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Smoke Bellew

by Jack London · English · Gutenberg #5737 · 538,244 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Smoke Bellew

Author: Jack London


        
Release date: May 1, 2004 [eBook #5737]
                Most recently updated: March 3, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5737

Credits: Produced by Les Bowler, Paul J. Hollander, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SMOKE BELLEW ***




Produced by Les Bowler and Paul J. Hollander





SMOKE BELLEW

by Jack London




CONTENTS

     The Taste of the Meat
     The Meat
     The Stampede to Squaw Creek
     Shorty Dreams
     The Man on the Other Bank
     The Race for Number Three*
     The Little Man
     The Hanging of Cultus George
     The Mistake of Creation
     A Flutter in Eggs
     The Town-Site of Tra-Lee
     Wonder of Woman

     * Alternate title--The Race for Number One





I. THE TASTE OF THE MEAT


In the beginning he was Christopher Bellew. By the time he was at
college he had become Chris Bellew. Later, in the Bohemian crowd of San
Francisco, he was called Kit Bellew. And in the end he was known by no
other name than Smoke Bellew. And this history of the evolution of his
name is the history of his evolution. Nor would it have happened had
he not had a fond mother and an iron uncle, and had he not received a
letter from Gillet Bellamy.

“I have just seen a copy of The Billow,” Gillet wrote from Paris. “Of
course O'Hara will succeed with it. But he's missing some tricks.” Here
followed details in the improvement of the budding society weekly. “Go
down and see him. Let him think they're your own suggestions. Don't let
him know they're from me. If you do, he'll make me Paris correspondent,
which I can't afford, because I'm getting real money for my stuff from
the big magazines. Above all, don't forget to make him fire that dub
who's doing the musical and art criticism. Another thing. San Francisco
has always had a literature of her own. But she hasn't any now. Tell him
to kick around and get some gink to turn out a live serial, and to put
into it the real romance and glamour and colour of San Francisco.”

And down to the office of The Billow went Kit Bellew faithfully to
instruct. O'Hara listened. O'Hara debated. O'Hara agreed. O'Hara fired
the dub who wrote criticisms. Further, O'Hara had a way with him--the
very way that was feared by Gillet in distant Paris. When O'Hara wanted
anything, no friend could deny him. He was sweetly and compellingly
irresistible. Before Kit Bellew could escape from the office, he had
become an associate editor, had agreed to write weekly columns of
criticism till some decent pen was found, and had pledged himself to
write a weekly instalment of ten thousand words on the San Francisco
serial--and all this without pay. The Billow wasn't paying yet, O'Hara
explained; and just as convincingly had he exposited that there was only
one man in San Francisco capable of writing the serial and that man Kit
Bellew.

“Oh, Lord, I'm the gink!” Kit had groaned to himself afterward on the
narrow stairway.

And thereat had begun his servitude to O'Hara and the insatiable columns
of The Billow. Week after week he held down an office chair, stood off
creditors, wrangled with printers, and turned out twenty-five thousand
words of all sorts. Nor did his labours lighten. The Billow was
ambitious. It went in for illustration. The processes were expensive.
It never had any money to pay Kit Bellew, and by the same token it was
unable to pay for any additions to the office staff.

“This is what comes of being a good fellow,” Kit grumbled one day.

“Thank God for good fellows then,” O'Hara cried, with tears in his eyes
as he gripped Kit's hand. “You're all that's saved me, Kit. But for you
I'd have gone bust. Just a little longer, old man, and things will be
easier.”

“Never,” was Kit's plaint. “I see my fate clearly. I shall be here
always.”

A little later he thought he saw his way out. Watching his chance, in
O'Hara's presence, he fell over a chair. A few minutes afterwards he
bumped into the corner of the desk, and, with fumbling fingers, capsized
a paste pot.

“Out late?” O'Hara queried.

Kit brushed his eyes with his hands and peered about him anxiously
before replying.

“No, it's not that. It's my eyes. They seem to be going back on me,
that's all.”

For several days he continued to fall over and bump into the office
furniture. But O'Hara's heart was not softened.

“I tell you what, Kit,” he said one day, “you've got to see an oculist.
There's Doctor Hassdapple. He's a crackerjack. And it won't cost you
anything. We can get it for advertizing. I'll see him myself.”

And, true to his word, he dispatched Kit to the oculist.

“There's nothing the matter with your eyes,” was the doctor's verdict,
after a lengthy examination. “In fact, your eyes are magnificent--a pair
in a million.”

“Don't tell O'Hara,” Kit pleaded. “And give me a pair of black glasses.”

The result of this was that O'Hara sympathized and talked glowingly of
the time when The Billow would be on its feet.

Luckily for Kit Bellew, he had his own income. Small it was, compared
with some, yet it was large enough to enable him to belong to several
clubs and maintain a studio in the Latin Quarter. In point of fact,
since his associate-editorship, his expenses had decreased prodigiously.
He had no time to spend money. He never saw the studio any more, nor
entertained the local Bohemians with his famous chafing-dish suppers.
Yet he was always broke, for The Billow, in perennial distress, absorbed
his cash as well as his brains. There were the illustrators, who
periodically refused to illustrate, the printers, who periodically
refused to print, and the office-boy, who frequently refused to
officiate. At such times O'Hara looked at Kit, and Kit did the rest.

When the steamship Excelsior arrived from Alaska, bringing the news
of the Klondike strike that set the country mad, Kit made a purely
frivolous proposition.

“Look here, O'Hara,” he said. “This gold rush is going to be big--the
days of '49 over again. Suppose I cover it for The Billow? I'll pay my
own expenses.”

O'Hara shook his head.

“Can't spare you from the office, Kit. Then there's that serial.
Besides, I saw Jackson not an hour ago. He's starting for the Klondike
to-morrow, and he's agreed to send a weekly letter and photos. I
wouldn't let him get away till he promised. And the beauty of it is,
that it doesn't cost us anything.”

The next Kit heard of the Klondike was when he dropped into the club
that afternoon, and, in an alcove off the library, encountered his
uncle.

“Hello, avuncular relative,” Kit greeted, sliding into a leather chair
and spreading out his legs. “Won't you join me?”

He ordered a cocktail, but the uncle contented himself with the thin
native claret he invariably drank. He glanced with irritated disapproval
at the cocktail, and on to his nephew's face. Kit saw a lecture
gathering.

“I've only a minute,” he announced hastily. “I've got to run and take in
that Keith exhibition at Ellery's and do half a column on it.”

“What's the matter with you?” the other demanded. “You're pale. You're a
wreck.”

Kit's only answer was a groan.

“I'll have the pleasure of burying you, I can see that.”

Kit shook his head sadly.

“No destroying worm, thank you. Cremation for mine.”

John Bellew came of the old hard and hardy stock that had crossed the
plains by ox-team in the fifties, and in him was this same hardness and
the hardness of a childhood spent in the conquering of a new land.

“You're not living right, Christopher. I'm ashamed of you.”

“Primrose path, eh?” Kit chuckled.

The older man shrugged his shoulders.

“Shake not your gory locks at me, avuncular. I wish it were the primrose
path. But that's all cut out. I have no time.”

“Then what in--?”

“Overwork.”

John Bellew laughed harshly and incredulously.

“Honest.”

Again came the laughter.

“Men are the products of their environment,” Kit proclaimed, pointing at
the other's glass. “Your mirth is thin and bitter as your drink.”

“Overwork!” was the sneer. “You never earned a cent in your life.”

“You bet I have--only I never got it. I'm earning five hundred a week
right now, and doing four men's work.”

“Pictures that won't sell? Or--er--fancy work of some sort? Can you
swim?”

“I used to.”

“Sit a horse?”

“I have essayed that adventure.”

John Bellew snorted his disgust. “I'm glad your father didn't live to
see you in all the glory of your gracelessness,” he said. “Your father
was a man, every inch of him. Do you get it? A man. I think he'd have
whaled all this musical and artistic tom foolery out of you.”

“Alas! these degenerate days,” Kit sighed.

“I could understand it, and tolerate it,” the other went on savagely,
“if you succeeded at it. You've never earned a cent in your life, nor
done a tap of man's work.”

“Etchings, and pictures, and fans,” Kit contributed unsoothingly.

“You're a dabbler and a failure. What pictures have you painted? Dinky
water-colours and nightmare posters. You've never had one exhibited,
even here in San Francisco--”

“Ah, you forget. There is one in the jinks room of this very club.”

“A gross cartoon. Music? Your dear fool of a mother spent hundreds
on lessons. You've dabbled and failed. You've never even earned
a five-dollar piece by accompanying some one at a concert. Your
songs?--rag-time rot that's never printed and that's sung only by a pack
of fake Bohemians.”

“I had a book published once--those sonnets, you remember,” Kit
interposed meekly.

“What did it cost you?”

“Only a couple of hundred.”

“Any other achievements?”

“I had a forest play acted at the summer jinks.”

“What did you get for it?”

“Glory.”

“And you used to swim, and you have essayed to sit a horse!” John Bellew
set his glass down with unnecessary violence. “What earthly good are
you anyway? You were well put up, yet even at university you didn't play
football. You didn't row. You didn't--”

“I boxed and fenced--some.”

“When did you box last?”

“Not since, but I was considered an excellent judge of time and
distance, only I was--er--”

“Go on.”

“Considered desultory.”

“Lazy, you mean.”

“I always imagined it was an euphemism.”

“My father, sir, your grandfather, old Isaac Bellew, killed a man with a
blow of his fist when he was sixty-nine years old.”

“The man?”

“No, your--you graceless scamp! But you'll never kill a mosquito at
sixty-nine.”

“The times have changed, oh, my avuncular! They send men to prison for
homicide now.”

“Your father rode one hundred and eighty-five miles, without sleeping,
and killed three horses.”

“Had he lived to-day, he'd have snored over the course in a Pullman.”

The older man was on the verge of choking with wrath, but swallowed it
down and managed to articulate:

“How old are you?”

“I have reason to believe--”

“I know. Twenty-seven. You finished college at twenty-two. You've
dabbled and played and frilled for five years. Before God and man, of
what use are you? When I was your age I had one suit of underclothes. I
was riding with the cattle in Coluso. I was hard as rocks, and I could
sleep on a rock. I lived on jerked beef and bear-meat. I am a better
man physically right now than you are. You weigh about one hundred and
sixty-five. I can throw you right now, or thrash you with my fists.”

“It doesn't take a physical prodigy to mop up cocktails or pink tea,”
 Kit murmured deprecatingly. “Don't you see, my avuncular, the times have
changed. Besides, I wasn't brought up right. My dear fool of a mother--”

John Bellew started angrily.

“--As you described her, was too good to me; kept me in cotton wool and
all the rest. Now, if when I was a youngster I had taken some of those
intensely masculine vacations you go in for--I wonder why you didn't
invite me sometimes? You took Hal and Robbie all over the Sierras and on
that Mexico trip.”

“I guess you were too Lord-Fauntleroyish.”

“Your fault, avuncular, and my dear--er--mother's. How was I to know
the hard? I was only a chee-ild. What was there left but etchings and
pictures and fans? Was it my fault that I never had to sweat?”

The older man looked at his nephew with unconcealed disgust. He had no
patience with levity from the lips of softness.

“Well, I'm going to take another one of those what-you-call masculine
vacations. Suppose I asked you to come along?”

“Rather belated, I must say. Where is it?”

“Hal and Robert are going in to Klondike, and I'm going to see them
across the Pass and down to the Lakes, then return--”

He got no further, for the young man had sprung forward and gripped his
hand.

“My preserver!”

John Bellew was immediately suspicious. He had not dreamed the
invitation would be accepted.

“You don't mean it?” he said.

“When do we start?”

“It will be a hard trip. You'll be in the way.”

“No, I won't. I'll work. I've learned to work since I went on The
Billow.”

“Each man has to take a year's supplies in with him. There'll be such a
jam the Indian packers won't be able to handle it. Hal and Robert will
have to pack their outfits across themselves. That's what I'm going
along for--to help them pack. If you come you'll have to do the same.”

“Watch me.”

“You can't pack,” was the objection.

“When do we start?”

“To-morrow.”

“You needn't take it to yourself that your lecture on the hard has done
it,” Kit said, at parting. “I just had to get away, somewhere, anywhere,
from O'Hara.”

“Who is O'Hara? A Jap?”

“No; he's an Irishman, and a slave-driver, and my best friend. He's the
editor and proprietor and all-round big squeeze of The Billow. What he
says goes. He can make ghosts walk.”

That night Kit Bellew wrote a note to O'Hara. “It's only a several
weeks' vacation,” he explained. “You'll have to get some gink to dope
out instalments for that serial. Sorry, old man, but my health demands
it. I'll kick in twice as hard when I get back.”


Kit Bellew landed through the madness of the Dyea beach, congested with
thousand-pound outfits of thousands of men. This immense mass of luggage
and food, flung ashore in mountains by the steamers, was beginning
slowly to dribble up the Dyea Valley and across Chilkoot. It was a
portage of twenty-eight miles, and could be accomplished only on the
backs of men. Despite the fact that the Indian packers had jumped the
freight from eight cents a pound to forty, they were swamped with the
work, and it was plain that winter would catch the major portion of the
outfits on the wrong side of the divide.

Tenderest of the tenderfeet was Kit. Like many hundreds of others he
carried a big revolver swung on a cartridge-belt. Of this, his uncle,
filled with memories of old lawless days, was likewise guilty. But Kit
Bellew was romantic. He was fascinated by the froth and sparkle of the
gold rush, and viewed its life and movement with an artist's eye. He
did not take it seriously. As he said on the steamer, it was not his
funeral. He was merely on a vacation, and intended to peep over the top
of the pass for a “look see” and then to return.

Leaving his party on the sand to wait for the putting ashore of the
freight, he strolled up the beach toward the old trading-post. He
did not swagger, though he noticed that many of the be-revolvered
individuals did. A strapping, six-foot Indian passed him, carrying an
unusually large pack. Kit swung in behind, admiring the splendid calves
of the man, and the grace and ease with which he moved along under his
burden. The Indian dropped his pack on the scales in front of the post,
and Kit joined the group of admiring gold-rushers who surrounded him.
The pack weighed one hundred and twenty-five pounds, which fact was
uttered back and forth in tones of awe. It was going some, Kit decided,
and he wondered if he could lift such a weight, much less walk off with
it.

“Going to Lake Linderman with it, old man?” he asked.

The Indian, swelling with pride, grunted an affirmative.

“How much you make that one pack?”

“Fifty dollar.”

Here Kit slid out of the conversation. A young woman, standing in
the doorway, had caught his eye. Unlike other women landing from the
steamers, she was neither short-skirted nor bloomer-clad. She was
dressed as any woman travelling anywhere would be dressed. What struck
him was the justness of her being there, a feeling that somehow she
belonged. Moreover, she was young and pretty. The bright beauty and
colour of her oval face held him, and he looked over-long--looked till
she resented, and her own eyes, long-lashed and dark, met his in cool
survey.

From his face they travelled in evident amusement down to the big
revolver at his thigh. Then her eyes came back to his, and in them was
amused contempt. It struck him like a blow. She turned to the man beside
her and indicated Kit. The man glanced him over with the same amused
contempt.

“Chechako,” the girl said.

The man, who looked like a tramp in his cheap overalls and dilapidated
woollen jacket, grinned dryly, and Kit felt withered, though he knew not
why. But anyway she was an unusually pretty girl, he decided, as the two
moved off. He noted the way of her walk, and recorded the judgment that
he would recognize it over the lapse of a thousand years.

“Did you see that man with the girl?” Kit's neighbor asked him
excitedly. “Know who he is?”

Kit shook his head.

“Cariboo Charley. He was just pointed out to me. He struck it big on
Klondike. Old-timer. Been on the Yukon a dozen years. He's just come
out.”

“What's 'chechako' mean?” Kit asked.

“You're one; I'm one,” was the answer.

“Maybe I am, but you've got to search me. What does it mean?”

“Tenderfoot.”

On his way back to the beach, Kit turned the phrase over and over. It
rankled to be called tenderfoot by a slender chit of a woman.

Going into a corner among the heaps of freight, his mind still filled
with the vision of the Indian with the redoubtable pack, Kit essayed
to learn his own strength. He picked out a sack of flour which he knew
weighed an even hundred pounds. He stepped astride it, reached down,
and strove to get it on his shoulder. His first conclusion was that one
hundred pounds were real heavy. His next was that his back was weak. His
third was an oath, and it occurred at the end of five futile minutes,
when he collapsed on top of the burden with which he was wrestling. He
mopped his forehead, and across a heap of grub-sacks saw John Bellew
gazing at him, wintry amusement in his eyes.

“God!” proclaimed that apostle of the hard. “Out of our loins has come a
race of weaklings. When I was sixteen I toyed with things like that.”

“You forget, avuncular,” Kit retorted, “that I wasn't raised on
bear-meat.”

“And I'll toy with it when I'm sixty.”

“You've got to show me.”

John Bellew did. He was forty-eight, but he bent over the sack, applied
a tentative, shifting grip that balanced it, and, with a quick heave,
stood erect, the somersaulted sack of flour on his shoulder.

“Knack, my boy, knack--and a spine.”

Kit took off his hat reverently.

“You're a wonder, avuncular, a shining wonder. D'ye think I can learn
the knack?”

John Bellew shrugged his shoulders. “You'll be hitting the back trail
before we get started.”

“Never you fear,” Kit groaned. “There's O'Hara, the roaring lion, down
there. I'm not going back till I have to.”


Kit's first pack was a success. Up to Finnegan's Crossing they had
managed to get Indians to carry the twenty-five-hundred-pound outfit.
From that point their own backs must do the work. They planned to move
forward at the rate of a mile a day. It looked easy--on paper. Since
John Bellew was to stay in camp and do the cooking, he would be unable
to make more than an occasional pack; so to each of the three young men
fell the task of carrying eight hundred pounds one mile each day. If
they made fifty-pound packs, it meant a daily walk of sixteen miles
loaded and of fifteen miles light--“Because we don't back-trip the last
time,” Kit explained the pleasant discovery. Eighty-pound packs meant
nineteen miles travel each day; and hundred-pound packs meant only
fifteen miles.

“I don't like walking,” said Kit. “Therefore I shall carry one hundred
pounds.” He caught the grin of incredulity on his uncle's face, and
added hastily: “Of course I shall work up to it. A fellow's got to learn
the ropes and tricks. I'll start with fifty.”

He did, and ambled gaily along the trail. He dropped the sack at the
next camp-site and ambled back. It was easier than he had thought. But
two miles had rubbed off the velvet of his strength and exposed the
underlying softness. His second pack was sixty-five pounds. It was more
difficult, and he no longer ambled. Several times, following the custom
of all packers, he sat down on the ground, resting the pack behind him
on a rock or stump. With the third pack he became bold. He fastened the
straps to a ninety-five-pound sack of beans and started. At the end of a
hundred yards he felt that he must collapse. He sat down and mopped his
face.

“Short hauls and short rests,” he muttered. “That's the trick.”

Sometimes he did not make a hundred yards, and each time he struggled to
his feet for another short haul the pack became undeniably heavier.
He panted for breath, and the sweat streamed from him. Before he had
covered a quarter of a mile he stripped off his woollen shirt and hung
it on a tree. A little later he discarded his hat. At the end of half a
mile he decided he was finished. He had never exerted himself so in his
life, and he knew that he was finished. As he sat and panted, his gaze
fell upon the big revolver and the heavy cartridge-belt.

“Ten pounds of junk!” he sneered, as he unbuckled it.

He did not bother to hang it on a tree, but flung it into the underbush.
And as the steady tide of packers flowed by him, up trail and down,
he noted that the other tenderfeet were beginning to shed their
shooting-irons.

His short hauls decreased. At times a hundred feet was all he could
stagger, and then the ominous pounding of his heart against his eardrums
and the sickening totteriness of his knees compelled him to rest. And
his rests grew longer. But his mind was busy. It was a twenty-eight-mile
portage, which represented as many days, and this, by all accounts, was
the easiest part of it. “Wait till you get to Chilkoot,” others told him
as they rested and talked, “where you climb with hands and feet.”

“They ain't going to be no Chilkoot,” was his answer. “Not for me. Long
before that I'll be at peace in my little couch beneath the moss.”

A slip and a violent, wrenching effort at recovery frightened him. He
felt that everything inside him had been torn asunder.

“If ever I fall down with this on my back, I'm a goner,” he told another
packer.

“That's nothing,” came the answer. “Wait till you hit the Canyon.
You'll have to cross a raging torrent on a sixty-foot pine-tree. No
guide-ropes, nothing, and the water boiling at the sag of the log to
your knees. If you fall with a pack on your back, there's no getting out
of the straps. You just stay there and drown.”

“Sounds good to me,” he retorted; and out of the depths of his
exhaustion he almost meant it.

“They drown three or four a day there,” the man assured him. “I helped
fish a German out of there. He had four thousand in greenbacks on him.”

“Cheerful, I must say,” said Kit, battling his way to his feet and
tottering on.

He and the sack of beans became a perambulating tragedy. It reminded him
of the old man of the sea who sat on Sinbad's neck. And this was one of
those intensely masculine vacations, he meditated. Compared with it, the
servitude to O'Hara was sweet. Again and again he was nearly seduced by
the thought of abandoning the sack of beans in the brush and of sneaking
around the camp to the beach and catching a steamer for civilization.

But he didn't. Somewhere in him was the strain of the hard, and he
repeated over and over to himself that what other men could do, he
could. It became a nightmare chant, and he gibbered it to those that
passed him on the trail. At other times, resting, he watched and envied
the stolid, mule-footed Indians that plodded by under heavier packs.
They never seemed to rest, but went on and on with a steadiness and
certitude that were to him appalling.

He sat and cursed--he had no breath for it when under way--and fought
the temptation to sneak back to San Francisco. Before the mile pack
was ended he ceased cursing and took to crying. The tears were tears of
exhaustion and of disgust with self. If ever a man was a wreck, he
was. As the end of the pack came in sight, he strained himself in
desperation, gained the camp-site, and pitched forward on his face, the
beans on his back. It did not kill him, but he lay for fifteen minutes
before he could summon sufficient shreds of strength to release himself
from the straps. Then he became deathly sick, and was so found by
Robbie, who had similar troubles of his own. It was this sickness of
Robbie that braced Kit up.

