II
It did snow that night, and Lucky Jim steered his sled across the frozen river about two o'clock. On arriving at the farther bank he slipped on his snowshoes and took the lead. The dog-team followed.
This dive into the wilderness seemed to differ little from starting across the ocean in a small boat, for the great flat resembled a sea that had been frozen when a heavy swell was on. But although Lucky Jim had never crossed the flat before—it was a route that invited hardship, even disaster—he knew perfectly well what he was doing. He was cutting off a great elbow in the river.
About four that afternoon he made camp on an "island," a half-acre covered with scrub spruce and birch. Centuries before this piece of high ground had doubtless occupied a place in the river channel of that time.
In the afternoon of the fourth day out he struck the river again. The weather had cleared. He reckoned he had covered sixty miles since leaving Totatla City—a distance he could have negotiated much sooner had he been traveling light and pressed for time; but the dogs were hauling a load in excess of seven hundred pounds, three hundred of which was their own rice and dried salmon.
And in reality Lucky Jim had made good time, for by crossing the flat instead of coming around by the river he had cut the distance from Totatla City in two. This he proved to his satisfaction by reason of a peculiarly shaped hill on the opposite bank, at the foot of which he had camped over night on his way down the fall before, and from which point it had taken him twenty-four hours by raft to reach Totatla City. He reckoned the river current—in the fall of the year—at five miles an hour.
He started up the river on the shore ice next morning. An hour later he arrived at the foot of the rapids, and shortly thereafter passed up through the canyon.
Fifteen days out from Totatla City he made his camp on Easy Money bar—or, as he had named it the summer before, Gold Tender. That night he made himself a calendar for the month of April out of the leaf of a notebook and crossed out the first day.
"On the face of it," he chuckled that night after rolling into his wolf robe, "it sounds queer that I should have landed on Dad's bar last summer, but not after you come to think it over. The bar is one of the highest on the whole river, I guess, and the heavy wash gravel that carries the pay stares everybody that passes in the face. Only a chechako would miss it, or one of the hot-air prospectors that hang around the Red Fox and the Nugget hotels. Which I take it Dad and me are the only two old-timers who have passed this way."
Lucky Jim had come over the divide from the Kantishna region the summer before.
A week later Lucky Jim was in possession of a good summer cabin—he had occupied a tent on his previous stay on the bar—and was engaged chopping down some spruce trees destined to become sluicing lumber, when the barking of the dogs announced the approach of someone. He paused and listened. A jangle of sleighbells came to his ear. Shouldering his axe he stepped to the bank and looked down the river. At a distance of three hundredyards he spied two mushers each driving a dog-team attached to which were heavily laden sleds. He went into his cabin, belted on a gun and returned to the bank to await the strangers' arrival.
As they drew near he noticed that both men were deeply tanned from the reflection of the April sun on the snow, and that they wore snowglasses. Because of these he did not at first recognize them.
"Hello!" he cried.
This hail was responded to in kind, but only after a slight but noticeable hesitation. He never removed his eye from them. They halted when they came level with him. He recognized them then as Chenoa Pete and Mike Taggart, men for whom he had little use. He had reckoned that they "didn't belong."
"Whither bound?" he asked.
"Oh, up the river a ways," returned Chenoa Pete.
"Unhitch and stick around for a day," invited Lucky Jim.
"We dassn't," spoke up Mike Taggart. "The snow is packin' fast and we've got quite a ways to go yet. Is this where you pick up your whisky dust?"
Mike waved a hand embracingly.
From where they stood, a dozen bars in the river were distinctly outlined, but in view of the fact that Lucky Jim had not yet done any work on Easy Money, all bars looked alike to the mushers.
Lucky Jim waved his hand in the manner Mike Taggart had employed.
"This is where I mean to do a little prospecting this summer," he made answer.
"Let's mush," suggested Chenoa Pete. "So long," he flung up to Lucky Jim, a civility repeated by Mike Taggart a moment later, and to which Lucky Jim replied in kind.
"We can't do a damned thing," swore Chenoa Pete when safely out of Lucky Jim's hearing, "until after he has gone to work. It may be any one of half a dozen bars near where he's camped. Let him do the dead work anyway, I mean to have a good long rest, beginning some time tomorrow."
"I'd give something to know how he got here so quick! He's put up that shack since he arrived. He took some short cut or another."
