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Title: Jack Heaton gold seeker
Author: A. Frederick Collins
Illustrator: Morgan Dennis
Release date: February 26, 2024 [eBook #73043]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1921
Credits: Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JACK HEATON GOLD SEEKER ***
JACK HEATON, GOLD SEEKER
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Wonders of Natural History
Jack Heaton, Gold Seeker
Jack Heaton, Wireless Operator
Jack Heaton, Oil Prospector
The Boys’ Airplane Book
The Boys’ Book of Submarines
Handicraft for Boys
Inventing for Boys
Farm and Garden Tractors
[Illustration: “HIS FIRST EFFORTS AT SNOWSHOEING WERE LAUGHABLE IN THE
EXTREME.”]
JACK HEATON
GOLD SEEKER
BY
A. FREDERICK COLLINS
Author of “Inventing for Boys,” “Handicraft for
Boys,” “Jack Heaton, Oil Prospector,” etc.
WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS BY
MORGAN DENNIS
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1921, by
Frederick A. Stokes Company
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
To
THE CORYS
WITH PLEASANT MEMORIES OF
ALASKAN NIGHTS
CONTENTS
I How the Trouble Started
II Ho! for the Gold Country!
III On the Edge of Things
IV When Bill and Black Pete Met
V Outfitting at Circle
VI Mush, You Huskies, Mush
VII In Winter Quarters
VIII On the Arctic Circle
IX The Land of the Yeehats
X On the Trail of Gold
XI Gold, Gold, Nothing but Gold
XII Back to the Haunts of Men
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“His efforts at snowshoeing were laughable in the extreme”
“It was a team of dancers”
“Black Pete did pull the trigger every chance he got”
“‘I’ve conclooded they’ve got human brains just the same
as you and me’”
“‘These Indians _cached_ the gold in a pile of stones’”
“Bill drew his six-gun and emptied it into the head of
the great beast”
“‘Gold! Gold! Nothing but gold!!!’”
“The ungainly craft pitched and rolled about like a
piece of cork”
JACK HEATON, GOLD SEEKER
CHAPTER I
HOW THE TROUBLE STARTED
“Well glory be! an’ if it ain’t Jack Heaton hisself. An’ right glad am I
to see yuh, Jack. Bill will be mighty glad, too, for he’s that bugs on
goin’ to South America for them di-_am_-onds. Sure he’s been talkin’ o’
nothin’ else these last two weeks gone Saturday. An’ how are yuh anyhow,
Jack?”
It was Mrs. Adams, Bill’s warm-hearted and courageous mother, who had
answered the bell and was greeting Jack in this whole-souled fashion.
Since the boys had returned from Mexico and had come into possession of
all that money for the services they had rendered the _American
Consolidated Oil Company, Inc._, the Adamses, mother and son, had risen
in the world not only figuratively but very literally, for instead of
living in a shanty hard by the gas-house under the viaduct which spans
Manhattan Street, they had moved into a five room apartment on Claremont
Avenue--and a front apartment overlooking the Hudson River at that. No
wonder, then, that Mrs. Adams was emitting her good nature in all
directions like rays of radium and that of all persons Jack was an
especial target for them.
“Bill’s in the parlor, Jack; go right in,” she said with emphasis on the
_parlor_, for it was the only one she had ever been the mistress of in
all her hardworking life.
“Well, Bill, what do you think you’re doing, getting ready to go after a
_yegg_ or rehearsing for a movie?” asked Jack as he reached the front
room, which by the grace of landlords and popular usage is known as the
parlor, where he found his _pal_ engaged in the gentle pastime of
snapping a six-gun.
Bill cut short his exercises with the weapon that had seen such hard
service in Mexico so recently and he laughed lightly, though no one
except his closest friends would have been aware of it.
“Nary one, Jack, but I’ve had one o’ them hunch things that you used to
get and it’s the one best bet as how me and you are goin’ to the wilds
o’ the Amazon and capture some o’ them chunks o’ mud similar like and
appertainin’ to the one you wears on your mitt. So I was just limberin’
up my trigger finger a bit with a little action.”
“Oh, you were, were you,” remarked Jack with a mild touch of sarcasm in
his voice.
“Yes, an’ I was just thinkin’ about ’phonin’ you to find out how soon we
could get under way. You see, I haven’t done a tap to make a dollar
since our landfall and owin’ to the high cost o’ livin’--we’re over two
hundred feet above Manhattan Street now--my pile’s nosin’ down like a
submarine and it’ll soon be restin’ on the bottom and we’ll be back
where we come from. So I’m askin’ you, not only as man to man but as my
pal, when do we start?”
“We don’t head that way this time,” replied Jack, “we head _north_, with
a capital N.”
“Whad’a mean we head north?” asked Bill in utter amazement.
“That’s exactly what I came over to see you about, Bill. I’ve had
half-a-dozen jobs offered me since we came back but routine work is
entirely out of my line so what’s the use in wasting someone else’s good
money and my own good time. No, I’ve tried it and I can’t be a good man
Friday for any business concern--not even for my dad’s.
“So you see you and I are in the same class--everything going out and
nothing coming in and I’ve been wondering a lot lately what we could
scare up that would make a noise like a million dollars. Say Bill, did
you ever read Jack London’s ‘Call of the Wild’?” Jack put the question
without notice.
“‘Call o’ the Wild’?” mused Bill, turning the phrase over in his dome of
thought; “I’ve heard all kinds o’ calls o’ wild men an’ wild women but
never do I remember any wild call by this blokie Jack London. Who is
this guy anyway?”
“There’s no use talking to a fellow like that,” thought Jack, but then,
as in dozens of other instances in the past, he patiently explained who
Jack London was and repeated the tale as told by that past master of
fiction, for the benefit of his less well-read pal.
“Now the point I’m driving at is this,” he went on. “Jack London tells
us that white men who were prospecting in the land of the _Yeehats_, a
tribe of Indians in the gold country of Alaska, found diggings where
there was _gold, gold, nothing but gold_, I tell you, and they packed it
in moosehide sacks so that they could get it back to civilization. Then
the Yeehats came upon and killed them and the shining yellow metal fell
into their hands. The gold must still be up there, and you can’t dispute
it either.”
At this recital Bill’s big blue eyes bulged out like those of a spider
watching a fly. He had caught the drift of what Jack was saying and if
there is any one thing that will set an inert imagination to functioning
quicker or fix the attention of the human mind faster than another it is
the mordant of seeking out this precious metal that we call gold. Then
he blinked his eyes and shook his head.
“It sounds to me,” he said finally, which in the lingo of the cowboy,
means that he had his doubts. “If this is a yarn this London feller
wrote how do we know that he didn’t make up the Yeehats and the gold
just like he made up the rest of it,” Bill wanted to know, and not
without reason.
“I’ll tell you how. That book was given to me for a birthday present
when I was about ten years old and whenever I wanted to read a good
story I took it up just as everybody, from the rag-picker to the
president, re-reads ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and ‘Treasure Island.’ So one fine
day, not long after we got back from the oil-fields I spied the book and
read it again; then all of a sudden this ending about the Yeehats and
the gold in sacks struck me that there might be some truth lurking
behind the fiction like a _greaser_ behind a giant cactus or a Siwash
behind a totem pole.”
“But how can we find out for sure?”
“I have found out already. I wrote to the _Secretary of the Bureau of
Ethnology_ at Washington and to the _Minister of the Interior of
Canada_, and they sent me handbooks that tell all about the Indians of
Alaska and the Yukon Territory and I’ve got the real _dope_ on them.”
Bill had a high regard for Jack’s way of boring into things and this
scheme of going to the governments for information about the Indians up
there in the far Northland seemed to his untrained mind to approach very
closely to a high order of genius. Still he was not entirely convinced.
“That shows that the climax of London’s book relating to the Yeehats is
straight from the shoulder, doesn’t it?” Jack wound up.
“That part about the Yeehats is all right but how about the gold?
Because a tribe of Indians called the Yeehats lived up there doesn’t say
that pioneer prospectors actually found the nuggets, got it, piled it up
in sacks ready to bring back where they could spend it and then were
killed off by the Indians. Mind you, Jack, I’m not sayin’ as how it
couldn’t have happened but I’m only sayin’ as how I’d like to know for
sure afore we goes, see?”
“Well first of all there’s the Yeehats--” Jack began to explain all over
again.
“That part about the Yeehats is all O.K.; there’s no blinkin’ at facts.
No one I’ll say, no not even a bookmaker could think up such an
outlandish name as _Yeehat_ even to splice it to a redskin for a name,
but any one who couldn’t think about gold in chunks would be lonesome if
he had a brain,” argued Bill.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” called out Jack. “First of all never
call a man who writes books a bookmaker. A man who puts his pen to paper
and writes down various things for other folks to read is a _maker of
books_ while a man that takes bets at a race track is a _bookmaker_. Now
don’t get these two professions mixed up again.”
“The trouble with you, Jack, is that you can’t see the woods because o’
the trees, as you used to tell me down in Mexico when I picked you up on
some point that didn’t have anything to do with the case. What’s the
_diff_ I’d like to know, whether he was a maker o’ books as you calls
him or a bookmaker as I calls him. Well go on with your ratkillin’.”
“What I was going to say when you sidetracked me was that when a writer
writes a book every idea that goes into it really comes from some
outside source and consequently all this stuff that we call inspiration
and imagination is more or less bunk. This being true, I hold that what
London wrote about the prospectors, the gold they found, the moosehide
sacks of it they piled up and the Yeehats, were not just mere fleeting
fancies which were conjured up in his brain to serve his purpose for the
story but hard and fast facts that he had heard about when he was up
above there in Alaska.”
“I knows what you say and I guess I knows what you’re talking about, but
as against the book that tells about the Yeehats and the sacks o’ gold
in the land where the rainbow ends give me the straight tip on the
di-_am_-onds that Jack Heaton got from the cannibal princess where the
rainbow begins,” plugged in Bill, still bent on the diamond project.
“Don’t you see, Bill, it will take a mint of money to outfit that
diamond hunting expedition--why, we’d have to take a small army with us
to cope with those Amazonian savages while as I told you before they’re
all Christianized, peace-loving folks in the far north--too cold to be
anything else. Why, we couldn’t begin to finance this diamond
proposition between us even if we put every dollar we have to our names
in it,” Jack drove his argument home and he could see that the force of
his logic and oratory was beginning to have the desired effect on his
hard-headed pal.
“Couldn’t you get the directors of the _American Consolidated Oil
Company_ to take a flyer and back us in the di-_am_-ond venture,”
further persisted Bill.
“I might be able to get them to see it but those old four-per-centers
are long on sure things and very short on anything that looks like a
gamble. I’d hate to have any of them go into anything with us that was
not as sure of succeeding as to-morrow’s sun is sure of rising, for if
we ever went down there and failed to bring back a boat load of diamonds
as large as the _Koohinoor_, or _Mountain of Light_ as it is called,
they’d think they’d been stung by a nest of hornets and if we didn’t
bring back any at all they’d want to throw us into the Atlantic Ocean.”
“They’re sure enough dead-game sports,” Bill commented sadly, “but
there’s one thing certain and that is if I don’t make a ten-strike soon
I’ll have to get a job as a longshoreman and me mudder and me ’ull be
movin’ down to the shanty. Get me?”
“As a longshoreman only gets ten dollars a day for six or eight hours’
work I guess the job at that might net you enough to keep the coyote
from sleeping in the vestibule of your apartment. If I wasn’t too heavy
for light work and too light for heavy work I’d get a job on the docks
myself. As things now stand I’m going to Alaska and I’ll bring back so
much gold that if I threw it on the market there’d be a slump in the
price of it,” orated Jack boastfully, as he rubbed his hands together in
pleasurable anticipation like a miserable young Shylock. But the magic
of gold is apt to make misers of even the most generous folks.
“Yuh lads come now and have a bite to eat,” sang out Mrs. Adams cheerily
and the two youngsters went through an arched hole in the wall that
connected, yet separated the parlor from the dining room, though this
may sound a bit paradoxical. The latter room was decorated with a plate
rail around the wall and a great vari-colored dome lamp hanging from the
ceiling.
Under the lamp was a table laid with a cloth as white, silver as bright
and china as fine as would be found, Jack opined, up or down the Avenue
or even over on Riverside Drive. Bill’s mother was almost as proud of
her new home and its fixtures as she was of her boy and that is saying
all of it. As for Jack, why she thought he was the smartest boy in the
world; yes, she truly did, and whatever he said went with her.
Their apartment was tastily furnished and comfortable, and he was glad
to know that he had been, in a measure, indirectly responsible for it.
It has often been said that travel is the great educator but the
possession of money goes a mighty long ways toward making gentlemen out
of coal heavers and ladies out of scrub women. True there was still some
room for improvement in the way Bill and his mother handled “English as
she is spoke” but no improvement was needed in their hearts.
“So yuh lads are goin’ to South America for di-_am_-onds, are yuh,” said
Mrs. Adams when they were seated. “Well, it ’ud be a fine and
ge-glorious thing if you’d fetch home a couple of scuttles of them
baubles and throw them to those as can afford ’em at so much per throw,”
and her eyes reflected the happy thought which she had voiced, as a
Kimberly blue-white stone reflects the light of the sun. “But do yuh
know Jack,” she added pensively, “I’d a deal ruther have me boy Bill
livin’ with me in the shanty than to have him riskin’ his young life
down there on the equator with those man-eaters.”
“You can rest easy in your mind on that score, Mrs. Adams,” Jack assured
her, “for I’ve nearly persuaded Bill to give up this South American
venture and join me in an expedition to the Alaskan gold fields, to
search for a few sacks of nuggets.”
“Ilasker, Ilasker? No, I never heard of the place before. It must not
have been on the map when I went to school,” thought Mrs. Adams out
loud.
“You’ve heard of the Yukon?” suggested Jack.
“Yukon, Yukon? I can’t say that I have, but,” and her eyes brightened as
though she had solved a jigsaw puzzle, “I have heard of the Klondike.”
“That accounts for it then,” said Jack, “for the Klondike is a gold
district and it is named from the Klondike River which it is on. The
Klondike River is in the Yukon Territory, which belongs to Canada, and
this is directly east of Alaska. The Klondike River is really only a
stream, perhaps not over a hundred feet wide, but so rich were the early
gold fields there that practically all of the Yukon Territory and a part
of Alaska to boot has been called the Klondike country. Such is the fame
and power of gold.”
“We own Ilasker, don’t we Jack?” Bill wanted to know.
“Yes, though she used to belong to Russia but the U. S. bought her about
fifty years ago for seven million, two hundred thousand dollars. Since
then she has produced three hundred million dollars worth of gold. Some
bargain, what say, Bill?”
“I’ll say it was,” replied his pal.
“It came about this way,” continued Jack, “when she was owned by Russia
she was a losing deal for that country because in the first place she
was too far away from the seat of government and there was no wire or
wireless communication at that time between them; and in the second
place Russia hadn’t any more of a notion as to how to govern her than
she has of governing herself now.
“When the Civil War was on Russia was a good friend of the Union and
helped us in every way she could, even to loaning us her warships. As
Russia wanted to dispose of Alaska and Uncle Sam wanted to pay something
for the services she had rendered, Mr. Seward, who was Secretary of
State in President Lincoln’s Cabinet, bought the territory, which was
then considered entirely worthless, from her.
“The International boundary line that divides Alaska from Canada was in
dispute between the United States and Great Britain almost from the time
we got her from Russia but neither country did any worrying over it for
Alaska was not supposed to be worth arguing about. But when gold was
discovered on the Yukon River in 1896 and at Cape Nome in 1898 there was
a great stampede, just as there was to California in ’49. Then it was
that both the United States and Great Britain got busy and a commission
met in London, England, in 1903 to settle the matter, which was done to
the satisfaction of both countries.”
“How far away are these gold fields that you and Bill are goin’ to?”
Mrs. Adams asked; “are they as far away as the di-_am_-ond fields of
South America?”
“I should say about the same distance, Mrs. Adams, and that is in the
neighborhood of some five thousand miles.”
“It’s sure some little ways off,” chipped in Bill, “but distance doesn’t
count; what we wants is the yellow butter, hey Buddie?”
“That’s what we’re after; other folks have found it and we stand as good
a chance as they did. Are you with me, Bill?”
“It sounds to me, Jack, but I’ll go with youse to Ilasker on your hunch
even if we have to walk back.”
“Good!” ejaculated Jack; “I guessed you would from the start. And so you
see all of this six-gun practice is tommyrot, for the men of the frozen
north are different from those of the burnt-up south, for whether they
are Americans, French-Canadians, Indians or half-breeds, they are all
white men--white at heart--and you’ll never have any use for a side arm
up there.”
“It must be a orful nice country, but if you don’t mind I’m going to
tote mine along just the same.”
“Then it’s all settled, is it, Bill?”
“I’m right there, pal o’ mine, every time.”
The boys struck hands and their new adventure was on.
CHAPTER II
HO! FOR THE GOLD COUNTRY!
“Now that I’ve declared myself in on this game I wants to know something
about how it is supposed to be played,” said Bill, who, having once
thrown his pet scheme overboard went into the new one heart and soul.
“How big a country is this here Ilasker and to what part do we hike?”
Now Bill was like lots of other born and bred “Noo” Yorkers in that
wherever there was an _a_ the end of a word he invariably substituted
_er_ for it. As Bill’s mother had excused herself and made her exit,
Jack took it upon himself to set his pal to rights.
“Not _Ile-ask’-her_, Bill, but _A-las’-ka_; get that? A-las’-ka!”
“All right, _A-las’-ker_ then; have it any way,” groused Bill who,
though he always wanted to know the right of every thing and had
insisted time and time again that Jack correct him whenever he said or
did anything that was not “accordin’ to Hoyle,” as he put it, still he
was a little peeved when his pal did so, and in this respect he was not
unlike the common run of folks whether of low or high degree.
“It’s a larger country than you’d think. Here are two maps of her that
I’ve brought along,” said Jack as he produced, unfolded and spread the
large sheets on the floor. This done, both he and Bill dropped to the
correct prone position for shooting--that is lying flat on their
stomachs with their faces downward--a position of great value in
skirmishes on the border, but one seldom needed in civilized New York,
unless it be to size up a map to the best advantage.
“This smaller one will give you an idea of how big she really is,”
continued Jack; “it shows Alaska laid on top of the United States, that
is compared with her. You see the main part of her is nearly square and
she is hemmed in by the Pacific and Arctic Oceans all round except on
her eastern boundary which is the Yukon Territory of Canada.
“If you lay the square part of Alaska over the middle part of the United
States as this map shows, it will cover about all of Illinois,
Wisconsin, Montana, Iowa, Missouri, North and South Dakota, Nebraska,
Kansas and Oklahoma; then that handle of coast land, which is less than
a hundred miles wide and some five hundred miles long, extends southeast
along the western edge of Canada and this strip would reach clear across
Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia to the Atlantic Ocean, while pushing out
to the southwest is the Alaska Peninsula and beyond it the Aleutian
Islands.
“The peninsula is nearly five hundred miles long and the islands are
strung out for another five hundred miles or more, so that the tail end
of them would touch the Pacific Ocean in California. You see for size,
Texas, which we think is a pretty big state, isn’t in it with Alaska.”
“It’s almost big enough to get lost in,” reflected Bill dryly.
“Now this large one is a government map of Alaska and I’ll show you
exactly where we are headed for. See that red cross I’ve marked there
just below the Arctic Circle on the Big Black River? Well, that’s our
destination and when we reach it we’ll be in the land of the Yeehats. At
any rate that is where they once lived, for from what I have gathered
they were wiped out of existence some years ago. Once we get into their
country it’s up to us to find out where _the gold is cached_.”[1]
[1] Pronounced _cashed_, and means hidden purposely.
“But suppose the Yeehats, or some other tribe of Indians, are still
there and that they’ve got the gold corralled, what then?” Bill wanted
to know.
“Oh well, we’ll have to treat with them according to the exigencies of
the case. The first thing we must do though is to get there, the next is
to locate the gold and when this preliminary but important work is done
I think we can safely say that it is ours.”
“Ours not because we found it first but because we found it last,” Bill
added to clinch the ownership.
“Exactly, or words to that effect.”
“Must be awful cold up there,” suggested Bill as his eyes wandered
around the sub-Arctic region on the map.
“In summer it’s a mighty pleasant place but in winter it does get a
little chilly, for sometimes the bottom nearly drops out of the
thermometer and the quicksilver falls to fifty, sixty and even seventy
degrees below zero; but you don’t mind a little thing like cold weather
do you?”
“No,” replied Bill thoughtfully, “but I kicked all last winter to the
superintendent of this here apartment buildin’ because the heat was only
sixty-eight degrees while I likes it about seventy-two degrees. If I’d
a-known we was goin’ on this here trip to the frigid zone I’d a-told him
to bank the fires, or let ’em go out entirely, so I’d get used to it.
Lettin’ that be as it may, what kind of an outfit do we want and do we
get it here or when we gets up into that blarsted country?”
“We’ll take our rifles and I suppose we ought to have a shot-gun for
small game, and while, as I have said before, the inhabitants, whatever
may be their color or country, are all peace abiding folks still we
ought to take our six-guns along so that we can protect our gold when we
get back to civilized lands again.”
“An’ we’d better take our thermos bottles, solid alcohol cookin’ outfit,
flash lamps, compasses and a pair of pliers with us, not forgettin’ me
mouth-organ,” put in Bill.
“By all means,” allowed Jack; “as for the rest of it we can find out
exactly what we need in the way of rations and equipment when we reach
Dawson or Circle City. We don’t want to overload ourselves but there
must be a-plenty of the necessaries, for, the way I figure it, we’ll
probably have to stay the best part of a year in those parts.”
“When do we leave for this promised land o’ gold and sixty degrees below
zero?” inquired impatient red-headed Bill.
“It’s about the right time of the year for us to be pilgriming now,”
returned his partner; “that’s why I’m here.”
“How long will it take us to get up there?”
“Oh, about three weeks or so if we make connections and don’t lose too
much time on the way.”
“Then I takes it the weather’ll still be warm when we arrives. We’ll get
a canoe, or maybe a couple o’ them, and paddle up this Big Black River
until we comes to the land of the Yeehats,” suggested Bill.
“No, that’s not my idea of it at all. You see, Bill, so much of the
country where we are going is low that it is more or less wet all the
time and it would make traveling overland in summer with our outfit a
hard game. The way I’ve figured it out is that we ought to start from
Circle City when winter sets in and travel by dogsled; then we can go up
or down rivers, over them, cut cross country, yes, to the North Pole if
we want to, and without any hard work on our part.
“Winter sets in early up there and by the time we reach Circle, get our
outfit, learn the lay of the land, hear what all the old timers have to
say and the first snow begins to fly, we’ll be just about ready to
strike out.”
Bill shoved his hands in his pockets, went to the window and focused his
eyes on a great warship that lay at anchor in the Hudson. He was
wondering, not about the craft for he knew all about her and every other
kind afloat; he likewise knew about some of those craft that navigated
the land as for instance _hawses_, but this traveling in winter in
search of gold with dog-sleds was a deep mystery to him.
“In winter the gold’ll be snowed under and we’d never find it I’m
a-thinkin’,” he said thoughtfully.
“Take it from me, Bill, wherever the gold has been _cached_ there will
be signs that will point out the place as plain as the nose on your
face. All we’ve got to do is to find the signs--uncovering the gold will
be easy,” argued Jack.
“It sounds to me, Buddy, but if we’re goin’, the sooner the quicker says
I.”
“The _Twentieth Century Limited_ leaves the Grand Central Station at
2:45 in the afternoon and pulls into the LaSalle Street Station at
Chicago the next morning in time so that we can make connection with the
_North Coast Limited_ of the _Burlington Route_ which carries a
_Northern Pacific_ sleeper through to Seattle. How about leaving
to-morrow afternoon?”
“All to the good; that’ll give me time to see me goil and tell her I’m
goin’ to Ilasker,” for Bill, be it known had become very much smitten
with Vera Clair, the little blond telephone girl down in the office of
the _American Consolidated Oil Company_. And Vera, who could roll the
number _three_ under, over, through and above her tongue with the best
of operators, and who also lived in Harlem, thought quite well of Bill,
too.
“If you say that,” warned Jack, “Miss Clair will think you are going to
ask her a very important question and you might find yourself in a
somewhat embarrassing position.”
“What d’you mean ‘’barrassin’ position,’” questioned Bill sharply,
blinking the while at Jack.
“Why she might think you meant you were going to pop the question----”
“Put the pedal on that soft stuff right where you are, or I’ll make
youse put up your dooks, see, Buddy.”
“Then say _A-las-ka_, as I told you before, and you’ll be on the safe
side,” again explained Jack.
“All right, _A-las-ker_ then,” Bill attempted once more and Jack gave up
trying to teach him how to pronounce it as a bad job.
* * * * *
The next afternoon the boys met at the Grand Central Station with their
big suit cases and each carried in his money-belt two hundred dollars in
cash and a draft on the National Bank at Skagway for a thousand dollars.
It was not long before they were on board the _Twentieth Century
Limited_ and were being whirled through the tunnel under New York and up
to Mott Haven; there the powerful electric locomotive gave way to a
gigantic steam locomotive and they were soon running along the edge of
the historic Hudson River headed toward the field of their new
endeavors.
At the sight of the Palisades Bill could no longer restrain his
aesthetic feelings--oh yes, Bill had them too, and he knew the beautiful
when he saw it.
“I tell youse the Hudson has got them all _faded_, Jack. I’ve seen ’em
all includin’ the Schuylkill at Philadelphia and they might as well get
offen the map.”
“There are three rivers you haven’t seen yet, Bill, and these are the
Mississippi, the Yukon and the Amazon. When you have seen these great
streams you’ll be in a better position to judge the merits of the
Hudson.”
“This position right here in seat 2, car 30 is good enough for me to
size up the Hudson. Just as Noo York is the onliest town in the world so
the Hudson is the onliest river on the map. Somebody oughter give Mr. H.
Hudson a medal for havin’ discovered it; an’ when we come back, richer’n
Rockerfeller, I’ll donate one to him that is twenty-four carats fine.”
Jack had the porter fix a table between the seats and laid out his
time-tables of the three railroads that were to carry them across the
continent. Then for Bill’s enlightenment and his own pleasure he traced
the route they were to make to Seattle and thence on up to Circle City,
Alaska.
“Let’s see, we reach Chicago to-morrow morning and change cars there.
Then we’re in for a long ride, for it will take us about three days and
nights to make the trip. We’ll get into Seattle next Saturday morning
some time. Our boat leaves Seattle the following Monday morning and this
will give us all the time we want to see Seattle.”
“Now look up this boat trip from Seattle to Skagway,” said Bill.
“We take the _S.S. Princess Alice_ and sail up through Puget Sound until
we reach the northern end of Vancouver Island, when we come to the open
sea; then we run through Hecate Strait, between the Queen Charlotte
Islands and the Province of Columbia, when we pass through Dixon
Entrance into Clarence Strait and are in Alaskan waters. Farther on when
we get to Juneau we’ll begin to see something that looks like real
scenery for that’s the beginning of the great glaciers.”
