Cumberland Gulf, there was a Hudson's Bay post; three hundred miles nearer the Pole, at Pond's Inlet, there was another; and at Kevetuk itself there was a trading station, owned by an English trading company, but operated by Kownung, the wife of Neakoteah.

But in spite of its prosperity, Kevetuk was isolated. Only the trading company's schooner called once each year to bring knives, ammunition, biscuits, and tobacco, and take away fox pelts, oil, and ivory.

Years ago the missionaries had established themselves on the shores of Cumberland Gulf, and, after a fashion, spread the Christian doctrine abroad through Baffin Land, even as far north as Pond's Inlet. The

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missionaries had invented kind of shorthand script for the Eskimos, and had printed for them simple texts, prayers, and passages from the Bible in the new sign-language.

And so it was that where the missionaries could not go, these few books spread the Word, translated laboriously by one Eskimo to another, losing much and gaining a great deal more in the passing. In far-distant villages perhaps one or two Eskimos would travel to see the missionaries, and return to their homes full of the stories they had heard about the white man's God.

But as the years went on, and as these stories passed from one village to another, the versions became so changed and contorted, altered and elaborated, by each Eskimo according to his own ideas and in his own metaphor, that the missionaries themselves might have found their own teachings hard to understand.

So it was with the Kevetukmiut and the people of Home Bay. The parables, the stories of Jonah and the whale, the killings and the bloody battles of the Old Testament, were comprehended far more than the story of salvation.

In the days before Christianity came, vaguely, to Keve

tuk, Neakoteah had been a medicine man, an angakok, given to the rites of Tornasuk and other heathen gods. It is only natural, then, that with the coming of Christianity, Neakoteah should seek to keep his prestige amongst the natives by assuming the position of leader in the new faith.

He was a clever man, after his own fashion. He could read better than the others, and he had studied long over the books brought up from Pangnirtung and Blacklead. It was to him that the Kevetukmiut looked for guidance in the new religion; it was he who translated the meaning of things which puzzled the rest of his fellow-tribesmen.

After Kownung's appointment as district trade manager of the trading company at Kevetuk, Neakoteah's power had increased threefold. He

was the spiritual leader, and his wife, guardian of the trading company's lumber shack containing the trade stores, ruled with temporal power. At the time when the terrible tragedy was enacted in the awful nightmare winter of 1921, Neakoteah's influence over the people of Kevetuk was at its height. They accepted his authority without question.

As interpreter of the new religion, Neakoteah's success was instantaneous. The Kevetukmiut nodded eagerly when he told them of the Great Flood, and readily identified Noah and the Ark as similar

to the white men whose huge oomiaktoaks visited Home Bay during the whaling season. They hailed with delight the story of Jonah and the whale. It was a distinct improvement on the old Eskimo legend of Kaig, the Mink, who went fishing in Hudson's Bay, and was swallowed by a great halibut, from whose stomach he cut his way free with a knife.

The doctrine of universal brotherhood was nothing new; it had been the keystone of Eskimo political economy for centuries. In a land where food caches were community stores, where reciprocal trust was born of the necessities of environment, "love thy neighbour was not a commandment but a matter of expediency.

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Perhaps in spite of all, things would have gone well at Kevetuk but for Neakoteah, and even in spite of him, had not a fit of madness seized himmadness which placed the terrified people absolutely in his power.

For months Neakoteah had been working himself up into a religious frenzy, studying his books, and evolving wild schemes in his disordered brain. He could not understand half he read, and his insane interpretations he passed on to the people.

There was bound to be a climax, and it came when Neakoteah, in his madness, proclaimed himself the Saviour of Kevetuk, the Jesuee of Baffin Land, ordained by divine au

thority to save the Eskimo near Kekertalukjuak. Why race; and they took him at were the hills now devoid of his word. a single track? In Cumberland Gulf when seals were shot, three out of five carcasses floated; here at Kevetuk nine out of every ten sank when they fell back dead in the water.

