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The God of His Fathers: Tales of the Klondyke

by Jack London · English · Gutenberg #1655 · 307,819 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The God of His Fathers: Tales of the Klondyke

Author: Jack London


        
Release date: February 1, 1999 [eBook #1655]
                Most recently updated: December 31, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1655

Credits: Transcribed from the 1906 Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GOD OF HIS FATHERS: TALES OF THE KLONDYKE ***




Transcribed from the 1906 Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





THE GOD OF HIS FATHERS: TALES OF THE KLONDYKE


Contents:

The God of His Fathers
The Great Interrogation
Which Make Men Remember
Siwash
The Man with the Gash
Jan, the Unrepentant
Grit of Women
Where the Trail Forks
A Daughter of the Aurora
At the Rainbow's End
The Scorn of Women

_These tales have appeared in "McClure's," "Ainslee's," "Outing," the
"Overland Monthly," the "Wave," the "National," and the San Francisco
"Examiner."  To the kindness of the various editors is due their
reappearance in more permanent form_.

TO THE DAUGHTERS OF THE WOLF WHO HAVE BRED AND SUCKLED A RACE OF MEN




THE GOD OF HIS FATHERS


I


On every hand stretched the forest primeval,--the home of noisy comedy
and silent tragedy.  Here the struggle for survival continued to wage
with all its ancient brutality.  Briton and Russian were still to overlap
in the Land of the Rainbow's End--and this was the very heart of it--nor
had Yankee gold yet purchased its vast domain.  The wolf-pack still clung
to the flank of the cariboo-herd, singling out the weak and the big with
calf, and pulling them down as remorselessly as were it a thousand,
thousand generations into the past.  The sparse aborigines still
acknowledged the rule of their chiefs and medicine men, drove out bad
spirits, burned their witches, fought their neighbors, and ate their
enemies with a relish which spoke well of their bellies.  But it was at
the moment when the stone age was drawing to a close.  Already, over
unknown trails and chartless wildernesses, were the harbingers of the
steel arriving,--fair-faced, blue-eyed, indomitable men, incarnations of
the unrest of their race.  By accident or design, single-handed and in
twos and threes, they came from no one knew whither, and fought, or died,
or passed on, no one knew whence.  The priests raged against them, the
chiefs called forth their fighting men, and stone clashed with steel; but
to little purpose.  Like water seeping from some mighty reservoir, they
trickled through the dark forests and mountain passes, threading the
highways in bark canoes, or with their moccasined feet breaking trail for
the wolf-dogs.  They came of a great breed, and their mothers were many;
but the fur-clad denizens of the Northland had this yet to learn.  So
many an unsung wanderer fought his last and died under the cold fire of
the aurora, as did his brothers in burning sands and reeking jungles, and
as they shall continue to do till in the fulness of time the destiny of
their race be achieved.

It was near twelve.  Along the northern horizon a rosy glow, fading to
the west and deepening to the east, marked the unseen dip of the midnight
sun.  The gloaming and the dawn were so commingled that there was no
night,--simply a wedding of day with day, a scarcely perceptible blending
of two circles of the sun.  A kildee timidly chirped good-night; the
full, rich throat of a robin proclaimed good-morrow.  From an island on
the breast of the Yukon a colony of wild fowl voiced its interminable
wrongs, while a loon laughed mockingly back across a still stretch of
river.

In the foreground, against the bank of a lazy eddy, birch-bark canoes
were lined two and three deep.  Ivory-bladed spears, bone-barbed arrows,
buckskin-thonged bows, and simple basket-woven traps bespoke the fact
that in the muddy current of the river the salmon-run was on.  In the
background, from the tangle of skin tents and drying frames, rose the
voices of the fisher folk.  Bucks skylarked with bucks or flirted with
the maidens, while the older squaws, shut out from this by virtue of
having fulfilled the end of their existence in reproduction, gossiped as
they braided rope from the green roots of trailing vines.  At their feet
their naked progeny played and squabbled, or rolled in the muck with the
tawny wolf-dogs.

To one side of the encampment, and conspicuously apart from it, stood a
second camp of two tents.  But it was a white man's camp.  If nothing
else, the choice of position at least bore convincing evidence of this.
In case of offence, it commanded the Indian quarters a hundred yards
away; of defence, a rise to the ground and the cleared intervening space;
and last, of defeat, the swift slope of a score of yards to the canoes
below.  From one of the tents came the petulant cry of a sick child and
the crooning song of a mother.  In the open, over the smouldering embers
of a fire, two men held talk.

"Eh?  I love the church like a good son.  _Bien_!  So great a love that
my days have been spent in fleeing away from her, and my nights in
dreaming dreams of reckoning.  Look you!"  The half-breed's voice rose to
an angry snarl.  "I am Red River born.  My father was white--as white as
you.  But you are Yankee, and he was British bred, and a gentleman's son.
And my mother was the daughter of a chief, and I was a man.  Ay, and one
had to look the second time to see what manner of blood ran in my veins;
for I lived with the whites, and was one of them, and my father's heart
beat in me.  It happened there was a maiden--white--who looked on me with
kind eyes.  Her father had much land and many horses; also he was a big
man among his people, and his blood was the blood of the French.  He said
the girl knew not her own mind, and talked overmuch with her, and became
wroth that such things should be.

"But she knew her mind, for we came quick before the priest.  And quicker
had come her father, with lying words, false promises, I know not what;
so that the priest stiffened his neck and would not make us that we might
live one with the other.  As at the beginning it was the church which
would not bless my birth, so now it was the church which refused me
marriage and put the blood of men upon my hands.  _Bien_!  Thus have I
cause to love the church.  So I struck the priest on his woman's mouth,
and we took swift horses, the girl and I, to Fort Pierre, where was a
minister of good heart.  But hot on our trail was her father, and
brothers, and other men he had gathered to him.  And we fought, our
horses on the run, till I emptied three saddles and the rest drew off and
went on to Fort Pierre.  Then we took east, the girl and I, to the hills
and forests, and we lived one with the other, and we were not
married,--the work of the good church which I love like a son.

"But mark you, for this is the strangeness of woman, the way of which no
man may understand.  One of the saddles I emptied was that of her
father's, and the hoofs of those who came behind had pounded him into the
earth.  This we saw, the girl and I, and this I had forgot had she not
remembered.  And in the quiet of the evening, after the day's hunt were
done, it came between us, and in the silence of the night when we lay
beneath the stars and should have been one.  It was there always.  She
never spoke, but it sat by our fire and held us ever apart.  She tried to
put it aside, but at such times it would rise up till I could read it in
the look of her eyes, in the very intake of her breath.

"So in the end she bore me a child, a woman-child, and died.  Then I went
among my mother's people, that it might nurse at a warm breast and live.
But my hands were wet with the blood of men, look you, because of the
church, wet with the blood of men.  And the Riders of the North came for
me, but my mother's brother, who was then chief in his own right, hid me
and gave me horses and food.  And we went away, my woman-child and I,
even to the Hudson Bay Country, where white men were few and the
questions they asked not many.  And I worked for the company a hunter, as
a guide, as a driver of dogs, till my woman-child was become a woman,
tall, and slender, and fair to the eye.

"You know the winter, long and lonely, breeding evil thoughts and bad
deeds.  The Chief Factor was a hard man, and bold.  And he was not such
that a woman would delight in looking upon.  But he cast eyes upon my
woman-child who was become a woman.  Mother of God! he sent me away on a
long trip with the dogs, that he might--you understand, he was a hard man
and without heart.  She was most white, and her soul was white, and a
good woman, and--well, she died.

"It was bitter cold the night of my return, and I had been away months,
and the dogs were limping sore when I came to the fort.  The Indians and
breeds looked on me in silence, and I felt the fear of I knew not what,
but I said nothing till the dogs were fed and I had eaten as a man with
work before him should.  Then I spoke up, demanding the word, and they
shrank from me, afraid of my anger and what I should do; but the story
came out, the pitiful story, word for word and act for act, and they
marvelled that I should be so quiet.

"When they had done I went to the Factor's house, calmer than now in the
telling of it.  He had been afraid and called upon the breeds to help
him; but they were not pleased with the deed, and had left him to lie on
the bed he had made.  So he had fled to the house of the priest.  Thither
I followed.  But when I was come to that place, the priest stood in my
way, and spoke soft words, and said a man in anger should go neither to
the right nor left, but straight to God.  I asked by the right of a
father's wrath that he give me past, but he said only over his body, and
besought with me to pray.  Look you, it was the church, always the
church; for I passed over his body and sent the Factor to meet my woman-
child before his god, which is a bad god, and the god of the white men.

"Then was there hue and cry, for word was sent to the station below, and
I came away.  Through the Land of the Great Slave, down the Valley of the
Mackenzie to the never-opening ice, over the White Rockies, past the
Great Curve of the Yukon, even to this place did I come.  And from that
day to this, yours is the first face of my father's people I have looked
upon.  May it be the last!  These people, which are my people, are a
simple folk, and I have been raised to honor among them.  My word is
their law, and their priests but do my bidding, else would I not suffer
them.  When I speak for them I speak for myself.  We ask to be let alone.
We do not want your kind.  If we permit you to sit by our fires, after
you will come your church, your priests, and your gods.  And know this,
for each white man who comes to my village, him will I make deny his god.
You are the first, and I give you grace.  So it were well you go, and go
quickly."

"I am not responsible for my brothers," the second man spoke up, filling
his pipe in a meditative manner.  Hay Stockard was at times as thoughtful
of speech as he was wanton of action; but only at times.

"But I know your breed," responded the other.  "Your brothers are many,
and it is you and yours who break the trail for them to follow.  In time
they shall come to possess the land, but not in my time.  Already, have I
heard, are they on the head-reaches of the Great River, and far away
below are the Russians."

Hay Stockard lifted his head with a quick start.  This was startling
geographical information.  The Hudson Bay post at Fort Yukon had other
notions concerning the course of the river, believing it to flow into the
Arctic.

"Then the Yukon empties into Bering Sea?" he asked.

"I do not know, but below there are Russians, many Russians.  Which is
neither here nor there.  You may go on and see for yourself; you may go
back to your brothers; but up the Koyukuk you shall not go while the
priests and fighting men do my bidding.  Thus do I command, I, Baptiste
the Red, whose word is law and who am head man over this people."

"And should I not go down to the Russians, or back to my brothers?"

"Then shall you go swift-footed before your god, which is a bad god, and
the god of the white men."

The red sun shot up above the northern sky-line, dripping and bloody.
Baptiste the Red came to his feet, nodded curtly, and went back to his
camp amid the crimson shadows and the singing of the robins.

Hay Stockard finished his pipe by the fire, picturing in smoke and coal
the unknown upper reaches of the Koyukuk, the strange stream which ended
here its arctic travels and merged its waters with the muddy Yukon flood.
Somewhere up there, if the dying words of a ship-wrecked sailorman who
had made the fearful overland journey were to be believed, and if the
vial of golden grains in his pouch attested anything,--somewhere up
there, in that home of winter, stood the Treasure House of the North.  And
as keeper of the gate, Baptiste the Red, English half-breed and renegade,
barred the way.

"Bah!"  He kicked the embers apart and rose to his full height, arms
lazily outstretched, facing the flushing north with careless soul.



II


Hay Stockard swore, harshly, in the rugged monosyllables of his mother
tongue.  His wife lifted her gaze from the pots and pans, and followed
his in a keen scrutiny of the river.  She was a woman of the Teslin
Country, wise in the ways of her husband's vernacular when it grew
intensive.  From the slipping of a snow-shoe thong to the forefront of
sudden death, she could gauge occasion by the pitch and volume of his
blasphemy.  So she knew the present occasion merited attention.  A long
canoe, with paddles flashing back the rays of the westering sun, was
crossing the current from above and urging in for the eddy.  Hay Stockard
watched it intently.  Three men rose and dipped, rose and dipped, in
rhythmical precision; but a red bandanna, wrapped about the head of one,
caught and held his eye.

"Bill!" he called.  "Oh, Bill!"

A shambling, loose-jointed giant rolled out of one of the tents, yawning
and rubbing the sleep from his eyes.  Then he sighted the strange canoe
and was wide awake on the instant.

"By the jumping Methuselah!  That damned sky-pilot!"

Hay Stockard nodded his head bitterly, half-reached for his rifle, then
shrugged his shoulders.

"Pot-shot him," Bill suggested, "and settle the thing out of hand.  He'll
spoil us sure if we don't."  But the other declined this drastic measure
and turned away, at the same time bidding the woman return to her work,
and calling Bill back from the bank.  The two Indians in the canoe moored
it on the edge of the eddy, while its white occupant, conspicuous by his
gorgeous head-gear, came up the bank.

"Like Paul of Tarsus, I give you greeting.  Peace be unto you and grace
before the Lord."

His advances were met sullenly, and without speech.

"To you, Hay Stockard, blasphemer and Philistine, greeting.  In your
heart is the lust of Mammon, in your mind cunning devils, in your tent
this woman whom you live with in adultery; yet of these divers sins, even
here in the wilderness, I, Sturges Owen, apostle to the Lord, bid you to
repent and cast from you your iniquities."

"Save your cant!  Save your cant!" Hay Stockard broke in testily.  "You'll
need all you've got, and more, for Red Baptiste over yonder."

He waved his hand toward the Indian camp, where the half-breed was
looking steadily across, striving to make out the newcomers.  Sturges
Owen, disseminator of light and apostle to the Lord, stepped to the edge
of the steep and commanded his men to bring up the camp outfit.  Stockard
followed him.

"Look here," he demanded, plucking the missionary by the shoulder and
twirling him about.  "Do you value your hide?"

"My life is in the Lord's keeping, and I do but work in His vineyard," he
replied solemnly.

"Oh, stow that!  Are you looking for a job of martyrship?"

"If He so wills."

"Well, you'll find it right here, but I'm going to give you some advice
first.  Take it or leave it.  If you stop here, you'll be cut off in the
midst of your labors.  And not you alone, but your men, Bill, my wife--"

"Who is a daughter of Belial and hearkeneth not to the true Gospel."

"And myself.  Not only do you bring trouble upon yourself, but upon us.  I
was frozen in with you last winter, as you will well recollect, and I
know you for a good man and a fool.  If you think it your duty to strive
with the heathen, well and good; but, do exercise some wit in the way you
go about it.  This man, Red Baptiste, is no Indian.  He comes of our
common stock, is as bull-necked as I ever dared be, and as wild a fanatic
the one way as you are the other.  When you two come together, hell'll be
to pay, and I don't care to be mixed up in it.  Understand?  So take my
advice and go away.  If you go down-stream, you'll fall in with the
Russians.  There's bound to be Greek priests among them, and they'll see
you safe through to Bering Sea,--that's where the Yukon empties,--and
from there it won't be hard to get back to civilization.  Take my word
for it and get out of here as fast as God'll let you."

"He who carries the Lord in his heart and the Gospel in his hand hath no
fear of the machinations of man or devil," the missionary answered
stoutly.  "I will see this man and wrestle with him.  One backslider
returned to the fold is a greater victory than a thousand heathen.  He
who is strong for evil can be as mighty for good, witness Saul when he
journeyed up to Damascus to bring Christian captives to Jerusalem.  And
the voice of the Saviour came to him, crying, 'Saul, Saul, why
persecutest thou me?'  And therewith Paul arrayed himself on the side of
the Lord, and thereafter was most mighty in the saving of souls.  And
even as thou, Paul of Tarsus, even so do I work in the vineyard of the
Lord, bearing trials and tribulations, scoffs and sneers, stripes and
punishments, for His dear sake."

"Bring up the little bag with the tea and a kettle of water," he called
the next instant to his boatmen; "not forgetting the haunch of cariboo
and the mixing-pan."

When his men, converts by his own hand, had gained the bank, the trio
fell to their knees, hands and backs burdened with camp equipage, and
offered up thanks for their passage through the wilderness and their safe
arrival.  Hay Stockard looked upon the function with sneering
disapproval, the romance and solemnity of it lost to his matter-of-fact
soul.  Baptiste the Red, still gazing across, recognized the familiar
postures, and remembered the girl who had shared his star-roofed couch in
the hills and forests, and the woman-child who lay somewhere by bleak
Hudson's Bay.



III


"Confound it, Baptiste, couldn't think of it.  Not for a moment.  Grant
that this man is a fool and of small use in the nature of things, but
still, you know, I can't give him up."

Hay Stockard paused, striving to put into speech the rude ethics of his
heart.

"He's worried me, Baptiste, in the past and now, and caused me all manner
of troubles; but can't you see, he's my own breed--white--and--and--why,
I couldn't buy my life with his, not if he was a nigger."

"So be it," Baptiste the Red made answer.  "I have given you grace and
choice.  I shall come presently, with my priests and fighting men, and
either shall I kill you, or you deny your god.  Give up the priest to my
pleasure, and you shall depart in peace.  Otherwise your trail ends here.
My people are against you to the babies.  Even now have the children
stolen away your canoes."  He pointed down to the river.  Naked boys had
slipped down the water from the point above, cast loose the canoes, and
by then had worked them into the current.  When they had drifted out of
rifle-shot they clambered over the sides and paddled ashore.

"Give me the priest, and you may have them back again.  Come!  Speak your
mind, but without haste."

Stockard shook his head.  His glance dropped to the woman of the Teslin
Country with his boy at her breast, and he would have wavered had he not
lifted his eyes to the men before him.

"I am not afraid," Sturges Owen spoke up.  "The Lord bears me in his
right hand, and alone am I ready to go into the camp of the unbeliever.
It is not too late.  Faith may move mountains.  Even in the eleventh hour
may I win his soul to the true righteousness."

"Trip the beggar up and make him fast," Bill whispered hoarsely in the
ear of his leader, while the missionary kept the floor and wrestled with
the heathen.  "Make him hostage, and bore him if they get ugly."

"No," Stockard answered.  "I gave him my word that he could speak with us
unmolested.  Rules of warfare, Bill; rules of warfare.  He's been on the
square, given us warning, and all that, and--why, damn it, man, I can't
break my word!"

"He'll keep his, never fear."

"Don't doubt it, but I won't let a half-breed outdo me in fair dealing.
Why not do what he wants,--give him the missionary and be done with it?"

"N-no," Bill hesitated doubtfully.

"Shoe pinches, eh?"

Bill flushed a little and dropped the discussion.  Baptiste the Red was
still waiting the final decision.  Stockard went up to him.

"It's this way, Baptiste.  I came to your village minded to go up the
Koyukuk.  I intended no wrong.  My heart was clean of evil.  It is still
clean.  Along comes this priest, as you call him.  I didn't bring him
here.  He'd have come whether I was here or not.  But now that he is
here, being of my people, I've got to stand by him.  And I'm going to.
Further, it will be no child's play.  When you have done, your village
will be silent and empty, your people wasted as after a famine.  True, we
will he gone; likewise the pick of your fighting men--"

"But those who remain shall be in peace, nor shall the word of strange
gods and the tongues of strange priests be buzzing in their ears."

Both men shrugged their shoulder and turned away, the half-breed going
back to his own camp.  The missionary called his two men to him, and they
fell into prayer.  Stockard and Bill attacked the few standing pines with
their axes, felling them into convenient breastworks.  The child had
fallen asleep, so the woman placed it on a heap of furs and lent a hand
in fortifying the camp.  Three sides were thus defended, the steep
declivity at the rear precluding attack from that direction.  When these
arrangements had been completed, the two men stalked into the open,
clearing away, here and there, the scattered underbrush.  From the
opposing camp came the booming of war-drums and the voices of the priests
stirring the people to anger.

"Worst of it is they'll come in rushes," Bill complained as they walked
back with shouldered axes.

"And wait till midnight, when the light gets dim for shooting."

"Can't start the ball a-rolling too early, then."  Bill exchanged the axe
for a rifle, and took a careful rest.  One of the medicine-men, towering
above his tribesmen, stood out distinctly.  Bill drew a bead on him.

"All ready?" he asked.

Stockard opened the ammunition box, placed the woman where she could
reload in safety, and gave the word.  The medicine-man dropped.  For a
moment there was silence, then a wild howl went up and a flight of bone
arrows fell short.

"I'd like to take a look at the beggar," Bill remarked, throwing a fresh
shell into place.  "I'll swear I drilled him clean between the eyes."

"Didn't work."  Stockard shook his head gloomily.  Baptiste had evidently
quelled the more warlike of his followers, and instead of precipitating
an attack in the bright light of day, the shot had caused a hasty exodus,
the Indians drawing out of the village beyond the zone of fire.

In the full tide of his proselyting fervor, borne along by the hand of
God, Sturges Owen would have ventured alone into the camp of the
unbeliever, equally prepared for miracle or martyrdom; but in the waiting
which ensued, the fever of conviction died away gradually, as the natural
man asserted itself.  Physical fear replaced spiritual hope; the love of
life, the love of God.  It was no new experience.  He could feel his
weakness coming on, and knew it of old time.  He had struggled against it
and been overcome by it before.  He remembered when the other men had
driven their paddles like mad in the van of a roaring ice-flood, how, at
the critical moment, in a panic of worldly terror, he had dropped his
paddle and besought wildly with his God for pity.  And there were other
times.  The recollection was not pleasant.  It brought shame to him that
his spirit should be so weak and his flesh so strong.  But the love of
life! the love of life!  He could not strip it from him.  Because of it
had his dim ancestors perpetuated their line; because of it was he
destined to perpetuate his.  His courage, if courage it might be called,
was bred of fanaticism.  The courage of Stockard and Bill was the
adherence to deep-rooted ideals.  Not that the love of life was less, but
the love of race tradition more; not that they were unafraid to die, but
that they were brave enough not to live at the price of shame.

The missionary rose, for the moment swayed by the mood of sacrifice.  He
half crawled over the barricade to proceed to the other camp, but sank
back, a trembling mass, wailing: "As the spirit moves!  As the spirit
moves!  Who am I that I should set aside the judgments of God?  Before
the foundations of the world were all things written in the book of life.
Worm that I am, shall I erase the page or any portion thereof?  As God
wills, so shall the spirit move!"

Bill reached over, plucked him to his feet, and shook him, fiercely,
silently.  Then he dropped the bundle of quivering nerves and turned his
attention to the two converts.  But they showed little fright and a
cheerful alacrity in preparing for the coming passage at arms.

