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Tales of the Klondyke

by Jack London

February, 1999 [Etext #1655]

Project Gutenberg Etext of Tales of the Klondyke, by Jack London

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This etext was prepared from the 1906 Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons

edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

TALES OF THE KLONDYKE

THE GOD OF HIS FATHERS

Contents:

The God of His Fathers

The Great Interrogation

Which Make Men Remember

Siwash

The Man with the Gash

Jan, the Unrepentant

Grit of Women

Where the Trail Forks

A Daughter of the Aurora

At the Rainbow's End

The Scorn of Women

THE GOD OF HIS FATHERS

On every hand stretched the forest primeval,--the home of noisy

comedy and silent tragedy. Here the struggle for survival

continued to wage with all its ancient brutality. Briton and

Russian were still to overlap in the Land of the Rainbow's End--

and this was the very heart of it--nor had Yankee gold yet

purchased its vast domain. The wolf-pack still clung to the flank

of the cariboo-herd, singling out the weak and the big with calf,

and pulling them down as remorselessly as were it a thousand,

thousand generations into the past. The sparse aborigines still

acknowledged the rule of their chiefs and medicine men, drove out

bad spirits, burned their witches, fought their neighbors, and ate

their enemies with a relish which spoke well of their bellies.

But it was at the moment when the stone age was drawing to a

close. Already, over unknown trails and chartless wildernesses,

were the harbingers of the steel arriving,--fair-faced, blue-eyed,

indomitable men, incarnations of the unrest of their race. By

accident or design, single-handed and in twos and threes, they

came from no one knew whither, and fought, or died, or passed on,

no one knew whence. The priests raged against them, the chiefs

called forth their fighting men, and stone clashed with steel; but

to little purpose. Like water seeping from some mighty reservoir,

they trickled through the dark forests and mountain passes,

threading the highways in bark canoes, or with their moccasined

feet breaking trail for the wolf-dogs. They came of a great

breed, and their mothers were many; but the fur-clad denizens of

the Northland had this yet to learn. So many an unsung wanderer

fought his last and died under the cold fire of the aurora, as did

his brothers in burning sands and reeking jungles, and as they

shall continue to do till in the fulness of time the destiny of

their race be achieved.

It was near twelve. Along the northern horizon a rosy glow,

fading to the west and deepening to the east, marked the unseen

dip of the midnight sun. The gloaming and the dawn were so

commingled that there was no night,--simply a wedding of day with

day, a scarcely perceptible blending of two circles of the sun. A

kildee timidly chirped good-night; the full, rich throat of a

robin proclaimed good-morrow. From an island on the breast of the

Yukon a colony of wild fowl voiced its interminable wrongs, while

a loon laughed mockingly back across a still stretch of river.

In the foreground, against the bank of a lazy eddy, birch-bark

canoes were lined two and three deep. Ivory-bladed spears, bone-

barbed arrows, buckskin-thonged bows, and simple basket-woven

traps bespoke the fact that in the muddy current of the river the

salmon-run was on. In the background, from the tangle of skin

tents and drying frames, rose the voices of the fisher folk.

Bucks skylarked with bucks or flirted with the maidens, while the

older squaws, shut out from this by virtue of having fulfilled the

end of their existence in reproduction, gossiped as they braided

rope from the green roots of trailing vines. At their feet their

naked progeny played and squabbled, or rolled in the muck with the

tawny wolf-dogs.

To one side of the encampment, and conspicuously apart from it,

stood a second camp of two tents. But it was a white man's camp.

If nothing else, the choice of position at least bore convincing

evidence of this. In case of offence, it commanded the Indian

quarters a hundred yards away; of defence, a rise to the ground

and the cleared intervening space; and last, of defeat, the swift

slope of a score of yards to the canoes below. From one of the

tents came the petulant cry of a sick child and the crooning song

of a mother. In the open, over the smouldering embers of a fire,

two men held talk.

"Eh? I love the church like a good son. Bien! So great a love

that my days have been spent in fleeing away from her, and my

nights in dreaming dreams of reckoning. Look you!" The half-

breed's voice rose to an angry snarl. "I am Red River born. My

father was white--as white as you. But you are Yankee, and he was

British bred, and a gentleman's son. And my mother was the

daughter of a chief, and I was a man. Ay, and one had to look the

second time to see what manner of blood ran in my veins; for I

lived with the whites, and was one of them, and my father's heart

beat in me. It happened there was a maiden--white--who looked on

me with kind eyes. Her father had much land and many horses; also

he was a big man among his people, and his blood was the blood of

the French. He said the girl knew not her own mind, and talked

overmuch with her, and became wroth that such things should be.

"But she knew her mind, for we came quick before the priest. And

quicker had come her father, with lying words, false promises, I

know not what; so that the priest stiffened his neck and would not

make us that we might live one with the other. As at the

beginning it was the church which would not bless my birth, so now

it was the church which refused me marriage and put the blood of

men upon my hands. Bien! Thus have I cause to love the church.

So I struck the priest on his woman's mouth, and we took swift

horses, the girl and I, to Fort Pierre, where was a minister of

good heart. But hot on our trail was her father, and brothers,

and other men he had gathered to him. And we fought, our horses

on the run, till I emptied three saddles and the rest drew off and

went on to Fort Pierre. Then we took east, the girl and I, to the

hills and forests, and we lived one with the other, and we were

not married,--the work of the good church which I love like a son.

"But mark you, for this is the strangeness of woman, the way of

which no man may understand. One of the saddles I emptied was

that of her father's, and the hoofs of those who came behind had

pounded him into the earth. This we saw, the girl and I, and this

I had forgot had she not remembered. And in the quiet of the

evening, after the day's hunt were done, it came between us, and

in the silence of the night when we lay beneath the stars and

should have been one. It was there always. She never spoke, but

it sat by our fire and held us ever apart. She tried to put it

aside, but at such times it would rise up till I could read it in

the look of her eyes, in the very in-take of her breath.

"So in the end she bore me a child, a woman-child, and died. Then

I went among my mother's people, that it might nurse at a warm

breast and live. But my hands were wet with the blood of men,

look you, because of the church, wet with the blood of men. And

the Riders of the North came for me, but my mother's brother, who

was then chief in his own right, hid me and gave me horses and

food. And we went away, my woman-child and I, even to the Hudson

Bay Country, where white men were few and the questions they asked

not many. And I worked for the company a hunter, as a guide, as a

driver of dogs, till my woman-child was become a woman, tall, and

slender, and fair to the eye.

"You know the winter, long and lonely, breeding evil thoughts and

bad deeds. The Chief Factor was a hard man, and bold. And he was

not such that a woman would delight in looking upon. But he cast

eyes upon my woman-child who was become a woman. Mother of God!

he sent me away on a long trip with the dogs, that he might--you

understand, he was a hard man and without heart. She was most

white, and her soul was white, and a good woman, and--well, she

died.

"It was bitter cold the night of my return, and I had been away

months, and the dogs were limping sore when I came to the fort.

The Indians and breeds looked on me in silence, and I felt the

fear of I knew not what, but I said nothing till the dogs were fed

and I had eaten as a man with work before him should. Then I

spoke up, demanding the word, and they shrank from me, afraid of

my anger and what I should do; but the story came out, the pitiful

story, word for word and act for act, and they marvelled that I

should be so quiet.

"When they had done I went to the Factor's house, calmer than now

in the telling of it. He had been afraid and called upon the

breeds to help him; but they were not pleased with the deed, and

had left him to lie on the bed he had made. So he had fled to the

house of the priest. Thither I followed. But when I was come to

that place, the priest stood in my way, and spoke soft words, and

said a man in anger should go neither to the right nor left, but

straight to God. I asked by the right of a father's wrath that he

give me past, but he said only over his body, and besought with me

to pray. Look you, it was the church, always the church; for I

passed over his body and sent the Factor to meet my woman-child

before his god, which is a bad god, and the god of the white men.

Then was there hue and cry, for word was sent to the station

below, and I came away. Through the Land of the Great Slave, down

the Valley of the Mackenzie to the never-opening ice, over the

White Rockies, past the Great Curve of the Yukon, even to this

place did I come. And from that day to this, yours is the first

face of my father's people I have looked upon. May it be the

last! These people, which are my people, are a simple folk, and I

have been raised to honor among them. My word is their law, and

their priests but do my bidding, else would I not suffer them.

When I speak for them I speak for myself. We ask to be let alone.

We do not want your kind. If we permit you to sit by our fires,

after you will come your church, your priests, and your gods. And

know this, for each white man who comes to my village, him will I

make deny his god. You are the first, and I give you grace. So

it were well you go, and go quickly."

"I am not responsible for my brothers," the second man spoke up,

filling his pipe in a meditative manner. Hay Stockard was at

times as thoughtful of speech as he was wanton of action; but only

at times.

"But I know your breed," responded the other. "Your brothers are

many, and it is you and yours who break the trail for them to

follow. In time they shall come to possess the land, but not in

my time. Already, have I heard, are they on the head-reaches of

the Great River, and far away below are the Russians."

Hay Stockard lifted his head with a quick start. This was

startling geographical information. The Hudson Bay post at Fort

Yukon had other notions concerning the course of the river,

believing it to flow into the Arctic.

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

"I do not know, but below there are Russians, many Russians.

Which is neither here nor there. You may go on and see for

yourself; you may go back to your brothers; but up the Koyukuk you

shall not go while the priests and fighting men do my bidding.

Thus do I command, I, Baptiste the Red, whose word is law and who

am head man over this people."

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

brothers?"

"Then shall you go swift-footed before your god, which is a bad

god, and the god of the white men."

The red sun shot up above the northern skyline, dripping and

bloody. Baptiste the Red came to his feet, nodded curtly, and

went back to his camp amid the crimson shadows and the singing of

the robins.

Hay Stockard finished his pipe by the fire, picturing in smoke and

coal the unknown upper reaches of the Koyukuk, the strange stream

which ended here its arctic travels and merged its waters with the

muddy Yukon flood. Somewhere up there, if the dying words of a

ship-wrecked sailorman who had made the fearful overland journey

were to be believed, and if the vial of golden grains in his pouch

attested anything,--somewhere up there, in that home of winter,

stood the Treasure House of the North. And as keeper of the gate,

Baptiste the Red, English half-breed and renegade, barred the way.

"Bah!" He kicked the embers apart and rose to his full height,

arms lazily outstretched, facing the flushing north with careless

soul.

Hay Stockard swore, harshly, in the rugged monosyllables of his

mother tongue. His wife lifted her gaze from the pots and pans,

and followed his in a keen scrutiny of the river. She was a woman

of the Teslin Country, wise in the ways of her husband's

vernacular when it grew intensive. From the slipping of a snow-

shoe thong to the forefront of sudden death, she could gauge

occasion by the pitch and volume of his blasphemy. So she knew

the present occasion merited attention. A long canoe, with

paddles flashing back the rays of the westering sun, was crossing

the current from above and urging in for the eddy. Hay Stockard

watched it intently. Three men rose and dipped, rose and dipped,

in rhythmical precision; but a red bandanna, wrapped about the

head of one, caught and held his eye.

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

A shambling, loose-jointed giant rolled out of one of the tents,

yawning and rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Then he sighted the

strange canoe and was wide awake on the instant.

