Lost Face, by Jack London

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Title: Lost Face


Author: Jack London

Release Date: May 12, 2005  [eBook #2429]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOST FACE***






Transcribed from the 1919 Mills and Boon edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





LOST FACE
by Jack London


Contents:

Lost Face
Trust
To Build a Fire
That Spot
Flush of Gold
The Passing of Marcus O'Brien
The Wit of Porportuk




LOST FACE


It was the end.  Subienkow had travelled a long trail of bitterness and
horror, homing like a dove for the capitals of Europe, and here, farther
away than ever, in Russian America, the trail ceased.  He sat in the
snow, arms tied behind him, waiting the torture.  He stared curiously
before him at a huge Cossack, prone in the snow, moaning in his pain.  The
men had finished handling the giant and turned him over to the women.
That they exceeded the fiendishness of the men, the man's cries attested.

Subienkow looked on, and shuddered.  He was not afraid to die.  He had
carried his life too long in his hands, on that weary trail from Warsaw
to Nulato, to shudder at mere dying.  But he objected to the torture.  It
offended his soul.  And this offence, in turn, was not due to the mere
pain he must endure, but to the sorry spectacle the pain would make of
him.  He knew that he would pray, and beg, and entreat, even as Big Ivan
and the others that had gone before.  This would not be nice.  To pass
out bravely and cleanly, with a smile and a jest--ah! that would have
been the way.  But to lose control, to have his soul upset by the pangs
of the flesh, to screech and gibber like an ape, to become the veriest
beast--ah, that was what was so terrible.

There had been no chance to escape.  From the beginning, when he dreamed
the fiery dream of Poland's independence, he had become a puppet in the
hands of Fate.  From the beginning, at Warsaw, at St. Petersburg, in the
Siberian mines, in Kamtchatka, on the crazy boats of the fur-thieves,
Fate had been driving him to this end.  Without doubt, in the foundations
of the world was graved this end for him--for him, who was so fine and
sensitive, whose nerves scarcely sheltered under his skin, who was a
dreamer, and a poet, and an artist.  Before he was dreamed of, it had
been determined that the quivering bundle of sensitiveness that
constituted him should be doomed to live in raw and howling savagery, and
to die in this far land of night, in this dark place beyond the last
boundaries of the world.

He sighed.  So that thing before him was Big Ivan--Big Ivan the giant,
the man without nerves, the man of iron, the Cossack turned freebooter of
the seas, who was as phlegmatic as an ox, with a nervous system so low
that what was pain to ordinary men was scarcely a tickle to him.  Well,
well, trust these Nulato Indians to find Big Ivan's nerves and trace them
to the roots of his quivering soul.  They were certainly doing it.  It
was inconceivable that a man could suffer so much and yet live.  Big Ivan
was paying for his low order of nerves.  Already he had lasted twice as
long as any of the others.

Subienkow felt that he could not stand the Cossack's sufferings much
longer.  Why didn't Ivan die?  He would go mad if that screaming did not
cease.  But when it did cease, his turn would come.  And there was Yakaga
awaiting him, too, grinning at him even now in anticipation--Yakaga, whom
only last week he had kicked out of the fort, and upon whose face he had
laid the lash of his dog-whip.  Yakaga would attend to him.  Doubtlessly
Yakaga was saving for him more refined tortures, more exquisite nerve-
racking.  Ah! that must have been a good one, from the way Ivan screamed.
The squaws bending over him stepped back with laughter and clapping of
hands.  Subienkow saw the monstrous thing that had been perpetrated, and
began to laugh hysterically.  The Indians looked at him in wonderment
that he should laugh.  But Subienkow could not stop.

This would never do.  He controlled himself, the spasmodic twitchings
slowly dying away.  He strove to think of other things, and began reading
back in his own life.  He remembered his mother and his father, and the
little spotted pony, and the French tutor who had taught him dancing and
sneaked him an old worn copy of Voltaire.  Once more he saw Paris, and
dreary London, and gay Vienna, and Rome.  And once more he saw that wild
group of youths who had dreamed, even as he, the dream of an independent
Poland with a king of Poland on the throne at Warsaw.  Ah, there it was
that the long trail began.  Well, he had lasted longest.  One by one,
beginning with the two executed at St. Petersburg, he took up the count
of the passing of those brave spirits.  Here one had been beaten to death
by a jailer, and there, on that bloodstained highway of the exiles, where
they had marched for endless months, beaten and maltreated by their
Cossack guards, another had dropped by the way.  Always it had been
savagery--brutal, bestial savagery.  They had died--of fever, in the
mines, under the knout.  The last two had died after the escape, in the
battle with the Cossacks, and he alone had won to Kamtchatka with the
stolen papers and the money of a traveller he had left lying in the snow.

It had been nothing but savagery.  All the years, with his heart in
studios, and theatres, and courts, he had been hemmed in by savagery.  He
had purchased his life with blood.  Everybody had killed.  He had killed
that traveller for his passports.  He had proved that he was a man of
parts by duelling with two Russian officers on a single day.  He had had
to prove himself in order to win to a place among the fur-thieves.  He
had had to win to that place.  Behind him lay the thousand-years-long
road across all Siberia and Russia.  He could not escape that way.  The
only way was ahead, across the dark and icy sea of Bering to Alaska.  The
way had led from savagery to deeper savagery.  On the scurvy-rotten ships
of the fur-thieves, out of food and out of water, buffeted by the
interminable storms of that stormy sea, men had become animals.  Thrice
he had sailed east from Kamtchatka.  And thrice, after all manner of
hardship and suffering, the survivors had come back to Kamtchatka.  There
had been no outlet for escape, and he could not go back the way he had
come, for the mines and the knout awaited him.

Again, the fourth and last time, he had sailed east.  He had been with
those who first found the fabled Seal Islands; but he had not returned
with them to share the wealth of furs in the mad orgies of Kamtchatka.  He
had sworn never to go back.  He knew that to win to those dear capitals
of Europe he must go on.  So he had changed ships and remained in the
dark new land.  His comrades were Slavonian hunters and Russian
adventurers, Mongols and Tartars and Siberian aborigines; and through the
savages of the new world they had cut a path of blood.  They had
massacred whole villages that refused to furnish the fur-tribute; and
they, in turn, had been massacred by ships' companies.  He, with one
Finn, had been the sole survivor of such a company.  They had spent a
winter of solitude and starvation on a lonely Aleutian isle, and their
rescue in the spring by another fur-ship had been one chance in a
thousand.

But always the terrible savagery had hemmed him in.  Passing from ship to
ship, and ever refusing to return, he had come to the ship that explored
south.  All down the Alaska coast they had encountered nothing but hosts
of savages.  Every anchorage among the beetling islands or under the
frowning cliffs of the mainland had meant a battle or a storm.  Either
the gales blew, threatening destruction, or the war canoes came off,
manned by howling natives with the war-paint on their faces, who came to
learn the bloody virtues of the sea-rovers' gunpowder.  South, south they
had coasted, clear to the myth-land of California.  Here, it was said,
were Spanish adventurers who had fought their way up from Mexico.  He had
had hopes of those Spanish adventurers.  Escaping to them, the rest would
have been easy--a year or two, what did it matter more or less--and he
would win to Mexico, then a ship, and Europe would be his.  But they had
met no Spaniards.  Only had they encountered the same impregnable wall of
savagery.  The denizens of the confines of the world, painted for war,
had driven them back from the shores.  At last, when one boat was cut off
and every man killed, the commander had abandoned the quest and sailed
back to the north.

The years had passed.  He had served under Tebenkoff when Michaelovski
Redoubt was built.  He had spent two years in the Kuskokwim country.  Two
summers, in the month of June, he had managed to be at the head of
Kotzebue Sound.  Here, at this time, the tribes assembled for barter;
here were to be found spotted deerskins from Siberia, ivory from the
Diomedes, walrus skins from the shores of the Arctic, strange stone
lamps, passing in trade from tribe to tribe, no one knew whence, and,
once, a hunting-knife of English make; and here, Subienkow knew, was the
school in which to learn geography.  For he met Eskimos from Norton
Sound, from King Island and St. Lawrence Island, from Cape Prince of
Wales, and Point Barrow.  Such places had other names, and their
distances were measured in days.

It was a vast region these trading savages came from, and a vaster region
from which, by repeated trade, their stone lamps and that steel knife had
come.  Subienkow bullied, and cajoled, and bribed.  Every far-journeyer
or strange tribesman was brought before him.  Perils unaccountable and
unthinkable were mentioned, as well as wild beasts, hostile tribes,
impenetrable forests, and mighty mountain ranges; but always from beyond
came the rumour and the tale of white-skinned men, blue of eye and fair
of hair, who fought like devils and who sought always for furs.  They
were to the east--far, far to the east.  No one had seen them.  It was
the word that had been passed along.

It was a hard school.  One could not learn geography very well through
the medium of strange dialects, from dark minds that mingled fact and
fable and that measured distances by "sleeps" that varied according to
the difficulty of the going.  But at last came the whisper that gave
Subienkow courage.  In the east lay a great river where were these blue-
eyed men.  The river was called the Yukon.  South of Michaelovski Redoubt
emptied another great river which the Russians knew as the Kwikpak.  These
two rivers were one, ran the whisper.

Subienkow returned to Michaelovski.  For a year he urged an expedition up
the Kwikpak.  Then arose Malakoff, the Russian half-breed, to lead the
wildest and most ferocious of the hell's broth of mongrel adventurers who
had crossed from Kamtchatka.  Subienkow was his lieutenant.  They
threaded the mazes of the great delta of the Kwikpak, picked up the first
low hills on the northern bank, and for half a thousand miles, in skin
canoes loaded to the gunwales with trade-goods and ammunition, fought
their way against the five-knot current of a river that ran from two to
ten miles wide in a channel many fathoms deep.  Malakoff decided to build
the fort at Nulato.  Subienkow urged to go farther.  But he quickly
reconciled himself to Nulato.  The long winter was coming on.  It would
be better to wait.  Early the following summer, when the ice was gone, he
would disappear up the Kwikpak and work his way to the Hudson Bay
Company's posts.  Malakoff had never heard the whisper that the Kwikpak
was the Yukon, and Subienkow did not tell him.

Came the building of the fort.  It was enforced labour.  The tiered walls
of logs arose to the sighs and groans of the Nulato Indians.  The lash
was laid upon their backs, and it was the iron hand of the freebooters of
the sea that laid on the lash.  There were Indians that ran away, and
when they were caught they were brought back and spread-eagled before the
fort, where they and their tribe learned the efficacy of the knout.  Two
died under it; others were injured for life; and the rest took the lesson
to heart and ran away no more.  The snow was flying ere the fort was
finished, and then it was the time for furs.  A heavy tribute was laid
upon the tribe.  Blows and lashings continued, and that the tribute
should be paid, the women and children were held as hostages and treated
with the barbarity that only the fur-thieves knew.

Well, it had been a sowing of blood, and now was come the harvest.  The
fort was gone.  In the light of its burning, half the fur-thieves had
been cut down.  The other half had passed under the torture.  Only
Subienkow remained, or Subienkow and Big Ivan, if that whimpering,
moaning thing in the snow could be called Big Ivan.  Subienkow caught
Yakaga grinning at him.  There was no gainsaying Yakaga.  The mark of the
lash was still on his face.  After all, Subienkow could not blame him,
but he disliked the thought of what Yakaga would do to him.  He thought
of appealing to Makamuk, the head-chief; but his judgment told him that
such appeal was useless.  Then, too, he thought of bursting his bonds and
dying fighting.  Such an end would be quick.  But he could not break his
bonds.  Caribou thongs were stronger than he.  Still devising, another
thought came to him.  He signed for Makamuk, and that an interpreter who
knew the coast dialect should be brought.

"Oh, Makamuk," he said, "I am not minded to die.  I am a great man, and
it were foolishness for me to die.  In truth, I shall not die.  I am not
like these other carrion."

He looked at the moaning thing that had once been Big Ivan, and stirred
it contemptuously with his toe.

"I am too wise to die.  Behold, I have a great medicine.  I alone know
this medicine.  Since I am not going to die, I shall exchange this
medicine with you."

"What is this medicine?" Makamuk demanded.

"It is a strange medicine."

Subienkow debated with himself for a moment, as if loth to part with the
secret.

"I will tell you.  A little bit of this medicine rubbed on the skin makes
the skin hard like a rock, hard like iron, so that no cutting weapon can
cut it.  The strongest blow of a cutting weapon is a vain thing against
it.  A bone knife becomes like a piece of mud; and it will turn the edge
of the iron knives we have brought among you.  What will you give me for
the secret of the medicine?"

"I will give you your life," Makamuk made answer through the interpreter.

Subienkow laughed scornfully.

"And you shall be a slave in my house until you die."

The Pole laughed more scornfully.

"Untie my hands and feet and let us talk," he said.

The chief made the sign; and when he was loosed Subienkow rolled a
cigarette and lighted it.

"This is foolish talk," said Makamuk.  "There is no such medicine.  It
cannot be.  A cutting edge is stronger than any medicine."

The chief was incredulous, and yet he wavered.  He had seen too many
deviltries of fur-thieves that worked.  He could not wholly doubt.

"I will give you your life; but you shall not be a slave," he announced.

"More than that."

Subienkow played his game as coolly as if he were bartering for a
foxskin.

"It is a very great medicine.  It has saved my life many times.  I want a
sled and dogs, and six of your hunters to travel with me down the river
and give me safety to one day's sleep from Michaelovski Redoubt."