Stockard, who had been talking in undertones with the Teslin woman, now
turned to the missionary.

"Fetch him over here," he commanded of Bill.

"Now," he ordered, when Sturges Owen had been duly deposited before him,
"make us man and wife, and be lively about it."  Then he added
apologetically to Bill: "No telling how it's to end, so I just thought
I'd get my affairs straightened up."

The woman obeyed the behest of her white lord.  To her the ceremony was
meaningless.  By her lights she was his wife, and had been from the day
they first foregathered.  The converts served as witnesses.  Bill stood
over the missionary, prompting him when he stumbled.  Stockard put the
responses in the woman's mouth, and when the time came, for want of
better, ringed her finger with thumb and forefinger of his own.

"Kiss the bride!" Bill thundered, and Sturges Owen was too weak to
disobey.

"Now baptize the child!"

"Neat and tidy," Bill commented.

"Gathering the proper outfit for a new trail," the father explained,
taking the boy from the mother's arms.  "I was grub-staked, once, into
the Cascades, and had everything in the kit except salt.  Never shall
forget it.  And if the woman and the kid cross the divide to-night they
might as well be prepared for pot-luck.  A long shot, Bill, between
ourselves, but nothing lost if it misses."

A cup of water served the purpose, and the child was laid away in a
secure corner of the barricade.  The men built the fire, and the evening
meal was cooked.

The sun hurried round to the north, sinking closer to the horizon.  The
heavens in that quarter grew red and bloody.  The shadows lengthened, the
light dimmed, and in the sombre recesses of the forest life slowly died
away.  Even the wild fowl in the river softened their raucous chatter and
feigned the nightly farce of going to bed.  Only the tribesmen increased
their clamor, war-drums booming and voices raised in savage folk songs.
But as the sun dipped they ceased their tumult.  The rounded hush of
midnight was complete.  Stockard rose to his knees and peered over the
logs.  Once the child wailed in pain and disconcerted him.  The mother
bent over it, but it slept again.  The silence was interminable,
profound.  Then, of a sudden, the robins burst into full-throated song.
The night had passed.

A flood of dark figures boiled across the open.  Arrows whistled and bow-
thongs sang.  The shrill-tongued rifles answered back.  A spear, and a
mighty cast, transfixed the Teslin woman as she hovered above the child.
A spent arrow, diving between the logs, lodged in the missionary's arm.

There was no stopping the rush.  The middle distance was cumbered with
bodies, but the rest surged on, breaking against and over the barricade
like an ocean wave.  Sturges Owen fled to the tent, while the men were
swept from their feet, buried beneath the human tide.  Hay Stockard alone
regained the surface, flinging the tribesmen aside like yelping curs.  He
had managed to seize an axe.  A dark hand grasped the child by a naked
foot, and drew it from beneath its mother.  At arm's length its puny body
circled through the air, dashing to death against the logs.  Stockard
clove the man to the chin and fell to clearing space.  The ring of savage
faces closed in, raining upon him spear-thrusts and bone-barbed arrows.
The sun shot up, and they swayed back and forth in the crimson shadows.
Twice, with his axe blocked by too deep a blow, they rushed him; but each
time he flung them clear.  They fell underfoot and he trampled dead and
dying, the way slippery with blood.  And still the day brightened and the
robins sang.  Then they drew back from him in awe, and he leaned
breathless upon his axe.

"Blood of my soul!" cried Baptiste the Red.  "But thou art a man.  Deny
thy god, and thou shalt yet live."

Stockard swore his refusal, feebly but with grace.

"Behold!  A woman!"  Sturges Owen had been brought before the half-breed.

Beyond a scratch on the arm, he was uninjured, but his eyes roved about
him in an ecstasy of fear.  The heroic figure of the blasphemer,
bristling with wounds and arrows, leaning defiantly upon his axe,
indifferent, indomitable, superb, caught his wavering vision.  And he
felt a great envy of the man who could go down serenely to the dark gates
of death.  Surely Christ, and not he, Sturges Owen, had been moulded in
such manner.  And why not he?  He felt dimly the curse of ancestry, the
feebleness of spirit which had come down to him out of the past, and he
felt an anger at the creative force, symbolize it as he would, which had
formed him, its servant, so weakly.  For even a stronger man, this anger
and the stress of circumstance were sufficient to breed apostasy, and for
Sturges Owen it was inevitable.  In the fear of man's anger he would dare
the wrath of God.  He had been raised up to serve the Lord only that he
might be cast down.  He had been given faith without the strength of
faith; he had been given spirit without the power of spirit.  It was
unjust.

"Where now is thy god?" the half-breed demanded.

"I do not know."  He stood straight and rigid, like a child repeating a
catechism.

"Hast thou then a god at all?"

"I had."

"And now?"

"No."

Hay Stockard swept the blood from his eyes and laughed.  The missionary
looked at him curiously, as in a dream.  A feeling of infinite distance
came over him, as though of a great remove.  In that which had
transpired, and which was to transpire, he had no part.  He was a
spectator--at a distance, yes, at a distance.  The words of Baptiste came
to him faintly:-

"Very good.  See that this man go free, and that no harm befall him.  Let
him depart in peace.  Give him a canoe and food.  Set his face toward the
Russians, that he may tell their priests of Baptiste the Red, in whose
country there is no god."

They led him to the edge of the steep, where they paused to witness the
final tragedy.  The half-breed turned to Hay Stockard.

"There is no god," he prompted.

The man laughed in reply.  One of the young men poised a war-spear for
the cast.

"Hast thou a god?"

"Ay, the God of my fathers."

He shifted the axe for a better grip.  Baptiste the Red gave the sign,
and the spear hurtled full against his breast.  Sturges Owen saw the
ivory head stand out beyond his back, saw the man sway, laughing, and
snap the shaft short as he fell upon it.  Then he went down to the river,
that he might carry to the Russians the message of Baptiste the Red, in
whose country there was no god.




THE GREAT INTERROGATION


I


To say the least, Mrs. Sayther's career in Dawson was meteoric.  She
arrived in the spring, with dog sleds and French-Canadian _voyageurs_,
blazed gloriously for a brief month, and departed up the river as soon as
it was free of ice.  Now womanless Dawson never quite understood this
hurried departure, and the local Four Hundred felt aggrieved and lonely
till the Nome strike was made and old sensations gave way to new.  For it
had delighted in Mrs. Sayther, and received her wide-armed.  She was
pretty, charming, and, moreover, a widow.  And because of this she at
once had at heel any number of Eldorado Kings, officials, and adventuring
younger sons, whose ears were yearning for the frou-frou of a woman's
skirts.

The mining engineers revered the memory of her husband, the late Colonel
Sayther, while the syndicate and promoter representatives spoke awesomely
of his deals and manipulations; for he was known down in the States as a
great mining man, and as even a greater one in London.  Why his widow, of
all women, should have come into the country, was the great
interrogation.  But they were a practical breed, the men of the
Northland, with a wholesome disregard for theories and a firm grip on
facts.  And to not a few of them Karen Sayther was a most essential fact.
That she did not regard the matter in this light, is evidenced by the
neatness and celerity with which refusal and proposal tallied off during
her four weeks' stay.  And with her vanished the fact, and only the
interrogation remained.

To the solution, Chance vouchsafed one clew.  Her last victim, Jack
Coughran, having fruitlessly laid at her feet both his heart and a five-
hundred-foot creek claim on Bonanza, celebrated the misfortune by walking
all of a night with the gods.  In the midwatch of this night he happened
to rub shoulders with Pierre Fontaine, none other than head man of Karen
Sayther's _voyageurs_.  This rubbing of shoulders led to recognition and
drinks, and ultimately involved both men in a common muddle of inebriety.

"Heh?" Pierre Fontaine later on gurgled thickly.  "Vot for Madame Sayther
mak visitation to thees country?  More better you spik wit her.  I know
no t'ing 'tall, only all de tam her ask one man's name.  'Pierre,' her
spik wit me; 'Pierre, you moos' find thees mans, and I gif you mooch--one
thousand dollar you find thees mans.'  Thees mans?  Ah, _oui_.  Thees
man's name--vot you call--Daveed Payne.  _Oui_, m'sieu, Daveed Payne.  All
de tam her spik das name.  And all de tam I look rount vaire mooch, work
lak hell, but no can find das dam mans, and no get one thousand dollar
'tall.  By dam!

"Heh?  Ah, _oui_.  One tam dose mens vot come from Circle City, dose mens
know thees mans.  Him Birch Creek, dey spik.  And madame?  Her say
'_Bon_!' and look happy lak anyt'ing.  And her spik wit me.  'Pierre,'
her spik, 'harness de dogs.  We go queek.  We find thees mans I gif you
one thousand dollar more.'  And I say, '_Oui_, queek!  _Allons, madame_!'

"For sure, I t'ink, das two thousand dollar mine.  Bully boy!  Den more
mens come from Circle City, and dey say no, das thees mans, Daveed Payne,
come Dawson leel tam back.  So madame and I go not 'tall.

"_Oui, m'sieu_.  Thees day madame spik.  'Pierre,' her spik, and gif me
five hundred dollar, 'go buy poling-boat.  To-morrow we go up de river.'
Ah, _oui_, to-morrow, up de river, and das dam Sitka Charley mak me pay
for de poling-boat five hundred dollar.  Dam!"

Thus it was, when Jack Coughran unburdened himself next day, that Dawson
fell to wondering who was this David Payne, and in what way his existence
bore upon Karen Sayther's.  But that very day, as Pierre Fontaine had
said, Mrs. Sayther and her barbaric crew of _voyageurs_ towed up the east
bank to Klondike City, shot across to the west bank to escape the bluffs,
and disappeared amid the maze of islands to the south.



II


"_Oui, madame_, thees is de place.  One, two, t'ree island below Stuart
River.  Thees is t'ree island."

As he spoke, Pierre Fontaine drove his pole against the bank and held the
stern of the boat against the current.  This thrust the bow in, till a
nimble breed climbed ashore with the painter and made fast.

"One leel tam, madame, I go look see."

A chorus of dogs marked his disappearance over the edge of the bank, but
a minute later he was back again.

"_Oui, madame_, thees is de cabin.  I mak investigation.  No can find
mans at home.  But him no go vaire far, vaire long, or him no leave dogs.
Him come queek, you bet!"

"Help me out, Pierre.  I'm tired all over from the boat.  You might have
made it softer, you know."

From a nest of furs amidships, Karen Sayther rose to her full height of
slender fairness.  But if she looked lily-frail in her elemental
environment, she was belied by the grip she put upon Pierre's hand, by
the knotting of her woman's biceps as it took the weight of her body, by
the splendid effort of her limbs as they held her out from the
perpendicular bank while she made the ascent.  Though shapely flesh
clothed delicate frame, her body was a seat of strength.

Still, for all the careless ease with which she had made the landing,
there was a warmer color than usual to her face, and a perceptibly extra
beat to her heart.  But then, also, it was with a certain reverent
curiousness that she approached the cabin, while the Hush on her cheek
showed a yet riper mellowness.

"Look, see!"  Pierre pointed to the scattered chips by the woodpile.  "Him
fresh--two, t'ree day, no more."

Mrs. Sayther nodded.  She tried to peer through the small window, but it
was made of greased parchment which admitted light while it blocked
vision.  Failing this, she went round to the door, half lifted the rude
latch to enter, but changed her mind and let it fall back into place.
Then she suddenly dropped on one knee and kissed the rough-hewn
threshold.  If Pierre Fontaine saw, he gave no sign, and the memory in
the time to come was never shared.  But the next instant, one of the
boatmen, placidly lighting his pipe, was startled by an unwonted
harshness in his captain's voice.

"Hey!  You!  Le Goire! You mak'm soft more better," Pierre commanded.
"Plenty bearskin; plenty blanket.  Dam!"

But the nest was soon after disrupted, and the major portion tossed up to
the crest of the shore, where Mrs. Sayther lay down to wait in comfort.

Reclining on her side, she looked out and over the wide-stretching Yukon.
Above the mountains which lay beyond the further shore, the sky was murky
with the smoke of unseen forest fires, and through this the afternoon sun
broke feebly, throwing a vague radiance to earth, and unreal shadows.  To
the sky-line of the four quarters--spruce-shrouded islands, dark waters,
and ice-scarred rocky ridges--stretched the immaculate wilderness.  No
sign of human existence broke the solitude; no sound the stillness.  The
land seemed bound under the unreality of the unknown, wrapped in the
brooding mystery of great spaces.

Perhaps it was this which made Mrs. Sayther nervous; for she changed her
position constantly, now to look up the river, now down, or to scan the
gloomy shores for the half-hidden mouths of back channels.  After an hour
or so the boatmen were sent ashore to pitch camp for the night, but
Pierre remained with his mistress to watch.

"Ah! him come thees tam," he whispered, after a long silence, his gaze
bent up the river to the head of the island.

A canoe, with a paddle flashing on either side, was slipping down the
current.  In the stern a man's form, and in the bow a woman's, swung
rhythmically to the work.  Mrs. Sayther had no eyes for the woman till
the canoe drove in closer and her bizarre beauty peremptorily demanded
notice.  A close-fitting blouse of moose-skin, fantastically beaded,
outlined faithfully the well-rounded lines of her body, while a silken
kerchief, gay of color and picturesquely draped, partly covered great
masses of blue-black hair.  But it was the face, cast belike in copper
bronze, which caught and held Mrs. Sayther's fleeting glance.  Eyes,
piercing and black and large, with a traditionary hint of obliqueness,
looked forth from under clear-stencilled, clean-arching brows.  Without
suggesting cadaverousness, though high-boned and prominent, the cheeks
fell away and met in a mouth, thin-lipped and softly strong.  It was a
face which advertised the dimmest trace of ancient Mongol blood, a
reversion, after long centuries of wandering, to the parent stem.  This
effect was heightened by the delicately aquiline nose with its thin
trembling nostrils, and by the general air of eagle wildness which seemed
to characterize not only the face but the creature herself.  She was, in
fact, the Tartar type modified to idealization, and the tribe of Red
Indian is lucky that breeds such a unique body once in a score of
generations.

Dipping long strokes and strong, the girl, in concert with the man,
suddenly whirled the tiny craft about against the current and brought it
gently to the shore.  Another instant and she stood at the top of the
bank, heaving up by rope, hand under hand, a quarter of fresh-killed
moose.  Then the man followed her, and together, with a swift rush, they
drew up the canoe.  The dogs were in a whining mass about them, and as
the girl stooped among them caressingly, the man's gaze fell upon Mrs.
Sayther, who had arisen.  He looked, brushed his eyes unconsciously as
though his sight were deceiving him, and looked again.

"Karen," he said simply, coming forward and extending his hand, "I
thought for the moment I was dreaming.  I went snow-blind for a time,
this spring, and since then my eyes have been playing tricks with me."

Mrs. Sayther, whose flush had deepened and whose heart was urging
painfully, had been prepared for almost anything save this coolly
extended hand; but she tactfully curbed herself and grasped it heartily
with her own.

"You know, Dave, I threatened often to come, and I would have, too,
only--only--"

"Only I didn't give the word."  David Payne laughed and watched the
Indian girl disappearing into the cabin.

"Oh, I understand, Dave, and had I been in your place I'd most probably
have done the same.  But I have come--now."

"Then come a little bit farther, into the cabin and get something to
eat," he said genially, ignoring or missing the feminine suggestion of
appeal in her voice.  "And you must be tired too.  Which way are you
travelling?  Up?  Then you wintered in Dawson, or came in on the last
ice.  Your camp?"  He glanced at the _voyageurs_ circled about the fire
in the open, and held back the door for her to enter.

"I came up on the ice from Circle City last winter," he continued, "and
settled down here for a while.  Am prospecting some on Henderson Creek,
and if that fails, have been thinking of trying my hand this fall up the
Stuart River."

"You aren't changed much, are you?" she asked irrelevantly, striving to
throw the conversation upon a more personal basis.

"A little less flesh, perhaps, and a little more muscle.  How did _you_
mean?"

But she shrugged her shoulders and peered I through the dim light at the
Indian girl, who had lighted the fire and was frying great chunks of
moose meat, alternated with thin ribbons of bacon.

"Did you stop in Dawson long?"  The man was whittling a stave of
birchwood into a rude axe-handle, and asked the question without raising
his head.

"Oh, a few days," she answered, following the girl with her eyes, and
hardly hearing.  "What were you saying?  In Dawson?  A month, in fact,
and glad to get away.  The arctic male is elemental, you know, and
somewhat strenuous in his feelings."

"Bound to be when he gets right down to the soil.  He leaves convention
with the spring bed at borne.  But you were wise in your choice of time
for leaving.  You'll be out of the country before mosquito season, which
is a blessing your lack of experience will not permit you to appreciate."

"I suppose not.  But tell me about yourself, about your life.  What kind
of neighbors have you?  Or have you any?"

While she queried she watched the girl grinding coffee in the corner of a
flower sack upon the hearthstone.  With a steadiness and skill which
predicated nerves as primitive as the method, she crushed the imprisoned
berries with a heavy fragment of quartz.  David Payne noted his visitor's
gaze, and the shadow of a smile drifted over his lips.

"I did have some," he replied.  "Missourian chaps, and a couple of
Cornishmen, but they went down to Eldorado to work at wages for a
grubstake."

Mrs. Sayther cast a look of speculative regard upon the girl.  "But of
course there are plenty of Indians about?"

"Every mother's son of them down to Dawson long ago.  Not a native in the
whole country, barring Winapie here, and she's a Koyokuk lass,--comes
from a thousand miles or so down the river."

Mrs. Sayther felt suddenly faint; and though the smile of interest in no
wise waned, the face of the man seemed to draw away to a telescopic
distance, and the tiered logs of the cabin to whirl drunkenly about.  But
she was bidden draw up to the table, and during the meal discovered time
and space in which to find herself.  She talked little, and that
principally about the land and weather, while the man wandered off into a
long description of the difference between the shallow summer diggings of
the Lower Country and the deep winter diggings of the Upper Country.

"You do not ask why I came north?" she asked.  "Surely you know."  They
had moved back from the table, and David Payne had returned to his axe-
handle.  "Did you get my letter?"

"A last one?  No, I don't think so.  Most probably it's trailing around
the Birch Creek Country or lying in some trader's shack on the Lower
River.  The way they run the mails in here is shameful.  No order, no
system, no--"

"Don't be wooden, Dave!  Help me!"  She spoke sharply now, with an
assumption of authority which rested upon the past.  "Why don't you ask
me about myself?  About those we knew in the old times?  Have you no
longer any interest in the world?  Do you know that my husband is dead?"

"Indeed, I am sorry.  How long--"

"David!"  She was ready to cry with vexation, but the reproach she threw
into her voice eased her.

"Did you get any of my letters?  You must have got some of them, though
you never answered."

"Well, I didn't get the last one, announcing, evidently, the death of
your husband, and most likely others went astray; but I did get some.
I--er--read them aloud to Winapie as a warning--that is, you know, to
impress upon her the wickedness of her white sisters.  And I--er--think
she profited by it.  Don't you?"

She disregarded the sting, and went on.  "In the last letter, which you
did not receive, I told, as you have guessed, of Colonel Sayther's death.
That was a year ago.  I also said that if you did not come out to me, I
would go in to you.  And as I had often promised, I came."

"I know of no promise."

"In the earlier letters?"

"Yes, you promised, but as I neither asked nor answered, it was
unratified.  So I do not know of any such promise.  But I do know of
another, which you, too, may remember.  It was very long ago."  He
dropped the axe-handle to the floor and raised his head.  "It was so very
long ago, yet I remember it distinctly, the day, the time, every detail.
We were in a rose garden, you and I,--your mother's rose garden.  All
things were budding, blossoming, and the sap of spring was in our blood.
And I drew you over--it was the first--and kissed you full on the lips.
Don't you remember?"

"Don't go over it, Dave, don't!  I know every shameful line of it.  How
often have I wept!  If you only knew how I have suffered--"

"You promised me then--ay, and a thousand times in the sweet days that
followed.  Each look of your eyes, each touch of your hand, each syllable
that fell from your lips, was a promise.  And then--how shall I
say?--there came a man.  He was old--old enough to have begotten you--and
not nice to look upon, but as the world goes, clean.  He had done no
wrong, followed the letter of the law, was respectable.  Further, and to
the point, he possessed some several paltry mines,--a score; it does not
matter: and he owned a few miles of lands, and engineered deals, and
clipped coupons.  He--"

"But there were other things," she interrupted, "I told you.
Pressure--money matters--want--my people--trouble.  You understood the
whole sordid situation.  I could not help it.  It was not my will.  I was
sacrificed, or I sacrificed, have it as you wish.  But, my God!  Dave, I
gave you up!  You never did _me_ justice.  Think what I have gone
through!"

"It was not your will?  Pressure?  Under high heaven there was no thing
to will you to this man's bed or that."

"But I cared for you all the time," she pleaded.

"I was unused to your way of measuring love.  I am still unused.  I do
not understand."

"But now! now!"

"We were speaking of this man you saw fit to marry.  What manner of man
was he?  Wherein did he charm your soul?  What potent virtues were his?
True, he had a golden grip,--an almighty golden grip.  He knew the odds.
He was versed in cent per cent.  He had a narrow wit and excellent
judgment of the viler parts, whereby he transferred this man's money to
his pockets, and that man's money, and the next man's.  And the law
smiled.  In that it did not condemn, our Christian ethics approved.  By
social measure he was not a bad man.  But by your measure, Karen, by
mine, by ours of the rose garden, what was he?"

"Remember, he is dead."

"The fact is not altered thereby.  What was he?  A great, gross, material
creature, deaf to song, blind to beauty, dead to the spirit.  He was fat
with laziness, and flabby-cheeked, and the round of his belly witnessed
his gluttony--"

"But he is dead.  It is we who are now--now! now!  Don't you hear?  As
you say, I have been inconstant.  I have sinned.  Good.  But should not
you, too, cry _peccavi_?  If I have broken promises, have not you?  Your
love of the rose garden was of all time, or so you said.  Where is it
now?"

"It is here! now!" he cried, striking his breast passionately with
clenched hand.  "It has always been."

"And your love was a great love; there was none greater," she continued;
"or so you said in the rose garden.  Yet it is not fine enough, large
enough, to forgive me here, crying now at your feet?"