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

Hay Stockard nodded his head bitterly, half-reached for his rifle,

then shrugged his shoulders.

"Pot-shot him," Bill suggested, "and settle the thing out of hand.

He'll spoil us sure if we don't." But the other declined this

drastic measure and turned away, at the same time bidding the

woman return to her work, and calling Bill back from the bank.

The two Indians in the canoe moored it on the edge of the eddy,

while its white occupant, conspicuous by his gorgeous head-gear,

came up the bank.

"Like Paul of Tarsus, I give you greeting. Peace be unto you and

grace before the Lord."

His advances were met sullenly, and without speech.

"To you, Hay Stockard, blasphemer and Philistine, greeting. In

your heart is the lust of Mammon, in your mind cunning devils, in

your tent this woman whom you live with in adultery; yet of these

divers sins, even here in the wilderness, I, Sturges Owen, apostle

to the Lord, bid you to repent and cast from you your iniquities."

"Save your cant! Save your cant!" Hay Stockard broke in testily.

"You'll need all you've got, and more, for Red Baptiste over

yonder."

He waved his hand toward the Indian camp, where the half-breed was

looking steadily across, striving to make out the newcomers.

Sturges Owen, disseminator of light and apostle to the Lord,

stepped to the edge of the steep and commanded his men to bring up

the camp outfit. Stockard followed him.

"Look here," he demanded, plucking the missionary by the shoulder

and twirling him about. "Do you value your hide?"

"My life is in the Lord's keeping, and I do but work in His

vineyard," he replied solemnly.

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

"If He so wills."

"Well, you'll find it right here, but I'm going to give you some

advice first. Take it or leave it. If you stop here, you'll be

cut off in the midst of your labors. And not you alone, but your

men, Bill, my wife--"

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

Gospel."

"And myself. Not only do you bring trouble upon yourself, but

upon us. I was frozen in with you last winter, as you will well

recollect, and I know you for a good man and a fool. If you think

it your duty to strive with the heathen, well and good; but, do

exercise some wit in the way you go about it. This man, Red

Baptiste, is no Indian. He comes of our common stock, is as bull-

necked as I ever dared be, and as wild a fanatic the one way as

you are the other. When you two come together, hell'll be to pay,

and I don't care to be mixed up in it. Understand? So take my

advice and go away. If you go down-stream, you'll fall in with

the Russians. There's bound to be Greek priests among them, and

they'll see you safe through to Bering Sea,--that's where the

Yukon empties,--and from there it won't be hard to get back to

civilization. Take my word for it and get out of here as fast as

God'll let you."

"He who carries the Lord in his heart and the Gospel in his hand

hath no fear of the machinations of man or devil," the missionary

answered stoutly. "I will see this man and wrestle with him. One

backslider returned to the fold is a greater victory than a

thousand heathen. He who is strong for evil can be as mighty for

good, witness Saul when he journeyed up to Damascus to bring

Christian captives to Jerusalem. And the voice of the Saviour

came to him, crying, 'Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?' And

therewith Paul arrayed himself on the side of the Lord, and

thereafter was most mighty in the saving of souls. And even as

thou, Paul of Tarsus, even so do I work in the vineyard of the

Lord, bearing trials and tribulations, scoffs and sneers, stripes

and punishments, for His dear sake."

"Bring up the little bag with the tea and a kettle of water," he

called the next instant to his boatmen; "not forgetting the haunch

of cariboo and the mixing-pan."

When his men, converts by his own hand, had gained the bank, the

trio fell to their knees, hands and backs burdened with camp

equipage, and offered up thanks for their passage through the

wilderness and their safe arrival. Hay Stockard looked upon the

function with sneering disapproval, the romance and solemnity of

it lost to his matter-of-fact soul. Baptiste the Red, still

gazing across, recognized the familiar postures, and remembered

the girl who had shared his star-roofed couch in the hills and

forests, and the woman-child who lay somewhere by bleak Hudson's

Bay.

III

"Confound it, Baptiste, couldn't think of it. Not for a moment.

Grant that this man is a fool and of small use in the nature of

things, but still, you know, I can't give him up."

Hay Stockard paused, striving to put into speech the rude ethics

of his heart.

"He's worried me, Baptiste, in the past and now, and caused me all

manner of troubles; but can't you see, he's my own breed--white--

and--and--why, I couldn't buy my life with his, not if he was a

nigger."

"So be it," Baptiste the Red made answer. "I have given you grace

and choice. I shall come presently, with my priests and fighting

men, and either shall I kill you, or you deny your god. Give up

the priest to my pleasure, and you shall depart in peace.

Otherwise your trail ends here. My people are against you to the

babies. Even now have the children stolen away your canoes." He

pointed down to the river. Naked boys had slipped down the water

from the point above, cast loose the canoes, and by then had

worked them into the current. When they had drifted out of rifle-

shot they clambered over the sides and paddled ashore.

"Give me the priest, and you may have them back again. Come!

Speak your mind, but without haste."

Stockard shook his head. His glance dropped to the woman of the

Teslin Country with his boy at her breast, and he would have

wavered had he not lifted his eyes to the men before him.

"I am not afraid," Sturges Owen spoke up. "The Lord bears me in

his right hand, and alone am I ready to go into the camp of the

unbeliever. It is not too late. Faith may move mountains. Even

in the eleventh hour may I win his soul to the true

righteousness."

"Trip the beggar up and make him fast," Bill whispered hoarsely in

the ear of his leader, while the missionary kept the floor and

wrestled with the heathen. "Make him hostage, and bore him if

they get ugly."

"No," Stockard answered. "I gave him my word that he could speak

with us unmolested. Rules of warfare, Bill; rules of warfare.

He's been on the square, given us warning, and all that, and--why,

damn it, man, I can't break my word!"

"He'll keep his, never fear."

"Don't doubt it, but I won't let a half-breed outdo me in fair

dealing. Why not do what he wants,--give him the missionary and

be done with it?"

"N-no," Bill hesitated doubtfully.

"Shoe pinches, eh?"

Bill flushed a little and dropped the discussion. Baptiste the

Red was still waiting the final decision. Stockard went up to

him.

"It's this way, Baptiste. I came to your village minded to go up

the Koyukuk. I intended no wrong. My heart was clean of evil.

It is still clean. Along comes this priest, as you call him. I

didn't bring him here. He'd have come whether I was here or not.

But now that he is here, being of my people, I've got to stand by

him. And I'm going to. Further, it will be no child's play.

When you have done, your village will be silent and empty, your

people wasted as after a famine. True, we will he gone; likewise

the pick of your fighting men--"

"But those who remain shall be in peace, nor shall the word of

strange gods and the tongues of strange priests be buzzing in

their ears."

Both men shrugged their shoulder and turned away, the half-breed

going back to his own camp. The missionary called his two men to

him, and they fell into prayer. Stockard and Bill attacked the

few standing pines with their axes, felling them into convenient

breastworks. The child had fallen asleep, so the woman placed it

on a heap of furs and lent a hand in fortifying the camp. Three

sides were thus defended, the steep declivity at the rear

precluding attack from that direction. When these arrangements

had been completed, the two men stalked into the open, clearing

away, here and there, the scattered underbrush. From the opposing

camp came the booming of war-drums and the voices of the priests

stirring the people to anger.

"Worst of it is they'll come in rushes," Bill complained as they

walked back with shouldered axes.

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

"Can't start the ball a-rolling too early, then." Bill exchanged

the axe for a rifle, and took a careful rest. One of the

medicine-men, towering above his tribesmen, stood out distinctly.

Bill drew a bead on him.

"All ready?" he asked.

Stockard opened the ammunition box, placed the woman where she

could reload in safety, and gave the word. The medicine-man

dropped. For a moment there was silence, then a wild howl went up

and a flight of bone arrows fell short.

"I'd like to take a look at the beggar," Bill remarked, throwing a

fresh shell into place. "I'll swear I drilled him clean between

the eyes."

"Didn't work." Stockard shook his head gloomily. Baptiste had

evidently quelled the more warlike of his followers, and instead

of precipitating an attack in the bright light of day, the shot

had caused a hasty exodus, the Indians drawing out of the village

beyond the zone of fire.

In the full tide of his proselyting fervor, borne along by the

hand of God, Sturges Owen would have ventured alone into the camp

of the unbeliever, equally prepared for miracle or martyrdom; but

in the waiting which ensued, the fever of conviction died away

gradually, as the natural man asserted itself. Physical fear

replaced spiritual hope; the love of life, the love of God. It

was no new experience. He could feel his weakness coming on, and

knew it of old time. He had struggled against it and been

overcome by it before. He remembered when the other men had

driven their paddles like mad in the van of a roaring ice-flood,

how, at the critical moment, in a panic of worldly terror, he had

dropped his paddle and besought wildly with his God for pity. And

there were other times. The recollection was not pleasant. It

brought shame to him that his spirit should be so weak and his

flesh so strong. But the love of life! the love of life! He

could not strip it from him. Because of it had his dim ancestors

perpetuated their line; because of it was he destined to

perpetuate his. His courage, if courage it might be called, was

bred of fanaticism. The courage of Stockard and Bill was the

adherence to deep-rooted ideals. Not that the love of life was

less, but the love of race tradition more; not that they were

unafraid to die, but that they were brave enough not to live at

the price of shame.

The missionary rose, for the moment swayed by the mood of

sacrifice. He half crawled over the barricade to proceed to the

other camp, but sank back, a trembling mass, wailing: "As the

spirit moves! As the spirit moves! Who am I that I should set

aside the judgments of God? Before the foundations of the world

were all things written in the book of life. Worm that I am,

shall I erase the page or any portion thereof? As God wills, so

shall the spirit move!"

Bill reached over, plucked him to his feet, and shook him,

fiercely, silently. Then he dropped the bundle of quivering

nerves and turned his attention to the two converts. But they

showed little fright and a cheerful alacrity in preparing for the

coming passage at arms.

Stockard, who had been talking in undertones with the Teslin

woman, now turned to the missionary.

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

"Now," he ordered, when Sturges Owen had been duly deposited

before him, "make us man and wife, and be lively about it." Then

he added apologetically to Bill: "No telling how it's to end, so

I just thought I'd get my affairs straightened up."

The woman obeyed the behest of her white lord. To her the

ceremony was meaningless. By her lights she was his wife, and had

been from the day they first foregathered. The converts served as

witnesses. Bill stood over the missionary, prompting him when he

stumbled. Stockard put the responses in the woman's mouth, and

when the time came, for want of better, ringed her finger with

thumb and forefinger of his own.

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

disobey.

"Now baptize the child!"

"Neat and tidy," Bill commented.

"Gathering the proper outfit for a new trail," the father

explained, taking the boy from the mother's arms. "I was grub-

staked, once, into the Cascades, and had everything in the kit

except salt. Never shall forget it. And if the woman and the kid

cross the divide to-night they might as well be prepared for pot-

luck. A long shot, Bill, between ourselves, but nothing lost if

it misses."

A cup of water served the purpose, and the child was laid away in

a secure corner of the barricade. The men built the fire, and the

evening meal was cooked.

The sun hurried round to the north, sinking closer to the horizon.

