So saying he opened the back of his watch and exposed a girl’s photograph pasted on the inside of the case. Corry Hutchinson gazed at it with admiration welling up in his eyes.
“Mabel is her name,” Pentfield went on. “And it’s just as well you should know how to find the house. Soon as you strike ’Frisco, take a cab, and just say, ‘Holmes’s place, Myrdon Avenue’—I doubt if the Myrdon Avenue is necessary. The cabby’ll know where Judge Holmes lives.
“And say,” Pentfield continued, after a pause, “it won’t be a bad idea for you to get me a few little things which a—er—”
“A married man should have in his business,” Hutchinson blurted out with a grin.
Pentfield grinned back.
“Sure, napkins and tablecloths and sheets and pillowslips, and such things. And you might get a good set of china. You know it’ll come hard for her to settle down to this sort of thing. You can freight them in by steamer around by Bering Sea. And, I say, what’s the matter with a piano?”
Hutchinson seconded the idea heartily. His reluctance had vanished, and he was warming up to his mission.
“By Jove! Lawrence,” he said at the conclusion of the council, as they both rose to their feet, “I’ll bring back that girl of yours in style. I’ll do the cooking and take care of the dogs, and all that brother’ll have to do will be to see to her comfort and do for her whatever I’ve forgotten. And I’ll forget damn little, I can tell you.”
The next day Lawrence Pentfield shook hands with him for the last time and watched him, running with his dogs, disappear up the frozen Yukon on his way to salt water and the world. Pentfield went back to his Bonanza mine, which was many times more dreary than before, and faced resolutely into the long winter. There was work to be done, men to superintend, and operations to direct in burrowing after the erratic pay streak; but his heart was not in the work. Nor was his heart in any work till the tiered logs of a new cabin began to rise on the hill behind the mine. It was a grand cabin, warmly built and divided into three comfortable rooms. Each log was hand-hewed and squared—an expensive whim when the axemen received a daily wage of fifteen dollars; but to him nothing could be too costly for the home in which Mabel Holmes was to live.
So he went about with the building of the cabin, singing, “And oh, my fair, would I somewhere might house my heart with thee!” Also, he had a calendar pinned on the wall above the table, and his first act each morning was to check off the day and to count the days that were left ere his partner would come booming down the Yukon ice in the spring. Another whim of his was to permit no one to sleep in the new cabin on the hill. It must be as fresh for her occupancy as the square-hewed wood was fresh; and when it stood complete, he put a padlock on the door. No one entered save himself, and he was wont to spend long hours there, and to come forth with his face strangely radiant and in his eyes a glad, warm light.
In December he received a letter from Corry Hutchinson. He had just seen Mabel Holmes. She was all she ought to be, to be Lawrence Pentfield’s wife, he wrote. He was enthusiastic, and his letter sent the blood tingling through Pentfield’s veins. Other letters followed, one on the heels of another, and sometimes two or three together when the mail lumped up. And they were all in the same tenor. Corry had just come from Myrdon Avenue; Corry was just going to Myrdon Avenue; or Corry was at Myrdon Avenue. And he lingered on and on in San Francisco, nor even mentioned his trip to Detroit.
Lawrence Pentfield began to think that his partner was a great deal in the company of Mabel Holmes for a fellow who was going east to see his people. He even caught himself worrying about it at times, though he would have worried more had he not known Mabel and Corry so well. Mabel’s letters, on the other hand, had a great deal to say about Corry. Also, a thread of timidity that was near to disinclination ran through them concerning the trip in over the ice and the Dawson marriage. Pentfield wrote back heartily, laughing at her fears, which he took to be the mere physical ones of danger and hardship rather than those bred of maidenly reserve.
But the long winter and tedious wait, following upon the two previous long winters, were telling upon him. The superintendence of the men and the pursuit of the pay streak could not break the irk of the daily round, and the end of January found him making occasional trips to Dawson, where he could forget his identity for a space at the gambling tables. Because he could afford to lose, he won, and “Pentfield’s luck” became a stock phrase among the faro players.
His luck ran with him till the second week in February. How much farther it might have run is conjectural; for, after one big game, he never played again.
It was in the Opera House that it occurred, and for an hour it had seemed that he could not place his money on a card without making the card a winner. In the lull at the end of a deal, while the game-keeper was shuffling the deck, Nick Inwood the owner of the game, remarked, apropos of nothing:-
“I say, Pentfield, I see that partner of yours has been cutting up monkey-shines on the outside.”
“Trust Corry to have a good time,” Pentfield had answered; “especially when he has earned it.”
“Every man to his taste,” Nick Inwood laughed; “but I should scarcely call getting married a good time.”
“Corry married!” Pentfield cried, incredulous and yet surprised out of himself for the moment.
“Sure,” Inwood said. “I saw it in the ’Frisco paper that came in over the ice this morning.”
“Well, and who’s the girl?” Pentfield demanded, somewhat with the air of patient fortitude with which one takes the bait of a catch and is aware at the time of the large laugh bound to follow at his expense.
Nick Inwood pulled the newspaper from his pocket and began looking it over, saying:-
“I haven’t a remarkable memory for names, but it seems to me it’s something like Mabel—Mabel—oh yes, here it—‘Mabel Holmes, daughter of Judge Holmes,’—whoever he is.”
Lawrence Pentfield never turned a hair, though he wondered how any man in the North could know her name. He glanced coolly from face to face to note any vagrant signs of the game that was being played upon him, but beyond a healthy curiosity the faces betrayed nothing. Then he turned to the gambler and said in cold, even tones:-
“Inwood, I’ve got an even five hundred here that says the print of what you have just said is not in that paper.”
The gambler looked at him in quizzical surprise. “Go ’way, child. I don’t want your money.”
“I thought so,” Pentfield sneered, returning to the game and laying a couple of bets.
Nick Inwood’s face flushed, and, as though doubting his senses, he ran careful eyes over the print of a quarter of a column. Then be turned on Lawrence Pentfield.
“Look here, Pentfield,” he said, in a quiet, nervous manner; “I can’t allow that, you know.”
“Allow what?” Pentfield demanded brutally.
“You implied that I lied.”
“Nothing of the sort,” came the reply. “I merely implied that you were trying to be clumsily witty.”
“Make your bets, gentlemen,” the dealer protested.
“But I tell you it’s true,” Nick Inwood insisted.
“And I have told you I’ve five hundred that says it’s not in that paper,” Pentfield answered, at the same time throwing a heavy sack of dust on the table.
“I am sorry to take your money,” was the retort, as Inwood thrust the newspaper into Pentfield’s hand.
Pentfield saw, though he could not quite bring himself to believe. Glancing through the headline, “Young Lochinvar came out of the North,” and skimming the article until the names of Mabel Holmes and Corry Hutchinson, coupled together, leaped squarely before his eyes, he turned to the top of the page. It was a San Francisco paper.
“The money’s yours, Inwood,” he remarked, with a short laugh. “There’s no telling what that partner of mine will do when he gets started.”
Then he returned to the article and read it word for word, very slowly and very carefully. He could no longer doubt. Beyond dispute, Corry Hutchinson had married Mabel Holmes. “One of the Bonanza kings,” it described him, “a partner with Lawrence Pentfield (whom San Francisco society has not yet forgotten), and interested with that gentleman in other rich, Klondike properties.” Further, and at the end, he read, “It is whispered that Mr. and Mrs. Hutchinson will, after a brief trip east to Detroit, make their real honeymoon journey into the fascinating Klondike country.”