"You must live here, and teach us all of your deviltries," was the reply.

Subienkow shrugged his shoulders and remained silent.  He blew cigarette
smoke out on the icy air, and curiously regarded what remained of the big
Cossack.

"That scar!" Makamuk said suddenly, pointing to the Pole's neck, where a
livid mark advertised the slash of a knife in a Kamtchatkan brawl.  "The
medicine is not good.  The cutting edge was stronger than the medicine."

"It was a strong man that drove the stroke."  (Subienkow considered.)
"Stronger than you, stronger than your strongest hunter, stronger than
he."

Again, with the toe of his moccasin, he touched the Cossack--a grisly
spectacle, no longer conscious--yet in whose dismembered body the pain-
racked life clung and was loth to go.

"Also, the medicine was weak.  For at that place there were no berries of
a certain kind, of which I see you have plenty in this country.  The
medicine here will be strong."

"I will let you go down river," said Makamuk; "and the sled and the dogs
and the six hunters to give you safety shall be yours."

"You are slow," was the cool rejoinder.  "You have committed an offence
against my medicine in that you did not at once accept my terms.  Behold,
I now demand more.  I want one hundred beaver skins."  (Makamuk sneered.)

"I want one hundred pounds of dried fish."  (Makamuk nodded, for fish
were plentiful and cheap.)  "I want two sleds--one for me and one for my
furs and fish.  And my rifle must be returned to me.  If you do not like
the price, in a little while the price will grow."

Yakaga whispered to the chief.

"But how can I know your medicine is true medicine?" Makamuk asked.

"It is very easy.  First, I shall go into the woods--"

Again Yakaga whispered to Makamuk, who made a suspicious dissent.

"You can send twenty hunters with me," Subienkow went on.  "You see, I
must get the berries and the roots with which to make the medicine.  Then,
when you have brought the two sleds and loaded on them the fish and the
beaver skins and the rifle, and when you have told off the six hunters
who will go with me--then, when all is ready, I will rub the medicine on
my neck, so, and lay my neck there on that log.  Then can your strongest
hunter take the axe and strike three times on my neck.  You yourself can
strike the three times."

Makamuk stood with gaping mouth, drinking in this latest and most
wonderful magic of the fur-thieves.

"But first," the Pole added hastily, "between each blow I must put on
fresh medicine.  The axe is heavy and sharp, and I want no mistakes."

"All that you have asked shall be yours," Makamuk cried in a rush of
acceptance.  "Proceed to make your medicine."

Subienkow concealed his elation.  He was playing a desperate game, and
there must be no slips.  He spoke arrogantly.

"You have been slow.  My medicine is offended.  To make the offence clean
you must give me your daughter."

He pointed to the girl, an unwholesome creature, with a cast in one eye
and a bristling wolf-tooth.  Makamuk was angry, but the Pole remained
imperturbable, rolling and lighting another cigarette.

"Make haste," he threatened.  "If you are not quick, I shall demand yet
more."

In the silence that followed, the dreary northland scene faded before
him, and he saw once more his native land, and France, and, once, as he
glanced at the wolf-toothed girl, he remembered another girl, a singer
and a dancer, whom he had known when first as a youth he came to Paris.

"What do you want with the girl?" Makamuk asked.

"To go down the river with me."  Subienkow glanced over her critically.
"She will make a good wife, and it is an honour worthy of my medicine to
be married to your blood."

Again he remembered the singer and dancer and hummed aloud a song she had
taught him.  He lived the old life over, but in a detached, impersonal
sort of way, looking at the memory-pictures of his own life as if they
were pictures in a book of anybody's life.  The chief's voice, abruptly
breaking the silence, startled him

"It shall be done," said Makamuk.  "The girl shall go down the river with
you.  But be it understood that I myself strike the three blows with the
axe on your neck."

"But each time I shall put on the medicine," Subienkow answered, with a
show of ill-concealed anxiety.

"You shall put the medicine on between each blow.  Here are the hunters
who shall see you do not escape.  Go into the forest and gather your
medicine."

Makamuk had been convinced of the worth of the medicine by the Pole's
rapacity.  Surely nothing less than the greatest of medicines could
enable a man in the shadow of death to stand up and drive an old-woman's
bargain.

"Besides," whispered Yakaga, when the Pole, with his guard, had
disappeared among the spruce trees, "when you have learned the medicine
you can easily destroy him."

"But how can I destroy him?" Makamuk argued.  "His medicine will not let
me destroy him."

"There will be some part where he has not rubbed the medicine," was
Yakaga's reply.  "We will destroy him through that part.  It may be his
ears.  Very well; we will thrust a spear in one ear and out the other.  Or
it may be his eyes.  Surely the medicine will be much too strong to rub
on his eyes."

The chief nodded.  "You are wise, Yakaga.  If he possesses no other devil-
things, we will then destroy him."

Subienkow did not waste time in gathering the ingredients for his
medicine, he selected whatsoever came to hand such as spruce needles, the
inner bark of the willow, a strip of birch bark, and a quantity of moss-
berries, which he made the hunters dig up for him from beneath the snow.
A few frozen roots completed his supply, and he led the way back to camp.

Makamuk and Yakaga crouched beside him, noting the quantities and kinds
of the ingredients he dropped into the pot of boiling water.

"You must be careful that the moss-berries go in first," he explained.

"And--oh, yes, one other thing--the finger of a man.  Here, Yakaga, let
me cut off your finger."

But Yakaga put his hands behind him and scowled.

"Just a small finger," Subienkow pleaded.

"Yakaga, give him your finger," Makamuk commanded.

"There be plenty of fingers lying around," Yakaga grunted, indicating the
human wreckage in the snow of the score of persons who had been tortured
to death.

"It must be the finger of a live man," the Pole objected.

"Then shall you have the finger of a live man."  Yakaga strode over to
the Cossack and sliced off a finger.

"He is not yet dead," he announced, flinging the bloody trophy in the
snow at the Pole's feet.  "Also, it is a good finger, because it is
large."

Subienkow dropped it into the fire under the pot and began to sing.  It
was a French love-song that with great solemnity he sang into the brew.

"Without these words I utter into it, the medicine is worthless," he
explained.  "The words are the chiefest strength of it.  Behold, it is
ready."

"Name the words slowly, that I may know them," Makamuk commanded.

"Not until after the test.  When the axe flies back three times from my
neck, then will I give you the secret of the words."

"But if the medicine is not good medicine?" Makamuk queried anxiously.

Subienkow turned upon him wrathfully.

"My medicine is always good.  However, if it is not good, then do by me
as you have done to the others.  Cut me up a bit at a time, even as you
have cut him up."  He pointed to the Cossack.  "The medicine is now cool.
Thus, I rub it on my neck, saying this further medicine."

With great gravity he slowly intoned a line of the "Marseillaise," at the
same time rubbing the villainous brew thoroughly into his neck.

An outcry interrupted his play-acting.  The giant Cossack, with a last
resurgence of his tremendous vitality, had arisen to his knees.  Laughter
and cries of surprise and applause arose from the Nulatos, as Big Ivan
began flinging himself about in the snow with mighty spasms.

Subienkow was made sick by the sight, but he mastered his qualms and made
believe to be angry.

"This will not do," he said.  "Finish him, and then we will make the
test.  Here, you, Yakaga, see that his noise ceases."

While this was being done, Subienkow turned to Makamuk.

"And remember, you are to strike hard.  This is not baby-work.  Here,
take the axe and strike the log, so that I can see you strike like a
man."

Makamuk obeyed, striking twice, precisely and with vigour, cutting out a
large chip.

"It is well."  Subienkow looked about him at the circle of savage faces
that somehow seemed to symbolize the wall of savagery that had hemmed him
about ever since the Czar's police had first arrested him in Warsaw.
"Take your axe, Makamuk, and stand so.  I shall lie down.  When I raise
my hand, strike, and strike with all your might.  And be careful that no
one stands behind you.  The medicine is good, and the axe may bounce from
off my neck and right out of your hands."

He looked at the two sleds, with the dogs in harness, loaded with furs
and fish.  His rifle lay on top of the beaver skins.  The six hunters who
were to act as his guard stood by the sleds.

"Where is the girl?" the Pole demanded.  "Bring her up to the sleds
before the test goes on."

When this had been carried out, Subienkow lay down in the snow, resting
his head on the log like a tired child about to sleep.  He had lived so
many dreary years that he was indeed tired.

"I laugh at you and your strength, O Makamuk," he said.  "Strike, and
strike hard."

He lifted his hand.  Makamuk swung the axe, a broadaxe for the squaring
of logs.  The bright steel flashed through the frosty air, poised for a
perceptible instant above Makamuk's head, then descended upon Subienkow's
bare neck.  Clear through flesh and bone it cut its way, biting deeply
into the log beneath.  The amazed savages saw the head bounce a yard away
from the blood-spouting trunk.

There was a great bewilderment and silence, while slowly it began to dawn
in their minds that there had been no medicine.  The fur-thief had
outwitted them.  Alone, of all their prisoners, he had escaped the
torture.  That had been the stake for which he played.  A great roar of
laughter went up.  Makamuk bowed his head in shame.  The fur-thief had
fooled him.  He had lost face before all his people.  Still they
continued to roar out their laughter.  Makamuk turned, and with bowed
head stalked away.  He knew that thenceforth he would be no longer known
as Makamuk.  He would be Lost Face; the record of his shame would be with
him until he died; and whenever the tribes gathered in the spring for the
salmon, or in the summer for the trading, the story would pass back and
forth across the camp-fires of how the fur-thief died peaceably, at a
single stroke, by the hand of Lost Face.

"Who was Lost Face?" he could hear, in anticipation, some insolent young
buck demand, "Oh, Lost Face," would be the answer, "he who once was
Makamuk in the days before he cut off the fur-thief's head."




TRUST


All lines had been cast off, and the _Seattle No_. 4 was pulling slowly
out from the shore.  Her decks were piled high with freight and baggage,
and swarmed with a heterogeneous company of Indians, dogs, and
dog-mushers, prospectors, traders, and homeward-bound gold-seekers.  A
goodly portion of Dawson was lined up on the bank, saying good-bye.  As
the gang-plank came in and the steamer nosed into the stream, the clamour
of farewell became deafening.  Also, in that eleventh moment, everybody
began to remember final farewell messages and to shout them back and
forth across the widening stretch of water.  Louis Bondell, curling his
yellow moustache with one hand and languidly waving the other hand to his
friends on shore, suddenly remembered something and sprang to the rail.

"Oh, Fred!" he bawled.  "Oh, Fred!"

The "Fred" desired thrust a strapping pair of shoulders through the
forefront of the crowd on the bank and tried to catch Louis Bondell's
message.  The latter grew red in the face with vain vociferation.  Still
the water widened between steamboat and shore.

"Hey, you, Captain Scott!" he yelled at the pilot-house.  "Stop the
boat!"

The gongs clanged, and the big stern wheel reversed, then stopped.  All
hands on steamboat and on bank took advantage of this respite to exchange
final, new, and imperative farewells.  More futile than ever was Louis
Bondell's effort to make himself heard.  The _Seattle No_. 4 lost way and
drifted down-stream, and Captain Scott had to go ahead and reverse a
second time.  His head disappeared inside the pilot-house, coming into
view a moment later behind a big megaphone.

Now Captain Scott had a remarkable voice, and the "Shut up!" he launched
at the crowd on deck and on shore could have been heard at the top of
Moosehide Mountain and as far as Klondike City.  This official
remonstrance from the pilot-house spread a film of silence over the
tumult.

"Now, what do you want to say?" Captain Scott demanded.

"Tell Fred Churchill--he's on the bank there--tell him to go to
Macdonald.  It's in his safe--a small gripsack of mine.  Tell him to get
it and bring it out when he comes."

In the silence Captain Scott bellowed the message ashore through the
megaphone:--

"You, Fred Churchill, go to Macdonald--in his safe--small
gripsack--belongs to Louis Bondell--important!  Bring it out when you
come!  Got it!"

Churchill waved his hand in token that he had got it.  In truth, had
Macdonald, half a mile away, opened his window, he'd have got it, too.
The tumult of farewell rose again, the gongs clanged, and the _Seattle
No_. 4 went ahead, swung out into the stream, turned on her heel, and
headed down the Yukon, Bondell and Churchill waving farewell and mutual
affection to the last.

That was in midsummer.  In the fall of the year, the _W. H. Willis_
started up the Yukon with two hundred homeward-bound pilgrims on board.
Among them was Churchill.  In his state-room, in the middle of a clothes-
bag, was Louis Bondell's grip.  It was a small, stout leather affair, and
its weight of forty pounds always made Churchill nervous when he wandered
too far from it.  The man in the adjoining state-room had a treasure of
gold-dust hidden similarly in a clothes-bag, and the pair of them
ultimately arranged to stand watch and watch.  While one went down to
eat, the other kept an eye on the two state-room doors.  When Churchill
wanted to take a hand at whist, the other man mounted guard, and when the
other man wanted to relax his soul, Churchill read four-months' old
newspapers on a camp stool between the two doors.

There were signs of an early winter, and the question that was discussed
from dawn till dark, and far into the dark, was whether they would get
out before the freeze-up or be compelled to abandon the steamboat and
tramp out over the ice.  There were irritating delays.  Twice the engines
broke down and had to be tinkered up, and each time there were snow
flurries to warn them of the imminence of winter.  Nine times the _W. H.
Willis_ essayed to ascend the Five-Finger Rapids with her impaired
machinery, and when she succeeded, she was four days behind her very
liberal schedule.  The question that then arose was whether or not the
steamboat _Flora_ would wait for her above the Box Canon.  The stretch of
water between the head of the Box Canon and the foot of the White Horse
Rapids was unnavigable for steamboats, and passengers were transhipped at
that point, walking around the rapids from one steamboat to the other.
There were no telephones in the country, hence no way of informing the
waiting _Flora_ that the _Willis_ was four days late, but coming.