The heavens in that quarter grew red and bloody. The shadows

lengthened, the light dimmed, and in the sombre recesses of the

forest life slowly died away. Even the wild fowl in the river

softened their raucous chatter and feigned the nightly farce of

going to bed. Only the tribesmen increased their clamor, war-

drums booming and voices raised in savage folk songs. But as the

sun dipped they ceased their tumult. The rounded hush of midnight

was complete. Stockard rose to his knees and peered over the

logs. Once the child wailed in pain and disconcerted him. The

mother bent over it, but it slept again. The silence was

interminable, profound. Then, of a sudden, the robins burst into

full-throated song. The night had passed.

A flood of dark figures boiled across the open. Arrows whistled

and bow-thongs sang. The shrill-tongued rifles answered back. A

spear, and a mighty cast, transfixed the Teslin woman as she

hovered above the child. A spent arrow, diving between the logs,

lodged in the missionary's arm.

There was no stopping the rush. The middle distance was cumbered

with bodies, but the rest surged on, breaking against and over the

barricade like an ocean wave. Sturges Owen fled to the tent,

while the men were swept from their feet, buried beneath the human

tide. Hay Stockard alone regained the surface, flinging the

tribesmen aside like yelping curs. He had managed to seize an

axe. A dark hand grasped the child by a naked foot, and drew it

from beneath its mother. At arm's length its puny body circled

through the air, dashing to death against the logs. Stockard

clove the man to the chin and fell to clearing space. The ring of

savage faces closed in, raining upon him spear-thrusts and bone-

barbed arrows. The sun shot up, and they swayed back and forth in

the crimson shadows. Twice, with his axe blocked by too deep a

blow, they rushed him; but each time he flung them clear. They

fell underfoot and he trampled dead and dying, the way slippery

with blood. And still the day brightened and the robins sang.

Then they drew back from him in awe, and he leaned breathless upon

his axe.

"Blood of my soul!" cried Baptiste the Red. "But thou art a man.

Deny thy god, and thou shalt yet live."

Stockard swore his refusal, feebly but with grace.

"Behold! A woman!" Sturges Owen had been brought before the

half-breed.

Beyond a scratch on the arm, he was uninjured, but his eyes roved

about him in an ecstasy of fear. The heroic figure of the

blasphemer, bristling with wounds and arrows, leaning defiantly

upon his axe, indifferent, indomitable, superb, caught his

wavering vision. And he felt a great envy of the man who could go

down serenely to the dark gates of death. Surely Christ, and not

he, Sturges Owen, had been moulded in such manner. And why not

he? He felt dimly the curse of ancestry, the feebleness of spirit

which had come down to him out of the past, and he felt an anger

at the creative force, symbolize it as he would, which had formed

him, its servant, so weakly. For even a stronger man, this anger

and the stress of circumstance were sufficient to breed apostasy,

and for Sturges Owen it was inevitable. In the fear of man's

anger he would dare the wrath of God. He had been raised up to

serve the Lord only that he might be cast down. He had been given

faith without the strength of faith; he had been given spirit

without the power of spirit. It was unjust.

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

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

repeating a catechism.

"Hast thou then a god at all?"

"I had."

"And now?"

"No."

Hay Stockard swept the blood from his eyes and laughed. The

missionary looked at him curiously, as in a dream. A feeling of

infinite distance came over him, as though of a great remove. In

that which had transpired, and which was to transpire, he had no

part. He was a spectator--at a distance, yes, at a distance. The

words of Baptiste came to him faintly:-

"Very good. See that this man go free, and that no harm befall

him. Let him depart in peace. Give him a canoe and food. Set

his face toward the Russians, that he may tell their priests of

Baptiste the Red, in whose country there is no god."

They led him to the edge of the steep, where they paused to

witness the final tragedy. The half-breed turned to Hay Stockard.

"There is no god," he prompted.

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

for the cast.

"Hast thou a god?"

"Ay, the God of my fathers."

He shifted the axe for a better grip. Baptiste the Red gave the

sign, and the spear hurtled full against his breast. Sturges Owen

saw the ivory head stand out beyond his back, saw the man sway,

laughing, and snap the shaft short as he fell upon it. Then he

went down to the river, that he might carry to the Russians the

message of Baptiste the Red, in whose country there was no god.

THE GREAT INTERROGATION

To say the least, Mrs. Sayther's career in Dawson was meteoric.

She arrived in the spring, with dog sleds and French-Canadian

voyageurs, blazed gloriously for a brief month, and departed up

the river as soon as it was free of ice. Now womanless Dawson

never quite understood this hurried departure, and the local Four

Hundred felt aggrieved and lonely till the Nome strike was made

and old sensations gave way to new. For it had delighted in Mrs.

Sayther, and received her wide-armed. She was pretty, charming,

and, moreover, a widow. And because of this she at once had at

heel any number of Eldorado Kings, officials, and adventuring

younger sons, whose ears were yearning for the frou-frou of a

woman's skirts.

The mining engineers revered the memory of her husband, the late

Colonel Sayther, while the syndicate and promoter representatives

spoke awesomely of his deals and manipulations; for he was known

down in the States as a great mining man, and as even a greater

one in London. Why his widow, of all women, should have come into

the country, was the great interrogation. But they were a

practical breed, the men of the Northland, with a wholesome

disregard for theories and a firm grip on facts. And to not a few

of them Karen Sayther was a most essential fact. That she did not

regard the matter in this light, is evidenced by the neatness and

celerity with which refusal and proposal tallied off during her

four weeks' stay. And with her vanished the fact, and only the

interrogation remained.

To the solution, Chance vouchsafed one clew. Her last victim,

Jack Coughran, having fruitlessly laid at her feet both his heart

and a five-hundred-foot creek claim on Bonanza, celebrated the

misfortune by walking all of a night with the gods. In the

midwatch of this night he happened to rub shoulders with Pierre

Fontaine, none other than head man of Karen Sayther's voyageurs.

This rubbing of shoulders led to recognition and drinks, and

ultimately involved both men in a common muddle of inebriety.

"Heh?" Pierre Fontaine later on gurgled thickly. "Vot for Madame

Sayther mak visitation to thees country? More better you spik wit

her. I know no t'ing 'tall, only all de tam her ask one man's

name. 'Pierre,' her spik wit me; 'Pierre, you moos' find thees

mans, and I gif you mooch--one thousand dollar you find thees

mans.' Thees mans? Ah, oui. Thees man's name--vot you call--

Daveed Payne. Oui, m'sieu, Daveed Payne. All de tam her spik das

name. And all de tam I look rount vaire mooch, work lak hell, but

no can find das dam mans, and no get one thousand dollar 'tall.

By dam!

"Heh? Ah, oui. One tam dose mens vot come from Circle City, dose

mens know thees mans. Him Birch Creek, dey spik. And madame?

Her say 'Bon!' and look happy lak anyt'ing. And her spik wit me.

'Pierre,' her spik, 'harness de dogs. We go queek. We find thees

mans I gif you one thousand dollar more.' And I say, 'Oui, queek!

Allons, madame!'

"For sure, I t'ink, das two thousand dollar mine. Bully boy! Den

more mens come from Circle City, and dey say no, das thees mans,

Daveed Payne, come Dawson leel tam back. So madame and I go not

'tall.

"Oui, m'sieu. Thees day madame spik. 'Pierre,' her spik, and gif

me five hundred dollar, 'go buy poling-boat. To-morrow we go up

de river.' Ah, oui, to-morrow, up de river, and das dam Sitka

Charley mak me pay for de poling-boat five hundred dollar. Dam!"

Thus it was, when Jack Coughran unburdened himself next day, that

Dawson fell to wondering who was this David Payne, and in what way

his existence bore upon Karen Sayther's. But that very day, as

Pierre Fontaine had said, Mrs. Sayther and her barbaric crew of

voyageurs towed up the east bank to Klondike City, shot across to

the west bank to escape the bluffs, and disappeared amid the maze

of islands to the south.

"Oui, madame, thees is de place. One, two, t'ree island below

Stuart River. Thees is t'ree island."

As he spoke, Pierre Fontaine drove his pole against the bank and

held the stern of the boat against the current. This thrust the

bow in, till a nimble breed climbed ashore with the painter and

made fast.

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

A chorus of dogs marked his disappearance over the edge of the

bank, but a minute later he was back again.

"Oui, madame, thees is de cabin. I mak investigation. No can

find mans at home. But him no go vaire far, vaire long, or him no

leave dogs. Him come queek, you bet!"

"Help me out, Pierre. I'm tired all over from the boat. You

might have made it softer, you know."

From a nest of furs amidships, Karen Sayther rose to her full

height of slender fairness. But if she looked lily-frail in her

elemental environment, she was belied by the grip she put upon

Pierre's hand, by the knotting of her woman's biceps as it took

the weight of her body, by the splendid effort of her limbs as

they held her out from the perpendicular bank while she made the

ascent. Though shapely flesh clothed delicate frame, her body was

a seat of strength.

Still, for all the careless ease with which she had made the

landing, there was a warmer color than usual to her face, and a

perceptibly extra beat to her heart. But then, also, it was with

a certain reverent curiousness that she approached the cabin,

while the Hush on her cheek showed a yet riper mellowness.

"Look, see!" Pierre pointed to the scattered chips by the

woodpile. "Him fresh--two, t'ree day, no more."

Mrs. Sayther nodded. She tried to peer through the small window,

but it was made of greased parchment which admitted light while it

blocked vision. Failing this, she went round to the door, half

lifted the rude latch to enter, but changed her mind and let it

fall back into place. Then she suddenly dropped on one knee and

kissed the rough-hewn threshold. If Pierre Fontaine saw, he gave

no sign, and the memory in the time to come was never shared. But

the next instant, one of the boatmen, placidly lighting his pipe,

was startled by an unwonted harshness in his captain's voice.

"Hey! You! Le Goire! You mak'm soft more better," Pierre

commanded. "Plenty bear-skin; plenty blanket. Dam!"

But the nest was soon after disrupted, and the major portion

tossed up to the crest of the shore, where Mrs. Sayther lay down

to wait in comfort.

Reclining on her side, she looked out and over the wide-stretching

Yukon. Above the mountains which lay beyond the further shore,

the sky was murky with the smoke of unseen forest fires, and

through this the afternoon sun broke feebly, throwing a vague

radiance to earth, and unreal shadows. To the sky-line of the

four quarters--spruce-shrouded islands, dark waters, and ice-

scarred rocky ridges--stretched the immaculate wilderness. No

sign of human existence broke the solitude; no sound the

stillness. The land seemed bound under the unreality of the

unknown, wrapped in the brooding mystery of great spaces.

Perhaps it was this which made Mrs. Sayther nervous; for she

changed her position constantly, now to look up the river, now

down, or to scan the gloomy shores for the half-hidden mouths of

back channels. After an hour or so the boatmen were sent ashore

to pitch camp for the night, but Pierre remained with his mistress

to watch.

"Ah! him come thees tam," he whispered, after a long silence, his

gaze bent up the river to the head of the island.

