Title: The Faith of Men
Author: London, Jack, 1876-1916
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.


*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Faith of Men" ***


Transcribed from the 1919 William Heinemann edition by David Price, email


THE FAITH OF MEN


Contents:

A Relic of the Pliocene
A Hyperborean Brew
The Faith of Men
Too Much Gold
The One Thousand Dozen
The Marriage of Lit-lit
Batard
The Story of Jees Uck



A RELIC OF THE PLIOCENE


I wash my hands of him at the start.  I cannot father his tales, nor will
I be responsible for them.  I make these preliminary reservations,
observe, as a guard upon my own integrity.  I possess a certain definite
position in a small way, also a wife; and for the good name of the
community that honours my existence with its approval, and for the sake
of her posterity and mine, I cannot take the chances I once did, nor
foster probabilities with the careless improvidence of youth.  So, I
repeat, I wash my hands of him, this Nimrod, this mighty hunter, this
homely, blue-eyed, freckle-faced Thomas Stevens.

Having been honest to myself, and to whatever prospective olive branches
my wife may be pleased to tender me, I can now afford to be generous.  I
shall not criticize the tales told me by Thomas Stevens, and, further, I
shall withhold my judgment.  If it be asked why, I can only add that
judgment I have none.  Long have I pondered, weighed, and balanced, but
never have my conclusions been twice the same--forsooth! because Thomas
Stevens is a greater man than I.  If he have told truths, well and good;
if untruths, still well and good.  For who can prove? or who disprove?  I
eliminate myself from the proposition, while those of little faith may do
as I have done--go find the same Thomas Stevens, and discuss to his face
the various matters which, if fortune serve, I shall relate.  As to where
he may be found?  The directions are simple: anywhere between 53 north
latitude and the Pole, on the one hand; and, on the other, the likeliest
hunting grounds that lie between the east coast of Siberia and
farthermost Labrador.  That he is there, somewhere, within that clearly
defined territory, I pledge the word of an honourable man whose
expectations entail straight speaking and right living.

Thomas Stevens may have toyed prodigiously with truth, but when we first
met (it were well to mark this point), he wandered into my camp when I
thought myself a thousand miles beyond the outermost post of
civilization.  At the sight of his human face, the first in weary months,
I could have sprung forward and folded him in my arms (and I am not by
any means a demonstrative man); but to him his visit seemed the most
casual thing under the sun.  He just strolled into the light of my camp,
passed the time of day after the custom of men on beaten trails, threw my
snowshoes the one way and a couple of dogs the other, and so made room
for himself by the fire.  Said he'd just dropped in to borrow a pinch of
soda and to see if I had any decent tobacco.  He plucked forth an ancient
pipe, loaded it with painstaking care, and, without as much as by your
leave, whacked half the tobacco of my pouch into his.  Yes, the stuff was
fairly good.  He sighed with the contentment of the just, and literally
absorbed the smoke from the crisping yellow flakes, and it did my
smoker's heart good to behold him.

Hunter?  Trapper?  Prospector?  He shrugged his shoulders No; just sort
of knocking round a bit.  Had come up from the Great Slave some time
since, and was thinking of trapsing over into the Yukon country.  The
factor of Koshim had spoken about the discoveries on the Klondike, and he
was of a mind to run over for a peep.  I noticed that he spoke of the
Klondike in the archaic vernacular, calling it the Reindeer River--a
conceited custom that the Old Timers employ against the _che-chaquas_
and all tenderfeet in general.  But he did it so naively and as such a
matter of course, that there was no sting, and I forgave him.  He also
had it in view, he said, before he crossed the divide into the Yukon, to
make a little run up Fort o' Good Hope way.

Now Fort o' Good Hope is a far journey to the north, over and beyond the
Circle, in a place where the feet of few men have trod; and when a
nondescript ragamuffin comes in out of the night, from nowhere in
particular, to sit by one's fire and discourse on such in terms of
"trapsing" and "a little run," it is fair time to rouse up and shake off
the dream.  Wherefore I looked about me; saw the fly and, underneath, the
pine boughs spread for the sleeping furs; saw the grub sacks, the camera,
the frosty breaths of the dogs circling on the edge of the light; and,
above, a great streamer of the aurora, bridging the zenith from south-
east to north-west.  I shivered.  There is a magic in the Northland
night, that steals in on one like fevers from malarial marshes.  You are
clutched and downed before you are aware.  Then I looked to the
snowshoes, lying prone and crossed where he had flung them.  Also I had
an eye to my tobacco pouch.  Half, at least, of its goodly store had
vamosed.  That settled it.  Fancy had not tricked me after all.

Crazed with suffering, I thought, looking steadfastly at the man--one of
those wild stampeders, strayed far from his bearings and wandering like a
lost soul through great vastnesses and unknown deeps.  Oh, well, let his
moods slip on, until, mayhap, he gathers his tangled wits together.  Who
knows?--the mere sound of a fellow-creature's voice may bring all
straight again.

So I led him on in talk, and soon I marvelled, for he talked of game and
the ways thereof.  He had killed the Siberian wolf of westernmost Alaska,
and the chamois in the secret Rockies.  He averred he knew the haunts
where the last buffalo still roamed; that he had hung on the flanks of
the caribou when they ran by the hundred thousand, and slept in the Great
Barrens on the musk-ox's winter trail.

And I shifted my judgment accordingly (the first revision, but by no
account the last), and deemed him a monumental effigy of truth.  Why it
was I know not, but the spirit moved me to repeat a tale told to me by a
man who had dwelt in the land too long to know better.  It was of the
great bear that hugs the steep slopes of St Elias, never descending to
the levels of the gentler inclines.  Now God so constituted this creature
for its hillside habitat that the legs of one side are all of a foot
longer than those of the other.  This is mighty convenient, as will be
reality admitted.  So I hunted this rare beast in my own name, told it in
the first person, present tense, painted the requisite locale, gave it
the necessary garnishings and touches of verisimilitude, and looked to
see the man stunned by the recital.

Not he.  Had he doubted, I could have forgiven him.  Had he objected,
denying the dangers of such a hunt by virtue of the animal's inability to
turn about and go the other way--had he done this, I say, I could have
taken him by the hand for the true sportsman that he was.  Not he.  He
sniffed, looked on me, and sniffed again; then gave my tobacco due
praise, thrust one foot into my lap, and bade me examine the gear.  It
was a _mucluc_ of the Innuit pattern, sewed together with sinew threads,
and devoid of beads or furbelows.  But it was the skin itself that was
remarkable.  In that it was all of half an inch thick, it reminded me of
walrus-hide; but there the resemblance ceased, for no walrus ever bore so
marvellous a growth of hair.  On the side and ankles this hair was well-
nigh worn away, what of friction with underbrush and snow; but around the
top and down the more sheltered back it was coarse, dirty black, and very
thick.  I parted it with difficulty and looked beneath for the fine fur
that is common with northern animals, but found it in this case to be
absent.  This, however, was compensated for by the length.  Indeed, the
tufts that had survived wear and tear measured all of seven or eight
inches.

I looked up into the man's face, and he pulled his foot down and asked,
"Find hide like that on your St Elias bear?"

I shook my head.  "Nor on any other creature of land or sea," I answered
candidly.  The thickness of it, and the length of the hair, puzzled me.

"That," he said, and said without the slightest hint of impressiveness,
"that came from a mammoth."

"Nonsense!" I exclaimed, for I could not forbear the protest of my
unbelief.  "The mammoth, my dear sir, long ago vanished from the earth.
We know it once existed by the fossil remains that we have unearthed, and
by a frozen carcase that the Siberian sun saw fit to melt from out the
bosom of a glacier; but we also know that no living specimen exists.  Our
explorers--"

At this word he broke in impatiently.  "Your explorers?  Pish!  A weakly
breed.  Let us hear no more of them.  But tell me, O man, what you may
know of the mammoth and his ways."

Beyond contradiction, this was leading to a yarn; so I baited my hook by
ransacking my memory for whatever data I possessed on the subject in
hand.  To begin with, I emphasized that the animal was prehistoric, and
marshalled all my facts in support of this.  I mentioned the Siberian
sand-bars that abounded with ancient mammoth bones; spoke of the large
quantities of fossil ivory purchased from the Innuits by the Alaska
Commercial Company; and acknowledged having myself mined six- and eight-
foot tusks from the pay gravel of the Klondike creeks.  "All fossils," I
concluded, "found in the midst of _debris_ deposited through countless
ages."

"I remember when I was a kid," Thomas Stevens sniffed (he had a most
confounded way of sniffing), "that I saw a petrified water-melon.  Hence,
though mistaken persons sometimes delude themselves into thinking that
they are really raising or eating them, there are no such things as
extant water-melons?"

"But the question of food," I objected, ignoring his point, which was
puerile and without bearing.  "The soil must bring forth vegetable life
in lavish abundance to support so monstrous creations.  Nowhere in the
North is the soil so prolific.  Ergo, the mammoth cannot exist."

"I pardon your ignorance concerning many matters of this Northland, for
you are a young man and have travelled little; but, at the same time, I
am inclined to agree with you on one thing.  The mammoth no longer
exists.  How do I know?  I killed the last one with my own right arm."

Thus spake Nimrod, the mighty Hunter.  I threw a stick of firewood at the
dogs and bade them quit their unholy howling, and waited.  Undoubtedly
this liar of singular felicity would open his mouth and requite me for my
St. Elias bear.

"It was this way," he at last began, after the appropriate silence had
intervened.  "I was in camp one day--"

"Where?" I interrupted.

He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the north-east, where
stretched a _terra incognita_ into which vastness few men have strayed
and fewer emerged.  "I was in camp one day with Klooch.  Klooch was as
handsome a little _kamooks_ as ever whined betwixt the traces or shoved
nose into a camp kettle.  Her father was a full-blood Malemute from
Russian Pastilik on Bering Sea, and I bred her, and with understanding,
out of a clean-legged bitch of the Hudson Bay stock.  I tell you, O man,
she was a corker combination.  And now, on this day I have in mind, she
was brought to pup through a pure wild wolf of the woods--grey, and long
of limb, with big lungs and no end of staying powers.  Say!  Was there
ever the like?  It was a new breed of dog I had started, and I could look
forward to big things.

"As I have said, she was brought neatly to pup, and safely delivered.  I
was squatting on my hams over the litter--seven sturdy, blind little
beggars--when from behind came a bray of trumpets and crash of brass.
There was a rush, like the wind-squall that kicks the heels of the rain,
and I was midway to my feet when knocked flat on my face.  At the same
instant I heard Klooch sigh, very much as a man does when you've planted
your fist in his belly.  You can stake your sack I lay quiet, but I
twisted my head around and saw a huge bulk swaying above me.  Then the
blue sky flashed into view and I got to my feet.  A hairy mountain of
flesh was just disappearing in the underbrush on the edge of the open.  I
caught a rear-end glimpse, with a stiff tail, as big in girth as my body,
standing out straight behind.  The next second only a tremendous hole
remained in the thicket, though I could still hear the sounds as of a
tornado dying quickly away, underbrush ripping and tearing, and trees
snapping and crashing.

"I cast about for my rifle.  It had been lying on the ground with the
muzzle against a log; but now the stock was smashed, the barrel out of
line, and the working-gear in a thousand bits.  Then I looked for the
slut, and--and what do you suppose?"

I shook my head.

"May my soul burn in a thousand hells if there was anything left of her!
Klooch, the seven sturdy, blind little beggars--gone, all gone.  Where
she had stretched was a slimy, bloody depression in the soft earth, all
of a yard in diameter, and around the edges a few scattered hairs."

I measured three feet on the snow, threw about it a circle, and glanced
at Nimrod.

"The beast was thirty long and twenty high," he answered, "and its tusks
scaled over six times three feet.  I couldn't believe, myself, at the
time, for all that it had just happened.  But if my senses had played me,
there was the broken gun and the hole in the brush.  And there was--or,
rather, there was not--Klooch and the pups.  O man, it makes me hot all
over now when I think of it Klooch!  Another Eve!  The mother of a new
race!  And a rampaging, ranting, old bull mammoth, like a second flood,
wiping them, root and branch, off the face of the earth!  Do you wonder
that the blood-soaked earth cried out to high God?  Or that I grabbed the
hand-axe and took the trail?"

"The hand-axe?" I exclaimed, startled out of myself by the picture.  "The
hand-axe, and a big bull mammoth, thirty feet long, twenty feet--"

Nimrod joined me in my merriment, chuckling gleefully.  "Wouldn't it kill
you?" he cried.  "Wasn't it a beaver's dream?  Many's the time I've
laughed about it since, but at the time it was no laughing matter, I was
that danged mad, what of the gun and Klooch.  Think of it, O man!  A
brand-new, unclassified, uncopyrighted breed, and wiped out before ever
it opened its eyes or took out its intention papers!  Well, so be it.
Life's full of disappointments, and rightly so.  Meat is best after a
famine, and a bed soft after a hard trail.

"As I was saying, I took out after the beast with the hand-axe, and hung
to its heels down the valley; but when he circled back toward the head, I
was left winded at the lower end.  Speaking of grub, I might as well stop
long enough to explain a couple of points.  Up thereabouts, in the midst
of the mountains, is an almighty curious formation.  There is no end of
little valleys, each like the other much as peas in a pod, and all neatly
tucked away with straight, rocky walls rising on all sides.  And at the
lower ends are always small openings where the drainage or glaciers must
have broken out.  The only way in is through these mouths, and they are
all small, and some smaller than others.  As to grub--you've slushed
around on the rain-soaked islands of the Alaskan coast down Sitka way,
most likely, seeing as you're a traveller.  And you know how stuff grows
there--big, and juicy, and jungly.  Well, that's the way it was with
those valleys.  Thick, rich soil, with ferns and grasses and such things
in patches higher than your head.  Rain three days out of four during the
summer months; and food in them for a thousand mammoths, to say nothing
of small game for man.

"But to get back.  Down at the lower end of the valley I got winded and
gave over.  I began to speculate, for when my wind left me my dander got
hotter and hotter, and I knew I'd never know peace of mind till I dined
on roasted mammoth-foot.  And I knew, also, that that stood for _skookum_
_mamook pukapuk_--excuse Chinook, I mean there was a big fight coming.
Now the mouth of my valley was very narrow, and the walls steep.  High up
on one side was one of those big pivot rocks, or balancing rocks, as some
call them, weighing all of a couple of hundred tons.  Just the thing.  I
hit back for camp, keeping an eye open so the bull couldn't slip past,
and got my ammunition.  It wasn't worth anything with the rifle smashed;
so I opened the shells, planted the powder under the rock, and touched it
off with slow fuse.  Wasn't much of a charge, but the old boulder tilted
up lazily and dropped down into place, with just space enough to let the
creek drain nicely.  Now I had him."

"But how did you have him?" I queried.  "Who ever heard of a man killing
a mammoth with a hand-axe?  And, for that matter, with anything else?"

"O man, have I not told you I was mad?" Nimrod replied, with a slight
manifestation of sensitiveness.  "Mad clean through, what of Klooch and
the gun.  Also, was I not a hunter?  And was this not new and most
unusual game?  A hand-axe?  Pish!  I did not need it.  Listen, and you
shall hear of a hunt, such as might have happened in the youth of the
world when cavemen rounded up the kill with hand-axe of stone.  Such
would have served me as well.  Now is it not a fact that man can outwalk
the dog or horse?  That he can wear them out with the intelligence of his
endurance?"

I nodded.

"Well?"

The light broke in on me, and I bade him continue.

"My valley was perhaps five miles around.  The mouth was closed.  There
was no way to get out.  A timid beast was that bull mammoth, and I had
him at my mercy.  I got on his heels again hollered like a fiend, pelted
him with cobbles, and raced him around the valley three times before I
knocked off for supper.  Don't you see?  A race-course!  A man and a
mammoth!  A hippodrome, with sun, moon, and stars to referee!

"It took me two months to do it, but I did it.  And that's no beaver
dream.  Round and round I ran him, me travelling on the inner circle,
eating jerked meat and salmon berries on the run, and snatching winks of
sleep between.  Of course, he'd get desperate at times and turn.  Then
I'd head for soft ground where the creek spread out, and lay anathema
upon him and his ancestry, and dare him to come on.  But he was too wise
to bog in a mud puddle.  Once he pinned me in against the walls, and I
crawled back into a deep crevice and waited.  Whenever he felt for me
with his trunk, I'd belt him with the hand-axe till he pulled out,
shrieking fit to split my ear drums, he was that mad.  He knew he had me
and didn't have me, and it near drove him wild.  But he was no man's
fool.  He knew he was safe as long as I stayed in the crevice, and he
made up his mind to keep me there.  And he was dead right, only he hadn't
figured on the commissary.  There was neither grub nor water around that
spot, so on the face of it he couldn't keep up the siege.  He'd stand
before the opening for hours, keeping an eye on me and flapping
mosquitoes away with his big blanket ears.  Then the thirst would come on
him and he'd ramp round and roar till the earth shook, calling me every
name he could lay tongue to.  This was to frighten me, of course; and
when he thought I was sufficiently impressed, he'd back away softly and
try to make a sneak for the creek.  Sometimes I'd let him get almost
there--only a couple of hundred yards away it was--when out I'd pop and
back he'd come, lumbering along like the old landslide he was.  After I'd
done this a few times, and he'd figured it out, he changed his tactics.
Grasped the time element, you see.  Without a word of warning, away he'd
go, tearing for the water like mad, scheming to get there and back before
I ran away.  Finally, after cursing me most horribly, he raised the siege
and deliberately stalked off to the water-hole.

"That was the only time he penned me,--three days of it,--but after that
the hippodrome never stopped.  Round, and round, and round, like a six
days' go-as-I-please, for he never pleased.  My clothes went to rags and
tatters, but I never stopped to mend, till at last I ran naked as a son
of earth, with nothing but the old hand-axe in one hand and a cobble in
the other.  In fact, I never stopped, save for peeps of sleep in the
crannies and ledges of the cliffs.  As for the bull, he got perceptibly
thinner and thinner--must have lost several tons at least--and as nervous
as a schoolmarm on the wrong side of matrimony.  When I'd come up with
him and yell, or lain him with a rock at long range, he'd jump like a
skittish colt and tremble all over.  Then he'd pull out on the run, tail
and trunk waving stiff, head over one shoulder and wicked eyes blazing,
and the way he'd swear at me was something dreadful.  A most immoral
beast he was, a murderer, and a blasphemer.

"But towards the end he quit all this, and fell to whimpering and crying
like a baby.  His spirit broke and he became a quivering jelly-mountain
of misery.  He'd get attacks of palpitation of the heart, and stagger
around like a drunken man, and fall down and bark his shins.  And then
he'd cry, but always on the run.  O man, the gods themselves would have
wept with him, and you yourself or any other man.  It was pitiful, and
there was so I much of it, but I only hardened my heart and hit up the
pace.  At last I wore him clean out, and he lay down, broken-winded,
broken-hearted, hungry, and thirsty.  When I found he wouldn't budge, I
hamstrung him, and spent the better part of the day wading into him with
the hand-axe, he a-sniffing and sobbing till I worked in far enough to
shut him off.  Thirty feet long he was, and twenty high, and a man could
sling a hammock between his tusks and sleep comfortably.  Barring the
fact that I had run most of the juices out of him, he was fair eating,
and his four feet, alone, roasted whole, would have lasted a man a
twelvemonth.  I spent the winter there myself."

"And where is this valley?" I asked

He waved his hand in the direction of the north-east, and said: "Your
tobacco is very good.  I carry a fair share of it in my pouch, but I
shall carry the recollection of it until I die.  In token of my
appreciation, and in return for the moccasins on your own feet, I will
present to you these _muclucs_.  They commemorate Klooch and the seven
blind little beggars.  They are also souvenirs of an unparalleled event
in history, namely, the destruction of the oldest breed of animal on
earth, and the youngest.  And their chief virtue lies in that they will
never wear out."

Having effected the exchange, he knocked the ashes from his pipe, gripped
my hand good-night, and wandered off through the snow.  Concerning this
tale, for which I have already disclaimed responsibility, I would
recommend those of little faith to make a visit to the Smithsonian
Institute.  If they bring the requisite credentials and do not come in
vacation time, they will undoubtedly gain an audience with Professor
Dolvidson.  The _muclucs_ are in his possession, and he will verify, not
the manner in which they were obtained, but the material of which they
are composed.  When he states that they are made from the skin of the
mammoth, the scientific world accepts his verdict.  What more would you
have?



A HYPERBOREAN BREW


[The story of a scheming white man among the strange people who live on
the rim of the Arctic sea]

Thomas Stevens's veracity may have been indeterminate as _x_, and his
imagination the imagination of ordinary men increased to the nth power,
but this, at least, must be said: never did he deliver himself of word
nor deed that could be branded as a lie outright. . . He may have played
with probability, and verged on the extremest edge of possibility, but in
his tales the machinery never creaked.  That he knew the Northland like a
book, not a soul can deny.  That he was a great traveller, and had set
foot on countless unknown trails, many evidences affirm.  Outside of my
own personal knowledge, I knew men that had met him everywhere, but
principally on the confines of Nowhere.  There was Johnson, the ex-Hudson
Bay Company factor, who had housed him in a Labrador factory until his
dogs rested up a bit, and he was able to strike out again.  There was
McMahon, agent for the Alaska Commercial Company, who had run across him
in Dutch Harbour, and later on, among the outlying islands of the
Aleutian group.  It was indisputable that he had guided one of the
earlier United States surveys, and history states positively that in a
similar capacity he served the Western Union when it attempted to put
through its trans-Alaskan and Siberian telegraph to Europe.  Further,
there was Joe Lamson, the whaling captain, who, when ice-bound off the
mouth of the Mackenzie, had had him come aboard after tobacco.  This last
touch proves Thomas Stevens's identity conclusively.  His quest for
tobacco was perennial and untiring.  Ere we became fairly acquainted, I
learned to greet him with one hand, and pass the pouch with the other.
But the night I met him in John O'Brien's Dawson saloon, his head was
wreathed in a nimbus of fifty-cent cigar smoke, and instead of my pouch
he demanded my sack.  We were standing by a faro table, and forthwith he
tossed it upon the "high card."  "Fifty," he said, and the game-keeper
nodded.  The "high card" turned, and he handed back my sack, called for a
"tab," and drew me over to the scales, where the weigher nonchalantly
cashed him out fifty dollars in dust.

"And now we'll drink," he said; and later, at the bar, when he lowered
his glass: "Reminds me of a little brew I had up Tattarat way.  No, you
have no knowledge of the place, nor is it down on the charts.  But it's
up by the rim of the Arctic Sea, not so many hundred miles from the
American line, and all of half a thousand God-forsaken souls live there,
giving and taking in marriage, and starving and dying in-between-whiles.
Explorers have overlooked them, and you will not find them in the census
of 1890.  A whale-ship was pinched there once, but the men, who had made
shore over the ice, pulled out for the south and were never heard of.

"But it was a great brew we had, Moosu and I," he added a moment later,
with just the slightest suspicion of a sigh.

I knew there were big deeds and wild doings behind that sigh, so I haled
him into a corner, between a roulette outfit and a poker layout, and
waited for his tongue to thaw.

"Had one objection to Moosu," he began, cocking his head
meditatively--"one objection, and only one.  He was an Indian from over
on the edge of the Chippewyan country, but the trouble was, he'd picked
up a smattering of the Scriptures.  Been campmate a season with a
renegade French Canadian who'd studied for the church.  Moosu'd never
seen applied Christianity, and his head was crammed with miracles,
battles, and dispensations, and what not he didn't understand.  Otherwise
he was a good sort, and a handy man on trail or over a fire.

"We'd had a hard time together and were badly knocked out when we plumped
upon Tattarat.  Lost outfits and dogs crossing a divide in a fall
blizzard, and our bellies clove to our backs and our clothes were in rags
when we crawled into the village.  They weren't much surprised at seeing
us--because of the whalemen--and gave us the meanest shack in the village
to live in, and the worst of their leavings to live on.  What struck me
at the time as strange was that they left us strictly alone.  But Moosu
explained it.

"'Shaman _sick tumtum_,' he said, meaning the shaman, or medicine man,
was jealous, and had advised the people to have nothing to do with us.
From the little he'd seen of the whalemen, he'd learned that mine was a
stronger race, and a wiser; so he'd only behaved as shamans have always
behaved the world over.  And before I get done, you'll see how near right
he was.

"'These people have a law,' said Mosu: 'whoso eats of meat must hunt.  We
be awkward, you and I, O master, in the weapons of this country; nor can
we string bows nor fling spears after the manner approved.  Wherefore the
shaman and Tummasook, who is chief, have put their heads together, and it
has been decreed that we work with the women and children in dragging in
the meat and tending the wants of the hunters.'

"'And this is very wrong,' I made to answer; 'for we be better men,
Moosu, than these people who walk in darkness.  Further, we should rest
and grow strong, for the way south is long, and on that trail the weak
cannot prosper.'"

"'But we have nothing,' he objected, looking about him at the rotten
timbers of the igloo, the stench of the ancient walrus meat that had been
our supper disgusting his nostrils.  'And on this fare we cannot thrive.
We have nothing save the bottle of "pain-killer," which will not fill
emptiness, so we must bend to the yoke of the unbeliever and become
hewers of wood and drawers of water.  And there be good things in this
place, the which we may not have.  Ah, master, never has my nose lied to
me, and I have followed it to secret caches and among the fur-bales of
the igloos.  Good provender did these people extort from the poor
whalemen, and this provender has wandered into few hands.  The woman
Ipsukuk, who dwelleth in the far end of the village next she igloo of the
chief, possesseth much flour and sugar, and even have my eyes told me of
molasses smeared on her face.  And in the igloo of Tummasook, the chief,
there be tea--have I not seen the old pig guzzling?  And the shaman
owneth a caddy of "Star" and two buckets of prime smoking.  And what have
we?  Nothing!  Nothing!'

"But I was stunned by the word he brought of the tobacco, and made no
answer.

"And Moosu, what of his own desire, broke silence: 'And there be
Tukeliketa, daughter of a big hunter and wealthy man.  A likely girl.
Indeed, a very nice girl.'

"I figured hard during the night while Moosu snored, for I could not bear
the thought of the tobacco so near which I could not smoke.  True, as he
had said, we had nothing.  But the way became clear to me, and in the
morning I said to him: 'Go thou cunningly abroad, after thy fashion, and
procure me some sort of bone, crooked like a gooseneck, and hollow.  Also,
walk humbly, but have eyes awake to the lay of pots and pans and cooking
contrivances.  And remember, mine is the white man's wisdom, and do what
I have bid you, with sureness and despatch.'

"While he was away I placed the whale-oil cooking lamp in the middle of
the igloo, and moved the mangy sleeping furs back that I might have room.
Then I took apart his gun and put the barrel by handy, and afterwards
braided many wicks from the cotton that the women gather wild in the
summer.  When he came back, it was with the bone I had commanded, and
with news that in the igloo of Tummasook there was a five-gallon kerosene
can and a big copper kettle.  So I said he had done well and we would
tarry through the day.  And when midnight was near I made harangue to
him.

"'This chief, this Tummasook, hath a copper kettle, likewise a kerosene
can.'  I put a rock, smooth and wave-washed, in Moosu's hand.  'The camp
is hushed and the stars are winking.  Go thou, creep into the chief's
igloo softly, and smite him thus upon the belly, and hard.  And let the
meat and good grub of the days to come put strength into thine arm.  There
will be uproar and outcry, and the village will come hot afoot.  But be
thou unafraid.  Veil thy movements and lose thy form in the obscurity of
the night and the confusion of men.  And when the woman Ipsukuk is anigh
thee,--she who smeareth her face with molasses,--do thou smite her
likewise, and whosoever else that possesseth flour and cometh to thy
hand.  Then do thou lift thy voice in pain and double up with clasped
hands, and make outcry in token that thou, too, hast felt the visitation
of the night.  And in this way shall we achieve honour and great
possessions, and the caddy of "Star" and the prime smoking, and thy
Tukeliketa, who is a likely maiden.'

"When he had departed on this errand, I bided patiently in the shack, and
the tobacco seemed very near.  Then there was a cry of affright in the
night, that became an uproar and assailed the sky.  I seized the 'pain-
killer' and ran forth.  There was much noise, and a wailing among the
women, and fear sat heavily on all.  Tummasook and the woman Ipsukuk
rolled on the ground in pain, and with them there were divers others,
also Moosu.  I thrust aside those that cluttered the way of my feet, and
put the mouth of the bottle to Moosu's lips.  And straightway he became
well and ceased his howling.  Whereat there was a great clamour for the
bottle from the others so stricken.  But I made harangue, and ere they
tasted and were made well I had mulcted Tummasook of his copper kettle
and kerosene can, and the woman Ipsukuk of her sugar and molasses, and
the other sick ones of goodly measures of flour.  The shaman glowered
wickedly at the people around my knees, though he poorly concealed the
wonder that lay beneath.  But I held my head high, and Moosu groaned
beneath the loot as he followed my heels to the shack.