When the _W. H. Willis_ pulled into White Horse, it was learned that the
_Flora_ had waited three days over the limit, and had departed only a few
hours before.  Also, it was learned that she would tie up at Tagish Post
till nine o'clock, Sunday morning.  It was then four o'clock, Saturday
afternoon.  The pilgrims called a meeting.  On board was a large
Peterborough canoe, consigned to the police post at the head of Lake
Bennett.  They agreed to be responsible for it and to deliver it.  Next,
they called for volunteers.  Two men were needed to make a race for the
_Flora_.  A score of men volunteered on the instant.  Among them was
Churchill, such being his nature that he volunteered before he thought of
Bondell's gripsack.  When this thought came to him, he began to hope that
he would not be selected; but a man who had made a name as captain of a
college football eleven, as a president of an athletic club, as a dog-
musher and a stampeder in the Yukon, and, moreover, who possessed such
shoulders as he, had no right to avoid the honour.  It was thrust upon
him and upon a gigantic German, Nick Antonsen.

While a crowd of the pilgrims, the canoe on their shoulders, started on a
trot over the portage, Churchill ran to his state-room.  He turned the
contents of the clothes-bag on the floor and caught up the grip, with the
intention of entrusting it to the man next door.  Then the thought smote
him that it was not his grip, and that he had no right to let it out of
his possession.  So he dashed ashore with it and ran up the portage
changing it often from one hand to the other, and wondering if it really
did not weigh more than forty pounds.

It was half-past four in the afternoon when the two men started.  The
current of the Thirty Mile River was so strong that rarely could they use
the paddles.  It was out on one bank with a tow-line over the shoulders,
stumbling over the rocks, forcing a way through the underbrush, slipping
at times and falling into the water, wading often up to the knees and
waist; and then, when an insurmountable bluff was encountered, it was
into the canoe, out paddles, and a wild and losing dash across the
current to the other bank, in paddles, over the side, and out tow-line
again.  It was exhausting work.  Antonsen toiled like the giant he was,
uncomplaining, persistent, but driven to his utmost by the powerful body
and indomitable brain of Churchill.  They never paused for rest.  It was
go, go, and keep on going.  A crisp wind blew down the river, freezing
their hands and making it imperative, from time to time, to beat the
blood back into the numbed fingers.

As night came on, they were compelled to trust to luck.  They fell
repeatedly on the untravelled banks and tore their clothing to sheds in
the underbrush they could not see.  Both men were badly scratched and
bleeding.  A dozen times, in their wild dashes from bank to bank, they
struck snags and were capsized.  The first time this happened, Churchill
dived and groped in three feet of water for the gripsack.  He lost half
an hour in recovering it, and after that it was carried securely lashed
to the canoe.  As long as the canoe floated it was safe.  Antonsen jeered
at the grip, and toward morning began to curse it; but Churchill
vouchsafed no explanations.

Their delays and mischances were endless.  On one swift bend, around
which poured a healthy young rapid, they lost two hours, making a score
of attempts and capsizing twice.  At this point, on both banks, were
precipitous bluffs, rising out of deep water, and along which they could
neither tow nor pole, while they could not gain with the paddles against
the current.  At each attempt they strained to the utmost with the
paddles, and each time, with heads nigh to bursting from the effort, they
were played out and swept back.  They succeeded finally by an accident.
In the swiftest current, near the end of another failure, a freak of the
current sheered the canoe out of Churchill's control and flung it against
the bluff.  Churchill made a blind leap at the bluff and landed in a
crevice.  Holding on with one hand, he held the swamped canoe with the
other till Antonsen dragged himself out of the water.  Then they pulled
the canoe out and rested.  A fresh start at this crucial point took them
by.  They landed on the bank above and plunged immediately ashore and
into the brush with the tow-line.

Daylight found them far below Tagish Post.  At nine o'clock Sunday
morning they could hear the _Flora_ whistling her departure.  And when,
at ten o'clock, they dragged themselves in to the Post, they could barely
see the _Flora's_ smoke far to the southward.  It was a pair of worn-out
tatterdemalions that Captain Jones of the Mounted Police welcomed and
fed, and he afterward averred that they possessed two of the most
tremendous appetites he had ever observed.  They lay down and slept in
their wet rags by the stove.  At the end of two hours Churchill got up,
carried Bondell's grip, which he had used for a pillow, down to the
canoe, kicked Antonsen awake, and started in pursuit of the _Flora_.

"There's no telling what might happen--machinery break down, or
something," was his reply to Captain Jones's expostulations.  "I'm going
to catch that steamer and send her back for the boys."

Tagish Lake was white with a fall gale that blew in their teeth.  Big,
swinging seas rushed upon the canoe, compelling one man to bale and
leaving one man to paddle.  Headway could not be made.  They ran along
the shallow shore and went overboard, one man ahead on the tow-line, the
other shoving on the canoe.  They fought the gale up to their waists in
the icy water, often up to their necks, often over their heads and buried
by the big, crested waves.  There was no rest, never a moment's pause
from the cheerless, heart-breaking battle.  That night, at the head of
Tagish Lake, in the thick of a driving snow-squall, they overhauled the
_Flora_.  Antonsen fell on board, lay where he had fallen, and snored.
Churchill looked like a wild man.  His clothes barely clung to him.  His
face was iced up and swollen from the protracted effort of twenty-four
hours, while his hands were so swollen that he could not close the
fingers.  As for his feet, it was an agony to stand upon them.

The captain of the _Flora_ was loth to go back to White Horse.  Churchill
was persistent and imperative; the captain was stubborn.  He pointed out
finally that nothing was to be gained by going back, because the only
ocean steamer at Dyea, the _Athenian_, was to sail on Tuesday morning,
and that he could not make the back trip to White Horse and bring up the
stranded pilgrims in time to make the connection.

"What time does the _Athenian_ sail?" Churchill demanded.

"Seven o'clock, Tuesday morning."

"All right," Churchill said, at the same time kicking a tattoo on the
ribs of the snoring Antonsen.  "You go back to White Home.  We'll go
ahead and hold the _Athenian_."

Antonsen, stupid with sleep, not yet clothed in his waking mind, was
bundled into the canoe, and did not realize what had happened till he was
drenched with the icy spray of a big sea, and heard Churchill snarling at
him through the darkness:--

"Paddle, can't you!  Do you want to be swamped?"

Daylight found them at Caribou Crossing, the wind dying down, and
Antonsen too far gone to dip a paddle.  Churchill grounded the canoe on a
quiet beach, where they slept.  He took the precaution of twisting his
arm under the weight of his head.  Every few minutes the pain of the pent
circulation aroused him, whereupon he would look at his watch and twist
the other arm under his head.  At the end of two hours he fought with
Antonsen to rouse him.  Then they started.  Lake Bennett, thirty miles in
length, was like a millpond; but, half way across, a gale from the south
smote them and turned the water white.  Hour after hour they repeated the
struggle on Tagish, over the side, pulling and shoving on the canoe, up
to their waists and necks, and over their heads, in the icy water; toward
the last the good-natured giant played completely out.  Churchill drove
him mercilessly; but when he pitched forward and bade fair to drown in
three feet of water, the other dragged him into the canoe.  After that,
Churchill fought on alone, arriving at the police post at the head of
Bennett in the early afternoon.  He tried to help Antonsen out of the
canoe, but failed.  He listened to the exhausted man's heavy breathing,
and envied him when he thought of what he himself had yet to undergo.
Antonsen could lie there and sleep; but he, behind time, must go on over
mighty Chilcoot and down to the sea.  The real struggle lay before him,
and he almost regretted the strength that resided in his frame because of
the torment it could inflict upon that frame.

Churchill pulled the canoe up on the beach, seized Bondell's grip, and
started on a limping dog-trot for the police post.

"There's a canoe down there, consigned to you from Dawson," he hurled at
the officer who answered his knock.  "And there's a man in it pretty near
dead.  Nothing serious; only played out.  Take care of him.  I've got to
rush.  Good-bye.  Want to catch the _Athenian_."

A mile portage connected Lake Bennett and Lake Linderman, and his last
words he flung back after him as he resumed the trot.  It was a very
painful trot, but he clenched his teeth and kept on, forgetting his pain
most of the time in the fervent heat with which he regarded the gripsack.
It was a severe handicap.  He swung it from one hand to the other, and
back again.  He tucked it under his arm.  He threw one hand over the
opposite shoulder, and the bag bumped and pounded on his back as he ran
along.  He could scarcely hold it in his bruised and swollen fingers, and
several times he dropped it.  Once, in changing from one hand to the
other, it escaped his clutch and fell in front of him, tripped him up,
and threw him violently to the ground.

At the far end of the portage he bought an old set of pack-straps for a
dollar, and in them he swung the grip.  Also, he chartered a launch to
run him the six miles to the upper end of Lake Linderman, where he
arrived at four in the afternoon.  The _Athenian_ was to sail from Dyea
next morning at seven.  Dyea was twenty-eight miles away, and between
towered Chilcoot.  He sat down to adjust his foot-gear for the long
climb, and woke up.  He had dozed the instant he sat down, though he had
not slept thirty seconds.  He was afraid his next doze might be longer,
so he finished fixing his foot-gear standing up.  Even then he was
overpowered for a fleeting moment.  He experienced the flash of
unconsciousness; becoming aware of it, in mid-air, as his relaxed body
was sinking to the ground and as he caught himself together, he stiffened
his muscles with a spasmodic wrench, and escaped the fall.  The sudden
jerk back to consciousness left him sick and trembling.  He beat his head
with the heel of his hand, knocking wakefulness into the numbed brain.

Jack Burns's pack-train was starting back light for Crater Lake, and
Churchill was invited to a mule.  Burns wanted to put the gripsack on
another animal, but Churchill held on to it, carrying it on his saddle-
pommel.  But he dozed, and the grip persisted in dropping off the pommel,
one side or the other, each time wakening him with a sickening start.
Then, in the early darkness, Churchill's mule brushed him against a
projecting branch that laid his cheek open.  To cap it, the mule
blundered off the trail and fell, throwing rider and gripsack out upon
the rocks.  After that, Churchill walked, or stumbled rather, over the
apology for a trail, leading the mule.  Stray and awful odours, drifting
from each side of the trail, told of the horses that had died in the rush
for gold.  But he did not mind.  He was too sleepy.  By the time Long
Lake was reached, however, he had recovered from his sleepiness; and at
Deep Lake he resigned the gripsack to Burns.  But thereafter, by the
light of the dim stars, he kept his eyes on Burns.  There were not going
to be any accidents with that bag.

At Crater Lake, the pack-train went into camp, and Churchill, slinging
the grip on his back, started the steep climb for the summit.  For the
first time, on that precipitous wall, he realized how tired he was.  He
crept and crawled like a crab, burdened by the weight of his limbs.  A
distinct and painful effort of will was required each time he lifted a
foot.  An hallucination came to him that he was shod with lead, like a
deep-sea diver, and it was all he could do to resist the desire to reach
down and feel the lead.  As for Bondell's gripsack, it was inconceivable
that forty pounds could weigh so much.  It pressed him down like a
mountain, and he looked back with unbelief to the year before, when he
had climbed that same pass with a hundred and fifty pounds on his back.
If those loads had weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, then Bondell's
grip weighed five hundred.

The first rise of the divide from Crater Lake was across a small glacier.
Here was a well-defined trail.  But above the glacier, which was also
above timber-line, was naught but a chaos of naked rock and enormous
boulders.  There was no way of seeing the trail in the darkness, and he
blundered on, paying thrice the ordinary exertion for all that he
accomplished.  He won the summit in the thick of howling wind and driving
snow, providentially stumbling upon a small, deserted tent, into which he
crawled.  There he found and bolted some ancient fried potatoes and half
a dozen raw eggs.

When the snow ceased and the wind eased down, he began the almost
impossible descent.  There was no trail, and he stumbled and blundered,
often finding himself, at the last moment, on the edge of rocky walls and
steep slopes the depth of which he had no way of judging.  Part way down,
the stars clouded over again, and in the consequent obscurity he slipped
and rolled and slid for a hundred feet, landing bruised and bleeding on
the bottom of a large shallow hole.  From all about him arose the stench
of dead horses.  The hole was handy to the trail, and the packers had
made a practice of tumbling into it their broken and dying animals.  The
stench overpowered him, making him deadly sick, and as in a nightmare he
scrambled out.  Half-way up, he recollected Bondell's gripsack.  It had
fallen into the hole with him; the pack-strap had evidently broken, and
he had forgotten it.  Back he went into the pestilential charnel-pit,
where he crawled around on hands and knees and groped for half an hour.
Altogether he encountered and counted seventeen dead horses (and one
horse still alive that he shot with his revolver) before he found
Bondell's grip.  Looking back upon a life that had not been without
valour and achievement, he unhesitatingly declared to himself that this
return after the grip was the most heroic act he had ever performed.  So
heroic was it that he was twice on the verge of fainting before he
crawled out of the hole.