A canoe, with a paddle flashing on either side, was slipping down

the current. In the stern a man's form, and in the bow a woman's,

swung rhythmically to the work. Mrs. Sayther had no eyes for the

woman till the canoe drove in closer and her bizarre beauty

peremptorily demanded notice. A close-fitting blouse of moose-

skin, fantastically beaded, outlined faithfully the well-rounded

lines of her body, while a silken kerchief, gay of color and

picturesquely draped, partly covered great masses of blue-black

hair. But it was the face, cast belike in copper bronze, which

caught and held Mrs. Sayther's fleeting glance. Eyes, piercing

and black and large, with a traditionary hint of obliqueness,

looked forth from under clear-stencilled, clean-arching brows.

Without suggesting cadaverousness, though high-boned and

prominent, the cheeks fell away and met in a mouth, thin-lipped

and softly strong. It was a face which advertised the dimmest

trace of ancient Mongol blood, a reversion, after long centuries

of wandering, to the parent stem. This effect was heightened by

the delicately aquiline nose with its thin trembling nostrils, and

by the general air of eagle wildness which seemed to characterize

not only the face but the creature herself. She was, in fact, the

Tartar type modified to idealization, and the tribe of Red Indian

is lucky that breeds such a unique body once in a score of

generations.

Dipping long strokes and strong, the girl, in concert with the

man, suddenly whirled the tiny craft about against the current and

brought it gently to the shore. Another instant and she stood at

the top of the bank, heaving up by rope, hand under hand, a

quarter of fresh-killed moose. Then the man followed her, and

together, with a swift rush, they drew up the canoe. The dogs

were in a whining mass about them, and as the girl stooped among

them caressingly, the man's gaze fell upon Mrs. Sayther, who had

arisen. He looked, brushed his eyes unconsciously as though his

sight were deceiving him, and looked again.

"Karen," he said simply, coming forward and extending his hand, "I

thought for the moment I was dreaming. I went snow-blind for a

time, this spring, and since then my eyes have been playing tricks

with me."

Mrs. Sayther, whose flush had deepened and whose heart was urging

painfully, had been prepared for almost anything save this coolly

extended hand; but she tactfully curbed herself and grasped it

heartily with her own.

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

too, only--only--"

"Only I didn't give the word." David Payne laughed and watched

the Indian girl disappearing into the cabin.

"Oh, I understand, Dave, and had I been in your place I'd most

probably have done the same. But I have come--now."

"Then come a little bit farther, into the cabin and get something

to eat," he said genially, ignoring or missing the feminine

suggestion of appeal in her voice. "And you must be tired too.

Which way are you travelling? Up? Then you wintered in Dawson,

or came in on the last ice. Your camp?" He glanced at the

voyageurs circled about the fire in the open, and held back the

door for her to enter.

"I came up on the ice from Circle City last winter," he continued,

"and settled down here for a while. Am prospecting some on

Henderson Creek, and if that fails, have been thinking of trying

my hand this fall up the Stuart River."

"You aren't changed much, are you?" she asked irrelevantly,

striving to throw the conversation upon a more personal basis.

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

YOU mean?"

But she shrugged her shoulders and peered I through the dim light

at the Indian girl, who had lighted the fire and was frying great

chunks of moose meat, alternated with thin ribbons of bacon.

"Did you stop in Dawson long?" The man was whittling a stave of

birchwood into a rude axe-handle, and asked the question without

raising his head.

"Oh, a few days," she answered, following the girl with her eyes,

and hardly hearing. "What were you saying? In Dawson? A month,

in fact, and glad to get away. The arctic male is elemental, you

know, and somewhat strenuous in his feelings."

"Bound to be when he gets right down to the soil. He leaves

convention with the spring bed at borne. But you were wise in

your choice of time for leaving. You'll be out of the country

before mosquito season, which is a blessing your lack of

experience will not permit you to appreciate."

"I suppose not. But tell me about yourself, about your life.

What kind of neighbors have you? Or have you any?"

While she queried she watched the girl grinding coffee in the

corner of a flower sack upon the hearthstone. With a steadiness

and skill which predicated nerves as primitive as the method, she

crushed the imprisoned berries with a heavy fragment of quartz.

David Payne noted his visitor's gaze, and the shadow of a smile

drifted over his lips.

"I did have some," he replied. "Missourian chaps, and a couple of

Cornishmen, but they went down to Eldorado to work at wages for a

grubstake."

Mrs. Sayther cast a look of speculative regard upon the girl.

"But of course there are plenty of Indians about?"

"Every mother's son of them down to Dawson long ago. Not a native

in the whole country, barring Winapie here, and she's a Koyokuk

lass,--comes from a thousand miles or so down the river."

Mrs. Sayther felt suddenly faint; and though the smile of interest

in no wise waned, the face of the man seemed to draw away to a

telescopic distance, and the tiered logs of the cabin to whirl

drunkenly about. But she was bidden draw up to the table, and

during the meal discovered time and space in which to find

herself. She talked little, and that principally about the land

and weather, while the man wandered off into a long description of

the difference between the shallow summer diggings of the Lower

Country and the deep winter diggings of the Upper Country.

"You do not ask why I came north?" she asked. "Surely you know."

They had moved back from the table, and David Payne had returned

to his axe-handle. "Did you get my letter?"

"A last one? No, I don't think so. Most probably it's trailing

around the Birch Creek Country or lying in some trader's shack on

the Lower River. The way they run the mails in here is shameful.

No order, no system, no--"

"Don't be wooden, Dave! Help me!" She spoke sharply now, with an

assumption of authority which rested upon the past. "Why don't

you ask me about myself? About those we knew in the old times?

Have you no longer any interest in the world? Do you know that my

husband is dead?"

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

"David!" She was ready to cry with vexation, but the reproach she

threw into her voice eased her.

"Did you get any of my letters? You must have got some of them,

though you never answered."

"Well, I didn't get the last one, announcing, evidently, the death

of your husband, and most likely others went astray; but I did get

some. I--er--read them aloud to Winapie as a warning--that is,

you know, to impress upon her the wickedness of her white sisters.

And I--er--think she profited by it. Don't you?"

She disregarded the sting, and went on. "In the last letter,

which you did not receive, I told, as you have guessed, of Colonel

Sayther's death. That was a year ago. I also said that if you

did not come out to me, I would go in to you. And as I had often

promised, I came."

"I know of no promise."

"In the earlier letters?"

"Yes, you promised, but as I neither asked nor answered, it was

unratified. So I do not know of any such promise. But I do know

of another, which you, too, may remember. It was very long ago."

He dropped the axe-handle to the floor and raised his head. "It

was so very long ago, yet I remember it distinctly, the day, the

time, every detail. We were in a rose garden, you and I,--your

mother's rose garden. All things were budding, blossoming, and

the sap of spring was in our blood. And I drew you over--it was

the first--and kissed you full on the lips. Don't you remember?"

"Don't go over it, Dave, don't! I know every shameful line of it.

How often have I wept! If you only knew how I have suffered--"

"You promised me then--ay, and a thousand times in the sweet days

that followed. Each look of your eyes, each touch of your hand,

each syllable that fell from your lips, was a promise. And then--

how shall I say?--there came a man. He was old--old enough to

have begotten you--and not nice to look upon, but as the world

goes, clean. He had done no wrong, followed the letter of the

law, was respectable. Further, and to the point, he possessed

some several paltry mines,--a score; it does not matter: and he

owned a few miles of lands, and engineered deals, and clipped

coupons. He--"

"But there were other things," she interrupted, "I told you.

Pressure--money matters--want--my people--trouble. You understood

the whole sordid situation. I could not help it. It was not my

will. I was sacrificed, or I sacrificed, have it as you wish.

But, my God! Dave, I gave you up! You never did ME justice.

Think what I have gone through!"

"It was not your will? Pressure? Under high heaven there was no

thing to will you to this man's bed or that."

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

"I was unused to your way of measuring love. I am still unused.

I do not understand."

"But now! now!"

"We were speaking of this man you saw fit to marry. What manner

of man was he? Wherein did he charm your soul? What potent

virtues were his? True, he had a golden grip,--an almighty golden

grip. He knew the odds. He was versed in cent per cent. He had

a narrow wit and excellent judgment of the viler parts, whereby he

transferred this man's money to his pockets, and that man's money,

and the next man's. And the law smiled. In that it did not

condemn, our Christian ethics approved. By social measure he was

not a bad man. But by your measure, Karen, by mine, by ours of

the rose garden, what was he?"

"Remember, he is dead."

"The fact is not altered thereby. What was he? A great, gross,

material creature, deaf to song, blind to beauty, dead to the

spirit. He was fat with laziness, and flabby-cheeked, and the

round of his belly witnessed his gluttony--"

"But he is dead. It is we who are now--now! now! Don't you hear?

As you say, I have been inconstant. I have sinned. Good. But

should not you, too, cry peccavi? If I have broken promises, have

not you? Your love of the rose garden was of all time, or so you

said. Where is it now?"

"It is here! now!" he cried, striking his breast passionately with

clenched hand. "It has always been."

"And your love was a great love; there was none greater," she

continued; "or so you said in the rose garden. Yet it is not fine

enough, large enough, to forgive me here, crying now at your

feet?"

The man hesitated. His mouth opened; words shaped vainly on his

lips. She had forced him to bare his heart and speak truths which

he had hidden from himself. And she was good to look upon,

standing there in a glory of passion, calling back old

associations and warmer life. He turned away his head that he

might not see, but she passed around and fronted him.

"Look at me, Dave! Look at me! I am the same, after all. And so

are you, if you would but see. We are not changed."

Her hand rested on his shoulder, and his had half-passed, roughly,

about her, when the sharp crackle of a match startled him to

himself. Winapie, alien to the scene, was lighting the slow wick

of the slush lamp. She appeared to start out against a background

of utter black, and the flame, flaring suddenly up, lighted her

bronze beauty to royal gold.

"You see, it is impossible," he groaned, thrusting the fair-haired

woman gently from him. "It is impossible," he repeated. "It is

impossible."

"I am not a girl, Dave, with a girl's illusions," she said softly,

though not daring to come back to him. "It is as a woman that I

understand. Men are men. A common custom of the country. I am

not shocked. I divined it from the first. But--ah!--it is only a

marriage of the country--not a real marriage?"

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

"I know, but--"

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

"And there are no children?"

"No."

"Nor--"

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

"But it is not." She was at his side again, her hand touching

lightly, caressingly, the sunburned back of his. "I know the

custom of the land too well. Men do it every day. They do not

care to remain here, shut out from the world, for all their days;

so they give an order on the P. C. C. Company for a year's

provisions, some money in hand, and the girl is content. By the

end of that time, a man--" She shrugged her shoulders. "And so

with the girl here. We will give her an order upon the company,

not for a year, but for life. What was she when you found her? A

raw, meat-eating savage; fish in summer, moose in winter, feasting

in plenty, starving in famine. But for you that is what she would

have remained. For your coming she was happier; for your going,

surely, with a life of comparative splendor assured, she will be

happier than if you had never been."

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

"Come, Dave, you must see. She is not your kind. There is no

race affinity. She is an aborigine, sprung from the soil, yet

close to the soil, and impossible to lift from the soil. Born

savage, savage she will die. But we--you and I--the dominant,

evolved race--the salt of the earth and the masters thereof! We

are made for each other. The supreme call is of kind, and we are

of kind. Reason and feeling dictate it. Your very instinct

demands it. That you cannot deny. You cannot escape the

generations behind you. Yours is an ancestry which has survived

for a thousand centuries, and for a hundred thousand centuries,

and your line must not stop here. It cannot. Your ancestry will

not permit it. Instinct is stronger than the will. The race is

mightier than you. Come, Dave, let us go. We are young yet, and

life is good. Come."

