Text Analytics: An Introduction to the

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John Atkinson-Abutridy
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Text Analytics
 Text Analytics
An Introduction to the Science
and ­Applications of Unstructured
­Information Analysis

John A
­ tkinson-Abutridy
First edition published 2022
by CRC Press
6000 Broken Sound Parkway NW, Suite 300, Boca Raton, FL ­33487-2742

and by CRC Press

4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

CRC Press is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

© 2022 John ­Atkinson-Abutridy

Reasonable efforts have been made to publish reliable data and information, but the author and
publisher cannot assume responsibility for the validity of all materials or the consequences of
their use. The authors and publishers have attempted to trace the copyright holders of all m
­ aterial
reproduced in this publication and apologize to copyright holders if permission to publish in this
form has not been obtained. If any copyright material has not been acknowledged please write
and let us know so we may rectify in any future reprint.

Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Law, no part of this book may be reprinted, ­reproduced,
transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any i­ nformation
storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers.

For permission to photocopy or use material electronically from this work, access www.­
copyright.com or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (­CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive,
Danvers, MA 01923, 9­ 78-­750-8400. For works that are not available on CCC please contact
­mpkbookspermissions@tandf.co.uk

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and
are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data

Names: Atkinson-Abutridy, John, author.
Title: Text analytics : an introduction to the science and applications of unstructured information
analysis / John Atkinson-Abutridy.
Description: First edition. | Boca Raton : CRC Press, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021056159 | ISBN 9781032249797 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781032245263 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003280996 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Text data mining. | Natural language processing (Computer science) |
Semantics—Data processing. | Document clustering.
Classification: LCC QA76.9.D343 A85 2022 | DDC 006.3/12—dc23/eng/20220105
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021056159

ISBN: ­978-­1- ­032-­24979-7 (­hbk)

ISBN: ­978-­1-­032-­24526-3 (­pbk)
ISBN: ­978-­1-­0 03-­28099-6 (­ebk)

DOI: 10.1201/­9781003280996

Typeset in Minion
by codeMantra

eResources are available for download at https://www.routledge.com/Atkinson-Abutridy/p/

book/9781032249797
To Ivana, my wife and my light
Contents

List of Figures, xi
List of Tables, xv
Preface, xvii
Acknowledgments, xxv
Author, xxvii

Chapter ­1   ◾   Text Analytics 1

1.1 INTRODUCTION 1
1.2 TEXT MINING AND TEXT ANALYTICS 4
1.3 TASKS AND APPLICATIONS 7
1.4 THE TEXT ANALYTICS PROCESS 10
1.5 SUMMARY 12
1.6 QUESTIONS 13

Chapter 2   ◾   ­Natural-Language Processing 15

2.1 INTRODUCTION 15
2.2 THE SCOPE OF ­NATURAL-LANGUAGE
PROCESSING 16
2.3 NLP LEVELS AND TASKS 18
2.3.1 Phonology 20
2.3.2 Morphology 20
2.3.3 Lexicon 22
2.3.4 Syntax 29

vii
viii   ◾    Contents

2.3.5 Semantics 33
2.3.6 Reasoning and Pragmatics 38
2.4 SUMMARY 39
2.5 EXERCISES 39
2.5.1 Morphological Analysis 39
2.5.2 Lexical Analysis 44
2.5.3 Syntactic Analysis 45

Chapter 3   ◾   Information Extraction 49

3.1 INTRODUCTION 49
3.2 ­RULE-BASED INFORMATION EXTRACTION 53
3.3 ­NAMED-ENTITY RECOGNITION 54
3.3.1 ­N-Gram Models 57
3.4 RELATION EXTRACTION 60
3.5 EVALUATION 64
3.6 SUMMARY 67
3.7 EXERCISES 67
3.7.1 Regular Expressions 68
3.7.2 ­Named-Entity Recognition 72

Chapter 4   ◾   Document Representation 75

4.1 INTRODUCTION 75
4.2 DOCUMENT INDEXING 77
4.3 VECTOR SPACE MODELS 79
4.3.1 Boolean Representation Model 79
4.3.2 Term Frequency Model 80
4.3.3 Inverse Document Frequency Model 82
4.4 SUMMARY 84
4.5 EXERCISES 84
4.5.1 TFxIDF Representation Model 84
 Contents   ◾    ix