"He came fast, I'll admit, Mike, but no man in his senses would cut across the flat—summer or winter. He's probably got a crackajack team. He's some fast mover, though."
Lucky Jim returned thoughtfully to his work. The meeting, from his point of view, had been an unsatisfactory one. The majority of mushers, he reasoned, would have stuck around and smoked a pipe or two, had dinner with him.
"They've left a bad taste in my mind," he declared.
By May first Lucky Jim finished whipsawing lumber. He then turned his attention to a bedrock drain across the bar. The snow was about gone, but the earth was still frozen. He laid a wood fire four feet wide and about one hundred and fifty feet long diagonally across the bar, and lighted it. Next day he began to dig out the drain.
Lucky Jim did not work like an ordinary man; he was as tireless as a machine. And he worked intelligently. During every day of the next three weeks he worked eighteen hours a day. Worked and slept.
At the end of that time his bedrock drain was completed. It was five feet deep and on bedrock from one end to the other. He had struck good, even rich pay. He spent two days making sluice-boxes, another making riffles for them out of three-inch poles, and still another fitting the whole into his trench.
The ice in the river moved downstream that night. Beginning next morning he worked thirty-six hours, steady, on a wing dam. The last of the ice passed down the river. He pulled the gate in the dam and let the water into the boxes, picked down some pay dirt from the sides. It worked like a charm. He was ready to sluice. He staggered to his cabin, curled up in his blankets and was sound asleep in no time.
Out of a hundred men Lucky Jim would have been the only one to go to all this trouble. The remaining ninety-nine would have contented themselves with rocking, and let it go at that. The high water might last no longer than a week. But in that week's sluicing Lucky Jim would shove more pay dirt through the boxes than three men could rock all summer long.
Shortly after midnight—though almostas clear as day at this time—the dogs began to bark, but Lucky Jim did not hear them. A few moments later Chenoa Pete shoved the barrel of his rifle through the open window, then cautiously raised his head. In that moment Mike Haggart entered by way of the door and covered Lucky Jim. Chenoa Pete then climbed in by way of the window.
Like a jack-in-the-box Lucky Jim suddenly raised himself to a sitting posture, and mechanically reached for his rifle which hung on the wall just above his bunk.
"Quit that and put them up!" ordered Mike Haggart.
Lucky Jim rubbed his eyes and glanced from one to the other.
"What's the idea?" he asked, raising his hands above his head.
"You're goin' back down the river," stated Chenoa Pete. "If you go quietly, everything will be hunkydory. If you make a fuss about it—why, you won't go at all. Get up!"
While his hands happened to be up Lucky Jim seized the opportunity for a good yawn.
"You poor crooks," he then said, throwing his legs over the bunk onto the floor. "I suppose you wouldn't listen to a partnership proposition?"
An idea had entered Lucky Jim's head.
"I should say nix!" exclaimed Chenoa Pete with a laugh. "You've got everything set and ready for a whoppin' clean-up a week from now. I'll say you're a good miner. But down the river you've got to go."
"And you're gonna stay down, too, see!" And Mike Haggart poked Lucky Jim in the side with the business end of his rifle.
"Just why are you running me off this bar?"
"Why? Good Lord, ain't we been watching Dad Manslow for eighteen months and tryin' to get outa him where he got that $2,000 worth of dust? Do you think a bar like this is picked up every day?"
"Why don't you go out and hunt up your own bars?"
"Aw, cut out the wranglin'!" exclaimed Chenoa Pete. "Put some grub in a box and get the hell outa here!"
Lucky Jim filled a sack with provisions and, followed by the claim-jumpers, went down the trail cut in the bank to the beach. There he was ordered aboard a raft tied to the root of a drift log, then told to call his dogs aboard. When this was done, they untied the rope and shoved the raft out into the current.
"So long," called Lucky Jim. "I'll see you in Totatla City when you come down."
"You've got some wait!" cried Chenoa Pete.
Lucky Jim started. "So they mean to go out by way of Kantishna, huh?" he mused.
"I still think we'd ought to have tied him," quoth Mike Haggart.