"There I set to work.  In Tummasook's copper kettle I mixed three quarts
of wheat flour with five of molasses, and to this I added of water twenty
quarts.  Then I placed the kettle near the lamp, that it might sour in
the warmth and grow strong.  Moosu understood, and said my wisdom passed
understanding and was greater than Solomon's, who he had heard was a wise
man of old time.  The kerosene can I set over the lamp, and to its nose I
affixed a snout, and into the snout the bone that was like a gooseneck.  I
sent Moosu without to pound ice, while I connected the barrel of his gun
with the gooseneck, and midway on the barrel I piled the ice he had
pounded.  And at the far end of the gun-barrel, beyond the pan of ice, I
placed a small iron pot.  When the brew was strong enough (and it was two
days ere it could stand on its own legs), I filled the kerosene can with
it, and lighted the wicks I had braided.

"Now that all was ready, I spoke to Moosu.  'Go forth,' I said, 'to the
chief men of the village, and give them greeting, and bid them come into
my igloo and sleep the night away with me and the gods.'

"The brew was singing merrily when they began shoving aside the skin flap
and crawling in, and I was heaping cracked ice on the gun-barrel.  Out of
the priming hole at the far end, drip, drip, drip into the iron pot fell
the liquor--_hooch_, you know.  But they'd never seen the like, and
giggled nervously when I made harangue about its virtues.  As I talked I
noted the jealousy in the shaman's eye, so when I had done, I placed him
side by side with Tummasook and the woman Ipsukuk.  Then I gave them to
drink, and their eyes watered and their stomachs warmed, till from being
afraid they reached greedily for more; and when I had them well started,
I turned to the others.  Tummasook made a brag about how he had once
killed a polar bear, and in the vigour of his pantomime nearly slew his
mother's brother.  But nobody heeded.  The woman Ipsukuk fell to weeping
for a son lost long years agone in the ice, and the shaman made
incantation and prophecy.  So it went, and before morning they were all
on the floor, sleeping soundly with the gods.

"The story tells itself, does it not?  The news of the magic potion
spread.  It was too marvellous for utterance.  Tongues could tell but a
tithe of the miracles it performed.  It eased pain, gave surcease to
sorrow, brought back old memories, dead faces, and forgotten dreams.  It
was a fire that ate through all the blood, and, burning, burned not.  It
stoutened the heart, stiffened the back, and made men more than men.  It
revealed the future, and gave visions and prophecy.  It brimmed with
wisdom and unfolded secrets.  There was no end of the things it could do,
and soon there was a clamouring on all hands to sleep with the gods.  They
brought their warmest furs, their strongest dogs, their best meats; but I
sold the _hooch_ with discretion, and only those were favoured that
brought flour and molasses and sugar.  And such stores poured in that I
set Moosu to build a cache to hold them, for there was soon no space in
the igloo.  Ere three days had passed Tummasook had gone bankrupt.  The
shaman, who was never more than half drunk after the first night, watched
me closely and hung on for the better part of the week.  But before ten
days were gone, even the woman Ipsukuk exhausted her provisions, and went
home weak and tottery.

"But Moosu complained.  'O master,' he said, 'we have laid by great
wealth in molasses and sugar and flour, but our shack is yet mean, our
clothes thin, and our sleeping furs mangy.  There is a call of the belly
for meat the stench of which offends not the stars, and for tea such as
Tummasook guzzles, and there is a great yearning for the tobacco of
Neewak, who is shaman and who plans to destroy us.  I have flour until I
am sick, and sugar and molasses without stint, yet is the heart of Moosu
sore and his bed empty.'

"'Peace!' I answered, 'thou art weak of understanding and a fool.  Walk
softly and wait, and we will grasp it all.  But grasp now, and we grasp
little, and in the end it will be nothing.  Thou art a child in the way
of the white man's wisdom.  Hold thy tongue and watch, and I will show
you the way my brothers do overseas, and, so doing, gather to themselves
the riches of the earth.  It is what is called "business," and what dost
thou know about business?'

"But the next day he came in breathless.  'O master, a strange thing
happeneth in the igloo of Neewak, the shaman; wherefore we are lost, and
we have neither worn the warm furs nor tasted the good tobacco, what of
your madness for the molasses and flour.  Go thou and witness whilst I
watch by the brew.'

"So I went to the igloo of Neewak.  And behold, he had made his own
still, fashioned cunningly after mine.  And as he beheld me he could ill
conceal his triumph.  For he was a man of parts, and his sleep with the
gods when in my igloo had not been sound.

"But I was not disturbed, for I knew what I knew, and when I returned to
my own igloo, I descanted to Moosu, and said: 'Happily the property right
obtains amongst this people, who otherwise have been blessed with but few
of the institutions of men.  And because of this respect for property
shall you and I wax fat, and, further, we shall introduce amongst them
new institutions that other peoples have worked out through great travail
and suffering.'

"But Moosu understood dimly, till the shaman came forth, with eyes
flashing and a threatening note in his voice, and demanded to trade with
me.  'For look you,' he cried, 'there be of flour and molasses none in
all the village.  The like have you gathered with a shrewd hand from my
people, who have slept with your gods and who now have nothing save large
heads, and weak knees, and a thirst for cold water that they cannot
quench.  This is not good, and my voice has power among them; so it were
well that we trade, you and I, even as you have traded with them, for
molasses and flour.'

"And I made answer: 'This be good talk, and wisdom abideth in thy mouth.
We will trade.  For this much of flour and molasses givest thou me the
caddy of "Star" and the two buckets of smoking.'

"And Moosu groaned, and when the trade was made and the shaman departed,
he upbraided me: 'Now, because of thy madness are we, indeed, lost!
Neewak maketh _hooch_ on his own account, and when the time is ripe, he
will command the people to drink of no _hooch_ but his hooch.  And in
this way are we undone, and our goods worthless, and our igloo mean, and
the bed of Moosu cold and empty!'

"And I answered: 'By the body of the wolf, say I, thou art a fool, and
thy father before thee, and thy children after thee, down to the last
generation.  Thy wisdom is worse than no wisdom and thine eyes blinded to
business, of which I have spoken and whereof thou knowest nothing.  Go,
thou son of a thousand fools, and drink of the hooch that Neewak brews in
his igloo, and thank thy gods that thou hast a white man's wisdom to make
soft the bed thou liest in.  Go! and when thou hast drunken, return with
the taste still on thy lips, that I may know.'

"And two days after, Neewak sent greeting and invitation to his igloo.
Moosu went, but I sat alone, with the song of the still in my ears, and
the air thick with the shaman's tobacco; for trade was slack that night,
and no one dropped in but Angeit, a young hunter that had faith in me.
Later, Moosu came back, his speech thick with chuckling and his eyes
wrinkling with laughter.

"'Thou art a great man,' he said.  'Thou art a great man, O master, and
because of thy greatness thou wilt not condemn Moosu, thy servant, who
ofttimes doubts and cannot be made to understand.'

"'And wherefore now?' I demanded.  'Hast thou drunk overmuch?  And are
they sleeping sound in the igloo of Neewak, the shaman?'

"'Nay, they are angered and sore of body, and Chief Tummasook has thrust
his thumbs in the throat of Neewak, and sworn by the bones of his
ancestors to look upon his face no more.  For behold! I went to the
igloo, and the brew simmered and bubbled, and the steam journeyed through
the gooseneck even as thy steam, and even as thine it became water where
it met the ice, and dropped into the pot at the far end.  And Neewak gave
us to drink, and lo, it was not like thine, for there was no bite to the
tongue nor tingling to the eyeballs, and of a truth it was water.  So we
drank, and we drank overmuch; yet did we sit with cold hearts and solemn.
And Neewak was perplexed and a cloud came on his brow.  And he took
Tummasook and Ipsukuk alone of all the company and set them apart, and
bade them drink and drink and drink.  And they drank and drank and drank,
and yet sat solemn and cold, till Tummasook arose in wrath and demanded
back the furs and the tea he had paid.  And Ipsukuk raised her voice,
thin and angry.  And the company demanded back what they had given, and
there was a great commotion.'

"'Does the son of a dog deem me a whale?' demanded Tummasook, shoving
back the skin flap and standing erect, his face black and his brows
angry.  'Wherefore I am filled, like a fish-bladder, to bursting, till I
can scarce walk, what of the weight within me.  Lalah!  I have drunken as
never before, yet are my eyes clear, my knees strong, my hand steady.'

"'The shaman cannot send us to sleep with the gods,' the people
complained, stringing in and joining us, 'and only in thy igloo may the
thing be done.'

"So I laughed to myself as I passed the _hooch_ around and the guests
made merry.  For in the flour I had traded to Neewak I had mixed much
soda that I had got from the woman Ipsukuk.  So how could his brew
ferment when the soda kept it sweet?  Or his _hooch_ be _hooch_ when it
would not sour?

"After that our wealth flowed in without let or hindrance.  Furs we had
without number, and the fancy-work of the women, all of the chief's tea,
and no end of meat.  One day Moosu retold for my benefit, and sadly
mangled, the story of Joseph in Egypt, but from it I got an idea, and
soon I had half the tribe at work building me great meat caches.  And of
all they hunted I got the lion's share and stored it away.  Nor was Moosu
idle.  He made himself a pack of cards from birch bark, and taught Neewak
the way to play seven-up.  He also inveigled the father of Tukeliketa
into the game.  And one day he married the maiden, and the next day he
moved into the shaman's house, which was the finest in the village.  The
fall of Neewak was complete, for he lost all his possessions, his walrus-
hide drums, his incantation tools--everything.  And in the end he became
a hewer of wood and drawer of water at the beck and call of Moosu.  And
Moosu--he set himself up as shaman, or high priest, and out of his
garbled Scripture created new gods and made incantation before strange
altars.

"And I was well pleased, for I thought it good that church and state go
hand in hand, and I had certain plans of my own concerning the state.
Events were shaping as I had foreseen.  Good temper and smiling faces had
vanished from the village.  The people were morose and sullen.  There
were quarrels and fighting, and things were in an uproar night and day.
Moosu's cards were duplicated and the hunters fell to gambling among
themselves.  Tummasook beat his wife horribly, and his mother's brother
objected and smote him with a tusk of walrus till he cried aloud in the
night and was shamed before the people.  Also, amid such diversions no
hunting was done, and famine fell upon the land.  The nights were long
and dark, and without meat no _hooch_ could be bought; so they murmured
against the chief.  This I had played for, and when they were well and
hungry, I summoned the whole village, made a great harangue, posed as
patriarch, and fed the famishing.  Moosu made harangue likewise, and
because of this and the thing I had done I was made chief.  Moosu, who
had the ear of God and decreed his judgments, anointed me with whale
blubber, and right blubberly he did it, not understanding the ceremony.
And between us we interpreted to the people the new theory of the divine
right of kings.  There was _hooch_ galore, and meat and feastings, and
they took kindly to the new order.

"So you see, O man, I have sat in the high places, and worn the purple,
and ruled populations.  And I might yet be a king had the tobacco held
out, or had Moosu been more fool and less knave.  For he cast eyes upon
Esanetuk, eldest daughter to Tummasook, and I objected.

"'O brother,' he explained, 'thou hast seen fit to speak of introducing
new institutions amongst this people, and I have listened to thy words
and gained wisdom thereby.  Thou rulest by the God-given right, and by
the God-given right I marry.'

"I noted that he 'brothered' me, and was angry and put my foot down.  But
he fell back upon the people and made incantations for three days, in
which all hands joined; and then, speaking with the voice of God, he
decreed polygamy by divine fiat.  But he was shrewd, for he limited the
number of wives by a property qualification, and because of which he,
above all men, was favoured by his wealth.  Nor could I fail to admire,
though it was plain that power had turned his head, and he would not be
satisfied till all the power and all the wealth rested in his own hands.
So he became swollen with pride, forgot it was I that had placed him
there, and made preparations to destroy me.

"But it was interesting, for the beggar was working out in his own way an
evolution of primitive society.  Now I, by virtue of the _hooch_
monopoly, drew a revenue in which I no longer permitted him to share.  So
he meditated for a while and evolved a system of ecclesiastical taxation.
He laid tithes upon the people, harangued about fat firstlings and such
things, and twisted whatever twisted texts he had ever heard to serve his
purpose.  Even this I bore in silence, but when he instituted what may be
likened to a graduated income-tax, I rebelled, and blindly, for this was
what he worked for.  Thereat, he appealed to the people, and they,
envious of my great wealth and well taxed themselves, upheld him.  'Why
should we pay,' they asked, 'and not you?  Does not the voice of God
speak through the lips of Moosu, the shaman?'  So I yielded.  But at the
same time I raised the price of hooch, and lo, he was not a whit behind
me in raising my taxes.

"Then there was open war.  I made a play for Neewak and Tummasook,
because of the traditionary rights they possessed; but Moosu won out by
creating a priesthood and giving them both high office.  The problem of
authority presented itself to him, and he worked it out as it has often
been worked before.  There was my mistake.  I should have been made
shaman, and he chief; but I saw it too late, and in the clash of
spiritual and temporal power I was bound to be worsted.  A great
controversy waged, but it quickly became one-sided.  The people
remembered that he had anointed me, and it was clear to them that the
source of my authority lay, not in me, but in Moosu.  Only a few faithful
ones clung to me, chief among whom Angeit was; while he headed the
popular party and set whispers afloat that I had it in mind to overthrow
him and set up my own gods, which were most unrighteous gods.  And in
this the clever rascal had anticipated me, for it was just what I had
intended--forsake my kingship, you see, and fight spiritual with
spiritual.  So he frightened the people with the iniquities of my
peculiar gods--especially the one he named 'Biz-e-Nass'--and nipped the
scheme in the bud.

"Now, it happened that Kluktu, youngest daughter to Tummasook, had caught
my fancy, and I likewise hers.  So I made overtures, but the ex-chief
refused bluntly--after I had paid the purchase price--and informed me
that she was set aside for Moosu.  This was too much, and I was half of a
mind to go to his igloo and slay him with my naked hands; but I
recollected that the tobacco was near gone, and went home laughing.  The
next day he made incantation, and distorted the miracle of the loaves and
fishes till it became prophecy, and I, reading between the lines, saw
that it was aimed at the wealth of meat stored in my caches.  The people
also read between the lines, and, as he did not urge them to go on the
hunt, they remained at home, and few caribou or bear were brought in.

"But I had plans of my own, seeing that not only the tobacco but the
flour and molasses were near gone.  And further, I felt it my duty to
prove the white man's wisdom and bring sore distress to Moosu, who had
waxed high-stomached, what of the power I had given him.  So that night I
went to my meat caches and toiled mightily, and it was noted next day
that all the dogs of the village were lazy.  No one suspected, and I
toiled thus every night, and the dogs grew fat and fatter, and the people
lean and leaner.  They grumbled and demanded the fulfilment of prophecy,
but Moosu restrained them, waiting for their hunger to grow yet greater.
Nor did he dream, to the very last, of the trick I had been playing on
the empty caches.

"When all was ready, I sent Angeit, and the faithful ones whom I had fed
privily, through the village to call assembly.  And the tribe gathered on
a great space of beaten snow before my door, with the meat caches
towering stilt-legged in the rear.  Moosu came also, standing on the
inner edge of the circle opposite me, confident that I had some scheme
afoot, and prepared at the first break to down me.  But I arose, giving
him salutation before all men.

"'O Moosu, thou blessed of God,' I began, 'doubtless thou hast wondered
in that I have called this convocation together; and doubtless, because
of my many foolishnesses, art thou prepared for rash sayings and rash
doings.  Not so.  It has been said, that those the gods would destroy
they first make mad.  And I have been indeed mad.  I have crossed thy
will, and scoffed at thy authority, and done divers evil and wanton
things.  Wherefore, last night a vision was vouchsafed me, and I have
seen the wickedness of my ways.  And thou stoodst forth like a shining
star, with brows aflame, and I knew in mine own heart thy greatness.  I
saw all things clearly.  I knew that thou didst command the ear of God,
and that when you spoke he listened.  And I remembered that whatever of
the good deeds that I had done, I had done through the grace of God, and
the grace of Moosu.

"'Yes, my children,' I cried, turning to the people, 'whatever right I
have done, and whatever good I have done, have been because of the
counsel of Moosu.  When I listened to him, affairs prospered; when I
closed my ears, and acted according to my folly, things came to folly.  By
his advice it was that I laid my store of meat, and in time of darkness
fed the famishing.  By his grace it was that I was made chief.  And what
have I done with my chiefship?  Let me tell you.  I have done nothing.  My
head was turned with power, and I deemed myself greater than Moosu, and,
behold I have come to grief.  My rule has been unwise, and the gods are
angered.  Lo, ye are pinched with famine, and the mothers are
dry-breasted, and the little babies cry through the long nights.  Nor do
I, who have hardened my heart against Moosu, know what shall be done, nor
in what manner of way grub shall be had.'

"At this there was nodding and laughing, and the people put their heads
together, and I knew they whispered of the loaves and fishes.  I went on
hastily.  'So I was made aware of my foolishness and of Moosu's wisdom;
of my own unfitness and of Moosu's fitness.  And because of this, being
no longer mad, I make acknowledgment and rectify evil.  I did cast
unrighteous eyes upon Kluktu, and lo, she was sealed to Moosu.  Yet is
she mine, for did I not pay to Tummasook the goods of purchase?  But I am
well unworthy of her, and she shall go from the igloo of her father to
the igloo of Moosu.  Can the moon shine in the sunshine?  And further,
Tummasook shall keep the goods of purchase, and she be a free gift to
Moosu, whom God hath ordained her rightful lord.

"'And further yet, because I have used my wealth unwisely, and to oppress
ye, O my children, do I make gifts of the kerosene can to Moosu, and the
gooseneck, and the gun-barrel, and the copper kettle.  Therefore, I can
gather to me no more possessions, and when ye are athirst for _hooch_, he
will quench ye and without robbery.  For he is a great man, and God
speaketh through his lips.

"'And yet further, my heart is softened, and I have repented me of my
madness.  I, who am a fool and a son of fools; I, who am the slave of the
bad god Biz-e-Nass; I, who see thy empty bellies and knew not wherewith
to fill them--why shall I be chief, and sit above thee, and rule to thine
own destruction?  Why should I do this, which is not good?  But Moosu,
who is shaman, and who is wise above men, is so made that he can rule
with a soft hand and justly.  And because of the things I have related do
I make abdication and give my chiefship to Moosu, who alone knoweth how
ye may be fed in this day when there be no meat in the land.'

"At this there was a great clapping of hands, and the people cried,
'_Kloshe_!  _Kloshe_!' which means 'good.'  I had seen the wonder-worry
in Moosu's eyes; for he could not understand, and was fearful of my white
man's wisdom.  I had met his wishes all along the line, and even
anticipated some; and standing there, self-shorn of all my power, he knew
the time did not favour to stir the people against me.

"Before they could disperse I made announcement that while the still went
to Moosu, whatever _hooch_ I possessed went to the people.  Moosu tried
to protest at this, for never had we permitted more than a handful to be
drunk at a time; but they cried, '_Kloshe_! _Kloshe_!' and made festival
before my door.  And while they waxed uproarious without, as the liquor
went to their heads, I held council within with Angeit and the faithful
ones.  I set them the tasks they were to do, and put into their mouths
the words they were to say.  Then I slipped away to a place back in the
woods where I had two sleds, well loaded, with teams of dogs that were
not overfed.  Spring was at hand, you see, and there was a crust to the
snow; so it was the best time to take the way south.  Moreover, the
tobacco was gone.  There I waited, for I had nothing to fear.  Did they
bestir themselves on my trail, their dogs were too fat, and themselves
too lean, to overtake me; also, I deemed their bestirring would be of an
order for which I had made due preparation.

"First came a faithful one, running, and after him another.  'O master,'
the first cried, breathless, 'there be great confusion in the village,
and no man knoweth his own mind, and they be of many minds.  Everybody
hath drunken overmuch, and some be stringing bows, and some be
quarrelling one with another.  Never was there such a trouble.'

"And the second one: 'And I did as thou biddest, O master, whispering
shrewd words in thirsty ears, and raising memories of the things that
were of old time.  The woman Ipsukuk waileth her poverty and the wealth
that no longer is hers.  And Tummasook thinketh himself once again chief,
and the people are hungry and rage up and down.'

"And a third one: 'And Neewak hath overthrown the altars of Moosu, and
maketh incantation before the time-honoured and ancient gods.  And all
the people remember the wealth that ran down their throats, and which
they possess no more.  And first, Esanetuk, who be _sick tumtum_,
fought with Kluktu, and there was much noise.  And next, being daughters
of the one mother, did they fight with Tukeliketa.  And after that did
they three fall upon Moosu, like wind-squalls, from every hand, till he
ran forth from the igloo, and the people mocked him.  For a man who
cannot command his womankind is a fool.'

"Then came Angeit: 'Great trouble hath befallen Moosu, O master, for I
have whispered to advantage, till the people came to Moosu, saying they
were hungry and demanding the fulfilment of prophecy.  And there was a
loud shout of "Itlwillie! Itlwillie!"  (Meat.)  So he cried peace to his
womenfolk, who were overwrought with anger and with hooch, and led the
tribe even to thy meat caches.  And he bade the men open them and be fed.
And lo, the caches were empty.  There was no meat.  They stood without
sound, the people being frightened, and in the silence I lifted my voice.
"O Moosu, where is the meat?  That there was meat we know.  Did we not
hunt it and drag it in from the hunt?  And it were a lie to say one man
hath eaten it; yet have we seen nor hide nor hair.  Where is the meat, O
Moosu?  Thou hast the ear of God.  Where is the meat?"

"'And the people cried, "Thou hast the ear of God.  Where is the meat?"
And they put their heads together and were afraid.  Then I went among
them, speaking fearsomely of the unknown things, of the dead that come
and go like shadows and do evil deeds, till they cried aloud in terror
and gathered all together, like little children afraid of the dark.
Neewak made harangue, laying this evil that had come upon them at the
door of Moosu.  When he had done, there was a furious commotion, and they
took spears in their hands, and tusks of walrus, and clubs, and stones
from the beach.  But Moosu ran away home, and because he had not drunken
of _hooch_ they could not catch him, and fell one over another and made
haste slowly.  Even now they do howl without his igloo, and his woman-
folk within, and what of the noise, he cannot make himself heard.'

"'O Angeit, thou hast done well,' I commanded.  'Go now, taking this
empty sled and the lean dogs, and ride fast to the igloo of Moosu; and
before the people, who are drunken, are aware, throw him quick upon the
sled and bring him to me.'

"I waited and gave good advice to the faithful ones till Angeit returned.
Moosu was on the sled, and I saw by the fingermarks on his face that his
womankind had done well by him.  But he tumbled off and fell in the snow
at my feet, crying: 'O master, thou wilt forgive Moosu, thy servant, for
the wrong things he has done!  Thou art a great man!  Surely wilt thou
forgive!'

"'Call me "brother," Moosu--call me "brother,"' I chided, lifting him to
his feet with the toe of my moccasin.  'Wilt thou evermore obey?'

"'Yea, master,' he whimpered, 'evermore.'

"'Then dispose thy body, so, across the sled,' I shifted the dogwhip to
my right hand.  'And direct thy face downwards, toward the snow.  And
make haste, for we journey south this day.'  And when he was well fixed I
laid the lash upon him, reciting, at every stroke, the wrongs he had done
me. 'This for thy disobedience in general--whack!  And this for thy
disobedience in particular--whack! whack!  And this for Esanetuk!  And
this for thy soul's welfare!  And this for the grace of thy authority!
And this for Kluktu!  And this for thy rights God-given!  And this for
thy fat firstlings!  And this and this for thy income-tax and thy loaves
and fishes!  And this for all thy disobedience!  And this, finally, that
thou mayest henceforth walk softly and with understanding!  Now cease thy
sniffling and get up!  Gird on thy snowshoes and go to the fore and break
trail for the dogs.  _Chook_!  _Mush-on_!  Git!'"

Thomas Stevens smiled quietly to himself as he lighted his fifth cigar
and sent curling smoke-rings ceilingward.

"But how about the people of Tattarat?" I asked.  "Kind of rough, wasn't
it, to leave them flat with famine?"

And he answered, laughing, between two smoke-rings, "Were there not the
fat dogs?"



THE FAITH OF MEN


"Tell you what we'll do; we'll shake for it."

"That suits me," said the second man, turning, as he spoke, to the Indian
that was mending snowshoes in a corner of the cabin.  "Here, you
Billebedam, take a run down to Oleson's cabin like a good fellow, and
tell him we want to borrow his dice box."

This sudden request in the midst of a council on wages of men, wood, and
grub surprised Billebedam.  Besides, it was early in the day, and he had
never known white men of the calibre of Pentfield and Hutchinson to dice
and play till the day's work was done.  But his face was impassive as a
Yukon Indian's should be, as he pulled on his mittens and went out the
door.

Though eight o'clock, it was still dark outside, and the cabin was
lighted by a tallow candle thrust into an empty whisky bottle.  It stood
on the pine-board table in the middle of a disarray of dirty tin dishes.
Tallow from innumerable candles had dripped down the long neck of the
bottle and hardened into a miniature glacier.  The small room, which
composed the entire cabin, was as badly littered as the table; while at
one end, against the wall, were two bunks, one above the other, with the
blankets turned down just as the two men had crawled out in the morning.

Lawrence Pentfield and Corry Hutchinson were millionaires, though they
did not look it.  There seemed nothing unusual about them, while they
would have passed muster as fair specimens of lumbermen in any Michigan
camp.  But outside, in the darkness, where holes yawned in the ground,
were many men engaged in windlassing muck and gravel and gold from the
bottoms of the holes where other men received fifteen dollars per day for
scraping it from off the bedrock.  Each day thousands of dollars' worth
of gold were scraped from bedrock and windlassed to the surface, and it
all belonged to Pentfield and Hutchinson, who took their rank among the
richest kings of Bonanza.

Pentfield broke the silence that followed on Billebedam's departure by
heaping the dirty plates higher on the table and drumming a tattoo on the
cleared space with his knuckles.  Hutchinson snuffed the smoky candle and
reflectively rubbed the soot from the wick between thumb and forefinger.

"By Jove, I wish we could both go out!" he abruptly exclaimed.  "That
would settle it all."

Pentfield looked at him darkly.

"If it weren't for your cursed obstinacy, it'd be settled anyway.  All
you have to do is get up and go.  I'll look after things, and next year I
can go out."

"Why should I go?  I've no one waiting for me--"

"Your people," Pentfield broke in roughly.

"Like you have," Hutchinson went on.  "A girl, I mean, and you know it."

Pentfield shrugged his shoulders gloomily.  "She can wait, I guess."

"But she's been waiting two years now."

"And another won't age her beyond recognition."

"That'd be three years.  Think of it, old man, three years in this end of
the earth, this falling-off place for the damned!"  Hutchinson threw up
his arm in an almost articulate groan.

He was several years younger than his partner, not more than twenty-six,
and there was a certain wistfulness in his face that comes into the faces
of men when they yearn vainly for the things they have been long denied.
This same wistfulness was in Pentfield's face, and the groan of it was
articulate in the heave of his shoulders.

"I dreamed last night I was in Zinkand's," he said.  "The music playing,
glasses clinking, voices humming, women laughing, and I was ordering
eggs--yes, sir, eggs, fried and boiled and poached and scrambled, and in
all sorts of ways, and downing them as fast as they arrived."

"I'd have ordered salads and green things," Hutchinson criticized
hungrily, "with a big, rare, Porterhouse, and young onions and
radishes,--the kind your teeth sink into with a crunch."

"I'd have followed the eggs with them, I guess, if I hadn't awakened,"
Pentfield replied.

He picked up a trail-scarred banjo from the floor and began to strum a
few wandering notes.  Hutchinson winced and breathed heavily.

"Quit it!" he burst out with sudden fury, as the other struck into a
gaily lifting swing.  "It drives me mad.  I can't stand it"

Pentfield tossed the banjo into a bunk and quoted:-

   "Hear me babble what the weakest won't confess--
   I am Memory and Torment--I am Town!
   I am all that ever went with evening dress!"