The man hesitated.  His mouth opened; words shaped vainly on his lips.
She had forced him to bare his heart and speak truths which he had hidden
from himself.  And she was good to look upon, standing there in a glory
of passion, calling back old associations and warmer life.  He turned
away his head that he might not see, but she passed around and fronted
him.

"Look at me, Dave!  Look at me!  I am the same, after all.  And so are
you, if you would but see.  We are not changed."

Her hand rested on his shoulder, and his had half-passed, roughly, about
her, when the sharp crackle of a match startled him to himself.  Winapie,
alien to the scene, was lighting the slow wick of the slush lamp.  She
appeared to start out against a background of utter black, and the flame,
flaring suddenly up, lighted her bronze beauty to royal gold.

"You see, it is impossible," he groaned, thrusting the fair-haired woman
gently from him.  "It is impossible," he repeated.  "It is impossible."

"I am not a girl, Dave, with a girl's illusions," she said softly, though
not daring to come back to him.  "It is as a woman that I understand.  Men
are men.  A common custom of the country.  I am not shocked.  I divined
it from the first.  But--ah!--it is only a marriage of the country--not a
real marriage?"

"We do not ask such questions in Alaska," he interposed feebly.

"I know, but--"

"Well, then, it is only a marriage of the country--nothing else."

"And there are no children?"

"No."

"Nor--"

"No, no; nothing--but it is impossible."

"But it is not."  She was at his side again, her hand touching lightly,
caressingly, the sunburned back of his.  "I know the custom of the land
too well.  Men do it every day.  They do not care to remain here, shut
out from the world, for all their days; so they give an order on the P.
C. C. Company for a year's provisions, some money in hand, and the girl
is content.  By the end of that time, a man--"  She shrugged her
shoulders.  "And so with the girl here.  We will give her an order upon
the company, not for a year, but for life.  What was she when you found
her?  A raw, meat-eating savage; fish in summer, moose in winter,
feasting in plenty, starving in famine.  But for you that is what she
would have remained.  For your coming she was happier; for your going,
surely, with a life of comparative splendor assured, she will be happier
than if you had never been."

"No, no," he protested.  "It is not right."

"Come, Dave, you must see.  She is not your kind.  There is no race
affinity.  She is an aborigine, sprung from the soil, yet close to the
soil, and impossible to lift from the soil.  Born savage, savage she will
die.  But we--you and I--the dominant, evolved race--the salt of the
earth and the masters thereof!  We are made for each other.  The supreme
call is of kind, and we are of kind.  Reason and feeling dictate it.  Your
very instinct demands it.  That you cannot deny.  You cannot escape the
generations behind you.  Yours is an ancestry which has survived for a
thousand centuries, and for a hundred thousand centuries, and your line
must not stop here.  It cannot.  Your ancestry will not permit it.
Instinct is stronger than the will.  The race is mightier than you.  Come,
Dave, let us go.  We are young yet, and life is good.  Come."

Winapie, passing out of the cabin to feed the dogs, caught his attention
and caused him to shake his head and weakly to reiterate.  But the
woman's hand slipped about his neck, and her cheek pressed to his.  His
bleak life rose up and smote him,--the vain struggle with pitiless
forces; the dreary years of frost and famine; the harsh and jarring
contact with elemental life; the aching void which mere animal existence
could not fill.  And there, seduction by his side, whispering of
brighter, warmer lands, of music, light, and joy, called the old times
back again.  He visioned it unconsciously.  Faces rushed in upon him;
glimpses of forgotten scenes, memories of merry hours; strains of song
and trills of laughter--

"Come, Dave, Come.  I have for both.  The way is soft."  She looked about
her at the bare furnishings of the cabin.  "I have for both.  The world
is at our feet, and all joy is ours.  Come! come!"

She was in his arms, trembling, and he held her tightly.  He rose to his
feet . . . But the snarling of hungry dogs, and the shrill cries of
Winapie bringing about peace between the combatants, came muffled to his
ear through the heavy logs.  And another scene flashed before him.  A
struggle in the forest,--a bald-face grizzly, broken-legged, terrible;
the snarling of the dogs and the shrill cries of Winapie as she urged
them to the attack; himself in the midst of the crush, breathless,
panting, striving to hold off red death; broken-backed, entrail-ripped
dogs howling in impotent anguish and desecrating the snow; the virgin
white running scarlet with the blood of man and beast; the bear,
ferocious, irresistible, crunching, crunching down to the core of his
life; and Winapie, at the last, in the thick of the frightful muddle,
hair flying, eyes flashing, fury incarnate, passing the long hunting
knife again and again--Sweat started to his forehead.  He shook off the
clinging woman and staggered back to the wall.  And she, knowing that the
moment had come, but unable to divine what was passing within him, felt
all she had gained slipping away.

"Dave!  Dave!" she cried.  "I will not give you up!  I will not give you
up!  If you do not wish to come, we will stay.  I will stay with you.  The
world is less to me than are you.  I will be a Northland wife to you.  I
will cook your food, feed your dogs, break trail for you, lift a paddle
with you.  I can do it.  Believe me, I am strong."

Nor did he doubt it, looking upon her and holding her off from him; but
his face had grown stern and gray, and the warmth had died out of his
eyes.

"I will pay off Pierre and the boatmen, and let them go.  And I will stay
with you, priest or no priest, minister or no minister; go with you, now,
anywhere!  Dave!  Dave!  Listen to me!  You say I did you wrong in the
past--and I did--let me make up for it, let me atone.  If I did not
rightly measure love before, let me show that I can now."

She sank to the floor and threw her arms about his knees, sobbing.  "And
you _do_ care for me.  You _do_ care for me.  Think!  The long years I
have waited, suffered!  You can never know!"  He stooped and raised her
to her feet.

"Listen," he commanded, opening the door and lifting her bodily outside.
"It cannot be.  We are not alone to be considered.  You must go.  I wish
you a safe journey.  You will find it tougher work when you get up by the
Sixty Mile, but you have the best boatmen in the world, and will get
through all right.  Will you say good-by?"

Though she already had herself in hand, she looked at him hopelessly.
"If--if--if Winapie should--"  She quavered and stopped.

But he grasped the unspoken thought, and answered, "Yes."  Then struck
with the enormity of it, "It cannot be conceived.  There is no
likelihood.  It must not be entertained."

"Kiss me," she whispered, her face lighting.  Then she turned and went
away.

* * * * *

"Break camp, Pierre," she said to the boatman, who alone had remained
awake against her return.  "We must be going."

By the firelight his sharp eyes scanned the woe in her face, but he
received the extraordinary command as though it were the most usual thing
in the world.  "_Oui, madame_," he assented.  "Which way?  Dawson?"

"No," she answered, lightly enough; "up; out; Dyea."

Whereat he fell upon the sleeping _voyageurs_, kicking them, grunting,
from their blankets, and buckling them down to the work, the while his
voice, vibrant with action, shrilling through all the camp.  In a trice
Mrs. Sayther's tiny tent had been struck, pots and pans were being
gathered up, blankets rolled, and the men staggering under the loads to
the boat.  Here, on the banks, Mrs. Sayther waited till the luggage was
made ship-shape and her nest prepared.

"We line up to de head of de island," Pierre explained to her while
running out the long tow rope.  "Den we tak to das back channel, where de
water not queek, and I t'ink we mak good tam."

A scuffling and pattering of feet in the last year's dry grass caught his
quick ear, and he turned his head.  The Indian girl, circled by a
bristling ring of wolf dogs, was coming toward them.  Mrs. Sayther noted
that the girl's face, which had been apathetic throughout the scene in
the cabin, had now quickened into blazing and wrathful life.

"What you do my man?" she demanded abruptly of Mrs. Sayther.  "Him lay on
bunk, and him look bad all the time.  I say, 'What the matter, Dave?  You
sick?'  But him no say nothing.  After that him say, 'Good girl Winapie,
go way.  I be all right bimeby.'  What you do my man, eh?  I think you
bad woman."

Mrs. Sayther looked curiously at the barbarian woman who shared the life
of this man, while she departed alone in the darkness of night.

"I think you bad woman," Winapie repeated in the slow, methodical way of
one who gropes for strange words in an alien tongue.  "I think better you
go way, no come no more.  Eh?  What you think?  I have one man.  I Indian
girl.  You 'Merican woman.  You good to see.  You find plenty men.  Your
eyes blue like the sky.  Your skin so white, so soft."

Coolly she thrust out a brown forefinger and pressed the soft cheek of
the other woman.  And to the eternal credit of Karen Sayther, she never
flinched.  Pierre hesitated and half stepped forward; but she motioned
him away, though her heart welled to him with secret gratitude.  "It's
all right, Pierre," she said.  "Please go away."

He stepped back respectfully out of earshot, where he stood grumbling to
himself and measuring the distance in springs.

"Um white, um soft, like baby."  Winapie touched the other cheek and
withdrew her hand.  "Bimeby mosquito come.  Skin get sore in spot; um
swell, oh, so big; um hurt, oh, so much.  Plenty mosquito; plenty spot.  I
think better you go now before mosquito come.  This way," pointing down
the stream, "you go St. Michael's; that way," pointing up, "you go Dyea.
Better you go Dyea.  Good-by."

And that which Mrs. Sayther then did, caused Pierre to marvel greatly.
For she threw her arms around the Indian girl, kissed her, and burst into
tears.

"Be good to him," she cried.  "Be good to him."

Then she slipped half down the face of the bank, called back "Good-by,"
and dropped into the boat amidships.  Pierre followed her and cast off.
He shoved the steering oar into place and gave the signal.  Le Goire
lifted an old French _chanson_; the men, like a row of ghosts in the dim
starlight, bent their backs to the tow line; the steering oar cut the
black current sharply, and the boat swept out into the night.




WHICH MAKE MEN REMEMBER


Fortune La Pearle crushed his way through the snow, sobbing, straining,
cursing his luck, Alaska, Nome, the cards, and the man who had felt his
knife.  The hot blood was freezing on his hands, and the scene yet bright
in his eyes,--the man, clutching the table and sinking slowly to the
floor; the rolling counters and the scattered deck; the swift shiver
throughout the room, and the pause; the game-keepers no longer calling,
and the clatter of the chips dying away; the startled faces; the infinite
instant of silence; and then the great blood-roar and the tide of
vengeance which lapped his heels and turned the town mad behind him.

"All hell's broke loose," he sneered, turning aside in the darkness and
heading for the beach.  Lights were flashing from open doors, and tent,
cabin, and dance-hall let slip their denizens upon the chase.  The clamor
of men and howling of dogs smote his ears and quickened his feet.  He ran
on and on.  The sounds grew dim, and the pursuit dissipated itself in
vain rage and aimless groping.  But a flitting shadow clung to him.  Head
thrust over shoulder, he caught glimpses of it, now taking vague shape on
an open expanse of snow, how merging into the deeper shadows of some
darkened cabin or beach-listed craft.

Fortune La Pearle swore like a woman, weakly, with the hint of tears that
comes of exhaustion, and plunged deeper into the maze of heaped ice,
tents, and prospect holes.  He stumbled over taut hawsers and piles of
dunnage, tripped on crazy guy-ropes and insanely planted pegs, and fell
again and again upon frozen dumps and mounds of hoarded driftwood.  At
times, when he deemed he had drawn clear, his head dizzy with the painful
pounding of his heart and the suffocating intake of his breath, he
slackened down; and ever the shadow leaped out of the gloom and forced
him on in heart-breaking flight.  A swift intuition lashed upon him,
leaving in its trail the cold chill of superstition.  The persistence of
the shadow he invested with his gambler's symbolism.  Silent, inexorable,
not to be shaken off, he took it as the fate which waited at the last
turn when chips were cashed in and gains and losses counted up.  Fortune
La Pearle believed in those rare, illuminating moments, when the
intelligence flung from it time and space, to rise naked through eternity
and read the facts of life from the open book of chance.  That this was
such a moment he had no doubt; and when he turned inland and sped across
the snow-covered tundra he was not startled because the shadow took upon
it greater definiteness and drew in closer.  Oppressed with his own
impotence, he halted in the midst of the white waste and whirled about.
His right hand slipped from its mitten, and a revolver, at level,
glistened in the pale light of the stars.

"Don't shoot.  I haven't a gun."

The shadow had assumed tangible shape, and at the sound of its human
voice a trepidation affected Fortune La Pearle's knees, and his stomach
was stricken with the qualms of sudden relief.

Perhaps things fell out differently because Uri Bram had no gun that
night when he sat on the hard benches of the El Dorado and saw murder
done.  To that fact also might be attributed the trip on the Long Trail
which he took subsequently with a most unlikely comrade.  But be it as it
may, he repeated a second time, "Don't shoot.  Can't you see I haven't a
gun?"

"Then what the flaming hell did you take after me for?" demanded the
gambler, lowering his revolver.

Uri Bram shrugged his shoulders.  "It don't matter much, anyhow.  I want
you to come with me."

"Where?"

"To my shack, over on the edge of the camp."

But Fortune La Pearle drove the heel of his moccasin into the snow and
attested by his various deities to the madness of Uri Bram.  "Who are
you," he perorated, "and what am I, that I should put my neck into the
rope at your bidding?"

"I am Uri Bram," the other said simply, "and my shack is over there on
the edge of camp.  I don't know who you are, but you've thrust the soul
from a living man's body,--there's the blood red on your sleeve,--and,
like a second Cain, the hand of all mankind is against you, and there is
no place you may lay your head.  Now, I have a shack--"

"For the love of your mother, hold your say, man," interrupted Fortune La
Pearle, "or I'll make you a second Abel for the joy of it.  So help me, I
will!  With a thousand men to lay me by the heels, looking high and low,
what do I want with your shack?  I want to get out of here--away! away!
away!  Cursed swine!  I've half a mind to go back and run amuck, and
settle for a few of them, the pigs!  One gorgeous, glorious fight, and
end the whole damn business!  It's a skin game, that's what life is, and
I'm sick of it!"

He stopped, appalled, crushed by his great desolation, and Uri Bram
seized the moment.  He was not given to speech, this man, and that which
followed was the longest in his life, save one long afterward in another
place.

"That's why I told you about my shack.  I can stow you there so they'll
never find you, and I've got grub in plenty.  Elsewise you can't get
away.  No dogs, no nothing, the sea closed, St. Michael the nearest post,
runners to carry the news before you, the same over the portage to
Anvik--not a chance in the world for you!  Now wait with me till it blows
over.  They'll forget all about you in a month or less, what of
stampeding to York and what not, and you can hit the trail under their
noses and they won't bother.  I've got my own ideas of justice.  When I
ran after you, out of the El Dorado and along the beach, it wasn't to
catch you or give you up.  My ideas are my own, and that's not one of
them."

He ceased as the murderer drew a prayer-book from his pocket.  With the
aurora borealis glimmering yellow in the northeast, heads bared to the
frost and naked hands grasping the sacred book, Fortune La Pearle swore
him to the words he had spoken--an oath which Uri Bram never intended
breaking, and never broke.

At the door of the shack the gambler hesitated for an instant, marvelling
at the strangeness of this man who had befriended him, and doubting.  But
by the candlelight he found the cabin comfortable and without occupants,
and he was quickly rolling a cigarette while the other man made coffee.
His muscles relaxed in the warmth and he lay back with half-assumed
indolence, intently studying Uri's face through the curling wisps of
smoke.  It was a powerful face, but its strength was of that peculiar
sort which stands girt in and unrelated.  The seams were deep-graven,
more like scars, while the stern features were in no way softened by
hints of sympathy or humor.  Under prominent bushy brows the eyes shone
cold and gray.  The cheekbones, high and forbidding, were undermined by
deep hollows.  The chin and jaw displayed a steadiness of purpose which
the narrow forehead advertised as single, and, if needs be, pitiless.
Everything was harsh, the nose, the lips, the voice, the lines about the
mouth.  It was the face of one who communed much with himself, unused to
seeking counsel from the world; the face of one who wrestled oft of
nights with angels, and rose to face the day with shut lips that no man
might know.  He was narrow but deep; and Fortune, his own humanity broad
and shallow, could make nothing of him.  Did Uri sing when merry and sigh
when sad, he could have understood; but as it was, the cryptic features
were undecipherable; he could not measure the soul they concealed.

"Lend a hand, Mister Man," Uri ordered when the cups had been emptied.
"We've got to fix up for visitors."

Fortune purred his name for the other's benefit, and assisted
understandingly.  The bunk was built against a side and end of the cabin.
It was a rude affair, the bottom being composed of drift-wood logs
overlaid with moss.  At the foot the rough ends of these timbers
projected in an uneven row.  From the side next the wall Uri ripped back
the moss and removed three of the logs.  The jagged ends he sawed off and
replaced so that the projecting row remained unbroken.  Fortune carried
in sacks of flour from the cache and piled them on the floor beneath the
aperture.  On these Uri laid a pair of long sea-bags, and over all spread
several thicknesses of moss and blankets.  Upon this Fortune could lie,
with the sleeping furs stretching over him from one side of the bunk to
the other, and all men could look upon it and declare it empty.

In the weeks which followed, several domiciliary visits were paid, not a
shack or tent in Nome escaping, but Fortune lay in his cranny
undisturbed.  In fact, little attention was given to Uri Bram's cabin;
for it was the last place under the sun to expect to find the murderer of
John Randolph.  Except during such interruptions, Fortune lolled about
the cabin, playing long games of solitaire and smoking endless
cigarettes.  Though his volatile nature loved geniality and play of words
and laughter, he quickly accommodated himself to Uri's taciturnity.
Beyond the actions and plans of his pursuers, the state of the trails,
and the price of dogs, they never talked; and these things were only
discussed at rare intervals and briefly.  But Fortune fell to working out
a system, and hour after hour, and day after day, he shuffled and dealt,
shuffled and dealt, noted the combinations of the cards in long columns,
and shuffled and dealt again.  Toward the end even this absorption failed
him, and, head bowed upon the table, he visioned the lively all-night
houses of Nome, where the gamekeepers and lookouts worked in shifts and
the clattering roulette ball never slept.  At such times his loneliness
and bankruptcy stunned him till he sat for hours in the same unblinking,
unchanging position.  At other times, his long-pent bitterness found
voice in passionate outbursts; for he had rubbed the world the wrong way
and did not like the feel of it.

"Life's a skin-game," he was fond of repeating, and on this one note he
rang the changes.  "I never had half a chance," he complained.  "I was
faked in my birth and flim-flammed with my mother's milk.  The dice were
loaded when she tossed the box, and I was born to prove the loss.  But
that was no reason she should blame me for it, and look on me as a cold
deck; but she did--ay, she did.  Why didn't she give me a show?  Why
didn't the world?  Why did I go broke in Seattle?  Why did I take the
steerage, and live like a hog to Nome?  Why did I go to the El Dorado?  I
was heading for Big Pete's and only went for matches.  Why didn't I have
matches?  Why did I want to smoke?  Don't you see?  All worked out, every
bit of it, all parts fitting snug.  Before I was born, like as not.  I'll
put the sack I never hope to get on it, before I was born.  That's why!
That's why John Randolph passed the word and his checks in at the same
time.  Damn him!  It served him well right!  Why didn't he keep his
tongue between his teeth and give me a chance?  He knew I was next to
broke.  Why didn't I hold my hand?  Oh, why?  Why?  Why?"

And Fortune La Pearle would roll upon the floor, vainly interrogating the
scheme of things.  At such outbreaks Uri said no word, gave no sign, save
that his grey eyes seemed to turn dull and muddy, as though from lack of
interest.  There was nothing in common between these two men, and this
fact Fortune grasped sufficiently to wonder sometimes why Uri had stood
by him.

But the time of waiting came to an end.  Even a community's blood lust
cannot stand before its gold lust.  The murder of John Randolph had
already passed into the annals of the camp, and there it rested.  Had the
murderer appeared, the men of Nome would certainly have stopped
stampeding long enough to see justice done, whereas the whereabouts of
Fortune La Pearle was no longer an insistent problem.  There was gold in
the creek beds and ruby beaches, and when the sea opened, the men with
healthy sacks would sail away to where the good things of life were sold
absurdly cheap.

So, one night, Fortune helped Uri Bram harness the dogs and lash the
sled, and the twain took the winter trail south on the ice.  But it was
not all south; for they left the sea east from St. Michael's, crossed the
divide, and struck the Yukon at Anvik, many hundred miles from its mouth.
Then on, into the northeast, past Koyokuk, Tanana, and Minook, till they
rounded the Great Curve at Fort Yukon, crossed and recrossed the Arctic
Circle, and headed south through the Flats.  It was a weary journey, and
Fortune would have wondered why the man went with him, had not Uri told
him that he owned claims and had men working at Eagle.  Eagle lay on the
edge of the line; a few miles farther on, the British flag waved over the
barracks at Fort Cudahy.  Then came Dawson, Pelly, the Five Fingers,
Windy Arm, Caribou Crossing, Linderman, the Chilcoot and Dyea.

On the morning after passing Eagle, they rose early.  This was their last
camp, and they were now to part.  Fortune's heart was light.  There was a
promise of spring in the land, and the days were growing longer.  The way
was passing into Canadian territory.  Liberty was at hand, the sun was
returning, and each day saw him nearer to the Great Outside.  The world
was big, and he could once again paint his future in royal red.  He
whistled about the breakfast and hummed snatches of light song while Uri
put the dogs in harness and packed up.  But when all was ready, Fortune's
feet itching to be off, Uri pulled an unused back-log to the fire and sat
down.

"Ever hear of the Dead Horse Trail?"

He glanced up meditatively and Fortune shook his head, inwardly chafing
at the delay.

"Sometimes there are meetings under circumstances which make men
remember," Uri continued, speaking in a low voice and very slowly, "and I
met a man under such circumstances on the Dead Horse Trail.  Freighting
an outfit over the White Pass in '97 broke many a man's heart, for there
was a world of reason when they gave that trail its name.  The horses
died like mosquitoes in the first frost, and from Skaguay to Bennett they
rotted in heaps.  They died at the Rocks, they were poisoned at the
Summit, and they starved at the Lakes; they fell off the trail, what
there was of it, or they went through it; in the river they drowned under
their loads, or were smashed to pieces against the boulders; they snapped
their legs in the crevices and broke their backs falling backwards with
their packs; in the sloughs they sank from sight or smothered in the
slime, and they were disembowelled in the bogs where the corduroy logs
turned end up in the mud; men shot them, worked them to death, and when
they were gone, went back to the beach and bought more.  Some did not
bother to shoot them,--stripping the saddles off and the shoes and
leaving them where they fell.  Their hearts turned to stone--those which
did not break--and they became beasts, the men on Dead Horse Trail.