"You're a good man with your hands, Mike, but you ain't got the brains of a flea. Just suppose he was to get into Totatla City in that condition? They'd have something on us, wouldn't they? Or suppose he got drowned in the rapids and goes floatin' down the river and winds up on a bar—which Alaskan rivers are always doin'. Wouldn't the whole marshal's force at Fairbanks be put to work on the case? He's got nothing on us at all. The worst he can do is to get an injunction to throw us off, and he'd have to go to Fairbanks to get that. By which time the season would be over. And seein' he has no witnesses to corroborate his statement, I don't believe he could even get an injunction. Lucky Jim knows all this. He'll swallow his medicine and take a chance on meeting up with us some other time. Which he'll never get the chance. About the middle of September we'll duck across to Ruby and catch a down-river boat for Nome. We've got possession. Let's get to work. What shift do you want to take?"
"Night shift for mine; it's cooler."
"All right. Go on to bed. We've got to take advantage of every hour of the high water."
Chenoa went up the river about two hundred yards and crossed the mainland to the bar by way of Lucky Jim's log bridge. Five minutes afterward the water was racing through the sluices, and Chenoa Pete shoveling and picking in the pay dirt from the sides of the bedrock drain.
After watching the raft disappear around a bend Mike Haggart climbed the trail to the bank, thence to the cabin.
"I thought I had put everybody off my trail," Lucky Jim was saying to himself, "who might happen to be interested in my movements. I got away clean enough, but the same snow storm that protected that, also gave me away—the untracked snow about my cabin. Of course, one of them must have followed Dad and me to his cabin the night he made me the proposition. Well, there they are, and here Iam. I guess Dad's trip to Sitka is all off."
Thoughts of this riled him.
"They're robbin' an old pioneer, that's what they're doin'! And I had it figured out that he'd spend the rest of his days in comfort. And, by gum, he will, too!"
When about two miles below the bar Lucky Jim steered the raft into a slough and went ashore. He kindled a fire and made himself a small pail full of coffee. Hour after hour he sat there drinking the warm liquid, and now and again throwing a couple of small sticks on the fire.
Around seven in the morning he cooked and ate his breakfast, then went to sleep.
He woke about five in the afternoon; cooked himself another meal, chained up the dogs, then climbed the hill. An hour later, from a point of vantage on the mountain spur that rose just back of his cabin, he looked down upon Easy Money bar. Not without a thrill he noticed that his bedrock drain was no longer that, but a real cut.
"I'll bet there's some real money in those boxes at this minute!" he cried.
Critically he inspected the several channels of the river beyond Easy Money and other bars, then the flat beyond these. Evidently satisfied with the results of his reconnoitre, he returned to his camp. His first act thereafter was to make a measuring stick and drive it into the river bottom a few yards from the shore.
Next day Lucky Jim took the dogs, crossed the divide and spent the day fishing on a stream on the other side. On his return with a mess of trout the first thing he did was to look at his measuring stick. The river, it told him, had gone down three inches during the past twenty-four hours.
"Five more days," he yawned. "Ho hum."
The customary thing on placer claims in Alaska is to make a clean-up every week. There was a special reason why the boxes would be cleaned up on Easy Money bar at the end of that period: If the river continued to fall and no rain came, there would not be sufficient water to sluice with. One or two men can't raise a whole river.
In the afternoon of the sixth day after his ejection, Lucky Jim trekked up the river by way of the mountain ridge. When well beyond Easy Money bar he dropped down to the river, then crossed it on a log. He walked down the beach until within a half-mile of Easy Money bar, then disappeared into the flat—just plumb dropped out of sight.
This was made possible by reason of the fact that for years innumerable the flat had annually been inundated for miles back from the river during the high water in the spring, and the receding waters had honeycombed the black muck to a depth of eighteen inches to two feet. On top of the "niggerheads," or pillars of muck thus formed, grew wild bunch grass. Through this maze Lucky Jim started to crawl downstream, secure in the fact that no one could see him.
He arrived at a point in line with Easy Money bar at nine o'clock, mud from his nose to the toes of his moccasins. In places he had been obliged to crawl through several inches of exceedingly dirty water. But he got there.
Between his place of concealment and Easy Money bar lay two other bars, one of which was covered with willows. For almost another day he lay and watched both men at work in the cut. And what a cut!
"They've put through the boxes just about double the dirt that I could have done alone!" he whispered to himself.
At length Chenoa Pete left the cut and strolled up to the cabin. Mike Haggart continued to work alone.
It was still almost as clear as at noon, and the hills were rosy in the westering sun when Lucky Jim dropped down the bank and made for the first bar. Such was the racket made by the rocks going over the riffles in the sluice-race that there was slight chance of his being heard.