By the time he had descended to the Scales, the steep pitch of Chilcoot
was past, and the way became easier.  Not that it was an easy way,
however, in the best of places; but it became a really possible trail,
along which he could have made good time if he had not been worn out, if
he had had light with which to pick his steps, and if it had not been for
Bondell's gripsack.  To him, in his exhausted condition, it was the last
straw.  Having barely strength to carry himself along, the additional
weight of the grip was sufficient to throw him nearly every time he
tripped or stumbled.  And when he escaped tripping, branches reached out
in the darkness, hooked the grip between his shoulders, and held him
back.

His mind was made up that if he missed the _Athenian_ it would be the
fault of the gripsack.  In fact, only two things remained in his
consciousness--Bondell's grip and the steamer.  He knew only those two
things, and they became identified, in a way, with some stern mission
upon which he had journeyed and toiled for centuries.  He walked and
struggled on as in a dream.  As part of the dream was his arrival at
Sheep Camp.  He stumbled into a saloon, slid his shoulders out of the
straps, and started to deposit the grip at his feet.  But it slipped from
his fingers and struck the floor with a heavy thud that was not unnoticed
by two men who were just leaving.  Churchill drank a glass of whisky,
told the barkeeper to call him in ten minutes, and sat down, his feet on
the grip, his head on his knees.

So badly did his misused body stiffen, that when he was called it
required another ten minutes and a second glass of whisky to unbend his
joints and limber up the muscles.

"Hey not that way!" the barkeeper shouted, and then went after him and
started him through the darkness toward Canyon City.  Some little husk of
inner consciousness told Churchill that the direction was right, and,
still as in a dream, he took the canon trail.  He did not know what
warned him, but after what seemed several centuries of travelling, he
sensed danger and drew his revolver.  Still in the dream, he saw two men
step out and heard them halt him.  His revolver went off four times, and
he saw the flashes and heard the explosions of their revolvers.  Also, he
was aware that he had been hit in the thigh.  He saw one man go down,
and, as the other came for him, he smashed him a straight blow with the
heavy revolver full in the face.  Then he turned and ran.  He came from
the dream shortly afterward, to find himself plunging down the trail at a
limping lope.  His first thought was for the gripsack.  It was still on
his back.  He was convinced that what had happened was a dream till he
felt for his revolver and found it gone.  Next he became aware of a sharp
stinging of his thigh, and after investigating, he found his hand warm
with blood.  It was a superficial wound, but it was incontestable.  He
became wider awake, and kept up the lumbering run to Canyon City.

He found a man, with a team of horses and a wagon, who got out of bed and
harnessed up for twenty dollars.  Churchill crawled in on the wagon-bed
and slept, the gripsack still on his back.  It was a rough ride, over
water-washed boulders down the Dyea Valley; but he roused only when the
wagon hit the highest places.  Any altitude of his body above the wagon-
bed of less than a foot did not faze him.  The last mile was smooth
going, and he slept soundly.

He came to in the grey dawn, the driver shaking him savagely and howling
into his ear that the _Athenian_ was gone.  Churchill looked blankly at
the deserted harbour.

"There's a smoke over at Skaguay," the man said.

Churchill's eyes were too swollen to see that far, but he said: "It's
she.  Get me a boat."

The driver was obliging and found a skiff, and a man to row it for ten
dollars, payment in advance.  Churchill paid, and was helped into the
skiff.  It was beyond him to get in by himself.  It was six miles to
Skaguay, and he had a blissful thought of sleeping those six miles.  But
the man did not know how to row, and Churchill took the oars and toiled
for a few more centuries.  He never knew six longer and more excruciating
miles.  A snappy little breeze blew up the inlet and held him back.  He
had a gone feeling at the pit of the stomach, and suffered from faintness
and numbness.  At his command, the man took the baler and threw salt
water into his face.

The _Athenian's_ anchor was up-and-down when they came alongside, and
Churchill was at the end of his last remnant of strength.

"Stop her!  Stop her!" he shouted hoarsely.

"Important message!  Stop her!"

Then he dropped his chin on his chest and slept.  When half a dozen men
started to carry him up the gang-plank, he awoke, reached for the grip,
and clung to it like a drowning man.

On deck he became a centre of horror and curiosity.  The clothing in
which he had left White Horse was represented by a few rags, and he was
as frayed as his clothing.  He had travelled for fifty-five hours at the
top notch of endurance.  He had slept six hours in that time, and he was
twenty pounds lighter than when he started.  Face and hands and body were
scratched and bruised, and he could scarcely see.  He tried to stand up,
but failed, sprawling out on the deck, hanging on to the gripsack, and
delivering his message.

"Now, put me to bed," he finished; "I'll eat when I wake up."

They did him honour, carrying him down in his rags and dirt and
depositing him and Bondell's grip in the bridal chamber, which was the
biggest and most luxurious state-room in the ship.  Twice he slept the
clock around, and he had bathed and shaved and eaten and was leaning over
the rail smoking a cigar when the two hundred pilgrims from White Horse
came alongside.

By the time the _Athenian_ arrived in Seattle, Churchill had fully
recuperated, and he went ashore with Bondell's grip in his hand.  He felt
proud of that grip.  To him it stood for achievement and integrity and
trust.  "I've delivered the goods," was the way he expressed these
various high terms to himself.  It was early in the evening, and he went
straight to Bondell's home.  Louis Bondell was glad to see him, shaking
hands with both hands at the same time and dragging him into the house.

"Oh, thanks, old man; it was good of you to bring it out," Bondell said
when he received the gripsack.

He tossed it carelessly upon a couch, and Churchill noted with an
appreciative eye the rebound of its weight from the springs.  Bondell was
volleying him with questions.

"How did you make out?  How're the boys?  What became of Bill Smithers?
Is Del Bishop still with Pierce?  Did he sell my dogs?  How did Sulphur
Bottom show up?  You're looking fine.  What steamer did you come out on?"

To all of which Churchill gave answer, till half an hour had gone by and
the first lull in the conversation had arrived.

"Hadn't you better take a look at it?" he suggested, nodding his head at
the gripsack.

"Oh, it's all right," Bondell answered.  "Did Mitchell's dump turn out as
much as he expected?"

"I think you'd better look at it," Churchill insisted.  "When I deliver a
thing, I want to be satisfied that it's all right.  There's always the
chance that somebody might have got into it when I was asleep, or
something."

"It's nothing important, old man," Bondell answered, with a laugh.

"Nothing important," Churchill echoed in a faint, small voice.  Then he
spoke with decision: "Louis, what's in that bag?  I want to know."

Louis looked at him curiously, then left the room and returned with a
bunch of keys.  He inserted his hand and drew out a heavy Colt's
revolver.  Next came out a few boxes of ammunition for the revolver and
several boxes of Winchester cartridges.

Churchill took the gripsack and looked into it.  Then he turned it upside
down and shook it gently.

"The gun's all rusted," Bondell said.  "Must have been out in the rain."

"Yes," Churchill answered.  "Too bad it got wet.  I guess I was a bit
careless."

He got up and went outside.  Ten minutes later Louis Bondell went out and
found him on the steps, sitting down, elbows on knees and chin on hands,
gazing steadfastly out into the darkness.




TO BUILD A FIRE


Day had broken cold and grey, exceedingly cold and grey, when the man
turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth-bank,
where a dim and little-travelled trail led eastward through the fat
spruce timberland.  It was a steep bank, and he paused for breath at the
top, excusing the act to himself by looking at his watch.  It was nine
o'clock.  There was no sun nor hint of sun, though there was not a cloud
in the sky.  It was a clear day, and yet there seemed an intangible pall
over the face of things, a subtle gloom that made the day dark, and that
was due to the absence of sun.  This fact did not worry the man.  He was
used to the lack of sun.  It had been days since he had seen the sun, and
he knew that a few more days must pass before that cheerful orb, due
south, would just peep above the sky-line and dip immediately from view.

The man flung a look back along the way he had come.  The Yukon lay a
mile wide and hidden under three feet of ice.  On top of this ice were as
many feet of snow.  It was all pure white, rolling in gentle undulations
where the ice-jams of the freeze-up had formed.  North and south, as far
as his eye could see, it was unbroken white, save for a dark hair-line
that curved and twisted from around the spruce-covered island to the
south, and that curved and twisted away into the north, where it
disappeared behind another spruce-covered island.  This dark hair-line
was the trail--the main trail--that led south five hundred miles to the
Chilcoot Pass, Dyea, and salt water; and that led north seventy miles to
Dawson, and still on to the north a thousand miles to Nulato, and finally
to St. Michael on Bering Sea, a thousand miles and half a thousand more.

But all this--the mysterious, far-reaching hairline trail, the absence of
sun from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness
of it all--made no impression on the man.  It was not because he was long
used to it.  He was a new-comer in the land, a _chechaquo_, and this was
his first winter.  The trouble with him was that he was without
imagination.  He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in
the things, and not in the significances.  Fifty degrees below zero meant
eighty odd degrees of frost.  Such fact impressed him as being cold and
uncomfortable, and that was all.  It did not lead him to meditate upon
his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in
general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold;
and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of
immortality and man's place in the universe.  Fifty degrees below zero
stood for a bite of frost that hurt and that must be guarded against by
the use of mittens, ear-flaps, warm moccasins, and thick socks.  Fifty
degrees below zero was to him just precisely fifty degrees below zero.
That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that
never entered his head.

As he turned to go on, he spat speculatively.  There was a sharp,
explosive crackle that startled him.  He spat again.  And again, in the
air, before it could fall to the snow, the spittle crackled.  He knew
that at fifty below spittle crackled on the snow, but this spittle had
crackled in the air.  Undoubtedly it was colder than fifty below--how
much colder he did not know.  But the temperature did not matter.  He was
bound for the old claim on the left fork of Henderson Creek, where the
boys were already.  They had come over across the divide from the Indian
Creek country, while he had come the roundabout way to take a look at the
possibilities of getting out logs in the spring from the islands in the
Yukon.  He would be in to camp by six o'clock; a bit after dark, it was
true, but the boys would be there, a fire would be going, and a hot
supper would be ready.  As for lunch, he pressed his hand against the
protruding bundle under his jacket.  It was also under his shirt, wrapped
up in a handkerchief and lying against the naked skin.  It was the only
way to keep the biscuits from freezing.  He smiled agreeably to himself
as he thought of those biscuits, each cut open and sopped in bacon
grease, and each enclosing a generous slice of fried bacon.

He plunged in among the big spruce trees.  The trail was faint.  A foot
of snow had fallen since the last sled had passed over, and he was glad
he was without a sled, travelling light.  In fact, he carried nothing but
the lunch wrapped in the handkerchief.  He was surprised, however, at the
cold.  It certainly was cold, he concluded, as he rubbed his numbed nose
and cheek-bones with his mittened hand.  He was a warm-whiskered man, but
the hair on his face did not protect the high cheek-bones and the eager
nose that thrust itself aggressively into the frosty air.

At the man's heels trotted a dog, a big native husky, the proper wolf-
dog, grey-coated and without any visible or temperamental difference from
its brother, the wild wolf.  The animal was depressed by the tremendous
cold.  It knew that it was no time for travelling.  Its instinct told it
a truer tale than was told to the man by the man's judgment.  In reality,
it was not merely colder than fifty below zero; it was colder than sixty
below, than seventy below.  It was seventy-five below zero.  Since the
freezing-point is thirty-two above zero, it meant that one hundred and
seven degrees of frost obtained.  The dog did not know anything about
thermometers.  Possibly in its brain there was no sharp consciousness of
a condition of very cold such as was in the man's brain.  But the brute
had its instinct.  It experienced a vague but menacing apprehension that
subdued it and made it slink along at the man's heels, and that made it
question eagerly every unwonted movement of the man as if expecting him
to go into camp or to seek shelter somewhere and build a fire.  The dog
had learned fire, and it wanted fire, or else to burrow under the snow
and cuddle its warmth away from the air.

The frozen moisture of its breathing had settled on its fur in a fine
powder of frost, and especially were its jowls, muzzle, and eyelashes
whitened by its crystalled breath.  The man's red beard and moustache
were likewise frosted, but more solidly, the deposit taking the form of
ice and increasing with every warm, moist breath he exhaled.  Also, the
man was chewing tobacco, and the muzzle of ice held his lips so rigidly
that he was unable to clear his chin when he expelled the juice.  The
result was that a crystal beard of the colour and solidity of amber was
increasing its length on his chin.  If he fell down it would shatter
itself, like glass, into brittle fragments.  But he did not mind the
appendage.  It was the penalty all tobacco-chewers paid in that country,
and he had been out before in two cold snaps.  They had not been so cold
as this, he knew, but by the spirit thermometer at Sixty Mile he knew
they had been registered at fifty below and at fifty-five.

He held on through the level stretch of woods for several miles, crossed
a wide flat of nigger-heads, and dropped down a bank to the frozen bed of
a small stream.  This was Henderson Creek, and he knew he was ten miles
from the forks.  He looked at his watch.  It was ten o'clock.  He was
making four miles an hour, and he calculated that he would arrive at the
forks at half-past twelve.  He decided to celebrate that event by eating
his lunch there.

The dog dropped in again at his heels, with a tail drooping
discouragement, as the man swung along the creek-bed.  The furrow of the
old sled-trail was plainly visible, but a dozen inches of snow covered
the marks of the last runners.  In a month no man had come up or down
that silent creek.  The man held steadily on.  He was not much given to
thinking, and just then particularly he had nothing to think about save
that he would eat lunch at the forks and that at six o'clock he would be
in camp with the boys.  There was nobody to talk to and, had there been,
speech would have been impossible because of the ice-muzzle on his mouth.
So he continued monotonously to chew tobacco and to increase the length
of his amber beard.

