Late the next evening, standing with Louis and Captain Gillies on the bridge, Hildegarde saw ships on the western horizon. The fleet at last! anchored two miles off from Nome. It was bedtime, but quite impossible to sleep, though there would be no landing till next day. They said “Good-night” to the captain, and found their way to a corner of the deck, where alone together they might see the belated sun setting, and watch a pale-gold moon of enormous size riding portentously the clear-colored sky, too bright for stars. Hand in hand, hidden among the freight, they talked of the future, arranging it in the high fashion of the young, as though they two had been gods seated on Olympus. And as they talked the faint flush over yonder turned the purest rose, then deepened as each beautiful moment sped, till the sun, gone but now, hastened back like one who abandons a projected journey, and on the heels of his good-by comes shamefaced home. What would it be like, this day that he was bringing? What was waiting over yonder in that mysterious land, still in shadow, that skirts the hills of Nome? Just a little longer the weary passengers hung about the decks, while the blood-red sun peered at them over a violet sea, ready, when the shadow-curtain lifted, to clothe the naked truth of Nome with a final splendor. Whatever might comeafter, in this first actual vision of the place people had fared so far to find, it was to wear the hues of heaven. For the “boat-load of failure,” the dream they had called “Nome” was to die in a glory of gold and fire.
The decks that had swarmed with excited people were falling silent. Men and women, whose whole lives hung upon what they should find waiting for them yonder, must be in bed betimes, that they might be ready to go ashore in the first boat. Soon only Hildegarde and Cheviot remained. But they were silent, watching all those white sails turn pink against the purple distance—sea and sky alike dyed deep, and still the honey-colored moon hanging there, immense, unreal. Whichever way they looked, this northern world was like something seen in a dream, spectral, uncanny, fitly ushered in by the sunrise in the night.
To Hildegarde, as though given in that hour some gift of prophecy, it seemed that after all her journeying the land she looked on was still beyond the reach of sober day, fated to be for ever outside the experience of waking hours.
Yet this incredible country for two years had been her father’s home!
Louis would go ashore in the first boat and prepare Nathaniel Mar for his daughter’s coming.
“If I were alone I should be imagining he might be dead.” Even as she said “if,” an inward dread clutched at her.
“If you were alone I should be imagining things worse than death.” They drew together. As he held her, looking down into her eyes, a new gravity came into his own. “Are you sureat last?” he said.
“You know I am. But I don’t scold you for asking. It’s the more beautiful of you to have quite realized and yet—yet not despise me for all that romantic feeling about some one I’ve never seen.”
“Your mother once helped me there.”
“My mother! What does she know about—”
“More than you might think. When I’d lost patience one day, she told me the only difference between you and other girls was that you were honester and stubborner than most.”
“I can hear her saying ‘stubborner.’”
“Yes, but it was curious to hear her saying few women, if they remember their youth, can truthfully say it went by without some such—well—she called it names—”
“I know one of them. Some such silly ‘infatuation.’” Hildegarde smiled, but not he. “I wonder if my mother ever—Oh, it’s a wild idea!”
“I don’t know. She said it was usually either a great soldier or a clergyman, often an actor, sometimes a poet, or ‘even a bachelor statesman.’ And she said that last with such an edge in her voice I wondered at the time what American statesman was still unmarried when Mrs. Mar was in her ’teens.” And their own cloud was dispersed in smiling at another’s.
Hildegarde, coming on deck at six o’clock, found sunshine whitening all the thousand tents of Nome. Frame dwellings, too, the eye found out—one standing boldly forth with flag flying. That, Blumpitty said, was the hospital. Was her father there? Courage! Louis was at her side, with confident looks and shining eyes that saw no shadow save the purple splotch in the sea to theleft—“Sledge Island.” Had she noticed the snow-seamed hills? She must take his glass and look at that higher lift in the low, undulant line; could she see a queer knob? “Anvil Rock!” But the main impression up the beach, and down the beach, and away over the tundra, was tents, tents. And between theLos Angelesand the surf-whitened shore, sails, sails! Ships of every size and kind. Big steamers from Seattle, from San Francisco, Portland, and Vancouver, smart sailing vessels, lumbering freight boats, whalers, and among them—darting back and forth like a flock of brown sparrows under the gleaming wings of seagulls—were myriads of little skiffs, dories, lighters, canoes, and here and there a steam launch, bobbing, swarming, surrounding “the last boat in,” and ready to take all and sundry to Nome for dazzling sums.
While the more enterprising of theLos Angeles’contingent (swallowing their resentment at the captain’s failure to set them instantly ashore) bargained with the owners of the small craft, a rumor ran about the ship that not even a millionaire might leave till certain formalities had been complied with. But Cheviot had in some way got a special permit to go ashore with one of the officers.
While Hildegarde waited after breakfast for his return, she tried to deaden fear of the news he might bring back, listening to the scraps of talk between the touting boatmen and the passengers longingly suspended over theLos Angeles’side.
Some old acquaintance called out “Howdy” to the bean-feaster, and after hearing what the Commission had settled in far away Washington, screamed backNome news in return. They were “havin’ a red hot roarin’ boom,” and Jolly Haley had made a million. One of the great steamers was spoken as she moved majestically by. Others, besides theLos Angeles, were overdue, the captain of theAkronsaid. Those haggard wrecks down there toward Cape Nome—they were only two, but the Bering Sea was full of ships disabled or gone down in these last days. Gillies asked for news of friends and rivals. TheCongresshad put into Dutch Harbor “for repairs,” he was told, and the men exchanged grim smiles. TheSanta Anawas burned to within two feet of the water. The passengers on theChiquitahad been all but starved to death, and theSt. Johnhad made escape from the ice-pack only to go to pieces on the rocks. Then, like some sentient thing exulting in her enviable fate, theAkronsteamed away in the sunshine.