“I’m not so keen on seein’ scenery as I am on seein’ gold,” vouchsafed
Bill, whose resultant financial success in the Mexican expedition seemed
to have completely turned his young head from contentment and the love
of adventure into discontent and a violent itching for riches.
“You’ll see both a-plenty before we’re through with it, take it from
me.”
“What’s all them pink spots on the map, islands?” inquired Bill scanning
them closely.
“Yes, and the blue part outside is the Pacific Ocean while that on the
inside represents various inlets, straits, sounds, canals, etc. So you
see we take what is called the _inside route_ and it will be as smooth
sailing as if we were going to Albany on the day boat.”
“An’ what happens when we land at Skagway?”
“There we change to the railroad, which has been built in recent years
over the White Pass across the Coast Range, and we are then in the Yukon
Territory which, as I told you and your mother, is a part of Canada. The
railroad ends at White Horse, a town about a hundred miles farther
north. We’ll still have about seven hundred miles to travel before we
get to Circle City, but we do this leg by a steamer on the Yukon River,
and from there to the land of the Yeehats on the Big Black River we’ll
have to cover with dog-sleds,” concluded Jack.
Their journey across the continent was about as exciting as a trip from
Manhattan Street to Bowling Green on the Subway. While the boys were
very much awake when in their waking state, when it came to sleeping
they could beat the seven sleepers by a stretch, and as for
appetites--well, they just naturally had an exaggerated idea of what
their stomachs were for--and ate like young pug-uglies. In truth they
were on the job every time the dining car waiter announced the last call
for breakfast and the first call for lunch and dinner.
As they were nearing Savanna up in the northwest corner of Illinois,
Jack told his pal that they would soon strike the Mississippi River and
that from there on to St. Paul the railroad parallels the ‘father of
waters.’
“The Mississippi is a thousand five hundred miles long, has its head
waters at Lake Itaska in Northern Minnesota and empties into the Gulf of
Mexico about a hundred miles south of New Orleans,” explained Jack. “You
will see from this, Bill, that there are other rivers in our United
States besides the noble Hudson.”
Presently the train ran right along side of the great river. Bill took
one look at the installment of scenery which lay spread out before them
as flat as a board and then he burst out into a long and loud cackle,
making, according to Jack’s way of thinking, a holy show of them both.
“Why the big noise?” questioned Jack in a sour voice, for he was
exasperated beyond all measure at this unseemly conduct of his pal.
“It’s enough to make a bucking broncho laugh. The Mississippi eh? and
you’d put it in the same class with the Hudson? Why it’s nothin’ but a
stream o’ mud,” Bill made answer.
“You must remember that we’re a thousand miles from its delta,”
expostulated Jack.
“That’s nothin’; the Hudson’s so wide at Noo York the politicians can’t
get enough money together at one time to build a bridge acrost it, see
Buddy?”
And let it be said in Bill’s behalf that that part of the Mississippi
which is visible to the eye where the Burlington railway parallels it
does make a mighty poor showing.
The boys were conspicuous for their silence all the rest of the way to
St. Paul for Bill had made up his mind that he wouldn’t let even his pal
run down his Hudson River, and Jack had taken a mental vow that, pal or
no pal, he would never again point out any wonder, ancient or modern,
whether produced by nature or fashioned by the hand of man again to
Bill, because the latter always pooh-poohed everything unless it was in
or intimately associated with the city of Bagdad-on-the-Hudson.
As the train was nearing Livingstone, Montana, late in the afternoon of
the following day the boys had entirely forgotten that the muddy waters
of the Mississippi had been the innocent cause of making them a little
sore at each other and all was to the merry with them again.
Livingstone is the junction where the change is made for Gardiner, the
“gateway of the Yellowstone,” and everybody in the car was talking about
the hot-springs, the geysers, the ‘Devil’s Paint Pot,’ ‘Hell’s
Half-Acre’ and other wonders to be seen there. Moreover quite a number
of passengers were tourists who had made this long western trip for the
express purpose of seeing the Park.
“We should by all means have seen the Park since we are so near it. It
was a great mistake of mine to have bought our tickets through to
Seattle without a stop-over here,” said Jack who was genuinely regretful
that he had not thought of it at the time, but it was too late now.
“Never youse mind,” bolstered up Bill cheerily, “we’ll stop off when we
comes back and we’ll have all the time we needs and plenty o’ coin to do
it on.”
“That _listens_ all right too but I have observed it is very seldom
indeed that a fellow ever returns over the same trail that he sets out
on, and that the time to see a thing is when he passes by the first
time. Well, we’ll get the gold we’re after and then I’m going to make a
tour of the world strictly for pleasure.”
“I’m with youse Jack,” responded Bill heartily.
Jack made no reply for he could see himself carrying Bill along as a
piece of excess baggage and having him size up everything they saw using
_his_ Noo York, as he calls it, as a yard-stick to measure it by. Bill
was all right for a trip of any kind where a sure-shot and brute-force
were needed but on a pleasure trip around the world--well, he preferred
to go it alone.
Came the time when the shine porter indicated his desire to brush off
the boys and they knew that they were getting close to the end of the
first leg of their journey--Seattle. They were right glad to get off the
train, though withal they had had a pleasant journey and had met a
number of interesting people. Among them was a Mr. Rayleigh who was
accompanied by his very charming daughter Miss Vivian.
Jack had told the Rayleighs a little of his varied experiences in the
World War, of his expedition to the Arctics, of his more recent journey
to Mexico (giving Bill all the credit of their adventures there) and of
their proposed trip to Alaska to find gold. The net result of it all was
that the chance acquaintance ripened into a warm friendship before they
left the train at Seattle and his new found friends gave Jack a very
cordial invitation to visit them in Chicago when he returned from his
quest in the Northland, but they left poor Bill out in the cold.
Jack didn’t blame Mr. Rayleigh much for he didn’t know Bill’s heart and
he judged him by exterior appearances only. Poor Bill! the only way he
could ever get a look-in anywhere was when some one saw him in action,
and if Mr. Rayleigh could have seen him swatting German U-boats, or on
the ’dobe in that fight with Lopez’s gang he would have welcomed him
with open arms.
As it was, Jack accepted the invitation so cordially given, with
avidity, for he liked Miss Vivian--she was so different from those New
York girls (but hush! it would never do to voice this thought in Bill’s
hearing or there would be a pitched battle on the spot) and she seemed
to him more like a beautiful dream picture than a real being who lived
in a world of three dimensions.
“Yes,” he said to himself, “I’ve simply got to get that gold now,
there’s no two ways about it.”
* * * * *
Seattle, so named after old Chief Seattle, an Indian who was friendly to
the whites, is built on a site where a handful of Indians once had their
village, but it was an important place even then in virtue of its being
a convenient point where every once in a while thousands of Indians
would meet and hold their pow-wows.
It was settled by the pale faces about seventy years ago and when the
gold stampede for the Klondike was on, it was the great center for
outfitting the prospectors. Later on Skagway became the chief outfitting
station but as the latter town is in Alaska a duty must also be paid by
those who cross over the boundary line into the Yukon Territory since it
is a part of Canada. To get around this the boys concluded that they
would wait until they got to Circle City and outfit up there if this was
possible.
Jack was rather surprised to find that Seattle was a fine, up-to-date
city in every sense of the word but of course Bill couldn’t see it that
way at all, so listen to him yawp:
“Youse could sot the whole blinkin’ town down on the East Side of Noo
York and then where’d it be? Youse couldn’t find it, see!”
By the following Monday the boys had seen everything that Seattle and
the surrounding country had to offer but the only things that interested
Bill were the Siwash Indians and Mount Ranier.
“I suppose you’ll say that the New Yorkers are dirtier than these
Siwashes and that Mount Ranier can’t hold a candle to the Palisades,”
Jack bantered him.
“Somebody must have taken the _wash_ out of them Siwashes from the way
they smell, and as for Mount Ranier, I’ll say it’s a real mountain.
Let’s climb it, what say, Jack?”
“After we get the gold,” was his pal’s comeback.
* * * * *
The five days that followed on the _S. S. Princess Alice_ were long,
bright, glorious, tiresome ones and the boys would have enjoyed every
minute of the time if that disconcerting, maddening, magic word _gold_
had not kept burning in their brains. They saw yellow and the nearer
they came to that wonderful land in the far north, which the discoveries
of gold had made as famous as diamonds have made the Kimberly mines or
watered stock has made Wall Street, their very beings seemed to be
transmuted into the precious metal.
Hence, neither the great Coast Range Mountains nor the wonderful
glaciers appealed overmuch to these youngsters who had set their hearts
on getting gold out of the Yukon-Arctic district just as firmly as had
ever the most seasoned prospector.
But Juneau did make an impression on Bill for he heard tales of gold up
there the like of which he had never heard before. Only once did he
think to belittle the town by making odious comparisons of it with his
“Noo York” but with Jack’s help he smothered the attempt for he was in
the gold country now and was carried away by that malignant disease
known as the _gold fever_.
CHAPTER III
ON THE EDGE OF THINGS
The _Princess Alice_ made a stop for a few hours at Juneau, a town
standing on a promontory between Lynn Canal and the Taku River, and the
boys, with many other passengers, disembarked to see what they could
see. Here for the first time they felt they were getting pretty close to
the field of their future activities for they were in Alaska, the land
of the midnight sun and the aurora borealis, the moose and the caribou,
the prehistoric glaciers and--hidden gold.
Across the water a great mill was in full blast and as they stood
looking at it a big, grisly sort of a man, who appeared to be between
fifty and sixty, and whose clothes showed that he was an old time
prospector, moved over toward them. Evidently he had in mind the idea of
holding some small conversation with them, for up on top of the world
the inhabitants do not consider formal introductions as being at all
necessary when they feel like talking to any one.
“Goin’ to buy it boys?” he asked, grinning good-naturedly to show that
his intentions were of the best.
“Afore we do, we’d kinda like to know what it is, for we’d hate to buy a
pig-in-a-poke,” replied Bill smiling just as cheerfully, only, as I have
previously mentioned, whenever Bill smiled the scar across his cheek
made him look as if he was getting ready to exterminate a greaser.
“Oh, I see, you youngsters are new up here--tourists maybe,” came from
the big throated man.
“We’re new up here all right,” admitted Jack, “but we’re not up here to
see the sights, or for our health either, but to do a bit of
prospecting.”
“Shake pards,” and he held out a calloused hand, as big as a ham and as
horny as a toad’s back, to each of them in turn. “I’m Hank Dease, but in
these parts I’m known as Grizzly Hank. And who might you fellows be?”
“I’m Jack Heaton of New Jersey, and this is my side-kick, Bill Adams of
New York City, New York County and New York State, and there with the
goods as needed.”
“I blazes! I’m right glad to know you boys,” drawled Grizzly Hank, “for
you look to me as if you’re made o’ the right kind o’ timber. Since
you’re strangers here I’ll tell you about Juneau, which I allow is the
finest city in the world.”
Now Juneau has a population of about two thousand people, so, naturally,
Bill was going to jump right in and monopolize things by asking Grizzly
Hank if he’d ever been in Noo York, but Jack gave him the high-sign not
to break in and so for once his pal held his peace.
“I’ll tell you about the wonderful things we have here first and then if
there’s any little thing you want to know about prospectin’ up here or
in the Yukon Territory I’ll tell you as good as I know. I’ve been in
this country for nigh onto thirty years and you see how well I’ve panned
out, but you fellows may do better--a few do, but, I blazes, most of ’em
don’t.”
Grizzly Hank had found a couple of good listeners and as he liked to
talk he was making the most of them while they lasted.
“That’s the Treadwell mill you are lookin’ at over yonder on Douglas
Island. It has an output of gold that runs upwards of eighty thousand
dollars a month. The first gold ever found in Alaska was down at Sitka
in 1873, but it was old Joe Juneau, a French-Canadian prospector, who
showed that gold could be mined here in payin’ quantities.
“At that time another prospector named Treadwell who was in this
district had loaned a little money on some claims over there and finally
had to take them for the debt. Later on he bought French Pete’s claim
which lay next to it for the magnificent sum of five hundred dollars;
and these claims which he bought for a mere song are the great Treadwell
mines of to-day. I blazes! There are some other mines in this district
and since Treadwell took over the original claims the output of gold has
been to the tune of a hundred million dollars and the end is nowhere yet
in sight. I blazes!”
“Do you mean to say, Mister Dease, that gold is mined over there like
coal?” asked Bill, thereby exposing his ignorance.
The grisly prospector looked amused but he recalled the time when his
own ideas of mining gold had been just about as vague.
“You see, boys, gold is found in several ways up here. Sometimes it is
’bedded in quartz when the _ore_, as it is called, has to be mined and
then crushed in a stamp mill to get the gold out; more often it is found
as free gold, dust and grains and bits of pure gold mixed with the dirt
when it must be _panned_, that is, put in a pan and the dirt washed away
and then the gold, which is the heaviest, falls to the bottom of the
pan, and again,” he lowered his voice to make what he was about to tell
them more impressive, “nuggets of gold are picked up from bits the size
of a pea to chunks as large as my fist! I blazes! It all depends on the
locality.”
“These diggin’s here are quartz mines and the ore is of mighty low
grade--only a couple of dollars in gold to the ton of quartz. To get
this gold out the quartz, or ore, is crushed in a mill called a stamp,
and the Treadwell has the largest number of stamps of any mill in the
world--upwards of two thousand, I blazes!”
Grizzly Hank paused for a moment to get a fresh start.
“Go on Mister Hank, we’re listenin’ with both ears,” urged Bill.
“As you were saying--” Jack paced him.
“As I was about to say,” continued the prospector, who was every whit as
appreciative of his audience as it was of him, “when Treadwell began to
take out gold, old timers all along the coast clear down as far as
’Frisco heard of it, came up and pushed further north believing that
they would find other lodes of gold bearing ore and they believed right,
I blazes!
“That other mine over there on Douglas Island that you see to the right
is the Mexican Mine but it’s small fry as against the Treadwell for it
only has a hundred and twenty stamps working.”
“We’re not pertiklarly keen on Mexican mines, oil wells or anything else
that goes by the name of _Mex_--we had all the Mexican stuff we wanted
when we was down there six months ago,” broke in Bill to whom the word
brought no very pleasant recollections.
“To this side of the Mexican mine,” went on the prospector, “is the
_Ready Bullion_ mine and it has a two hundred stamp mill.”
“_Ready Bullion_ listens good to me,” admitted Jack, once more breaking
into his discourse.
“Shortly after the Treadwell mine began to show itself a bonanza, a
story went the rounds that it was an accidental lode, or a _blowout_ as
we call it; that is, it was a lode of gold deposited there by some
gigantic upheaval of the earth when Alaska was in the makin’ and that it
was the only place north of fifty-six where gold could be mined at a
profit.
“I always believed that yarn was set agoin’ to keep other prospectors
out of the country; but when it kept on producin’, men with picks and
shovels came here just the same, and what happened was that other
deposits were found and these are the mines that are bein’ worked now in
southern Alaska.
“Still other prospectors pushed on further north with their packs on
their backs, on sleds which they pulled themselves or which were hauled
by dog teams, on horses and mules, and they toiled up the _Trail of
Heartache_, as the nearly straight-up _White Pass_ trail was called in
those days. I blazes, _and_, I was one of ’em.
“Once on the other side of yonder range we prospected for gold bearin’
quartz, and panned the river beds until we reached the Klondike River.
There is where Carmack, with two Indian pards, Skookum Jim and Tagish
Charlie, had already staked rich claims. One day Carmack went down to
the stream to wash a piece of moose he had killed and it was then that
he saw gold in the water and when he panned it he got more nuggets than
his eyes could believe. News of gold travels faster than greased
lightnin’ and it was not long before the biggest gold stampede was on
that ever took place in the golden history of gold! I blazes!
“Over night the Klondike became famous and wherever human bein’s lived
that spoke a language it was a word that they knew and it meant but one
thing to them--and that was gold. And, I blazes, the world knew that
gold was bein’ panned out in the Klondike by hundreds and thousands and
hundreds of thousands of dollars and the world went crazy over it.
“When I got there one mornin’ I was dead-broke but by night I was a rich
man. It was nothin’ to wash a hundred, five hundred, I blazes, a
thousand dollars from a few pans of gravel. And still further north,
somewhere along the Porcupine River, Thornton and a couple of his pards
discovered a blow-out where nuggets of gold were so thick they could
pick ’em up like stones; they packed them in moosehide sacks and corded
them up like stovewood until they had all the gold they thought they
could carry out of the country.”
Grizzly Hank had the boys going for fair. They stood as though they were
magnetized to the spot. Both were itching for more detailed information
but neither spoke his mind for they had agreed before they left New York
that while they would have to admit they were prospectors bent on
finding gold, like countless thousands before them, they would give no
hint, under any circumstance, of their real mission to any one.
“Go on--” said Bill impatiently.
“Yes, pards,” he went on, his sharp, deep-set eyes brightening which
showed that however it was he had failed to keep the elusive metal he
had found, his long quest left no cause for regret; “yes pards, the gold
belt runs from the Gulf of Alaska to the Arctic Ocean, and the further
north you go the more gold you’ll find and--the harder it will be to get
it _down under_.[2] I’m goin’ to the Porcupine River district as soon as
I can get some one to grub-stake me----”
[2] In Alaska and the far north the United States is called _down
under_.
A mighty bellowing blast came from the triple throated whistle of the
steamer at the dock and drowned out the alluring voice of the prospector
pioneer. Then the warning sound subsided for a moment.
“There’s your boat a-whistlin’ an’ if you’re goin’ on her you’d better
scoot. I blazes! Good-by and good luck.”
They started for the boat on the run but their minds were in a
semi-torpid condition, for the old miner had surely enough set them by
the ears. When they were again on the deck of the _Princess Alice_ and
had somewhat recovered from the magic of his words they fell to
discussing gold, Grizzly Hank and a few other consequential things.
“Moosehide sacks of gold corded up like stovewood!” repeated Bill
blinking his blue eyes.
“The farther north you go the more gold you’ll find!” reiterated Jack,
for the words sounded like ready money to him.
“Shake, old pard, we’re on the right trail,” and the boys struck hands
with a vengeance. “I was thinkin’ as how we orter have taken Grizzly
Hank along with us,” commented Bill; “he knows all the ropes and he’d
a-come in mighty handy.”
“I thought of that too when he was talking to us but then we’d have to
split up our winnings into thirds which would mean that we’d simply
short-change ourselves out of a couple of million dollars or so. Then
again his ideas and ours would probably be entirely different for he’s a
prospector of the old school while we are discoverers of the new school.
Finally, ‘two’s company and three’s none’ is just as true, I imagine, of
the trail as it is of a parlor date.”
“Agreed to on all points,” said Bill, “but when we comes back let’s
grub-stake him to the limit so that he can eke out a million or so on
his own account afore he kicks-in.”
Skagway was the jumping off place as far as the _Princess Alice_ was
concerned and the boys were right glad of it for they were anxious more
than ever to get into the heart of things. The town is on the Chilkat
Inlet at the head of Lynn Canal and, like many others along the coast,
it has a mountain for a background.
They stopped over night at Mrs. Pullen’s hotel, which is also a
wonderful Alaskan museum, and as they were looking about they came
across a rack of the inevitable picture post cards. Bill said he was of
a mind to send one down under to a certain little telephone countess,
(whom he could see in his mind’s eye masticating the indestructible
listerated nuggets and hear her say in the deep recesses of his auditory
organ “who do you want to talk to?” with the “smile that wins.”)
On one of the post cards was a picture of a very pleasant, mild mannered
looking gentleman whose kindly eyes and benevolent mouth bore out Jack’s
statement that all men north of fifty-six are _white_ at heart. Under
the picture on the card of the somewhat incongruous caption of _Soapy
Smith_.
“I suppose he’s the Sunday School Superintendent, owner of the First
National Bank and mayor of this burg,” Bill remarked to his partner.
A prosperous looking individual standing near-by overheard Bill’s
facetious comment, smiled sadly and said:
“I take it you boys haven’t heard the story of Soapy Smith and so I’ll
enlighten you as to the manner of man he was. Soapy came by his
saponified cognomen honestly for he began his career as a full member of
the fraternity of gentle grafters. Soapy’s line was to wrap up a ten
dollar bill with a small bar of soap and sell it from the tail end of a
wagon for the small sum of one dollar.
“Then the lamb would take his purchase around in the back alley where no
one could see him, and open it up and then he would find that he was out
just ninety-nine cents, for while he had the soap the slippery ten-spot
still remained as a part of Soapy’s financial reserve fund.
“But this graft was too legitimate for Soapy for he had to give a bar of
soap worth at least a cent to each and every purchaser. Having
accumulated a little coin he drifted in here with the stampeders in ’98
and opened up a saloon, dance-hall and gambling house. As if this game
was too honest he organized a gang of outlaws and they robbed men and
killed them too, right and left.
“Law abiding citizens got tired of these hold-ups, for the prospectors
and miners began to go through Dyea and use the Chilcoot Pass rather
than take a chance of meeting Soapy and his gang in Skagway or on the
White Pass trail. So a _Vigilance Committee_ was organized and at one of
their meetings one night they put Frank Reed at the gate to keep Soapy
and the members of his gang out.
“As soon as Soapy heard of the meeting he took his shootin’ irons and
went over to it where Reed promptly refused to admit him. Came two
simultaneous pistol shots; Soapy fell dead and Reed lived for a couple
of weeks and then he cashed in. If you go up to the canyon you’ll see
the graves of both these men in the cemetery there. So you see you can’t
most always tell by lookin’ at a man what is under his vest.”
The next morning the boys took the train for White Horse, about a
hundred and ten miles due north at which point they would make
connections with a boat on the Yukon River. While the stampeders had
toiled up the icy trail of White Pass, their backs breaking under their
packs and their hearts breaking under the torture of it all, the boys
were now making the trip in a comfortable train of the White Pass and
Yukon Railway, the first in Alaska and the Yukon Territory.
“Isn’t just exactly like ridin’ on the _Twentieth Century_, is it Jack?”
observed Bill as the train crept at a snail’s pace up to the summit.
Just then the train rounded a curve blasted out of solid rock and they
looked straight down a thousand feet into a canyon.
“More like a trip on the _Elevated_,” suggested Jack.
Once over the Pass the engineer opened the throttle a little and the
train picked up in speed. Then by way of varying the kaleidoscopic
changes of scenery the train shot into a tunnel and out of it onto a
tremendously high bridge that spans the Skagway River which flows
tumultuously over the rocky bottom on its way to the gulf.
A few miles beyond they crossed an old wagon road which was being built
to connect White Horse with White Pass but the railroad was completed
first and took its place. A dozen miles or so farther on they saw some
log cabins which the conductor of the train pointed out as having been
the center of White Pass City, one of the tented towns that had sprung
up during the mad rush to the Klondike, and when it subsided the town
vanished.
Then came into view Glacier Gorge and high above it the train sped along
its very edge, then wound up a long grade, when spread before them were
the Sawtooth Mountains and Dead Horse Gulch.
“Sounds like the name of a dime novel I onct read,” reflected Bill.
“Why Dead Horse Gulch?” Jack asked the conductor.
“Because when the rush was on in ’98 thousands of the pioneers brought
their horses with them and so many of them died down there from
starvation and overwork that their bodies choked up the gulch.
“See that sheet of water yonder?” he continued, “that’s the beginning of
Lake Bennet and there the hustling, bustling, town of Bennet once was.
As soon as the gold crowd from Skagway reached this lake they gave up
the trail and threw together rafts and craft of every description. They
piled their outfits on or in them and then floated down the Yukon River
to the Klondike, unless they were drowned first, as many were. You’ll be
glad to know, boys, the train hesitates twenty minutes at Bennet for
victuals,” and the boys thought it was high time that it did so.
When this important function was over and they were again on the train
it ran along the edge of the lake until the lower end of it was reached
where the friendly _con_ called “Carcross! Carcross!”
“This town,” he told them, “is built on a place where the Indians used
to watch for the caribou to cross and this is the cause why of its
name.”
After a short ride their rail trip--the last they would have for many,
many moons--came to an end at White Horse, on the Thirty Mile River.
They considered they were playing in great good luck, for the steamboats
leave only twice a week for Dawson and one was scheduled to sail that
night.
This gave the boys plenty of time to look around White Horse but they
saw with eyes dimly for their vision was as blurred by their quest for
gold as ever were those who had rushed madly through there in the days
of ’98.
Bill opined that he “liked White Horse fine as it has two boats a week
we can get away on.” As a matter of fact it is a lively town for the
steamboats take on their supplies here for their down river trips.
The boys walked over to the White Horse Rapids, as the Indians called it
after a Finnlander because of his light hair and whom they thought was
as strong as a horse, after he had lost his life in its swirling waters.
And hundreds of other lives and dozens of outfits were lost in the wild
scramble of the early prospectors to get to the gold fields.
But neither Jack nor Bill gave more than a passing thought to these
foolhardy and adventurous souls who had risked and lost all in their
futile attempts to get to the Klondike; much less did they think of
those who had made the golden goal and won out in the finality of their
efforts, for the boys’ own scheme consumed every moment of their time,
and all of their energies were directed upon the consummation of it
since they were gold seekers just as truly as were any of those who had
gone before.
The steamboat _Selkirk_, which was to carry the boys from White Horse to
Circle City, was of the old time kind that was used on the Mississippi
and other rivers half a century ago; that is, it was of the
wood-burning, stern paddle-wheel type.
As they stood out on deck the next morning Jack tried to lose sight of
the big issue for the moment and he imagined himself to be the first
explorer who had traced the Yukon River in this region. If he had not
had gold on the brain it would have been an easy thing to do for here
were the same virgin meadows, primeval forests and silent fastnesses
just as they were when the Russians laid claim to Alaska. And the gold,
he reasoned, that was here then is, for the greater part, here now.
Not once since they had left Seattle had Bill compared anything with his
Noo York, at least not out loud, but when they were passing through the
headwaters of the Yukon he said as though he was talking to himself, “It
hasn’t got anything on the _Spuyten Duyvil_,” which, let me elucidate,
is a tidal channel that connects the Harlem River with the Hudson River
and so forms the northern boundary of Manhattan Island on which New York
City proper is built. But in the eight hundred and sixty odd mile trip
down the Yukon to Circle City Bill had ample opportunity to amend his
snap comparison and even then he was fifteen hundred miles from its many
channeled delta where it flows into the Bering Sea.
“Doesn’t look much like the naked north or frozen regions that the folks
back home think it is,” remarked Bill, as they passed a _tundra_
(pronounced toon´-dra) which was thick with grass and shrubs and
sprinkled with various plants in flower.
“I’ll say it doesn’t,” replied Jack, “but wait, we haven’t run into
winter weather yet.”
As the boat plied its way softly and swiftly down the Yukon they saw
occasional Indian villages, the men taking life easy, the children
playing and the squaws busy drying the golden salmon on poles set in the
sun. Then to the great delight of both boys they saw a caribou swim out
from the shore intending, probably, to cross to the other side, but
frightened by the modernity of the throbbing, smoking monster he swam
back faster than he came, and on gaining the shore he disappeared from
view.