Once in a while the thought reiterated itself that it was very cold and
that he had never experienced such cold.  As he walked along he rubbed
his cheek-bones and nose with the back of his mittened hand.  He did this
automatically, now and again changing hands.  But rub as he would, the
instant he stopped his cheek-bones went numb, and the following instant
the end of his nose went numb.  He was sure to frost his cheeks; he knew
that, and experienced a pang of regret that he had not devised a nose-
strap of the sort Bud wore in cold snaps.  Such a strap passed across the
cheeks, as well, and saved them.  But it didn't matter much, after all.
What were frosted cheeks?  A bit painful, that was all; they were never
serious.

Empty as the man's mind was of thoughts, he was keenly observant, and he
noticed the changes in the creek, the curves and bends and timber-jams,
and always he sharply noted where he placed his feet.  Once, coming
around a bend, he shied abruptly, like a startled horse, curved away from
the place where he had been walking, and retreated several paces back
along the trail.  The creek he knew was frozen clear to the bottom--no
creek could contain water in that arctic winter--but he knew also that
there were springs that bubbled out from the hillsides and ran along
under the snow and on top the ice of the creek.  He knew that the coldest
snaps never froze these springs, and he knew likewise their danger.  They
were traps.  They hid pools of water under the snow that might be three
inches deep, or three feet.  Sometimes a skin of ice half an inch thick
covered them, and in turn was covered by the snow.  Sometimes there were
alternate layers of water and ice-skin, so that when one broke through he
kept on breaking through for a while, sometimes wetting himself to the
waist.

That was why he had shied in such panic.  He had felt the give under his
feet and heard the crackle of a snow-hidden ice-skin.  And to get his
feet wet in such a temperature meant trouble and danger.  At the very
least it meant delay, for he would be forced to stop and build a fire,
and under its protection to bare his feet while he dried his socks and
moccasins.  He stood and studied the creek-bed and its banks, and decided
that the flow of water came from the right.  He reflected awhile, rubbing
his nose and cheeks, then skirted to the left, stepping gingerly and
testing the footing for each step.  Once clear of the danger, he took a
fresh chew of tobacco and swung along at his four-mile gait.

In the course of the next two hours he came upon several similar traps.
Usually the snow above the hidden pools had a sunken, candied appearance
that advertised the danger.  Once again, however, he had a close call;
and once, suspecting danger, he compelled the dog to go on in front.  The
dog did not want to go.  It hung back until the man shoved it forward,
and then it went quickly across the white, unbroken surface.  Suddenly it
broke through, floundered to one side, and got away to firmer footing.  It
had wet its forefeet and legs, and almost immediately the water that
clung to it turned to ice.  It made quick efforts to lick the ice off its
legs, then dropped down in the snow and began to bite out the ice that
had formed between the toes.  This was a matter of instinct.  To permit
the ice to remain would mean sore feet.  It did not know this.  It merely
obeyed the mysterious prompting that arose from the deep crypts of its
being.  But the man knew, having achieved a judgment on the subject, and
he removed the mitten from his right hand and helped tear out the ice-
particles.  He did not expose his fingers more than a minute, and was
astonished at the swift numbness that smote them.  It certainly was cold.
He pulled on the mitten hastily, and beat the hand savagely across his
chest.

At twelve o'clock the day was at its brightest.  Yet the sun was too far
south on its winter journey to clear the horizon.  The bulge of the earth
intervened between it and Henderson Creek, where the man walked under a
clear sky at noon and cast no shadow.  At half-past twelve, to the
minute, he arrived at the forks of the creek.  He was pleased at the
speed he had made.  If he kept it up, he would certainly be with the boys
by six.  He unbuttoned his jacket and shirt and drew forth his lunch.  The
action consumed no more than a quarter of a minute, yet in that brief
moment the numbness laid hold of the exposed fingers.  He did not put the
mitten on, but, instead, struck the fingers a dozen sharp smashes against
his leg.  Then he sat down on a snow-covered log to eat.  The sting that
followed upon the striking of his fingers against his leg ceased so
quickly that he was startled, he had had no chance to take a bite of
biscuit.  He struck the fingers repeatedly and returned them to the
mitten, baring the other hand for the purpose of eating.  He tried to
take a mouthful, but the ice-muzzle prevented.  He had forgotten to build
a fire and thaw out.  He chuckled at his foolishness, and as he chuckled
he noted the numbness creeping into the exposed fingers.  Also, he noted
that the stinging which had first come to his toes when he sat down was
already passing away.  He wondered whether the toes were warm or numbed.
He moved them inside the moccasins and decided that they were numbed.

He pulled the mitten on hurriedly and stood up.  He was a bit frightened.
He stamped up and down until the stinging returned into the feet.  It
certainly was cold, was his thought.  That man from Sulphur Creek had
spoken the truth when telling how cold it sometimes got in the country.
And he had laughed at him at the time!  That showed one must not be too
sure of things.  There was no mistake about it, it was cold.  He strode
up and down, stamping his feet and threshing his arms, until reassured by
the returning warmth.  Then he got out matches and proceeded to make a
fire.  From the undergrowth, where high water of the previous spring had
lodged a supply of seasoned twigs, he got his firewood.  Working
carefully from a small beginning, he soon had a roaring fire, over which
he thawed the ice from his face and in the protection of which he ate his
biscuits.  For the moment the cold of space was outwitted.  The dog took
satisfaction in the fire, stretching out close enough for warmth and far
enough away to escape being singed.

When the man had finished, he filled his pipe and took his comfortable
time over a smoke.  Then he pulled on his mittens, settled the ear-flaps
of his cap firmly about his ears, and took the creek trail up the left
fork.  The dog was disappointed and yearned back toward the fire.  This
man did not know cold.  Possibly all the generations of his ancestry had
been ignorant of cold, of real cold, of cold one hundred and seven
degrees below freezing-point.  But the dog knew; all its ancestry knew,
and it had inherited the knowledge.  And it knew that it was not good to
walk abroad in such fearful cold.  It was the time to lie snug in a hole
in the snow and wait for a curtain of cloud to be drawn across the face
of outer space whence this cold came.  On the other hand, there was keen
intimacy between the dog and the man.  The one was the toil-slave of the
other, and the only caresses it had ever received were the caresses of
the whip-lash and of harsh and menacing throat-sounds that threatened the
whip-lash.  So the dog made no effort to communicate its apprehension to
the man.  It was not concerned in the welfare of the man; it was for its
own sake that it yearned back toward the fire.  But the man whistled, and
spoke to it with the sound of whip-lashes, and the dog swung in at the
man's heels and followed after.

The man took a chew of tobacco and proceeded to start a new amber beard.
Also, his moist breath quickly powdered with white his moustache,
eyebrows, and lashes.  There did not seem to be so many springs on the
left fork of the Henderson, and for half an hour the man saw no signs of
any.  And then it happened.  At a place where there were no signs, where
the soft, unbroken snow seemed to advertise solidity beneath, the man
broke through.  It was not deep.  He wetted himself half-way to the knees
before he floundered out to the firm crust.

He was angry, and cursed his luck aloud.  He had hoped to get into camp
with the boys at six o'clock, and this would delay him an hour, for he
would have to build a fire and dry out his foot-gear.  This was
imperative at that low temperature--he knew that much; and he turned
aside to the bank, which he climbed.  On top, tangled in the underbrush
about the trunks of several small spruce trees, was a high-water deposit
of dry firewood--sticks and twigs principally, but also larger portions
of seasoned branches and fine, dry, last-year's grasses.  He threw down
several large pieces on top of the snow.  This served for a foundation
and prevented the young flame from drowning itself in the snow it
otherwise would melt.  The flame he got by touching a match to a small
shred of birch-bark that he took from his pocket.  This burned even more
readily than paper.  Placing it on the foundation, he fed the young flame
with wisps of dry grass and with the tiniest dry twigs.

He worked slowly and carefully, keenly aware of his danger.  Gradually,
as the flame grew stronger, he increased the size of the twigs with which
he fed it.  He squatted in the snow, pulling the twigs out from their
entanglement in the brush and feeding directly to the flame.  He knew
there must be no failure.  When it is seventy-five below zero, a man must
not fail in his first attempt to build a fire--that is, if his feet are
wet.  If his feet are dry, and he fails, he can run along the trail for
half a mile and restore his circulation.  But the circulation of wet and
freezing feet cannot be restored by running when it is seventy-five
below.  No matter how fast he runs, the wet feet will freeze the harder.

All this the man knew.  The old-timer on Sulphur Creek had told him about
it the previous fall, and now he was appreciating the advice.  Already
all sensation had gone out of his feet.  To build the fire he had been
forced to remove his mittens, and the fingers had quickly gone numb.  His
pace of four miles an hour had kept his heart pumping blood to the
surface of his body and to all the extremities.  But the instant he
stopped, the action of the pump eased down.  The cold of space smote the
unprotected tip of the planet, and he, being on that unprotected tip,
received the full force of the blow.  The blood of his body recoiled
before it.  The blood was alive, like the dog, and like the dog it wanted
to hide away and cover itself up from the fearful cold.  So long as he
walked four miles an hour, he pumped that blood, willy-nilly, to the
surface; but now it ebbed away and sank down into the recesses of his
body.  The extremities were the first to feel its absence.  His wet feet
froze the faster, and his exposed fingers numbed the faster, though they
had not yet begun to freeze.  Nose and cheeks were already freezing,
while the skin of all his body chilled as it lost its blood.

But he was safe.  Toes and nose and cheeks would be only touched by the
frost, for the fire was beginning to burn with strength.  He was feeding
it with twigs the size of his finger.  In another minute he would be able
to feed it with branches the size of his wrist, and then he could remove
his wet foot-gear, and, while it dried, he could keep his naked feet warm
by the fire, rubbing them at first, of course, with snow.  The fire was a
success.  He was safe.  He remembered the advice of the old-timer on
Sulphur Creek, and smiled.  The old-timer had been very serious in laying
down the law that no man must travel alone in the Klondike after fifty
below.  Well, here he was; he had had the accident; he was alone; and he
had saved himself.  Those old-timers were rather womanish, some of them,
he thought.  All a man had to do was to keep his head, and he was all
right.  Any man who was a man could travel alone.  But it was surprising,
the rapidity with which his cheeks and nose were freezing.  And he had
not thought his fingers could go lifeless in so short a time.  Lifeless
they were, for he could scarcely make them move together to grip a twig,
and they seemed remote from his body and from him.  When he touched a
twig, he had to look and see whether or not he had hold of it.  The wires
were pretty well down between him and his finger-ends.

All of which counted for little.  There was the fire, snapping and
crackling and promising life with every dancing flame.  He started to
untie his moccasins.  They were coated with ice; the thick German socks
were like sheaths of iron half-way to the knees; and the mocassin strings
were like rods of steel all twisted and knotted as by some conflagration.
For a moment he tugged with his numbed fingers, then, realizing the folly
of it, he drew his sheath-knife.

But before he could cut the strings, it happened.  It was his own fault
or, rather, his mistake.  He should not have built the fire under the
spruce tree.  He should have built it in the open.  But it had been
easier to pull the twigs from the brush and drop them directly on the
fire.  Now the tree under which he had done this carried a weight of snow
on its boughs.  No wind had blown for weeks, and each bough was fully
freighted.  Each time he had pulled a twig he had communicated a slight
agitation to the tree--an imperceptible agitation, so far as he was
concerned, but an agitation sufficient to bring about the disaster.  High
up in the tree one bough capsized its load of snow.  This fell on the
boughs beneath, capsizing them.  This process continued, spreading out
and involving the whole tree.  It grew like an avalanche, and it
descended without warning upon the man and the fire, and the fire was
blotted out!  Where it had burned was a mantle of fresh and disordered
snow.

The man was shocked.  It was as though he had just heard his own sentence
of death.  For a moment he sat and stared at the spot where the fire had
been.  Then he grew very calm.  Perhaps the old-timer on Sulphur Creek
was right.  If he had only had a trail-mate he would have been in no
danger now.  The trail-mate could have built the fire.  Well, it was up
to him to build the fire over again, and this second time there must be
no failure.  Even if he succeeded, he would most likely lose some toes.
His feet must be badly frozen by now, and there would be some time before
the second fire was ready.

Such were his thoughts, but he did not sit and think them.  He was busy
all the time they were passing through his mind, he made a new foundation
for a fire, this time in the open; where no treacherous tree could blot
it out.  Next, he gathered dry grasses and tiny twigs from the high-water
flotsam.  He could not bring his fingers together to pull them out, but
he was able to gather them by the handful.  In this way he got many
rotten twigs and bits of green moss that were undesirable, but it was the
best he could do.  He worked methodically, even collecting an armful of
the larger branches to be used later when the fire gathered strength.  And
all the while the dog sat and watched him, a certain yearning wistfulness
in its eyes, for it looked upon him as the fire-provider, and the fire
was slow in coming.

When all was ready, the man reached in his pocket for a second piece of
birch-bark.  He knew the bark was there, and, though he could not feel it
with his fingers, he could hear its crisp rustling as he fumbled for it.
Try as he would, he could not clutch hold of it.  And all the time, in
his consciousness, was the knowledge that each instant his feet were
freezing.  This thought tended to put him in a panic, but he fought
against it and kept calm.  He pulled on his mittens with his teeth, and
threshed his arms back and forth, beating his hands with all his might
against his sides.  He did this sitting down, and he stood up to do it;
and all the while the dog sat in the snow, its wolf-brush of a tail
curled around warmly over its forefeet, its sharp wolf-ears pricked
forward intently as it watched the man.  And the man as he beat and
threshed with his arms and hands, felt a great surge of envy as he
regarded the creature that was warm and secure in its natural covering.