Winapie, passing out of the cabin to feed the dogs, caught his

attention and caused him to shake his head and weakly to

reiterate. But the woman's hand slipped about his neck, and her

cheek pressed to his. His bleak life rose up and smote him,--the

vain struggle with pitiless forces; the dreary years of frost and

famine; the harsh and jarring contact with elemental life; the

aching void which mere animal existence could not fill. And

there, seduction by his side, whispering of brighter, warmer

lands, of music, light, and joy, called the old times back again.

He visioned it unconsciously. Faces rushed in upon him; glimpses

of forgotten scenes, memories of merry hours; strains of song and

trills of laughter -

"Come, Dave, Come. I have for both. The way is soft." She

looked about her at the bare furnishings of the cabin. "I have

for both. The world is at our feet, and all joy is ours. Come!

come!"

She was in his arms, trembling, and he held her tightly. He rose

to his feet . . . But the snarling of hungry dogs, and the shrill

cries of Winapie bringing about peace between the combatants, came

muffled to his ear through the heavy logs. And another scene

flashed before him. A struggle in the forest,--a bald-face

grizzly, broken-legged, terrible; the snarling of the dogs and the

shrill cries of Winapie as she urged them to the attack; himself

in the midst of the crush, breathless, panting, striving to hold

off red death; broken-backed, entrail-ripped dogs howling in

impotent anguish and desecrating the snow; the virgin white

running scarlet with the blood of man and beast; the bear,

ferocious, irresistible, crunching, crunching down to the core of

his life; and Winapie, at the last, in the thick of the frightful

muddle, hair flying, eyes flashing, fury incarnate, passing the

long hunting knife again and again--Sweat started to his forehead.

He shook off the clinging woman and staggered back to the wall.

And she, knowing that the moment had come, but unable to divine

what was passing within him, felt all she had gained slipping

away.

"Dave! Dave!" she cried. "I will not give you up! I will not

give you up! If you do not wish to come, we will stay. I will

stay with you. The world is less to me than are you. I will be a

Northland wife to you. I will cook your food, feed your dogs,

break trail for you, lift a paddle with you. I can do it.

Believe me, I am strong."

Nor did he doubt it, looking upon her and holding her off from

him; but his face had grown stern and gray, and the warmth had

died out of his eyes.

"I will pay off Pierre and the boatmen, and let them go. And I

will stay with you, priest or no priest, minister or no minister;

go with you, now, anywhere! Dave! Dave! Listen to me! You say

I did you wrong in the past--and I did--let me make up for it, let

me atone. If I did not rightly measure love before, let me show

that I can now."

She sank to the floor and threw her arms about his knees, sobbing.

"And you DO care for me. You DO care for me. Think! The long

years I have waited, suffered! You can never know!" He stooped

and raised her to her feet.

"Listen," he commanded, opening the door and lifting her bodily

outside. "It cannot be. We are not alone to be considered. You

must go. I wish you a safe journey. You will find it tougher

work when you get up by the Sixty Mile, but you have the best

boatmen in the world, and will get through all right. Will you

say good-by?"

Though she already had herself in hand, she looked at him

hopelessly. "If--if--if Winapie should--" She quavered and

stopped.

But he grasped the unspoken thought, and answered, "Yes." Then

struck with the enormity of it, "It cannot be conceived. There is

no likelihood. It must not be entertained."

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

went away.

"Break camp, Pierre," she said to the boatman, who alone had

remained awake against her return. "We must be going."

By the firelight his sharp eyes scanned the woe in her face, but

he received the extraordinary command as though it were the most

usual thing in the world. "Oui, madame," he assented. "Which

way? Dawson?"

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

Whereat he fell upon the sleeping voyageurs, kicking them,

grunting, from their blankets, and buckling them down to the work,

the while his voice, vibrant with action, shrilling through all

the camp. In a trice Mrs. Sayther's tiny tent had been struck,

pots and pans were being gathered up, blankets rolled, and the men

staggering under the loads to the boat. Here, on the banks, Mrs.

Sayther waited till the luggage was made ship-shape and her nest

prepared.

"We line up to de head of de island," Pierre explained to her

while running out the long tow rope. "Den we tak to das back

channel, where de water not queek, and I t'ink we mak good tam."

A scuffling and pattering of feet in the last year's dry grass

caught his quick ear, and he turned his head. The Indian girl,

circled by a bristling ring of wolf dogs, was coming toward them.

Mrs. Sayther noted that the girl's face, which had been apathetic

throughout the scene in the cabin, had now quickened into blazing

and wrathful life.

"What you do my man?" she demanded abruptly of Mrs. Sayther. "Him

lay on bunk, and him look bad all the time. I say, 'What the

matter, Dave? You sick?' But him no say nothing. After that him

say, 'Good girl Winapie, go way. I be all right bimeby.' What

you do my man, eh? I think you bad woman."

Mrs. Sayther looked curiously at the barbarian woman who shared

the life of this man, while she departed alone in the darkness of

night.

"I think you bad woman," Winapie repeated in the slow, methodical

way of one who gropes for strange words in an alien tongue. "I

think better you go way, no come no more. Eh? What you think? I

have one man. I Indian girl. You 'Merican woman. You good to

see. You find plenty men. Your eyes blue like the sky. Your

skin so white, so soft."

Coolly she thrust out a brown forefinger and pressed the soft

cheek of the other woman. And to the eternal credit of Karen

Sayther, she never flinched. Pierre hesitated and half stepped

forward; but she motioned him away, though her heart welled to him

with secret gratitude. "It's all right, Pierre," she said.

"Please go away."

He stepped back respectfully out of earshot, where he stood

grumbling to himself and measuring the distance in springs.

"Um white, um soft, like baby." Winapie touched the other cheek

and withdrew her hand. "Bimeby mosquito come. Skin get sore in

spot; um swell, oh, so big; um hurt, oh, so much. Plenty

mosquito; plenty spot. I think better you go now before mosquito

come. This way," pointing down the stream, "you go St. Michael's;

that way," pointing up, "you go Dyea. Better you go Dyea. Good-

by."

And that which Mrs. Sayther then did, caused Pierre to marvel

greatly. For she threw her arms around the Indian girl, kissed

her, and burst into tears.

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

Then she slipped half down the face of the bank, called back

"Good-by," and dropped into the boat amidships. Pierre followed

her and cast off. He shoved the steering oar into place and gave

the signal. Le Goire lifted an old French chanson; the men, like

a row of ghosts in the dim starlight, bent their backs to the tow

line; the steering oar cut the black current sharply, and the boat

swept out into the night.

WHICH MAKE MEN REMEMBER

Fortune La Pearle crushed his way through the snow, sobbing,

straining, cursing his luck, Alaska, Nome, the cards, and the man

who had felt his knife. The hot blood was freezing on his hands,

and the scene yet bright in his eyes,--the man, clutching the

table and sinking slowly to the floor; the rolling counters and

the scattered deck; the swift shiver throughout the room, and the

pause; the game-keepers no longer calling, and the clatter of the

chips dying away; the startled faces; the infinite instant of

silence; and then the great blood-roar and the tide of vengeance

which lapped his heels and turned the town mad behind him.

"All hell's broke loose," he sneered, turning aside in the

darkness and heading for the beach. Lights were flashing from

open doors, and tent, cabin, and dance-hall let slip their

denizens upon the chase. The clamor of men and howling of dogs

smote his ears and quickened his feet. He ran on and on. The

sounds grew dim, and the pursuit dissipated itself in vain rage

and aimless groping. But a flitting shadow clung to him. Head

thrust over shoulder, he caught glimpses of it, now taking vague

shape on an open expanse of snow, how merging into the deeper

shadows of some darkened cabin or beach-listed craft.

Fortune La Pearle swore like a woman, weakly, with the hint of

tears that comes of exhaustion, and plunged deeper into the maze

of heaped ice, tents, and prospect holes. He stumbled over taut

hawsers and piles of dunnage, tripped on crazy guy-ropes and

insanely planted pegs, and fell again and again upon frozen dumps

and mounds of hoarded driftwood. At times, when he deemed he had

drawn clear, his head dizzy with the painful pounding of his heart

and the suffocating intake of his breath, he slackened down; and

ever the shadow leaped out of the gloom and forced him on in

heart-breaking flight. A swift intuition lashed upon him, leaving

in its trail the cold chill of superstition. The persistence of

the shadow he invested with his gambler's symbolism. Silent,

inexorable, not to be shaken off, he took it as the fate which

waited at the last turn when chips were cashed in and gains and

losses counted up. Fortune La Pearle believed in those rare,

illuminating moments, when the intelligence flung from it time and

space, to rise naked through eternity and read the facts of life

from the open book of chance. That this was such a moment he had

no doubt; and when he turned inland and sped across the snow-

covered tundra he was not startled because the shadow took upon it

greater definiteness and drew in closer. Oppressed with his own

impotence, he halted in the midst of the white waste and whirled

about. His right hand slipped from its mitten, and a revolver, at

level, glistened in the pale light of the stars.

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

The shadow had assumed tangible shape, and at the sound of its

human voice a trepidation affected Fortune La Pearle's knees, and

his stomach was stricken with the qualms of sudden relief.

Perhaps things fell out differently because Uri Bram had no gun

that night when he sat on the hard benches of the El Dorado and

saw murder done. To that fact also might be attributed the trip

on the Long Trail which he took subsequently with a most unlikely

comrade. But be it as it may, he repeated a second time, "Don't

shoot. Can't you see I haven't a gun?"

"Then what the flaming hell did you take after me for?" demanded

the gambler, lowering his revolver.

Uri Bram shrugged his shoulders. "It don't matter much, anyhow.

I want you to come with me."

"Where?"

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

But Fortune La Pearle drove the heel of his moccasin into the snow

and attested by his various deities to the madness of Uri Bram.

"Who are you," he perorated, "and what am I, that I should put my

neck into the rope at your bidding?"

"I am Uri Bram," the other said simply, "and my shack is over

there on the edge of camp. I don't know who you are, but you've

thrust the soul from a living man's body,--there's the blood red

on your sleeve,--and, like a second Cain, the hand of all mankind

is against you, and there is no place you may lay your head. Now,

I have a shack--"

"For the love of your mother, hold your say, man," interrupted

Fortune La Pearle, "or I'll make you a second Abel for the joy of

it. So help me, I will! With a thousand men to lay me by the

heels, looking high and low, what do I want with your shack? I

want to get out of here--away! away! away! Cursed swine! I've

half a mind to go back and run amuck, and settle for a few of

them, the pigs! One gorgeous, glorious fight, and end the whole

damn business! It's a skin game, that's what life is, and I'm

sick of it!"

He stopped, appalled, crushed by his great desolation, and Uri

Bram seized the moment. He was not given to speech, this man, and

that which followed was the longest in his life, save one long

afterward in another place.