Another time Bill went over to Jack, who was talking with some
passengers, and saluting as to an officer he said, “I have to report,
sir, a bear on the starboard bow.” And sure enough there stood a huge
bear high on the ledge of a rock and so motionless was he that he seemed
carved out of the rock itself; but inwardly he was fully alive to this
mechanical invasion of his eminent domain.
Never was a river trip of such wild beauty, so full of interest and yet
such soothing quiet as this one the boys were now making and it would
have proved doubly delightful if they had been pleasure seekers instead
of gold seekers. The only breaks in the continuity of the run were made
when the boat nosed its way along a bank and, finding an anchorage, she
_wooded up_, that is she took on wood to be burned under her boilers.
Now the river widened and the boat ran into the more placid waters of
Lake LeBarge which Jack pointed out to Bill as having been the scene of
action in _The Cremation of Sam McGee_, a poem by Robert Service. On
reaching the lower end of the lake the boat shot down the Thirty Mile
River where the swift current winds forth and back like a tangled rope
and it takes a pilot who knows his trade to hold her to the channel.
But the most exciting piece of navigation is at Five Finger Rapids, for
here the river narrows down into a neck and almost closing the latter
are five ugly finger-like rocks projecting above the surface with the
water swirling swiftly round them in mighty eddies. It looked to Jack
and Bill as if there was not enough room for the boat to pass between
any two of them but this didn’t seem to worry the pilot any who held her
nose hard toward the middle finger.
The boys thought that he must be tired of life. But hold there matey,
just as they had timed her to strike the rock he bore down hard on his
wheel to port and the boat missed the rock by the skin of its teeth,
Their hearts dropped back from their throats to their thoraxes again and
they believed they still stood a fair chance of finding the gold they
were after.
And now comes Dawson into view--Dawson in the heart of the Klondike--the
Dawson of tradition, adventure, romance and--of gold! This is the
identical town where that great army of pioneer gold seekers, who braved
the rigors of the winters, the dangers of the rapids, the stresses of
starvation and the robbers of Soapy Smith’s gang, found themselves if
they were unfortunate enough to be so fortunate.
As the steamboat ties up here for half a day to load and unload its
cargo the boys went on a hike over to an Indian village called
_Moosehide_, a little way down the trail from Dawson. On returning to
town they got the _borry_, as Bill called it, of a couple of horses and
rode out eight or ten miles where some great dredges were at work
bringing up the sand and gravel from the streams and hydraulicking
equipments were washing the gold out of it.
“This kind of mining,” Jack said to his partner, “is simply panning out
gold on a big scale by machinery, and gold fields that are not rich
enough to be worked profitably by a prospector will yield gold on a
paying basis where hydraulicking can be taken advantage of.”
“It’s too slow a game for me,” was Bill’s idea of the scheme, “I wants
to pick it up in chunks.”
“That’s what we’re here for,” Jack made answer.
They left Dawson that evening and the next morning still found them in
the Yukon Territory, but shortly after breakfast the boat crossed the
International boundary line and they were on good old U. S. soil again.
The boat soon made a landing at Eagle City where Fort Egbert is located
and the first thing Jack spied was a big wireless station which he knew
belonged to the U. S. Army.
From Eagle to Circle City, or just _Circle_ as it is called for short,
is a sail of a hundred and ninety miles. Both Jack and Bill were dead
tired of traveling and they hailed Circle as heartily as they would have
hailed their own home town. But they didn’t know what they were hailing.
The only outstanding fact with them was that they had _arrived_, or at
any rate they had gone as far as trains and boats could carry them
toward the goal of their desires. The bridge was swung ashore and they
got off without delay. The whistle blew a couple of sonorous blasts, and
the boat backed off and went on her way down stream.
In the days of the gold rush Circle had been the great outfitting town
in these parts. It was built up entirely of log cabins and it had more
log cabins than any town had ever gathered together before or since. Why
Circle City? Whence the name? Because when the town was started it was
believed to be located right on the Arctic Circle but later it was
learned that it was a good eighty miles below the Circle.
As the boys stepped ashore they were greeted by a few white men, some
Indians and the ear-splitting howls of the huskies.
“I tell you Bill, we’re on the very edge of things.”
“You said a mouthful, pard,” was that worthy’s sober reply.
CHAPTER IV
WHEN BILL AND BLACK PETE MET
The boys wore sorely disappointed in Circle for while it had been, as
they had heard, “the largest log house town in the world,” and as far as
log houses go it was yet, for that matter, still that essential moving
principle that makes up a town, namely the inhabitants, was lacking.
But times have changed since the early ’90’s and now all that remain of
its population are a few men who look after the stores and a handful of
prospectors, miners, hunters and trappers who come into town to buy
their supplies, and these hearten it up a bit. As for the empty log
houses they serve only as so many monuments to commemorate the time when
the town was alive and full of action.
You ask why the town died out? I’ll tell you. Gold was discovered there
in 1894 and for the next four years its growth was phenomenal--the
wonder of all Alaska; but when the Klondike was opened up the
inhabitants left everything behind them and made a mad rush for the new
gold fields, and so at the present time there is little left to tell of
the glory that was Circle’s.
The way Jack had figured it out coming up on the boat was that they
would get their clothes, grub, sleds and dogs at Circle, which
prospectors and others he had talked with said they could do, and then
when they were all fixed and winter had set in they would push on over
to the land of the Yeehats and there establish a base from which they
could work.
This base of supplies was to be like the hub of a great wheel the
circumference of which would include all of the territory to be
prospected and their local expeditions would be like the spokes, that is
they would strike out with their dog teams, traveling light, taking a
new line of direction each trip they made. In this way they could, he
said, make a thorough search for the hidden gold that those before them
had struck so rich but which for divers reasons best known to those who
had sought it had never been gotten out of the country.
His best thought, as he had previously explained in answer to an
objection of Bill’s, was to make this search during the winter months
instead of doing it in summer-time in virtue of the fact that they could
then use dog sleds and this would enable them to cover the ground
without working themselves to death and do it at a goodly clip besides.
Now, when Bill had set his eyes on the deserted City of Circle he
instantly took a violent dislike to it. Having become fairly well posted
on the geography of _Ilasker_, as he still persisted in calling it, he
concocted the notion that what they should have done was to come up in
the early spring and go on by boat to Fort Yukon, which is about
eighty-five miles farther on down the river.
From there, he contended, they could have gotten a couple of canoes and
paddled up the Porcupine and Big Black Rivers until they were close to
where the International boundary line crosses the Arctic Circle. This
done, (according to Jack’s own reasoning he said), they would be about
as near the place where they wanted to make their winter quarters as
they could get. But there was no getting away from it, they were now in
Circle with winter fast coming on and it was too late to change the work
sheet as previously laid out.
By the time this argument was over, the boys had reached the Grand
Palace Hotel, an enormous log building of two stories of the regulation
kind to be found in all frontier and mining towns.
Running nearly the length of one side of the hall as they entered it,
was a bar with a hotel register on the end nearest the door. At the
extreme farther end of the hall a platform had been built up about as
high as a man’s head, while any number of small round tables covered
with worn-out and faded green cloth were strewn about the room.
The owner of the Grand Palace in the days antedating the Klondike rush
was Sam Hastings, or _Silent Sam_ as he was called, because he never
spoke unless he was spoken to and his replies were always pithy and to
the point. His face was smooth shaven; he wore a low crowned, narrow
brimmed Stetson hat, a rolling collar with a flowing tie, silk shirt
with diamond set gold buttons in the cuffs, a Prince Albert coat with a
six gun conveniently within reach under it, doeskin[3] breeches and kid
button shoes. Unlike Soapy Smith he was honest, as men of his type went
in those days, but like Soapy he died with his button shoes on.
[3] _Doeskin_ is a kind of fine twilled cloth much used in those days
for making breeches.
Now let this close-up of Silent Sam fade away and take a look at a
snap-shot of Doc Marling, the present owner of the Grand Palace and you
will observe a further change that time and circumstances have wrought
in Circle.
Doc is a big-headed man and bearded like a couple of pards. He wears a
woolen shirt, under which beats a fair to middling heart; his breeches
are also woolen tied around his ankles and he has on a pair of deerskin
moccasins.
He is no shooter--you could see that the moment you look at him--but it
is history up yonder that he once choked a bear to death with his hands
alone.
He was the only animated object in the great bare room when the boys
walked in and they felt like a couple of mavericks that had been cut out
from the herd. No more lonesome place had either of them ever been in
this side of Nyack-on-the-Hudson.
But Doc Marling didn’t seem to feel that way, since after being there
for twenty odd years perhaps he’d gotten used to it. He invited them to
inscribe their names on the hotel register, after which he led the march
down the hall--it seemed to the boys as if it was a block long--thence
up the stair-way whose well-worn steps showed clearly that Circle had
been very much alive in the days of her youth, and then to their room
which was altogether too big.
“One thing sure, we’ll get in practice here for the long winter that is
ahead of us,” reflected Jack philosophically.
“It wouldn’t be half-bad if we had a ’phone connection with the
_American Consolidated Oil Company_ back in Noo York, but where are we?
Five thousand miles away and not even a wireless station nearer than
Eagle. ‘I blazes!’ as Grizzly Hank down at Juneau says,” groused Bill.
His indisposition was curious in that no matter how strenuous the tide
of battle might be he had never a word to say, but inaction always
behaved as an irritant to his nervous system.
Came soon the loud jangling of a bell and they knew it for a call to
supper. They followed where it led and sat down to their first meal in
Circle, and it was good. There were ten or a dozen men at the table with
them and up here at the very outpost of civilization, where men are what
they are, they all fell into loud and easy conversation.
“We’re in the hands of white men, as I said we’d be, back there in New
York,” Jack told his partner when they were again in their room.
Just as they were about to turn in they thought they heard a phonograph
going, and as “music hath charms to soothe the savage breast” they went
down into the big hall to be soothed.
While in pre-Klondike days it was of nightly occurrence to find four or
five hundred people gathered in the hall, there were now congregated
perhaps some twenty-five or thirty men, and these were made up of
Americans, French-Canadians, Indians, half-breeds, and a Chinaman or
two, to say nothing of the bear.
A few of those who composed this agglomeration of humanity, were the
scum of the earth but most of them were men of strong character and
sterling worth. Considering that they were on the very edge of things
they were bound to be a rough and ready lot but taken all in all they
were well behaved and peaceably inclined--all except one and he was
Black Pete.
While the crowd by no means filled the void of the big hall, still it
breathed enough of life into the stagnated atmosphere to take off the
sharp edges of their lonesomeness.
Now instead of a phonograph they discovered that the source of the music
originated in a tall, rangy miner with a big bushy mustache, who was
sitting on the platform and sawing away on a fiddle as if his whole soul
was in it. Near the platform some kind of a disturbance was going on
around which the onlookers had formed themselves into a ring. Whatever
it was they were greatly interested and from the roars of laughter they
were evidently enjoying it hugely.
Jack and Bill elbowed their way deep enough into the ring to see what
the frolic was and what they saw they concluded was about as good as an
act in a side-show. In a word it was a team of dancers executing with
great precision and solemnity the “bear-trot”, or “bear-hug”, or
“bear-something-or-other”, for a young French-Canadian and a big brown
bear, who stood erect on his hind legs, when he was as tall as his
keeper, were executing a most ludicrous, albeit, a lumbering sort of
dance.
[Illustration: “IT WAS A TEAM OF DANCERS.”]
After a spell Rip Stoneback, the fiddler, ceased scraping the catgut
strings with his horse-hair bow and the trainer and his bear wound up
their exhibition with a wrestling bout that tickled the everlasting
daylights out of these simple northmen, from which it could be fairly
deduced that, after all, they were really only boys “growed” up.
The boys mingled freely with the knots of men taking in what they had to
say about everything in general and little things in particular, for it
was all brand-new and novel to them. Jack struck up a conversation with
a young fellow named Jim Wendle from ’Frisco who had staked a claim over
on Preacher Creek.
“The boys here are all right,” he was saying to Jack, “there’s only one
fellow who is really hard boiled and that’s Black Pete over there. He’s
laid out every man he’s ever tackled, either with his fists, or his
knife and I’ve heard that he shot a man once. He’s meaner than all get
out when he’s had a few drinks so don’t get into any argument with him.
Agree to anything he says if he talks to you.”
Black Pete did not look the part of a “bad man” though his face was hard
and his complexion was swarthy. He was not very tall, had tremendous
shoulders and having lived in the open Northland all his life he knew
the run of men who gathered here. He was thoroughly disliked in Circle
because of this disposition on his part to always want to pick a fight
and there were men thereabouts who were actually afraid of him.
At about the same time that Jack was getting his information concerning
Black Pete another prospector was tipping off his history to Bill and it
was lucky for both of the boys that they were “let in” on his past
performances when they were.
Black Pete and a boon companion were leaning against the bar when the
latter made some passing remark about that young stripling and his
partner who had just landed in Circle.
“Sleem keed heem all right,” returned Pete, “but I no got use for heem
pardner--zat fellow weez da cut cross hees cheek. I give heem beeg
leeking sometime. Maybe theese night. Watch a meenute. I have som’ fun
with sleem keed.” Black Pete called to Jack and motioned him to come
over, but as the latter had not been introduced he paid no attention and
this aroused Black Pete’s ire. Then he and his companion started over
toward Jack and Jim Wendle.
“Be careful now,” his friend cautioned him.
Black Pete laid his hand on Jack’s shoulder in a perfectly friendly like
manner and said:
“You and Jeem com’ heeva dreenk weeth me?”
At that Jack got up from the table and looked Black Pete square in the
eye.
“I don’t drink,” he said shortly.
Black Pete was mad clear through, that much was plain.
Bill who had been taking a hand in a world-old game called _poker_,
happened to see Jack and Black Pete facing each other and he divined
trouble. He laid down his cards and went over where his pardner and the
bad un were, to _listen in_ on the conversation.
“Heeve a seegar, then,” the Canuk insisted catching hold of Jack’s arm
and pulling him toward the bar.
Taking a firm hold on Black Pete’s wrist Jack removed his hand from his
arm and said, without the slightest inflexion in his voice, “I don’t
smoke.”
Then the unexpected happened--that which had not happened in Circle in
perhaps a dozen or twenty years before.
“You don’t eh?” growled Black Pete, infuriated at Jack’s cold refusal to
join him in either one or the other, “then deem you, heeve a bullet!”
At the same time he whipped out his six-shooter and pulled the trigger,
but his marksmanship was bad, for Bill had caught him by his throat from
the side and pulled his body over so that the bullet crashed through the
roof, instead of boring a hole through Jack’s body.
Expecting that the remaining chambers would be emptied in the struggle
which took place between Bill and Black Pete the crowd dropped to the
floor, jumped behind the bar, crawled under tables--all except René and
he kept his trained bear between himself and the business end of the gun
the bad man of Circle and the Harlem boy were struggling for.
These latter two were well matched though there was no doubt but that
Black Pete who was the larger was also the stronger, but sheer brute
strength could not gain the mastery where the tricks of the wrestler’s
art are brought to bear and Bill had a little the best of it.
As the crowd rightly guessed when the first shot was fired, Black Pete
did pull the trigger every chance he got until all of his cartridges
were shot off but each time the bullet that was intended for Bill went
wild and neither he nor the others were scratched. One bullet, though,
shivered the big plate glass mirror over the bar into a thousand pieces
and Doc Marling, the proprietor, knew that he was having bad luck just
then to the jig-time of three hundred dollars, even if it didn’t keep on
for the next seven years.
All the time the struggle was under way Jack stood by as though he was
watching a friendly bout in Prof. William Adam’s Academy on Manhattan
Street in the good old days. More than one of the onlookers wondered why
he didn’t crack a bottle on Black Pete’s head and so help out his
partner, but this was not the way the boys did team work. In a set-to of
any kind whether it was with bare knuckles, with knives or with pistols
neither one would take a hand in the affair the other was engaged in
unless, as Jack had once explained to me, it was “absolutely
imperative.”
And this status of the fray was far from having come to pass, at least
that was the way Jack sized it up. The crowd must have kept count of the
shots fired for when the last one took place they quickly picked
themselves up from the floor, or crawled out from their safety-first
hiding places, and gathered around Bill and Black Pete who were still at
it.
Whether it was due to the final breaking down of his courage, failing
strength, too much hootch or the superior tactics of the trained
athlete, was not apparent, but slowly Bill overpowered his opponent,
threw him over his shoulder, when he struck the floor on his back, and
pinned him down so that he could not move. After all had seen that Black
Pete was helpless Bill let him up.
There was wild cheering for the victor and some one brought Bill a big
glass of forty-rod.
“You have well earned it boy and you need it,” he said as he offered the
glass to him.
“I never drink,” said Bill and it was given instead to Black Pete to
revive him again.
[Illustration: “BLACK PETE DID PULL THE TRIGGER EVERY CHANCE HE GOT.”]
When the latter had regained his feet, and recovered from the shock a
little, he offered no explanation for his defeat, but in his deep
humiliation he moved over toward the door to make as dignified an exit
as he could in the quickest possible time.
“Hey, where are youse goin’,” Bill called out after him. “Come back here
and sit down at this table and let’s be friends, for I never holds a
grudge after I have downed me man. Sit down here, I wants to tell youse
something.”
Black Pete reluctantly did as Bill requested and the crowd surged round
them to hear what it was this boy from down under had to say to him.
“I takes it you’re a bit loaded with licker to-night and perhaps I had
the ’vantage of youse for I never lets any of that hootch stuff
interfere with me _phys-e-que_, see? Now you think you’re some scrapper
don’t you? Well maybe you are, and I’ll give you a fair chanst. Tomorrer
youse keep away from the bug-juice, see? and come ’round in de evenin’
and I’ll spar’ a few rounds with youse--tree rounds ull be about
enough--just a friendly bout for the sport it will give these gents
here. Marquis Queensbury rules or sluggers rules, I don’t care which.
Youse can go now,” and Black Pete promptly sneaked off wishing that an
earthquake would open a gulch through Circle and swallow up him, Bill,
Jack and everybody else, but it didn’t.
All the next day Black Pete wondered how he could get out of the
‘friendly bout’ that Bill was so willing to _pull off_ for the mere fun
of the thing. He didn’t know what the Marquis of Queensbury rules were
but he finally came to the conclusion that he was a better man than his
opponent and that the only way he could retrieve his standing in Circle
was to give the _Keed_ the beating of his life.
Curiously enough he did ‘cut out the booze’ just as though he had paid
Bill for the advice and then he proceeded to get into his best fighting
trim.
“I knock heem face een eef I ever heet heem,” he said talking to
himself, and then to prove to his own satisfaction that he could do it
he made four well defined dents in the pine board wall with a smashing
blow of his fist.
“An’ you said these folks up here was all of the peace-lovin’ garden
variety, and never use a gun,” Bill said soberly when they were in their
room after the fracas.
“I thought they were,” replied Jack.
“You _thought_ they were?” and Bill looked at him as though he had
caught him breaking the n^th commandment. “Well don’t youse think
again, Buddy, or youse might hurt yourself, see?”
CHAPTER V
OUTFITTING AT CIRCLE
In the great hall everything was as quiet as the faces on the totem
poles that reared their ugliness into the air on either side of the
Grand Palace Hotel. While the night before had been the most exciting of
any that the oldest pioneers of Circle could remember since the days of
’94, in the broad light of the morning after, it seemed as though “the
makin’s of it had just melted away,” as Bill expressed it.
The boys found Doc Marling in the ‘office’ of his hotel which meant that
he was standing back of the register and ink-bottle. He greeted his
paying guests mournfully and when Jack inquired what he had on his young
mind that grieved him he pointed to the frame-work which had held the
largest mirror north of Dawson so short a time before as yesterday. It
only went to prove how fragile are mirrors and the mutability of things
in general.
“My lookin’-glass is busted,” he said funeral-like, “and I’m out just
three hundred cold dollars in gold.”
“I don’t see how you could blame us because a patron of yours thought
he’d let daylight through me. Black Pete started it and it’s up to you
to make him settle for it,” suggested Jack.
“He hasn’t got anything to settle with; that’s the worst part of it,” he
replied, fishing.
“Then you orter take it gentle-like outen his hide.” This from Bill.
“Well, I kinda allowed that you about did that thing last night,” said
Doc, “and bein’ somewhat of a philosopher I allowed too that while the
glass was worth three hundred dollars it was worth well nigh that amount
in gold dust to see him take his medicine.”
“That’s a pleasant way to look at it, Mr. Marling, and now,” said Jack,
“we want you to tell us which of these stores here is the best place to
buy our outfit.”
“They’re all all right. But you ought to go and make the acquaintance of
Jack McQuesten over there at the _N. C._ (_Northern Commercial
Company’s_) store. He is the daddy of Circle for he set up a tradin’
post here as soon as the pioneer prospectors begin to come in. Jack’s a
man that seventeen dog-sleds loaded with moosehide sacks of gold
couldn’t budge from the straight and unerrin’ path of rectitude, is
Jack, and he’ll fix you lads up bully and O. K.,” he told them.
So the boys went over to the _N. C._, and while Jack McQuesten’s fame
had reached them down as far as Skagway, Bill Adams’ fame had preceded
them that morning from the hotel. The old trader was sitting on a box
when they came in and they saw right away that he was a pioneer of the
old school. A low, broad brimmed hat, without a dent or crease in it,
set squarely on his head, and a pair of keen gray eyes, about half
closed as if he didn’t want to see too much at a time, was boring holes
through them.
He was full-faced, his nose was broad and his mustache gray; it was
plain to be seen why he had been entrusted with hundreds of thousands of
dollars by the various companies whose trading posts were famous all
over Alaska. He was, as Doc Marling had said, as straight as a die and
he knew character, even as characters knew him. He was dressed like a
miner and the only outstanding feature of his rig that the boys caught
sight of was a magnificent gold watch chain and charm--and he had a
watch to match them in his pocket--which had been presented to him by
the _Order of Pioneers_, for of the first of the hardy pioneers of
Alaska, he was the very first.
“Mr. McQuesten,” began Jack, “we came over to get a winter’s supply of
grub and an outfit fit for an arctic expedition.”
Jack McQuesten took a good look at Bill and said with a twinkle in his
eye, “so you are the young chap that whipped Black Pete--well I’ll be
dog-goned. But let me give you a pointer, be careful how you handle him
for his ways are not our ways--and we can’t be responsible for them.
It’s the first time in the history of Circle he has not done up his man
and he isn’t any too particular how he does it, so watch out he doesn’t
knife you.”
“We’ll be careful all right, from now on, Mr. McQuesten, believe me,”
returned Bill.
“He’s out of his latitude,” put in Jack--that is Jack Heaton; “he ought
to be ashamed of himself living up here on the Arctic Circle with white
people instead of being down there on the Tropic of Cancer with the rest
of the _greasers_.”
“If he pulls any of that _Chilili Mex_ stuff on me to-night I’ll send
him so far he’ll need a weegie board to get back to earth on, but I’m
thankin’ you Mister McQuesten for tellin’ me as how I should be careful,
sir,” Bill said in an apologetic voice, perhaps because he had let Black
Pete off so easily the night before.
“Now to get down to business, Mr. McQuesten,” began Jack who was anxious
to get things a-moving. “What we want is an outfit of clothes, mess-gear
and grub that will carry us through the winter. We’re not going so far
away but what we expect to get back before the _last ice_ and _first
water_ but we might want to keep on going and we must have an outfit so
that we can pull through if needs be.”
“What you want is an outfit for about eight months but you couldn’t
begin to pack it on your backs or haul it on sleds,” the old outfitter
explained; “such an outfit would weigh in the neighborhood of eight
hundred or a thousand pounds, and a man can’t carry more than fifty
pounds or haul more than one hundred pounds on a stretch. What you ought
to have is a couple of dog-sleds.”
“Perzactly!” agreed Bill, “and the question now is can we get the dogs.”
“There are some very likely dogs in and around Circle that I might be
able to pick up for you and I’ll see the men who own them over at the
Palace to-night. I’ll go ahead and outfit you on the strength of your
being able to get the dogs.”
“Good!” ejaculated Jack.
“First of all the things you’ll wear,” the old trader struck out
genially and his eyes twinkled more merrily than ever for here was big
business staring him in the face--a volume of it such as he had not
transacted since the palmy days of Circle these many years agone.
The boys were all attention.
“You’ll want a couple of suits of waterproof underwear, a Mackinaw coat
and breeches for early winter and spring; a caribou skin coat with the
fur on which has a hood fixed to it; a pair of moosehide or bearskin
breeches, a couple of pairs of moccasins and _muk-luks_ apiece and about
a dozen pairs of German sox.”
“Whoa, Buddy,” sang out Bill, “I wouldn’t wear a pair o’ them Boche
socks if I had to go barefoot, see?”
“That’s only the name of them, boy; why they make them down there in
Dawson,” explained Mr. Jack, the storekeeper.
“Well, I might wear ’em in a pinch then,” said Bill.
“Then you must have fur mittens that are lined with wool; several pairs
of woolen mittens to wear when you are building your log cabin, heavy
fur caps and fur lined sleeping bags. Of course there will be towels and
handkerchiefs and all of that sort of small stuff.”
As the storekeeper enumerated the various items of clothing, he brought
them forth and laid out two piles, one for each of the boys.
“Now let me tell you something about taking care of these fur clothes;
if you expect them to last you for more than a month take my advice and
keep them dry, or if they do get wet, don’t wait but stop where you are,
build a fire and dry them then and there. I don’t care how low the
_quick_ falls you can’t get cold in one of these suits.
“Oh, yes; I almost forgot your eye shades but they are absolutely
necessary in traveling over the snow on bright days,” and he produced a
queer looking pair of goggles without any glasses in them. “These are
Esquimo shades and I wouldn’t give a cent for any other kind,” he said
as he handed the boys a pair.
They examined them closely and found that they were made of wood and
where the lenses were supposed to be in a pair of goggles there were
thin pieces of wood instead with a couple of slits in them to let the
light through. Jack and Bill put them on and made puns and had fun over
and out of them. Jack pretended he was a college _prof_ and then gave an
imitation of Teddy Roosevelt. Not to be outdone, Bill gave an imitation
of Jack giving an imitation of him, and then he wound up by pretending
he was Judge Gilhooley of the Harlem Police Court and promptly sentenced
himself to pay a fine of seven dollars and twenty-three cents for
falsely (or badly) impersonating _Hizzoner_.
Jack McQuesten laughed at their antics until his sides ached and the
boys laughed too, and altogether Circle wasn’t such a bad town as they
had painted it.
“You’ll take these eye shades more seriously when you have to use them
and you’ll thank your Uncle Jack for giving them to you, for they leave
no bad after effects as glass goggles do when you take them off.
“Next comes the hardware,” he went on explaining as he had to a
thousand, yes ten thousand, _tenderfeet_, in the past, and he thoroughly
enjoyed living over again those golden days. “I call everything hardware
that you can’t eat, wear, use for medicine, hunt or fish with, except
the dogs.