“What other men can do, we can do,” Kit told Robbie, though down in his
heart he wondered whether or not he was bluffing.


“And I am twenty-seven years old and a man,” he privately assured
himself many times in the days that followed. There was need for it. At
the end of a week, though he had succeeded in moving his eight hundred
pounds forward a mile a day, he had lost fifteen pounds of his own
weight. His face was lean and haggard. All resilience had gone out
of his body and mind. He no longer walked, but plodded. And on the
back-trips, travelling light, his feet dragged almost as much as when he
was loaded.

He had become a work animal. He fell asleep over his food, and his sleep
was heavy and beastly, save when he was aroused, screaming with agony,
by the cramps in his legs. Every part of him ached. He tramped on raw
blisters; yet even this was easier than the fearful bruising his feet
received on the water-rounded rocks of the Dyea Flats, across which the
trail led for two miles. These two miles represented thirty-eight miles
of travelling. He washed his face once a day. His nails, torn and broken
and afflicted with hangnails, were never cleaned. His shoulders and
chest, galled by the pack-straps, made him think, and for the first time
with understanding, of the horses he had seen on city streets.

One ordeal that nearly destroyed him at first had been the food. The
extraordinary amount of work demanded extraordinary stoking, and his
stomach was unaccustomed to great quantities of bacon and of the coarse,
highly poisonous brown beans. As a result, his stomach went back on him,
and for several days the pain and irritation of it and of starvation
nearly broke him down. And then came the day of joy when he could eat
like a ravenous animal, and, wolf-eyed, ask for more.

When they had moved the outfit across the foot-logs at the mouth of the
Canyon, they made a change in their plans. Word had come across the Pass
that at Lake Linderman the last available trees for building boats were
being cut. The two cousins, with tools, whipsaw, blankets, and grub
on their backs, went on, leaving Kit and his uncle to hustle along the
outfit. John Bellew now shared the cooking with Kit, and both packed
shoulder to shoulder. Time was flying, and on the peaks the first snow
was falling. To be caught on the wrong side of the Pass meant a delay of
nearly a year. The older man put his iron back under a hundred pounds.
Kit was shocked, but he gritted his teeth and fastened his own straps to
a hundred pounds. It hurt, but he had learned the knack, and his body,
purged of all softness and fat, was beginning to harden up with lean
and bitter muscle. Also, he observed and devised. He took note of the
head-straps worn by the Indians and manufactured one for himself, which
he used in addition to the shoulder-straps. It made things easier, so
that he began the practice of piling any light, cumbersome piece of
luggage on top. Thus, he was soon able to bend along with a hundred
pounds in the straps, fifteen or twenty more lying loosely on top of the
pack and against his neck, an axe or a pair of oars in one hand, and in
the other the nested cooking-pails of the camp.

But work as they would, the toil increased. The trail grew more rugged;
their packs grew heavier; and each day saw the snow-line dropping down
the mountains, while freight jumped to sixty cents. No word came from
the cousins beyond, so they knew they must be at work chopping down the
standing trees and whipsawing them into boat-planks. John Bellew grew
anxious. Capturing a bunch of Indians back-tripping from Lake Linderman,
he persuaded them to put their straps on the outfit. They charged thirty
cents a pound to carry it to the summit of Chilkoot, and it nearly broke
him. As it was, some four hundred pounds of clothes-bags and camp outfit
were not handled. He remained behind to move it along, dispatching Kit
with the Indians. At the summit Kit was to remain, slowly moving his
ton until overtaken by the four hundred pounds with which his uncle
guaranteed to catch him.


Kit plodded along the trail with his Indian packers. In recognition of
the fact that it was to be a long pack, straight to the top of Chilkoot,
his own load was only eighty pounds. The Indians plodded under their
loads, but it was a quicker gait than he had practised. Yet he felt no
apprehension, and by now had come to deem himself almost the equal of an
Indian.

At the end of a quarter of a mile he desired to rest. But the Indians
kept on. He stayed with them, and kept his place in the line. At the
half-mile he was convinced that he was incapable of another step, yet he
gritted his teeth, kept his place, and at the end of the mile was amazed
that he was still alive. Then, in some strange way, came the thing
called second wind, and the next mile was almost easier than the first.
The third mile nearly killed him, but, though half delirious with pain
and fatigue, he never whimpered. And then, when he felt he must surely
faint, came the rest. Instead of sitting in the straps, as was the
custom of the white packers, the Indians slipped out of the shoulder-
and head-straps and lay at ease, talking and smoking. A full half-hour
passed before they made another start. To Kit's surprise he found
himself a fresh man, and “long hauls and long rests” became his newest
motto.

The pitch of Chilkoot was all he had heard of it, and many were the
occasions when he climbed with hands as well as feet. But when he
reached the crest of the divide in the thick of a driving snow-squall,
it was in the company of his Indians, and his secret pride was that he
had come through with them and never squealed and never lagged. To be
almost as good as an Indian was a new ambition to cherish.

When he had paid off the Indians and seen them depart, a stormy darkness
was falling, and he was left alone, a thousand feet above timber-line,
on the backbone of a mountain. Wet to the waist, famished and exhausted,
he would have given a year's income for a fire and a cup of coffee.
Instead, he ate half a dozen cold flapjacks and crawled into the folds
of the partly unrolled tent. As he dozed off he had time for only one
fleeting thought, and he grinned with vicious pleasure at the picture
of John Bellew in the days to follow, masculinely back-tripping his four
hundred pounds up Chilcoot. As for himself, even though burdened with
two thousand pounds, he was bound down the hill.

In the morning, stiff from his labours and numb with the frost, he
rolled out of the canvas, ate a couple of pounds of uncooked bacon,
buckled the straps on a hundred pounds, and went down the rocky way.
Several hundred yards beneath, the trail led across a small glacier and
down to Crater Lake. Other men packed across the glacier. All that day
he dropped his packs at the glacier's upper edge, and, by virtue of the
shortness of the pack, he put his straps on one hundred and fifty pounds
each load. His astonishment at being able to do it never abated. For two
dollars he bought from an Indian three leathery sea-biscuits, and out of
these, and a huge quantity of raw bacon, made several meals. Unwashed,
unwarmed, his clothing wet with sweat, he slept another night in the
canvas.

In the early morning he spread a tarpaulin on the ice, loaded it with
three-quarters of a ton, and started to pull. Where the pitch of the
glacier accelerated, his load likewise accelerated, overran him, scooped
him in on top, and ran away with him.

A hundred packers, bending under their loads, stopped to watch him. He
yelled frantic warnings, and those in his path stumbled and staggered
clear. Below, on the lower edge of the glacier, was pitched a small
tent, which seemed leaping toward him, so rapidly did it grow larger. He
left the beaten track where the packers' trail swerved to the left,
and struck a patch of fresh snow. This arose about him in frosty smoke,
while it reduced his speed. He saw the tent the instant he struck it,
carrying away the corner guys, bursting in the front flaps, and fetching
up inside, still on top of the tarpaulin and in the midst of his
grub-sacks. The tent rocked drunkenly, and in the frosty vapour he found
himself face to face with a startled young woman who was sitting up in
her blankets--the very one who had called him a tenderfoot at Dyea.

“Did you see my smoke?” he queried cheerfully.

She regarded him with disapproval.

“Talk about your magic carpets!” he went on.

“Do you mind removing that sack from my foot?” she said coldly.

He looked, and lifted his weight quickly.

“It wasn't a sack. It was my elbow. Pardon me.”

The information did not perturb her, and her coolness was a challenge.

“It was a mercy you did not overturn the stove,” she said.

He followed her glance and saw a sheet-iron stove and a coffee-pot,
attended by a young squaw. He sniffed the coffee and looked back to the
girl.

“I'm a chechako,” he said.

Her bored expression told him that he was stating the obvious. But he
was unabashed.

“I've shed my shooting-irons,” he added.

Then she recognized him, and her eyes lighted. “I never thought you'd
get this far,” she informed him.

Again, and greedily, he sniffed the air. “As I live, coffee!” He turned
and directly addressed her: “I'll give you my little finger--cut it
right off now; I'll do anything; I'll be your slave for a year and a day
or any other old time, if you'll give me a cup out of that pot.”

And over the coffee he gave his name and learned hers--Joy Gastell.
Also, he learned that she was an old-timer in the country. She had been
born in a trading-post on the Great Slave, and as a child had crossed
the Rockies with her father and come down to the Yukon. She was going
in, she said, with her father, who had been delayed by business in
Seattle, and who had then been wrecked on the ill-fated Chanter and
carried back to Puget Sound by the rescuing steamer.

In view of the fact that she was still in her blankets, he did not
make it a long conversation, and, heroically declining a second cup of
coffee, he removed himself and his heaped and shifted baggage from her
tent. Further, he took several conclusions away with him: she had a
fetching name and fetching eyes; could not be more than twenty, or
twenty-one or -two; her father must be French; she had a will of her own
and temperament to burn; and she had been educated elsewhere than on the
frontier.


Over the ice-scoured rocks and above the timber-line, the trail ran
around Crater Lake and gained the rocky defile that led toward Happy
Camp and the first scrub-pines. To pack his heavy outfit around would
take days of heart-breaking toil. On the lake was a canvas boat employed
in freighting. Two trips with it, in two hours, would see him and his
ton across. But he was broke, and the ferryman charged forty dollars a
ton.

“You've got a gold-mine, my friend, in that dinky boat,” Kit said to the
ferryman. “Do you want another gold-mine?”

“Show me,” was the answer.

“I'll sell it to you for the price of ferrying my outfit. It's an idea,
not patented, and you can jump the deal as soon as I tell you it. Are
you game?”

The ferryman said he was, and Kit liked his looks.

“Very well. You see that glacier. Take a pick-axe and wade into it. In a
day you can have a decent groove from top to bottom. See the point? The
Chilkoot and Crater Lake Consolidated Chute Corporation, Limited. You
can charge fifty cents a hundred, get a hundred tons a day, and have no
work to do but collect the coin.”

Two hours later, Kit's ton was across the lake, and he had gained three
days on himself. And when John Bellew overtook him, he was well along
toward Deep Lake, another volcanic pit filled with glacial water.


The last pack, from Long Lake to Linderman, was three miles, and
the trail, if trail it could be called, rose up over a thousand-foot
hogback, dropped down a scramble of slippery rocks, and crossed a wide
stretch of swamp. John Bellew remonstrated when he saw Kit arise with a
hundred pounds in the straps and pick up a fifty-pound sack of flour and
place it on top of the pack against the back of his neck.

“Come on, you chunk of the hard,” Kit retorted. “Kick in on your
bear-meat fodder and your one suit of underclothes.”

But John Bellew shook his head. “I'm afraid I'm getting old,
Christopher.”

“You're only forty-eight. Do you realize that my grandfather, sir,
your father, old Isaac Bellew, killed a man with his fist when he was
sixty-nine years old?”

John Bellew grinned and swallowed his medicine.

“Avuncular, I want to tell you something important. I was raised a Lord
Fauntleroy, but I can outpack you, outwalk you, put you on your back, or
lick you with my fists right now.”

John Bellew thrust out his hand and spoke solemnly. “Christopher, my
boy, I believe you can do it. I believe you can do it with that pack
on your back at the same time. You've made good, boy, though it's too
unthinkable to believe.”

Kit made the round trip of the last pack four times a day, which is to
say that he daily covered twenty-four miles of mountain climbing, twelve
miles of it under one hundred and fifty pounds. He was proud, hard, and
tired, but in splendid physical condition. He ate and slept as he had
never eaten and slept in his life, and as the end of the work came in
sight, he was almost half sorry.

One problem bothered him. He had learned that he could fall with a
hundred-weight on his back and survive; but he was confident, if he fell
with that additional fifty pounds across the back of his neck, that it
would break it clean. Each trail through the swamp was quickly churned
bottomless by the thousands of packers, who were compelled continually
to make new trails. It was while pioneering such a new trail, that he
solved the problem of the extra fifty.

The soft, lush surface gave way under him; he floundered, and pitched
forward on his face. The fifty pounds crushed his face in the mud and
went clear without snapping his neck. With the remaining hundred pounds
on his back, he arose on hands and knees. But he got no farther. One arm
sank to the shoulder, pillowing his cheek in the slush. As he drew
this arm clear, the other sank to the shoulder. In this position it was
impossible to slip the straps, and the hundred-weight on his back would
not let him rise. On hands and knees, sinking first one arm and then the
other, he made an effort to crawl to where the small sack of flour had
fallen. But he exhausted himself without advancing, and so churned and
broke the grass surface, that a tiny pool of water began to form in
perilous proximity to his mouth and nose.

He tried to throw himself on his back with the pack underneath, but this
resulted in sinking both arms to the shoulders and gave him a foretaste
of drowning. With exquisite patience, he slowly withdrew one sucking arm
and then the other and rested them flat on the surface for the support
of his chin. Then he began to call for help. After a time he heard the
sound of feet sucking through the mud as some one advanced from behind.

“Lend a hand, friend,” he said. “Throw out a life-line or something.”

It was a woman's voice that answered, and he recognized it.

“If you'll unbuckle the straps I can get up.”

The hundred pounds rolled into the mud with a soggy noise, and he slowly
gained his feet.

“A pretty predicament,” Miss Gastell laughed, at sight of his
mud-covered face.

“Not at all,” he replied airily. “My favourite physical-exercise stunt.
Try it some time. It's great for the pectoral muscles and the spine.”

He wiped his face, flinging the slush from his hand with a snappy jerk.

“Oh!” she cried in recognition. “It's Mr.--ah--Mr. Smoke Bellew.”

“I thank you gravely for your timely rescue and for that name,” he
answered. “I have been doubly baptized. Henceforth I shall insist always
on being called Smoke Bellew. It is a strong name, and not without
significance.”

He paused, and then voice and expression became suddenly fierce.

“Do you know what I'm going to do?” he demanded. “I'm going back to the
States. I am going to get married. I am going to raise a large family
of children. And then, as the evening shadows fall, I shall gather those
children about me and relate the sufferings and hardships I endured on
the Chilkoot Trail. And if they don't cry--I repeat, if they don't cry,
I'll lambaste the stuffing out of them.”


The arctic winter came down apace. Snow that had come to stay lay six
inches on the ground, and the ice was forming in quiet ponds, despite
the fierce gales that blew. It was in the late afternoon, during a lull
in such a gale, that Kit and John Bellew helped the cousins load the
boat and watched it disappear down the lake in a snow-squall.

“And now a night's sleep and an early start in the morning,” said
John Bellew. “If we aren't storm-bound at the summit we'll make Dyea
to-morrow night, and if we have luck in catching a steamer we'll be in
San Francisco in a week.”

“Enjoyed your vacation?” Kit asked absently.

Their camp for that last night at Linderman was a melancholy remnant.
Everything of use, including the tent, had been taken by the cousins. A
tattered tarpaulin, stretched as a wind-break, partially sheltered them
from the driving snow. Supper they cooked on an open fire in a couple of
battered and discarded camp utensils. All that was left them were their
blankets, and food for several meals.

From the moment of the departure of the boat, Kit had become absent and
restless. His uncle noticed his condition, and attributed it to the fact
that the end of the hard toil had come. Only once during supper did Kit
speak.

“Avuncular,” he said, relevant of nothing, “after this, I wish you'd
call me Smoke. I've made some smoke on this trail, haven't I?”

A few minutes later he wandered away in the direction of the village of
tents that sheltered the gold-rushers who were still packing or building
their boats. He was gone several hours, and when he returned and slipped
into his blankets John Bellew was asleep.

In the darkness of a gale-driven morning, Kit crawled out, built a fire
in his stocking feet, by which he thawed out his frozen shoes, then
boiled coffee and fried bacon. It was a chilly, miserable meal. As soon
as it was finished, they strapped their blankets. As John Bellew turned
to lead the way toward the Chilcoot Trail, Kit held out his hand.

“Good-bye, avuncular,” he said.

John Bellew looked at him and swore in his surprise.

“Don't forget, my name's Smoke,” Kit chided.

“But what are you going to do?”

Kit waved his hand in a general direction northward over the
storm-lashed lake.

“What's the good of turning back after getting this far?” he asked.
“Besides, I've got my taste of meat, and I like it. I'm going on.”

“You're broke,” protested John Bellew. “You have no outfit.”

“I've got a job. Behold your nephew, Christopher Smoke Bellew! He's got
a job! He's a gentleman's man! He's got a job at a hundred and fifty
per month and grub. He's going down to Dawson with a couple of dudes
and another gentleman's man--camp-cook, boatman, and general all-around
hustler. And O'Hara and The Billow can go to the devil. Good-bye.”

But John Bellew was dazed, and could only mutter: “I don't understand.”

“They say the baldface grizzlies are thick in the Yukon Basin,” Kit
explained. “Well, I've got only one suit of underclothes, and I'm going
after the bear-meat, that's all.”




II. THE MEAT


Half the time the wind blew a gale, and Smoke Bellew staggered against
it along the beach. In the gray of dawn a dozen boats were being loaded
with the precious outfits packed across Chilkoot. They were clumsy,
home-made boats, put together by men who were not boat-builders, out of
planks they had sawed by hand from green spruce-trees. One boat, already
loaded, was just starting, and Kit paused to watch.

The wind, which was fair down the lake, here blew in squarely on the
beach, kicking up a nasty sea in the shallows. The men of the departing
boat waded in high rubber boots as they shoved it out toward deeper
water. Twice they did this. Clambering aboard and failing to row clear,
the boat was swept back and grounded. Kit noticed that the spray on the
sides of the boat quickly turned to ice. The third attempt was a partial
success. The last two men to climb in were wet to their waists, but the
boat was afloat. They struggled awkwardly at the heavy oars, and slowly
worked off shore. Then they hoisted a sail made of blankets, had it
carry away in a gust, and were swept a third time back on the freezing
beach.

Kit grinned to himself and went on. This was what he must expect to
encounter, for he, too, in his new role of gentleman's man, was to start
from the beach in a similar boat that very day.

Everywhere men were at work, and at work desperately, for the closing
down of winter was so imminent that it was a gamble whether or not they
would get across the great chain of lakes before the freeze-up. Yet,
when Kit arrived at the tent of Messrs. Sprague and Stine, he did not
find them stirring.

By a fire, under the shelter of a tarpaulin, squatted a short, thick man
smoking a brown-paper cigarette.

“Hello,” he said. “Are you Mister Sprague's new man?”

As Kit nodded, he thought he had noted a shade of emphasis on the MISTER
and the MAN, and he was sure of a hint of a twinkle in the corner of the
eye.

“Well, I'm Doc Stine's man,” the other went on. “I'm five feet two
inches long, and my name's Shorty, Jack Short for short, and sometimes
known as Johnny-on-the-Spot.”

Kit put out his hand and shook. “Were you raised on bear-meat?” he
queried.

“Sure,” was the answer; “though my first feedin' was buffalo-milk as
near as I can remember. Sit down an' have some grub. The bosses ain't
turned out yet.”

And despite the one breakfast, Kit sat down under the tarpaulin and ate
a second breakfast thrice as hearty. The heavy, purging toil of weeks
had given him the stomach and appetite of a wolf. He could eat anything,
in any quantity, and be unaware that he possessed a digestion. Shorty he
found voluble and pessimistic, and from him he received surprising tips
concerning their bosses and ominous forecasts of the expedition.
Thomas Stanley Sprague was a budding mining engineer and the son of a
millionaire. Doctor Adolph Stine was also the son of a wealthy father.
And, through their fathers, both had been backed by an investing
syndicate in the Klondike adventure.

“Oh, they're sure made of money,” Shorty expounded. “When they hit the
beach at Dyea, freight was seventy cents, but no Indians. There was a
party from Eastern Oregon, real miners, that'd managed to get a team of
Indians together at seventy cents. Indians had the straps on the outfit,
three thousand pounds of it, when along comes Sprague and Stine. They
offered eighty cents and ninety, and at a dollar a pound the Indians
jumped the contract and took off their straps. Sprague and Stine came
through, though it cost them three thousand, and the Oregon bunch is
still on the beach. They won't get through till next year.

“Oh, they are real hummers, your boss and mine, when it comes to
sheddin' the mazuma an' never mindin' other folks' feelin's. What did
they do when they hit Linderman? The carpenters was just putting in
the last licks on a boat they'd contracted to a 'Frisco bunch for six
hundred. Sprague and Stine slipped 'em an even thousand, and they jumped
their contract. It's a good-lookin' boat, but it's jiggered the other
bunch. They've got their outfit right here, but no boat. And they're
stuck for next year.

“Have another cup of coffee, and take it from me that I wouldn't travel
with no such outfit if I didn't want to get to Klondike so blamed bad.
They ain't hearted right. They'd take the crape off the door of a
house in mourning if they needed it in their business. Did you sign a
contract?”

Kit shook his head.

“Then I'm sorry for you, pardner. They ain't no grub in the country,
and they'll drop you cold as soon as they hit Dawson. Men are going to
starve there this winter.”

“They agreed--” Kit began.

“Verbal,” Shorty snapped him short. “It's your say-so against theirs,
that's all. Well, anyway, what's your name, pardner?”

“Call me Smoke,” said Kit.

“Well, Smoke, you'll have a run for your verbal contract just the same.
This is a plain sample of what to expect. They can sure shed mazuma, but
they can't work, or turn out of bed in the morning. We should have been
loaded and started an hour ago. It's you an' me for the big work. Pretty
soon you'll hear 'em shoutin' for their coffee--in bed, mind you, and
them grown men. What d'ye know about boatin' on the water? I'm a cowman
and a prospector, but I'm sure tenderfooted on water, an' they don't
know punkins. What d'ye know?”

“Search me,” Kit answered, snuggling in closer under the tarpaulin as
the snow whirled before a fiercer gust. “I haven't been on a small boat
since a boy. But I guess we can learn.”

A corner of the tarpaulin tore loose, and Shorty received a jet of
driven snow down the back of his neck.

“Oh, we can learn all right,” he muttered wrathfully. “Sure we can. A
child can learn. But it's dollars to doughnuts we don't even get started
to-day.”

It was eight o'clock when the call for coffee came from the tent, and
nearly nine before the two employers emerged.

“Hello,” said Sprague, a rosy-cheeked, well-fed young man of
twenty-five. “Time we made a start, Shorty. You and--” Here he glanced
interrogatively at Kit. “I didn't quite catch your name last evening.”