Keeping to one side so that even should Mike Haggart turn around he would still be none the wiser regarding his presence, Lucky Jim dashed across the second channel and into the willows of bar number two. A clump of birch on the lower end of Easy Money bar protected him against discovery from the cabin.
Lucky Jim collected his wits for the final rush. Carefully he selected two rocks from the tail-race that exactly fitted his capable hands, stepped into channel number three and up the tail-race into the sluice-boxes.
Mike Haggart never knew what struck him. He fell back into the boxes and thewater raced over him. Five minutes afterward, tied hand and foot and with the collar of his own shirt in his mouth as a gag, Lucky Jim dumped him among the willows of bar number two.
He then hastened to the head of the sluice-string and almost but not quite, shut off the water. Here he also discovered Mike Haggart's rifle, which he removed to a handier location. He began to pull the nails driven in the sides of the boxes which held the riffles in place. That done he washed the bottoms of them carefully. The gold dust lay on them like sawdust.
"It's goin' to be a fine clean-up," he declared.
He turned on a little more water and began to work down the residue with a shovel. Later he laid that aside and pulled two wooden paddles from his hip pocket; reduced the water, produced a homemade whisk-broom.
By and by a nice pile of clean gold lay against one side of the head box.
"Ten or twelve thousand dollars anyway," he assured himself. "Dad Manslow goes to Sitka, I guess!"
He scooped the gold into a panning pan that lay handy, and with this under one arm and Mike Haggart's rifle under the other he crossed the log bridge to the mainland and started up the hillside. Lucky Jim was taking no chances of losing the clean-up.
He returned fifteen minutes later, strode into the cabin and poked Chenoa Pete in the ribs with his rifle.
"Get up!" he ordered.
Chenoa Pete sat up and stared at him. His jaw fell, and for a few moments Lucky Jim expected a flood of tears. Never in all his life before had he been a witness to such keen disappointment. As had been meted to him when similarly situated, he once more jabbed the crook in the ribs.
"Get up and get out!"
Chenoa Pete was a big man and in a purely physical encounter would doubtless have disposed of Lucky Jim, not easily, but by force of his advantage in weight. And because of this superiority, in the past he had got by fairly easily, and elected himself to the position of dictator of the parasite element in Totatla City. Dignity off its perch is a sad sight. His eyes actually filled with tears.
"Get the hell out of my cabin!" cried Lucky Jim, disgusted at this exhibition. "I'd like to sentence you to work alongside of me with a shovel for six months. Out you go!" And he poked the big fellow in the back and actually shoved him through the door.
There Chenoa Pete was commanded to take an axe and get to work on a raft. While this order was being executed, Lucky Jim seated himself on a stump with the rifle across his knees. Now and again he rolled a cigarette. When the raft was completed, its maker was requested to carry his partner from the farther bar and place him on it. But in the line of provisions Lucky Jim did not make the mistake they had made. He had been allowed to take what, and as much as he wanted, so had taken as much as would last him for about three weeks. He gave them a four-quart kettle half-filled with dry rolled oats—and no salt.
"Now let me tell you something," he warned them when ready to depart, "don't stick around Totatla City. Because if you're there when I arrive I'll call a miners' meeting. You know what that will mean to such as you. Now get!"
They got.
Lucky Jim followed by way of the bank, and took no little abuse, and listened to about a thousand threats, from Chenoa Pete. He merely laughed.
Two hours later he returned with a pack on his back and his dogs at his heels. Then he retrieved the clean-up from the hillside, dried and weighed it. It totalled $10,500.
"I'm surely the lucky guy!" he exclaimed. "This looks as if I'd get away with a homestake this summer!"
He sluiced and shoveled into the boxes for two more days. When the water got so low that it couldn't carry off the washed rocks, he cleaned up once more. Fifteen hundred dollars this time. He dug out and re-set his boxes.
For over a month thereafter Lucky Jim rocked the pay dirt. This change from a swift to a slow method of getting rich would have disgusted the majority of miners in his affluent situation, but the thoughtof going down the river at this time never even crossed his mind.
Along toward the first of August a wet spell set in, and being all set to take advantage of the high water, he subtly put the latter to work for him. For almost two weeks it rained steadily, all of which time Lucky Jim shoveled sixteen and seventeen hours every day.
"Make gold while the water runs," he would tell himself when his arms ached. "There's a long winter coming."