“You’ll need quite a lot of hardware including snowshoes and sleds, a
wall tent, tarpaulins and compasses, for traveling. For building your
cabin you will want a five-foot crosscut saw, a rip and a hand saw, an
ax, hammer and some other carpenter tools, besides nails, hinges, rivets
and such like traps.
“For cooking a folding sheet-iron stove, pans, coffee pot, tin plates,
cups, knives, forks and spoons. You say you’ve got a good single
barrelled repeating shotgun and a hunting knife apiece? You must take
along plenty of loaded shells and I will fix up all of the fishing
tackle you want. For your prospecting outfit you must take a
prospector’s pick and a miner’s pick with a steel point, a shovel with a
round point such as we use up here, a magnet, a few pounds of
quicksilver, a gold pan, a small gold scale to weigh your winnings on
and a magnifying glass.
“And now for the grub. This will include flour, corn-meal, yeast in
cakes and baking powder; evaporated fruits, potatoes, onions and
vegetables; sugar and saccharin tablets; ham, bacon and salt pork; about
a hundred pounds of Alaska strawberries and hardtack for emergency
rations, also a lot of pemmican for the same purpose; some tea, coffee
and condensed milk, soap and oleomargarine; salt and pepper, and a few
other little things I shall not forget to put in. You have a medicine
case? What have you got in it?” he asked, for Jack McQuesten had taken a
great interest in these two ‘down east’ boys and he intended to see that
they had enough of everything and the right kind of things--that is if
they ever started.
Jack told him it had bottles containing quinine, pepsin, cathartic
pills, calomel and migrain.
“No drug kit is complete up here unless you have arnica for stiff joints
and strained muscles and boracic acid for blistered and aching feet.”
The old trader was in no hurry to get the outfit together that day for
he knew there was going to be a fight to the finish in the evening and
knowing Black Pete better than he cared to and not knowing Bill Adams at
all, he allowed that, like as not, the boys wouldn’t need anything
further unless it was one or two spruce boxes.
“Looks to me as if Mr. Jack is tryin’ to sell us his store and is goin’
off to new diggin’s,” yawped Bill when he looked over the list Jack had
made as the storekeeper called off the items. “An’ what’s the
quicksilver for anyway--to fill up the thermometer tube when the bottom
drops out o’ it?”
Jack laughed at his pal’s little joke. “No, to dissolve out the gold
when we find it in quartz.”
“I suppose we’ll have to take it and pay for it and all them other
prospectin’ tools just to make things look regular, but we’ll throw them
away as soon as we gets outer sight. We’re after gold in sacks, not in
handfuls,” said Bill. “Why man alive it ’ud take a freight car to
transport all the stuff he’s goin’ to sell us; and besides, think o’ the
skads o’ spondulicks we’re goin’ to have to cough up fer it all, too.”
“You must remember that we’ve got to live all winter, Bill, and
McQuesten knows just what he’s about.”
“An’ what’s them Alaska strawberries?--a hundred pounds o’ them!--he
must think we’re goin’ to a Fourth Ward Picnic or a strawberry festible.
Do you know, Jack, I’m goin’ to have some o’ them night-bloomin’
strawberries for supper if I has to tip that slant-eyed, Hong-Kong cook
at the hotel a four bit piece.
“I suppose you’ve eaten _pemmican_, haven’t you Bill?”
“I’ve eaten most everything from _chicken-à-la-King_ with youse at the
Ritz-Carlton to a pair o’ old rubber boots when I was shipwrecked at
sea. It seems to me I’ve heard that word _pemmican_ somewhere afore in
my bright log-book o’ youth, but I can’t say as how I ever sat down to a
_table-de-hoty_ dinner where it was served and that I knew I was
partakin’ of it at the same time. Explain it to me and maybe I’ll
remember it by the way it smells.”
“Pemmican,” began Jack, “is like Irish stew, Hungarian goulash,
chop-suey or _chili-con-carne_ in that there is a general recipe for
making it. But cooks take even more liberties than poets; consequently
no two brands of pemmican are made the same, and, hence, cannot taste,
or smell, alike, but the two things that all of them have in common are
filling and staying qualities for either man or dog.
“Pemmican is usually made of meat ground up and grease added to it when
it is cooked, and some makers put pea-flour and other vegetable
ingredients into it to make it cheap. A pound of it will not fill a cup
and you can eat it every meal without getting tired of it. We used great
lots of it--in fact almost lived on it--when I went on that Arctic
expedition, and we fed it to the dogs too.
“Rear Admiral Peary had his pemmican made to order to get the full food
value out of it; his recipe called for lean beef ground fine, two thirds
part, and this was mixed with beef fat, one third part, to which was
added a little sugar and some raisins. The pemmican for the dogs is made
of cats, dogs, horses or any other kind of meat that is cheap. What this
pemmican is like that we are going to get here I haven’t the faintest
idea, but it doesn’t matter much for we’re not going to use it as a
steady diet.”
“One thing is sure, other prospectors have et it and what they can eat
we can eat if we have to,” was Bill’s idea of it.
On returning to the hotel Bill took Sing Nook, the Chinese cook to one
side, pressed a fifty cent piece into his hand and told him it was his
earnest desire to have some Alaska strawberries for his supper by way of
a little delicacy.
“Velly welly,” returned the celestial dignitary who presided over the
joss-house of pots and pans; “I glivee you pleanty Alaska stlawbellies
flor slupper.” And so that was easily fixed.
When Bill sat down to partake of the rations that evening he waited
patiently for the Alaska strawberries to come under his observation; but
none materialized as far as his acute judgment of the luscious fruit was
concerned. As soon as the meal was over and the diners had dispersed
Bill got Sing into a corner and sang him a song without music, but the
words of which ran something like this:
“I gave you four bits this afternoon to get me a helpin’ o’ Alaska
strawberries. You took my good money but you failed to deliver the
goods. Now what have you got to say for yourself, you Shanghai colored
son of a Pekin pigtail.”
“Allee samee I dlid glivee you Alaska stlawbellies flor slupper. You no
catchee ’em?” Sing asked very much surprised.
“No, I didn’t catchee ’em and if you don’t catchee ’em for me right now
youse ’ell catchee a couple of ’em in the eye, I’m a thinkin’.”
Sing had seen what Bill had done to Black Pete and he had a very
wholesome respect for this boy with the “velly badee facee,” so he
hustled out into the kitchen and was soon back with an enormous bowl of
beans, which he set on the table.
“What’s this?” questioned Bill sharply.
“Alaska stlawbellies, allee samee you havee tonlight for slupper.”
“Holy cat!” cried Bill in an awful voice. “I’ve been stung!”
Sing in the meantime had become very much alarmed over the
misunderstanding but when he heard Bill guffawing in appreciation of the
joke, he joined in heartily. Bill had learned two things; namely, what
Alaskan strawberries are, and that a Chinaman has a sense of humor.
There was a larger gathering of the Northmen in the Grand Palace Hotel
that night than there had been since the last election. They came in
like spooks at a séance, apparently materialized out of thin air, but
unlike the latter, you would have to admit that they looked mighty like
hard and fast, flesh and blood human beings; and further they refuse to
dematerialize until they had seen what they came forth to see.
As was his wont, Rip Stoneback, who had been prospecting for gold in
these parts for the last quarter of a century but whose innumerable
disappointments had not affected his musical talent, was on the
platform, but he was not fiddling. René and his big brown bear were
there too but they were not executing any fancy steps or doing any funny
stunts, for the gathering that night were neither interested in the
goddess of music, nor of the dance, nor, again, of comedy.
What they were there to see was a man’s game that had originated in the
primeval world, had been handed down while man was in the process of
development, and has since bided in communities that are far more
cultured than Circle. It was the old spirit of the fight that called
them and they were there to a man.
The tables, which were always scattered round the hall, where divers and
sundry games with the pasteboards were played of an evening, had all
been set back against the walls and the chairs piled up around them.
Just why Doc Marling had seen fit to move them off the floor was not
apparent unless he thought it was going to be a sprinting match instead
of a pugilistic contest. There was enough room in the hall for a dozen
squared rings.
He had also removed all of the breakable assets to better protected
places, his bump of precaution having been enlarged by the unfortunate
breaking of his three hundred dollar “lookin’-glass” that was the pride
of Circle and the envy of towns up and down the Yukon River for a
hundred miles in either direction.
Conversation was being carried on but it was of a tense kind and low,
and not at all like the big voiced, open hearted talk that is the way of
these free men of the Northland. And all because a seasoned man, but a
bully, was going to do battle with a stripling who hailed from a place
they had heard spoken of as New York.
Bill had seen fights, yes, he had had fights ever since he could
remember and in later years, as a member of the _Harlem Athletic Club_,
he had watched some friendly bouts of give and take and had himself
participated in so many battles that the fact he was going to fight
Black Pete had no more effect on him than if he had been going to spar
with Jack.
Black Pete was in a different mood. He too had had his fights but they
were far between and rough and tumble ones at that with men who, like
himself, knew nothing about the science of the game, and usually he came
out on top. Failing in this he had used his knife on men who downed him,
and once he shot a man. A bully sooner or later, though, will meet his
match and when Black Pete met Bill he was scheduled for a K. O.
(knockout).
At nine o’clock, or thereabouts, the proprietor walked over to the place
where the bout was to be pulled off and made this announcement:
“We have with us to-night Black Pete, champeen all round pugilist of
Alaska and Bill Adams, the New York Kid, in a friendly bout and may the
best man win.”
Black Pete came on to the center of the floor full of dash and dog. Then
Bill came on and held out his hand but Black Pete refused to shake, so
Bill shook hands with himself, just like that. Evidently Pete was not
going to fight according to approved ring rules. Instead he swung a
vicious right hander at Bill’s head. Bill ducked it and laughed and he
knew his man was slow.
Then by sparring and feinting he drew from Pete rights and lefts with
the force of a sledge-hammer back of them but which Bill side-stepped or
ducked. It was not long before Pete showed signs of getting tired of
hitting the air. As Pete had told himself, if he could ever hit Bill he
would smash in his face; the power was back of his blows all right but
the trouble was that Bill wouldn’t stand still long enough to let him do
it.
Bill, who was as lithe and nimble on his feet as a cat, was everywhere
around his opponent at once and kept him on the go following his
tactics. Then Bill must have gotten careless for Black Pete gave him a
wallop on the jaw that sent him whirling a dozen feet. Now for the first
time Pete’s friends egged him on and yelled “give it to him again.”
Then Pete, encouraged by his luck, rushed Bill, but he was not to be
caught napping again. He warmed up to his work and tapped Pete on the
nose, making it bleed, on the jaw, making it hurt, in the mouth, making
it swell and in the eye making it black; in fact he hit him any and
everywhere he wanted to and so fast did he hammer him that Pete got
bewildered and began to strike out in every direction in the hope that
some of his blows would land on his enemy’s anatomy, and so another did.
It was a glancing blow and scraped Bill’s cheek so hard it nearly ripped
the knife scar open.
“Wind him up Bill,” called out Jack.
“All right,” his partner answered, and with that he gave Pete one of his
famous ’ospital punches and he went to the floor in a heap.
Jack went over to Pete and slowly counted ten and as he still failed to
show any signs of intelligence he counted him out. Pete’s friends
carried him over to a corner where he came to a half hour later and then
they put him to bed. He had had “a yard and a half over plenty,” as Bill
would say.
Rip sawed away again on his fiddle, Doc put the tables back on the
floor, René danced and wrestled with his good-natured bear and the men
played cards again, but no one asked Bill or Jack to have a drink, a
cigar or a bullet as long as they were in Circle. I dare say that the
veriest tenderfoot can now go into the Grand Palace Hotel and he will be
treated as considerately as he would in the Waldorf-Astoria, in New
York, the Blackstone in Chicago or the Palace in San Francisco.
The next morning after the bout Black Pete lit out for other diggings
and he has never been seen in Circle since. In this primitive way then
are bad breeds often made into better men.
CHAPTER VI
MUSH, YOU HUSKIES, MUSH
When pioneer Jack McQuesten saw Bill deliver the final blow that knocked
Black Pete out he knew he was safe in going ahead with the boys’ outfit.
He also made it known that very night that they were in the market to
buy some dogs, that nothing but the best would be good enough for them
and that he himself would pick them out. The result was that within the
next two or three days there was quite a bunch of dogs in Circle, enough
I should say to make up half-a-dozen dog-teams.
“How many dogs do you reckon we’ll need to haul our outfit?” Bill wanted
to know.
“What do you say, Mr. McQuesten?” Jack put it up to the storekeeper.
“You could get along with five or six dogs to the team, but seven will
give you much better service and besides, if any thing should happen to
any of them, you would be in no danger of getting stuck.”
“It’s better to have too many than too few,” said Jack Heaton.
Then they went out and took a look at the dogs and they were of all the
kinds used in Alaska. Among the lot that were offered the boys were some
genuine Eskimo dogs or _malamutes_ as they are called, a number of
_huskies_, which are a mixture of various breeds of dogs that have been
brought into Alaska, with the native Indian dogs; a few _Siwash_, or
common Indian dogs and the rest were _outside_ dogs of various breeds.
“It’s like buyin’ a necktie in a department store--any of ’em would do
but when you see ’em all together you don’t know which one you like the
best,” confided Bill. “Now if they was hawses----”
“Leave it to me Bill,” broke in Jack; “it’s been a month of Sundays
since I’ve had anything to do with dogs and dog teams but I’ll pick out
the best of the bunch with Mr. McQuesten’s help. The malamute was the
only kind of dog we used in the Arctic and we’ll buy all of them there
are here--what, only four?--not enough for even one team. Can’t you get
us three more of these malamutes, Mr. McQuesten, so that we’ll have at
least one team of them?” asked Jack.
“These are all that I know about. It’s a great day when you see any one
with a matched team of any kind of dogs. The husky is just as good a
dog, or better for these parts, and there are five of them. You’ll have
to make out with outside dogs for the others.” Then he whispered in
Jack’s ear, “I wouldn’t take any of those Indian dogs if I was you, for
they are the worst kind of thieves and will keep your teams in bad blood
all of the time. But I will say they are good work dogs.”
“You’re in the know, Mr. McQuesten, and I’ll take your tip,” replied
Jack.
This buying of dogs was an entirely new phase of business to Bill and he
took in every word that the pair of Jacks, by which I mean Messrs.
McQuesten and Heaton, were saying and to the remarks, arguments and
laudations that the owners of the various dogs made and were having by
and between themselves. It must be admitted that Bill stood at the foot
of the pass when it came to knowing anything about these work dogs.
“Tell me this, Jack,” Bill whispered so that no one might learn of his
profound ignorance, “what’s the diff’ ’tween a malamute and a husky?”
“More than there is between a broncho and a mustang, though the dogs of
a dog team are always called _huskies_, regardless of the kinds of dogs
it is made up of. See those handsome, alert-looking fellows over there
with their ears sticking straight up?” Jack nodded toward them; “well,
they are the malamutes.
“Their pointed ears are in that position for keeps, their noses are
black and as sharp as a collie’s, while they have slitted eyes from
which I shouldn’t wonder if the Eskimo got his idea for making his eye
shades. Their pointed ears, keen eyes and sharp noses make them look as
if they were ready to jump out of their hides. They’re the Ford motors
of the Arctic region all right. Their close hair is about the color of a
silver fox, and look at their tails! two of them stand up like wireless
masts and those of the other two look as if they had been put over their
backs with a curling iron.
“A husky looks a good deal like a malamute, for his ears are pointed
too, but instead of being fixed in an upright position he can move them,
so every once in a while you’ll notice he will let them drop. He doesn’t
stand one, two, three though with the malamute for beauty.”
“McGargle over there says that dog drivers up here will take a husky
anytime before they’d take a malamute. How do you make that out?”
“I make it out because McGargle has a couple of huskies he wants to
sell. We’ll ask McQuesten anyway,” said Jack.
“I’ve just had a argument with my pard,” Bill said to the storekeeper as
big as though he had all the inside information that is known about
dogs, “and he says that the malamutes are the best and I says that the
huskies are the best. Now what do you say?”
“Yes, huskies are supposed to be a little better workers for the kind of
sledding we do in this part of the country, but speaking for myself I
prefer the malamute because the snow doesn’t stick between his toes as
easily and his feet are harder. After all it’s only a matter of choice
and usually what you can get. Both kinds of dogs were made by Almighty
God for the work they have to do and they do it well.
“This is true too of the outside dogs; some of them are just as good
workers and just as good in every respect as either the malamutes or the
huskies. It isn’t a question of which dogs are the best any more now
than in the days back there when a good dog brought two hundred and
fifty, five hundred, yes, even a thousand dollars.” McQuesten shook his
head sadly. “But those good old days will never come back again.”
Nearly all the time the boys were looking over the dogs and bartering
with their owners for them they made a bedlam of the peace and quiet of
Circle with their ear-splitting barking and howling, and Jack asked Bill
to observe that it was the malamutes and huskies that did the howling,
while the Siwashes and outside dogs did the barking.
“Whenever you find a dog barking, though he may look like a malamute or
a husky you will know to a certainty that he is not full blooded but has
some other strain in him,” explained Jack.
An Indian had half-a-dozen Siwashes for sale and Bill made it his
business to get a line on them. Not knowing, or let us say, forgetting,
that the Indian dog has the meanest disposition in the world, Bill held
out his hand and snapped his fingers at one of them. As a reward for his
kindy notice the dog returned the compliment by snapping savagely at his
hand and had he not been tied to a stake and Bill somewhat of an
acrobat, the brute would have made a partial meal from the extremity.
“No Siwashes for mine,” Bill bellowed; “I wouldn’t have a team o’ them
Indian savages on a bet.”
Having selected the dogs they wanted the dickering began in earnest
between the boys and the various owners, with McQuesten as referee. They
drove some pretty good bargains too, though it just so happened they
were favored by a slump in the dog market at that particular time so
that dogs that used to fetch a hundred dollars or more they bought for
twenty-five dollars or less.
The upshot of it all was that the malamutes and the huskies cost the
boys in the neighborhood of twenty-five dollars apiece and the outside
dogs from ten to fifteen dollars apiece. The outside dogs included a
couple of cross-bred mastiffs, a couple of St. Bernards and a
Newfoundland.
The boys paid over the money and got the names of the various dogs,
which Jack wrote down, so that they would neither forget them nor get
them twisted, for a dog will not respond to any save his own name any
quicker than a man will, though he’s not so sensitive about it. The
owners who had not been fortunate enough to have made sales took their
dogs with them and went their way, but not happily for they knew not
when Circle would see prospectors like these boys again.
“Now, men, bring the dogs over to the store and we’ll hitch them up for
the boys,” said McQuesten.
“What in thunder to?” Bill wondered, but never a question did he ask.
The men and the boys took a couple of dogs apiece and when they brought
up at the store McQuesten went in and in a few minutes returned with two
sets of harness. These were made of strips of deerskin a couple of
inches wide, fixed to rawhide traces. The strips were made into a loop
that went round each dog’s neck to form a collar, and three strips, to
which the traces were fastened, crossed his back, the first one just
back of his forelegs, and the other two, which were fixed to the trace
some fourteen inches apart, met on top of his back just in front of his
hind legs.
In front of the store were two small two-wheeled carts which are used in
the various towns to transport goods on during the summer months by
means of dog teams. Then came the question of which should be the
lead-dogs and which should be the wheel-dogs, as the dogs are called
that are hitched in front and next to the sled, or in this case to the
carts.
Next, old Jack and young Jack separated the dogs into two teams, with
the plentiful advice of their former owners and others who were looking
on, and then with the aid of more than willing hands of the old timers
the dogs were hitched up with all the malamutes in one team and all of
the huskies in the other.
“Now let’s get the names of these dogs straight, so that they’ll know
when we’re talking to them,” said Jack to Bill.
“First off, which team do you want, Jack?” asked Bill, though he knew
his partner, like himself, was strong for the malamutes.
“You take whichever one you want, Bill.”
“Well, I’ll take the huskies if you don’t mind,” he replied as if he
meant it.
“That wouldn’t be regular, Bill; we’ll draw straws and whoever gets the
long one takes the malamutes.”
“No, I must have them huskies. They’re the best dogs, that’s what all
the drivers say, an’ as I don’t know much about drivin’ dog-teams I
orter have the best one, what say, Mr. Jack?”
Jack McQuesten saw through Bill’s little game and his eyes twinkled for
he had bored into Bill’s nature when he first saw him and he knew he had
a heart as big as all Alaska.
“Give him the team of huskies, Jack,” was McQuesten’s decision; “Bill
deserves them.”
In Jack’s team of malamutes ’Frisco was the lead-dog, with Wolf, Jennie,
Tofty, Jim and Prince after him while Skookum was wheel-dog. The team of
huskies that Bill fell heir to was made up of Sate, the leader, and
after him came Caro, Lukeen, Danny, Lon, Moosehide and Jinx for wheeler.
How these dogs came by their names is, as Kipling used to say, another
story, or, rather, more in the nature of a riddle, but we can make a
guess at a few of them. For instance ’Frisco, who was a pure malamute,
couldn’t have come from San Francisco, hence it is likely that his first
owner had. Wolf, also a pure malamute, probably came by his name from
having been a wolf killer, Tofty, from a town over near Fish Creek where
he might have been born, while Skookum means _strong_ in the Chinook
jargon. So much for Jack’s team.
As to Bill’s team, Sate, it seems clear, is a contraction of Satan, and
was so called because he was an imp of knowledge, as wise and wily as
huskies are made. Caro is a town over by Chandlar Lake, about a hundred
miles northwest of Fort Yukon; Lukeen got his name from old Fort Lukeen,
on the Kushokwin River, but on whose site the town of Kolmakoffsky now
stands. He was a long, long way from the place where his slit-eyes first
saw the light of day. Moosehide may have derived his cognomen by having
eaten this delicacy when he was once starving to death, while Jinx is a
name that is always associated with bad luck and he finally lived up to
it.
The storekeeper handed Jack and Bill a rawhide whip apiece, about twelve
or fourteen feet long, and told two of the drivers to give the boys a
_hand_, which was his easy way of saying to show them how to manage the
teams, for it takes much time and a deal of practice before a tenderfoot
can drive these dogs by word of mouth and the crack of the whip.
It was plain to be seen that the dogs were glad to be in the traces
again and they all stood alert and ready for the word to _mush_, which
means the same thing as the farmer’s _gid-ap_. While Jack had had some
experience with driving a dog team in the Arctic he was by no means an
adept at it and poor Bill was as helpless as a pedestrian crossing Fifth
Avenue at Forty-Second Street. But the men knew and the dogs know what
to do.
There was a crack of a whip that sounded like a pistol shot, with a yell
of “_mush, you huskies_,” and Bill’s team was at it and away. Another
crack of a whip and another “mush on” from Jack, when his team followed
a close second in the wake of the other. It was great sport for the old
timers watching the breaking in of the new teams and their new drivers.
For the boys it was real hard work and they felt as though they were
sweating blood in their efforts to keep the dogs under control.
Every day from that time on Jack and Bill hitched up their dog teams and
carted goods to and from the boat landing and the store for Jack
McQuesten and when there was nothing else to do they would get on their
carts and ride all round the town to the end that they might learn how
to drive the dogs right and so that the dogs would get used to them.
As both Jack and Bill were past masters in the game of handling horses
they used the same tactics with the dogs--that is to say, they treated
them decently and punished them only when they really needed it. At
first the dogs didn’t know what the boys were up to, being so kind to
them; they seemed to think it was a trick and some of them resented it.
Now it has been said that malamutes and huskies have no affection for
anyone, not even the man that feeds them, but Jack and Bill believed
that dogs are alike the world over and they proceeded to prove it by
making friends with these work-dogs of the north. This in the face of
the fact that the old timers told them that petting the dogs would spoil
them, but the boys thought differently.
Came then the first fall of snow and winter had set in. For the next
week or so the boys drove their dog teams around hitched to the sleds
and both did much walking on their snow-shoes. Like driving a dog team
walking on snow-shoes requires practice, only not nearly as much, and
while Jack had learned both of these things in the Arctic they were an
entirely new means of transportation to Bill, but he took to them with
avidity for they were in the nature of sport.
As I had occasion to remark in an earlier account of Bill, he could
learn anything that had to do with the concrete, as for instance riding
or shooting or athletics, but when it came to the abstract, such as
extracting cube root, how wireless works or the way chemical elements
combine, he was as compact as the antlers of a bull moose. But he was
like the rest of the human herd in that he would have given his
gold-tooth to be able to do what someone else could do, only it must
have to do with the working of the mind. What Bill did have, though, was
a good memory, but he lacked the fundamentals of education and this was
where he fell down. But this has nothing to do with snowshoes and how he
learned to use them.
His first efforts at snowshoeing were like everyone’s else, laughable in
the extreme, and the natives who congregated to watch him roared as he
spilled himself this way or that way and then must needs have assistance
to get up again. Before he had done with it, though, he could walk on
them very swiftly notwithstanding his rather short bowed legs and it was
surprising how quickly he learned the swinging outward motion that must
be acquired in order to become an expert.
To cap the climax he laughed best at them by laughing last when he
turned a complete back somersault with a pair of five-foot snowshoes on
and that, as you will allow, is some very considerable trick.
“He’ll do!” as Jack McQuesten put it.
A good deal of snow had fallen, the streams and rivers had frozen over
so that the sledding was good and it was getting around the zero mark.
The long awaited day had arrived and Jack McQuesten had packed their
outfit on the sleds, at the same time showing the boys how to do it.
There is a wonderful knack in knowing how to pack, and the “freight-car”
that Bill had declared they would need to carry their outfit, which the
old trader had made up for them, his experienced hands compressed into
two comfortable loads. It was next to impossible, as Jack said, to
believe that such an enormous amount of stores could be contained in so
small a space.
The dogs were harnessed and they knew that now they were in for some
real work but they were none the less anxious for the start. Then there
emerged from McQuesten’s store two strange figures dressed in furs from
head to foot. They were neither Eskimos nor Indians but a look at them
full in the face revealed that they were no other than a couple of
youthful gold seekers who had come out of the far east and answered to
the names of Jack and Bill. Truly they looked of the North, Northern.
Finally just as the first dull streaks of daylight sifted through the
thick air the cracks of their rawhide whips broke the monotony of weeks
of waiting and the orders to “mush on, you huskies” from both Jack and
Bill who were at the handle bars of their sleds started the teams down
the main street of Circle at a brisk pace.
They crossed the Yukon River and took the No Name River that flows into
it a little to the north of Circle and whose headwaters lay some forty
miles to the east of it. By noon they calculated they had covered about
fifteen miles and here they made their first stop, had a drink of hot
tea from their thermos bottles and did justice to some other edibles
that Sing Nook had knocked together for them, and they were not Alaska
strawberries either.
