Page:Hugh Pendexter--Tiberius Smith.djvu/51

 his belief that they could be found somewhere up there in the interior of Greenland. He added, significantly, they were amply protected from circus collectors, not only by peculiar territorial and climatic conditions, but also by sheer avoidupois. He had first learned of this overgrown race, he continued, from the Innuits. In fact, several of his freely perspiring children, who ought to have been in better business, declared that they had met with stray specimens while penetrating the Far North. But if all the legends and stale stories were true, our quarry would not readily eat from our hands.

"Yet the more he rambled, the more Tib's eyes twinkled, and he was all aglow to learn more of these museum possibilities. Consequently, three additional hours found us in Philadelphia, in search of old sea-dogs, who prowl about the Greenland waters yearly, in their cryolite-ladened barks. The missionary had furnished us with the name of one of this ilk, a man who was a crude expert upon the aborigines of the polar ice-cap, and who had recently returned to civilization. On finding him, Tib easily managed to make him talk, and the old salt startled us by declaring he had seen some of the Goliaths in a mining settlement near Ivigtut Bay. He pictured them as being from seven to nine feet tall, but apologized for the former and explained