Chapter 5   ◾   Association Rules Mining 91

5.1 INTRODUCTION 91
5.2 ASSOCIATION PATTERNS 92
5.3 EVALUATION 94
5.3.1 Support 94
5.3.2 Confidence 95
5.3.3 Lift 95
5.4 ASSOCIATION RULES GENERATION 96
5.5 SUMMARY 101
5.6 EXERCISES 101
5.6.1 Extraction of Association Rules 101

Chapter 6   ◾   ­Corpus-Based Semantic Analysis 105

6.1 INTRODUCTION 105
6.2 ­CORPUS-BASED SEMANTIC ANALYSIS 107
6.3 LATENT SEMANTIC ANALYSIS 109
6.3.1 Creating Vectors with LSA 110
6.4 WORD2VEC 115
6.4.1 Embedding Learning 118
6.4.2 Prediction and Embeddings Interpretation 121
6.5 SUMMARY 123
6.6 EXERCISES 123
6.6.1 Latent Semantic Analysis 124
6.6.2 Word Embedding with Word2Vec 130

Chapter 7   ◾   Document Clustering 137

7.1 INTRODUCTION 137
7.2 DOCUMENT CLUSTERING 139
7.3 ­K-MEANS CLUSTERING 145
7.4 ­SELF-ORGANIZING MAPS 149
7.4.1 Topological Maps Learning 150
7.5 SUMMARY 155
7.6 EXERCISES 155
x   ◾    Contents

7.6.1 ­K-means Clustering 155

7.6.2 ­Self-organizing Maps 162

Chapter 8   ◾   Topic Modeling 165

8.1 INTRODUCTION 165
8.2 TOPIC MODELING 166
8.3 LATENT DIRICHLET ALLOCATION 169
8.4 EVALUATION 176
8.5 SUMMARY 179
8.6 EXERCISES 179
8.6.1 Modeling Topics with LDA 179

Chapter 9   ◾   Document Categorization 185

9.1 INTRODUCTION 185
9.2 CATEGORIZATION MODELS 187
9.3 BAYESIAN TEXT CATEGORIZATION 191
9.3.1 Conditional Class Probability 192
9.3.2 A Priori Probability 193
9.3.3 Evidence 194
9.3.4 Classification 194
9.4 MAXIMUM ENTROPY CATEGORIZATION 195
9.5 EVALUATION 200
9.6 SUMMARY 203
9.7 EXERCISES 203
9.7.1 Naïve Bayes Categorization 203
9.7.2 MaxEnt Categorization 208

CONCLUDING REMARKS, 215

BIBLIOGRAPHY, 221

GLOSSARY, 225

INDEX, 229
List of Figures

­Figure 1.1 Search versus data discovery 2

­Figure 1.2 The scope of text mining 6
­Figure 1.3 Document clustering 8
­Figure 1.4 Information extraction 8
­Figure 1.5 Text categorization 9
­Figure 1.6 Relationship inference 9
­Figure 1.7 The text mining process 10
­Figure 2.1 Levels, tasks, and linguistic resources in NLP 19
­Figure 2.2 A simple Markov model 25
­Figure 2.3 Hidden Markov Models (­HMM) with transition
and emission probabilities 27
­Figure 2.4 Syntactic analysis task 29
­Figure 2.5 ­Context-Independent Grammar (­CFG) rules 30
­Figure 2.6 Parse tree for the sentence “­The flight arrived” 31
­Figure 2.7 Dependency grammar for “­The flight arrived
without problems” 32
­Figure 2.8 S emantic graph for the sentence “­The flight arrived
without problems” 34
­Figure 2.9 The task of Word Sense Disambiguation (­WSD) 34

xi
xii   ◾    List of Figures

­Figure 2.10 Structure of rhetorical relationships for an

example text 38
­Figure 3.1   A complaint text 50
­Figure 3.2   Relation extraction to feed a template 50
­Figure 3.3   Steps in information extraction 51
­Figure 3.4   Simple and relational information extraction 52
­Figure 3.5   Example of extraction based on cascading rules 53
­Figure 3.6   Association and search for specific relationships 60
­Figure 3.7   Extracting ­protein-protein interaction relationships 61
­Figure 4.1   The indexing or characteristics generation task 78
­Figure 4.2   Vector representation of sample texts 80
­Figure 5.1   Documents transactions as shopping baskets 93
­Figure 5.2   Generating frequent itemsets using the
APRIORI method 98
­Figure 5.3   Association rules search space 100
­Figure 6.1   Word embeddings representation 108
­Figure 6.2   Matrix decomposition using Singular Value
Decomposition (­SVD) 112
­Figure 6.3   Selecting the best number of dimensions 113
­Figure 6.4   Types of Word2Vec models 116
­Figure 6.5   Examples of context windows for training 117
­Figure 6.6   A
 rchitecture of a Continuous Bag of Words
(­CBOW) model 118
­Figure 6.7   Updating hidden layer values 119
­Figure 6.8   Computing values for output neurons 119
­Figure 6.9   Output words prediction using the SoftMax classifier 120
­Figure 6.10 Continuous Bag of Words (­CBOW) training
process to generate predictions 121
 List of Figures   ◾    xiii