"It was there I met a man with the heart of a Christ and the patience.
And he was honest.  When he rested at midday he took the packs from the
horses so that they, too, might rest.  He paid $50 a hundred-weight for
their fodder, and more.  He used his own bed to blanket their backs when
they rubbed raw.  Other men let the saddles eat holes the size of water-
buckets.  Other men, when the shoes gave out, let them wear their hoofs
down to the bleeding stumps.  He spent his last dollar for horseshoe
nails.  I know this because we slept in the one bed and ate from the one
pot, and became blood brothers where men lost their grip of things and
died blaspheming God.  He was never too tired to ease a strap or tighten
a cinch, and often there were tears in his eyes when he looked on all
that waste of misery.  At a passage in the rocks, where the brutes
upreared hindlegged and stretched their forelegs upward like cats to
clear the wall, the way was piled with carcasses where they had toppled
back.  And here he stood, in the stench of hell, with a cheery word and a
hand on the rump at the right time, till the string passed by.  And when
one bogged he blocked the trail till it was clear again; nor did the man
live who crowded him at such time.

"At the end of the trail a man who had killed fifty horses wanted to buy,
but we looked at him and at our own,--mountain cayuses from eastern
Oregon.  Five thousand he offered, and we were broke, but we remembered
the poison grass of the Summit and the passage in the Rocks, and the man
who was my brother spoke no word, but divided the cayuses into two
bunches,--his in the one and mine in the other,--and he looked at me and
we understood each other.  So he drove mine to the one side and I drove
his to the other, and we took with us our rifles and shot them to the
last one, while the man who had killed fifty horses cursed us till his
throat cracked.  But that man, with whom I welded blood-brothership on
the Dead Horse Trail--"

"Why, that man was John Randolph," Fortune, sneering the while, completed
the climax for him.

Uri nodded, and said, "I am glad you understand."

"I am ready," Fortune answered, the old weary bitterness strong in his
face again.  "Go ahead, but hurry."

Uri Bram rose to his feet.

"I have had faith in God all the days of my life.  I believe He loves
justice.  I believe He is looking down upon us now, choosing between us.
I believe He waits to work His will through my own right arm.  And such
is my belief, that we will take equal chance and let Him speak His own
judgment."

Fortune's heart leaped at the words.  He did not know much concerning
Uri's God, but he believed in Chance, and Chance had been coming his way
ever since the night he ran down the beach and across the snow.  "But
there is only one gun," he objected.

"We will fire turn about," Uri replied, at the same time throwing out the
cylinder of the other man's Colt and examining it.

"And the cards to decide!  One hand of seven up!"

Fortune's blood was warming to the game, and he drew the deck from his
pocket as Uri nodded.  Surely Chance would not desert him now!  He
thought of the returning sun as he cut for deal, and he thrilled when he
found the deal was his.  He shuffled and dealt, and Uri cut him the Jack
of Spades.  They laid down their hands.  Uri's was bare of trumps, while
he held ace, deuce.  The outside seemed very near to him as they stepped
off the fifty paces.

"If God withholds His hand and you drop me, the dogs and outfit are
yours.  You'll find a bill of sale, already made out, in my pocket," Uri
explained, facing the path of the bullet, straight and broad-breasted.

Fortune shook a vision of the sun shining on the ocean from his eyes and
took aim.  He was very careful.  Twice he lowered as the spring breeze
shook the pines.  But the third time he dropped on one knee, gripped the
revolver steadily in both hands, and fired.  Uri whirled half about,
threw up his arms, swayed wildly for a moment, and sank into the snow.
But Fortune knew he had fired too far to one side, else the man would not
have whirled.

When Uri, mastering the flesh and struggling to his feet, beckoned for
the weapon, Fortune was minded to fire again.  But he thrust the idea
from him.  Chance had been very good to him already, he felt, and if he
tricked now he would have to pay for it afterward.  No, he would play
fair.  Besides Uri was hard hit and could not possibly hold the heavy
Colt long enough to draw a bead.

"And where is your God now?" he taunted, as he gave the wounded man the
revolver.

And Uri answered: "God has not yet spoken.  Prepare that He may speak."

Fortune faced him, but twisted his chest sideways in order to present
less surface.  Uri tottered about drunkenly, but waited, too, for the
moment's calm between the catspaws.  The revolver was very heavy, and he
doubted, like Fortune, because of its weight.  But he held it, arm
extended, above his head, and then let it slowly drop forward and down.
At the instant Fortune's left breast and the sight flashed into line with
his eye, he pulled the trigger.  Fortune did not whirl, but gay San
Francisco dimmed and faded, and as the sun-bright snow turned black and
blacker, he breathed his last malediction on the Chance he had misplayed.




SIWASH


"If I was a man--"  Her words were in themselves indecisive, but the
withering contempt which flashed from her black eyes was not lost upon
the men-folk in the tent.

Tommy, the English sailor, squirmed, but chivalrous old Dick Humphries,
Cornish fisherman and erstwhile American salmon capitalist, beamed upon
her benevolently as ever.  He bore women too large a portion of his rough
heart to mind them, as he said, when they were in the doldrums, or when
their limited vision would not permit them to see all around a thing.  So
they said nothing, these two men who had taken the half-frozen woman into
their tent three days back, and who had warmed her, and fed her, and
rescued her goods from the Indian packers.  This latter had necessitated
the payment of numerous dollars, to say nothing of a demonstration in
force--Dick Humphries squinting along the sights of a Winchester while
Tommy apportioned their wages among them at his own appraisement.  It had
been a little thing in itself, but it meant much to a woman playing a
desperate single-hand in the equally desperate Klondike rush of '97.  Men
were occupied with their own pressing needs, nor did they approve of
women playing, single-handed, the odds of the arctic winter.  "If I was a
man, I know what I would do."  Thus reiterated Molly, she of the flashing
eyes, and therein spoke the cumulative grit of five American-born
generations.

In the succeeding silence, Tommy thrust a pan of biscuits into the Yukon
stove and piled on fresh fuel.  A reddish flood pounded along under his
sun-tanned skin, and as he stooped, the skin of his neck was scarlet.
Dick palmed a three-cornered sail needle through a set of broken pack
straps, his good nature in nowise disturbed by the feminine cataclysm
which was threatening to burst in the storm-beaten tent.

"And if you was a man?" he asked, his voice vibrant with kindness.  The
three-cornered needle jammed in the damp leather, and he suspended work
for the moment.

"I'd be a man.  I'd put the straps on my back and light out.  I wouldn't
lay in camp here, with the Yukon like to freeze most any day, and the
goods not half over the portage.  And you--you are men, and you sit here,
holding your hands, afraid of a little wind and wet.  I tell you
straight, Yankee-men are made of different stuff.  They'd be hitting the
trail for Dawson if they had to wade through hell-fire.  And you, you--I
wish I was a man."

"I'm very glad, my dear, that you're not."  Dick Humphries threw the
bight of the sail twine over the point of the needle and drew it clear
with a couple of deft turns and a jerk.

A snort of the gale dealt the tent a broad-handed slap as it hurtled
past, and the sleet rat-tat-tatted with snappy spite against the thin
canvas.  The smoke, smothered in its exit, drove back through the fire-
box door, carrying with it the pungent odor of green spruce.

"Good Gawd!  Why can't a woman listen to reason?"  Tommy lifted his head
from the denser depths and turned upon her a pair of smoke-outraged eyes.

"And why can't a man show his manhood?"

Tommy sprang to his feet with an oath which would have shocked a woman of
lesser heart, ripped loose the sturdy reef-knots and flung back the flaps
of the tent.

The trio peered out.  It was not a heartening spectacle.  A few water-
soaked tents formed the miserable foreground, from which the streaming
ground sloped to a foaming gorge.  Down this ramped a mountain torrent.
Here and there, dwarf spruce, rooting and grovelling in the shallow
alluvium, marked the proximity of the timber line.  Beyond, on the
opposing slope, the vague outlines of a glacier loomed dead-white through
the driving rain.  Even as they looked, its massive front crumbled into
the valley, on the breast of some subterranean vomit, and it lifted its
hoarse thunder above the screeching voice of the storm.  Involuntarily,
Molly shrank back.

"Look, woman!  Look with all your eyes!  Three miles in the teeth of the
gale to Crater Lake, across two glaciers, along the slippery rim-rock,
knee-deep in a howling river!  Look, I say, you Yankee woman!  Look!
There's your Yankee-men!"  Tommy pointed a passionate hand in the
direction of the struggling tents.  "Yankees, the last mother's son of
them.  Are they on trail?  Is there one of them with the straps to his
back?  And you would teach us men our work?  Look, I say!"

Another tremendous section of the glacier rumbled earthward.  The wind
whipped in at the open doorway, bulging out the sides of the tent till it
swayed like a huge bladder at its guy ropes.  The smoke swirled about
them, and the sleet drove sharply into their flesh.  Tommy pulled the
flaps together hastily, and returned to his tearful task at the fire-box.
Dick Humphries threw the mended pack straps into a corner and lighted his
pipe.  Even Molly was for the moment persuaded.

"There's my clothes," she half-whimpered, the feminine for the moment
prevailing.  "They're right at the top of the cache, and they'll be
ruined!  I tell you, ruined!"

"There, there," Dick interposed, when the last quavering syllable had
wailed itself out.  "Don't let that worry you, little woman.  I'm old
enough to be your father's brother, and I've a daughter older than you,
and I'll tog you out in fripperies when we get to Dawson if it takes my
last dollar."

"When we get to Dawson!"  The scorn had come back to her throat with a
sudden surge.  "You'll rot on the way, first.  You'll drown in a mudhole.
You--you--Britishers!"

The last word, explosive, intensive, had strained the limits of her
vituperation.  If that would not stir these men, what could?  Tommy's
neck ran red again, but he kept his tongue between his teeth.  Dick's
eyes mellowed.  He had the advantage over Tommy, for he had once had a
white woman for a wife.

The blood of five American-born generations is, under certain
circumstances, an uncomfortable heritage; and among these circumstances
might be enumerated that of being quartered with next of kin.  These men
were Britons.  On sea and land her ancestry and the generations thereof
had thrashed them and theirs.  On sea and land they would continue to do
so.  The traditions of her race clamored for vindication.  She was but a
woman of the present, but in her bubbled the whole mighty past.  It was
not alone Molly Travis who pulled on gum boots, mackintosh, and straps;
for the phantom hands of ten thousand forbears drew tight the buckles,
just so as they squared her jaw and set her eyes with determination.  She,
Molly Travis, intended to shame these Britishers; they, the innumerable
shades, were asserting the dominance of the common race.

The men-folk did not interfere.  Once Dick suggested that she take his
oilskins, as her mackintosh was worth no more than paper in such a storm.
But she sniffed her independence so sharply that he communed with his
pipe till she tied the flaps on the outside and slushed away on the
flooded trail.

"Think she'll make it?"  Dick's face belied the indifference of his
voice.

"Make it?  If she stands the pressure till she gets to the cache, what of
the cold and misery, she'll be stark, raving mad.  Stand it?  She'll be
dumb-crazed.  You know it yourself, Dick.  You've wind-jammed round the
Horn.  You know what it is to lay out on a topsail yard in the thick of
it, bucking sleet and snow and frozen canvas till you're ready to just
let go and cry like a baby.  Clothes?  She won't be able to tell a bundle
of skirts from a gold pan or a tea-kettle."

"Kind of think we were wrong in letting her go, then?"

"Not a bit of it.  So help me, Dick, she'd 'a' made this tent a hell for
the rest of the trip if we hadn't.  Trouble with her she's got too much
spirit.  This'll tone it down a bit."

"Yes," Dick admitted, "she's too ambitious.  But then Molly's all right.
A cussed little fool to tackle a trip like this, but a plucky sight
better than those pick-me-up-and-carry-me kind of women.  She's the stock
that carried you and me, Tommy, and you've got to make allowance for the
spirit.  Takes a woman to breed a man.  You can't suck manhood from the
dugs of a creature whose only claim to womanhood is her petticoats.  Takes
a she-cat, not a cow, to mother a tiger."

"And when they're unreasonable we've got to put up with it, eh?"

"The proposition.  A sharp sheath-knife cuts deeper on a slip than a dull
one; but that's no reason for to hack the edge off over a capstan bar."

"All right, if you say so, but when it comes to woman, I guess I'll take
mine with a little less edge."

"What do you know about it?" Dick demanded.

"Some."  Tommy reached over for a pair of Molly's wet stockings and
stretched them across his knees to dry.

Dick, eying him querulously, went fishing in her hand satchel, then
hitched up to the front of the stove with divers articles of damp
clothing spread likewise to the heat.

"Thought you said you never were married?" he asked.

"Did I?  No more was I--that is--yes, by Gawd! I was.  And as good a
woman as ever cooked grub for a man."

"Slipped her moorings?" Dick symbolized infinity with a wave of his hand.

"Ay."

"Childbirth," he added, after a moment's pause.

The beans bubbled rowdily on the front lid, and he pushed the pot back to
a cooler surface.  After that he investigated the biscuits, tested them
with a splinter of wood, and placed them aside under cover of a damp
cloth.  Dick, after the manner of his kind, stifled his interest and
waited silently.  "A different woman to Molly.  Siwash."

Dick nodded his understanding.

"Not so proud and wilful, but stick by a fellow through thick and thin.
Sling a paddle with the next and starve as contentedly as Job.  Go
for'ard when the sloop's nose was more often under than not, and take in
sail like a man.  Went prospecting once, up Teslin way, past Surprise
Lake and the Little Yellow-Head.  Grub gave out, and we ate the dogs.
Dogs gave out, and we ate harnesses, moccasins, and furs.  Never a
whimper; never a pick-me-up-and-carry-me.  Before we went she said look
out for grub, but when it happened, never a I-told-you-so.  'Never mind,
Tommy,' she'd say, day after day, that weak she could bare lift a snow-
shoe and her feet raw with the work.  'Never mind.  I'd sooner be flat-
bellied of hunger and be your woman, Tommy, than have a _potlach_ every
day and be Chief George's _klooch_.'  George was chief of the Chilcoots,
you know, and wanted her bad.

"Great days, those.  Was a likely chap myself when I struck the coast.
Jumped a whaler, the _Pole Star_, at Unalaska, and worked my way down to
Sitka on an otter hunter.  Picked up with Happy Jack there--know him?"

"Had charge of my traps for me," Dick answered, "down on the Columbia.
Pretty wild, wasn't he, with a warm place in his heart for whiskey and
women?"

"The very chap.  Went trading with him for a couple of seasons--_hooch_,
and blankets, and such stuff.  Then got a sloop of my own, and not to cut
him out, came down Juneau way.  That's where I met Killisnoo; I called
her Tilly for short.  Met her at a squaw dance down on the beach.  Chief
George had finished the year's trade with the Sticks over the Passes, and
was down from Dyea with half his tribe.  No end of Siwashes at the dance,
and I the only white.  No one knew me, barring a few of the bucks I'd met
over Sitka way, but I'd got most of their histories from Happy Jack.

"Everybody talking Chinook, not guessing that I could spit it better than
most; and principally two girls who'd run away from Haine's Mission up
the Lynn Canal.  They were trim creatures, good to the eye, and I kind of
thought of casting that way; but they were fresh as fresh-caught cod.  Too
much edge, you see.  Being a new-comer, they started to twist me, not
knowing I gathered in every word of Chinook they uttered.

"I never let on, but set to dancing with Tilly, and the more we danced
the more our hearts warmed to each other.  'Looking for a woman,' one of
the girls says, and the other tosses her head and answers, 'Small chance
he'll get one when the women are looking for men.'  And the bucks and
squaws standing around began to grin and giggle and repeat what had been
said.  'Quite a pretty boy,' says the first one.  I'll not deny I was
rather smooth-faced and youngish, but I'd been a man amongst men many's
the day, and it rankled me.  'Dancing with Chief George's girl,' pipes
the second.  'First thing George'll give him the flat of a paddle and
send him about his business.'  Chief George had been looking pretty black
up to now, but at this he laughed and slapped his knees.  He was a husky
beggar and would have used the paddle too.

"'Who's the girls?' I asked Tilly, as we went ripping down the centre in
a reel.  And as soon as she told me their names I remembered all about
them from Happy Jack.  Had their pedigree down fine--several things he'd
told me that not even their own tribe knew.  But I held my hush, and went
on courting Tilly, they a-casting sharp remarks and everybody roaring.
'Bide a wee, Tommy,' I says to myself; 'bide a wee.'

"And bide I did, till the dance was ripe to break up, and Chief George
had brought a paddle all ready for me.  Everybody was on the lookout for
mischief when we stopped; but I marched, easy as you please, slap into
the thick of them.  The Mission girls cut me up something clever, and for
all I was angry I had to set my teeth to keep from laughing.  I turned
upon them suddenly.

"'Are you done?' I asked.

"You should have seen them when they heard me spitting Chinook.  Then I
broke loose.  I told them all about themselves, and their people before
them; their fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers--everybody, everything.
Each mean trick they'd played; every scrape they'd got into; every shame
that'd fallen them.  And I burned them without fear or favor.  All hands
crowded round.  Never had they heard a white man sling their lingo as I
did.  Everybody was laughing save the Mission girls.  Even Chief George
forgot the paddle, or at least he was swallowing too much respect to dare
to use it.

"But the girls.  'Oh, don't, Tommy,' they cried, the tears running down
their cheeks.  'Please don't.  We'll be good.  Sure, Tommy, sure.'  But I
knew them well, and I scorched them on every tender spot.  Nor did I
slack away till they came down on their knees, begging and pleading with
me to keep quiet.  Then I shot a glance at Chief George; but he did not
know whether to have at me or not, and passed it off by laughing
hollowly.

"So be.  When I passed the parting with Tilly that night I gave her the
word that I was going to be around for a week or so, and that I wanted to
see more of her.  Not thick-skinned, her kind, when it came to showing
like and dislike, and she looked her pleasure for the honest girl she
was.  Ay, a striking lass, and I didn't wonder that Chief George was
taken with her.

"Everything my way.  Took the wind from his sails on the first leg.  I
was for getting her aboard and sailing down Wrangel way till it blew
over, leaving him to whistle; but I wasn't to get her that easy.  Seems
she was living with an uncle of hers--guardian, the way such things
go--and seems he was nigh to shuffling off with consumption or some sort
of lung trouble.  He was good and bad by turns, and she wouldn't leave
him till it was over with.  Went up to the tepee just before I left, to
speculate on how long it'd be; but the old beggar had promised her to
Chief George, and when he clapped eyes on me his anger brought on a
hemorrhage.

"'Come and take me, Tommy,' she says when we bid good-by on the beach.
'Ay,' I answers; 'when you give the word.'  And I kissed her, white-man-
fashion and lover-fashion, till she was all of a tremble like a quaking
aspen, and I was so beside myself I'd half a mind to go up and give the
uncle a lift over the divide.

"So I went down Wrangel way, past St. Mary's and even to the Queen
Charlottes, trading, running whiskey, turning the sloop to most anything.
Winter was on, stiff and crisp, and I was back to Juneau, when the word
came.  'Come,' the beggar says who brought the news.  'Killisnoo say,
"Come now."'  'What's the row?' I asks.  'Chief George,' says he.
'_Potlach_.  Killisnoo, makum _klooch_.'

"Ay, it was bitter--the Taku howling down out of the north, the salt
water freezing quick as it struck the deck, and the old sloop and I
hammering into the teeth of it for a hundred miles to Dyea.  Had a
Douglass Islander for crew when I started, but midway up he was washed
over from the bows.  Jibed all over and crossed the course three times,
but never a sign of him."

"Doubled up with the cold most likely," Dick suggested, putting a pause
into the narrative while he hung one of Molly's skirts up to dry, "and
went down like a pot of lead."

"My idea.  So I finished the course alone, half-dead when I made Dyea in
the dark of the evening.  The tide favored, and I ran the sloop plump to
the bank, in the shelter of the river.  Couldn't go an inch further, for
the fresh water was frozen solid.  Halyards and blocks were that iced up
I didn't dare lower mainsail or jib.  First I broached a pint of the
cargo raw, and then, leaving all standing, ready for the start, and with
a blanket around me, headed across the flat to the camp.  No mistaking,
it was a grand layout.  The Chilcats had come in a body--dogs, babies,
and canoes--to say nothing of the Dog-Ears, the Little Salmons, and the
Missions.  Full half a thousand of them to celebrate Tilly's wedding, and
never a white man in a score of miles.

"Nobody took note of me, the blanket over my head and hiding my face, and
I waded knee deep through the dogs and youngsters till I was well up to
the front.  The show was being pulled off in a big open place among the
trees, with great fires burning and the snow moccasin-packed as hard as
Portland cement.  Next me was Tilly, beaded and scarlet-clothed galore,
and against her Chief George and his head men.  The shaman was being
helped out by the big medicines from the other tribes, and it shivered my
spine up and down, the deviltries they cut.  I caught myself wondering if
the folks in Liverpool could only see me now; and I thought of yellow-
haired Gussie, whose brother I licked after my first voyage, just because
he was not for having a sailorman courting his sister.  And with Gussie
in my eyes I looked at Tilly.  A rum old world, thinks I, with man
a-stepping in trails the mother little dreamed of when he lay at suck.

"So be.  When the noise was loudest, walrus hides booming and priests a-
singing, I says, 'Are you ready?'  Gawd!  Not a start, not a shot of the
eyes my way, not the twitch of a muscle.  'I knew,' she answers, slow and
steady as a calm spring tide.  'Where?'  'The high bank at the edge of
the ice,' I whispers back.  'Jump out when I give the word.'

"Did I say there was no end of huskies?  Well, there was no end.  Here,
there, everywhere, they were scattered about,--tame wolves and nothing
less.  When the strain runs thin they breed them in the bush with the
wild, and they're bitter fighters.  Right at the toe of my moccasin lay a
big brute, and by the heel another.  I doubled the first one's tail,
quick, till it snapped in my grip.  As his jaws clipped together where my
hand should have been, I threw the second one by the scruff straight into
his mouth.  'Go!' I cried to Tilly.