After they and the dogs had rested half-an-hour, they broke out their
sleds, which means loosening the runners, which freeze and stick fast,
by moving the sled sidewise with the gee pole, and started up the river
again. They didn’t make such good time now for the work was new and was
telling on them even more than it was on the dogs. So by sundown they
had made only ten miles more, but Bill said he thought that was doing
mighty well under the circumstances and Jack thought so too. They had
hoped, though, to make the head of the stream that night.
“Four days o’ this kind o’ goin’ will put us in the land o’ the
Yeehats,” said Bill.
They pitched their tent on the bank of the river and built a rousing
fire just outside of it. Then they fed the dogs a generous piece of fish
each, which is the principal diet of the dogs in Alaska; this done they
got their own suppers and, just to see how it would go, they warmed up
some pemmican, got out the hardtack and made a big pot of coffee.
Here it was that Bill was introduced to that celebrated food which was
the chief factor in the discovery of the North Pole, though of course
Peary and his malamutes and the Eskimos had something to do with it too.
“Pemmican,” allowed Bill, making a face that would put shame to an
ancestor on a totem-pole, “seems to be a concoction on the order o’ a
brownstone house built up o’ schnitzel and artificial rubber. I suppose
it is all right though when everything else is all wrong but when we get
there,” and he pointed somewhere in a direction that might lead to the
North Star, the one hundred and thirty-fourth parallel and New York, but
meaning their winter quarters to be, “it will be venison steak for
ours.”
The dogs, tired after their first day’s work, since they had been idle
all summer, had disappeared, having dug out holes in the snow and gone
to bed. The boys, though they were dead tired too, were in no mood for
sleep, but in their fur clothes they were as warm as though ensconced in
their own steam-heated homes, while the mellow glow of the candle light
inside their tent gave it as cheery an aspect as a cluster of electric
lights in a parlor.
So they sat around for an hour or so after supper discussing their
successful start, their outfit, the dogs and--not to be forgotten for a
single moment--the gold they were after. It was good to know that here,
far from the civilized haunts of men, there were fourteen huskies,
strong of leg and tough of feet, sleeping out there under the snow who
could carry them to the farthermost ends of the frozen North if needs
be. It gave them a great feeling of security.
“Imagine us, Jack, a-drivin’ down Broadway or Fifth Avenoo! What’d the
people think anyway?” Bill dreamed in an audible voice.
“I opine we wouldn’t get very far,” replied Jack, laughing at this
ridiculous idea of his pal’s.
“I’d like to know why not?” queried Bill.
“Because the _Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals_ wouldn’t
stand for it for a moment. They would send the dogs to the _Bide-a-Wee_
home and us to Randall’s Island.[4] And then the tables would be turned
for we’d get the dried fish and water and they’d get the pemmican, pink
tea and ice cream.”
[4] The reformatory in New York where bad boys are sent.
“I’m on, Buddy; what’s all right in one part o’ the United States is a
crime in some other part o’ it. I guess we’ll stay right here with our
huskies, eh, Jack?”
“I’ll say we will for about six months--or until we find that gold.”
“These Indian guys ain’t such slouches, are they?” went on Bill, who
having filled up on pemmican was in a talkative mood. “Imagine them
havin’ sense enough to hitch up a lot o’ dogs and puttin’ them to work
pullin’ loads. Some invention I calls it.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Jack. “While the Indians used dog teams before
the white men came here, the Indians didn’t know anything about using a
smart dog for a leader and driving them by word of mouth.”
“How’d they do it, then!”
“By having an Indian boy run ahead of the dogs and of course the dogs
ran after him. It was the white man that put an intelligent dog ahead of
the team to lead them. You must have noticed to-day that our lead dogs,
’Frisco and Sate, did mighty little real pulling but they kept the other
dogs spread out and pulling their level best. And it’s the leaders who
_ho_ and _mush_ and _gee_ and _haw_ when we yell at them and impart our
orders to the other dogs of the teams. It’s always the white man who
puts the finishing touches on things he finds.”
“We’ll put the finishin’ touches on them sacks o’ gold, I’m sayin’,”
Bill rejoined and then calming down a bit he added, “when we finds ’em.”
The fire had burned low and the boys got into their sleeping bags, when
they followed their dogs into the shadowy land of dreams. But while the
dogs dreamed of getting their fill of fish just once, their young
masters dreamed of enough yellow gold to last them for all time.
CHAPTER VII
IN WINTER QUARTERS
The barking and howling of the dogs woke the boys from a sound sleep.
They quickly got out of their sleeping bags to see what it was all about
and when they looked out of the tent they saw a pack of fourteen huskies
with their mouths wide open and looking for all the world as though they
were laughing, except when they were in the act of straining their vocal
cords to make a noise.
If they could have talked the boys would have heard them say, “here, you
sleepy fellows, get a move on yourselves, for we’ve got to do twenty
miles to-day.” The handsome brutes were as playful and joyous as any of
their tribe this side of the happy hunting grounds where all good
canines go to when they die and where the “toil of the trace and trail”
are not known.
On second thought, though, it may just be that they were not so
particularly anxious to get into the harness again as it was that they
had fond recollections of the dried fish they had eaten the night
before, and that they were more than ready now for another helping of
the same hyperbolical breakfast food.
While Jack fed them more generous portions of fish than they had ever
known before, Bill proceeded to get their own breakfasts, of crisp
bacon, real bread made by that heathen Chinese, Sing Nook, back there at
Circle, and coffee with condensed milk and sugar in it. What more could
they--could anyone--want? The boys couldn’t imagine.
Now as long as they had followed the river their course had been due
east and they didn’t have to worry about going in the right direction
but when they reached the end of it their course lay northeast, which
is, naturally, forty-five degrees between the points of the compass
known as _due north_ and _due east_. To follow this course they produced
their compasses and while both Jack and Bill were perfectly familiar
with the use of the instruments something seemed to be wrong with them,
for instead of the needles pointing to the north as do all good
compasses, they pointed almost due east, or to be exact they pointed to
_east by north_, which is eleven and one-fourth degrees north of due
east.
“It’s twelve o’clock by both your watch and mine and there’s the sun
overhead on the meridian, so north must be up there and here’s these
bloomin’ compasses a-pointin’ to the east,” complained Bill. “Here we
are a thousand miles from nowhere and we don’t even know the blinkin’
north when we sees it.”
“Now don’t get excited, Bill, but let’s investigate this thing and
reason out the whyness of the wherefore,” said Jack sanely, though he
couldn’t understand it any more than did his “pard” Bill.
They were so close to the north-pole the needles vibrated with dynamic
energy and yet they fixedly held their positions north by east.
“Maybe it’s the hardware in our outfit that’s affectin’ them, or the
pemmican we had for lunch yesterday, or else the dogs have et a
keg-o’-nails afore we left Circle,” suggested Bill, who had a better
idea of funning than he had of science.
“There isn’t enough iron in our outfit to affect them as you can tell if
you will walk around the sleds with your compass. It may be the
pemmican, though, for I sort of feel as if there’s a loadstone in my
stomach. Leaving all joking aside, Bill, there is something here--some
phenomenon we don’t understand,” returned Jack, thinking as he had never
thought before.
“It may just be,” he went on, “that there is a vein of iron ore running
along in this direction which would of course account for the erratic
behavior of the needles. If so we’ll soon get out of the range of its
influence. What we’ll do is to call the point marked _east_ on our
compass cards _north_ and then if we travel _north by east_ we’ll really
be going in the right direction, see?” explained Jack.
“It’s as clear as mud,” responded Bill, “we’ll have a nice time
correctin’ the errors of these compasses when they are ninety degrees
outen the way. You can use your compass if you want to but I’m goin’ by
the blinkin’ Sun and the bloomin’ North Star, I am.”
All that day as they were mushing on Jack kept tab on his compass and
Bill kept his eye on the sun and while they both firmly believed they
were headed right, the compass, by which the mariner pushes boldly
forward, steering always as it directs, knowing it will not send him
astray, had the boys worked up into something that very nearly
approached a nervous state of mind.
All the time they were on the march that afternoon the going was very
much heavier than it had been on the No Name River, for they had to
break the trail as they went along. Jack kept wondering what had come
over the compasses that so persistently made them point east instead of
north.
When they had established camp that night they were still discussing the
frivolous peculiarities of compasses which enabled them to point east
when they were on top-o’-the-world with the same degree of freedom that
they pointed north when they were used on the rim-o’-the-world.
The weather was crisp and cold and the air as thin and clear as crystal.
Bill, who had lost faith in the instrument that is the symbol of
unerring accuracy, stood forth in the night, looking more like some
barbarian of the glacial age than a pampered boy of the gas-house
district and viewed the twinkling lights in the bowl of the heavens. He
called Jack and indicating the North Star with his finger said:
“Either that star is wrong and our compasses are right or the other way
about, but ’tween you and me, Bud, I’ll bank on the North Star every
time and _dish_ the compasses.”
“I know exactly where the trouble comes in, Bill; funny I couldn’t have
thought of it before,” said Jack, brightening up as though his
brain-cells had decohered. “The North Star and the compasses are both
right. You know that the magnetic north pole and the true, or
geographic, north pole are not in the same place.
“In fact the magnetic pole is way south of the true pole--let me see, if
I remember rightly it is pretty close to the meridian which is one
hundred degrees west of Greenwich and on the sixty-eighth parallel, and
is, consequently, nearly twenty degrees south of the geographic pole.
This is the reason, then, our compasses point to the east instead of to
the north; the only thing we don’t want to forget to do is to allow for
this difference.”
“Right you are, Jack,” Bill made answer, for of all times that his
admiration for his partner welled in his breast it was when the latter
explained what he called “this high-brow stuff.” “Say if I had a brain
like yourn I wouldn’t be up here seekin’ moosehide sacks o’ gold, I’d be
back there in little ole Noo York on Wall Street shovelin’ it into
vaults; that’s what I’d be doin’.”
Having disposed of the vexatious problem of the North Pole Bill again
took an interest in his compass and began figuring out how many points
this way or that way they would have to go to get so many points the
other side of somewhere else. Bill didn’t know it but up there in the
cold, cold North he was developing his gray matter, for he was
_thinking_ and this is the only process by which it can be done.
And so for the next three days they kept steadily onward over tundras,
on streams, through wooded lands, up hills and down dales and always
north by east. Nor did the boys feel a bit lonesome here in these vast
stretches of the sub-Arctic ice and snow and the great, grim solitude of
nature but this may be accounted for in virtue of there being hardly
ever a minute but that they were kept on the jump doing something for
either themselves or the dogs.
Neither were they without companions for the dogs were the most
wonderful company ever. They showed the most amazing intelligence,
particularly ’Frisco and Sate, and Bill was not far from the truth when
he said “they’re human and that’s all there is to it.” And in very truth
so it seemed, for whatever they wanted to do or say, they knew precisely
how to go about it, or to make themselves understood.
“We still have another day’s journey before us,” Jack announced as they
made their last temporary camp, and they were, indeed, getting pretty
close to the end of the rainbow, for they were even then in the land of
the Yeehats, which was the land of their golden hopes.
But to Bill, instead of there being more gold the farther north they
went, the snowscape grew more desolate and forbidding, for he was better
acquainted with a semi-torrid climate than he was with a wholly frigid
one, and to him the outlook was far from alluring. Jack who had spent
nine months in the Arctic didn’t mind it a little bit. He had the
makings in him of a polar explorer.
Harking back to that July morning when Jack had unfolded the fascinating
story of gold in moosehide sacks to him in his apartment, and now
looking out upon the snow-veiled land as far as his eye could reach Bill
again began to wonder if, after all, it wasn’t a fairy tale told by a
writer of fiction, or, more likely, a hoax perpetrated by the early
miners on the tenderfeet who pestered them with questions.
“What I’d like to know is if this metal is really up here,” he finally
said to Jack, “why haven’t men like Jack McQuesten, Doc Marling, Sam
Stoneback and all the other old timers who have lived in Ilasker ever
since gold was discovered, searched for and found this treasure.”
Jack smiled cynically--that is, as cynically as a boy can smile.
“You might just as reasonably ask me why the head door-keeper of the
Stock Exchange has not made a fortune on the floor--he’s on the _ground_
too you know. Or why is it a boot-black sometimes becomes a millionaire,
or a girl from Tin Can Alley rises out of the depths and is crowned a
queen?” Jack argued.
“Or Bill Adams, of Claremont Avenoo, seekin’ the yellow metal in the
shadow o’ the North Pole,” Bill commented and then he added, “I’m
gettin’ to be some poet like Mr. Service, what say, Jack?”
“Yes, this beautiful Northland will make a poet of anybody. But were the
bootblack and the alley wench destined to do and become what they did do
and did become?” Jack went on.
“Is it because they _thought_ their way up, or is the element of chance
responsible for it all? Perhaps it is like pemmican, due to a little of
everything mixed together. These are things for you to think about,
Bill.”
Bill _was_ thinking but he couldn’t think fast enough to keep up with
Jack’s line of talk, though he had the satisfaction of knowing what his
partner was driving at and this was more than he was sometimes able to
do.
“It sounds to me, Jack,” he finally said, “but I’m hopin’ as how you’re
right. I wouldn’t take any stock in it comin’ from any one else ’ceptin’
yourself. Your hunches from the time I first knowed you has got the
weegie board locked in a vault. An’ consekently I’m sayin’ as how I take
it your hunch inkubator is in just as good workin’ order and reliable
here in Ilasker, as it was down in Mexico.”
“Now you’re talking sense,” said Jack, throwing out his chest, only it
couldn’t be noticed from the exterior because his caribou coat was so
big it covered up his abnormal expansion. “And see here, Bill, you want
to _cut out_ this ‘it sounds to me’ stuff. I’m not exactly what you call
a Christian Scientist but we’ll never find the pot of gold if you’re
going to keep doubting it all the time.”
This little talk gave Bill some food for thought too, and he resolved
that let come what may he would never show any signs of its “sounding to
him” again.
Along in the late afternoon of the next day they came to a river and
Jack proclaimed that they had at last reached the end of their long
trip.
“This is the Big Black River all right and if I haven’t missed my guess
we are about ten miles below the Arctic Circle and fifteen or twenty
miles west of the International boundary line. Put her there, old pard,
we’re in the land of the Yeehats at last!”
“With nary a Yeehat in sight,” said Bill as they grasped hands, “but I’m
goin’ to keep my rifle handy if it’s all the same to you.”
Then came the work of building their winter quarters which was to be a
log cabin of one room about twelve feet wide and fourteen feet long.
There were plenty of trees about, the chief kind being Alaska spruce,
and owing to its abundance in the more northern parts of Alaska it is
used for work of every description, such as cabins, mining timber,
firewood, sleds, etc.
The first thing to be done was to fell the trees and they began by
sawing them down with their crosscut saw. Bill said he would rather chop
them down and that he could do it easier and quicker than both of them
could do it together with the saw. While this work was in progress the
dogs grew restless on account of their inactivity and enlivened things
up every now and then with a fight; then Jack would go among them, like
Daniel in the lion’s den, and use the butt-end of his whip handle on
them until they broke apart.
“I’ll give you _muts_ something to do that will take the fight out of
you,” he told them, and he did, for as Bill felled each tree his
_pardner_, as he had now begun to call him, lashed a rope round an end
and hitching the dogs to it put them to doing work the like of which
none of them had ever done before.
And pull? Why, boy, they pulled so hard that their muscles looked as if
they would break through their hides. After he had broken out a log and
was ready to start Jack would give his long whip a tremendous crack and
yell _mush!_ when every dog did his duty and they liked it too.
It was a never ending source of wonder to the boys that these animals
liked to work. And yet under the influence of kind treatment they were
very affectionate, especially the malamutes, though none of them showed
it in a way at all like dogs that live in the lap of luxury. Neither
would it do to pet one of them to the exclusion of the others else there
would be a terrific fight going on in an instant for they were fearfully
jealous, and would not tolerate the slightest show of partiality.
“I’ve got one o’ them high-brow ideas, Jack; I’ve been thinkin’ and
thinkin’ as I’ve watched these huskies, and after what you told me about
the way the dogs acted on the front over there in France, I’ve
conclooded they’ve got human brains just the same as you and me. They
could talk if they wants to but they just pretend they can’t so they
won’t have to argy with a feller. They’re just like them furriners in
Noo York, they can _savvy_ anything they wanter and anything they don’t
wanter _savvy_--why they don’t.”
“Then you believe in _reincarnation_,” said Jack.
“Reindarnation!” was Bill’s near echo. “I might believe in it if I knew
what it is, but not knowin’ I cannot say.”
Then Jack explained how some folks, including about four hundred million
in India, believed that the souls of animals, when they died, passed on
into the bodies of people. This was all easy enough for Jack to tell
about but when Bill wanted to know what Jack meant by _soul_ his partner
had no small time telling him about it in a way that he could
understand.
“It sounds reasonable,” declared Bill, “and I would believe in this
reindarnation thing only these dogs are so much decenter than most
people.”
[Illustration: “‘I’VE CONCLOODED THEY’VE GOT HUMAN BRAINS JUST THE SAME
AS YOU AND ME.’”]
And so they worked and talked and talked and worked and another month
slipped by before they got their log cabin done. The way Bill could
swing an ax made Jack envious and while building the cabin was the
hardest of hard work, both of these youngsters got a lot of pleasure
seeing it go up log by log. And when it was all done they were as proud
of it as any millionaire who ever built a mansion on Fifth Avenue.
And furniture! They made mission furniture, table, chairs and all the
accessories of home, the like of which no missionary in the heart of
lightest Africa ever set eyes upon. And comfortable! With a rousing
fire, ham and Alaska strawberries, coffee and biscuits that Jack made so
well (I didn’t say so light) they were as comfortable as a husky after a
double ration of dried fish, fast asleep under the snow.
“I’m thinkin’ we’ve got to get out and kill some fresh meat,” suggested
Bill after a meal in which the spirit of Sing Nook was present, _i.e._,
when the strawberries came on as usual.
“I thought you declared that Alaska strawberries were every whit as good
as the spaghetti we used to get at _The Black Cat_ back in New York,
when we thought we were a couple of highflyers,” Jack laughed.
“Oh, for a dish of spaghetti,” sighed Bill, and then he came back with
this statement: “Ilasker strawberries are all right but after you’ve et
them for thirty or forty meals you get a lee-tle tired of them and pine
for a young oyster, in a bowl of cracker soup, or a couple of fried
eggs--one fried on one side and one on the other--or even a steak from a
hoof of a panhandle longhorn.”
“I move that to-morrow we begin ‘prospecting’,” Jack said, paying no
attention to Bill’s likes and dislikes. “We’ve been away now for over
three months and all we’ve got to show for it is an outlay of more than
a thousand dollars, these two mighty good dog teams, our cabin and the
fun we’re having.”
“Then let’s go to it,” Bill said.
“We’ll strike out across the river and go due north; then every trip we
make we’ll veer round five points until we’ve boxed the compass.”
CHAPTER VIII
ON THE ARCTIC CIRCLE
While the boys did not expect to be gone longer than a week, or ten days
at the most, on any one spoke of their prospecting wheel, and carried
good grub to last them for this length of time, they nevertheless took
the precaution to stock up with enough alcohol, compressed tea, hard
tack and pemmican for themselves, and dried fish for the dogs, to stave
off starvation for a month in the event of meeting with an accident,
getting stormbound, or wanting to make a longer stay.
With a team apiece of seven dogs and a load of only a hundred and fifty
pounds it was possible for them to ride on their sleds a good deal of
the time. But this does not mean that they could very often actually sit
on them but the way they did it was to stand on the rear ends of the
runners and hold on to the handle bars.
The night before they made their first trip out they packed their
traveling mess-gear, which consisted of a collapsible stove and alcohol
for fuel, grub and the few other necessary things of their outfit, on
the sleds, so that they could make a start the next morning at
day-break.
They crossed the Big Black River and drove due north over the tundra (a
Russian word, pronounced _toon-dra_,) which is a rolling prairie,
without any trees on it; the soil is black and soft, or _muck_ as it is
called, and on it both mosses and lichens grow. They drove due north and
in the course of time Bill announced that according to the sun, his
watch and his stomach there should be a period of rest and of eating.
According to Jack’s calculations they had made about twelve miles and
were moreover right then on the Arctic Circle.
“After we gets through with the eats, Jack, I wants you to edicate me on
this Arctic Circle thing,” said Bill as he threw the dogs their fish.
Jack was busy opening the thermos bottles of hot tea and getting out the
sandwiches.
“What do you want to know about it?” he asked absent-mindedly, for he
was not a little bit interested in this at the particular moment.
“I wants to know _why_ is the Arctic Circle, and everything else about
the bloomin’ thing. The way I’ve doped it out it is like a meridian or
the equator, that is, it’s a line that you can’t see and yet it’s there
or here just the same. I’m settin’ on it and I know it but I can’t prove
it, As man to man, now, I’m askin’ you what is it?” asked Bill with
great earnestness.
Jack looked at him and laughed.
“You asked a question and then answered it yourself in the next breath.
You’ve said all there is to say about it except that it’s a circle
running round the North Pole like an ostrich feather on a lady’s hat,
only, different from the latter, it extends on all sides of the pole to
latitude sixty-six degrees and thirty-two minutes north.”
“But why is it?” persisted Bill.
Jack thought a moment.
“The chief reason the Arctic Circle is so called is because it is the
circle below which the sun does not drop in mid-summer. If we were here
on the Arctic Circle in summer we’d see the sun at midnight just above
the horizon, and the farther north a person goes in summer the higher he
will see the sun above the horizon at midnight. Lots of tourists come up
here every summer just to take a look at the midnight sun, and the
natives call them _sunners_.”
“An’ we won’t get to see it then?” kicked Bill; “it’s just my luck. If
it ’ud be rainin’ soup I’d be standin’ out in it with a fork.”
“We’re not up here to see the sun at midnight,” Jack came back at him,
“we’re lucky if we get a glimpse of it at noon. What we’re up here for
is to get the yellow stuff.”
“Oh yes, I kinda lost sight o’ the bloomin’ gold for a minute,” was
Bill’s reply.
It was great sport, now that their loads were light, for the young
drivers to flourish their whips and crack them in the dry air, while the
dogs, fed-up, fresh and eager, raced along, with tinkling bells where
the going was good, as though they were making a dash for the pole. The
boys and their outfit would have made a capital movie, but there wasn’t
a cinematograph camera nearer than Skagway on the south or St. Michaels
on the west.
At this time of the year, the period of daylight on the Arctic Circle is
very short and as darkness came on they pulled up on the banks of a
stream to make camp.
“This must be the Rat River,” said Bill.
“It is, but it certainly isn’t much at this point. We’re close to its
head waters though and that accounts for it. It empties into the
Porcupine River about sixty or seventy miles west of here. It might be
worth our while to make a survey up and down the river for a few miles,
so to-morrow let’s go down stream.”
They had not gone more than five miles the next morning when their
attention was attracted by a huge fire a couple of hundred feet back of
the north bank and they drove up to see what was going on.
“Bet it’s the Yeehats barbecuin’ a caribou,” suggested Bill who was
dying by inches for the want of a caribou steak.
“Look again,” said Jack, and then Bill saw the winter diggings of some
miners, three all told, one white man and two Indians, busy with picks
and shovels.
“Lookin’ for our gold,” was Bill’s idea of it.
“More likely they are mining for some on their own account. A great deal
of placer mining is done up here in the winter--has to be done in winter
as a matter of fact--because the ground is so low and wet that they
can’t do any digging in the summer time, for the hole fills up with
water as fast as the dirt is thrown out.
“The way they work it according to what Rip Stoneback told me, is like
this. The miner cuts all the fire-wood he can in the summer, which isn’t
a great deal as it is so scarce in these parts, and builds his
_sluice-box_; then when winter sets in and it begins to freeze, he
clears the moss off of a small patch. On this clearing he builds a fire
and keeps it going until the ground is thawed down a foot or so when he
digs it out; then he builds another fire, digs out the thawed ground and
repeats the operation until he has sunk a shaft through the muck and
gravel to bed-rock.
“Now between the gravel and bed-rock is a layer of gold-bearing dirt
called _pay-streak_ and this is hoisted to the surface by means of a
windlass on the ends of whose rope are spliced a couple of buckets; and
this windlass, of course, sets over the shaft. Usually two men go down
in the shaft and pick the frozen pay streak from the ground. The shafts
vary in depth from fifteen to forty feet depending on what part of the
country the mine is located.
“The third man stays on top to draw up the buckets and with a
wheel-barrow wheels the gold-bearing dirt back and dumps it in a pile
where it will be in no danger of getting washed away by the melting
snows when spring comes. In the spring when water is plentiful the fun
begins for then the _clean-up_ takes place and the men who were as poor
as Indian dogs all winter wax rich and take their winnings back to
civilization where they can be separated from it.
“The _clean-up_ means that the color-bearing dirt is shoveled into the
sluice-box, that is, a trough without ends, into which the miner has
contrived to keep a steady stream of water running. The water washes
away the dirt and leaves the free gold just as it does in the more
primitive method of panning.”
The miners were as glad to see the boys as the latter were to see them,
yes even more so. They immediately knocked off all work and there was a
regular “chin-fest,” as Bill called it, from that time on. They made the
boys stay to supper and improvised bunks in their cabin for them to
sleep on. After Art Jennings, who, as you will gather from his name, was
the lone white man, had heard the news of the outside world they talked
about three other things only, the first of which was gold, the second
gold and the third gold.
“This placer minin’ is altogether too slow a game for me,” remarked Bill
when they were on their way again. “What I wants is to see moosehide
sacks of it piled up like cordwood, I do.”
“Well there are moosehide sacks of it _cached_ right here in Yeehatville
on the Circle. From the Pacific Ocean on up to the Arctic Ocean there’s
gold. In every stream and river, as well as the land between them, this
precious metal is found in either particles or in nuggets. Take the
Klondike! it’s not much larger than the Rat River here and yet so much
gold was found there its name became known all over the world. Every
river in Alaska and the Yukon, I suppose, is just as rich but you don’t
hear much about them because the Klondike was the first and so outshone
all the rest. We’ll get ours yet, don’t worry,” said Jack hopefully.
Each trip the boys made from their base of supplies took them from one
to two weeks. Their marches in and out were usually made in a couple of
days and when they had worked away from their permanent base as far as
they wanted to go they would set up a temporary camp.
If the weather was not too severe, that is to say below zero, they
pitched their tent, but when it got to twenty, forty or sixty below, or
a blizzard struck them as it frequently did in mid-winter, they made a
better camp by cutting out blocks of snow and piling them up into a
dome-shaped shelter like the igloo of the Eskimo, but which Bill, who
always persisted in nick-naming everything that was new to him, called a
_butter-dish_.
Building a snow igloo was a simple matter after they had put up a
couple, and the boys got it down to such a fine point that they could do
the complete job in two or three hours. Of course this was largely the
result of Jack’s experience in the Arctic which enabled him to go about
it in the right way. He had brought his saw-knife with him for this
express purpose. This useful tool is about eighteen inches long and one
and three-fourths inches wide and while one of the edges of it is sharp
like a knife the other edge has teeth cut in it like a saw.