Popular interest shifted to starboard when the whalerBelugadrew ’longside. Her captain, a hard-looking customer, came on board theLos Angelesto talk to Gillies. O’Gorman discovered a man he knew on board the whaler. “Going to Nome?” he asked him. “No, better than that. Gettin’ out.” Where was the ex-Nomite off to? “Up the coast.” TheBelugawas to meet some south-bound whalers up in Grantley Harbor in a day or two—might come south herself afterward, or might go still farther north to Kotzebue. O’Gorman’s friend didn’t care where, just so it wasn’t Nome. The people of theLos Angelesonly laughed. Clear that fellow was a hoodoo. The more luck in Nome, since he was leaving it!
“He might be able to give you news about yourfather,” O’Gorman said aside to Miss Mar. But before she answered he saw, from the sudden fear in the girl’s face, that she couldn’t risk having bawled at her in public tidings that more and more she dreaded.
“He—Mr. Cheviot will soon be back,” she said.
“Has he been in Nome all winter?—yourBelugafriend?” Mrs. Locke asked O’Gorman.
“Yes, I guess so.”
“I’d like to inquire about my firm, Dixon and Blumenstein.” O’Gorman called out the question for her.
“Lots o’ folks inquirin’ ’bout Dixon and Blumenstein,” the man on the whaler roared back.
“How so?”
“Lit out.”
“Gone away?”
“You bet.”
“What for?”
“Busted.”
“Oh, Mrs. Locke, what shall you do?” While Hildegarde, vaguely aware of the unusual sound of a dog howling distractedly, stood beside the woman who in those seconds had seen her hoped-for home, her very bread swept from her, Louis’s voice was audible over the girl’s shoulder. Hildegarde turned to find herself in her father’s arms. She did not notice how wet he was with sea-water. “Oh, you are ill!” she faltered.
“My child! My child!” he kept repeating, and then: “What a journey!”
“But you see I’ve got to Nome all right.”
“To Nome! God forbid!”
“But God hasn’t forbidden,” said the girl, swallowingthe sob that sight of the haggard face had brought into her throat. She was conscious, too, that her fellow-travelers were eagerly listening to the colloquy.
“I’ve been telling Cheviot I can’t think how he could allow you—” Mr. Mar caught himself up and laid his hand affectionately on the young man’s shoulder. “Of course Louis didn’t really know. The Nome he left was bad enough, but that Nome has passed away. To-day it isn’t a place for a girl to stay in an hour.”
“’Sh! father! You’ll scare my friends. This is Mrs. Blumpitty. She thinks very highly of Nome. And this is Mr. Blumpitty. Mother put me under their care, and they’ve beensokind. They’ve brought a big party up again this year. We’ve all come believing great things of the new camp.”
The moment the handshaking was over, “This way,” Cheviot said, and while the talk buzzed, and the dog somewhere down yonder among the swarming rowboats howled dismally, and questions showered on the man from Nome, Louis was leading Mr. Mar toward the companionway.
“Oh, yes,” said Hildegarde, “my suit-case and things. But father needn’t trouble to come below. I’ve had everything packed and readyfor hours!” She smiled at Cheviot across the halting figure. “What kept you so, Louis? Couldn’t you find him?”
“You can’t get along very fast over there,” Cheviot answered.
“Youcouldn’t?”
“Nobody can. There’s a wall of stuff piled higgledy-piggledy for a mile along the shore.”
“Dingleys and McKeowns, and—”
“Yes, and grub. Tons of it. Hundreds of barrels of whisky. Thousands of bags of flour and beans piled higher than my head. Lumber—acres of it. Furniture and bedding, engines and boilers, mixed up with sides of bacon and blankets, and a sprinkling of centrifugal pumps and Klondike thawers. How they’ll ever sort that chaos—”
“The next high tide will save them the trouble,” said Nathaniel Mar.
“Well, it’s a queer sight. Hundreds and hundreds of people, Hildegarde, sitting on top of their worldly goods, looking as if they’d never stir again. Like so many Robinson Crusoes, each one on his own desert island, among the wreck of his possessions.” Hildegarde smiled. Louis was only pointing out that Nome justified his prophecy. A form of “I told you so.” But he was speaking to her father. “And the faces! You’re used to them, but I—” He caught Hildegarde’s significant little smile and deliberately changed the tune. “Of course there’s a lot of hustling, too,” he ended, stopping by the smoking-room door.
“Yes, the old story,” said Hildegarde’s father, wearily. “All land there free and equal from the common life of the ships. Twenty minutes, and some are masters and others are slaves.”
“I thought there’d be no one here!” Cheviot said with satisfaction, as he held open the door.
“Isn’t the boat ready to take us back?” Hildegarde asked.
“I suppose,” said her father, leaning heavily on his stick and looking at her from under his bushy eyebrows, “you think we’ve got hotels over yonder.”
“Oh, no.”
“There isn’t even a boarding-house—”
“Mrs. L’Estrangewillbe glad! She’s going to set up the very thing, and make her everlasting fortune.”
“Well,I’mglad”—Mar dropped into the nearest seat—“very glad you’re a sensible girl and take it like that.”
Imagine his thinking she’d come expecting a hotel and all the comforts of home! That was why he seemed so harassed. “Poor father!” She put an arm about his crooked shoulders. It had been hard for him to make his way over the chaos of the beach, and he had got so wet coming out. How thoughtful of that dear Louis to bring him in here to rest before undertaking the return trip.
The old man crossed his wrinkled hands on the knob of his heavy stick and slowly shook his head. “No, Nome wasn’t Paradise before, but since the invasion it’s a hell upon earth.”
“Oh, father!”
“Well, think of it! Something like forty thousand homeless people stranded over yonder on the beach.”
“I’m gladyouhaven’t been one of the homeless ones,” she said gently.
“I don’t know how glad you’d be if you saw my one-roomed tent on the boggy tundra.”