“I’ll be back again; keep my place for me,” Pentfield said, rising to his feet and taking his sack, which meantime had hit the blower and came back lighter by five hundred dollars.
He went down the street and bought a Seattle paper. It contained the same facts, though somewhat condensed. Corry and Mabel were indubitably married. Pentfield returned to the Opera House and resumed his seat in the game. He asked to have the limit removed.
“Trying to get action,” Nick Inwood laughed, as he nodded assent to the dealer. “I was going down to the A. C. store, but now I guess I’ll stay and watch you do your worst.”
This Lawrence Pentfield did at the end of two hours’ plunging, when the dealer bit the end off a fresh cigar and struck a match as he announced that the bank was broken. Pentfield cashed in for forty thousand, shook hands with Nick Inwood, and stated that it was the last time he would ever play at his game or at anybody’s else’s.
No one knew nor guessed that he had been hit, much less hit hard. There was no apparent change in his manner. For a week he went about his work much as he had always done, when he read an account of the marriage in a Portland paper. Then he called in a friend to take charge of his mine and departed up the Yukon behind his dogs. He held to the Salt Water trail till White River was reached, into which he turned. Five days later he came upon a hunting camp of the White River Indians. In the evening there was a feast, and he sat in honour beside the chief; and next morning he headed his dogs back toward the Yukon. But he no longer travelled alone. A young squaw fed his dogs for him that night and helped to pitch camp. She had been mauled by a bear in her childhood and suffered from a slight limp. Her name was Lashka, and she was diffident at first with the strange white man that had come out of the Unknown, married her with scarcely a look or word, and now was carrying her back with him into the Unknown.
But Lashka’s was better fortune than falls to most Indian girls that mate with white men in the Northland. No sooner was Dawson reached than the barbaric marriage that had joined them was re-solemnized, in the white man’s fashion, before a priest. From Dawson, which to her was all a marvel and a dream, she was taken directly to the Bonanza claim and installed in the square-hewed cabin on the hill.
The nine days’ wonder that followed arose not so much out of the fact of the squaw whom Lawrence Pentfield had taken to bed and board as out of the ceremony that had legalized the tie. The properly sanctioned marriage was the one thing that passed the community’s comprehension. But no one bothered Pentfield about it. So long as a man’s vagaries did no special hurt to the community, the community let the man alone, nor was Pentfield barred from the cabins of men who possessed white wives. The marriage ceremony removed him from the status of squaw-man and placed him beyond moral reproach, though there were men that challenged his taste where women were concerned.
No more letters arrived from the outside. Six sledloads of mails had been lost at the Big Salmon. Besides, Pentfield knew that Corry and his bride must by that time have started in over the trail. They were even then on their honeymoon trip—the honeymoon trip he had dreamed of for himself through two dreary years. His lip curled with bitterness at the thought; but beyond being kinder to Lashka he gave no sign.
March had passed and April was nearing its end, when, one spring morning, Lashka asked permission to go down the creek several miles to Siwash Pete’s cabin. Pete’s wife, a Stewart River woman, had sent up word that something was wrong with her baby, and Lashka, who was pre-eminently a mother-woman and who held herself to be truly wise in the matter of infantile troubles, missed no opportunity of nursing the children of other women as yet more fortunate than she.
Pentfield harnessed his dogs, and with Lashka behind took the trail down the creek bed of Bonanza. Spring was in the air. The sharpness had gone out of the bite of the frost and though snow still covered the land, the murmur and trickling of water told that the iron grip of winter was relaxing. The bottom was dropping out of the trail, and here and there a new trail had been broken around open holes. At such a place, where there was not room for two sleds to pass, Pentfield heard the jingle of approaching bells and stopped his dogs.
A team of tired-looking dogs appeared around the narrow bend, followed by a heavily-loaded sled. At the gee-pole was a man who steered in a manner familiar to Pentfield, and behind the sled walked two women. His glance returned to the man at the gee-pole. It was Corry. Pentfield got on his feet and waited. He was glad that Lashka was with him. The meeting could not have come about better had it been planned, he thought. And as he waited he wondered what they would say, what they would be able to say. As for himself there was no need to say anything. The explaining was all on their side, and he was ready to listen to them.
As they drew in abreast, Corry recognized him and halted the dogs. With a “Hello, old man,” he held out his hand.
Pentfield shook it, but without warmth or speech. By this time the two women had come up, and he noticed that the second one was Dora Holmes. He doffed his fur cap, the flaps of which were flying, shook hands with her, and turned toward Mabel. She swayed forward, splendid and radiant, but faltered before his outstretched hand. He had intended to say, “How do you do, Mrs. Hutchinson?”—but somehow, the Mrs. Hutchinson had choked him, and all he had managed to articulate was the “How do you do?”
There was all the constraint and awkwardness in the situation he could have wished. Mabel betrayed the agitation appropriate to her position, while Dora, evidently brought along as some sort of peacemaker, was saying:-
“Why, what is the matter, Lawrence?”
Before he could answer, Corry plucked him by the sleeve and drew him aside.
“See here, old man, what’s this mean?” Corry demanded in a low tone, indicating Lashka with his eyes.
“I can hardly see, Corry, where you can have any concern in the matter,” Pentfield answered mockingly.
But Corry drove straight to the point.
“What is that squaw doing on your sled? A nasty job you’ve given me to explain all this away. I only hope it can be explained away. Who is she? Whose squaw is she?”
Then Lawrence Pentfield delivered his stroke, and he delivered it with a certain calm elation of spirit that seemed somewhat to compensate for the wrong that had been done him.
“She is my squaw,” he said; “Mrs. Pentfield, if you please.”
Corry Hutchinson gasped, and Pentfield left him and returned to the two women. Mabel, with a worried expression on her face, seemed holding herself aloof. He turned to Dora and asked, quite genially, as though all the world was sunshine:- “How did you stand the trip, anyway? Have any trouble to sleep warm?”
“And, how did Mrs. Hutchinson stand it?” he asked next, his eyes on Mabel.
“Oh, you dear ninny!” Dora cried, throwing her arms around him and hugging him. “Then you saw it, too! I thought something was the matter, you were acting so strangely.”
“I—I hardly understand,” he stammered.
“It was corrected in next day’s paper,” Dora chattered on. “We did not dream you would see it. All the other papers had it correctly, and of course that one miserable paper was the very one you saw!”
“Wait a moment! What do you mean?” Pentfield demanded, a sudden fear at his heart, for he felt himself on the verge of a great gulf.
But Dora swept volubly on.
“Why, when it became known that Mabel and I were going to Klondike,EveryOtherWeeksaid that when we were gone, it would be lovely on Myrdon Avenue, meaning, of course, lonely.”
“Then—”
“I am Mrs. Hutchinson,” Dora answered. “And you thought it was Mabel all the time—”
“Precisely the way of it,” Pentfield replied slowly. “But I can see now. The reporter got the names mixed. The Seattle and Portland paper copied.”
He stood silently for a minute. Mabel’s face was turned toward him again, and he could see the glow of expectancy in it. Corry was deeply interested in the ragged toe of one of his moccasins, while Dora was stealing sidelong glances at the immobile face of Lashka sitting on the sled. Lawrence Pentfield stared straight out before him into a dreary future, through the grey vistas of which he saw himself riding on a sled behind running dogs with lame Lashka by his side.
Then he spoke, quite simply, looking Mabel in the eyes.