­Figure 6.11 General network structure for context prediction 121

­Figure 7.1   Simple news grouping 138
­Figure 7.2   Generating document groups 139
­Figure 7.3    xample of three clusters represented by
E
­2-dimensional vectors 140
­ igure 7.4  
F A document clustering system 141
­ igure 7.5  
F Clusters distribution based on their centroids 142
­ igure 7.6  
F Spatial distribution of document vectors 144
­ igure 7.7  
F Generating three clusters from a corpus of documents 146
­ igure 7.8   Different clusters based on their initial centroids
F 147
­Figure 7.9   Selecting the best number of clusters 148
­Figure 7.10 SOM general architecture 150
­ igure 7.11
F Some shapes of SOM topologies: (­a) rectangle (­2D),
(­b) octahedron (­2D), and (­c) linear (­1D) 151
­ igure 7.12
F Geometric representation of clusters in ­Self-
Organizational Map (­SOM) 154
­Figure 8.1   Topic distribution, words and documents 167
­Figure 8.2   A mixture of three distributions 168
F
­ igure 8.3   Geometric interpretation of topics 171
­ igure 8.4  
F Dependency modeling between documents,
topics and words 172
­ igure 8.5  
F Modeling topics with Dirichlet distribution 173
F
­ igure 8.6    irichlet distribution on a 2­ -simplex for different
D
values of α 175
­Figure 8.7   Topic visualization for a sample corpus 176
­Figure 8.8   Evaluating a topic model according to perplexity 177
­Figure 8.9   Evaluating a topic model according to coherence 178
F
­ igure 9.1   Testing a text classification model 188
xiv   ◾    List of Figures

­Figure 9.2 Training a text classification model 189

­Figure 9.3 Entropy for probability distribution of X 196
­Figure 9.4 Computing indicator functions and probability
of classes 200
­Figure 9.5 A
 n example of a Receiver Operating Characteristic
(­ROC) curve 202
List of Tables

­Table 3.1 Confusion Matrix 65

­Table 3.2 Example of a Confusion Matrix 67
­Table 4.1 Sample Documents and Terms 79
­Table 4.2 Normalized TF Vector Representation 81
­Table 4.3 Correlation between Document Vectors: (­a) TF Model
(­b) TFxIDF Model 83
­Table 6.1 Initial Matrix of Terms by Documents 111

xv
Preface

W hen I thought about writing this book, I wasn’t clear enough

where to start, as there are many related topics that could be
addressed. However, it was clear to me that I wanted to share knowledge in
the simplest possible way, so that professionals with basic knowledge could
not only understand the theoretical and practical topics related to text ana-
lytics but also perceive their applications and impact in a c­ ross-sectional
way in many areas.
The challenge wasn’t simple, because despite my experience as an aca-
demic, I’m used to writing specialized scientific articles (­papers) and
technical books, giving technical conferences to scientific audiences and
directing ­scientific-technological projects evaluated by experts, etc. that
is, activities aimed at professionals/­scientists who are able to understand
complex issues. But this isn’t the case for common professionals and spe-
cialists in general; in other words, accessible and understandable formal
literature was required for them to understand the fundamentals in a sim-
ple way as well as the applications.
There were several alternatives to address the above, such as theoreti-
cal books, which are already available. However, these are usually focused
toward more advanced professionals and/­or postgraduate students leaving
aside practical and applied aspects. On the other hand, there are several
practical books focused on programming aspects; however, they’re usually
highly biased to the author’s own conception of the subject. Furthermore,
in my experience as an academic teaching text analytics and text mining
courses for many years, both within and outside Chile, I’ve been able to
verify how the students, professionals, or technicians who rely on such
books simply don’t understand what they’re doing, not being able to
compare/­analyze methods or models, being unable to go beyond what’s
written. This is mainly because they’re o ­ ver-focused on coding in specific
languages, where, unfortunately, many functionalities are arranged as