“Smoke.”

“Well, Shorty, you and Mr. Smoke had better begin loading the boat.”

“Plain Smoke--cut out the Mister,” Kit suggested.

Sprague nodded curtly and strolled away among the tents, to be followed
by Doctor Stine, a slender, pallid young man.

Shorty looked significantly at his companion. “Over a ton and a half of
outfit, and they won't lend a hand. You'll see.”

“I guess it's because we're paid to do the work,” Kit answered
cheerfully, “and we might as well buck in.”

To move three thousand pounds on the shoulders a hundred yards was no
slight task, and to do it in half a gale, slushing through the snow in
heavy rubber boots, was exhausting. In addition, there was the taking
down of the tent and the packing of small camp equipage. Then came the
loading. As the boat settled, it had to be shoved farther and farther
out, increasing the distance they had to wade. By two o'clock it had all
been accomplished, and Kit, despite his two breakfasts, was weak with
the faintness of hunger. His knees were shaking under him. Shorty, in
similar predicament, foraged through the pots and pans, and drew forth
a big pot of cold boiled beans in which were imbedded large chunks of
bacon. There was only one spoon, a long-handled one, and they dipped,
turn and turn about, into the pot. Kit was filled with an immense
certitude that in all his life he had never tasted anything so good.

“Lord, man,” he mumbled between chews, “I never knew what appetite was
till I hit the trail.”

Sprague and Stine arrived in the midst of this pleasant occupation.

“What's the delay?” Sprague complained. “Aren't we ever going to get
started?”

Shorty dipped in turn, and passed the spoon to Kit. Nor did either speak
till the pot was empty and the bottom scraped.

“Of course we ain't been doin' nothing,” Shorty said, wiping his mouth
with the back of his hand. “We ain't been doin' nothing at all. And of
course you ain't had nothing to eat. It was sure careless of me.”

“Yes, yes,” Stine said quickly. “We ate at one of the tents--friends of
ours.”

“Thought so,” Shorty grunted.

“But now that you're finished, let us get started,” Sprague urged.

“There's the boat,” said Shorty. “She's sure loaded. Now, just how might
you be goin' about to get started?”

“By climbing aboard and shoving off. Come on.”

They waded out, and the employers got on board, while Kit and Shorty
shoved clear. When the waves lapped the tops of their boots they
clambered in. The other two men were not prepared with the oars, and
the boat swept back and grounded. Half a dozen times, with a great
expenditure of energy, this was repeated.

Shorty sat down disconsolately on the gunwale, took a chew of tobacco,
and questioned the universe, while Kit baled the boat and the other two
exchanged unkind remarks.

“If you'll take my orders, I'll get her off,” Sprague finally said.

The attempt was well intended, but before he could clamber on board he
was wet to the waist.

“We've got to camp and build a fire,” he said, as the boat grounded
again. “I'm freezing.”

“Don't be afraid of a wetting,” Stine sneered. “Other men have gone off
to-day wetter than you. Now I'm going to take her out.”

This time it was he who got the wetting and who announced with
chattering teeth the need of a fire.

“A little splash like that!” Sprague chattered spitefully. “We'll go
on.”

“Shorty, dig out my clothes-bag and make a fire,” the other commanded.

“You'll do nothing of the sort,” Sprague cried.

Shorty looked from one to the other, expectorated, but did not move.

“He's working for me, and I guess he obeys my orders,” Stine retorted.
“Shorty, take that bag ashore.”

Shorty obeyed, and Sprague shivered in the boat. Kit, having received no
orders, remained inactive, glad of the rest.

“A boat divided against itself won't float,” he soliloquized.

“What's that?” Sprague snarled at him.

“Talking to myself--habit of mine,” he answered.

His employer favoured him with a hard look, and sulked several minutes
longer. Then he surrendered.

“Get out my bag, Smoke,” he ordered, “and lend a hand with that fire. We
won't get off till morning now.”


Next day the gale still blew. Lake Linderman was no more than a narrow
mountain gorge filled with water. Sweeping down from the mountains
through this funnel, the wind was irregular, blowing great guns at times
and at other times dwindling to a strong breeze.

“If you give me a shot at it, I think I can get her off,” Kit said, when
all was ready for the start.

“What do you know about it?” Stine snapped at him.

“Search me,” Kit answered, and subsided.

It was the first time he had worked for wages in his life, but he was
learning the discipline of it fast. Obediently and cheerfully he joined
in various vain efforts to get clear of the beach.

“How would you go about it?” Sprague finally half panted, half whined at
him.

“Sit down and get a good rest till a lull comes in the wind, and then
buck in for all we're worth.”

Simple as the idea was, he had been the first to evolve it; the first
time it was applied it worked, and they hoisted a blanket to the mast
and sped down the lake. Stine and Sprague immediately became cheerful.
Shorty, despite his chronic pessimism, was always cheerful, and Kit
was too interested to be otherwise. Sprague struggled with the
steering-sweep for a quarter of an hour, and then looked appealingly at
Kit, who relieved him.

“My arms are fairly broken with the strain of it,” Sprague muttered
apologetically.

“You never ate bear-meat, did you?” Kit asked sympathetically.

“What the devil do you mean?”

“Oh, nothing; I was just wondering.”

But behind his employer's back Kit caught the approving grin of Shorty,
who had already caught the whim of his metaphor.

Kit steered the length of Linderman, displaying an aptitude that
caused both young men of money and disinclination for work to name him
boat-steerer. Shorty was no less pleased, and volunteered to continue
cooking and leave the boat work to the other.

Between Linderman and Lake Bennett was a portage. The boat, lightly
loaded, was lined down the small but violent connecting stream, and here
Kit learned a vast deal more about boats and water. But when it came to
packing the outfit, Stine and Sprague disappeared, and their men spent
two days of back-breaking toil in getting the outfit across. And this
was the history of many miserable days of the trip--Kit and Shorty
working to exhaustion, while their masters toiled not and demanded to be
waited upon.

But the iron-bound arctic winter continued to close down, and they
were held back by numerous and unavoidable delays. At Windy Arm, Stine
arbitrarily dispossessed Kit of the steering-sweep and within the hour
wrecked the boat on a wave-beaten lee shore. Two days were lost here in
making repairs, and the morning of the fresh start, as they came down
to embark, on stern and bow, in large letters, was charcoaled “The
Chechako.”

Kit grinned at the appropriateness of the invidious word.

“Huh!” said Shorty, when accused by Stine. “I can sure read and spell,
an' I know that chechako means tenderfoot, but my education never went
high enough to learn me to spell a jaw-breaker like that.”

Both employers looked daggers at Kit, for the insult rankled; nor did he
mention that the night before, Shorty had besought him for the spelling
of that particular word.

“That's 'most as bad as your bear-meat slam at 'em,” Shorty confided
later.

Kit chuckled. Along with the continuous discovery of his own powers had
come an ever-increasing disapproval of the two masters. It was not so
much irritation, which was always present, as disgust. He had got his
taste of the meat, and liked it; but they were teaching him how not to
eat it. Privily, he thanked God that he was not made as they. He came
to dislike them to a degree that bordered on hatred. Their malingering
bothered him less than their helpless inefficiency. Somewhere in him,
old Isaac Bellew and all the rest of the hardy Bellews were making good.

“Shorty,” he said one day, in the usual delay of getting started, “I
could almost fetch them a rap over the head with an oar and bury them in
the river.”

“Same here,” Shorty agreed. “They're not meat-eaters. They're
fish-eaters, and they sure stink.”


They came to the rapids; first, the Box Canyon, and, several miles
below, the White Horse. The Box Canyon was adequately named. It was a
box, a trap. Once in it, the only way out was through. On either side
arose perpendicular walls of rock. The river narrowed to a fraction of
its width and roared through this gloomy passage in a madness of motion
that heaped the water in the center into a ridge fully eight feet higher
than at the rocky sides. This ridge, in turn, was crested with stiff,
upstanding waves that curled over yet remained each in its unvarying
place. The Canyon was well feared, for it had collected its toll of dead
from the passing goldrushers.

Tying to the bank above, where lay a score of other anxious boats, Kit
and his companions went ahead on foot to investigate. They crept to
the brink and gazed down at the swirl of water. Sprague drew back,
shuddering.

“My God!” he exclaimed. “A swimmer hasn't a chance in that.”

Shorty touched Kit significantly with his elbow and said in an
undertone:

“Cold feet. Dollars to doughnuts they don't go through.”

Kit scarcely heard. From the beginning of the boat trip he had been
learning the stubbornness and inconceivable viciousness of the elements,
and this glimpse of what was below him acted as a challenge. “We've got
to ride that ridge,” he said. “If we get off it we'll hit the walls.”

“And never know what hit us,” was Shorty's verdict. “Can you swim,
Smoke?”

“I'd wish I couldn't if anything went wrong in there.”

“That's what I say,” a stranger, standing alongside and peering down
into the Canyon, said mournfully. “And I wish I were through it.”

“I wouldn't sell my chance to go through,” Kit answered.

He spoke honestly, but it was with the idea of heartening the man. He
turned to go back to the boat.

“Are you going to tackle it?” the man asked.

Kit nodded.

“I wish I could get the courage to,” the other confessed. “I've been
here for hours. The longer I look, the more afraid I am. I am not a
boatman, and I have with me only my nephew, who is a young boy, and my
wife. If you get through safely, will you run my boat through?”

Kit looked at Shorty, who delayed to answer.

“He's got his wife with him,” Kit suggested. Nor had he mistaken his
man.

“Sure,” Shorty affirmed. “It was just what I was stopping to think
about. I knew there was some reason I ought to do it.”

Again they turned to go, but Sprague and Stine made no movement.

“Good luck, Smoke,” Sprague called to him. “I'll--er--” He hesitated.
“I'll just stay here and watch you.”

“We need three men in the boat, two at the oars and one at the
steering-sweep,” Kit said quietly.

Sprague looked at Stine.

“I'm damned if I do,” said that gentleman. “If you're not afraid to
stand here and look on, I'm not.”

“Who's afraid?” Sprague demanded hotly.

Stine retorted in kind, and their two men left them in the thick of a
squabble.

“We can do without them,” Kit said to Shorty. “You take the bow with
a paddle, and I'll handle the steering-sweep. All you'll have to do is
just to help keep her straight. Once we're started, you won't be able to
hear me, so just keep on keeping her straight.”

They cast off the boat and worked out to middle in the quickening
current. From the Canyon came an ever-growing roar. The river sucked in
to the entrance with the smoothness of molten glass, and here, as the
darkening walls received them, Shorty took a chew of tobacco and dipped
his paddle. The boat leaped on the first crests of the ridge, and they
were deafened by the uproar of wild water that reverberated from the
narrow walls and multiplied itself. They were half-smothered with flying
spray. At times Kit could not see his comrade at the bow. It was only a
matter of two minutes, in which time they rode the ridge three-quarters
of a mile and emerged in safety and tied to the bank in the eddy below.

Shorty emptied his mouth of tobacco juice--he had forgotten to spit--and
spoke.

“That was bear-meat,” he exulted, “the real bear-meat. Say, we want
a few, didn't we? Smoke, I don't mind tellin' you in confidence that
before we started I was the gosh-dangdest scaredest man this side of the
Rocky Mountains. Now I'm a bear-eater. Come on an' we'll run that other
boat through.”

Midway back, on foot, they encountered their employers, who had watched
the passage from above.

“There comes the fish-eaters,” said Shorty. “Keep to win'ward.”


After running the stranger's boat through, whose name proved to be
Breck, Kit and Shorty met his wife, a slender, girlish woman whose blue
eyes were moist with gratitude. Breck himself tried to hand Kit fifty
dollars, and then attempted it on Shorty.

“Stranger,” was the latter's rejection, “I come into this country to
make money outa the ground an' not outa my fellow critters.”

Breck rummaged in his boat and produced a demijohn of whiskey. Shorty's
hand half went out to it and stopped abruptly. He shook his head.

“There's that blamed White Horse right below, an' they say it's worse
than the Box. I reckon I don't dast tackle any lightning.”

Several miles below they ran in to the bank, and all four walked down to
look at the bad water. The river, which was a succession of rapids, was
here deflected toward the right bank by a rocky reef. The whole body of
water, rushing crookedly into the narrow passage, accelerated its speed
frightfully and was up-flung into huge waves, white and wrathful. This
was the dread Mane of the White Horse, and here an even heavier toll of
dead had been exacted. On one side of the Mane was a corkscrew curl-over
and suck-under, and on the opposite side was the big whirlpool. To go
through, the Mane itself must be ridden.

“This plum rips the strings outa the Box,” Shorty concluded.

As they watched, a boat took the head of the rapids above. It was a
large boat, fully thirty feet long, laden with several tons of outfit,
and handled by six men. Before it reached the Mane it was plunging and
leaping, at times almost hidden by the foam and spray.

Shorty shot a slow, sidelong glance at Kit and said: “She's fair
smoking, and she hasn't hit the worst. They've hauled the oars in. There
she takes it now. God! She's gone! No; there she is!”

Big as the boat was, it had been buried from sight in the flying smother
between crests. The next moment, in the thick of the Mane, the boat
leaped up a crest and into view. To Kit's amazement he saw the whole
long bottom clearly outlined. The boat, for the fraction of an instant,
was in the air, the men sitting idly in their places, all save one
in the stern, who stood at the steering-sweep. Then came the downward
plunge into the trough and a second disappearance. Three times the boat
leaped and buried itself, then those on the bank saw its nose take the
whirlpool as it slipped off the Mane. The steersman, vainly opposing
with his full weight on the steering-gear, surrendered to the whirlpool
and helped the boat to take the circle.

Three times it went around, each time so close to the rocks on which Kit
and Shorty stood that either could have leaped on board. The steersman,
a man with a reddish beard of recent growth, waved his hand to them. The
only way out of the whirlpool was by the Mane, and on the third round
the boat entered the Mane obliquely at its upper end. Possibly out of
fear of the draw of the whirlpool, the steersman did not attempt to
straighten out quickly enough. When he did, it was too late. Alternately
in the air and buried, the boat angled the Mane and was sucked into and
down through the stiff wall of the corkscrew on the opposite side of
the river. A hundred feet below, boxes and bales began to float up. Then
appeared the bottom of the boat and the scattered heads of six men. Two
managed to make the bank in the eddy below. The others were drawn under,
and the general flotsam was lost to view, borne on by the swift current
around the bend.

There was a long minute of silence. Shorty was the first to speak.

“Come on,” he said. “We might as well tackle it. My feet'll get cold if
I stay here any longer.”

“We'll smoke some,” Kit grinned at him.

“And you'll sure earn your name,” was the rejoinder. Shorty turned to
their employers. “Comin'?” he queried.

Perhaps the roar of the water prevented them from hearing the
invitation.

Shorty and Kit tramped back through a foot of snow to the head of the
rapids and cast off the boat. Kit was divided between two impressions:
one, of the caliber of his comrade, which served as a spur to him; the
other, likewise a spur, was the knowledge that old Isaac Bellew, and all
the other Bellews, had done things like this in their westward march
of empire. What they had done, he could do. It was the meat, the strong
meat, and he knew, as never before, that it required strong men to eat
such meat.

“You've sure got to keep the top of the ridge,” Shorty shouted at him,
the plug of tobacco lifting to his mouth, as the boat quickened in the
quickening current and took the head of the rapids.

Kit nodded, swayed his strength and weight tentatively on the
steering-gear, and headed the boat for the plunge.

Several minutes later, half-swamped and lying against the bank in the
eddy below the White Horse, Shorty spat out a mouthful of tobacco juice
and shook Kit's hand.

“Meat! Meat!” Shorty chanted. “We eat it raw! We eat it alive!”

At the top of the bank they met Breck. His wife stood at a little
distance. Kit shook his hand.

“I'm afraid your boat can't make it,” he said. “It is smaller than ours
and a bit cranky.”

The man pulled out a row of bills.

“I'll give you each a hundred if you run it through.”

Kit looked out and up the tossing Mane of the White Horse. A long, gray
twilight was falling, it was turning colder, and the landscape seemed
taking on a savage bleakness.

“It ain't that,” Shorty was saying. “We don't want your money. Wouldn't
touch it nohow. But my pardner is the real meat with boats, and when he
says yourn ain't safe I reckon he knows what he's talkin' about.”

Kit nodded affirmation, and chanced to glance at Mrs Breck. Her eyes
were fixed upon him, and he knew that if ever he had seen prayer in a
woman's eyes he was seeing it then. Shorty followed his gaze and saw
what he saw. They looked at each other in confusion and did not speak.
Moved by the common impulse, they nodded to each other and turned to the
trail that led to the head of the rapids. They had not gone a hundred
yards when they met Stine and Sprague coming down.

“Where are you going?” the latter demanded.

“To fetch that other boat through,” Shorty answered.

“No, you're not. It's getting dark. You two are going to pitch camp.”

So huge was Kit's disgust that he forebore to speak.

“He's got his wife with him,” Shorty said.

“That's his lookout,” Stine contributed.

“And Smoke's and mine,” was Shorty's retort.

“I forbid you,” Sprague said harshly. “Smoke, if you go another step
I'll discharge you.”

“And you, too, Shorty,” Stine added.

“And a hell of a pickle you'll be in with us fired,” Shorty replied.
“How'll you get your blamed boat to Dawson? Who'll serve you coffee in
your blankets and manicure your finger-nails? Come on, Smoke. They don't
dast fire us. Besides, we've got agreements. If they fire us they've got
to divvy up grub to last us through the winter.”

Barely had they shoved Breck's boat out from the bank and caught the
first rough water, when the waves began to lap aboard. They were small
waves, but it was an earnest of what was to come. Shorty cast back a
quizzical glance as he gnawed at his inevitable plug, and Kit felt a
strange rush of warmth at his heart for this man who couldn't swim and
who couldn't back out.

The rapids grew stiffer, and the spray began to fly. In the gathering
darkness, Kit glimpsed the Mane and the crooked fling of the current
into it. He worked into this crooked current, and felt a glow of
satisfaction as the boat hit the head of the Mane squarely in the
middle. After that, in the smother, leaping and burying and swamping, he
had no clear impression of anything save that he swung his weight on
the steering-oar and wished his uncle were there to see. They emerged,
breathless, wet through, the boat filled with water almost to the
gunwale. Lighter pieces of baggage and outfit were floating inside the
boat. A few careful strokes on Shorty's part worked the boat into the
draw of the eddy, and the eddy did the rest till the boat softly touched
the bank. Looking down from above was Mrs. Breck. Her prayer had been
answered, and the tears were streaming down her cheeks.

“You boys have simply got to take the money,” Breck called down to them.

Shorty stood up, slipped, and sat down in the water, while the boat
dipped one gunwale under and righted again.

“Damn the money,” said Shorty. “Fetch out that whiskey. Now that it's
over I'm getting cold feet, an' I'm sure likely to have a chill.”


In the morning, as usual, they were among the last of the boats to
start. Breck, despite his boating inefficiency, and with only his wife
and nephew for crew, had broken camp, loaded his boat, and pulled out
at the first streak of day. But there was no hurrying Stine and Sprague,
who seemed incapable of realizing that the freeze-up might come at any
time. They malingered, got in the way, delayed, and doubled the work of
Kit and Shorty.

“I'm sure losing my respect for God, seein' as he must 'a' made them two
mistakes in human form,” was the latter's blasphemous way of expressing
his disgust.

“Well, you're the real goods, at any rate,” Kit grinned back at him. “It
makes me respect God the more just to look at you.”

“He was sure goin' some, eh?” was Shorty's fashion of overcoming the
embarrassment of the compliment.

The trail by water crossed Lake Labarge. Here was no fast current, but
a tideless stretch of forty miles which must be rowed unless a fair wind
blew. But the time for fair wind was past, and an icy gale blew in their
teeth out of the north. This made a rough sea, against which it was
almost impossible to pull the boat. Added to their troubles was driving
snow; also, the freezing of the water on their oar-blades kept one man
occupied in chopping it off with a hatchet. Compelled to take their turn
at the oars, Sprague and Stine patently loafed. Kit had learned how
to throw his weight on an oar, but he noted that his employers made a
seeming of throwing their weights and that they dipped their oars at a
cheating angle.

At the end of three hours, Sprague pulled his oar in and said they would
run back into the mouth of the river for shelter. Stine seconded him,
and the several hard-won miles were lost. A second day, and a third,
the same fruitless attempt was made. In the river mouth, the continually
arriving boats from White Horse made a flotilla of over two hundred.
Each day forty or fifty arrived, and only two or three won to the
northwest shore of the lake and did not come back. Ice was now forming
in the eddies, and connecting from eddy to eddy in thin lines around the
points. The freeze-up was very imminent.

“We could make it if they had the souls of clams,” Kit told Shorty, as
they dried their moccasins by the fire on the evening of the third day.
“We could have made it to-day if they hadn't turned back. Another hour's
work would have fetched that west shore. They're--they're babes in the
woods.”

“Sure,” Shorty agreed. He turned his moccasin to the flame and debated a
moment. “Look here, Smoke. It's hundreds of miles to Dawson. If we don't
want to freeze in here, we've got to do something. What d'ye say?”

Kit looked at him, and waited.

“We've got the immortal cinch on them two babes,” Shorty expounded.
“They can give orders an' shed mazuma, but as you say, they're plum
babes. If we're goin' to Dawson, we got to take charge of this here
outfit.”

They looked at each other.

“It's a go,” said Kit, as his hand went out in ratification.

In the morning, long before daylight, Shorty issued his call. “Come on!”
 he roared. “Tumble out, you sleepers! Here's your coffee! Kick into it!
We're goin' to make a start!”

Grumbling and complaining, Stine and Sprague were forced to get under
way two hours earlier than ever before. If anything, the gale was
stiffer, and in a short time every man's face was iced up, while the
oars were heavy with ice. Three hours they struggled, and four, one man
steering, one chopping ice, two toiling at the oars, and each taking his
various turns. The northwest shore loomed nearer and nearer. The gale
blew ever harder, and at last Sprague pulled in his oar in token of
surrender. Shorty sprang to it, though his relief had only begun.

“Chop ice,” he said, handing Sprague the hatchet.

“But what's the use?” the other whined. “We can't make it. We're going
to turn back.”

“We're going on,” said Shorty. “Chop ice. An' when you feel better you
can spell me.”