“I am very sorry. I did not dream it. I thought you had married Corry. That is Mrs. Pentfield sitting on the sled over there.”
Mabel Holmes turned weakly toward her sister, as though all the fatigue of her great journey had suddenly descended on her. Dora caught her around the waist. Corry Hutchinson was still occupied with his moccasins. Pentfield glanced quickly from face to face, then turned to his sled.
“Can’t stop here all day, with Pete’s baby waiting,” he said to Lashka.
The long whip-lash hissed out, the dogs sprang against the breast bands, and the sled lurched and jerked ahead.
“Oh, I say, Corry,” Pentfield called back, “you’d better occupy the old cabin. It’s not been used for some time. I’ve built a new one on the hill.”
This being a story—and a truer one than it may appear—of a mining country, it is quite to be expected that it will be a hard-luck story. But that depends on the point of view. Hard luck is a mild way of terming it so far as Kink Mitchell and Hootchinoo Bill are concerned; and that they have a decided opinion on the subject is a matter of common knowledge in the Yukon country.
It was in the fall of 1896 that the two partners came down to the east bank of the Yukon, and drew a Peterborough canoe from a moss-covered cache. They were not particularly pleasant-looking objects. A summer’s prospecting, filled to repletion with hardship and rather empty of grub, had left their clothes in tatters and themselves worn and cadaverous. A nimbus of mosquitoes buzzed about each man’s head. Their faces were coated with blue clay. Each carried a lump of this damp clay, and, whenever it dried and fell from their faces, more was daubed on in its place. There was a querulous plaint in their voices, an irritability of movement and gesture, that told of broken sleep and a losing struggle with the little winged pests.
“Them skeeters’ll be the death of me yet,” Kink Mitchell whimpered, as the canoe felt the current on her nose, and leaped out from the bank.
“Cheer up, cheer up. We’re about done,” Hootchinoo Bill answered, with an attempted heartiness in his funereal tones that was ghastly. “We’ll be in Forty Mile in forty minutes, and then—cursed little devil!”
One hand left his paddle and landed on the back of his neck with a sharp slap. He put a fresh daub of clay on the injured part, swearing sulphurously the while. Kink Mitchell was not in the least amused. He merely improved the opportunity by putting a thicker coating of clay on his own neck.
They crossed the Yukon to its west bank, shot down-stream with easy stroke, and at the end of forty minutes swung in close to the left around the tail of an island. Forty Mile spread itself suddenly before them. Both men straightened their backs and gazed at the sight. They gazed long and carefully, drifting with the current, in their faces an expression of mingled surprise and consternation slowly gathering. Not a thread of smoke was rising from the hundreds of log-cabins. There was no sound of axes biting sharply into wood, of hammering and sawing. Neither dogs nor men loitered before the big store. No steamboats lay at the bank, no canoes, nor scows, nor poling-boats. The river was as bare of craft as the town was of life.
“Kind of looks like Gabriel’s tooted his little horn, and you an’ me has turned up missing,” remarked Hootchinoo Bill.
His remark was casual, as though there was nothing unusual about the occurrence. Kink Mitchell’s reply was just as casual as though he, too, were unaware of any strange perturbation of spirit.
“Looks as they was all Baptists, then, and took the boats to go by water,” was his contribution.
“My ol’ dad was a Baptist,” Hootchinoo Bill supplemented. “An’ he always did hold it was forty thousand miles nearer that way.”
This was the end of their levity. They ran the canoe in and climbed the high earth bank. A feeling of awe descended upon them as they walked the deserted streets. The sunlight streamed placidly over the town. A gentle wind tapped the halyards against the flagpole before the closed doors of the Caledonia Dance Hall. Mosquitoes buzzed, robins sang, and moose birds tripped hungrily among the cabins; but there was no human life nor sign of human life.
“I’m just dyin’ for a drink,” Hootchinoo Bill said and unconsciously his voice sank to a hoarse whisper.
His partner nodded his head, loth to hear his own voice break the stillness. They trudged on in uneasy silence till surprised by an open door. Above this door, and stretching the width of the building, a rude sign announced the same as the “Monte Carlo.” But beside the door, hat over eyes, chair tilted back, a man sat sunning himself. He was an old man. Beard and hair were long and white and patriarchal.
“If it ain’t ol’ Jim Cummings, turned up like us, too late for Resurrection!” said Kink Mitchell.
“Most like he didn’t hear Gabriel tootin’,” was Hootchinoo Bill’s suggestion.
“Hello, Jim! Wake up!” he shouted.
The old man unlimbered lamely, blinking his eyes and murmuring automatically: “What’ll ye have, gents? What’ll ye have?”
They followed him inside and ranged up against the long bar where of yore a half-dozen nimble bar-keepers found little time to loaf. The great room, ordinarily aroar with life, was still and gloomy as a tomb. There was no rattling of chips, no whirring of ivory balls. Roulette and faro tables were like gravestones under their canvas covers. No women’s voices drifted merrily from the dance-room behind. Ol’ Jim Cummings wiped a glass with palsied hands, and Kink Mitchell scrawled his initials on the dust-covered bar.
“Where’s the girls?” Hootchinoo Bill shouted, with affected geniality.
“Gone,” was the ancient bar-keeper’s reply, in a voice thin and aged as himself, and as unsteady as his hand.
“Where’s Bidwell and Barlow?”
“Gone.”
“And Sweetwater Charley?”
“Gone.”
“And his sister?”
“Gone too.”
“Your daughter Sally, then, and her little kid?”
“Gone, all gone.” The old man shook his head sadly, rummaging in an absent way among the dusty bottles.
“Great Sardanapolis! Where?” Kink Mitchell exploded, unable longer to restrain himself. “You don’t say you’ve had the plague?”
“Why, ain’t you heerd?” The old man chuckled quietly. “They-all’s gone to Dawson.”
“What-like is that?” Bill demanded. “A creek? or a bar? or a place?”
“Ain’t never heered of Dawson, eh?” The old man chuckled exasperatingly. “Why, Dawson’s a town, a city, bigger’n Forty Mile. Yes, sir, bigger’n Forty Mile.”
“I’ve ben in this land seven year,” Bill announced emphatically, “an’ I make free to say I never heard tell of the burg before. Hold on! Let’s have some more of that whisky. Your information’s flabbergasted me, that it has. Now just whereabouts is this Dawson-place you was a-mentionin’?”
“On the big flat jest below the mouth of Klondike,” ol’ Jim answered. “But where has you-all ben this summer?”
“Never you mind where we-all’s ben,” was Kink Mitchell’s testy reply. “We-all’s ben where the skeeters is that thick you’ve got to throw a stick into the air so as to see the sun and tell the time of day. Ain’t I right, Bill?”
“Right you are,” said Bill. “But speakin’ of this Dawson-place how like did it happen to be, Jim?”
“Ounce to the pan on a creek called Bonanza, an’ they ain’t got to bedrock yet.”
“Who struck it?”
“Carmack.”
At mention of the discoverer’s name the partners stared at each other disgustedly. Then they winked with great solemnity.
“Siwash George,” sniffed Hootchinoo Bill.
“That squaw-man,” sneered Kink Mitchell.
“I wouldn’t put on my moccasins to stampede after anything he’d ever find,” said Bill.
“Same here,” announced his partner. “A cuss that’s too plumb lazy to fish his own salmon. That’s why he took up with the Indians. S’pose that black brother-in-law of his,—lemme see, Skookum Jim, eh?—s’pose he’s in on it?”
