Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/282

old vikings of Greenland? If that was so, what a story was told in those scratches on the handle of the spear! First, as the wrecking of the ships cut off communication with Europe, the intermarrying and mixing of the Norsemen with the Eskimos; then, for reasons which no one yet could know, the travelling of white men with the Eskimos away from the shores of Greenland. The lonely stone houses scattered through the Arctic next took up the story. The Norsemen had mingled with the Eskimos and moved to other lands with them, but here and there a family still tried to keep up the traditions of their race and built a house of stone, which had stood through the centuries after the snow igloos of the Eskimos, which had been built beside it, had melted with the first summer's sun. Then, though the houses of stone still stood, no one lived in them any longer. The sons of the men who had built them lived in the igloos of Eskimos and stared at the stone walls and, calling them the work of spirits, feared to enter. But some viking's determination to keep known his name still persisted. He had carved it on his spear, and when his son