It was heart-breaking toil, but they gained the shore, only to find it
composed of surge-beaten rocks and cliffs, with no place to land.

“I told you so,” Sprague whimpered.

“You never peeped,” Shorty answered.

“We're going back.”

Nobody spoke, and Kit held the boat into the seas as they skirted the
forbidding shore. Sometimes they gained no more than a foot to the
stroke, and there were times when two or three strokes no more than
enabled them to hold their own. He did his best to hearten the two
weaklings. He pointed out that the boats which had won to this shore had
never come back. Perforce, he argued, they had found a shelter somewhere
ahead. Another hour they labored, and a second.

“If you fellows'd put into your oars some of that coffee you swig in
your blankets, we'd make it,” was Shorty's encouragement. “You're just
goin' through the motions an' not pullin' a pound.”

A few minutes later, Sprague drew in his oar.

“I'm finished,” he said, and there were tears in his voice.

“So are the rest of us,” Kit answered, himself ready to cry or to commit
murder, so great was his exhaustion. “But we're going on just the same.”

“We're going back. Turn the boat around.”

“Shorty, if he won't pull, take that oar yourself,” Kit commanded.

“Sure,” was the answer. “He can chop ice.”

But Sprague refused to give over the oar; Stine had ceased rowing, and
the boat was drifting backward.

“Turn around, Smoke,” Sprague ordered.

And Kit, who never in his life had cursed any man, astonished himself.

“I'll see you in hell, first,” he replied. “Take hold of that oar and
pull.”

It is in moments of exhaustion that men lose all their reserves of
civilization, and such a moment had come. Each man had reached the
breaking-point. Sprague jerked off a mitten, drew his revolver, and
turned it on his steersman. This was a new experience to Kit. He had
never had a gun presented at him in his life. And now, to his surprise,
it seemed to mean nothing at all. It was the most natural thing in the
world.

“If you don't put that gun up,” he said, “I'll take it away and rap you
over the knuckles with it.”

“If you don't turn the boat around, I'll shoot you,” Sprague threatened.

Then Shorty took a hand. He ceased chopping ice and stood up behind
Sprague.

“Go on an' shoot,” said Shorty, wiggling the hatchet. “I'm just aching
for a chance to brain you. Go on an' start the festivities.”

“This is mutiny,” Stine broke in. “You were engaged to obey orders.”

Shorty turned on him. “Oh, you'll get yours as soon as I finish with
your pardner, you little hog-wallopin' snooper, you.”

“Sprague,” Kit said, “I'll give you just thirty seconds to put away that
gun and get that oar out.”

Sprague hesitated, gave a short hysterical laugh, put the revolver away,
and bent his back to the work.

For two hours more, inch by inch, they fought their way along the edge
of the foaming rocks, until Kit feared he had made a mistake. And then,
when on the verge of himself turning back, they came abreast of a narrow
opening, not twenty feet wide, which led into a land-locked enclosure
where the fiercest gusts scarcely flawed the surface. It was the haven
gained by the boats of previous days. They landed on a shelving beach,
and the two employers lay in collapse in the boat, while Kit and Shorty
pitched the tent, built a fire, and started the cooking.

“What's a hog-walloping snooper, Shorty?” Kit asked.

“Blamed if I know,” was the answer; “but he's one just the same.”

The gale, which had been dying quickly, ceased at nightfall, and it came
on clear and cold. A cup of coffee, set aside to cool and forgotten, a
few minutes later was found coated with half an inch of ice. At eight
o'clock, when Sprague and Stine, already rolled in their blankets, were
sleeping the sleep of exhaustion, Kit came back from a look at the boat.

“It's the freeze-up, Shorty,” he announced. “There's a skin of ice over
the whole pond already.”

“What are you going to do?”

“There's only one thing. The lake of course freezes first. The rapid
current of the river may keep it open for days. This time to-morrow any
boat caught in Lake Labarge remains there until next year.”

“You mean we got to get out to-night? Now?”

Kit nodded.

“Tumble out, you sleepers!” was Shorty's answer, couched in a roar, as
he began casting off the guy-ropes of the tent.

The other two awoke, groaning with the pain of stiffened muscles and the
pain of rousing from the sleep of exhaustion.

“What time is it?” Stine asked.

“Half-past eight.”

“It's dark yet,” was the objection.

Shorty jerked out a couple of guy-ropes, and the tent began to sag.

“It's not morning,” he said. “It's evening. Come on. The lake's
freezin'. We got to get acrost.”

Stine sat up, his face bitter and wrathful. “Let it freeze. We're not
going to stir.”

“All right,” said Shorty. “We're goin' on with the boat.”

“You were engaged--”

“To take your outfit to Dawson,” Shorty caught him up. “Well, we're
takin' it, ain't we?” He punctuated his query by bringing half the tent
down on top of them.

They broke their way through the thin ice in the little harbor, and came
out on the lake, where the water, heavy and glassy, froze on their oars
with every stroke. The water soon became like mush, clogging the stroke
of the oars and freezing in the air even as it dripped. Later the
surface began to form a skin, and the boat proceeded slower and slower.

Often afterwards, when Kit tried to remember that night and failed to
bring up aught but nightmare recollections, he wondered what must have
been the sufferings of Stine and Sprague. His one impression of himself
was that he struggled through biting frost and intolerable exertion for
a thousand years, more or less.

Morning found them stationary. Stine complained of frosted fingers, and
Sprague of his nose, while the pain in Kit's cheeks and nose told him
that he, too, had been touched. With each accretion of daylight they
could see farther, and as far as they could see was icy surface. The
water of the lake was gone. A hundred yards away was the shore of the
north end. Shorty insisted that it was the opening of the river and that
he could see water. He and Kit alone were able to work, and with their
oars they broke the ice and forced the boat along. And at the last gasp
of their strength they made the suck of the rapid river. One look back
showed them several boats which had fought through the night and were
hopelessly frozen in; then they whirled around a bend in a current
running six miles an hour.


Day by day they floated down the swift river, and day by day the
shore-ice extended farther out. When they made camp at nightfall, they
chopped a space in the ice in which to lay the boat and carried the camp
outfit hundreds of feet to shore. In the morning, they chopped the
boat out through the new ice and caught the current. Shorty set up
the sheet-iron stove in the boat, and over this Stine and Sprague hung
through the long, drifting hours. They had surrendered, no longer gave
orders, and their one desire was to gain Dawson. Shorty, pessimistic,
indefatigable, and joyous, at frequent intervals roared out the three
lines of the first four-line stanza of a song he had forgotten. The
colder it got the oftener he sang:

     “Like Argus of the ancient times,
       We leave this Modern Greece;
      Tum-tum, tum-tum, tum-tum, tum-tum,
       To shear the Golden Fleece.”

As they passed the mouths of the Hootalinqua and the Big and Little
Salmon, they found these streams throwing mush-ice into the main Yukon.
This gathered about the boat and attached itself, and at night they
found themselves compelled to chop the boat out of the current. In the
morning they chopped the boat back into the current.

The last night ashore was spent between the mouths of the White River
and the Stewart. At daylight they found the Yukon, half a mile wide,
running white from ice-rimmed bank to ice-rimmed bank. Shorty cursed the
universe with less geniality than usual, and looked at Kit.

“We'll be the last boat this year to make Dawson,” Kit said.

“But they ain't no water, Smoke.”

“Then we'll ride the ice down. Come on.”

Futilely protesting, Sprague and Stine were bundled on board. For half
an hour, with axes, Kit and Shorty struggled to cut a way into the swift
but solid stream. When they did succeed in clearing the shore-ice, the
floating ice forced the boat along the edge for a hundred yards, tearing
away half of one gunwale and making a partial wreck of it. Then, at the
lower end of the bend, they caught the current that flung off-shore.
They proceeded to work farther toward the middle. The stream was no
longer composed of mush-ice but of hard cakes. In between the cakes only
was mush-ice, that froze solidly as they looked at it. Shoving with the
oars against the cakes, sometimes climbing out on the cakes in order to
force the boat along, after an hour they gained the middle. Five minutes
after they ceased their exertions, the boat was frozen in. The whole
river was coagulating as it ran. Cake froze to cake, until at last the
boat was the center of a cake seventy-five feet in diameter. Sometimes
they floated sideways, sometimes stern-first, while gravity tore
asunder the forming fetters in the moving mass, only to be manacled by
faster-forming ones. While the hours passed, Shorty stoked the stove,
cooked meals, and chanted his war-song.

Night came, and after many efforts, they gave up the attempt to force
the boat to shore, and through the darkness they swept helplessly
onward.

“What if we pass Dawson?” Shorty queried.

“We'll walk back,” Kit answered, “if we're not crushed in a jam.”

The sky was clear, and in the light of the cold, leaping stars they
caught occasional glimpses of the loom of mountains on either hand.
At eleven o'clock, from below, came a dull, grinding roar. Their speed
began to diminish, and cakes of ice to up-end and crash and smash about
them. The river was jamming. One cake, forced upward, slid across their
cake and carried one side of the boat away. It did not sink, for its
own cake still upbore it, but in a whirl they saw dark water show for an
instant within a foot of them. Then all movement ceased. At the end of
half an hour the whole river picked itself up and began to move. This
continued for an hour, when again it was brought to rest by a jam. Once
again it started, running swiftly and savagely, with a great grinding.
Then they saw lights ashore, and, when abreast, gravity and the Yukon
surrendered, and the river ceased for six months.

On the shore at Dawson, curious ones, gathered to watch the river
freeze, heard from out of the darkness the war-song of Shorty:

     “Like Argus of the ancient times,
       We leave this Modern Greece;
      Tum-tum, tum-tum; tum-tum, tum-tum,
       To shear the Golden Fleece.”


For three days Kit and Shorty labored, carrying the ton and a half of
outfit from the middle of the river to the log-cabin Stine and Sprague
had bought on the hill overlooking Dawson. This work finished, in
the warm cabin, as twilight was falling, Sprague motioned Kit to him.
Outside the thermometer registered sixty-five below zero.

“Your full month isn't up, Smoke,” Sprague said. “But here it is in
full. I wish you luck.”

“How about the agreement?” Kit asked. “You know there's a famine here.
A man can't get work in the mines even, unless he has his own grub. You
agreed--”

“I know of no agreement,” Sprague interrupted. “Do you, Stine? We
engaged you by the month. There's your pay. Will you sign the receipt?”

Kit's hands clenched, and for the moment he saw red. Both men shrank
away from him. He had never struck a man in anger in his life, and he
felt so certain of his ability to thrash Sprague that he could not bring
himself to do it.

Shorty saw his trouble and interposed.

“Look here, Smoke, I ain't travelin' no more with a ornery outfit like
this. Right here's where I sure jump it. You an' me stick together.
Savvy? Now, you take your blankets an' hike down to the Elkhorn. Wait
for me. I'll settle up, collect what's comin', an' give them what's
comin'. I ain't no good on the water, but my feet's on terry-fermy now
an' I'm sure goin' to make smoke.”

       .       .       .       .       .

Half an hour afterwards Shorty appeared at the Elkhorn. From his
bleeding knuckles and the skin off one cheek, it was evident that he had
given Stine and Sprague what was coming.

“You ought to see that cabin,” he chuckled, as they stood at the bar.
“Rough-house ain't no name for it. Dollars to doughnuts nary one of 'em
shows up on the street for a week. An' now it's all figgered out for you
an' me. Grub's a dollar an' a half a pound. They ain't no work for wages
without you have your own grub. Moose-meat's sellin' for two dollars a
pound an' they ain't none. We got enough money for a month's grub an'
ammunition, an' we hike up the Klondike to the back country. If they
ain't no moose, we go an' live with the Indians. But if we ain't got
five thousand pounds of meat six weeks from now, I'll--I'll sure go back
an' apologize to our bosses. Is it a go?”

Kit's hand went out, and they shook. Then he faltered. “I don't know
anything about hunting,” he said.

Shorty lifted his glass.

“But you're a sure meat-eater, an' I'll learn you.”




III. THE STAMPEDE TO SQUAW CREEK.


Two months after Smoke Bellew and Shorty went after moose for a
grub-stake, they were back in the Elkhorn saloon at Dawson. The hunting
was done, the meat hauled in and sold for two dollars and a half a
pound, and between them they possessed three thousand dollars in gold
dust and a good team of dogs. They had played in luck. Despite the fact
that the gold-rush had driven the game a hundred miles or more into the
mountains, they had, within half that distance, bagged four moose in a
narrow canyon.

The mystery of the strayed animals was no greater than the luck of their
killers, for within the day four famished Indian families, reporting no
game in three days' journey back, camped beside them. Meat was traded
for starving dogs, and after a week of feeding, Smoke and Shorty
harnessed the animals and began freighting the meat to the eager Dawson
market.

The problem of the two men now was to turn their gold-dust into food.
The current price for flour and beans was a dollar and a half a pound,
but the difficulty was to find a seller. Dawson was in the throes of
famine. Hundreds of men, with money but no food, had been compelled to
leave the country. Many had gone down the river on the last water, and
many more, with barely enough food to last, had walked the six hundred
miles over the ice to Dyea.

Smoke met Shorty in the warm saloon, and found the latter jubilant.

“Life ain't no punkins without whiskey an' sweetenin',” was Shorty's
greeting, as he pulled lumps of ice from his thawing moustache and flung
them rattling on the floor. “An' I sure just got eighteen pounds of that
same sweetenin'. The geezer only charged three dollars a pound for it.
What luck did you have?”

“I, too, have not been idle,” Smoke answered with pride. “I bought fifty
pounds of flour. And there's a man up on Adam Creek who says he'll let
me have fifty pounds more to-morrow.”

“Great! We'll sure live till the river opens. Say, Smoke, them dogs of
ourn is the goods. A dog-buyer offered me two hundred apiece for the
five of them. I told him nothin' doin'. They sure took on class when
they got meat to get outside of; but it goes against the grain, feedin'
dog-critters on grub that's worth two an' a half a pound. Come on
an' have a drink. I just got to celebrate them eighteen pounds of
sweetenin'.”

Several minutes later, as he weighed in on the gold-scales for the
drinks, he gave a start of recollection.

“I plum forgot that man I was to meet in the Tivoli. He's got some
spoiled bacon he'll sell for a dollar an' a half a pound. We can feed it
to the dogs an' save a dollar a day on each's board-bill. So long.”

“So long,” said Smoke. “I'm goin' to the cabin an' turn in.”

Hardly had Shorty left the place, when a fur-clad man entered through
the double storm-doors. His face lighted at sight of Smoke, who
recognized him as Breck, the man whose boat they had run through the Box
Canyon and White Horse Rapids.

“I heard you were in town,” Breck said hurriedly, as they shook hands.
“Been looking for you for half an hour. Come outside, I want to talk
with you.”

Smoke looked regretfully at the roaring, red-hot stove.

“Won't this do?”

“No; it's important. Come outside.”

As they emerged, Smoke drew off one mitten, lighted a match, and glanced
at the thermometer that hung beside the door. He remittened his naked
hand hastily as if the frost had burned him. Overhead arched the flaming
aurora borealis, while from all Dawson arose the mournful howling of
thousands of wolf-dogs.

“What did it say?” Breck asked.

“Sixty below.” Kit spat experimentally, and the spittle crackled in the
air. “And the thermometer is certainly working. It's falling all the
time. An hour ago it was only fifty-two. Don't tell me it's a stampede.”

“It is,” Breck whispered back cautiously, casting anxious eyes about in
fear of some other listener. “You know Squaw Creek?--empties in on the
other side of the Yukon thirty miles up?”

“Nothing doing there,” was Smoke's judgment. “It was prospected years
ago.”

“So were all the other rich creeks. Listen! It's big. Only eight to
twenty feet to bedrock. There won't be a claim that don't run to half a
million. It's a dead secret. Two or three of my close friends let me in
on it. I told my wife right away that I was going to find you before
I started. Now, so long. My pack's hidden down the bank. In fact, when
they told me, they made me promise not to pull out until Dawson was
asleep. You know what it means if you're seen with a stampeding outfit.
Get your partner and follow. You ought to stake fourth or fifth claim
from Discovery. Don't forget--Squaw Creek. It's the third after you pass
Swede Creek.”


When Smoke entered the little cabin on the hillside back of Dawson, he
heard a heavy familiar breathing.

“Aw, go to bed,” Shorty mumbled, as Smoke shook his shoulder. “I'm not
on the night shift,” was his next remark, as the rousing hand became
more vigorous. “Tell your troubles to the barkeeper.”

“Kick into your clothes,” Smoke said. “We've got to stake a couple of
claims.”

Shorty sat up and started to explode, but Smoke's hand covered his
mouth.

“Ssh!” Smoke warned. “It's a big strike. Don't wake the neighborhood.
Dawson's asleep.”

“Huh! You got to show me. Nobody tells anybody about a strike, of course
not. But ain't it plum amazin' the way everybody hits the trail just the
same?”

“Squaw Creek,” Smoke whispered. “It's right. Breck gave me the tip.
Shallow bedrock. Gold from the grass-roots down. Come on. We'll sling a
couple of light packs together and pull out.”

Shorty's eyes closed as he lapsed back into sleep. The next moment his
blankets were swept off him.

“If you don't want them, I do,” Smoke explained.

Shorty followed the blankets and began to dress.

“Goin' to take the dogs?” he asked.

“No. The trail up the creek is sure to be unbroken, and we can make
better time without them.”

“Then I'll throw 'em a meal, which'll have to last 'em till we get back.
Be sure you take some birch-bark and a candle.”

Shorty opened the door, felt the bite of the cold, and shrank back to
pull down his ear-flaps and mitten his hands.

Five minutes later he returned, sharply rubbing his nose.

“Smoke, I'm sure opposed to makin' this stampede. It's colder than
the hinges of hell a thousand years before the first fire was lighted.
Besides, it's Friday the thirteenth, an' we're goin' to trouble as the
sparks fly upward.”

With small stampeding-packs on their backs, they closed the door behind
them and started down the hill. The display of the aurora borealis
had ceased, and only the stars leaped in the great cold and by their
uncertain light made traps for the feet. Shorty floundered off a turn of
the trail into deep snow, and raised his voice in blessing of the date
of the week and month and year.

“Can't you keep still?” Smoke chided. “Leave the almanac alone. You'll
have all Dawson awake and after us.”

“Huh! See the light in that cabin? An' in that one over there? An' hear
that door slam? Oh, sure Dawson's asleep. Them lights? Just buryin'
their dead. They ain't stampedin', betcher life they ain't.”

By the time they reached the foot of the hill and were fairly in Dawson,
lights were springing up in the cabins, doors were slamming, and from
behind came the sound of many moccasins on the hard-packed snow. Again
Shorty delivered himself.

“But it beats hell the amount of mourners there is.”

They passed a man who stood by the path and was calling anxiously in a
low voice: “Oh, Charley; get a move on.”

“See that pack on his back, Smoke? The graveyard's sure a long ways off
when the mourners got to pack their blankets.”

By the time they reached the main street a hundred men were in line
behind them, and while they sought in the deceptive starlight for the
trail that dipped down the bank to the river, more men could be heard
arriving. Shorty slipped and shot down the thirty-foot chute into the
soft snow. Smoke followed, knocking him over as he was rising to his
feet.

“I found it first,” he gurgled, taking off his mittens to shake the snow
out of the gauntlets.

The next moment they were scrambling wildly out of the way of the
hurtling bodies of those that followed. At the time of the freeze-up,
a jam had occurred at this point, and cakes of ice were up-ended in
snow-covered confusion. After several hard falls, Smoke drew out his
candle and lighted it. Those in the rear hailed it with acclaim. In the
windless air it burned easily, and he led the way more quickly.

“It's a sure stampede,” Shorty decided. “Or might all them be
sleep-walkers?”

“We're at the head of the procession at any rate,” was Smoke's answer.

“Oh, I don't know. Mebbe that's a firefly ahead there. Mebbe they're all
fireflies--that one, an' that one. Look at 'em! Believe me, they is a
whole string of processions ahead.”

It was a mile across the jams to the west bank of the Yukon, and candles
flickered the full length of the twisting trail. Behind them, clear to
the top of the bank they had descended, were more candles.

“Say, Smoke, this ain't no stampede. It's a exode-us. They must be a
thousand men ahead of us an' ten thousand behind. Now, you listen to
your uncle. My medicine's good. When I get a hunch it's sure right. An'
we're in wrong on this stampede. Let's turn back an' hit the sleep.”

“You'd better save your breath if you intend to keep up,” Smoke retorted
gruffly.

“Huh! My legs is short, but I slog along slack at the knees an' don't
worry my muscles none, an' I can sure walk every piker here off the
ice.”

And Smoke knew he was right, for he had long since learned his comrade's
phenomenal walking powers.

“I've been holding back to give you a chance,” Smoke jeered.

“An' I'm plum troddin' on your heels. If you can't do better, let me go
ahead and set pace.”

Smoke quickened, and was soon at the rear of the nearest bunch of
stampeders.

“Hike along, you, Smoke,” the other urged. “Walk over them unburied
dead. This ain't no funeral. Hit the frost like you was goin'
somewheres.”

Smoke counted eight men and two women in this party, and before the
way across the jam-ice was won, he and Shorty had passed another party
twenty strong. Within a few feet of the west bank, the trail swerved to
the south, emerging from the jam upon smooth ice. The ice, however, was
buried under several feet of fine snow. Through this the sled-trail ran,
a narrow ribbon of packed footing barely two feet in width. On either
side one sank to his knees and deeper in the snow. The stampeders they
overtook were reluctant to give way, and often Smoke and Shorty had to
plunge into the deep snow and by supreme efforts flounder past.

Shorty was irrepressible and pessimistic. When the stampeders resented
being passed, he retorted in kind.

“What's your hurry?” one of them asked.

“What's yours?” he answered. “A stampede come down from Indian River
yesterday afternoon an' beat you to it. They ain't no claims left.”

“That being so, I repeat, what's your hurry?”

“WHO? Me? I ain't no stampeder. I'm workin' for the government. I'm on
official business. I'm just traipsin' along to take the census of Squaw
Creek.”

To another, who hailed him with: “Where away, little one? Do you really
expect to stake a claim?” Shorty answered:

“Me? I'm the discoverer of Squaw Creek. I'm just comin' back from
recordin' so as to see no blamed chechako jumps my claim.”

