At length, one morning in late September, after many vexatious delays, the steamboat, with whose fortunes our lads had cast their own, was laden and ready to start for the Yukon. With fluttering flags and defiant whistle she steamed away from inhospitable St. Michaels, towing a dozen native boats behind her.
“Hurrah!” shouted Phil Ryder, as he and Serge stood on her upper deck. “We are off, at last. Hurrah for snow-shoes and sledges! I say, old man, I’m glad we got away before that craft came in. She may be bound to Oonalaska, or somewhere down among the islands, and, if so, I suppose we should have felt it our duty to go with her. But you can’t stop us now, old ship! You’re too late!”
The craft to which he thus referred was a small schooner beating up the sound. From her deck Mr. John Ryder was scanning the oncoming steamboat through a powerful telescope. Suddenly it fell from his hands, as he cried out, in wild excitement:
“Thank God, Jalap Coombs, our long search is ended! There is my boy――there, on that steamer! We can hail him, and have him alongside in five minutes more.”
“Right you are, sir,” replied the mate, peering through the glass the other had dropped. “It looks like the young scamp, and I believe it is him, but don’t ye be dead sartain ye’ve got him till ye lays hands on him. As my friend old Kite Roberson uster say, ‘Eels is never so slippery as when they’s caught.’”
――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
――Except for the frontispiece, illustrations have been moved to follow the text that they illustrate.
――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fur-Seal's Tooth, by Kirk Munroe