“Dearest.” She took off his big soft hat that impeached his dignity with an absurd operatic air, and she stroked the whitened hair. “It’s well I”—she looked across at her lover—“we’vecome to look after you.”
“Oh, I’m one of the fortunate Nomites! I tell you a man withanysort of shelter over his head is in luck.Hundreds are sleeping on the beach in the cold and rain.”
“Silly people not to buy a tent.”
“Most of them did, and can’t get it landed or can’t find it in the hurly-burly.”
“Oh, I hope mine won’t get lost!”
“Yours!”
“Yes, father, I’ve got a tent and two pairs of Hudson Bay blankets, waterproof boots, stout netting—for the mosquitoes, you know. Oh, I have heard all about those mosquitoes! I’ve got a canvas knapsack and an oil-stove, and oceans of oil, and a pistol and plenty of chocolates and six weeks’ provisions.” With a little encouragement she would have told him every item in that six weeks’ provision. She was distinctly proud of her list. Many people on theLos Angeleshad complimented her upon its judicious selection.
But Nathaniel Mar’s face showed no pride—showed something even like horror. “I can’t think what you were about, Cheviot,” he said almost sharply.
Hildegarde was still incredulous that Louis had been able to resist the natural temptation of “telling on her,” and saving his own credit. “Doesn’t father know—anything?”
“Oh, yes, I told him—about us.”
“It’s the one redeeming feature in the present situation,” said Mr. Mar.
“Father!” She was really wounded by that.
“But as I’ve told you already”—he turned his melancholy eyes on the young man—“I’d take more comfort in the intelligence if you hadn’t brought her up here!”
“Does he say he brought me?”
“He can’t say he prevented you.”
“Iwouldcome. I was afraid we’d never get you back.” She was on the verge of tears.
“Well, well,” said Cheviot briskly, “it’s no use spilling milk.”
“No,” agreed the old man. “It might be worse. After all, the ship is going back in a week and I’ll make arrangements for you to live on board till then.”
Hildegarde withdrew her arm. She came and stood in front of the bowed old man. “You can’t mean that while Iamhere, I’m not to stay with you—or in my own tent near—”
“Your tent!” Mr. Mar lifted one hand, calling heaven to witness his offspring’s folly. “As to ‘near’me, I’m sleeping in a ghastly lodging-house myself at the moment. We pay ten dollars a night for floor space. Spread a blanket on filthy boards, and try to get some rest in spite of drunken rows and vermin.”
“I should think even a tent in the bog was better than that.”
“Much. I’ve lent mine for a few nights to a miserable woman and her daughter, who’d slept a week on the beach. Like Hildegarde here, they ‘bought a tent!’ It’s on that steamer we passed. There are half a dozen ships that can’t get unloaded.”
“I don’t know that I like those other women living in your tent,” said Hildegarde, with frank envy.
“Some of us are arranging to get the daughter home.”
“Not the mother?”
“No.”
“She’s going to stay?”
“She’s got consumption.”
“Oh!”
“They came in the steerage. No, the mother won’t go home, and won’t need my tent long, I think.”
Hildegarde stroked his hand. “It was like you, father, to give them shelter.”
“It’s been pretty much as you saw it this morning”—Mar turned to Louis—“for two weeks now. People are paralyzed. The fall from the height of their anticipations has stunned them. The women sit and wait. For what, they don’t know. The men drink and play high, and when they’re cleaned out and can’t think of anything else to do, they shoot. There were two men killed last night in a fight over a lot. In the last week there have been six suicides. Nobody minds. What’s the spilling of a little blood? A thing far more important is the scarcity of water. You buy it by the small bucketful and carry it home yourself. If you don’t boil it, you get typhoid. The mayor told somebody that, after all, we lacked only two things here—water and good society. The stranger said: ‘It’s all the damned lack.’” It was as striking to ears that heard the retort then for the first time as though the saying had not grown hoary. “You’ll see,” Mar said, as though Cheviot had denied such a possibility, “it’ll be worse here than ever Dawson was in the toughest times. We haven’t got any such body of men to keep the peace as the mounted police.”
“And to think it’s all your fault, father.”
Mar stared at her.
“Two years ago and nobody cared a pin to go to Nome. You couldn’t induce the boys to come. You had to bribe even Louis. Now forty thousand people,and all that tangle on the beach.” Her eyes were eager. “Nome, at this minute, must be the most wonderful sight in the world.”
“It’s the dump-heap of the nations! I’ll tell you what happened a week ago.” Mr. Mar was almost voluble in his anxiety to convince his daughter of the unfitness of Nome as a subject of feminine curiosity. “I’d been to the A.C. store and got a small draft cashed. Then I went up to Penny River and was gone all day. As I came back, behind the big Music Hall tent, I was held up. Two men turned out my pockets and made off with my thirty dollars. It was no use reporting the robbery. I was very tired, and I went to bed. I was waked up by some one rummaging about. But before I realized what was happening inside, I saw there were holes cut in the off wall of my tent, and two pairs of eyes were watching me. A little lower down the bores of a couple of pistols were sticking through. I lay perfectly still, and presently the man inside, who’d been going through my grip-sack, threw it down. ‘Where do you keep your stuff, anyhow?’ he said, and then I recognized him. ‘You’re not in luck. You’ve got hold of the same person twice,’ I said. ‘Think we didn’t know that?’ he said. ‘We made such a devilish poor haul we thought we’d give you another chance. Come along,’ he said, ‘where do you keep the rest?’ And when he found there wasn’t anything in the tent but a match and a pistol—well, he was good enough to tell me his opinion of me.”
“I don’t understand—isn’t it daylight all night?”
“Yes, but some of the honest people try to sleep, and then the crooks take over the town. The place is full ofthe professional criminal class. And if it weren’t, Nome, as it is to-day, would breed them. My next-door neighbor says if he owned all the Nome district and owned hell, he’d sell Nome and live in hell.”
“But the thing that brought everybody here—the gold!”