"That's why I told you about my shack. I can stow you there so

they'll never find you, and I've got grub in plenty. Elsewise you

can't get away. No dogs, no nothing, the sea closed, St. Michael

the nearest post, runners to carry the news before you, the same

over the portage to Anvik--not a chance in the world for you! Now

wait with me till it blows over. They'll forget all about you in

a month or less, what of stampeding to York and what not, and you

can hit the trail under their noses and they won't bother. I've

got my own ideas of justice. When I ran after you, out of the El

Dorado and along the beach, it wasn't to catch you or give you up.

My ideas are my own, and that's not one of them."

He ceased as the murderer drew a prayer-book from his pocket.

With the aurora borealis glimmering yellow in the northeast, heads

bared to the frost and naked hands grasping the sacred book,

Fortune La Pearle swore him to the words he had spoken--an oath

which Uri Bram never intended breaking, and never broke.

At the door of the shack the gambler hesitated for an instant,

marvelling at the strangeness of this man who had befriended him,

and doubting. But by the candlelight he found the cabin

comfortable and without occupants, and he was quickly rolling a

cigarette while the other man made coffee. His muscles relaxed in

the warmth and he lay back with half-assumed indolence, intently

studying Uri's face through the curling wisps of smoke. It was a

powerful face, but its strength was of that peculiar sort which

stands girt in and unrelated. The seams were deep-graven, more

like scars, while the stern features were in no way softened by

hints of sympathy or humor. Under prominent bushy brows the eyes

shone cold and gray. The cheekbones, high and forbidding, were

undermined by deep hollows. The chin and jaw displayed a

steadiness of purpose which the narrow forehead advertised as

single, and, if needs be, pitiless. Everything was harsh, the

nose, the lips, the voice, the lines about the mouth. It was the

face of one who communed much with himself, unused to seeking

counsel from the world; the face of one who wrestled oft of nights

with angels, and rose to face the day with shut lips that no man

might know. He was narrow but deep; and Fortune, his own humanity

broad and shallow, could make nothing of him. Did Uri sing when

merry and sigh when sad, he could have understood; but as it was,

the cryptic features were undecipherable; he could not measure the

soul they concealed.

"Lend a hand, Mister Man," Uri ordered when the cups had been

emptied. "We've got to fix up for visitors."

Fortune purred his name for the other's benefit, and assisted

understandingly. The bunk was built against a side and end of the

cabin. It was a rude affair, the bottom being composed of drift-

wood logs overlaid with moss. At the foot the rough ends of these

timbers projected in an uneven row. From the side next the wall

Uri ripped back the moss and removed three of the logs. The

jagged ends he sawed off and replaced so that the projecting row

remained unbroken. Fortune carried in sacks of flour from the

cache and piled them on the floor beneath the aperture. On these

Uri laid a pair of long sea-bags, and over all spread several

thicknesses of moss and blankets. Upon this Fortune could lie,

with the sleeping furs stretching over him from one side of the

bunk to the other, and all men could look upon it and declare it

empty.

In the weeks which followed, several domiciliary visits were paid,

not a shack or tent in Nome escaping, but Fortune lay in his

cranny undisturbed. In fact, little attention was given to Uri

Bram's cabin; for it was the last place under the sun to expect to

find the murderer of John Randolph. Except during such

interruptions, Fortune lolled about the cabin, playing long games

of solitaire and smoking endless cigarettes. Though his volatile

nature loved geniality and play of words and laughter, he quickly

accommodated himself to Uri's taciturnity. Beyond the actions and

plans of his pursuers, the state of the trails, and the price of

dogs, they never talked; and these things were only discussed at

rare intervals and briefly. But Fortune fell to working out a

system, and hour after hour, and day after day, he shuffled and

dealt, shuffled and dealt, noted the combinations of the cards in

long columns, and shuffled and dealt again. Toward the end even

this absorption failed him, and, head bowed upon the table, he

visioned the lively all-night houses of Nome, where the

gamekeepers and lookouts worked in shifts and the clattering

roulette ball never slept. At such times his loneliness and

bankruptcy stunned him till he sat for hours in the same

unblinking, unchanging position. At other times, his long-pent

bitterness found voice in passionate outbursts; for he had rubbed

the world the wrong way and did not like the feel of it.

"Life's a skin-game," he was fond of repeating, and on this one

note he rang the changes. "I never had half a chance," he

complained. "I was faked in my birth and flim-flammed with my

mother's milk. The dice were loaded when she tossed the box, and

I was born to prove the loss. But that was no reason she should

blame me for it, and look on me as a cold deck; but she did--ay,

she did. Why didn't she give me a show? Why didn't the world?

Why did I go broke in Seattle? Why did I take the steerage, and

live like a hog to Nome? Why did I go to the El Dorado? I was

heading for Big Pete's and only went for matches. Why didn't I

have matches? Why did I want to smoke? Don't you see? All

worked out, every bit of it, all parts fitting snug. Before I was

born, like as not. I'll put the sack I never hope to get on it,

before I was born. That's why! That's why John Randolph passed

the word and his checks in at the same time. Damn him! It served

him well right! Why didn't he keep his tongue between his teeth

and give me a chance? He knew I was next to broke. Why didn't I

hold my hand? Oh, why? Why? Why?"

And Fortune La Pearle would roll upon the floor, vainly

interrogating the scheme of things. At such outbreaks Uri said no

word, gave no sign, save that his grey eyes seemed to turn dull

and muddy, as though from lack of interest. There was nothing in

common between these two men, and this fact Fortune grasped

sufficiently to wonder sometimes why Uri had stood by him.

But the time of waiting came to an end. Even a community's blood

lust cannot stand before its gold lust. The murder of John

Randolph had already passed into the annals of the camp, and there

it rested. Had the murderer appeared, the men of Nome would

certainly have stopped stampeding long enough to see justice done,

whereas the whereabouts of Fortune La Pearle was no longer an

insistent problem. There was gold in the creek beds and ruby

beaches, and when the sea opened, the men with healthy sacks would

sail away to where the good things of life were sold absurdly

cheap.

So, one night, Fortune helped Uri Bram harness the dogs and lash

the sled, and the twain took the winter trail south on the ice.

But it was not all south; for they left the sea east from St.

Michael's, crossed the divide, and struck the Yukon at Anvik, many

hundred miles from its mouth. Then on, into the northeast, past

Koyokuk, Tanana, and Minook, till they rounded the Great Curve at

Fort Yukon, crossed and recrossed the Arctic Circle, and headed

south through the Flats. It was a weary journey, and Fortune

would have wondered why the man went with him, had not Uri told

him that he owned claims and had men working at Eagle. Eagle lay

on the edge of the line; a few miles farther on, the British flag

waved over the barracks at Fort Cudahy. Then came Dawson, Pelly,

the Five Fingers, Windy Arm, Caribou Crossing, Linderman, the

Chilcoot and Dyea.

On the morning after passing Eagle, they rose early. This was

their last camp, and they were now to part. Fortune's heart was

light. There was a promise of spring in the land, and the days

were growing longer. The way was passing into Canadian territory.

Liberty was at hand, the sun was returning, and each day saw him

nearer to the Great Outside. The world was big, and he could once

again paint his future in royal red. He whistled about the

breakfast and hummed snatches of light song while Uri put the dogs

in harness and packed up. But when all was ready, Fortune's feet

itching to be off, Uri pulled an unused back-log to the fire and

sat down.

"Ever hear of the Dead Horse Trail?"

He glanced up meditatively and Fortune shook his head, inwardly

chafing at the delay.

"Sometimes there are meetings under circumstances which make men

remember," Uri continued, speaking in a low voice and very slowly,

"and I met a man under such circumstances on the Dead Horse Trail.

Freighting an outfit over the White Pass in '97 broke many a man's

heart, for there was a world of reason when they gave that trail

its name. The horses died like mosquitoes in the first frost, and

from Skaguay to Bennett they rotted in heaps. They died at the

Rocks, they were poisoned at the Summit, and they starved at the

Lakes; they fell off the trail, what there was of it, or they went

through it; in the river they drowned under their loads, or were

smashed to pieces against the boulders; they snapped their legs in

the crevices and broke their backs falling backwards with their

packs; in the sloughs they sank from sight or smothered in the

slime, and they were disembowelled in the bogs where the corduroy

logs turned end up in the mud; men shot them, worked them to

death, and when they were gone, went back to the beach and bought

more. Some did not bother to shoot them,--stripping the saddles

off and the shoes and leaving them where they fell. Their hearts

turned to stone--those which did not break--and they became

beasts, the men on Dead Horse Trail.

"It was there I met a man with the heart of a Christ and the

patience. And he was honest. When he rested at midday he took

the packs from the horses so that they, too, might rest. He paid

$50 a hundred-weight for their fodder, and more. He used his own

bed to blanket their backs when they rubbed raw. Other men let

the saddles eat holes the size of water-buckets. Other men, when

the shoes gave out, let them wear their hoofs down to the bleeding

stumps. He spent his last dollar for horseshoe nails. I know

this because we slept in the one bed and ate from the one pot, and

became blood brothers where men lost their grip of things and died

blaspheming God. He was never too tired to ease a strap or

tighten a cinch, and often there were tears in his eyes when he

looked on all that waste of misery. At a passage in the rocks,

where the brutes upreared hindlegged and stretched their forelegs

upward like cats to clear the wall, the way was piled with

carcasses where they had toppled back. And here he stood, in the

stench of hell, with a cheery word and a hand on the rump at the

right time, till the string passed by. And when one bogged he

blocked the trail till it was clear again; nor did the man live

who crowded him at such time.

"At the end of the trail a man who had killed fifty horses wanted

to buy, but we looked at him and at our own,--mountain cayuses

from eastern Oregon. Five thousand he offered, and we were broke,

but we remembered the poison grass of the Summit and the passage

in the Rocks, and the man who was my brother spoke no word, but

divided the cayuses into two bunches,--his in the one and mine in

the other,--and he looked at me and we understood each other. So

he drove mine to the one side and I drove his to the other, and we

took with us our rifles and shot them to the last one, while the

man who had killed fifty horses cursed us till his throat cracked.

But that man, with whom I welded blood-brothership on the Dead

Horse Trail--"

"Why, that man was John Randolph," Fortune, sneering the while,

completed the climax for him.

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

"I am ready," Fortune answered, the old weary bitterness strong in

his face again. "Go ahead, but hurry."

Uri Bram rose to his feet.

"I have had faith in God all the days of my life. I believe He

loves justice. I believe He is looking down upon us now, choosing

between us. I believe He waits to work His will through my own

right arm. And such is my belief, that we will take equal chance

and let Him speak His own judgment."

Fortune's heart leaped at the words. He did not know much

concerning Uri's God, but he believed in Chance, and Chance had

been coming his way ever since the night he ran down the beach and

across the snow. "But there is only one gun," he objected.

"We will fire turn about," Uri replied, at the same time throwing

out the cylinder of the other man's Colt and examining it.

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

Fortune's blood was warming to the game, and he drew the deck from

his pocket as Uri nodded. Surely Chance would not desert him now!

He thought of the returning sun as he cut for deal, and he

thrilled when he found the deal was his. He shuffled and dealt,

and Uri cut him the Jack of Spades. They laid down their hands.

Uri's was bare of trumps, while he held ace, deuce. The outside

seemed very near to him as they stepped off the fifty paces.