The other man winced where he sat and dropped his head forward on the
table.  Pentfield resumed the monotonous drumming with his knuckles.  A
loud snap from the door attracted his attention.  The frost was creeping
up the inside in a white sheet, and he began to hum:-

   "The flocks are folded, boughs are bare,
   The salmon takes the sea;
   And oh, my fair, would I somewhere
   Might house my heart with thee."

Silence fell and was not again broken till Billebedam arrived and threw
the dice box on the table.

"Um much cold," he said.  "Oleson um speak to me, um say um Yukon freeze
last night."

"Hear that, old man!" Pentfield cried, slapping Hutchinson on the
shoulder.  "Whoever wins can be hitting the trail for God's country this
time tomorrow morning!"

He picked up the box, briskly rattling the dice.

"What'll it be?"

"Straight poker dice," Hutchinson answered.  "Go on and roll them out."

Pentfield swept the dishes from the table with a crash and rolled out the
five dice.  Both looked tragedy.  The shake was without a pair and five-
spot high.

"A stiff!" Pentfield groaned.

After much deliberating Pentfield picked up all the five dice and put
them in the box.

"I'd shake to the five if I were you," Hutchinson suggested.

"No, you wouldn't, not when you see this," Pentfield replied, shaking out
the dice.

Again they were without a pair, running this time in unbroken sequence
from two to six.

"A second stiff!" he groaned.  "No use your shaking, Corry.  You can't
lose."

The other man gathered up the dice without a word, rattled them, rolled
them out on the table with a flourish, and saw that he had likewise
shaken a six-high stiff.

"Tied you, anyway, but I'll have to do better than that," he said,
gathering in four of them and shaking to the six.  "And here's what beats
you!"

But they rolled out deuce, tray, four, and five--a stiff still and no
better nor worse than Pentfield's throw.

Hutchinson sighed.

"Couldn't happen once in a million times," said.

"Nor in a million lives," Pentfield added, catching up the dice and
quickly throwing them out.  Three fives appeared, and, after much delay,
he was rewarded by a fourth five on the second shake.  Hutchinson seemed
to have lost his last hope.

But three sixes turned up on his first shake.  A great doubt rose in the
other's eyes, and hope returned into his.  He had one more shake.  Another
six and he would go over the ice to salt water and the States.

He rattled the dice in the box, made as though to cast them, hesitated,
and continued rattle them.

"Go on!  Go on!  Don't take all night about it!" Pentfield cried sharply,
bending his nails on the table, so tight was the clutch with which he
strove to control himself.

The dice rolled forth, an upturned six meeting their eyes.  Both men sat
staring at it.  There was a long silence.  Hutchinson shot a covert
glance at his partner, who, still more covertly, caught it, and pursed up
his lips in an attempt to advertise his unconcern.

Hutchinson laughed as he got up on his feet.  It was a nervous,
apprehensive laugh.  It was a case where it was more awkward to win than
lose.  He walked over to his partner, who whirled upon him fiercely:-

"Now you just shut up, Corry!  I know all you're going to say--that you'd
rather stay in and let me go, and all that; so don't say it.  You've your
own people in Detroit to see, and that's enough.  Besides, you can do for
me the very thing I expected to do if I went out."

"And that is--?"

Pentfield read the full question in his partner's eyes, and answered:-

"Yes, that very thing.  You can bring her in to me.  The only difference
will be a Dawson wedding instead of a San Franciscan one."

"But, man alike!" Corry Hutchinson objected "how under the sun can I
bring her in?  We're not exactly brother and sister, seeing that I have
not even met her, and it wouldn't be just the proper thing, you know, for
us to travel together.  Of course, it would be all right--you and I know
that; but think of the looks of it, man!"

Pentfield swore under his breath, consigning the looks of it to a less
frigid region than Alaska.

"Now, if you'll just listen and not get astride that high horse of yours
so blamed quick," his partner went on, "you'll see that the only fair
thing under the circumstances is for me to let you go out this year.  Next
year is only a year away, and then I can take my fling."

Pentfield shook his head, though visibly swayed by the temptation.

"It won't do, Corry, old man.  I appreciate your kindness and all that,
but it won't do.  I'd be ashamed every time I thought of you slaving away
in here in my place."

A thought seemed suddenly to strike him.  Burrowing into his bunk and
disrupting it in his eagerness, he secured a writing-pad and pencil, and
sitting down at the table, began to write with swiftness and certitude.

"Here," he said, thrusting the scrawled letter into his partner's hand.
"You just deliver that and everything'll be all right."

Hutchinson ran his eye over it and laid it down.

"How do you know the brother will be willing to make that beastly trip in
here?" he demanded.

"Oh, he'll do it for me--and for his sister," Pentfield replied.  "You
see, he's tenderfoot, and I wouldn't trust her with him alone.  But with
you along it will be an easy trip and a safe one.  As soon as you get
out, you'll go to her and prepare her.  Then you can take your run east
to your own people, and in the spring she and her brother'll be ready to
start with you.  You'll like her, I know, right from the jump; and from
that, you'll know her as soon as you lay eyes on her."

So saying he opened the back of his watch and exposed a girl's photograph
pasted on the inside of the case.  Corry Hutchinson gazed at it with
admiration welling up in his eyes.

"Mabel is her name," Pentfield went on.  "And it's just as well you
should know how to find the house.  Soon as you strike 'Frisco, take a
cab, and just say, 'Holmes's place, Myrdon Avenue'--I doubt if the Myrdon
Avenue is necessary.  The cabby'll know where Judge Holmes lives.

"And say," Pentfield continued, after a pause, "it won't be a bad idea
for you to get me a few little things which a--er--"

"A married man should have in his business," Hutchinson blurted out with
a grin.

Pentfield grinned back.

"Sure, napkins and tablecloths and sheets and pillowslips, and such
things.  And you might get a good set of china.  You know it'll come hard
for her to settle down to this sort of thing.  You can freight them in by
steamer around by Bering Sea.  And, I say, what's the matter with a
piano?"

Hutchinson seconded the idea heartily.  His reluctance had vanished, and
he was warming up to his mission.

"By Jove!  Lawrence," he said at the conclusion of the council, as they
both rose to their feet, "I'll bring back that girl of yours in style.
I'll do the cooking and take care of the dogs, and all that brother'll
have to do will be to see to her comfort and do for her whatever I've
forgotten.  And I'll forget damn little, I can tell you."

The next day Lawrence Pentfield shook hands with him for the last time
and watched him, running with his dogs, disappear up the frozen Yukon on
his way to salt water and the world.  Pentfield went back to his Bonanza
mine, which was many times more dreary than before, and faced resolutely
into the long winter.  There was work to be done, men to superintend, and
operations to direct in burrowing after the erratic pay streak; but his
heart was not in the work.  Nor was his heart in any work till the tiered
logs of a new cabin began to rise on the hill behind the mine.  It was a
grand cabin, warmly built and divided into three comfortable rooms.  Each
log was hand-hewed and squared--an expensive whim when the axemen
received a daily wage of fifteen dollars; but to him nothing could be too
costly for the home in which Mabel Holmes was to live.

So he went about with the building of the cabin, singing, "And oh, my
fair, would I somewhere might house my heart with thee!"  Also, he had a
calendar pinned on the wall above the table, and his first act each
morning was to check off the day and to count the days that were left ere
his partner would come booming down the Yukon ice in the spring.  Another
whim of his was to permit no one to sleep in the new cabin on the hill.
It must be as fresh for her occupancy as the square-hewed wood was fresh;
and when it stood complete, he put a padlock on the door.  No one entered
save himself, and he was wont to spend long hours there, and to come
forth with his face strangely radiant and in his eyes a glad, warm light.

In December he received a letter from Corry Hutchinson.  He had just seen
Mabel Holmes.  She was all she ought to be, to be Lawrence Pentfield's
wife, he wrote.  He was enthusiastic, and his letter sent the blood
tingling through Pentfield's veins.  Other letters followed, one on the
heels of another, and sometimes two or three together when the mail
lumped up.  And they were all in the same tenor.  Corry had just come
from Myrdon Avenue; Corry was just going to Myrdon Avenue; or Corry was
at Myrdon Avenue.  And he lingered on and on in San Francisco, nor even
mentioned his trip to Detroit.

Lawrence Pentfield began to think that his partner was a great deal in
the company of Mabel Holmes for a fellow who was going east to see his
people.  He even caught himself worrying about it at times, though he
would have worried more had he not known Mabel and Corry so well.  Mabel's
letters, on the other hand, had a great deal to say about Corry.  Also, a
thread of timidity that was near to disinclination ran through them
concerning the trip in over the ice and the Dawson marriage.  Pentfield
wrote back heartily, laughing at her fears, which he took to be the mere
physical ones of danger and hardship rather than those bred of maidenly
reserve.

But the long winter and tedious wait, following upon the two previous
long winters, were telling upon him.  The superintendence of the men and
the pursuit of the pay streak could not break the irk of the daily round,
and the end of January found him making occasional trips to Dawson, where
he could forget his identity for a space at the gambling tables.  Because
he could afford to lose, he won, and "Pentfield's luck" became a stock
phrase among the faro players.

His luck ran with him till the second week in February.  How much farther
it might have run is conjectural; for, after one big game, he never
played again.

It was in the Opera House that it occurred, and for an hour it had seemed
that he could not place his money on a card without making the card a
winner.  In the lull at the end of a deal, while the game-keeper was
shuffling the deck, Nick Inwood the owner of the game, remarked, apropos
of nothing:-

"I say, Pentfield, I see that partner of yours has been cutting up monkey-
shines on the outside."

"Trust Corry to have a good time," Pentfield had answered; "especially
when he has earned it."

"Every man to his taste," Nick Inwood laughed; "but I should scarcely
call getting married a good time."

"Corry married!" Pentfield cried, incredulous and yet surprised out of
himself for the moment.

"Sure," Inwood said.  "I saw it in the 'Frisco paper that came in over
the ice this morning."

"Well, and who's the girl?" Pentfield demanded, somewhat with the air of
patient fortitude with which one takes the bait of a catch and is aware
at the time of the large laugh bound to follow at his expense.

Nick Inwood pulled the newspaper from his pocket and began looking it
over, saying:-

"I haven't a remarkable memory for names, but it seems to me it's
something like Mabel--Mabel--oh yes, here it--'Mabel Holmes, daughter of
Judge Holmes,'--whoever he is."

Lawrence Pentfield never turned a hair, though he wondered how any man in
the North could know her name.  He glanced coolly from face to face to
note any vagrant signs of the game that was being played upon him, but
beyond a healthy curiosity the faces betrayed nothing.  Then he turned to
the gambler and said in cold, even tones:-

"Inwood, I've got an even five hundred here that says the print of what
you have just said is not in that paper."

The gambler looked at him in quizzical surprise.  "Go 'way, child.  I
don't want your money."

"I thought so," Pentfield sneered, returning to the game and laying a
couple of bets.

Nick Inwood's face flushed, and, as though doubting his senses, he ran
careful eyes over the print of a quarter of a column.  Then be turned on
Lawrence Pentfield.

"Look here, Pentfield," he said, in a quiet, nervous manner; "I can't
allow that, you know."

"Allow what?" Pentfield demanded brutally.

"You implied that I lied."

"Nothing of the sort," came the reply.  "I merely implied that you were
trying to be clumsily witty."

"Make your bets, gentlemen," the dealer protested.

"But I tell you it's true," Nick Inwood insisted.

"And I have told you I've five hundred that says it's not in that paper,"
Pentfield answered, at the same time throwing a heavy sack of dust on the
table.

"I am sorry to take your money," was the retort, as Inwood thrust the
newspaper into Pentfield's hand.

Pentfield saw, though he could not quite bring himself to believe.
Glancing through the headline, "Young Lochinvar came out of the North,"
and skimming the article until the names of Mabel Holmes and Corry
Hutchinson, coupled together, leaped squarely before his eyes, he turned
to the top of the page.  It was a San Francisco paper.

"The money's yours, Inwood," he remarked, with a short laugh.  "There's
no telling what that partner of mine will do when he gets started."

Then he returned to the article and read it word for word, very slowly
and very carefully.  He could no longer doubt.  Beyond dispute, Corry
Hutchinson had married Mabel Holmes.  "One of the Bonanza kings," it
described him, "a partner with Lawrence Pentfield (whom San Francisco
society has not yet forgotten), and interested with that gentleman in
other rich, Klondike properties."  Further, and at the end, he read, "It
is whispered that Mr. and Mrs. Hutchinson will, after a brief trip east
to Detroit, make their real honeymoon journey into the fascinating
Klondike country."

"I'll be back again; keep my place for me," Pentfield said, rising to his
feet and taking his sack, which meantime had hit the blower and came back
lighter by five hundred dollars.

He went down the street and bought a Seattle paper.  It contained the
same facts, though somewhat condensed.  Corry and Mabel were indubitably
married.  Pentfield returned to the Opera House and resumed his seat in
the game.  He asked to have the limit removed.

"Trying to get action," Nick Inwood laughed, as he nodded assent to the
dealer.  "I was going down to the A. C. store, but now I guess I'll stay
and watch you do your worst."

This Lawrence Pentfield did at the end of two hours' plunging, when the
dealer bit the end off a fresh cigar and struck a match as he announced
that the bank was broken.  Pentfield cashed in for forty thousand, shook
hands with Nick Inwood, and stated that it was the last time he would
ever play at his game or at anybody's else's.

No one knew nor guessed that he had been hit, much less hit hard.  There
was no apparent change in his manner.  For a week he went about his work
much as he had always done, when he read an account of the marriage in a
Portland paper.  Then he called in a friend to take charge of his mine
and departed up the Yukon behind his dogs.  He held to the Salt Water
trail till White River was reached, into which he turned.  Five days
later he came upon a hunting camp of the White River Indians.  In the
evening there was a feast, and he sat in honour beside the chief; and
next morning he headed his dogs back toward the Yukon.  But he no longer
travelled alone.  A young squaw fed his dogs for him that night and
helped to pitch camp.  She had been mauled by a bear in her childhood and
suffered from a slight limp.  Her name was Lashka, and she was diffident
at first with the strange white man that had come out of the Unknown,
married her with scarcely a look or word, and now was carrying her back
with him into the Unknown.

But Lashka's was better fortune than falls to most Indian girls that mate
with white men in the Northland.  No sooner was Dawson reached than the
barbaric marriage that had joined them was re-solemnized, in the white
man's fashion, before a priest.  From Dawson, which to her was all a
marvel and a dream, she was taken directly to the Bonanza claim and
installed in the square-hewed cabin on the hill.

The nine days' wonder that followed arose not so much out of the fact of
the squaw whom Lawrence Pentfield had taken to bed and board as out of
the ceremony that had legalized the tie.  The properly sanctioned
marriage was the one thing that passed the community's comprehension.  But
no one bothered Pentfield about it.  So long as a man's vagaries did no
special hurt to the community, the community let the man alone, nor was
Pentfield barred from the cabins of men who possessed white wives.  The
marriage ceremony removed him from the status of squaw-man and placed him
beyond moral reproach, though there were men that challenged his taste
where women were concerned.

No more letters arrived from the outside.  Six sledloads of mails had
been lost at the Big Salmon.  Besides, Pentfield knew that Corry and his
bride must by that time have started in over the trail.  They were even
then on their honeymoon trip--the honeymoon trip he had dreamed of for
himself through two dreary years.  His lip curled with bitterness at the
thought; but beyond being kinder to Lashka he gave no sign.

March had passed and April was nearing its end, when, one spring morning,
Lashka asked permission to go down the creek several miles to Siwash
Pete's cabin.  Pete's wife, a Stewart River woman, had sent up word that
something was wrong with her baby, and Lashka, who was pre-eminently a
mother-woman and who held herself to be truly wise in the matter of
infantile troubles, missed no opportunity of nursing the children of
other women as yet more fortunate than she.

Pentfield harnessed his dogs, and with Lashka behind took the trail down
the creek bed of Bonanza.  Spring was in the air.  The sharpness had gone
out of the bite of the frost and though snow still covered the land, the
murmur and trickling of water told that the iron grip of winter was
relaxing.  The bottom was dropping out of the trail, and here and there a
new trail had been broken around open holes.  At such a place, where
there was not room for two sleds to pass, Pentfield heard the jingle of
approaching bells and stopped his dogs.

A team of tired-looking dogs appeared around the narrow bend, followed by
a heavily-loaded sled.  At the gee-pole was a man who steered in a manner
familiar to Pentfield, and behind the sled walked two women.  His glance
returned to the man at the gee-pole.  It was Corry.  Pentfield got on his
feet and waited.  He was glad that Lashka was with him.  The meeting
could not have come about better had it been planned, he thought.  And as
he waited he wondered what they would say, what they would be able to
say.  As for himself there was no need to say anything.  The explaining
was all on their side, and he was ready to listen to them.

As they drew in abreast, Corry recognized him and halted the dogs.  With
a "Hello, old man," he held out his hand.

Pentfield shook it, but without warmth or speech.  By this time the two
women had come up, and he noticed that the second one was Dora Holmes.  He
doffed his fur cap, the flaps of which were flying, shook hands with her,
and turned toward Mabel.  She swayed forward, splendid and radiant, but
faltered before his outstretched hand.  He had intended to say, "How do
you do, Mrs. Hutchinson?"--but somehow, the Mrs. Hutchinson had choked
him, and all he had managed to articulate was the "How do you do?"

There was all the constraint and awkwardness in the situation he could
have wished.  Mabel betrayed the agitation appropriate to her position,
while Dora, evidently brought along as some sort of peacemaker, was
saying:-

"Why, what is the matter, Lawrence?"

Before he could answer, Corry plucked him by the sleeve and drew him
aside.

"See here, old man, what's this mean?" Corry demanded in a low tone,
indicating Lashka with his eyes.

"I can hardly see, Corry, where you can have any concern in the matter,"
Pentfield answered mockingly.

But Corry drove straight to the point.

"What is that squaw doing on your sled?  A nasty job you've given me to
explain all this away.  I only hope it can be explained away.  Who is
she?  Whose squaw is she?"

Then Lawrence Pentfield delivered his stroke, and he delivered it with a
certain calm elation of spirit that seemed somewhat to compensate for the
wrong that had been done him.

"She is my squaw," he said; "Mrs. Pentfield, if you please."

Corry Hutchinson gasped, and Pentfield left him and returned to the two
women.  Mabel, with a worried expression on her face, seemed holding
herself aloof.  He turned to Dora and asked, quite genially, as though
all the world was sunshine:- "How did you stand the trip, anyway?  Have
any trouble to sleep warm?"

"And, how did Mrs. Hutchinson stand it?" he asked next, his eyes on
Mabel.

"Oh, you dear ninny!" Dora cried, throwing her arms around him and
hugging him.  "Then you saw it, too!  I thought something was the matter,
you were acting so strangely."

"I--I hardly understand," he stammered.

"It was corrected in next day's paper," Dora chattered on.  "We did not
dream you would see it.  All the other papers had it correctly, and of
course that one miserable paper was the very one you saw!"

"Wait a moment!  What do you mean?" Pentfield demanded, a sudden fear at
his heart, for he felt himself on the verge of a great gulf.

But Dora swept volubly on.

"Why, when it became known that Mabel and I were going to Klondike,
_Every Other Week_ said that when we were gone, it would be lovely on
Myrdon Avenue, meaning, of course, lonely."

"Then--"

"I am Mrs. Hutchinson," Dora answered.  "And you thought it was Mabel all
the time--"

"Precisely the way of it," Pentfield replied slowly.  "But I can see now.
The reporter got the names mixed.  The Seattle and Portland paper
copied."

He stood silently for a minute.  Mabel's face was turned toward him
again, and he could see the glow of expectancy in it.  Corry was deeply
interested in the ragged toe of one of his moccasins, while Dora was
stealing sidelong glances at the immobile face of Lashka sitting on the
sled.  Lawrence Pentfield stared straight out before him into a dreary
future, through the grey vistas of which he saw himself riding on a sled
behind running dogs with lame Lashka by his side.

Then he spoke, quite simply, looking Mabel in the eyes.

"I am very sorry.  I did not dream it.  I thought you had married Corry.
That is Mrs. Pentfield sitting on the sled over there."

Mabel Holmes turned weakly toward her sister, as though all the fatigue
of her great journey had suddenly descended on her.  Dora caught her
around the waist.  Corry Hutchinson was still occupied with his
moccasins.  Pentfield glanced quickly from face to face, then turned to
his sled.

"Can't stop here all day, with Pete's baby waiting," he said to Lashka.

The long whip-lash hissed out, the dogs sprang against the breast bands,
and the sled lurched and jerked ahead.

"Oh, I say, Corry," Pentfield called back, "you'd better occupy the old
cabin.  It's not been used for some time.  I've built a new one on the
hill."



TOO MUCH GOLD


This being a story--and a truer one than it may appear--of a mining
country, it is quite to be expected that it will be a hard-luck story.
But that depends on the point of view.  Hard luck is a mild way of
terming it so far as Kink Mitchell and Hootchinoo Bill are concerned; and
that they have a decided opinion on the subject is a matter of common
knowledge in the Yukon country.

It was in the fall of 1896 that the two partners came down to the east
bank of the Yukon, and drew a Peterborough canoe from a moss-covered
cache.  They were not particularly pleasant-looking objects.  A summer's
prospecting, filled to repletion with hardship and rather empty of grub,
had left their clothes in tatters and themselves worn and cadaverous.  A
nimbus of mosquitoes buzzed about each man's head.  Their faces were
coated with blue clay.  Each carried a lump of this damp clay, and,
whenever it dried and fell from their faces, more was daubed on in its
place.  There was a querulous plaint in their voices, an irritability of
movement and gesture, that told of broken sleep and a losing struggle
with the little winged pests.

"Them skeeters'll be the death of me yet," Kink Mitchell whimpered, as
the canoe felt the current on her nose, and leaped out from the bank.

"Cheer up, cheer up.  We're about done," Hootchinoo Bill answered, with
an attempted heartiness in his funereal tones that was ghastly.  "We'll
be in Forty Mile in forty minutes, and then--cursed little devil!"

One hand left his paddle and landed on the back of his neck with a sharp
slap.  He put a fresh daub of clay on the injured part, swearing
sulphurously the while.  Kink Mitchell was not in the least amused.  He
merely improved the opportunity by putting a thicker coating of clay on
his own neck.

They crossed the Yukon to its west bank, shot down-stream with easy
stroke, and at the end of forty minutes swung in close to the left around
the tail of an island.  Forty Mile spread itself suddenly before them.
Both men straightened their backs and gazed at the sight.  They gazed
long and carefully, drifting with the current, in their faces an
expression of mingled surprise and consternation slowly gathering.  Not a
thread of smoke was rising from the hundreds of log-cabins.  There was no
sound of axes biting sharply into wood, of hammering and sawing.  Neither
dogs nor men loitered before the big store.  No steamboats lay at the
bank, no canoes, nor scows, nor poling-boats.  The river was as bare of
craft as the town was of life.

"Kind of looks like Gabriel's tooted his little horn, and you an' me has
turned up missing," remarked Hootchinoo Bill.

His remark was casual, as though there was nothing unusual about the
occurrence.  Kink Mitchell's reply was just as casual as though he, too,
were unaware of any strange perturbation of spirit.

"Looks as they was all Baptists, then, and took the boats to go by
water," was his contribution.

"My ol' dad was a Baptist," Hootchinoo Bill supplemented.  "An' he always
did hold it was forty thousand miles nearer that way."

This was the end of their levity.  They ran the canoe in and climbed the
high earth bank.  A feeling of awe descended upon them as they walked the
deserted streets.  The sunlight streamed placidly over the town.  A
gentle wind tapped the halyards against the flagpole before the closed
doors of the Caledonia Dance Hall.  Mosquitoes buzzed, robins sang, and
moose birds tripped hungrily among the cabins; but there was no human
life nor sign of human life.

"I'm just dyin' for a drink," Hootchinoo Bill said and unconsciously his
voice sank to a hoarse whisper.

His partner nodded his head, loth to hear his own voice break the
stillness.  They trudged on in uneasy silence till surprised by an open
door.  Above this door, and stretching the width of the building, a rude
sign announced the same as the "Monte Carlo."  But beside the door, hat
over eyes, chair tilted back, a man sat sunning himself.  He was an old
man.  Beard and hair were long and white and patriarchal.

"If it ain't ol' Jim Cummings, turned up like us, too late for
Resurrection!" said Kink Mitchell.

"Most like he didn't hear Gabriel tootin'," was Hootchinoo Bill's
suggestion.

"Hello, Jim!  Wake up!" he shouted.

The old man unlimbered lamely, blinking his eyes and murmuring
automatically: "What'll ye have, gents?  What'll ye have?"

They followed him inside and ranged up against the long bar where of yore
a half-dozen nimble bar-keepers found little time to loaf.  The great
room, ordinarily aroar with life, was still and gloomy as a tomb.  There
was no rattling of chips, no whirring of ivory balls.  Roulette and faro
tables were like gravestones under their canvas covers.  No women's
voices drifted merrily from the dance-room behind.  Ol' Jim Cummings
wiped a glass with palsied hands, and Kink Mitchell scrawled his initials
on the dust-covered bar.

"Where's the girls?" Hootchinoo Bill shouted, with affected geniality.

"Gone," was the ancient bar-keeper's reply, in a voice thin and aged as
himself, and as unsteady as his hand.

"Where's Bidwell and Barlow?"

"Gone."

"And Sweetwater Charley?"

"Gone."

"And his sister?"

"Gone too."

"Your daughter Sally, then, and her little kid?"

"Gone, all gone."  The old man shook his head sadly, rummaging in an
absent way among the dusty bottles.

"Great Sardanapolis!  Where?" Kink Mitchell exploded, unable longer to
restrain himself.  "You don't say you've had the plague?"

"Why, ain't you heerd?"  The old man chuckled quietly.  "They-all's gone
to Dawson."

"What-like is that?" Bill demanded.  "A creek? or a bar? or a place?"

"Ain't never heered of Dawson, eh?"  The old man chuckled exasperatingly.
"Why, Dawson's a town, a city, bigger'n Forty Mile.  Yes, sir, bigger'n
Forty Mile."

"I've ben in this land seven year," Bill announced emphatically, "an' I
make free to say I never heard tell of the burg before.  Hold on!  Let's
have some more of that whisky.  Your information's flabbergasted me, that
it has.  Now just whereabouts is this Dawson-place you was a-mentionin'?"

"On the big flat jest below the mouth of Klondike," ol' Jim answered.
"But where has you-all ben this summer?"

"Never you mind where we-all's ben," was Kink Mitchell's testy reply.  "We-
all's ben where the skeeters is that thick you've got to throw a stick
into the air so as to see the sun and tell the time of day.  Ain't I
right, Bill?"

"Right you are," said Bill.  "But speakin' of this Dawson-place how like
did it happen to be, Jim?"

"Ounce to the pan on a creek called Bonanza, an' they ain't got to
bedrock yet."

"Who struck it?"

"Carmack."

At mention of the discoverer's name the partners stared at each other
disgustedly.  Then they winked with great solemnity.

"Siwash George," sniffed Hootchinoo Bill.

"That squaw-man," sneered Kink Mitchell.

"I wouldn't put on my moccasins to stampede after anything he'd ever
find," said Bill.

"Same here," announced his partner.  "A cuss that's too plumb lazy to
fish his own salmon.  That's why he took up with the Indians.  S'pose
that black brother-in-law of his,--lemme see, Skookum Jim, eh?--s'pose
he's in on it?"

The old bar-keeper nodded.  "Sure, an' what's more, all Forty Mile,
exceptin' me an' a few cripples."

"And drunks," added Kink Mitchell.

"No-sir-ee!" the old man shouted emphatically.

"I bet you the drinks Honkins ain't in on it!" Hootchinoo Bill cried with
certitude.

Ol' Jim's face lighted up.  "I takes you, Bill, an' you loses."

"However did that ol' soak budge out of Forty Mile?" Mitchell demanded.

"The ties him down an' throws him in the bottom of a polin'-boat," ol'
Jim explained.  "Come right in here, they did, an' takes him out of that
there chair there in the corner, an' three more drunks they finds under
the pianny.  I tell you-alls the whole camp hits up the Yukon for Dawson
jes' like Sam Scratch was after them,--wimmen, children, babes in arms,
the whole shebang.  Bidwell comes to me an' sez, sez he, 'Jim, I wants
you to keep tab on the Monte Carlo.  I'm goin'.'

"'Where's Barlow?' sez I.  'Gone,' sez he, 'an' I'm a-followin' with a
load of whisky.'  An' with that, never waitin' for me to decline, he
makes a run for his boat an' away he goes, polin' up river like mad.  So
here I be, an' these is the first drinks I've passed out in three days."

The partners looked at each other.

