There were many obstacles in the way of Angus’s mission. The first of these was particularly disheartening—a lack of money. The young minister had but scant funds of his own; he had just started in a profession not too well paid at best. Yet a substantial sum of money was necessary to his success. Unlike a fellow devotee on the long highways of Asia, he could not beg his way to Mecca. Steamship rates are high in the North, and the distance from Seattle to Point Barrow—beyond which he must go to find Narwhale Cape—was over three thousand miles.
His first hope lay in his brother James, the most prosperous of the family. But James heard the story coldly. “I reckon that the old man was wanderin’ in delirium, and the whole thing never happened,” he answered in his dour way. “At the best, it wo