"If God withholds His hand and you drop me, the dogs and outfit

are yours. You'll find a bill of sale, already made out, in my

pocket," Uri explained, facing the path of the bullet, straight

and broad-breasted.

Fortune shook a vision of the sun shining on the ocean from his

eyes and took aim. He was very careful. Twice he lowered as the

spring breeze shook the pines. But the third time he dropped on

one knee, gripped the revolver steadily in both hands, and fired.

Uri whirled half about, threw up his arms, swayed wildly for a

moment, and sank into the snow. But Fortune knew he had fired too

far to one side, else the man would not have whirled.

When Uri, mastering the flesh and struggling to his feet, beckoned

for the weapon, Fortune was minded to fire again. But he thrust

the idea from him. Chance had been very good to him already, he

felt, and if he tricked now he would have to pay for it afterward.

No, he would play fair. Besides Uri was hard hit and could not

possibly hold the heavy Colt long enough to draw a bead.

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

man the revolver.

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

speak."

Fortune faced him, but twisted his chest sideways in order to

present less surface. Uri tottered about drunkenly, but waited,

too, for the moment's calm between the catspaws. The revolver was

very heavy, and he doubted, like Fortune, because of its weight.

But he held it, arm extended, above his head, and then let it

slowly drop forward and down. At the instant Fortune's left

breast and the sight flashed into line with his eye, he pulled the

trigger. Fortune did not whirl, but gay San Francisco dimmed and

faded, and as the sun-bright snow turned black and blacker, he

breathed his last malediction on the Chance he had misplayed.

SIWASH

"If I was a man--" Her words were in themselves indecisive, but

the withering contempt which flashed from her black eyes was not

lost upon the men-folk in the tent.

Tommy, the English sailor, squirmed, but chivalrous old Dick

Humphries, Cornish fisherman and erstwhile American salmon

capitalist, beamed upon her benevolently as ever. He bore women

too large a portion of his rough heart to mind them, as he said,

when they were in the doldrums, or when their limited vision would

not permit them to see all around a thing. So they said nothing,

these two men who had taken the half-frozen woman into their tent

three days back, and who had warmed her, and fed her, and rescued

her goods from the Indian packers. This latter had necessitated

the payment of numerous dollars, to say nothing of a demonstration

in force--Dick Humphries squinting along the sights of a

Winchester while Tommy apportioned their wages among them at his

own appraisement. It had been a little thing in itself, but it

meant much to a woman playing a desperate single-hand in the

equally desperate Klondike rush of '97. Men were occupied with

their own pressing needs, nor did they approve of women playing,

single-handed, the odds of the arctic winter. "If I was a man, I

know what I would do." Thus reiterated Molly, she of the flashing

eyes, and therein spoke the cumulative grit of five American-born

generations.

In the succeeding silence, Tommy thrust a pan of biscuits into the

Yukon stove and piled on fresh fuel. A reddish flood pounded

along under his sun-tanned skin, and as he stooped, the skin of

his neck was scarlet. Dick palmed a three-cornered sail needle

through a set of broken pack straps, his good nature in nowise

disturbed by the feminine cataclysm which was threatening to burst

in the storm-beaten tent.

"And if you was a man?" he asked, his voice vibrant with kindness.

The three-cornered needle jammed in the damp leather, and he

suspended work for the moment.

"I'd be a man. I'd put the straps on my back and light out. I

wouldn't lay in camp here, with the Yukon like to freeze most any

day, and the goods not half over the portage. And you--you are

men, and you sit here, holding your hands, afraid of a little wind

and wet. I tell you straight, Yankee-men are made of different

stuff. They'd be hitting the trail for Dawson if they had to wade

through hell-fire. And you, you--I wish I was a man."

"I'm very glad, my dear, that you're not." Dick Humphries threw

the bight of the sail twine over the point of the needle and drew

it clear with a couple of deft turns and a jerk.

A snort of the gale dealt the tent a broad-handed slap as it

hurtled past, and the sleet rat-tat-tatted with snappy spite

against the thin canvas. The smoke, smothered in its exit, drove

back through the fire-box door, carrying with it the pungent odor

of green spruce.

"Good Gawd! Why can't a woman listen to reason?" Tommy lifted

his head from the denser depths and turned upon her a pair of

smoke-outraged eyes.

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

Tommy sprang to his feet with an oath which would have shocked a

woman of lesser heart, ripped loose the sturdy reef-knots and

flung back the flaps of the tent.

The trio peered out. It was not a heartening spectacle. A few

water-soaked tents formed the miserable foreground, from which the

streaming ground sloped to a foaming gorge. Down this ramped a

mountain torrent. Here and there, dwarf spruce, rooting and

grovelling in the shallow alluvium, marked the proximity of the

timber line. Beyond, on the opposing slope, the vague outlines of

a glacier loomed dead-white through the driving rain. Even as

they looked, its massive front crumbled into the valley, on the

breast of some subterranean vomit, and it lifted its hoarse

thunder above the screeching voice of the storm. Involuntarily,

Molly shrank back.

"Look, woman! Look with all your eyes! Three miles in the teeth

of the gale to Crater Lake, across two glaciers, along the

slippery rim-rock, knee-deep in a howling river! Look, I say, you

Yankee woman! Look! There's your Yankee-men!" Tommy pointed a

passionate hand in the direction of the struggling tents.

"Yankees, the last mother's son of them. Are they on trail? Is

there one of them with the straps to his back? And you would

teach us men our work? Look, I say!"

Another tremendous section of the glacier rumbled earthward. The

wind whipped in at the open doorway, bulging out the sides of the

tent till it swayed like a huge bladder at its guy ropes. The

smoke swirled about them, and the sleet drove sharply into their

flesh. Tommy pulled the flaps together hastily, and returned to

his tearful task at the fire-box. Dick Humphries threw the mended

pack straps into a corner and lighted his pipe. Even Molly was

for the moment persuaded.

"There's my clothes," she half-whimpered, the feminine for the

moment prevailing. "They're right at the top of the cache, and

they'll be ruined! I tell you, ruined!"

"There, there," Dick interposed, when the last quavering syllable

had wailed itself out. "Don't let that worry you, little woman.

I'm old enough to be your father's brother, and I've a daughter

older than you, and I'll tog you out in fripperies when we get to

Dawson if it takes my last dollar."

"When we get to Dawson!" The scorn had come back to her throat

with a sudden surge. "You'll rot on the way, first. You'll drown

in a mudhole. You--you--Britishers!"

The last word, explosive, intensive, had strained the limits of

her vituperation. If that would not stir these men, what could?

Tommy's neck ran red again, but he kept his tongue between his

teeth. Dick's eyes mellowed. He had the advantage over Tommy,

for he had once had a white woman for a wife.

The blood of five American-born generations is, under certain

circumstances, an uncomfortable heritage; and among these

circumstances might be enumerated that of being quartered with

next of kin. These men were Britons. On sea and land her

ancestry and the generations thereof had thrashed them and theirs.

On sea and land they would continue to do so. The traditions of

her race clamored for vindication. She was but a woman of the

present, but in her bubbled the whole mighty past. It was not

alone Molly Travis who pulled on gum boots, mackintosh, and

straps; for the phantom hands of ten thousand forbears drew tight

the buckles, just so as they squared her jaw and set her eyes with

determination. She, Molly Travis, intended to shame these

Britishers; they, the innumerable shades, were asserting the

dominance of the common race.

The men-folk did not interfere. Once Dick suggested that she take

his oilskins, as her mackintosh was worth no more than paper in

such a storm. But she sniffed her independence so sharply that he

communed with his pipe till she tied the flaps on the outside and

slushed away on the flooded trail.

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

his voice.

"Make it? If she stands the pressure till she gets to the cache,

what of the cold and misery, she'll be stark, raving mad. Stand

it? She'll be dumb-crazed. You know it yourself, Dick. You've

wind-jammed round the Horn. You know what it is to lay out on a

topsail yard in the thick of it, bucking sleet and snow and frozen

canvas till you're ready to just let go and cry like a baby.

Clothes? She won't be able to tell a bundle of skirts from a gold

pan or a tea-kettle."

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

"Not a bit of it. So help me, Dick, she'd 'a' made this tent a

hell for the rest of the trip if we hadn't. Trouble with her

she's got too much spirit. This'll tone it down a bit."

"Yes," Dick admitted, "she's too ambitious. But then Molly's all

right. A cussed little fool to tackle a trip like this, but a

plucky sight better than those pick-me-up-and-carry-me kind of

women. She's the stock that carried you and me, Tommy, and you've

got to make allowance for the spirit. Takes a woman to breed a

man. You can't suck manhood from the dugs of a creature whose

only claim to womanhood is her petticoats. Takes a she-cat, not a

cow, to mother a tiger."

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

"The proposition. A sharp sheath-knife cuts deeper on a slip than

a dull one; but that's no reason for to hack the edge off over a

capstan bar."

"All right, if you say so, but when it comes to woman, I guess

I'll take mine with a little less edge."

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

"Some." Tommy reached over for a pair of Molly's wet stockings

and stretched them across his knees to dry.

Dick, eying him querulously, went fishing in her hand satchel,

then hitched up to the front of the stove with divers articles of

damp clothing spread likewise to the heat.

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

"Did I? No more was I--that is--yes, by Gawd! I was. And as good

a woman as ever cooked grub for a man."

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

his hand.

"Ay."

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

The beans bubbled rowdily on the front lid, and he pushed the pot

back to a cooler surface. After that he investigated the

biscuits, tested them with a splinter of wood, and placed them

aside under cover of a damp cloth. Dick, after the manner of his

kind, stifled his interest and waited silently. "A different

woman to Molly. Siwash."

Dick nodded his understanding.

"Not so proud and wilful, but stick by a fellow through thick and

thin. Sling a paddle with the next and starve as contentedly as

Job. Go for'ard when the sloop's nose was more often under than

not, and take in sail like a man. Went prospecting once, up

Teslin way, past Surprise Lake and the Little Yellow-Head. Grub

gave out, and we ate the dogs. Dogs gave out, and we ate

harnesses, moccasins, and furs. Never a whimper; never a pick-me-

up-and-carry-me. Before we went she said look out for grub, but

when it happened, never a I-told-you-so. 'Never mind, Tommy,'

she'd say, day after day, that weak she could bare lift a snow-

shoe and her feet raw with the work. 'Never mind. I'd sooner be

flat-bellied of hunger and be your woman, Tommy, than have a

potlach every day and be Chief George's klooch.' George was chief

of the Chilcoots, you know, and wanted her bad.

"Great days, those. Was a likely chap myself when I struck the

coast. Jumped a whaler, the Pole Star, at Unalaska, and worked my

way down to Sitka on an otter hunter. Picked up with Happy Jack

there--know him?"

"Had charge of my traps for me," Dick answered, "down on the

Columbia. Pretty wild, wasn't he, with a warm place in his heart

for whiskey and women?"

"The very chap. Went trading with him for a couple of seasons--

hooch, and blankets, and such stuff. Then got a sloop of my own,

and not to cut him out, came down Juneau way. That's where I met

Killisnoo; I called her Tilly for short. Met her at a squaw dance

down on the beach. Chief George had finished the year's trade

with the Sticks over the Passes, and was down from Dyea with half

his tribe. No end of Siwashes at the dance, and I the only white.