"You know how they fight.  In the wink of an eye there was a raging
hundred of them, top and bottom, ripping and tearing each other, kids and
squaws tumbling which way, and the camp gone wild.  Tilly'd slipped away,
so I followed.  But when I looked over my shoulder at the skirt of the
crowd, the devil laid me by the heart, and I dropped the blanket and went
back.

"By then the dogs'd been knocked apart and the crowd was untangling
itself.  Nobody was in proper place, so they didn't note that Tilly'd
gone.  'Hello,' I says, gripping Chief George by the hand.  'May your
potlach-smoke rise often, and the Sticks bring many furs with the
spring.'

"Lord love me, Dick, but he was joyed to see me,--him with the upper hand
and wedding Tilly.  Chance to puff big over me.  The tale that I was hot
after her had spread through the camps, and my presence did him proud.
All hands knew me, without my blanket, and set to grinning and giggling.
It was rich, but I made it richer by playing unbeknowing.

"'What's the row?' I asks.  'Who's getting married now?'

"'Chief George,' the shaman says, ducking his reverence to him.

"'Thought he had two _klooches_.'

"'Him takum more,--three,' with another duck.

"'Oh!'  And I turned away as though it didn't interest me.

"But this wouldn't do, and everybody begins singing out, 'Killisnoo!
Killisnoo!'

"'Killisnoo what?' I asked.

"'Killisnoo, _klooch_, Chief George,' they blathered.  'Killisnoo,
_klooch_.'

"I jumped and looked at Chief George.  He nodded his head and threw out
his chest.

"She'll be no _klooch_ of yours,' I says solemnly.  'No _klooch_ of
yours,' I repeats, while his face went black and his hand began dropping
to his hunting-knife.

"'Look!' I cries, striking an attitude.  'Big Medicine.  You watch my
smoke.'

"I pulled off my mittens, rolled back my sleeves, and made half-a-dozen
passes in the air.

"'Killisnoo!' I shouts.  'Killisnoo!  Killisnoo!'

"I was making medicine, and they began to scare.  Every eye was on me; no
time to find out that Tilly wasn't there.  Then I called Killisnoo three
times again, and waited; and three times more.  All for mystery and to
make them nervous.  Chief George couldn't guess what I was up to, and
wanted to put a stop to the foolery; but the shamans said to wait, and
that they'd see me and go me one better, or words to that effect.
Besides, he was a superstitious cuss, and I fancy a bit afraid of the
white man's magic.

"Then I called Killisnoo, long and soft like the howl of a wolf, till the
women were all a-tremble and the bucks looking serious.

"'Look!' I sprang for'ard, pointing my finger into a bunch of
squaws--easier to deceive women than men, you know.  'Look!'  And I
raised it aloft as though following the flight of a bird.  Up, up,
straight overhead, making to follow it with my eyes till it disappeared
in the sky.

"'Killisnoo,' I said, looking at Chief George and pointing upward again.
'Killisnoo.'

"So help me, Dick, the gammon worked.  Half of them, at least, saw Tilly
disappear in the air.  They'd drunk my whiskey at Juneau and seen
stranger sights, I'll warrant.  Why should I not do this thing, I, who
sold bad spirits corked in bottles?  Some of the women shrieked.
Everybody fell to whispering in bunches.  I folded my arms and held my
head high, and they drew further away from me.  The time was ripe to go.
'Grab him,' Chief George cries.  Three or four of them came at me, but I
whirled, quick, made a couple of passes like to send them after Tilly,
and pointed up.  Touch me?  Not for the kingdoms of the earth.  Chief
George harangued them, but he couldn't get them to lift a leg.  Then he
made to take me himself; but I repeated the mummery and his grit went out
through his fingers.

"'Let your shamans work wonders the like of which I have done this
night,' I says.  'Let them call Killisnoo down out of the sky whither I
have sent her.'  But the priests knew their limits.  'May your _klooches_
bear you sons as the spawn of the salmon,' I says, turning to go; 'and
may your totem pole stand long in the land, and the smoke of your camp
rise always.'

"But if the beggars could have seen me hitting the high places for the
sloop as soon as I was clear of them, they'd thought my own medicine had
got after me.  Tilly'd kept warm by chopping the ice away, and was all
ready to cast off.  Gawd! how we ran before it, the Taku howling after us
and the freezing seas sweeping over at every clip.  With everything
battened down, me a-steering and Tilly chopping ice, we held on half the
night, till I plumped the sloop ashore on Porcupine Island, and we
shivered it out on the beach; blankets wet, and Tilly drying the matches
on her breast.

"So I think I know something about it.  Seven years, Dick, man and wife,
in rough sailing and smooth.  And then she died, in the heart of the
winter, died in childbirth, up there on the Chilcat Station.  She held my
hand to the last, the ice creeping up inside the door and spreading thick
on the gut of the window.  Outside, the lone howl of the wolf and the
Silence; inside, death and the Silence.  You've never heard the Silence
yet, Dick, and Gawd grant you don't ever have to hear it when you sit by
the side of death.  Hear it?  Ay, till the breath whistles like a siren,
and the heart booms, booms, booms, like the surf on the shore.

"Siwash, Dick, but a woman.  White, Dick, white, clear through.  Towards
the last she says, 'Keep my feather bed, Tommy, keep it always.'  And I
agreed.  Then she opened her eyes, full with the pain.  'I've been a good
woman to you, Tommy, and because of that I want you to promise--to
promise'--the words seemed to stick in her throat--'that when you marry,
the woman be white.  No more Siwash, Tommy.  I know.  Plenty white women
down to Juneau now.  I know.  Your people call you "squaw-man," your
women turn their heads to the one side on the street, and you do not go
to their cabins like other men.  Why?  Your wife Siwash.  Is it not so?
And this is not good.  Wherefore I die.  Promise me.  Kiss me in token of
your promise.'

"I kissed her, and she dozed off, whispering, 'It is good.'  At the end,
that near gone my ear was at her lips, she roused for the last time.
'Remember, Tommy; remember my feather bed.'  Then she died, in
childbirth, up there on the Chilcat Station."

The tent heeled over and half flattened before the gale.  Dick refilled
his pipe, while Tommy drew the tea and set it aside against Molly's
return.

And she of the flashing eyes and Yankee blood?  Blinded, falling,
crawling on hand and knee, the wind thrust back in her throat by the
wind, she was heading for the tent.  On her shoulders a bulky pack caught
the full fury of the storm.  She plucked feebly at the knotted flaps, but
it was Tommy and Dick who cast them loose.  Then she set her soul for the
last effort, staggered in, and fell exhausted on the floor.

Tommy unbuckled the straps and took the pack from her.  As he lifted it
there was a clanging of pots and pans.  Dick, pouring out a mug of
whiskey, paused long enough to pass the wink across her body.  Tommy
winked back.  His lips pursed the monosyllable, "clothes," but Dick shook
his head reprovingly.  "Here, little woman," he said, after she had drunk
the whiskey and straightened up a bit.

"Here's some dry togs.  Climb into them.  We're going out to extra-peg
the tent.  After that, give us the call, and we'll come in and have
dinner.  Sing out when you're ready."

"So help me, Dick, that's knocked the edge off her for the rest of this
trip," Tommy spluttered as they crouched to the lee of the tent.

"But it's the edge is her saving grace." Dick replied, ducking his head
to a volley of sleet that drove around a corner of the canvas.  "The edge
that you and I've got, Tommy, and the edge of our mothers before us."




THE MAN WITH THE GASH


Jacob Kent had suffered from cupidity all the days of his life.  This, in
turn, had engendered a chronic distrustfulness, and his mind and
character had become so warped that he was a very disagreeable man to
deal with.  He was also a victim to somnambulic propensities, and very
set in his ideas.  He had been a weaver of cloth from the cradle, until
the fever of Klondike had entered his blood and torn him away from his
loom.  His cabin stood midway between Sixty Mile Post and the Stuart
River; and men who made it a custom to travel the trail to Dawson,
likened him to a robber baron, perched in his fortress and exacting toll
from the caravans that used his ill-kept roads.  Since a certain amount
of history was required in the construction of this figure, the less
cultured wayfarers from Stuart River were prone to describe him after a
still more primordial fashion, in which a command of strong adjectives
was to be chiefly noted.

This cabin was not his, by the way, having been built several years
previously by a couple of miners who had got out a raft of logs at that
point for a grub-stake.  They had been most hospitable lads, and, after
they abandoned it, travelers who knew the route made it an object to
arrive there at nightfall.  It was very handy, saving them all the time
and toil of pitching camp; and it was an unwritten rule that the last man
left a neat pile of firewood for the next comer.  Rarely a night passed
but from half a dozen to a score of men crowded into its shelter.  Jacob
Kent noted these things, exercised squatter sovereignty, and moved in.
Thenceforth, the weary travelers were mulcted a dollar per head for the
privilege of sleeping on the floor, Jacob Kent weighing the dust and
never failing to steal the down-weight.  Besides, he so contrived that
his transient guests chopped his wood for him and carried his water.  This
was rank piracy, but his victims were an easy-going breed, and while they
detested him, they yet permitted him to flourish in his sins.

One afternoon in April he sat by his door,--for all the world like a
predatory spider,--marvelling at the heat of the returning sun, and
keeping an eye on the trail for prospective flies.  The Yukon lay at his
feet, a sea of ice, disappearing around two great bends to the north and
south, and stretching an honest two miles from bank to bank.  Over its
rough breast ran the sled-trail, a slender sunken line, eighteen inches
wide and two thousand miles in length, with more curses distributed to
the linear foot than any other road in or out of all Christendom.

Jacob Kent was feeling particularly good that afternoon.  The record had
been broken the previous night, and he had sold his hospitality to no
less than twenty-eight visitors.  True, it had been quite uncomfortable,
and four had snored beneath his bunk all night; but then it had added
appreciable weight to the sack in which he kept his gold dust.  That
sack, with its glittering yellow treasure, was at once the chief delight
and the chief bane of his existence.  Heaven and hell lay within its
slender mouth.  In the nature of things, there being no privacy to his
one-roomed dwelling, he was tortured by a constant fear of theft.  It
would be very easy for these bearded, desperate-looking strangers to make
away with it.  Often he dreamed that such was the case, and awoke in the
grip of nightmare.  A select number of these robbers haunted him through
his dreams, and he came to know them quite well, especially the bronzed
leader with the gash on his right cheek.  This fellow was the most
persistent of the lot, and, because of him, he had, in his waking
moments, constructed several score of hiding-places in and about the
cabin.  After a concealment he would breathe freely again, perhaps for
several nights, only to collar the Man with the Gash in the very act of
unearthing the sack.  Then, on awakening in the midst of the usual
struggle, he would at once get up and transfer the bag to a new and more
ingenious crypt.  It was not that he was the direct victim of these
phantasms; but he believed in omens and thought-transference, and he
deemed these dream-robbers to be the astral projection of real personages
who happened at those particular moments, no matter where they were in
the flesh, to be harboring designs, in the spirit, upon his wealth.  So
he continued to bleed the unfortunates who crossed his threshold, and at
the same time to add to his trouble with every ounce that went into the
sack.

As he sat sunning himself, a thought came to Jacob Kent that brought him
to his feet with a jerk.  The pleasures of life had culminated in the
continual weighing and reweighing of his dust; but a shadow had been
thrown upon this pleasant avocation, which he had hitherto failed to
brush aside.  His gold-scales were quite small; in fact, their maximum
was a pound and a half,--eighteen ounces,--while his hoard mounted up to
something like three and a third times that.  He had never been able to
weigh it all at one operation, and hence considered himself to have been
shut out from a new and most edifying coign of contemplation.  Being
denied this, half the pleasure of possession had been lost; nay, he felt
that this miserable obstacle actually minimized the fact, as it did the
strength, of possession.  It was the solution of this problem flashing
across his mind that had just brought him to his feet.  He searched the
trail carefully in either direction.  There was nothing in sight, so he
went inside.

In a few seconds he had the table cleared away and the scales set up.  On
one side he placed the stamped disks to the equivalent of fifteen ounces,
and balanced it with dust on the other.  Replacing the weights with dust,
he then had thirty ounces precisely balanced.  These, in turn, he placed
together on one side and again balanced with more dust.  By this time the
gold was exhausted, and he was sweating liberally.  He trembled with
ecstasy, ravished beyond measure.  Nevertheless he dusted the sack
thoroughly, to the last least grain, till the balance was overcome and
one side of the scales sank to the table.  Equilibrium, however, was
restored by the addition of a pennyweight and five grains to the opposite
side.  He stood, head thrown back, transfixed.  The sack was empty, but
the potentiality of the scales had become immeasurable.  Upon them he
could weigh any amount, from the tiniest grain to pounds upon pounds.
Mammon laid hot fingers on his heart.  The sun swung on its westering way
till it flashed through the open doorway, full upon the yellow-burdened
scales.  The precious heaps, like the golden breasts of a bronze
Cleopatra, flung back the light in a mellow glow.  Time and space were
not.

"Gawd blime me! but you 'ave the makin' of several quid there, 'aven't
you?"

Jacob Kent wheeled about, at the same time reaching for his
double-barrelled shotgun, which stood handy.  But when his eyes lit on
the intruder's face, he staggered back dizzily.  _It was the face of the
Man with the Gash_!

The man looked at him curiously.

"Oh, that's all right," he said, waving his hand deprecatingly.  "You
needn't think as I'll 'arm you or your blasted dust.

"You're a rum 'un, you are," he added reflectively, as he watched the
sweat pouring from off Kent's face and the quavering of his knees.

"W'y don't you pipe up an' say somethin'?" he went on, as the other
struggled for breath.  "Wot's gone wrong o' your gaff?  Anythink the
matter?"

"W--w--where'd you get it?" Kent at last managed to articulate, raising a
shaking forefinger to the ghastly scar which seamed the other's cheek.

"Shipmate stove me down with a marlin-spike from the main-royal.  An' now
as you 'ave your figger'ead in trim, wot I want to know is, wot's it to
you?  That's wot I want to know--wot's it to you?  Gawd blime me! do it
'urt you?  Ain't it smug enough for the likes o' you?  That's wot I want
to know!"

"No, no," Kent answered, sinking upon a stool with a sickly grin.  "I was
just wondering."

"Did you ever see the like?" the other went on truculently.

"No."

"Ain't it a beute?"

"Yes."  Kent nodded his head approvingly, intent on humoring this strange
visitor, but wholly unprepared for the outburst which was to follow his
effort to be agreeable.

"You blasted, bloomin', burgoo-eatin' son-of-a-sea-swab!  Wot do you
mean, a sayin' the most onsightly thing Gawd Almighty ever put on the
face o' man is a beute?  Wot do you mean, you--"

And thereat this fiery son of the sea broke off into a string of Oriental
profanity, mingling gods and devils, lineages and men, metaphors and
monsters, with so savage a virility that Jacob Kent was paralyzed.  He
shrank back, his arms lifted as though to ward off physical violence.  So
utterly unnerved was he that the other paused in the mid-swing of a
gorgeous peroration and burst into thunderous laughter.

"The sun's knocked the bottom out o' the trail," said the Man with the
Gash, between departing paroxysms of mirth.  "An' I only 'ope as you'll
appreciate the hoppertunity of consortin' with a man o' my mug.  Get
steam up in that fire-box o' your'n.  I'm goin' to unrig the dogs an'
grub 'em.  An' don't be shy o' the wood, my lad; there's plenty more
where that come from, and it's you've got the time to sling an axe.  An'
tote up a bucket o' water while you're about it.  Lively! or I'll run you
down, so 'elp me!"

Such a thing was unheard of.  Jacob Kent was making the fire, chopping
wood, packing water--doing menial tasks for a guest!  When Jim Cardegee
left Dawson, it was with his head filled with the iniquities of this
roadside Shylock; and all along the trail his numerous victims had added
to the sum of his crimes.  Now, Jim Cardegee, with the sailor's love for
a sailor's joke, had determined, when he pulled into the cabin, to bring
its inmate down a peg or so.  That he had succeeded beyond expectation he
could not help but remark, though he was in the dark as to the part the
gash on his cheek had played in it.  But while he could not understand,
he saw the terror it created, and resolved to exploit it as remorselessly
as would any modern trader a choice bit of merchandise.

"Strike me blind, but you're a 'ustler," he said admiringly, his head
cocked to one side, as his host bustled about.  "You never 'ort to 'ave
gone Klondiking.  It's the keeper of a pub' you was laid out for.  An'
it's often as I 'ave 'eard the lads up an' down the river speak o' you,
but I 'adn't no idea you was so jolly nice."

Jacob Kent experienced a tremendous yearning to try his shotgun on him,
but the fascination of the gash was too potent.  This was the real Man
with the Gash, the man who had so often robbed him in the spirit.  This,
then, was the embodied entity of the being whose astral form had been
projected into his dreams, the man who had so frequently harbored designs
against his hoard; hence--there could be no other conclusion--this Man
with the Gash had now come in the flesh to dispossess him.  And that
gash!  He could no more keep his eyes from it than stop the beating of
his heart.  Try as he would, they wandered back to that one point as
inevitably as the needle to the pole.

"Do it 'urt you?" Jim Cardegee thundered suddenly, looking up from the
spreading of his blankets and encountering the rapt gaze of the other.
"It strikes me as 'ow it 'ud be the proper thing for you to draw your
jib, douse the glim, an' turn in, seein' as 'ow it worrits you.  Jes' lay
to that, you swab, or so 'elp me I'll take a pull on your
peak-purchases!"

Kent was so nervous that it took three puffs to blow out the slush-lamp,
and he crawled into his blankets without even removing his moccasins.  The
sailor was soon snoring lustily from his hard bed on the floor, but Kent
lay staring up into the blackness, one hand on the shotgun, resolved not
to close his eyes the whole night.  He had not had an opportunity to
secrete his five pounds of gold, and it lay in the ammunition box at the
head of his bunk.  But, try as he would, he at last dozed off with the
weight of his dust heavy on his soul.  Had he not inadvertently fallen
asleep with his mind in such condition, the somnambulic demon would not
have been invoked, nor would Jim Cardegee have gone mining next day with
a dish-pan.

The fire fought a losing battle, and at last died away, while the frost
penetrated the mossy chinks between the logs and chilled the inner
atmosphere.  The dogs outside ceased their howling, and, curled up in the
snow, dreamed of salmon-stocked heavens where dog-drivers and kindred
task-masters were not.  Within, the sailor lay like a log, while his host
tossed restlessly about, the victim of strange fantasies.  As midnight
drew near he suddenly threw off the blankets and got up.  It was
remarkable that he could do what he then did without ever striking a
light.  Perhaps it was because of the darkness that he kept his eyes
shut, and perhaps it was for fear he would see the terrible gash on the
cheek of his visitor; but, be this as it may, it is a fact that,
unseeing, he opened his ammunition box, put a heavy charge into the
muzzle of the shotgun without spilling a particle, rammed it down with
double wads, and then put everything away and got back into bed.

Just as daylight laid its steel-gray fingers on the parchment window,
Jacob Kent awoke.  Turning on his elbow, he raised the lid and peered
into the ammunition box.  Whatever he saw, or whatever he did not see,
exercised a very peculiar effect upon him, considering his neurotic
temperament.  He glanced at the sleeping man on the floor, let the lid
down gently, and rolled over on his back.  It was an unwonted calm that
rested on his face.  Not a muscle quivered.  There was not the least sign
of excitement or perturbation.  He lay there a long while, thinking, and
when he got up and began to move about, it was in a cool, collected
manner, without noise and without hurry.

It happened that a heavy wooden peg had been driven into the ridge-pole
just above Jim Cardegee's head.  Jacob Kent, working softly, ran a piece
of half-inch manila over it, bringing both ends to the ground.  One end
he tied about his waist, and in the other he rove a running noose.  Then
he cocked his shotgun and laid it within reach, by the side of numerous
moose-hide thongs.  By an effort of will he bore the sight of the scar,
slipped the noose over the sleeper's head, and drew it taut by throwing
back on his weight, at the same time seizing the gun and bringing it to
bear.

Jim Cardegee awoke, choking, bewildered, staring down the twin wells of
steel.

"Where is it?" Kent asked, at the same time slacking on the rope.

"You blasted--ugh--"

Kent merely threw back his weight, shutting off the other's wind.

"Bloomin'--Bur--ugh--"

"Where is it?" Kent repeated.

"Wot?"  Cardegee asked, as soon as he had caught his breath.

"The gold-dust."

"Wot gold-dust?" the perplexed sailor demanded.

"You know well enough,--mine."

"Ain't seen nothink of it.  Wot do ye take me for?  A safe-deposit?  Wot
'ave I got to do with it, any'ow?"

"Mebbe you know, and mebbe you don't know, but anyway, I'm going to stop
your breath till you do know.  And if you lift a hand, I'll blow your
head off!"

"Vast heavin'!" Cardegee roared, as the rope tightened.

Kent eased away a moment, and the sailor, wriggling his neck as though
from the pressure, managed to loosen the noose a bit and work it up so
the point of contact was just under the chin.

"Well?" Kent questioned, expecting the disclosure.

But Cardegee grinned.  "Go ahead with your 'angin', you bloomin' old pot-
wolloper!"

Then, as the sailor had anticipated, the tragedy became a farce.  Cardegee
being the heavier of the two, Kent, throwing his body backward and down,
could not lift him clear of the ground.  Strain and strive to the
uttermost, the sailor's feet still stuck to the floor and sustained a
part of his weight.  The remaining portion was supported by the point of
contact just under his chin.  Failing to swing him clear, Kent clung on,
resolved to slowly throttle him or force him to tell what he had done
with the hoard.  But the Man with the Gash would not throttle.  Five,
ten, fifteen minutes passed, and at the end of that time, in despair,
Kent let his prisoner down.

"Well," he remarked, wiping away the sweat, "if you won't hang you'll
shoot.  Some men wasn't born to be hanged, anyway."

"An' it's a pretty mess as you'll make o' this 'ere cabin floor."
Cardegee was fighting for time.  "Now, look 'ere, I'll tell you wot we
do; we'll lay our 'eads 'longside an' reason together.  You've lost some
dust.  You say as 'ow I know, an' I say as 'ow I don't.  Let's get a
hobservation an' shape a course--"

"Vast heavin'!"  Kent dashed in, maliciously imitating the other's
enunciation.  "I'm going to shape all the courses of this shebang, and
you observe; and if you do anything more, I'll bore you as sure as
Moses!"