The average pace of the stampeders on the smooth going was three miles
and a half an hour. Smoke and Shorty were doing four and a half, though
sometimes they broke into short runs and went faster.

“I'm going to travel your feet clean off, Shorty,” Smoke challenged.

“Huh! I can hike along on the stumps an' wear the heels off your
moccasins. Though it ain't no use. I've been figgerin'. Creek claims
is five hundred feet. Call 'em ten to the mile. They's a thousand
stampeders ahead of us, an' that creek ain't no hundred miles long.
Somebody's goin' to get left, an' it makes a noise like you an' me.”

Before replying, Smoke let out an unexpected link that threw Shorty half
a dozen feet in the rear. “If you saved your breath and kept up, we'd
cut down a few of that thousand,” he chided.

“Who? Me? If you'd get outa the way I'd show you a pace what is.”

Smoke laughed, and let out another link. The whole aspect of the
adventure had changed. Through his brain was running a phrase of the
mad philosopher--“the transvaluation of values.” In truth, he was less
interested in staking a fortune than in beating Shorty. After all, he
concluded, it wasn't the reward of the game but the playing of it that
counted. Mind, and muscle, and stamina, and soul, were challenged in a
contest with this Shorty, a man who had never opened the books, and who
did not know grand opera from rag-time, nor an epic from a chilblain.

“Shorty, I've got you skinned to death. I've reconstructed every cell
in my body since I hit the beach at Dyea. My flesh is as stringy as
whipcords, and as bitter and mean as the bite of a rattlesnake. A few
months ago I'd have patted myself on the back to write such words, but
I couldn't have written them. I had to live them first, and now that
I'm living them there's no need to write them. I'm the real, bitter,
stinging goods, and no scrub of a mountaineer can put anything over on
me without getting it back compound. Now, you go ahead and set pace for
half an hour. Do your worst, and when you're all in I'll go ahead and
give you half an hour of the real worst.”

“Huh!” Shorty sneered genially. “An' him not dry behind the ears yet.
Get outa the way an' let your father show you some goin'.”

Half-hour by half-hour they alternated in setting pace. Nor did they
talk much. Their exertions kept them warm, though their breath froze on
their faces from lips to chin. So intense was the cold that they almost
continually rubbed their noses and cheeks with their mittens. A few
minutes' cessation from this allowed the flesh to grow numb, and then
most vigorous rubbing was required to produce the burning prickle of
returning circulation.

Often they thought they had reached the lead, but always they overtook
more stampeders who had started before them. Occasionally, groups of
men attempted to swing in behind to their pace, but invariably they were
discouraged after a mile or two and disappeared in the darkness to the
rear.

“We've been out on trail all winter,” was Shorty's comment. “An' them
geezers, soft from layin' around their cabins, has the nerve to think
they can keep our stride. Now, if they was real sour-doughs it'd be
different. If there's one thing a sour-dough can do it's sure walk.”

Once, Smoke lighted a match and glanced at his watch. He never repeated
it, for so quick was the bite of the frost on his bared hands that half
an hour passed before they were again comfortable.

“Four o'clock,” he said, as he pulled on his mittens, “and we've already
passed three hundred.”

“Three hundred and thirty-eight,” Shorty corrected. “I been keepin'
count. Get outa the way, stranger. Let somebody stampede that knows how
to stampede.”

The latter was addressed to a man, evidently exhausted, who could no
more than stumble along and who blocked the trail. This, and one other,
were the only played-out men they encountered, for they were very near
to the head of the stampede. Nor did they learn till afterwards the
horrors of that night. Exhausted men sat down to rest by the way and
failed to get up again. Seven were frozen to death, while scores of
amputations of toes, feet, and fingers were performed in the Dawson
hospitals on the survivors. For the stampede to Squaw Creek occurred on
the coldest night of the year. Before morning, the spirit thermometers
at Dawson registered seventy degrees below zero. The men composing the
stampede, with few exceptions, were new-comers in the country who did
not know the way of the cold.

The other played-out man they found a few minutes later, revealed by a
streamer of aurora borealis that shot like a searchlight from horizon to
zenith. He was sitting on a piece of ice beside the trail.

“Hop along, sister Mary,” Shorty gaily greeted him. “Keep movin'. If you
sit there you'll freeze stiff.”

The man made no response, and they stopped to investigate.

“Stiff as a poker,” was Shorty's verdict. “If you tumbled him over he'd
break.”

“See if he's breathing,” Smoke said, as, with bared hand, he sought
through furs and woollens for the man's heart.

Shorty lifted one ear-flap and bent to the iced lips. “Nary breathe,” he
reported.

“Nor heart-beat,” said Smoke.

He mittened his hand and beat it violently for a minute before exposing
it to the frost to strike a match. It was an old man, incontestably
dead. In the moment of illumination, they saw a long grey beard, massed
with ice to the nose, cheeks that were white with frost, and closed eyes
with frost-rimmed lashes frozen together. Then the match went out.

“Come on,” Shorty said, rubbing his ear. “We can't do nothin' for the
old geezer. An' I've sure frosted my ear. Now all the blamed skin'll
peel off, and it'll be sore for a week.”

A few minutes later, when a flaming ribbon spilled pulsating fire over
the heavens, they saw on the ice a quarter of a mile ahead two forms.
Beyond, for a mile, nothing moved.

“They're leading the procession,” Smoke said, as darkness fell again.
“Come on, let's get them.”

At the end of half an hour, not yet having overtaken the two in front,
Shorty broke into a run.

“If we catch 'em we'll never pass 'em,” he panted. “Lord, what a pace
they're hittin'. Dollars to doughnuts they're no chechakos. They're the
real sour-dough variety, you can stack on that.”

Smoke was leading when they finally caught up, and he was glad to ease
to a walk at their heels. Almost immediately he got the impression that
the one nearer him was a woman. How this impression came, he could not
tell. Hooded and furred, the dark form was as any form; yet there was a
haunting sense of familiarity about it. He waited for the next flame of
the aurora, and by its light saw the smallness of the moccasined feet.
But he saw more--the walk, and knew it for the unmistakable walk he had
once resolved never to forget.

“She's a sure goer,” Shorty confided hoarsely. “I'll bet it's an
Indian.”

“How do you do, Miss Gastell?” Smoke addressed her.

“How do you do,” she answered, with a turn of the head and a quick
glance. “It's too dark to see. Who are you?”

“Smoke.”

She laughed in the frost, and he was certain it was the prettiest
laughter he had ever heard. “And have you married and raised all those
children you were telling me about?” Before he could retort, she went
on. “How many chechakos are there behind?”

“Several thousand, I imagine. We passed over three hundred. And they
weren't wasting any time.”

“It's the old story,” she said bitterly. “The new-comers get in on the
rich creeks, and the old-timers, who dared and suffered and made this
country, get nothing. Old-timers made this discovery on Squaw Creek--how
it leaked out is the mystery--and they sent word up to all the
old-timers on Sea Lion. But it's ten miles farther than Dawson, and when
they arrive they'll find the creek staked to the skyline by the Dawson
chechakos. It isn't right, it isn't fair, such perversity of luck.”

“It is too bad,” Smoke sympathized. “But I'm hanged if I know what
you're going to do about it. First come, first served, you know.”

“I wish I could do something,” she flashed back at him. “I'd like to
see them all freeze on the trail, or have everything terrible happen to
them, so long as the Sea Lion stampede arrived first.”

“You've certainly got it in for us hard,” he laughed.

“It isn't that,” she said quickly. “Man by man, I know the crowd from
Sea Lion, and they are men. They starved in this country in the old
days, and they worked like giants to develop it. I went through the hard
times on the Koyukuk with them when I was a little girl. And I was with
them in the Birch Creek famine, and in the Forty Mile famine. They are
heroes, and they deserve some reward, and yet here are thousands of
green softlings who haven't earned the right to stake anything, miles
and miles ahead of them. And now, if you'll forgive my tirade, I'll save
my breath, for I don't know when you and all the rest may try to pass
dad and me.”

No further talk passed between Joy and Smoke for an hour or so, though
he noticed that for a time she and her father talked in low tones.

“I know 'em now,” Shorty told Smoke. “He's old Louis Gastell, an' the
real goods. That must be his kid. He come into this country so long ago
they ain't nobody can recollect, an' he brought the girl with him, she
only a baby. Him an' Beetles was tradin' partners an' they ran the first
dinkey little steamboat up the Koyukuk.”

“I don't think we'll try to pass them,” Smoke said. “We're at the head
of the stampede, and there are only four of us.”

Shorty agreed, and another hour of silence followed, during which they
swung steadily along. At seven o'clock, the blackness was broken by a
last display of the aurora borealis, which showed to the west a broad
opening between snow-clad mountains.

“Squaw Creek!” Joy exclaimed.

“Goin' some,” Shorty exulted. “We oughtn't to been there for another
half hour to the least, accordin' to my reckonin'. I must 'a' been
spreadin' my legs.”

It was at this point that the Dyea trail, baffled by ice-jams, swerved
abruptly across the Yukon to the east bank. And here they must leave
the hard-packed, main-travelled trail, mount the jams, and follow a dim
trail, but slightly packed, that hovered the west bank.

Louis Gastell, leading, slipped in the darkness on the rough ice, and
sat up, holding his ankle in both his hands. He struggled to his feet
and went on, but at a slower pace and with a perceptible limp. After a
few minutes he abruptly halted.

“It's no use,” he said to his daughter. “I've sprained a tendon. You go
ahead and stake for me as well as yourself.”

“Can't we do something?” Smoke asked solicitously.

Louis Gastell shook his head. “She can stake two claims as well as one.
I'll crawl over to the bank, start a fire, and bandage my ankle. I'll be
all right. Go on, Joy. Stake ours above the Discovery claim; it's richer
higher up.”

“Here's some birch bark,” Smoke said, dividing his supply equally.
“We'll take care of your daughter.”

Louis Gastell laughed harshly. “Thank you just the same,” he said. “But
she can take care of herself. Follow her and watch her.”

“Do you mind if I lead?” she asked Smoke, as she headed on. “I know this
country better than you.”

“Lead on,” Smoke answered gallantly, “though I agree with you it's a
darned shame all us chechakos are going to beat that Sea Lion bunch to
it. Isn't there some way to shake them?”

She shook her head. “We can't hide our trail, and they'll follow it like
sheep.”

After a quarter of a mile, she turned sharply to the west. Smoke noticed
that they were going through unpacked snow, but neither he nor Shorty
observed that the dim trail they had been on still led south. Had they
witnessed the subsequent procedure of Louis Gastell, the history of the
Klondike would have been written differently; for they would have seen
that old-timer, no longer limping, running with his nose to the trail
like a hound, following them. Also, they would have seen him trample
and widen the turn to the fresh trail they had made to the west. And,
finally, they would have seen him keep on the old dim trail that still
led south.

A trail did run up the creek, but so slight was it that they continually
lost it in the darkness. After a quarter of an hour, Joy Gastell was
willing to drop into the rear and let the two men take turns in breaking
a way through the snow. This slowness of the leaders enabled the whole
stampede to catch up, and when daylight came, at nine o'clock, as far
back as they could see was an unbroken line of men. Joy's dark eyes
sparkled at the sight.

“How long since we started up the creek?” she asked.

“Fully two hours,” Smoke answered.

“And two hours back make four,” she laughed. “The stampede from Sea Lion
is saved.”

A faint suspicion crossed Smoke's mind, and he stopped and confronted
her.

“I don't understand,” he said.

“You don't? Then I'll tell you. This is Norway Creek. Squaw Creek is the
next to the south.”

Smoke was for the moment, speechless.

“You did it on purpose?” Shorty demanded.

“I did it to give the old-timers a chance.” She laughed mockingly. The
men grinned at each other and finally joined her. “I'd lay you across
my knee an' give you a wallopin', if women folk wasn't so scarce in this
country,” Shorty assured her.

“Your father didn't sprain a tendon, but waited till we were out of
sight and then went on?” Smoke asked.

She nodded.

“And you were the decoy?”

Again she nodded, and this time Smoke's laughter rang out clear and
true. It was the spontaneous laughter of a frankly beaten man.

“Why don't you get angry with me?” she queried ruefully. “Or--or wallop
me?”

“Well, we might as well be starting back,” Shorty urged. “My feet's
gettin' cold standin' here.”

Smoke shook his head. “That would mean four hours lost. We must be eight
miles up this creek now, and from the look ahead Norway is making a long
swing south. We'll follow it, then cross over the divide somehow, and
tap Squaw Creek somewhere above Discovery.” He looked at Joy. “Won't you
come along with us? I told your father we'd look after you.”

“I--” She hesitated. “I think I shall, if you don't mind.” She was
looking straight at him, and her face was no longer defiant and mocking.
“Really, Mr. Smoke, you make me almost sorry for what I have done. But
somebody had to save the old-timers.”

“It strikes me that stampeding is at best a sporting proposition.”

“And it strikes me you two are very game about it,” she went on, then
added with the shadow of a sigh: “What a pity you are not old-timers!”

For two hours more they kept to the frozen creek-bed of Norway, then
turned into a narrow and rugged tributary that flowed from the south. At
midday they began the ascent of the divide itself. Behind them, looking
down and back, they could see the long line of stampeders breaking up.
Here and there, in scores of places, thin smoke-columns advertised the
making of camps.

As for themselves, the going was hard. They wallowed through snow to
their waists, and were compelled to stop every few yards to breathe.
Shorty was the first to call a halt.

“We been hittin' the trail for over twelve hours,” he said. “Smoke, I'm
plum willin' to say I'm good an' tired. An' so are you. An' I'm free to
shout that I can sure hang on to this here pasear like a starvin' Indian
to a hunk of bear-meat. But this poor girl here can't keep her legs no
time if she don't get something in her stomach. Here's where we build a
fire. What d'ye say?”

So quickly, so deftly and methodically, did they go about making a
temporary camp, that Joy, watching with jealous eyes, admitted to
herself that the old-timers could not do it better. Spruce boughs,
with a spread blanket on top, gave a foundation for rest and cooking
operations. But they kept away from the heat of the fire until noses and
cheeks had been rubbed cruelly.

Smoke spat in the air, and the resultant crackle was so immediate and
loud that he shook his head. “I give it up,” he said. “I've never seen
cold like this.”

“One winter on the Koyukuk it went to eighty-six below,” Joy answered.
“It's at least seventy or seventy-five right now, and I know I've
frosted my cheeks. They're burning like fire.”

On the steep slope of the divide there was no ice, so snow, as fine and
hard and crystalline as granulated sugar, was poured into the gold-pan
by the bushel until enough water was melted for the coffee. Smoke fried
bacon and thawed biscuits. Shorty kept the fuel supplied and tended the
fire, and Joy set the simple table composed of two plates, two cups, two
spoons, a tin of mixed salt and pepper, and a tin of sugar. When it came
to eating, she and Smoke shared one set between them. They ate out of
the same plate and drank from the same cup.

It was nearly two in the afternoon when they cleared the crest of the
divide and began dropping down a feeder of Squaw Creek. Earlier in the
winter some moose-hunter had made a trail up the canyon--that is, in
going up and down he had stepped always in his previous tracks. As a
result, in the midst of soft snow, and veiled under later snow falls,
was a line of irregular hummocks. If one's foot missed a hummock, he
plunged down through unpacked snow and usually to a fall. Also, the
moose-hunter had been an exceptionally long-legged individual. Joy, who
was eager now that the two men should stake, and fearing that they were
slackening their pace on account of her evident weariness, insisted
on taking her turn in the lead. The speed and manner in which she
negotiated the precarious footing called out Shorty's unqualified
approval.

“Look at her!” he cried. “She's the real goods an' the red meat. Look at
them moccasins swing along. No high-heels there. She uses the legs God
gave her. She's the right squaw for any bear-hunter.”

She flashed back a smile of acknowledgment that included Smoke. He
caught a feeling of chumminess, though at the same time he was bitingly
aware that it was very much of a woman who embraced him in that
comradely smile.

Looking back, as they came to the bank of Squaw Creek, they could see
the stampede, strung out irregularly, struggling along the descent of
the divide.

They slipped down the bank to the creek bed. The stream, frozen solidly
to bottom, was from twenty to thirty feet wide and ran between six- and
eight-foot earth banks of alluvial wash. No recent feet had disturbed
the snow that lay upon its ice, and they knew they were above the
Discovery claim and the last stakes of the Sea Lion stampeders.

“Look out for springs,” Joy warned, as Smoke led the way down the creek.
“At seventy below you'll lose your feet if you break through.”

These springs, common to most Klondike streams, never cease at the
lowest temperatures. The water flows out from the banks and lies in
pools which are cuddled from the cold by later surface-freezings and
snow falls. Thus, a man, stepping on dry snow, might break through half
an inch of ice-skin and find himself up to the knees in water. In five
minutes, unless able to remove the wet gear, the loss of one's foot was
the penalty.

Though only three in the afternoon, the long grey twilight of the Arctic
had settled down. They watched for a blazed tree on either bank, which
would show the center-stake of the last claim located. Joy, impulsively
eager, was the first to find it. She darted ahead of Smoke, crying:
“Somebody's been here! See the snow! Look for the blaze! There it is!
See that spruce!”

She sank suddenly to her waist in the snow.

“Now I've done it,” she said woefully. Then she cried: “Don't come near
me! I'll wade out.”

Step by step, each time breaking through the thin skin of ice concealed
under the dry snow, she forced her way to solid footing. Smoke did not
wait, but sprang to the bank, where dry and seasoned twigs and sticks,
lodged amongst the brush by spring freshets, waited the match. By the
time she reached his side, the first flames and flickers of an assured
fire were rising.

“Sit down!” he commanded.

She obediently sat down in the snow. He slipped his pack from his back,
and spread a blanket for her feet.

From above came the voices of the stampeders who followed them.

“Let Shorty stake,” she urged.

“Go on, Shorty,” Smoke said, as he attacked her moccasins, already stiff
with ice. “Pace off a thousand feet and place the two center-stakes. We
can fix the corner-stakes afterwards.”

With his knife Smoke cut away the lacings and leather of the moccasins.
So stiff were they with ice that they snapped and crackled under the
hacking and sawing. The Siwash socks and heavy woollen stockings
were sheaths of ice. It was as if her feet and calves were encased in
corrugated iron.

“How are your feet?” he asked, as he worked.

“Pretty numb. I can't move nor feel my toes. But it will be all right.
The fire is burning beautifully. Watch out you don't freeze your own
hands. They must be numb now from the way you're fumbling.”

He slipped his mittens on, and for nearly a minute smashed the open
hands savagely against his sides. When he felt the blood-prickles, he
pulled off the mittens and ripped and tore and sawed and hacked at the
frozen garments. The white skin of one foot appeared, then that of the
other, to be exposed to the bite of seventy below zero, which is the
equivalent of one hundred and two below freezing.

Then came the rubbing with snow, carried on with an intensity of
cruel fierceness, till she squirmed and shrank and moved her toes, and
joyously complained of the hurt.

He half-dragged her, and she half-lifted herself, nearer to the fire. He
placed her feet on the blanket close to the flesh-saving flames.

“You'll have to take care of them for a while,” he said.

She could now safely remove her mittens and manipulate her own feet,
with the wisdom of the initiated, being watchful that the heat of the
fire was absorbed slowly. While she did this, he attacked his hands.
The snow did not melt nor moisten. Its light crystals were like so much
sand. Slowly the stings and pangs of circulation came back into the
chilled flesh. Then he tended the fire, unstrapped the light pack from
her back, and got out a complete change of foot-gear.

Shorty returned along the creek bed and climbed the bank to them. “I
sure staked a full thousan' feet,” he proclaimed. “Number twenty-seven
an' number twenty-eight, though I'd only got the upper stake of
twenty-seven, when I met the first geezer of the bunch behind. He just
straight declared I wasn't goin' to stake twenty-eight. An' I told
him--”

“Yes, yes,” Joy cried. “What did you tell him?”

“Well, I told him straight that if he didn't back up plum five hundred
feet I'd sure punch his frozen nose into ice-cream an' chocolate
eclaires. He backed up, an' I've got in the center-stakes of two full
an' honest five-hundred-foot creek claims. He staked next, and I guess
by now the bunch has Squaw Creek located to head-waters an' down the
other side. Ourn is safe. It's too dark to see now, but we can put out
the corner-stakes in the mornin'.”


When they awoke, they found a change had taken place during the night.
So warm was it, that Shorty and Smoke, still in their mutual blankets,
estimated the temperature at no more than twenty below. The cold snap
had broken. On top of their blankets lay six inches of frost crystals.

“Good morning! how are your feet?” was Smoke's greeting across the ashes
of the fire to where Joy Gastell, carefully shaking aside the snow, was
sitting up in her sleeping-furs.

Shorty built the fire and quarried ice from the creek, while Smoke
cooked breakfast. Daylight came on as they finished the meal.

“You go an' fix them corner-stakes, Smoke,” Shorty said. “There's gravel
under where I chopped ice for the coffee, an' I'm goin' to melt water
and wash a pan of that same gravel for luck.”

Smoke departed, axe in hand, to blaze the stakes. Starting from the
down-stream center-stake of 'twenty-seven,' he headed at right angles
across the narrow valley towards its rim. He proceeded methodically,
almost automatically, for his mind was alive with recollections of
the night before. He felt, somehow, that he had won to empery over the
delicate lines and firm muscles of those feet and ankles he had rubbed
with snow, and this empery seemed to extend to the rest and all of
this woman of his kind. In dim and fiery ways a feeling of possession
mastered him. It seemed that all that was necessary was for him to walk
up to this Joy Gastell, take her hand in his, and say “Come.”

It was in this mood that he discovered something that made him forget
empery over the white feet of woman. At the valley rim he blazed no
corner-stake. He did not reach the valley rim, but, instead, he found
himself confronted by another stream. He lined up with his eye a blasted
willow tree and a big and recognizable spruce. He returned to the stream
where were the center-stakes. He followed the bed of the creek around a
wide horseshoe bend through the flat and found that the two creeks were
the same creek. Next, he floundered twice through the snow from valley
rim to valley rim, running the first line from the lower stake of
'twenty-seven,' the second from the upper stake of 'twenty-eight,' and
he found that THE UPPER STAKE OF THE LATTER WAS LOWER THAN THE LOWER
STAKE OF THE FORMER. In the gray twilight and half-darkness Shorty had
located their two claims on the horseshoe.