"Gosh darn my buttoms!" said Hootchinoo Bill.  "Seems likes you and me,
Kink, is the kind of folks always caught out with forks when it rains
soup."

"Wouldn't it take the saleratus out your dough, now?" said Kink Mitchell.
"A stampede of tin-horns, drunks, an' loafers."

"An' squaw-men," added Bill.  "Not a genooine miner in the whole
caboodle."

"Genooine miners like you an' me, Kink," he went on academically, "is all
out an' sweatin' hard over Birch Creek way.  Not a genooine miner in this
whole crazy Dawson outfit, and I say right here, not a step do I budge
for any Carmack strike.  I've got to see the colour of the dust first."

"Same here," Mitchell agreed.  "Let's have another drink."

Having wet this resolution, they beached the canoe, transferred its
contents to their cabin, and cooked dinner.  But as the afternoon wore
along they grew restive.  They were men used to the silence of the great
wilderness, but this gravelike silence of a town worried them.  They
caught themselves listening for familiar sounds--"waitin' for something
to make a noise which ain't goin' to make a noise," as Bill put it.  They
strolled through the deserted streets to the Monte Carlo for more drinks,
and wandered along the river bank to the steamer landing, where only
water gurgled as the eddy filled and emptied, and an occasional salmon
leapt flashing into the sun.

They sat down in the shade in front of the store and talked with the
consumptive storekeeper, whose liability to hemorrhage accounted for his
presence.  Bill and Kink told him how they intended loafing in their
cabin and resting up after the hard summer's work.  They told him, with a
certain insistence, that was half appeal for belief, half challenge for
contradiction, how much they were going to enjoy their idleness.  But the
storekeeper was uninterested.  He switched the conversation back to the
strike on Klondike, and they could not keep him away from it.  He could
think of nothing else, talk of nothing else, till Hootchinoo Bill rose up
in anger and disgust.

"Gosh darn Dawson, say I!" he cried.

"Same here," said Kink Mitchell, with a brightening face.  "One'd think
something was doin' up there, 'stead of bein' a mere stampede of
greenhorns an' tinhorns."

But a boat came into view from down-stream.  It was long and slim.  It
hugged the bank closely, and its three occupants, standing upright,
propelled it against the stiff current by means of long poles.

"Circle City outfit," said the storekeeper.  "I was lookin' for 'em along
by afternoon.  Forty Mile had the start of them by a hundred and seventy
miles.  But gee! they ain't losin' any time!"

"We'll just sit here quiet-like and watch 'em string by," Bill said
complacently.

As he spoke, another boat appeared in sight, followed after a brief
interval by two others.  By this time the first boat was abreast of the
men on the bank.  Its occupants did not cease poling while greetings were
exchanged, and, though its progress was slow, a half-hour saw it out of
sight up river.

Still they came from below, boat after boat, in endless procession.  The
uneasiness of Bill and Kink increased.  They stole speculative, tentative
glances at each other, and when their eyes met looked away in
embarrassment.  Finally, however, their eyes met and neither looked away.

Kink opened his mouth to speak, but words failed him and his mouth
remained open while he continued to gaze at his partner.

"Just what I was thinken', Kink," said Bill.

They grinned sheepishly at each other, and by tacit consent started to
walk away.  Their pace quickened, and by the time they arrived at their
cabin they were on the run.

"Can't lose no time with all that multitude a-rushin' by," Kink
spluttered, as he jabbed the sour-dough can into the beanpot with one
hand and with the other gathered in the frying-pan and coffee-pot.

"Should say not," gasped Bill, his head and shoulders buried in a clothes-
sack wherein were stored winter socks and underwear.  "I say, Kink, don't
forget the saleratus on the corner shelf back of the stove."

Half-an-hour later they were launching the canoe and loading up, while
the storekeeper made jocular remarks about poor, weak mortals and the
contagiousness of "stampedin' fever."  But when Bill and Kink thrust
their long poles to bottom and started the canoe against the current, he
called after them:-

"Well, so-long and good luck!  And don't forget to blaze a stake or two
for me!"

They nodded their heads vigorously and felt sorry for the poor wretch who
remained perforce behind.

* * * * *

Kink and Bill were sweating hard.  According to the revised Northland
Scripture, the stampede is to the swift, the blazing of stakes to the
strong, and the Crown in royalties, gathers to itself the fulness
thereof.  Kink and Bill were both swift and strong.  They took the soggy
trail at a long, swinging gait that broke the hearts of a couple of
tender-feet who tried to keep up with them.  Behind, strung out between
them and Dawson (where the boats were discarded and land travel began),
was the vanguard of the Circle City outfit.  In the race from Forty Mile
the partners had passed every boat, winning from the leading boat by a
length in the Dawson eddy, and leaving its occupants sadly behind the
moment their feet struck the trail.

"Huh! couldn't see us for smoke," Hootchinoo Bill chuckled, flirting the
stinging sweat from his brow and glancing swiftly back along the way they
had come.

Three men emerged from where the trail broke through the trees.  Two
followed close at their heels, and then a man and a woman shot into view.

"Come on, you Kink!  Hit her up!  Hit her up!"

Bill quickened his pace.  Mitchell glanced back in more leisurely
fashion.

"I declare if they ain't lopin'!"

"And here's one that's loped himself out," said Bill, pointing to the
side of the trail.

A man was lying on his back panting in the culminating stages of violent
exhaustion.  His face was ghastly, his eyes bloodshot and glazed, for all
the world like a dying man.

"_Chechaquo_!" Kink Mitchell grunted, and it was the grunt of the old
"sour dough" for the green-horn, for the man who outfitted with "self-
risin'" flour and used baking-powder in his biscuits.

The partners, true to the old-timer custom, had intended to stake down-
stream from the strike, but when they saw claim 81 BELOW blazed on a
tree,--which meant fully eight miles below Discovery,--they changed their
minds.  The eight miles were covered in less than two hours.  It was a
killing pace, over so rough trail, and they passed scores of exhausted
men that had fallen by the wayside.

At Discovery little was to be learned of the upper creek.  Cormack's
Indian brother-in-law, Skookum Jim, had a hazy notion that the creek was
staked as high as the 30's; but when Kink and Bill looked at the corner-
stakes of 79 ABOVE, they threw their stampeding packs off their backs and
sat down to smoke.  All their efforts had been vain.  Bonanza was staked
from mouth to source,--"out of sight and across the next divide."  Bill
complained that night as they fried their bacon and boiled their coffee
over Cormack's fire at Discovery.

"Try that pup," Carmack suggested next morning.

"That pup" was a broad creek that flowed into Bonanza at 7 ABOVE.  The
partners received his advice with the magnificent contempt of the sour
dough for a squaw-man, and, instead, spent the day on Adam's Creek,
another and more likely-looking tributary of Bonanza.  But it was the old
story over again--staked to the sky-line.

For threes days Carmack repeated his advice, and for three days they
received it contemptuously.  But on the fourth day, there being nowhere
else to go, they went up "that pup."  They knew that it was practically
unstaked, but they had no intention of staking.  The trip was made more
for the purpose of giving vent to their ill-humour than for anything
else.  They had become quite cynical, sceptical.  They jeered and scoffed
at everything, and insulted every _chechaquo_ they met along the way.

At No. 23 the stakes ceased.  The remainder of the creek was open for
location.

"Moose pasture," sneered Kink Mitchell.

But Bill gravely paced off five hundred feet up the creek and blazed the
corner-stakes.  He had picked up the bottom of a candle-box, and on the
smooth side he wrote the notice for his centre-stake:-

   THIS MOOSE PASTURE IS RESERVED FOR THE
   SWEDES AND CHECHAQUOS.
   --BILL RADER.

Kink read it over with approval, saying:-

"As them's my sentiments, I reckon I might as well subscribe."

So the name of Charles Mitchell was added to the notice; and many an old
sour dough's face relaxed that day at sight of the handiwork of a kindred
spirit.

"How's the pup?" Carmack inquired when they strolled back into camp.

"To hell with pups!" was Hootchinoo Bill's reply.  "Me and Kink's goin' a-
lookin' for Too Much Gold when we get rested up."

Too Much Gold was the fabled creek of which all sour doughs dreamed,
whereof it was said the gold was so thick that, in order to wash it,
gravel must first be shovelled into the sluice-boxes.  But the several
days' rest, preliminary to the quest for Too Much Gold, brought a slight
change in their plan, inasmuch as it brought one Ans Handerson, a Swede.

Ans Handerson had been working for wages all summer at Miller Creek over
on the Sixty Mile, and, the summer done, had strayed up Bonanza like many
another waif helplessly adrift on the gold tides that swept willy-nilly
across the land.  He was tall and lanky.  His arms were long, like
prehistoric man's, and his hands were like soup-plates, twisted and
gnarled, and big-knuckled from toil.  He was slow of utterance and
movement, and his eyes, pale blue as his hair was pale yellow, seemed
filled with an immortal dreaming, the stuff of which no man knew, and
himself least of all.  Perhaps this appearance of immortal dreaming was
due to a supreme and vacuous innocence.  At any rate, this was the
valuation men of ordinary clay put upon him, and there was nothing
extraordinary about the composition of Hootchinoo Bill and Kink Mitchell.

The partners had spent a day of visiting and gossip, and in the evening
met in the temporary quarters of the Monte Carlo--a large tent were
stampeders rested their weary bones and bad whisky sold at a dollar a
drink.  Since the only money in circulation was dust, and since the house
took the "down-weight" on the scales, a drink cost something more than a
dollar.  Bill and Kink were not drinking, principally for the reason that
their one and common sack was not strong enough to stand many excursions
to the scales.

"Say, Bill, I've got a _chechaquo_ on the string for a sack of flour,"
Mitchell announced jubilantly.

Bill looked interested and pleased.  Grub as scarce, and they were not
over-plentifully supplied for the quest after Too Much Gold.

"Flour's worth a dollar a pound," he answered.  "How like do you
calculate to get your finger on it?"

"Trade 'm a half-interest in that claim of ourn," Kink answered.

"What claim?" Bill was surprised.  Then he remembered the reservation he
had staked off for the Swedes, and said, "Oh!"

"I wouldn't be so clost about it, though," he added.  "Give 'm the whole
thing while you're about it, in a right free-handed way."

Bill shook his head.  "If I did, he'd get clean scairt and prance off.
I'm lettin' on as how the ground is believed to be valuable, an' that
we're lettin' go half just because we're monstrous short on grub.  After
the dicker we can make him a present of the whole shebang."

"If somebody ain't disregarded our notice," Bill objected, though he was
plainly pleased at the prospect of exchanging the claim for a sack of
flour.

"She ain't jumped," Kink assured him.  "It's No. 24, and it stands.  The
_chechaquos_ took it serious, and they begun stakin' where you left off.
Staked clean over the divide, too.  I was gassin' with one of them which
has just got in with cramps in his legs."

It was then, and for the first time, that they heard the slow and groping
utterance of Ans Handerson.

"Ay like the looks," he was saying to the bar-keeper.  "Ay tank Ay gat a
claim."

The partners winked at each other, and a few minutes later a surprised
and grateful Swede was drinking bad whisky with two hard-hearted
strangers.  But he was as hard-headed as they were hard-hearted.  The
sack made frequent journeys to the scales, followed solicitously each
time by Kink Mitchell's eyes, and still Ans Handerson did not loosen up.
In his pale blue eyes, as in summer seas, immortal dreams swam up and
burned, but the swimming and the burning were due to the tales of gold
and prospect pans he heard, rather than to the whisky he slid so easily
down his throat.

The partners were in despair, though they appeared boisterous and jovial
of speech and action.

"Don't mind me, my friend," Hootchinoo Bill hiccoughed, his hand upon Ans
Handerson's shoulder.  "Have another drink.  We're just celebratin'
Kink's birthday here.  This is my pardner, Kink, Kink Mitchell.  An' what
might your name be?"

This learned, his hand descended resoundingly on Kink's back, and Kink
simulated clumsy self-consciousness in that he was for the time being the
centre of the rejoicing, while Ans Handerson looked pleased and asked
them to have a drink with him.  It was the first and last time he
treated, until the play changed and his canny soul was roused to unwonted
prodigality.  But he paid for the liquor from a fairly healthy-looking
sack.  "Not less 'n eight hundred in it," calculated the lynx-eyed Kink;
and on the strength of it he took the first opportunity of a privy
conversation with Bidwell, proprietor of the bad whisky and the tent.

"Here's my sack, Bidwell," Kink said, with the intimacy and surety of one
old-timer to another.  "Just weigh fifty dollars into it for a day or so
more or less, and we'll be yours truly, Bill an' me."

Thereafter the journeys of the sack to the scales were more frequent, and
the celebration of Kink's natal day waxed hilarious.  He even essayed to
sing the old-timer's classic, "The Juice of the Forbidden Fruit," but
broke down and drowned his embarrassment in another round of drinks.  Even
Bidwell honoured him with a round or two on the house; and he and Bill
were decently drunk by the time Ans Handerson's eyelids began to droop
and his tongue gave promise of loosening.

Bill grew affectionate, then confidential.  He told his troubles and hard
luck to the bar-keeper and the world in general, and to Ans Handerson in
particular.  He required no histrionic powers to act the part.  The bad
whisky attended to that.  He worked himself into a great sorrow for
himself and Bill, and his tears were sincere when he told how he and his
partner were thinking of selling a half-interest in good ground just
because they were short of grub.  Even Kink listened and believed.

Ans Handerson's eyes were shining unholily as he asked, "How much you
tank you take?"

Bill and Kink did not hear him, and he was compelled to repeat his query.
They appeared reluctant.  He grew keener.  And he swayed back and
forward, holding on to the bar and listened with all his ears while they
conferred together on one side, and wrangled as to whether they should or
not, and disagreed in stage whispers over the price they should set.

"Two hundred and--hic!--fifty," Bill finally announced, "but we reckon as
we won't sell."

"Which is monstrous wise if I might chip in my little say," seconded
Bidwell.

"Yes, indeedy," added Kink.  "We ain't in no charity business
a-disgorgin' free an' generous to Swedes an' white men."

"Ay tank we haf another drink," hiccoughed Ans Handerson, craftily
changing the subject against a more propitious time.

And thereafter, to bring about that propitious time, his own sack began
to see-saw between his hip pocket and the scales.  Bill and Kink were
coy, but they finally yielded to his blandishments.  Whereupon he grew
shy and drew Bidwell to one side.  He staggered exceedingly, and held on
to Bidwell for support as he asked--

"They ban all right, them men, you tank so?"

"Sure," Bidwell answered heartily.  "Known 'em for years.  Old sour
doughs.  When they sell a claim, they sell a claim.  They ain't no air-
dealers."

"Ay tank Ay buy," Ans Handerson announced, tottering back to the two men.

But by now he was dreaming deeply, and he proclaimed he would have the
whole claim or nothing.  This was the cause of great pain to Hootchinoo
Bill.  He orated grandly against the "hawgishness" of _chechaquos_ and
Swedes, albeit he dozed between periods, his voice dying away to a
gurgle, and his head sinking forward on his breast.  But whenever roused
by a nudge from Kink or Bidwell, he never failed to explode another
volley of abuse and insult.

Ans Handerson was calm under it all.  Each insult added to the value of
the claim.  Such unamiable reluctance to sell advertised but one thing to
him, and he was aware of a great relief when Hootchinoo Bill sank snoring
to the floor, and he was free to turn his attention to his less
intractable partner.

Kink Mitchell was persuadable, though a poor mathematician.  He wept
dolefully, but was willing to sell a half-interest for two hundred and
fifty dollars or the whole claim for seven hundred and fifty.  Ans
Handerson and Bidwell laboured to clear away his erroneous ideas
concerning fractions, but their labour was vain.  He spilled tears and
regrets all over the bar and on their shoulders, which tears, however,
did not wash away his opinion, that if one half was worth two hundred and
fifty, two halves were worth three times as much.

In the end,--and even Bidwell retained no more than hazy recollections of
how the night terminated,--a bill of sale was drawn up, wherein Bill
Rader and Charles Mitchell yielded up all right and title to the claim
known as 24 ELDORADO, the same being the name the creek had received from
some optimistic _chechaquo_.

When Kink had signed, it took the united efforts of the three to arouse
Bill.  Pen in hand, he swayed long over the document; and, each time he
rocked back and forth, in Ans Handerson's eyes flashed and faded a
wondrous golden vision.  When the precious signature was at last appended
and the dust paid over, he breathed a great sigh, and sank to sleep under
a table, where he dreamed immortally until morning.

But the day was chill and grey.  He felt bad.  His first act, unconscious
and automatic, was to feel for his sack.  Its lightness startled him.
Then, slowly, memories of the night thronged into his brain.  Rough
voices disturbed him.  He opened his eyes and peered out from under the
table.  A couple of early risers, or, rather, men who had been out on
trail all night, were vociferating their opinions concerning the utter
and loathsome worthlessness of Eldorado Creek.  He grew frightened, felt
in his pocket, and found the deed to 24 ELDORADO.

Ten minutes later Hootchinoo Bill and Kink Mitchell were roused from
their blankets by a wild-eyed Swede that strove to force upon them an ink-
scrawled and very blotty piece of paper.

"Ay tank Ay take my money back," he gibbered.  "Ay tank Ay take my money
back."

Tears were in his eyes and throat.  They ran down his cheeks as he knelt
before them and pleaded and implored.  But Bill and Kink did not laugh.
They might have been harder hearted.

"First time I ever hear a man squeal over a minin' deal," Bill said.  "An'
I make free to say 'tis too onusual for me to savvy."

"Same here," Kink Mitchell remarked.  "Minin' deals is like
horse-tradin'."

They were honest in their wonderment.  They could not conceive of
themselves raising a wail over a business transaction, so they could not
understand it in another man.

"The poor, ornery _chechaquo_," murmured Hootchinoo Bill, as they watched
the sorrowing Swede disappear up the trail.

"But this ain't Too Much Gold," Kink Mitchell said cheerfully.

And ere the day was out they purchased flour and bacon at exorbitant
prices with Ans Handerson's dust and crossed over the divide in the
direction of the creeks that lie between Klondike and Indian River.

Three months later they came back over the divide in the midst of a snow-
storm and dropped down the trail to 24 ELDORADO.  It merely chanced that
the trail led them that way.  They were not looking for the claim.  Nor
could they see much through the driving white till they set foot upon the
claim itself.  And then the air lightened, and they beheld a dump, capped
by a windlass that a man was turning.  They saw him draw a bucket of
gravel from the hole and tilt it on the edge of the dump.  Likewise they
saw another, man, strangely familiar, filling a pan with the fresh
gravel.  His hands were large; his hair wets pale yellow.  But before
they reached him, he turned with the pan and fled toward a cabin.  He
wore no hat, and the snow falling down his neck accounted for his haste.
Bill and Kink ran after him, and came upon him in the cabin, kneeling by
the stove and washing the pan of gravel in a tub of water.

He was too deeply engaged to notice more than that somebody had entered
the cabin.  They stood at his shoulder and looked on.  He imparted to the
pan a deft circular motion, pausing once or twice to rake out the larger
particles of gravel with his fingers.  The water was muddy, and, with the
pan buried in it, they could see nothing of its contents.  Suddenly he
lifted the pan clear and sent the water out of it with a flirt.  A mass
of yellow, like butter in a churn, showed across the bottom.

Hootchinoo Bill swallowed.  Never in his life had he dreamed of so rich a
test-pan.

"Kind of thick, my friend," he said huskily.  "How much might you reckon
that-all to be?"

Ans Handerson did not look up as he replied, "Ay tank fafty ounces."

"You must be scrumptious rich, then, eh?"

Still Ans Handerson kept his head down, absorbed in putting in the fine
touches which wash out the last particles of dross, though he answered,
"Ay tank Ay ban wort' five hundred t'ousand dollar."

"Gosh!" said Hootchinoo Bill, and he said it reverently.

"Yes, Bill, gosh!" said Kink Mitchell; and they went out softly and
closed the door.



THE ONE THOUSAND DOZEN


David Rasmunsen was a hustler, and, like many a greater man, a man of the
one idea.  Wherefore, when the clarion call of the North rang on his ear,
he conceived an adventure in eggs and bent all his energy to its
achievement.  He figured briefly and to the point, and the adventure
became iridescent-hued, splendid.  That eggs would sell at Dawson for
five dollars a dozen was a safe working premise.  Whence it was
incontrovertible that one thousand dozen would bring, in the Golden
Metropolis, five thousand dollars.

On the other hand, expense was to be considered, and he considered it
well, for he was a careful man, keenly practical, with a hard head and a
heart that imagination never warmed.  At fifteen cents a dozen, the
initial cost of his thousand dozen would be one hundred and fifty
dollars, a mere bagatelle in face of the enormous profit.  And suppose,
just suppose, to be wildly extravagant for once, that transportation for
himself and eggs should run up eight hundred and fifty more; he would
still have four thousand clear cash and clean when the last egg was
disposed of and the last dust had rippled into his sack.

"You see, Alma,"--he figured it over with his wife, the cosy dining-room
submerged in a sea of maps, government surveys, guide-books, and Alaskan
itineraries,--"you see, expenses don't really begin till you make
Dyea--fifty dollars'll cover it with a first-class passage thrown in.  Now
from Dyea to Lake Linderman, Indian packers take your goods over for
twelve cents a pound, twelve dollars a hundred, or one hundred and twenty
dollars a thousand.  Say I have fifteen hundred pounds, it'll cost one
hundred and eighty dollars--call it two hundred and be safe.  I am
creditably informed by a Klondiker just come out that I can buy a boat
for three hundred.  But the same man says I'm sure to get a couple of
passengers for one hundred and fifty each, which will give me the boat
for nothing, and, further, they can help me manage it.  And . . . that's
all; I put my eggs ashore from the boat at Dawson.  Now let me see how
much is that?"

"Fifty dollars from San Francisco to Dyea, two hundred from Dyea to
Linderman, passengers pay for the boat--two hundred and fifty all told,"
she summed up swiftly.

"And a hundred for my clothes and personal outfit," he went on happily;
"that leaves a margin of five hundred for emergencies.  And what possible
emergencies can arise?"

Alma shrugged her shoulders and elevated her brows.  If that vast
Northland was capable of swallowing up a man and a thousand dozen eggs,
surely there was room and to spare for whatever else he might happen to
possess.  So she thought, but she said nothing.  She knew David Rasmunsen
too well to say anything.

"Doubling the time because of chance delays, I should make the trip in
two months.  Think of it, Alma!  Four thousand in two months!  Beats the
paltry hundred a month I'm getting now.  Why, we'll build further out
where we'll have more space, gas in every room, and a view, and the rent
of the cottage'll pay taxes, insurance, and water, and leave something
over.  And then there's always the chance of my striking it and coming
out a millionaire.  Now tell me, Alma, don't you think I'm very
moderate?"

And Alma could hardly think otherwise.  Besides, had not her own
cousin,--though a remote and distant one to be sure, the black sheep, the
harum-scarum, the ne'er-do-well,--had not he come down out of that weird
North country with a hundred thousand in yellow dust, to say nothing of a
half-ownership in the hole from which it came?

David Rasmunsen's grocer was surprised when he found him weighing eggs in
the scales at the end of the counter, and Rasmunsen himself was more
surprised when he found that a dozen eggs weighed a pound and a
half--fifteen hundred pounds for his thousand dozen!  There would be no
weight left for his clothes, blankets, and cooking utensils, to say
nothing of the grub he must necessarily consume by the way.  His
calculations were all thrown out, and he was just proceeding to recast
them when he hit upon the idea of weighing small eggs.  "For whether they
be large or small, a dozen eggs is a dozen eggs," he observed sagely to
himself; and a dozen small ones he found to weigh but a pound and a
quarter.  Thereat the city of San Francisco was overrun by anxious-eyed
emissaries, and commission houses and dairy associations were startled by
a sudden demand for eggs running not more than twenty ounces to the
dozen.

Rasmunsen mortgaged the little cottage for a thousand dollars, arranged
for his wife to make a prolonged stay among her own people, threw up his
job, and started North.  To keep within his schedule he compromised on a
second-class passage, which, because of the rush, was worse than
steerage; and in the late summer, a pale and wabbly man, he disembarked
with his eggs on the Dyea beach.  But it did not take him long to recover
his land legs and appetite.  His first interview with the Chilkoot
packers straightened him up and stiffened his backbone.  Forty cents a
pound they demanded for the twenty-eight-mile portage, and while he
caught his breath and swallowed, the price went up to forty-three.
Fifteen husky Indians put the straps on his packs at forty-five, but took
them off at an offer of forty-seven from a Skaguay Croesus in dirty shirt
and ragged overalls who had lost his horses on the White Pass trail and
was now making a last desperate drive at the country by way of Chilkoot.

But Rasmunsen was clean grit, and at fifty cents found takers, who, two
days later, set his eggs down intact at Linderman.  But fifty cents a
pound is a thousand dollars a ton, and his fifteen hundred pounds had
exhausted his emergency fund and left him stranded at the Tantalus point
where each day he saw the fresh-whipsawed boats departing for Dawson.
Further, a great anxiety brooded over the camp where the boats were
built.  Men worked frantically, early and late, at the height of their
endurance, caulking, nailing, and pitching in a frenzy of haste for which
adequate explanation was not far to seek.  Each day the snow-line crept
farther down the bleak, rock-shouldered peaks, and gale followed gale,
with sleet and slush and snow, and in the eddies and quiet places young
ice formed and thickened through the fleeting hours.  And each morn, toil-
stiffened men turned wan faces across the lake to see if the freeze-up
had come.  For the freeze-up heralded the death of their hope--the hope
that they would be floating down the swift river ere navigation closed on
the chain of lakes.

To harrow Rasmunsen's soul further, he discovered three competitors in
the egg business.  It was true that one, a little German, had gone broke
and was himself forlornly back-tripping the last pack of the portage; but
the other two had boats nearly completed, and were daily supplicating the
god of merchants and traders to stay the iron hand of winter for just
another day.  But the iron hand closed down over the land.  Men were
being frozen in the blizzard which swept Chilkoot, and Rasmunsen frosted
his toes ere he was aware.  He found a chance to go passenger with his
freight in a boat just shoving off through the rubble, but two hundred
hard cash, was required, and he had no money.

"Ay tank you yust wait one leedle w'ile," said the Swedish boat-builder,
who had struck his Klondike right there and was wise enough to know
it--"one leedle w'ile und I make you a tam fine skiff boat, sure Pete."

With this unpledged word to go on, Rasmunsen hit the back trail to Crater
Lake, where he fell in with two press correspondents whose tangled
baggage was strewn from Stone House, over across the Pass, and as far as
Happy Camp.

"Yes," he said with consequence.  "I've a thousand dozen eggs at
Linderman, and my boat's just about got the last seam caulked.  Consider
myself in luck to get it.  Boats are at a premium, you know, and none to
be had."

Whereupon and almost with bodily violence the correspondents clamoured to
go with him, fluttered greenbacks before his eyes, and spilled yellow
twenties from hand to hand.  He could not hear of it, but they
over-persuaded him, and he reluctantly consented to take them at three
hundred apiece.  Also they pressed upon him the passage money in advance.
And while they wrote to their respective journals concerning the Good
Samaritan with the thousand dozen eggs, the Good Samaritan was hurrying
back to the Swede at Linderman.

"Here, you!  Gimme that boat!" was his salutation, his hand jingling the
correspondents' gold pieces and his eyes hungrily bent upon the finished
craft.

The Swede regarded him stolidly and shook his head.

"How much is the other fellow paying?  Three hundred?  Well, here's four.
Take it."

He tried to press it upon him, but the man backed away.

"Ay tank not.  Ay say him get der skiff boat.  You yust wait--"

"Here's six hundred.  Last call.  Take it or leave it.  Tell 'm it's a
mistake."

The Swede wavered.  "Ay tank yes," he finally said, and the last
Rasmunsen saw of him his vocabulary was going to wreck in a vain effort
to explain the mistake to the other fellows.

The German slipped and broke his ankle on the steep hogback above Deep
Lake, sold out his stock for a dollar a dozen, and with the proceeds
hired Indian packers to carry him back to Dyea.  But on the morning
Rasmunsen shoved off with his correspondents, his two rivals followed
suit.

"How many you got?" one of them, a lean little New Englander, called out.

"One thousand dozen," Rasmunsen answered proudly.

"Huh!  I'll go you even stakes I beat you in with my eight hundred."