The old bar-keeper nodded. “Sure, an’ what’s more, all Forty Mile, exceptin’ me an’ a few cripples.”
“And drunks,” added Kink Mitchell.
“No-sir-ee!” the old man shouted emphatically.
“I bet you the drinks Honkins ain’t in on it!” Hootchinoo Bill cried with certitude.
Ol’ Jim’s face lighted up. “I takes you, Bill, an’ you loses.”
“However did that ol’ soak budge out of Forty Mile?” Mitchell demanded.
“The ties him down an’ throws him in the bottom of a polin’-boat,” ol’ Jim explained. “Come right in here, they did, an’ takes him out of that there chair there in the corner, an’ three more drunks they finds under the pianny. I tell you-alls the whole camp hits up the Yukon for Dawson jes’ like Sam Scratch was after them,—wimmen, children, babes in arms, the whole shebang. Bidwell comes to me an’ sez, sez he, ‘Jim, I wants you to keep tab on the Monte Carlo. I’m goin’.’
“‘Where’s Barlow?’ sez I. ‘Gone,’ sez he, ‘an’ I’m a-followin’ with a load of whisky.’ An’ with that, never waitin’ for me to decline, he makes a run for his boat an’ away he goes, polin’ up river like mad. So here I be, an’ these is the first drinks I’ve passed out in three days.”
The partners looked at each other.
“Gosh darn my buttoms!” said Hootchinoo Bill. “Seems likes you and me, Kink, is the kind of folks always caught out with forks when it rains soup.”
“Wouldn’t it take the saleratus out your dough, now?” said Kink Mitchell. “A stampede of tin-horns, drunks, an’ loafers.”
“An’ squaw-men,” added Bill. “Not a genooine miner in the whole caboodle.”
“Genooine miners like you an’ me, Kink,” he went on academically, “is all out an’ sweatin’ hard over Birch Creek way. Not a genooine miner in this whole crazy Dawson outfit, and I say right here, not a step do I budge for any Carmack strike. I’ve got to see the colour of the dust first.”
“Same here,” Mitchell agreed. “Let’s have another drink.”
Having wet this resolution, they beached the canoe, transferred its contents to their cabin, and cooked dinner. But as the afternoon wore along they grew restive. They were men used to the silence of the great wilderness, but this gravelike silence of a town worried them. They caught themselves listening for familiar sounds—“waitin’ for something to make a noise which ain’t goin’ to make a noise,” as Bill put it. They strolled through the deserted streets to the Monte Carlo for more drinks, and wandered along the river bank to the steamer landing, where only water gurgled as the eddy filled and emptied, and an occasional salmon leapt flashing into the sun.
They sat down in the shade in front of the store and talked with the consumptive storekeeper, whose liability to hemorrhage accounted for his presence. Bill and Kink told him how they intended loafing in their cabin and resting up after the hard summer’s work. They told him, with a certain insistence, that was half appeal for belief, half challenge for contradiction, how much they were going to enjoy their idleness. But the storekeeper was uninterested. He switched the conversation back to the strike on Klondike, and they could not keep him away from it. He could think of nothing else, talk of nothing else, till Hootchinoo Bill rose up in anger and disgust.
“Gosh darn Dawson, say I!” he cried.
“Same here,” said Kink Mitchell, with a brightening face. “One’d think something was doin’ up there, ’stead of bein’ a mere stampede of greenhorns an’ tinhorns.”
But a boat came into view from down-stream. It was long and slim. It hugged the bank closely, and its three occupants, standing upright, propelled it against the stiff current by means of long poles.
“Circle City outfit,” said the storekeeper. “I was lookin’ for ’em along by afternoon. Forty Mile had the start of them by a hundred and seventy miles. But gee! they ain’t losin’ any time!”
“We’ll just sit here quiet-like and watch ’em string by,” Bill said complacently.
As he spoke, another boat appeared in sight, followed after a brief interval by two others. By this time the first boat was abreast of the men on the bank. Its occupants did not cease poling while greetings were exchanged, and, though its progress was slow, a half-hour saw it out of sight up river.
Still they came from below, boat after boat, in endless procession. The uneasiness of Bill and Kink increased. They stole speculative, tentative glances at each other, and when their eyes met looked away in embarrassment. Finally, however, their eyes met and neither looked away.
Kink opened his mouth to speak, but words failed him and his mouth remained open while he continued to gaze at his partner.
“Just what I was thinken’, Kink,” said Bill.
They grinned sheepishly at each other, and by tacit consent started to walk away. Their pace quickened, and by the time they arrived at their cabin they were on the run.
“Can’t lose no time with all that multitude a-rushin’ by,” Kink spluttered, as he jabbed the sour-dough can into the beanpot with one hand and with the other gathered in the frying-pan and coffee-pot.
“Should say not,” gasped Bill, his head and shoulders buried in a clothes-sack wherein were stored winter socks and underwear. “I say, Kink, don’t forget the saleratus on the corner shelf back of the stove.”
Half-an-hour later they were launching the canoe and loading up, while the storekeeper made jocular remarks about poor, weak mortals and the contagiousness of “stampedin’ fever.” But when Bill and Kink thrust their long poles to bottom and started the canoe against the current, he called after them:-
“Well, so-long and good luck! And don’t forget to blaze a stake or two for me!”
They nodded their heads vigorously and felt sorry for the poor wretch who remained perforce behind.
* * * * *
Kink and Bill were sweating hard. According to the revised Northland Scripture, the stampede is to the swift, the blazing of stakes to the strong, and the Crown in royalties, gathers to itself the fulness thereof. Kink and Bill were both swift and strong. They took the soggy trail at a long, swinging gait that broke the hearts of a couple of tender-feet who tried to keep up with them. Behind, strung out between them and Dawson (where the boats were discarded and land travel began), was the vanguard of the Circle City outfit. In the race from Forty Mile the partners had passed every boat, winning from the leading boat by a length in the Dawson eddy, and leaving its occupants sadly behind the moment their feet struck the trail.
“Huh! couldn’t see us for smoke,” Hootchinoo Bill chuckled, flirting the stinging sweat from his brow and glancing swiftly back along the way they had come.
Three men emerged from where the trail broke through the trees. Two followed close at their heels, and then a man and a woman shot into view.
“Come on, you Kink! Hit her up! Hit her up!”
Bill quickened his pace. Mitchell glanced back in more leisurely fashion.
“I declare if they ain’t lopin’!”
“And here’s one that’s loped himself out,” said Bill, pointing to the side of the trail.
A man was lying on his back panting in the culminating stages of violent exhaustion. His face was ghastly, his eyes bloodshot and glazed, for all the world like a dying man.
“Chechaquo!” Kink Mitchell grunted, and it was the grunt of the old “sour dough” for the green-horn, for the man who outfitted with “self-risin’” flour and used baking-powder in his biscuits.
The partners, true to the old-timer custom, had intended to stake down-stream from the strike, but when they saw claim 81 BELOW blazed on a tree,—which meant fully eight miles below Discovery,—they changed their minds. The eight miles were covered in less than two hours. It was a killing pace, over so rough trail, and they passed scores of exhausted men that had fallen by the wayside.
At Discovery little was to be learned of the upper creek. Cormack’s Indian brother-in-law, Skookum Jim, had a hazy notion that the creek was staked as high as the 30’s; but when Kink and Bill looked at the corner-stakes of 79 ABOVE, they threw their stampeding packs off their backs and sat down to smoke. All their efforts had been vain. Bonanza was staked from mouth to source,—“out of sight and across the next divide.” Bill complained that night as they fried their bacon and boiled their coffee over Cormack’s fire at Discovery.