With this saw-knife Jack or Bill would saw out the hard frozen snow into
blocks which for the lower layers of the igloo measured about two feet
in length and eighteen inches wide and high; as the upper layers were
reached they used smaller and smaller blocks. Finally when all of the
snow-blocks but one were laid up and the igloo was as hemispherical as
the half of a ball, the last block, which they beveled on four sides,
was set in the center and this held all of the other blocks out like the
keystone of a bridge.
They made these snow igloos about six feet in diameter on the inside of
the base so that they could lie down comfortably. To get into the igloo
they left one of the snow blocks of the first layer out and through this
hole they also took in the grub they needed, the alcohol stoves and the
sleeping bags. To close the hole it was only necessary to push in the
snow block when they were pretty well housed in.
What, then, with their fur clothing, a log house at their permanent base
and these snow igloos at the ends of their trips, they were able to keep
quite comfortable. Nearly every one who has never put in a winter in the
Arctic, or sub-Arctic, regions seems to think that the extreme cold is a
thing to be feared, but it isn’t if one has the right kind of clothes,
enough food and if, when outside of the shelter, he does not stop but
keeps right on going or working. But the long hours of darkness often
get to be mighty monotonous.
Being boys, however, nothing could chill their ardor or cast a gloom on
their spirits for any length of time and they were always ready for a
frolic. Thus it was when they were sledding on streams where the ice was
good they had some great races. Each contended that his team was the
swiftest that ever pulled a sled and this difference of opinion
invariably led to a challenge to prove it.
The dogs entered into the spirit of the races with as much zest as their
young masters and when they were abreast and the signal to _go_ was
given, the whips cracked and the dogs jumped to get first place. Onward
they dashed with an ease and grace that made them seem more like rubber
balls bouncing along low on the course, than four-footed animals whose
business it was to work.
But the spirit of sport was strangely strong in these living, vibrant
creatures and as they fairly flew along over the course they voiced
their joy by short howls and yelps when they were in the lead or their
anguish by whines and cries when they dropped behind.
Jack was, perhaps, a better driver than Bill but in his own heart he
gave the credit to his team when they won and win they nearly always
did. Bill was a good “sport” though and never got “sore” when he lost a
race; he always took the blame on himself for his poor driving and
nothing could shake his belief that his was the fastest team, bar none,
in all Alaska.
There were a few times though when Bill’s team won. One of these rare
occasions was when a snowshoe rabbit ran from a bank onto the ice
intending to cross to the other side; finding himself in front of a
terrible pack of running dogs or wolves, he knew not which, that were
bent on catching him, instead of going on across to safety he ran
straightaway ahead of them.
Sate, Bill’s lead-dog, spotted him first and he ran as he had never run
before; the dogs of his team felt this super-burst of speed on his part
and as the rabbit paced him, so he paced them with the highly gratifying
result, to Bill, that his team jumped ahead of Jack’s by a length. The
boys urged their teams on with their “yow-yows,” and the bells jingled
joyously while the wild race was on.
The dogs of both teams had forgotten that there were such things as a
trace or trail, while the boys had lost sight of the treasure they were
seeking and let nothing impede their mad flight toward destruction. At
the end of a quarter of a mile Bill’s team was nearly three lengths
ahead of Jack’s and he felt the race well won. His dogs had lost all
interest in the race, indeed, they did not know they were racing for it
was the rabbit they were after now. Then little snowshoe fooled them,
for he made a sharp turn and ran up the bank.
Sate likewise turned as sharp as the high speed he was making would
allow; the team swerved abruptly, slipped and slid for half-a-dozen
yards, the sled upset and everything was piled up in a heap. Jack’s team
shot by them like an arrow and they ran for another quarter of a mile
before he could stop them in their mad flight. When he got back he had
to admit that Bill’s team had won the race but it cost them an hour’s
work to make good the damage done. There was no more racing that day.
“You see, Jack, as I always told you, my team is faster than yourn and
all it needs to show speed is a rabbit for a pace maker,” was Bill’s
comment as he picked himself up.
In their goings and comings they ran across all sorts of wild animal
life from the little lemmings, a mouse-like animal with short ears and
tail, which looks like a miniature yellow rabbit, to the giant moose. In
between these two extremes they saw squirrels, snowshoe rabbits, red and
black foxes, lynxes, gray wolves and caribou. They had also seen the
tracks of bears, for the species of bear that live in the sub-Arctic
regions does not hibernate.
They often shot squirrel, rabbit and ptarmigan (pronounced
_tar’-mi-gan_), a bird of the grouse order, and these served as dishes
of great delicacy for the boys, as well as giving the dogs a welcome
change from dried fish. Bill declared it to be the open season for
bagging some big game and Jack agreed that they must. But it is hard to
seek cached treasure and be big game hunters at the same time.
Once while they were moving leisurely along after a satisfying dinner
and they were talking about hunting the caribou, moose and bear, the
tables were suddenly turned on them when they became the _hunted_ prey
of wild beasts, for a pack of famished wolves had scented them out and
were headed straight for them.
Pell-mell came the lean, long-legged beasts with ears erect, ribs
bulging out of their loose skins, tails drooping and starved to
desperation. Instantly the boys halted their teams and had barely time
enough to cut the dogs out of their traces before the pack was upon
them. The dogs knew they were in for a fight to the death and braced
themselves for it, while the boys drew their revolvers and stood on
their sleds ready for the attack.
In less than a minute the wolves were upon them and the fight was on.
The dogs met the onslaught with the strength and courage the wolves
lacked; and in between pistol shots, each of which picked off a wolf,
the dogs snapped in two the legs, and broke the necks of their savage
ancestors with a crunch of their powerful jaws, or opened their bellies,
which let their entrails half out, or severed the jugular veins when
streams of blood spurted forth from the rips made by merciless fangs.
But the dogs suffered too, for often three or even four wolves would
fight a single one and in this unequal struggle he would go down unless
his master took a hand and evened up numbers by a few well-placed
bullets. Nor was it easy for the boys to shoot the wolves, for the fight
was so fast and furious it was well-nigh impossible at times to send a
piece of cold lead into their miserable carcasses without the danger of
hitting their dogs.
One of the curious things was that when a wolf got hold of the harness
on a dog it mistook it for brute substance instead of inert leather and
it would bite it viciously and shake it furiously without getting the
living response that it had the right to expect.
When the number of wolves had been brought down to twice that of the
dogs, they knew they were beaten and the moment this happened their
courage failed them and those that were left with strength enough to
take to their heels slunk quickly away.
An examination of the dogs showed that far from coming out of the fight
unscathed every one of them was in a bad way and, still more sad to
relate, Jennie and Prince, two of the outside dogs of Jack’s team, had
to be shot to put them out of their misery. As the dogs were so badly
off and the harness cut up and chewed to pieces the boys had to make
camp on the spot.
They dressed the wounds of the dogs as well as they could and gave them
half-a-can of pemmican apiece--a food that the dogs liked above all
else. While the dogs laid down and rested and nursed their hurts, their
masters built an igloo, for they couldn’t tell when they would be able
to move on. While the igloo was going up there was nothing but kind
words and praise for the dogs and it could be seen by the looks in their
eyes and the expressions on their faces that they knew every word which
was said to and about them, and enjoyed and appreciated it all. As Bill
saw them now he was more thoroughly convinced than ever that these
particular dogs were endowed with human brains and not just common dog
brains.
“I always told you my team could outrun yourn and you’ll have to admit
they out-fought yourn too,” said Bill boastfully after the gloom had
somewhat worn off.
“I don’t see how you make that out,” Jack flared up.
“Well, two of your dogs will never _mush_ again pullin’ a sled after
them here on earth--though they may haul a little red cart with angels
in it when they go tearin’ along the trails o’ heaven.”
“That’s no argument at all,” returned Jack soberly, “and you can’t get
away with it either. Why, I saw ’Frisco rip the throats open of one wolf
after another when four of them were at him at once. Prince and Jennie
went down in a fluke--in a fluke I tell you--and that is the only reason
they lost out.’”
“This is soitenly tough luck,” said Bill as he was going over the wounds
of the dogs before they turned in.
“And I’m two dogs short,” moaned Jack, “though I’m mighty glad they were
not the malamutes.”
“Never youse mind, Buddy. I’ll give youse one of mine and we’ll still be
even.”
“I don’t want any of your dogs, Bill, I’ll just drive my five dogs along
until we strike an Indian village or some camp and then I’ll buy a
couple of Siwashes. But I’m sure sorry to lose Prince and Jennie for
they were a couple of dandy dogs to say the least.”
Just the same when Bill had fixed the harness and hitched up the dogs
preparatory to making a fresh start, Jack saw with grim pleasure that
the teams were even and that Bill’s best dog, next to Sate his leader,
was in the traces of his team.
Jack didn’t say anything about it then but he made up his mind that when
he went ’round the world on a pleasure jaunt, or anywhere else, Bill
could go with him however crude his speech, and rough his manner.
They limped back to their base of supplies and stayed there for a week
until the dogs got into shape again.
CHAPTER IX
THE LAND OF THE YEEHATS
On the various trips they had made from their base of supplies on the
Big Black River the boys had kept a sharp lookout for marks or signs or
other visual evidence which might indicate in some way the location of
the treasure they sought. Jack’s _hunch_ was responsible for his belief
that so great a store of gold would not, in fact could not, have been
abandoned without some clew which would serve as a key to its recovery.
They often dug off the snow from a pile of dirt which they thought might
cover the sacks of gold; as wood was frequently hard to get, they
couldn’t thaw it out and, consequently, had to work like “niggers” with
their picks and shovels to penetrate it. And to what purpose?--usually
only to find it was the dump of some discarded mine. But a gold seeker
wots not of either hardship or work if his efforts give promise of
bringing about the desired result. And they hoped great hopes.
Again they would find a _cache_ (pronounced _cash_) but it was not of
the kind that is formed of a hole in the ground, or a cavity under a
pile of stones, but a box-like structure erected on poles set in the
ground. Some of the better ones had notched logs which served as steps
and these were set up at an angle on one side so that access to the
cache could be made with greater ease and lesser agility. These caches
were used by prospectors and miners who transported their outfits on
their backs, or hauled them on sleds, and who had to double back on the
trail time and time again before they got to their journey’s end.
In nearly all of these caches the stores were of ancient vintage, a few
of them dating back to the pioneers of ’94 or perhaps a little later,
and those who made the caches never returned to claim their contents
either because they found they could get along without them, or were
killed or died, or grew disheartened and made their way back to the
river towns of the Yukon. In only a couple of them did they find fresh
stores and in one of these, curiously enough, there was a _poke_[5] of
gold nuggets. Its owner, in all probability, had laid it down when he
was stocking the cache and forgot to take it with him when he went.
[5] A poke is a small bag usually of deerskin.
Neither did the boys take it, nor disturb the stores in any of the
caches they found, for it is an unwritten law in the barren north that
no man shall touch anything cached which belongs to another.
On the fifth trip out they drove east, or more accurately east by south,
crossed the International boundary line and headed straight for Mount
Burgess forty miles away. As Jack had said, they cared not whether they
found the gold in Alaska, in the Yukon Territory or on top of the North
Pole, as long as they found it. After they had covered about thirty
miles they ran into a scrub forest and the first thing Jack spied was a
pair of moose antlers lashed to a tree.
Both he and Bill thought this a very strange circumstance but they
presently concluded that it had been put there by some hunter though for
what purpose they could not guess. After going half-a-mile farther into
the woods they came to another pair of moose antlers likewise lashed to
a tree; this interested them in dead earnest and they began to
investigate accordingly. Ordinarily when a trail is blazed through the
woods a bit of the bark of the trees is chipped off at short intervals
so that those who go or come cannot go astray but must find their way
there and back, let come whatever may.
But here was a trail blazed differently from any they had ever seen or
heard of, in that at considerable distances apart the antlers of a moose
lashed to a tree pointed the way, but what that way led to neither Jack
nor Bill had the remotest idea. Sometimes the antlers were so far apart,
or led off at such angles, that they had to hunt for an hour or more for
the next one.
“What, I’m askin’ you as man to man, does it mean? Are we gettin’ near
it?” questioned Bill, blinking his blue eyes.
“I don’t know,” replied Jack soberly, though hoping against hope that it
was the sign they sought; “but it is queer, isn’t it?”
“Let’s keep right on,” was Bill’s solemn advice.
“Mush on there, you huskies!” yelled Jack; “double rations of fish for
you if we find it.”
“Ten rations of fish, three times a day fer life if we finds it, says
I,” came from Bill.
It is not known positively whether Sate could count up to ten or not but
he gave Bill an awful look which in husky language meant “cut out that
loose talk and maybe each of us will get a piece of fish for supper
anyway,” and with that he and his mates mushed on as fast as their
masters could pick out the trail.
They kept this up the best part of the day when their quest ended at a
log cabin not unlike their own, and over whose door was the largest pair
of bull-moose antlers the boys had ever seen. The boys, who had been
building high their hopes on something far less tangible than a clew,
were disappointed to the quick but they had the right kind of stuff in
them and so never batted an eye.
They were greeted by the barking and howling of many dogs and what with
the noise their own teams made it sounded as if pandemonium had broken
loose. Then Joseph Cook, hunter, trapper, Indian Agent and sometime gold
seeker, otherwise familiarly known as Bull Moose Joe, for he had brought
down more moose than any other living man, appeared at the door and gave
them a warm welcome.
“But why all the antlers lashed to the trees?” Jack queried after they
had established comrade-like relations.
“I have blazed the trail to my cabin with antlers so that he who chances
this way with his eyes open can find me.”
Bull Moose Joe was a man who stood six foot in his moccasins, was of
medium build and as straight as an Indian. He looked as if he might have
stepped out of the great West in the days of the fifties for he wore his
hair long, had a mustache and a goatee. As usual with white men up there
he must needs have the news from _down under_, no matter how stale it
was, and then, also as usual, the conversation just naturally drifted
over to the channel of gold. It was then that Bull Moose Joe gave the
boys the greatest jolt they had had in all their varied but brief career
in the gold fields.
“I take it you boys are looking for the same thing I came up to look for
ten years ago,” he said in an off-hand way.
“Yes, it’s gold we’re after,” replied Jack.
“Gold in moosehide sacks piled up like cordwood!” he added, watching the
effect of his words on the boys.
And the effect was truly electrical for their faces became rigid, their
eyes glassed over and they felt the very blood in their arteries congeal
into water-ice.
“And--and--did you find it?” asked Jack when he had recovered his powers
of speech a little.
“Yes, that’s what we want to know,” Bill gurgled as if his gullet was
choked up.
Bull Moose Joe pulled a couple of times on his pipe, watched the hot
smoke ascend and dissolve away just as had his dreams of gold. He
laughed softly. He was in no hurry to answer but to the boys the moments
seemed like an age.
“No,” he said finally, “I never found it though I searched diligently
for it winter and summer for the first five years I was here. I speak
the _Hupa_ tongue which is the tongue of the _Athapascans_ and I learned
to talk it so that I could find out what the Indians knew about it.
“There was once a tribe of Indians, who lived hereabouts and they were
different from any of the Indians that are living in the Yukon or Alaska
to-day, for they were as fierce and bloodthirsty as the Apaches _down
under_. Among our natives here there is a legend about a pocket of gold
that was found by these Indians long before the gold seekers came on to
it.
“Then hunters and trappers from the _Hudson Bay Company_ pushed their
way across the desolate wastes of upper Canada and coming upon this
tribe they killed them and took the gold from them. Before they could
get the metal out of the country they were attacked by the Yeehats,
another band of Indians, and, in turn, lost their lives. These latter
Indians _cached_ the gold in a pile of stones but how long it remained
there it is hard to say for the Indians now living seem not to know.
“Many years after, when men swarmed over Chilcoot Pass and White Pass
like so many black flies, floated down the Yukon River and on to the
Klondike, a miner named John Thornton and a couple of _pards_, left the
others and pushed farther north. And then, like the fools for luck they
were, they discovered the _cache_ and in it the pile of nuggets that is
worth millions.
“How to get it over to the Yukon River and down under in safety were
their only worries but they were big ones. They were rich beyond the
dreams of the wildest stampeder and so to lessen the chances of loss by
any means they took their time and laid the most painstaking plans.
“First they hunted the moose and made sacks of the hides; into these
they packed the gold nuggets fifty pounds to the sack, and there were
five hundred sacks which were worth millions. No sooner had they started
than the Yeehats swooped down on them and although Thornton and his men
put up a desperate fight they fell before the larger number of Indians
and the moosehide sacks of gold stayed right where they found them.
“In a few years the Yeehats as a tribe were practically exterminated by
starvation and disease and so the gold is still here, but exactly where,
no one knows. But sometime it will be found again and if those who
strike it are luckier than the others they will get it out; but that
time has not yet come. To keep me going I began to trap and hunt and a
year or so ago the _Minister of the Interior_ made me Indian Agent for
this part of the Yukon.”
[Illustration: “‘THESE INDIANS _CACHED_ THE GOLD IN A PILE OF STONES.’”]
“How did you come to take up moose-hunting?” Jack asked him.
“I calculated that when I found the gold I wouldn’t want to wait until I
killed the moose needed to make the new sacks I should need, so I began
to hunt them long ago and there they are,” and he pointed to a pile of
finished sacks over in the corner. “You see I took time by the forelock.
“There’s only one other man up here that has any kind of a reputation as
a moose-hunter other than myself and that’s Moosehide Mike who lives
somewhere over in the Klondike River district. I met him a few years ago
at a potlatch but as soon as we found out that each was looking for the
same pot of gold we didn’t hit it up very well together.”
When the boys left Bull Moose Joe’s cabin they were on pins and needles,
for their thoughts were of the most conflicting nature. Their belief
that the gold was there was now for the first time fixed to a certainty;
on the other hand what ghost of a chance had they of finding it when an
old timer like Bull Moose Joe who had lived there for years and covered
the ground in winter and summer had not unearthed it?
“We won’t be quitters anyway,” announced Jack, “we’ll keep right on as
per schedule.”
“You said it,” affirmed his partner.
As they had met with quite a few Indians during their sojourn at Circle
and had since run into several Indian villages, the boys had acquired a
fair vocabulary of the _Chinook jargon_; which is a simple universal
language formed of a lot of heterogeneous words which every Indian and
white man understands and by which they are able to hold intelligible
though limited conversation.
For instance, in the Chinook jargon the word _English_ is called
_Boston_; to go toward the shore is called _Friday_; a big lot of
anything is expressed by saying _hi-ya_; a vile native alcoholic drink
is known as _hootchenoo_, and from this latter word comes the word
_hootch_ which is used by the frontiersmen everywhere. _Do you
understand_, or _you do understand_, is _kum-tux_; anything to eat is
_muck-a-muck_; a strong person or animal is _skookum_; a friend,
_tillacum_, and so on.
With a vocabulary of a couple of dozen words of Chinook the boys were
able to get along fairly well with any of the Indian tribes they
happened to meet. In all of the Indian villages they came to everything
was quiet and peaceful excepting the fiendish howling and barking of the
half-starved dogs. There was nothing to indicate the cruelty and
ferociousness that marked the Yeehats and the Indians who lived in these
parts before them.
Jack and Bill easily made friends with the Indians they came in contact
with for they bought dried fish of them for their teams, gave them a few
provisions where the need was great and Jack always carried his medicine
case and treated the sick for such ailments as were not beyond his poor
ability. These latter he had to leave for the _medicine man_, or
_Shamen_, as he is called, to kill or cure.
One afternoon as they neared an Indian village of considerable size near
the head waters of the Tatonduk River they met with whole families of
Indians and on scraping up an acquaintance with some of them the boys
gathered the information that they were going to a _potlatch_.
Now about all that the Indians of this region of Alaska do, outside of
trapping and hunting, is to eat, drink and be merry, provided of course,
they have the food and hootchenoo to do it with, for lacking these
integers the resultant product, that is, unalloyed joy, could not be
had. Among the Indians who were going to the _potlatch_ was a half-breed
boy who spoke English a little having learned it from Bull Moose Joe and
other white hunters and trappers, and Jack promptly annexed him with the
gift of a knife.
When Jack asked the lad his name he said that the white men called him
_Kloshsky_, but that his right name was _Montegnard_. Now _Klosh_ in
Chinook means _good_ but where the _sky_ came from was not so easy to
guess, unless he was nicknamed by some one of Semitic persuasion.
Kloshsky told the boys that the _potlatch_ was a _hi-yu_ feast with
_hyas_ fun, and that it was going to be given by a big man of the
_Yikyak_ tribe who wanted to be chief. The word _potlatch_, he
explained, really means _gift_ and that after much feasting, drinking,
dancing and wrestling the man-who-would-be-chief and whose name was
_Montegnais_, would give away everything he owned to his guests.
“Let’s declare ourselves in on this _potlatch_ thing,” said Bill.
“Not a bad idea at all,” admitted Jack. And so they followed the crowd.
Friends and relatives of the man-who-would-be-chief came from miles and
miles around and the journey finally ended at an Indian village in the
center of which was a big log house nearly as large as that of the Grand
Palace Hotel back at Circle. Into it the visitors made their way and
Jack and Bill went with them.
Talk about the decorations for a Halloween party! why, boy, nothing a
white mind ever conceived of could begin to come up to the
embellishments of this great hall. In the middle there was a wonderful
bird that reached from the floor to the ceiling, nearly, and the like of
which nature had never made in all her seven million years of
experience. From the ceiling there hung curiously shapen birds, beasts
and human beings that for fearsomeness outdid anything the boys had ever
seen. As Bill said, “it was enough to scare a fellow half-to-death.”
On poles, which were arranged in a circle around the giant bird, the
finest blankets, the costliest furs and other articles prized by the
Indians were displayed and these, Kloshsky told the boys, were the
presents which the man-who-would-be-chief was to give away.
When all had assembled the _potlatch_ came to order. The big man was
gorgeously dressed in ceremonial clothes and carried a long wand. Around
him gathered his lieutenants (they would be so called down under) and
they were also outfitted in ceremonial clothes.
Then came the orchestra which consisted of half-a-dozen men with their
tom-toms. Finally followed the guests who moved about talking among
themselves like society folks at a church fair. From the
man-who-would-be-chief on down to the poorest Indian, all wore the
richest kind of furs, some of them made of the silver fox, and they were
ornamented with various decorations and natural jewelry. Many of the men
and women wore necklaces and belts formed of gold nuggets as large as
hickory nuts and these at once caught the eyes of the boys. Lo! the poor
Indian!
Of all those present there were only two poorly dressed ones and these
were a couple of rank outsiders who had come from down under and now saw
for the first time what Indian high-life really meant. Jack and Bill
felt like a couple of hobos who had tumbled out of a box-car and landed
in the midst of a fancy dress hall in progress on Fifth Avenue.
When all were assembled the man-who-would-be-chief opened the _potlatch_
with a recital of the wonderful deeds his ancestors had done, that his
family had done, and especially those that he had done.
“It’s the same old stuff the politician who wants to be mayor, or
governor, or president pulls in the States,” Bill pointed out.
Then the players began to beat their tom-toms and when the rhythm of
this bombastic music had stirred the souls of the guests to their very
depths, it got them going and they danced for all they were worth. Most
of them carried huge wooden masks that were a nightmare to look at.
Different from our dances their movements were not regulated by art but
by the simple history of their lives and of those of their ancestors; in
other words they were folk-dances.
“I could do that dance as good as any of them if I only had a
false-face,” spoke up Bill, who could see nothing whatever in the
energetic but solemn performance.
“What do you want a false-face for? What’s the matter with the one you
have on?” said Jack, laughing heartily.
“I knew it was purtty bad but I didn’t know it was as bad as all that,”
retorted his partner.
The dance over, the man-who-would-be-chief began to talk to the spirits
of his ancestors. Getting no immediate response he called upon his
guests to wake them up that they might hear what he had to say to them.
He started them off with a large assortment of terrifying yells and this
was augmented by cries, shrieks and screams of the others until it
sounded like a band of renegade savages rushing to the first onslaught
of battle.
Bill wasn’t the least bit afraid of anything happening, because Jack had
told him all of the people in Alaska and the Yukon country, whatever the
color of their exteriors might be, were _white_ at heart. But his excess
of caution just naturally led him to fold his arms so that his hand
wouldn’t be more than half-a-second away from his six-gun should he need
it.
The yelling kept up at a pitch so that a white man could not have heard
himself think and it lasted for fifteen or twenty minutes. Neither Jack
nor Bill took very much stock in what they were yelling for but (it is
sad to relate and hard to believe) the primitive instinct in these boys
overpowered the civilizing influences to which they had been subjected
and time and again they both let loose the awful and heartrending
_yi-yi_, _yi-yi_, of the cowboy.
“Oh, Harlem flat, where is thy sting?” said Jack when the yelling was
over.
“You’d think they was a lot o’ cliff-dwellers in Noo York tellin’ the
janitor in soothin’ tones down the dumb-waiter to put on a little more
coal,” commented Bill.
Then came the wrestling matches between those who had been enemies and,
without regard to which one won, when the bout was over they were good
friends again.
“I could throw the two o’ them with me right hand tied back o’ me, see?”
Bill sneered with evident disgust. “Let’s you and me show these Injuns
what a real wrestling bout is, what say, Jack?”
“Don’t get peeved, Bill. This is their game. If you saw a bout in the
_New York Athletic Club_, or back of the gas-house, you wouldn’t want to
jump in and show the onlookers how it ought to be done, would you? Just
remember that we are only innocent bystanders.”
Next came the big feast and although there were caribou and rabbit,
geese and ptarmigan, still that old standby without which no Indian
feast would be complete had the place of honor.
There was a team of ten roast dogs all hitched up and going to fill the
great void in the principal organ of digestion which existed under the
belt of each redskin. They were _hot-dogs_ in very truth.
“I think I’d better go an’ find out if all our dogs says ‘here’ when I
calls the roll,” said Bill, and not withstanding Jack’s assurances that
these edible dogs were not their sled dogs, Bill went out and counted up
the members of their teams just the same.
After every one had gorged himself, or herself, the
man-who-would-be-chief began to distribute the presents. One of his
lieutenants would call out a name, another would hold the gift before
the person who answered to it, Montegnais would strike the floor with
his wand indicating his pleasure and the gift would be made.
The boys came last and the man-who-would-be-chief asked them their
names. Kloshsky interpreted his wishes to the boys and through the
linguistic ability of this half-breed lad they made known that they
answered to the cognomens of Jack and Bill, the latter from “Noo” York.
Then it was they knew the man-who-would-be-chief for a gentleman, even
if he was a red-skin, for he gave them each a most wonderful blanket.
When he had given away all of his possessions the _potlatch_ was over;
it was then very near morning but as the boys were tired they stayed
over at the village until the following day.
“Old hatchet face can have my vote, anytime,” proclaimed Bill, as he
admired his trophy.
“You’re a nice American, you are,” said Jack; “selling your vote for a
blanket, eh!”
“There’s a big difference,” proclaimed Bill; “this
man-who-wants-to-be-chief is a heathen savage politician while down in
the States the politicians are civilized Christians. An’ besides they’ve
got jails down there. Get me?”