After a time he was aware of the first far-away signals of sensation in
his beaten fingers.  The faint tingling grew stronger till it evolved
into a stinging ache that was excruciating, but which the man hailed with
satisfaction.  He stripped the mitten from his right hand and fetched
forth the birch-bark.  The exposed fingers were quickly going numb again.
Next he brought out his bunch of sulphur matches.  But the tremendous
cold had already driven the life out of his fingers.  In his effort to
separate one match from the others, the whole bunch fell in the snow.  He
tried to pick it out of the snow, but failed.  The dead fingers could
neither touch nor clutch.  He was very careful.  He drove the thought of
his freezing feet; and nose, and cheeks, out of his mind, devoting his
whole soul to the matches.  He watched, using the sense of vision in
place of that of touch, and when he saw his fingers on each side the
bunch, he closed them--that is, he willed to close them, for the wires
were drawn, and the fingers did not obey.  He pulled the mitten on the
right hand, and beat it fiercely against his knee.  Then, with both
mittened hands, he scooped the bunch of matches, along with much snow,
into his lap.  Yet he was no better off.

After some manipulation he managed to get the bunch between the heels of
his mittened hands.  In this fashion he carried it to his mouth.  The ice
crackled and snapped when by a violent effort he opened his mouth.  He
drew the lower jaw in, curled the upper lip out of the way, and scraped
the bunch with his upper teeth in order to separate a match.  He
succeeded in getting one, which he dropped on his lap.  He was no better
off.  He could not pick it up.  Then he devised a way.  He picked it up
in his teeth and scratched it on his leg.  Twenty times he scratched
before he succeeded in lighting it.  As it flamed he held it with his
teeth to the birch-bark.  But the burning brimstone went up his nostrils
and into his lungs, causing him to cough spasmodically.  The match fell
into the snow and went out.

The old-timer on Sulphur Creek was right, he thought in the moment of
controlled despair that ensued: after fifty below, a man should travel
with a partner.  He beat his hands, but failed in exciting any sensation.
Suddenly he bared both hands, removing the mittens with his teeth.  He
caught the whole bunch between the heels of his hands.  His arm-muscles
not being frozen enabled him to press the hand-heels tightly against the
matches.  Then he scratched the bunch along his leg.  It flared into
flame, seventy sulphur matches at once!  There was no wind to blow them
out.  He kept his head to one side to escape the strangling fumes, and
held the blazing bunch to the birch-bark.  As he so held it, he became
aware of sensation in his hand.  His flesh was burning.  He could smell
it.  Deep down below the surface he could feel it.  The sensation
developed into pain that grew acute.  And still he endured it, holding
the flame of the matches clumsily to the bark that would not light
readily because his own burning hands were in the way, absorbing most of
the flame.

At last, when he could endure no more, he jerked his hands apart.  The
blazing matches fell sizzling into the snow, but the birch-bark was
alight.  He began laying dry grasses and the tiniest twigs on the flame.
He could not pick and choose, for he had to lift the fuel between the
heels of his hands.  Small pieces of rotten wood and green moss clung to
the twigs, and he bit them off as well as he could with his teeth.  He
cherished the flame carefully and awkwardly.  It meant life, and it must
not perish.  The withdrawal of blood from the surface of his body now
made him begin to shiver, and he grew more awkward.  A large piece of
green moss fell squarely on the little fire.  He tried to poke it out
with his fingers, but his shivering frame made him poke too far, and he
disrupted the nucleus of the little fire, the burning grasses and tiny
twigs separating and scattering.  He tried to poke them together again,
but in spite of the tenseness of the effort, his shivering got away with
him, and the twigs were hopelessly scattered.  Each twig gushed a puff of
smoke and went out.  The fire-provider had failed.  As he looked
apathetically about him, his eyes chanced on the dog, sitting across the
ruins of the fire from him, in the snow, making restless, hunching
movements, slightly lifting one forefoot and then the other, shifting its
weight back and forth on them with wistful eagerness.

The sight of the dog put a wild idea into his head.  He remembered the
tale of the man, caught in a blizzard, who killed a steer and crawled
inside the carcass, and so was saved.  He would kill the dog and bury his
hands in the warm body until the numbness went out of them.  Then he
could build another fire.  He spoke to the dog, calling it to him; but in
his voice was a strange note of fear that frightened the animal, who had
never known the man to speak in such way before.  Something was the
matter, and its suspicious nature sensed danger,--it knew not what danger
but somewhere, somehow, in its brain arose an apprehension of the man.  It
flattened its ears down at the sound of the man's voice, and its
restless, hunching movements and the liftings and shiftings of its
forefeet became more pronounced but it would not come to the man.  He got
on his hands and knees and crawled toward the dog.  This unusual posture
again excited suspicion, and the animal sidled mincingly away.

The man sat up in the snow for a moment and struggled for calmness.  Then
he pulled on his mittens, by means of his teeth, and got upon his feet.
He glanced down at first in order to assure himself that he was really
standing up, for the absence of sensation in his feet left him unrelated
to the earth.  His erect position in itself started to drive the webs of
suspicion from the dog's mind; and when he spoke peremptorily, with the
sound of whip-lashes in his voice, the dog rendered its customary
allegiance and came to him.  As it came within reaching distance, the man
lost his control.  His arms flashed out to the dog, and he experienced
genuine surprise when he discovered that his hands could not clutch, that
there was neither bend nor feeling in the lingers.  He had forgotten for
the moment that they were frozen and that they were freezing more and
more.  All this happened quickly, and before the animal could get away,
he encircled its body with his arms.  He sat down in the snow, and in
this fashion held the dog, while it snarled and whined and struggled.

But it was all he could do, hold its body encircled in his arms and sit
there.  He realized that he could not kill the dog.  There was no way to
do it.  With his helpless hands he could neither draw nor hold his sheath-
knife nor throttle the animal.  He released it, and it plunged wildly
away, with tail between its legs, and still snarling.  It halted forty
feet away and surveyed him curiously, with ears sharply pricked forward.
The man looked down at his hands in order to locate them, and found them
hanging on the ends of his arms.  It struck him as curious that one
should have to use his eyes in order to find out where his hands were.  He
began threshing his arms back and forth, beating the mittened hands
against his sides.  He did this for five minutes, violently, and his
heart pumped enough blood up to the surface to put a stop to his
shivering.  But no sensation was aroused in the hands.  He had an
impression that they hung like weights on the ends of his arms, but when
he tried to run the impression down, he could not find it.

A certain fear of death, dull and oppressive, came to him.  This fear
quickly became poignant as he realized that it was no longer a mere
matter of freezing his fingers and toes, or of losing his hands and feet,
but that it was a matter of life and death with the chances against him.
This threw him into a panic, and he turned and ran up the creek-bed along
the old, dim trail.  The dog joined in behind and kept up with him.  He
ran blindly, without intention, in fear such as he had never known in his
life.  Slowly, as he ploughed and floundered through the snow, he began
to see things again--the banks of the creek, the old timber-jams, the
leafless aspens, and the sky.  The running made him feel better.  He did
not shiver.  Maybe, if he ran on, his feet would thaw out; and, anyway,
if he ran far enough, he would reach camp and the boys.  Without doubt he
would lose some fingers and toes and some of his face; but the boys would
take care of him, and save the rest of him when he got there.  And at the
same time there was another thought in his mind that said he would never
get to the camp and the boys; that it was too many miles away, that the
freezing had too great a start on him, and that he would soon be stiff
and dead.  This thought he kept in the background and refused to
consider.  Sometimes it pushed itself forward and demanded to be heard,
but he thrust it back and strove to think of other things.

It struck him as curious that he could run at all on feet so frozen that
he could not feel them when they struck the earth and took the weight of
his body.  He seemed to himself to skim along above the surface and to
have no connection with the earth.  Somewhere he had once seen a winged
Mercury, and he wondered if Mercury felt as he felt when skimming over
the earth.

His theory of running until he reached camp and the boys had one flaw in
it: he lacked the endurance.  Several times he stumbled, and finally he
tottered, crumpled up, and fell.  When he tried to rise, he failed.  He
must sit and rest, he decided, and next time he would merely walk and
keep on going.  As he sat and regained his breath, he noted that he was
feeling quite warm and comfortable.  He was not shivering, and it even
seemed that a warm glow had come to his chest and trunk.  And yet, when
he touched his nose or cheeks, there was no sensation.  Running would not
thaw them out.  Nor would it thaw out his hands and feet.  Then the
thought came to him that the frozen portions of his body must be
extending.  He tried to keep this thought down, to forget it, to think of
something else; he was aware of the panicky feeling that it caused, and
he was afraid of the panic.  But the thought asserted itself, and
persisted, until it produced a vision of his body totally frozen.  This
was too much, and he made another wild run along the trail.  Once he
slowed down to a walk, but the thought of the freezing extending itself
made him run again.

And all the time the dog ran with him, at his heels.  When he fell down a
second time, it curled its tail over its forefeet and sat in front of him
facing him curiously eager and intent.  The warmth and security of the
animal angered him, and he cursed it till it flattened down its ears
appeasingly.  This time the shivering came more quickly upon the man.  He
was losing in his battle with the frost.  It was creeping into his body
from all sides.  The thought of it drove him on, but he ran no more than
a hundred feet, when he staggered and pitched headlong.  It was his last
panic.  When he had recovered his breath and control, he sat up and
entertained in his mind the conception of meeting death with dignity.
However, the conception did not come to him in such terms.  His idea of
it was that he had been making a fool of himself, running around like a
chicken with its head cut off--such was the simile that occurred to him.
Well, he was bound to freeze anyway, and he might as well take it
decently.  With this new-found peace of mind came the first glimmerings
of drowsiness.  A good idea, he thought, to sleep off to death.  It was
like taking an anaesthetic.  Freezing was not so bad as people thought.
There were lots worse ways to die.

He pictured the boys finding his body next day.  Suddenly he found
himself with them, coming along the trail and looking for himself.  And,
still with them, he came around a turn in the trail and found himself
lying in the snow.  He did not belong with himself any more, for even
then he was out of himself, standing with the boys and looking at himself
in the snow.  It certainly was cold, was his thought.  When he got back
to the States he could tell the folks what real cold was.  He drifted on
from this to a vision of the old-timer on Sulphur Creek.  He could see
him quite clearly, warm and comfortable, and smoking a pipe.

"You were right, old hoss; you were right," the man mumbled to the old-
timer of Sulphur Creek.

Then the man drowsed off into what seemed to him the most comfortable and
satisfying sleep he had ever known.  The dog sat facing him and waiting.
The brief day drew to a close in a long, slow twilight.  There were no
signs of a fire to be made, and, besides, never in the dog's experience
had it known a man to sit like that in the snow and make no fire.  As the
twilight drew on, its eager yearning for the fire mastered it, and with a
great lifting and shifting of forefeet, it whined softly, then flattened
its ears down in anticipation of being chidden by the man.  But the man
remained silent.  Later, the dog whined loudly.  And still later it crept
close to the man and caught the scent of death.  This made the animal
bristle and back away.  A little longer it delayed, howling under the
stars that leaped and danced and shone brightly in the cold sky.  Then it
turned and trotted up the trail in the direction of the camp it knew,
where were the other food-providers and fire-providers.




THAT SPOT


I don't think much of Stephen Mackaye any more, though I used to swear by
him.  I know that in those days I loved him more than my own brother.  If
ever I meet Stephen Mackaye again, I shall not be responsible for my
actions.  It passes beyond me that a man with whom I shared food and
blanket, and with whom I mushed over the Chilcoot Trail, should turn out
the way he did.  I always sized Steve up as a square man, a kindly
comrade, without an iota of anything vindictive or malicious in his
nature.  I shall never trust my judgment in men again.  Why, I nursed
that man through typhoid fever; we starved together on the headwaters of
the Stewart; and he saved my life on the Little Salmon.  And now, after
the years we were together, all I can say of Stephen Mackaye is that he
is the meanest man I ever knew.

We started for the Klondike in the fall rush of 1897, and we started too
late to get over Chilcoot Pass before the freeze-up.  We packed our
outfit on our backs part way over, when the snow began to fly, and then
we had to buy dogs in order to sled it the rest of the way.  That was how
we came to get that Spot.  Dogs were high, and we paid one hundred and
ten dollars for him.  He looked worth it.  I say _looked_, because he was
one of the finest-appearing dogs I ever saw.  He weighed sixty pounds,
and he had all the lines of a good sled animal.  We never could make out
his breed.  He wasn't husky, nor Malemute, nor Hudson Bay; he looked like
all of them and he didn't look like any of them; and on top of it all he
had some of the white man's dog in him, for on one side, in the thick of
the mixed yellow-brown-red-and-dirty-white that was his prevailing
colour, there was a spot of coal-black as big as a water-bucket.  That
was why we called him Spot.

He was a good looker all right.  When he was in condition his muscles
stood out in bunches all over him.  And he was the strongest-looking
brute I ever saw in Alaska, also the most intelligent-looking.  To run
your eves over him, you'd think he could outpull three dogs of his own
weight.  Maybe he could, but I never saw it.  His intelligence didn't run
that way.  He could steal and forage to perfection; he had an instinct
that was positively gruesome for divining when work was to be done and
for making a sneak accordingly; and for getting lost and not staying lost
he was nothing short of inspired.  But when it came to work, the way that
intelligence dribbled out of him and left him a mere clot of wobbling,
stupid jelly would make your heart bleed.