“Try that pup,” Carmack suggested next morning.
“That pup” was a broad creek that flowed into Bonanza at 7 ABOVE. The partners received his advice with the magnificent contempt of the sour dough for a squaw-man, and, instead, spent the day on Adam’s Creek, another and more likely-looking tributary of Bonanza. But it was the old story over again—staked to the sky-line.
For threes days Carmack repeated his advice, and for three days they received it contemptuously. But on the fourth day, there being nowhere else to go, they went up “that pup.” They knew that it was practically unstaked, but they had no intention of staking. The trip was made more for the purpose of giving vent to their ill-humour than for anything else. They had become quite cynical, sceptical. They jeered and scoffed at everything, and insulted everychechaquothey met along the way.
At No. 23 the stakes ceased. The remainder of the creek was open for location.
“Moose pasture,” sneered Kink Mitchell.
But Bill gravely paced off five hundred feet up the creek and blazed the corner-stakes. He had picked up the bottom of a candle-box, and on the smooth side he wrote the notice for his centre-stake:-
THIS MOOSE PASTURE IS RESERVED FOR THESWEDES AND CHECHAQUOS.—BILL RADER.
THIS MOOSE PASTURE IS RESERVED FOR THESWEDES AND CHECHAQUOS.—BILL RADER.
Kink read it over with approval, saying:-
“As them’s my sentiments, I reckon I might as well subscribe.”
So the name of Charles Mitchell was added to the notice; and many an old sour dough’s face relaxed that day at sight of the handiwork of a kindred spirit.
“How’s the pup?” Carmack inquired when they strolled back into camp.
“To hell with pups!” was Hootchinoo Bill’s reply. “Me and Kink’s goin’ a-lookin’ for Too Much Gold when we get rested up.”
Too Much Gold was the fabled creek of which all sour doughs dreamed, whereof it was said the gold was so thick that, in order to wash it, gravel must first be shovelled into the sluice-boxes. But the several days’ rest, preliminary to the quest for Too Much Gold, brought a slight change in their plan, inasmuch as it brought one Ans Handerson, a Swede.
Ans Handerson had been working for wages all summer at Miller Creek over on the Sixty Mile, and, the summer done, had strayed up Bonanza like many another waif helplessly adrift on the gold tides that swept willy-nilly across the land. He was tall and lanky. His arms were long, like prehistoric man’s, and his hands were like soup-plates, twisted and gnarled, and big-knuckled from toil. He was slow of utterance and movement, and his eyes, pale blue as his hair was pale yellow, seemed filled with an immortal dreaming, the stuff of which no man knew, and himself least of all. Perhaps this appearance of immortal dreaming was due to a supreme and vacuous innocence. At any rate, this was the valuation men of ordinary clay put upon him, and there was nothing extraordinary about the composition of Hootchinoo Bill and Kink Mitchell.
The partners had spent a day of visiting and gossip, and in the evening met in the temporary quarters of the Monte Carlo—a large tent were stampeders rested their weary bones and bad whisky sold at a dollar a drink. Since the only money in circulation was dust, and since the house took the “down-weight” on the scales, a drink cost something more than a dollar. Bill and Kink were not drinking, principally for the reason that their one and common sack was not strong enough to stand many excursions to the scales.
“Say, Bill, I’ve got achechaquoon the string for a sack of flour,” Mitchell announced jubilantly.
Bill looked interested and pleased. Grub as scarce, and they were not over-plentifully supplied for the quest after Too Much Gold.
“Flour’s worth a dollar a pound,” he answered. “How like do you calculate to get your finger on it?”
“Trade ’m a half-interest in that claim of ourn,” Kink answered.
“What claim?” Bill was surprised. Then he remembered the reservation he had staked off for the Swedes, and said, “Oh!”
“I wouldn’t be so clost about it, though,” he added. “Give ’m the whole thing while you’re about it, in a right free-handed way.”
Bill shook his head. “If I did, he’d get clean scairt and prance off. I’m lettin’ on as how the ground is believed to be valuable, an’ that we’re lettin’ go half just because we’re monstrous short on grub. After the dicker we can make him a present of the whole shebang.”
“If somebody ain’t disregarded our notice,” Bill objected, though he was plainly pleased at the prospect of exchanging the claim for a sack of flour.
“She ain’t jumped,” Kink assured him. “It’s No. 24, and it stands. Thechechaquostook it serious, and they begun stakin’ where you left off. Staked clean over the divide, too. I was gassin’ with one of them which has just got in with cramps in his legs.”
It was then, and for the first time, that they heard the slow and groping utterance of Ans Handerson.
“Ay like the looks,” he was saying to the bar-keeper. “Ay tank Ay gat a claim.”
The partners winked at each other, and a few minutes later a surprised and grateful Swede was drinking bad whisky with two hard-hearted strangers. But he was as hard-headed as they were hard-hearted. The sack made frequent journeys to the scales, followed solicitously each time by Kink Mitchell’s eyes, and still Ans Handerson did not loosen up. In his pale blue eyes, as in summer seas, immortal dreams swam up and burned, but the swimming and the burning were due to the tales of gold and prospect pans he heard, rather than to the whisky he slid so easily down his throat.
The partners were in despair, though they appeared boisterous and jovial of speech and action.
“Don’t mind me, my friend,” Hootchinoo Bill hiccoughed, his hand upon Ans Handerson’s shoulder. “Have another drink. We’re just celebratin’ Kink’s birthday here. This is my pardner, Kink, Kink Mitchell. An’ what might your name be?”
This learned, his hand descended resoundingly on Kink’s back, and Kink simulated clumsy self-consciousness in that he was for the time being the centre of the rejoicing, while Ans Handerson looked pleased and asked them to have a drink with him. It was the first and last time he treated, until the play changed and his canny soul was roused to unwonted prodigality. But he paid for the liquor from a fairly healthy-looking sack. “Not less ’n eight hundred in it,” calculated the lynx-eyed Kink; and on the strength of it he took the first opportunity of a privy conversation with Bidwell, proprietor of the bad whisky and the tent.
“Here’s my sack, Bidwell,” Kink said, with the intimacy and surety of one old-timer to another. “Just weigh fifty dollars into it for a day or so more or less, and we’ll be yours truly, Bill an’ me.”
Thereafter the journeys of the sack to the scales were more frequent, and the celebration of Kink’s natal day waxed hilarious. He even essayed to sing the old-timer’s classic, “The Juice of the Forbidden Fruit,” but broke down and drowned his embarrassment in another round of drinks. Even Bidwell honoured him with a round or two on the house; and he and Bill were decently drunk by the time Ans Handerson’s eyelids began to droop and his tongue gave promise of loosening.
Bill grew affectionate, then confidential. He told his troubles and hard luck to the bar-keeper and the world in general, and to Ans Handerson in particular. He required no histrionic powers to act the part. The bad whisky attended to that. He worked himself into a great sorrow for himself and Bill, and his tears were sincere when he told how he and his partner were thinking of selling a half-interest in good ground just because they were short of grub. Even Kink listened and believed.
Ans Handerson’s eyes were shining unholily as he asked, “How much you tank you take?”
Bill and Kink did not hear him, and he was compelled to repeat his query. They appeared reluctant. He grew keener. And he swayed back and forward, holding on to the bar and listened with all his ears while they conferred together on one side, and wrangled as to whether they should or not, and disagreed in stage whispers over the price they should set.