"For the sake of my mother--"

"Whom God have mercy upon if she loves you.  Ah!  Would you?"  He
frustrated a hostile move on the part of the other by pressing the cold
muzzle against his forehead.  "Lay quiet, now!  If you lift as much as a
hair, you'll get it."

It was rather an awkward task, with the trigger of the gun always within
pulling distance of the finger; but Kent was a weaver, and in a few
minutes had the sailor tied hand and foot.  Then he dragged him without
and laid him by the side of the cabin, where he could overlook the river
and watch the sun climb to the meridian.

"Now I'll give you till noon, and then--"

"Wot?"

"You'll be hitting the brimstone trail.  But if you speak up, I'll keep
you till the next bunch of mounted police come by."

"Well, Gawd blime me, if this ain't a go!  'Ere I be, innercent as a
lamb, an' 'ere you be, lost all o' your top 'amper an' out o' your
reckonin', run me foul an' goin' to rake me into 'ell-fire.  You bloomin'
old pirut!  You--"

Jim Cardegee loosed the strings of his profanity and fairly outdid
himself.  Jacob Kent brought out a stool that he might enjoy it in
comfort.  Having exhausted all the possible combinations of his
vocabulary, the sailor quieted down to hard thinking, his eyes constantly
gauging the progress of the sun, which tore up the eastern slope of the
heavens with unseemly haste.  His dogs, surprised that they had not long
since been put to harness, crowded around him.  His helplessness appealed
to the brutes.  They felt that something was wrong, though they knew not
what, and they crowded about, howling their mournful sympathy.

"Chook!  Mush-on! you Siwashes!" he cried, attempting, in a vermicular
way, to kick at them, and discovering himself to be tottering on the edge
of a declivity.  As soon as the animals had scattered, he devoted himself
to the significance of that declivity which he felt to be there but could
not see.  Nor was he long in arriving at a correct conclusion.  In the
nature of things, he figured, man is lazy.  He does no more than he has
to.  When he builds a cabin he must put dirt on the roof.  From these
premises it was logical that he should carry that dirt no further than
was absolutely necessary.  Therefore, he lay upon the edge of the hole
from which the dirt had been taken to roof Jacob Kent's cabin.  This
knowledge, properly utilized, might prolong things, he thought; and he
then turned his attention to the moose-hide thongs which bound him.  His
hands were tied behind him, and pressing against the snow, they were wet
with the contact.  This moistening of the raw-hide he knew would tend to
make it stretch, and, without apparent effort, he endeavored to stretch
it more and more.

He watched the trail hungrily, and when in the direction of Sixty Mile a
dark speck appeared for a moment against the white background of an ice-
jam, he cast an anxious eye at the sun.  It had climbed nearly to the
zenith.  Now and again he caught the black speck clearing the hills of
ice and sinking into the intervening hollows; but he dared not permit
himself more than the most cursory glances for fear of rousing his
enemy's suspicion.  Once, when Jacob Kent rose to his feet and searched
the trail with care, Cardegee was frightened, but the dog-sled had struck
a piece of trail running parallel with a jam, and remained out of sight
till the danger was past.

"I'll see you 'ung for this," Cardegee threatened, attempting to draw the
other's attention.  "An' you'll rot in 'ell, jes' you see if you don't.

"I say," he cried, after another pause; "d'ye b'lieve in ghosts?"  Kent's
sudden start made him sure of his ground, and he went on: "Now a ghost
'as the right to 'aunt a man wot don't do wot he says; and you can't
shuffle me off till eight bells--wot I mean is twelve o'clock--can you?
'Cos if you do, it'll 'appen as 'ow I'll 'aunt you.  D'ye 'ear?  A
minute, a second too quick, an' I'll 'aunt you, so 'elp me, I will!"

Jacob Kent looked dubious, but declined to talk.

"'Ow's your chronometer?  Wot's your longitude?  'Ow do you know as your
time's correct?" Cardegee persisted, vainly hoping to beat his
executioner out of a few minutes.  "Is it Barrack's time you 'ave, or is
it the Company time?  'Cos if you do it before the stroke o' the bell,
I'll not rest.  I give you fair warnin'.  I'll come back.  An' if you
'aven't the time, 'ow will you know?  That's wot I want--'ow will you
tell?"

"I'll send you off all right," Kent replied.  "Got a sun-dial here."

"No good.  Thirty-two degrees variation o' the needle."

"Stakes are all set."

"'Ow did you set 'em?  Compass?"

"No; lined them up with the North Star."

"Sure?"

"Sure."

Cardegee groaned, then stole a glance at the trail.  The sled was just
clearing a rise, barely a mile away, and the dogs were in full lope,
running lightly.

"'Ow close is the shadows to the line?"

Kent walked to the primitive timepiece and studied it.  "Three inches,"
he announced, after a careful survey.

"Say, jes' sing out 'eight bells' afore you pull the gun, will you?"

Kent agreed, and they lapsed into silence.  The thongs about Cardegee's
wrists were slowly stretching, and he had begun to work them over his
hands.

"Say, 'ow close is the shadows?"

"One inch."

The sailor wriggled slightly to assure himself that he would topple over
at the right moment, and slipped the first turn over his hands.

"'Ow close?"

"Half an inch."  Just then Kent heard the jarring churn of the runners
and turned his eyes to the trail.  The driver was lying flat on the sled
and the dogs swinging down the straight stretch to the cabin.  Kent
whirled back, bringing his rifle to shoulder.

"It ain't eight bells yet!" Cardegee expostulated.  "I'll 'aunt you,
sure!"

Jacob Kent faltered.  He was standing by the sun-dial, perhaps ten paces
from his victim.  The man on the sled must have seen that something
unusual was taking place, for he had risen to his knees, his whip singing
viciously among the dogs.

The shadows swept into line.  Kent looked along the sights.

"Make ready!" he commanded solemnly.  "Eight b--"

But just a fraction of a second too soon, Cardegee rolled backward into
the hole.  Kent held his fire and ran to the edge.  Bang!  The gun
exploded full in the sailor's face as he rose to his feet.  But no smoke
came from the muzzle; instead, a sheet of flame burst from the side of
the barrel near its butt, and Jacob Kent went down.  The dogs dashed up
the bank, dragging the sled over his body, and the driver sprang off as
Jim Cardegee freed his hands and drew himself from the hole.

"Jim!"  The new-comer recognized him.  "What's the matter?"

"Wot's the matter?  Oh, nothink at all.  It jest 'appens as I do little
things like this for my 'ealth.  Wot's the matter, you bloomin' idjit?
Wot's the matter, eh?  Cast me loose or I'll show you wot!  'Urry up, or
I'll 'olystone the decks with you!"

"Huh!" he added, as the other went to work with his sheath-knife.  "Wot's
the matter?  I want to know.  Jes' tell me that, will you, wot's the
matter?  Hey?"

Kent was quite dead when they rolled him over.  The gun, an
old-fashioned, heavy-weighted muzzle-loader, lay near him.  Steel and
wood had parted company.  Near the butt of the right-hand barrel, with
lips pressed outward, gaped a fissure several inches in length.  The
sailor picked it up, curiously.  A glittering stream of yellow dust ran
out through the crack.  The facts of the case dawned upon Jim Cardegee.

"Strike me standin'!" he roared; "'ere's a go!  'Ere's 'is bloomin' dust!
Gawd blime me, an' you, too, Charley, if you don't run an' get the dish-
pan!"




JAN, THE UNREPENTANT


   "For there's never a law of God or man
   Runs north of Fifty-three."

Jan rolled over, clawing and kicking.  He was fighting hand and foot now,
and he fought grimly, silently.  Two of the three men who hung upon him,
shouted directions to each other, and strove to curb the short, hairy
devil who would not curb.  The third man howled.  His finger was between
Jan's teeth.

"Quit yer tantrums, Jan, an' ease up!" panted Red Bill, getting a
strangle-hold on Jan's neck.  "Why on earth can't yeh hang decent and
peaceable?"

But Jan kept his grip on the third man's finger, and squirmed over the
floor of the tent, into the pots and pans.

"Youah no gentleman, suh," reproved Mr. Taylor, his body following his
finger, and endeavoring to accommodate itself to every jerk of Jan's
head.  "You hev killed Mistah Gordon, as brave and honorable a gentleman
as ever hit the trail aftah the dogs.  Youah a murderah, suh, and without
honah."

"An' yer no comrade," broke in Red Bill.  "If you was, you'd hang 'thout
rampin' around an' roarin'.  Come on, Jan, there's a good fellow.  Don't
give us no more trouble.  Jes' quit, an' we'll hang yeh neat and handy,
an' be done with it."

"Steady, all!" Lawson, the sailorman, bawled.  "Jam his head into the
bean pot and batten down."

"But my fingah, suh," Mr. Taylor protested.

"Leggo with y'r finger, then!  Always in the way!"

"But I can't, Mistah Lawson.  It's in the critter's gullet, and nigh
chewed off as 't is."

"Stand by for stays!"  As Lawson gave the warning, Jan half lifted
himself, and the struggling quartet floundered across the tent into a
muddle of furs and blankets.  In its passage it cleared the body of a
man, who lay motionless, bleeding from a bullet-wound in the neck.

All this was because of the madness which had come upon Jan--the madness
which comes upon a man who has stripped off the raw skin of earth and
grovelled long in primal nakedness, and before whose eyes rises the fat
vales of the homeland, and into whose nostrils steals the whiff of bay,
and grass, and flower, and new-turned soil.  Through five frigid years
Jan had sown the seed.  Stuart River, Forty Mile, Circle City, Koyokuk,
Kotzebue, had marked his bleak and strenuous agriculture, and now it was
Nome that bore the harvest,--not the Nome of golden beaches and ruby
sands, but the Nome of '97, before Anvil City was located, or Eldorado
District organized.  John Gordon was a Yankee, and should have known
better.  But he passed the sharp word at a time when Jan's blood-shot
eyes blazed and his teeth gritted in torment.  And because of this, there
was a smell of saltpetre in the tent, and one lay quietly, while the
other fought like a cornered rat, and refused to hang in the decent and
peacable manner suggested by his comrades.

"If you will allow me, Mistah Lawson, befoah we go further in this
rumpus, I would say it wah a good idea to pry this hyer varmint's teeth
apart.  Neither will he bite off, nor will he let go.  He has the wisdom
of the sarpint, suh, the wisdom of the sarpint."

"Lemme get the hatchet to him!" vociferated the sailor.  "Lemme get the
hatchet!"  He shoved the steel edge close to Mr. Taylor's finger and used
the man's teeth as a fulcrum.  Jan held on and breathed through his nose,
snorting like a grampus.  "Steady, all!  Now she takes it!"

"Thank you, suh; it is a powerful relief."  And Mr. Taylor proceeded to
gather into his arms the victim's wildly waving legs.

But Jan upreared in his Berserker rage; bleeding, frothing, cursing; five
frozen years thawing into sudden hell.  They swayed backward and forward,
panted, sweated, like some cyclopean, many-legged monster rising from the
lower deeps.  The slush-lamp went over, drowned in its own fat, while the
midday twilight scarce percolated through the dirty canvas of the tent.

"For the love of Gawd, Jan, get yer senses back!" pleaded Red Bill.  "We
ain't goin' to hurt yeh, 'r kill yeh, 'r anythin' of that sort.  Jes'
want to hang yeh, that's all, an' you a-messin' round an' rampagin'
somethin' terrible.  To think of travellin' trail together an' then bein'
treated this-a way.  Wouldn't 'bleeved it of yeh, Jan!"

"He's got too much steerage-way.  Grab holt his legs, Taylor, and heave'm
over!"

"Yes, suh, Mistah Lawson.  Do you press youah weight above, after I give
the word."  The Kentuckian groped about him in the murky darkness.  "Now,
suh, now is the accepted time!"

There was a great surge, and a quarter of a ton of human flesh tottered
and crashed to its fall against the side-wall.  Pegs drew and guy-ropes
parted, and the tent, collapsing, wrapped the battle in its greasy folds.

"Yer only makin' it harder fer yerself," Red Bill continued, at the same
time driving both his thumbs into a hairy throat, the possessor of which
he had pinned down.  "You've made nuisance enough a' ready, an' it'll
take half the day to get things straightened when we've strung yeh up."

"I'll thank you to leave go, suh," spluttered Mr. Taylor.

Red Bill grunted and loosed his grip, and the twain crawled out into the
open.  At the same instant Jan kicked clear of the sailor, and took to
his heels across the snow.

"Hi! you lazy devils!  Buck!  Bright!  Sic'm!  Pull 'm down!" sang out
Lawson, lunging through the snow after the fleeing man.  Buck and Bright,
followed by the rest of the dogs, outstripped him and rapidly overhauled
the murderer.

There was no reason that these men should do this; no reason for Jan to
run away; no reason for them to attempt to prevent him.  On the one hand
stretched the barren snow-land; on the other, the frozen sea.  With
neither food nor shelter, he could not run far.  All they had to do was
to wait till he wandered back to the tent, as he inevitably must, when
the frost and hunger laid hold of him.  But these men did not stop to
think.  There was a certain taint of madness running in the veins of all
of them.  Besides, blood had been spilled, and upon them was the blood-
lust, thick and hot.  "Vengeance is mine," saith the Lord, and He saith
it in temperate climes where the warm sun steals away the energies of
men.  But in the Northland they have discovered that prayer is only
efficacious when backed by muscle, and they are accustomed to doing
things for themselves.  God is everywhere, they have heard, but he flings
a shadow over the land for half the year that they may not find him; so
they grope in darkness, and it is not to be wondered that they often
doubt, and deem the Decalogue out of gear.

Jan ran blindly, reckoning not of the way of his feet, for he was
mastered by the verb "to live."  To live!  To exist!  Buck flashed gray
through the air, but missed.  The man struck madly at him, and stumbled.
Then the white teeth of Bright closed on his mackinaw jacket, and he
pitched into the snow.  _To live_!  _To exist_!  He fought wildly as
ever, the centre of a tossing heap of men and dogs.  His left hand
gripped a wolf-dog by the scruff of the back, while the arm was passed
around the neck of Lawson.  Every struggle of the dog helped to throttle
the hapless sailor.  Jan's right hand was buried deep in the curling
tendrils of Red Bill's shaggy head, and beneath all, Mr. Taylor lay
pinned and helpless.  It was a deadlock, for the strength of his madness
was prodigious; but suddenly, without apparent reason, Jan loosed his
various grips and rolled over quietly on his back.  His adversaries drew
away a little, dubious and disconcerted.  Jan grinned viciously.

"Mine friends," he said, still grinning, "you haf asked me to be
politeful, und now I am politeful.  Vot piziness vood you do mit me?"

"That's right, Jan.  Be ca'm," soothed Red Bill.  "I knowed you'd come to
yer senses afore long.  Jes' be ca'm now, an' we'll do the trick with
neatness and despatch."

"Vot piziness?  Vot trick?"

"The hangin'.  An' yeh oughter thank yer lucky stars for havin' a man
what knows his business.  I've did it afore now, more'n once, down in the
States, an' I can do it to a T."

"Hang who?  Me?"

"Yep."

"Ha! ha!  Shust hear der man speak foolishness!  Gif me a hand, Bill, und
I vill get up und be hung."  He crawled stiffly to his feet and looked
about him.  "Herr Gott! listen to der man!  He vood hang me!  Ho! ho! ho!
I tank not!  Yes, I tank not!"

"And I tank yes, you swab," Lawson spoke up mockingly, at the same time
cutting a sled-lashing and coiling it up with ominous care.  "Judge Lynch
holds court this day."

"Von liddle while."  Jan stepped back from the proffered noose.  "I haf
somedings to ask und to make der great proposition.  Kentucky, you know
about der Shudge Lynch?"

"Yes, suh.  It is an institution of free men and of gentlemen, and it is
an ole one and time-honored.  Corruption may wear the robe of magistracy,
suh, but Judge Lynch can always be relied upon to give justice without
court fees.  I repeat, suh, without court fees.  Law may be bought and
sold, but in this enlightened land justice is free as the air we breathe,
strong as the licker we drink, prompt as--"

"Cut it short!  Find out what the beggar wants," interrupted Lawson,
spoiling the peroration.

"Vell, Kentucky, tell me dis: von man kill von odder man, Shudge Lynch
hang dot man?"

"If the evidence is strong enough--yes, suh."

"An' the evidence in this here case is strong enough to hang a dozen men,
Jan," broke in Red Bill.

"Nefer you mind, Bill.  I talk mit you next.  Now von anodder ding I ask
Kentucky.  If Shudge Lynch hang not der man, vot den?"

"If Judge Lynch does not hang the man, then the man goes free, and his
hands are washed clean of blood.  And further, suh, our great and
glorious constitution has said, to wit: that no man may twice be placed
in jeopardy of his life for one and the same crime, or words to that
effect."

"Unt dey can't shoot him, or hit him mit a club over der head alongside,
or do nodings more mit him?"

"No, suh."

"Goot!  You hear vot Kentucky speaks, all you noddleheads?  Now I talk
mit Bill.  You know der piziness, Bill, und you hang me up brown, eh?  Vot
you say?"

"'Betcher life, an', Jan, if yeh don't give no more trouble ye'll be
almighty proud of the job.  I'm a connesoor."

"You haf der great head, Bill, und know somedings or two.  Und you know
two und one makes tree--ain't it?"

Bill nodded.

"Und when you haf two dings, you haf not tree dings--ain't it?  Now you
follow mit me close und I show you.  It takes tree dings to hang.  First
ding, you haf to haf der man.  Goot!  I am der man.  Second ding, you haf
to haf der rope.  Lawson haf der rope.  Goot!  Und tird ding, you haf to
haf someding to tie der rope to.  Sling your eyes over der landscape und
find der tird ding to tie der rope to?  Eh?  Vot you say?"

Mechanically they swept the ice and snow with their eyes.  It was a
homogeneous scene, devoid of contrasts or bold contours, dreary,
desolate, and monotonous,--the ice-packed sea, the slow slope of the
beach, the background of low-lying hills, and over all thrown the endless
mantle of snow.  "No trees, no bluffs, no cabins, no telegraph poles,
nothin'," moaned Red Bill; "nothin' respectable enough nor big enough to
swing the toes of a five-foot man clear o' the ground.  I give it up."  He
looked yearningly at that portion of Jan's anatomy which joins the head
and shoulders.  "Give it up," he repeated sadly to Lawson.  "Throw the
rope down.  Gawd never intended this here country for livin' purposes,
an' that's a cold frozen fact."

Jan grinned triumphantly.  "I tank I go mit der tent und haf a smoke."

"Ostensiblee y'r correct, Bill, me son," spoke up Lawson; "but y'r a
dummy, and you can lay to that for another cold frozen fact.  Takes a sea
farmer to learn you landsmen things.  Ever hear of a pair of shears?  Then
clap y'r eyes to this."

The sailor worked rapidly.  From the pile of dunnage where they had
pulled up the boat the preceding fall, he unearthed a pair of long oars.
These he lashed together, at nearly right angles, close to the ends of
the blades.  Where the handles rested he kicked holes through the snow to
the sand.  At the point of intersection he attached two guy-ropes, making
the end of one fast to a cake of beach-ice.  The other guy he passed over
to Red Bill.  "Here, me son, lay holt o' that and run it out."

And to his horror, Jan saw his gallows rise in the air.  "No! no!" he
cried, recoiling and putting up his fists.  "It is not goot!  I vill not
hang!  Come, you noddleheads!  I vill lick you, all together, von after
der odder!  I vill blay hell!  I vill do eferydings!  Und I vill die
pefore I hang!"

The sailor permitted the two other men to clinch with the mad creature.
They rolled and tossed about furiously, tearing up snow and tundra, their
fierce struggle writing a tragedy of human passion on the white sheet
spread by nature.  And ever and anon a hand or foot of Jan emerged from
the tangle, to be gripped by Lawson and lashed fast with rope-yarns.
Pawing, clawing, blaspheming, he was conquered and bound, inch by inch,
and drawn to where the inexorable shears lay like a pair of gigantic
dividers on the snow.  Red Bill adjusted the noose, placing the hangman's
knot properly under the left ear.  Mr. Taylor and Lawson tailed onto the
running-guy, ready at the word to elevate the gallows.  Bill lingered,
contemplating his work with artistic appreciation.

"Herr Gott!  Vood you look at it!"

The horror in Jan's voice caused the rest to desist.  The fallen tent had
uprisen, and in the gathering twilight it flapped ghostly arms about and
titubated toward them drunkenly.  But the next instant John Gordon found
the opening and crawled forth.

"What the flaming--!"  For the moment his voice died away in his throat
as his eyes took in the tableau.  "Hold on!  I'm not dead!" he cried out,
coming up to the group with stormy countenance.

"Allow me, Mistah Gordon, to congratulate you upon youah escape," Mr.
Taylor ventured.  "A close shave, suh, a powahful close shave."

" Congratulate hell!  I might have been dead and rotten and no thanks to
you, you--!"  And thereat John Gordon delivered himself of a vigorous
flood of English, terse, intensive, denunciative, and composed solely of
expletives and adjectives.

"Simply creased me," he went on when he had eased himself sufficiently.
"Ever crease cattle, Taylor?"

"Yes, suh, many a time down in God's country."

"Just so.  That's what happened to me.  Bullet just grazed the base of my
skull at the top of the neck.  Stunned me but no harm done."  He turned
to the bound man.  "Get up, Jan.  I'm going to lick you to a standstill
or you're going to apologize.  The rest of you lads stand clear."

"I tank not.  Shust tie me loose und you see," replied Jan, the
Unrepentant, the devil within him still unconquered.  "Und after as I
lick you, I take der rest of der noddleheads, von after der odder,
altogedder!"




GRIT OF WOMEN


A wolfish head, wistful-eyed and frost-rimed, thrust aside the
tent-flaps.