There are times when I think it wasn't stupidity.  Maybe, like some men I
know, he was too wise to work.  I shouldn't wonder if he put it all over
us with that intelligence of his.  Maybe he figured it all out and
decided that a licking now and again and no work was a whole lot better
than work all the time and no licking.  He was intelligent enough for
such a computation.  I tell you, I've sat and looked into that dog's eyes
till the shivers ran up and down my spine and the marrow crawled like
yeast, what of the intelligence I saw shining out.  I can't express
myself about that intelligence.  It is beyond mere words.  I saw it,
that's all.  At times it was like gazing into a human soul, to look into
his eyes; and what I saw there frightened me and started all sorts of
ideas in my own mind of reincarnation and all the rest.  I tell you I
sensed something big in that brute's eyes; there was a message there, but
I wasn't big enough myself to catch it.  Whatever it was (I know I'm
making a fool of myself)--whatever it was, it baffled me.  I can't give
an inkling of what I saw in that brute's eyes; it wasn't light, it wasn't
colour; it was something that moved, away back, when the eyes themselves
weren't moving.  And I guess I didn't see it move either; I only sensed
that it moved.  It was an expression--that's what it was--and I got an
impression of it.  No; it was different from a mere expression; it was
more than that.  I don't know what it was, but it gave me a feeling of
kinship just the same.  Oh, no, not sentimental kinship.  It was, rather,
a kinship of equality.  Those eyes never pleaded like a deer's eyes.  They
challenged.  No, it wasn't defiance.  It was just a calm assumption of
equality.  And I don't think it was deliberate.  My belief is that it was
unconscious on his part.  It was there because it was there, and it
couldn't help shining out.  No, I don't mean shine.  It didn't shine; it
_moved_.  I know I'm talking rot, but if you'd looked into that animal's
eyes the way I have, you'd understand.  Steve was affected the same way I
was.  Why, I tried to kill that Spot once--he was no good for anything;
and I fell down on it.  I led him out into the brush, and he came along
slow and unwilling.  He knew what was going on.  I stopped in a likely
place, put my foot on the rope, and pulled my big Colt's.  And that dog
sat down and looked at me.  I tell you he didn't plead.  He just looked.
And I saw all kinds of incomprehensible things moving, yes, _moving_, in
those eyes of his.  I didn't really see them move; I thought I saw them,
for, as I said before, I guess I only sensed them.  And I want to tell
you right now that it got beyond me.  It was like killing a man, a
conscious, brave man, who looked calmly into your gun as much as to say,
"Who's afraid?"

Then, too, the message seemed so near that, instead of pulling the
trigger quick, I stopped to see if I could catch the message.  There it
was, right before me, glimmering all around in those eyes of his.  And
then it was too late.  I got scared.  I was trembly all over, and my
stomach generated a nervous palpitation that made me seasick.  I just sat
down and looked at the dog, and he looked at me, till I thought I was
going crazy.  Do you want to know what I did?  I threw down the gun and
ran back to camp with the fear of God in my heart.  Steve laughed at me.
But I notice that Steve led Spot into the woods, a week later, for the
same purpose, and that Steve came back alone, and a little later Spot
drifted back, too.

At any rate, Spot wouldn't work.  We paid a hundred and ten dollars for
him from the bottom of our sack, and he wouldn't work.  He wouldn't even
tighten the traces.  Steve spoke to him the first time we put him in
harness, and he sort of shivered, that was all.  Not an ounce on the
traces.  He just stood still and wobbled, like so much jelly.  Steve
touched him with the whip.  He yelped, but not an ounce.  Steve touched
him again, a bit harder, and he howled--the regular long wolf howl.  Then
Steve got mad and gave him half a dozen, and I came on the run from the
tent.

I told Steve he was brutal with the animal, and we had some words--the
first we'd ever had.  He threw the whip down in the snow and walked away
mad.  I picked it up and went to it.  That Spot trembled and wobbled and
cowered before ever I swung the lash, and with the first bite of it he
howled like a lost soul.  Next he lay down in the snow.  I started the
rest of the dogs, and they dragged him along while I threw the whip into
him.  He rolled over on his back and bumped along, his four legs waving
in the air, himself howling as though he was going through a sausage
machine.  Steve came back and laughed at me, and I apologized for what
I'd said.

There was no getting any work out of that Spot; and to make up for it, he
was the biggest pig-glutton of a dog I ever saw.  On top of that, he was
the cleverest thief.  There was no circumventing him.  Many a breakfast
we went without our bacon because Spot had been there first.  And it was
because of him that we nearly starved to death up the Stewart.  He
figured out the way to break into our meat-cache, and what he didn't eat,
the rest of the team did.  But he was impartial.  He stole from
everybody.  He was a restless dog, always very busy snooping around or
going somewhere.  And there was never a camp within five miles that he
didn't raid.  The worst of it was that they always came back on us to pay
his board bill, which was just, being the law of the land; but it was
mighty hard on us, especially that first winter on the Chilcoot, when we
were busted, paying for whole hams and sides of bacon that we never ate.
He could fight, too, that Spot.  He could do everything but work.  He
never pulled a pound, but he was the boss of the whole team.  The way he
made those dogs stand around was an education.  He bullied them, and
there was always one or more of them fresh-marked with his fangs.  But he
was more than a bully.  He wasn't afraid of anything that walked on four
legs; and I've seen him march, single-handed into a strange team, without
any provocation whatever, and put the _kibosh_ on the whole outfit.  Did
I say he could eat?  I caught him eating the whip once.  That's straight.
He started in at the lash, and when I caught him he was down to the
handle, and still going.

But he was a good looker.  At the end of the first week we sold him for
seventy-five dollars to the Mounted Police.  They had experienced dog-
drivers, and we knew that by the time he'd covered the six hundred miles
to Dawson he'd be a good sled-dog.  I say we _knew_, for we were just
getting acquainted with that Spot.  A little later we were not brash
enough to know anything where he was concerned.  A week later we woke up
in the morning to the dangdest dog-fight we'd ever heard.  It was that
Spot come back and knocking the team into shape.  We ate a pretty
depressing breakfast, I can tell you; but cheered up two hours afterward
when we sold him to an official courier, bound in to Dawson with
government despatches.  That Spot was only three days in coming back,
and, as usual, celebrated his arrival with a rough house.

We spent the winter and spring, after our own outfit was across the pass,
freighting other people's outfits; and we made a fat stake.  Also, we
made money out of Spot.  If we sold him once, we sold him twenty times.
He always came back, and no one asked for their money.  We didn't want
the money.  We'd have paid handsomely for any one to take him off our
hands for keeps'.  We had to get rid of him, and we couldn't give him
away, for that would have been suspicious.  But he was such a fine looker
that we never had any difficulty in selling him.  "Unbroke," we'd say,
and they'd pay any old price for him.  We sold him as low as twenty-five
dollars, and once we got a hundred and fifty for him.  That particular
party returned him in person, refused to take his money back, and the way
he abused us was something awful.  He said it was cheap at the price to
tell us what he thought of us; and we felt he was so justified that we
never talked back.  But to this day I've never quite regained all the old
self-respect that was mine before that man talked to me.

When the ice cleared out of the lakes and river, we put our outfit in a
Lake Bennett boat and started for Dawson.  We had a good team of dogs,
and of course we piled them on top the outfit.  That Spot was along--there
was no losing him; and a dozen times, the first day, he knocked one or
another of the dogs overboard in the course of fighting with them.  It
was close quarters, and he didn't like being crowded.

"What that dog needs is space," Steve said the second day.  "Let's maroon
him."

We did, running the boat in at Caribou Crossing for him to jump ashore.
Two of the other dogs, good dogs, followed him; and we lost two whole
days trying to find them.  We never saw those two dogs again; but the
quietness and relief we enjoyed made us decide, like the man who refused
his hundred and fifty, that it was cheap at the price.  For the first
time in months Steve and I laughed and whistled and sang.  We were as
happy as clams.  The dark days were over.  The nightmare had been lifted.
That Spot was gone.

Three weeks later, one morning, Steve and I were standing on the river-
bank at Dawson.  A small boat was just arriving from Lake Bennett.  I saw
Steve give a start, and heard him say something that was not nice and
that was not under his breath.  Then I looked; and there, in the bow of
the boat, with ears pricked up, sat Spot.  Steve and I sneaked
immediately, like beaten curs, like cowards, like absconders from
justice.  It was this last that the lieutenant of police thought when he
saw us sneaking.  He surmised that there were law-officers in the boat
who were after us.  He didn't wait to find out, but kept us in sight, and
in the M. & M. saloon got us in a corner.  We had a merry time
explaining, for we refused to go back to the boat and meet Spot; and
finally he held us under guard of another policeman while he went to the
boat.  After we got clear of him, we started for the cabin, and when we
arrived, there was that Spot sitting on the stoop waiting for us.  Now
how did he know we lived there?  There were forty thousand people in
Dawson that summer, and how did he _savve_ our cabin out of all the
cabins?  How did he know we were in Dawson, anyway?  I leave it to you.
But don't forget what I said about his intelligence and that immortal
something I have seen glimmering in his eyes.

There was no getting rid of him any more.  There were too many people in
Dawson who had bought him up on Chilcoot, and the story got around.  Half
a dozen times we put him on board steamboats going down the Yukon; but he
merely went ashore at the first landing and trotted back up the bank.  We
couldn't sell him, we couldn't kill him (both Steve and I had tried), and
nobody else was able to kill him.  He bore a charmed life.  I've seen him
go down in a dogfight on the main street with fifty dogs on top of him,
and when they were separated, he'd appear on all his four legs, unharmed,
while two of the dogs that had been on top of him would be lying dead.

I saw him steal a chunk of moose-meat from Major Dinwiddie's cache so
heavy that he could just keep one jump ahead of Mrs. Dinwiddie's squaw
cook, who was after him with an axe.  As he went up the hill, after the
squaw gave up, Major Dinwiddie himself came out and pumped his Winchester
into the landscape.  He emptied his magazine twice, and never touched
that Spot.  Then a policeman came along and arrested him for discharging
firearms inside the city limits.  Major Dinwiddie paid his fine, and
Steve and I paid him for the moose-meat at the rate of a dollar a pound,
bones and all.  That was what he paid for it.  Meat was high that year.

I am only telling what I saw with my own eyes.  And now I'll tell you
something also.  I saw that Spot fall through a water-hole.  The ice was
three and a half feet thick, and the current sucked him under like a
straw.  Three hundred yards below was the big water-hole used by the
hospital.  Spot crawled out of the hospital water-hole, licked off the
water, bit out the ice that had formed between his toes, trotted up the
bank, and whipped a big Newfoundland belonging to the Gold Commissioner.

In the fall of 1898, Steve and I poled up the Yukon on the last water,
bound for Stewart River.  We took the dogs along, all except Spot.  We
figured we'd been feeding him long enough.  He'd cost us more time and
trouble and money and grub than we'd got by selling him on the
Chilcoot--especially grub.  So Steve and I tied him down in the cabin and
pulled our freight.  We camped that night at the mouth of Indian River,
and Steve and I were pretty facetious over having shaken him.  Steve was
a funny cuss, and I was just sitting up in the blankets and laughing when
a tornado hit camp.  The way that Spot walked into those dogs and gave
them what-for was hair-raising.  Now how did he get loose?  It's up to
you.  I haven't any theory.  And how did he get across the Klondike
River?  That's another facer.  And anyway, how did he know we had gone up
the Yukon?  You see, we went by water, and he couldn't smell our tracks.
Steve and I began to get superstitious about that dog.  He got on our
nerves, too; and, between you and me, we were just a mite afraid of him.

The freeze-up came on when we were at the mouth of Henderson Creek, and
we traded him off for two sacks of flour to an outfit that was bound up
White River after copper.  Now that whole outfit was lost.  Never trace
nor hide nor hair of men, dogs, sleds, or anything was ever found.  They
dropped clean out of sight.  It became one of the mysteries of the
country.  Steve and I plugged away up the Stewart, and six weeks
afterward that Spot crawled into camp.  He was a perambulating skeleton,
and could just drag along; but he got there.  And what I want to know is,
who told him we were up the Stewart?  We could have gone to a thousand
other places.  How did he know?  You tell me, and I'll tell you.

No losing him.  At the Mayo he started a row with an Indian dog.  The
buck who owned the dog took a swing at Spot with an axe, missed him, and
killed his own dog.  Talk about magic and turning bullets aside--I, for
one, consider it a blamed sight harder to turn an axe aside with a big
buck at the other end of it.  And I saw him do it with my own eyes.  That
buck didn't want to kill his own dog.  You've got to show me.

I told you about Spot breaking into our meat cache.  It was nearly the
death of us.  There wasn't any more meat to be killed, and meat was all
we had to live on.  The moose had gone back several hundred miles and the
Indians with them.  There we were.  Spring was on, and we had to wait for
the river to break.  We got pretty thin before we decided to eat the
dogs, and we decided to eat Spot first.  Do you know what that dog did?
He sneaked.  Now how did he know our minds were made up to eat him?  We
sat up nights laying for him, but he never came back, and we ate the
other dogs.  We ate the whole team.