Just as they were ready to start back Kloshsky, the half-breed boy, told
them it is the custom to return all gifts to the man-who-would-be-chief
within a month and that they must bring his blankets back by the next
moon.
Jack and Bill reluctantly handed over their presents to Kloshsky and
told him to give them back to the man-who-would-be-chief with their best
wishes and kindest personal regards and other nice felicitations that
are usually found on the ends of business letters.
“Mush, you huskies!” yelled Jack and Bill simultaneously while the
Indians, less cheerful than on the night of the _potlatch_, waved them
their adieus.
“Indian giver,” said Jack when they were beyond earshot.
“I wouldn’t vote for that stingy guy now if he gave me all the blankets
he owns,” groused Bill.
But while they soon forgot the blankets they could not forget the
necklaces and belts of nuggets the Indians wore and they had more reason
than ever to believe they were at the rainbow’s end where it dipped into
pots of pure gold.
CHAPTER X
ON THE TRAIL OF GOLD
“Well, how is old Potlatch this nice, bright, beautiful morning,” Jack
jocularly inquired of his partner after they had started and their
grouches had somewhat subsided.
“No more o’ them things for me,” replied Bill almost amiably. “We’ve
wasted a whole day and we haven’t even got a blanket between us to show
for it. What I was thinkin’ about, though, was the sacks Bull Moose Joe
has made pertainin’ to an’ anticipatin’ the findin’ of the gold. My one
best bet is that we gets the gold first off and the sacks arterward.”
“Now you’re talking sense, Bill. It just goes to show how all-fired over
confident a fellow can be. Confidence is a good thing but some people
have so much of it they fool themselves. Of course I’ll admit that it
would take a long time to kill enough moose to make twenty or thirty
sacks but a few months more or less wouldn’t make much difference after
we’ve got the metal. Of course if we accidentally stumbled onto a
moose-yard that would be different.”
The boys had hunted the caribou for their fresh meat supplies, in fact
caribou were so plentiful in some districts of the country through which
they passed they seldom had to use their stock provisions, such as bacon
and Alaska strawberries, and as for the dogs, they waxed fat on the
excess of meat they were given and grew sluggish. There was no need for
them to die to get to the happy hunting grounds--they had attained all
that their canine souls could wish for under these youngsters of great
hearts and high courage who were their masters.
It is no trick at all to shoot a caribou and it is no sport either for
if it is wounded it will not put up a fight. Sport in hunting big game
comes in only when the hunter is exposed to danger and takes a chance of
fighting for his life along with the beast he is trying to kill. And
Bill was right when he said that any man who calls himself a sportsman
and goes after caribou for the mere sake of killing them ought to be
given a spanking and sent back home to his mother.
While Jack was something of a naturalist and knew all about caribou and
their habits Bill was the expert when it came to dressing them. Bill
shot the first caribou and when he brought it into camp he examined it
closely for it was the first one he had ever seen at close range.
“It looks like a reindeer to me, pard,” he said after eyeing it closely.
“It is a reindeer, for caribou and reindeer are one and the same animal;
the only difference is that reindeer are domesticated and caribou are
wild. Then again there are two kinds of caribou; the one you’ve brought
in is the kind that lives north of sixty-four and this is called _barren
ground_ caribou, while the kind that lives farther south is called
_woodland_ caribou.
“You see the winter coat of this caribou is thick and almost white, but
in summer it takes on a reddish-brown color except underneath and that
stays white. As summer comes on the caribou goes north and in winter he
comes down here to the woodlands. While he is quite shy yet his
curiosity is so great it often gets the best of him and he will stand
and give a fellow the once over until it is sometimes too late for him
to retreat.
“As to speed, why he can beat a dog or a horse all hollow and so when he
is running nothing but a target shot will bring him down.”
“We must get some moose afore we start back for little ole Noo York. I
want to take back the head and antlers of a big un to me goil, see,”
reflected Bill, who was evidently beginning to think of home.
Jack allowed that it might not be a bad scheme to bring down a moose or
two, not merely for trophies of their prowess as big game hunters, but
for the purpose of using their flesh for food, as well as their hides,
in the possible event of their having need for them. Now, know you, that
while in summer the moose usually travels alone, in winter a number of
them will band together and trample down the snow in a space with their
hoofs, and this is called a _moose-yard_.
Finally, one day, the boys came across tracks leading to a moose-yard,
then quickly made a temporary camp, and struck out to stalk it. They
came upon it just as the moose, of which there were about a dozen, had
reached a small lake. In the yard were two old bull moose, half-a-dozen
cows and the rest calves. The boys crept up on them until they were
within bullet range. The bull moose were magnificent specimens of wild
animal life and must have weighed more than a thousand pounds apiece.
The boys chose their quarry and then two bullets speeded forth though
the cracks of their Winchesters sounded like a single shot. They ran
toward the moose but the bullets which had crashed into their great
bodies did not kill them or even drop them to the ground. Instead, the
wounded beasts bellowed with rage and as the boys came up they charged
them with mighty fury, their great antlers cutting the air like so many
sabers.
As fast as they were able to get out of the way of one of the bulls, the
other was upon them and they were kept busy dodging, side-stepping and
in devious other ways eluding them. In the skirmish between the boys and
the bulls, the cows and the calves stood off at some little distance
looking on but without the slightest show of any intention of joining
in, for their belief in the power of the bulls to look after themselves
was absolute.
Just as the larger of the bulls was making a final desperate charge on
Jack, he pulled the trigger of his rifle three times with lightning-like
rapidity; the monster moose came to a dead-stop and toppled over, when a
fourth bullet ended him and Jack had his first and only moose to his
credit.
In the meantime Bill was having a hard time of it, for the other bull
pressed him so close he not only could not use his gun but he had to
drop it to save himself. Bill had seen bullfights in Mexico, but a
toreador dodging a bull of the bovine species was as mere child’s play,
he opined, as he afterward said in telling me about it, when compared
with getting away from this mighty animal of the genus _Cervus_.
He had also seen, yes, had even performed, that seemingly superhuman
feat known in the cattle country as _bulldogging_ a steer, which means
that a cowboy throws a steer to the ground by grasping its horns and
twisting its neck until the animal falls, but he knew that this trick
would not succeed with the monster he was now pitted against.
The struggle was going on away from where it started as far as powder
will send a bullet and the moment Jack had killed his moose he ran to
help his partner. Before he got within firing range he saw a sight that
he would not be likely to forget, no, not if he lived to the century
mark. The bull moose had made a terrific lunge at Bill but instead of
pinning him on his horns, or catching and tossing him a dozen yards or
so as is the way of these enraged beasts, the New York boy had grasped
his antlers as he lowered his head and with the agility of an acrobat,
plus the desire to aid and abet the first law of nature, when the bull’s
head went up Bill went with it with his feet straight up in the air.
In another instant he turned completely over and landed on the moose’s
neck and there he gripped the coarse thatch of hair and held on with a
tenacity of purpose that all of the bull’s cavorting around could not
shake off. Then it was that Bill drew his six-gun and emptied the
contents of it into the head of the great beast, while a bullet from
Jack’s rifle brought him down. Finding their leaders were no more, the
cows and calves turned and fled.
The next thing on the list was to skin the moose, and this was a very
arduous job. Both of the boys, but especially Bill, could almost
out-Indian an Indian when it came to skinning a caribou but out here
where the icy wind was cutting across the lake it was a very
disagreeable task. Before they were through with the work the day had
slipped into night and they had to make their temporary camp their
quarters. After a supper of moose-cutlet they felt much “sorensified” as
Bill expressed it, and he was not so badly off but that he could play a
few _chunes_, as he called them, on his mouth organ. They piled the
hides, both of which were as large as the largest buffalo hides, on
their sleds, together with as much of the meat of the carcass of one of
the moose as they could carry; this they took back with them to their
permanent camp, and it solved the meat problem for a very considerable
time to come.
While Jack could clean the skins quite as well as his partner, still the
job didn’t agree with his finer sensibilities and he balked on doing it
in true Indian style. Bill was not so particular and he would squat
squaw-like on the floor, lay the skin on his lap, hair-side down, grip
the edge of it with his teeth, and with his left hand under it he easily
and quickly cut and scraped away all the flesh and fat from it with his
knife in the right and never once make a miscue and cut the skin.
[Illustration: “BILL DREW HIS SIX-GUN AND EMPTIED IT INTO THE HEAD OF
THE GIANT BEAST.”]
Not satisfied with their experience as big game hunters in bringing down
the moose, the boys pined for a bear. Now while bears are quite
plentiful in many parts of Alaska they seemed to be mighty scarce in the
Yeehat district, though every once in a while the boys would see the
tracks of one. And so it was that Jack and Bill left their work of
seeking gold ever and anon and sought to track, instead, the bear to his
lair.
But their hunt for a bear was very like their hunt for gold in that they
hunted both with vim and determination but neither the bear nor the gold
was anywhere to be found. Yet the boys knew that both were there if they
could only catchee ’em, as Sing Nook would say. When they came upon the
fresh tracks of a bear, as they did once in a while in crossing lakes or
going through the woods, they forewent their main quest in the hopes of
getting a shot at Bruin, but instead they never even got a look at one.
But bear was not on their minds all of the time. They had been busy
around their permanent camp for several days getting the moosehides into
shape and bear was as remote from their minds as the prehistoric
dinosaur.
One evening Jack was getting supper and Bill had gone over to the
wood-pile, which was a stone’s throw from the cabin, for some firewood.
After he had been gone for a quarter of an hour, or so, Jack began to
wonder what had become of him, inasmuch as he was waiting for the wood
to broil a moose-steak. Another five minutes elapsed and Jack, who had
become impatient, went to the door to hurry Bill up.
“Going to stay at that wood-pile all day,” he yelled very loud and not
very gently.
No answer from Bill, so Jack went over to see if anything could have
happened. When he got close to the wood-pile he heard groans and when he
came upon his partner he found enough had happened, and to spare. There
was Bill keeled over in the snow covered with frozen blood while lying
up as close to him as two mortal enemies could get was a big brown bear
breathing his last.
Jack lifted his partner to his shoulder and carried him to the cabin
where he gave him first aid and washed him up. Bill was clawed, chewed,
torn and bruised from head to foot and back again. Only for his fur
clothing he must certainly have been killed.
After Jack had attended his partner and made him as comfortable as
possible he went out to the wood-pile and took a look at the bear. Mr.
Bruin had been slashed up quite a bit himself for Jack counted fifty-six
knife wounds in his head and body. He was assuredly a whopper for he
must have weighed in the neighborhood of six hundred pounds.
Bill lay in his bunk for two days and nights and when he got up he was
still feeling pretty groggy. The first thing he did was to ask for his
“lookin’ glass,” which was a bit of burnished steel of the kind used by
dough-boys in the army. Bill screwed up his face and Jack thought he was
going to cry.
“’Tain’t no use, pard,” he moaned looking at himself.
“No use of what, Bill,” Jack asked sympathetically.
“No use in havin’ a goil. Look at me map now and tells me, as man to
man, could any goil love a guy what’s got one like it. I says no.”
“A fellow’s face hasn’t anything to do with it. It’s the kind of a
fellow he is down deep in his heart, and the stuff he’s made of, that
counts, not only with his girl, but with the world at large,” urged
Jack.
“But look at it. Nobody but a mother could love a face like that,”
proclaimed Bill, and Jack came very near thinking his partner had spoken
rightly.
“Now tell me how it all happened.”
“Well,” began Bill, putting his hand to his forehead, “I remember I went
to the wood-pile and as I was pickin’ up an armful o’ wood I heard
something back of me go _woof! woof!_ I said ’_woof, woof_ yourself’ and
lookin’ ’round I saw this here ornery bear standin’ back o’ me with his
dooks up and ready for a fight. I drops the wood and lets out an orful
holler for you to bring a gun but you musta gone to sleep on the stove
for you didn’t show up.
“Then this here ornery bear makes a reach for me jaw and me and him had
a sprintin’ match ’round the wood-pile. Finally he catches up with me
and lands a gentle little tap on me jaw with his tremendous right hand
and it sent me sprawling. Afore I could get up he was on top o’ me and I
thought I was goin’ to be like the hero o’ that rime for little kids
which runs:
‘Algy met a bear;
The bear was bulgy
And the bulge was Algy.’
“I had left me six-gun here in the cabin and I had just sense enough
left to grabs me huntin’ knife when I stabbed him every chanst I got.
“We rolls over and over until after a while he and me couldn’t roll over
any more and then you comes.”
“Yes, you drove that knife into him fifty-six times by actual count,”
said Jack admiringly.
“One more stab and there’d have been enough for an advertisement for a
pickle factory,” replied Bill.
“You certainly did put him out of commission all right. It must have
been a great fight. I tell you I’d like to have seen it,” allowed Jack
with enthusiasm.
Bill looked up and blinked his eyes at his partner.
“Yes, it was a great fight all right. I’m sorry you missed it and I wish
you could have seen it from the place I did. I allus did prefer broilin’
moose-steaks as against killin’ a b’ar, and hereafter youse gets the
wood. See?”
So ended their hunt for big game.
* * * * *
Now if you will look at a map of Alaska you will see that the Porcupine
River is like the letter U laid over on its side; that is to say, its
head waters are in Alaska and the stream then flows east over the
International boundary into the Yukon Territory, thence north by
northeast across the Arctic Circle and when it reaches latitude 137
degrees and longitude about 67-1/2 degrees, it makes a sharp bend and
flows back west by southwest for a couple of hundred miles, when it
empties into the Yukon River, between the towns of Beaver and Fort
Yukon.
The boys had followed Jack’s scheme of going out in every direction like
spokes from the hub of a wheel, in which case, as has been previously
explained, the hub was the base of their supplies on the Big Black
River. And it will also be seen by a reference to the map that this
river is a tributary of the Porcupine River and empties into it near
Fort Yukon. In fact, Alaska is a country of rivers and nearly all of
them, except those along the coast, are feeders for the Yukon River.
By the middle of March the boys had completed about half of the spokes
of the wheel and on this particular trip they had found greater
evidences of gold in larger quantities than on any one they had
previously made. It was their sixth trip, which took them due south of
their base, and at the end of it they came to the head waters of the
Porcupine River. Then they traveled down it, or perhaps it would be
better to say up it, for in its inception it flows northwest. They met
more miners on, and in the vicinity of, the Porcupine River than in all
of the rest of their trips put together.
Every little way they would come across a handful of miners who were
engaged in the irksome but albeit pleasant task of picking out the
pay-streak in a mine, hauling it to the surface and piling it up on the
dump. At these camps the boys always lost a lot of time for they would
have to stop and give, or get, the latest news from down under which in
most instances was from three to five months old. All of the men they
met were in the most cheerful and sanguine frame of mind, which of
itself was enough to show that the claims they had staked out were rich
in the yellow metal.
At every camp the boys received a most hearty welcome from these rough
and hardy men who were wresting treasure from old Mother Earth here in
the high, high North. Often they felt that they must push on but they
simply could not withstand the temptation of accepting an invite to stay
for dinner, supper or breakfast, or as long as they had a mind to, for
the men were making their _piles_ and under such auspicious
circumstances they craved the company of their fellow kind.
Thus it was that when the boys went into the rough log cabins, which
were often no better and sometimes a great deal worse than their own,
they saw glittering things lying around loose the like of which their
cabin could not boast, and these were nuggets of gold in abundance. In
one cabin they saw an old molasses can with the cover melted off and it
was filled to overflowing with nuggets; in another cabin there was a
bucket heaped high with nuggets, while in still another, nuggets were
piled up in the corner like coal.
And this treasure was only a small part, an incidental part, of the
winnings of these men, for the nuggets were picked up from the
pay-streak as it was picked out and shoveled into the buckets, while the
gold dust which had a far greater worth was still out in the dumps
waiting to be washed in the final clean-up which would take place in the
spring.
Bill allowed that the men in Alaska must all be white except for that
rotter, Black Pete, for no one watched the gold to keep it from being
stolen, nor would there be any need to watch it until they started back
on their long journey toward civilization. The boys were at last on the
trail of gold!
“Here in this district is gold a-plenty, Jack, if we want to do like the
rest of ’em and work for it,” said Bill as a feeler, for he had begun to
think that, after all, it might be a better paying deal to do a little
digging on their own account and get a few thousand out of a place where
they knew it was, than to keep on looking for millions laced up in
moosehide sacks, when they hadn’t the faintest notion of where it was
hidden. In other words it was the outcropping of the old cabbage--adage
I mean--which says that a canary in the cage is worth a couple of them
flying around the room with the windows open.
But Jack vetoed the idea, for since they were on the richest claims that
had yet been staked by mortal, it stood to reason that right in this
district must be the great store of gold they were after. Again, and by
the same token, when various miners offered them ten, fifteen, yes, even
as high as twenty-five dollars a day to work for them, these generous
wages made not the slightest appeal to the boys. If they had to work to
get the gold out of the earth, the boys allowed it would be better to do
a little prospecting the coming summer, stake out their claims and then
go to it the next winter.
“It’s the same old game I’m tellin’ you, pards,” said one of the miners
to his companions as the boys drove away after he had made them a
particularly alluring offer to go to work. “These young scalawags are
after them moosehide sacks o’ gold as sure as I’m born, and twenty
dog-teams couldn’t pull them away from the crazy idee.”
Then the three men laughed a long, loud, and hearty laugh which showed
what they thought of the scheme.
CHAPTER XI
GOLD, GOLD, NOTHING BUT GOLD
The boys had made a much longer stay on the end of this last trip out
than they had figured on, for now that they were in the heart of the
real gold fields they were reluctant to go back until they had explored
every part of it.
While gold dust and gold nuggets were to be found in every miner’s cabin
in amounts ranging up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, still the
boys were as poor as ever, for nowhere had they found the slightest
signs of gold packed in moosehide sacks and corded up like stovewood.
They had gone through valleys, up and down streams, over tundras, into
forests and across lakes and they had combed these districts pretty
well, but the only visible effect of their efforts was the exeunt of
their good grub and they were fast running short of their reserve
rations for both themselves and their dogs.
Both Jack and Bill were growing discouraged but the difference between
them was that while the latter never hesitated to voice his innermost
thoughts, the former applied the brakes so that his never got to the
surface of audible speech.
“This prospectin’ business is beginnin’ to clog on me phy-si-que,”
announced Bill, as he was hitching up the dogs preparatory to starting
back to their base.
“Suppose you’d been prospecting here for twenty odd years like old ‘_I
Blazes_’ we met down at Juneau, or for fifteen, ten, or five years like
hundreds of others up here,” plugged in Jack.
“That’s a hawse of an entirely different breed for they haven’t anything
else to do, while I have me business, me mother and me goil to look
after in little ole Noo York,” Bill replied, his eyes snapping with the
pure joy of the thought.
New York! how good those two words sounded to Jack, for while Montclair,
New Jersey, is where he lived, everybody north of New York as far as
Albany, east as far as Coney Island, south as far as the Atlantic Ocean
and west as far as Trenton always think of New York as his _home town_
when he gets a respectable distance away from it.
But to get back to Earth and Alaska. The dwindling condition of their
food supplies led the boys to go into close caucus as the best means of
supporting their party, so they decided to go back to their base at once
and bring down a larger store of provisions.
This settled, they repacked their sleds and hitched up the dogs for the
trip northward again. They started off with whips a-cracking, bells
a-jingling and the dogs in the best of spirits even if their masters
were not in such good humor.
“My only regret in leaving Alaska will be that we can’t take all of
these huskies along with us. I’m going to take ’Frisco and maybe Skookum
too,” said Jack.
“An’ I’m goin’ to take old Sate home,” said Bill, and when Sate heard
this he gave two merry little howls for all the world as if he had
understood and, on second thought, there’s no doubt but that he did.
“Wouldn’t it be great if we could take back both dog teams an’ the sleds
an’ drive them up Fifth Avenoo--wouldn’t it be great, Jack?”
His partner gave him the laugh.
“There you go dreaming that same stuff again. It would be a great show
for the New Yorkers who don’t know how to travel except on trolleys, and
trains and in motor cars and hearses. But by the time we get back it
will be well along toward the middle of summer so I guess we’ll have to
call that little day dream of yours off.”
“Can’t youse even let a fellow dream out loud onct in a while?” Bill
inquired petulantly. “It don’t cost nothin’.”
“Go on and rave then, I don’t care,” said Jack.
“Well then, just imagine it was winter in Noo York an’ us a-drivin’ our
dog teams up the Avenoo with moosehide sacks o’ gold piled on our sleds
like cordwood.”
“Why, we wouldn’t get from Thirty-third Street to Forty-second before
there’d be Wild West doings and a dozen gangs of gunmen, any one of
which would be as bad or worse than Soapy Smith’s, would be holding us
up and taking our sacks of gold away from us,” Jack told him.
“An’ what would the perlice be doin’ all this time?” asked Bill
innocently.
“Oh, they’d be directing the traffic and showing the hold-up men which
way to go to keep from being run over by the many motor cars,” Jack
replied with all seriousness.
Bill blinked his eyes.
“An’ I suppose we’d be standin’ by with our hands in our pockets lookin’
on. Mush, you huskies, mush!” yelled Bill gruffly and with that the
conversation lagged.
All that day they traveled leisurely along and when night came on they
had only done some twenty miles. As usual the boys looked after the
dogs’ feet and fed them a stinting portion of fish, when they at once
dug into the snow with the openings on the south side. Jack and Bill had
no intention of making a snow igloo for, like their dogs, they had grown
fat upon the good things of the land and in consequence they were not as
alert and spry as they had been.
“See them huskies Jack? See the way they’ve crawled in on the south
side? That means a high wind from the north to-night and I
prognosticates a blizzard comin’. I hates to think o’ it but I guess
we’d better build a igloo,” was Bill’s advice.
“Not so bad when you can use a dog for a barometer, what say Bill?”
remarked his partner.
“Sure, they’re great animules all right. You can use ’em for Christmas
presents, a pair o’ suspenders or eat ’em, accordin’ to your needs,”
added Bill to his partner’s eulogy on the wide range of usefulness of
the husky as an all round convenience.
Now the dogs of the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions are the greatest
weather forecasters in the world for when they want to go to sleep they
dig a hole out of the snow so that the opening will be to the leeside,
that is, to the side opposite that which the wind strikes when it blows
up in the night.
The dogs forecasted the direction the wind would blow that night with
their usual accuracy and Bill’s acumen of mind in foreseeing the
necessity of an igloo was justified, for a blizzard hurled itself down
on them from the north, the thermometer dropped to seventy below, the
wind raged and tore around like mad, while the sleet beat down upon and
around them with mighty fury for four whole days and nights without a
let-up.
In the meantime the boys stood it, or rather laid down to it,
uncomfortably in their igloo, for it was altogether too small for such a
prolonged stay. At that they would have gotten along all right but for
their short rations, which, if the blizzard had kept up much longer,
would have starved them to death. During all this time the dogs had
stayed in their holes without so much as a bite of fish to eat.
When on the morning of the fifth day the boys pulled away the block of
snow that closed the opening to their igloo they found they were snowed
under, and after a couple of hours of hard work they succeeded in
digging their way out through ten feet of snow. Then they called their
dogs who were likewise sewed up in the blanket of snow. One by one they
dug their way out but they were so hungry they were in a mean humor.
Since they had not had anything to eat for so long a time the boys
generously gave them half of their fish rations for the time they were
entombed, when they became something like their old selves again. It
didn’t take the boys long to hitch up and get started but the going was
painfully slow and tedious, though they hoped for better sledding when
they struck the tundra that lay beyond.
“All I’m asking is that we run into an Indian village, for as our
grub-boxes now stand, we’ll soon be without anything to eat,” said Jack
half to himself, as they moved along.
“Funny as how this blizzard couldn’t have held off for a couple of days
and given us a chanst to get back to our base,” groused Bill just as
though the weather cared anything for them; “but what’s that I spies
down yonder in the valley.”
The boys stopped their teams so that they could see to better advantage
and took a look at the object in the distance.
“Looks like the top of some miner’s cabin,” was Jack’s opinion. “As it
is about noon let’s go over, invite ourselves in, eat and be miserable.”
“Mush!” they bawled out and made for the cabin which was nearly a mile
away.
As they came up to it the only sign of life they saw was a couple of
gaunt huskies that looked more like starved timber wolves than animals
of the domesticated canine breed. They snarled and snapped at the boys,
which ill manners made the team dogs furiously mad and had they not been
in the traces they would have made short work of them. Bill threw each
of the starved dogs a piece of fish and in the hopes of getting more
they curbed their tempers a bit. In the meantime Jack hallooed time and
again outside the door but there was no response from the cabin.
“Whoever lives here can’t be very far away or his dogs wouldn’t stick
around,” said Jack. Then he pounded vigorously on the door and hallooed
again.
He was about to give it up for a bad job when the door opened a little,
but instead of a miner to greet him he was astonished almost out of his
wits when he saw before him the frail, wasted form of a young half-breed
girl. Then Bill stepped up and he got the shock of his life too.
The girl, who was not more than fifteen years old, said never a word but
stared appealingly at them with her big, dark hollow eyes, and then fell
suddenly to the floor. The boys were inside the cabin in an instant and
it was easy to guess that hers was a case of pure and simple starvation.
Bill picked her up as though she were a baby and he was going to lay her
on a bunk near by when he saw a white man stretched out motionless on
it. Hastily laying the girl on another bunk he went to the man, listened
to his heart and found that he was still alive.
Jack had not been idle in the meantime but had made some tea and
prepared some bouillon and these he gave to both the girl and the man.
The tea acted as a stimulant, the bouillon as a food and together they
had an almost immediate effect on the girl, for now she opened her wan,
lusterless eyes and looked at her benefactors. Then she feebly smiled
her appreciation of the kindness of these two strange white boys whom
she felt had been sent in this hour of her extreme need by the Great
Spirit.
Having got the girl well on the mend, both Jack and Bill gave their
undivided attention to the man; but he did not recover so rapidly for
with him starvation was an after effect, the primary cause having its
origin in a cancer of the stomach which was of several years’ standing.
But with all of Jack’s medical lore and Bill’s skill in making new men
out of broken down ones; in spite of the strengthening food and careful
nursing, Michael Carscadden, better known as Moosehide Mike, steadily
grow worse; for he was sorely in need of an operation.
In the early morning hours he always seemed to be better and on the
fifth day after the boys reached the cabin they believed he had a
fighting chance; it was on this basis that they held out the hope of his
recovery to the girl Eileen. But Michael knew his condition better than
did the boys and that same evening, just as the red Arctic sun was
slipping down behind the White Mountains, this mighty hunter of moose
and of gold knew that he was slipping with it to his last rest. Death
had staked out its claim on him. Knowing that the end was not far off he
took Eileen in his arms and called the boys to his bedside.
“This little girl is my daughter. Her mother was a full-blooded
_Athapascan_ and as good a woman as the great God ever put a heart in. A
year ago she died and I did not have the strength to get back to
civilization with my sacks of gold and as I would not leave without them
Eileen and I have lived here alone these last twelve months. My wife was
a direct descendant of Yakintat, a Yeehat chief.