When for the second time the water went down, Lucky Jim's gold sacks contained a matter of $22,000.
Still he kept his head and set to rocking again, and continued this until the middle of September. By which time the water was low in the river, the birch and willows yellow, and a light snow lay on the ground.
His summer's work on Easy Money bar had netted him something better than $25,000. The gold was in five sacks of $5,000 each.
"I guess," he said, "Dad can go to California or Timbucto if he wants to. And welcome. A pioneer has every right to spend his last years in comfort."
On the morning of September 17th he started down the river. He was lean, brown and as hard as nails. Late that night he made camp just above the canyon. He wasn't minded to risk the rapids in the dark. Anyway, he reckoned he had plenty of time. He had relaxed and was enjoying his trip.
In the morning he went through the rapids without incident. A mile below this the main channel passed through a narrow gap between two islands. When halfway through, and at the narrowest point, a rope settled about his shoulders and he was jerked violently off the raft.
After a short struggle he got his arms free and started to swim for the shore. A small raft passed him on which stood Mike Haggart.
"How d'ye like it, huh?" he snarled and hit Lucky Jim a blow on the head with his pole in passing.
For some time thereafter the world was dark. He came to lying on the beach, the rope still about his waist. He struggled to his feet and stared downstream. He was just in time to see Chenoa Pete spring aboard his raft from the deck of a smaller one. He steered it into the eddy until Mike Haggart came along and joined him. Five minutes later they disappeared round a bend.
"This looks bad," muttered Lucky Jim. "And of course they'll drift clear to Fort Gibbon and catch a boat there for the Outside. Poor Dad." He wound the rope about his waist.
He crossed the island and waded the channel between it and the flat. He started walking down the bank, because there seemed nothing else that he could do. Meantime, he was thinking, and thinking the hardest he knew how.
Thirty minutes later he paused beside the charred remains of a camp-fire. He looked about him. He had a remarkable memory for landmarks.
"This is where I camped four days out from Totatla City last March," he said to himself. "Let's see."
He turned and looked away across the interminable flat. In mind he went over it the entire distance.
"I don't doubt but what the ground is firm by this time," he muttered, "but—Well, there's about one chance in a thousand that I nose them out! It's at least a hundred and twenty-five miles away by way of the river, and sixty, maybe a little more, across the flat. And I've still got my gun. Poor Dad!"
Lucky Jim started on a lope across the flat. Without a pound of grub.
Meanwhile, Chenoa Pete was complimenting his partner.
"I'll say you can handle a rope, Mike!" he declared admiringly. Then he laughed. "Damn if I ever saw anything so funny in all my life. I never did! One moment he was on the raft, and the next—haw, haw, haw! He went through the air like a fish on the end of a line!"
"At first," returned Mike, highly elated with the success of his exploit, "I meant to drop it around his neck. Then says I to myself, I won't get but the one chance, so I made the loop bigger and dropped it around his body."
"It was pretty work. Of course, I'd have got him with the rifle if you had missed, but I'm leary about rivers. I remember one time a guy in the upper country shot his three partners comin' down theYukon in a small boat and buried them on an island. Next year along comes the old river and washes half that island away and turns the three guys loose on the current. The Mounted Police finally picked them up, and two years later there was a hangin' in Dawson. Believe me, Mike, Alaska is a hard country to get out of, if you're wanted!"
"It is," Mike Haggart agreed. "But we ain't goin' out. Nome will be good enough for us this winter."
"Anywhere along the lower river."
They then hefted Lucky Jim's pokes of dust, and guessed and guessed again at the value of their contents.
"He surely is some worker!" vowed Mike Haggart.
The day passed and evening came on apace. Chenoa Pete rolled himself in a blanket and lay down. Mike Haggart set himself to watch till midnight. The moon rose and the stars came out.
All through that long day, loping and walking by turns, no definite plan formed itself in Lucky Jim's mind with regard to the manner of successfully handling the crooks even should he succeed in intercepting them. True, he had their lariat about his waist, and his gun was still in its holster at his belt—he had dried and cleaned it the first time he rested. Even so, the idea of shooting them down in cold blood was repugnant to him, and besides, might not be wholly effective, for the raft would continue to drift. But walking or running, the problem never for a moment left his mind.