Smoke plodded back to the little camp. Shorty, at the end of washing a
pan of gravel, exploded at sight of him.

“We got it!” Shorty cried, holding out the pan. “Look at it! A nasty
mess of gold. Two hundred right there if it's a cent. She runs rich
from the top of the wash-gravel. I've churned around placers some, but I
never got butter like what's in this pan.”

Smoke cast an incurious glance at the coarse gold, poured himself a
cup of coffee at the fire, and sat down. Joy sensed something wrong
and looked at him with eagerly solicitous eyes. Shorty, however, was
disgruntled by his partner's lack of delight in the discovery.

“Why don't you kick in an' get excited?” he demanded. “We got our pile
right here, unless you're stickin' up your nose at two-hundred-dollar
pans.”

Smoke took a swallow of coffee before replying. “Shorty, why are our two
claims here like the Panama Canal?”

“What's the answer?”

“Well, the eastern entrance of the Panama Canal is west of the western
entrance, that's all.”

“Go on,” Shorty said. “I ain't seen the joke yet.”

“In short, Shorty, you staked our two claims on a big horseshoe bend.”

Shorty set the gold pan down in the snow and stood up. “Go on,” he
repeated.

“The upper stake of 'twenty-eight' is ten feet below the lower stake of
'twenty-seven.'”

“You mean we ain't got nothin', Smoke?”

“Worse than that; we've got ten feet less than nothing.”

Shorty departed down the bank on the run. Five minutes later he
returned. In response to Joy's look, he nodded. Without speech, he went
over to a log and sat down to gaze steadily at the snow in front of his
moccasins.

“We might as well break camp and start back for Dawson,” Smoke said,
beginning to fold the blankets.

“I am sorry, Smoke,” Joy said. “It's all my fault.”

“It's all right,” he answered. “All in the day's work, you know.”

“But it's my fault, wholly mine,” she persisted. “Dad's staked for me
down near Discovery, I know. I'll give you my claim.”

He shook his head.

“Shorty,” she pleaded.

Shorty shook his head and began to laugh. It was a colossal laugh.
Chuckles and muffled explosions yielded to hearty roars.

“It ain't hysterics,” he explained. “I sure get powerful amused at
times, an' this is one of them.”

His gaze chanced to fall on the gold-pan. He walked over and gravely
kicked it, scattering the gold over the landscape.

“It ain't ourn,” he said. “It belongs to the geezer I backed up five
hundred feet last night. An' what gets me is four hundred an' ninety
of them feet was to the good--his good. Come on, Smoke. Let's start the
hike to Dawson. Though if you're hankerin' to kill me I won't lift a
finger to prevent.”




IV. SHORTY DREAMS.


“Funny you don't gamble none,” Shorty said to Smoke one night in the
Elkhorn. “Ain't it in your blood?”

“It is,” Smoke answered. “But the statistics are in my head. I like an
even break for my money.”

All about them, in the huge bar-room, arose the click and rattle and
rumble of a dozen games, at which fur-clad, moccasined men tried their
luck. Smoke waved his hand to include them all.

“Look at them,” he said. “It's cold mathematics that they will lose more
than they win to-night, that the big proportion are losing right now.”

“You're sure strong on figgers,” Shorty murmured admiringly. “An' in
the main you're right. But they's such a thing as facts. An' one fact is
streaks of luck. They's times when every geezer playin' wins, as I know,
for I've sat in such games an' saw more'n one bank busted. The only way
to win at gamblin' is wait for a hunch that you've got a lucky streak
comin' and then play it to the roof.”

“It sounds simple,” Smoke criticized. “So simple I can't see how men can
lose.”

“The trouble is,” Shorty admitted, “that most men gets fooled on their
hunches. On occasion I sure get fooled on mine. The thing is to try an'
find out.”

Smoke shook his head. “That's a statistic, too, Shorty. Most men prove
wrong on their hunches.”

“But don't you ever get one of them streaky feelin's that all you got to
do is put your money down an' pick a winner?”

Smoke laughed. “I'm too scared of the percentage against me. But I'll
tell you what, Shorty. I'll throw a dollar on the 'high card' right now
and see if it will buy us a drink.”

Smoke was edging his way in to the faro table, when Shorty caught his
arm.

“Hold on. I'm gettin' one of them hunches now. You put that dollar on
roulette.”

They went over to a roulette table near the bar.

“Wait till I give the word,” Shorty counselled.

“What number?” Smoke asked.

“Pick it yourself. But wait till I say let her go.”

“You don't mean to say I've got an even chance on that table?” Smoke
argued.

“As good as the next geezer's.”

“But not as good as the bank's.”

“Wait an' see,” Shorty urged. “Now! Let her go!”

The game-keeper had just sent the little ivory ball whirling around the
smooth rim above the revolving, many-slotted wheel. Smoke, at the lower
end of the table, reached over a player, and blindly tossed the dollar.
It slid along the smooth, green cloth and stopped fairly in the center
of “34.”

The ball came to rest, and the game-keeper announced, “Thirty-four
wins!” He swept the table, and alongside of Smoke's dollar, stacked
thirty-five dollars. Smoke drew the money in, and Shorty slapped him on
the shoulder.

“Now, that was the real goods of a hunch, Smoke! How'd I know it?
There's no tellin'. I just knew you'd win. Why, if that dollar of
yourn'd fell on any other number it'd won just the same. When the hunch
is right, you just can't help winnin'.”

“Suppose it had come 'double naught'?” Smoke queried, as they made their
way to the bar.

“Then your dollar'd been on 'double naught,'” was Shorty's answer.
“They's no gettin' away from it. A hunch is a hunch. Here's how. Come on
back to the table. I got a hunch, after pickin' you for a winner, that I
can pick some few numbers myself.”

“Are you playing a system?” Smoke asked, at the end of ten minutes, when
his partner had dropped a hundred dollars.

Shorty shook his head indignantly, as he spread his chips out in the
vicinities of “3,” “11,” and “17,” and tossed a spare chip on the green.

“Hell is sure cluttered with geezers that played systems,” he exposited,
as the keeper raked the table.

From idly watching, Smoke became fascinated, following closely every
detail of the game from the whirling of the ball to the making and the
paying of the bets. He made no plays, however, merely contenting himself
with looking on. Yet so interested was he, that Shorty, announcing that
he had had enough, with difficulty drew Smoke away from the table.

The game-keeper returned Shorty the gold-sack he had deposited as a
credential for playing, and with it went a slip of paper on which was
scribbled, “Out--$350.00.” Shorty carried the sack and the paper across
the room and handed them to the weigher, who sat behind a large pair
of gold-scales. Out of Shorty's sack he weighed three hundred and fifty
dollars, which he poured into the coffer of the house.

“That hunch of yours was another one of those statistics,” Smoke jeered.

“I had to play it, didn't I, in order to find out?” Shorty retorted.
“I reckon I was crowdin' some just on account of tryin' to convince you
they's such a thing as hunches.”

“Never mind, Shorty,” Smoke laughed. “I've got a hunch right now--”

Shorty's eyes sparkled as he cried eagerly: “What is it? Kick in an'
play it pronto.”

“It's not that kind, Shorty. Now, what I've got is a hunch that some day
I'll work out a system that will beat the spots off that table.”

“System!” Shorty groaned, then surveyed his partner with a vast pity.
“Smoke, listen to your side-kicker an' leave system alone. Systems is
sure losers. They ain't no hunches in systems.”

“That's why I like them,” Smoke answered. “A system is statistical.
When you get the right system you can't lose, and that's the difference
between it and a hunch. You never know when the right hunch is going
wrong.”

“But I know a lot of systems that went wrong, an' I never seen a system
win.” Shorty paused and sighed. “Look here, Smoke, if you're gettin'
cracked on systems this ain't no place for you, an' it's about time we
hit the trail again.”


During the several following weeks, the two partners played at cross
purposes. Smoke was bent on spending his time watching the roulette game
in the Elkhorn, while Shorty was equally bent on travelling trail.
At last Smoke put his foot down when a stampede was proposed for two
hundred miles down the Yukon.

“Look here, Shorty,” he said, “I'm not going. That trip will take ten
days, and before that time I hope to have my system in proper working
order. I could almost win with it now. What are you dragging me around
the country this way for, anyway?”

“Smoke, I got to take care of you,” was Shorty's reply. “You're gettin'
nutty. I'd drag you stampedin' to Jericho or the North Pole if I could
keep you away from that table.”

“It's all right, Shorty. But just remember I've reached full man-grown,
meat-eating size. The only dragging you'll do, will be dragging home the
dust I'm going to win with that system of mine, and you'll most likely
have to do it with a dog-team.”

Shorty's response was a groan.

“And I don't want you to be bucking any games on your own,” Smoke went
on. “We're going to divide the winnings, and I'll need all our money to
get started. That system's young yet, and it's liable to trip me for a
few falls before I get it lined up.”


At last, after long hours and days spent at watching the table, the
night came when Smoke proclaimed he was ready, and Shorty, glum
and pessimistic, with all the seeming of one attending a funeral,
accompanied his partner to the Elkhorn. Smoke bought a stack of chips
and stationed himself at the game-keeper's end of the table. Again and
again the ball was whirled, and the other players won or lost, but Smoke
did not venture a chip. Shorty waxed impatient.

“Buck in, buck in,” he urged. “Let's get this funeral over. What's the
matter? Got cold feet?”

Smoke shook his head and waited. A dozen plays went by, and then,
suddenly, he placed ten one-dollar chips on “26.” The number won, and
the keeper paid Smoke three hundred and fifty dollars. A dozen plays
went by, twenty plays, and thirty, when Smoke placed ten dollars on
“32.” Again he received three hundred and fifty dollars.

“It's a hunch!” Shorty whispered vociferously in his ear. “Ride it! Ride
it!”

Half an hour went by, during which Smoke was inactive, then he placed
ten dollars on “34” and won.

“A hunch!” Shorty whispered.

“Nothing of the sort,” Smoke whispered back. “It's the system. Isn't she
a dandy?”

“You can't tell me,” Shorty contended. “Hunches comes in mighty
funny ways. You might think it's a system, but it ain't. Systems is
impossible. They can't happen. It's a sure hunch you're playin'.”

Smoke now altered his play. He bet more frequently, with single chips,
scattered here and there, and he lost more often than he won.

“Quit it,” Shorty advised. “Cash in. You've rung the bull's-eye three
times, an' you're ahead a thousand. You can't keep it up.”

At this moment the ball started whirling, and Smoke dropped ten chips on
“26.” The ball fell into the slot of “26,” and the keeper again paid him
three hundred and fifty dollars.

“If you're plum crazy an' got the immortal cinch, bet 'em the limit,”
 Shorty said. “Put down twenty-five next time.”

A quarter of an hour passed, during which Smoke won and lost on small
scattering bets. Then, with the abruptness that characterized his big
betting, he placed twenty-five dollars on the “double naught,” and the
keeper paid him eight hundred and seventy-five dollars.

“Wake me up, Smoke, I'm dreamin',” Shorty moaned.

Smoke smiled, consulted his notebook, and became absorbed in
calculation. He continually drew the notebook from his pocket, and from
time to time jotted down figures.

A crowd had packed densely around the table, while the players
themselves were attempting to cover the same numbers he covered. It was
then that a change came over his play. Ten times in succession he placed
ten dollars on “18” and lost. At this stage he was deserted by the
hardiest. He changed his number and won another three hundred and fifty
dollars. Immediately the players were back with him, deserting again
after a series of losing bets.

“Quit it, Smoke, quit it,” Shorty advised. “The longest string of
hunches is only so long, an' your string's finished. No more bull's-eyes
for you.”

“I'm going to ring her once again before I cash in,” Smoke answered.

For a few minutes, with varying luck, he played scattering chips over
the table, and then dropped twenty-five dollars on the “double naught.”

“I'll take my slip now,” he said to the dealer, as he won.

“Oh, you don't need to show it to me,” Shorty said, as they walked to
the weigher. “I been keepin' track. You're something like thirty-six
hundred to the good. How near am I?”

“Thirty-six-sixty,” Smoke replied. “And now you've got to pack the dust
home. That was the agreement.”


“Don't crowd your luck,” Shorty pleaded with Smoke, the next night, in
the cabin, as he evidenced preparations to return to the Elkhorn. “You
played a mighty long string of hunches, but you played it out. If you go
back you'll sure drop all your winnings.”

“But I tell you it isn't hunches, Shorty. It's statistics. It's a
system. It can't lose.”

“System be damned. They ain't no such a thing as system. I made
seventeen straight passes at a crap table once. Was it system? Nope. It
was fool luck, only I had cold feet an' didn't dast let it ride. If it'd
rid, instead of me drawin' down after the third pass, I'd 'a' won over
thirty thousan' on the original two-bit piece.”

“Just the same, Shorty, this is a real system.”

“Huh! You got to show me.”

“I did show you. Come on with me now, and I'll show you again.”

When they entered the Elkhorn, all eyes centered on Smoke, and those
about the table made way for him as he took up his old place at the
keeper's end. His play was quite unlike that of the previous night. In
the course of an hour and a half he made only four bets, but each bet
was for twenty-five dollars, and each bet won. He cashed in thirty-five
hundred dollars, and Shorty carried the dust home to the cabin.

“Now's the time to jump the game,” Shorty advised, as he sat on the edge
of his bunk and took off his moccasins. “You're seven thousan' ahead. A
man's a fool that'd crowd his luck harder.”

“Shorty, a man would be a blithering lunatic if he didn't keep on
backing a winning system like mine.”

“Smoke, you're a sure bright boy. You're college-learnt. You know more'n
a minute than I could know in forty thousan' years. But just the same
you're dead wrong when you call your luck a system. I've been around
some, an' seen a few, an' I tell you straight an' confidential an'
all-assurin', a system to beat a bankin' game ain't possible.”

“But I'm showing you this one. It's a pipe.”

“No, you're not, Smoke. It's a pipe-dream. I'm asleep. Bimeby I'll wake
up, an' build the fire, an' start breakfast.”

“Well, my unbelieving friend, there's the dust. Heft it.”

So saying, Smoke tossed the bulging gold-sack upon his partner's knees.
It weighed thirty-five pounds, and Shorty was fully aware of the crush
of its impact on his flesh.

“It's real,” Smoke hammered his point home.

“Huh! I've saw some mighty real dreams in my time. In a dream all things
is possible. In real life a system ain't possible. Now, I ain't never
been to college, but I'm plum justified in sizin' up this gamblin' orgy
of ourn as a sure-enough dream.”

“Hamilton's 'Law of Parsimony,'” Smoke laughed.

“I ain't never heard of the geezer, but his dope's sure right. I'm
dreamin', Smoke, an' you're just snoopin' around in my dream an'
tormentin' me with system. If you love me, if you sure do love me,
you'll just yell, 'Shorty! Wake up!' An' I'll wake up an' start
breakfast.”


The third night of play, as Smoke laid his first bet, the game-keeper
shoved fifteen dollars back to him.

“Ten's all you can play,” he said. “The limit's come down.”

“Gettin' picayune,” Shorty sneered.

“No one has to play at this table that don't want to,” the keeper
retorted. “And I'm willing to say straight out in meeting that we'd
sooner your pardner didn't play at our table.”

“Scared of his system, eh?” Shorty challenged, as the keeper paid over
three hundred and fifty dollars.

“I ain't saying I believe in system, because I don't. There never was
a system that'd beat roulette or any percentage game. But just the same
I've seen some queer strings of luck, and I ain't going to let this bank
go bust if I can help it.”

“Cold feet.”

“Gambling is just as much business, my friend, as any other business. We
ain't philanthropists.”

Night by night, Smoke continued to win. His method of play varied.
Expert after expert, in the jam about the table, scribbled down his bets
and numbers in vain attempts to work out his system. They complained of
their inability to get a clew to start with, and swore that it was pure
luck, though the most colossal streak of it they had ever seen.

It was Smoke's varied play that obfuscated them. Sometimes, consulting
his note-book or engaging in long calculations, an hour elapsed without
his staking a chip. At other times he would win three limit-bets and
clean up a thousand dollars and odd in five or ten minutes. At still
other times, his tactics would be to scatter single chips prodigally
and amazingly over the table. This would continue for from ten to thirty
minutes of play, when, abruptly, as the ball whirled through the last
few of its circles, he would play the limit on column, colour, and
number, and win all three. Once, to complete confusion in the minds of
those that strove to divine his secret, he lost forty straight bets,
each at the limit. But each night, play no matter how diversely, Shorty
carried home thirty-five hundred dollars for him.

“It ain't no system,” Shorty expounded at one of their bed-going
discussions. “I follow you, an' follow you, but they ain't no figgerin'
it out. You never play twice the same. All you do is pick winners when
you want to, an' when you don't want to, you just on purpose don't.”

“Maybe you're nearer right than you think, Shorty. I've just got to pick
losers sometimes. It's part of the system.”

“System--hell! I've talked with every gambler in town, an' the last one
is agreed they ain't no such thing as system.”

“Yet I'm showing them one all the time.”

“Look here, Smoke.” Shorty paused over the candle, in the act of blowing
it out. “I'm real irritated. Maybe you think this is a candle. It ain't.
No, sir! An' this ain't me neither. I'm out on trail somewheres, in my
blankets, lyin' flat on my back with my mouth open, an' dreamin' all
this. That ain't you talkin', any more than this candle is a candle.”

“It's funny, how I happen to be dreaming along with you then,” Smoke
persisted.

“No, it ain't. You're part of my dream, that's all. I've hearn many a
man talk in my dreams. I want to tell you one thing, Smoke. I'm gettin'
mangy an' mad. If this here dream keeps up much more I'm goin' to bite
my veins an' howl.”


On the sixth night of play at the Elkhorn, the limit was reduced to five
dollars.

“It's all right,” Smoke assured the game-keeper. “I want thirty-five
hundred to-night, as usual, and you only compel me to play longer. I've
got to pick twice as many winners, that's all.”

“Why don't you buck somebody else's table?” the keeper demanded
wrathfully.

“Because I like this one.” Smoke glanced over to the roaring stove only
a few feet away. “Besides, there are no draughts here, and it is warm
and comfortable.”

On the ninth night, when Shorty had carried the dust home, he had a fit.
“I quit, Smoke, I quit,” he began. “I know when I got enough. I ain't
dreamin'. I'm wide awake. A system can't be, but you got one just the
same. There's nothin' in the rule o' three. The almanac's clean out.
The world's gone smash. There's nothin' regular an' uniform no more.
The multiplication table's gone loco. Two is eight, nine is eleven, and
two-times-six is eight hundred an' forty-six--an'--an' a half.
Anything is everything, an' nothing's all, an' twice all is cold-cream,
milk-shakes, an' calico horses. You've got a system. Figgers beat the
figgerin'. What ain't is, an' what isn't has to be. The sun rises in the
west, the moon's a pay-streak, the stars is canned corn-beef, scurvy's
the blessin' of God, him that dies kicks again, rocks floats, water's
gas, I ain't me, you're somebody else, an' mebbe we're twins if we ain't
hashed-brown potatoes fried in verdigris. Wake me up! Somebody! Oh! Wake
me up!”


The next morning a visitor came to the cabin. Smoke knew him, Harvey
Moran, the owner of all the games in the Tivoli. There was a note of
appeal in his deep gruff voice as he plunged into his business.

“It's like this, Smoke,” he began. “You've got us all guessing. I'm
representing nine other game-owners and myself from all the saloons in
town. We don't understand. We know that no system ever worked against
roulette. All the mathematic sharps in the colleges have told us
gamblers the same thing. They say that roulette itself is the system,
the one and only system, and, therefore, that no system can beat it, for
that would mean arithmetic has gone bug-house.”

Shorty nodded his head violently.

“If a system can beat a system, then there's no such thing as system,”
 the gambler went on. “In such a case anything could be possible--a thing
could be in two different places at once, or two things could be in the
same place that's only large enough for one at the same time.”

“Well, you've seen me play,” Smoke answered defiantly; “and if you think
it's only a string of luck on my part, why worry?”

“That's the trouble. We can't help worrying. It's a system you've got,
and all the time we know it can't be. I've watched you five nights now,
and all I can make out is that you favour certain numbers and keep on
winning. Now the ten of us game-owners have got together, and we want to
make a friendly proposition. We'll put a roulette-table in a back room
of the Elkhorn, pool the bank against you, and have you buck us. It will
be all quiet and private. Just you and Shorty and us. What do you say?”

“I think it's the other way around,” Smoke answered. “It's up to you to
come and see me. I'll be playing in the barroom of the Elkhorn to-night.
You can watch me there just as well.”


That night, when Smoke took up his customary place at the table,
the keeper shut down the game. “The game's closed,” he said. “Boss's
orders.”

But the assembled game-owners were not to be balked. In a few minutes
they arranged a pool, each putting in a thousand, and took over the
table.

“Come on and buck us,” Harvey Moran challenged, as the keeper sent the
ball on its first whirl around.

“Give me the twenty-five limit,” Smoke suggested.

“Sure; go to it.”

Smoke immediately placed twenty-five chips on the “double naught,” and
won.

Moran wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Go on,” he said. “We got ten
thousand in this bank.”

At the end of an hour and a half, the ten thousand was Smoke's.

“The bank's bust,” the keeper announced.

“Got enough?” Smoke asked.

The game-owners looked at one another. They were awed. They, the fatted
proteges of the laws of chance, were undone. They were up against one
who had more intimate access to those laws, or who had invoked higher
and undreamed laws.

“We quit,” Moran said. “Ain't that right, Burke?”

Big Burke, who owned the games in the M. and G. Saloon, nodded. “The
impossible has happened,” he said. “This Smoke here has got a system all
right. If we let him go on we'll all bust. All I can see, if we're goin'
to keep our tables running, is to cut down the limit to a dollar, or to
ten cents, or a cent. He won't win much in a night with such stakes.”

All looked at Smoke.

He shrugged his shoulders. “In that case, gentlemen, I'll have to hire a
gang of men to play at all your tables. I can pay them ten dollars for a
four-hour shift and make money.”

“Then we'll shut down our tables,” Big Burke replied. “Unless--” He
hesitated and ran his eye over his fellows to see that they were with
him. “Unless you're willing to talk business. What will you sell the
system for?”

“Thirty thousand dollars,” Smoke answered. “That's a tax of three
thousand apiece.”

They debated and nodded.