“The sour-doughs are getting some out of the creeks. But there aren’t any more windfalls for late comers, since the beach was worked out.”
“I did see one or two cheechalkers rocking in a hole here and there,” said Cheviot.
“Go back to-morrow; you won’t see the same faces. ‘Poor man’s country!’—where bread costs more than luxuries anywhere else on earth! Any business that’s done in Nome to-day is buying and selling and brokerage precisely as it is in Wall Street. For the moneyless mass there isn’t only disappointment, there isn’t only hardship; there’s acute suffering down on the beach. I don’t know, for my part, where it’s going to end.”
“I don’t mind not stayinglong,” said Miss Mar obligingly, “in a place where you wake up to find pistols and eyes peering in at you; but I wouldn’t,for all the world, I wouldn’t miss just seeing it.”
Mr. Mar moved his stick impatiently.
“I’dbe willing enough to miss seeing it,” said Cheviot, “and I’m not squeamish either. But, Lord! some of those faces!”
The old man nodded. “I keep away from the water front as much as I can. Can’t stand it. I’ve never seen such despair in human eyes. If there are lost souls on the earth, I’ve seen them on the beach at Nome.”
“Well, I dare say a little of it will go a long way with me, too.”
“Hildegarde, you’re growing very like your mother.”
“Thank you, father,” said the girl, imperturbably.
“The trouble is if you insisted on having ‘a little’ of Nome, you might have to take a great deal,” Cheviot said.
“Why might I?”
He exchanged a look with Mr. Mar. “Come out here, Hildegarde, and I’ll show you.”
As she followed to the ship’s side, “What makes the dog howl so?” she asked. “Look! he’ll be out of that little boat in a minute—he’ll be drowned.”
Cheviot leaned over. “Shut up!” he called down. “Say,Red! D’you hear? Shut up, I tell you!”
The dog looked critically at Cheviot, ears cocked, nose pointed, forefeet on the gunwale of the lighter, which was bobbing about at the foot of theLos Angeles’ladder.
“Louis, is that father’s Reddy? Oh, I do so want to make friends with him! Red! Red! how d’you do? Be a good dog, we’re coming down in a minute.”
“I’ll get one of the sailors to bring him up. Here”—Cheviot adjusted his glass for her—“now look off there to the right—farther, beyond the wreck of thePioneer. Do you see that big tent with the flag?”
“Yes.”
“Can you see what flag it is?”
“It isn’t Stars and Stripes. It looks all yellow.”
“Yes.”
“Who are the people who have a yellow flag?”
“The people who have smallpox. That’s the pest-house.”
On their way back they met Blumpitty asking, sadder than ever, if anybody knew how soon quarantine was going to be declared. “Pretty rough on the people who get shut out,” murmured Blumpitty.
“Rougher on those who get shut in,” said Cheviot.
Joslin was furious at either prospect. “Damned nonsense,” he said, “spoilin’ the finest boom since ’49, all on account of a little smallpox.”
They found Mr. Mar in the smoking-room, in the same weary attitude, head hung over his wide breast, hat hung on the sound knee, wooden leg stiffly slanting, eyes among the cigar ashes on the floor.
“Whatever else I do, father, I can’t go home withoutyou.”
“Oh, I’ll take you home, my dear,” said Mar, with alacrity. “I’ve nothing to keep me here now, except my claims at Polaris.”
“Oh,” said the girl, losing some of her gloom, “have you got a share in the Mother Lode?”
He smiled faintly at miners’ superstition on his daughter’s lips. “I’ve got something worth looking after,” he said, “though, as I told Louis, I wish my good luck wasn’t always so inaccessible. Only two boats touched Polaris last year. I don’t know how it will be this summer. I wasn’t able to go in either of those that have set off so far. But I sent up a man to do the assessment work.”
“I’ll find a way of seeing what he’s made of his job.” Cheviot seemed to ratify some arrangement. Then turning to Hildegarde: “And I’ll follow you in the first ship.”
“Follow? Can’t you go and get back in a week?”
“I might, if there should happen to be a boat.” He was touchingly pleased at Hildegarde’s unwillingness to go home without him.
Quite suddenly she remembered O’Gorman’s loud-voiced friend of the whaler. “I’ve got an inspiration,” she said gaily. “Why shouldn’t we all three go up to Polaris in the barkBeluga? Yes, yes, that whaler alongside is going north in a day or two. Now, don’t say it’s impossible till you see.” Quickly she outlined a delightful plan. They could all come back in one of the boats waiting about in Grantley Harbor. Or why shouldn’t they (after they’d attended to the Mother Lode), why shouldn’t they go in theBelugaas far as Kotzebue? Nobody realized in the very least, she said, her immense interest in all this queer northern world. And after what she’d gone through to get here, they wanted to forbid her Nome! Adroitly she spoke, as though their success were still a matter of doubt.Ifshe didn’t see Nome, oh, how she’d be laughed at in Valdivia! Butifshe didn’t, why shouldn’t she be a little compensated for so huge a disappointment? But that wasn’t the main consideration. How could anybody expect her to go away in this very same horrible boat that had brought her, and gowithoutLouis? Was her father grown so hard-hearted up here as to expect to part them when they’d only just found each other? Half-smiling, but serious enough in reality, as Mar could see, she pleaded for her plan. Louis was plainly a convert, though he did say in a feeble and highly unconvinced fashion, that if he hadn’t used up all his credit with her on the subject of travel, he’d point out that the accommodation on board these coasting vessels—
“Oh,don’tbe so careful of me—you two!” shewailed. “The reasons why I mustn’t see Nome surely don’t apply to Polaris. Why mayn’t I have a look at that miraculous Mother Lode? Besides, Polaris! why, that’s where Blumpitty’s hermit lives! Dearest father, I’ve been dying to see the hermit. Was it he who told you, too, where to get claims?”