The correspondents offered to lend him the money; but Rasmunsen declined,
and the Yankee closed with the remaining rival, a brawny son of the sea
and sailor of ships and things, who promised to show them all a wrinkle
or two when it came to cracking on.  And crack on he did, with a large
tarpaulin square-sail which pressed the bow half under at every jump.  He
was the first to run out of Linderman, but, disdaining the portage, piled
his loaded boat on the rocks in the boiling rapids.  Rasmunsen and the
Yankee, who likewise had two passengers, portaged across on their backs
and then lined their empty boats down through the bad water to Bennett.

Bennett was a twenty-five-mile lake, narrow and deep, a funnel between
the mountains through which storms ever romped.  Rasmunsen camped on the
sand-pit at its head, where were many men and boats bound north in the
teeth of the Arctic winter.  He awoke in the morning to find a piping
gale from the south, which caught the chill from the whited peaks and
glacial valleys and blew as cold as north wind ever blew.  But it was
fair, and he also found the Yankee staggering past the first bold
headland with all sail set.  Boat after boat was getting under way, and
the correspondents fell to with enthusiasm.

"We'll catch him before Cariboo Crossing," they assured Rasmunsen, as
they ran up the sail and the Alma took the first icy spray over her bow.

Now Rasmunsen all his life had been prone to cowardice on water, but he
clung to the kicking steering-oar with set face and determined jaw.  His
thousand dozen were there in the boat before his eyes, safely secured
beneath the correspondents' baggage, and somehow, before his eyes were
the little cottage and the mortgage for a thousand dollars.

It was bitter cold.  Now and again he hauled in the steering-sweep and
put out a fresh one while his passengers chopped the ice from the blade.
Wherever the spray struck, it turned instantly to frost, and the dipping
boom of the spritsail was quickly fringed with icicles.  The _Alma_
strained and hammered through the big seas till the seams and butts began
to spread, but in lieu of bailing the correspondents chopped ice and
flung it overboard.  There was no let-up.  The mad race with winter was
on, and the boats tore along in a desperate string.

"W-w-we can't stop to save our souls!" one of the correspondents
chattered, from cold, not fright.

"That's right!  Keep her down the middle, old man!" the other encouraged.

Rasmunsen replied with an idiotic grin.  The iron-bound shores were in a
lather of foam, and even down the middle the only hope was to keep
running away from the big seas.  To lower sail was to be overtaken and
swamped.  Time and again they passed boats pounding among the rocks, and
once they saw one on the edge of the breakers about to strike.  A little
craft behind them, with two men, jibed over and turned bottom up.

"W-w-watch out, old man," cried he of the chattering teeth.

Rasmunsen grinned and tightened his aching grip on the sweep.  Scores of
times had the send of the sea caught the big square stern of the _Alma_
and thrown her off from dead before it till the after leach of the
spritsail fluttered hollowly, and each time, and only with all his
strength, had he forced her back.  His grin by then had become fixed, and
it disturbed the correspondents to look at him.

They roared down past an isolated rock a hundred yards from shore.  From
its wave-drenched top a man shrieked wildly, for the instant cutting the
storm with his voice.  But the next instant the _Alma_ was by, and the
rock growing a black speck in the troubled froth.

"That settles the Yankee!  Where's the sailor?" shouted one of his
passengers.

Rasmunsen shot a glance over his shoulder at a black square-sail.  He had
seen it leap up out of the grey to windward, and for an hour, off and on,
had been watching it grow.  The sailor had evidently repaired damages and
was making up for lost time.

"Look at him come!"

Both passengers stopped chopping ice to watch.  Twenty miles of Bennett
were behind them--room and to spare for the sea to toss up its mountains
toward the sky.  Sinking and soaring like a storm-god, the sailor drove
by them.  The huge sail seemed to grip the boat from the crests of the
waves, to tear it bodily out of the water, and fling it crashing and
smothering down into the yawning troughs.

"The sea'll never catch him!"

"But he'll r-r-run her nose under!"

Even as they spoke, the black tarpaulin swooped from sight behind a big
comber.  The next wave rolled over the spot, and the next, but the boat
did not reappear.  The _Alma_ rushed by the place.  A little riffraff of
oats and boxes was seen.  An arm thrust up and a shaggy head broke
surface a score of yards away.

For a time there was silence.  As the end of the lake came in sight, the
waves began to leap aboard with such steady recurrence that the
correspondents no longer chopped ice but flung the water out with
buckets.  Even this would not do, and, after a shouted conference with
Rasmunsen, they attacked the baggage.  Flour, bacon, beans, blankets,
cooking-stove, ropes, odds and ends, everything they could get hands on,
flew overboard.  The boat acknowledged it at once, taking less water and
rising more buoyantly.

"That'll do!" Rasmunsen called sternly, as they applied themselves to the
top layer of eggs.

"The h-hell it will!" answered the shivering one, savagely.  With the
exception of their notes, films, and cameras, they had sacrificed their
outfit.  He bent over, laid hold of an egg-box, and began to worry it out
from under the lashing.

"Drop it!  Drop it, I say!"

Rasmunsen had managed to draw his revolver, and with the crook of his arm
over the sweep head, was taking aim.  The correspondent stood up on the
thwart, balancing back and forth, his face twisted with menace and
speechless anger.

"My God!"

So cried his brother correspondent, hurling himself, face downward, into
the bottom of the boat.  The _Alma_, under the divided attention of
Rasmunsen, had been caught by a great mass of water and whirled around.
The after leach hollowed, the sail emptied and jibed, and the boom,
sweeping with terrific force across the boat, carried the angry
correspondent overboard with a broken back.  Mast and sail had gone over
the side as well.  A drenching sea followed, as the boat lost headway,
and Rasmunsen sprang to the bailing bucket.

Several boats hurtled past them in the next half-hour,--small boats,
boats of their own size, boats afraid, unable to do aught but run madly
on.  Then a ten-ton barge, at imminent risk of destruction, lowered sail
to windward and lumbered down upon them.

"Keep off!  Keep off!" Rasmunsen screamed.

But his low gunwale ground against the heavy craft, and the remaining
correspondent clambered aboard.  Rasmunsen was over the eggs like a cat
and in the bow of the _Alma_, striving with numb fingers to bend the
hauling-lines together.

"Come on!" a red-whiskered man yelled at him.

"I've a thousand dozen eggs here," he shouted back.  "Gimme a tow!  I'll
pay you!"

"Come on!" they howled in chorus.

A big whitecap broke just beyond, washing over the barge and leaving the
_Alma_ half swamped.  The men cast off, cursing him as they ran up their
sail.  Rasmunsen cursed back and fell to bailing.  The mast and sail,
like a sea anchor, still fast by the halyards, held the boat head on to
wind and sea and gave him a chance to fight the water out.

Three hours later, numbed, exhausted, blathering like a lunatic, but
still bailing, he went ashore on an ice-strewn beach near Cariboo
Crossing.  Two men, a government courier and a half-breed voyageur,
dragged him out of the surf, saved his cargo, and beached the Alma.  They
were paddling out of the country in a Peterborough, and gave him shelter
for the night in their storm-bound camp.  Next morning they departed, but
he elected to stay by his eggs.  And thereafter the name and fame of the
man with the thousand dozen eggs began to spread through the land.  Gold-
seekers who made in before the freeze-up carried the news of his coming.
Grizzled old-timers of Forty Mile and Circle City, sour doughs with
leathern jaws and bean-calloused stomachs, called up dream memories of
chickens and green things at mention of his name.  Dyea and Skaguay took
an interest in his being, and questioned his progress from every man who
came over the passes, while Dawson--golden, omeletless Dawson--fretted
and worried, and way-laid every chance arrival for word of him.

But of this Rasmunsen knew nothing.  The day after the wreck he patched
up the _Alma_ and pulled out.  A cruel east wind blew in his teeth from
Tagish, but he got the oars over the side and bucked manfully into it,
though half the time he was drifting backward and chopping ice from the
blades.  According to the custom of the country, he was driven ashore at
Windy Arm; three times on Tagish saw him swamped and beached; and Lake
Marsh held him at the freeze-up.  The _Alma_ was crushed in the jamming
of the floes, but the eggs were intact.  These he back-tripped two miles
across the ice to the shore, where he built a cache, which stood for
years after and was pointed out by men who knew.

Half a thousand frozen miles stretched between him and Dawson, and the
waterway was closed.  But Rasmunsen, with a peculiar tense look in his
face, struck back up the lakes on foot.  What he suffered on that lone
trip, with nought but a single blanket, an axe, and a handful of beans,
is not given to ordinary mortals to know.  Only the Arctic adventurer may
understand.  Suffice that he was caught in a blizzard on Chilkoot and
left two of his toes with the surgeon at Sheep Camp.  Yet he stood on his
feet and washed dishes in the scullery of the _Pawona_ to the Puget
Sound, and from there passed coal on a P. S. boat to San Francisco.

It was a haggard, unkempt man who limped across the shining office floor
to raise a second mortgage from the bank people.  His hollow cheeks
betrayed themselves through the scraggy beard, and his eyes seemed to
have retired into deep caverns where they burned with cold fires.  His
hands were grained from exposure and hard work, and the nails were rimmed
with tight-packed dirt and coal-dust.  He spoke vaguely of eggs and ice-
packs, winds and tides; but when they declined to let him have more than
a second thousand, his talk became incoherent, concerning itself chiefly
with the price of dogs and dog-food, and such things as snowshoes and
moccasins and winter trails.  They let him have fifteen hundred, which
was more than the cottage warranted, and breathed easier when he scrawled
his signature and passed out the door.

Two weeks later he went over Chilkoot with three dog sleds of five dogs
each.  One team he drove, the two Indians with him driving the others.  At
Lake Marsh they broke out the cache and loaded up.  But there was no
trail.  He was the first in over the ice, and to him fell the task of
packing the snow and hammering away through the rough river jams.  Behind
him he often observed a camp-fire smoke trickling thinly up through the
quiet air, and he wondered why the people did not overtake him.  For he
was a stranger to the land and did not understand.  Nor could he
understand his Indians when they tried to explain.  This they conceived
to be a hardship, but when they balked and refused to break camp of
mornings, he drove them to their work at pistol point.

When he slipped through an ice bridge near the White Horse and froze his
foot, tender yet and oversensitive from the previous freezing, the
Indians looked for him to lie up.  But he sacrificed a blanket, and, with
his foot incased in an enormous moccasin, big as a water-bucket,
continued to take his regular turn with the front sled.  Here was the
cruellest work, and they respected him, though on the side they rapped
their foreheads with their knuckles and significantly shook their heads.
One night they tried to run away, but the zip-zip of his bullets in the
snow brought them back, snarling but convinced.  Whereupon, being only
savage Chilkat men, they put their heads together to kill him; but he
slept like a cat, and, waking or sleeping, the chance never came.  Often
they tried to tell him the import of the smoke wreath in the rear, but he
could not comprehend and grew suspicious of them.  And when they sulked
or shirked, he was quick to let drive at them between the eyes, and quick
to cool their heated souls with sight of his ready revolver.

And so it went--with mutinous men, wild dogs, and a trail that broke the
heart.  He fought the men to stay with him, fought the dogs to keep them
away from the eggs, fought the ice, the cold, and the pain of his foot,
which would not heal.  As fast as the young tissue renewed, it was bitten
and scared by the frost, so that a running sore developed, into which he
could almost shove his fist.  In the mornings, when he first put his
weight upon it, his head went dizzy, and he was near to fainting from the
pain; but later on in the day it usually grew numb, to recommence when he
crawled into his blankets and tried to sleep.  Yet he, who had been a
clerk and sat at a desk all his days, toiled till the Indians were
exhausted, and even out-worked the dogs.  How hard he worked, how much he
suffered, he did not know.  Being a man of the one idea, now that the
idea had come, it mastered him.  In the foreground of his consciousness
was Dawson, in the background his thousand dozen eggs, and midway between
the two his ego fluttered, striving always to draw them together to a
glittering golden point.  This golden point was the five thousand
dollars, the consummation of the idea and the point of departure for
whatever new idea might present itself.  For the rest, he was a mere
automaton.  He was unaware of other things, seeing them as through a
glass darkly, and giving them no thought.  The work of his hands he did
with machine-like wisdom; likewise the work of his head.  So the look on
his face grew very tense, till even the Indians were afraid of it, and
marvelled at the strange white man who had made them slaves and forced
them to toil with such foolishness.

Then came a snap on Lake Le Barge, when the cold of outer space smote the
tip of the planet, and the force ranged sixty and odd degrees below zero.
Here, labouring with open mouth that he might breathe more freely, he
chilled his lungs, and for the rest of the trip he was troubled with a
dry, hacking cough, especially irritable in smoke of camp or under stress
of undue exertion.  On the Thirty Mile river he found much open water,
spanned by precarious ice bridges and fringed with narrow rim ice, tricky
and uncertain.  The rim ice was impossible to reckon on, and he dared it
without reckoning, falling back on his revolver when his drivers
demurred.  But on the ice bridges, covered with snow though they were,
precautions could be taken.  These they crossed on their snowshoes, with
long poles, held crosswise in their hands, to which to cling in case of
accident.  Once over, the dogs were called to follow.  And on such a
bridge, where the absence of the centre ice was masked by the snow, one
of the Indians met his end.  He went through as quickly and neatly as a
knife through thin cream, and the current swept him from view down under
the stream ice.

That night his mate fled away through the pale moonlight, Rasmunsen
futilely puncturing the silence with his revolver--a thing that he
handled with more celerity than cleverness.  Thirty-six hours later the
Indian made a police camp on the Big Salmon.

"Um--um--um funny mans--what you call?--top um head all loose," the
interpreter explained to the puzzled captain.  "Eh?  Yep, clazy, much
clazy mans.  Eggs, eggs, all a time eggs--savvy?  Come bime-by."

It was several days before Rasmunsen arrived, the three sleds lashed
together, and all the dogs in a single team.  It was awkward, and where
the going was bad he was compelled to back-trip it sled by sled, though
he managed most of the time, through herculean efforts, to bring all
along on the one haul.  He did not seem moved when the captain of police
told him his man was hitting the high places for Dawson, and was by that
time, probably, half-way between Selkirk and Stewart.  Nor did he appear
interested when informed that the police had broken the trail as far as
Pelly; for he had attained to a fatalistic acceptance of all natural
dispensations, good or ill.  But when they told him that Dawson was in
the bitter clutch of famine, he smiled, threw the harness on his dogs,
and pulled out.

But it was at his next halt that the mystery of the smoke was explained.
With the word at Big Salmon that the trail was broken to Pelly, there was
no longer any need for the smoke wreath to linger in his wake; and
Rasmunsen, crouching over lonely fire, saw a motley string of sleds go
by.  First came the courier and the half-breed who had hauled him out
from Bennett; then mail-carriers for Circle City, two sleds of them, and
a mixed following of ingoing Klondikers.  Dogs and men were fresh and
fat, while Rasmunsen and his brutes were jaded and worn down to the skin
and bone.  They of the smoke wreath had travelled one day in three,
resting and reserving their strength for the dash to come when broken
trail was met with; while each day he had plunged and floundered forward,
breaking the spirit of his dogs and robbing them of their mettle.

As for himself, he was unbreakable.  They thanked him kindly for his
efforts in their behalf, those fat, fresh men,--thanked him kindly, with
broad grins and ribald laughter; and now, when he understood, he made no
answer.  Nor did he cherish silent bitterness.  It was immaterial.  The
idea--the fact behind the idea--was not changed.  Here he was and his
thousand dozen; there was Dawson; the problem was unaltered.

At the Little Salmon, being short of dog food, the dogs got into his
grub, and from there to Selkirk he lived on beans--coarse, brown beans,
big beans, grossly nutritive, which griped his stomach and doubled him up
at two-hour intervals.  But the Factor at Selkirk had a notice on the
door of the Post to the effect that no steamer had been up the Yukon for
two years, and in consequence grub was beyond price.  He offered to swap
flour, however, at the rate of a cupful of each egg, but Rasmunsen shook
his head and hit the trail.  Below the Post he managed to buy frozen
horse hide for the dogs, the horses having been slain by the Chilkat
cattle men, and the scraps and offal preserved by the Indians.  He
tackled the hide himself, but the hair worked into the bean sores of his
mouth, and was beyond endurance.

Here at Selkirk he met the forerunners of the hungry exodus of Dawson,
and from there on they crept over the trail, a dismal throng.  "No grub!"
was the song they sang.  "No grub, and had to go."  "Everybody holding
candles for a rise in the spring."  "Flour dollar 'n a half a pound, and
no sellers."

"Eggs?" one of them answered.  "Dollar apiece, but there ain't none."

Rasmunsen made a rapid calculation.  "Twelve thousand dollars," he said
aloud.

"Hey?" the man asked.

"Nothing," he answered, and _mushed_ the dogs along.

When he arrived at Stewart River, seventy from Dawson, five of his dogs
were gone, and the remainder were falling in the traces.  He, also, was
in the traces, hauling with what little strength was left in him.  Even
then he was barely crawling along ten miles a day.  His cheek-bones and
nose, frost-bitten again and again, were turned bloody-black and hideous.
The thumb, which was separated from the fingers by the gee-pole, had
likewise been nipped and gave him great pain.  The monstrous moccasin
still incased his foot, and strange pains were beginning to rack the leg.
At Sixty Mile, the last beans, which he had been rationing for some time,
were finished; yet he steadfastly refused to touch the eggs.  He could
not reconcile his mind to the legitimacy of it, and staggered and fell
along the way to Indian River.  Here a fresh-killed moose and an open-
handed old-timer gave him and his dogs new strength, and at Ainslie's he
felt repaid for it all when a stampede, ripe from Dawson in five hours,
was sure he could get a dollar and a quarter for every egg he possessed.

He came up the steep bank by the Dawson barracks with fluttering heart
and shaking knees.  The dogs were so weak that he was forced to rest
them, and, waiting, he leaned limply against the gee-pole.  A man, an
eminently decorous-looking man, came sauntering by in a great bearskin
coat.  He glanced at Rasmunsen curiously, then stopped and ran a
speculative eye over the dogs and the three lashed sleds.

"What you got?" he asked.

"Eggs," Rasmunsen answered huskily, hardly able to pitch his voice above
a whisper.

"Eggs!  Whoopee!  Whoopee!"  He sprang up into the air, gyrated madly,
and finished with half-a-dozen war steps.  "You don't say--all of 'em?"

"All of 'em."

"Say, you must be the Egg Man."  He walked around and viewed Rasmunsen
from the other side.  "Come, now, ain't you the Egg Man?"

Rasmunsen didn't know, but supposed he was, and the man sobered down a
bit.

"What d'ye expect to get for 'em?" he asked cautiously.

Rasmunsen became audacious. "Dollar 'n a half," he said.

"Done!" the man came back promptly.  "Gimme a dozen."

"I--I mean a dollar 'n a half apiece," Rasmunsen hesitatingly explained.

"Sure.  I heard you.  Make it two dozen.  Here's the dust."

The man pulled out a healthy gold sack the size of a small sausage and
knocked it negligently against the gee-pole.  Rasmunsen felt a strange
trembling in the pit of his stomach, a tickling of the nostrils, and an
almost overwhelming desire to sit down and cry.  But a curious, wide-eyed
crowd was beginning to collect, and man after man was calling out for
eggs.  He was without scales, but the man with the bearskin coat fetched
a pair and obligingly weighed in the dust while Rasmunsen passed out the
goods.  Soon there was a pushing and shoving and shouldering, and a great
clamour.  Everybody wanted to buy and to be served first.  And as the
excitement grew, Rasmunsen cooled down.  This would never do.  There must
be something behind the fact of their buying so eagerly.  It would be
wiser if he rested first and sized up the market.  Perhaps eggs were
worth two dollars apiece.  Anyway, whenever he wished to sell, he was
sure of a dollar and a half.  "Stop!" he cried, when a couple of hundred
had been sold.  "No more now.  I'm played out.  I've got to get a cabin,
and then you can come and see me."

A groan went up at this, but the man with the bearskin coat approved.
Twenty-four of the frozen eggs went rattling in his capacious pockets,
and he didn't care whether the rest of the town ate or not.  Besides, he
could see Rasmunsen was on his last legs.

"There's a cabin right around the second corner from the Monte Carlo," he
told him--"the one with the sody-bottle window.  It ain't mine, but I've
got charge of it.  Rents for ten a day and cheap for the money.  You move
right in, and I'll see you later.  Don't forget the sody-bottle window."

"Tra-la-loo!" he called back a moment later.  "I'm goin' up the hill to
eat eggs and dream of home."

On his way to the cabin, Rasmunsen recollected he was hungry and bought a
small supply of provisions at the N. A. T. & T. store--also a beefsteak
at the butcher shop and dried salmon for the dogs.  He found the cabin
without difficulty, and left the dogs in the harness while he started the
fire and got the coffee under way.

"A dollar 'n a half apiece--one thousand dozen--eighteen thousand
dollars!" he kept muttering it to himself, over and over, as he went
about his work.

As he flopped the steak into the frying-pan the door opened.  He turned.
It was the man with the bearskin coat.  He seemed to come in with
determination, as though bound on some explicit errand, but as he looked
at Rasmunsen an expression of perplexity came into his face.

"I say--now I say--" he began, then halted.

Rasmunsen wondered if he wanted the rent.

"I say, damn it, you know, them eggs is bad."

Rasmunsen staggered.  He felt as though some one had struck him an
astounding blow between the eyes.  The walls of the cabin reeled and
tilted up.  He put out his hand to steady himself and rested it on the
stove.  The sharp pain and the smell of the burning flesh brought him
back to himself.

"I see," he said slowly, fumbling in his pocket for the sack.  "You want
your money back."

"It ain't the money," the man said, "but hain't you got any eggs--good?"

Rasmunsen shook his head.  "You'd better take the money."

But the man refused and backed away.  "I'll come back," he said, "when
you've taken stock, and get what's comin'."

Rasmunsen rolled the chopping-block into the cabin and carried in the
eggs.  He went about it quite calmly.  He took up the hand-axe, and, one
by one, chopped the eggs in half.  These halves he examined carefully and
let fall to the floor.  At first he sampled from the different cases,
then deliberately emptied one case at a time.  The heap on the floor grew
larger.  The coffee boiled over and the smoke of the burning beefsteak
filled the cabin.  He chopped steadfastly and monotonously till the last
case was finished.

Somebody knocked at the door, knocked again, and let himself in.

"What a mess!" he remarked, as he paused and surveyed the scene.

The severed eggs were beginning to thaw in the heat of the stove, and a
miserable odour was growing stronger.

"Must a-happened on the steamer," he suggested.

Rasmunsen looked at him long and blankly.

"I'm Murray, Big Jim Murray, everybody knows me," the man volunteered.
"I'm just hearin' your eggs is rotten, and I'm offerin' you two hundred
for the batch.  They ain't good as salmon, but still they're fair
scoffin's for dogs."

Rasmunsen seemed turned to stone.  He did not move.  "You go to hell," he
said passionlessly.

"Now just consider.  I pride myself it's a decent price for a mess like
that, and it's better 'n nothin'.  Two hundred.  What you say?"

"You go to hell," Rasmunsen repeated softly, "and get out of here."

Murray gaped with a great awe, then went out carefully, backward, with
his eyes fixed an the other's face.

Rasmunsen followed him out and turned the dogs loose.  He threw them all
the salmon he had bought, and coiled a sled-lashing up in his hand.  Then
he re-entered the cabin and drew the latch in after him.  The smoke from
the cindered steak made his eyes smart.  He stood on the bunk, passed the
lashing over the ridge-pole, and measured the swing-off with his eye.  It
did not seem to satisfy, for he put the stool on the bunk and climbed
upon the stool.  He drove a noose in the end of the lashing and slipped
his head through.  The other end he made fast.  Then he kicked the stool
out from under.



THE MARRIAGE OF LIT-LIT


When John Fox came into a country where whisky freezes solid and may be
used as a paper-weight for a large part of the year, he came without the
ideals and illusions that usually hamper the progress of more delicately
nurtured adventurers.  Born and reared on the frontier fringe of the
United States, he took with him into Canada a primitive cast of mind, an
elemental simplicity and grip on things, as it were, that insured him
immediate success in his new career.  From a mere servant of the Hudson
Bay Company, driving a paddle with the voyageurs and carrying goods on
his back across the portages, he swiftly rose to a Factorship and took
charge of a trading post at Fort Angelus.

Here, because of his elemental simplicity, he took to himself a native
wife, and, by reason of the connubial bliss that followed, he escaped the
unrest and vain longings that curse the days of more fastidious men,
spoil their work, and conquer them in the end.  He lived contentedly, was
at single purposes with the business he was set there to do, and achieved
a brilliant record in the service of the Company.  About this time his
wife died, was claimed by her people, and buried with savage circumstance
in a tin trunk in the top of a tree.

Two sons she had borne him, and when the Company promoted him, he
journeyed with them still deeper into the vastness of the North-West
Territory to a place called Sin Rock, where he took charge of a new post
in a more important fur field.  Here he spent several lonely and
depressing months, eminently disgusted with the unprepossessing
appearance of the Indian maidens, and greatly worried by his growing sons
who stood in need of a mother's care.  Then his eyes chanced upon Lit-
lit.

"Lit-lit--well, she is Lit-lit," was the fashion in which he despairingly
described her to his chief clerk, Alexander McLean.

McLean was too fresh from his Scottish upbringing--"not dry behind the
ears yet," John Fox put it--to take to the marriage customs of the
country.  Nevertheless he was not averse to the Factor's imperilling his
own immortal soul, and, especially, feeling an ominous attraction himself
for Lit-lit, he was sombrely content to clinch his own soul's safety by
seeing her married to the Factor.

Nor is it to be wondered that McLean's austere Scotch soul stood in
danger of being thawed in the sunshine of Lit-lit's eyes.  She was
pretty, and slender, and willowy; without the massive face and
temperamental stolidity of the average squaw.  "Lit-lit," so called from
her fashion, even as a child, of being fluttery, of darting about from
place to place like a butterfly, of being inconsequent and merry, and of
laughing as lightly as she darted and danced about.

Lit-lit was the daughter of Snettishane, a prominent chief in the tribe,
by a half-breed mother, and to him the Factor fared casually one summer
day to open negotiations of marriage.  He sat with the chief in the smoke
of a mosquito smudge before his lodge, and together they talked about
everything under the sun, or, at least, everything that in the Northland
is under the sun, with the sole exception of marriage.  John Fox had come
particularly to talk of marriage; Snettishane knew it, and John Fox knew
he knew it, wherefore the subject was religiously avoided.  This is
alleged to be Indian subtlety.  In reality it is transparent simplicity.

The hours slipped by, and Fox and Snettishane smoked interminable pipes,
looking each other in the eyes with a guilelessness superbly histrionic.
In the mid-afternoon McLean and his brother clerk, McTavish, strolled
past, innocently uninterested, on their way to the river.  When they
strolled back again an hour later, Fox and Snettishane had attained to a
ceremonious discussion of the condition and quality of the gunpowder and
bacon which the Company was offering in trade.  Meanwhile Lit-lit,
divining the Factor's errand, had crept in under the rear wall of the
lodge, and through the front flap was peeping out at the two logomachists
by the mosquito smudge.  She was flushed and happy-eyed, proud that no
less a man than the Factor (who stood next to God in the Northland
hierarchy) had singled her out, femininely curious to see at close range
what manner of man he was.  Sunglare on the ice, camp smoke, and weather
beat had burned his face to a copper-brown, so that her father was as
fair as he, while she was fairer.  She was remotely glad of this, and
more immediately glad that he was large and strong, though his great
black beard half frightened her, it was so strange.

Being very young, she was unversed in the ways of men.  Seventeen times
she had seen the sun travel south and lose itself beyond the sky-line,
and seventeen times she had seen it travel back again and ride the sky
day and night till there was no night at all.  And through these years
she had been cherished jealously by Snettishane, who stood between her
and all suitors, listening disdainfully to the young hunters as they bid
for her hand, and turning them away as though she were beyond price.
Snettishane was mercenary.  Lit-lit was to him an investment.  She
represented so much capital, from which he expected to receive, not a
certain definite interest, but an incalculable interest.

And having thus been reared in a manner as near to that of the nunnery as
tribal conditions would permit, it was with a great and maidenly anxiety
that she peeped out at the man who had surely come for her, at the
husband who was to teach her all that was yet unlearned of life, at the
masterful being whose word was to be her law, and who was to mete and
bound her actions and comportment for the rest of her days.

But, peeping through the front flap of the lodge, flushed and thrilling
at the strange destiny reaching out for her, she grew disappointed as the
day wore along, and the Factor and her father still talked pompously of
matters concerning other things and not pertaining to marriage things at
all.  As the sun sank lower and lower toward the north and midnight
approached, the Factor began making unmistakable preparations for
departure.  As he turned to stride away Lit-lit's heart sank; but it rose
again as he halted, half turning on one heel.