xvii
xviii   ◾    Preface

“­black boxes”, that is, hiding all the technical details, making it hard to
replicate their experiences using other computational methods or tools.
The book’s nature was clear then. This should be an introductory book
combining the basic theoretical foundations of the different paradigms
and methods of textual analytics, with practical aspects, accompanied by
examples in some programming language, which would allow us to fully
understand the background and logic of computational methods, but at
the same time, being flexible enough to use and implement them in other
languages or computational tools.
I should take advantage of my academic experience to help profession-
als better understand computational concepts and methods. For more
than 25 years, I’ve taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses related
to text analytics, text mining, ­natural-language processing, and artificial
intelligence at several national and foreign universities. While doing this,
I learned a lot from students and professionals alike, understanding what
was easier or difficult for them to understand, their questioning of what
was established, their ways of taking something complex and simplifying
it, etc.
On the other hand, my extensive experience as a scientific researcher
and consultant, developing and leading scientific projects, and transferring
technologies to the public and private sectors, should also have something
to say in the way I’m focusing this book. Indeed, much of what the book
conveys had to do not only with the basis behind computational methods
but also with the challenges and considerations involved in the study, use
and design of computational methods in real practical problems. Thus, the
book is the result of both types of experiences, which allows us to under-
stand not only the how but also the why.
After all these years doing this, why am I creating this text analytics
book now? Globally, this is a l­ong-standing topic, and we started seeing
this in the ­mid-1990s in Chile, at the academy. However, in many ways,
society and industry weren’t prepared, and, up to a certain extent, many
didn’t see the need to be prepared, considering it to be something abstract
and, therefore, impractical, taking into account not only the small amount
of data available for them in that period but also performing several ana-
lytical tasks manually, like the old days.
However, the access and size of data sources, and in particular unstruc-
tured ones such as texts and documents, have experienced exponential
growth in the last 10 years. This led to important scientific advances in
both new and improved methods of text analytics as well as a greater need
 Preface   ◾    xix

for companies, not only to analyze structured information automatically

per se but to generate insights from it, improving their ­decision-making
and business productivity.
Nor is it fortuitous that the writing of this book went through two major
local and international crises. First, there was the unprecedented social
crisis that affected Chile in October 2019. Then, since the end of 2019, the
world has been affected by a gigantic global pandemic of the C ­ OVID-19
disease, and, even now, when finishing this book, when it will come to an
end is still uncertain. But what do these two recent events have in common?
In addition to the already increasing information overload, in the case of
Chile, the social crisis generated an enormous flow of information, especially
related to social media information, whose analysis was key to making stra-
tegic decisions in terms of discovering links in informal textual information.
On the other hand, in the case of the pandemic, there has been a large accu-
mulation of scientific literature (­i.e., formal textual information), around the
investigations that shed light on various factors related to C ­ OVID-19, and
that, due to its dimension (­more than 45,000 articles) and complexity, it’s
necessary to have advanced textual analytics methods that can automatically
extract and discover relevant knowledge that allows research to progress, a
task that clearly cannot be performed manually by human experts.
The above shows once again not only the technological, critical, and
strategic relevance of text analytics but also the need of a book capable of
introducing this technology as a powerful ­decision-making tool.
Crises bring opportunities, and this book was written in the midst of a
crisis.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

This is an introductory book to the science and applications of text ana-
lytics or text mining, which enables automatic knowledge discovery from
unstructured information sources. With this purpose, the book introduces
the main concepts, models, and computational techniques that allow solv-
ing several real ­decision-making problems coming from textual and/­or
documentary sources.