“Two hundred and—hic!—fifty,” Bill finally announced, “but we reckon as we won’t sell.”
“Which is monstrous wise if I might chip in my little say,” seconded Bidwell.
“Yes, indeedy,” added Kink. “We ain’t in no charity business a-disgorgin’ free an’ generous to Swedes an’ white men.”
“Ay tank we haf another drink,” hiccoughed Ans Handerson, craftily changing the subject against a more propitious time.
And thereafter, to bring about that propitious time, his own sack began to see-saw between his hip pocket and the scales. Bill and Kink were coy, but they finally yielded to his blandishments. Whereupon he grew shy and drew Bidwell to one side. He staggered exceedingly, and held on to Bidwell for support as he asked—
“They ban all right, them men, you tank so?”
“Sure,” Bidwell answered heartily. “Known ’em for years. Old sour doughs. When they sell a claim, they sell a claim. They ain’t no air-dealers.”
“Ay tank Ay buy,” Ans Handerson announced, tottering back to the two men.
But by now he was dreaming deeply, and he proclaimed he would have the whole claim or nothing. This was the cause of great pain to Hootchinoo Bill. He orated grandly against the “hawgishness” ofchechaquosand Swedes, albeit he dozed between periods, his voice dying away to a gurgle, and his head sinking forward on his breast. But whenever roused by a nudge from Kink or Bidwell, he never failed to explode another volley of abuse and insult.
Ans Handerson was calm under it all. Each insult added to the value of the claim. Such unamiable reluctance to sell advertised but one thing to him, and he was aware of a great relief when Hootchinoo Bill sank snoring to the floor, and he was free to turn his attention to his less intractable partner.
Kink Mitchell was persuadable, though a poor mathematician. He wept dolefully, but was willing to sell a half-interest for two hundred and fifty dollars or the whole claim for seven hundred and fifty. Ans Handerson and Bidwell laboured to clear away his erroneous ideas concerning fractions, but their labour was vain. He spilled tears and regrets all over the bar and on their shoulders, which tears, however, did not wash away his opinion, that if one half was worth two hundred and fifty, two halves were worth three times as much.
In the end,—and even Bidwell retained no more than hazy recollections of how the night terminated,—a bill of sale was drawn up, wherein Bill Rader and Charles Mitchell yielded up all right and title to the claim known as 24 ELDORADO, the same being the name the creek had received from some optimisticchechaquo.
When Kink had signed, it took the united efforts of the three to arouse Bill. Pen in hand, he swayed long over the document; and, each time he rocked back and forth, in Ans Handerson’s eyes flashed and faded a wondrous golden vision. When the precious signature was at last appended and the dust paid over, he breathed a great sigh, and sank to sleep under a table, where he dreamed immortally until morning.
But the day was chill and grey. He felt bad. His first act, unconscious and automatic, was to feel for his sack. Its lightness startled him. Then, slowly, memories of the night thronged into his brain. Rough voices disturbed him. He opened his eyes and peered out from under the table. A couple of early risers, or, rather, men who had been out on trail all night, were vociferating their opinions concerning the utter and loathsome worthlessness of Eldorado Creek. He grew frightened, felt in his pocket, and found the deed to 24 ELDORADO.
Ten minutes later Hootchinoo Bill and Kink Mitchell were roused from their blankets by a wild-eyed Swede that strove to force upon them an ink-scrawled and very blotty piece of paper.
“Ay tank Ay take my money back,” he gibbered. “Ay tank Ay take my money back.”
Tears were in his eyes and throat. They ran down his cheeks as he knelt before them and pleaded and implored. But Bill and Kink did not laugh. They might have been harder hearted.
“First time I ever hear a man squeal over a minin’ deal,” Bill said. “An’ I make free to say ’tis too onusual for me to savvy.”
“Same here,” Kink Mitchell remarked. “Minin’ deals is like horse-tradin’.”
They were honest in their wonderment. They could not conceive of themselves raising a wail over a business transaction, so they could not understand it in another man.
“The poor, ornerychechaquo,” murmured Hootchinoo Bill, as they watched the sorrowing Swede disappear up the trail.
“But this ain’t Too Much Gold,” Kink Mitchell said cheerfully.
And ere the day was out they purchased flour and bacon at exorbitant prices with Ans Handerson’s dust and crossed over the divide in the direction of the creeks that lie between Klondike and Indian River.
Three months later they came back over the divide in the midst of a snow-storm and dropped down the trail to 24 ELDORADO. It merely chanced that the trail led them that way. They were not looking for the claim. Nor could they see much through the driving white till they set foot upon the claim itself. And then the air lightened, and they beheld a dump, capped by a windlass that a man was turning. They saw him draw a bucket of gravel from the hole and tilt it on the edge of the dump. Likewise they saw another, man, strangely familiar, filling a pan with the fresh gravel. His hands were large; his hair wets pale yellow. But before they reached him, he turned with the pan and fled toward a cabin. He wore no hat, and the snow falling down his neck accounted for his haste. Bill and Kink ran after him, and came upon him in the cabin, kneeling by the stove and washing the pan of gravel in a tub of water.
He was too deeply engaged to notice more than that somebody had entered the cabin. They stood at his shoulder and looked on. He imparted to the pan a deft circular motion, pausing once or twice to rake out the larger particles of gravel with his fingers. The water was muddy, and, with the pan buried in it, they could see nothing of its contents. Suddenly he lifted the pan clear and sent the water out of it with a flirt. A mass of yellow, like butter in a churn, showed across the bottom.
Hootchinoo Bill swallowed. Never in his life had he dreamed of so rich a test-pan.
“Kind of thick, my friend,” he said huskily. “How much might you reckon that-all to be?”
Ans Handerson did not look up as he replied, “Ay tank fafty ounces.”
“You must be scrumptious rich, then, eh?”
Still Ans Handerson kept his head down, absorbed in putting in the fine touches which wash out the last particles of dross, though he answered, “Ay tank Ay ban wort’ five hundred t’ousand dollar.”
“Gosh!” said Hootchinoo Bill, and he said it reverently.
“Yes, Bill, gosh!” said Kink Mitchell; and they went out softly and closed the door.
David Rasmunsen was a hustler, and, like many a greater man, a man of the one idea. Wherefore, when the clarion call of the North rang on his ear, he conceived an adventure in eggs and bent all his energy to its achievement. He figured briefly and to the point, and the adventure became iridescent-hued, splendid. That eggs would sell at Dawson for five dollars a dozen was a safe working premise. Whence it was incontrovertible that one thousand dozen would bring, in the Golden Metropolis, five thousand dollars.
On the other hand, expense was to be considered, and he considered it well, for he was a careful man, keenly practical, with a hard head and a heart that imagination never warmed. At fifteen cents a dozen, the initial cost of his thousand dozen would be one hundred and fifty dollars, a mere bagatelle in face of the enormous profit. And suppose, just suppose, to be wildly extravagant for once, that transportation for himself and eggs should run up eight hundred and fifty more; he would still have four thousand clear cash and clean when the last egg was disposed of and the last dust had rippled into his sack.