“Certainly not. I wouldn’t go near the imposter! Living on people’s greedy hopes. That’ll come to an end, too, some fine day!”
“Well, if it hasn’t come to an end yet, you won’t mind my seeing him, will you, dearest? It isn’t just idle curiosity. You really ought to sympathize a little. I must have got it from you—all this interest in the North, that we used to think was left out of the rest of the family. Don’t you remember, I never wondered at the hold it had on you? Even when I was quite little—” She pulled herself up suddenly, with an anxious glance at Cheviot’s averted face. But he turned briskly at that first pause and said: “I’ll leave you to butter the parsnips, Hildegarde, while I tackle the captain.”
When Cheviot had gone, “What’s the news?” said Mar.
“Oh, they’re all well, and the boys are getting on splendidly. Mother sends you—”
“Nothing yet from Jack Galbraith?”
“Nothing, up to the day I left. Father, it bores Louis dreadfully, hearing about—arctic exploration. We won’t talk about Jack Galbraith before Louis. But I’ve often thought, while I’m crawling up this side of the round world, Jack is probably sliding down the other.”
“It’s one of the reasons for going home,” said the old man, thinking aloud.
It was after some delay through fogs that, on a clear July morning to Hildegarde for ever memorable, the small whaling vesselBelugaanchored below the cape called Prince of Wales, that looks across the narrow Strait of Bering to the Siberian shore. The girl, with her new friend Reddy at her side, overheard with inattentive ear her father’s final instructions. Mar, whose difficulty in getting about was obviously increased in these months of absence, had agreed to remain on board. Cheviot’s the task of making the most of the brief span granted by the surly captain for inquiry into the condition of the gold camp two miles across the surf, and two more inland up Polaris Creek.
But if the talk between the men about possible claim-jumpers, treatment of “tailings,” increase of water-power, double shifts, and clean-ups—if such matters held but a modified interest for the girl on this golden morning, not so the scene itself. Even in the gray light of yesterday, when, toward bedtime, the thicker fog-veils lifted enough to show how far theBelugahad gone out of her course, the girl had thrilled at the misty vision of the Diomede Islands. For one of these showed the fringe of Asia. Hildegarde had reached that place in her journeying where the East was become the West,and where to find the farthest limit of the immemorial Orient you must needs look toward the setting sun.
To-day, coming on deck before she broke her fast, something in the girl had cried out greeting at her first glimpse of the coast-line bluffs of extreme northwestern Alaska, drawn in purple against a radiant east, to the south receding a little from the shore and fainting into the blue of snow-flecked hills having a strip of tundra at their feet.
There, upon that narrow coastwise margin, directly in front of what from the deck of theBelugaseemed the highest point in the background, the sunshine picked out boldly the intense white of the handful of tents that stood for the settlement of Polaris and the port for the Polaris mining-camp.
Hildegarde had won her father’s consent, reluctant though it was, that she should go ashore with Cheviot. Gaily she assured him it was little compensation enough to a girl who had foregone the fearful joys of Nome. The visit of inspection to the Polaris claims would not take long. As the old man looked at his “two children,” with the sunshine on their faces, he wondered who would have the heart to steal from them a single one of those early hours of enchantment.
Not Nathaniel Mar.
But neither he nor they had bargained for Reddy’s bearing them company. He announced his intention unmistakably, when Cheviot went over the ship’s side into the small boat that was to take him and Hildegarde through the surf. Mar tried in vain to quiet the beast. So unnerving were Mr. Reddy’s demonstrations, when he saw Hildegarde preparing to follow Cheviot, thatMar called out, Hildegarde must wait till the dog could be shut up; the sailors could hardly hold him. But the men below, bobbing about on the rough water, were with difficulty preventing the boat from being battered against the ship’s side, and Cheviot was shouting, “No time to worry with the dog!”
At the same moment, Hildegarde, hanging suspended between her two counselors on the swinging ladder, saw a big wave sweeping askew the boat beneath her. From above her father, and Cheviot from below, called out “Hold tight,” while Louis supplemented the vain efforts of the two other men, unable by themselves to steady the clumsy craft in such a sea. But Hildegarde, with a conviction that Reddy, escaping out of a sailor’s arms, was in the act of coming down on her head, jumped from the ladder and landed in the boat with the dog and a twisted ankle. Instantly she called up to her horrified father, “I’m all right, and so is Reddy.” Whereupon the boat was swung out into open water. They had gone half a mile before Cheviot discovered something was amiss. “Nothing the least serious,” she said, though it would be serious enough for her if she were cheated of the two or three hours’ wandering at Louis’s side on this heaven-sent morning through the wild, sunshiny land across the surf. Cheviot was for turning round at once and taking her back to the steamer, but that would be to prolong by a mile a sufficiently difficult transit. He would send her back after the boat had landed him.
“No, no,” she pleaded. “If I can’t walk, I’ll wait for you on shore.”
But Cheviot was giving the sailors directions about getting her safely back to theBeluga.
Then, for the first time, the girl spoke of the stark discomfort that reigned aboard the whaler, how she longed for a little respite, and how she longed—But the landward-looking eyes could not, down here in the deep sea furrows, pick out the far-shining tents toward which the lighter was plunging, down the watery dales and up on foamy hills, and down again to shining green deeps that shut out ship and shore—holding the small boat hugged an uneasy instant in the rocking lap of the sea. Yet the girl clung to the memory of that early morning vision from the deck, of violet headlands and snow-filled hollows, and as the boat rode high again on the top of the next big breaker, she drew in rapturous breath, saying softly of the land beckoning her across the furious surf, “The ‘farthest North’ that I shall know!” But in the end she owed it to Reddy’s companionship that Cheviot let her have her way.
“Oh, what an old-fashionedTurkof a man I shall have to spend my life with!” But she laughed for joy at the prospect.
As Cheviot, sharply scrutinizing the harborless shore, directed the boat above the settlement: “Some better landing-place round the point?” she asked.