Audience
If you have textual data sources that you need to understand, this is the
right book for you. If you want to obtain textual data and want to take
advantage of it to discover and/­or detect important knowledge, this is also
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Arctic angels
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
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you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Arctic angels

Author: A. DeHerries Smith

Illustrator: Clarence Rowe

Release date: April 25, 2024 [eBook #73460]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: The Butterick Publishing

Company, 1928

Credits: Roger Frank and Sue Clark

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ARCTIC

ANGELS ***
 A Story of the Northwest Mounted
By A. DeHerries Smith

ARCTIC ANGELS

Howls floated out on the thin Arctic air, filling rock-walled Kannequoq
Inlet with dirge-like notes. A dozen gaunt huskies padded to and fro
near the red boulders to which they were tied; they eyed one another
in murderous speculation, straining uselessly at the tethering sticks
fastened to their shaggy necks.
Occasionally one of the animals halted its ceaseless trotting,
squatted and, elevating a long wolf snout, sent out another wail to
echo and re-echo back from the granite cliffs.
“Rotten! Rotten! Rotten!” Sergeant Richard Cleaver muttered to
himself, striding up and down the narrow confines of the Mounted
Police detachment building. “That brute Scarth is torturing those
dogs just for pure devilment; can’t be any other reason that I can
see. For five cents I’d go down there and shoot up the whole works.”
Peering through one of the little windows, he gazed down at the
trader’s roof, set on a lower rock ledge, and then at the whimpering
blurs beyond. A moon faced halfbreed, lounging in the post doorway,
glanced up at the huskies and spat contemptuously. Apparently the
man saw something humorous in the situation. Yellow teeth showed
momentarily when the native tore off another mouthful of tobacco
from a black plug.
Thin columns of smoke continued to well up undisturbed from the
huddle of skin tupiks, sheltering beneath the cliffs from the ever
present winds. But beyond the curling smoke there was no
movement; none of the Eskimo inhabitants took any notice of the
starving animals’ plea for food.
With a curse, the sergeant swung away from the window to glare
at Constable Timothy Noonan’s thick frame stretched on his bunk.
“Helluva lot you care, you fat lobster!” Cleaver threw out at the
slumbering man’s round, freckled face. “You don’t give a hoot about
the prestige of the service, do you? Said you’d never make a dog
man, and that goes! Blah!”
An angelic smile stole across the sleeper’s features. He rolled
over lazily, grunting his contentment. Sergeant Cleaver snorted and
stamped out of the cabin, crashing the door behind him.

Sergeant Cleaver shrugged his khaki service tunic up on wide

shoulders, staring across the inlet at the precipitous coastline
beyond. Already the brown hillsides were showing red where the
lichens were commencing to take on their summer hue. There was a
faint hint of green at the blue white glacier’s foot. A brilliant sun
shone down out of an amazingly blue sky.
“Spring, all right,” he mumbled to himself as gray eyes roved over
the ice pans and bergs tinkling together in the bay. “Another eight
months’ winter over, and I ought to be tickled pink. Damn Scarth and
his dogs, anyhow!”
 The supply ship would probably be coming in another month or
so, but he couldn’t go out on leave with all these sick and starving
Eskimos on his hands, the sergeant ruminated, when his gaze
swung about to the huddle of tupiks. Had to look after the poor devils
somehow.
“I’ll make him feed those dogs, at any rate,” he said with sudden
decision.
Quick fingers fastened the glinting brass buttons of the faded
tunic, as soft stepping sealskin boots carried him downward in long
strides.
A sudden chorus of expectant howls broke out from the watching
huskies when Cleaver passed Scarth’s fish cache, and swung in at
the trader’s open door.
The sergeant’s keen ears picked up a low whistle when he
stepped into the post’s dim interior and stood, motionless, waiting for
his eyes to become accustomed to the gloom.
“That you, Uluk?” he queried, blundering forward.
Twin grunts answered and, following the direction, he made out
two lounging blurs behind the wood heater’s rounded shape.
“Look here, Scarth, you’ll have to feed those dogs,” Cleaver
announced, pushing forward until he was looking down at the
trader’s narrow face and flickering eyes.
“Huh—huh,” Scarth grunted, giving the faintly grinning Uluk a soft
kick on the leg with his sealskin mukluks. “What the heck am I goin’
to feed ’em on, eh? You Arctic angels goin’ to tumble down a bunch
of manna, eh?”
The trader’s narrow shoulders quivered slightly. To cover the
motion he jumped erect, pulling up his ever slipping and dirty
mackinaw shirt. A yellow hand waved toward his empty shelves.
“Yes, I know you’re traded out,” Sergeant Cleaver agreed,
ignoring the tone as he followed the gesture. “No grub left. You can
fish though, can’t you?”
“Nothin’ doin’,” Scarth laughed. “That’s a native’s job. Think I’m
goin’ to have the Esks see me an’ lose my white man’s rep? Not so’s
you’d notice it.”
“Well, what about Uluk?”
 “Uluk?” Scarth replied, a note of feigned astonishment in his tone.
“Why, the lad’s half white, ain’t he? Got to look after his rep too.
Don’t want to have the Esks see him workin’. No, sir.”
The halfbreed grinned faintly in response to the trader’s nudge.
“Well if it wasn’t for the fact that you’d report it and I’d be replying
to fool questions from headquarters for the next two years, I’d shoot
your blasted huskies,” Cleaver rumbled.
He wheeled away, pacing up and down the post’s earthen floor,
followed by two pairs of amused eyes. Only just enough dog feed left
to keep the police huskies going until the supply ship got in, the
Mountie reflected. Out of the question to feed Scarth’s animals on
his team rations. And the hungry Eskimos had eaten their sled dogs
long since.
“Hey!” Scarth’s thin voice came suddenly. “Lookit, Cleaver. That
skin boat of your’n is the only thing left in Kannequoq that’ll float.
There’s walrus out there on the floes. Red meat. Why don’t you go
out an’ belt one down for the Esks? I’ll buy the scraps for the dogs.
How’s that?”
Again Cleaver sensed thinly covered insult in the little man’s
tones and again he ignored it. Under other conditions he would have
quickly removed the sneer from that weasel face, but now only one
thought pulsed through his brain—how to feed the Eskimos and
those yowling brutes up on the rocks.