He rested for two full hours at sunset, but when the moon shot up he resumed his way. As when he crossed the flat in the spring, he was going it blind. In reality, however, his sense of direction was so highly developed that he might have been racing along a chalked line that ended opposite Totatla City. During the years he had spent in Alaska, Lucky Jim had taken longer chances, and many of them, to save a long detour. He was a man perfectly at home in the wilderness.
For the first time in his carefree life he worried over an issue, dreaded the approach of the crucial moment. Not for his own, be it understood, but for Dad Manslow's sake. He would have done just as much on his own behalf, but he never would have worried, racked his brain for a solution to the affair. He would have trusted to what he called his luck, and backed the same with his indefatigable spirit and energy.
At six in the morning he encountered a rather wide back slough, the quicksand on the edge of which gave him pause. A bank of blue smoke rimmed with sunlight away to the left he guessed must be Totatla City. He reasoned, therefore, that he could not be far from the river. He was nervous, but never for a moment did he forget the main chance. He must get to the river just as fast as he could. He started along the bank of the slough.
Lucky Jim no longer ran. Nor, despite his long fast and his almost continuous effort, could it be said that he staggered. It was a queer, humped-up lope. The joints of his knees were so stiff, and ached so that, in order to avoid bending them, when taking a step he flung his leg out from his body. On the stage or in a motion picture, his manner of locomotion would have been considered a scream.
The lariat was still about his waist, and the gun still hung at his belt.
He came upon the river suddenly on rounding a bend. To stave off reaction, the desire to fling himself down and forget everything, he walked into the river and headed for an island against which the current nibbled. At the deepest point, which was a mere dozen feet from the island, the water just reached his armpits. He breasted this on an upstream slant and finally effected a landing.
He turned and looked back. He at length decided that any raft, or tree or floating thing that came down the river must of necessity come within twenty feet of the island. And before he was aware of it, he had, so to speak, seized his problem by the throat.
He went to the lower end of the island and tied three drift logs together with the lariat; left it on the shingle ready to launch. He returned to the head of the island and gathered a pile of stones. A couple of shots over their heads from his gun and a swat on the head with a rock would, he reasoned, create no little confusion, out of which he expected to come with a drop on them.
Miracles will never cease is a true saying. They never cease to happen for thebenefit of those who help them with all their might to come to pass. Lucky Jim was still piling rocks when he happened to look upstream and spy the nose of the raft coming around a bend about a third of a mile away. He flattened himself in the brush and waited; drew his gun.
As the raft drew nearer he sighted the dogs, and started. The fools! Weren't there a hundred men in Totatla City who knew his dogs? What damned fools they were! But how his heart did sing within him. He repressed the desire to let loose a great big laugh. Towser, his lead dog lay in the front end, his massive head on his paws. He looked—or so thought Lucky Jim—peeved. Chenoa Pete had a hand on the sweep; his companion was lying down.
The raft came on without a ripple. The current was driving it toward the upper end of the island. Chenoa Pete began to work the sweep, leisurely. When thirty feet distant Lucky Jim fired a shot over his head then sprang to his feet.
"Sick 'em, Towser!" he shouted. "Sick 'em, Rum! Sick 'em, Rye! Sick 'em, Brandy!"
Coincident with calling each of his dogs by name Lucky Jim fired a shot. Then he sprang down to the beach, picked up a handful of gravel and threw it at the two men. Recognizing the familiar voice, the dogs first barked with delight. "Sick 'em," they also understood without a doubt, for they immediately sprang on Chenoa Pete and Mike Haggart, snarling, snapping and biting, husky fashion.
The raft came alongside Lucky Jim, and just about ten feet away. He started down the beach in line with it.
"Jump, you fools," he shouted, "or they'll eat you alive!" He fired another couple of shots.
Out of the mélée on the raft sprang a figure in rags bawling blue murder. There was a splash. Lucky Jim had just paused long enough to note that it was Chenoa Pete that was struggling in the water, and bawling still. He was followed a moment later by Mike Haggart. Neither men had had a chance to seize a gun. The dogs had kept them too busy.
Lucky Jim raced ahead a short distance then plunged into the water. The dogs welcomed him with yowls of joy as he climbed aboard the raft. His pokes of dust still lay in the bottom of his empty sled.
"Fine," he said.
He turned and looked back. Chenoa Pete was already ashore and Mike Haggart was climbing the bank. He waved his hand to them.
"You're the poorest fish that ever came out of this river!" he called to them.