“I don’t expect a landing-place on this coast, but I don’t see even the tumble-down sod hut your father talked about.”
The boat shot up out of a boiling hollow, and as it climbed the slippery back of a great wave, Hildegarde called out, “I see it!”
“The hut? Where?”
“All alone, over yonder. Just beyond those rocks. That’s where you and I will sit and wait, won’t we, Red? Those rocks are farther north than where the tents are shining—‘farther north,’ do you hear, Mr. Red?”
Beyond the chaos of boulders, in a cloud of spray, the boat was not so much beached as daringly run in and her passengers ejected, all in that breathless instant before the turbulent water withdrew, carrying out the clumsy craft as lightly as it would a cork. And now already the toiling sailors were some yards on their way back, disappearing round the point. Hildegarde was safe on a temporary perch, and Reddy much occupied in howling defiance at each thunderous onslaught of the surf. Cheviot, thinking to combine the girl’s appeal for “a good observatory” with his own notion of an easy niche safe beyond the tide’s reach, went to spy out the land over there where some mighty storm had piled the rocks. At sight of a man skulking among the boulders, Cheviot called out, “Hello!”
With a certain reluctance the bearded figure shuffled into fuller view. “Hello!” he said, without enthusiasm.
“Do you belong here?” he was asked.
“Sort o’.”
“Oh—a—anything doing?”
“Where?”
“Why, here.”
“Here?What d’ y’ expect anybody to dohere?”
“Isn’t there a camp just over yonder?”
“Up in the hills. Yep, there’s a camp there all right.”
“Nothing in it, though?”
“Plenty. Things are boomin’ out there. Thoughtyou meanthere.” And he looked past the new arrivals in an unpleasant, shifty fashion.
They exchanged glances. Hildegarde was so sure Louis wouldn’t go away and leave such an individual hanging about that she felt no surprise at hearing him offered money “to come along and show the way.”
When the two had agreed on the price of this service, Cheviot said: “I’ll be ready in a minute. I want to find a more comfortable seat for this lady,” and off he bolted toward the rocks.
The man eyed Hildegarde askance, and made some observation.
“I can’t hear you,” she called, above the noise of the surf.
He shuffled nearer. “Ain’t you goin’, too?”
“Out to the mines? No.”
“What y’ goin’ t’ do?” he asked.
The girl laughed. “Oh, just stay here and look at things.”
“What things?” The uneasy eye shot out a sudden alert beam.
She only smiled, as her own glance wandered to the wider vision.
“I got some ‘things’ to see after m’self,” he said in a surly tone. “Guess I ain’t got time to go to no gulch to-day.”
The girl fell a prey to misgiving lest this incident should end in dissuading Louis from leaving her at all. Was her insistence upon coming to result in defeat of the expedition?
The shifty man had drawn a trifle nearer still and lowered his voice. “What made yer land here?”
“It didn’t seem to matter where we landed. There’s no harbor.”
“But here yer so—” It occurred to Hildegarde, for some inexplicable reason, he was going to add, “so near that hut,” instead of what he did say, “so fur from town.”
At the obvious suspicion on the man’s face, Hildegarde smiled to herself. If this uncouth apparition had inspired distrust in the new arrivals, their appearance had precisely the same effect on him.
“Y’ might ’a’ come and gone before anybuddy in the town knowed we’d had visitors,” he said, with an air indescribably sly.
“Well, you see, our business isn’t in the town. We’re nearer the diggings here, aren’t we?”
“Guess yer been here afore.”
“No, neither of us.”
“Then yer better come along with me and him, an’ have a look at the gulch.”
So he didn’t, after all, want to remain behind and murder her for her watch!
“No, I shall stay here, and while you and my friend are gone, I’ll practise shooting at a mark.” As she drew her little revolver out of her pocket, and the silver mounting caught the sunlight, she recognized herself for a very astute person. Louis, if no one else, might quite well need reminding that she was armed.
“Y’ won’t go?” the man persisted. “Well, I guess I ain’t got time fur it neither. I ought to see a man up at the store.”
In the act of going forward to meet Cheviot with thisinformation, the unaccountable creature paused to say over his shoulder: “Yer sure to git a nugget if yer go to the gulch.”
“I’d go quick enough if I could walk.”
He faced about. “Y’ can’twalk!” It seemed somehow to make a difference, but he narrowed his little eyes.
“Why can’t yer?”
“I’ve sprained my ankle.”
“Oh! Bad?”
“I’m afraid so. I’ve been told not to put my foot to the ground—or else I’d hobble to the town and hunt up a man I’ve heard lives hereabouts.” Ah,thatinterested the disreputable one quite as much, apparently, as it did Miss Mar. “I wonder ifyouknow him! A queer, hermit sort of person who discovered the—What’s the matter?”
“I knowed all along what ye’d come fur.”
“Oh, we didn’tcomefor that—it was only my idea—but it’s not much good now I’m crippled.”
“What did yer want to see him fur?”
“Oh, just to hear him talk.”
“Ye-es. I been told they’s a lot would ’a’ liked to hear him talk, only it’s no go. And people gits tired o’ feedin’ a feller with such a parshallity fur keepin’ his mouth shut.”
Cheviot had come back with, “Put that away!” as he caught sight of the revolver. “I’ve made a kind of chair for you, and lined it with overcoat.” He half carried her over to the rocks, while she clung to him, sparing the hurt foot. The man with the long, lank chin-beard, like the last nine inches of a cow’s tail, watched proceedings with a critical eye.
“There now!” Louis had established her to his satisfaction. “And Red’ll take care of you since he’s grown such a gentleman. You hear, Red?” he admonished the cock-eared dog.
“Reddy hears, and Reddy’ll do it, but if I weren’t so hopelessly happy I’d be rather miserable at finding myself a prisoner.Thisday of all days in the year!” And, in spite of Cheviot’s assurance that he wasn’t going to be long, she looked a little wistfully after her lover.