“And you'll tell us your system?”

“Surely.”

“And you'll promise not to play roulette in Dawson ever again?”

“No, sir,” Smoke said positively. “I'll promise not to play this system
again.”

“My God!” Moran exploded. “You haven't got other systems, have you?”

“Hold on!” Shorty cried. “I want to talk to my pardner. Come over here,
Smoke, on the side.”

Smoke followed into a quiet corner of the room, while hundreds of
curious eyes centered on him and Shorty.

“Look here, Smoke,” Shorty whispered hoarsely. “Mebbe it ain't a dream.
In which case you're sellin' out almighty cheap. You've sure got the
world by the slack of its pants. They's millions in it. Shake it! Shake
it hard!”

“But if it's a dream?” Smoke queried softly.

“Then, for the sake of the dream an' the love of Mike, stick them
gamblers up good and plenty. What's the good of dreamin' if you can't
dream to the real right, dead sure, eternal finish?”

“Fortunately, this isn't a dream, Shorty.”

“Then if you sell out for thirty thousan', I'll never forgive you.”

“When I sell out for thirty thousand, you'll fall on my neck an' wake
up to find out that you haven't been dreaming at all. This is no dream,
Shorty. In about two minutes you'll see you have been wide awake all the
time. Let me tell you that when I sell out it's because I've got to sell
out.”

Back at the table, Smoke informed the game-owners that his offer still
held. They proffered him their paper to the extent of three thousand
each.

“Hold out for the dust,” Shorty cautioned.

“I was about to intimate that I'd take the money weighed out,” Smoke
said.

The owner of the Elkhorn cashed their paper, and Shorty took possession
of the gold-dust.

“Now, I don't want to wake up,” he chortled, as he hefted the various
sacks. “Toted up, it's a seventy thousan' dream. It'd be too blamed
expensive to open my eyes, roll out of the blankets, an' start
breakfast.”

“What's your system?” Big Burke demanded. “We've paid for it, and we
want it.”

Smoke led the way to the table. “Now, gentlemen, bear with me a moment.
This isn't an ordinary system. It can scarcely be called legitimate, but
its one great virtue is that it works. I've got my suspicious, but I'm
not saying anything. You watch. Mr. Keeper, be ready with the ball.
Wait. I am going to pick '26.' Consider I've bet on it. Be ready, Mr.
Keeper--Now!”

The ball whirled around.

“You observe,” Smoke went on, “that '9' was directly opposite.”

The ball finished in “26.”

Big Burke swore deep in his chest, and all waited.

“For 'double naught' to win, '11' must be opposite. Try it yourself and
see.”

“But the system?” Moran demanded impatiently. “We know you can pick
winning numbers, and we know what those numbers are; but how do you do
it?”

“By observed sequences. By accident I chanced twice to notice the ball
whirled when '9' was opposite. Both times '26' won. After that I saw it
happen again. Then I looked for other sequences, and found them. 'Double
naught' opposite fetches '32,' and '11' fetches 'double naught.'
It doesn't always happen, but it USUALLY happens. You notice, I say
'usually.' As I said before, I have my suspicions, but I'm not saying
anything.”

Big Burke, with a sudden flash of comprehension reached over, stopped
the wheel, and examined it carefully. The heads of the nine other
game-owners bent over and joined in the examination. Big Burke
straightened up and cast a glance at the near-by stove.

“Hell,” he said. “It wasn't any system at all. The table stood close
to the fire, and the blamed wheel's warped. And we've been worked to a
frazzle. No wonder he liked this table. He couldn't have bucked for sour
apples at any other table.”

Harvey Moran gave a great sigh of relief and wiped his forehead. “Well,
anyway,” he said, “it's cheap at the price just to find out that
it wasn't a system.” His face began to work, and then he broke into
laughter and slapped Smoke on the shoulder. “Smoke, you had us going for
a while, and we patting ourselves on the back because you were letting
our tables alone! Say, I've got some real fizz I'll open if you'll all
come over to the Tivoli with me.”

Later, back in the cabin, Shorty silently overhauled and hefted the
various bulging gold-sacks. He finally piled them on the table, sat down
on the edge of his bunk, and began taking off his moccasins.

“Seventy thousan',” he calculated. “It weighs three hundred and fifty
pounds. And all out of a warped wheel an' a quick eye. Smoke, you
eat'm raw, you eat'm alive, you work under water, you've given me the
jim-jams; but just the same I know it's a dream. It's only in dreams
that the good things comes true. I'm almighty unanxious to wake up. I
hope I never wake up.”

“Cheer up,” Smoke answered. “You won't. There are a lot of philosophy
sharps that think men are sleep-walkers. You're in good company.”

Shorty got up, went to the table, selected the heaviest sack, and
cuddled it in his arms as if it were a baby. “I may be sleep-walkin',”
 he said, “but as you say, I'm sure in mighty good company.”




V. THE MAN ON THE OTHER BANK.


It was before Smoke Bellew staked the farcical town-site of Tra-Lee,
made the historic corner of eggs that nearly broke Swiftwater Bill's
bank account, or won the dog-team race down the Yukon for an even
million dollars, that he and Shorty parted company on the Upper
Klondike. Shorty's task was to return down the Klondike to Dawson to
record some claims they had staked.

Smoke, with the dog-team, turned south. His quest was Surprise Lake and
the mythical Two Cabins. His traverse was to cut the headwaters of the
Indian River and cross the unknown region over the mountains to the
Stewart River. Here, somewhere, rumour persisted, was Surprise Lake,
surrounded by jagged mountains and glaciers, its bottom paved with raw
gold. Old-timers, it was said, whose very names were forgotten in the
frosts of earlier years, had dived into the icy waters of Surprise Lake
and fetched lump-gold to the surface in both hands. At different times,
parties of old-timers had penetrated the forbidding fastness and sampled
the lake's golden bottom. But the water was too cold. Some died in the
water, being pulled up dead. Others died later of consumption. And one
who had gone down never did come up. All survivors had planned to return
and drain the lake, yet none had ever gone back. Disaster always smote
them. One man fell into an air-hole below Forty Mile; another was killed
and eaten by his dogs; a third was crushed by a falling tree. And so the
tale ran. Surprise Lake was a hoodoo; its location was unremembered; and
the gold still paved its undrained bottom.

Two Cabins, no less mythical, was more definitely located. “Five
sleeps,” up the McQuestion River from the Stewart, stood two ancient
cabins. So ancient were they that they must have been built before
ever the first known gold-hunter had entered the Yukon Basin. Wandering
moose-hunters, whom even Smoke had met and talked with, claimed to have
found the two cabins in the old days, but to have sought vainly for the
mine which those early adventurers must have worked.

“I wish you was goin' with me,” Shorty said wistfully, at parting. “Just
because you got the Indian bug ain't no reason for to go pokin' into
trouble. They's no gettin' away from it, that's loco country you're
bound for. The hoodoo's sure on it, from the first flip to the last
call, judgin' from all you an' me has hearn tell about it.”

“It's all right, Shorty,” replied Smoke. “I'll make the round trip and
be back in Dawson in six weeks. The Yukon trail is packed, and the first
hundred miles or so of the Stewart ought to be packed. Old-timers from
Henderson have told me a number of outfits went up last fall after the
freeze-up. When I strike their trail I ought to hit her up forty or
fifty miles a day. I'm likely to be back inside a month, once I get
across.”

“Yep, once you get acrost. But it's the gettin' acrost that worries me.
Well, so long, Smoke. Keep your eyes open for that hoodoo, that's all.
An' don't be ashamed to turn back if you don't kill any meat.”


A week later, Smoke found himself among the jumbled ranges south of
Indian River. On the divide from the Klondike he had abandoned the sled
and packed his wolf-dogs. The six big huskies each carried fifty pounds,
and on his own back was an equal burden. Through the soft snow he led
the way, packing it down under his snow-shoes, and behind, in single
file, toiled the dogs.

He loved the life, the deep arctic winter, the silent wilderness,
the unending snow-surface unpressed by the foot of any man. About him
towered icy peaks unnamed and uncharted. No hunter's camp-smoke, rising
in the still air of the valleys, ever caught his eye. He, alone,
moved through the brooding quiet of the untravelled wastes; nor was
he oppressed by the solitude. He loved it all, the day's toil, the
bickering wolf-dogs, the making of the camp in the long twilight, the
leaping stars overhead, and the flaming pageant of the aurora borealis.

Especially he loved his camp at the end of the day, and in it he saw a
picture which he ever yearned to paint and which he knew he would never
forget--a beaten place in the snow, where burned his fire; his bed, a
couple of rabbit-skin robes spread on fresh-chopped spruce-boughs; his
shelter, a stretched strip of canvas that caught and threw back the heat
of the fire; the blackened coffee-pot and pail resting on a length of
log, the moccasins propped on sticks to dry, the snow-shoes up-ended
in the snow; and across the fire the wolf-dogs snuggling to it for
the warmth, wistful and eager, furry and frost-rimed, with bushy tails
curled protectingly over their feet; and all about, pressed backward but
a space, the wall of encircling darkness.

At such times San Francisco, The Billow, and O'Hara seemed very far
away, lost in a remote past, shadows of dreams that had never happened.
He found it hard to believe that he had known any other life than this
of the wild, and harder still was it for him to reconcile himself to the
fact that he had once dabbled and dawdled in the Bohemian drift of city
life. Alone, with no one to talk to, he thought much, and deeply,
and simply. He was appalled by the wastage of his city years, by the
cheapness, now, of the philosophies of the schools and books, of the
clever cynicism of the studio and editorial room, of the cant of the
business men in their clubs. They knew neither food, nor sleep, nor
health; nor could they ever possibly know the sting of real appetite,
the goodly ache of fatigue, nor the rush of mad strong blood that bit
like wine through all one's body as work was done.

And all the time this fine, wise, Spartan Northland had been here, and
he had never known. What puzzled him was, that, with such intrinsic
fitness, he had never heard the slightest calling whisper, had not
himself gone forth to seek. But this, too, he solved in time.

“Look here, Yellow Face, I've got it clear!”

The dog addressed lifted first one forefoot and then the other with
quick, appeasing movements, curled his bush of a tail about them again,
and laughed across the fire.

“Herbert Spencer was nearly forty before he caught the vision of his
greatest efficiency and desire. I'm none so slow. I didn't have to wait
till I was thirty to catch mine. Right here is my efficiency and desire.
Almost, Yellow Face, do I wish I had been born a wolf-boy and been
brother all my days to you and yours.”

For days he wandered through a chaos of canyons and divides which did
not yield themselves to any rational topographical plan. It was as if
they had been flung there by some cosmic joker. In vain he sought for
a creek or feeder that flowed truly south toward the McQuestion and
the Stewart. Then came a mountain storm that blew a blizzard across the
riff-raff of high and shallow divides. Above timber-line, fireless, for
two days, he struggled blindly to find lower levels. On the second day
he came out upon the rim of an enormous palisade. So thickly drove the
snow that he could not see the base of the wall, nor dared he attempt
the descent. He rolled himself in his robes and huddled the dogs about
him in the depths of a snow-drift, but did not permit himself to sleep.

In the morning, the storm spent, he crawled out to investigate. A
quarter of a mile beneath him, beyond all mistake, lay a frozen,
snow-covered lake. About it, on every side, rose jagged peaks. It
answered the description. Blindly, he had found Surprise Lake.

“Well named,” he muttered, an hour later, as he came out upon its
margin. A clump of aged spruce was the only woods. On his way to it,
he stumbled upon three graves, snow-buried, but marked by hand-hewn
head-posts and undecipherable writing. On the edge of the woods was a
small ramshackle cabin. He pulled the latch and entered. In a corner, on
what had once been a bed of spruce-boughs, still wrapped in mangy
furs that had rotted to fragments, lay a skeleton. The last visitor to
Surprise Lake, was Smoke's conclusion, as he picked up a lump of gold as
large as his doubled fist. Beside the lump was a pepper-can filled with
nuggets of the size of walnuts, rough-surfaced, showing no signs of
wash.

So true had the tale run that Smoke accepted without question that the
source of the gold was the lake's bottom. Under many feet of ice and
inaccessible, there was nothing to be done, and at midday, from the rim
of the palisade, he took a farewell look back and down at his find.

“It's all right, Mr. Lake,” he said. “You just keep right on staying
there. I'm coming back to drain you--if that hoodoo doesn't catch me. I
don't know how I got here, but I'll know by the way I go out.”


In a little valley, beside a frozen stream and under beneficent spruce
trees, he built a fire four days later. Somewhere in that white anarchy
he had left behind him was Surprise Lake--somewhere, he knew not where;
for a hundred hours of driftage and struggle through blinding, driving
snow had concealed his course from him, and he knew not in what
direction lay BEHIND. It was as if he had just emerged from a nightmare.
He was not sure whether four days or a week had passed. He had slept
with the dogs, fought across a forgotten number of shallow divides,
followed the windings of weird canyons that ended in pockets, and twice
had managed to make a fire and thaw out frozen moose-meat. And here he
was, well-fed and well-camped. The storm had passed, and it had turned
clear and cold. The lay of the land had again become rational. The creek
he was on was natural in appearance, and tended as it should toward the
southwest. But Surprise Lake was as lost to him as it had been to all
its seekers in the past.

Half a day's journey down the creek brought him to the valley of a
larger stream which he decided was the McQuestion. Here he shot a moose,
and once again each wolf-dog carried a full fifty-pound pack of meat. As
he turned down the McQuestion, he came upon a sled-trail. The late snows
had drifted over, but underneath, it was well packed by travel. His
conclusion was that two camps had been established on the McQuestion,
and that this was the connecting trail. Evidently, Two Cabins had been
found, and it was the lower camp, so he headed down the stream.

It was forty below zero when he camped that night, and he fell asleep
wondering who were the men who had rediscovered the Two Cabins, and if
he would fetch it next day. At the first hint of dawn he was under way,
easily following the half-obliterated trail and packing the recent snow
with his webbed shoes so that the dogs should not wallow.

And then it came, the unexpected, leaping out upon him on a bend of the
river. It seemed to him that he heard and felt simultaneously. The crack
of the rifle came from the right, and the bullet, tearing through and
across the shoulders of his drill parka and woollen coat, pivoted him
half around with the shock of its impact. He staggered on his twisted
snow-shoes to recover balance, and heard a second crack of the rifle.
This time it was a clean miss. He did not wait for more, but plunged
across the snow for the sheltering trees of the bank a hundred feet
away. Again and again the rifle cracked, and he was unpleasantly aware
of a trickle of warm moisture down his back.

He climbed the bank, the dogs floundering behind, and dodged in among
the trees and brush. Slipping out of his snow-shoes, he wallowed forward
at full length and peered cautiously out. Nothing was to be seen.
Whoever had shot at him was lying quiet among the trees of the opposite
bank.

“If something doesn't happen pretty soon,” he muttered at the end of
half an hour, “I'll have to sneak away and build a fire or freeze my
feet. Yellow Face, what'd you do, lying in the frost with circulation
getting slack and a man trying to plug you?”

He crawled back a few yards, packed down the snow, danced a jig that
sent the blood back into his feet, and managed to endure another half
hour. Then, from down the river, he heard the unmistakable jingle of
dog-bells. Peering out, he saw a sled round the bend. Only one man was
with it, straining at the gee-pole and urging the dogs along. The effect
on Smoke was one of shock, for it was the first human he had seen since
he parted from Shorty three weeks before. His next thought was of the
potential murderer concealed on the opposite bank.

Without exposing himself, Smoke whistled warningly. The man did not
hear, and came on rapidly. Again, and more sharply, Smoke whistled. The
man whoa'd his dogs, stopped, and had turned and faced Smoke when the
rifle cracked. The instant afterwards, Smoke fired into the wood in
the direction of the sound. The man on the river had been struck by
the first shot. The shock of the high velocity bullet staggered him.
He stumbled awkwardly to the sled, half-falling, and pulled a rifle out
from under the lashings. As he strove to raise it to his shoulder, he
crumpled at the waist and sank down slowly to a sitting posture on the
sled. Then, abruptly, as the gun went off aimlessly, he pitched backward
and across a corner of the sled-load, so that Smoke could see only his
legs and stomach.

From below came more jingling bells. The man did not move. Around the
bend swung three sleds, accompanied by half a dozen men. Smoke cried
warningly, but they had seen the condition of the first sled, and they
dashed on to it. No shots came from the other bank, and Smoke, calling
his dogs to follow, emerged into the open. There were exclamations from
the men, and two of them, flinging off the mittens of their right hands,
levelled their rifles at him.

“Come on, you red-handed murderer, you,” one of them, a black-bearded
man, commanded. “An' jest pitch that gun of yourn in the snow.”

Smoke hesitated, then dropped his rifle and came up to them.

“Go through him, Louis, an' take his weapons,” the black-bearded man
ordered.

Louis was a French-Canadian voyageur, Smoke decided, as were four of
the others. His search revealed only Smoke's hunting knife, which was
appropriated.

“Now, what have you got to say for yourself, stranger, before I shoot
you dead?” the black-bearded man demanded.

“That you're making a mistake if you think I killed that man,” Smoke
answered.

A cry came from one of the voyageurs. He had quested along the trail and
found Smoke's tracks where he had left it to take refuge on the bank.
The man explained the nature of his find.

“What'd you kill Joe Kinade for?” he of the black beard asked.

“I tell you I didn't--” Smoke began.

“Aw, what's the good of talkin'? We got you red-handed. Right up there's
where you left the trail when you heard him comin'. You laid among
the trees an' bushwhacked him. A short shot. You couldn't 'a' missed.
Pierre, go an' get that gun he dropped.”

“You might let me tell what happened,” Smoke objected.

“You shut up,” the man snarled at him. “I reckon your gun'll tell the
story.”

All the men examined Smoke's rifle, ejecting and counting the
cartridges, and examining the barrel at muzzle and breech.

“One shot,” Blackbeard concluded.

Pierre, with nostrils that quivered and distended like a deer's, sniffed
at the breech.

“Him one fresh shot,” he said.

“The bullet entered his back,” Smoke said. “He was facing me when he was
shot. You see, it came from the other bank.”

Blackbeard considered this proposition for a scant second, and shook his
head. “Nope. It won't do. Turn him around to face the other bank--that's
how you whopped him in the back. Some of you boys run up an' down the
trail, and see if you can see any tracks making for the other bank.”

Their report was that on that side the snow was unbroken. Not even a
snow-shoe rabbit had crossed it. Blackbeard, bending over the dead man,
straightened up, with a woolly, furry wad in his hand. Shredding this,
he found imbedded in the center the bullet which had perforated the
body. Its nose was spread to the size of a half dollar, its butt-end,
steel-jacketed, was undamaged. He compared it with a cartridge from
Smoke's belt.

“That's plain enough evidence, stranger, to satisfy a blind man. It's
soft-nosed an' steel-jacketed; yourn is soft-nosed and steel-jacketed.
It's thirty-thirty; yourn is thirty-thirty. It's manufactured by the
J. and T. Arms Company; yourn is manufactured by the J. and T. Arms
Company. Now you come along, an' we'll go over to the bank an' see jest
how you done it.”

“I was bushwhacked myself,” Smoke said. “Look at the hole in my parka.”

While Blackbeard examined it, one of the voyageurs threw open the breech
of the dead man's gun. It was patent to all that it had been fired once.
The empty cartridge was still in the chamber.

“A damn shame poor Joe didn't get you,” Blackbeard said bitterly. “But
he did pretty well with a hole like that in him. Come on, you.”

“Search the other bank first,” Smoke urged.

“You shut up an' come on, an' let the facts do the talkin'.”

They left the trail at the same spot he had, and followed it on up the
bank and then in among the trees.

“Him dance that place keep him feet warm,” Louis pointed out. “That
place him crawl on belly. That place him put one elbow w'en him shoot.”

“And by God there's the empty cartridge he done it with!” was
Blackbeard's discovery. “Boys, there's only one thing to do--”

“You might ask me how I came to fire that shot,” Smoke interrupted.

“An' I might knock your teeth into your gullet if you butt in again.
You can answer them questions later on. Now, boys, we're decent an'
law-abidin', an' we got to handle this right an' regular. How far do you
reckon we've come, Pierre?”

“Twenty mile, I t'ink for sure.”

“All right. We'll cache the outfit an' run him an' poor Joe back to
Two Cabins. I reckon we've seen an' can testify to what'll stretch his
neck.”


It was three hours after dark when the dead man, Smoke, and his captors
arrived at Two Cabins. By the starlight, Smoke could make out a dozen or
more recently built cabins snuggling about a larger and older cabin on
a flat by the river bank. Thrust inside this older cabin, he found it
tenanted by a young giant of a man, his wife, and an old blind man. The
woman, whom her husband called “Lucy,” was herself a strapping creature
of the frontier type. The old man, as Smoke learned afterwards, had
been a trapper on the Stewart for years, and had gone finally blind the
winter before. The camp of Two Cabins, he was also to learn, had been
made the previous fall by a dozen men who arrived in half as many
poling-boats loaded with provisions. Here they had found the blind
trapper, on the site of Two Cabins, and about his cabin they had built
their own. Later arrivals, mushing up the ice with dog teams, had
tripled the population. There was plenty of meat in camp, and good
low-pay dirt had been discovered and was being worked.

In five minutes, all the men of Two Cabins were jammed into the room.
Smoke, shoved off into a corner, ignored and scowled at, his hands and
feet tied with thongs of moose-hide, looked on. Thirty-eight men he
counted, a wild and husky crew, all frontiersmen of the States or
voyageurs from Upper Canada. His captors told the tale over and over,
each the center of an excited and wrathful group. There were mutterings
of: “Lynch him now! Why wait?” And, once, a big Irishman was restrained
only by force from rushing upon the helpless prisoner and giving him a
beating.

It was while counting the men that Smoke caught sight of a familiar
face. It was Breck, the man whose boat Smoke had run through the rapids.
He wondered why the other did not come and speak to him, but himself
gave no sign of recognition. Later, when with shielded face Breck passed
him a significant wink, Smoke understood.

Blackbeard, whom Smoke heard called Eli Harding, ended the discussion as
to whether or not the prisoner should be immediately lynched.