"Hi!  Chook!  Siwash!  Chook, you limb of Satan!" chorused the protesting
inmates.  Bettles rapped the dog sharply with a tin plate, and it
withdrew hastily.  Louis Savoy refastened the flaps, kicked a frying-pan
over against the bottom, and warmed his hands.  It was very cold without.
Forty-eight hours gone, the spirit thermometer had burst at sixty-eight
below, and since that time it had grown steadily and bitterly colder.
There was no telling when the snap would end.  And it is poor policy,
unless the gods will it, to venture far from a stove at such times, or to
increase the quantity of cold atmosphere one must breathe.  Men sometimes
do it, and sometimes they chill their lungs.  This leads up to a dry,
hacking cough, noticeably irritable when bacon is being fried.  After
that, somewhere along in the spring or summer, a hole is burned in the
frozen muck.  Into this a man's carcass is dumped, covered over with
moss, and left with the assurance that it will rise on the crack of Doom,
wholly and frigidly intact.  For those of little faith, sceptical of
material integration on that fateful day, no fitter country than the
Klondike can be recommended to die in.  But it is not to be inferred from
this that it is a fit country for living purposes.

It was very cold without, but it was not over-warm within.  The only
article which might be designated furniture was the stove, and for this
the men were frank in displaying their preference.  Upon half of the
floor pine boughs had been cast; above this were spread the
sleeping-furs, beneath lay the winter's snowfall.  The remainder of the
floor was moccasin-packed snow, littered with pots and pans and the
general _impedimenta_ of an Arctic camp.  The stove was red and roaring
hot, but only a bare three feet away lay a block of ice, as sharp-edged
and dry as when first quarried from the creek bottom.  The pressure of
the outside cold forced the inner heat upward.  Just above the stove,
where the pipe penetrated the roof, was a tiny circle of dry canvas;
next, with the pipe always as centre, a circle of steaming canvas; next a
damp and moisture-exuding ring; and finally, the rest of the tent,
sidewalls and top, coated with a half-inch of dry, white,
crystal-encrusted frost.

"_Oh_!  OH!  OH!"  A young fellow, lying asleep in the furs, bearded and
wan and weary, raised a moan of pain, and without waking increased the
pitch and intensity of his anguish.  His body half-lifted from the
blankets, and quivered and shrank spasmodically, as though drawing away
from a bed of nettles.

"Roll'm over!" ordered Bettles.  "He's crampin'."

And thereat, with pitiless good-will, he was pitched upon and rolled and
thumped and pounded by half-a-dozen willing comrades.

"Damn the trail," he muttered softly, as he threw off the robes and sat
up.  "I've run across country, played quarter three seasons hand-running,
and hardened myself in all manner of ways; and then I pilgrim it into
this God-forsaken land and find myself an effeminate Athenian without the
simplest rudiments of manhood!"  He hunched up to the fire and rolled a
cigarette.  "Oh, I'm not whining.  I can take my medicine all right, all
right; but I'm just decently ashamed of myself, that's all.  Here I am,
on top of a dirty thirty miles, as knocked up and stiff and sore as a
pink-tea degenerate after a five-mile walk on a country turn-pike.  Bah!
It makes me sick!  Got a match?"  "Don't git the tantrums, youngster."
Bettles passed over the required fire-stick and waxed patriarchal.  "Ye've
gotter 'low some for the breakin'-in.  Sufferin' cracky! don't I
recollect the first time I hit the trail!  Stiff?  I've seen the time
it'd take me ten minutes to git my mouth from the water-hole an' come to
my feet--every jint crackin' an' kickin' fit to kill.  Cramp?  In sech
knots it'd take the camp half a day to untangle me.  You're all right,
for a cub, any ye've the true sperrit.  Come this day year, you'll walk
all us old bucks into the ground any time.  An' best in your favor, you
hain't got that streak of fat in your make-up which has sent many a husky
man to the bosom of Abraham afore his right and proper time."

"Streak of fat?"

"Yep.  Comes along of bulk.  'T ain't the big men as is the best when it
comes to the trail."

"Never heard of it."

"Never heered of it, eh?  Well, it's a dead straight, open-an'-shut fact,
an' no gittin' round.  Bulk's all well enough for a mighty big effort,
but 'thout stayin' powers it ain't worth a continental whoop; an' stayin'
powers an' bulk ain't runnin' mates.  Takes the small, wiry fellows when
it comes to gittin' right down an' hangin' on like a lean-jowled dog to a
bone.  Why, hell's fire, the big men they ain't in it!"

"By gar!" broke in Louis Savoy, "dat is no, vot you call, josh!  I know
one mans, so vaire beeg like ze buffalo.  Wit him, on ze Sulphur Creek
stampede, go one small mans, Lon McFane.  You know dat Lon McFane, dat
leetle Irisher wit ze red hair and ze grin.  An' dey walk an' walk an'
walk, all ze day long an' ze night long.  And beeg mans, him become vaire
tired, an' lay down mooch in ze snow.  And leetle mans keek beeg mans,
an' him cry like, vot you call--ah! vot you call ze kid.  And leetle mans
keek an' keek an' keek, an' bime by, long time, long way, keek beeg mans
into my cabin.  Tree days 'fore him crawl out my blankets.  Nevaire I see
beeg squaw like him.  No nevaire.  Him haf vot you call ze streak of fat.
You bet."

"But there was Axel Gunderson," Prince spoke up.  The great Scandinavian,
with the tragic events which shadowed his passing, had made a deep mark
on the mining engineer.  "He lies up there, somewhere."  He swept his
hand in the vague direction of the mysterious east.

"Biggest man that ever turned his heels to Salt Water, or run a moose
down with sheer grit," supplemented Bettles; "but he's the prove-the-rule
exception.  Look at his woman, Unga,--tip the scales at a hundred an'
ten, clean meat an' nary ounce to spare.  She'd bank grit 'gainst his for
all there was in him, an' see him, an' go him better if it was possible.
Nothing over the earth, or in it, or under it, she wouldn't 'a' done."

"But she loved him," objected the engineer.

"'T ain't that.  It--"

"Look you, brothers," broke in Sitka Charley from his seat on the grub-
box.  "Ye have spoken of the streak of fat that runs in big men's
muscles, of the grit of women and the love, and ye have spoken fair; but
I have in mind things which happened when the land was young and the
fires of men apart as the stars.  It was then I had concern with a big
man, and a streak of fat, and a woman.  And the woman was small; but her
heart was greater than the beef-heart of the man, and she had grit.  And
we traveled a weary trail, even to the Salt Water, and the cold was
bitter, the snow deep, the hunger great.  And the woman's love was a
mighty love--no more can man say than this."

He paused, and with the hatchet broke pieces of ice from the large chunk
beside him.  These he threw into the gold pan on the stove, where the
drinking-water thawed.  The men drew up closer, and he of the cramps
sought greater comfort vainly for his stiffened body.

"Brothers, my blood is red with Siwash, but my heart is white.  To the
faults of my fathers I owe the one, to the virtues of my friends the
other.  A great truth came to me when I was yet a boy.  I learned that to
your kind and you was given the earth; that the Siwash could not
withstand you, and like the caribou and the bear, must perish in the
cold.  So I came into the warm and sat among you, by your fires, and
behold, I became one of you, I have seen much in my time.  I have known
strange things, and bucked big, on big trails, with men of many breeds.
And because of these things, I measure deeds after your manner, and judge
men, and think thoughts.  Wherefore, when I speak harshly of one of your
own kind, I know you will not take it amiss; and when I speak high of one
of my father's people, you will not take it upon you to say, 'Sitka
Charley is Siwash, and there is a crooked light in his eyes and small
honor to his tongue.'  Is it not so?"

Deep down in throat, the circle vouchsafed its assent.

"The woman was Passuk.  I got her in fair trade from her people, who were
of the Coast and whose Chilcat totem stood at the head of a salt arm of
the sea.  My heart did not go out to the woman, nor did I take stock of
her looks.  For she scarce took her eyes from the ground, and she was
timid and afraid, as girls will be when cast into a stranger's arms whom
they have never seen before.  As I say, there was no place in my heart
for her to creep, for I had a great journey in mind, and stood in need of
one to feed my dogs and to lift a paddle with me through the long river
days.  One blanket would cover the twain; so I chose Passuk.

"Have I not said I was a servant to the Government?  If not, it is well
that ye know.  So I was taken on a warship, sleds and dogs and evaporated
foods, and with me came Passuk.  And we went north, to the winter ice-rim
of Bering Sea, where we were landed,--myself, and Passuk, and the dogs.  I
was also given moneys of the Government, for I was its servant, and
charts of lands which the eyes of man had never dwelt upon, and messages.
These messages were sealed, and protected shrewdly from the weather, and
I was to deliver them to the whale-ships of the Arctic, ice-bound by the
great Mackenzie.  Never was there so great a river, forgetting only our
own Yukon, the Mother of all Rivers.

"All of which is neither here nor there, for my story deals not with the
whale-ships, nor the berg-bound winter I spent by the Mackenzie.
Afterward, in the spring, when the days lengthened and there was a crust
to the snow, we came south, Passuk and I, to the Country of the Yukon.  A
weary journey, but the sun pointed out the way of our feet.  It was a
naked land then, as I have said, and we worked up the current, with pole
and paddle, till we came to Forty Mile.  Good it was to see white faces
once again, so we put into the bank.  And that winter was a hard winter.
The darkness and the cold drew down upon us, and with them the famine.  To
each man the agent of the Company gave forty pounds of flour and twenty
of bacon.  There were no beans.  And, the dogs howled always, and there
were flat bellies and deep-lined faces, and strong men became weak, and
weak men died.  There was also much scurvy.

"Then came we together in the store one night, and the empty shelves made
us feel our own emptiness the more.  We talked low, by the light of the
fire, for the candles had been set aside for those who might yet gasp in
the spring.  Discussion was held, and it was said that a man must go
forth to the Salt Water and tell to the world our misery.  At this all
eyes turned to me, for it was understood that I was a great traveler.  'It
is seven hundred miles,' said I, 'to Haines Mission by the sea, and every
inch of it snowshoe work.  Give me the pick of your dogs and the best of
your grub, and I will go.  And with me shall go Passuk.'

"To this they were agreed.  But there arose one, Long Jeff, a Yankee-man,
big-boned and big-muscled.  Also his talk was big.  He, too, was a mighty
traveler, he said, born to the snowshoe and bred up on buffalo milk.  He
would go with me, in case I fell by the trail, that he might carry the
word on to the Mission.  I was young, and I knew not Yankee-men.  How was
I to know that big talk betokened the streak of fat, or that Yankee-men
who did great things kept their teeth together?  So we took the pick of
the dogs and the best of the grub, and struck the trail, we
three,--Passuk, Long Jeff, and I.

"Well, ye have broken virgin snow, labored at the gee-pole, and are not
unused to the packed river-jams; so I will talk little of the toil, save
that on some days we made ten miles, and on others thirty, but more often
ten.  And the best of the grub was not good, while we went on stint from
the start.  Likewise the pick of the dogs was poor, and we were hard put
to keep them on their legs.  At the White River our three sleds became
two sleds, and we had only come two hundred miles.  But we lost nothing;
the dogs that left the traces went into the bellies of those that
remained.

"Not a greeting, not a curl of smoke, till we made Pelly.  Here I had
counted on grub; and here I had counted on leaving Long Jeff, who was
whining and trail-sore.  But the factor's lungs were wheezing, his eyes
bright, his cache nigh empty; and he showed us the empty cache of the
missionary, also his grave with the rocks piled high to keep off the
dogs.  There was a bunch of Indians there, but babies and old men there
were none, and it was clear that few would see the spring.

"So we pulled on, light-stomached and heavy-hearted, with half a thousand
miles of snow and silence between us and Haines Mission by the sea.  The
darkness was at its worst, and at midday the sun could not clear the sky-
line to the south.  But the ice-jams were smaller, the going better; so I
pushed the dogs hard and traveled late and early.  As I said at Forty
Mile, every inch of it was snow-shoe work.  And the shoes made great
sores on our feet, which cracked and scabbed but would not heal.  And
every day these sores grew more grievous, till in the morning, when we
girded on the shoes, Long Jeff cried like a child.  I put him at the fore
of the light sled to break trail, but he slipped off the shoes for
comfort.  Because of this the trail was not packed, his moccasins made
great holes, and into these holes the dogs wallowed.  The bones of the
dogs were ready to break through their hides, and this was not good for
them.  So I spoke hard words to the man, and he promised, and broke his
word.  Then I beat him with the dog-whip, and after that the dogs
wallowed no more.  He was a child, what of the pain and the streak of
fat.

"But Passuk.  While the man lay by the fire and wept, she cooked, and in
the morning helped lash the sleds, and in the evening to unlash them.  And
she saved the dogs.  Ever was she to the fore, lifting the webbed shoes
and making the way easy.  Passuk--how shall I say?--I took it for granted
that she should do these things, and thought no more about it.  For my
mind was busy with other matters, and besides, I was young in years and
knew little of woman.  It was only on looking back that I came to
understand.

"And the man became worthless.  The dogs had little strength in them, but
he stole rides on the sled when he lagged behind.  Passuk said she would
take the one sled, so the man had nothing to do.  In the morning I gave
him his fair share of grub and started him on the trail alone.  Then the
woman and I broke camp, packed the sleds, and harnessed the dogs.  By
midday, when the sun mocked us, we would overtake the man, with the tears
frozen on his cheeks, and pass him.  In the night we made camp, set aside
his fair share of grub, and spread his furs.  Also we made a big fire,
that he might see.  And hours afterward he would come limping in, and eat
his grub with moans and groans, and sleep.  He was not sick, this man.  He
was only trail-sore and tired, and weak with hunger.  But Passuk and I
were trail-sore and tired, and weak with hunger; and we did all the work
and he did none.  But he had the streak of fat of which our brother
Bettles has spoken.  Further, we gave the man always his fair share of
grub.

"Then one day we met two ghosts journeying through the Silence.  They
were a man and a boy, and they were white.  The ice had opened on Lake Le
Barge, and through it had gone their main outfit.  One blanket each
carried about his shoulders.  At night they built a fire and crouched
over it till morning.  They had a little flour.  This they stirred in
warm water and drank.  The man showed me eight cups of flour--all they
had, and Pelly, stricken with famine, two hundred miles away.  They said,
also, that there was an Indian behind; that they had whacked fair, but
that he could not keep up.  I did not believe they had whacked fair, else
would the Indian have kept up.  But I could give them no grub.  They
strove to steal a dog--the fattest, which was very thin--but I shoved my
pistol in their faces and told them begone.  And they went away, like
drunken men, through the Silence toward Pelly.

"I had three dogs now, and one sled, and the dogs were only bones and
hair.  When there is little wood, the fire burns low and the cabin grows
cold.  So with us.  With little grub the frost bites sharp, and our faces
were black and frozen till our own mothers would not have known us.  And
our feet were very sore.  In the morning, when I hit the trail, I sweated
to keep down the cry when the pain of the snowshoes smote me.  Passuk
never opened her lips, but stepped to the fore to break the way.  The man
howled.

"The Thirty Mile was swift, and the current ate away the ice from
beneath, and there were many air-holes and cracks, and much open water.
One day we came upon the man, resting, for he had gone ahead, as was his
wont, in the morning.  But between us was open water.  This he had passed
around by taking to the rim-ice where it was too narrow for a sled.  So
we found an ice-bridge.  Passuk weighed little, and went first, with a
long pole crosswise in her hands in chance she broke through.  But she
was light, and her shoes large, and she passed over.  Then she called the
dogs.  But they had neither poles nor shoes, and they broke through and
were swept under by the water.  I held tight to the sled from behind,
till the traces broke and the dogs went on down under the ice.  There was
little meat to them, but I had counted on them for a week's grub, and
they were gone.

"The next morning I divided all the grub, which was little, into three
portions.  And I told Long Jeff that he could keep up with us, or not, as
he saw fit; for we were going to travel light and fast.  But he raised
his voice and cried over his sore feet and his troubles, and said harsh
things against comradeship.  Passuk's feet were sore, and my feet were
sore--ay, sorer than his, for we had worked with the dogs; also, we
looked to see.  Long Jeff swore he would die before he hit the trail
again; so Passuk took a fur robe, and I a cooking pot and an axe, and we
made ready to go.  But she looked on the man's portion, and said, 'It is
wrong to waste good food on a baby.  He is better dead.'  I shook my head
and said no--that a comrade once was a comrade always.  Then she spoke of
the men of Forty Mile; that they were many men and good; and that they
looked to me for grub in the spring.  But when I still said no, she
snatched the pistol from my belt, quick, and as our brother Bettles has
spoken, Long Jeff went to the bosom of Abraham before his time.  I chided
Passuk for this; but she showed no sorrow, nor was she sorrowful.  And in
my heart I knew she was right."

Sitka Charley paused and threw pieces of ice into the gold pan on the
stove.  The men were silent, and their backs chilled to the sobbing cries
of the dogs as they gave tongue to their misery in the outer cold.

"And day by day we passed in the snow the sleeping-places of the two
ghosts--Passuk and I--and we knew we would be glad for such ere we made
Salt Water.  Then we came to the Indian, like another ghost, with his
face set toward Pelly.  They had not whacked up fair, the man and the
boy, he said, and he had had no flour for three days.  Each night he
boiled pieces of his moccasins in a cup, and ate them.  He did not have
much moccasins left.  And he was a Coast Indian, and told us these things
through Passuk, who talked his tongue.  He was a stranger in the Yukon,
and he knew not the way, but his face was set to Pelly.  How far was it?
Two sleeps? ten? a hundred--he did not know, but he was going to Pelly.
It was too far to turn back; he could only keep on.

"He did not ask for grub, for he could see we, too, were hard put.  Passuk
looked at the man, and at me, as though she were of two minds, like a
mother partridge whose young are in trouble.  So I turned to her and
said, 'This man has been dealt unfair.  Shall I give him of our grub a
portion?'  I saw her eyes light, as with quick pleasure; but she looked
long at the man and at me, and her mouth drew close and hard, and she
said, 'No.  The Salt Water is afar off, and Death lies in wait.  Better
it is that he take this stranger man and let my man Charley pass.'  So
the man went away in the Silence toward Pelly.  That night she wept.
Never had I seen her weep before.  Nor was it the smoke of the fire, for
the wood was dry wood.  So I marveled at her sorrow, and thought her
woman's heart had grown soft at the darkness of the trail and the pain.

"Life is a strange thing.  Much have I thought on it, and pondered long,
yet daily the strangeness of it grows not less, but more.  Why this
longing for Life?  It is a game which no man wins.  To live is to toil
hard, and to suffer sore, till Old Age creeps heavily upon us and we
throw down our hands on the cold ashes of dead fires.  It is hard to
live.  In pain the babe sucks his first breath, in pain the old man gasps
his last, and all his days are full of trouble and sorrow; yet he goes
down to the open arms of Death, stumbling, falling, with head turned
backward, fighting to the last.  And Death is kind.  It is only Life, and
the things of Life that hurt.  Yet we love Life, and we hate Death.  It
is very strange.

"We spoke little, Passuk and I, in the days which came.  In the night we
lay in the snow like dead people, and in the morning we went on our way,
walking like dead people.  And all things were dead.  There were no
ptarmigan, no squirrels, no snowshoe rabbits,--nothing.  The river made
no sound beneath its white robes.  The sap was frozen in the forest.  And
it became cold, as now; and in the night the stars drew near and large,
and leaped and danced; and in the day the sun-dogs mocked us till we saw
many suns, and all the air flashed and sparkled, and the snow was diamond
dust.  And there was no heat, no sound, only the bitter cold and the
Silence.  As I say, we walked like dead people, as in a dream, and we
kept no count of time.  Only our faces were set to Salt Water, our souls
strained for Salt Water, and our feet carried us toward Salt Water.  We
camped by the Tahkeena, and knew it not.  Our eyes looked upon the White
Horse, but we saw it not.  Our feet trod the portage of the Canyon, but
they felt it not.  We felt nothing.  And we fell often by the way, but we
fell, always, with our faces toward Salt Water.

"Our last grub went, and we had shared fair, Passuk and I, but she fell
more often, and at Caribou Crossing her strength left her.  And in the
morning we lay beneath the one robe and did not take the trail.  It was
in my mind to stay there and meet Death hand-in-hand with Passuk; for I
had grown old, and had learned the love of woman.  Also, it was eighty
miles to Haines Mission, and the great Chilcoot, far above the timber-
line, reared his storm-swept head between.  But Passuk spoke to me, low,
with my ear against her lips that I might hear.  And now, because she
need not fear my anger, she spoke her heart, and told me of her love, and
of many things which I did not understand.

"And she said: 'You are my man, Charley, and I have been a good woman to
you.  And in all the days I have made your fire, and cooked your food,
and fed your dogs, and lifted paddle or broken trail, I have not
complained.  Nor did I say that there was more warmth in the lodge of my
father, or that there was more grub on the Chilcat.  When you have
spoken, I have listened.  When you have ordered, I have obeyed.  Is it
not so, Charley?'

"And I said: 'Ay, it is so.'

"And she said: 'When first you came to the Chilcat, nor looked upon me,
but bought me as a man buys a dog, and took me away, my heart was hard
against you and filled with bitterness and fear.  But that was long ago.
For you were kind to me, Charley, as a good man is kind to his dog.  Your
heart was cold, and there was no room for me; yet you dealt me fair and
your ways were just.  And I was with you when you did bold deeds and led
great ventures, and I measured you against the men of other breeds, and I
saw you stood among them full of honor, and your word was wise, your
tongue true.  And I grew proud of you, till it came that you filled all
my heart, and all my thought was of you.  You were as the midsummer sun,
when its golden trail runs in a circle and never leaves the sky.  And
whatever way I cast my eyes I beheld the sun.  But your heart was ever
cold, Charley, and there was no room.'

"And I said: 'It is so.  It was cold, and there was no room.  But that is
past.  Now my heart is like the snowfall in the spring, when the sun has
come back.  There is a great thaw and a bending, a sound of running
waters, and a budding and sprouting of green things.  And there is
drumming of partridges, and songs of robins, and great music, for the
winter is broken, Passuk, and I have learned the love of woman.'