He docked at Totatla City an hour later. TheDusty Diamondwas at the wharf, bow downstream. Lucky Jim hitched the dogs to the sled and set out for Dad Manslow's cabin. The old man came to the door when he heard his voice.
"Well, Dad, here I am!" cried Lucky Jim. "And, believe me, my usual well-known luck has been on the job every minute since I left you. On the square, Dad! I'm the luckiest guy——"
Dad's grin, an ear-to-ear affair, cut him short.
"You tell that dodgasted rubbish about your luck to the sit-downers and stove-huggers!" he exclaimed. "I know what prospectors' luck is. It's guts an' gumption! Did yuh have any trouble findin' the bar or anything?"
Lucky Jim's whimsical smile faded.
"Why, Dad, twice a couple o' tinhorns tried to put something over on me, but there wasn't enough gray matter mixed in with their stuff, which was pretty raw. It was easy money from Easy Money bar, Dad." He uncovered the five pokes of dust. "And there's the clean-up," he concluded.
The Adam's apple on the old man's throat worked up and down, and his eyes blurred.
"God bless yuh, Lucky Jim," he mumbled.
Lucky Jim started to carry the gold inside. On a plate on the table were a few soda biscuits. He shoved one into his mouth, then went after another sack. Dad carried in the remainder while Lucky Jim stuffed himself with biscuits.
TheDusty Diamondlet loose two blasts with her siren.
"Is she going down today?" inquired Lucky Jim.
"That's her fifteen minute whistle," replied Dad. "She'll be the last boat toleave Totatla City this fall. I'd like to catch her. If you'll weigh me out that thousand dollars——"
Lucky Jim opened one of the sacks and did that. He poured the dust into the old man's poke.
"Now," said Dad, "I'll pay you for the grub. I guess I just about cleaned it up. How much was it?"
"Oh, call it two hundred dollars."
Dad weighed that amount out of his thousand and poured in back into Lucky Jim's poke.
Dad produced his dunnage bag. Into this Lucky Jim threw the four full sacks, $20,000 worth.
"Hey!" cried Dad, alarmed. "What yuh doin'? That ain't mine!"
"Ain't I got as good a right to go outside as you have?"
The old man's face lighted up. "Gosh, that'll be great!" he cried.
Lucky Jim swung Dad's sack across his shoulders.
"Let's get aboard," he suggested. "I've still got a little debt to settle at the Red Fox."
He picked up the remaining sack of gold and led the way on board the steamboat. Out of the corner of his eye he beheld a little raft drift past on which were seated two men back to back, sort of like twin billikins. He waved to them airily.
He dropped Dad's seventy-odd years' gatherings in theDusty Diamond'ssaloon.
"Don't ever let that bag out of your sight," he told Dad. "I'll be back in a few minutes."
Lucky Jim did not reappear on the dock until the gangplank had been hauled ashore and the lines cast off. Dad Manslow, almost frantic, stood on the saloon deck waving and shouting.
"Come on!" he cried, "Come on!"
Lucky Jim could still have jumped aboard.
"I can't come today, Dad," he made answer. "I'm too sleepy. Take care of yourself. So long."
TheDusty Diamondswung out into the channel.
Lucky Jim strolled across the street into the Red Fox and entered the bar. He was familiarly greeted by half a hundred men not unlike himself. He took off his old fur cap and bowed acknowledgments; tapped his breast.
"Lucky Jim," he cried, "from Easy Money bar."
He turned to stare at Pinleg Scoddy whose face was creased into something that remotely resembled a smite of welcome. He flung his poke on the bar.
"Take eleven ounces out of that!" ordered Lucky Jim coldly.
Pinleg Scoddy started at the size of the poke, and guessed at its value to within five ounces. He pushed it back toward its owner.
"Aw, forget that," he cried, "and have a little drink on the house."
"Take eleven ounces of dust out of that poke!" repeated Lucky Jim.
This time there was no temporizing. With a face as red as a split beet, Pinleg Scoddy weighed out what was coming to him and returned the poke to Lucky Jim.
The latter tucked the poke under his arm and turned to the crowd.
"Boys," he cried, "I'm going up to the Nugget hotel to raise the roof. I need all the help I can get. Come along!"
A minute later the Red Fox bar was empty.
A PINKERTON novelette in our next number
DOWNSTREAM
ByRobert E. Pinkerton
A story of the North; of those pushing upstream, their fortunes still ahead; of those coming downstream, the magic of the wild behind them.