“The Yeehats once lived in this district and they had in their
possession a great store of gold which they had taken from three white
men, of whom a prospector named John Thornton was the leader. In the
fight which followed Thornton and his companions were killed. The Chief
of the Yeehats _cached_ the gold which Thornton and his men had packed
in moosehide sacks and its hiding place remained a secret with the
tribe.
“A few years after, a plague broke out among the Yeehats and when that
ended there was only a handful of them left and these joined other and
less fierce tribes. When I reached Alaska I heard, like yourselves and
all the others who came here, the story of this great treasure of gold
and, like yourselves and many others, I set my heart on finding it.
“I lived with different Indian tribes and, finally, when I was pretty
nearly killed by a moose a young Indian woman nursed me back to life and
then I married her. She told me many legends and folk-lore tales about
the Indians and one of these had to do with a mighty store of gold, the
location of which had been handed down to her. She thought of it as
nothing more than a mere story but I took it seriously and me and my
Marie set out to find it and find it we did.”
The dying gold seeker raised himself on his arm a little and clutched at
the collar of his shirt. His eyes brightened with a kind of
preternatural light as he continued:
“Yes, there we found it in a cave deep in the side of a hill, bright and
yellow nuggets ranging in size from bits as large as a pea to chunks as
large as my fist. The moosehide sacks that held it had long since rotted
away and the metal had burst through them and lay in heaps on the
ground.
“Then it was I became a hunter of moose, not for the love of hunting,
not for the meat to eat, but for their hides to make new sacks of. And I
killed more moose than any other man hereabouts, unless it be Bull-Moose
Joe who lives over there around Mount Burgess in the Yukon. The
difference ’twixt him and me is that he hunted the moose a-fore he found
the gold whilst I found the gold and then hunted the moose. My Marie and
little Eileen and me made new sacks of the hides, packed them full of
gold, brought them and here they be.”
The boys looked at each other knowingly and shook their heads. They
understood perfectly, or thought they did.
“He’s got a high fever and is as delirious as they make them,” said
Jack.
“Bats in his belfry for fair,” added Bill.
“No, good friends. My poor daddy is not out of his head. Every word he
says is truly so,” Eileen told them.
The dying man smiled feebly.
“When I am gone I want you two boys to take my little Eileen with you
down under and see that she is brought up like a white lady and given
everything that gold can buy. And I want you to watch over and protect
her as if she was your own sister. Promise me you will do all this and I
will give to each of you one-third of all my gold and Eileen is to have
the other third. She will tell you where it is when I am gone and there
I want you to bury me.”
He stretched out his hands unsteadily toward the boys and they grasped
them warmly.
“Do you promise?” he asked almost inaudibly.
“We most solemnly do,” answered the boys deep from their hearts.
“Then I shall die in peace.”
Her father took Eileen’s thin, pale hand in his and kissed it.
“Good-by, little daughter. I hear your mother calling and I must go. I
thought that I would live to take you down under but it is not to be.
Instead your mother and me will meet you in the sweet bye and bye. And
may the great, good God above us bless you.”
Her hand fell out of his and she threw her arms around his neck.
“Good-by, dear, dear Daddy; good-by,” she sobbed, and then fell
prostrate across the inert body of her father from which his spirit had
just taken flight.
Jack lifted her gently back to her own bunk, while Bill drew a blanket
over the dead man’s face and turned away with something mighty like
tears in his blue eyes.
That night was the most solemn and heart-rending one any of these young
folks had ever experienced, for to the young, death is ever gloomy. The
boys built a good fire, lit half-a-dozen candles and did all they could
to soften the weight of the blow which had fallen on Eileen, but their
efforts were in vain.
To add to the melancholy of the occasion the dogs, instead of crawling
into their holes after they had eaten their half-rations of fish, sat in
a semi-circle outside of the cabin door and in the ghostly light of the
streaming aurora borealis, with their noses pointed skyward, they spent
the greater part of the night howling mournfully a last requiem for the
departed soul.
The next morning the boys set to work to fashion a casket to hold the
remains of Michael Carscadden, and it took them the best part of three
days to finish it. Then they put his body in his sleeping bag and laid
it in the rough hewn box.
Eileen was so weak and dazed she seemed hardly to realize what it was
all about. As she lay on her bunk she only stared with wide-open,
pathetic eyes at these last sad arrangements. It was merciful that she
did not understand to the full.
The boys gave her all the food they could scrape together and did
without themselves for they had to get her strong enough to travel.
Starvation was close on their heels. Bill’s solution for the shortage of
food was that they kill one of the sled-dogs but Jack would not listen
to such a thing.
“I’m no cannibal Bill, and I’d as leave eat my grandmother as I would
one of our dogs,” was the way he disposed of this brash idea of his
partner.
Jack figured that they could last just three days longer and by the end
of that time they would have to be back at their base of supplies, or
they would never get there.
“We must leave your father now, Eileen, and will you tell us where it is
he wished to sleep his last sleep?” Jack was finally forced to ask her.
He had waited as long as he could for he greatly feared that in her
weakened condition she might not survive this last sad ordeal. But in
Eileen’s veins flowed the blood of Irish stoics and Indian chiefs and
she accepted the inevitable with great courage and fortitude.
“Under the floor,” she replied as bravely as she could.
“He chose well,” Bill whispered, “for here the wolves can’t get him.”
“The cabin will be the tomb of a true Alaskan gold seeker here in the
heart of the wild northland,” said Jack reverently.
The boys commenced to tear up the heavy timbers that formed the floor of
the cabin and when they had a couple of them up what they saw underneath
almost caused their senses to leave them, for there in a big pit lay
_sack upon sack made of moosehide piled up like cordwood_!
Bill lowered himself into the pit and lifted out the sacks to Jack who
piled them up against the wall. The rawhide thongs had come loose from
some of them and the shining yellow metal poured out in a golden stream
about the floor.
When hardships and starvation overtook the boys they knew them for stern
realities but having stumbled upon the great store of gold in this
wholly unexpected manner and under such surprising conditions they
didn’t know whether it was truly so or merely a wild and woolly dream.
They really didn’t. To them it was all too wonderful for any human
explanation.
While they were hard at work getting up the sacks, the gold seeker who
slept on yonder bunk and the half-breed girl who lay weak and helpless
on the other bunk were well nigh forgotten for they were the masters of
gold that made them as rich as the ancient Crœsus or the modern
Rockefeller.
[Illustration: “‘GOLD! GOLD! NOTHING BUT GOLD!!!’”]]
“Gold! gold!! Nothing but gold!!! I tell you Bill,” ejaculated Jack in
the wild frenzy of the gold seeker who has made his strike.
“Yes, old pard, and we’ve got it in our clutches where it won’t get
away,” returned Bill, just as excitedly. “Jack I’ve got to take my hat
offen to you for bein’ the only, original man with the hunch that always
makes good.”
CHAPTER XII
BACK TO THE HAUNTS OF MEN
After the boys had taken the sacks of gold out of the pit they lowered
the rude box that held all that was mortal of Michael Carscadden into
it; stood with Eileen by the open grave with bowed heads and made their
silent prayers for him. Then Bill played _Nearer My God To Thee_ on his
mouth-organ and never before had he played the toy musical instrument so
sweetly and with such feeling.
This done the boys filled in the space around and above the box with
snow which they packed down tight; then they came to rigid attention,
gave the military salute and Bill sounded _taps_ on his mouth-organ when
the simple but sincere service was over. So ended the life of adventure
and romance of one of Alaska’s greatest hunters of moose and seekers of
gold--Michael Carscadden.
After the boys had put back the heavy hewn timbers, which formed the
floor, they fell to discussing the best way to get Eileen and the gold
over to their permanent camp, for it was about as hard a puzzle as
getting the fox, the geese and corn across the river.
There were three ways of doing it but as two of them necessitated
leaving Eileen alone at one or the other of the cabins they did not
think well of either of these and hence eliminated them. The matter
resolved itself down to the conclusion that the only feasible plan was
for them all to go together and take along the gold at the same time.
“You can hitch up my dogs, boys,” spoke up Eileen, “then you will have
seven dogs in each team and they can haul these heavy loads.”
“But your dogs are nothing but skin and bones, Eileen,” Jack explained
to her, “and I doubt very much if they will be able to drag themselves
back to our camp, let alone do any team-work.”
“Here we are millionaires in our own right an’ only half-a-pound of tea,
a dozen biscuits and two cans of pemmican left and our dogs a-starvin’
to death. I’ll give a hundred dollars for a beefsteak as big as my
hand,” said Bill, and he meant it, but there were no takers, for here in
the frozen wilderness gold had lost its purchasing power.
That night while Eileen slept, the boys loaded the heavy sacks on their
sleds and on one of them they made a comfortable bed for her of
bear-skins. Then Jack prepared a pot of tea, doled out a single biscuit
and a spoonful of pemmican for each hand and called Eileen to
“breakfast.” While she was getting ready for the long journey the boys
went out and whistled for the dogs but they were in no great hurry to
leave their warm holes.
Less than half a ration of fish apiece was their share but they are long
suffering beasts and actually seemed thankful for the little that they
got. As Bill was hitching up his team, Sate, his lead dog, caught his
eye and his master’s heart went out to him.
“Sate, you poor dum animule, you’ll get your fill o’ rations, I’m
thinkin’, when we hits our camp,” he told him as he gave him a couple of
love pats on the head.
“You’re all right, pard. You’re the goodest driver in all Alaska and I
know it isn’t your fault that we’re starved out,” Sate said
good-naturedly. At any rate he howled a couple of times cheerfully which
was his way of saying it in short-hand dog-language.
When Jack went into the cabin Eileen had taken her last leave of her
sleeping father whose burial place she might never see again.
“We’re all ready to go, Eileen,” he called cheerily.
“I am ready to go too, Jack,” she said simply; “there is nothing for me
to stay for now.”
Jack picked her up and carried her out to his sled where he put her in
her sleeping bag and tucked a lot of big fur robes around her.
It was an hour or more before the night would fade into day, yet so
bright gleamed the aurora borealis that it was easily light enough to
see to travel. Their whips cracked, the commands to _mush_ were given to
the teams, the bells jingled, but there was lacking the great vibrant
joy that comes of living in the open which usually marked their going.
The sleds were heavy with gold, but Eileen’s daddy had been left behind
and they were on the ragged edge of starvation.
Even when they reached the tundra the sleds did not pull easily for they
were overloaded and the dogs were weak from hunger so that instead of
enjoying themselves racing along in the traces, gold had made them
work-dogs with all that this hard term implies.
Nor were the boys more kind to them because of the gold and hardship
that had been thrust upon them. Rather they gave their orders in harsher
tones and plied their whips harder and more often. The dogs well knew
that there had been a great and sudden change in their lives and they
laid it all to the girl who rode, when, according to their canine way of
thinking, she by rights ought to and should have walked.
And Eileen thought so too and she often asked the boys to let her walk
with them that the loads might be made the lighter but they would not
hear of it. Her little added weight made no difference, according to
Jack, and besides, alleged Bill, the dogs could stand it for once, for
never had huskies been taken care of better, done so little real work,
or had suffered less from hunger.
It took them two days and the best part of another one before they
reached their camp and it was lucky for them that the time was not
prolonged for that noon they had drunk their last drop of tea, eaten the
last crumb of biscuit and particle of pemmican, and given their dogs the
last bite of fish. So hungry had Bill become that he had marked out the
dog he was going to kill to provide provender for them all, but fate was
kind to the dog, and to Bill, for he was not called on to do this act of
sabotage.
When they at last got to their camp Bill was as good as his word and fed
the dogs a dozen rations of fish and moosemeat and having downed this in
as many gulps they began to show signs of life and decency again. Jack
threw together a real meal, the first that Eileen had eaten in weeks,
nay months, and oh, how good those Alaska strawberries tasted! They were
indeed a delicious fruit.
After the boys had gorged themselves they counted up their sacks of gold
to make sure that none had escaped either by way of the door or up the
chimney, and in their youthful ardor they were on the very verge of
giving vent to their repressed feelings in true western style, and whoop
things up. But somehow they simply couldn’t do it with that frail, slip
of a girl, weakened by months of misery and starvation, and all of her
own people gone out of her life forever, lying there on the bunk
following their every movement. Once she smiled, ever so faintly, and
the light of a new life was in her eyes and the peace of contentment was
on her face.
After policing up the cooking utensils and setting things to rights a
bit they turned the cabin over to Eileen and built a snow igloo of
goodly size just outside the door, for their own quarters. Now that the
precious metal they had sought for so long and hard was theirs they were
keen to start back to the haunts of men, but Eileen did not grow strong
as rapidly as they had hoped for and there was naught else for them to
do but stay.
Then the question came up as to the safest way to get their winnings
from their cabin in the Alaskan wilds back to the Atlantic seaboard and
into the _Empire Safe Deposit Company’s_ vault. Convoying a cargo of
gold nuggets, to say nothing of chaperoning a little Irish-Indian maid,
from the almost unknown heart of this great sub-Arctic country, over
rivers, sea and land and into the most thickly inhabited part of the
world was, they realized, no small undertaking.
“There are two trails we can take to get to Seattle,” began Jack.
“One is the way we came up,” interrupted Bill, “and the other--”
“Is for us to sled down the Big Black and Porcupine Rivers to Fort
Yukon, then take a Yukon River steamer to St. Michaels, over on Norton
Sound, and from that place sail on a regular steamer that goes direct to
Seattle.”
“But that way is longer by a thousand miles,” protested Bill.
“I know it is but if we go to Circle City and then up the Yukon River to
White Horse we’ll have to cross over into Yukon Territory and the
chances are we’ll have to hand over a ten per cent tax on our
hard-earned winnings to the Canadian Government; besides they’ll be
liable to make us do a lot of explaining as to where we got it from, and
I hold it’s nobody’s business. Get me?”
Bill batted his eyes.
“Afore I’d pay a nickel tax on our dust I’d drive over to the North Pole
and go around by the way of Greenland,” was his emphatic rejoinder.
Now there are a lot of terse phrases such as “nothing succeeds like
success,” “a fool and his money are soon parted,” _et cetera_, and
another might be to say that nothing makes most fellows so stingy as
coming into possession of a fortune, for it was evident that these
usually over-generous boys had “tightened up” since this golden manna
had risen from the pit where it was _cached_ in such a strange manner.
They were, as Bill expressed it, “fools for luck.”
Eileen was not progressing as fast as they thought she would though she
improved slowly and surely. Good food, the best care, cheerful
companionship and strong arms to look after her every want had made a
wondrous change in this frail little girl who had dropped to the floor
from exhaustion only a fortnight before. One thing was sure, however
miserly the boys had grown in their minds, they took a tremendous
interest in this silent half-breed child whose father had been the means
of making them as rich as the richest caliph and that, you will allow,
is pretty rich.
Eileen in turn recognized in them messengers sent by the Great Spirit
who had saved her life, and as she watched them go about their work,
heard them talk of their plans, and what they would do with and for her
when they got home, she knew they were, like the nuggets in the sacks,
twenty-four carats fine.
At first she couldn’t quite make Bill out, especially when he smiled,
for the very emotion that nature intended a smile to represent, that
terrible scar across his cheek gave the opposite appearance. Sometimes
Eileen would look at him so curiously that Jack thought perhaps, she
might be a little afraid of him, so one day while Bill was out getting
some wood Jack told her how he came by that scar and the kind of a
fellow he was as a friend and a fighter.
Came that day when all agreed that Eileen could safely make the sled
trip down to Fort Yukon and, indeed, it was high time, for spring was
fast coming on and this meant that the snow would melt, the ice grow
thin and rotten and the bottom drop out of the trail at any moment.
So again the gold and the girl were loaded on the sleds and the long
awaited start back home was made--a journey of some six thousand miles.
Many things can happen in making a trip of even less length, aye, and
_did_ happen as you shall presently see.
It was not often that the dogs got into any very serious fights but
there had been bad blood between Eileen’s Indian dogs and Jack’s and
Bill’s dogs from the time they first met and they would have discarded
the Indian dogs long before but as each team was short a dog and the two
_scrubs_, as Bill called them, could haul their full share, they kept
them.
At the first camp they made, going down the Big Black River, Link, one
of the Indian dogs and Dave, of Jack’s team, got into a fight over so
small a thing as a piece of fish that neither of them had, and before
the boys could separate them Link lay very close to the edge of the
world next to come. It was a calamity that this fight should have
happened a day after instead of a week before they started for it proved
to be the most costly dog-fight that was ever pulled off anywhere, bar
none.
Bill was for leaving the dog and going on but Jack said it was best to
stay in camp for a few days and let Link’s wound’s heal, for they had
great need of him as both sleds were loaded to the guards and it was all
that a full team of seven dogs each could haul. Then again Jack had
conscientious scruples against shooting the dog or turning him loose in
the wilds. (Perhaps because Link belonged to Eileen). But before Link
was whole again another seven days had slipped by and spring was
pressing winter hard for first place.
The days were getting longer and so warm that their thick fur clothing
was quite uncomfortable and they must needs change into their mackinaws.
The melting snow and running water everywhere made sledding overland out
of the question but the trail was still holding on the river though here
and there holes appeared and cracks separated the more solid stretches
of ice. Time was up and they must push on.
Jack took the lead as he had Eileen on his sled and Bill’s outfit came
on a little ways behind. Another day’s march and they came to some
rapids where the air holes were larger and the ice bent under the weight
of their treasure. Jack was ahead of his team picking the way across the
treacherous trail when all of a sudden Bill let out a blood-curdling
yell of the Apache variety, and on looking back he and Eileen saw that
he and his sled and Jinx, the wheel dog had gone through the ice while
Sate and the rest of the team were straining every muscle to the
breaking limit to keep from being dragged down into the icy waters
behind them. The pole that Bill had taken the precaution to carry saved
him from going under but try as he would he could not get out.
Running back at top speed Jack had the situation sized up long before he
reached the scene of disaster. When he was within a dozen feet of the
team he made a mighty slide, as a man sliding for home with three on
bases, and drawing his hunting knife from its sheath at the same time,
the instant he came alongside the last dog he cut the traces. Relieved
of the mighty weight so suddenly the team fell headlong forward and
sprawled about on the ice; at the same moment the sled, with over half
of the moosehide sacks of gold on it, and Jinx, the wheel dog, dropped
to the bottom of the river. Jack then helped Bill out and on getting
back to the former’s team they made an air line for the shore.
It would add nothing to the gayety of the world to relate what Jack said
to Bill and Bill said to Jack and what both of them said about the loss
of their vast fortune so soon after they had found it. Eileen was the
peace maker and she told them they still had enough gold to keep them
forever and ever (she had never lived in New York) and that the loss of
the gold mattered not a whit as long as Bill had been saved. And both of
the boys came to think that she had the right view of it at that.
The result of the dreadful mishap was a pow-wow in which it was resolved
first, that they couldn’t afford to take any further chances on the
_last ice_ with either Eileen or the remainder of their treasure,
second, that spring was altogether too far advanced to make any further
attempt to get to Fort Yukon with their remaining sled, and third, that
they must mark the spot where the gold went down so that they could
recover it when conditions were more favorable.
“The only thing for us to do now,” declared Jack, “is to camp right here
until the _first water_ and then build a boat or a raft and float on
down to Fort Yukon, which is some seventy miles from here. In the
meantime we’ll build up a cairn of rocks on each side of the river and
in a line with the sunken yellow stuff so that when we do come back
we’ll know right where it is.”
“An’ one good thing no one else ’ull ever guess out where it is,”
philosophized Bill.
The boys made a fairly comfortable camp and set about building a raft of
spruce logs which they lashed together with rawhide thongs. When this
was done and they could get across the river they built up a great pile
of rocks on either side of it but well back from the shore. Before
another moon rolled round they were ready to make a fresh start down the
river.
“What about these huskies here,” asked Bill, who always kept his
weather-eye open for the welfare of their dogs even though they didn’t
have any more use for them.
“We’ll turn them loose and they’ll follow us along the shore all right,”
replied Jack, and so that little matter was settled.
They loaded the remaining sacks of gold, their outfit and provisions, of
which precious little was left, onto the raft. In the middle they had
built up a platform of saplings for Eileen to sit on to the thoughtful
end that when the raft struck the rapids and took a notion to dive, like
a submarine, the water would not wash over and wet her.
Then Eileen took her seat on the platform, Jack stood on the front end
and Bill on the diagonal corner of the rear end and with their long
poles they pushed their treasure float off shore. As Jack had said, the
huskies followed them and they kept as close to the edge of the river as
they could, barking and howling furiously as they ran along.
It took very little effort on the part of the boys to steer the raft and
none at all to keep it moving as the current was augmented all along by
rivulets and streams from the melting snows. Where the river was wide
and the water shallow the raft sailed gently along but where the channel
was narrow the boys had to do some tall maneuvering to keep it from
getting swamped.
The rapids, of which there were many, were their despair. When the
ungainly craft struck these eddying currents it pitched and rolled about
like a piece of cork and the little crew had to hang on to it for dear
life. In this exciting fashion they covered the rest of the distance
down the Big Black River. Just before they came to the mouth where it
empties into the Porcupine River the bed made a sharp descent and the
water rushed down it in a mighty torrent.
There was a bend in the river ahead of them and this too they
successfully navigated, but a rock, that projected out of the water, and
which was directly in their course, proved their undoing. Jack managed
to get his pole on it and brought all of his strength to bear to keep
the raft clear of it, but the weight and the momentum were too great and
a corner struck it with such force that Eileen and the boys were thrown
bodily into the water.
It was well for them that they were good swimmers and after a struggle
with the swift current all of them landed on the shore like bags of wet
rags. Then the huskies covered with mud and rending the air with their
vocal organs swarmed round them.
Never in all his life had Jack felt more like crying. He could stand any
kind of bodily pain but with all of their gold gone he suffered
exquisite mental torture. Many a prospector in the early days had killed
himself for less bad luck. Bill seemed to be not all there for he acted
queerly and talked about the little “boidies” that were singing in the
trees, the “bloomin’” flowers that bloomed in the spring, and other like
idiotic fancies that hadn’t anything to do with the case, tra, la.
[Illustration: “THE UNGAINLY CRAFT PITCHED AND ROLLED ABOUT LIKE A PIECE
OF CORK.”]
Eileen was the only one who had kept her wits about her. She reasoned
with the boys, or at least she tried to; she told them how very, very,
lucky they were in that for the second time none of them were drowned,
and as for the gold it was a blessed good thing it was all gone, she
said, for it only brought bad luck.
Bill looked at her as she spoke these consoling words in a funny kind of
way, as though he’d just got out of a merry-go-round and didn’t quite
know where he was.
“Eileen,” he managed to say, blinking at her; “I wouldn’t even let a
perliceman talk that way to me. If you was me pard, Jack here, I’d make
you put up your dooks, see.”
Eileen laughed as if either he, or what he had said, was a great joke,
and what’s more, she laughed out loud--the first time since they had
known her. Then Jack laughed, and Bill, not to be left out in the cold,
joined them with his hearty guffaw. And there the three of them sat on a
fallen tree, water soaked, bedraggled, dead broke and as miserable as
possible, laughing fit to kill.
Having had experience in losing things, including a few mere sacks of
gold and a lot of provisions when his sled went down, Bill had insisted
before they embarked on their raft that they should each carry a day’s
rations strapped to their backs. Building a big fire they dried their
clothes and had their drop of tea and bit of pemmican and after that
they felt much better, and quit laughing.
The huskies fared very much _a la_ Mother Hubbard’s dog, which is to say
that the cupboard was bare and so the poor brutes had none, no, not even
a piece of fish to eat.
“Well, one good thing,” said Bill, whose pemmican had revived him again,
“we won’t have to mark this blarsted spot where the last bit of our gold
was dumped for I’d know that rock if I saw it a thousand miles off Fire
Island.”
Jack and Eileen took a good look at the projecting finger which wouldn’t
get out of the way of their raft, and they agreed with Bill that it was
a monument of misfortune which having once been run into could never be
forgotten.
As they were only twenty some odd miles from Fort Yukon these youngsters
started out to walk there, or “hoof it” as Bill so inelegantly expressed
it. They had not gone more than a couple of miles when they came
upon--no, it couldn’t be, and yet there it was--their raft beached on
the shore and on it there still remained three of the moosehide sacks of
gold.
As Jack had often told Bill conditions are largely a matter of mind and
truly it seemed so. For see you now, when they first stumbled on the pit
of gold in Carscadden’s cabin they were not nearly as elated as one
would have thought they’d be. Then when they lost the sled load of gold,
though they were still millionaires, they were as sore at heart and mad
at each other as they could be. When they lost all of their treasure and
were dead-broke they laughed, and now having recovered three sacks of it
they simply went wild with joy. Can you beat it?
It was a remarkable trio of youngsters that landed from their raft at
Fort Yukon on that never-to-be-forgotten day in July. At any rate so
said the inhabitants of that burg. Hoboes couldn’t have looked more
disreputable. And the huskies were all there too, mean, lean and dog
dirty.
The crowd at the landing that gathered round this motley little group
scarce knew what to make of it, they felt so sorry for these woe-be-gone
“kids.” But when they saw Bill take two moosehide sacks filled with
something that was tremendously heavy under his arms and Jack take
another and third one on his shoulder, the half-breed girl trudging
along between them and their teams of huskies sticking as close to them
as they could get without being stepped on, their mute sorrow changed to
open expressions of surprise. Here was something to talk about to the
end of time.
“Moosehide sacks filled with gold! by jimminy!” blurted out an old
timer.
“An’ them kids found it where we couldn’t,” exclaimed another bitterly.
And so on, and so on.
They went over to the Crystal Hotel and while Bill stood guard over what
was left of their treasure, Jack took Eileen across the street to the
_New York Emporium_ and there they outfitted themselves and Bill for the
trip down to St. Michaels. When they next appeared in public there had
been a great transformation for Eileen was a brand new girl and Jack and
Bill were almost themselves again.
Eileen, as pretty as ever an Irish lass and an Indian maid blended into
one could be, had her hair done up, wore a blue traveling dress, a
sailor hat and, cross my criss cross, she had on stockings and shoes,
which latter, let it be whispered, she would willingly have traded for a
pair of old moccasins.
The boys were clean, well groomed and had their hair cut. They wore real
store clothes--all wool suits that looked as if the price tag on them
had been marked up to $7.65 from $5.67. When they walked their shoes
squeaked at every step like a duck having its neck wrung. They were
rich, genial and willing to talk on any subject they didn’t know
anything about, but of the moosehide sacks filled with gold, they said
never a word.
Yet, with all their good humor the boys were ready to pull the triggers
of their six-guns on the bat of an eyelid should any one get the idea in
his head that he was going to relieve them of their treasure. And they
guarded Eileen with the same jealous care.
A week’s run on the steamboat down the Yukon landed them at St. Michael,
and once there they shipped their sacks of gold by express through to
New York City when a part of their great responsibility was lifted from
their minds. In a month’s time Jack and Bill were back where they had
started from, while Eileen was being petted and pampered by the swelldom
of Montclair.
THE END
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