“Hold on,” Harding roared. “Keep your shirts on. That man belongs to me.
I caught him an' I brought him here. D'ye think I brought him all the
way here to be lynched? Not on your life. I could 'a' done that myself
when I found him. I brought him here for a fair an' impartial trial, an'
by God, a fair an' impartial trial he's goin' to get. He's tied up safe
an' sound. Chuck him in a bunk till morning, an' we'll hold the trial
right here.”


Smoke woke up. A draught that possessed all the rigidity of an icicle
was boring into the front of his shoulders as he lay on his side facing
the wall. When he had been tied into the bunk there had been no such
draught, and now the outside air, driving into the heated atmosphere
of the cabin with the pressure of fifty below zero, was sufficient
advertizement that some one from without had pulled away the
moss-chinking between the logs. He squirmed as far as his bonds would
permit, then craned his neck forward until his lips just managed to
reach the crack.

“Who is it?” he whispered.

“Breck,” came the almost inaudible answer. “Be careful you don't make a
noise. I'm going to pass a knife in to you.”

“No good,” Smoke said. “I couldn't use it. My hands are tied behind me
and made fast to the leg of the bunk. Besides, you couldn't get a knife
through that crack. But something must be done. Those fellows are of a
temper to hang me, and, of course, you know I didn't kill that man.”

“It wasn't necessary to mention it, Smoke. And if you did you had your
reasons. Which isn't the point at all. I want to get you out of this.
It's a tough bunch of men here. You've seen them. They're shut off from
the world, and they make and enforce their own law--by miner's meeting,
you know. They handled two men already--both grub-thieves. One they
hiked from camp without an ounce of grub and no matches. He made about
forty miles and lasted a couple of days before he froze stiff. Two weeks
ago they hiked the second man. They gave him his choice: no grub, or
ten lashes for each day's ration. He stood for forty lashes before he
fainted. And now they've got you, and every last one is convinced you
killed Kinade.”

“The man who killed Kinade shot at me, too. His bullet broke the skin
on my shoulder. Get them to delay the trial till some one goes up and
searches the bank where the murderer hid.”

“No use. They take the evidence of Harding and the five Frenchmen with
him. Besides, they haven't had a hanging yet, and they're keen for
it. You see, things have been pretty monotonous. They haven't located
anything big, and they got tired of hunting for Surprise Lake. They did
some stampeding the first part of the winter, but they've got over that
now. Scurvy is beginning to show up amongst them, too, and they're just
ripe for excitement.”

“And it looks like I'll furnish it,” was Smoke's comment. “Say, Breck,
how did you ever fall in with such a God-forsaken bunch?”

“After I got the claims at Squaw Creek opened up and some men to
working, I came up here by way of the Stewart, hunting for Two Cabins.
They'd beaten me to it, so I've been higher up the Stewart. Just got
back yesterday out of grub.”

“Find anything?”

“Nothing much. But I think I've got a hydraulic proposition that'll work
big when the country's opened up. It's that, or a gold-dredger.”

“Hold on,” Smoke interrupted. “Wait a minute. Let me think.”

He was very much aware of the snores of the sleepers as he pursued the
idea that had flashed into his mind.

“Say, Breck, have they opened up the meat-packs my dogs carried?” he
asked.

“A couple. I was watching. They put them in Harding's cache.”

“Did they find anything?”

“Meat.”

“Good. You've got to get into the brown-canvas pack that's patched with
moose-hide. You'll find a few pounds of lumpy gold. You've never seen
gold like it in the country, nor has anybody else. Here's what you've
got to do. Listen.”

A quarter of an hour later, fully instructed and complaining that his
toes were freezing, Breck went away. Smoke, his own nose and one cheek
frosted by proximity to the chink, rubbed them against the blankets for
half an hour before the blaze and bite of the returning blood assured
him of the safety of his flesh.


“My mind's made up right now. There ain't no doubt but what he killed
Kinade. We heard the whole thing last night. What's the good of goin'
over it again? I vote guilty.”

In such fashion, Smoke's trial began. The speaker, a loose-jointed,
hard-rock man from Colorado, manifested irritation and disgust when
Harding set his suggestion aside, demanded the proceedings should be
regular, and nominated one Shunk Wilson for judge and chairman of the
meeting. The population of Two Cabins constituted the jury, though,
after some discussion, the woman, Lucy, was denied the right to vote on
Smoke's guilt or innocence.

While this was going on, Smoke, jammed into a corner on a bunk,
overheard a whispered conversation between Breck and a miner.

“You haven't fifty pounds of flour you'll sell?” Breck queried.

“You ain't got the dust to pay the price I'm askin',” was the reply.

“I'll give you two hundred.”

The man shook his head.

“Three hundred. Three-fifty.”

At four hundred, the man nodded, and said, “Come on over to my cabin an'
weigh out the dust.”

The two squeezed their way to the door, and slipped out. After a few
minutes Breck returned alone.

Harding was testifying, when Smoke saw the door shoved open slightly,
and in the crack appear the face of the man who had sold the flour. He
was grimacing and beckoning emphatically to some one inside, who arose
from near the stove and started to work toward the door.

“Where are you goin', Sam?” Shunk Wilson demanded.

“I'll be back in a jiffy,” Sam explained. “I jes' got to go.”

Smoke was permitted to question the witnesses, and he was in the middle
of the cross-examination of Harding when from without came the whining
of dogs in harness, and the grind and churn of sled-runners. Somebody
near the door peeped out.

“It's Sam an' his pardner an' a dog-team hell-bent down the trail for
Stewart River,” the man reported.

Nobody spoke for a long half-minute, but men glanced significantly at
one another, and a general restlessness pervaded the packed room. Out
of the corner of his eye, Smoke caught a glimpse of Breck, Lucy, and her
husband whispering together.

“Come on, you,” Shunk Wilson said gruffly to Smoke. “Cut this
questionin' short. We know what you're tryin' to prove--that the other
bank wa'n't searched. The witness admits it. We admit it. It wa'n't
necessary. No tracks led to that bank. The snow wa'n't broke.”

“There was a man on the other bank just the same,” Smoke insisted.

“That's too thin for skatin', young man. There ain't many of us on the
McQuestion, an' we got every man accounted for.”

“Who was the man you hiked out of camp two weeks ago?” Smoke asked.

“Alonzo Miramar. He was a Mexican. What's that grub-thief got to do with
it?”

“Nothing, except that you haven't accounted for HIM, Mr. Judge.”

“He went down the river, not up.”

“How do you know where he went?”

“Saw him start.”

“And that's all you know of what became of him?”

“No, it ain't, young man. I know, we all know, he had four days' grub
an' no gun to shoot meat with. If he didn't make the settlement on the
Yukon he'd croaked long before this.”

“I suppose you've got all the guns in this part of the country accounted
for, too,” Smoke observed pointedly.

Shunk Wilson was angry. “You'd think I was the prisoner the way you
slam questions into me. Now then, come on with the next witness. Where's
French Louis?”

While French Louis was shoving forward, Lucy opened the door.

“Where you goin'?” Shunk Wilson shouted.

“I reckon I don't have to stay,” she answered defiantly. “I ain't got no
vote, an' besides, my cabin's so jammed up I can't breathe.”

In a few minutes her husband followed. The closing of the door was the
first warning the judge received of it.

“Who was that?” he interrupted Pierre's narrative to ask.

“Bill Peabody,” somebody spoke up. “Said he wanted to ask his wife
something and was coming right back.”

Instead of Bill, it was Lucy who re-entered, took off her furs, and
resumed her place by the stove.

“I reckon we don't need to hear the rest of the witnesses,” was Shunk
Wilson's decision, when Pierre had finished. “We already know they only
can testify to the same facts we've already heard. Say, Sorensen, you
go an' bring Bill Peabody back. We'll be votin' a verdict pretty short.
Now, stranger, you can get up an' say your say concernin' what happened.
In the meantime, we'll just be savin' delay by passin' around the two
rifles, the ammunition, an' the bullet that done the killin'.”

Midway in his story of how he had arrived in that part of the country,
and at the point in his narrative where he described his own ambush
and how he had fled to the bank, Smoke was interrupted by the indignant
Shunk Wilson.

“Young man, what sense is there in you testifyin' that way? You're just
takin' up valuable time. Of course you got the right to lie to save your
neck, but we ain't goin' to stand for such foolishness. The rifle, the
ammunition, an' the bullet that killed Joe Kinade is against you. What's
that? Open the door, somebody!”

The frost rushed in, taking form and substance in the heat of the room,
while through the open door came the whining of dogs that decreased
rapidly with distance.

“It's Sorensen an' Peabody,” some one cried, “a-throwin' the whip into
the dawgs an' headin' down river!”

“Now, what the hell--!” Shunk Wilson paused, with dropped jaw, and
glared at Lucy. “I reckon you can explain, Mrs. Peabody.”

She tossed her head and compressed her lips, and Shunk Wilson's wrathful
and suspicious gaze passed on and rested on Breck.

“An' I reckon that newcomer you've been chinning with could explain if
HE had a mind to.”

Breck, now very uncomfortable, found all eyes centered on him.

“Sam was chewing the rag with him, too, before he hit out,” some one
said.

“Look here, Mr. Breck,” Shunk Wilson continued. “You've been
interruptin' proceedings, and you got to explain the meanin' of it. What
was you chinnin' about?”

Breck cleared his throat timidly and replied. “I was just trying to buy
some grub.”

“What with?”

“Dust, of course.”

“Where'd you get it?”

Breck did not answer.

“He's been snoopin' around up the Stewart,” a man volunteered. “I run
across his camp a week ago when I was huntin'. An' I want to tell you he
was almighty secretious about it.”

“The dust didn't come from there,” Breck said. “That's only a low-grade
hydraulic proposition.”

“Bring your poke here an' let's see your dust,” Wilson commanded.

“I tell you it didn't come from there.”

“Let's see it, just the same.”

Breck made as if to refuse, but all about him were menacing faces.
Reluctantly, he fumbled in his coat pocket. In the act of drawing forth
a pepper-can, it rattled against what was evidently a hard object.

“Fetch it all out!” Shunk Wilson thundered.

And out came the big nugget, fist-size, yellow as no gold any onlooker
had ever seen. Shunk Wilson gasped. Half a dozen, catching one glimpse,
made a break for the door. They reached it at the same moment, and, with
cursing and scuffling, jammed and pivoted through. The judge emptied
the contents of the pepper-can on the table, and the sight of the rough
lump-gold sent half a dozen more toward the door.

“Where are you goin'?” Eli Harding asked, as Shunk started to follow.

“For my dogs, of course.”

“Ain't you goin' to hang him?”

“It'd take too much time right now. He'll keep till we get back, so I
reckon this court is adjourned. This ain't no place for lingerin'.”

Harding hesitated. He glanced savagely at Smoke, saw Pierre beckoning
to Louis from the doorway, took one last look at the lump-gold on the
table, and decided.

“No use you tryin' to get away,” he flung back over his shoulder.
“Besides, I'm goin' to borrow your dogs.”

“What is it?--another one of them blamed stampedes?” the old blind
trapper asked in a queer and petulant falsetto, as the cries of men and
dogs and the grind of the sleds swept the silence of the room.

“It sure is,” Lucy answered. “An' I never seen gold like it. Feel that,
old man.”

She put the big nugget in his hand. He was but slightly interested.

“It was a good fur-country,” he complained, “before them danged miners
come in an' scared back the game.”

The door opened, and Breck entered. “Well,” he said, “we four are all
that are left in camp. It's forty miles to the Stewart by the cut-off
I broke, and the fastest of them can't make the round trip in less than
five or six days. But it's time you pulled out, Smoke, just the same.”

Breck drew his hunting-knife across the other's bonds, and glanced
at the woman. “I hope you don't object?” he said, with significant
politeness.

“If there's goin' to be any shootin',” the blind man broke out, “I wish
somebody'd take me to another cabin first.”

“Go on, an' don't mind me,” Lucy answered. “If I ain't good enough to
hang a man, I ain't good enough to hold him.”

Smoke stood up, rubbing his wrists where the thongs had impeded the
circulation.

“I've got a pack all ready for you,” Breck said. “Ten days' grub,
blankets, matches, tobacco, an axe, and a rifle.”

“Go to it,” Lucy encouraged. “Hit the high places, stranger. Beat it as
fast as God'll let you.”

“I'm going to have a square meal before I start,” Smoke said. “And when
I start it will be up the McQuestion, not down. I want you to go along
with me, Breck. We're going to search that other bank for the man that
really did the killing.”

“If you'll listen to me, you'll head down for the Stewart and the
Yukon,” Breck objected. “When this gang gets back from my low-grade
hydraulic proposition, it will be seeing red.”

Smoke laughed and shook his head.

“I can't jump this country, Breck. I've got interests here. I've got to
stay and make good. I don't care whether you believe me or not, but I've
found Surprise Lake. That's where that gold came from. Besides, they
took my dogs, and I've got to wait to get them back. Also, I know what
I'm about. There was a man hidden on that bank. He came pretty close to
emptying his magazine at me.”

Half an hour afterward, with a big plate of moose-steak before him and
a big mug of coffee at his lips, Smoke half-started up from his seat. He
had heard the sounds first. Lucy threw open the door.

“Hello, Spike; hello, Methody,” she greeted the two frost-rimed men who
were bending over the burden on their sled.

“We just come down from Upper Camp,” one said, as the pair staggered
into the room with a fur-wrapped object which they handled with
exceeding gentleness. “An' this is what we found by the way. He's all
in, I guess.”

“Put him in the near bunk there,” Lucy said. She bent over and pulled
back the furs, disclosing a face composed principally of large, staring,
black eyes, and of skin, dark and scabbed by repeated frost-bite,
tightly stretched across the bones.

“If it ain't Alonzo!” she cried. “You pore, starved devil!”

“That's the man on the other bank,” Smoke said in an undertone to Breck.

“We found it raidin' a cache that Harding must 'a' made,” one of the men
was explaining. “He was eatin' raw flour an' frozen bacon, an' when we
got 'm he was cryin' an' squealin' like a hawg. Look at him! He's all
starved, an' most of him frozen. He'll kick at any moment.”


Half an hour later, when the furs had been drawn over the face of the
still form in the bunk, Smoke turned to Lucy. “If you don't mind, Mrs.
Peabody, I'll have another whack at that steak. Make it thick and not so
well done. I'm a meat-eater, I am.”




VI. THE RACE FOR NUMBER THREE.


“Huh! Get on to the glad rags!”

Shorty surveyed his partner with simulated disapproval, and Smoke,
vainly attempting to rub the wrinkles out of the pair of trousers he had
just put on, was irritated.

“They sure fit you close for a second-hand buy,” Shorty went on. “What
was the tax?”

“One hundred and fifty for the suit,” Smoke answered. “The man was
nearly my own size. I thought it was remarkably reasonable. What are you
kicking about?”

“Who? Me? Oh, nothin'. I was just thinkin' it was goin' some for a
meat-eater that hit Dawson in an ice-jam, with no grub, one suit of
underclothes, a pair of mangy moccasins, an' overalls that looked
like they'd been through the wreck of the Hesperus. Pretty gay front,
pardner. Pretty gay front. Say--?”

“What do you want now?” Smoke demanded testily.

“What's her name?”

“There isn't any her, my friend. I'm to have dinner at Colonel Bowie's,
if you want to know. The trouble with you, Shorty, is you're envious
because I'm going into high society and you're not invited.”

“Ain't you some late?” Shorty queried with concern.

“What do you mean?”

“For dinner. They'll be eatin' supper when you get there.”

Smoke was about to explain with crudely elaborate sarcasm when he caught
the twinkle in the other's eye. He went on dressing, with fingers that
had lost their deftness, tying a Windsor tie in a bow-knot at the throat
of his soft cotton shirt.

“Wisht I hadn't sent all my starched shirts to the laundry,” Shorty
murmured sympathetically. “I might 'a' fitted you out.”

By this time Smoke was straining at a pair of shoes. The woollen socks
were too thick to go into them. He looked appealingly at Shorty, who
shook his head.

“Nope. If I had thin ones I wouldn't lend 'em to you. Back to the
moccasins, pardner. You'd sure freeze your toes in skimpy-fangled gear
like that.”

“I paid fifteen dollars for them, second hand,” Smoke lamented.

“I reckon they won't be a man not in moccasins.”

“But there are to be women, Shorty. I'm going to sit down and eat with
real live women--Mrs. Bowie, and several others, so the Colonel told
me.”

“Well, moccasins won't spoil their appetite none,” was Shorty's comment.
“Wonder what the Colonel wants with you?”

“I don't know, unless he's heard about my finding Surprise Lake. It will
take a fortune to drain it, and the Guggenheims are out for investment.”

“Reckon that's it. That's right, stick to the moccasins. Gee! That coat
is sure wrinkled, an' it fits you a mite too swift. Just peck around at
your vittles. If you eat hearty you'll bust through. An' if them women
folks gets to droppin' handkerchiefs, just let 'em lay. Don't do any
pickin' up. Whatever you do, don't.”


As became a high-salaried expert and the representative of the great
house of Guggenheim, Colonel Bowie lived in one of the most magnificent
cabins in Dawson. Of squared logs, hand-hewn, it was two stories high,
and of such extravagant proportions that it boasted a big living room
that was used for a living room and for nothing else.

Here were big bear-skins on the rough board floor, and on the walls
horns of moose and caribou. Here roared an open fireplace and a big
wood-burning stove. And here Smoke met the social elect of Dawson--not
the mere pick-handle millionaires, but the ultra-cream of a mining
city whose population had been recruited from all the world--men like
Warburton Jones, the explorer and writer; Captain Consadine of the
Mounted Police; Haskell, Gold Commissioner of the Northwest Territory;
and Baron Von Schroeder, an emperor's favourite with an international
duelling reputation.

And here, dazzling in evening gown, he met Joy Gastell, whom hitherto
he had encountered only on trail, befurred and moccasined. At dinner he
found himself beside her.

“I feel like a fish out of water,” he confessed. “All you folks are
so real grand you know. Besides, I never dreamed such Oriental luxury
existed in the Klondike. Look at Von Schroeder there. He's actually got
a dinner jacket, and Consadine's got a starched shirt. I noticed he wore
moccasins just the same. How do you like MY outfit?”

He moved his shoulders about as if preening himself for Joy's approval.

“It looks as if you'd grown stout since you came over the Pass,” she
laughed.

“Wrong. Guess again.”

“It's somebody else's.”

“You win. I bought it for a price from one of the clerks at the A. C.
Company.”

“It's a shame clerks are so narrow-shouldered,” she sympathized. “And
you haven't told me what you think of MY outfit.”

“I can't,” he said. “I'm out of breath. I've been living on trail too
long. This sort of thing comes to me with a shock, you know. I'd quite
forgotten that women have arms and shoulders. To-morrow morning, like
my friend Shorty, I'll wake up and know it's all a dream. Now, the last
time I saw you on Squaw Creek--”

“I was just a squaw,” she broke in.

“I hadn't intended to say that. I was remembering that it was on Squaw
Creek that I discovered you had feet.”

“And I can never forget that you saved them for me,” she said. “I've
been wanting to see you ever since to thank you--” (He shrugged his
shoulders deprecatingly). “And that's why you are here to-night.”

“You asked the Colonel to invite me?”

“No! Mrs. Bowie. And I asked her to let me have you at table. And here's
my chance. Everybody's talking. Listen, and don't interrupt. You know
Mono Creek?”

“Yes.”

“It has turned out rich--dreadfully rich. They estimate the claims as
worth a million and more apiece. It was only located the other day.”

“I remember the stampede.”

“Well, the whole creek was staked to the sky-line, and all the feeders,
too. And yet, right now, on the main creek, Number Three below
Discovery is unrecorded. The creek was so far away from Dawson that
the Commissioner allowed sixty days for recording after location. Every
claim was recorded except Number Three below. It was staked by Cyrus
Johnson. And that was all. Cyrus Johnson has disappeared. Whether he
died, whether he went down river or up, nobody knows. Anyway, in six
days, the time for recording will be up. Then the man who stakes it, and
reaches Dawson first and records it, gets it.”

“A million dollars,” Smoke murmured.

“Gilchrist, who has the next claim below, has got six hundred dollars
in a single pan off bedrock. He's burned one hole down. And the claim on
the other side is even richer. I know.”

“But why doesn't everybody know?” Smoke queried skeptically.

“They're beginning to know. They kept it secret for a long time, and it
is only now that it's coming out. Good dog-teams will be at a premium
in another twenty-four hours. Now, you've got to get away as decently as
you can as soon as dinner is over. I've arranged it. An Indian will come
with a message for you. You read it, let on that you're very much put
out, make your excuses, and get away.”

“I--er--I fail to follow.”

“Ninny!” she exclaimed in a half-whisper. “What you must do is to get
out to-night and hustle dog-teams. I know of two. There's Hanson's
team, seven big Hudson Bay dogs--he's holding them at four hundred each.
That's top price to-night, but it won't be to-morrow. And Sitka Charley
has eight Malemutes he's asking thirty-five hundred for. To-morrow he'll
laugh at an offer of five thousand. Then you've got your own team
of dogs. And you'll have to buy several more teams. That's your work
to-night. Get the best. It's dogs as well as men that will win this
race. It's a hundred and ten miles, and you'll have to relay as
frequently as you can.”

“Oh, I see, you want me to go in for it,” Smoke drawled.

“If you haven't the money for the dogs, I'll--” She faltered, but before
she could continue, Smoke was speaking.

“I can buy the dogs. But--er--aren't you afraid this is gambling?”

“After your exploits at roulette in the Elkhorn,” she retorted, “I'm not
afraid that you're afraid. It's a sporting proposition, if that's
what you mean. A race for a million, and with some of the stiffest
dog-mushers and travellers in the country entered against you. They
haven't entered yet, but by this time to-morrow they will, and dogs will
be worth what the richest man can afford to pay. Big Olaf is in town.
He came up from Circle City last month. He is one of the most terrible
dog-mushers in the country, and if he enters he will be your most
dangerous man. Arizona Bill is another. He's been a professional
freighter and mail-carrier for years. If he goes in, interest will be
centered on him and Big Olaf.”

“And you intend me to come along as a sort of dark horse.”

“Exactly. And it will have its advantages. You will not be supposed to
stand a show. After all, you know, you are still classed as a chechako.
You haven't seen the four seasons go around. Nobody will take notice of
you until you come into the home stretch in the lead.”

“It's on the home stretch the dark horse is to show up its classy form,
eh?”

She nodded, and continued earnes

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