And he was master here.

If--some day--Graham should happen to cross his path, he would settle the matter in Tautuk's way.

Later, while Tautuk slept, and the world lay about him in a soft glow, and the valley below was filled with misty billows of twilight out of which came to him faintly the curious, crackling sound of reindeer hoofs and the grunting contentment of the feeding herd, the reaction came, as he had known it would come in the end.
The morning of the fifth day he set out alone for the eastward herd, and on the sixth overtook Tatpan and his herdsmen.

Tatpan, like Sokwenna's foster-children, Keok and Nawadlook, had a quarter-strain of white in him, and when Alan came up to him in the edge of the valley where the deer were grazing, he was lying on a rock, playing Yankee Doodle on a mouth-organ.

It was Tatpan who told him that an hour or two before an exhausted stranger had come into camp, looking for him, and that the man was asleep now, apparently more dead than alive, but had given instructions to be awakened at the end of two hours, and not a minute later.