And now for the sequel.  You know what it is when a big river breaks up
and a few billion tons of ice go out, jamming and milling and grinding.
Just in the thick of it, when the Stewart went out, rumbling and roaring,
we sighted Spot out in the middle.  He'd got caught as he was trying to
cross up above somewhere.  Steve and I yelled and shouted and ran up and
down the bank, tossing our hats in the air.  Sometimes we'd stop and hug
each other, we were that boisterous, for we saw Spot's finish.  He didn't
have a chance in a million.  He didn't have any chance at all.  After the
ice-run, we got into a canoe and paddled down to the Yukon, and down the
Yukon to Dawson, stopping to feed up for a week at the cabins at the
mouth of Henderson Creek.  And as we came in to the bank at Dawson, there
sat that Spot, waiting for us, his ears pricked up, his tail wagging, his
mouth smiling, extending a hearty welcome to us.  Now how did he get out
of that ice?  How did he know we were coming to Dawson, to the very hour
and minute, to be out there on the bank waiting for us?

The more I think of that Spot, the more I am convinced that there are
things in this world that go beyond science.  On no scientific grounds
can that Spot be explained.  It's psychic phenomena, or mysticism, or
something of that sort, I guess, with a lot of Theosophy thrown in.  The
Klondike is a good country.  I might have been there yet, and become a
millionaire, if it hadn't been for Spot.  He got on my nerves.  I stood
him for two years altogether, and then I guess my stamina broke.  It was
the summer of 1899 when I pulled out.  I didn't say anything to Steve.  I
just sneaked.  But I fixed it up all right.  I wrote Steve a note, and
enclosed a package of "rough-on-rats," telling him what to do with it.  I
was worn down to skin and bone by that Spot, and I was that nervous that
I'd jump and look around when there wasn't anybody within hailing
distance.  But it was astonishing the way I recuperated when I got quit
of him.  I got back twenty pounds before I arrived in San Francisco, and
by the time I'd crossed the ferry to Oakland I was my old self again, so
that even my wife looked in vain for any change in me.

Steve wrote to me once, and his letter seemed irritated.  He took it kind
of hard because I'd left him with Spot.  Also, he said he'd used the
"rough-on-rats," per directions, and that there was nothing doing.  A
year went by.  I was back in the office and prospering in all ways--even
getting a bit fat.  And then Steve arrived.  He didn't look me up.  I
read his name in the steamer list, and wondered why.  But I didn't wonder
long.  I got up one morning and found that Spot chained to the gate-post
and holding up the milkman.  Steve went north to Seattle, I learned, that
very morning.  I didn't put on any more weight.  My wife made me buy him
a collar and tag, and within an hour he showed his gratitude by killing
her pet Persian cat.  There is no getting rid of that Spot.  He will be
with me until I die, for he'll never die.  My appetite is not so good
since he arrived, and my wife says I am looking peaked.  Last night that
Spot got into Mr. Harvey's hen-house (Harvey is my next-door neighbour)
and killed nineteen of his fancy-bred chickens.  I shall have to pay for
them.  My neighbours on the other side quarrelled with my wife and then
moved out.  Spot was the cause of it.  And that is why I am disappointed
in Stephen Mackaye.  I had no idea he was so mean a man.




FLUSH OF GOLD


Lon McFane was a bit grumpy, what of losing his tobacco pouch, or else he
might have told me, before we got to it, something about the cabin at
Surprise Lake.  All day, turn and turn about, we had spelled each other
at going to the fore and breaking trail for the dogs.  It was heavy
snowshoe work, and did not tend to make a man voluble, yet Lon McFane
might have found breath enough at noon, when we stopped to boil coffee,
with which to tell me.  But he didn't.  Surprise Lake? it was Surprise
Cabin to me.  I had never heard of it before.  I confess I was a bit
tired.  I had been looking for Lon to stop and make camp any time for an
hour; but I had too much pride to suggest making camp or to ask him his
intentions; and yet he was my man, lured at a handsome wage to mush my
dogs for me and to obey my commands.  I guess I was a bit grumpy myself.
He said nothing, and I was resolved to ask nothing, even if we tramped on
all night.

We came upon the cabin abruptly.  For a week of trail we had met no one,
and, in my mind, there had been little likelihood of meeting any one for
a week to come.  And yet there it was, right before my eyes, a cabin,
with a dim light in the window and smoke curling up from the chimney.

"Why didn't you tell me--" I began, but was interrupted by Lon, who
muttered--

"Surprise Lake--it lies up a small feeder half a mile on.  It's only a
pond."

"Yes, but the cabin--who lives in it?"

"A woman," was the answer, and the next moment Lon had rapped on the
door, and a woman's voice bade him enter.

"Have you seen Dave recently?" she asked.

"Nope," Lon answered carelessly.  "I've been in the other direction, down
Circle City way.  Dave's up Dawson way, ain't he?"

The woman nodded, and Lon fell to unharnessing the dogs, while I unlashed
the sled and carried the camp outfit into the cabin.  The cabin was a
large, one-room affair, and the woman was evidently alone in it.  She
pointed to the stove, where water was already boiling, and Lon set about
the preparation of supper, while I opened the fish-bag and fed the dogs.
I looked for Lon to introduce us, and was vexed that he did not, for they
were evidently old friends.

"You are Lon McFane, aren't you?" I heard her ask him.  "Why, I remember
you now.  The last time I saw you it was on a steamboat, wasn't it?  I
remember . . . "

Her speech seemed suddenly to be frozen by the spectacle of dread which,
I knew, from the tenor I saw mounting in her eyes, must be on her inner
vision.  To my astonishment, Lon was affected by her words and manner.
His face showed desperate, for all his voice sounded hearty and genial,
as he said--

"The last time we met was at Dawson, Queen's Jubilee, or Birthday, or
something--don't you remember?--the canoe races in the river, and the
obstacle races down the main street?"

The terror faded out of her eyes and her whole body relaxed.  "Oh, yes, I
do remember," she said.  "And you won one of the canoe races."

"How's Dave been makin' it lately?  Strikin' it as rich as ever, I
suppose?" Lon asked, with apparent irrelevance.

She smiled and nodded, and then, noticing that I had unlashed the bed
roll, she indicated the end of the cabin where I might spread it.  Her
own bunk, I noticed, was made up at the opposite end.

"I thought it was Dave coming when I heard your dogs," she said.

After that she said nothing, contenting herself with watching Lon's
cooking operations, and listening the while as for the sound of dogs
along the trail.  I lay back on the blankets and smoked and watched.  Here
was mystery; I could make that much out, but no more could I make out.
Why in the deuce hadn't Lon given me the tip before we arrived?  I looked
at her face, unnoticed by her, and the longer I looked the harder it was
to take my eyes away.  It was a wonderfully beautiful face, unearthly, I
may say, with a light in it or an expression or something "that was never
on land or sea."  Fear and terror had completely vanished, and it was a
placidly beautiful face--if by "placid" one can characterize that
intangible and occult something that I cannot say was a radiance or a
light any more than I can say it was an expression.

Abruptly, as if for the first time, she became aware of my presence.

"Have you seen Dave recently?" she asked me.  It was on the tip of my
tongue to say "Dave who?" when Lon coughed in the smoke that arose from
the sizzling bacon.  The bacon might have caused that cough, but I took
it as a hint and left my question unasked.  "No, I haven't," I answered.
"I'm new in this part of the country--"

"But you don't mean to say," she interrupted, "that you've never heard of
Dave--of Big Dave Walsh?"

"You see," I apologised, "I'm new in the country.  I've put in most of my
time in the Lower Country, down Nome way."

"Tell him about Dave," she said to Lon.

Lon seemed put out, but he began in that hearty, genial manner that I had
noticed before.  It seemed a shade too hearty and genial, and it
irritated me.

"Oh, Dave is a fine man," he said.  "He's a man, every inch of him, and
he stands six feet four in his socks.  His word is as good as his bond.
The man lies who ever says Dave told a lie, and that man will have to
fight with me, too, as well--if there's anything left of him when Dave
gets done with him.  For Dave is a fighter.  Oh, yes, he's a scrapper
from way back.  He got a grizzly with a '38 popgun.  He got clawed some,
but he knew what he was doin'.  He went into the cave on purpose to get
that grizzly.  'Fraid of nothing.  Free an' easy with his money, or his
last shirt an' match when out of money.  Why, he drained Surprise Lake
here in three weeks an' took out ninety thousand, didn't he?"  She
flushed and nodded her head proudly.  Through his recital she had
followed every word with keenest interest.  "An' I must say," Lon went
on, "that I was disappointed sore on not meeting Dave here to-night."

Lon served supper at one end of the table of whip-sawed spruce, and we
fell to eating.  A howling of the dogs took the woman to the door.  She
opened it an inch and listened.

"Where is Dave Walsh?" I asked, in an undertone.

"Dead," Lon answered.  "In hell, maybe.  I don't know.  Shut up."

"But you just said that you expected to meet him here to-night," I
challenged.

"Oh, shut up, can't you," was Lon's reply, in the same cautious
undertone.

The woman had closed the door and was returning, and I sat and meditated
upon the fact that this man who told me to shut up received from me a
salary of two hundred and fifty dollars a month and his board.

Lon washed the dishes, while I smoked and watched the woman.  She seemed
more beautiful than ever--strangely and weirdly beautiful, it is true.
After looking at her steadfastly for five minutes, I was compelled to
come back to the real world and to glance at Lon McFane.  This enabled me
to know, without discussion, that the woman, too, was real.  At first I
had taken her for the wife of Dave Walsh; but if Dave Walsh were dead, as
Lon had said, then she could be only his widow.

It was early to bed, for we faced a long day on the morrow; and as Lon
crawled in beside me under the blankets, I ventured a question.

"That woman's crazy, isn't she?"

"Crazy as a loon," he answered.

And before I could formulate my next question, Lon McFane, I swear, was
off to sleep.  He always went to sleep that way--just crawled into the
blankets, closed his eyes, and was off, a demure little heavy breathing
rising on the air.  Lon never snored.

And in the morning it was quick breakfast, feed the dogs, load the sled,
and hit the trail.  We said good-bye as we pulled out, and the woman
stood in the doorway and watched us off.  I carried the vision of her
unearthly beauty away with me, just under my eyelids, and all I had to
do, any time, was to close them and see her again.  The way was unbroken,
Surprise Lake being far off the travelled trails, and Lon and I took turn
about at beating down the feathery snow with our big, webbed shoes so
that the dogs could travel.  "But you said you expected to meet Dave
Walsh at the cabin," trembled on the tip of my tongue a score of times.  I
did not utter it.  I could wait until we knocked off in the middle of the
day.  And when the middle of the day came, we went right on, for, as Lon
explained, there was a camp of moose hunters at the forks of the Teelee,
and we could make there by dark.  But we didn't make there by dark, for
Bright, the lead-dog, broke his shoulder-blade, and we lost an hour over
him before we shot him.  Then, crossing a timber jam on the frozen bed of
the Teelee, the sled suffered a wrenching capsize, and it was a case of
make camp and repair the runner.  I cooked supper and fed the dogs while
Lon made the repairs, and together we got in the night's supply of ice
and firewood.  Then we sat on our blankets, our moccasins steaming on
upended sticks before the fire, and had our evening smoke.

"You didn't know her?" Lon queried suddenly.  I shook my head.

"You noticed the colour of her hair and eyes and her complexion, well,
that's where she got her name--she was like the first warm glow of a
golden sunrise.  She was called Flush of Gold.  Ever heard of her?"

Somewhere I had a confused and misty remembrance of having heard the
name, yet it meant nothing to me.  "Flush of Gold," I repeated; "sounds
like the name of a dance-house girl."  Lon shook his head.  "No, she was
a good woman, at least in that sense, though she sinned greatly just the
same."

"But why do you speak always of her in the past tense, as though she were
dead?"

"Because of the darkness on her soul that is the same as the darkness of
death.  The Flush of Gold that I knew, that Dawson knew, and that Forty
Mile knew before that, is dead.  That dumb, lunatic creature we saw last
night was not Flush of Gold."

"And Dave?" I queried.

"He built that cabin," Lon answered, "He built it for her . . . and for
himself.  He is dead.  She is waiting for him there.  She half believes
he is not dead.  But who can know the whim of a crazed mind?  Maybe she
wholly believes he is not dead.  At any rate, she waits for him there in
the cabin he built.  Who would rouse the dead?  Then who would rouse the
living that are dead?  Not I, and that is why I let on to expect to meet
Dave Walsh there last night.  I'll bet a stack that I'd a been more
surprised than she if I _had_ met him there last night."

"I do not understand," I said.  "Begin at the beginning, as a white man
should, and tell me the whole tale."

And Lon began.  "Victor Chauvet was an old Frenchman--born in the south
of France.  He came to California in the days of gold.  He was a pioneer.
He found no gold, but, instead, became a maker of bottled sunshine--in
short, a grape-grower and wine-maker.  Also, he followed gold
excitements.  That is what brought him to Alaska in the early days, and
over the Chilcoot and down the Yukon long before the Carmack strike.  The
old town site of Ten Mile was Chauvet's.  He carried the first mail into
Arctic City.  He staked those coal-mines on the Porcupine a dozen years
ago.  He grubstaked Loftus into the Nippennuck Country.  Now it happened
that Victor Chauvet was a good Catholic, loving two things in this world,
wine and woman.  Wine of all kinds he loved, but of woman, only one, and
she was the mother of Marie Chauvet."

Here I groaned aloud, having meditated beyond self-control over the fact
that I paid this man two hundred and fifty dollars a month.

"What's the matter now?" he demanded.

"Matter?" I complained.  "I thought you were telling the story of Flush
of Gold.  I don't want a biography of your old French wine-bibber."

Lon calmly lighted his pipe, took one good puff, then put the pipe aside.
"And you asked me to begin at the