“It’s all right,” his queer guide hung back a moment to assure her. “It don’t reely matter as much as you think.”
“Oh, itdoesn’t!”
“No, fur he ain’t here.”
“Who? The—”
“Yep—feller y’ come to see.”
She humored him. “You mean the—”
“Yep.”
“Come along, Father Christmas,” shouted Cheviot, taking the tundra on a run.
“Father Christmas! D’ ye hear wot he’s callin’ me?”
“Where is he, then?” Hildegarde persisted.
“Dead.”
“Oh, I’m disappointed to hear that. Youaretoo young for Father Christmas, but I was beginning to hope you might be the hermit.”
She took her disappointment so light-heartedly that the odd creature grinned.
“Golly, don’t I wish Iwus‘the hermit,’” he muttered, as he scrambled up the tundra after Cheviot.
What nonsense to talk of being a prisoner! Her eyes were free to roam, and her heart was light as a bird’s homing across the shining world toward the shining future. She must remember always in the happiness that was coming, how she first had seen it at its vividest from a throne of rocks, sitting between the tundra and the sea. Oh, but she was glad she had come! If it was Cheviot’s mission to see how work went on at the gold camp, hers no less to see with her own eyes—to get by heart and keep for ever—the aspect of the world up here where you touch the skirts of the uttermost North. Happy, happy chance that vouchsafed the vision on one of those unmatched days of the short arctic summer that she’d heard about so long ago—a day that made you feel never before have you seen the sunshine showering such a glory on the world, never known such color on the sea, never felt the sweet wind bringing influence so magical. You unfurl the banner of your spirit, and you carry the splendid hour like a flag, looking abroad and saying: “This is what it is, then, to be alive. And I—I am still among the living!”
In that same hour, a few yards from where Hildegarde sat waiting, a man was saying farewell to sun and sea and all the shining ways of all the world; and this man, dying in the peat hut at the tundra’s edge, was that one of all who heap up riches having most to leave behind.
There was nothing about the solitary hovel that specially arrested the girl’s attention. She had seen several such on the way, during the delay at Grantley Harbor—rude makeshift shelters, deserted in favor of the booming camp at Nome. But Reddy found the sod hut somehow interesting, even suspicious. He had gone away tosnuff at the threshold. He tore back to Hildegarde to report, then off again. Now he had set his sharp nose against the door, and now he howled softly. In the momentary lull of surf drawn seaward, to Hildegarde’s surprise, a responsive whine came weakly forth from the hut. Whereat Red’s excitement was so great that the girl forgot her ankle and stood up to quiet him. Why, the ankle hardly hurt at all! She might have gone—could she, even now, catch up with Louis? She picked her way across the rocks with scarce a twinge of pain, and she climbed upon the thick moss carpet of the tundra. Of course she could have gone! But Louis was out of sight. To say sooth, she was in a mood too happy to be cast down. For, as she had just been feeling, it was one of those hours when all life seems to be waiting for one to come and claim it, when a girl feels she has just this little time for pausing at the gate, to give the glad eyes full possession before she enters in. She takes the sunshine on her face, and all her being melts to gold, and has its little share in making the wide earth shine. Even her secret dreams are dissolved in the universal sea. Instead of hoping, fearing, her heart floats like an idle boat in that shifting iridescence. In the air, instead of trumpet-call and battle-cry only a long, low singing on the beach. No; one thing beside—a faint whining from within a deserted hovel. Again, from without, the beast before the desolate threshold woke the hill-born echoes with his howling. Surely a stray dog had got in there and been unable to get out. She would open the door barely wide enough to throw him some of the pilot bread she’d brought in her pocket for luncheon. She lifted a hand to the rude latch, but, instead of openingthe door outright, sheer habit, with nothing in it of reflection, made her first of all knock. “Come in,” said a voice. She started back, and held her breath. Again that low: “Come in.”
It seemed to her that she must run, and at the same time even more that she must obey the voice. Oh, why had she come? Taking uncertain hold of her courage she pushed the door ajar. Red flung it wide by bounding in before her. She had time only to see that a man, half-sitting up on a camp bed, with a gray army blanket over his knees, was whittling away at a long, narrow bit of flat wood. She hardly noticed at the moment, though she remembered later, that when he saw a stranger at his door, he dropped his knife and made an automatic action to lay protecting hands on a dingy bundle, half out, half under the low bed. Hildegarde’s attention was of necessity centered in the dogs; his, shaky and half-blind, conducting defense from the foot of the bed. The girl laid hold on Red’s collar and dragged him back, although it was plain now she had done so, that he considered the decrepit animal, half-muffled in the blanket, as vanquished already and quite unworthy of more consideration than could be conveyed in a final volley of scornful howls. After which relief to his feelings, Hildegarde’s fellow-intruder pointedly turned his back and went sniffing about the forlorn little room.
“I am sorry we disturbed you,” the girl said to the hollow-eyed, unkempt being on the bed. There were curious scars on the wasted face set in its frame of wild, tawny hair and wilder, tawnier beard. No scattering of silver here and there, but just at the temples the hair was white as wool. As she saw plainer now, being usedto the dimness, the face, striking as it was, impressed her chiefly through that quality of special ghastliness produced by a pallor that shows clay-like under tan. “I thought,” she said, winding up her apology—“I thought the dog was shut up here alone—forgotten.”
“It might come to be like that,” he said, and paused an instant, as if for breath. When he spoke again it was less to his visitor than as if to soothe the ruffled feelings of the miserable beast at his feet. “It won’t be my fault, though,” he said. “I’ll forget most things before I forget you, shan’t I, Ky?”
“That is how his master feels about this dog, too, thoughhe’snothing but a mongrel,” Hildegarde said. She was thinking, “The man is very ill.”
“His master—some one prospecting hereabouts?”