No one knew me, barring a few of the bucks I'd met over Sitka way,

but I'd got most of their histories from Happy Jack.

"Everybody talking Chinook, not guessing that I could spit it

better than most; and principally two girls who'd run away from

Haine's Mission up the Lynn Canal. They were trim creatures, good

to the eye, and I kind of thought of casting that way; but they

were fresh as fresh-caught cod. Too much edge, you see. Being a

new-comer, they started to twist me, not knowing I gathered in

every word of Chinook they uttered.

"I never let on, but set to dancing with Tilly, and the more we

danced the more our hearts warmed to each other. 'Looking for a

woman,' one of the girls says, and the other tosses her head and

answers, 'Small chance he'll get one when the women are looking

for men.' And the bucks and squaws standing around began to grin

and giggle and repeat what had been said. 'Quite a pretty boy,'

says the first one. I'll not deny I was rather smooth-faced and

youngish, but I'd been a man amongst men many's the day, and it

rankled me. 'Dancing with Chief George's girl,' pipes the second.

'First thing George'll give him the flat of a paddle and send him

about his business.' Chief George had been looking pretty black

up to now, but at this he laughed and slapped his knees. He was a

husky beggar and would have used the paddle too.

"'Who's the girls?' I asked Tilly, as we went ripping down the

centre in a reel. And as soon as she told me their names I

remembered all about them from Happy Jack. Had their pedigree

down fine--several things he'd told me that not even their own

tribe knew. But I held my hush, and went on courting Tilly, they

a-casting sharp remarks and everybody roaring. 'Bide a wee,

Tommy,' I says to myself; 'bide a wee.'

"And bide I did, till the dance was ripe to break up, and Chief

George had brought a paddle all ready for me. Everybody was on

the lookout for mischief when we stopped; but I marched, easy as

you please, slap into the thick of them. The Mission girls cut me

up something clever, and for all I was angry I had to set my teeth

to keep from laughing. I turned upon them suddenly.

"'Are you done?' I asked.

"You should have seen them when they heard me spitting Chinook.

Then I broke loose. I told them all about themselves, and their

people before them; their fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers--

everybody, everything. Each mean trick they'd played; every

scrape they'd got into; every shame that'd fallen them. And I

burned them without fear or favor. All hands crowded round.

Never had they heard a white man sling their lingo as I did.

Everybody was laughing save the Mission girls. Even Chief George

forgot the paddle, or at least he was swallowing too much respect

to dare to use it.

"But the girls. 'Oh, don't, Tommy,' they cried, the tears running

down their cheeks. 'Please don't. We'll be good. Sure, Tommy,

sure.' But I knew them well, and I scorched them on every tender

spot. Nor did I slack away till they came down on their knees,

begging and pleading with me to keep quiet. Then I shot a glance

at Chief George; but he did not know whether to have at me or not,

and passed it off by laughing hollowly.

"So be. When I passed the parting with Tilly that night I gave

her the word that I was going to be around for a week or so, and

that I wanted to see more of her. Not thick-skinned, her kind,

when it came to showing like and dislike, and she looked her

pleasure for the honest girl she was. Ay, a striking lass, and I

didn't wonder that Chief George was taken with her.

"Everything my way. Took the wind from his sails on the first

leg. I was for getting her aboard and sailing down Wrangel way

till it blew over, leaving him to whistle; but I wasn't to get her

that easy. Seems she was living with an uncle of hers--guardian,

the way such things go--and seems he was nigh to shuffling off

with consumption or some sort of lung trouble. He was good and

bad by turns, and she wouldn't leave him till it was over with.

Went up to the tepee just before I left, to speculate on how long

it'd be; but the old beggar had promised her to Chief George, and

when he clapped eyes on me his anger brought on a hemorrhage.

"'Come and take me, Tommy,' she says when we bid good-by on the

beach. 'Ay,' I answers; 'when you give the word.' And I kissed

her, white-man-fashion and lover-fashion, till she was all of a

tremble like a quaking aspen, and I was so beside myself I'd half

a mind to go up and give the uncle a lift over the divide.

"So I went down Wrangel way, past St. Mary's and even to the Queen

Charlottes, trading, running whiskey, turning the sloop to most

anything. Winter was on, stiff and crisp, and I was back to

Juneau, when the word came. 'Come,' the beggar says who brought

the news. 'Killisnoo say, "Come now."' 'What's the row?' I asks.

'Chief George,' says he. 'Potlach. Killisnoo, makum klooch.'

"Ay, it was bitter--the Taku howling down out of the north, the

salt water freezing quick as it struck the deck, and the old sloop

and I hammering into the teeth of it for a hundred miles to Dyea.

Had a Douglass Islander for crew when I started, but midway up he

was washed over from the bows. Jibed all over and crossed the

course three times, but never a sign of him."

"Doubled up with the cold most likely," Dick suggested, putting a

pause into the narrative while he hung one of Molly's skirts up to

dry, "and went down like a pot of lead."

"My idea. So I finished the course alone, half-dead when I made

Dyea in the dark of the evening. The tide favored, and I ran the

sloop plump to the bank, in the shelter of the river. Couldn't go

an inch further, for the fresh water was frozen solid. Halyards

and blocks were that iced up I didn't dare lower mainsail or jib.

First I broached a pint of the cargo raw, and then, leaving all

standing, ready for the start, and with a blanket around me,

headed across the flat to the camp. No mistaking, it was a grand

layout. The Chilcats had come in a body--dogs, babies, and

canoes--to say nothing of the Dog-Ears, the Little Salmons, and

the Missions. Full half a thousand of them to celebrate Tilly's

wedding, and never a white man in a score of miles.

"Nobody took note of me, the blanket over my head and hiding my

face, and I waded knee deep through the dogs and youngsters till I

was well up to the front. The show was being pulled off in a big

open place among the trees, with great fires burning and the snow

moccasin-packed as hard as Portland cement. Next me was Tilly,

beaded and scarlet-clothed galore, and against her Chief George

and his head men. The shaman was being helped out by the big

medicines from the other tribes, and it shivered my spine up and

down, the deviltries they cut. I caught myself wondering if the

folks in Liverpool could only see me now; and I thought of yellow-

haired Gussie, whose brother I licked after my first voyage, just

because he was not for having a sailor-man courting his sister.

And with Gussie in my eyes I looked at Tilly. A rum old world,

thinks I, with man a-stepping in trails the mother little dreamed

of when he lay at suck.

"So be. When the noise was loudest, walrus hides booming and

priests a-singing, I says, 'Are you ready?' Gawd! Not a start,

not a shot of the eyes my way, not the twitch of a muscle. 'I

knew,' she answers, slow and steady as a calm spring tide.

'Where?' 'The high bank at the edge of the ice,' I whispers back.

'Jump out when I give the word.'

"Did I say there was no end of huskies? Well, there was no end.

Here, there, everywhere, they were scattered about,--tame wolves

and nothing less. When the strain runs thin they breed them in

the bush with the wild, and they're bitter fighters. Right at the

toe of my moccasin lay a big brute, and by the heel another. I

doubled the first one's tail, quick, till it snapped in my grip.

As his jaws clipped together where my hand should have been, I

threw the second one by the scruff straight into his mouth. 'Go!'

I cried to Tilly.

"You know how they fight. In the wink of an eye there was a

raging hundred of them, top and bottom, ripping and tearing each

other, kids and squaws tumbling which way, and the camp gone wild.

Tilly'd slipped away, so I followed. But when I looked over my

shoulder at the skirt of the crowd, the devil laid me by the

heart, and I dropped the blanket and went back.

"By then the dogs'd been knocked apart and the crowd was

untangling itself. Nobody was in proper place, so they didn't

note that Tilly'd gone. 'Hello,' I says, gripping Chief George by

the hand. 'May your potlach-smoke rise often, and the Sticks

bring many furs with the spring.'

"Lord love me, Dick, but he was joyed to see me,--him with the

upper hand and wedding Tilly. Chance to puff big over me. The

tale that I was hot after her had spread through the camps, and my

presence did him proud. All hands knew me, without my blanket,

and set to grinning and giggling. It was rich, but I made it

richer by playing unbeknowing.

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

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

"'Thought he had two klooches.'

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

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

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

'Killisnoo! Killisnoo!'

"'Killisnoo what?' I asked.

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

klooch.'

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

threw out his chest.

"She'll be no klooch of yours,' I says solemnly. 'No klooch of

yours,' I repeats, while his face went black and his hand began

dropping to his hunting-knife.

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

my smoke.'

"I pulled off my mittens, rolled back my sleeves, and made half-a-

dozen passes in the air.

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

"I was making medicine, and they began to scare. Every eye was on

me; no time to find out that Tilly wasn't there. Then I called

Killisnoo three times again, and waited; and three times more.

All for mystery and to make them nervous. Chief George couldn't

guess what I was up to, and wanted to put a stop to the foolery;

but the shamans said to wait, and that they'd see me and go me one

better, or words to that effect. Besides, he was a superstitious

cuss, and I fancy a bit afraid of the white man's magic.

"Then I called Killisnoo, long and soft like the howl of a wolf,

till the women were all a-tremble and the bucks looking serious.

"'Look!' I sprang for'ard, pointing my finger into a bunch of

squaws--easier to deceive women than men, you know. 'Look!' And

I raised it aloft as though following the flight of a bird. Up,

up, straight overhead, making to follow it with my eyes till it

disappeared in the sky.

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

again. 'Killisnoo.'

"So help me, Dick, the gammon worked. Half of them, at least, saw

Tilly disappear in the air. They'd drunk my whiskey at Juneau and

seen stranger sights, I'll warrant. Why should I not do this

thing, I, who sold bad spirits corked in bottles? Some of the

women shrieked. Everybody fell to whispering in bunches. I

folded my arms and held my head high, and they drew further away

from me. The time was ripe to go. 'Grab him,' Chief George

cries. Three or four of them came at me, but I whirled, quick,

made a couple of passes like to send them after Tilly, and pointed

up. Touch me? Not for the kingdoms of the earth. Chief George

harangued them, but he couldn't get them to lift a leg. Then he

made to take me himself; but I repeated the mummery and his grit

went out through his fingers.

"'Let your shamans work wonders the like of which I have done this

night,' I says. 'Let them call Killisnoo down out of the sky

whither I have sent her.' But the priests knew their limits.

'May your klooches bear you sons as the spawn of the salmon,' I

says, turning to go; 'and may your totem pole stand long in the

land, and the smoke of your camp rise always.'

"But if the beggars could have seen me hitting the high places for

the sloop as soon as I was clear of them, they'd thought my own

medicine had got after me. Tilly'd kept warm by chopping the ice

away, and was all ready to cast off. Gawd! how we ran before it,

the Taku howling after us and the freezing seas sweeping over at

every clip. With everything battened down, me a-steering and

Tilly chopping ice, we held on half the night, till I plumped the

sloop ashore on Porcupine Island, and we shivered it out on the

beach; blankets wet, and Tilly drying the matches on her breast.

"So I think I know something about it. Seven years, Dick, man and

wife, in rough sailing and smooth. And then she died, in the

heart of the winter, died in childbirth, up there on the Chilcat

Station. She held my hand to the last, the ice creeping up inside

the door and spreading thick on the gut of the window. Outside,

the lone howl of the w