Followed by twin grins of satisfaction, the Mountie padded to the

door to stare out across the ice filled inlet. Yes, there were walrus out
on the float ice; he had seen them through the glasses. It was as
much as a man’s life was worth, though, to venture out among those
razor edged pans in a frail skin boat.
Cleaver clenched brown fists, swung away from the post and,
padding across the ice polished rocks, reached the first of the tupiks.
For a moment he stood with one hand on the caribou skin that
served for a door, his sunburned face wrinkled in disgust.
Abominable odors floated out on the crisp air from the tupik; the
stench of unwashed humans, half tanned deerskins, moldy furs.
 Cleaver pulled out a handkerchief and, holding it across his
mouth and nostrils, ducked his long body and came upright in the
tupik. The foul smelling interior was littered with the Eskimos’
priceless possessions; they were too far gone now with the coast
sickness to care. Wooden pans sewn with rawhide, and stone
cooking pots were thrown about in confusion. The floor was a wild
jumble of feverish natives rolling about on bearskins, sealing spears,
snowshoes and mukluks.
“By Christopher, they’ve got to have red meat or they’ll all kick
out,” the Mountie said to himself, staring down on the emaciated,
yellow faces. “Guess I’ve got to do it.”
“Oh, Kanneyok,” Cleaver called in the Innuit tongue. “I come
bearing a message. Listen well, O you people of the ice.”
Three tousled heads were elevated for a moment above the
skins; a thin arm waved to signify that the message had been heard.
“Thus and thus,” the sergeant called in Innuit through his
handkerchief. “There must be red meat or you will all pass to the
shadow hills. Therefore, because the great white king does not
forget his people, I and the fat one go to hunt walrus. With the new
sun we bring meat. I have spoken.”
Faint clucking sounded when the Eskimos passed this satisfying
information along. A chorus of grunts.
“That’s the way to shoot it to ’em,” Scarth’s nasal tones came
suddenly from the doorway. “You police sure knows your onions. Fall
for this white king stuff, don’t they? But, by cripes, you’d better make
good, Cleaver, or the Esks’ll give you the hee-haw from Alaska to
Greenland—”
“Anumlatciaq tamna oomiak!” a laughing voice broke in on Scarth
in the Eskimo tongue.
There followed a crisp oath from the trader, the sound of a blow,
and a yelp from Uluk.
“Anumlatciaq tamna oomiak! The skin boat it never goes out!”
Cleaver translated the halfbreed’s phrase slowly, subconsciously
aware that the sick Eskimos had heard and understood the words.
Several of them were sitting upright, bony faces staring over at the
door flap.
 “By God, I’ve stood all I’m going to take from you and that
grinning breed of yours!” the Mountie roared, gripped by long
suppressed passion.
One leap carried him across the littered tupik. Two hard hands
fastened on Scarth’s scrawny throat. The sergeant dragged the little
man out into the glaring sunshine, shook him viciously for a long
moment, and then sent him spinning with a well placed kick.
The trader was on his feet again in a moment, close set eyes
darting fire. He opened his slit of a mouth; then thinking better of it,
he wheeled away and padded off for the post, mumbling to himself.
Cleaver watched him pass out of sight; then once more he
ducked back into the tupik, calling:
“Oh, Kanneyok, I have made a true talk; I am a redcoat and you
are the children of the great white king. The skin boat goes out.
There will be red meat before the sun comes again. I have spoken.”
“Ai! Ai!”
A chorus of grunts answered him, but Cleaver sensed that the
natives’ tones lacked conviction. Swearing softly to himself, the
Mountie plunged out into the clean air and made his way up to the
detachment building.