Briefly Hildegarde explained. As she moved toward the door, she caught an expression on the sunken face so arresting that straightway she said to herself: “What is a starving dog more than a dying man, that I should come to help the one and flee the other?”
“I am afraid you are very ill.”
“Yes,” he answered quietly.
“There’s someone at the settlement who looks after you?”
He smiled faintly. “They’ve given me up as a bad investment.”
“Oh!” broke from the girl’s lips, as she leaned forward and then caught herself up. Was the hermit not dead after all! Was she face to face at last with the discoverer of the Mother Lode? If so, she mustn’t seem to know. “Isn’t there any doctor here?” she added hurriedly.
“There’s a fellow theycall‘doctor.’”
“Then let me go for him.”
“He’s off prospecting.”
“When will he be back?”
“After I’m gone, I guess.”
“Oh, you are leaving here?” and the moment she said it she felt the cruelty of the question.
But he only answered “Yes,” and left her to miss or to divine his meaning. Looking in his face she forgot his character of hermit, and fell to wondering whom he had in the world to care about his leaving it. Instinctively she knew that a man with such a spirit looking out of eyes like those—for a man like this to die, meant to some one far away the worst that could befall. And suddenly she felt that she was enviable, being there, if in some way she could help him. What was there she might do?
He glanced at the foot of the bed, where the old dog lay at his feet. “When did you say you were going back to your ship?”
“Not for an hour or so,” she said. “More than long enough for me to—when did you eat last?”
“If you’d give me a little water,” he spoke huskily.
She went to a zinc bucket that stood in the corner. “I’m afraid this isn’t fresh,” she said.
“Yes. An old fellow brought it only an hour ago. There’s the cup.”
She followed his eyes to a rusty condensed-milk can, which she filled and rinsed, saying cheerfully: “Then some onedoeslook after you?”
“No, it isn’t after me the old scoundrel looks.” With great eyes darkening, he lowered his voice: “Is he hanging about still? A sort of tramp with—”
“No, the man I think you mean has gone out to the gulch.”
“H’m! Tired of waiting! We saw that in his face when he brought in the water, didn’t we, Ky?” The dog raised her head. “Yes, he wasn’t anything like as afraid of you, Ky, as he used to be. Time’s short.” He pulled himself up and fell to work with a knife upon the piece of wood that lay on the gray blanket.
Suspiciousness has made him brain-sick, thought the girl. She dried the dripping can on her handkerchief as she looked over at the dog. “Poor Ky. What happened to her eye?”
“Left it up yonder.” He glanced through the open door to the white surf curling up above the tundra, and with his wild head he made a little motion to the north. But not even long enough to drink did he stop his feverish whittling. As she put the cup on a tin cracker-box, set within his reach, she saw there was a little heap of shavings and splinters in the hollow of the blanket between the man’s gaunt knees, and she noticed that he held his knife with grotesque awkwardness. Then, with an inward shrinking, saw that to every finger but two, the final joint or more was lacking. “How dreadfully you’ve been hurt.”
He looked up and then followed the direction of her glance. “Yes, I got a good deal mauled”—only half-articulate the iterated burden—“up yonder.”
His voice made her heart ache for pity of such utter weakness. The task he had set himself looked as painful as impossible. Yet remembering the solace whittling seems to be to certain backwoodsmen: “Do you do that for amusement?” she asked diffidently.
“If that’s what it is, I shan’t lack entertainment.”
She looked wonderingly in his face.
“I was weeks before cutting up a little wood. But somebody stole it. Scarcer than gold up here.”
Oh, yes, the discoverer of the Mother Lode had stores of the precious metal hidden away somewhere. The skulker among the rocks—heknew!
“Let me help.” She went closer with outstretched hand. But he started and dropped the clumsily held wood. It all happened in an instant. Hildegarde, following the look on the wild face he was bending down, saw that his concern was not for the precious and sole piece of timber in the hut, but for the oilskin bundle under the bed, which her dog was in the act of investigating. The half-blind beast on the blanket saw, too. She made one bound and fell upon Hildegarde’s companion with a fury that filled the narrow space with noise of battle. The sick man called off his dog, while Hildegarde reviled hers and tugged at his collar.
When peace was again restored, “I must take him away,” said his mistress. “He’s behaving very badly.”
“No, it will be all right if I—” The sick man leaned still further over the side of the narrow bed, and fastened the hand Hildegarde couldn’t bear to look at under the knotted oilskin.
As she saw him feebly straining to lift it: “Oh, let me,” she said, and bent to help him.
Again his dog flew to the rescue, while the man himself, with a desperate final effort, almost snatched the bundle from under her fingers. “I—I beg your pardon,” he said panting, and again he made his dog lie down.
But Hildegarde’s feelings were a little hurt. The normal miner, she had always understood, showed people his gold—even trusted them to handle it.
“Poor old Ky,” the sick man went on apologetically; “she has got so used to guarding this”—he was himself positively hugging the unsavory bundle—“she can’t see any other creature come near it without—”
“You’re quite as bad,” Hildegarde said to herself, but a glance at the face, with the look of doom in the eyes, made her set down his excitement, and the failure in fairly judging her, to the darkening of all things in the gathering shadow.
“I suppose you think I have something very valuable here?” he said, suspiciously.
“It wouldn’t be the first time in Alaska that something valuable has been wrapped in rags and left lying in a corner.”
“Something like what I’ve got here?” he asked, as he took tighter hold on the oilskin.
He should not think she was curious about his gold dust and his nuggets. She looked at Ky climbing with difficulty back to her place at the foot of the bed, and pointedly changed the subject. “Your dog is very lame.”
He nodded. “Got one of her paws crushed.”
To distract him from his brain-sick anxiety about the bundle, “How was that?” Hildegarde asked. No answer this time, only that same northward motion. “She must be very old,” Hildegarde pursued.
“No.”
“Your dog, I mean. Surely she is old.”
“No. She got like that—up—”