"Oh, by the way, Snettishane," he said, "I want a squaw to wash for me
and mend my clothes."

Snettishane grunted and suggested Wanidani, who was an old woman and
toothless.

"No, no," interposed the Factor.  "What I want is a wife.  I've been kind
of thinking about it, and the thought just struck me that you might know
of some one that would suit."

Snettishane looked interested, whereupon the Factor retraced his steps,
casually and carelessly to linger and discuss this new and incidental
topic.

"Kattou?" suggested Snettishane.

"She has but one eye," objected the Factor.

"Laska?"

"Her knees be wide apart when she stands upright.  Kips, your biggest
dog, can leap between her knees when she stands upright."

"Senatee?" went on the imperturbable Snettishane.

But John Fox feigned anger, crying: "What foolishness is this?  Am I old,
that thou shouldst mate me with old women?  Am I toothless? lame of leg?
blind of eye?  Or am I poor that no bright-eyed maiden may look with
favour upon me?  Behold!  I am the Factor, both rich and great, a power
in the land, whose speech makes men tremble and is obeyed!"

Snettishane was inwardly pleased, though his sphinx-like visage never
relaxed.  He was drawing the Factor, and making him break ground.  Being
a creature so elemental as to have room for but one idea at a time,
Snettishane could pursue that one idea a greater distance than could John
Fox.  For John Fox, elemental as he was, was still complex enough to
entertain several glimmering ideas at a time, which debarred him from
pursuing the one as single-heartedly or as far as did the chief.

Snettishane calmly continued calling the roster of eligible maidens,
which, name by name, as fast as uttered, were stamped ineligible by John
Fox, with specified objections appended.  Again he gave it up and started
to return to the Fort.  Snettishane watched him go, making no effort to
stop him, but seeing him, in the end, stop himself.

"Come to think of it," the Factor remarked, "we both of us forgot Lit-
lit.  Now I wonder if she'll suit me?"

Snettishane met the suggestion with a mirthless face, behind the mask of
which his soul grinned wide.  It was a distinct victory.  Had the Factor
gone but one step farther, perforce Snettishane would himself have
mentioned the name of Lit-lit, but--the Factor had not gone that one step
farther.

The chief was non-committal concerning Lit-lit's suitability, till he
drove the white man into taking the next step in order of procedure.

"Well," the Factor meditated aloud, "the only way to find out is to make
a try of it."  He raised his voice.  "So I will give for Lit-lit ten
blankets and three pounds of tobacco which is good tobacco."

Snettishane replied with a gesture which seemed to say that all the
blankets and tobacco in all the world could not compensate him for the
loss of Lit-lit and her manifold virtues.  When pressed by the Factor to
set a price, he coolly placed it at five hundred blankets, ten guns,
fifty pounds of tobacco, twenty scarlet cloths, ten bottles of rum, a
music-box, and lastly the good-will and best offices of the Factor, with
a place by his fire.

The Factor apparently suffered a stroke of apoplexy, which stroke was
successful in reducing the blankets to two hundred and in cutting out the
place by the fire--an unheard-of condition in the marriages of white men
with the daughters of the soil.  In the end, after three hours more of
chaffering, they came to an agreement.  For Lit-lit Snettishane was to
receive one hundred blankets, five pounds of tobacco, three guns, and a
bottle of rum, goodwill and best offices included, which according to
John Fox, was ten blankets and a gun more than she was worth.  And as he
went home through the wee sma' hours, the three-o'clock sun blazing in
the due north-east, he was unpleasantly aware that Snettishane had bested
him over the bargain.

Snettishane, tired and victorious, sought his bed, and discovered Lit-lit
before she could escape from the lodge.

He grunted knowingly: "Thou hast seen.  Thou has heard.  Wherefore it be
plain to thee thy father's very great wisdom and understanding.  I have
made for thee a great match.  Heed my words and walk in the way of my
words, go when I say go, come when I bid thee come, and we shall grow fat
with the wealth of this big white man who is a fool according to his
bigness."

The next day no trading was done at the store.  The Factor opened whisky
before breakfast, to the delight of McLean and McTavish, gave his dogs
double rations, and wore his best moccasins.  Outside the Fort
preparations were under way for a _potlatch_.  Potlatch means "a giving,"
and John Fox's intention was to signalize his marriage with Lit-lit by a
potlatch as generous as she was good-looking.  In the afternoon the whole
tribe gathered to the feast.  Men, women, children, and dogs gorged to
repletion, nor was there one person, even among the chance visitors and
stray hunters from other tribes, who failed to receive some token of the
bridegroom's largess.

Lit-lit, tearfully shy and frightened, was bedecked by her bearded
husband with a new calico dress, splendidly beaded moccasins, a gorgeous
silk handkerchief over her raven hair, a purple scarf about her throat,
brass ear-rings and finger-rings, and a whole pint of pinchbeck
jewellery, including a Waterbury watch.  Snettishane could scarce contain
himself at the spectacle, but watching his chance drew her aside from the
feast.

"Not this night, nor the next night," he began ponderously, "but in the
nights to come, when I shall call like a raven by the river bank, it is
for thee to rise up from thy big husband, who is a fool, and come to me.

"Nay, nay," he went on hastily, at sight of the dismay in her face at
turning her back upon her wonderful new life.  "For no sooner shall this
happen than thy big husband, who is a fool, will come wailing to my
lodge.  Then it is for thee to wail likewise, claiming that this thing is
not well, and that the other thing thou dost not like, and that to be the
wife of the Factor is more than thou didst bargain for, only wilt thou be
content with more blankets, and more tobacco, and more wealth of various
sorts for thy poor old father, Snettishane.  Remember well, when I call
in the night, like a raven, from the river bank."

Lit-lit nodded; for to disobey her father was a peril she knew well; and,
furthermore, it was a little thing he asked, a short separation from the
Factor, who would know only greater gladness at having her back.  She
returned to the feast, and, midnight being well at hand, the Factor
sought her out and led her away to the Fort amid joking and outcry, in
which the squaws were especially conspicuous.

Lit-lit quickly found that married life with the head-man of a fort was
even better than she had dreamed.  No longer did she have to fetch wood
and water and wait hand and foot upon cantankerous menfolk.  For the
first time in her life she could lie abed till breakfast was on the
table.  And what a bed!--clean and soft, and comfortable as no bed she
had ever known.  And such food!  Flour, cooked into biscuits, hot-cakes
and bread, three times a day and every day, and all one wanted!  Such
prodigality was hardly believable.

To add to her contentment, the Factor was cunningly kind.  He had buried
one wife, and he knew how to drive with a slack rein that went firm only
on occasion, and then went very firm.  "Lit-lit is boss of this place,"
he announced significantly at the table the morning after the wedding.
"What she says goes.  Understand?"  And McLean and McTavish understood.
Also, they knew that the Factor had a heavy hand.

But Lit-lit did not take advantage.  Taking a leaf from the book of her
husband, she at once assumed charge of his own growing sons, giving them
added comforts and a measure of freedom like to that which he gave her.
The two sons were loud in the praise of their new mother; McLean and
McTavish lifted their voices; and the Factor bragged of the joys of
matrimony till the story of her good behaviour and her husband's
satisfaction became the property of all the dwellers in the Sin Rock
district.

Whereupon Snettishane, with visions of his incalculable interest keeping
him awake of nights, thought it time to bestir himself.  On the tenth
night of her wedded life Lit-lit was awakened by the croaking of a raven,
and she knew that Snettishane was waiting for her by the river bank.  In
her great happiness she had forgotten her pact, and now it came back to
her with behind it all the childish terror of her father.  For a time she
lay in fear and trembling, loath to go, afraid to stay.  But in the end
the Factor won the silent victory, and his kindness plus his great
muscles and square jaw, nerved her to disregard Snettishane's call.

But in the morning she arose very much afraid, and went about her duties
in momentary fear of her father's coming.  As the day wore along,
however, she began to recover her spirits.  John Fox, soundly berating
McLean and McTavish for some petty dereliction of duty, helped her to
pluck up courage.  She tried not to let him go out of her sight, and when
she followed him into the huge cache and saw him twirling and tossing
great bales around as though they were feather pillows, she felt
strengthened in her disobedience to her father.  Also (it was her first
visit to the warehouse, and Sin Rock was the chief distributing point to
several chains of lesser posts), she was astounded at the endlessness of
the wealth there stored away.

This sight and the picture in her mind's eye of the bare lodge of
Snettishane, put all doubts at rest.  Yet she capped her conviction by a
brief word with one of her step-sons.  "White daddy good?" was what she
asked, and the boy answered that his father was the best man he had ever
known.  That night the raven croaked again.  On the night following the
croaking was more persistent.  It awoke the Factor, who tossed restlessly
for a while.  Then he said aloud, "Damn that raven," and Lit-lit laughed
quietly under the blankets.

In the morning, bright and early, Snettishane put in an ominous
appearance and was set to breakfast in the kitchen with Wanidani.  He
refused "squaw food," and a little later bearded his son-in-law in the
store where the trading was done.  Having learned, he said, that his
daughter was such a jewel, he had come for more blankets, more tobacco,
and more guns--especially more guns.  He had certainly been cheated in
her price, he held, and he had come for justice.  But the Factor had
neither blankets nor justice to spare.  Whereupon he was informed that
Snettishane had seen the missionary at Three Forks, who had notified him
that such marriages were not made in heaven, and that it was his father's
duty to demand his daughter back.

"I am good Christian man now," Snettishane concluded.  "I want my Lit-lit
to go to heaven."

The Factor's reply was short and to the point; for he directed his father-
in-law to go to the heavenly antipodes, and by the scruff of the neck and
the slack of the blanket propelled him on that trail as far as the door.

But Snettishane sneaked around and in by the kitchen, cornering Lit-lit
in the great living-room of the Fort.

"Mayhap thou didst sleep over-sound last night when I called by the river
bank," he began, glowering darkly.

"Nay, I was awake and heard."  Her heart was beating as though it would
choke her, but she went on steadily, "And the night before I was awake
and heard, and yet again the night before."

And thereat, out of her great happiness and out of the fear that it might
be taken from her, she launched into an original and glowing address upon
the status and rights of woman--the first new-woman lecture delivered
north of Fifty-three.

But it fell on unheeding ears.  Snettishane was still in the dark ages.
As she paused for breath, he said threateningly, "To-night I shall call
again like the raven."

At this moment the Factor entered the room and again helped Snettishane
on his way to the heavenly antipodes.

That night the raven croaked more persistently than ever.  Lit-lit, who
was a light sleeper, heard and smiled.  John Fox tossed restlessly.  Then
he awoke and tossed about with greater restlessness.  He grumbled and
snorted, swore under his breath and over his breath, and finally flung
out of bed.  He groped his way to the great living-room, and from the
rack took down a loaded shot-gun--loaded with bird-shot, left therein by
the careless McTavish.

The Factor crept carefully out of the Fort and down to the river.  The
croaking had ceased, but he stretched out in the long grass and waited.
The air seemed a chilly balm, and the earth, after the heat of the day,
now and again breathed soothingly against him.  The Factor, gathered into
the rhythm of it all, dozed off, with his head upon his arm, and slept.

Fifty yards away, head resting on knees, and with his back to John Fox,
Snettishane likewise slept, gently conquered by the quietude of the
night.  An hour slipped by and then he awoke, and, without lifting his
head, set the night vibrating with the hoarse gutturals of the raven
call.

The Factor roused, not with the abrupt start of civilized man, but with
the swift and comprehensive glide from sleep to waking of the savage.  In
the night-light he made out a dark object in the midst of the grass and
brought his gun to bear upon it.  A second croak began to rise, and he
pulled the trigger.  The crickets ceased from their sing-song chant, the
wildfowl from their squabbling, and the raven croak broke midmost and
died away in gasping silence.

John Fox ran to the spot and reached for the thing he had killed, but his
fingers closed on a coarse mop of hair and he turned Snettishane's face
upward to the starlight.  He knew how a shotgun scattered at fifty yards,
and he knew that he had peppered Snettishane across the shoulders and in
the small of the back.  And Snettishane knew that he knew, but neither
referred to it.

"What dost thou here?" the Factor demanded.  "It were time old bones
should be in bed."

But Snettishane was stately in spite of the bird-shot burning under his
skin.

"Old bones will not sleep," he said solemnly.  "I weep for my daughter,
for my daughter Lit-lit, who liveth and who yet is dead, and who goeth
without doubt to the white man's hell."

"Weep henceforth on the far bank, beyond ear-shot of the Fort," said John
Fox, turning on his heel, "for the noise of thy weeping is exceeding
great and will not let one sleep of nights."

"My heart is sore," Snettishane answered, "and my days and nights be
black with sorrow."

"As the raven is black," said John Fox.

"As the raven is black," Snettishane said.

Never again was the voice of the raven heard by the river bank.  Lit-lit
grows matronly day by day and is very happy.  Also, there are sisters to
the sons of John Fox's first wife who lies buried in a tree.  Old
Snettishane is no longer a visitor at the Fort, and spends long hours
raising a thin, aged voice against the filial ingratitude of children in
general and of his daughter Lit-lit in particular.  His declining years
are embittered by the knowledge that he was cheated, and even John Fox
has withdrawn the assertion that the price for Lit-lit was too much by
ten blankets and a gun.



BATARD


Batard was a devil.  This was recognized throughout the Northland.
"Hell's Spawn" he was called by many men, but his master, Black Leclere,
chose for him the shameful name "Batard."  Now Black Leclere was also a
devil, and the twain were well matched.  There is a saying that when two
devils come together, hell is to pay.  This is to be expected, and this
certainly was to be expected when Batard and Black Leclere came together.
The first time they met, Batard was a part-grown puppy, lean and hungry,
with bitter eyes; and they met with snap and snarl, and wicked looks, for
Leclere's upper lip had a wolfish way of lifting and showing the white,
cruel teeth.  And it lifted then, and his eyes glinted viciously, as he
reached for Batard and dragged him out from the squirming litter.  It was
certain that they divined each other, for on the instant Batard had
buried his puppy fangs in Leclere's hand, and Leclere, thumb and finger,
was coolly choking his young life out of him.

"_Sacredam_," the Frenchman said softly, flirting the quick blood from
his bitten hand and gazing down on the little puppy choking and gasping
in the snow.

Leclere turned to John Hamlin, storekeeper of the Sixty Mile Post.  "Dat
fo' w'at Ah lak heem.  'Ow moch, eh, you, _M'sieu_'?  'Ow moch?  Ah buy
heem, now; Ah buy heem queek."

And because he hated him with an exceeding bitter hate, Leclere bought
Batard and gave him his shameful name.  And for five years the twain
adventured across the Northland, from St. Michael's and the Yukon delta
to the head-reaches of the Pelly and even so far as the Peace River,
Athabasca, and the Great Slave.  And they acquired a reputation for
uncompromising wickedness, the like of which never before attached itself
to man and dog.

Batard did not know his father--hence his name--but, as John Hamlin knew,
his father was a great grey timber wolf.  But the mother of Batard, as he
dimly remembered her, was snarling, bickering, obscene, husky,
full-fronted and heavy-chested, with a malign eye, a cat-like grip on
life, and a genius for trickery and evil.  There was neither faith nor
trust in her.  Her treachery alone could be relied upon, and her wild-
wood amours attested her general depravity.  Much of evil and much of
strength were there in these, Batard's progenitors, and, bone and flesh
of their bone and flesh, he had inherited it all.  And then came Black
Leclere, to lay his heavy hand on the bit of pulsating puppy life, to
press and prod and mould till it became a big bristling beast, acute in
knavery, overspilling with hate, sinister, malignant, diabolical.  With a
proper master Batard might have made an ordinary, fairly efficient sled-
dog.  He never got the chance: Leclere but confirmed him in his
congenital iniquity.

The history of Batard and Leclere is a history of war--of five cruel,
relentless years, of which their first meeting is fit summary.  To begin
with, it was Leclere's fault, for he hated with understanding and
intelligence, while the long-legged, ungainly puppy hated only blindly,
instinctively, without reason or method.  At first there were no
refinements of cruelty (these were to come later), but simple beatings
and crude brutalities.  In one of these Batard had an ear injured.  He
never regained control of the riven muscles, and ever after the ear
drooped limply down to keep keen the memory of his tormentor.  And he
never forgot.

His puppyhood was a period of foolish rebellion.  He was always worsted,
but he fought back because it was his nature to fight back.  And he was
unconquerable.  Yelping shrilly from the pain of lash and club, he none
the less contrived always to throw in the defiant snarl, the bitter
vindictive menace of his soul which fetched without fail more blows and
beatings.  But his was his mother's tenacious grip on life.  Nothing
could kill him.  He flourished under misfortune, grew fat with famine,
and out of his terrible struggle for life developed a preternatural
intelligence.  His were the stealth and cunning of the husky, his mother,
and the fierceness and valour of the wolf, his father.

Possibly it was because of his father that he never wailed.  His puppy
yelps passed with his lanky legs, so that he became grim and taciturn,
quick to strike, slow to warn.  He answered curse with snarl, and blow
with snap, grinning the while his implacable hatred; but never again,
under the extremest agony, did Leclere bring from him the cry of fear nor
of pain.  This unconquerableness but fanned Leclere's wrath and stirred
him to greater deviltries.

Did Leclere give Batard half a fish and to his mates whole ones, Batard
went forth to rob other dogs of their fish.  Also he robbed caches and
expressed himself in a thousand rogueries, till he became a terror to all
dogs and masters of dogs.  Did Leclere beat Batard and fondle
Babette--Babette who was not half the worker he was--why, Batard threw
her down in the snow and broke her hind leg in his heavy jaws, so that
Leclere was forced to shoot her.  Likewise, in bloody battles, Batard
mastered all his team-mates, set them the law of trail and forage, and
made them live to the law he set.

In five years he heard but one kind word, received but one soft stroke of
a hand, and then he did not know what manner of things they were.  He
leaped like the untamed thing he was, and his jaws were together in a
flash.  It was the missionary at Sunrise, a newcomer in the country, who
spoke the kind word and gave the soft stroke of the hand.  And for six
months after, he wrote no letters home to the States, and the surgeon at
McQuestion travelled two hundred miles on the ice to save him from blood-
poisoning.

Men and dogs looked askance at Batard when he drifted into their camps
and posts.  The men greeted him with feet threateningly lifted for the
kick, the dogs with bristling manes and bared fangs.  Once a man did kick
Batard, and Batard, with quick wolf snap, closed his jaws like a steel
trap on the man's calf and crunched down to the bone.  Whereat the man
was determined to have his life, only Black Leclere, with ominous eyes
and naked hunting-knife, stepped in between.  The killing of Batard--ah,
_sacredam_, _that_ was a pleasure Leclere reserved for himself.  Some day
it would happen, or else--bah! who was to know?  Anyway, the problem
would be solved.

For they had become problems to each other.  The very breath each drew
was a challenge and a menace to the other.  Their hate bound them
together as love could never bind.  Leclere was bent on the coming of the
day when Batard should wilt in spirit and cringe and whimper at his feet.
And Batard--Leclere knew what was in Batard's mind, and more than once
had read it in Batard's eyes.  And so clearly had he read, that when
Batard was at his back, he made it a point to glance often over his
shoulder.

Men marvelled when Leclere refused large money for the dog.  "Some day
you'll kill him and be out his price," said John Hamlin once, when Batard
lay panting in the snow where Leclere had kicked him, and no one knew
whether his ribs were broken, and no one dared look to see.

"Dat," said Leclere, dryly, "dat is my biz'ness, _M'sieu_'."

And the men marvelled that Batard did not run away.  They did not
understand.  But Leclere understood.  He was a man who lived much in the
open, beyond the sound of human tongue, and he had learned the voices of
wind and storm, the sigh of night, the whisper of dawn, the clash of day.
In a dim way he could hear the green things growing, the running of the
sap, the bursting of the bud.  And he knew the subtle speech of the
things that moved, of the rabbit in the snare, the moody raven beating
the air with hollow wing, the baldface shuffling under the moon, the wolf
like a grey shadow gliding betwixt the twilight and the dark.  And to him
Batard spoke clear and direct.  Full well he understood why Batard did
not run away, and he looked more often over his shoulder.

When in anger, Batard was not nice to look upon, and more than once had
he leapt for Leclere's throat, to be stretched quivering and senseless in
the snow, by the butt of the ever ready dogwhip.  And so Batard learned
to bide his time.  When he reached his full strength and prime of youth,
he thought the time had come.  He was broad-chested, powerfully muscled,
of far more than ordinary size, and his neck from head to shoulders was a
mass of bristling hair--to all appearances a full-blooded wolf.  Leclere
was lying asleep in his furs when Batard deemed the time to be ripe.  He
crept upon him stealthily, head low to earth and lone ear laid back, with
a feline softness of tread.  Batard breathed gently, very gently, and not
till he was close at hand did he raise his head.  He paused for a moment
and looked at the bronzed bull throat, naked and knotty, and swelling to
a deep steady pulse.  The slaver dripped down his fangs and slid off his
tongue at the sight, and in that moment he remembered his drooping ear,
his uncounted blows and prodigious wrongs, and without a sound sprang on
the sleeping man.

Leclere awoke to the pang of the fangs in his throat, and, perfect animal
that he was, he awoke clear-headed and with full comprehension.  He
closed on Batard's windpipe with both his hands, and rolled out of his
furs to get his weight uppermost.  But the thousands of Batard's
ancestors had clung at the throats of unnumbered moose and caribou and
dragged them down, and the wisdom of those ancestors was his.  When
Leclere's weight came on top of him, he drove his hind legs upwards and
in, and clawed down chest and abdomen, ripping and tearing through skin
and muscle.  And when he felt the man's body wince above him and lift, he
worried and shook at the man's throat.  His team-mates closed around in a
snarling circle, and Batard, with failing breath and fading sense, knew
that their jaws were hungry for him.  But that did not matter--it was the
man, the man above him, and he ripped and clawed, and shook and worried,
to the last ounce of his strength.  But Leclere choked him with both his
hands, till Batard's chest heaved and writhed for the air denied, and his
eyes glazed and set, and his jaws slowly loosened, and his tongue
protruded black and swollen.

"Eh?  _Bon_, you devil!" Leclere gurgled mouth and throat clogged with
his own blood, as he shoved the dizzy dog from him.

And then Leclere cursed the other dogs off as they fell upon Batard.  They
drew back into a wider circle, squatting alertly on their haunches and
licking their chops, the hair on every neck bristling and erect.

Batard recovered quickly, and at sound of Leclere's voice, tottered to
his feet and swayed weakly back and forth.

"A-h-ah!  You beeg devil!" Leclere spluttered.  "Ah fix you; Ah fix you
plentee, by _Gar_!"

Batard, the air biting into his exhausted lungs like wine, flashed full
into the man's face, his jaws missing and coming together with a metallic
clip.  They rolled over and over on the snow, Leclere striking madly with
his fists.  Then they separated, face to face, and circled back and forth
before each other.  Leclere could have drawn his knife.  His rifle was at
his feet.  But the beast in him was up and raging.  He would do the thing
with his hands--and his teeth.  Batard sprang in, but Leclere knocked him
over with a blow of the fist, fell upon him, and buried his teeth to the
bone in the dog's shoulder.

It was a primordial setting and a primordial scene, such as might have
been in the savage youth of the world.  An open space in a dark forest, a
ring of grinning wolf-dogs, and in the centre two beasts, locked in
combat, snapping and snarling raging madly about panting, sobbing,
cursing, straining, wild with passion, in a fury of murder, ripping and
tearing and clawing in elemental brutishness.

But Leclere caught Batard behind the ear with a blow from his fist,
knocking him over, and, for the instant, stunning him.  Then Leclere
leaped upon him with his feet, and sprang up and down, striving to grind
him into the earth.  Both Batard's hind legs were broken ere Leclere
ceased that he might catch breath.

"A-a-ah!  A-a-ah!" he screamed, incapable of speech, shaking his fist,
through sheer impotence of throat and larynx.

But Batard was indomitable.  He lay there in a helpless welter, his lip
feebly lifting and writhing to the snarl he had not the strength to
utter.  Leclere kicked him, and the tired jaws closed on the ankle, but
could not break the skin.

Then Leclere picked up the whip and proceeded almost to cut him to
pieces, at each stroke of the lash crying: "Dis taim Ah break you!  Eh?
By _Gar_!  Ah break you!"

In the end, exhausted, fainting from loss of blood, he crumpled up and
fell by his victim, and when the wolf-dogs closed in to take their
vengeance, with his last consciousness dragged his body on top of Batard
to shield him from their fangs.

This occurred not far from Sunrise, and the missionary, opening the door
to Leclere a few hours later, was surprised to note the absence of Batard
from the team.  Nor did his surprise lessen when Leclere threw back the
robes from the sled, gathered Batard into his arms and staggered across
the threshold.  It happened that the surgeon of McQuestion, who was
something of a gadabout, was up on a gossip, and between them they
proceeded to repair Leclere,

"_Merci, non_," said he.  "Do you fix firs' de dog.  To die?  _Non_.
Eet is not good.  Becos' heem Ah mus' yet break.  Dat fo' w'at he mus'
not die."

The surgeon called it a marvel, the missionary a miracle, that Leclere
pulled through at all; and so weakened was he, that in the spring the
fever got him, and he went on his back again.  Batard had been in even
worse plight, but his grip on life prevailed, and the bones of his hind
legs knit, and his organs righted themselves, during the several weeks he
lay strapped to the floor.  And by the time Leclere, finally
convalescent, sallow and shaky, took the sun by the cabin door, Batard
had reasserted his supremacy among his kind, and brought not only his own
team-mates but the missionary's dogs into subjection.

He moved never a muscle, nor twitched a hair, when, for the first time,
Leclere tottered out on the missionary's arm, and sank down slowly and
with infinite caution on the three-legged stool.

"_Bon_!" he said.  "_Bon_!  De good sun!"  And he stretched out his
wasted hands and washed them in the warmth.

Then his gaze fell on the dog, and the old light blazed back in his eyes.
He touched the missionary lightly on the arm.  "_Mon pere_, dat is one
beeg devil, dat Batard.  You will bring me one pistol, so, dat Ah drink
de sun in peace."

And thenceforth for many days he sat in the sun before the cabin door.  He
never dozed, and the pistol lay always across his knees.  Batard had a
way, the first thing each day, of looking for the weapon in its wonted
place.  At sight of it he would lift his lip faintly in token that he
understood, and Leclere would lift his own lip in an answering grin.  One
day the missionary took note of the trick.

"Bless me!" he said.  "I really believe the brute comprehends."

Leclere laughed softly.  "Look you, _mon pere_.  Dat w'at Ah now spik,
to dat does he lissen."

As if in confirmation, Batard just perceptibly wriggled his lone ear up
to catch the sound.

"Ah say 'keel'."

Batard growled deep down in his throat, the hair bristled along his neck,
and every muscle went tense and expectant.

"Ah lift de gun, so, like dat."  And suiting action to word, he sighted
the pistol at Batard.  Batard, with a single leap, sideways, landed
around the corner of the cabin out of sight.

"Bless me!" he repeated at intervals.  Leclere grinned proudly.

"But why does he not run away?"

The Frenchman's shoulders went up in the racial shrug that means all
things from total ignorance to infinite understanding.

"Then why do you not kill him?"

Again the shoulders went up.

"_Mon pere_," he said after a pause, "de taim is not yet.  He is one
beeg devil.  Some taim Ah break heem, so an' so, all to leetle bits.  Hey?
some taim.  _Bon_!"

A day came when Leclere gathered his dogs together and floated down in a
bateau to Forty Mile, and on to the Porcupine, where he took a commission
from the P. C. Company, and went exploring for the better part of a year.
After that he poled up the Koyokuk to deserted Arctic City, and later
came drifting back, from camp to camp, along the Yukon.  And during the
long months Batard was well lessoned.  He learned many tortures, and,
notably, the torture of hunger, the torture of thirst, the torture of
fire, and, worst of all, the torture of music.

Like the rest of his kind, he did not enjoy music.  It gave him exquisite
anguish, racking him nerve by nerve, and ripping apart every fibre of his
being.  It made him howl, long and wolf-life, as when the wolves bay the
stars on frosty nights.  He could not help howling.  It was his one
weakness in the contest with Leclere, and it was his shame.  Leclere, on
the other hand, passionately loved music--as passionately as he loved
strong drink.  And when his soul clamoured for expression, it usually
uttered itself in one or the other of the two ways, and more usually in
both ways.  And when he had drunk, his brain a-lilt with unsung song and
the devil in him aroused and rampant, his soul found its supreme
utterance in torturing Batard.