Winter was fast approaching in Baffin Land. Fierce blizzards kept the men from hunting, and the thickening darkness of the Arctic night made each little family in the huts at Kevetuk huddle closer to the yellow flame of the seal-oil lamp. The air was pregnant with superstition. Neakoteah could not have chosen a better time.

And there were three blind men at Kevetuk; many more had sore eyes and failing sight. Why was it? No one could answer. They trembled when Neakoteah told them that it was because they were being punished; it was the wrath of the Lord.

From that day forward a sermon by the frenzied Neakoteah was part of the daily life at Kevetuk. No travelling was done and little trapping, no one to convey news of what was happening on the bleak shores of Home Bay to the

Early in December came the aurora borealis. Neakoteah seemed to be strangely affected by the weird lights in the icy northern heavens, and his fellow Eskimos crowded closely to one another when Neakoteah stood out in front of his igloo, raised his arms to the sky, and cried"I have seen the sign, and I white men at Pangnirtung and will obey." American Harbor.

Next day Neakoteah gathered the rest of the natives into the trading company's store, owned by his wife's employers. To the gathering of frightened, open-mouthed Eskimos, Neakoteah announced that he had a message from God, and from a wooden box which had once contained pilot biscuit, the evangelist preached his first

sermon.

There was wickedness in Kevetuk, he told them. There were plenty of salmon last winter in the mountain lakes, but why, then, did they not rise to the fishing hole? Last year herds of caribou ranged

Each day the Eskimos gathered in the red storehouse to hear Neakoteah tell in passionate tones how every ache and pain, every accident and ill, was brought on by their evil doings. Even the accident to the trading company's schooner, forced aground the previous summer on her way to Kevetuk, was attributed by the evangelist to the wickedness of his fellow-tribesmen. Terror gripped his hearers.

He called on them to repent. Kevetuk was doomed, he told them, unless they listened to the voice of Neakoteah, their Saviour, their Messiah !

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shot

them floated.

They

"It is because I have given you a good spirit," Neakoteah told Yaksan, and the hunter joyously spread the news on their return to the village. Neakoteah had performed his first miracle.

The effect was instantaneous. sealing in Home Bay. With one guttural roar the five seals, and all of people acclaimed Neakoteah as the direct representative of Nakongmek himself. Through him Kevetuk would be saved. Henceforward they would listen only to the teachings of Neakoteah-all but Kidlappik. Kidlappik and his young wife Okee were relatives of Neakoteah, but for all that Kidlappik felt within himself that all this about his kinsman being the Messiah of the innuit was nothing but talk-nothing but Neakoteah's own imagining. He was convinced that nothing but harm could come of it, and when day after day Neakoteah's lengthy sermons kept the men of the village from hunting and attending to their traps, he doubted even more the wisdom of the teacher. When Neakoteah told the hunters to pray instead of searching for game, he became openly rebellious.

And Kidlappik kept to his igloo with Okee and their children, and refrained from attending Neakoteah's religious meetings. When Neakoteah announced that he was henceforward to be known as Jesuee, the Saviour of Kevetuk, Kidlappik shook his head, and to hunters who came to visit him in his igloo he muttered gloomily

After that there was a meeting in the red storehouse and a wild orgy of dancing and hymn-singing. That night the people left for their igloos in a state of religious frenzy bordering on that of Neakoteah himself; and no one believed the evangelist to be the Messiah more firmly than Neakoteah himself.

He became strangely abstract in his manner as the fervour grew. He pondered long over his books, and took to walking about the village with a loaded rifle. The people did his bidding in fear and trembling. Kownung, who had first doubted her husband, became his most devout disciple after he had beaten her until she was heard to cry out that he was indeed her saviour. Under her instruction the women of Kevetuk made a long gown for Neakoteah from several yards of green trade cloth. This garment, with a paper crown constructed by the master himself, Neakoteah wore at the re

"It is not good for man to ligious meetings. take the place of God."

Soon afterwards Neakoteah and one of his devoted followers named Yaksan went

On the walls of the store hung a calendar, the gift of the trading company. The 25th of December was ringed

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