“You see, Alma,”—he figured it over with his wife, the cosy dining-room submerged in a sea of maps, government surveys, guide-books, and Alaskan itineraries,—“you see, expenses don’t really begin till you make Dyea—fifty dollars’ll cover it with a first-class passage thrown in. Now from Dyea to Lake Linderman, Indian packers take your goods over for twelve cents a pound, twelve dollars a hundred, or one hundred and twenty dollars a thousand. Say I have fifteen hundred pounds, it’ll cost one hundred and eighty dollars—call it two hundred and be safe. I am creditably informed by a Klondiker just come out that I can buy a boat for three hundred. But the same man says I’m sure to get a couple of passengers for one hundred and fifty each, which will give me the boat for nothing, and, further, they can help me manage it. And . . . that’s all; I put my eggs ashore from the boat at Dawson. Now let me see how much is that?”
“Fifty dollars from San Francisco to Dyea, two hundred from Dyea to Linderman, passengers pay for the boat—two hundred and fifty all told,” she summed up swiftly.
“And a hundred for my clothes and personal outfit,” he went on happily; “that leaves a margin of five hundred for emergencies. And what possible emergencies can arise?”
Alma shrugged her shoulders and elevated her brows. If that vast Northland was capable of swallowing up a man and a thousand dozen eggs, surely there was room and to spare for whatever else he might happen to possess. So she thought, but she said nothing. She knew David Rasmunsen too well to say anything.
“Doubling the time because of chance delays, I should make the trip in two months. Think of it, Alma! Four thousand in two months! Beats the paltry hundred a month I’m getting now. Why, we’ll build further out where we’ll have more space, gas in every room, and a view, and the rent of the cottage’ll pay taxes, insurance, and water, and leave something over. And then there’s always the chance of my striking it and coming out a millionaire. Now tell me, Alma, don’t you think I’m very moderate?”
And Alma could hardly think otherwise. Besides, had not her own cousin,—though a remote and distant one to be sure, the black sheep, the harum-scarum, the ne’er-do-well,—had not he come down out of that weird North country with a hundred thousand in yellow dust, to say nothing of a half-ownership in the hole from which it came?
David Rasmunsen’s grocer was surprised when he found him weighing eggs in the scales at the end of the counter, and Rasmunsen himself was more surprised when he found that a dozen eggs weighed a pound and a half—fifteen hundred pounds for his thousand dozen! There would be no weight left for his clothes, blankets, and cooking utensils, to say nothing of the grub he must necessarily consume by the way. His calculations were all thrown out, and he was just proceeding to recast them when he hit upon the idea of weighing small eggs. “For whether they be large or small, a dozen eggs is a dozen eggs,” he observed sagely to himself; and a dozen small ones he found to weigh but a pound and a quarter. Thereat the city of San Francisco was overrun by anxious-eyed emissaries, and commission houses and dairy associations were startled by a sudden demand for eggs running not more than twenty ounces to the dozen.
Rasmunsen mortgaged the little cottage for a thousand dollars, arranged for his wife to make a prolonged stay among her own people, threw up his job, and started North. To keep within his schedule he compromised on a second-class passage, which, because of the rush, was worse than steerage; and in the late summer, a pale and wabbly man, he disembarked with his eggs on the Dyea beach. But it did not take him long to recover his land legs and appetite. His first interview with the Chilkoot packers straightened him up and stiffened his backbone. Forty cents a pound they demanded for the twenty-eight-mile portage, and while he caught his breath and swallowed, the price went up to forty-three. Fifteen husky Indians put the straps on his packs at forty-five, but took them off at an offer of forty-seven from a Skaguay Croesus in dirty shirt and ragged overalls who had lost his horses on the White Pass trail and was now making a last desperate drive at the country by way of Chilkoot.
But Rasmunsen was clean grit, and at fifty cents found takers, who, two days later, set his eggs down intact at Linderman. But fifty cents a pound is a thousand dollars a ton, and his fifteen hundred pounds had exhausted his emergency fund and left him stranded at the Tantalus point where each day he saw the fresh-whipsawed boats departing for Dawson. Further, a great anxiety brooded over the camp where the boats were built. Men worked frantically, early and late, at the height of their endurance, caulking, nailing, and pitching in a frenzy of haste for which adequate explanation was not far to seek. Each day the snow-line crept farther down the bleak, rock-shouldered peaks, and gale followed gale, with sleet and slush and snow, and in the eddies and quiet places young ice formed and thickened through the fleeting hours. And each morn, toil-stiffened men turned wan faces across the lake to see if the freeze-up had come. For the freeze-up heralded the death of their hope—the hope that they would be floating down the swift river ere navigation closed on the chain of lakes.
To harrow Rasmunsen’s soul further, he discovered three competitors in the egg business. It was true that one, a little German, had gone broke and was himself forlornly back-tripping the last pack of the portage; but the other two had boats nearly completed, and were daily supplicating the god of merchants and traders to stay the iron hand of winter for just another day. But the iron hand closed down over the land. Men were being frozen in the blizzard which swept Chilkoot, and Rasmunsen frosted his toes ere he was aware. He found a chance to go passenger with his freight in a boat just shoving off through the rubble, but two hundred hard cash, was required, and he had no money.
“Ay tank you yust wait one leedle w’ile,” said the Swedish boat-builder, who had struck his Klondike right there and was wise enough to know it—“one leedle w’ile und I make you a tam fine skiff boat, sure Pete.”
With this unpledged word to go on, Rasmunsen hit the back trail to Crater Lake, where he fell in with two press correspondents whose tangled baggage was strewn from Stone House, over across the Pass, and as far as Happy Camp.
“Yes,” he said with consequence. “I’ve a thousand dozen eggs at Linderman, and my boat’s just about got the last seam caulked. Consider myself in luck to get it. Boats are at a premium, you know, and none to be had.”
Whereupon and almost with bodily violence the correspondents clamoured to go with him, fluttered greenbacks before his eyes, and spilled yellow twenties from hand to hand. He could not hear of it, but they over-persuaded him, and he reluctantly consented to take them at three hundred apiece. Also they pressed upon him the passage money in advance. And while they wrote to their respective journals concerning the Good Samaritan with the thousand dozen eggs, the Good Samaritan was hurrying back to the Swede at Linderman.
“Here, you! Gimme that boat!” was his salutation, his hand jingling the correspondents’ gold pieces and his eyes hungrily bent upon the finished craft.
The Swede regarded him stolidly and shook his head.
“How much is the other fellow paying? Three hundred? Well, here’s four. Take it.”
He tried to press it upon him, but the man backed away.
“Ay tank not. Ay say him get der skiff boat. You yust wait—”
“Here’s six hundred. Last call. Take it or leave it. Tell ’m it’s a mistake.”
The Swede wavered. “Ay tank yes,” he finally said, and the last Rasmunsen saw of him his vocabulary was going to wreck in a vain effort to explain the mistake to the other fellows.
The German slipped and broke his ankle on the steep hogback above Deep Lake, sold out his stock for a dollar a dozen, and with the proceeds hired Indian packers to carry him back to Dyea. But on the morning Rasmunsen shoved off with his correspondents, his two rivals followed suit.
“How many you got?” one of them, a lean little New Englander, called out.
“One thousand dozen,” Rasmunsen answered proudly.
“Huh! I’ll go you even stakes I beat you in with my eight hundred.”
The correspondents offered to lend him the money; but Rasmunsen declined, and the Yankee closed with the remaining rival, a brawny son of the sea and sailor of ships and things, who promised to show them all a wrinkle or two when it came to cracking on. And crack on he did, with a large tarpaulin square-sail which pressed the bow half under at every jump. He was the first to run out of Linderman, but, disdaining the portage, piled his loaded boat on the rocks in the boiling rapids. Rasmunsen and the Yankee, who likewise had two passengers, portaged across on their backs and then lined their empty boats down through the bad water to Bennett.