"Now we will haf a leetle museek," he would say.  "Eh?  W'at you t'ink,
Batard?"

It was only an old and battered harmonica, tenderly treasured and
patiently repaired; but it was the best that money could buy, and out of
its silver reeds he drew weird vagrant airs that men had never heard
before.  Then Batard, dumb of throat, with teeth tight clenched, would
back away, inch by inch, to the farthest cabin corner.  And Leclere,
playing, playing, a stout club tucked under his arm, followed the animal
up, inch by inch, step by step, till there was no further retreat.

At first Batard would crowd himself into the smallest possible space,
grovelling close to the floor; but as the music came nearer and nearer,
he was forced to uprear, his back jammed into the logs, his fore legs
fanning the air as though to beat off the rippling waves of sound.  He
still kept his teeth together, but severe muscular contractions attacked
his body, strange twitchings and jerkings, till he was all a-quiver and
writhing in silent torment.  As he lost control, his jaws spasmodically
wrenched apart, and deep throaty vibrations issued forth, too low in the
register of sound for human ear to catch.  And then, nostrils distended,
eyes dilated, hair bristling in helpless rage, arose the long wolf howl.
It came with a slurring rush upwards, swelling to a great heart-breaking
burst of sound, and dying away in sadly cadenced woe--then the next rush
upward, octave upon octave; the bursting heart; and the infinite sorrow
and misery, fainting, fading, falling, and dying slowly away.

It was fit for hell.  And Leclere, with fiendish ken, seemed to divine
each particular nerve and heartstring, and with long wails and tremblings
and sobbing minors to make it yield up its last shred of grief.  It was
frightful, and for twenty-four hours after, Batard was nervous and
unstrung, starting at common sounds, tripping over his own shadow, but,
withal, vicious and masterful with his team-mates.  Nor did he show signs
of a breaking spirit.  Rather did he grow more grim and taciturn, biding
his time with an inscrutable patience that began to puzzle and weigh upon
Leclere.  The dog would lie in the firelight, motionless, for hours,
gazing straight before him at Leclere, and hating him with his bitter
eyes.

Often the man felt that he had bucked against the very essence of
life--the unconquerable essence that swept the hawk down out of the sky
like a feathered thunderbolt, that drove the great grey goose across the
zones, that hurled the spawning salmon through two thousand miles of
boiling Yukon flood.  At such times he felt impelled to--express his own
unconquerable essence; and with strong drink, wild music, and Batard, he
indulged in vast orgies, wherein he pitted his puny strength in the face
of things, and challenged all that was, and had been, and was yet to be.

"Dere is somet'ing dere," he affirmed, when the rhythmed vagaries of his
mind touched the secret chords of Batard's being and brought forth the
long lugubrious howl.  "Ah pool eet out wid bot' my han's, so, an' so.
Ha! ha!  Eet is fonee!  Eet is ver' fonee!  De priest chant, de womans
pray, de mans swear, de leetle bird go _peep-peep_, Batard, heem go
_yow-yow_--an' eet is all de ver' same t'ing.  Ha! ha!"

Father Gautier, a worthy priest, one reproved him with instances of
concrete perdition.  He never reproved him again.

"Eet may be so, _mon pere_," he made answer.  "An' Ah t'ink Ah go troo
hell a-snappin', lak de hemlock troo de fire.  Eh, _mon pere_?"

But all bad things come to an end as well as good, and so with Black
Leclere.  On the summer low water, in a poling boat, he left McDougall
for Sunrise.  He left McDougall in company with Timothy Brown, and
arrived at Sunrise by himself.  Further, it was known that they had
quarrelled just previous to pulling out; for the _Lizzie_, a wheezy ten-
ton stern-wheeler, twenty-four hours behind, beat Leclere in by three
days.  And when he did get in, it was with a clean-drilled bullet-hole
through his shoulder muscle, and a tale of ambush and murder.

A strike had been made at Sunrise, and things had changed considerably.
With the infusion of several hundred gold-seekers, a deal of whisky, and
half-a-dozen equipped gamblers, the missionary had seen the page of his
years of labour with the Indians wiped clean.  When the squaws became
preoccupied with cooking beans and keeping the fire going for the
wifeless miners, and the bucks with swapping their warm furs for black
bottles and broken time-pieces, he took to his bed, said "Bless me"
several times, and departed to his final accounting in a rough-hewn,
oblong box.  Whereupon the gamblers moved their roulette and faro tables
into the mission house, and the click of chips and clink of glasses went
up from dawn till dark and to dawn again.

Now Timothy Brown was well beloved among these adventurers of the North.
The one thing against him was his quick temper and ready fist--a little
thing, for which his kind heart and forgiving hand more than atoned.  On
the other hand, there was nothing to atone for Black Leclere.  He was
"black," as more than one remembered deed bore witness, while he was as
well hated as the other was beloved.  So the men of Sunrise put an
antiseptic dressing on his shoulder and haled him before Judge Lynch.

It was a simple affair.  He had quarrelled with Timothy Brown at
McDougall.  With Timothy Brown he had left McDougall.  Without Timothy
Brown he had arrived at Sunrise.  Considered in the light of his
evilness, the unanimous conclusion was that he had killed Timothy Brown.
On the other hand, Leclere acknowledged their facts, but challenged their
conclusion, and gave his own explanation.  Twenty miles out of Sunrise he
and Timothy Brown were poling the boat along the rocky shore.  From that
shore two rifle-shots rang out.  Timothy Brown pitched out of the boat
and went down bubbling red, and that was the last of Timothy Brown.  He,
Leclere, pitched into the bottom of the boat with a stinging shoulder.  He
lay very quiet, peeping at the shore.  After a time two Indians stuck up
their heads and came out to the water's edge, carrying between them a
birch-bark canoe.  As they launched it, Leclere let fly.  He potted one,
who went over the side after the manner of Timothy Brown.  The other
dropped into the bottom of the canoe, and then canoe and poling boat went
down the stream in a drifting battle.  After that they hung up on a split
current, and the canoe passed on one side of an island, the poling boat
on the other.  That was the last of the canoe, and he came on into
Sunrise.  Yes, from the way the Indian in the canoe jumped, he was sure
he had potted him.  That was all.  This explanation was not deemed
adequate.  They gave him ten hours' grace while the _Lizzie_ steamed down
to investigate.  Ten hours later she came wheezing back to Sunrise.  There
had been nothing to investigate.  No evidence had been found to back up
his statements.  They told him to make his will, for he possessed a fifty-
thousand dollar Sunrise claim, and they were a law-abiding as well as a
law-giving breed.

Leclere shrugged his shoulders.  "Bot one t'ing," he said; "a leetle,
w'at you call, favour--a leetle favour, dat is eet.  I gif my feefty
t'ousan' dollair to de church.  I gif my husky dog, Batard, to de devil.
De leetle favour?  Firs' you hang heem, an' den you hang me.  Eet is
good, eh?"

Good it was, they agreed, that Hell's Spawn should break trail for his
master across the last divide, and the court was adjourned down to the
river bank, where a big spruce tree stood by itself.  Slackwater Charley
put a hangman's knot in the end of a hauling-line, and the noose was
slipped over Leclere's head and pulled tight around his neck.  His hands
were tied behind his back, and he was assisted to the top of a cracker
box.  Then the running end of the line was passed over an over-hanging
branch, drawn taut, and made fast.  To kick the box out from under would
leave him dancing on the air.

"Now for the dog," said Webster Shaw, sometime mining engineer.  "You'll
have to rope him, Slackwater."

Leclere grinned.  Slackwater took a chew of tobacco, rove a running
noose, and proceeded leisurely to coil a few turns in his hand.  He
paused once or twice to brush particularly offensive mosquitoes from off
his face.  Everybody was brushing mosquitoes, except Leclere, about whose
head a small cloud was visible.  Even Batard, lying full-stretched on the
ground with his fore paws rubbed the pests away from eyes and mouth.

But while Slackwater waited for Batard to lift his head, a faint call
came from the quiet air, and a man was seen waving his arms and running
across the flat from Sunrise.  It was the storekeeper.

"C-call 'er off, boys," he panted, as he came in among them.

"Little Sandy and Bernadotte's jes' got in," he explained with returning
breath.  "Landed down below an' come up by the short cut.  Got the Beaver
with 'm.  Picked 'm up in his canoe, stuck in a back channel, with a
couple of bullet-holes in 'm.  Other buck was Klok Kutz, the one that
knocked spots out of his squaw and dusted."

"Eh?  W'at Ah say?  Eh?" Leclere cried exultantly.  "Dat de one fo' sure!
Ah know.  Ah spik true."

"The thing to do is to teach these damned Siwashes a little manners,"
spoke Webster Shaw.  "They're getting fat and sassy, and we'll have to
bring them down a peg.  Round in all the bucks and string up the Beaver
for an object lesson.  That's the programme.  Come on and let's see what
he's got to say for himself."

"Heh, _M'sieu_!" Leclere called, as the crowd began to melt away through
the twilight in the direction of Sunrise.  "Ah lak ver' moch to see de
fon."

"Oh, we'll turn you loose when we come back," Webster Shaw shouted over
his shoulder.  "In the meantime meditate on your sins and the ways of
Providence.  It will do you good, so be grateful."

As is the way with men who are accustomed to great hazards, whose nerves
are healthy and trained in patience, so it was with Leclere who settled
himself to the long wait--which is to say that he reconciled his mind to
it.  There was no settling of the body, for the taut rope forced him to
stand rigidly erect.  The least relaxation of the leg muscles pressed the
rough-fibred noose into his neck, while the upright position caused him
much pain in his wounded shoulder.  He projected his under lip and
expelled his breath upwards along his face to blow the mosquitoes away
from his eyes.  But the situation had its compensation.  To be snatched
from the maw of death was well worth a little bodily suffering, only it
was unfortunate that he should miss the hanging of the Beaver.

And so he mused, till his eyes chanced to fall upon Batard, head between
fore paws and stretched on the ground asleep.  And their Leclere ceased
to muse.  He studied the animal closely, striving to sense if the sleep
were real or feigned.  Batard's sides were heaving regularly, but Leclere
felt that the breath came and went a shade too quickly; also he felt that
there was a vigilance or alertness to every hair that belied unshackling
sleep.  He would have given his Sunrise claim to be assured that the dog
was not awake, and once, when one of his joints cracked, he looked
quickly and guiltily at Batard to see if he roused.  He did not rouse
then but a few minutes later he got up slowly and lazily, stretched, and
looked carefully about him.

"_Sacredam_," said Leclere under his breath.

Assured that no one was in sight or hearing, Batard sat down, curled his
upper lip almost into a smile, looked up at Leclere, and licked his
chops.

"Ah see my feenish," the man said, and laughed sardonically aloud.

Batard came nearer, the useless ear wabbling, the good ear cocked forward
with devilish comprehension.  He thrust his head on one side quizzically,
and advanced with mincing, playful steps.  He rubbed his body gently
against the box till it shook and shook again.  Leclere teetered
carefully to maintain his equilibrium.

"Batard," he said calmly, "look out.  Ah keel you."

Batard snarled at the word and shook the box with greater force.  Then he
upreared, and with his fore paws threw his weight against it higher up.
Leclere kicked out with one foot, but the rope bit into his neck and
checked so abruptly as nearly to overbalance him.

"Hi, ya!  _Chook_!  _Mush-on_!" he screamed.

Batard retreated, for twenty feet or so, with a fiendish levity in his
bearing that Leclere could not mistake.  He remembered the dog often
breaking the scum of ice on the water hole by lifting up and throwing his
weight upon it; and remembering, he understood what he now had in mind.
Batard faced about and paused.  He showed his white teeth in a grin,
which Leclere answered; and then hurled his body through the air, in full
charge, straight for the box.

Fifteen minutes later, Slackwater Charley and Webster Shaw returning,
caught a glimpse of a ghostly pendulum swinging back and forth in the dim
light.  As they hurriedly drew in closer, they made out the man's inert
body, and a live thing that clung to it, and shook and worried, and gave
to it the swaying motion.

"Hi, ya!  _Chook_! you Spawn of Hell!" yelled Webster Shaw.

But Batard glared at him, and snarled threateningly, without loosing his
jaws.

Slackwater Charley got out his revolver, but his hand was shaking, as
with a chill, and he fumbled.

"Here you take it," he said, passing the weapon over.

Webster Shaw laughed shortly, drew a sight between the gleaming eyes, and
pressed the trigger.  Batard's body twitched with the shock, threshed the
ground spasmodically for a moment, and went suddenly limp.  But his teeth
still held fast locked.



THE STORY OF JEES UCK


There have been renunciations and renunciations.  But, in its essence,
renunciation is ever the same.  And the paradox of it is, that men and
women forego the dearest thing in the world for something dearer.  It was
never otherwise.  Thus it was when Abel brought of the firstlings of his
flock and of the fat thereof.  The firstlings and the fat thereof were to
him the dearest things in the world; yet he gave them over that he might
be on good terms with God.  So it was with Abraham when he prepared to
offer up his son Isaac on a stone.  Isaac was very dear to him; but God,
in incomprehensible ways, was yet dearer.  It may be that Abraham feared
the Lord.  But whether that be true or not it has since been determined
by a few billion people that he loved the Lord and desired to serve him.

And since it has been determined that love is service, and since to
renounce is to serve, then Jees Uck, who was merely a woman of a swart-
skinned breed, loved with a great love.  She was unversed in history,
having learned to read only the signs of weather and of game; so she had
never heard of Abel nor of Abraham; nor, having escaped the good sisters
at Holy Cross, had she been told the story of Ruth, the Moabitess, who
renounced her very God for the sake of a stranger woman from a strange
land.  Jees Uck had learned only one way of renouncing, and that was with
a club as the dynamic factor, in much the same manner as a dog is made to
renounce a stolen marrow-bone.  Yet, when the time came, she proved
herself capable of rising to the height of the fair-faced royal races and
of renouncing in right regal fashion.

So this is the story of Jees Uck, which is also the story of Neil Bonner,
and Kitty Bonner, and a couple of Neil Bonner's progeny.  Jees Uck was of
a swart-skinned breed, it is true, but she was not an Indian; nor was she
an Eskimo; nor even an Innuit.  Going backward into mouth tradition,
there appears the figure of one Skolkz, a Toyaat Indian of the Yukon, who
journeyed down in his youth to the Great Delta where dwell the Innuits,
and where he foregathered with a woman remembered as Olillie.  Now the
woman Olillie had been bred from an Eskimo mother by an Innuit man.  And
from Skolkz and Olillie came Halie, who was one-half Toyaat Indian, one-
quarter Innuit, and one-quarter Eskimo.  And Halie was the grandmother of
Jees Uck.

Now Halie, in whom three stocks had been bastardized, who cherished no
prejudice against further admixture, mated with a Russian fur trader
called Shpack, also known in his time as the Big Fat.  Shpack is herein
classed Russian for lack of a more adequate term; for Shpack's father, a
Slavonic convict from the Lower Provinces, had escaped from the
quicksilver mines into Northern Siberia, where he knew Zimba, who was a
woman of the Deer People and who became the mother of Shpack, who became
the grandfather of Jees Uck.

Now had not Shpack been captured in his boyhood by the Sea People, who
fringe the rim of the Arctic Sea with their misery, he would not have
become the grandfather of Jees Uck and there would be no story at all.
But he _was_ captured by the Sea People, from whom he escaped to
Kamchatka, and thence, on a Norwegian whale-ship, to the Baltic.  Not
long after that he turned up in St. Petersburg, and the years were not
many till he went drifting east over the same weary road his father had
measured with blood and groans a half-century before.  But Shpack was a
free man, in the employ of the great Russian Fur Company.  And in that
employ he fared farther and farther east, until he crossed Bering Sea
into Russian America; and at Pastolik, which is hard by the Great Delta
of the Yukon, became the husband of Halie, who was the grandmother of
Jees Uck.  Out of this union came the woman-child, Tukesan.

Shpack, under the orders of the Company, made a canoe voyage of a few
hundred miles up the Yukon to the post of Nulato.  With him he took Halie
and the babe Tukesan.  This was in 1850, and in 1850 it was that the
river Indians fell upon Nulato and wiped it from the face of the earth.
And that was the end of Shpack and Halie.  On that terrible night Tukesan
disappeared.  To this day the Toyaats aver they had no hand in the
trouble; but, be that as it may, the fact remains that the babe Tukesan
grew up among them.

Tukesan was married successively to two Toyaat brothers, to both of whom
she was barren.  Because of this, other women shook their heads, and no
third Toyaat man could be found to dare matrimony with the childless
widow.  But at this time, many hundred miles above, at Fort Yukon, was a
man, Spike O'Brien.  Fort Yukon was a Hudson Bay Company post, and Spike
O'Brien one of the Company's servants.  He was a good servant, but he
achieved an opinion that the service was bad, and in the course of time
vindicated that opinion by deserting.  It was a year's journey, by the
chain of posts, back to York Factory on Hudson's Bay.  Further, being
Company posts, he knew he could not evade the Company's clutches.  Nothing
retained but to go down the Yukon.  It was true no white man had ever
gone down the Yukon, and no white man knew whether the Yukon emptied into
the Arctic Ocean or Bering Sea; but Spike O'Brien was a Celt, and the
promise of danger was a lure he had ever followed.

A few weeks later, somewhat battered, rather famished, and about dead
with river-fever, he drove the nose of his canoe into the earth bank by
the village of the Toyaats and promptly fainted away.  While getting his
strength back, in the weeks that followed, he looked upon Tukesan and
found her good.  Like the father of Shpack, who lived to a ripe old age
among the Siberian Deer People, Spike O'Brien might have left his aged
bones with the Toyaats.  But romance gripped his heart-strings and would
not let him stay.  As he had journeyed from York Factory to Fort Yukon,
so, first among men, might he journey from Fort Yukon to the sea and win
the honour of being the first man to make the North-West Passage by land.
So he departed down the river, won the honour, and was unannaled and
unsung.  In after years he ran a sailors' boarding-house in San
Francisco, where he became esteemed a most remarkable liar by virtue of
the gospel truths he told.  But a child was born to Tukesan, who had been
childless.  And this child was Jees Uck.  Her lineage has been traced at
length to show that she was neither Indian, nor Eskimo, nor Innuit, nor
much of anything else; also to show what waifs of the generations we are,
all of us, and the strange meanderings of the seed from which we spring.

What with the vagrant blood in her and the heritage compounded of many
races, Jees Uck developed a wonderful young beauty.  Bizarre, perhaps, it
was, and Oriental enough to puzzle any passing ethnologist.  A lithe and
slender grace characterized her.  Beyond a quickened lilt to the
imagination, the contribution of the Celt was in no wise apparent.  It
might possibly have put the warm blood under her skin, which made her
face less swart and her body fairer; but that, in turn, might have come
from Shpack, the Big Fat, who inherited the colour of his Slavonic
father.  And, finally, she had great, blazing black eyes--the half-caste
eye, round, full-orbed, and sensuous, which marks the collision of the
dark races with the light.  Also, the white blood in her, combined with
her knowledge that it was in her, made her, in a way, ambitious.
Otherwise by upbringing and in outlook on life, she was wholly and
utterly a Toyaat Indian.

One winter, when she was a young woman, Neil Bonner came into her life.
But he came into her life, as he had come into the country, somewhat
reluctantly.  In fact, it was very much against his will, coming into the
country.  Between a father who clipped coupons and cultivated roses, and
a mother who loved the social round, Neil Bonner had gone rather wild.  He
was not vicious, but a man with meat in his belly and without work in the
world has to expend his energy somehow, and Neil Bonner was such a man.
And he expended his energy in such a fashion and to such extent that when
the inevitable climax came, his father, Neil Bonner, senior, crawled out
of his roses in a panic and looked on his son with a wondering eye.  Then
he hied himself away to a crony of kindred pursuits, with whom he was
wont to confer over coupons and roses, and between the two the destiny of
young Neil Bonner was made manifest.  He must go away, on probation, to
live down his harmless follies in order that he might live up to their
own excellent standard.

This determined upon, and young Neil a little repentant and a great deal
ashamed, the rest was easy.  The cronies were heavy stockholders in the
P. C. Company.  The P. C. Company owned fleets of river-steamers and
ocean-going craft, and, in addition to farming the sea, exploited a
hundred thousand square miles or so of the land that, on the maps of
geographers, usually occupies the white spaces.  So the P. C. Company
sent young Neil Bonner north, where the white spaces are, to do its work
and to learn to be good like his father.  "Five years of simplicity,
close to the soil and far from temptation, will make a man of him," said
old Neil Bonner, and forthwith crawled back among his roses.  Young Neil
set his jaw, pitched his chin at the proper angle, and went to work.  As
an underling he did his work well and gained the commendation of his
superiors.  Not that he delighted in the work, but that it was the one
thing that prevented him from going mad.

The first year he wished he was dead.  The second year he cursed God.  The
third year he was divided between the two emotions, and in the confusion
quarrelled with a man in authority.  He had the best of the quarrel,
though the man in authority had the last word,--a word that sent Neil
Bonner into an exile that made his old billet appear as paradise.  But he
went without a whimper, for the North had succeeded in making him into a
man.

Here and there, on the white spaces on the map, little circlets like the
letter "o" are to be found, and, appended to these circlets, on one side
or the other, are names such as "Fort Hamilton," "Yanana Station,"
"Twenty Mile," thus leading one to imagine that the white spaces are
plentifully besprinkled with towns and villages.  But it is a vain
imagining.  Twenty Mile, which is very like the rest of the posts, is a
log building the size of a corner grocery with rooms to let up-stairs.  A
long-legged cache on stilts may be found in the back yard; also a couple
of outhouses.  The back yard is unfenced, and extends to the sky-line and
an unascertainable bit beyond.  There are no other houses in sight,
though the Toyaats sometimes pitch a winter camp a mile or two down the
Yukon.  And this is Twenty Mile, one tentacle of the many-tentacled P. C.
Company.  Here the agent, with an assistant, barters with the Indians for
their furs, and does an erratic trade on a gold-dust basis with the
wandering miners.  Here, also, the agent and his assistant yearn all
winter for the spring, and when the spring comes, camp blasphemously on
the roof while the Yukon washes out the establishment.  And here, also,
in the fourth year of his sojourn in the land, came Neil Bonner to take
charge.

He had displaced no agent; for the man that previously ran the post had
made away with himself; "because of the rigours of the place," said the
assistant, who still remained; though the Toyaats, by their fires, had
another version.  The assistant was a shrunken-shouldered, hollow-chested
man, with a cadaverous face and cavernous cheeks that his sparse black
beard could not hide.  He coughed much, as though consumption gripped his
lungs, while his eyes had that mad, fevered light common to consumptives
in the last stage.  Pentley was his name--Amos Pentley--and Bonner did
not like him, though he felt a pity for the forlorn and hopeless devil.
They did not get along together, these two men who, of all men, should
have been on good terms in the face of the cold and silence and darkness
of the long winter.

In the end, Bonner concluded that Amos was partly demented, and left him
alone, doing all the work himself except the cooking.  Even then, Amos
had nothing but bitter looks and an undisguised hatred for him.  This was
a great loss to Bonner; for the smiling face of one of his own kind, the
cheery word, the sympathy of comradeship shared with misfortune--these
things meant much; and the winter was yet young when he began to realize
the added reasons, with such an assistant, that the previous agent had
found to impel his own hand against his life.

It was very lonely at Twenty Mile.  The bleak vastness stretched away on
every side to the horizon.  The snow, which was really frost, flung its
mantle over the land and buried everything in the silence of death.  For
days it was clear and cold, the thermometer steadily recording forty to
fifty degrees below zero.  Then a change came over the face of things.
What little moisture had oozed into the atmosphere gathered into dull
grey, formless clouds; it became quite warm, the thermometer rising to
twenty below; and the moisture fell out of the sky in hard frost-granules
that hissed like dry sugar or driving sand when kicked underfoot.  After
that it became clear and cold again, until enough moisture had gathered
to blanket the earth from the cold of outer space.  That was all.  Nothing
happened.  No storms, no churning waters and threshing forests, nothing
but the machine-like precipitation of accumulated moisture.  Possibly the
most notable thing that occurred through the weary weeks was the gliding
of the temperature up to the unprecedented height of fifteen below.  To
atone for this, outer space smote the earth with its cold till the
mercury froze and the spirit thermometer remained more than seventy below
for a fortnight, when it burst.  There was no telling how much colder it
was after that.  Another occurrence, monotonous in its regularity, was
the lengthening of the nights, till day became a mere blink of light
between the darkness.

Neil Bonner was a social animal.  The very follies for which he was doing
penance had been bred of his excessive sociability.  And here, in the
fourth year of his exile, he found himself in company--which were to
travesty the word--with a morose and speechless creature in whose sombre
eyes smouldered a hatred as bitter as it was unwarranted.  And Bonner, to
whom speech and fellowship were as the breath of life, went about as a
ghost might go, tantalized by the gregarious revelries of some former
life.  In the day his lips were compressed, his face stern; but in the
night he clenched his hands, rolled about in his blankets, and cried
aloud like a little child.  And he would remember a certain man in
authority and curse him through the long hours.  Also, he cursed God.  But
God understands.  He cannot find it in his heart to blame weak mortals
who blaspheme in Alaska.

And here, to the post of Twenty Mile, came Jees Uck, to trade for flour
and bacon, and beads, and bright scarlet cloths for her fancy work.  And
further, and unwittingly, she came to the post of Twenty Mile to make a
lonely man more lonely, make him reach out empty arms in his sleep.  For
Neil Bonner was only a man.  When she first came into the store, he
looked at her long, as a thirsty man may look at a flowing well.  And
she, with the heritage bequeathed her by Spike O'Brien, imagined daringly
and smiled up into his eyes, not as the swart-skinned peoples should
smile at the royal races, but as a woman smiles at a man.  The thing was
inevitable; only, he did not see it, and fought against her as fiercely
and passionately as he was drawn towards her.  And she?  She was Jees
Uck, by upbringing wholly and utterly a Toyaat Indian woman.

She came often to the post to trade.  And often she sat by the big wood
stove and chatted in broken English with Neil Bonner.  And he came to
look for her coming; and on the days she did not come he was worried and
restless.  Sometimes he stopped to think, and then she was met coldly,
with a resolve that perplexed and piqued her, and which, she was
convinced, was not sincere.  But more often he did not dare to think, and
then all went well and there were smiles and laughter.  And Amos Pentley,
gasping like a stranded catfish, his hollow cough a-reek with the grave,
looked upon it all and grinned.  He, who loved life, could not live, and
it rankled his soul that others should be able to live.  Wherefore he
hated Bonner, who was so very much alive and into whose eyes sprang joy
at the sight of Jees Uck.  As for Amos, the very thought of the girl was
sufficient to send his blood pounding up into a hemorrhage.

Jees Uck, whose mind was simple, who thought elementally and was unused
to weighing life in its subtler quantities, read Amos Pentley like a
book.  She warned Bonner, openly and bluntly, in few words; but the
complexities of higher existence confused the situation to him, and he
laughed at her evident anxiety.  To him, Amos was a poor, miserable
devil, tottering desperately into the grave.  And Bonner, who had
suffered much, found it easy to forgive greatly.

But one morning, during a bitter snap, he got up from the breakfast-table
and went into the store.  Jees Uck was already there, rosy from the
trail, to buy a sack of flour.  A few minutes later, he was out in the
snow lashing the flour on her sled.  As he bent over he noticed a
stiffness in his neck and felt a premonition of impending physical
misfortune.  And as he put the last half-hitch into the lashing and
attempted to straighten up, a quick spasm seized him and he sank into the
snow.  Tense and quivering, head jerked back, limbs extended, back arched
and mouth twisted and distorted, he appeared as though being racked limb
from limb.  Without cry or sound, Jees Uck was in the snow beside him;
but he clutched both her wrists spasmodically, and as long as the
convulsion endured she was helpless.  In a few moments the spasm relaxed
and he was left weak and fainting, his forehead beaded with sweat, and
his lips flecked with foam.

"Quick!" he muttered, in a strange, hoarse voice.  "Quick!  Inside!"

He started to crawl on hands and knees, but she raised him up, and,
supported by her young arm, he made faster progress.  As he entered the
store the spasm seized him again, and his body writhed irresistibly away
from her and rolled and curled on the floor.  Amos Pentley came and
looked on with curious eyes.

"Oh, Amos!" she cried in an agony of apprehension and helplessness, "him
die, you think?"  But Amos shrugged his shoulders and continued to look
on.

Bonner's body went slack, the tense muscles easing down and an expression
of relief coming into his face.  "Quick!" he gritted between his teeth,
his mouth twisting with the on-coming of the next spasm and with his
effort to control it.  "Quick, Jees Uck!  The medicine!  Never mind!  Drag
me!"