“Ain’t no way for a buck to talk to his superior, but that was a damn’
fool play,” Constable Noonan offered from his perch on the bunk.
“You got us in dutch, Sergeant dear. We’ll never be able to handle
the Esks again if we falls down on this job, an’ I got a hunch that’s
what Mr. Scarth is after. Suit his tradin’ fine if the natives go wild an’
woolly. I ain’t no Sherlock Holmes, but if this ain’t a plant I’m a
Hindoo philosopher.”
“Oh, shut up!” Cleaver put in irritably. “I’ve got enough on my
hands without scrapping with you. We’re going out in the skin boat in
the morning, ice or no ice, and we’re going to bring back a walrus.
I’ve given the king’s word for that. It’s getting dark. Any intention of
feeding the dogs tonight?”
“Thought you said I weren’t no dog man—”
 “You’ve got enough brains to feed them some tallow, at any rate,”
the sergeant cut in on him. “Go out, Timothy Noonan, or I’ll throw you
out!”
Constable Noonan dodged about the heater, grabbed his parka
off a peg and slid through the door. Once outside he listened for a
moment to the ice pans’ tinkling and the mournful wailing of Scarth’s
huskies. Then with an expressive shoulder shrug, Noonan made his
way up to the little storehouse.
The key grated in the lock, and with that well known sound eager
whines burst from the dogs penned in the corral. Scarth’s starving
brutes heard those expectant whimpers and filled the night air with
agonized howling.
It was a good three hours later when Noonan pushed in the door
of the detachment building and grinned over at his chief. Cleaver
was stretched on his bunk, khaki shirted, body bathed in yellow
lamplight, and deep in “Soldiers Three”. The sergeant threw the book
down and glared at the rubicund face.
“Look here, you nighthawk,” he called. “Haven’t you got any
savvy at all? You stay away from that girl, or I’ll—”
“Nix on the gentle sentiment tonight,” the constable broke in.
“Love’s off; murder’s on. Been prowlin’. We won’t possess any skin
boat in the mornin’; the Esks will have it that the great white king ain’t
the caribou’s chin whiskers no longer, an’ Scarth will be known as
the very strong man from here to Hoboken.”
“What’s the matter with you?” Cleaver boomed, jerking bolt
upright. “Scarth wouldn’t dare break up that boat; not after that three
months I got him for monkeying with our schooner last year.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised!” Noonan mocked his superior. “There’s
more ways of killin’ a polar bear than choking it with chocolate
eclairs. Climb into your parka an’ mukluks an’ we’ll take in the movie.
It’s a real fifty cent show. Come on.”