Bennett was a twenty-five-mile lake, narrow and deep, a funnel between the mountains through which storms ever romped. Rasmunsen camped on the sand-pit at its head, where were many men and boats bound north in the teeth of the Arctic winter. He awoke in the morning to find a piping gale from the south, which caught the chill from the whited peaks and glacial valleys and blew as cold as north wind ever blew. But it was fair, and he also found the Yankee staggering past the first bold headland with all sail set. Boat after boat was getting under way, and the correspondents fell to with enthusiasm.
“We’ll catch him before Cariboo Crossing,” they assured Rasmunsen, as they ran up the sail and the Alma took the first icy spray over her bow.
Now Rasmunsen all his life had been prone to cowardice on water, but he clung to the kicking steering-oar with set face and determined jaw. His thousand dozen were there in the boat before his eyes, safely secured beneath the correspondents’ baggage, and somehow, before his eyes were the little cottage and the mortgage for a thousand dollars.
It was bitter cold. Now and again he hauled in the steering-sweep and put out a fresh one while his passengers chopped the ice from the blade. Wherever the spray struck, it turned instantly to frost, and the dipping boom of the spritsail was quickly fringed with icicles. TheAlmastrained and hammered through the big seas till the seams and butts began to spread, but in lieu of bailing the correspondents chopped ice and flung it overboard. There was no let-up. The mad race with winter was on, and the boats tore along in a desperate string.
“W-w-we can’t stop to save our souls!” one of the correspondents chattered, from cold, not fright.
“That’s right! Keep her down the middle, old man!” the other encouraged.
Rasmunsen replied with an idiotic grin. The iron-bound shores were in a lather of foam, and even down the middle the only hope was to keep running away from the big seas. To lower sail was to be overtaken and swamped. Time and again they passed boats pounding among the rocks, and once they saw one on the edge of the breakers about to strike. A little craft behind them, with two men, jibed over and turned bottom up.
“W-w-watch out, old man,” cried he of the chattering teeth.
Rasmunsen grinned and tightened his aching grip on the sweep. Scores of times had the send of the sea caught the big square stern of theAlmaand thrown her off from dead before it till the after leach of the spritsail fluttered hollowly, and each time, and only with all his strength, had he forced her back. His grin by then had become fixed, and it disturbed the correspondents to look at him.
They roared down past an isolated rock a hundred yards from shore. From its wave-drenched top a man shrieked wildly, for the instant cutting the storm with his voice. But the next instant theAlmawas by, and the rock growing a black speck in the troubled froth.
“That settles the Yankee! Where’s the sailor?” shouted one of his passengers.
Rasmunsen shot a glance over his shoulder at a black square-sail. He had seen it leap up out of the grey to windward, and for an hour, off and on, had been watching it grow. The sailor had evidently repaired damages and was making up for lost time.
“Look at him come!”
Both passengers stopped chopping ice to watch. Twenty miles of Bennett were behind them—room and to spare for the sea to toss up its mountains toward the sky. Sinking and soaring like a storm-god, the sailor drove by them. The huge sail seemed to grip the boat from the crests of the waves, to tear it bodily out of the water, and fling it crashing and smothering down into the yawning troughs.
“The sea’ll never catch him!”
“But he’ll r-r-run her nose under!”
Even as they spoke, the black tarpaulin swooped from sight behind a big comber. The next wave rolled over the spot, and the next, but the boat did not reappear. TheAlmarushed by the place. A little riffraff of oats and boxes was seen. An arm thrust up and a shaggy head broke surface a score of yards away.
For a time there was silence. As the end of the lake came in sight, the waves began to leap aboard with such steady recurrence that the correspondents no longer chopped ice but flung the water out with buckets. Even this would not do, and, after a shouted conference with Rasmunsen, they attacked the baggage. Flour, bacon, beans, blankets, cooking-stove, ropes, odds and ends, everything they could get hands on, flew overboard. The boat acknowledged it at once, taking less water and rising more buoyantly.
“That’ll do!” Rasmunsen called sternly, as they applied themselves to the top layer of eggs.
“The h-hell it will!” answered the shivering one, savagely. With the exception of their notes, films, and cameras, they had sacrificed their outfit. He bent over, laid hold of an egg-box, and began to worry it out from under the lashing.
“Drop it! Drop it, I say!”
Rasmunsen had managed to draw his revolver, and with the crook of his arm over the sweep head, was taking aim. The correspondent stood up on the thwart, balancing back and forth, his face twisted with menace and speechless anger.
“My God!”
So cried his brother correspondent, hurling himself, face downward, into the bottom of the boat. TheAlma, under the divided attention of Rasmunsen, had been caught by a great mass of water and whirled around. The after leach hollowed, the sail emptied and jibed, and the boom, sweeping with terrific force across the boat, carried the angry correspondent overboard with a broken back. Mast and sail had gone over the side as well. A drenching sea followed, as the boat lost headway, and Rasmunsen sprang to the bailing bucket.
Several boats hurtled past them in the next half-hour,—small boats, boats of their own size, boats afraid, unable to do aught but run madly on. Then a ten-ton barge, at imminent risk of destruction, lowered sail to windward and lumbered down upon them.
“Keep off! Keep off!” Rasmunsen screamed.
But his low gunwale ground against the heavy craft, and the remaining correspondent clambered aboard. Rasmunsen was over the eggs like a cat and in the bow of theAlma, striving with numb fingers to bend the hauling-lines together.
“Come on!” a red-whiskered man yelled at him.
“I’ve a thousand dozen eggs here,” he shouted back. “Gimme a tow! I’ll pay you!”
“Come on!” they howled in chorus.
A big whitecap broke just beyond, washing over the barge and leaving theAlmahalf swamped. The men cast off, cursing him as they ran up their sail. Rasmunsen cursed back and fell to bailing. The mast and sail, like a sea anchor, still fast by the halyards, held the boat head on to wind and sea and gave him a chance to fight the water out.
Three hours later, numbed, exhausted, blathering like a lunatic, but still bailing, he went ashore on an ice-strewn beach near Cariboo Crossing. Two men, a government courier and a half-breed voyageur, dragged him out of the surf, saved his cargo, and beached the Alma. They were paddling out of the country in a Peterborough, and gave him shelter for the night in their storm-bound camp. Next morning they departed, but he elected to stay by his eggs. And thereafter the name and fame of the man with the thousand dozen eggs began to spread through the land. Gold-seekers who made in before the freeze-up carried the news of his coming. Grizzled old-timers of Forty Mile and Circle City, sour doughs with leathern jaws and bean-calloused stomachs, called up dream memories of chickens and green things at mention of his name. Dyea and Skaguay took an interest in his being, and questioned his progress from every man who came over the passes, while Dawson—golden, omeletless Dawson—fretted and worried, and way-laid every chance arrival for word of him.
But of this Rasmunsen knew nothing. The day after the wreck he patched up theAlmaand pulled out. A cruel east wind blew in his teeth from Tagish, but he got the oars over the side and bucked manfully into it, though half the time he was drifting backward and chopping ice from the blades. According to the custom of the country, he was driven ashore at Windy Arm; three times on Tagish saw him swamped and beached; and Lake Marsh held him at the freeze-up. TheAlmawas crushed in the jamming of the floes, but the eggs were intact. These he back-tripped two miles across the ice to the shore, where he built a cache, which stood for years after and was pointed out by men who knew.