She knew where the medicine-chest stood, at the rear of the room beyond
the stove, and thither, by the legs, she dragged the struggling man.  As
the spasm passed he began, very faint and very sick, to overhaul the
chest.  He had seen dogs die exhibiting symptoms similar to his own, and
he knew what should be done.  He held up a vial of chloral hydrate, but
his fingers were too weak and nerveless to draw the cork.  This Jees Uck
did for him, while he was plunged into another convulsion.  As he came
out of it he found the open bottle proffered him, and looked into the
great black eyes of the woman and read what men have always read in the
Mate-woman's eyes.  Taking a full dose of the stuff, he sank back until
another spasm had passed.  Then he raised himself limply on his elbow.

"Listen, Jees Uck!" he said very slowly, as though aware of the necessity
for haste and yet afraid to hasten.  "Do what I say.  Stay by my side,
but do not touch me.  I must be very quiet, but you must not go away."
His jaw began to set and his face to quiver and distort with the fore-
running pangs, but he gulped and struggled to master them.  "Do not got
away.  And do not let Amos go away.  Understand!  Amos must stay right
here."

She nodded her head, and he passed off into the first of many
convulsions, which gradually diminished in force and frequency.  Jees Uck
hung over him remembering his injunction and not daring to touch him.
Once Amos grew restless and made as though to go into the kitchen; but a
quick blaze from her eyes quelled him, and after that, save for his
laboured breathing and charnel cough, he was very quiet.

Bonner slept.  The blink of light that marked the day disappeared.  Amos,
followed about by the woman's eyes, lighted the kerosene lamps.  Evening
came on.  Through the north window the heavens were emblazoned with an
auroral display, which flamed and flared and died down into blackness.
Some time after that, Neil Bonner roused.  First he looked to see that
Amos was still there, then smiled at Jees Uck and pulled himself up.
Every muscle was stiff and sore, and he smiled ruefully, pressing and
prodding himself as if to ascertain the extent of the ravage.  Then his
face went stern and businesslike.

"Jees Uck," he said, "take a candle.  Go into the kitchen.  There is food
on the table--biscuits and beans and bacon; also, coffee in the pot on
the stove.  Bring it here on the counter.  Also, bring tumblers and water
and whisky, which you will find on the top shelf of the locker.  Do not
forget the whisky."

Having swallowed a stiff glass of the whisky, he went carefully through
the medicine chest, now and again putting aside, with definite purpose,
certain bottles and vials.  Then he set to work on the food, attempting a
crude analysis.  He had not been unused to the laboratory in his college
days and was possessed of sufficient imagination to achieve results with
his limited materials.  The condition of tetanus, which had marked his
paroxysms, simplified matters, and he made but one test.  The coffee
yielded nothing; nor did the beans.  To the biscuits he devoted the
utmost care.  Amos, who knew nothing of chemistry, looked on with steady
curiosity.  But Jees Uck, who had boundless faith in the white man's
wisdom, and especially in Neil Bonner's wisdom, and who not only knew
nothing but knew that she knew nothing watched his face rather than his
hands.

Step by step he eliminated possibilities, until he came to the final
test.  He was using a thin medicine vial for a tube, and this he held
between him and the light, watching the slow precipitation of a salt
through the solution contained in the tube.  He said nothing, but he saw
what he had expected to see.  And Jees Uck, her eyes riveted on his face,
saw something too,--something that made her spring like a tigress upon
Amos, and with splendid suppleness and strength bend his body back across
her knee.  Her knife was out of its sheaf and uplifted, glinting in the
lamplight.  Amos was snarling; but Bonner intervened ere the blade could
fall.

"That's a good girl, Jees Uck.  But never mind.  Let him go!"

She dropped the man obediently, though with protest writ large on her
face; and his body thudded to the floor.  Bonner nudged him with his
moccasined foot.

"Get up, Amos!" he commanded.  "You've got to pack an outfit yet to-night
and hit the trail."

"You don't mean to say--" Amos blurted savagely.

"I mean to say that you tried to kill me," Neil went on in cold, even
tones.  "I mean to say that you killed Birdsall, for all the Company
believes he killed himself.  You used strychnine in my case.  God knows
with what you fixed him.  Now I can't hang you.  You're too near dead as
it is.  But Twenty Mile is too small for the pair of us, and you've got
to mush.  It's two hundred miles to Holy Cross.  You can make it if
you're careful not to over-exert.  I'll give you grub, a sled, and three
dogs.  You'll be as safe as if you were in jail, for you can't get out of
the country.  And I'll give you one chance.  You're almost dead.  Very
well.  I shall send no word to the Company until the spring.  In the
meantime, the thing for you to do is to die.  Now _mush_!"

"You go to bed!" Jees Uck insisted, when Amos had churned away into the
night towards Holy Cross.  "You sick man yet, Neil."

"And you're a good girl, Jees Uck," he answered.  "And here's my hand on
it.  But you must go home."

"You don't like me," she said simply.

He smiled, helped her on with her _parka_, and led her to the door.  "Only
too well, Jees Uck," he said softly; "only too well."

After that the pall of the Arctic night fell deeper and blacker on the
land.  Neil Bonner discovered that he had failed to put proper valuation
upon even the sullen face of the murderous and death-stricken Amos.  It
became very lonely at Twenty Mile.  "For the love of God, Prentiss, send
me a man," he wrote to the agent at Fort Hamilton, three hundred miles up
river.  Six weeks later the Indian messenger brought back a reply.  It
was characteristic: "Hell.  Both feet frozen.  Need him myself--Prentiss."

To make matters worse, most of the Toyaats were in the back country on
the flanks of a caribou herd, and Jees Uck was with them.  Removing to a
distance seemed to bring her closer than ever, and Neil Bonner found
himself picturing her, day by day, in camp and on trail.  It is not good
to be alone.  Often he went out of the quiet store, bare-headed and
frantic, and shook his fist at the blink of day that came over the
southern sky-line.  And on still, cold nights he left his bed and
stumbled into the frost, where he assaulted the silence at the top of his
lungs, as though it were some tangible, sentiment thing that he might
arouse; or he shouted at the sleeping dogs till they howled and howled
again.  One shaggy brute he brought into the post, playing that it was
the new man sent by Prentiss.  He strove to make it sleep decently under
blankets at nights and to sit at table and eat as a man should; but the
beast, mere domesticated wolf that it was, rebelled, and sought out dark
corners and snarled and bit him in the leg, and was finally beaten and
driven forth.

Then the trick of personification seized upon Neil Bonner and mastered
him.  All the forces of his environment metamorphosed into living,
breathing entities and came to live with him.  He recreated the primitive
pantheon; reared an altar to the sun and burned candle fat and bacon
grease thereon; and in the unfenced yard, by the long-legged cache, made
a frost devil, which he was wont to make faces at and mock when the
mercury oozed down into the bulb.  All this in play, of course.  He said
it to himself that it was in play, and repeated it over and over to make
sure, unaware that madness is ever prone to express itself in
make-believe and play.

One midwinter day, Father Champreau, a Jesuit missionary, pulled into
Twenty Mile.  Bonner fell upon him and dragged him into the post, and
clung to him and wept, until the priest wept with him from sheer
compassion.  Then Bonner became madly hilarious and made lavish
entertainment, swearing valiantly that his guest should not depart.  But
Father Champreau was pressing to Salt Water on urgent business for his
order, and pulled out next morning, with Bonner's blood threatened on his
head.

And the threat was in a fair way toward realization, when the Toyaats
returned from their long hunt to the winter camp.  They had many furs,
and there was much trading and stir at Twenty Mile.  Also, Jees Uck came
to buy beads and scarlet cloths and things, and Bonner began to find
himself again.  He fought for a week against her.  Then the end came one
night when she rose to leave.  She had not forgotten her repulse, and the
pride that drove Spike O'Brien on to complete the North-West Passage by
land was her pride.

"I go now," she said; "good-night, Neil."

But he came up behind her.  "Nay, it is not well," he said.

And as she turned her face toward his with a sudden joyful flash, he bent
forward, slowly and gravely, as it were a sacred thing, and kissed her on
the lips.  The Toyaats had never taught her the meaning of a kiss upon
the lips, but she understood and was glad.

With the coming of Jees Uck, at once things brightened up.  She was regal
in her happiness, a source of unending delight.  The elemental workings
of her mind and her naive little ways made an immense sum of pleasurable
surprise to the over-civilized man that had stooped to catch her up.  Not
alone was she solace to his loneliness, but her primitiveness rejuvenated
his jaded mind.  It was as though, after long wandering, he had returned
to pillow his head in the lap of Mother Earth.  In short, in Jees Uck he
found the youth of the world--the youth and the strength and the joy.

And to fill the full round of his need, and that they might not see
overmuch of each other, there arrived at Twenty Mile one Sandy
MacPherson, as companionable a man as ever whistled along the trail or
raised a ballad by a camp-fire.  A Jesuit priest had run into his camp, a
couple of hundred miles up the Yukon, in the nick of time to say a last
word over the body of Sandy's partner.  And on departing, the priest had
said, "My son, you will be lonely now."  And Sandy had bowed his head
brokenly.  "At Twenty Mile," the priest added, "there is a lonely man.
You have need of each other, my son."

So it was that Sandy became a welcome third at the post, brother to the
man and woman that resided there.  He took Bonner moose-hunting and wolf-
trapping; and, in return, Bonner resurrected a battered and way-worn
volume and made him friends with Shakespeare, till Sandy declaimed iambic
pentameters to his sled-dogs whenever they waxed mutinous.  And of the
long evenings they played cribbage and talked and disagreed about the
universe, the while Jees Uck rocked matronly in an easy-chair and darned
their moccasins and socks.

Spring came.  The sun shot up out of the south.  The land exchanged its
austere robes for the garb of a smiling wanton.  Everywhere light laughed
and life invited.  The days stretched out their balmy length and the
nights passed from blinks of darkness to no darkness at all.  The river
bared its bosom, and snorting steamboats challenged the wilderness.  There
were stir and bustle, new faces, and fresh facts.  An assistant arrived
at Twenty Mile, and Sandy MacPherson wandered off with a bunch of
prospectors to invade the Koyokuk country.  And there were newspapers and
magazines and letters for Neil Bonner.  And Jees Uck looked on in
worriment, for she knew his kindred talked with him across the world.

Without much shock, it came to him that his father was dead.  There was a
sweet letter of forgiveness, dictated in his last hours.  There were
official letters from the Company, graciously ordering him to turn the
post over to the assistant and permitting him to depart at his earliest
pleasure.  A long, legal affair from the lawyers informed him of
interminable lists of stocks and bonds, real estate, rents, and chattels
that were his by his father's will.  And a dainty bit of stationery,
sealed and monogramed, implored dear Neil's return to his heart-broken
and loving mother.

Neil Bonner did some swift thinking, and when the _Yukon Belle_ coughed
in to the bank on her way down to Bering Sea, he departed--departed with
the ancient lie of quick return young and blithe on his lips.

"I'll come back, dear Jees Uck, before the first snow flies," he promised
her, between the last kisses at the gang-plank.

And not only did he promise, but, like the majority of men under the same
circumstances, he really meant it.  To John Thompson, the new agent, he
gave orders for the extension of unlimited credit to his wife, Jees Uck.
Also, with his last look from the deck of the _Yukon Belle_, he saw a
dozen men at work rearing the logs that were to make the most comfortable
house along a thousand miles of river front--the house of Jees Uck, and
likewise the house of Neil Bonner--ere the first flurry of snow.  For he
fully and fondly meant to come back.  Jees Uck was dear to him, and,
further, a golden future awaited the north.  With his father's money he
intended to verify that future.  An ambitious dream allured him.  With
his four years of experience, and aided by the friendly cooperation of
the P. C. Company, he would return to become the Rhodes of Alaska.  And
he would return, fast as steam could drive, as soon as he had put into
shape the affairs of his father, whom he had never known, and comforted
his mother, whom he had forgotten.

There was much ado when Neil Bonner came back from the Arctic.  The fires
were lighted and the fleshpots slung, and he took of it all and called it
good.  Not only was he bronzed and creased, but he was a new man under
his skin, with a grip on things and a seriousness and control.  His old
companions were amazed when he declined to hit up the pace in the good
old way, while his father's crony rubbed hands gleefully, and became an
authority upon the reclamation of wayward and idle youth.

For four years Neil Bonner's mind had lain fallow.  Little that was new
had been added to it, but it had undergone a process of selection.  It
had, so to say, been purged of the trivial and superfluous.  He had lived
quick years, down in the world; and, up in the wilds, time had been given
him to organize the confused mass of his experiences.  His superficial
standards had been flung to the winds and new standards erected on deeper
and broader generalizations.  Concerning civilization, he had gone away
with one set of values, had returned with another set of values.  Aided,
also, by the earth smells in his nostrils and the earth sights in his
eyes, he laid hold of the inner significance of civilization, beholding
with clear vision its futilities and powers.  It was a simple little
philosophy he evolved.  Clean living was the way to grace.  Duty
performed was sanctification.  One must live clean and do his duty in
order that he might work.  Work was salvation.  And to work toward life
abundant, and more abundant, was to be in line with the scheme of things
and the will of God.

Primarily, he was of the city.  And his fresh earth grip and virile
conception of humanity gave him a finer sense of civilization and
endeared civilization to him.  Day by day the people of the city clung
closer to him and the world loomed more colossal.  And, day by day,
Alaska grew more remote and less real.  And then he met Kitty Sharon--a
woman of his own flesh and blood and kind; a woman who put her hand into
his hand and drew him to her, till he forgot the day and hour and the
time of the year the first snow flies on the Yukon.

Jees Uck moved into her grand log-house and dreamed away three golden
summer months.  Then came the autumn, post-haste before the down rush of
winter.  The air grew thin and sharp, the days thin and short.  The river
ran sluggishly, and skin ice formed in the quiet eddies.  All migratory
life departed south, and silence fell upon the land.  The first snow
flurries came, and the last homing steamboat bucked desperately into the
running mush ice.  Then came the hard ice, solid cakes and sheets, till
the Yukon ran level with its banks.  And when all this ceased the river
stood still and the blinking days lost themselves in the darkness.

John Thompson, the new agent, laughed; but Jees Uck had faith in the
mischances of sea and river.  Neil Bonner might be frozen in anywhere
between Chilkoot Pass and St. Michael's, for the last travellers of the
year are always caught by the ice, when they exchange boat for sled and
dash on through the long hours behind the flying dogs.

But no flying dogs came up the trail, nor down the trail, to Twenty Mile.
And John Thompson told Jees Uck, with a certain gladness ill concealed,
that Bonner would never come back again.  Also, and brutally, he
suggested his own eligibility.  Jees Uck laughed in his face and went
back to her grand log-house.  But when midwinter came, when hope dies
down and life is at its lowest ebb, Jees Uck found she had no credit at
the store.  This was Thompson's doing, and he rubbed his hands, and
walked up and down, and came to his door and looked up at Jees Uck's
house and waited.  And he continued to wait.  She sold her dog-team to a
party of miners and paid cash for her food.  And when Thompson refused to
honour even her coin, Toyaat Indians made her purchases, and sledded them
up to her house in the dark.

In February the first post came in over the ice, and John Thompson read
in the society column of a five-months-old paper of the marriage of Neil
Bonner and Kitty Sharon.  Jees Uck held the door ajar and him outside
while he imparted the information; and, when he had done, laughed
pridefully and did not believe.  In March, and all alone, she gave birth
to a man-child, a brave bit of new life at which she marvelled.  And at
that hour, a year later, Neil Bonner sat by another bed, marvelling at
another bit of new life that had fared into the world.

The snow went off the ground and the ice broke out of the Yukon.  The sun
journeyed north, and journeyed south again; and, the money from the being
spent, Jees Uck went back to her own people.  Oche Ish, a shrewd hunter,
proposed to kill the meat for her and her babe, and catch the salmon, if
she would marry him.  And Imego and Hah Yo and Wy Nooch, husky young
hunters all, made similar proposals.  But she elected to live alone and
seek her own meat and fish.  She sewed moccasins and _parkas_ and
mittens--warm, serviceable things, and pleasing to the eye, withal, what
of the ornamental hair-tufts and bead-work.  These she sold to the
miners, who were drifting faster into the land each year.  And not only
did she win food that was good and plentiful, but she laid money by, and
one day took passage on the _Yukon Belle_ down the river.

At St. Michael's she washed dishes in the kitchen of the post.  The
servants of the Company wondered at the remarkable woman with the
remarkable child, though they asked no questions and she vouchsafed
nothing.  But just before Bering Sea closed in for the year, she bought a
passage south on a strayed sealing schooner.  That winter she cooked for
Captain Markheim's household at Unalaska, and in the spring continued
south to Sitka on a whisky sloop.  Later on appeared at Metlakahtla,
which is near to St. Mary's on the end of the Pan-Handle, where she
worked in the cannery through the salmon season.  When autumn came and
the Siwash fishermen prepared to return to Puget Sound, she embarked with
a couple of families in a big cedar canoe; and with them she threaded the
hazardous chaos of the Alaskan and Canadian coasts, till the Straits of
Juan de Fuca were passed and she led her boy by the hand up the hard pave
of Seattle.

There she met Sandy MacPherson, on a windy corner, very much surprised
and, when he had heard her story, very wroth--not so wroth as he might
have been, had he known of Kitty Sharon; but of her Jees Uck breathed not
a word, for she had never believed.  Sandy, who read commonplace and
sordid desertion into the circumstance, strove to dissuade her from her
trip to San Francisco, where Neil Bonner was supposed to live when he was
at home.  And, having striven, he made her comfortable, bought her
tickets and saw her off, the while smiling in her face and muttering "dam-
shame" into his beard.

With roar and rumble, through daylight and dark, swaying and lurching
between the dawns, soaring into the winter snows and sinking to summer
valleys, skirting depths, leaping chasms, piercing mountains, Jees Uck
and her boy were hurled south.  But she had no fear of the iron stallion;
nor was she stunned by this masterful civilization of Neil Bonner's
people.  It seemed, rather, that she saw with greater clearness the
wonder that a man of such godlike race had held her in his arms.  The
screaming medley of San Francisco, with its restless shipping, belching
factories, and thundering traffic, did not confuse her; instead, she
comprehended swiftly the pitiful sordidness of Twenty Mile and the skin-
lodged Toyaat village.  And she looked down at the boy that clutched her
hand and wondered that she had borne him by such a man.

She paid the hack-driver five pieces and went up the stone steps of Neil
Bonner's front door.  A slant-eyed Japanese parleyed with her for a
fruitless space, then led her inside and disappeared.  She remained in
the hall, which to her simply fancy seemed to be the guest-room--the show-
place wherein were arrayed all the household treasures with the frank
purpose of parade and dazzlement.  The walls and ceiling were of oiled
and panelled redwood.  The floor was more glassy than glare-ice, and she
sought standing place on one of the great skins that gave a sense of
security to the polished surface.  A huge fireplace--an extravagant
fireplace, she deemed it--yawned in the farther wall.  A flood of light,
mellowed by stained glass, fell across the room, and from the far end
came the white gleam of a marble figure.

This much she saw, and more, when the slant-eyed servant led the way past
another room--of which she caught a fleeting glance--and into a third,
both of which dimmed the brave show of the entrance hall.  And to her
eyes the great house seemed to hold out the promise of endless similar
rooms.  There was such length and breadth to them, and the ceilings were
so far away!  For the first time since her advent into the white man's
civilization, a feeling of awe laid hold of her.  Neil, her Neil, lived
in this house, breathed the air of it, and lay down at night and slept!
It was beautiful, all this that she saw, and it pleased her; but she
felt, also, the wisdom and mastery behind.  It was the concrete
expression of power in terms of beauty, and it was the power that she
unerringly divined.

And then came a woman, queenly tall, crowned with a glory of hair that
was like a golden sun.  She seemed to come toward Jees Uck as a ripple of
music across still water; her sweeping garment itself a song, her body
playing rhythmically beneath.  Jees Uck herself was a man compeller.
There were Oche Ish and Imego and Hah Yo and Wy Nooch, to say nothing of
Neil Bonner and John Thompson and other white men that had looked upon
her and felt her power.  But she gazed upon the wide blue eyes and rose-
white skin of this woman that advanced to meet her, and she measured her
with woman's eyes looking through man's eyes; and as a man compeller she
felt herself diminish and grow insignificant before this radiant and
flashing creature.

"You wish to see my husband?" the woman asked; and Jees Uck gasped at the
liquid silver of a voice that had never sounded harsh cries at snarling
wolf-dogs, nor moulded itself to a guttural speech, nor toughened in
storm and frost and camp smoke.

"No," Jees Uck answered slowly and gropingly, in order that she might do
justice to her English.  "I come to see Neil Bonner."

"He is my husband," the woman laughed.

Then it was true!  John Thompson had not lied that bleak February day,
when she laughed pridefully and shut the door in his face.  As once she
had thrown Amos Pentley across her knee and ripped her knife into the
air, so now she felt impelled to spring upon this woman and bear her back
and down, and tear the life out of her fair body.  But Jees Uck was
thinking quickly and gave no sign, and Kitty Bonner little dreamed how
intimately she had for an instant been related with sudden death.

Jees Uck nodded her head that she understood, and Kitty Bonner explained
that Neil was expected at any moment.  Then they sat down on ridiculously
comfortable chairs, and Kitty sought to entertain her strange visitor,
and Jees Uck strove to help her.

"You knew my husband in the North?" Kitty asked, once.

"Sure.  I wash um clothes," Jees Uck had answered, her English abruptly
beginning to grow atrocious.

"And this is your boy?  I have a little girl."

Kitty caused her daughter to be brought, and while the children, after
their manner, struck an acquaintance, the mothers indulged in the talk of
mothers and drank tea from cups so fragile that Jees Uck feared lest hers
should crumble to pieces beneath her fingers.  Never had she seen such
cups, so delicate and dainty.  In her mind she compared them with the
woman who poured the tea, and there uprose in contrast the gourds and
pannikins of the Toyaat village and the clumsy mugs of Twenty Mile, to
which she likened herself.  And in such fashion and such terms the
problem presented itself.  She was beaten.  There was a woman other than
herself better fitted to bear and upbring Neil Bonner's children.  Just
as his people exceeded her people, so did his womankind exceed her.  They
were the man compellers, as their men were the world compellers.  She
looked at the rose-white tenderness of Kitty Bonner's skin and remembered
the sun-beat on her own face.  Likewise she looked from brown hand to
white--the one, work-worn and hardened by whip-handle and paddle, the
other as guiltless of toil and soft as a newborn babe's.  And, for all
the obvious softness and apparent weakness, Jees Uck looked into the blue
eyes and saw the mastery she had seen in Neil Bonner's eyes and in the
eyes of Neil Bonner's people.

"Why, it's Jees Uck!" Neil Bonner said, when he entered.  He said it
calmly, with even a ring of joyful cordiality, coming over to her and
shaking both her hands, but looking into her eyes with a worry in his own
that she understood.

"Hello, Neil!" she said.  "You look much good."

"Fine, fine, Jees Uck," he answered heartily, though secretly studying
Kitty for some sign of what had passed between the two.  Yet he knew his
wife too well to expect, even though the worst had passed, such a sign.

"Well, I can't say how glad I am to see you," he went on.  "What's
happened?  Did you strike a mine?  And when did you get in?"

"Oo-a, I get in to-day," she replied, her voice instinctively seeking its
guttural parts.  "I no strike it, Neil.  You known Cap'n Markheim,
Unalaska?  I cook, his house, long time.  No spend money.  Bime-by,
plenty.  Pretty good, I think, go down and see White Man's Land.  Very
fine, White Man's Land, very fine," she added.  Her English puzzled him,
for Sandy and he had sought, constantly, to better her speech, and she
had proved an apt pupil.  Now it seemed that she had sunk back into her
race.  Her face was guileless, stolidly guileless, giving no cue.  Kitty's
untroubled brow likewise baffled him.  What had happened?  How much had
been said? and how much guessed?

While he wrestled with these questions and while Jees Uck wrestled with
her problem--never had he looked so wonderful and great--a silence fell.

"To think that you knew my husband in Alaska!" Kitty said softly.

Knew him!  Jees Uck could not forbear a glance at the boy she had borne
him, and his eyes followed hers mechanically to the window where played
the two children.  An iron hand seemed to tighten across his forehead.
His knees went weak and his heart leaped up and pounded like a fist
against his breast.  His boy!  He had never dreamed it!

Little Kitty Bonner, fairylike in gauzy lawn, with pinkest of cheeks and
bluest of dancing eyes, arms outstretched and lips puckered in
invitation, was striving to kiss the boy.  And the boy, lean and lithe,
sunbeaten and browned, skin-clad and in hair-fringed and hair-tufted
_muclucs_ that showed the wear of the sea and rough work, coolly
withstood her advances, his body straight and stiff with the peculiar
erectness common to children of savage people.  A stranger in a strange
land, unabashed and unafraid, he appeared more like an untamed animal,
silent and watchful, his black eyes flashing from face to face, quiet so
long as quiet endured, but prepared to spring and fight and tear and
scratch for life, at the first sign of danger.

The contrast between boy and girl was striking, but not pitiful.  There
was too much strength in the boy for that, waif that he was of the
generations of Shpack, Spike O'Brien, and Bonner.  In his features, clean
cut as a cameo and almost classic in their severity, there were the power
and achievement of his father, and his grandfather, and the one known as
the Big Fat, who was captured by the Sea people and escaped to Kamchatka.

Neil Bonner fought his emotion down, swallowed it down, and choked over
it, though his face smiled with good-humour and the joy with which one
meets a friend.

"Your boy, eh, Jees Uck?" he said.  And then turning to Kitty: "Handsome
fellow!  He'll do something with those two hands of his in this our
world."

Kitty nodded concurrence.  "What is your name?" she asked.

The young savage flashed his quick eyes upon her and dwelt over her for a
space, seeking out, as it were, the motive beneath the question.

"Neil," he answered deliberately when the scrutiny had satisfied him.

"Injun talk," Jees Uck interposed, glibly manufacturing languages on the
spur of the moment.  "Him Injun talk, _nee-al_ all the same 'cracker.'
Him baby, him like cracker; him cry for cracker.  Him say, '_Nee-al_,
_nee-al_,' all time him say, '_Nee-al_.'  Then I say that um name.  So
um name all time Nee-al."

Never did sound more blessed fall upon Neil Bonner's ear than that lie
from Jees Uck's lips.  It was the cue, and he knew there was reason for
Kitty's untroubled brow.

"And his father?" Kitty asked.  "He must be a fine man."

"Oo-a, yes," was the reply.  "Um father fine man.  Sure!"

"Did you know him, Neil?" queried Kitty.

"Know him?  Most intimately," Neil answered, and harked back to dreary
Twenty Mile and the man alone in the silence with his thoughts.

And here might well end the story of Jees Uck but for the crown she put
upon her renunciation.  When she returned to the North to dwell in her
grand log-house, John Thompson found that the P. C. Company could make a
shift somehow to carry on its business without his aid.  Also, the new
agent and the succeeding agents received instructions that the woman Jees
Uck should be given whatsoever goods and grub she desired, in whatsoever
quantities she ordered, and that no charge should be placed upon the
books.  Further, the Company paid yearly to the woman Jees Uck a pension
of five thousand dollars.

When he had attained suitable age, Father Champreau laid hands upon the
boy, and the time was not long when Jees Uck received letters regularly
from the Jesuit college in Maryland.  Later on these letters came from
Italy, and still later from France.  And in the end there returned to
Alaska one Father Neil, a man mighty for good in the land, who loved his
mother and who ultimately went into a wider field and rose to high
authority in the order.

Jees Uck was a young woman when she went back into the North, and men
still looked upon her and yearned.  But she lived straight, and no breath
was ever raised save in commendation.  She stayed for a while with the
good sisters at Holy Cross, where she learned to read and write and
became versed in practical medicine and surgery.  After that she returned
to her grand log-house and gathered about her the young girls of the
Toyaat village, to show them the way of their feet in the world.  It is
neither Protestant nor Catholic, this school in the house built by Neil
Bonner for Jees Uck, his wife; but the missionaries of all the sects look
upon it with equal favour.  The latchstring is always out, and tired
prospectors and trail-weary men turn aside from the flowing river or
frozen trail to rest there for a space and be warm by her fire.  And,
down in the States, Kitty Bonner is pleased at the interest her husband
takes in Alaskan education and the large sums he devotes to that purpose;
and, though she often smiles and chaffs, deep down and secretly she is
but the prouder of him.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Faith of Men" ***

Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.