Mumbling uncomplimentary things regarding his companion’s

mentality, Cleaver vaulted off the bunk, pulled on his sealskin boots
and parka, and followed Noonan’s squat figure out into the night.
 A bright moon bathed Kannequoq Inlet, flooding the open spaces
with soft radiance, softening the rugged coast’s raw contours. The
two men stood motionless, ears filled with the subdued tinkling of the
ice pans and the distant honking of some migrant geese seeking
open water.
Noonan caught the other man’s sleeve and pointed down to
Scarth’s trading post. Cleaver nodded. Yes, the lights were out—and
for the first time in a month the unfortunate huskies had ceased
howling. He turned to peer down at the constable, but Tim avoided
the glance, padding off and beckoning his comrade to follow.
Swinging wide of the settlement below, the little man made his
way over the moonlight bathed ridges until at length he arrived at
one of the giant boulders that studded the beach. Beyond him, and
less than a dozen yards away, the police skin boat lay overturned on
the white sands.
“Well?” the sergeant’s glance read as he lowered himself to the
cold shingle alongside his comrade.
Noonan made no offer to enlighten him, signaling for silence.
The sergeant and the constable lay motionless, staring up at the
stars.
All at once the constable twisted over on his face, when Cleaver’s
hard hand gripped his thick arm.
A new sound had been added to the faint night noises. Both
Mounties knew what it was; the soft slithering of sealskin boots over
the rocks.
Then suddenly two upright figures were blurred against the ice
filled waters when Scarth and the halfbreed stepped down from the
rocks and padded over to the skin boat. Each man was leading a
number of the trader’s huskies.
“Pst!”
Noonan pulled Cleaver’s head down to him, whispering:
“You’ve seen hungry dogs up here chewin’ the rawhide lashings
off sleds, ain’t you? You’ve seen ’em eatin’ the sides outa skin
houses, an’ gnawin’ old sealskin boots? Sure. Well, now they’re
changin’ the diet; goin’ to scoff our old skin boat.”
 Cleaver’s right hand jerked back toward his revolver holster, but
before it reached the weapon Tim’s fingers fastened on his wrist.
“Not yet! Not yet!” Tim Noonan urged. “See the whole show.
Comic’s comin’. Savvy what it is, Dick? We’ve given the king’s word
that there’ll be red meat for the sick Esks in the mornin’ an’ Scarth
has passed the talk around that there won’t be any. If there ain’t no
meat our name is mud, frozen mud at that. An’ how the heck can we
get walrus without a boat?”
Cleaver glared down at the constable’s grinning face. What was
he repeating that for, and why the blazes was he so happy about it?
The sergeant wrenched his hand free, thrusting the revolver
forward. At the same moment a low oath sounded from one of the
two men, and Cleaver’s trigger finger relaxed.

Scarth tugged the lines off the dogs he was leading, kicking one of
the starving brutes toward the walrus hide covering the oomiak. But
instead of rushing forward and tearing at the skin the dog squatted
on the shingle, staring up at its master. Three more of the released
huskies lay down and curled up for immediate sleep. Some of the
others commenced to wander along the beach. None of the animals
took the least notice of the skin boat.
Scarth’s rumbled cursing and the halfbreed’s clucking sounded
dimly in the sergeant’s ears as he rolled over to stare in amazement
at the bursting Noonan.
“Oh, my fat sides,” Tim groaned. “Seventeen dried fish, eleven
tins of bully beef, five lumps of tallow, an’ a chunk of pemmican as
big as a battleship. An’ they polished off the whole works. An’ now
Scarth’s offerin’ ’em a dried up old walrus skin for dessert. A dog’s
life, that’s what it is.”
Sudden realization stabbed Cleaver’s mind. Tim had sneaked out
and fed Scarth’s starving huskies so that they would not attack the
skin boat!
“Listen,” Noonan’s voice came again. “Yesterday a big floe
grounded beyond the point. There was a walrus on it as big as the
side of a house. Uluk shot it. Get the idea? With the skin boat gone
we couldn’t pull the Arctic angel stuff, and when we fell down on the
job Scarth would lug in his walrus an’ get the glad hand from the
Esks. Cripes, you’re in a hurry, eh?”
Cleaver had vaulted from the icy ground with a catlike leap. As
Noonan lumbered to his feet he heard Scarth’s surprised cry and the
halfbreed’s yelp of dismay.
The trader threw himself face down on the beach when the white
faced sergeant raced across the slippery shingle. A single lunge
brought Scarth to his feet.
Then sounded the slithering of Noonan’s mukluks on the shingle
as the little man raced after the grunting halfbreed.
“I take it all back about the dogs, Timsy,” Cleaver yelled at the
flying figure. “Damn it, I’ll recommend you for corporal’s stripes for
this!”
“Keep ’em!” Noonan’s voice panted. “I’m the detective sergeant of
this man’s army, an’ that’s good enough for me. All right, you blubber
chewer, try a taste of that!”
Whug! Whug!
Cleaver laughed softly, turning back to the squirming Scarth.
“Look here, you insignificant fragment of decayed whale meat,”
he growled at the trader. “You’re too small to pound, but I have
something nice in store for you. It’ll be daylight in an hour. You and
the breed will cut up that walrus and bring it down here. Then you’ll
keep on making soup for the Esks until they’re well again. On top of
that you’re going to wash all their clothes and clean up the tupiks.
That’s slow motion death, if you ask me. Not a word, you rat. Move!”
As he shoved Scarth forward, Cleaver saw his comrade come
upright and fan himself vigorously. Surrounding him were four of the
satiated huskies. They sniffed gratefully at Noonan’s legs.

THE END

Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the November 15,

1928 issue of Adventure magazine.
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