"She smiled and moved for me to draw her closer.  And she said, 'I am
glad.'  After that she lay quiet for a long time, breathing softly, her
head upon my breast.  Then she whispered: 'The trail ends here, and I am
tired.  But first I would speak of other things.  In the long ago, when I
was a girl on the Chilcat, I played alone among the skin bales of my
father's lodge; for the men were away on the hunt, and the women and boys
were dragging in the meat.  It was in the spring, and I was alone.  A
great brown bear, just awake from his winter's sleep, hungry, his fur
hanging to the bones in flaps of leanness, shoved his head within the
lodge and said, "Oof!"  My brother came running back with the first sled
of meat.  And he fought the bear with burning sticks from the fire, and
the dogs in their harnesses, with the sled behind them, fell upon the
bear.  There was a great battle and much noise.  They rolled in the fire,
the skin bales were scattered, the lodge overthrown.  But in the end the
bear lay dead, with the fingers of my brother in his mouth and the marks
of his claws upon my brother's face.  Did you mark the Indian by the
Pelly trail, his mitten which had no thumb, his hand which he warmed by
our fire?  He was my brother.  And I said he should have no grub.  And he
went away in the Silence without grub.'

"This, my brothers, was the love of Passuk, who died in the snow, by the
Caribou Crossing.  It was a mighty love, for she denied her brother for
the man who led her away on weary trails to a bitter end.  And, further,
such was this woman's love, she denied herself.  Ere her eyes closed for
the last time she took my hand and slipped it under her squirrel-skin
_parka_ to her waist.  I felt there a well-filled pouch, and learned the
secret of her lost strength.  Day by day we had shared fair, to the last
least bit; and day by day but half her share had she eaten.  The other
half had gone into the well-filled pouch.

"And she said: 'This is the end of the trail for Passuk; but your trail,
Charley, leads on and on, over the great Chilcoot, down to Haines Mission
and the sea.  And it leads on and on, by the light of many suns, over
unknown lands and strange waters, and it is full of years and honors and
great glories.  It leads you to the lodges of many women, and good women,
but it will never lead you to a greater love than the love of Passuk.'

"And I knew the woman spoke true.  But a madness came upon me, and I
threw the well-filled pouch from me, and swore that my trail had reached
an end, till her tired eyes grew soft with tears, and she said: 'Among
men has Sitka Charley walked in honor, and ever has his word been true.
Does he forget that honor now, and talk vain words by the Caribou
Crossing?  Does he remember no more the men of Forty Mile, who gave him
of their grub the best, of their dogs the pick?  Ever has Passuk been
proud of her man.  Let him lift himself up, gird on his snowshoes, and
begone, that she may still keep her pride.'

"And when she grew cold in my arms I arose, and sought out the
well-filled pouch, and girt on my snowshoes, and staggered along the
trail; for there was a weakness in my knees, and my head was dizzy, and
in my ears there was a roaring, and a flashing of fire upon my eyes.  The
forgotten trails of boyhood came back to me.  I sat by the full pots of
the _potlach_ feast, and raised my voice in song, and danced to the
chanting of the men and maidens and the booming of the walrus drums.  And
Passuk held my hand and walked by my side.  When I laid down to sleep,
she waked me.  When I stumbled and fell, she raised me.  When I wandered
in the deep snow, she led me back to the trail.  And in this wise, like a
man bereft of reason, who sees strange visions and whose thoughts are
light with wine, I came to Haines Mission by the sea."

Sitka Charley threw back the tent-flaps.  It was midday.  To the south,
just clearing the bleak Henderson Divide, poised the cold-disked sun.  On
either hand the sun-dogs blazed.  The air was a gossamer of glittering
frost.  In the foreground, beside the trail, a wolf-dog, bristling with
frost, thrust a long snout heavenward and mourned.




WHERE THE TRAIL FORKS


   "Must I, then, must I, then, now leave this town--
   And you, my love, stay here?"--_Schwabian Folk-song_.

The singer, clean-faced and cheery-eyed, bent over and added water to a
pot of simmering beans, and then, rising, a stick of firewood in hand,
drove back the circling dogs from the grub-box and cooking-gear.  He was
blue of eye, and his long hair was golden, and it was a pleasure to look
upon his lusty freshness.  A new moon was thrusting a dim horn above the
white line of close-packed snow-capped pines which ringed the camp and
segregated it from all the world.  Overhead, so clear it was and cold,
the stars danced with quick, pulsating movements.  To the southeast an
evanescent greenish glow heralded the opening revels of the aurora
borealis.  Two men, in the immediate foreground, lay upon the bearskin
which was their bed.  Between the skin and naked snow was a six-inch
layer of pine boughs.  The blankets were rolled back.  For shelter, there
was a fly at their backs,--a sheet of canvas stretched between two trees
and angling at forty-five degrees.  This caught the radiating heat from
the fire and flung it down upon the skin.  Another man sat on a sled,
drawn close to the blaze, mending moccasins.  To the right, a heap of
frozen gravel and a rude windlass denoted where they toiled each day in
dismal groping for the pay-streak.  To the left, four pairs of snowshoes
stood erect, showing the mode of travel which obtained when the stamped
snow of the camp was left behind.

That Schwabian folk-song sounded strangely pathetic under the cold
northern stars, and did not do the men good who lounged about the fire
after the toil of the day.  It put a dull ache into their hearts, and a
yearning which was akin to belly-hunger, and sent their souls questing
southward across the divides to the sun-lands.

"For the love of God, Sigmund, shut up!" expostulated one of the men.  His
hands were clenched painfully, but he hid them from sight in the folds of
the bearskin upon which he lay.

"And what for, Dave Wertz?" Sigmund demanded.  "Why shall I not sing when
the heart is glad?"

"Because you've got no call to, that's why.  Look about you, man, and
think of the grub we've been defiling our bodies with for the last
twelvemonth, and the way we've lived and worked like beasts!"

Thus abjured, Sigmund, the golden-haired, surveyed it all, and the frost-
rimmed wolf-dogs and the vapor breaths of the men.  "And why shall not
the heart be glad?" he laughed.  "It is good; it is all good.  As for the
grub--"  He doubled up his arm and caressed the swelling biceps.  "And if
we have lived and worked like beasts, have we not been paid like kings?
Twenty dollars to the pan the streak is running, and we know it to be
eight feet thick.  It is another Klondike--and we know it--Jim Hawes
there, by your elbow, knows it and complains not.  And there's Hitchcock!
He sews moccasins like an old woman, and waits against the time.  Only
you can't wait and work until the wash-up in the spring.  Then we shall
all be rich, rich as kings, only you cannot wait.  You want to go back to
the States.  So do I, and I was born there, but I can wait, when each day
the gold in the pan shows up yellow as butter in the churning.  But you
want your good time, and, like a child, you cry for it now.  Bah!  Why
shall I not sing:

   "In a year, in a year, when the grapes are ripe,
      I shall stay no more away.
   Then if you still are true, my love,
      It will be our wedding day.
   In a year, in a year, when my time is past,
      Then I'll live in your love for aye.
   Then if you still are true, my love,
      It will be our wedding day."

The dogs, bristling and growling, drew in closer to the firelight.  There
was a monotonous crunch-crunch of webbed shoes, and between each crunch
the dragging forward of the heel of the shoe like the sound of sifting
sugar.  Sigmund broke off from his song to hurl oaths and firewood at the
animals.  Then the light was parted by a fur-clad figure, and an Indian
girl slipped out of the webs, threw back the hood of her squirrel-skin
_parka_, and stood in their midst.  Sigmund and the men on the bearskin
greeted her as "Sipsu," with the customary "Hello," but Hitchcock made
room on the sled that she might sit beside him.

"And how goes it, Sipsu?" he asked, talking, after her fashion, in broken
English and bastard Chinook.  "Is the hunger still mighty in the camp?
and has the witch doctor yet found the cause wherefore game is scarce and
no moose in the land?"

"Yes; even so.  There is little game, and we prepare to eat the dogs.
Also has the witch doctor found the cause of all this evil, and to-morrow
will he make sacrifice and cleanse the camp."

"And what does the sacrifice chance to be?--a new-born babe or some poor
devil of a squaw, old and shaky, who is a care to the tribe and better
out of the way?"

"It chanced not that wise; for the need was great, and he chose none
other than the chief's daughter; none other than I, Sipsu."

"Hell!"  The word rose slowly to Hitchcock's lips, and brimmed over full
and deep, in a way which bespoke wonder and consideration.

"Wherefore we stand by a forking of the trail, you and I," she went on
calmly, "and I have come that we may look once more upon each other, and
once more only."

She was born of primitive stock, and primitive had been her traditions
and her days; so she regarded life stoically, and human sacrifice as part
of the natural order.  The powers which ruled the day-light and the dark,
the flood and the frost, the bursting of the bud and the withering of the
leaf, were angry and in need of propitiation.  This they exacted in many
ways,--death in the bad water, through the treacherous ice-crust, by the
grip of the grizzly, or a wasting sickness which fell upon a man in his
own lodge till he coughed, and the life of his lungs went out through his
mouth and nostrils.  Likewise did the powers receive sacrifice.  It was
all one.  And the witch doctor was versed in the thoughts of the powers
and chose unerringly.  It was very natural.  Death came by many ways, yet
was it all one after all,--a manifestation of the all-powerful and
inscrutable.

But Hitchcock came of a later world-breed.  His traditions were less
concrete and without reverence, and he said, "Not so, Sipsu.  You are
young, and yet in the full joy of life.  The witch doctor is a fool, and
his choice is evil.  This thing shall not be."

She smiled and answered, "Life is not kind, and for many reasons.  First,
it made of us twain the one white and the other red, which is bad.  Then
it crossed our trails, and now it parts them again; and we can do
nothing.  Once before, when the gods were angry, did your brothers come
to the camp.  They were three, big men and white, and they said the thing
shall not be.  But they died quickly, and the thing was."

Hitchcock nodded that he heard, half-turned, and lifted his voice.  "Look
here, you fellows!  There's a lot of foolery going on over to the camp,
and they're getting ready to murder Sipsu.  What d'ye say?"

Wertz looked at Hawes, and Hawes looked back, but neither spoke.  Sigmund
dropped his head, and petted the shepherd dog between his knees.  He had
brought Shep in with him from the outside, and thought a great deal of
the animal.  In fact, a certain girl, who was much in his thoughts, and
whose picture in the little locket on his breast often inspired him to
sing, had given him the dog and her blessing when they kissed good-by and
he started on his Northland quest.

"What d'ye say?" Hitchcock repeated.

"Mebbe it's not so serious," Hawes answered with deliberation.  "Most
likely it's only a girl's story."

"That isn't the point!"  Hitchcock felt a hot flush of anger sweep over
him at their evident reluctance.  "The question is, if it is so, are we
going to stand it?  What are we going to do?"

"I don't see any call to interfere," spoke up Wertz.  "If it is so, it is
so, and that's all there is about it.  It's a way these people have of
doing.  It's their religion, and it's no concern of ours.  Our concern is
to get the dust and then get out of this God-forsaken land.  'T isn't fit
for naught else but beasts?  And what are these black devils but beasts?
Besides, it'd be damn poor policy."

"That's what I say," chimed in Hawes.  "Here we are, four of us, three
hundred miles from the Yukon or a white face.  And what can we do against
half-a-hundred Indians?  If we quarrel with them, we have to vamose; if
we fight, we are wiped out.  Further, we've struck pay, and, by God! I,
for one, am going to stick by it!"

"Ditto here," supplemented Wertz.

Hitchcock turned impatiently to Sigmund, who was softly singing,--

   "In a year, in a year, when the grapes are ripe,
      I shall stay no more away."

"Well, it's this way, Hitchcock," he finally said, "I'm in the same boat
with the rest.  If three-score bucks have made up their mind to kill the
girl, why, we can't help it.  One rush, and we'd be wiped off the
landscape.  And what good'd that be?  They'd still have the girl.  There's
no use in going against the customs of a people except you're in force."

"But we are in force!" Hitchcock broke in.  "Four whites are a match for
a hundred times as many reds.  And think of the girl!"

Sigmund stroked the dog meditatively.  "But I do think of the girl.  And
her eyes are blue like summer skies, and laughing like summer seas, and
her hair is yellow, like mine, and braided in ropes the size of a big
man's arms.  She's waiting for me, out there, in a better land.  And
she's waited long, and now my pile's in sight I'm not going to throw it
away."

"And shamed I would be to look into the girl's blue eyes and remember the
black ones of the girl whose blood was on my hands," Hitchcock sneered;
for he was born to honor and championship, and to do the thing for the
thing's sake, nor stop to weigh or measure.

Sigmund shook his head.  "You can't make me mad, Hitchcock, nor do mad
things because of your madness.  It's a cold business proposition and a
question of facts.  I didn't come to this country for my health, and,
further, it's impossible for us to raise a hand.  If it is so, it is too
bad for the girl, that's all.  It's a way of her people, and it just
happens we're on the spot this one time.  They've done the same for a
thousand-thousand years, and they're going to do it now, and they'll go
on doing it for all time to come.  Besides, they're not our kind.  Nor's
the girl.  No, I take my stand with Wertz and Hawes, and--"

But the dogs snarled and drew in, and he broke off, listening to the
crunch-crunch of many snowshoes.  Indian after Indian stalked into the
firelight, tall and grim, fur-clad and silent, their shadows dancing
grotesquely on the snow.  One, the witch doctor, spoke gutturally to
Sipsu.  His face was daubed with savage paint blotches, and over his
shoulders was drawn a wolfskin, the gleaming teeth and cruel snout
surmounting his head.  No other word was spoken.  The prospectors held
the peace.  Sipsu arose and slipped into her snowshoes.

"Good-by, O my man," she said to Hitchcock.  But the man who had sat
beside her on the sled gave no sign, nor lifted his head as they filed
away into the white forest.

Unlike many men, his faculty of adaptation, while large, had never
suggested the expediency of an alliance with the women of the Northland.
His broad cosmopolitanism had never impelled toward covenanting in
marriage with the daughters of the soil.  If it had, his philosophy of
life would not have stood between.  But it simply had not.  Sipsu?  He
had pleasured in camp-fire chats with her, not as a man who knew himself
to be man and she woman, but as a man might with a child, and as a man of
his make certainly would if for no other reason than to vary the tedium
of a bleak existence.  That was all.  But there was a certain chivalric
thrill of warm blood in him, despite his Yankee ancestry and New England
upbringing, and he was so made that the commercial aspect of life often
seemed meaningless and bore contradiction to his deeper impulses.

So he sat silent, with head bowed forward, an organic force, greater than
himself, as great as his race, at work within him.  Wertz and Hawes
looked askance at him from time to time, a faint but perceptible
trepidation in their manner.  Sigmund also felt this.  Hitchcock was
strong, and his strength had been impressed upon them in the course of
many an event in their precarious life.  So they stood in a certain
definite awe and curiosity as to what his conduct would be when he moved
to action.

But his silence was long, and the fire nigh out, when Wertz stretched his
arms and yawned, and thought he'd go to bed.  Then Hitchcock stood up his
full height.

"May God damn your souls to the deepest hells, you chicken-hearted
cowards!  I'm done with you!"  He said it calmly enough, but his strength
spoke in every syllable, and every intonation was advertisement of
intention.  "Come on," he continued, "whack up, and in whatever way suits
you best.  I own a quarter-interest in the claims; our contracts show
that.  There're twenty-five or thirty ounces in the sack from the test
pans.  Fetch out the scales.  We'll divide that now.  And you, Sigmund,
measure me my quarter-share of the grub and set it apart.  Four of the
dogs are mine, and I want four more.  I'll trade you my share in the camp
outfit and mining-gear for the dogs.  And I'll throw in my six or seven
ounces and the spare 45-90 with the ammunition.  What d'ye say?"

The three men drew apart and conferred.  When they returned, Sigmund
acted as spokesman.  "We'll whack up fair with you, Hitchcock.  In
everything you'll get your quarter-share, neither more nor less; and you
can take it or leave it.  But we want the dogs as bad as you do, so you
get four, and that's all.  If you don't want to take your share of the
outfit and gear, why, that's your lookout.  If you want it, you can have
it; if you don't, leave it."

"The letter of the law," Hitchcock sneered.  "But go ahead.  I'm willing.
And hurry up.  I can't get out of this camp and away from its vermin any
too quick."

The division was effected without further comment.  He lashed his meagre
belongings upon one of the sleds, rounded in his four dogs, and harnessed
up.  His portion of outfit and gear he did not touch, though he threw
onto the sled half a dozen dog harnesses, and challenged them with his
eyes to interfere.  But they shrugged their shoulders and watched him
disappear in the forest.

* * * * *

A man crawled upon his belly through the snow.  On every hand loomed the
moose-hide lodges of the camp.  Here and there a miserable dog howled or
snarled abuse upon his neighbor.  Once, one of them approached the
creeping man, but the man became motionless.  The dog came closer and
sniffed, and came yet closer, till its nose touched the strange object
which had not been there when darkness fell.  Then Hitchcock, for it was
Hitchcock, upreared suddenly, shooting an unmittened hand out to the
brute's shaggy throat.  And the dog knew its death in that clutch, and
when the man moved on, was left broken-necked under the stars.  In this
manner Hitchcock made the chief's lodge.  For long he lay in the snow
without, listening to the voices of the occupants and striving to locate
Sipsu.  Evidently there were many in the tent, and from the sounds they
were in high excitement.  At last he heard the girl's voice, and crawled
around so that only the moose-hide divided them.  Then burrowing in the
snow, he slowly wormed his head and shoulders underneath.  When the warm
inner air smote his face, he stopped and waited, his legs and the greater
part of his body still on the outside.  He could see nothing, nor did he
dare lift his head.  On one side of him was a skin bale.  He could smell
it, though he carefully felt to be certain.  On the other side his face
barely touched a furry garment which he knew clothed a body.  This must
be Sipsu.  Though he wished she would speak again, he resolved to risk
it.

He could hear the chief and the witch doctor talking high, and in a far
corner some hungry child whimpering to sleep.  Squirming over on his
side, he carefully raised his head, still just touching the furry
garment.  He listened to the breathing.  It was a woman's breathing; he
would chance it.

He pressed against her side softly but firmly, and felt her start at the
contact.  Again he waited, till a questioning hand slipped down upon his
head and paused among the curls.  The next instant the hand turned his
face gently upward, and he was gazing into Sipsu's eyes.

She was quite collected.  Changing her position casually, she threw an
elbow well over on the skin bale, rested her body upon it, and arranged
her _parka_.  In this way he was completely concealed.  Then, and still
most casually, she reclined across him, so that he could breathe between
her arm and breast, and when she lowered her head her ear pressed lightly
against his lips.

"When the time suits, go thou," he whispered, "out of the lodge and
across the snow, down the wind to the bunch of jackpine in the curve of
the creek.  There wilt thou find my dogs and my sled, packed for the
trail.  This night we go down to the Yukon; and since we go fast, lay
thou hands upon what dogs come nigh thee, by the scruff of the neck, and
drag them to the sled in the curve of the creek."

Sipsu shook her head in dissent; but her eyes glistened with gladness,
and she was proud that this man had shown toward her such favor.  But
she, like the women of all her race, was born to obey the will masculine,
and when Hitchcock repeated "Go!" he did it with authority, and though
she made no answer he knew that his will was law.

"And never mind harness for the dogs," he added, preparing to go.  "I
shall wait.  But waste no time.  The day chaseth the night alway, nor
does it linger for man's pleasure."

Half an hour later, stamping his feet and swinging his arms by the sled,
he saw her coming, a surly dog in either hand.  At the approach of these
his own animals waxed truculent, and he favored them with the butt of his
whip till they quieted.  He had approached the camp up the wind, and
sound was the thing to be most feared in making his presence known.

"Put them into the sled," he ordered when she had got the harness on the
two dogs.  "I want my leaders to the fore."

But when she had done this, the displaced animals pitched upon the
aliens.  Though Hitchcock plunged among them with clubbed rifle, a riot
of sound went up and across the sleeping camp.

"Now we shall have dogs, and in plenty," he remarked grimly, slipping an
axe from the sled lashings.  "Do thou harness whichever I fling thee, and
betweenwhiles protect the team."

He stepped a space in advance and waited between two pines.  The dogs of
the camp were disturbing the night with their jangle, and he watched for
their coming.  A dark spot, growing rapidly, took form upon the dim white
expanse of snow.  It was a forerunner of the pack, leaping cleanly, and,
after the wolf fashion, singing direction to its brothers.  Hitchcock
stood in the shadow.  As it sprang past, he reached out, gripped its
forelegs in mid-career, and sent it whirling earthward.  Then he struck
it a well-judged blow beneath the ear, and flung it to Sipsu.  And while
she clapped on the harness, he, with his axe, held the passage between
the trees, till a shaggy flood of white teeth and glistening eyes surged
and crested just beyond reach.  Sipsu worked rapidly.  When she had
finished, he leaped forward, seized and stunned a second, and flung it to
her.  This he repeated thrice again, and when the sled team stood
snarling in a string of ten, he called, "Enough!"

But at this instant a young buck, the forerunner of the tribe, and swift
of limb, wading through the dogs and cuffing right and left, attempted
the passage.  The butt of Hitchcock's rifle drove him to his knees,
whence he toppled over sideways.  The witch doctor, running lustily, saw
the blow fall.

Hitchcock called to Sipsu to pull out.  At her shrill "Chook!" the
maddened brutes shot straight ahead, and the sled, bounding mightily,
just missed unseating her.  The powers were evidently angry with the
witch doctor, for at this moment they plunged him upon the trail.  The
lead-dog fouled his snowshoes and tripped him up, and the nine succeeding
dogs trod him under foot and the sled bumped over him.  But he was quick
to his feet, and the night might have turned out differently had not
Sipsu struck backward with the long dog-whip and smitten him a blinding
blow across the eyes.  Hitchcock, hurrying to overtake her, collided
against him as he swayed with pain in the middle of the trail.  Thus it
was, when this primitive theologian got back to the chief's lodge, that
his wisdom had been increased in so far as concerns the efficacy of the
white man's fist.  So, when he orated then and there in the council, he
was wroth against all white men.

* * * * *

"Tumble out, you loafers!  Tumble out!  Grub'll be ready before you get
into your footgear!"

Dave Wertz threw off the bearskin, sat up, and yawned.

Hawes stretched, discovered a lame muscle in his arm, and rubbed it
sleepily.  "Wonder where Hitchcock bunked last night?" he queried,
reaching for his moccasins.  They were stiff, and he walked gingerly in
his socks to the fire to thaw them out.  "It's a blessing he's gone," he
added, "though he was a mighty good worker."

"Yep.  Too masterful.  That was his trouble.  Too bad for Sipsu.  Think
he cared for her much?

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